The False Promise of Transgender Centrism

By Nate Hochman

Thursday, February 02, 2023

 

Giselle Donnelly’s Bulwark piece today, “Trump’s Escalation in the ‘Gender War,’” is a masterclass in false centrism. Donnelly, a biologically male American Enterprise Institute fellow who “came out” as a woman in 2018 — announcing “a love of national security, wine, gender fluidity and BDSM,” according to a Washington Post profile — frames conservative anti-gender-ideology policies and left-wing pro-gender-ideology policies as two birds of the same feather. Citing Trump’s recent “video screed” announcing “an onslaught of gender-war measures,” Donnelly writes:

 

Throughout the video Trump was dog-whistling furiously to rile up his traditional base. While curbing “transgender ideology” has become a central tenet of the MAGA and MAGA-adjacent right in recent years—even National Review averages several articles per week dunking on the excesses of gender advocacy—Trump is, as is his wont, recklessly disregarding what have heretofore been the limits of the debate. Gone is the we’re-just-trying-to-protect-kids-and-save-women’s-sports façade, replaced by naked efforts to prevent transition for all, regardless of age, and attacks on the therapeutic and medical systems that have improved the process and made it available to more patients. The agenda is equal parts fear and loathing.

 

One wonders how Trump could be “dog-whistling furiously” while also making “naked efforts” to attack transgender Americans, given that the entire point of a dog whistle is that its surface meaning masks its true meaning. But in any event, the actual policies Donnelly cites in this vein are Trump’s promise to “revoke Joe Biden’s policies on so-called ‘gender-affirming’ care”; ask “Congress to pass legislation that recognizes only two genders, male and female” and “that they are assigned at birth”; “sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex or gender transition at any age”; and “ask Congress to outlaw the use of federal funds to pay for transition procedures.” Also on the docket are a private right of action for lawsuits against transgender medical practitioners who harmed patients, and investigations into whether or not Big Pharma has “deliberately covered up the horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions.”

 

If this is a reactionary agenda, it’s one with a very short-term memory — the long-lost mores surrounding gender and sex that it would reinstate were more or less the consensus position until Obama’s second term. And then there’s the extremism Donnelly points to at the other end of the spectrum. Donnelly quotes the reaction of ACLU transgender activist Chase Strangio to the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified the right to same-sex marriage:

 

I feel an inexplicable amount of rage witnessing the Senate likely overcome the filibuster to vote to codify marriage rights for same-sex couples. . . . I find it disappointing how much time and resource went into fighting for inclusion in the deeply flawed and fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage. I believe in many ways, the mainstream LGBTQ legal movement caused significant harm in further entrenching the institution of marriage as an organizing structure of US civil society.

 

What Trump and his Republican counterparts are proposing is a series of aggressive but constitutional efforts to combat the ideological project championed by Strangio et al. Pace Donnelly, the views outlined by Strangio are a feature, not a bug, of the transgender project. In reality, Donnelly’s case for a down-the-middle strategy is merely a slightly slower and more moderate-sounding version of that radicalism: “There’s a moderation window opening for President Biden and Democrats in general,” Donnelly writes. “They can use this as an opportunity to step away from those on the left who have used the trans rights movement as a battering ram in their war against mainstream society, heteronormativity, the patriarchy, et cetera, et cetera.” But that battering ram is precisely the essence of the gender identity movement. 

 

Few things are more fundamental to civilization than the basic, immutable distinctions between men and women. Having dismantled the various social, economic, and political mores and habits that we had developed, over the course of centuries, to cultivate and steward those distinctions — what the Left derisively referred to as “gender roles” — progressivism has now arrived at the final barrier on the road to universal homogeneity: biological distinction itself. There is simply no “moderate” version of a project that seeks not only to destroy the idea of distinctions between men and women but to artificially dismantle the structural evidence that those distinctions ever existed — evidence that is written into the basic composition of the human body itself. It is a movement that brooks no dissent, for its advocates understand better than Donnelly that assimilation into a gender-normative society is at odds with their core goals. This is precisely the reason that even the “moderate,” bipartisan versions of trans-rights legislation carry strikingly illiberal provisions aimed at delegitimizing and punishing disagreement.

 

Donnelly expresses bewilderment at the extremism of left-wing transgender activism: “I wanted ‘re-assimilation’ into mainstream society, not revolution against it. I thought that the trans rights movement would take the path charted by the marriage equality movement.” There’s only one problem: Revolution against mainstream society, and the core structures, norms, and ways of life it encompasses, is exactly what the trans-rights movement is all about.