How has Gender Identity Ideology spread so far so fast?
One key strategy has been hitchhiking on other people’s struggles. Wrapping themselves in popular causes, so-called “trans rights” activists advance their outrageously regressive agenda with little or no discussion. Put another way, Gender Identity Ideology is a parasite. The kind that does grave damage to the host.
Feminism is one of the primary hosts that Gender Ideology has latched onto. Trans activists have co-opted our goals, falsely implying that they, like feminists, are working to free people from sexist straitjackets. They have taken over our organizations transforming them into mouthpieces for positions and policies that directly undercut our struggle. Instead of standing up against attacks on women’s rights, appropriated groups now lend their imprimatur to those attacks.
The resulting destruction Is staggering. Men are flooding into female-only prisons, locker rooms, rape shelters, sports, and political positions. They are organizing cancelation campaigns against lesbians who refuse to allow them in their dating pools. Sexist stereotypes have been reinstated with a vengeance, as people are told that liking things unfairly reserved for the other sex means you might be the other sex. Efforts to help girls and women understand and celebrate our bodies, resisting the self-loathing promoted in our society, have been derailed. A decade ago, posters featured photos of little girls proudly declaring themselves to be girls and telling the world that their bodies were beautiful just the way they were. Now, a female actress who denounces her sex and cuts off her breasts is featured on the cover of Time declaring “I’m fully who I am.”
As the fight for abortion rights reaches fever pitch, so-called feminist groups studiously avoid the word “woman” and babble about how it’s vital to not focus on women’s right to abortion, because, hey, men have babies, too. Articles and essays are being published all over the place arguing that pro-choice demands should always be accompanied by guarantees that vulnerable children who decide they’re “born in the wrong body” will be sterilized and otherwise harmed by medical “affirmation” “care.” This is madness. Even abortion, a quintessential women’s issue is being commandeered to advance the trans agenda. This leads to all the anti-woman outcomes listed above, and directly undermines our ability to fight effectively for abortion rights.
The Gender Cult hitchhikes on all sorts of other causes as well including the struggles for justice fought by lesbians and gay men, by people of color, by indigenous communities, and by people with Disorders of Sexual Development. It also hitchhikes on the compassion people feel for children and our desire to protect them and help them thrive. It uses the co-optations of other causes to persuade people that hurting children is helping them, and that feeding children to Big Pharma is somehow akin to supporting homosexual rights and fighting sexism.
The resulting damage on lesbian and gay rights, racial and indigenous justice movements, and people with DSDs is substantial. And what is happening to children is unspeakable. It is one of the most horrific medical scandals of all time.
Hitchhiking is not the only strategy responsible for Gender Ideology’s rapid ascent and the devastating consequences. Suppression of dissenting voices is another key strategy. Those who challenge or even just question Gender Ideology face vicious attacks. The list of things that have happened to gender critical people, particularly women, is shocking. People are fired, de-platformed from speaking on any topic, denied the ability to publish articles and books, kicked out of universities, doxxed, threatened, and assaulted. They are kicked off social media and their bank accounts, Paypal accounts, and GoFundMe campaigns are shut down. Some lose custody of their children. Others are told they’re not eligible to be foster parents. And all of that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Those of us fighting Gender Ideology often marvel at the fact that something so incoherent has taken over. But incoherence—wherein lies are woven together with inconsistent and completely irrational statements in impenetrable word salads—helps this ideology advance. People assume that the narrative doesn’t make sense to them because they’re not bright enough to grasp the nuances. They don’t realize that it doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t make sense.
There is Big Money to be made through the medicalization of children and adults, and through teaching people to view our bodies as sets of detachable parts that can and should be replaced at will. And there is Big Money behind Gender Ideology. What do the Big Pharma- and Big Tech-oligarchs pushing this buy with their money? Many things, including advice from the world’s top experts on manipulation, advice that leads to the strategies discussed here. Gender ideologue PR documents openly talk about hiding behind other causes, framing dissenters as racist, and making sure to not inform the media about the details of the trans agenda.
Gender Ideology is based on authoritarian and irrational core tenets: i) replacing objective consistent anatomy-based definitions for essential words like “woman” with mystical circular inconsistent ones, and ii) forcing everyone to accept these definitions and what flows from them. There is nothing scientific or liberatory about it.
Gender ideologues rely not only on circular definitions for vital words, but also circular reasoning regarding why their agenda must be implemented. “We need inclusive policies, because we face such hatred and discrimination,” they say, citing impressive-sounding statistics. But when you visit the sources for those stats, you discover that they are literally defining failing to go along with their agenda as discriminatory and hateful. And then citing resulting statistics as proof of the need for their policies.
In short, the term “trans rights” is fundamentally misleading. The “trans rights” agenda is not about defending the basic rights of trans-identifying individuals. It is about imposing irrational definitions on other people and forcing them to forfeit sex-based rights accordingly. Trans-identifying men are seeking exemptions from the rules that apply to other men. And when women refuse to be doormats—when we refuse to forfeit our language and our rights—they they have the audacity to claim that we are hurting them!
Many people, particularly on the left, have been duped into thinking that Gender Identity Ideology, aka “trans rights,” is something entirely different from what it actually is. They avidly promote it and cancel dissenting voices. They are blissfully unaware of their role in undercutting civil rights and promoting medical abuse of the most vulnerable of children.
Others are simply ignoring this issue, as they focus on do-or-die issues like preventing global ecological disaster. But the damage to civil rights and children happening all around us is simply too egregious to ignore. Just as importantly, unchecked, Gender Ideology is destroying our ability to organize on other issues. It is making it more and more difficult to accomplish what we need to accomplish if we want peace, economic justice, and an inhabitable planet.
When environmental groups embrace Gender Ideology, they destroy their scientific credibility, and they alienate anyone who understands what this ideology is doing. Many groups have already lost members and other support, and we’re still in the early stages of public awareness on this matter. Some groups are also proactively ejecting people who are gender critics, thereby depriving themselves of some of the clearest-thinking, most courageous voices around. The same dynamic is at play on issues other than the environment.
Meanwhile, Gender Ideology school curricula are undermining critical thinking skills. And Gender Ideology throughout society is persuading people that change comes from obsessing about individual identities and pronouns and by organizing mobs to cancel demonized individuals. But this is the opposite of what we need. It is time to build a movement infused with solidarity that addresses the systemic roots of war, injustice, and environmental degradation. Splintering, isolation, and cancelation make that impossible.
We must defeat Gender Identity Ideology. It is not only eviscerating women’s rights and other civil rights, and doing unspeakable harm to children. It is also undercutting our ability to organize effectively on other critical issues.
Thank you to all who are standing up against Gender Identity madness in their daily lives, supporting groups like Women’s Declaration International, and participating in specific campaigns such as those focusing on prisons, sports and schools. Keep up the fight!
Carol Dansereau is a long-time environmental advocate, feminist, and fighter for economic justice. Her comprehensive Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Transgender Galaxy. Why We Must Fight Gender Identity Ideology can be found here.
So glad to have found this and some related sites recently. As a 70 year old retired white male clinical social worker, I was informed in my late 20’s by reading the works mainly of Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Phylis Chesler. I can’t help but find it completely irrational and ironic to say the least that the new spear-point of patriarchy are trans-women (literally men who identify as women). As someone who has spent half my life deeply studying oligarchic efforts to subvert, manage and derail any and all truly progressive organizing for social change – I can’t shake the suspicion that the CIA’s covert propaganda operations through directing NGO funding, media contacts and academia aren’t somehow behind the support and dissemination of this ideological position. It just seems to be too perfect of an example of a “divide and conquer” tactic NOT to have intelligence fingerprints all over it.