Foreword to The War on Gender

This is the Foreword from my forthcoming book The War on Gender in which I critique the modern movement to the deconstruction of gender.

I

'm transsexual and I went through my transition from male to female in the 1980s.

Things have changed a lot since then and I'm grateful for the greater acceptance that people such as myself have won over the years.

Yet the genderqueer and radical trans activists who are currently seeking to destroy the model of gender which suits and satisfies over 99.5% of the population worldwide do not represent my views, or to my knowledge the views of many successfully transitioned transsexuals whose only desire was to pass in their preferred gender and disappear into society. 

The idea of changing societal norms about what gender is or how it should be expressed was never an intention of mine and indeed to seek to do so would be entirely antithetical to my own path of trying to find a means of being which both minimised my own stress and at the same time allowed me to interface with society in as frictionless a manner as possible.

The changes in social attitudes around these issues which are being pushed through and even put into law at a rate of knots at this present time are disturbing to many people because they seek to enforce ideas which seem to have come from nowhere suddenly to become entirely dominant.

Where such radical changes are involved we should always employ the precautionary principle as a matter of course.  A way of seeing gender, a map of reality which has served us since the earliest times and which we see omnipresent in nature should not be discarded wholesale without good reason, and before we have a tried and tested replacement ready to put in its place.

Postmodern Gender Theory claims to do this, but I believe it is a sham.  All it has is critique which fails ultimately to address the evolutionary and survival adaptive nature of the phenomenon which is being interrogated, but instead sees everything in terms of social power, moral blame, privilege and oppression, things inappropriate to the requirements of biology and evolution from which we sprang.

The strict binary of male and female, where never the twain shall overlap, is a model which has become a little creaky with age, but only because of those who seek to maintain it as a digital rather than an analogue system.  The postmodernists argue destructively that anomalies destroy this model, while my position is that these anomalies can be fitted into an expanded version of the existing model with a little adjustment and open mindedness.

We should seek to see gender as archetype, as fractal expression of universal energy propagation, not as a mere ideational construct or even a fixed and rigid division in nature.  It is a dynamic, an essential function of existence.

The implications of this are profound.  Either we seek to rewrite and override our instincts with the political enforcement of assumed moral imperatives, or we readjust our focus and allow that there is a little bit of indeterminacy around some fuzzy edges which might involve cognitive engagement, but that this doesn’t abolish the basic model of gender we have inherited.  It revises and enlarges it, as Copernicus revised and enlarged on Ptolemy.  But the world was still a globe, the heavens still looked and behaved the same, the Moon still orbited the Earth; our understanding had grown of how we fitted into it all, and our context in the Universe, however nothing in our immediate experience of it had changed.

This is what I seek to do here, in the face of the wildfires that are occurring all around in which suggestible people are being led into dangerous territory by the Pied Pipers of Gender Studies and radical trans activism who wish to destroy traditional notions of gender.

Gender reassignment is a serious business and should be treated as such.  The current exploitation of the phenomenon for the political ends that it seems is being done at this present time is something which I never signed up for as part of my transition or life plan.  Rather it seems to me that this is a cynical exploitation of the situations of people like myself for political ends, that extend beyond gender itself, to which I do not wish to lend my support.

On the contrary I see it as my bounden duty to call this out and to challenge it.

As to a proper Gender Theory itself, all I believe we need, and which I propose, is a slightly enlarged and more nuanced understanding rooted in developmental biology and philosophy that encompasses the anomalies and reaches toward an archetypal understanding of gender, and the dominance of Social Gender Theory will be broken.

© 2020 Claire Rae Randall