Though there’s a lot going on to obscure it, quite a bit has been happening in the social-culture wars over gender and related matters, and it may be that it is once again reaching a decisive moment across the Anglosphere.
In the UK, the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) has been shut down following a scathing interim report by eminent paediatrician Hilary Cass, which accused the service of multiple failures in handling gender dysphoric adolescents, applying an uncritical ideology of gender self-determination, being overwilling to characterise complex adolescent sexuality and neurodivergence questions as transgender issues, excessively and dangerously prescribing puberty-blocking drugs, and ignoring multiple protests by highly qualified staff over the clinic’s direction.
The interim report went further in its condemnation than many thought it would. What is noticeable is the relative absence of any full-tilt defence of the clinic, or any attack on its closure.
I haven’t seen anyone in any of the UK left media willing to do that. The revelations of the report on the clinic have quite possibly shocked a few people who were willing to defend it, as well as the general practice of easy accession to adolescents’ self-identification as transgender.
The right meanwhile has piled on. In the “final two” competition for the Tory leadership — one that drives candidates to the right — Liz Truss has used the clinic’s closure as a springboard to declare that she would make redundant every civil service “diversity officer” in the UK, a program that will be met with great support in the “Red Wall” seats won from Labour in 2019.
The closure of GIDS comes as that old perennial is flaring up on the other side of the Atlantic: the struggle over “drag queen story hour”. The right, having for decades focused its grassroots campaigns on getting elected to school governing boards, has now turned its attention to library boards. That’s not only to continue the process of censoring the library’s holdings, but also to put a stop to libraries booking full-glam drag queens to read to small children.
Crikey readers will remember that a demonstration against such an event turned tragic several years ago, when a young man in Queensland who was part of the protest (which ended up scaring and upsetting the children far more than a fat tax accountant in a leopard print reading them Mem Fox) committed suicide, a victim of the cultural right’s thuggish dimension.
The first thing to say about drag queen story hour is that before it is anything, it is bewildering. Drag has been argued for and against for decades, by feminism, the gay lib and LGBTIQA+ movements, but one thing everyone has agreed upon, implicitly, was that it was an adult pleasure. Nor has anyone ever equated it, per se, with being transgender.
The pleasure of drag, in its post-1960s version, is that it is meant to be politically sinful, transgressive. It’s not the old mainstream act of “female impersonation”, but nor is it the old leagues club’s drag that exuded a misogyny, in serving as a “relief valve” for straight and gay men’s antagonistic feelings towards women.
Post-1960s drag is surely, still, misogynistic at its root — men are real, women aren’t — but tends to mock that aspect of itself, to varying degrees, to create an act that moves in and out of cultural slander. The residual, root misogyny comes out of the imbalance.
Drag “king” shows — women playing exaggerated men — only really work when done by skilful theatrical performers, are relatively rare, and simply less fascinating, due to deep cultural settings. Whereas this Saturday night, in a thousand pubs across the world, someone’s gangly uncle is calling themselves something like Lolly Suck, and belting out “I Will Survive” in EE falsies, and it won’t really matter how crap it is, it will still be riotous and fun.
What on earth is this adult “naughty pleasure” cultural practice doing, being relocated to the teaching of pre-adolescent children? It’s complex enough teaching small kids about transgender issues. Why then introduce someone who is pretending to be a lady but doesn’t believe themselves to be a lady, etc, etc. The answer lies in the queer conception prior to and parallel with the more recent gender self-determination movement.
This derived from Judith Butler’s founding work Gender Trouble (1990). Prior to this work, and the movement it came out of, even radicals had seen gender as a social-cultural extension to embodied sex. But Butler saw the creation of our gender identities as occurring at the culture-performative level, with our bodily sex was retroactively culturally framed by it. Drag was crucial to that, since Butler argued that its very existence ruptured the idea that embodied sex had any determination of gender at all.
Butler is, with that master-thought, the RD Laing of our era: pointing out some critical truths about received ideas, while also creating a massive movement powered by a simplified myth running parallel to reality. The ethical intensity of their challenge — they began as a theological adolescent, coming through Jewish hermeneutics (with its intense focus on the textuality of truth) to the “radical enlightenment” philosopher Spinoza and beyond, in proto-hipster America, a sort of lentil Yentl — has been the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. It’s not simply that the fixed notions of sex and gender that govern most people’s lives can be queered for liberatory purposes. They must be queered as widely as possible.
That lies at the root of the drag queen story time phenomenon, pushed by a small grouping in the queer and drag community, acceded to or encouraged by librarians who, as nice core knowledge class people, see their role in booking it as a moral affirmation of progress. So it’s more likely to happen in some places than others, and parents there, if they are somewhat disconcerted, are less likely to speak against it. The objection to it is that there is real embodied sex and real gender, and children need to learn it in order to make sense of the world.
The drag queen story hour response to that is that there is no such order. It is all the play of symbols. So, all dissembling aside, its cultural agenda is very clear, and for anyone who believes in the determinative role of real sex, or even simply of real gender, needs to be resisted. That its proponents seem uninterested in considering the objections raised draws on a regrettable feature of some minor strands of LGBTIQA+ politics: an inability or unwillingness to fully see the special and distinct character of the child as a form of being.
So how did we get from the queer notion of performative gender and fluid being to the operation of a gender identity clinic accused of being too willing to confirm adolescents in a “solid” gender that is not that of their body, and to offer them the means of physical modification? Well, the queer focus on fluidity and non-essential forms of being was at home among the social avant-garde. But as the genuine notion of gender complexity spread to wider social groupings, the radical framing slipped away, and the meaning of the process reversed. The transgender journey became one to the hidden “real” self.
Without doubting the reality of the process for many, it can also be said that the widespread understanding of the process reintroduced not only a body/self distinction, but the ghost of a body/soul one. Gender fluidity entered a world dominated by the rule of the brand and the commodity, and what emerged was the notion that liberation could be achieved through an ever-expanding list of different genders.
The journey became the heroic one of our era, and such a premium caused many to passionately attach to the theory, or at least lose critical faculties. The failure to thoroughly investigate the Tavistock GIDS’ practices during years of mounting concern will be a prominent historic moment in measuring how a movement went completely awry.
It will unquestionably prove a rallying moment for a movement within progressivism, to reconstitute a more reflexive, critical and materialist notion of sex and gender. There is a ways to go in the US and here. A story in The New York Times illustrates the rift: what looks like a freakish tale of an 83-year-old female murderer who had killed three victims, all of them women.
Except of course Marceline Harvey wasn’t a woman when, in 1963, he murdered a witness in a rape case against him. Released in 1983, he stabbed to death a heroin-addicted sex worker he was living with, and was put back inside. Paroled in 2019, and then transitioning, Harvey is now accused of stabbing and dismembering a 68-year-old woman.
The crucial fact of this is not the murders themselves, but the way in which Harvey is described throughout the record of a violent life as “she”. Here’s a typical excerpt from the story in the Times:
“At the time [of the 1985 murder], Ms Harvey was unmoored. She had no stable job, was caught up in street life and wanted to be a pimp, she later told parole officials. Ms Harvey and [victim] Ms Sierra occasionally lived together.”
“‘She was very fiery and provocative,’ Ms Harvey later told parole officials. Ms Sierra, she said, brought ‘johns and tricks to the apartment,’ and sold Ms Harvey’s flute for drugs.”
Galpals hanging out gone wrong? No, the victim was an addicted sex-worker living with a violent would-be pimp who killed her, and who was then, by the Times, retroactively regendered as a woman, after making — as some violent prisoners have done — a late-life transition. Yet none of this can be posed as a question in the liberal newspaper of record; it must be communicated in code:
“A homeless shelter worker and people close to [murder victim] Ms Leyden questioned whether, despite her gender identity, Ms Harvey should have been placed in a homeless shelter for women, given her history of attacking and murdering them.”
How is it that such a cultural centre has no capacity to pivot from a standard story in which trans identity would be taken at face value, to one in which a sceptical approach is essential to not wronging the memory of two or more women murdered from deepset misogyny?
It comes from a knowledge class centre that has not yet worked out an ethic beyond the uncritical celebration of the trans claim. Now surely the contradictions can start to be seen.
Does all this matter much, in a world of climate and economic disaster? The paradox of what might be seen as the politics of such social processes is that while they seem marginal to politics, the two sides have a greater division than, say, the question of who should own the steel industry — the sort of question that dominated the politics of modernity.
But questions of sex and gender are biopolitical — they decide who we, or the next generation, shall be and become. Just as the trans struggle was powered by the demand for identity, so too has its opposition been energised by the transformation of that biopolitical process. The brutal and inhuman responses by the right in the US to such transformations have partly occurred because no critical “third” discourse arose, between the adoption of gender questions as a heroic marker of liberation, and a flat refusal of their legitimacy.
In a whole set of institutions — refuges, prisons, hospitals, sports, schools — the questions of sex and gender are particular and non-transferable, and any reasonable pro-diversity/multiplicity position has to acknowledge that. Many should have acknowledged it a few years ago; now the extended absurdity of many of these unyielding positions — say, in a sport like swimming — pushes this small matter to the centre of public life, and gives it a symbolic meaning it might have avoided. That is a clear loss for team multiplicity, and coming up with a revised position on questions of sex, gender and institutions might stop further losses.
Beyond that, there are real questions about other things. School curricula and programs, for example. It is reasonable for everyone, including progressives, to question these intently. Many people would have a view that being transgender is real, but that embodied sex is the root of gendered being, that sex/gender congruence is a better state to be in, and that educational assumptions should lean towards that. This is an explicit materialist argument that fully acknowledges the reality and truth of being transgender, but also argues that social processes can produce a trans state out of a period of gender complexity in adolescence that could otherwise be resolved to embodied sex-gender congruence.
From a left-materialist-existentialist point of view, it argues that you are your body in the first and last instance, and it is a better choice to undertake the dialectical struggle to be it if you can — and that a child-raising/educational system should positively lean in that direction. But that would also need to be prudently aware of “non-produced” transgender people, and try and avoid oppressing them.
It is reasonable to ask whether the approaches of some schools are de facto transgenic in a manner that is not desirable, and whether — after factoring in specific cultural conditions (cough, inner-city, cough cough) — some schools are producing significantly more and unnecessary “gender trouble” than others. If so, the curricula and programs should change. This is not easy, to say the least.
Questions must also be asked about the way in which suicide among young transgender people is spoken of, and whether the urge to acknowledge its reality also offers it as an attractive identity to some very troubled young people. There has been a well-established curb on suicide reporting for decades; it’s reasonable to reflect on the potentially contradictory role this discourse might play.
Responding to all of this demands a certain amount of courage from progressives who were either swept along or unquestioning of this transformation of the culture, simply because it was progressive. Those who are finding these contradictions needling, but are still ignoring them as part of a progressive’s “duty” to disregard their own doubts, need to have a conversation with themselves about one of the left’s worst habits: hiding from messy questions of governance, by preferring a role “imagining utopia” or “fostering hope”. That is more about the protection of the progressive intellectual’s identity than it is any sort of vital social role.
The best thing those feeling sceptical about institutional transformations by radical gender ideologies can do is to be publicly critical, from within a progressive discourse. Quite aside from anything else, as we bear down for new fights on climate, earth, war and economy, as the political centre disappoints, and the left has a chance to lead, it is vital that we separate ourselves from an ideology that many people — radicalised on questions of the planet and the economy — simply will not accept as a condition of joining a movement.
The courage demanded of many in this new situation is about something rather more than the embarrassment of having to admit to a change of mind. There’s a lot going on, and all of this is a big part of it, in the death of a clinic.
