Gender ideology is a luxury belief system

Its costs include weakened relationships, health, safety, freedom of speech and conscience, and basic consent in multiple aspects of life.

Note: To state up top what I will say again below: People should have every right to express themselves how they see fit, and even to seek spaces where other people will voluntarily indulge their desires. I have no problem with fully informed, consenting adults who wish to alter their names, bodies, or anything else in order to express themselves however they prefer.

But in recent years, the gender identity movement has gone well beyond simply honoring people’s freedom of expression, and started encroaching upon other people’s rights and well-being. That is a problem, and it is not “transphobic” to name that problem— it is the bare minimum that social responsibility requires. Call me whatever you want, but I stand firmly on the side of consent, fairness in public policy, and especially children’s health and safety.

—SJS

ONE of the “turning point” issues that ultimately drove me away from the Left was gender ideology. Way back in college when I first encountered this ideology, I regrettably didn’t think about it very deeply. And especially after seeing the venom directed at people who questioned it, but not yet attuned to the risks of this movement’s skillful linguistic maneuvers, I capitulated to its rituals and thought-terminating clichés. The issue didn’t seem to directly affect my life, so I figured I’d just be polite and go along to get along whenever it came up.

Then I saw the impact this ideology was having on kids.

Years later, I started to see more and more news about so-called “right wing attacks on transgender youth” denying them “basic health care!” I was alarmed— why would anyone attack any kind of youth, or health care? Around the same time, I started being approached by prospective and now-former clients working with gender clinics and organizations, who wanted my help preparing for campaigns and legislative hearings related to these ‘attacks.’

“We’re getting slammed in these hearings,” one such prospective client told me, “by Republicans asking ‘gotcha’ questions like ‘What is a woman?’ and we need a better approach.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Is this team’s leader really telling me that they need to pay a professional communications strategist to help them answer this very basic question? What is their clinic even offering people who say they want to transition into womanhood, if they can’t define what a woman is?!

As I finally, far too belatedly, dug deeper into the reality beneath euphemisms like “gender affirming care for minors,” I was utterly horrified — both by the irresponsible misuse and misrepresentation of off-label drugs and surgeries to change kids’ appearance, and by my own and my peers’ ideological capture. As soon as we were told the wrong kind of people (“right wingers”) had committed an alleged identity-based sin, we had become bobbleheads, thoughtlessly nodding along as the emerging gender industrial complex made billions of dollars by experimenting on confused children.

One of the most destructive impacts of Groupthink, Inc. has been its militant insistence upon enforcing its luxury beliefs in every aspect of public life, including via public policy. Though gender ideology is by no means the only example of this, it is perhaps the clearest example of how detached from material reality Groupthinkers are capable of becoming once a flimsy idea becomes fashionable among their in-group. The gender debate perfectly illustrates how a seemingly noble idea — that everyone should be accepted for who they are — can be distorted and abused in destructive ways, including toward the very people that idea is meant to liberate. It exposes how ideologically captured academics, professionals, and activists work to manufacture an illusion of consensus by hiding contradictory evidence and delegitimizing dissenters. It also demonstrates how bad actors¹ will readily exploit well-intentioned activism, co-opting the language and infrastructure of health care and civil rights movements to advance their own power and profit interests.

But before we go on, let’s quickly clarify something:

Sex is a clearly-defined biological reality determined by what kinds of reproductive cells a person’s body is organized around. (And no, rare genetic conditions or reproductive dysfunction don’t mean humans aren’t a sexually dimorphic species, any more than an individual mother’s inability to breastfeed means humans aren’t mammals.) Human beings cannot change our sex; we can only change our appearance and/or our language. But no matter what we say, do, think, or look like; no matter what damage we do or don’t inflict on our most delicate-yet-powerful body parts and systems, biological reality remains true. In the broadest sense, we are either the kind of human whose body at some point contains eggs (female), or the kind of human whose body at some point produces sperm (male).

Gender is either a) a term people use synonymously with sex when it would otherwise be ambiguous (for example, when people might hear it and think a person is referring to “sexual intercourse” instead of “male versus female embodiment”), or b) the basis of a luxury belief system rooted in sex stereotyping.

The former concept is universally valid, while the latter is constantly shifting. And I say gender ideology is a luxury belief system because it is primarily —though certainly not exclusively! — promoted by affluent and/or highly-indoctrinated educated people who typically don’t make their living doing manual labor (where biological differences are much more apparent and consequential); who are comparatively less likely to have to live in places like prisons or domestic violence shelters; and who are otherwise more likely to enjoy the social status benefits of affirming this belief system while being less likely to suffer (or at least acknowledge) the negative consequences of it.

Sex-based rights are rooted in the biological reality of our reproductive capacity and of women and girls’ physical vulnerability relative to men and boys, as well as the recognition that no one should be forced to conform to sex stereotypes. Every well-meaning person who just wants to live their life without conforming to sex stereotypes is already covered by historic civil rights protections established on the basis of sex — including men who want to present in typically-feminine ways and vice versa.

By contrast, the ill-defined notion of “gender identity” fundamentally revolves around sex stereotypes. When the fuzzy concept of “gender identity” is allowed to supersede the reality of biological sex, it directly undermines sex-based rights, among other civil and human rights. When societies stop making policy decisions based on objective, clearly defined understandings of reality and start making them based on hazy and unverifiable² expressions of people’s feelings, they cause unnecessary problems, as we’ve now seen in:

• Single-sex spaces like bathrooms, prisons, shelters, locker rooms, etc.: The competing safety arguments advanced on both sides of so-called “bathroom debates” tend to overlook a once-obvious truth: the common denominator in most violence against both women and trans-identifying people is male biology, and its greater proneness to violence. We can protect freedom of expression and people’s safety, dignity, and comfort in vulnerable spaces by making men’s spaces safer for men who don’t fit sex stereotypes, instead of abolishing vital single-sex spaces altogether or making women’s spaces less safe by allowing men to self-identify into them.

  Also, while safety is understandably the main concern people raise around spaces like bathrooms, it’s worth acknowledging far more common, practical matters of basic health and dignity here. For starters, there’s frequently a long line to the public ladies’ room because we have more to do in there. Do we really need to make that line even longer? Should a menstruating woman whose Diva cup runneth over really have to bleed through her clothes in public because a dude ahead of her wants to feel ~affirmed~ in his femininity? Public bathrooms are a space to handle basic biological needs. They do not exist to be a fueling station for ‘gender euphoria’ (or narcissistic supply, whichever the case may be).

• Lapses in interpersonal consent: Consent matters, and shouldn’t be overridden to privilege certain people’s feelings. No one should be forced to validate or participate in other people’s fantasies, or fetishes. But that is what happens when people are required to share previously single-sex spaces with people claiming to be the opposite sex, or have their tax dollars spent on gender drugs and surgeries, or participate in pronoun rituals and other gender ideology customs as a condition of employment, education, or athletic competition. People should have every right to express themselves how they see fit, and to seek spaces where other people will voluntarily indulge their desires. But no one is entitled to unwilling people’s affirmation of or participation in their desires, and our laws and policies should respect that.

• Sports: Because biological differences between male and female people exist, allowing athletes to self-identify into opposite-sex athletic competitions not only undermines fair competition for women and girls, but raises more critical issues of safety (particularly in sports with a higher likelihood of contact) and economic justice (when women are subjected to unfair competition for financial opportunities like scholarships and sponsorships).

• Attacks on freedom of speech and conscience: When subjective, ideologically-bound notions like “misgendering” are inserted into civil rights regulations, tech platform policies, workplace or educational codes of conduct, publication guidelines, and so on, they result in people being punished for describing humans in biologically accurate terms. Requiring people who don’t believe in gender ideology to participate in its social and linguistic rituals (ex. pronoun declarations; using neopronouns; calling male people by female pronouns and vice versa) is compelled speech, a violation of their rights to freedom of speech and conscience.

  If consenting adults want to modify their bodies, or if people want to apply different pronouns to themselves, they should have every right to do that. But they should not be able to force unwilling people to participate in those choices by appealing to the state or other authorities to threaten other people’s livelihoods, educational opportunities, rights to parent their children, and/or ability to express themselves in public. Especially for those of us who are concerned about authoritarianism, this particular expression of it shouldn’t go unchecked. Coercive laws, policies, and behavior are a threat to freedom no matter where they originate on the political spectrum.

• Attacks on family integrity: When ideologically-captured judges and social workers separate children from loving parents simply for refusing to submit to certain social rituals or risky surgical and hormonal interventions, that is an egregious violation of some of their most basic civil and human rights. Children are too young to understand the full implications of life-altering procedures like these, and depend on their parents’ and caregivers’ greater foresight and maturity to protect them from making irreversible decisions based on mistaken or fantastical beliefs. If children can be taken away from one or both of their parents for refusing to consent to faddish recommendations made by people with a direct financial interest in carrying out those recommendations, that’s not only horrifying in its own right, it sets a terrible precedent for enabling profit-driven actors to pad their incomes by silencing protective parents or dividing families.

• Lapses in informed consent: As a growing number of parents and detransitioners have revealed over the years, many people — particularly children and younger adults— have accepted drugs and surgeries whose full impacts they didn’t truly understand based on false claims and emotional blackmail. Children who are too young to consent to sex are also too young to consent to permanently altering their sexual functioning. That decision ultimately falls to their (frequently terrified and confused, or sometimes more deeply misguided) parents, who often feel outmatched in perceived authority and expertise when they wind up in so-called gender clinics. Many report being asked if they wanted “a dead son or a live daughter” or vice versa, as if those were their only choices.

  But not only is that manipulative question rooted in faulty research, the framing of the question plainly distorts reality. Again, it is physically impossible for human beings to change their sex. Even the most invasive gender procedures can only change a person’s appearance, and often at the expense of their physical functionality. It also ignores the fact that a sizable majority of such children will outgrow their dissatisfaction³ with their bodies if allowed to mature intact. Yet these families are being encouraged or even pressured into procedures that carry hefty risks of persistent pain, recurrent infections, certain cancers, and significant harms to the brain, bones, cardiovascular system, thyroid, liver, and reproductive organs, all to change their child’s appearance. Even many adults report not fully understanding the lifelong ramifications of these procedures before having them.

When Groupthinkers refuse to acknowledge biological reality, or distinguish between sex-based rights versus identity-based privileges, they leave people vulnerable to unnecessary harm— and alienate themselves from everyone else who doesn’t subscribe to this belief system.

If consenting adults who are fully aware of the risks decide that looking the way they want is worth those risks, the government shouldn’t stop them. But as a long overdue matter of basic consumer protection, I support a nationwide ban on these drugs and procedures for minors, given the extraordinarily high risk to (non-)benefit ratio, the egregiously irresponsible way medical professionals and associated organizations have handled them, and especially because of the way these procedures have become a tool for ideologically captured judges and bureaucrats to divide families. When luxury beliefs as dangerous as these become professional practice or state law, our federal government has to step in to protect the public from unaccountable ideologues who willfully ignore material reality in order to preserve their own pride, personal preferences, or profit.

1. On this issue, bad actors include political operatives and organizations who mine manufactured identity conflicts for votes and donations, as well as extra-medical industry profiteers.

2. A note on self-ID: I understand why people who simply want to express themselves without hurting others get upset when they are lumped in with people who take advantage of relaxed norms around single-sex spaces and opportunities for more nefarious reasons. But changing access based solely on self-identification inevitably invites abuse, because there is no way to consistently verify who is earnest and who isn’t. As far as laws and policies are concerned, health, safety and basic fairness must take precedence over individuals’ feelings. Again, single-sex spaces exist primarily for practical and safety reasons that supersede individuals’ feelings and preferences. If a person considers their personal preferences more important than everyone’s health, safety, and fairness, that is a sign that their motives are not as pure as they think.

3. I first learned that the overwhelming majority of children who experience transgender ideation (what orgs like WPATH call “gender dysphoria”) outgrow it when I read the seventh version of WPATH’s own “Standards of Care” (p.11). To put a finer point on it: The people pushing interventions like puberty blockers have full access to information indicating that, even by their own warped standards, such interventions are inappropriate for most children they will be offered to. Yet they are pushing them anyway. And this plainly contradictory information has long hidden in plain sight for anyone willing to scratch even the surface of the so-called evidence they offer for their shenanigans. Organizations like this are so ideologically captured, and so accustomed to “progressive” activists uncritically accepting whatever passes for evidence in this field, that they barely hide information that instantly undermines their position.

For a great discussion of this and other myths about gender, I recommend Dr. Debra Soh’s The End of Gender. FYI, purchases made through my Bookshop links are a great way to learn while supporting Leaving Groupthink, Inc. at no extra cost to you.