Stuck in the Middle with You

... so please, tell me who you are

[Chorus]

Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

When the US goes mad, the whole world becomes a little crazy by association.

There are vast challenges spiralling out of control around us, but some of the crazies out there seem to think that one single issue redeems all the rest. Here is one of them on Twitter. (It’s a small, futile act of resistance to keep calling it Twitter):

I saw this because I follow some gender critical feminists on Twitter, and the algorithms don’t distinguish between Far Right fanatics and those of us twittering in the margins and being shouted down by the zealots at either extreme of the gender wars.

Trump’s Executive Orders at the end of his first twenty four hours in office include:

• A move to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants

• Withdrawal from the World Health Organization

• Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement

• Declaring a national emergency to override environmental protection laws

• Renaming the Gulf of Mexico

• Committing to ensure that states carrying out the death penalty have enough legal drugs to do so
  

He has pardoned nearly all the insurrectionists of 6th January 2021.

To those who think he is absolved from all this because he affirms the most fundamental fact of human existence which even an idiot like him can grasp (there are only two human sexes), let me remind you that your little darlings with their gonads and boobs in tact will drown along with their hormonally neutered, surgically mutilated peers when the ice caps melt. And if you think Trump’s anti-LGBTQIA+ fanaticism is about saving children, I can only presume that you regard those about to be deported as some kind of sub-human species not worth saving, not to mention the millions of children who will suffer as a result of the US withdrawing support from the World Health Organisation.

I hope it’s clear by now that I’m repelled by those Stepford Wives cooing over Donald Trump because hey, he might be a fascist but he knows the difference between guys and gals. Of course he does. I don’t think any men have accused him of sexual abuse and rape.

But hand-wringing US progressives bear significant responsibility for the election of Trump, in their stubborn resistance to any argument, however reasonable or informed, that calls into question aspects of the LGBTQIA+ movement.

There are legitimate reasons to resist the onslaught of gender ideology, including its brainwashing of children in age-inappropriate ways, often with masked allusions to sexualised fetishes:

Grandad's Pride - Liberalism's Shame

Women who express concerns about anatomical males in women’s prisons and changing rooms, lesbians who resist the intrusion of anatomically male trans women into their events and relationships, are not terfs or bigots. Women who are defeated by trans women and males with DSDs in sporting events have a right to be distressed.

Controversy, Complexity and Compassion

It’s interesting that these controversies all play out on one side. There are few campaigns for trans men to be allowed access to gay men’s activities and relationships. Trans men compete in women’s sports without any problems. Trans men are not clamouring to use men’s toilets and changing rooms. The problem of prisons is not an issue, because it is very rare for females (including trans men) to be imprisoned for violent and/or sexual crimes, whereas there is no significant statistical difference between trans women and men with regard to those imprisoned for sex offences. The vast majority of such offences are committed by men against women, children, and vulnerable men.

To refuse to acknowledge any of this, to label everyone who disagrees with you as a terf and a fascist, is to alienate the vast majority of ordinary people struggling to live meaningful lives outside the echo chamber of progressive politics. The captivity of liberal and progressive politics by the LGBTQIA+ movement leaves a wide open political space for populists like Trump to move into.

Trump is the ultimate postmodernist, the ultimate anarchist. Here is where all our deconstructive, parodic, gender-bending strategies have led us. Populism is the political progeny of the postmodern academy with its elitist rhetoric and disembodied language games. If you eviscerate language of all objective material realities and all ethical significance, if you insist that there is no truth, if you see all laws and social norms as violent and oppressive, if you look to the future with a steely bright vision of progress that seeks to break free of all traditional, religious and historical claims upon us, you should recognise that Trump and his followers subscribe to the same anarchic futurism. What values of truth and meaning do you have left to judge him by? To what objective reality do you hold him accountable?

Questions of sex and gender affect us individually and collectively. We’re experiencing experiments in language, meaning and identity that push us to the far frontiers of what it means to be a person in our social and cultural contexts as well as our personal relationships, at a time when we face escalating global crises and threats. The science is uncertain, the ethical issues are complex, the confusion is intense, and the suffering is real. The chaos that has consumed society’s gendered norms and constructs calls for attentiveness to all who are suffering and vulnerable, especially those who have been rendered voiceless by vocal and powerful ideologies on both sides. This means negotiating conflicting and threatened rights on all sides and learning to live with perhaps insurmountable complexity and doubt. But how did we get here?

I’m revisiting my writings on gender theory and questioning some of my ideas, but I remain convinced that our ability to think through issues of sex and gender with the best insights offered by science, theology and theory must be protected from the absolutists and ideologues at both ends of the spectrum. This leads me to a more radical feminism, a more exploratory theology, and a more critical approach to gender theory than I had before, with an insistence that they must not be separated. Gender theorists and activists have been allowed to obscure the fact that in every culture and era, women and girls have been and are subordinated at best and killed at worst solely on account of their female bodies. Feminism must reclaim its radical vision, without losing sight of the ways in which gender theory can inform its principles.

When feminism sacrificed female bodily lives on the high altar of gender theory, it opened the door to every kind of male desire and corporate power. Big pharma, like the arms trade, will seize any opportunity to make a killing. We should not be surprised that the pharmaceutical captivity of the gender-fluid body followed hot on the heels of the disembodied language games of postmodern theorists. Nor should we be surprised that those same theorists subscribe to the idea that sexed bodies should be conformed to phantasms of gender by any means possible, for they long ago evicted the materially significant body from the house of language. The female body becomes the ultimate challenge in this triumph of gender over sexual embodiment, for male desire no longer has to settle for possession by penetration. It can become an act of total conquest and colonisation.

I first realized that gender theory was becoming an anti-feminist ideology when I read a review of my book published in 2007, New Catholic Feminism: Theory and Theology. The book is a feminist critique of both Catholic teaching on sexuality and gender, and of feminist theology’s progressive optimism. It would have benefitted from a rigorous editor, and if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some of it. But this I know—it was original. Nobody before or since has scrutinised Catholic gender ideology and liberal feminist theology through the lens of psychoanalytic theories of gender and found both wanting. Yet one reviewer complained:

Move on, feminists. You’ve had your say. It’s all about queer theory now. That theoretical language game has become the Trojan horse which allowed feminism to be appropriated and controlled through the socially and historically sanctioned dominance of men’s desires and demands.

But gender theory is too important to be left to ideologues. The teasing apart of sex and gender gave women a small space in which to navigate possible paths to freedom, liberating our sexed bodies from the tyranny of shame, repression and self-loathing, and allowing us to become social subjects free from the shackles of conformity to oppressive gendered stereotypes. This Twitter thread by Victoria Smith gives a good account of why this matters:

The dissolution of the distinction between sex and gender reinforced the old regime—through the essentialisation of sexual difference by religious and political conservatives, and through the promotion of mimetic femininity evidenced in the ascendant status of beautiful trans misogynists and the transformation of drag queens from pantomime dames into sexual fetishists.

Dylan Mulvaney - the ultimate “woman”:

Jess l’whor: “I like a good slap or a choke every now and then, okay, who doesn’t?”

“I Google a lot of uh throat [ __ ] … um a lot of bisexual porn. I’m a lover of the body, I love titties, I love badge, I love everything.”

The realisation that gender is fluid, creative and performative, that our sexed bodies do not determine who we are and how we must live, created an opportunity for both sexes to break free of binary opposites. Instead, it has reinforced them in multiple destructive and misogynistic ways.

Every time somebody declares themselves non-binary, they collude in reinforcing that dualistic binary, posturing as the interesting and exotic exception to the conformist binaried norm with which they presumably associate the rest of us. Meanwhile, the sleeping monster of gendered dualism awakes with all its oppressive consequences for women. Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson represent different versions of the same old toxic masculinity, which finds its pathetic and deadly embodiment in men like Putin and Trump.

The defeat of feminism is evident not just in some forms of gender theory and in the obvious and violent examples of populist politicians and their followers, but more subtly in the corporate conditioning of children through the advertising and entertainment industries. I took these images from The Entertainer website, where I searched for “toys for boys” and “toys for girls”:

In this brave new world now emerging, women are literally and metaphorically being made to serve men’s demands, from the imprisoning torment of women in Afghanistan to the legalised eradication of lesbian rights and women-only groups in Australia. In that context, the popular all-American fantasy of a feminist Barbie in the film of that name is nothing other than the corporate commodification of women’s struggles for justice. That glamorous Barbie sashaying in to a high rise office block see her gynaecologist is a world away from the gynaecological and obstetric realities of health care for the vast majority of women, including women in the US without adequate health insurance:

Barbie: the naked empress

So yes to radical feminism, yes to gender theory, but no to all gender ideologies and dogmas, whether on the political and religious right, or on the political and religious left.

I have never been mainstream in my politics, but I’ve never felt as politically isolated as I do today. Why don’t more people speak out? If you recognise that lesbians don’t have penises, adolescent girls do not become boys by amputating their beautiful budding breasts, gay teenage boys do not become heterosexual by pretending to be girls, blocking puberty in adolescents with complex mental health needs with drugs peddled by big pharma is child abuse, and anatomically male adult “women” demanding access to women’s spaces, bodies and sporting events are voyeurs at best and sexual predators at worst, then please, speak out. If you are a gay man who has allowed the continuing struggle for homosexual rights to be appropriated by the amorphous drift of rights for every sexual proclivity and narcissistic identity, it’s not too late to stand up and stand apart. If you recognise that the fragile rights of women, including lesbians, are being sacrificed to demands for unconditional trans inclusivity, say so. Otherwise, when Trump sweeps away the whole LGBTQIA+ movement, these fragile newborn rights for gay men and lesbians will be thrown out with the bathwater. And if non-binary, bisexual and trans-identifying persons seek allies in the struggle, then we must all find a better way of differentiating between legitimate and defensible rights and unreasonable demands that violate the rights of others, especially women and children.

Gay and lesbian rights must be protected against the draconian onslaught of Trump’s hatred, which has global implications for all homophobic cultures, without having to sign up to the vacuous rhetoric of whatever is meant by the LGBTQIA+ “community”. Every one of the letters in that alphabet soup must be separated out, interrogated, made to give an account of itself, and supported or rejected on the basis of its ethical coherence and its integrity. To do otherwise is to reduce the political forum to a hall of mirrors, with our bodies bent out of shape by whichever distorting mirror image we choose to look in.

I wrote this last night after a couple of glasses of wine, to help me to cope with the television news. I decided not to post it immediately, but have spent time editing it this morning. It is still a somewhat wine-induced polemic!