Transgenderism: A New Operating System for Patriarchy

How has a single movement captured institutions at record speed? First published in early 2021 in 4W, this article attempts to explain why institutions have adopted transgenderism en masse

Feminists who have watched and waited through decades of progress on social issues such as women’s liberation, civil rights, and LGB equality are scratching their heads right now. Social progress takes time, and often decades of sustained organizing and action. So how has one movement, transgenderism, gained so much ground so quickly under the guise of “social progress”? Governments, corporations, and nonprofits have all adopted trans ideology in a shockingly short period of time, especially when compared to the struggles other “marginalized” groups have experienced. How is this possible? What makes transgenderism different?

The point of transgenderism is to fix glitches in the patriarchal system. After decades, even centuries, of organizing, the women’s movement has made cracks in society’s operating system. Feminism has undermined the smooth functioning of the professions and organizations that keep order of the family as the basic site of control and extraction of labor, and weakened respect for god the father.

While appearing to play a benign role in society, the actual point of professions in modern life is to promote and enforce patriarchy. The police force, the judiciary, government and civil service, schools and universities, the media and religious orders, the health service, and the military are all organizations whose purpose is to maintain the proper order of society. The professionals who work in these organizations do much to pretend otherwise, but the order they are protecting and promoting is patriarchy.

The patriarchal system is neither natural nor god-given, but socially constructed; the architects of this construction are the professionals. They make the laws and rules we live by, they control our access to resources and they oversee the extraction of labor and distribution of what is produced.

The point of organizations in patriarchy is to promote and enforce male dominance. Governments make laws to oppress women, the media and religion create myths and stories to confuse women, and NGOs mislead women into accepting crumbs instead of freedom, leading women up the garden path, selling them out. The point of the free market, money, capitalist systems is to enable flows of energy and resources from nature and women towards men. “Free” markets make the daily struggle for resources into billions of competitions in which the strongest win, repeatedly. Markets help and obfuscate the patriarchy.

At the smallest scale, most humans live in families in which one man dominates and oversees the oppression of females in the group. He is backed up by the state, the legal system, the media, religion, education, and the arrangement of markets.

“The point of organizations in patriarchy is to promote and enforce male dominance.”

Each organization or profession can be seen as a system, for instance, the health care system or the educational system. Together, professionals, professional bodies, organizations, and families form a complex interlocking web-like social system that maintains and recreates order in society. We are dependent on this system as well as oppressed by it. The system is almost compulsory, inescapable, given its reach in the world.

To maintain the order, men have worked to exclude the oppressed outsider class, women, from the officer class of patriarchy, the professions. The United Kingdom is typical in this respect. British women only got to work as lawyers in 1923 and police officers in 1939. They got the vote in 1918 but were mostly kept from holding political office by political parties who either did not select women candidates or concentrated them in unwinnable seats. There have only ever been 552 female Members of Parliament, compared to 16,747 men. The laws governing who qualifies to work in the professions have been made by politicians and men have made sure to exclude women from lawmaking.

Women have been allowed to work as teachers for rather longer, but men have dominated as teachers in the top schools, such as boys-only Eton and Harrow, and in the universities. In academia, the production of knowledge has been closely regulated by the patriarchy. Women’s voices are systematically shut out or erased. Women could not get university degrees in the UK until 1878. The media has been overwhelmingly male, with journalists needing accreditation from professional bodies in order to get access to government briefings. The spiritual leaders who justify the patriarchy to the faithful have until recently been exclusively male. Those women that do work in professions are pressured to enforce the patriarchy on themselves, by limiting their creativity to patriarchally sanctioned themes and by showing their submission by wearing make-up and high heels – performing their “sexual corvée” as Sheila Jeffreys put it in Beauty and Misogyny.

Women were pushed to the margins of medical care in the Middle Ages when a new class of professional male doctors muscled onto the scene. Midwives became outsiders. In the 1800s, British men made it illegal for anyone without a university degree to practice medicine and excluded women from getting degrees by arguing that menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause made women frail, unstable and incapacitated. Sex in Education by Dr Edward H. Clark (1873) justified this saying “higher education in women produces monstrous brains.”

Professional organizations are hierarchical. They are set up to cascade rules and obligations to their members and thus to implement new orders. For instance, during COVID-19 in the UK, new rules have been spread with lightning speed via the professional structures and related organizations: daily government press briefings broadcast via television and the Internet and then repeated on the BBC news and other media. Schools send instructions to pupils and parents, the National Health Service mails and emails “patients” as we are called. Regional governments back this up with guidelines and newsletters. At the local scale, councilors are on hand to flood the population with messages. In the case of COVID-19, the top authority is the World Health Organisation (WHO) that collates information and directs government actions globally. Our experience in fighting COVID-19 in 2020 is that there is a global social system and that information and instructions are transmitted daily and efficiently.

The professional class who lead organizations are obligated to be “professional.” Part of what this means is they have promised to do what those above them in the hierarchy tell them. They study for years to qualify and can have their professional license taken away from them if they do not follow orders. They get authority, status, and the legal right to work as a professional in return for agreeing to promote and implement the patriarchal system. As intellectuals, professionals also need to be able to think for themselves and make their own judgments as to what would be most professional at any given moment. They are thus both obedient servants of the system and originators of new ideas and methods within it. So, a teacher in the UK, for example, has to follow the government’s National Curriculum and the school’s schemes of work but has some freedom to deliver the material in their own way. To some extent they are creative and this gives professionals a little room to push for change within the systems.

“Transgender ideology is like a software upgrade for the hardware of patriarchal organizations.”

Taking advantage of this, in recent years, as more women pushed into the professions, they pushed back some of the worst practices of patriarchy. Female police have broken up the fraternal protection rackets afforded by male police officers to their civilian brothers. Female police have stopped male police from protecting rapists. Female judges put some paedophiles away. Female teachers have stopped male teachers grooming and abusing girls and worked to put new safeguarding systems in place. Female journalists have been able to tell our stories.

Despite this, mostly, professionals understand that their job is to implement patriarchy. In return, the insider professionals get money, power, and status. Professionals are handmaidens of patriarchy, the officer class of patriarchy. To get a passport in the UK, you need a professional to sign your photo to verify your identity. Those who do not know a professional have to pay their family doctor for the verification.

However, professionals are also citizens, patients, consumers, and individual people. When not in their officer class of the patriarchy role, they also experience the world as civilians. Many professionals are uncomfortable with what they are expected to do at work: doctors giving out drugs that treat symptoms, not the cause, of illness, police arresting and deporting migrants, etc. Many teachers are unhappy promoting the gender gingerbread person. Some speak out, often at the end of careers of careful conformity. Others speak out mid-career and get fired, expelled from the patriarchal enforcer ranks. Many, trapped by debt, mortgages, fear of poverty now or in old age, or addicted to expensive lifestyles or enjoying the power and status too much, keep their heads down and keep quiet.

Many people don’t think of the professions as patriarchal. Teachers, for instance, are mostly seen as fair, even-handed, kind experts who dedicate their lives to helping children develop and flourish. Parents are mostly grateful to schools for keeping their offspring safe and preparing them for adult life.

The proof that the professions and organizations are patriarchal enforcers came between 2015 and 2020 in the form of an unbelievable and unbelievably effective new operating system that has been embraced by almost all organized groups in Britain. Transgender ideology is like a software upgrade for the hardware of patriarchal organizations.

New Patriarchy OS TG7.2 will install tonight as you sleep.....

The reason transgenderism has spread like wildfire through professions and organizations worldwide is that it is a new operating system helping them do their job —implementing patriarchy. It feels right, it solves problems, it fixes glitches. In the old operating system, the growing acceptance of equality between men and women had led to calls for women to hold half of the top jobs, get paid half of the money, control half of the decision-making power. This tide was held back by the “it takes a long time to change” argument for a few decades, but as more and more outsider women have joined the professions, the professions were being turned against patriarchy itself. The pillars of the patriarchy were crumbling.

The new operating system (OS): we could call it TG7.2 as if it were a new software update for a smartphone, is a neat simple fix that works in many ways. Basically, the new OS functions so that whenever someone says “woman,” if it suits you, you can simply insert a man who says he’s a woman instead. What is more, in TG7.2, there is no fixed definition of woman, so it can mean anything the man says it means at any given moment. This changing definition of “woman” will be validated by the new OS, using techniques such as double-think in which sex=gender and sex≠gender. The professionals in organizations should support this as far as they can, but where necessary allow old operating systems to run in parallel. In biology teaching, for instance, it is acceptable to use the old understanding of women as adult human females.

“Transgenderism is providing new tools to implement patriarchy, filling in the cracks in the system left by the work of feminists.”

Foundational truths of the new OS such as “everyone has a gender identity” are being taught and repeated in schools and pumped out via the media. Civil servants around the world are mainstreaming gender into laws and social policy. Rather than continue the campaign against gender as sex-role stereotyping, United Nations Women hosted an event on gender diversity in 2019. In the USA, President-elect Joe Biden has promised to let people be treated as if their gender identity were their sex in the military, schools and sport, saying, “This is the civil rights issue of our time.” Much has been written about how helpful this is for patriarchy and how it is being done.

Over and over, people say they don’t understand how good organizations such as the National Health Service, the police, schools, the Labour Party etc. are going along with transgender ideology and so quickly.

Contrast the glacial rate of change towards equal pay at the Bank of England, where men still earn 24 percent more than women, with the rapid acceptance of transgender ideology. The bank reported in 2020 that it had three times more staff who say their gender identity is different from their sex than the national average. A press report explained that a driver for this change is that the 326-year-old bank, typical of City institutions, is trying to “shake off a long-held image of hiring a disproportionate number of white men from privileged backgrounds.”

In the same vein, contrast how the UK’s tax-payer funded broadcaster, the BBC, urged its staff in 2020 to state their pronouns in emails, and has rolled out a plethora of programs with almost exclusively pro-trans themes with the doggedly slow rate of change towards equal pay.

“The lightning fast global uptake of transgender ideology is useful in that it reveals how the patriarchy works.”

Even organizations set up to help girls and women, such as the Girl Guides, the Women’s Institute, or the Fawcett Society have switched to transgender ideology.

The only explanation that makes sense is that transgenderism is providing new tools to implement patriarchy, filling in the cracks in the system left by the work of feminists. The majority of people, at least in the United States where research has been conducted, do not believe in or want transgender ideology. Professions and organizations do implement it, nonetheless, their raison d’etre is to promote patriarchy.

As Virginia Woolf noted in Three Guineas, professional men wear clothes that “make us gape with astonishment… Now you dress in violet: a jewelled crucifix swings on your breast: now your shoulders are covered with lace; now furred with ermine; now slung with many linked chains set with precious stones.”

Each costume signifies professional status and role, with some special patriarchs even wearing dresses to profess their oppression—religious leaders and judges, and now we have a new enforcer of patriarchy—the “transwoman,” a man who claims to be a woman. The shape-shifting duplicitous processions of professionals have a new man in a dress.

Meanwhile, a few stubborn pedants like Putin and the Pope are still skeptical, but maybe they don’t need it seeing as their institutions have managed to maintain the heterosexual family and the strong men to keep the patriarchy running. Transgender ideology offers a new operating system for men who reject the conservative strong man leader, or the religious father god. It offers a new, modern, better OS for patriarchy—not top-down, but bottom-up. Not the Old Testament angry god laying down the law, but new touchy-feely shape-shifting, wordless and formless, bodiless, spirit form of patriarchy.

Far from being a befuddling mystery, the lightning fast global uptake of transgender ideology is useful in that it reveals how the patriarchy works. Like a bolt of lightning on a stormy night revealing the landscape, transgender ideology has illuminated the structure of patriarchy. Organizations and professions have not been “captured” by transgender ideology. To be captured implies that they were taken over against their will. They have installed the new operating system because it helps them do their job, which is implementing patriarchy.