If you are here to read about movement strategy and theory, read the whole thing. If you’re just here for the theory, skip ahead to the section called “Social Constructions.”
The Current State of the Gender Critical Movement
For most of the past decade, the gender critical movement, for lack of a better term, i.e. opponents of genderwang from all quarters in society, have been against the ropes taking punch after punch after punch, just trying to keep our careers, homes, jobs and kids, with, at best, mixed degrees of success.
However, beginning in Red State America and England, places where there are long-term, albeit different, cultural traditions that enable dissidents and popular classes to push back against elite hegemony, we have started chalking up the odd victory. By “victory,” I don’t mean actual gains for gender critical thinking in culture and law but successful resistance to ambitious, novel changes to culture and public policy that have been forced-though elsewhere but are stalled in particular regions within the two largest and most venerable countries of the Anglosphere. And I have offered some reasons for the greater resilience of Dixie and England in my writing previously.
Perhaps it is the luxury of occasionally winning something that is allowing a coalition of people and organizations largely forced together by our adversaries that is causing us to begin squabbling more vigorously and loudly about our differences in public. We are an extraordinarily broad coalition, encompassing a range of opinion from deeply anti-feminist religious traditionalists to communist lesbian separatists.
But it is not the merits of feminism and nor of traditional partriarchal religion that forms the locus of the conflict. In some ways, our movement is showing its health because our divisions are not playing out along those lines. In fact, radical feminists and religious conservatives are likely to be on the same page whereas people who have been pulled into the debate over questions of child safeguarding or free speech are more likely to be in the opposite camp, along the small but important community around which much of the debate swirls, a group I will call “legacy transsexuals.”
So, what are the camps? First of all, the framing and naming of the issue indicates which side is winning. The camps are those who oppose using “wrong-sex pronouns” and those who believe we should award the honour of third person pronouns not matching sex to adults who underwent gender reassignment surgery but are on our side, politically, regarding pediatric gender medicine, free speech and other issues.
The Problems of Grand Coalitions
One of the reasons I feel qualified to contribute to this debate is that I have experience with working in anti-establishment grand coalitions from days as leader of the BC Green Party. In the 1990s, I played a founding and leadership role in the BC Anti-Casino Coalition and BC Electoral Change Coalition. The former group included conservative and far left municipal politicians, trade union leaders, social conservatives, people of faith from both liberal and conservative churches and was led by members of what we might call the “NIMBY Left.” The latter comprised liberal academics studying the voting system, the anti-abortion movement, the neo-Jeffersonian taxpayer movement, environmentalists and Maoists.
Unlike the current grand coalition that has been corralled and herded together by the establishment, these coalitions formed voluntarily. As such, we built institutions and processes for working together as our coalition coalesced. One of the challenges we face today is that we are in a situation more akin to the coalition building work of the United Nations powers in the Second World War. Having discovered that we are under attack by the same powers, we now have to figure out how to cooperate because we’re stuck with each other until the end of this war.
Due to the highly effective retooling and escalation of the cancelation campaign waged against me since 2020 in 2022, work I wanted to do in sharing my practical knowledge from the grand coalitions of the 1990s mostly went nowhere. I simply was not able to participate as much as I wished in the organized coalitions that haltingly emerged in 2023. All I was able to do was get my otherwise-Marxist institute to sponsor a monthly multi-partisan gender critical meet-up and bring in conservative intellectual Karin Litzcke as its co-chair.
The first thing this undignified public debate should tell us is that we need national and supra-national institutions where these things should be, if not agreed upon then, at least clarified and fought over by trusted movement leaders outside immediate public view. Twitter is a suboptimal location for us to be hanging out these questions, especially when, because we are struggling to find language to describe our disagreement, it is all the easier to descend into expressing our disagreements in interpersonal or sectarian terms.
Gender criticals need spaces to fight with each other and make necessary agreements at a high level. And I commit, if I decide return to Canada this fall, to building such spaces.
A word on such spaces before we get to the theory: the people from whom I learned the most about how to sustain unity in a coalition in which there is only agreement on one issue are now deceased and deeply missed by me: Kathleen Toth, the anti-abortion activist and leader of the Family Coalition Party of BC and Charles Boylan, the Maoist and leader of the BC Marxist-Leninist Party. There was almost nothing other than the need for proportional representation on which I agreed with either of them but I learned a lot not just about the practicalities of broad coalition work but about how to see goodness and experience friendship with people whose politics and worldview one deeply opposes.
Social Constructions
I want to suggest that, as with so many of the problems our movement faces, the origin of our difficulty is that even we internalize too many of the cognitive distortions the genderwang Newspeak project is pushing into our consciousness every minute of every day through legacy media, social media and compelled speech in our homes and workplaces.
When gender ideologues state that they believe “gender is a social construction,” we mistakenly believe them. Their argument is that their gender is whatever they personally think it is at that moment of that day, that whatever they believe in their heart of hearts about their gender is necessarily true.
Except: that is not what “social construction” means. You do not need to read Michel Foucault or Judith Butler or any other poststructuralist thinker to know that. Just look at the words. A construction is something that is made, built, fashioned in the real world, not merely fleetingly imagined in one’s private interior life. What genderists today mean by “social construction” is actually “personal fantasy.”
To give an example of a social construction, let’s pick something neutral, like time zones. Until the advent of long-distance passenger rail, time was what one might call “objectively determined.” In every place in the world, one could discover when the shortest shadows were cast in all directions and deduce that the sun was at the highest point in the sky. Whenever the sun reached its zenith, that was noon. It was then just a matter of dividing the rest of the time into twenty-four hours of equal length and dividing those hours into sixty minutes of equal length. As one moved around the circumference of the earth, what time it was was both objectively discoverable and slightly different from everywhere else.
But it was impossible to fashion railway schedules on that basis. So, strips of the world were arbitrarily selected and turned into “time zones.” And what was originally called “railway time,” soon wholly obliterated the objective experience of time human beings had been living with for millennia. Instead, all time was determined relative to when noon happened at the Greenwich Observatory east of London. Time ceased to describe one’s position relative to the sun or surface of the earth and now described which zone one had been arbitrarily placed in and the centre of that zone’s position relative to Greenwich.
We now find this so natural that we use the communications technology we now have not to measure what time it is objectively where we are but to instead make sure that everyone’s clock knows what zones it is in and reports the time in that zone identically, down to the nanosecond. This is what a social construction is, something that is based on physical and observed realities and constructed out of them based on widespread, near-unanimous social agreement. It feels like part of the physical world but as actually something we build, maintain and constantly rebuild and reinforce at the level of mass culture.
Legacy Transsexuals vs. Autogynephiles
Before the rise of the current theory of gender that has seized control of our institutions at the elite level, there were very few people who underwent medical procedures in order to resemble individuals of the opposite sex. We called these folks “transsexuals” or “female impersonators,” as the vast majority were male. The men and women who engaged in these practices were almost all same-sex-attracted people who desperately desired to be beautiful to opposite sex-attracted (i.e. straight) people of their sex.
These individuals did not desire, require or possess a legal regime to force others to behave as though their impersonation was working. Sometimes the impersonations and surgeries were so flawless people were, at least consciously, fooled. Sometimes the impersonations and surgeries were “good enough” for more sexually flexible but straight-identified people to be attracted to transsexuals. Sometimes the impersonations were failures but people went along with them out of pity and the desire to make the transsexual feel better.
The point was that if the room agreed with you about the gender you claimed, you possessed that gender, not the sex you were impersonating but you got people to act and speak as though you were that sex. That is what any plain understanding of “gender is a social construction” means.
And a minority of the community today called “transgender,” mainly older members thereof understand their gender in this context. These individuals tend to be vigilant about how others react to them, often becoming amateur cold readers so they can modulate their body language, tone of voice even claims about what they believe or have experienced emotionally so as to best impersonate someone of the sex they wish they were. They are mostly older and tend to be same-sex attracted. And one can see the logic of some of these individuals having been part of the long-term gay pride, gay rights movement.
But we face today is a very different situation with younger trans-identified people, along with opposite sex-attracted trans-identified males who have eschewed the red sports car and instead chosen to act out their midlife crisis by sexually traumatizing their wives and children, individuals we call autogynephiles. Until recently, it was viewed by the medical profession as wrong to transition children, young adults or autogynephiles. But thanks to masses of Big Pharma investment, the “do no harm” ethos has been broken down, as it was during the opioid crisis.
Trans-identifying autogynephiles, who, today, commit rapes at somewhere between 250% and 400% the rate that other males do, tend to have certain psychiatric comorbidities along with their sexual arousal at imagining themselves as a woman engaged in same-sex relations, such as preferential rape. And it is these individuals who dominate the leadership of pro-genderwang organizations and movements. It is from them that young, gender-confused people take their cues.
What autogynephiles desire is not to sincerely convince people they are women, through acts of credible impersonation but to force people to behave as though they believe they are, when they know they are not. When people interact with militant autogynephiles, they claim to believe these guys are women, not because they think they are but because they know they are violent, coercive men who will punish, harass, beat, rape or even murder them if they don’t pretend to be convinced. In other words, autogynephiles’ power to make people call them female comes from those people’s recognition that they are actually potentially physically dangerous men.
And many autogynephiles are as aroused by the force, the lack of consent, the lack of true belief as they are by the pronouns they compel and the silk panties they wear.
Subjectivity, Objectivity and Intersubjectivity
When I teach courses in both economics and philosophy, at the core of my teaching is the “three kinds of reality” model. Every person has three concurrent experiences of what is real. There is the subjective experience, which is how that person is internally, personally and individually seeing and experiencing the world. There is the objective experience, how the world actually is, as measured by instruments, senses and direct engagement with physical reality. But then there are intersubjective experiences, like our experience of railway time. Or like a bank loan, where $1000 today is worthy $1100 next year, where powerful social agreements and observations about others’ behaviour condition our reality.
Our community is fighting against people who believe gender is subjective, who simply want to force us to describe the world as they see it in their mind’s eye, irrespective of our actual perceptions or experiences. But our community contains two groups: those who see gender as intersubjective and those who see it as objective. Free speech, anti-authoritarian and refugees from the pre-genderwang trans scene, all constituencies I identify with, are intersubjectivists: our views are best expressed by my slight elaboration of Bill Maher’s words on the “bathroom debate:” “If you look [and act] like a man, go to the men’s; if you look [and act] like a woman, go to the women’s but you there, with the beard in the dress, you can fucking hold it.”
On the other hand, religious conservatives and feminists tend towards the objective side, which makes sense on a number of fronts. Feminists, especially survivors of men’s violence, are much less interested in splitting social hairs to describe tiny numbers of outliers within an already tiny demographic group than ensuring basic physical fairness and safety in women’s spaces and activities.
And I think they probably are in the right, here, in articulating a position that we need to stop focusing on people’s, usually men’s, thoughts about things and focus on material reality. But we also have to recognize that in debates about gender, courageous legacy transsexuals on our side punch massively above their weight. The establishment goes to great lengths to suppress their voices because when legacy transsexuals say “there is no such thing as a trans child” or “save women’s sports,” people who would not otherwise listen do.
On one hand, I think that we probably should speak for objective, material reality. On the other hand, the idea of gender as intersubjective reminds of a past détente with the trans community and points to ways of living together that are more harmonious. When this war ends, there will be a lot of people in bodies disfigured by “gender medicine” who will need better models, non-bullying, non-coercive models for interacting with the rest of society and we will need models for treating them with the kindness and respect their behaviour warrants.
Personally, I hope that people who have been bamboozled by genderwang build more resilience and become less concerned about how others talk about them, an enterprise that is probably the biggest, hardest and most incomplete work of my own life. And I also hope that this essay has provided a little more precise language and a little more perspective so we have, at least, a more constructive debate.
