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January 12 - December 10, 2021
observed in part 3 that victimhood emerged as a key virtue, perhaps the key virtue, out of the Marxist tradition of New Left thinking.
For example, in 1956, a group in Washington, DC, known as the Council for the Repeal of Unjust Laws had complained that the civil rights legislation that Congress was then considering took no account of homosexuals nor of the fact that many leading advocates of black civil rights were
antihomosexual.
longer is the claim made that gay people can fit into American society, that they are as decent, as patriotic, as clean-living as anyone. Rather, it is argued, it is American society itself that needs to change.” To the young radicals there was no need to create a “favorable” public image. . . . Now Blatant was Beautiful.13
Furthermore, the Stonewall riots provided one more key element to the gay narrative that resonated deeply within Western culture: victimhood.
Bill Kraus, a San Francisco politician who was himself to die of AIDS, tried unsuccessfully to promote safe-sex practices by recommending the closure of the city’s bathhouses, focal points for uninhibited gay sexual activity. This idea was compared by one gay opponent of the plan as giving “the Moral Majority and the right wing the gasoline they have been waiting for to fuel the flames that will annihilate us!”
designed to prevent the transmission of a deadly disease—is considered unacceptable because of its perceived obnoxious moralizing or potential for promoting such.
the modern post-Freud, post-Nietzsche mind, those who argue that sex acts have intrinsic moral content are merely expressing irrational aesthetic preferences rooted in cultural conditioning of simple prejudice. Sex becomes morally significant only as it is an expression of the self or of personal identity, and so any moral discussion of sexual acts or their consequences must be set against that
background.
the story was now one in which both groups were being prevented from being who they really were; both were victims of a common conservative enemy.
Indeed, the acronym LGBT had established itself as common currency among gay activists by the mid-1990s, many years before Jenner came out.
The earlier work, as I noted above, was steeped in Marcusan New Left concepts and also placed significant emphasis on the physicality of being a woman as being decisive for the female experience of selfhood and the world around it.
there is an entire section devoted to sex, gender, and transgender issues.
An increasing number of feminists and other activists are advocating for the expansion or elimination of either-or gender norms, in order to allow for a full range of human behavior and expression. Knowing that gender is separate from sexual
anatomy enables us to express ourselves in ways that may conflict with how society dictates we should look and act.31
not because AIDS ever really hit the lesbian community, but because white, middle class, educated men who identified as gay suddenly appeared as victims to us, and that changed everything.
The coining of the pejorative acronym TERF, standing for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, in 2008 witnesses to the fact that some feminists refuse to accept that men can be surgically transformed into women. Of particular note in this context are Janice G. Raymond and Germaine Greer.34
But she is unwilling therefore to reduce being a woman to some kind of gnostic psychological experience that has no connection whatsoever to female biology.
But in some very real senses, female biology shapes female history—a history that men don’t have because of their sex—including the history of menstruation, the history of pregnancy or the capacity
to become pregnant, the history of childbirth and abortion, the history of certain bodily cycles and life changes, and the history of female subordination in a male-dominant society. Note that I keep saying history. To deny that female history is, in part, based on female biology is like denying that important aspects of Black history are based on skin color. As with biological skin color, female biology doesn’t confer an essential femininity; rather it confers a historical reality about what it means to be born with XX chromosomes.36
Menstruation and pregnancy are experiences unique to women and are part of their history.
To reject that, as transgenderism does, is to move gender entirely into the realm of the psychological and to deny, in a quasi-gnostic fashion, any significance to the body.
If one’s basic approach to the problem of transsexualism is from a psychological and medical basis, then many moral issues, as well as sociopolitical, economic, and environmental problems, are transformed into technical problems.
Being a woman is now something that can be produced by a technique—literally prescribed by a doctor. The pain, the struggle, and the history of oppression that shape what it means to be a woman in society are thus trivialized and rendered irrelevant.
Such a display both perpetuates stereotypes and would seem to support Raymond’s basic thesis that the man who thinks he is a woman trapped in a man’s body really wants to be a woman in accordance with male expectations of what a woman should be.
Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognize as women men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight.
In fact, Greer believes, men who transition to become women are simply trying to conform themselves to what they as males think women should be.
In this context, transgenderism is merely the latest iteration of self-creation that becomes necessary in the wake of decreation.
If gender is a construct, then so are all those categories based on it—heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. The world of psychological man is a world in which, to borrow Marx’s phrase, all that is solid is constantly in danger of melting into air—including our selves.
Understanding “sexual orientation” to refer to each person’s capacity for profound emotional, affectional and sexual attraction to, and intimate and sexual relations with, individuals of a different gender or the same gender or more than one gender; Understanding “gender identity” to refer to each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body (which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical or other means) and
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So the reality of the body is not as real as the convictions of the mind.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law. Persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities shall enjoy legal capacity in all aspects of life. Each person’s self-defined sexual orientation and gender identity is integral to their personality and is one of the most basic aspects of self-determination, dignity and freedom.
This statement is both consistent with the modern notion of selfhood as a subjective psychological construct and also deeply problematic in several ways.
close connection of personhood with self-determined sexual identity
Second, there are no limits set for what does and does not constitute acceptable sexual orientation.
This tacit understanding prioritizes sexuality and gender while at the same time setting limits for how these can be constructed.
Everyone has the right to found a family, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Second, we see the connection between the emerging moral imperatives of the sexual revolution and the possibilities created by science.
What nature has declared impossible—that two men or two women might conceive a child together—technology has made possible, and the sexual revolution has then made imperative.
Families, we are told, exist in diverse forms. True, but that diversity has always been somewhat limited because of its deep connections to biology and to a basic binary distinction between male and female.
It is also clear that its drive to inclusion ironically involves significant elements of exclusion—for example, those who affirm the normative nature of heterosexuality and those feminists who consider the female body to be decisive for their identity.
Certainly, in terms of its underlying philosophy, there is nothing to stop such an eventuality, but as I noted in chapter 8, the basic redefinition of marriage did not take place with Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 but when Governor Ronald Reagan signed no-fault divorce into law in California in 1970.
It would seem reasonable to assume that as fewer and fewer people care about their own religious commitments, so they will care less and less about religious freedom as an important commitment for society as a whole.14
if the Supreme Court’s judgment in United States v. Windsor is representative of wider social attitudes, then traditionalists only maintain their beliefs about sex and sexual mores on the grounds of irrational bigotry.
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differently, the social imaginary of the West is no longer that of the American founders, for whom religious freedom was regarded as a good that actually helped social cohesion; it is now regarded as something that poses a potentially lethal threat to that cohesion.
It is not so much that Chinese Christians and Uighurs are religious as that they are a minority.
Indeed, the question of what exactly free exercise means is likely to be determined by the wider question of the nature and legitimacy of sexual identity.
