What’s more, ever since the late 1960s, the transgender revolution – both politically and ideologically – has been intertwined with both the feminist and homosexual revolutions. Yet because it has been tucked in behind them (sometimes quite deliberately so, due to the gay lobby’s uneasiness with their transgender compatriots) most westerners hadn’t felt its force, recognized its significance, or seen its implications. For at the heart of the transgender revolution, as we’ve already noted, is a new way of thinking about gender.
Central to this new way of thinking is the idea that gender itself (and not simply gender roles or gender expression) is entirely a social construct and not in any way biologically determined. The seeds of this idea came out of feminism (e.g., Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement: “One is not born, but becomes a woman”),18 but then got refracted through homosexual ideology into queer ideology or gender theory. How so? The logic is as follows: If being born a female and becoming a woman are two different things (feminist ideology), and if there is no necessary correlation between your biological sex and your sexual orientation (homosexual ideology), then why should there be any necessary correlation between your biological sex and your gender identity (queer ideology)?19
In other words, this new way of thinking not only draws a sharp distinction between sex and gender, but severs the connection. Sex is still generally seen as an objective biological reality, but it is not determinative of gender. What then determines gender? Answers vary. For some, gender is determined by one’s own choice (gender voluntarism); for others, by social forces (gender constructivism); for yet others, by independent neurological factors20 (gender determinism); and for others still, by some combination of factors. Either way, there is no necessary connection between any person’s biological sex and their gender identity. Consequently, more and more people are choosing to identify as transgender, pangender, bigender, trigender, multigender, omnigender, agender, gender fluid, gender diverse, gender queer, etc. As one teenager recently remarked to a psychiatrist: “I want to be transgender, it’s the new black.”21
c) Queer theory and the end of gender
If this were not revolutionary enough, some want to take things even further. For example, the ultimate goal of some queer theorists is freedom from gender itself! In other words, they not only want to eliminate ‘heteronormativity’ and banish binary categories, but jettison completely the very concept of gender. As one advocate has put it: “At the heart of Queer culture is revolution. The truest rebellion against a world built on categories, labels and binaries is coming from the emergence of identities that refuse to conform.”22 Queer theorist, Judith Butler, states it this way:
The prospect of being anything, even for pay, has always produced in me a certain anxiety, ‘to be’ gay, ‘to be’ lesbian seems to be more than a simple injunction to become who or what I already am … I am not at ease with lesbian theories, gay theories, for identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes.23
Butler, therefore, believes that gender is not something a person has but something a person does. It is ‘reiterated’ rather than ‘received’, ‘performed’ rather than ‘possessed.’ For this reason, any notion of gender norms necessarily “operates as a preemptive and violent circumscription of reality.”24 In fact, she even puts forward the idea that biological sex “is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”25