Transgenderism as a PC ideology: Denying Nature
July 3, 2023/ by Richard Knight
Introduction
Transgenderism can be seen as a politically correct ideology along with feminism, anti-racism and the others. The main things it has in common with them are a hatred and denial of nature and an impertinent urge to overcome it.
Feminism against nature
Feminists’ hatred and denial of nature are seen in their refusal to accept that the sexes are simply different. On the contrary, they say, they are essentially the same. Anything a man can do, a woman can, and so on. They back this up not by pointing to facts but with a taboo against saying the opposite. Like the exponents of every politically correct ideology, they have a special attack word for dissenters. In fact, they have two. Should you have the temerity to ignore the taboo, you will be called a sexist or a misogynist.
For some reason these techniques persuade many that what feminists say is true. Equally importantly, they silence those who are not persuaded, leaving feminists a clear field.
With no dissent to be heard, feminists proceed to ask why the sexes are in different circumstances. Why are women rarely found in leadership positions, they wonder, when the idea that men are more likely to compete for such positions and more suited to them is just a myth? Men must be keeping women down.
Feminists reason that to undo this injustice society must be reshaped to look as it would have done had they been correct, with women in half of all leadership positions. If the principle of equal treatment must be disregarded to achieve this, so be it. Thus, having denied nature, they seek to overcome it, or to give the appearance of having overcome it, at no matter what cost to society.
But then, having filled half the leadership positions in a certain field with women, they ask themselves why they should stop there. Why leave the other half to the oppressor? So they carry on, resulting in a fact such as that in 2018 almost every top position concerning the British police was occupied by a woman. This included London’s senior officer (Cressida Dick), the Director General of the National Crime Agency (Lynne Owens), the head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (Sarah Thornton), the chair of the College of Policing (Shirley Pearce), the president of the Police Superintendents Association (Irene Curtis) and the chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (Anne Owers).[1]
About the only exceptions were the chief constables outside London, of whom by 2020 still only two out of 46 were female. Yet just eighteen months later there were fifteen female chief constables.[2] It is surprising even that as many as thirteen chief constables retired in so short a period. For them all to have been succeeded by women was proof indeed that women can not only do anything men can do but are likely to be able to do it considerably better. Or perhaps it just proved that if no man is on the shortlist, a woman will get the job.
Anti-racism against nature
Anti-racism proceeds just like feminism except that this time it is the races that are supposedly the same. The doctrine of essential racial equality might not appear to be true, but we must assent to it for it too is protected by a taboo. Point to a difference between the races, however evident, and anti-racism’s attack word will be attached to you: you will be called a racist. Again, with any dissent from its basic proposition stifled, we are asked to explain the fact that the races are in different circumstances, the only available explanation being that Whites have been oppressing Blacks. And again, the solution is not the removal of the discrimination but its reversal. Blacks must be favoured over Whites.
Thus feminism and anti-racism use the same playbook. They both employ the idea of essential equality to deny nature before seeking to reshape it to fit their Procrustean bed. Is it too tall? Chop its feet off! Too short? Put it on the rack!
Transgenderism against nature
That transgenderism hates nature and refuses to submit to it is obvious. It finds the most basic fact of life — that nature makes us male or female — too much to bear. What if I didn’t want to be male? Did nature think of that? It is time it learned that if I choose to become a woman I will jolly well do it.
How? Well, first I am going to adopt a philosophy that tells me that whatever I say is true: the philosophy of word magic. I will call myself a woman, which will make me one. Just in case, I will then embark on a lifelong course of cross-sex hormones and undergo innumerable surgical procedures that will make me resemble a woman or at least make me look a lot more like one than I do now.
What is more, I will get my medical insurance to pay for all this on the basis that my dissatisfaction with my sex is a psychiatric condition. At the same time, I will insist that I have no psychiatric condition but am simply an example of normal human variation. Then everyone will see that I am as much a woman as any woman and that there is nothing wrong with me. It was nature that got it wrong. As I might put it: “I was born with the wrong genitals. … I had a birth defect that I got sorted with surgery and medication”.[3] How incompetent of nature to give me that birth defect! How wrong nature was if it didn’t think I could get it sorted with surgery and medication! It must be feeling pretty silly now.
Punishments for thinkers
No politically correct ideology can tolerate considered thought, as we see in the case of transgenderism in some events from the last few years. In 2019 the contract of a woman named Maya Forstater was not renewed after she tweeted that “transgender women” were men.[4] When she contested what was in effect her sacking, the judge ruled against her, finding that her opinion was not compatible with human dignity.[5]
In the midst of this, J.K. Rowling spoke up for her, saying that biological sex existed. For this she received a “barrage of criticism”, yet she refused to apologise, said the news outlet RT in wonderment.[6] Six months later she mocked an NGO for using the phrase “people who menstruate”, asking whether there had not once been a single word for such people, which she seemed to remember had begun with “w”. This brought another “avalanche” of denunciation down on her, with someone tweeting that her words were “causing unimaginable pain”. Well, of course they were! How can a transgender person be expected to encounter a cryptic reference to the word “woman” without suffering unimaginable pain? Another commenter called J.K. Rowling a hate-filled weirdo.
In October 2021 Cambridge University’s Students Union issued a guide to spotting “Terfs”, these being feminists who think that there are two sexes and that one cannot switch from one to the other.[7] Predictably, the guide indulged in projection, referring to “Terf ideology” as though it were the views of Terfs that were ideological rather than its own. It stated that Terfs had a “deep hatred for trans women”, when it was the guide that was spreading hatred, of Terfs. It alleged that Terfs had links to the far right, when there is nothing political about their position, in contrast to the far-left position of the guide.[8]
The same week, activists at Sussex University launched a campaign to get a philosophy professor fired. Kathleen Stock had asked whether a person’s gender identity could have more social significance than their sex and had doubted whether men should be allowed in women’s changing rooms. Students put up posters saying “IT’S NOT A DEBATE. IT’S NOT FEMINISM. … IT’S JUST TRANSPHOBIA … FIRE KATHLEEN STOCK.” She received death threats and was advised not to go on campus without bodyguards. Her union offered her no support but expressed “solidarity” with “trans and nonbinary communities”. Two weeks later she resigned.
What was noticeable about her defenders was their feebleness. The commentator Paul Embery said that she had merely defended the principle of biological sex and women’s right to single-sex spaces. Women’s concerns about having men in their changing rooms were perfectly legitimate. Transgender activists were trying to get everyone to take their view, he said. But biological sex is not a principle to which one might adhere or not; it is a basic fact of life, and women’s right to women-only changing rooms should be beyond dispute. Instead of saying that transgender activists were trying to get others to take their view, as though it were a view that could deserve respect, Paul Embery should have said that they were trying to get people to affirm a lie.[9] A philosopher named Arif Ahmed stated that Kathleen Stock’s persecution was making it impossible for “one side of a very important public policy debate” to speak. Apparently we had reached the point where the efforts of men to get into women’s changing rooms counted as a contribution to an important debate.
Transgender language rules
No PC ideology can leave the language alone, for unless interfered with, it has a way of reflecting reality. A previous article gave some examples of linguistic engineering aimed at abolishing sex–related words and the associated concepts with them. To give a few more examples, in 2023 Oxfam published an Inclusive Language Guide that illustrated its “commitment to gender justice”, defined as “full equality between women and men (including trans men and women) as well as non-binary people”.[10]
According to the guide, we must not speak of husbands or wives but must call them partners or spouses, nor must we use the words “mother” or “father”, which would assume “the adoption of gendered roles by transgender parents”. We must be aware that patriarchal systems perpetuate sexist and hierarchical power relations and legitimise “discrimination against and exclusion of women and gender non-conforming people”. Moreover, we must be aware that the word “people” itself, although it might not seem to specify a sex, can still express a bias because “in the context of a world based on patriarchal systems, ‘people’ is often misunderstood as only referring to men”. If we must talk about “people”, therefore, we should do it in a way that makes the word “as inclusive as possible”.
When it comes to personal pronouns, the guide tells us not to assume that it is correct to “describe someone as ‘he’ or ‘she’ based on their name or physical appearance”. The person might prefer to be called “they” or “ze”.
Like the British Medical Association (referred to in the previous article), Oxfam advises against using the term “expectant mother”. Not only does the expression “reinforce gender stereotypes”; the woman might not wish to continue her pregnancy. It does allow that pregnant people are women, however, although if we stress this fact we might be excluding “gender non-binary, trans men, or gender non-conforming people”.
The words “transgendered” and “transsexual” must be avoided in case someone referred to in this way doesn’t like it. “In a society that upholds the human rights to equality, freedom of expression, privacy and self-determination, we must respect how people wish to be referred to.” We must take an approach that “actively includes transgender people”. Ideally, “a trans-inclusive approach will identify the ways that trans people are specifically impacted by discrimination”. Presumably, then, rather than calling transgender people transgender, we should call them victims of discrimination in various ways that we will proceed to specify, who might be mistakenly referred to as transgender by the unenlightened.
Transgenderism against science
From the postmodern philosophy that gives it its belief in word magic, transgenderism also gets its belief in the priority of subjectivity over objectivity. But since it exists in a society that values science, it must do as other politically correct ideologies do and pretend that its dogmas are scientific, as when claiming that the evidence “strongly suggests” that gender identity is “usually established … by the age of two to three”;[11] that “the expression of transgender identity … is a healthy, appropriate and typical aspect of human development”;[12] or that “From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity”. The last comment was made by a professor at Duke University School of Medicine, who meant that the best way for a doctor to establish a person’s sex is by asking them. “It is counter to medical science”, she continued, “to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female”.[13]
Of course, deception itself is characteristic of political correctness, on which subject it might be worth pointing out that a politically correct statement is necessarily untrue. This is because true statements, meaning empirically correct ones, can look after themselves. Only statements that are empirically incorrect need to be made correct politically.
Transgenderism and childism
A little-mentioned ideology of political correctness is childism, which transgenderism does not so much resemble as incorporate. Childism inverts the natural order by transferring the authority of adults to children, as seen one day in 1998 when BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour looked at the question of what to do with the children in the summer holidays. It didn’t ask parents for their ideas but asked a panel of children. Already in the 1970s Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet (1923) was popular, mainly for its advice to parents: “You may strive to be like [your children], but seek not to make them like you”. This gave rise to the idea that adults have more to learn from children than children have to learn from adults.
The children’s author Cressida Cowell expressed her childism when she wrote in 2020 that children “are the most creative people in the world”, raising the question of why Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel when he could have got a better result by commissioning a child. Cressida Cowell hoped that children’s “magical powers of creativity, intelligence and empathy” would make them “come up with solutions to the political and scientific challenges facing the world” — not as adults, mark you, when they would have lost their magical powers, but now, as children.
But childism had reached its apogee the year before, when an assembly of world leaders asked a child to tell them what to do. This was at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York, which Greta Thunberg, aged sixteen, was invited to address. Rising to her role as leader of leaders, the pigtailed adolescent expressed her advice by asking her audience how they dared to do this or that.
The natural complement of treating children like adults is to treat adults like children. This is the essence of “dumbing down”, which first appeared in the 1990s. Many adults responded by starting not only to talk and think like children but also to dress like them, going about in track suits that resembled romper suits. The infantilisation of adults has continued ever since.
Transgenderism incorporates childism by telling teachers not to talk to transgender children but to listen to them, and not to lead them but to follow. Thus in 2014, East Sussex County Council Children’s Services issued the following guidance to teachers: “Listen to the [transgender] child … and wherever possible follow their lead and preferences”.[14] Similarly, an American campaigning organisation says that “the most important thing we can do is listen to what our [transgender] children are telling us”.[15] Adults should learn from children, thinks Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at Benioff Children’s Hospital at the University of California, San Francisco. Children are “our best teachers”.[16] The logical conclusion of this will see groups of grown-ups filing into the classroom to be instructed by infants wearing mortarboards.
Transgenderism requires doctors to accept not only a transgender child’s self-diagnosis but also its prescribed course of treatment. Medical professionals do as they are told for fear of their patients declaring themselves unsatisfied with the service they have received or accusing them of “transphobia”.[17]
Conclusion
If one views political correctness as a collection of ideologies, then transgenderism is just one of these. All tend to the destruction of our societies and culture; most pit themselves against nature. This suggests that their originators are conducting a war against God, for to say that something is as it is by nature is only to say that that is the way God made it. The rebels’ chosen battlefield is the West, where political correctness is mainly found. White people are their particular enemies on earth. If they can defeat us here, they will take themselves to have defeated God. At least, that is one way of looking at the situation.
[1] The Director of Public Prosecutions was also a woman: Alison Saunders, who was found to have been suppressing evidence of men’s innocence in rape cases.
[2] History Debunked, July 8th 2021, “Women in command; female leaders in the police and army”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i6pBj6dYMw. Including Wales, after another six months there were 19 out 49 (Telegraph, Jan. 9th 2023, “Record 40 per cent of chief constables are now women amid anti-misogyny drive”, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/09/record-40-per-cent-chief-constables-now-women-amid-anti-misogyny/).
[3] This was a man calling himself Bethany Black in conversation with Helen Lewis (New Statesman, Sept. 13th 2013, “What makes you a man or a woman anyway?” https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2013/09/battle-over-gender-what-makes-you-man-or-woman-anyway).
[4] Maya Forstater made her comments, not while at work, during a discussion of possible reforms to the Gender Recognition Act.
[5] Her appeal, heard in 2021, found that her position was “worthy of respect in a democratic society”.
[6] RT. Jun 7th 2020. “‘There used to be a word for people who menstruate’: JK Rowling gets denounced as transphobe AGAIN”. https://www.rt.com/news/491077-rowling-trans-women-row/.
[7] Telegraph, Oct. 13th 2021, “Cambridge University ‘Terf-spotting’ guide condemned as a ‘witch-finder’s charter’”, reproduced at https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/45570/cambridge-university-terf-spotting-guide-condemned-as-a-witch-finders-charter.
[8] MailOnline, “Cambridge Students’ Union publishes pro-trans guide claiming that being a woman is not just down to ‘biological sex’ — and accuses feminists opposing such views as being linked to ‘far right’”, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10087849/Cambridge-SU-publishes-pro-trans-guide-claiming-woman-not-just-biological-sex.html.
[9] GB News, Oct. 17th 2021, “Kathleen Stock: Paul Embery says abuse of academic after alleged ‘transphobic’ remark is ‘appalling’”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY4b1atncaY.
[10] For an overview of the guide, see Oxfam, March 2023, “Inclusive Language Guide”, https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/inclusive-language-guide-621487/. For the guide itself see https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621487/tk-inclusive-language-guide-130323-en.pdf?sequence=4.
[11] Ryan T. Anderson, 2019 (2018), When Harry Became Sally, New York: Encounter Books. 2019, ibid., pp. 32-33.
[12] Ryan Anderson 2019, ibid., p. 38.
[13] Ryan Anderson 2019, ibid., p. 30.
[14] East Sussex County Council Children’s Services, Oct. 2014, “Trans* Inclusion Schools Toolkit”, https://czone.eastsussex.gov.uk/media/2480/trans-toolkit.pdf (file no longer there).
[15] PFLAG, quoted by Ryan Anderson 2019, op. cit., p. 35.
[16] Quoted by Ryan Anderson 2019, ibid., pp 35-36.
[17] The Heritage Foundation, March 28th 2019, “The Medical Harms of Hormonal and Surgical Interventions for Gender Dysphoric Children”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnP_WoeNuwA.