Pride before the Fall

                 Transgender Laurel Hubbard at Tokyo Olympics

Pride that once stood for defending the rights of gay people, has been queered into reactionary homophobic and sexist politics in the pay of the patriarchy. It is now an ideological and political attack on women. Sex is conflated with gender, biological fact is erased by cultural belief, sexism represses women in the struggle to end patriarchal capitalism. But has it won? Not at all. We are reaching peak trans where trans ideology becomes its own worst enemy. By separating itself from sex transgender ideology denies fact, history and science, for a cult that has no agency other than as the mercenary of the capitalocene. No social movement in the service of the capitalocene, which rejects material reality, and attacks  the only class that can restore humanity to nature, will survive. As part of patriarchal capitalism itself, trans Pride will destroy the conditions of its own existence and is heading for the Fall.  

By abandoning sex, gender identity deludes itself that ‘sex’ self-identification (ID) being proposed in the BDMRR Bill will replace biological and social determination with the postmodern delusion of self-determination. Sex self ID creates the legal right for people to change their gender identity by statutory declaration on the basis of a belief. Like all belief systems, far from being self-determination, self sex ID is validated only by law, the state, and ultimately the ruling class. Already its contrived agency is melting into nothingness. It comes in a package of new laws introducing ‘hate speech’ to include gender identity, and making gender transition/de-transition a form of gay conversion. These three law changes are transparently designed to empower the state to deny fundamental human rights, particularly of women and children. And they will not stand.   

Sex self ID conflates sex and gender as an attack on science and rationality. Sex is biological and immutable, gender historically the social relations between men and women. More important, since the origin of the first form of class society, the patriarchy, gender represents the subordination of women by men in order to control their reproductive and productive capacity. In this context, gender today is code for gender oppression of women, part of which entails their ideological and political domination as a sex-class. Women’s liberation therefore entails the defeat of gender as an ideology.

Since the conflation of sex and gender reduces women to an oppressed sex. State-ifying gender erases herstory of oppression, and worse, becomes part of the oppression of women. Sex self-ID, along with the other law changes, will allow men the legal status of women so that any attempt by women to criticise and resist this form of gender oppression will be outlawed as ‘hate speech’ or worse ‘gay conversion’.

If Self-ID becomes law it will be a license for men who identify as woman to invade women’s spaces, deny them jobs, get them imprisoned as transphobes, and most alarmingly as homophobes. Campaigning against this law change the SUFW group seems to have forced some rethinking on the part of Jan Tinetti, Minister of Women and of Internal Affairs. She has signaled that she will not agree to the replacement of sex by gender in the BDMRR Bill. If that is the case and she does not reverse her current position under pressure from trans activism, then this is a significant retreat from trans ideology. It would mean that trans would still be legally a protected group for the purposes of ‘hate speech’ on the grands of their belief rather than fact, and that gender critics would not be jailed for gay conversion when opposing puberty blockers for underage children, or supporting those who de-transition to their sex.

It remains to be seen if the rest of the Labour Government agrees with Jan Tinetti. The minister in charge of the law change on gay conversion, Kris Faafoi, has been won over by trans activists to equate criticism of gender transition with gay conversion. But if sex and gender are not conflated then gender reassignment and gay conversion cannot be treated as equally offensive. Sexual orientation is a fact while gender is a belief. A lot rests on whether the conflation of sex and gender is undone, and the objectional aspects of gay conversion and ‘hate speech’ remain, as these law changes go through parliament. Apart from the fact that the ‘hate speech’ law increases the power of the state to suppress free speech in general and should be opposed outright, if the homophobic sections are not thrown out, they will pose a danger to gays, women and children in particular.

To clarify, the Bill that outlaws gay conversion conflates any opposition to gender transition/de-transition with gay conversion. The purpose of the Bill is ostensibly to outlaw the old institutional homophobia of church and state which has been officially eliminated today. But it is shutting the door after the horse has bolted. Homophobia stayed underground and has been ‘re-converted’ to mean any attempt to question or advise against the right of any child, man or women to come out as their ‘true’ gender.

Yet gender dysphoria is not like sex orientation. Gender dysphoria, or being born in the wrong body, is a sort of creationism whereby the backlash against second wave feminism of the 1970s now takes the form of a postmodern belief that sex is replaced by gender self-determination. This is testified to by those who have de-transitioned, recognising that the purpose of their transition was to suppress their same sex gender orientation. Sex is replaced by gender, fact by belief. Fact:= forcing young people to give up their homosexuality is harmful. Belief: counselling against hasty gender re-assignment in young people is harmless.

Ironically, the new gay conversion is gender transition itself itself, now increasingly licensed by the state. The evidence is clear. The rapid uptake of gender conversion, especially of girls to boys, is this new form as it legally replaces homosexual attraction with the fiction of heterosexual attraction. The Gender Recognition Act of 2004 in UK was openly supported as an alternative to same sex marriage. Better the fiction of gender transition than legitimating gay marriage! This set the scene so that increasingly young lesbians meeting resistance to their same sex relations, found that gender ideology provided an alternative ‘gay conversion’ as boys, in other words, to “trans the gay away”.

Similarly, men who always thought that all lesbians needed was a good ‘f**k’, can with sex self ID, claim to be Lesbians and demand sex as their special ‘male pattern’ violent form of gay conversion. Lesbians who reject penises can, under a law that conflates gender with sex, be sent to prison for ‘hate speech’. There they will find themselves locked up with other predatory men. All of this shows why these law changes serve to perpetuate the historic male dominance of women and girls behind the façade of a progressive human rights narrative.

From the time of the first class society, the patriarchal mode of production, sex has been violently separated from nature, sexual reproduction controlled by men and enforced by gender oppression. Today, capitalism is dying. It is destroying nature that is the condition for its own existence. As capitalism’s terminal crisis intensifies this makes women the greatest threat to its survival. Those who side with capital giving it the kiss of life, are out to destroy women who, as part of nature, strive to resist it. The contradiction between sex (nature) and gender (society) reflects the class contradiction in capitalist society between exploited and exploiters. The class struggle encompasses economics, politics, culture and law. Gender self ID is the last gasp of patriachal capitalism to stop women representing humanity and nature and uniting with other men to overthrow patriarchal capitalism.

This is the patriarchy in drag (not butch girls or feminine boys) finding a new way to penetrate women’s spaces to defeat them in the gender war, and to divide the only class capable of overthrowing capitalism and restoring non-class society to nature. Yet identity politics backed by the state will never be enough to suppress the struggle to bring workers to power. Already we are reaching peak trans as gender ideology runs up against nature’s feedback loops. It’s grotesque effects are a symptom of capitalism’s desperate attempts to survive at all costs. Reactionary laws of sex self ID, hate speech and queering gay conversion in the name of gender re-assignment, are incapable of smoothing dying capitalism’s pillow, let alone destroying humanity’s fundamental unity with nature.