On gender ideology and why there's just one side

 It's been a while since I last posted on this blog. I have been writing a bit on a new blog that I started on my personal website, as part of my attempt for a year or so now to get away from the whole legacy of both this blog that I began in 2007, and the countless unpleasant memories that I made along the way. Suffice it to say that perhaps as part of writing my autobiography (which should actually be ready this year) I have had an opportunity to reflect on many things, thoughts and events along the way.

Perhaps most interesting about these reflections was being able to finally put the sore finger on why exactly it is that gender ideology and associated groups manage to rile me up so much. After all, aren't intersex people supposed to be on the exact same side as those of various sexual persuasions and those more gender ideologist of all: the transgender folk? This never felt right to me, and the reason for it is actually pretty simple: the binary is a lie.

When I watched Matt Walsh's 'What is a Woman?' [1] a few months ago, I realised just how incredibly cathartic it felt to see Matt tear apart the whole delusion that was constructed around the nonsensical term of 'gender identity', something about which I have ranted previously on this blog. Yet in the intro to this documentary and reading up on Matt's overall views on gender/biological sex, it would also seem quite clear that he's a strong believer in men and women being very different mentally and emotionally, leading to each having distinct roles in society. Naturally, that doesn't quite jive with my own experiences, or my physical reality.

What is however an interesting notion that becomes apparent here is that in order to believe in gender ideology and the notion of 'gender' being somehow distinct from biological sex, you can be either on the conservatory side - like Matt Walsh - or be a fervent proponent of transgenderism. The only significant difference between these two groups is whether or not they believe that this 'gender identity' is intrinsically tied to a specific biological sex or not. In the end the distinction between these two groups is about as clear as between Catholics and Protestants: although they love to lock horns, they're both still part of the same overarching belief system.

Yet much like the Christian dogma, so too is the gender ideology's dogmatic system devoid of scientific evidence. There exists no clear evidence that would support the notion of a 'gender identity' any more than we have been able to identify a 'soul' within the confines of the human brain, and generally speaking, nurture seems to be the deciding factor in gender roles, rather than nature.

For me as an intersex person this feels like something that should have been obvious, yet much like a 'former' Catholic who escaped the Church's clutches, you can run from the dogma, but it's hard to fully shake off its effects after being exposed to it since you were a child. Whenever I see the 'I' of intersex meshed into the alphabet soup of LGBTQI+ and what not, it is mostly as a reminder of how little intersex people like me have to do with any of those groups.

Transgenderism and conservative views on gender both fly in the face of factual reality for intersex individuals, especially those of us who have been forced to navigate all sides of the gender role spectrum, and for those of us who have bodies that are both male and female. After all, how would you even go about defining terms like 'homosexual', 'bisexual', or heavens forbid 'heterosexual' within this context?

In the end those are all just convenience terms that have been assigned to fit within a narrow spectrum of personal interpretations of physical reality, yet this also means that they deny reality the way any dogmatic system does.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_a_Woman%3F