After her bruising encounter with transgenderists, there is good news and bad news for Germaine Greer. The good news is that transgenderism is not misogynistic. The bad news is that it is misogynistic and misandristic: if males and females can be males or females, then male and female are identical; therefore males and females can oppress males and females; therefore patriarchy cannot exist.
Bang goes feminism. My condolences, Ms Greer.
Transgenderism is not even sexist: it attacks both sexes. Feminists have been fighting it for a few years, dubbed Exclusionary and Radical for the crime of insisting that only members of the female sex can be women, but now a new front has opened up.
A warning shot has been fired across transgenderism’s bows in the form of a Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual (LGB) sponsored petition asking LGBT organisations such as GLAAD and HRC to Drop the T. LGB wants to give the T (transgenderism) the boot. Alas, for LGB there is only bad news…
Feminism, like gay and lesbian sexual orientation, is premised on the recognition of sexual identity. Transgenderism is not, as I explain below. The problem for feminists is that a male can now legally enter a female bathroom, meaning gender identity legally overrides sexual identity.
Given that ‘gay’ and ‘bi’ cannot be protected without first protecting sexual identity, legally to override sexual identity is legally to override gay and bi. Put another way, if male and female are identical so are gay and straight oriented people. Trans gender is effectively a legal declaration that sexual identity does not exist. Thus the State can no longer protect sexual orientation. We could not continue to issue car driving licences if we abolished cars, could we? It’s the same thing.
LBG/sexual orientation and T/gender may once have seemed like allies. T/genderism however renders the categories of gay, straight and bi legally inexplicable and unsustainable, as is now the case in Canada where the list of protected hate crime categories has been extended to include “gender identity and expression”; or, more expansively, “a gender-related identity, appearance, expression, or behavior of an individual.”
As Canadian theologian Douglas Farrow has observed, gender identity and gender expression are not actually two additions to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. Rather: “they constitute a deliberate attack on one of the existing grounds: sex.”
The sewage poured into Canadian law tends to wash up on our legal shores about five years later, though the gap is shrinking. Canada used to be a country but is now a social experiment.
Sexual identity is a state of being (bodies), whereas gender claims to be a state of doing (gender performativity). In backing gender, the State has reversed the relationship between being and doing. This is another goodreason for LGB to end its bad romance with transgenderism.
To summarise we cannot define sexual orientation without defining sex, because sexual means ‘of sex’. If sex denotes being, sexual orientation denotes combinations of person A’s sex and the sex of the person to whom person A is sexually attracted. Sexual identity limits these combinations to three: difference (straight), sameness (gay) and both (bi).
If sex instead denotes doing (sexual acts), sexual orientation denotes the acts to which person A is sexually attracted. Not limited by sexual identity, this includes number (polyamory) and age (paedophilia).
Logically, to remain in its abusive relationship with transgenderism, the lesbian, gay and bi-sexual lobby will have to accept sexual orientation is defined by activity not orientation and be prepared to jump into bed with paedophilia too.The alternative is to plead irreconcilable differences and move away from a worldview contradicting natural law, science, history, Christianity and the laws of most countries.
Consider too the T/gender’s hijacking of the phrase ‘coming out’. In coming out as lesbian, Sophie says “My sexual desires are in my mind. Unless I tell somebody, nobody will ever know. That’s why I’m telling you”. But in coming out as female, Trevor says “I have never been who you have always thought I was.” Surely somebody would have noticed, Trevor? Sophie reveals to us her otherwise invisible mind, whereas Trevor asks us mentally to hide his otherwise visible body.
The understood or ‘natural’ definition of sexual orientation says man1 can ask man2 whether he is gay. According to the new gender identity rules, man2 can say “how dare you assume I am male?!”
Man1 can then reply, “I didn’t, I thought you might be lesbian like me”.
Similarly, suppose Trevor and Gary are in a gay partnership and that Trevor then comes out as female. Given that Gary is then in a sexual partnership with a female, Trevor’s mind has rendered Gary straight, hasn’t it? Sounds like involuntary ‘reparative therapy’ to me.
Gay identity is derived from something solid – the body. But gender identity derives from the mind alone.
Remember the cartoon image of a man sitting on a tree branch with saw in hand, unaware that he is sawing through a part of the branch which connects him to the tree? The tree is sexual identity and the branch is sexual orientation. Gender is the guy with the saw. T is not a quirky hitch-hiker thumbing a lift off LGB. No, from a legal perspective T is in the driving seat, pedal to the metal, approaching the city limits of Reality and taking us to some post-sexual place beyond the rainbow.
LGB and T always were strange bedfellows. Now they have reached that awkward “It’s not you, it’s me” moment – separate agendas going separate ways; a very public conscious uncoupling. Who, I wonder, will get to keep the CD collection? (That’s Cross-Dresser).
LGB should divorce T on grounds that T is divorced from reality. If not, T will dump LGB. HRC and GLAAD have responded to the Drop the T petition by issuing statements fully supportive of transgenderism.
We should not expect them to change their minds. LGB, it’s time to dump or be dumped.
