Gender Reform Must Be Bipartisan

Why lefties and feminists must help guide the conversation

Last week, Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo released “A Parents’ Guide to Radical Gender Theory”: cliff notes to many of the ideological stances on sex and gender being taught in schools today, and often supported by liberal institutions and the mainstream media.

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @realchrisrufo

Want to understand why all of this is happening? Read my new "Parent's Guide to Radical Gender Theory" here:

christopherrufo.comA Parent’s Guide to Radical Gender TheoryRadical gender theory is a catch-all term for academic queer theory, transgender ideology, and gender identity activism. The premise of this ideology is that

It’s really important to arm people with the knowledge to effectively and respectfully push back on some of the ideas our children are being steeped in—for instance, that sex is a spectrum, or that everyone has a gender identity. Rufo identifies that “Radical gender theorists argue that white, European men invented the ‘gender binary,’ or division between man and woman, in order to oppress racial and sexual minorities,” and yes, we really need to dismantle this notion. From the anthropologists and archaeologists I’ve spoken to, I learned that every culture that we know of has gender in some form or another—that is, ideas about what women and men should be like and do.

But while this document does convey some important information and some good strategies for dealing with school boards and other institutions, it left me worried. It’s written from a very specific viewpoint that leaves out some nuance that discussions about gender benefit from—that is, if we’re looking for gender culture peace instead of just trying to come out the victors in the gender culture war.

Rufo writes that gender ideology advances the notion that “sex and gender are socially constructed—that is, they are human inventions used as instruments of power, rather than features of objective reality.” Of course sex is not socially constructed; humans are sexually dimorphic. But while I do understand that some “male-typical” and “female-typical” behavior has biological roots, I very much do believe that gender—our culturally-based expectations of how men and women should behave—is socially constructed.

I’ve spent a long time collecting information on how gender norms shift generationally, or geographically. Ideas about what women and girls do and what men and boys do vary greatly across cultures and geographies. (This is review for some of you who’ve already heard this spiel from me.) Pink is an un-gendered color in some countries, and wasn’t always associated with femininity here. Men had and have long hair in some cultures; in some cultures they still wear what might look to us Westerners like dresses. The ancient Pueblos were matrilineal—women owned the property and their daughters inherited it. Evelyn, Kimberly, Dana, Beverly and so many other “girl names” used to be “boy names.” Computer programming used to be a “woman’s job.” I could go on (and I do, in this presentation I give to schools, businesses, etc). But you get the point. Sex is immutable. Gender is mutable. Until quite recently, this was an important point for liberals to embrace and for conservatives to reject—and some still do. Many kids today are taught the opposite: sex is mutable (via medical interventions) and gender, which they define as a feeling inside them, is fixed.

Rufo also writes that “They believe that this system of ‘heteronormativity’ must be exposed, critiqued, and deconstructed in order to usher in a world beyond the norms of heterosexual, middle-class society.”

Well, that sounds okay to me. I’m just finishing a book about the history of the ideal and the idea of the housewife and how it has powered private lives and public policy in ways many of us are unaware of so, yeah, I think a world beyond the norms of heterosexual, middle-class society exists and much of it should be embraced. There are a lot of ways to live in the world without our embracing those norms—ways that don’t hurt people.

The question, as always, is who gets to decide what’s normal and impose it on the rest of us? Do we only use the norms of the largest group? It’s true that there are more middle-class folks than wealthy or poor in this country, but the middle class now makes up 50 percent of Americans—should we be splitting the norms with the upper and lower classes since they make up 50 percent, too? Is there a way to accommodate multiple versions of normal? Should we not normalize heterosexuality because there are fewer gay than straight people? I mean, it exists whether the normies want to usher in a world of it or not.

There are a lot of reasons that gender identity ideology has taken such a hold in our society, from social contagion to massive institutional support. But it has also provided many people with a sense of meaning, meeting some kind of religious or spiritual need. The gendered soul speaks to them. People have been fighting about gender—or at least about what women should do and be like—since the beginning of this nation. It’s not a new battle, but it’s been taken to an extreme as never before. And now it is about kids. And medicine. And silencing critiques, debate, and science.

I think that’s happened in part because of an elite obsession with marginalized groups—members of the media and liberal institutions thinking their job is to protect the most marginalized, or those in minority groups, over all other considerations. Perhaps they also have some kind of savior complex, a sense of crusading that blinds them to considering inconvenient and competing truths. This has led to us imposing a way of thinking about gender that applies to an extremely tiny minority—whom we used to call transsexuals—onto the majority. We have mapped treatments for extreme gender dysphoria, like social transition, onto the larger population. Chaos has ensued, in part because what we are imposing is a belief system, and it’s not right or fair to compel people to embrace or share someone else’s beliefs.

The most humane solution I can think of is to acknowledge competing beliefs, to teach children to traverse a complex subject in which people have very different ideas about the same thing—but to understand that there are some biological realities. There are some facts we can and should rely on as we do that. Sex is one of them.

Rufo’s document includes important information to help some people navigate through the chaos toward some kind of island of sanity. I get that. But the left needs to participate in this navigation, because some of our pre-gender-identity ideas about gender have been hugely important and I don’t want to lose them. Women had to fight for the right to vote, for the right to own property, to not be legally raped by their husbands, for the right to practice medicine or law, for the right to control their own bodies, to be paid what men are paid. A few of these battles have been won—only recently. Some were lost. Some are ongoing. But they are being fought according to the feminist definition of gender—that it is culturally constructed, and that women can do much more than they were historically allowed to, culturally or legally, because of their sex.

The weirdest part about gender identity ideology, to me, is how it embraces the gender stereotypes feminists and others on the left spent decades dismantling in order to win those rights. Now a girl who wants short hair and to play baseball is offered the chance to socially transition to be a boy (as I know from personal experience). We hear tales of young boys who, from early ages, wanted pink, sparkly dresses, and thus knew they were girls. They socially transition and begin planning early for their medical transitions, despite the experience of someone like Jazz Jennings, for whom medical transition seems to have been incredibly difficult—in a way that should spark a discussion about medical ethics, not a culture war.

I want any guide to the gender culture wars to include this message: There is no one right way to be a boy or a girl—biological, not political, categories of humans. You can be as masculine or feminine as you want to be or naturally are. There is nothing wrong with your body if you are behaving more like members of the opposite sex than your own. There is nothing wrong with same-sex attraction. And there are plenty of ways to be in the world beyond middle-class heterosexual norms—but those norms are fine, too.

The great joy of the work I’m doing is that I interact with a diverse group of people on this issue: transsexuals (as they call themselves), gays and lesbians, conservatives, detransitioners, feminists, lefties, and also boring old middle class heterosexuals (raises hand). I don’t always agree with all these people, and they certainly don’t always agree with me—we have different belief systems about gender, and mine is informed by feminism and by the work I’ve done on how gender norms change culturally and generationally. But I think it’s important that if we’re going to create a world where gender identity ideology is effectively argued against—based on science, and based on those who’ve been hurt by these ideas and how they were translated into actions—we need to do that without restricting gender nonconformity. We need to do that with a broad coalition of people who have similar concerns, but not always similar beliefs.

We can’t do that until we’ve created an environment where more people feel safe to speak up. We can’t create that environment until more people speak up. It’s the gender Catch-22. I don’t remember how that book ends, but I recall it being dark and murky. I hope we can find a better resolution. I hope the gender peace talks can begin.