As readers of Freedom and Reason are aware, I have written quite a lot about gender ideology, and I’m always trying to find ways to more clearly convey my thoughts about a particular subject. Often this comes with several attempts. Writing is not just about communicating one’s ideas to others, but often about conveying one’s ideas to oneself. Writing is a process of self-listening. Other times, it comes with the discovery of a new voice. The present essay is inspired by the latter.
Recently, I watched a video clip explaining the problem of gender ideology by Amy Sousa, a psychologist who works in the area of depth psychology, a branch of psychoanalysis that investigates the realm of unconscious (or subconscious) cognition through an examination of apparently inconsequential occurrences such as dreams, serendipitous events, and verbal slips. The promise of this method is that allows for the unearthing of suppressed emotions, ideas, and thoughts and the reintegration of these into conscious awareness. This approach is powerful and Sousa’s explanation insightful. I want to share her thoughts and then add to her’s those my own.
You can watch the Sousa clip here: https://x.com/KnownHeretic/status/1704263942426796037?s=20. Sousa argues that the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is ideological, perpetuating sexism and transforming the potential for critiquing cultural sexism into self-blame. Sousa contends that the medical industry is equipping children with a knife, encouraging them to alter their bodies to conform to culture’s predefined molds. It’s not bodies that are flawed, she contends; it’s the act of forcing bodies into these molds that’s wrong. The claustrophobia experienced at being coerced into these molds is a natural reaction, not a mental disorder. Children need support in debunking cultural falsehoods and embracing themselves as complete, embodied individuals.
This is good stuff, and it addresses my wonderment at how woke progressivism, which is supposedly a left-wing ideology sympathetic to feminism, would embrace right-wing stereotypes of women and use them to justify perpetrating medical atrocities against boys and girls. You would think that the last Orwellian inversion to infect the progressive mind, if it were what it thinks it is, would be seeing boys and girls uncomfortable with or who transgress gender norms as actually representing the opposite sex. Didn’t feminists argue that gender stereotypes are straitjackets limiting the emotional and social range of boys and girls? That’s my understanding. Children distressed over their bodies need is validation, not affirmation.
I’m not suggesting here that Sousa is making my argument about how progressivism is at heart a right-wing ideology. Deconstructing progressivism is my own obsession. Her analysis helps me clarify some things; I am responsible for the argument presented in this essay.
The feminism to which I subscribe sees men and women, both biological (or essential) categories, beyond the abilities and limitations associated with the respective biological attributes, such as the ability to have children or the inability to complete with men at elite levels of sports, as equally as capable of being journalists, musicians, nurses, physicians, poets, politicians, scholars, and scientists. All that needs to happen is for stereotypes to be dismantled and a fair playing field established. Biology determines the genotypes; beyond those parameters, individuals can pursue any career they desire and express themselves in any way.
Right-wing ideology, on the other hand, sees the gender (or sex) roles and statuses, which are historical and social, as instead god-ordained or naturally occurring—i.e., as transcultural. Based on suppositions about human nature, women are believed to have their place in society and men their’s, and these are defined in the terms of patriarchal relations. Man as warrior. Woman as helpmeet. That sort of thing. This is the essence of conservatism—not conservatism as classical liberalism (ideological labels are fuzzy in this way), but conservatism as traditionalism, as embodied in the patriarchy.
These stereotypical views of women, where they are enforced, or where there is the desire that they should be, are misogynistic. We see this, for example, in Muslim-majority societies where the imposition of the veil is characteristic of the misogynistic attitude, rationalized as obedience to their god Allah (the same god as the Judeo-Christian one). The goal of an enlightened society is to blow away these stereotypical views of women (and men) and emancipate the individual from such impositions. The reactionary resists this, insisting that masculine and the feminine characteristics are baked into the sexes. And such reactionaries exist now as much on the so-called left as they do on the right.
For the actual left wing thinker (speaking for myself), a woman can eschew makeup, cut her hair short, wear pants, be sexually attracted to women, and not be a man since there are no restrictions on women beyond those imposed by her genotypic attributes. There is no such thing as “acting like a woman” or “acting like a man” in sociocultural terms standing outside of space and time. There are only women and men as essential categories. Indeed, what is a man beyond those natural historical results is also the work of gender stereotypes. There is no principle in nature that says a man cannot wear a dress, makeup, long hair, etc., either. The only thing a man has to be is determined by his chromosomes and his gametes. He cannot change these. He will always be a man.
The right winger sees gender nonconformity as problematic because he hypostatizes the stereotypes drawn from cultural and social relations as essential and rooted in natural history. Thus right-wing ideology reduces difference to inequality through conflation of things. The core of right-wing ideology is the notion that hierarchy is baked into the species. To be sure, both the cultural/historical and the biological are realities, but they are different sorts of realities, and one of those realities can be altered or changed.
Progressives subscribe to an ideology that is the inverse—an ideology that reifies culturally and historical bounded gender roles while rejecting the reality of the animality of the species, a fallacy that results from the nihilism inhering in the postmodernist epistemic. The progressive believes that a boy who likes to wear his sister’s clothes, who likes to put on his mother’s makeup, who likes to cook, or who feels a romantic attraction to other boys, is really a girl trapped in a boy’s body. The progressive has internalized the misogynistic view that gender roles are baked in and sublimated it as secularized absolute idealism. Progressives who argue that their politics are neo-Marxist are really neo-Hegelian: they stand scientific materialism on its head.
Both right wingers and progressives are wrong for different reasons; both operate from an ideological space that either is or resembles religious consciousness. In fact, the progressive view is the more irrational and reactionary. To be sure, forcing boys and girls to conform to the stereotypical views of traditional patriarchal relations is a form of conversion therapy, but the hormonal and surgical transformation of bodies takes conversion therapy to a radically new level—all on the basis of a quasi-religious doctrine that children are born broken and need fixing. So frantic are the zealots about transforming bodies that progressives worry that children may not know they are broken, which has led to the moral project of queering public schools, medical clinics, and popular culture.
It might strike the reader as ironic that the progressive view is much like the view held, for example, in Iran, where boys “who act like girls” are given hormones and surgeries, and the state pays the bills. This is because homosexuality is an abomination and a boy “who acts like girl” must really be a girl born in the wrong body. The misogyny of their religion is such that the Islamic state cannot abide by a boy who likes girl things, i.e., whose behaves in the stereotypic feminine manner constructed and demanded by the terms of Islamic religious belief. But it is not ironic. It is embedded in the progressive worldview.
It is vital to understand this problem because, like Islam, a form of clerical fascism, misogyny is a fundamental characteristic of secular fascism, of the corporate state, the most notorious historical instantiations of which are authoritarian Italian corporatism and and German national socialism. Progressives are open about their admiration of exotic clerical fascism. We have to reveal their admiration for the secular version.
Indeed, the fascist mentality pervades corporate state arrangements, not only in the existence of a vast medical-industrial complex, the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus, but in its street-level manifestations. Consider the actions of Antifa and TRAs, the so-called antifascists and their constant attacks on women and lesbians, shutting down pro-woman events and rallies, physically assaulting women and their allies, while police officers either passively permit their actions or use the chaos to shut down the events and rallies.
What do Antifa/TRAs actions look like to you? Street-level fascism is the only honest answer. Their claim to be the opposite is an Orwellian inversion that takes very little effort to overcome. They scream “fascist!” at those who actually stand against the fascist desire to silence and terrorize women. They carry posters threatening to “Punch a TERF!” “Kill TERFS!” “Rape TERFS!” The appearance and methods of the blackshirts and brownshirts in the actions of Antifa/TRAs is unmistakable to the student of history.
Why do they act this way? Why do progressives uplift them? “Antifa is only an idea,” law enforcement rationalizes. It’s not obvious? To chill the air of debate and dissent, to sow insecurity and confusion, to spread fear and terror, to disorder civil society—all this so that the corporate state can steer society towards the inverted totalitarian ends George Orwell and Sheldon Wolin warn us about. The historical specifics are but interchangeable spatial-temporal elements of fascist politics. There is no functional difference between the concrete manifestations.
The answer to the seeming contradiction, then, is that what passes for the left today is not left at all. Progressivism is the projection of corporate state power and, as such, is a species of rightwing politics. The home of progressivism, the Democratic Party, is the party of the professional-managerial class, the class and strata that run the administrative state and attendant technocratic apparatus. It’s not the party of the left or the working class. It is the party of power and war, and that power is transnational and transgressive—not just of national but of moral borders. These are the agents of corporate power who control the culture industry and mass media system that works as a vast camera obscura to delude the masses into believing that right is left. It’s another classic Orwellian inversion, just slickly coded. “Trans-peace is Peace” has replaced the slogan “War is Peace.” “Men are Women” is too obvious.
Compounding the confusion, the political right believes alongside many progressives that progressivism is socialism. But as an expression of corporatism, progressivism is at best a soft form of fascism, a right-wing ideology. The rank-and-file of the progressive left, not understanding what left wing politics actually is, i.e., liberal and populist-nationalism, made stupid by public instruction, believing that these are rightwing politics, falsely perceive actual left wing politics to align with the right. And so the deception is complete.
But I shouldn’t have to tell readers that socialism is the administration of things not people. Corporatism is the administration of people. As the great German sociologist Max Weber noted more than a century ago, it is the nature of corporate bureaucratic arrangements to dehumanize those they control. It is the irrationality of hyper-rationality. That’s how corporations control people: by robbing them of the rhythms of their own bodies and crushing individually different conduct—by reducing them to cogs and commodities—manufacturing charisma and celebrity.
As the old religious fades aways, an ideology emerges to take its place, born of the alienation engendered by the inhuman situation: the ideology of transhumanist desire—that is, the desire to escape the body. In an early signal of the nightmare to come, this desire was expressed at the birth of fascism in the early twentieth century (see The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint). That desire has today become totalized. Trans-genderism and trans-speciesism are subcategories of the greater transhumanist desire. As the ideology of the corporate state, progressivism can do nothing other than to deny human beings their animality. And, like the fascists before them, they mean to stamp the gospel of self-estrangement onto the bodies of the children.
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