Gender Ideology Does Not Exist
A relentless campaign to refer to the existence of transgender people as if they were a faceless “ideology” continues to gain steam, even though, when you look closely there’s no ideology to be found.
by Evan Urquhart
A gay politician was thrown out of a Conservative Party conference last week for responding aloud during a speech by the Tories’ leader, Suella Braveman, saying gender ideology does not exist. Andrew Boff is, apparently, a lifelong Conservative, a politician, a gay man, and an apostate to the sloganeering groupthink that insists transgender people and transgender rights do not exist. In the orthodoxy of conservatism today, both in the U. K. and worldwide, the basic humanity of trans people is unsayable, even unthinkable. In its place the words “gender ideology” (or sometimes “transgender ideology”) have been crudely and haphazardly taped up. The phrase exists to forestall all reason, all empathy, all pragmatism in discussions of transgender people and their human rights. It allows no room for human beings who also happen to be trans. Of course it doesn’t. It was designed to erase such people from the conversation, as Boff discussed in a subsequent interview with GB News.
In the past, the precise meaning of gender ideology was kept intentionally vague. The phrase, which originated with the Catholic Church, was used as a catch-all to refer to what the Church believed were the dangers of feminism, same-sex marriage, women not submitting to their traditional role, women fighting sexual harassment and assault, gender nonconformity, trans people, and a whole host of other gender and gender-related things.
Right around when the public began cottoning on to the vagueness and shiftiness of the phrase, anti-trans politics became a monomania on the right, and what was meant by gender ideology suddenly narrowed. But with that narrowing and specificity came another problem. Gender ideology can now be defined as synonymous with the existence of trans people, anywhere, at all.
Here’s Jay Richards of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, writing a simple, clear-cut definition of gender ideology for the Heritage Foundation’s website:
screenshot from the Heritage Foundation
This is very similar to what GB News host Andrew Doyle referenced when he sought to define “gender ideology” for Boff. He said the phrase refers to activists who believe “gender self-identification supersedes biological sex.” The problem is that these definitions, while much, much clearer than the earlier mishmash of objections to feminism, lesbian and gay rights, and gender nonconformity of all kinds, do not so much define an ideology as they describe the presence of transgender people in the world.
Are you unsure? Well let’s take the Heritage Foundation’s definition and examine what it would mean if their definition of gender ideology was real, and false. If that were so, then this would be the case: The sex binary captures the complexity of the human species. Human individuals are properly described in terms of a sex assigned at birth that cannot be changed.
Regardless of any beliefs about in internal gender identity, where it comes from, or what it means, is this view compatible with the fact that trans people exist? It’s clearly not. Remember, it is an objective, factual observation that there are people who live as a different sex from the one they were initially assigned. Whether you believe that they are “really” members of their original sex, whether you believe, or care, what the gender identity they hold in their heads is, none of that changes the fact that such people exist. They’re called transgender people, and by opposing “gender ideology” the Heritage Foundation is saying they must not be allowed to continue to exist.
It is not an ideology to simply live ones life. That’s why gender ideology, as currently defined, does not exist. Ironically, the earlier definition, which encompassed the entire framework of equality between the sexes, is more defensible as an ideology that is prevalent in the modern world It is ideological to say that genital configuration shouldn’t determine everything about the role a person is allowed to play throughout their life. It is not ideological to observe that there are many people, cis and trans, male, female, and intersex, who have chosen not to live within the narrow, ideologically driven gender roles conservatives want them to play.