We Can't Beat Gender Identity Ideology whilst doing Femininity

December 2024

At the centre of gender identity ideology is the idea of individual choice, that you can be who you want to be, you can choose your own gender and be free. You can break out of rigid conservative stereotyped roles for males and females set by right wing forces such as religion, the government and society. Transactivists suggest you pick your own role from a range on offer (see image below).

Pick your own gender!

Transactivists support you in your choice and vilify anyone who tries to keep you penned in. If your father is telling you to wear a dress and put on some make up, transactivists will comfort you and validate your trousers, cropped hair and unvarnished nails. You can join the happy gender family and shake off the shackles of patriarchal oppression. Into the bargain you can feel revolutionary fervour, because you are creating a new, post patriarchal society where everyone will be free.

Radical feminists, on the other hand, see gender and femininity as imposed, often by force, on females. Society bullies girls and women into feminine behaviour and into looking feminine. Femininity is the gendered behaviour expected of females. Gender is a fist primed to punch us if we don’t “choose” shoes we can’t run in and dresses that make us feel vulnerable. It is a boot keeping our faces down in the gutter, afraid that our income will be taken away if we don’t “choose” long hair and pointless painful bras. Gender is an abusive relationship. Gender means females spend hours shaving their legs to look pre-pubescent.

Femininity is the way women are marked as powerless by our male masters through a variety of means, including naming, clothing, hair-styles and make up. Femininity is a response to male violence. It acts to show men that we know they’re our masters, we are their slaves. It’s a response to a possible male whip, and becomes associated with that violent whip. Thus, when men do femininity, they are summoning up that whip. In slave cultures, the masters allow the vanquished in war to keep their lives in exchange for acceptance of inferiority and submission. In the sex war, this is done by performing femininity, which tells everyone we know we are inferior. Conversely, not performing femininity is an assertion that we are equals and we do not submit.

The problem with women on our side of the gender wars choosing femininity is that they reject the idea that gender is a form of oppression. Women on our side who say they do femininity by choice or because it’s expressing their essence, locate themselves at the top of this image, not with us at the bottom. The sartorial implication is that they agree we are inferior slaves, but we just want more safety and better conditions.

The image below of the gender spectrum is another way to illustrate the problem. On the right we see a stereotyped male being masculine. On the left a stereotyped female being feminine. These are the core roles for males and females under patriarchy. What most people don’t see is that the male with his weapon is not wearing combat gear to fight an outside enemy – he’s fighting females. It’s a sex class war by male on women. The masters wear combat kit to remind us that they are in charge. If we notice it and call them out, they deny it and say they are defending us against the foreign enemy, they are actually our protectors.

Femininity signifies consent to the relationship of subordination. Often the more powerful a woman, the more feminine she must be. In recent years we are seeing more and more females in positions of power and influence: news anchors, football commentators, politicians. But whilst their words and role might indicate a new high status, their revealing clothes and high heels tell us they know their place. They are selling women out with their attire.

So how does this relate to the gender wars? The Venn diagram below helps explain it. On the left side radical feminists (a.k.a. gender abolitionists) want to abolish gender. We want society to recognise sex: that we are male and female. We know that males and females are different, and want society to function well for both sexes, for instance by having single sex spaces, valuing women’s reproductive work, giving women real power. We don’t want sex roles for males or females so want to end gender.

On the right transactivists, or gender identarians, want society to recognise gender (thus the Gender Recognition Act 2004 in UK).[1] They would like as little reference to or recognition of sex as possible. They seem to want health providers to know what sex people are, in a quiet secret way, so they get appropriate treatment, but in pretty much all other circumstances they’d like to abolish sex.

In the middle of the Venn diagram are the conservatives who want sex and gender. They acknowledge sex and believe society functions better with sex roles – masculine males and feminine females.

Now we all know a picture tells a thousand words. If you look at the pictures below, you can tell mostly which part of the Venn diagram the people would fit into. The man in trousers carrying a woman in a dress and high heels would fit into the conservative, sex and gender part. The men in make up and wigs would fit into the gender identarian, just gender, section. They’d be offended if we asked their sex. The couples at the bottom might well fit into the gender abolitionist part but they might want to put themselves into the gender identarian section – you would have to ask them, because from what they are wearing, it’s not at all clear.

This next image reiterates the point. We’ll assume the following is what they are thinking. The gender abolitionist woman on the left wants sex recognised (she wants her single sex space) but no gender sex role stereotypes, so she’s not wearing make-up, long hair or high heels. The woman in the middle, a conservative, wants sex and gender wedded – females doing femininity, thus she’s in a princess dress, long hair and high heels. The person on the right is doing gender (sex stereotype feminine dyed pink hair, butterfly earing, lipstick) and wants gender to be the thing they are recognised for with no questioning or mention of their sex.

But the Venn diagram most people see in the real world, which is actually the online world as we are all glued to the TV, internet and our phones, isn’t like the above, it’s more like this one below. In this diagram, the sections you can mostly see are the sex and gender section, or the just gender section. The Vatican, or Matt Walsh conservatives who want feminine women and masculine men seems to be in a binary battle against the transactivist gender identarians who want gender identity to break free from and supercede sex – people like Dylan Mulvaney or Blaire White. Most people don’t see the small sliver of a section of gender abolitionists (radical feminists) who are proposing a third way, to get rid of gender altogether. This is because there is a media blackout on radical feminists, both from the conservatives and the transactivists. Mainstream legacy media pretend to be balanced, but are utterly unbalanced when it comes to presenting alternative views. To them, it’s either progressive gender discourse, or regressive sex and gender discourse.

Now hold on, you might say, there is a space for gender critical views from time to time in the mainstream or in the patriarchal alternative press like GB News. But the problem is that mostly the women who are picked to represent gender critical views shoot us in the foot by presenting themselves as feminine, thus giving the impression, if a picture tells a thousand words, that they are one of the conservatives who want sex and gender. This is part of the reason young progressives think those who oppose gender identity ideology are right wing. It’s an unintended consequence perhaps, but we’ve seen that however much gender critical women protest that they are not right wing, most people believe they are.

When a young woman wants to break free from the sex and gender trap, she is highly unlikely to see the gender abolitionist alternative. There is a media blackout. She only sees conservatives and gender identitarians. Most detransitioner females perform femininity, maybe because they haven’t realised they can be female without make up and high heels.

The first rule of gender club is don’t mention the radical feminists. Gender club, we can see by looking at the Venn diagrams, includes both progressive patriarchs (transactivists) and conservative patriarchs (religious and traditionalists). Both groups agree that they should never give a platform to the radical feminists, their common enemy. Both groups love gender, they just disagree on whether it should be glued to sex.

It's important then, that we continue to get our message out. We can do that by writing and talking. But we can also do it by rejecting femininity and showing on our bodies that we want to abolish gender and sex roles altogether. As with lots of bits of radical feminist activism, doing this is metamorphic and for many women, feels fantastic.

Transactivists have colonised and corrupted the work of breaking down sex roles that feminists were doing in the 70’s. They make out that jumping out of one gender into another is a way out of sex roles. Trans are offering a quick fix, like junk food – it tastes like freedom, it smells like freedom, but it’s actually full of toxic rubbish and isn’t nourishing. Plus, someone behind the scenes is making a whole load of money supplying a fake feminist answer to a real need females have to cast off the patriarchal yoke. Radical feminists are the wholemeal, organic, no pesticides, no GMO version of overthrowing patriarchy. Transactivists are the McDonalds of feminism, Ronald now reborn as a drag queen.

Watch a version of this essay here from 24.10

from 24.10

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[1] GOV.UK. “Gender Recognition Act 2004.” Legislation.gov.uk, 2004, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/contents.