In the first part of this series, I discussed the pro-lockdown stance of the modern left and how that indicated a break with reality.

In order to recap my definition of the modern left, it is those that claim to be independent from the mainstream media, advocate for left wing policies on the economy and criticise US/UK foreign policy but have a large proportion of their focus on identity politics. For an expanded definition, see the original article.

The second part of this series will discuss the modern left’s belief in transgender ideology, and how that indicates that their break with reality came earlier than the Covid Narrative.

What is Transgender Ideology?

People who support transgender ideology will claim that there is no such thing as transgender ideology (or alternatively, Gender Identity Ideology).

Transgender ideologists believe that each human being has an innate gender identity. This can either match the biological sex of the person (‘cis’) or not match the biological sex of the person (‘trans’). This gender identity does not have to be male or female; the most popular alternative to male or female identities is ‘non-binary’ meaning not identifying as either male or female. This identity is considered to override biological sex, so if a man ‘identifies as’ a woman, he is a woman, if a woman identifies as non binary then she is non binary.

This ideology seeks to change the way that society is constructed, to change the point of reference from sex to gender identity. So female toilets should be those for a female gender identity and not for the female biological sex. This applies to all other things segregated by sex – they should become segregated by identity (or not segregated at all). Pronouns are also another key part of this ideology. Rather than pronouns simply being used to shorten communication and to avoid contorted sentences, they are used as a form of validation of the individual’s gender identity. It is common nowadays in ‘queer’ spaces to state the pronouns ‘you use’ (i.e. that other people use about you) while introducing yourself to the group. She/her if you identify as a woman, they/them if you identify as non-binary etc. Some use multiple pronouns like she/they or ‘neopronouns’ (new words) like zie/zim.

The Left and Transgender Ideology

The modern left is heavily invested in supporting and defending this ideology and protecting it from criticism. Many of the individuals that I identified in my previous post, such as Kerry Ann Mendoza, Ash Sarkar, and Owen Jones, put a lot of energy into defending gender identity ideology. Here’s a few examples of how that applies in practise.

Sarkar and Jones, in particular, have criticised the High Court ruling in Bell/A. vs. Tavistock. This legal case was brought by Keira Bell, a detransitioned woman, and Mrs. A., the mother of a teenager with rapid onset gender dysphoria. It regarded the issue of whether children can consent to puberty blockers – drugs that prevent natural puberty which are the first step towards medical transition. The High Court declared that children under 16 were very unlikely to be able to consent to the use of puberty blockers.

Both Jones and Sarkar support the notion of the ‘trans child’. Of course, this follows from the notion of an ‘innate gender identity’ which children are capable of ‘just knowing’ by magic whether they are a boy or a girl (I would suggest that anyone who believes this try interacting with some children.) They believe that saying that children cannot consent to puberty blockers is discrimination against the ‘trans child’.

This isn’t the only position that these left wing activists take that is completely out of touch with reality. They also consider the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to be ‘transphobic’ because it requires a waiting time of two years before ‘gender’ can be changed and the presentation of medical evidence of gender dysphoria. Instead, they want this system to be operated on the principle of ‘self-ID’ – anyone can change their ‘gender’ at any time for any reason.

This article criticising Liz Truss for rejecting reforms along these lines from the Canary is a good example. One sentence of this article – talking about the fact that the GRA does not mention ‘non binary’ identities – is particularly revealing:

“Right now, non-binary individuals have nowhere to turn to legitimise their gender.”

The idea that the state and government legislation exists to legitimise an individual’s belief about themselves is of course, absurd and extremely narcissistic. The article does not answer the question as to why the state should consider ‘gender’ to be a valid category at all to include in law, other than that people’s feelings will be hurt if it is not.

Meanwhile, women’s concerns about men in their spaces are dismissed as transphobic. Women are perceived as the oppressors of those poor trans-identified males because we don’t consider them women and don’t want their male bodies in our spaces. This of course is a complete inversion of reality, where patriarchy oppresses women through male violence and the threat of such.

Transgender ideology has become a key plank of the modern left, and one which brooks no dissent, similar to the Covid narrative. The publications that are part of this milieu would refuse to publish any woman talking about the harms of this ideology (even publishing an article by her on a completely different topic) because in their view she is a ‘transphobe’ and a ‘terf’. The mantras are – ‘No Debate’ and ‘Trans Women are Women’. Anything other than full belief is transphobia.

What’s wrong with Gender Identity Ideology?

What’s the problem? Someone might ask. After all, isn’t this just about being kind to people who are suffering from mental distress? Isn’t this just about alleviating an individual’s dysphoria by being polite and kind? Well, no.

It should go without saying that criticising an ideology is not the same thing as expressing hatred towards a person. If one criticises Christianity or Islam, because they disagree with those religions, that is not the same as hating individuals that profess belief in those faiths. Whereas say, abuse towards someone for wearing a religious symbol would be an example of hatred towards the person believing in that religion. It should go without saying, except for the fact that transgender ideologists frame any disagreement with the concept of ‘gender identity’ as personal hatred and denial of their existence. They often abuse women for criticising their beliefs as ‘terfs’ and ‘transphobic’. So what are the problems with this belief? I am going to outline the fact that gender identity ideology is both misogynistic and homophobic.

Misogyny

Gender identity ideology is misogynistic.

How can one ‘identify’ as a woman? Women (and in general, non-gender identity believers) would say that female is a biological sex which is defined by the body type designed to produce eggs (large gametes). Women generally develop certain primary and secondary sex characteristics (womb, vagina, breasts) etc. That said because female is the type of body that is designed to develop large gametes, women who have certain disorders with regards to hormones or differences of sex development are still female, despite some transgender ideology claims that sex is a spectrum.

It’s clear that males cannot identify as having female biology, because that does not make any sense. Males by definition cannot have female biology (and vice versa). So, if a male identifies as female, what is he identifying with? Males who claim they are female claim to have some sort of inner female essence. What this amounts to in reality, however, is that they consider this female essence to be feminine stereotypes. Obviously, reducing women to feminine stereotypes is misogynistic.

The sexism is also very notable in the discussion around ‘trans kids’. ‘Affirmative’ parents – those who accept their child is the opposite sex – generally make comments about how their male child always liked dresses and dolls or their female child always liked trucks and climbing trees. The implication of this logic being that if a boy likes dresses he must really be a girl inside. This is regressive and encourages medicalisation of children who do not conform to gender stereotypes.

Gender identity ideology implies that women can identify out of their own oppression, as if ‘gender identity’ is the cause of women’s oppression, then women could escape this by identifying as men. This is obviously wrong, as women and girls cannot avoid FGM, forced marriage, rape, domestic violence and prostitution simply by identifying as male. Gender ideology also believes that men who identify as women are more oppressed than women because of their ‘identity’, and because of the fact that women refuse to ‘respect’ this identity. This ignores the male violence that women face, and also equates the oppression of trans identified homosexual males in prostitution in South America – a form of homophobic male violence – with the alleged oppression of middle class white trans-identified males in the West.

This ideology also reduces women’s safety, by allowing men who identify as women into spaces designed for women such as female toilets and changing rooms. It reduces the ability of women to be able to say no to men in these spaces for fear of being accused of transphobia. It also leads to dangerous situations where males are placed in female prisons and attack women.

Homophobia

Gender identity ideology is homophobic.

A lesbian is a woman who is attracted to other women and a gay man is a man attracted to other men. These terms are defined on the basis of biological sex. Gender identity ideology redefines these terms by stating that ‘woman’ is anyone who says they are a woman and ‘man’ is anyone who says they are a man. It follows that lesbians must include trans women in their dating pool and gay men must include trans men in their dating pool. This is imposing compulsory heterosexuality on gays and lesbians, which is homophobic.

Lesbians and gay men are subjected to abuse if they define their orientation as same sex attraction. There are endless amounts of twitter comments that state that if a lesbian refuses to sleep with trans women she is a ‘terf’, a ‘transphobe’ and that she is ‘denying that a trans women is a real woman’. There is even a term used by trans activists for this, the ‘cotton ceiling’, in other words framing lesbian sexuality as a barrier to be overcome by trans women. The same applies to gay men in reverse.

Trans ideology is also homophobic because it encourages children to ‘transition’. Gender dysphoria in children is more likely than not to resolve or decrease if a child is allowed to go through puberty and the number of these children that grow up LGB is higher than statistical average. There are also cases – revealed by whistleblowers at the Tavistock gender identity clinic in the UK – that many parents who do not want a gay child will seek their child’s transition as a ‘cure’ for homosexuality.

Where did Transgender Ideology Come From?

How did the absurd idea that men are actually women if they say so become so popular? After all, it is a laughable idea, or would be, if it wasn’t being used as a basis to undermine women’s rights and give harmful drugs to children.

Transgender ideology would not have been able to have become so dominant in society without a large amount of money behind it. Unlike Civil Rights and Gay Rights, transgender ideology has completely captured society in a small period of time without any real input from the broader society and without any attempts by activists to build public support for their position. The powerful men behind this ideology have captured institutions from the top down.

Stonewall, for example, used to be an organisation for gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals. It was designed to combat discrimination and to abolish homophobic laws such as Section 28. In 2015, Stonewall added the T to the previous Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual activism that it had been doing. Stonewall started pushing for extreme claims such as that biological sex does not matter and that same sex attraction is actually same gender attraction. The amount of funding that Stonewall has increased since they started promoting transgender ideology.

This idea was able to capture many large institutions in the UK through the mechanism of the ‘Stonewall Diversity Champions’ scheme. This scheme involves organisations paying Stonewall money to have a label placed on their website that shows that they are affiliated with Stonewall. This is then used to push their ideology and silence dissent, as has been seen with the case of Allison Bailey, a barrister who disagrees with gender identity ideology.

It is far more than just Stonewall, of course. Stonewall is merely a footsoldier in this war, the main drivers of this ideology are certain billionaires invested in pharmaceutical companies, and those who seek to change humanity through the mechanism of transhumanism. Big Pharma has an incentive to promote transgender hormones and surgeries as these make a large amount of money as opposite sex imitation requires a lifelong hormone regimen. Trans-identified male Martine Rothblatt has been the most vocal in promoting the intersection between transgenderism and transhumanism. The idea of transgenderism, in the words of Jennifer Bilek, is the “normalisation of disembodiment”, which opens up a path to lead to transhumanism as transhumanism is based on rejecting human embodiment and seeking to upload human beings to the cloud and other similar projects.

So How did the Left Become Duped by this Big Pharma based Ideology?

This ideology is another case – similarly to the Official Covid Narrative – where a detachment from material reality has led to the left supporting something destructive and dangerous, that benefits the billionaires that they claim to oppose. In the case of transgender ideology it also leads to the left promoting ideas that it claims to be opposed to such as misogyny and homophobia.

Both the Covid Narrative and Transgender ideology are able to manipulate the idea of compassion. The left considers itself to be compassionate and caring, so the idea that they could possibly be a ‘bigot’ for criticising transgender ideology is extremely upsetting to them. In fact, many on the left spend a lot of energy on calling other people bigots. When a large part of your identity is wrapped up in not seeming to be bigoted, and you are automatically the ‘kind’ one because you are on the left, the idea of being called phobic is a possible psychological harm to you.

Misogyny also likely plays a role, because trans activism inherently privileges the opinions of men over women. Learned misogyny makes people turning to the left more likely to take men’s claims that they are women seriously. There has been a significant history of misoogyny on the left, and one of the reasons that women created their own movements was because of the lack of support for women’s rights within broader movements. Thus I don’t think implicit misogyny can be ruled out as an influence on the left – as although the left has adopted more women’s rights positions over time, it cannot be expected that they would be immune to misogyny. Misogyny also means that they dismiss women’s counterarguments to transgender ideology as being bigoted and hateful.

The detachment from the reality of biological sex means they fail to see how the ideology harms women. Their detachment from material reality in terms of class and economics means that they fail to examine the massive amounts of money behind this agenda, and fail to see that the more people ‘being their true self’ by taking hormones and having surgery, the more money for Big Pharma.

The left also fails to understand the concept of autogynephilia. If you understand this concept, the behaviour of trans-identified males makes perfect sense. Combine this with big pharma based ‘activism’ for the acceptance of this fetish and the mixture is truly toxic, but the left fails to understand this.

Many trans-identified males, and former trans identified males, have admitted that autogynephilia is or was their motivation to ‘transition’ from male to female. Autogynephilia can be defined as a fetish in which a man is sexually aroused by the idea of thinking of himself as a woman. This fetish can involve being aroused by female clothing, female biology (such as breastfeeding or pregnancy) etc.

The concept of autogynephilia explains male trans activist behaviour exceedingly well. It explains the obsession with entering female spaces (as this involves being validated as a ‘real woman’ and not a man claiming to be a woman and this is a crucial part of the fetish), why they desire to sleep with lesbians, etc. It also explains the anger they show if they do not get their fetish validated – the anger of male entitlement.  When men get sexually rejected by women, they often get angry.

People find it hard to believe that there could be men out there that are so sexually obsessed and motivated by their fetish that they could go to the extremes of transitioning. However, there are many cases of men murdering women because of sexual rejection. The idea that there is a subset of men that would take hormones and have surgery for their fetish is really not so extreme.

Conclusion

Transgender Ideology is another sign of the left’s detachment from material reality. In particular, the material reality of biological sex, which is undermined and in some cases outright denied by transgender activists. But also the reality of the fact that this ideology is promoted by Big Pharma as a means to create profit, and has nothing to do with ‘being your true self.’