What Do They Mean By "Gender Ideology"?
One of the key terms of the culture panic crowd is "gender ideology." No gender ideology in schools! Don't indoctrinate our children with that gender ideology! The teachers are all busy pushing that gender ideology?
But what does that mean, exactly? One might guess that its meaning is something along the lines of "Now that we have overturned Roe v. Wade, we need a new hot-button issue to mobilize the base," but I'm not sure anyone at Heritage is going to fess up to that. So what is the explanation for the"gender ideology" thing?
The Heritage Foundation, one of our country's leading producers of culture panic, is willing to provide an explanation, courtesy of Jay W. Richards, director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation, where he is a fellow (his conservative credentials are deep). It's an instructive piece.
Richards frames the piece with the notion that reporters working on culture panic stories ask what the term means and where it comes from , and he's pretty sure the whole business (which includes outfits like the Associate Press and Wikipedia) is "part of a larger media campaign to discredit this and related terms." His argument is basically that everyone understands what it means.
Richards shares a definition of the term that he once popped out on Twitter:
Gender ideology is the theory that the sex binary doesn’t capture the complexity of the human species, and that human individuals are properly described in terms of an “internal sense of gender” called “gender identity” that may be incongruent with their “sex assigned at birth.”
Though he says he would replace "theory" with the less forceful "view."
You may be looking at his definition and thinking, "Well, that sounds like a True Thing. What's his problem?" Well, he'll tell you.
Richards accuses "gender ideologues" of playing "verbal shell games" with words like "gender" and "sex." "Fender," he argues, is now treated as short for "gender identity" and "sex" has become "sex assigned at birth" which in his view turns sex into a social construct instead of "the real biological difference between male and female human beings." Okay. It may frustrate him to be left without terms that reflect reality as he understands it, but redefining terms to fit the view you hold is a long-time advocacy tool of all sides of all issues (he can ask Chris Rufo how it works).
As Richards lays out his objections, it's clear that we have here, at root another version of a basic right wing complaint.
The plain truth: Gender ideology does not accommodate the reality of sex—the reproductive strategy of mammals including human beings. Sex, in this reckoning, is not an objective truth about men and women. We are not male or female by virtue of our body structure or the fact that our bodies are oriented around the production of sperm or eggs. Human beings, are, in essence, psychological selves with internal senses of gender—like disembodied gendered souls. These “gender identities” are independent of, and can be incongruent with, the bodies that God gave us and that medicine has come to associate with “male” and female.” These “sex” categories are mere conventions, says the gender ideologue, not facts.
Richards says that "gender acolytes" will "rarely speak so bluntly," because he is apparently certain that to just say what he just said would offend and upset people. I'm not so sure. It seems like a fairly food definition; what's less clear is why it's objectionable.
The standard right wing complaint seen here is one we've seen again and again-- there is One Objective Truth and we know it and people who disagree are stupid or nuts or evil. Learning to be in the world is all about learning the One Objective Truth about everything (as discovered by some dead white guys); "critical thinking" is about learning how to unfailing arrive at the One Objective Truth. People who talk about different points of view are just trying to cause trouble. This has animated endless arguments since the Mayflower docked, and it is the foundational principle behind the classical school movement.
The other argument here is a less common one, but Richards seems to be arguing that human beings are just flesh and bone, and talk about psychological selves or souls is just silly. God gave us a body, but our psychological selves, our souls, come from... somewhere else? There's a more obvious flaw with this part of the argument-- God does in fact give people bodies that are a wide variety of intersex (also, am I in trouble because I wear glasses and had cataract surgery to correct the eyes that God gave me at birth). But I am fascinated to see the christianist Heritage Foundation arguing against the idea of souls and asserting that we are just meat sacks, and the nature of the meat sacks determines all that we are.
Ultimately Richards falls back on depending on "what you know to be true" in resisting the gender ideologues who try to tell you that human beings are varied and different, because "you know" they aren't. Nor does one have to search far to find the same right wing folks arguing that not only are there just two sexes, but the correct ways to be a real man or woman are limited to only a few choices (go get to making some babies, missy).
We're talking about fundamentally different ways to view the world, which is why these arguments inevitably land in schools and debates about whether students should be taught about how to navigate through a rich and complicated world or whether they should be taught that for every question, there is one Right and True answer and all others should be avoided and suppressed-- not even mentioned or acknowledged to exist. It is one thing to disagree with a point of view, and a whole other thing to insist that it not even be mentioned. Maybe, the hope goes, if we can commandeer education and teach only the One Objective Truth and suppress all the rest, children will grow up to see the world as we do. Good luck with that.
Gender expression is culture bound. However no one can change sex. People with Differences of Sexual Development have nothing to do with the modern trans movement in the West. They are one sex or the other, not “intersex,” and many of these people will need medical help. The gender ideology movement has created a zeitgeist of social media contagion and unsound educational policies and curriculum in which we teachers tell kids that they may have been “born in the wrong body,” starting as young as kindergarten in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live and teach. There is nothing more abusive than telling kids that their body is wrong, their puberty is wrong, and that they will need everyone to pretend that they are the opposite sex, need radical double mastectomies, block their natural cognitive and physical development through puberty blockers, and take cross sex hormones in order to not to commit suicide. Gender ideology is bad for women, bad for young people, bad for gender non-conforming people, and particularly bad for pre gay youth who often pretend to be the opposite sex when they are young. Gender ideology depends on regressive sex stereotypes, the ones I fought against my whole life. It is a money making medical scandal that convinces well intentioned adults to teach children that one must radically alter their bodies in order to live as their “authentic selves”. As more and more detransitioners speak out and sue the medical doctors that harmed them, I expect that many more will sue their schools and teachers. Listen to the gender critical feminists on the left. We know this is a huge setback for human rights that appropriates third gender, two spirits, and the LGB community as it pushes gender medicalization and “affirmation” on vulnerable members of society who cannot knowingly consent. Read Kara Dansky, Magdalene Berns, Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, and many other women fighting against the new patriarchal possession of our sex based rights. Read our declaration at Women’s Declaration International, follow Women’s Liberation Front, read the LGB Courage Coalition. We are politically left and know that those who call us “rightwing” need to read a lot more, against the media ties with Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex. https://womensdeclarationusa.com/the-declaration/
Live, dress, talk, act, present however you want in life. You should -- and do -- have the freedom to do that. But that doesn't mean you can magically morph into the opposite sex.
Female is a fact, not a feeling. It's not a costume you can put on. There is no such thing as "trans" or "non-binary." There are two sexes: male and female.
You're a man and wanna wear a skirt and lipstick? Have at it. I don't care. But that doesn't make you a woman. And you have no right to invade women's single-sex spaces, such as locker rooms, toilets, sports teams, women's prisons, rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters.
Those of us on the left who are lifelong feminists and have been fighting for human rights all our lives aren't going to put up with men invading our spaces and endangering us because they say they "feel" like women.
If you "feel" like the opposite sex, then please get mental health help. Just as you wouldn't tell an anorexic that because she says she "feels" fat therefore she is, you shouldn't be telling men they can magically morph into women. Biology isn't bigotry!