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Why I say gender ideology is fundamentalist

25 March 2022

Most people on the left, like me, are empathetic towards trans people and the challenges that that life must entail. We think all people should be able to enjoy their human rights and live life free of discrimination and violence.

Lots of us have grown up and grown older comfortable with a distinction between sex (biological reality) and gender (a social construct often based around stereotyped ideas of how males and females should behave). We accept that the former shouldn’t be limited by the latter. You can be anyone and anything. Be who the hell you want. And because bucking against society’s ridiculous and uncomfortable expectations is at the core of our flavour of progressivism, transgender people seem an interesting addition to our transgression party. Of course we’ll support them. It’s the only logical and compassionate position.

But the framework of egalitarianism and tolerance underpinning our instinctive support has been ripped out and replaced by a conservative trans rights framework. The most vocal brand of trans rights activists (TRAs)¹ argue that the only way that anyone can support trans people is through rigidly and unquestioningly adhering to a set of beliefs that are fundamentally opposed to progressivism. And from where I’m sitting, it looks like what they’re going for is less about trans rights and more about entrenching old ideas about the relative roles and rights of males and females, about what is proper and seemly, and who should be in control. And in a move of genius hoodwinkery they’ve got large portions of their natural critics, the left, in line and out in front. The left is eating itself.

The core principles of TRA’s gender ideology are something like this:

• Human biological sex is not real or not important. Transwomen are literally biological women. Sex is not binary but on a mysterious never fully explained spectrum. Sex is not recorded at birth, based on observation, but is assigned and can be assigned wrongly. Sex is a feeling. Sex can change during one’s lifetime.

• Transwomen must have access to the same spaces, activities and opportunities as biological women.

• Any male-bodied person who feels that they are a woman must be recognised as one from the moment they announce it.

• Children and young people who don’t conform to gender stereotypes are likely to be trapped in the wrong body. It is the children not the stereotypes that need to change.

• Children and young people who have gender dysphoria or identify as a gender not their own must be believed, supported and affirmed. It is imperative that they are provided with “affirming” treatment including puberty blockers, hormones and surgery.

This is a conservative, anti-science agenda. One that unblinkingly accepts that a healthy kid is in the wrong body and must be fixed, that biological sex is a feeling not a fact (meaning of course that evolution, as science understands it, can not exist), that biological women have no right to self-determination — to organise and caucus as we wish. That there is a hierarchy of rights, and transwomen’s rights and comfort always trump biological women’s rights and comfort.

This is not a progressive agenda on any count. Its most chilling characteristic the position that anyone who questions, debates or disagrees with any element of the doctrine must be shut down. TRA’s have been hugely successful in widespread vilification of people who resist their narrative. If people want to open up a discussion about gay kids being sterilised, or women’s safety, or biological reality, or how porn or social media or gender expectations might be driving transitions, or how language has become so genderlocked, so useless, we risk travelling back decades to times when women couldn’t have conversations they needed to because they weren’t permitted the words, if people want those discussions they’re TERFs (no better than nazis) or transphobes or hateful bigots or obsessed with genitals or they literally want to kill all trans people.

Religious fundamentalists believe in the superiority of their religious teachings, and in a strict division between righteous people and evildoers. ²

The essential point is that what one believes, while obviously important, is often not as influential on behavior as how one believes…A fundamentalist, to wit, implicitly holds that what he believes corresponds to a single, underlying code that explains everything about the world, in its totality.³

Fundamentalism (religious) … Despite its theological character it is usually linked to projects of social reform and the acquisition of political power.⁴

What the hell is going on? Why are my friends defending the very same things we once marched against? How is the latest brand of encouraging girls to hate their bodies now a cause for celebration? How are the public institutions of secular democracies, often sluggish in their adaptation to new ideas, so into this so quickly? And what, oh what, is going to happen next?

Welcome to The Ministry has fallen.⁵

(Image from Manchester Evening News 26/3/22, showing a trans rights rally outside a women’s conference in Manchester. Protesters yelled Terfs off our turf, Fuck terfs, and UK Women’s place is a place of hate.)

1. Lots of transgender people of course reject the TRA brand of gender ideology and lots of its fiercest supporters are not transgender.

2. Altemeer and Hunsberger quoted in Kossowska Małgorzata et al.

3. William Egginton

4. Marshall, Gordon. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. OUP, 1994.

5. My newsletter’s title comes from JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Bloomsbury, 2007.