Debunking the right-wing: Gender and sexuality

In contemporary Western culture wars, LGBT people have been put into the center stage of contention. The conservative campaign against legal equality for gay people is well known. But in the 2020s, rhetoric has now turned to focus primarily on transgender people. Conservative politicians constantly peddle transphobic rhetoric, using it to justify such repression as Arksansa’s anti-trans healthcare law.

While conservatives peddle violently reactionary propaganda about LGBT people, many liberals offer only lukewarm refutations or depend on inaccurate rhetoric. Although they may have their hearts in the right place, the effect is ultimately to muddy the waters and set up rhetoric that can easily be undermined by reactionaries.

A very important underlying issue in considering the status of the LGBT community that is often ignored is how gender oppression arises. Non-heterosexual and non-binary forms of identification have existed in many regions throughout history, from the pre-colonial Americas to South Asia. The gendered division of labor, the regulation of sexuality and gender identity in the name of controlling reproduction in general, is not without motive. Rather, it has purely concrete motives in regulating the reproduction of the workforce and cementing the rule of a class society on the basis of patriarchy.

This system is historically limited, meaning that it has not existed forever. With modern reproductive technology, contraceptives, and growing rates of women’s participation in the workforce, we have before us the potential to make major steps in undoing patriarchy in favor of something new. Here, however, our concern is first and foremost with undermining the reactionary mystification of gender and sexuality.

“You’re a man if you have a penis and a woman if you have a vagina!”

This binary categorization falls apart when one considers the existence of intersex people, who have genitalia that is neither fully a penis or a vagina. The extreme focus on categorizing genders based on reproductive organs is not motivated “objectively” or “neutrally.” Rather, it is ultimately based on the basic mission of regulation reproductive functions in the name of patriarchal social control. “Men” and “women” are defined strictly with this fundamental criteria in order to ingrain this system into people’s worldviews and cultural practices.

“Men and women have completely different bodies! There are only two genders!”

This narrative is repeated by conservatives as ostensibly irrefutable. It is so well-accepted in popular discourse that many liberals make a hard distinction between sex - physical characteristics centering around reproductive organs - and gender - historical and social cultural identities. They claim that sex never changes and involves hard-and-fast distinctions, whereas gender is a spectrum that changes. Within that framework, one can account for third genders in non-Western cultures, such as winktes among the Lakota, muxes among the Zapotec, and hijras in South Asia.

This dichotomous categorization of sex does not hold up with reality. Skeletons vary significantly rather than falling easily within one or two sex categories. Sex-related chromosomes do not simply emerge into XX for women and XY for men. Human brains are not divided directly into “male” and “female,” contrary to what both conservatives and liberals have claimed.

Further, sex stereotypes and gender roles directly influence sexual dimorphism in athleticism. That is to say, dichotomous categorization tends to create something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Social relations, in this case the gendered division of labor and associated ideology, directly shape our bodies along their lines.

“Men are pretending to be women to molest children and rape women in bathrooms!”

Aside from this being based on an inaccurate understanding of where and when rapes happen, since most happen between people who know each other, this is flat out wrong. There is no correlation between transgender-inclusive bathroom policies and sexual molestation or harassment.

Most people aren’t going into public bathrooms to be perverts, but to do their business and leave. In fact, regulation of anti-transgender bathroom policies ends up itself being more perverse. How will you verify whether someone is transgender or not without checking their genitalia? Is that something you want, or would you rather just use the bathroom like a normal person and move on with your life?

“Gay people get diseases because they’re unclean!”

This stereotype is based on homophobia rather than rational analysis. Gay men who practice anal sex are more likely to have STDs due to the higher rate of STD transmission through that act. However, gay men are not the primary cause of the spread of STDs, or even HIV. In fact, many STDs can spread through non-sexual acts.

The primary cause of transmission is unprotected sex in general, both heterosexual and homosexual. The key thing is to promote contraceptives and treatment. Stigmatizing people will not help to encourage them to seek treatment, and only makes the problem worse.

“Minors shouldn’t be able to transition, they might change their minds!”

Many young transgender people want to “physically transition” earlier to avoid dysphoria. In particular, many seek to use puberty blockers to aid in their transition processes in the long term. Conservatives and some liberals argue that allowing this is undesirable and harmful because they are “destroying their bodies” and may change their minds later. However, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) poses no major risks.

In fact, it is riskier to be forced to stop treatment once one has started. Young trans people are left worse off in mental health when they are not allowed to transition, with social stigma directly corresponding to high rates of attempted suicide. Further, detransitioning is incredibly uncommon, and is usually motivated by lack of social support and botched surgeries more than anything else. Ultimately, the benefits outweigh the costs when allowing transgender minors to begin HRT.

“Transgender women are forcing real women to be more feminine by being hyper-feminine!”

Wouldn’t cisgender women who are similarly hyper-feminine be doing the same? Besides, it’s not individual people or groups of people choosing to be hyper-feminine that drives the patriarchal and demanding culture of the United States around women’s appearances.

Instead, it’s big capitalists spending decades engraining makeup and “beauty practices” into our culture through advertising, media, hiring practices, workplace norms, and the engineering of a “women’s culture” surrounding it. The incentivizing of wearing makeup through greater respect and opportunities, and dis-incentivizing of it through social stigma and insecurity, is the true driving force.

Transgender women have high rates of poverty, and most leaders of Fortune 500 companies are men. Who’s really engineering this culture? A largely impoverished, socially marginalized, disempowered group, or the big capitalists who control our society?

“They can’t raise kids properly, children need normal parents!”

Actually, children raised by LGBT parents fare just as well as children raised by straight and cisgender parents. Children do not need both a mother and a father to have quality parenting. This logic is often extended to single parents, but a good single parent has little difference from two good parents. The key difference is that a single parent is likely to be poorer and have less time to spend with their kids by comparison due to having to work more.

Capitalism already undermines the nuclear family by pushing more and more people into the labor-force who weren’t already in it, such as former stay-at-home mothers. It leaves people with far less time to spend with their kids, and many unable to even afford starting families. The nuclear family is on its way out. It has not existed forever, as long histories of communal families in the Pacific Islands, Mexico, Ireland etc. have shown us. Instead, it is essentially a product of the bourgeoisie, meant to ensure easy inheritance for capitalists and a laborer that is taken care of by a wife at no expense to the capitalist.

The family of the future must be communal and social. Socialized childcare and domestic labor help to liberate women and challenge the gendered division of labor. The liberation of women from patriarchal capitalism must go hand in hand with the liberation of LGBT people. The two struggles are one, not separate.