It might be asked how gender identity ideology, and the movement it represents, have been successful, despite its contradictions and impossible claims – claims by men to women’s rights while erasing the very meaning of woman; and claims to the ability to change one’s sex while denying the biological and binary nature of it and its basis in human reproduction.

There are various strands to the answer that have been touched upon in previous posts. Undue discrimination and prejudice evoke sympathy and support, and it is particularly popular among the young, who feel much less need to ask themselves how and why this issue has arisen and dominates certain milieus. Almost by definition they have less sensitivity to historical experience and awareness.  Their need for some historical validation – on the grounds that gender identity is innate – is shown by the attempts to read the modern idea of gender identity back into history, even if this results in yet more unsupported claims.

In the past week four ‘non-binary’ girls tried to disrupt a gay, lesbian and bi-sexual conference in London by releasing insects into the venue.  Their youth obviously permitted their oblivion to the irony of attacking the conference while claiming to be part of a wider LGBTQ+ movement – in doing so exposing their cannibalism of the original LGB and the incompatibility of their ideology with these original struggles.

It was also yet another demonstration that the T in the assortment of letters is interested solely in itself and is prepared to shaft its presumptive allies in pursuit of its own claims.  The young have had no experience of the struggle for gay and lesbian rights in many countries, or the experience of PRIDE marches not being huge parades that include numerous corporate sponsors; but rather, marginal demonstrations viewed by many with prejudicial revulsion and contempt.  But then, if men can aggressively and menacingly confront feminists while demanding that they be considered women, there would seem to be no set of circumstances for some in which gender ideology can be seen for what it is.

Defenders of women’s rights, and of reality itself, have thus found it necessary to explain how this modern and reactionary phenomenon has risen to such prominence.

As befits her occupation as a philosopher, Kathleen Stock in her book Material Girls, sets out ‘a brief history of Gender Identity’ in terms of the development of its ideas: from Simone de Beauvoir’s “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman”; through biological sex being “a continuum” and Judith Butler’s ‘gender as performance’; to the invention of the concept of TERF and the explosion of gender identities.

Helen Joyce, as a journalist, goes for ‘a brief history of transexuality’ in her book Trans, looking at the story of the medical and psychological treatment of what became transgender status.  Jane Clare Jones, in her essay on ‘the history of sex’ in the book Sex and Gender, looks at the ‘intellectual development and cogency of the sex-denialist ideas’ and identifies ‘the emergence of the contemporary trans movement to the early 1990s on both sides of the Atlantic through a blend of legal activism and academic theorisation.’

The periodisation of the movement to the 1990s helps understanding of the grounds upon which gender ideology has been able to drive its anti-woman and irrational claims into society.  Most obviously through the state and its various bureaucracies – especially health – and through NGOs, which are more and more reflections of the interests of the state despite their name. These often act as its conscience that the state can either ignore – if it is criticised – or hold up as justification for interventions if it is another rival state that is criticised

Legal changes supported by the gender identity movement have often been made surreptitiously, with little debate and without widespread public knowledge, as in Ireland, Denmark, Australia and Iceland.  No women’s organisations were included in the parliamentary enquiry by the UK Women and Equalities Committee in 2015 which led to consultation on changes to the UK Gender Recognition Act (2004), or for legislating for Gender self-identification in New Zealand.

The state has bought into and imposed gender identity ideology, from the local hospital and school, all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights and United Nations.  Sanctioning by such bodies has been seen as proof that the ideology and its claims are progressive by a left that has identified these bureaucracies as progressive, just as this left has more and more taken on the identity of an NGO rather than of a revolutionary working class organisation.  Law firms, prisons, sports organisations, religious and medical institutions, all normalise the abnormal so that we have ‘normal’ organisations claiming to believe in the preposterous.

It is rarely, if ever, noted by this left that the movement and ideology draws support from prominent capitalists, their corporate executives; bourgeois political parties, governments and state bureaucracies, and the NGOs they finance.  Some of these come together in the Gates, Soros and Ford foundations, which have committed $2.62bn to support self-identification.  (Women’s Rights, Gender Wrongs p187). And we haven’t even mentioned the fashionable philosophical and political ideologies pumped out of universities that give it the thinnest of veneers of intellectual legitimacy.

A small number of billionaires have played an outsized role in promoting the ideology and using their enormous wealth to fund the transgender movement through their own political organisations and corporations.  More important than the financing going directly to trans organisations is the money invested in health and pharmaceutical corporations in order to cater for the fact that many who undergo surgical and medical interventions can become lifetime patients.  The ideology has a growing material basis in the profitability of transgender medicine, especially in the US.

This is another difference between gay men and lesbians, who do not require medical or surgical intervention, and some who buy into gender identity and become lifelong patients, and especially in the US – lifelong paying customers.  For young people it can begin with puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, radical removal of healthy tissue, the addition of false secondary sex characteristics, and also the potential for repeated treatment to deal with the deleterious side-effects and consequences of these interventions.  In this respect, yet another difference between LGB and T.

Transgender health treatment has entailed creation of a medical-industrial complex with, for example, thousands of gender clinics around the world to deliver and support it, which also play a role in adding important ideological defences for it.  One writer gives the example of one billionaire sponsor of the ideology, Jennifer Pritzker:

‘Once a family man and a decorated member of the armed forces, Jennifer Pritzker now identifies as transgender. He has made transgenderism a high note in philanthropic funding through his Tawani Foundation. He is one of the largest contributors to transgender causes and, with his family, an enormous influence in the rapid institutionalization of transgenderism.’ 

‘Some of the organizations Jennifer owns and funds are especially noteworthy for examining the rapid induction of transgender ideology into medical, legal and educational institutions. Pritzker owns Squadron Capital, an acquisitions corporation, with a focus on medical technology, medical devices, and orthopedic implants, and the Tawani Foundation, a philanthropic organization with a grants focus on gender and human sexuality.’

‘Pritzker sits on the leadership council of the Program of Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota, to which he also committed $6.5 million over the past decade. Among many other organizations and institutions Pritzker funds are Lurie Children’s Hospital, a medical center for gender non-conforming children, serving 400 children in Chicago; the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago; a chair of transgender studies at the University of Victoria in Canada (the first of its kind); and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies’ at the University of Toronto. He also funds the American Civil Liberties Union and his family funds Planned Parenthood, two significant organizations for institutionalizing female-erasing language and support for transgender causes. Planned Parenthood also recently decided to get into the transgender medical market.’

‘There doesn’t seem to be a sphere of influence that is untouched by Pritzker money, from early childhood education and universities to law, medical institutions, LGBT lobby and organizations, politics, and the military.’  (Bilek, Jennifer. Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from The 11th Hour (pp. 38-39, 43). Spinifex Press. Kindle Edition.. The money from these sources buys the spread of this influential ideological network across the world, including Ireland, which is hardly immune to economic, social, political and cultural influences from the US.

That such a tiny number of men, like Pritzker, have been able to impact in such a powerful fashion, and with such irrational effect from the point of view of our understanding and working of society, is a tribute to the irrational nature of capitalism and the power of the inequalities it generates.  The massive socialisation of production by capitalism that brings humanity together in innumerable connections exists beside the increasing monopolisation of production and the power of the tiny number of capitalists who benefit most from it: an illustration of the Marxist understanding of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production.

This impact should not be put down solely to the tiny number of billionaires who are themselves transgender, or are otherwise devoted to the idea of it as a way to advance some transhumanist agenda – in which technology increasingly renders biology (including sex) irrelevant – but to the wider influence and power that they can mobilise.  The author above also notes that:

‘Along with support by pharmaceutical giants such as Janssen Therapeutics, Johnson & Johnson, Viiv, Pfizer, Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, major technology corporations including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Dell, and IBM are also funding the transgender project. In February 2017, Apple, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Yelp, PayPal, and 53 other mostly tech corporations signed onto an amicus brief pushing the US Supreme Court to prohibit schools from keeping private facilities for students designated according to sex. (Bilek, Jennifer. Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from The 11th Hour (pp. 43-44). Spinifex Press. Kindle Edition.)

With such powerful support from big business and the state it is not hard to explain the gender identity movement’s success.  The corporate sponsorship of Pride and their HR departments’ Diversity and Inclusion departments are all examples of the appropriation of the claims of oppressed groups by capitalism.  Annual Pride demonstrations are no longer an expression of rebellious campaigns but a rainbow of multinational corporations; state agencies; NGOs; the mainstream mass media and bourgeois politicians, in what is more a fancy dress party – themed by inane slogans such as ‘love your mind’ – than a progressive campaign.  The idea that this is a grass-roots movement is as true as the claim of men to be women.

One banner at this year’s Pride parade in Belfast that hit the nail on the head.

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