Much is made in gender literature on the right not to be discriminated against because of one’s gender identity, as we have seen on much of the literature produced by international organisations and repeated acritically by international courts. This work is an attempt to make sense of this narrative and expose its weak points and logical fallacies.
One of the most glaring ones, is that the fact that people cannot be discriminated against for reason of their gender identity in itself does not prove that gender identity is anything other than a belief. People cannot be discriminated against for reason of their belief in God. That in itself that does not prove the existence of God or of the immortal soul. There is no proof other than what affirmed dogmatically, that gender identity is anything other than a belief. Or better, the changeability of gender identity is a belief.
Gender theory leverages a lot of feminist theory in recognising that sex is accompanied in any society by a plethora of ideological constructs, cultural practices, political understandings, of what it means to be a man or a woman. We call this gender and we recognise that in most society, the construct of gender is designed to keep women in a subservient position. The exploitation of women’s reproductive capacity is the oldest axis of oppression. It is superficially attractive for women to be told that they do not have to accept the constrainting rules of gender, if by this we mean the awareness of the rules of gender that are associated with our sex. This issue overlap with the misuse of the idea of intersectionality that is also rife in gender theory. Intersectionality is not simply the idea that we all have different identities (for example, I am female, and Italian, and European, etc). Intersectionality cannot be understood without understanding the difference between exploitation and discrimination, for example.
There are three axes of exploitation: sex, race and class. These distinct characteristics create conditions of exploitation and oppression that are both specific and culturally/temporally situated. Sex is the oldest ground of exploitation. Women are exploited for their reproductive capacity throughout history in a way that cuts across the other two categories: a queen will have been forced to provide as many heirs to the king as possible, not differently from what a poor woman will have had to.
Race became a distinct chategory for individuals with colonisation (in the past exploitation may have happened along slightly different lines; for example debt slavery may affect anyone, and it was not ‘race specific’). Black Africans especially were enslaved and moved to the New World in order to provide slave labour in the plantations. Race based exploitation affected women and men differently.
Finally social class has, regardless of economic system (from ancient empires, to feudalism to capitalism), affected the life conditions of humans. Lower social classes were exploited for their labour and prevented from acquiring control of land and capital.
Outside these three axes, there are conditions that may result in discrimination (of course, sex, race and class are also axes of discrimination), such as disability, or age, or sexual orientation. But not exploitation or oppression as such.
Another crucial distinction is that discrimination can also be intended as a positive act, to remedy past and present oppression and exploitation. So that special scholarships for women or black students can be seen as positive discrimination to remedy a situation of objective historical disadvantage. There is not such a thing of positive exploitation on the other hand (though all the language about ‘empowering’ sex work or ‘altruistic’ surrogacy can be seen as a badly disguised attempt to give a positive veneer to the exploitation of women’s sexed bodies).
I think most people would end up agreeing that we have some form of identity connected to gender, though most feminists would prefer to talk about a sex identity, in order not to lose sight of the material reality of our sexed bodies. When people talk about gender identity, I dislike the idea of saying my identity is gender based rather than sex based. But I do recognise that we are not simply sexed animals. We grow up in a society where rules, norms, ideas and preconceptions about sex are deeply ingrained. We call this 'gender'. For feminists, these are negative superstructures women should dismantle to achieve the liberation of women from 'patriarchy'. For conservatives, these are necessary rules to keep women subservient to men. Both sides acknowledge the reality of sex.
As any woman, I remember acquiring an understanding and awareness of what being born female meant in my life. This awareness goes beyond knowing I *was* female. In that sense, I developed an identity *as* a female, first a girl then a woman. And I could see that this trajectory was predetermined not so much by what my female body allowed me to do, but by what gendered rules prevented me from doing. This is the sense of De Beauvoir's statement (One is not born, but rather becomes a woman). Gender theory leverages the work done by feminists to posit that this identity becomes a fluid, changeable object. But not in order to liberate women from the constraint of gendered norms (and also, in some cases, men); gender identity is now used to negate sex. It is not the awareness of our sexed body and the constraints society puts upon it, but a tool to negate our sexed body and self determine our gender as the only relevant aspect of our identity.
This is a leap that defies logic and reality. It seems that no-one who should have, assessed the consequences of this leap. It is quite clear that, within the community that engineered this leap, negating the relevance of birth sex was precisely the point. Whether they originally planned to completely erase the significance of sex, to the point of arguing that if a man says he is a woman, his penis becomes a female organ, it is not clear. Certainly some fringes of the trans planned this all along. And again, some fringes of feminism might have been superficially attracted by the idea that sex was completely irrelevant and should be invisibilised. Clearly only women living in the US, UK or similar could ever conceive this as as possibility, having grown up in societies that, by and large, allow girls to develop a personality, to get an education, to make life choices, including the crucial choices about reproduction which shape a woman’s life, regardless of the direction her life takes.
How ridiculous this sounds in countries where women abort female fetuses because of the pressure to have male children is only too evident. The enthusiasm for gender theory from a certain section of academic feminism seems to derive from a classist disgust for women who are incapable of trascending their female body and be like men. There is a strand of liberal feminism that recoils at the bodily functions of women and think them beneath their intellectual investigation. They were always going to be attracted by an ideology that promises to overcome the embodiedness of the female body. Consciousness raising feminism was always beyond their grasp. Their feminism willingly adopts male structured way of thinking to describe and critique the women condition. It is absolutely no surprise that they are so comfortable with gender theory.
Well said, thank you. I doubt that anyone planned that leap. I think it was mainly driven by the narcissism of autogynephiles and overprivileged self-indulgent academics who grew up with Free To Be You And Me.
When I read (a bit of) Judith Butler, I saw she leapt from describing gender as a social construct, to describing it as free-floating, like a coat you could take off or put on. The social conditioning of gender is deeply tied to one's sex, it's stitched into our psyches. No one conditions males into feminine stereotypes, or vice versa. It's impossible for males to be socially conditioned feminine. It's ridiculous. But I really think people in general do not understand how conditioning works.