Notes for a Critique of Identitarianism
Notes for a Critique of Identitarianism
Some thoughts on ‘The Transgender-Industrial Complex’ and the category of “gender-critical”
In coming into her political estate woman will find a mass of illiteracy to be dispelled. If knowledge is power, ignorance is also power. The power that educates wickedness may manipulate and dash against the pillars of any state when they are undermined and honeycombed by injustice.
- Frances E.W. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” 18931
Toward the end of 2020, there was a book published titled The Transgender-Industrial Complex by Scott Howard, from Antelope Hill Publishing. Prior to its publication, on November 8, 2020, Women Are Human published an excerpt from Heather Brunskell-Evans’s Transgender Body Politics, published by Spinifex Press. I selected the excerpt and titled it as “The Transgender-Industrial Complex,” without knowing of Howard’s book. Even being about six pages in length, that small piece of Brunskell-Evans’s book does far better than Howard’s book over hundreds of pages. Before discussing The Transgender-Industrial Complex, however, I want to discuss the work that I have done with Women Are Human over the past few years.
We at Women Are Human—that is, Diana Shaw and I—published excerpts from various works critical of transgenderism. These included Janice G. Raymond’s Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism (2021), Sheila Jeffreys’s Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life (2020), Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), and Robert Jensen’s The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (2017). When not printing independently published work, like selections from Ute Heggen’s In the Curated Woods: True Tales of a Grass Widow (2022), we excerpted mainly works from Spinifex Press, explicitly feminist, more left-wing, and two works from Regnery Publishing, more conservative or right-wing, less feminist. Among the works I felt especially pleased for us to reprint, there was Julia Long’s “Transgenderism and the Power of Naming,” first published in the 2016 anthology Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics’ War on Women, the Female Sex, and Human Rights. Two of the works that I reviewed were Brunskell-Evans’s Transgender Body Politics (“Totalitarianism for Our Time”) and Susan Hawthorne’s Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy (“Woman and Nature”). I chose the selections as I researched and thought of pieces that would be most useful for informing the public and introducing it to works otherwise unseen.
Looking back, Women Are Human did much work, though essentially unfunded, without sufficient donations for support, and entirely volunteer. I was also about twenty-three when I reviewed my first book for Women Are Human: Andrea Long Chu’s Females (“Desire as Dehumanization”). That previous year, I did my first ever review in Feminist Current on Andrea Dworkin, thanks to Meghan Murphy for giving me a chance when virtually none would. I also remain grateful to Dan Fisher at Uncommon Ground Media for giving me a platform where I had none. In the work for Women Are Human, we did what we did with the power of literacy driving us, even if we paid a price in the struggle.
Our publishing viewpoints from the left and the right had at its core an understanding that critiquing the politics of transgenderism matters above the divide between left and right. A shared and defined political goal has been the defense of single-sex spaces for women and girls as necessary provisions in terms of the most basic material improvements for women as a sex class. Whether left-wing or right-wing, women, being adult human females, need the right to spaces of their own, free of adult human males, also known as men. At present, the liberal left overwhelmingly acts in opposition to this aim, which functions to undermine not only the women’s movement but also women’s movement as women exist in public life. Being a men’s sexual rights movement, transgenderism embodies male sexual domination in the sexual colonization of women’s bodies.2 The liberal individualist emphasis on “identity” holds that some males can be women—therefore lesbians, too—by virtue of “identity.” Asserting that women are women by virtue of being adult human females, not by woman as “identity,” resists this view. Men claiming womanhood by virtue of so-called “identification” with it expresses men possessing women. Women’s political resistance to men who make womanhood into a matter of “identity” has been opposed mainly by the liberal left.
Apart from the need for single-sex spaces, there was the social and medical transitioning of children and young people. Politics masquerading as medicine, this practice undermines children’s rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. Girls and boys experience the castrating effects of Lupron, with negative physiological and psychological impacts. Children’s bodies become extraction sites for medical expropriation in profits accumulated to an unprecedented degree. As with the defense of single-sex spaces for women and girls, child transition continues to be primarily supported on the liberal left. Opposition to the social and medical transitioning of children is always political in resistance to the power of the state as pharmacracy: social control and political rule through medicalization.3 Abolishing the social and medical transitioning of children also qualifies as one relatively sizable political goal that deserves attention.
Analyses that do not acknowledge the above as defined political goals caricature whatever they attempt to analyze. Thus, it becomes possible to apply the branding of “liberal individualism” due to a large part of the field of vision being distorted and obscured, if not ignored entirely. Such analyses may have some merit, within the overall critiques made, but their premises for critique rest on misrepresentation. One can critique what one sees as “identity politics,” in favor of “class politics,” while, ironically, still practicing a form of identity politics. The liberal left has not moved from this kind of doublethink and even some of its otherwise thoughtful critics end up reproducing its same errors without being conscious of it.
Now, let us turn to Howard’s book. Though I have a longer review in progress, specifically discussing the history of misogyny and anti-Semitism, I will briefly discuss The Transgender-Industrial Complex here.4 In short, Howard’s book attributes the development of transsexualism and transgenderism to Jewish people, homosexuality, and feminism. He argues that transgenderism stands in the way of a white ethnostate that, we presume, must relegate Jewish people and other racial and ethnic minorities to some lesser status. According to Howard:
Indeed, the Jewish role in promoting not just the LGBTQ agenda—and the inextricability of Judaism and Jewishness itself from transgenderism and homosexuality in the words of Jews themselves and in their actions, which have been plainly illustrated in this book—but mass immigration, anti-white rhetoric, crony capitalism, and the corrosive array of other proclivities, activities, and policies is dramatically outsized. It must be acknowledged that the neo-liberal system and all its excesses and the group interests of Jews are now virtually identical. If we were to consider the Jewish role in neo-liberal economics (see Chapter Four of John Q. Publius’s Plastic Empire), especially at the ‘margins’ of ethical behavior, or that of pornography (also revealed in Plastic Empire), such a thesis becomes even more apparent and inescapable.5
Over the course of 437 pages, the argument remains basically the same as what can be read in the above passage. Even where otherwise rich white men appear concerned, Howard clarifies to the reader that, actually, they happen to be Ashkenazi Jews.6 While I plan on discussing it more in the longer review, Howard criticizes Jennifer Bilek for emphasizing the wealth and not the Jewishness of wealthy Jewish men.7
What about Antelope Hill Publishing that, by the way, has me blocked on Twitter among suspected Jews and Jew sympathizers? This publisher has reprinted translations of works by Adolf Hitler, other Nazis, and Nazi sympathizers. Antelope Hill Publishing’s catalog features In His Own Words: The Essential Speeches of Adolf Hitler (2022) and Joseph Goebbels’s Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Form (2023).8
Curious, I also looked up John Q. Publius’s Plastic Empire, as cited by Howard. The cover features the Star of David over the “A” in “PLASTIC EMPIRE.” Usually, these works are transparently anti-Semitic, as in the case of Antelope Hill Publishing’s catalog.
In contrast to Howard, Brunskell-Evans, who also cites Bilek, focuses on capitalism and the expansion of an industry that markets the dissociation from sex to the masses. Transgenderism may be read alongside prostitution and surrogacy for the way in which it also commodifies the female body. In the excerpt published to Women Are Human, Brunskell-Evans writes:
Transgenderism is a capitalist enterprise driven by the pharmaceutical industry (Bilek, 2018). Over the past decade, there has been an explosion in transgender medical infrastructure across the United States and world to ‘treat’ transgender people. The massive medical and technological infrastructure expansion for a tiny (but growing) fraction of the population, along with the money being funnelled into the transgender project by those heavily invested in the medical and technology industries, means that doctors are being trained in all manner of surgeries related to transgender individuals, including phalloplasty, vaginoplasty, facial feminisation surgery, urethral procedures, and more. Manufacturing puberty blockers for children and young people is another growing and extremely lucrative market. With the medical infrastructure being built, doctors being trained for various surgeries, clinics opening at speed, and the media celebrating it, transgenderism is poised for further growth (Bilek, 2018).9
Though social and medical transitioning reinforces sex-role stereotyping, it remains broadly supported on the liberal left. To the majority, it seems not only above critique, a big part of the problem, but also inevitable. Where Brunskell-Evans also differs from Howard is her clear understanding that defending single-sex spaces for women and girls and abolishing the social and medical transitioning of children and young people are political issues essential to contemporary women’s rights activism.
Over and over, women have clarified how they are not white nationalists, religious fundamentalists, and Nazis, always locked in defending their character. The defense of single-sex spaces for women and girls and the abolition of the social and medical transitioning of children and young people are not like the rise of the Fourth Reich. Arguments that position work toward political goals benefiting women and girls as the equivalent to white nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and Nazism seem disingenuous, at best. Given that Howard explicitly argues for females to be feminine and males to be masculine, he would not qualify as “gender-critical.” By contrast, Brunskell-Evans critiques man’s claim to womanhood as “identity” and, embedded in this claim, the conflation of female with feminine and male with masculine. Therefore, Howard does not qualify as gender-critical, in any sense; Brunskell-Evans does. Nevertheless, The Transgender-Industrial Complex may be called “gender-critical,” simply on the basis of Howard opposing transgenderism.
The category of “gender-critical” has been applied to feminists and Marxists as much as practitioners of gender conservatism. Trans activists have made it an umbrella designation inclusive of anybody from the left to the right who opposes transgenderism. Gender reactionaries of their own kind, trans activists have drawn no distinctions. Grace Lavery’s Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis, published in 2022, gives us a typical example. He writes:
Why are so many British people—including a sizable chunk of liberal/lefty women—hostile to trans women? Over the last few years, the gender critical movement has become, along with Brexit, one of the definitive dimensions of contemporary British political style—the ‘characteristic part’ of contemporary British politics, one might say. The gender criticals have a certain amount in common with the Brexiteers: a love of boundaries; a rather defeated but nonetheless dogmatic insistence on the inviolability of traditional taxonomies; perhaps above all, a pastoral delight in the idea of a space from which outsiders have been evacuated—a Pole-less nation, and a pole-less ladies’ bathroom.10
In Lavery’s analysis, women excluding men become a kind of nation-state scapegoating immigrants. The ongoing analogy has been that women in defense of single-sex spaces for women and girls are like Brexiteers. Lavery’s framing of men as “outsiders” to be “evacuated” conjures images of the fascistic “insider” female. His analysis posits that women excluding males as men only do so on the basis of a moralizing sense of the men’s contamination of women. There is no reckoning with sexual politics in favor of making it a case of female totalitarianism and identitarianism. At the same time, men like Lavery neglect male sexual entitlement, which functions in a totalitarian and identitarian fashion. If “TERF” and “gender-critical” did not exist as ways to mark ideological opponents, then trans activism would invent something else for the purpose of designating its enemies, especially its female ones.
Why did I read Howard’s book and not respond directly following its publication? First, I was not going to pay for a copy; mine is from a friend, who sent me hers in having no use for it. There is a free text online that can be pirated, for the purpose of reading what Howard writes, but I like having page numbers for my references. Second, I usually do not respond to works attempting to link any critique of transgenderism with white nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and Nazism. Within pages, I quickly lose patience with these arguments, wherever they come from. Seldom do they seem to make a remotely effective case, which is why I may read them but choose not to respond. Third, related to the second, dealing with pages after pages of the above irritates me. I read Howard’s Transgender-Industrial Complex for the same reason that I read Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, a similar work in misogyny and anti-Semitism: fodder.11 It is less the substance of the work, per se, than what I can build against it—and, eventually, I get to it, sometimes even sooner than I wish.
For years, at least some of us have been thinking about the problems with the category of “gender-critical,” though we may not be publishing our thoughts as pamphlets. Feminist critiques of transgenderism, like those from Raymond, Hawthorne, and Brunskell-Evans, have usually been conflated with the kind seen in Howard’s Transgender-Industrial Complex, without drawing any distinctions. By the same token, the females-as-feminazis slandering device ends up transcending all political borders, reproduced in both likely and unlikely places. Women’s rights activism being construed as the female version of a white ethnostate seems unreasonable. The Nazi analogy has served to create a theoretical justification for the practice of male violence against women. If there were arguments that did not use disingenuous comparisons to white nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and Nazism, then I think that more would read them and respond. Intended or not, a lack of nuance, which now seems typical, calls far more for silence than dialogue.
Frances E.W. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” 1893, in World’s Congress of Representative Women, ed. May Wright Sewell (Chicago and New York: Rand, McNally, & Company, 1894), 434.
This analysis follows from the critique seen in Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Plume, 1981/1989), 203 and Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (New York: Teachers College Press, 1979/1994), 30, 176-177. Dworkin further expands on men’s possession, occupation, and colonization of women in subsequent works, including Intercourse (New York: Basic Books, 1987/2007) and Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation (New York: The Free Press, 2000). Analyses of this kind date back to the 1970s, most clearly articulated in Robin Morgan’s “On Women as a Colonized People,” first published in 1974 and later reprinted in Morgan’s Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist in 1977. Kathleen Barry’s Female Sexual Slavery, in 1979, identifies “sex colonization” as fundamental to the politics of sexual domination. A more recent articulation of this feminist analysis can be found in Sheila Jeffreys, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women’s Subordination (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2022).
See Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1974/2003), 139.
In Scapegoat, Dworkin provides an extensive analysis with references, which I have found helpful to read alongside Howard’s work.
Scott Howard, The Transgender-Industrial Complex (Antelope Hill Publishing, 2020), 197.
Howard, 182-183.
See Jennifer Bilek, “Who Are the Rich, White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology?,” The Federalist, February 20, 2018, https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology. See also Jennifer Bilek, “Transgenderism Is Just Big Business Dressed Up In Pretend Civil Rights Clothes,” The Federalist, July 5, 2018, https://thefederalist.com/2018/07/05/transgenderism-just-big-business-dressed-pretend-civil-rights-clothes. For a more recent critique, see Jennifer Bilek, “The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI),” Tablet, June 14, 2022, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers.
See “National Hate Group Monitor Unmasks a Lehigh Valley-Area Publishing Company Peddling Nazi and Fascist Literature,” The Morning Call, June 15, 2022, https://www.mcall.com/2022/06/15/national-hate-group-monitor-unmasks-a-lehigh-valley-area-publishing-company-peddling-nazi-and-fascist-literature.
Heather Brunskell-Evans, Transgender Body Politics (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2020), 146-147.
Grace Lavery, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis (London: Daunt Books Publishing, 2022), 175.
See Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1903/2005).