thoughts on lgbt
(linked from this blurb)
1. my early background
in 2015 (i was 20), i had the average person’s attitude to transsexuality. this was a debilitating illness that left people with needs that necessitated understanding, special rights and social justice. i’d come up on feminism by reading the legendary social justice and words words words article, which prompted me to go to the oxford uni group “cuntry living” (i was in cambridge at the time) to gaze upon all these crazy sjws for myself, but the result it actually had was unexpectedly that, in the year i was there, i learned about feminism. (to be clear, the second article i link there should be read light-heartedly, but it’s pretty accurate and important to understand that this is culturally where modern trans activism comes from). this means that i had, from the outset, a balanced and critical understanding of social justice.
there were some fringe gender ideologues in there discussing the elimination of a distinction between male and female but i kinda just agreed to disagree. it wasn’t fashionable to talk about that. there weren’t any he/theys in cuntry living. i eventually got booted out in 2016 for saying that a sexual preference for people of your own race wasn’t inherently racist, lol. i wore that ban as a badge of honour, tho kinda facetiously because i owed that group the fact that i was an intersectional feminist at all.
late 2020 (me 25), a friend comes out as he/they. having never seen that before, i ask them “what’s with the he/they thing?” and immediately receive a hostile argument from third parties. their reason ended up coming down to not wanting to be thought of as a man. i still see that as being a rather sexist reinforcement of the stereotypes that define what a man is supposed to be thought of as. but i never really blamed them for wanting to follow their own heart on the matter. a transgender person is not sexist for trying to pass as eir chosen gender by pandering to stereotypes, and the same applies to a man who feels a need to be seen as “not that”.
the biggest shock for me tho was that somebody was choosing to be not male, rather than suffering from dysphoria that forced em to be not male. dysphoria is still how most people conceive of a trans person, but the “queer” movement intends to change that – by espousing a unique gender identity that every person has that we should all validate. everyone does have a unique experience of gender, so everyone has the option of being trans, which leaves the “cistem” as comprising people who voluntarily sideline their unique experiences to be allies, and people who just disagree that gender identities exist outside of one’s imagination of oneself, or really mean anything (outside of medical dysphoria). in 2021, i realised i was exactly that. since i experience a basically non-existent internal gender, i am an “agender transgender” person. but really as far as activists go, i am a cis man, because i disagree. the ideology requires you to “identify as” trans rather than “be” trans.
and that’s the crux really – supporting rights for transsexuals and supporting gender ideology are two completely different things.
2. my recent background
2021 to 2023, i researched trans rights a lot, and found that a lot of the opposition to the trans-rights activist (TRA) movement, particularly from feminists, was not inherent (out of hate) but rather a reaction to ideological factors where, for example, gender identites were seen as these immutable things that 14-year-olds “knew” and so were unquestionably affirmed and medicalised, which caused a medical scandal that led to england’s only paediatric gender clinic “GIDS” being shut down. that’s really the silver bullet for proving this ideology is harmful – read this editorial for a take on it that i back or, if you want to decide for yourself, the nhs review it’s interpreting (points 4.15–4.22). anyway. there were ideological arguments in both directions, transphobia, exclusionary feminism, legal and medical takes, and i ended up coming to the conclusion that trans rights had to be based on reality rather than subjective gender identities. a transgender person is someone trying to be seen as not of eir birth sex. that should be it.
i saw gender ideology as this kind of surreal, postmodern (meaning defining reality via subjective experience) cringe that was harmful to women, lgb people, and especially transsexuals and children. but i still felt a kind of distance from it, like a normal person would – “transsexuals are rare, how many have you even met?”. it felt like an intellectual exercise that was only relevant to a tiny, heavily-marginalised minority.
but during pride month 2023, walking around soho in london as a miserable bisexual looking at all the flags, lamenting that everyone was fighting and each side so misunderstood the other… just as an aside, i used a female bathroom by mistake, and got a stare i’ll never forget from a middle-aged woman. my first thought was “ig i know what it’s like to be trans now…”, and my second thought was “… but nobody asked her why she finds a man in her bathroom so disturbing”. anyway. i read an essay from a “transsexual separatist” critiquing gender ideology, and it flipped my own relationship with it. forgetting all the ideas in here that i agree or disagree with, the thing that really stuck with me is this:
What queer theory proposes is an anarchic demolition of societal boundaries and norms until reality becomes distorted and nebulous. It promises an illusionary utopia where all identities and expressions are ‘possible’. It is a disingenuous ruse of emancipation, which actually confines behavior within a strict, homogenised orthodoxy.
i had thought that my emotional reaction to gender ideology arose from it being self-contradictory and meaningless. but actually, i don’t think i’m that attached to my logic. what i am attached to is my real identity, a grounding, of knowing and accepting who i am, rather than replacing it with a constructed identity, that pretends i can be anything i want, but really just drowns me in this explosion of stereotypes over what it means to be male, bi, cis, or even just human. in 2022, i’d been drowning in internet people using gender as a focal point in constructing virtual identities, and reposting TRA extremism (puberty blockers are not actually known to be reversible for example – see the nhs report, points 3.24–3.33, esp. 3.32 – so it’s terrifying how many times i read that they were online). this had thrown me into the world of gender critical feminism, where i’d fortunately kept a cool head and avoided ruining my support for trans rights (credit to a couple of friends for helping). i had walked away mixed as usual.
i realised, then, that gender ideology, as part of the broader concept of “queerness”, is actually something that from a mental health angle affects everyone and is everyone’s business. there’s no allyship to be had here. it affects me. so i guess my motive was more selfish than i had realised.
3. i am not queer
the reason i oppose gender ideology is essentially the following. as a relatively “real” bisexual – one who goes by real name even online, one who values community, real people and being yourself – i want to live in a world where my (homo)sexuality is seen as normal and i can engage in it as a straight person would. i want to accept that i am attracted to men sometimes. that means i want my lgbt movement to ASSIMILATE, and to promote SELF-ACCEPTANCE. queer ideology is the opposite of that.
it’s ironic because inability to accept your sex is the making of dysphoria and the transsexual experience. that’s why the resulting queer movement was able to get away with promoting self-rejection to the extent it has i guess. but i don’t see any good coming from a non-dysphoric person persisting an imaginary gender identity, instead of coming to terms with eir sex and eir ability to be free from stereotypes and to challenge eir gender role as they please. a non-binary person isn’t really thought of differently from a binary person in most people’s eyes, other than this expectation that we should parrot all these extra neo-stereotypes when we think of that person.
given that every other aspect of mental health prioritises coming to terms with who you actually are, i don’t think this is in most people’s best interest. certainly not for most teenagers who don’t know the meanings of the words. it’s not harmless for everyone in your school to be seeking meaning, for their internal struggles, in realms of gender dissonance. it seems to me like most real transsexual people just know from day dot that they are trans.
likewise, i can feel the effects of lgbt non-assimilation all the time. my friend complained about the default expectation of hookup-culture and grindr as stopping him from finding a soulmate. to say nothing of the hiv epidemic ! i don’t want being lgbt to be associated with being a “stereotypical queer” – which in the eyes of teenagers means engaging in kink sex, as i was reminded when reading a sexual assault case from Geometry Dash recently. i don’t want honest homosexual or transgender indentities to be conflated with ideological movements to “queer” different things and spaces by breaking down social norms around them, like by sending a penis into a rape crisis centre. anarchy is the opposite extreme to conservatism bro.
i had a nasty experience in 2021 when someone i was attracted to led me on and got into my head by being a pervert online, fake-flirting with me and crossing boundaries. when i confronted it in distress, he vented hypocritically about my “creepy” actions to someone who went on to try to cancel me with a false accusation of sexually harassing him. my and my friend’s best explanation was that he was “trying to be a queer on the internet”.
i also just plainly don’t want my sexuality to be defined by a fucking slur.
4. conciliation
deep breath. i just don’t support it. but some people do, and disagreement is cool. the fight for lgbt rights is to give rights to everyone. that means it’s not our place to question people who say they are gay, or want us to use certain pronouns or anything. calling people as they wish to be called is basic respect that goes beyond lgbt. there’s no part here where i want to judge individuals on whether they are who they say they are, even tho i consider trans rights as being intended for transsexuals rather than drag queens. it is not for gatekeeping. rather, i want people one day to better understand who they themselves really are and be responsible when taking on an oppressed identity.
i will also always have respectful but critical views of opinions that for example see more of a path to trans emancipation in mainstream TRA activism than in my approach, which is more burn down gender ideology and start from scratch :). i sympathise with the view that an lgbt movement that homogenises these disparate identities is the strongest way to promote their rights. but i also can’t much fault people like prominent scottish broadcaster andrew neil who recently came out as “proud to be a terf” after reading and investigating a child detransition story. not after what happened with GIDS. at the end of the day, most people care more about children than transgender people. and most of the world is too small-minded to not let opposition to gender ideology turn into trans-exclusionary politics, as seen by how support for trans rights in the UK is currently declining. it’s a double-standard to criticise this when all a TRA will do when someone opposes gender ideology is insinuate a non-existent hateful motive and shut down discussion.
remember that, even when people use loaded terms like “queer”, they can do it for benign reasons. many people think inclusive language is just like, “well why wouldn’t you want to include more people?”. remember also that trans people are not trans activists. i see them as victims of gender ideology personally, because it removes science from their healthcare and makes normal people turn against trans rights.
that’s really it. it’s hard. my pride month 2023 was not pleasant at all as i came to terms with the non-assimilationism of the lgbt movement i found myself in. being trapped between that and heteronormativity seems like it’s put me on a downward spiral to where i will die without having ever expressed my homosexuality. to put myself in the shoes of a transsexual, i try to combine that feeling with the feeling of dysphoria caused by my autism, the disconnect between my inner monologue and the person i’m able to express to the world. i guess i’ve always found it odd that this lgbt non-assimilationism is reinforcing the feeling of not fitting your body by glorifying stuff like, what i’ve seen cutely described as “gender euphoria”, people revelling in crossing boundaries around gender expression, in the same way that i’ve had to put up with a fetishised gay culture growing up that i just couldn’t seem to fit into.
this shit makes it so easy to harbour subconscious resentment towards trans people and tbh i probably have some self-loathing over it for being bi. i’m trying.
i don’t know if things will ever get better but i do think gender ideology specifically will just be forgotten about in 50 years’ time. there’s too much of a backlash from non-trans-identifying people over its misogynistic and homophobic aspects (i can tell you that my bisexual brain perceives attraction based on someone’s physical characteristics rather than what gender ey says ey is – duh), and eventually TRAs will see that those people actually have no issue with lgbt people themselves, rather than pretending that everyone is a bigot or a closeted bigot.
p.s. what would one replace gender ideology with? how about an understanding of the rooting of transsexual oppression in gender roles? check out this kathleen stock essay on the different meanings of gender. gender roles are the third definition. it’s quite balanced for a gender-critical piece. reading it in late 2022 is what moved me away from destructively opposing gender ideology like an ignorant terf to constructively proposing something new. i finally wasn’t lost, unable to find the words to explain how something i felt was wrong was wrong.