Were Gay Rights a Slippery Slope to Gender?

What is the fundamental difference between gay rights and trans rights? Why does it matter?

This is the second post based on reader responses to my draft Unbeliever’s Manifesto, in which I requested your thoughts, objections, criticisms before I release to the public.

The first of these response essays related to gay marriage and to what extent it may have “destroyed” traditional notions of marriage. In this one, I’ll clarify why I believe the gender movement “denies reality” while the gay rights movement does not, in response to some reader objections, and also share some thoughts about how one could have led to the other.

Unlike the first post, this one relates too much to the arguments in the Manifesto that I am not yet prepared to release to the public, so it will be mostly paywalled. After the release, however, I’ll unlock this as well.

~Sarah

---

An increasingly common idea I encounter among liberals who are alarmed by the gender identity movement is a kind of hindsight regret—a feeling that the “slippery slope” argument wielded by those opposed to gay rights a decade ago has turned out to be more true than they would like. 

Slippery slope is not my favorite argument generally—all new stances have further implications, so nearly every claim creates a slope of some kind. Not to mention, as society has contradicting commitments there is no reason that we must slide down any particular slope forever—it can collide with another, more compelling slope. 

I think the argument is often more wrong than bad. Slippery slopes exist, but it is very hard to predict how the logic of a movement will proceed. To do so with any kind of accuracy, you must understand its underlying nature, which is too easy to mistake.

For example: if someone had argued that gay marriage would inevitably lead to, say, marriage between animals and humans, I would reply that they are wrong not because gay marriage does not move us down some slope, but because it does not go down that one. In other words, the logic isn’t wrong, but the norm that gay marriage did in fact “loosen” has been misidentified. 

In that respect, I think that those who identify the gender movement as downhill from the “slippery slope” created by the gay rights movement are misidentifying the fundamental natures of both.

Before we dive in, let’s grant some concessions.

Movements are complex and multi-dimensional…there can be many slopes created at once, and I don’t deny that the campaign for gay rights has contributed to the success of the gender identity movement in some respects.

For example, it is undeniable that the gay rights movement helped mainstream the poisonous conflation of politics with morality by labeling all ideological disagreement as “hate” or a “phobia”. It is now commonplace to find any disagreement with a leftist social project cast as evidence of some form of bigotry, and this tactic is liberally applied by the gender identity movement to great effect.

More broadly, queer activism helped forward the radical notion that social norms are inherently discriminatory, in that they privilege some over others. “Heteronormativity” for example, privileges heterosexuality by understanding it as the “normal orientation”, therefore creating a “sex hierarchy” in which other orientations are deemed “abnormal”. It does not matter that heterosexuality is the most common sexuality among humans, and that it is vital for the continuation of the human race. The usefulness and rationality of the norm are not important. What matters is that the norm excludes, and in the value hierarchy of the modern left, nothing can be worse. This too eased the path for gender activists. One might argue, for example, that it does not make sense to alter our existing bathroom norms to accommodate what is a very small percentage of the population. Perhaps trans people can use dedicated single-use rooms, or simply bear the inconvenience of being “invalidated” so that females do not bear a greater risk to their safety. In the modern left, however, this common-sense norm is an egregious violation because it excludes—makes some people feel as if they are less equal. Even language that “excludes” is intolerable, no matter how accurate and useful it might be for the vast majority of the population. “Breastfeeding” might exclude trans men who do not feel that their breasts should be breasts—therefore, the logic goes, it is better to replace it with the inclusive term “chestfeeding”.

It is also true that the lavishly-funded and politically powerful NGO apparatus that gays and lesbians built up today exists largely to serve the needs of the gender identity movement. Without this institutional muscle, it is unlikely that they would have progressed so far in lawmaking bodies. 

Finally, the acronym alone is a huge advantage to genderists. Confused but well-meaning people who do not want to find themselves on the “wrong side of history” conflate the two movements and “support” the T without much further thought.

Having conceded all that, let’s move on to the main course. What is the most relevant distinction between the two movements?

---

In my draft Manifesto, I claimed that “the gender movement aims to grant choice where nature gives none. It is liberation from an undesirable, unchosen reality – from the very fact of our sex”.

One commentator did not believe mine was a very strong case. 

“…An earlier generation leveled that same accusation against gay people. There is no doubt that our bodies were designed, by God or nature, for the purpose of males and females coming together for reproduction. Gays defeat that purpose. They go against the design and purpose of our bodies, which was one reason why it was so easy for people to believe for so long that there was something wrong with them. But today we think (rightly) it is cruel to forbid someone who is attracted to his or her own sex to instead seek out only persons of the opposite sex. Put another way, a gay man’s body is like mine, but his mind is different. We say, that’s fine, let him go where his mind takes him. But then the trans person says, “that’s all I am asking for.”

Another asked for a deeper distillation of the differences with the two movements.  

I believe others here have already said something like this, but I'd like to see you dive deeper into the differences between sexual orientation and "gender identity."

Specifically, I'd like to see you really break it down from an epistemological perspective. I think one of the key misconceptions fueling this lunacy is the fallacy that being trans is analogous to being gay or bisexual, that it's "innate." This is, as you obviously understand, not only not true; it couldn't possibly be true, as sexual orientation is a real, concrete thing that's observable and documentable, whereas "gender identity" is, as you so brilliantly describe, an "anti-concept."...

I’m going to attempt to answer both, by clarifying the distinction I think is most important between the gay rights campaign and the gender movement. 

• Yes, both movements are oriented around a desire, one that society considers/ed “abnormal”. 

• And yes, both desires are, in some sense, “going against the design and purpose of our bodies”. 

• It is even possible that both are “innate”—even if there is no such thing as “gender”, as I argue, there may still be a kind of biological predisposition for the feeling of dysphoria—perhaps some people are predisposed to psychosomatic disorders, perhaps some are predisposed to social contagions, etc. 

The key difference—what makes the trans movement so unlike gay rights—lies in the object of the desire. More specifically, the object of gay desire can literally be achieved—it is possible for a gay person to find a willing, romantic partner of the same sex. Gays are thwarted from achieving this object due to the prohibitions of society. The public debate, therefore, was not oriented around whether gays could have sex and fall in love—it was over whether they should, whether we should permit it. 

Meanwhile, the object of trans desires is impossible. A biological man might desire to “be” or “become” a biological woman, but he can never actually achieve it. 

Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Too obvious to even point out, perhaps, but (as I explain below), the implications of this difference are enormous, so it is worth spelling out and talking through.

Granting the Impossible Wish
 

We know that gay men were restricted from the object of their desire because of societal restrictions. So, which aspects of transgenderism does society restrict today? 

In other words, when a man desires to “become” a woman, what is he not allowed to do? He can: “dress as a woman”, wear makeup and grow out his hair, act like what he believes women act like, be the “receptive” sexual partner with a man. As RuPaul can attest, while we might not treat men who behave like this kindly, we also do not stop them.  Even the more extreme and permanent measures of female impersonation like adult access to surgeries and hormones have never been under threat, and are unlikely to be at any point in the future. 

But while society permits men to dress like women, society continues to view them as men dressed like women—and this is the point of contention in the gender debate.

If you are not convinced, let’s imagine how the debate would shift if the impossible desire was not impossible.

Imagine that there was a device which could, through some magical means, literally change our sex, permanently. It could morph our bodies and our minds, edit our very DNA—leaving nothing of the former sex behind. Our entire physical form would be “re-done” with our new chromosomes. (For the sake of this thought experiment, let’s assume there are no obvious negative effects either. We hop into this machine as one sex, and hop out as the other–many of us looking very much as our opposite sex siblings.) Imagine also that in this scenario, we know without a shadow of a doubt that this device is perfect and foolproof—there is no reason to doubt that it leaves anything of the former sex behind. 

If a male goes into this machine and comes out a female—with female gametes, female body, female psychology, female sex drive….would we debate over whether this person should use the female restrooms? Would it even occur to us to restrict their access to the spaces of their new sex, given that we know that they did in fact change sex? In this society, the transgender individual’s desire is achievable, and I would argue that in this one, it is reasonable to assume that the debate would be oriented around whether to permit this kind of change, not whether those who have gone through it should be treated by society as their new sex. 

When the object of a desire is literally achievable, the debate is oriented around whether allowing them to do so is in the interests of society. (Pedophiles, for example, can literally achieve the object of their desire too–they can groom children and rape them. But society chooses not to permit this, because it has deemed the behavior harmful to its interests.)

When the object of a desire is impossible, however, merely “allowing” a person to pursue it is fairly meaningless. The impossible desire’s main conflict is not with the limits imposed by society, it is with the limits imposed by reality. Seeing as the impossible desire cannot be achieved, those burdened by it must resort to the next best thing: a social construct in which others are obligated to act as if what cannot be true is (in some meaningful, significant sense) actually true. In other words, when one cannot change sex, the second best solution is to force society to act as if they have—to break its relationship with reality. 

This is why it is wrong to conceive of the nature of the gender movement as “norm-violating” in the ordinary sense. 

A man in a dress might be a norm violator, doubly so if he was also publicly advocating for societal acceptance of non-conforming dress. And of course, if men in dresses were more socially accepted, transwomen might find greater tolerance. But genderists do not advocate for the acceptance of “men in dresses”—rather, they wish for us to act as if the man in a dress is in fact, not a man in a dress. They are not asking us to loosen our norms of sex-typical dress or behavior. They are not asking us to be more tolerant of violators of such norms. They are asking us to act as if the norms are not even being violated. 

---

This is why the gender movement does not stop at what might appear to be “reasonable” limits—they understand that “trans women are women” is an equivalency and therefore must be accepted as true in every case, or else it will be false. Even a single exception, regardless of how reasonable or necessary, invalidates the equivalency. 

The layman, when stumbling into this debate, routinely displays his misunderstanding in this arena by proposing reasonable compromises. “What about adding single-use restrooms for use by trans people–like we sometimes do with breastfeeding mothers or disabled folks?”, he may ask. Sure, he thinks, there may be some logistical difficulties, and it might cost a good deal of money, but we force standards of accessibility for the inclusion of disabled people despite the costs–so surely we can find a way to do the same here.  

In his calculations, he places the risks of violence and intimidation as the most important concerns to address on both sides. If transwomen are unsafe in male restrooms, but females are unsafe with any male at all, then this compromise will lead to a safer environment for both.

However, puzzlingly for the layman, genderists frequently reject such compromises, despite the benefits to their life and limb. Faced with this rejection, he may then conclude that either the genderists concerns of safety are disingenuous, or else they are real but conflicting with something more important. I argue that it is a bit of the former, but largely the latter: special accommodations by their very nature “invalidate” gender identity–they would prove by their existence that we refuse to “act as if”.

The Costs of the Construct

Reality is useful, and denying it comes with a price.

In addition to the harms now faced by women and children–society must be burdened by the cognitive load of “treating” a biological male as a biological female, and vice-versa. Now, a sexually-reproducing species must re-train itself to disregard one of the most vital distinctions it makes for its continuation, one that has been finely honed over millions of years of evolution: biological sex. Unless the trans person passes extraordinarily well (and, if we can be honest in this substack, they rarely do), we must constantly run a corrective program in our heads so that we can treat this person as what they are not. A female might reflexively recoil at an unbidden, too-intimate touch from a male friend in a way she may not with her girlfriends–but if the male is trans she must remind herself to behave as she would if he were a she. In other words, she must swallow her discomfort, suppress her instincts and allow what otherwise would not be allowed.

Even the pronoun use can be cognitively taxing—it is simple enough to avoid “misgendering” in text, but in person the reality stands before us and the task becomes far more difficult. Guides to reduce “misgendering” are easy enough to find online, encouraging us to “rewire” our “untrained minds”. 

“We see a beard and “he” comes out like second nature. We think of a vagina and we say “hers” without thinking about it. These deep brain associations are learned and cultural, but we are capable of changing them,” explains writer and transwoman Som Paris, who acknowledges early on that this isn’t easy. “You have to work that thought to change the geography of your brain”.
 

Stable Diffusion. Prompt: “A happy woman has her brain rewired in the style of dali“. Guidance Scale: 8.6

How to Run Against Reason

Genderists know that no one would agree to “rewiring” their brain to suit a preferred fiction–they cannot outright ask us to pretend (and interestingly, the request alone would invalidate the fantasy).

They find themselves in a pickle: The fiction must be adopted widely, but it can not be explicitly stated as such. This is where the anti-concept of gender becomes not only useful, but necessary. The function of the anti-concept is not to reveal or to clarify, but to conceal and confuse. We all have an inner quality called “gender identity”, we are told, which may or may not align with our sex. Thus, the desire is reframed as a state of incongruence with two equally “real” aspects of oneself. Although gender identity resists any kind of coherent definition, it nevertheless eases the transition from reality to unreality: People will not accept a blatant falsehood–but they will readily suspend their disbelief, a fact I learned in my time attempting to counter (Islamic) creationist apologetics. 

The baffling thing about debating creationists was that their “evidence” was never very good–at best they might string together a chain of weak links with heavy doses of imaginative interpretations. But they knew that they did not have to present the most reasonable theory out there, or even, one that was anywhere as reasonable as their opponents’. Creationist apologetics had a different purpose, and thus could meet a much (much) lower standard. Despite their claims, apologetics do not exist to “refute” science, they exist to provide believers with breathing room. So long as they could present an alternative reading of the facts that can be just barely plausible, they would relieve the committed believer of the discomfort of running against reason. 

The gender movement is in a similar position, and therefore it isn’t required to find a good explanation for its claims. What it needs is a theory that will grant those who are already predisposed to genderism some mental release, some claim to “rationality”. If one can simply grant that such a thing called “gender” might exist, then the debate no longer “feels” like a stark binary between reality and fiction. It also creates a diversion–allies rack their brains searching for how such a thing could be possible, scientists orient their research towards attempts to measure it.  

If this theory is also impossible to define, all the better. The more the debate is effectively frustrated, the more the discussion is pulled away from material reality, the better. 

---

So that’s it for this one. As before, I’m not sure how much of this I should add to the Manifesto–I thought I initially covered this well enough, but perhaps it could do with a more thorough treatment?

I might continue this train of thought later with a post on what I believe did put us on the slippery slope to gender identity. Some of you might be able to guess based on the my last post about gay marriage, and I know from the comments that at least a few of you would agree with me.

Sarah