Posted by A Twitter thread by @Lachlan_Edi
There is nothing to be found in all the conceits of gender identity that wasn’t previously covered by ideas of androgyny, gender bending, transsexualism or sexual orientation. Nothing except a denial of sex and an insistence without evidence on these things being somehow innate.
It seems to me that all the people buying the snake oil are a bit like conspiracy theorists: they know, profoundly, something doesn’t add up, doesn’t make sense, so they concoct an explanation which reassures them: born in the wrong body, or some such simple interpretation.
Then, when the evidence is put on the table, when the logic is followed through, they tie themselves in knots trying to defend the indefensible, ending up with accusatory hyperbole and emotional appeals, whilst looking ever more unhinged to the rest of us.
Gender as a cultural phenomena, a varying set of rules, a limiting system, based on sex, is not hard to understand, well evidenced and thoroughly explained.
It is so powerful, so ‘normal’ and so socially constructed that it jars with individuals and their own sense of self.
It is the ‘something that doesn’t add up’ which so many people feel or sense.
To reify the construct, to treat it as an innate, natural, helpful influence is wrong, scientifically and politically.
We should be looking for the roots to pull up.
Of course trans people exist. To some extent we’re all trans bc gender puts us irregular shaped individuals into the squared off boxes of masculine and feminine. We each respond in a different way, which is why the umbrella is so big. What we don’t ever do is change our sex.
We don’t ever change our sex because human beings dont do that. And that’s the point.
The shackles of sex based gender systems cannot simply be shrugged off. That’s how they work. You can’t identify out of them, you can’t perform them away, no matter how much they don’t fit you.
Not as individuals, anyway. Only through collective social transformation. Only by reshaping the rules of our society, our cultural norms.
Telling people they can do this by an individual performance, however often it is repeated, is not kind. It is cruel. It is doomed to fail.
Entrenching a belief GNC people are the misfits, not that it is the social and cultural norms which are the problem, that they need to change themselves, to the point of body modification, is a regressive, controlling constraining act in support of gender shackles.
Teaching it to children, as the Scottish Government is now doing, is unforgiveable. And, for that, I name you an enemy of all that is good.