On the ‘Natural Order’ of Things

Feminism, Trans Rights, and Gender Conservatism

Ahead of tomorrow’s critical Supreme Court verdict in For Women Scotland’s case against the Scottish Government, Amnesty International, that once great defender of human rights, has issued a statement regarding their intervention in the case. The statement follows the standard TRA formula of presenting any objections to the political aims of the trans rights movement as aligned with a conservative political project that aims to strip human rights from marginalised groups, viz:

In many countries, groups that want to limit the autonomy of women and LGBT+ people are bringing legal challenges to erode human rights protections.

Whether it is the right to legal gender recognition, the recognition of LGBT+ families or the right to access healthcare and abortion services the arguments tend to be very similar. This is one of those cases.

Anyone who believes in the fight to advance human rights, needs to be alert and ready to preserve what one of the most marginalised groups in society already has.

The styling of the trans rights project as a straightforward frontier in human rights was strategized from the earliest days of the contemporary movement at the International Conference for Transgender Law and Employment Policy (ICTLEP), which met for a week every year at a Hilton Hotel in Houston, Texas from 1992 to 1996 (because, as we know, all rights movement for the world’s most marginalised people have the resources to book out a fancy hotel for a week). The ICTLEP theorized the force-teaming of the gay rights movement—a crucial move in styling itself as the next civil rights frontier—the demedicalized/‘informed consent’ model of trans healthcare, and importantly, as I have previously discussed, the ‘sex is a spectrum’ model of sex denial. It also pioneered calling anyone who disagreed with them a ‘bigot,’ which has been a central move in the ‘no debate’ strategy used to steamroller through a very radical program of political sex erasure without adequate democratic discussion (see Phyllis Frye’s speech from the 1993 March on Washington here).

Following this thread I did yesterday, what I want to think through here is the logic of this accusation of ‘bigotry,’ how it relates to Amnesty’s prima facie absurd suggestion that ‘male people are not female people’ is the same kind of claim as ‘gay people shouldn’t be allowed to have children’ or ‘women shouldn’t be allowed to have abortions,’ and how this is all very much connected to our dear friend Judith, and the matter we discussed in our last post, namely, the effort to reduce all objections to sex denial to ‘you’re the Pope.’ TRAs and their allies are apparently entirely convinced that all their detractors are conservative bigots who want to strip away marginalised people’s rights, a framing that has functioned as a form of discursive discipline and is now feeding the pipeline to right-wing populism and Trumpian authoritarianism.

There is, however, also a tendency among some gender critical activists to believe that the TRA suggestion that there is some connection between ‘sex realism’ and ‘gender conservatism’ is just baseless propaganda plucked out of thin air to make women shut up. But the historical story is a bit more complicated than that. So, what I want to do here is examine how and why gender identitarians conflate appeals to biological nature with conservative appeals to the ‘natural order,’ how many people on the identitarian right actually do do exactly that, and how this theological concept of nature is producing the mirror-image mechanisms between left and right identitarians that consistently erases radical and materialist feminist critiques of trans ideology from both sides.

The Natural Order: Gender Conservatism and Trans Activism

As radical and materialist feminists have noted ad nauseum, both TRAs and gender conservatives share a similar set of assumptions about the necessary relationship between biological sex and the norms of gender. This assumption is expressed in what Butler famously called ‘the gender binary,’ which collapses into one concept a) biological sex and the natural biological differences between males and females b) proper notions of masculinity and femininity in behaviour and roles and c) social injunctions against homosexuality (which follow from proper notions of masculine and feminine behaviour) [1]. From a second-wave feminist perspective, this collapse of the distinction between sex and gender is an absolutely bonkers move, and when it comes down to it, is basically what caused the gender war (contrary to the anti-feminist right’s contention that the gender war happened because women had the temerity to insist that they were not, in fact, biologically ordained to make men’s sandwiches which then led, inexorably, to the belief that men are women).

Understanding Butler’s bonkers move depends, I think, on reading it in the context of the religiosity of the United States, and specifically, as a reaction to the beginning of the organisation of the Christian right in the 1980s, which was formed in order to push back against the gains of the civil rights and the women’s movement. It is worth noting here that the Christian right did not originally organise itself around opposition to abortion as its lightening rod issue. The issue that provided the initial impetus was the decision by the US government to remove tax breaks from educational institutions that refused to desegregate, and abortion was only settled on as the central organising issue some years later (see Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers). Abortion arguably was chosen for this role because it allowed the Christian right to conceal its core political motives beneath a discourse about the Christian duty to protect the life of the unborn from those evil feminist murderers. But to understand the core motive we need only to examine what links opposing desegregation to opposing abortion, which is, bluntly, ‘keeping women and black people in their proper place.’

Here, the existence of gendered and racial hierarchies is intertwined with a notion of the ‘natural order’ of things, which is itself intertwined with religious ideas about the Great Chain of Being, and the proper ordering of persons inside the patriarchal family, commonly illustrated by this evangelical diagram.

All of which is to say that when Butler, and other third-wave feminists of her era, hear the word ‘nature,’ what they hear isn’t an appeal to evolved biological facts, but to a conservative Christian worldview based on the ideal of ‘natural order’ or hierarchy. Which is how we arrive at this piece of nonsense, which I quoted in my last essay:

The language of ‘immutability’ belongs more properly to a natural law tradition in which male and female kinds are established by divine will and so belong to a version of creationism. They are immutable features of the human, as Pope Francis has affirmed. Trump speaks in the name of science, but the cameo appearance of the gamete theory notwithstanding, he does so effectively to insist that God decreed the immutable character of the two sexes, and that he, Trump, is decreeing it once more, either to echo the word of God, or to represent his own word as the word of God. Religious doctrine cannot serve as the basis for scientific research or state policy. But that is what is happening in this executive order.

For Butler, any appeal to ‘nature’ must, necessarily, be a religious appeal, “a version of creationism,” and the scientific basis of human sexual difference must be dismissed with the epic handwave of “the cameo appearance of the gamete theory notwithstanding” (that line is fucking GOLD). The extent to which Butler actually believes this rubbish is debatable. She will, on the one hand, claim that no one is denying biology, and in the next breath, claim that appeals to biological nature are de facto evidence of being a creationist or taking instruction from the Pope. What is clear to me, however, is how large the fundamentalist, evangelical or conservative Christian worldview looms in her mind, the extent to which it informed the concept of ‘the gender binary,’ and how her framing of that extremely troublesome concept arose in response to the political conditions of the US in the 80s, and specifically the beginning of the Christian right and the programme of the Moral Majority. The marks of this specific context are also discernible in another key third-wave feminist text, Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto,’ which similarly reads the concept of nature in an entirely theological manner and again relates it to the inevitable naturalisation of the social hierarchies of gender and race (see my ‘The Cyborg vs The Goddess’ for further discussion).

What happens in Butler’s thinking then, is that she takes ‘the gender binary’ as a basically theological concept which necessarily links the God-given nature of sex to the God-given nature of gender, and then inverts it. ‘Smashing the binary’ then becomes a matter of denying that there is any natural basis to the structure of sex/gender/desire, and assertions of the material reality of sex come to be viewed as identical to assertions of the natural social hierarchy of gender, and more broadly, all social hierarchies that appeal to putative ideas of natural superiority or inferiority to justify themselves. Which is how we ended up at with the batshit idea that the entire structure of ‘ciswhiteheteropatriarchalcolonialism’ could be undone in a puff of unicorn smoke if only everyone could be made to believe that biological sex was a cultural construct, and male people could become female people and vice versa.

But while that idea is evidently batshit, what is not batshit is the idea that many cultural conservatives, Christian fundamentalists, and right-wing populists of various stripes, do believe that there is such a thing as ‘the natural order of things.’ That order involves a society in which men, and white people, are on top, and people viewed as other, lesser, deviant, or dangerous are excluded from the body politic or positions of power within it (which is where the anti-DEI wrecking ball is getting a lot of its momentum from right now). This desired order justifies itself by various appeals to ‘natural’ superiority, and ‘natural’ hierarchies of sex and race, and by othering, dehumanising and stripping rights from marginalised people. (At this point Jordan Peterson enters stage right and start whiffling on about lobsters or how social hierarchies are just reflections of competence, a claim that the clownshow currently running the US should have put comprehensively to bed.)

In the traditional theological vernacular, justifications of natural hierarchy come down to the idea that God made it so, whereas contemporary populist invocations of natural order often lean into something ostensibly more scientific sounding, like Elmo RTing the “interesting [batshit] observation” that “a Republic of high status males is best for decision making” because “only high T alpha males” are “free to parse new information through an objective…filter.” Evolutionary psychology and scientific racism—now rebranded as the ‘Human Biodiversity Movement’ (sounds a bit EDI guys)—often play significant roles here justifying natural hierarchy in contemporary political discourse. I don’t want to go down a whole evopysch rabbit hole at this juncture—I’ve published pieces critiquing it here and here, and discussed why I think a feminist analysis of gender does not commit us to blank slatism here—but the recent trajectory of ‘reactionary feminism’ is nothing is not testament to how quickly things can slide from ‘evolution didn’t just stop at the neck you silly feminists’ to ‘patriarchy is good akchully,’ ‘woke is destroying civilisation because women are too nice and too bitchy at the same time,’ and ‘oh dear is there going to be a race civil war (I am definitely not fomenting it, it just might be inevitable)’ [2].

What this should remind us is that while it is proper bonkers to claim that anyone who asserts the material reality of sex is in league with the Pope, and this caricaturing of dissent is most certainly an illegitimate, identitarian, and authoritarian gesture, it is also, at the same time, not completely bonkers to suggest that some of the people appealing to the ‘naturalness’ of sex are, in fact, committed to an idea of ‘natural order’ not a million miles away from the one Butler was reacting against when she wrote Gender Trouble. What has happened here is an absolute exemplar of the mirror-image mechanisms of patriarchy. The civil rights and women’s movements developed in response to the structural conditions of sex and race-based oppression that had historically characterised Western societies (1960s-70s). This challenge scared the shit out of people committed to white men’s power, who then began to organise against these gains, laying the foundations of the Christian Right and what would become Christian Nationalism (1980s), a political movement whose doctrine relies heavily on appeals to natural order or hierarchy. This scared the shit out of progressives, who responded by deciding that all appeals to nature were sketchy af conservatism and tried to mandate the whole kit-and-kaboodle out of existence (1990s-2010s), including, centrally, the claim that sex was a biological phenomenon. And then this excessive, authoritarian reality denial created a massive backlash, feeding goddess-knows-how-many people into a hard right radicalisation machine which has produced a conservative vibeshift which looks, in many respects, exactly like what Butler was reacting against in the first place, and has now brought the ambitions of the Christian right to its final ‘Project 2025’ fruition, half a century later.

The moral of this story for feminists, I would suggest, is that it is a spectacularly bad idea for us to get tied up playing patriarchy’s mirror-image game.

One way or another, it always ends up with white men winning.

Radical and Materialist Feminism: Smashing the Hall of Mirrors

As I suggested in the thread I wrote yesterday, I very strongly believe that the reason why the pushback against gender identitarianism in the UK was the most successful of all the Anglophone nations is because we originally framed our arguments in the language of materialist feminism, and in a discourse of genuine gender criticism. Doing so successfully frustrated the polarization mechanisms which the ascendence of gender identitarianism depends on, and allowed us to get our message heard more effectively than anywhere else. Both gender identitarianism, with its wholesale erasure of nature, and gender conservatism, with its reassertion of natural hierarchy, are historically, and ideologically, part of one mirror-image mechanism. They are two identitarian sides of the same patriarchal coin, and neither side will serve the actual interests of female human beings. Moreover, both sides need each other for the game of inversion and opposition they are intent on playing to continue, and both sides will, as we’ve discussed, reliably project all their detractors as members of the other ‘tribe.’

Radical/materialist feminists will be assimilated to gender conservatives, bigots and nazis by left identitarians, and they will be assimilated to ‘woke Marxist globalist elites’ by gender conservatives and right identitarians (while also being informed by people who turned up five minutes ago and have no fucking idea of the actual history of how this all went down that it is us who created gender identitarians in the first place). And, as I also suggested in my thread, this mirror-image mechanism tells us something very strategically important. It tells us how much gender identitarians need all their detractors to be gender conservatives who are advocates of natural hierarchy. One, because they have no decent arguments against radical and materialist critiques while it is easy to get lefties to dismiss obvious right identitarians who willingly and gleefully play into the stereotypes of being a bigot, and two, because telling left-leaning people they have to accept sex erasure because otherwise it will lead right back to conservative systems of ‘natural’ hierarchy is how you keep them in line.

This is why left-leaning resistance to trans ideology never got off the ground in countries whose political discourse was already heavily structured by the inverting mechanisms of the culture war, and why, in particular, the American ‘left’ fell so catastrophically hard for gender identitarianism. (I’m listening to lots of US progressive podcasts atm to keep up with the Trump shitshow, and while they are beginning to realise that cancel culture might have been a bad idea they still cannot remotely get it together to question the role TWAW played in this whole story.) This is also why I have always considered it a catastrophic political mistake to allow the genuinely gender critical discourse that once characterised the pushback in TERF-island to be subsumed by a culture war framing between the mirror-image tribes of gender identitarianism and gender conservatism. In doing so you are giving gender identitarians exactly what they want. You are giving them the resistance that feeds right into the polarization game they want to be playing and serves their ends of disciplining and entrenching left-leaning resistance in turn.

Some people seem to believe that trying to win over the left on this issue is a fool’s errand and are apparently of the firm opinion that the best and only option is to amass as much right-wing power as possible and try to strangle left identitarianism to death (how much of this is strategy, how much conservative inclination, and how much the desire for pure vengeance is anyone’s guess). I think that is a profoundly authoritarian instinct (which much of the Trumpian vibeshift is presently exemplifying to the hilt), and is no way, in either principle or practice, to produce a lasting and democratic resolution to the problem. Indeed, I am one of those crazy idealists who belives that the way to emphatically win an argument in a democratic society is to make sure that you emphatically win the argument. And trying to crush your opposition to death is very much not that, and will inevitably lead to the return of the repressed, with added pissed-off teeth.

Back in early 2023, when discussing the way British gender critical space was becoming ensnared in culture war mechanisms, I argued that maintaining the political integrity of radical/materialist feminist responses to left identitarianism mattered ethically, politically and strategically, and nothing that has happened in the intervening two years has changed my mind on that a great deal. It matters ethically because the mechanisms of dehumanisation and othering that are central to ideas of natural hierarchy are ethically wrong (and I’m sorry if that reads like pious moralism, I believe that dehumanising people is bad, sue me). It matters politically, for feminists, because the othering mechanisms that maintain natural hierarchy are central to the oppression of women—indeed, are the historic core of it—and there is no world in which hard right identitarianism works out well for women’s humanity (as we have repeatedly said, these fuckers are not going to let you off the Gilead train just after they get rid of trans identified males in sports and before they take away your reproductive and possibly voting rights). And it matters strategically, because achieving a stable democratic resolution to this conflict is made so much harder by playing the game the gender identitarians want you to play.

They want you to play that game because it is easy for them to dismiss resistance to gender identitarianism when it looks like it does lead directly back to natural hierarchy and stripping rights away from marginalised people, and it is very much harder for them to deal with careful, empirical, materially grounded arguments that understand that actually, gender identitarianism is a load of regressive, misogynist, neoliberal, individualist guff that, in its own way, serves the interests of the patriarchal status quo and corporate power. It’s not an accident that gender identitarians constantly project their critics as conservative bigots and refuse to ever faithfully rehearse the bare precepts of the radical/materialist feminist position. It’s because they have no fucking answer to our arguments whatsoever. And because those arguments, when clearly articulated and heard are convincing to many left-leaning people on the basis of appeal to their own principles. You are not going to win left-leaning people over by conjoining resistance to sex erasure with acceptance of ‘natural’ hierarchies and telling them to just suck it up. They won’t, and neither should they. And all that will achieve is making them stick their heels in all the harder and feeding back into the endless pendulum swing of the mirror-image mechanism. All that will achieve is making it look like Amnesty is right when it fallaciously claims that the arguments against legal gender recognition are “very similar” to all arguments against human rights for marginalised people.

The purpose of the For Women Scotland case against the Scottish government is to force legal clarification of the contradiction in the law that was created by the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, and the efforts by the trans rights movement to argue that the GRA redefines the meaning of sex for all other purposes throughout the law, and in particular, with respect to the EA2010’s exceptions that provide for lawful female-only space. If successful, it will mark the culmination of an over decade-long campaign by British women to resist the gender identitarian effort to change law and public policy in order to redefine women as a gender rather than as a sex class. Nothing in that campaign commits us to believing that the hierarchies of the ‘natural order’ follow from the assertion of the material reality of sex, and indeed, feminists have long maintained that the only non-sexist definition of ‘woman’ has nothing to do with gender whatsoever. If the Supreme Court verdict goes the wrong way, however, women will need to mobilise to lobby the Labour government and hold their feet to the fire about how the hell they intend to honour their commitments to making single-sex space operative. And in those circumstances, it would be ethically, politically, and above all, strategically wise to resist the mirror-image game that the gender identitarians so desperately want us to play.

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[1] See my essay on ‘The History of Sex’ for more detailed discussion.

[2] I should say that I am using reactionary feminism as a kind of exemplar of how certain forms of ‘sex realism’ have slid into blatant gender conservatism, and indeed racism, over recent years. But it is a phenomenon that is by no means confined to them.