Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

Developments in academia played a central role. Feminists used to use the word ‘gender’, and some still do, to denote the societal framing of female people as inferior and subordinate to male ones. Roughly, sex is a biological category, and gender a historical category; sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed. But in the 1990s the word was borrowed to signify a discourse – or, in the words of Judith Butler, the doyenne of gender studies and queer theory, ‘an imitation for which there is no original’. And so in these academic fields, which developed on American campuses out of 1960s French postmodernism, a man or woman came to mean someone who performed manhood or womanhood, which were sets of stereotypes – matters of self-presentation, such as clothing and hairstyle, and behaviours, such as choice of hobbies and career – that were meaningful simply because they were performed over and over again. In the past decade, even the tenuous link with objective reality provided by those stereotypes has been severed. In the simplistic version of the new creed that has hardened into social-justice orthodoxy, gender is no longer even something that is performed. It is innate and ineffable: something like a sexed soul.