The Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft
I wondered how in the world I would broach the subject of “gender critical theory.” In case you could not tell from some of my other writings, I am not a big fan of it. It is basically a thinly veiled dog-whistle couching transphobic rhetoric in academic jargon.
I wondered how, how do I do it. Should I title this rant as, “The New Gomorrah on the Right?” Should I compare “gender critical theory” to “parental alienation syndrome” in terms of academic rigor? I think I will, but Forbes…. Forbes really saved the day. Who would have thought?
It is not a good look for “gender critical” feminists when some who subscribe to said philosophy feel that they have been backed into such a corner they need a church to protect their precious theories and for good reason, too. I have never seen “gender critical” anything without some insipid, bilious remark about trans women coupled to it.
“Gender critical feminists” will tell you they want to abolish gender to spare anyone the indignity of living a life of torment as a trans person. They will say they engage in open and honest dialogue challenging gender-norms and stereotypes and gender-identity as a whole. They conflate sex with gender and maintain they are stridently against the concept of gender as a whole. However, any honest person who took them up on their offer will tell a completely different story.
I can see where “gender critical” terminology is appealing. I, too, hate the concept of gender and even sex. These concepts and the culture which defines them shaped me as a person and was principally responsible for most of my misery as a child up through adolescence and eventually adulthood. It was not because I wanted to deny reality. Quite the opposite. I consistently had to confront the reality of my birth and how my thoughts and the thoughts of others around me affected everyone, including myself. No matter what fantasy land I escaped to or how many times I dreamed I was something or someone else to flee the pain, I had to eventually confront myself, my family, friends, and eventually the world. The only other people I knew who had this problem suffered in similar ways from domestic violence and sex abuse.
That is not what “gender critical feminists” are. They could care less. They are reactionary sex-essentialists. They are the men’s rights activists of the feminist world. They use people, radicalized them, then throw them away when they are no longer useful.
The first time I encountered them they did not call themselves “gender critical.” They called themselves “trans exclusionary,” but that was not the half of it. More than ten years ago, I remember reading about groups of “feminists” coming out of the late-90s with some new age, shamanistic woo coupling old patriarchal stereotypes to a kind of jargon reminiscent of pagan religions like Wicca. It confused the hell out of the feminist supporting liberals. It certainly confused me. They were obsessed with defining superficial, sexist traits as “female essence.” Think Camille Paglia, “I am the Cosmos,” and you have hit the mark. That was the core of this new “gender critical” philosophy. It was laughable to think anyone would take this pseudo-sage crap seriously, but they did.
Think I am lying? Then I have six words for you: The Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft.
I have dealt with bad-faith arguments in the past when it came to trans women, and couching blatant misanthropic content as “gender critical feminism” really takes the cake. Turning it into a religion brings this sort of thinking into sharp relief. How magical must their thinking must be, I wonder? There is no consummate difference between their theories and the theories of an incel who believes “gay men” are really “straight men” who worship women to the extent that they become women themselves. Both “gender critical feminist” theories and the ramblings of a deranged incel are merely a rehash of “rat psychologist,” Ray Blanchard’s pet theories.
An “expert in addiction and sexual paraphilia”, it was no surprise that Blanchard discovered that transsexualism is caused by, you guessed it: sexual addiction and sexual paraphilia. Blanchard then used a stream of mostly indigent and thus captive clients at his gender clinic (the infamous “Clarke Institute” in Toronto, Canada) to get the answers he wanted in order to prove his new theory of transsexualism.
In the late 1980’s, Blanchard began teaching that all transsexualism is either (i) an extreme form of homosexuality, in which men acquire female physicality in order to be able to have sex with large numbers of other men, or (ii) a sexual paraphilia (“autogynephilia”), in which men acquire female physicality in order to heighten their masturbation experiences (by being in love with their own bodies). In a sweeping claim of having discovered the cause of transsexualism, Blanchard eliminated inner gender identity or gendered feelings (GID) as factors or mechanisms in transsexualism, replacing them with a model of transsexualism as a pathological male sexual disorder. ~ http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/BaileyAssociates/BlanchardResigns.html
Ray Blanchard is a semi-famous quack “gender critical” acolytes cannot get enough of. Yet like all quacks, Blanchard has a terrible secret.
A rat psychologist by training, Blanchard always wanted to be a famous scientist. (Bailey even talks about Blanchard’s science-fame ambition in his book on pages 157–158 in his book). As is common knowledge in the sexology community, for many years Blanchard used his highly developed alpha-male dominance capabilities in efforts to force his so-called “discovery” on his sexology colleagues and into the sex textbooks. He may have hoped that this approach to doing science would make him famous, even though his ideas have never been taken seriously by the majority of clinicians and researchers knowledgeable about transsexualism. ~ http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/BaileyAssociates/BlanchardResigns.html
“FAME! I’m gonna live forever! I’m gonna learn how to fly HIGH! I feel it coming together! People will see me and cry, fame….”
He also lies, too. Imagine that!
Ray Blanchard also admits to academic dishonesty to push his pet theories into the mainstream.
You coined the term autogynephilia, which refers to a man who is aroused by the thought of himself as a woman. This term is kind of your baby. Is it going to make it into the DSM-5?
That comes under the heading of what I can’t tell you, because of the confidentiality agreement I signed with the APA.
Do you think autoandrophelia, where a woman is aroused by the thought of herself as a man, is a real paraphelia?
No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism, because there are all these women who want to say, “women can rape too, women can be pedophiles too, women can be exhibitionists too.” It’s a perverse expression of feminism, and so, I thought, let me jump the gun on this. I don’t think the phenomenon even exists. ~ https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypp93m/heres-how-the-guy-who-wrote-the-manual-on-sex-talks-about-sex
Ray Blanchard might have fantasized at some point he was Buckaroo Banzai but no. He is just a sad little man who is followed by sad little creatures constantly visualizing little children’s bits hacked to pieces, downing pills, and fornicating with each other.
In a desperate attempt to regain the public’s attention, he championed some online troll’s pet theory that anime turns your children trans.
How was this man ever respected as a researcher and allowed to contribute to the DSM IV and VI we may never know.
Now you might be thinking, “Don’t gender critical feminists raise women’s concerns? They are only fighting ‘violence against women.’ Why do not want to believe women?”
Would you be interested to find out these “feminists” are not interested in protecting women at all but instead silence those who speak up for trans rights?
Another possible reaction is a popular pseudo-scientific theory hatched on forums like Mumsnet called, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” or ROGD for short.
ROGD posits that children are being “culturally contaminated” by the influx of some “trans activist indoctrination.” Trans folk in modern society are becoming normalized and accepted. This in turn emboldens children to explore their gender and sexuality, and … surprise … trans kids feel they can live more openly after discovering who they are. The “gender critical” crowd, masquerading their disgust and contempt as genuine human concern, posit the view that these children were somehow brainwashed on sites like Tumblr into identifying as trans. Imagine such an incredulous statement ever making the news as anything but the rantings of some couch-potato conservative or armchair quack. Yet “concerned parents” buy it wholesale. I remember my parents did, but it was not ROGD they sited. They blamed the honors philosophy class I took in college.
Think about the many ways we are constantly inundated with sexist messaging from prominent advertisers, shopping centers, and social groups and how that is reinforced in society from our formative years into adulthood. But the real problem no one is talking about is some fringe group on Tumblr talking about Steven Universe, Adventure Time, and furry porn.
All kidding aside, “gender critical” trend-setters do not care about the welfare of children, either.
I have had enough calling these people TERFs, too. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth referring to them as trans-exclusionary “radical feminists.” They are not feminists. Fortunately, the folks down at We Hunted The Mammoth came up with a clever solution to this troubling acronym. It is called FART, Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe. Kudos to Bina for coining the term.
I feel like we are leaving some folks out of the party, though. After all, FARTs are not very prolific. They happen to be a minority within feminist circles a very loud megaphone. So who hands them the megaphone? Why moderate liberals, of course! But not just any moderate liberals, SCHARTs (Seriously Centrist Hecklers Assuming Reactionary Tendencies). You know, your Sargons, your Tim Pools, your Jordan Petersons, your Joe Rogans, your Ian Miles Cheongs, your Honey Badgers, farmers from Kiwi Farms, “alpha” minds from Beta Minds, gabbing frogs from Gab, etc., etc.
If this seems a bit too acerbic for you, hold on. I am not done scharting all over these FARTs.
If you are like me and feel a bit of bile welling up inside every time you see such toxic people making headlines and writing half-baked theories on Feminist Current, then as they say in the meme biz, “Hold my beer.”
Yes, that’s right! It turns out hateful perversity is just as common within the “gender critical” sphere as it is within the “manosphere.” They are positively obsessed with trans women’s bodies and incessantly fantasize about them. I remember this bizarre story where some young woman complained on a “gender critical” site she felt “violated” for entering an Uber cab with a trans woman driver on the way to a feminist convention, because she did not know at the time she was trans when she got in. She sat there silent and mortified and … nothing … happened. She was fine.
If you have any stories yourself to share, by all means leave a comment.
If you think this rant was a bit unfair and want a gentler, more civil, nuanced critique, then this essay on the Guardian Acorn is for you.
There are also some very good resources on Julia Serano’s website.
The TransAdvocate is also a good resource. Below is an article about TERF violence against radical feminists during the early days of the TERF movement in the ‘70s.
The TS Road Map has been around since the early days of the internet and is one of the best resources for trans people in general and those who are curious about trans folk. There are even articles over Ray Blanchard’s understudy, Michael Bailey, the controversy surrounding his book, and Alice Dreger’s defense of him.
Here is some background information on Alice Dreger.
Alice Domurat Dreger is a self-styled “hermaphrodite monger” (Dreger 1994) and former tenured professor who currently holds a job at Northwestern University. Dreger is the J. Michael Bailey of the intersex community: someone whose trade is writing and speaking about controversies surrounding marginalized populations.
Dreger is most famous (if you can call her that) for pushing to abandon the term “intersex” in favor of the medicalized term DSD, for “disorders of sex development” (Dreger 2005). Though Dreger has claimed that “DSD isn’t terribly stigmatizing” (Dreger 2006a), activists and experts have objected to Dreger’s pathologizing disease model (e.g. OII 2006, Diamond 2006). Like her counterpart Bailey, Dreger leverages her academic connections to suppress and discredit criticism.
Dreger’s academic influence had faded by 2006, however. She claimed she wanted to spend more time with her son and was “exhausted” (Dreger 2006b), but what was really exhausted was the money she’d been paid to prepare promotional materials for the DSD Consortium (Dreger 2006c), a group from which she was about to resign. ~ https://www.transgendermap.com/info/alice-dreger/hermaphrodite-monger.html
Dreger now enjoys minor fame as a professional “heterodox” scientist like Steven Pinker. “Why,” you might ask? I guess it might have something to do with having different opinions about sex and gender than your average sexologist or your average bloke.
It is amazing how terrible scientists plying their own personal grifts know one another and defend each other, brothers and sisters in crime and all that.
After writing all this, I feel a little better, but all the work I did looking up this material and wading through transphobic garbage has left me more than a bit drained. It was rather entertaining to find reactionary pseudo-science rolled into a New Age religion. Maybe this is a sign the world is moving on.
