4. We don't worship gender after all.

[lesbotronic]

To clarify what could be confusing:  We said we were cisgender here (sexism sucks) because that's where we were at the time, but we're stopping now.  We're not revising the profiles and matching criteria right now, if we do in the future it'll be to add something like "not into gender" in addition to the two slightly different refusals there already.

Along with the heterosexual queer community and the postmodern pornographic personality, we feel gender is trying to virally create so much more gender . . . so so so much more.  

 

. . . 

 

Gender is more like a religion.  The traditional religions we grew up with were sexist and obsessed with sex too, so this should never have come as a surprise, even though it . . . did?  It did make more sense once we really thought it through, past all the language seemingly designed to hide the sexism.

We also think it's telling that while typing this section we felt a similar feeling of dread as discussing agnosticism with the traditionally Christian.  Like we might be rejecting an angry person's church.

Like another coming out?  We're kinda old for that, so it's cringe, but kinda anyway.

We don't have a gender.  We never felt "cisgender" now that we really think about it, but that doesn't make us trans or non-binary or pangender or multiply gendered or fluid fluxed or any other genderqueerporntastic way.  We also don't need new genders invented or discovered because that last list wasn't enough, still no thank you.

We're just XX lesbians.  

Even if someone insists they love genders too much to allow us to refuse some, gender labels could never be as bedrock as the XX + lesbian.  

But everybody else who wants them can have their gender Popes.  We're not trying to take those dudes away, and even if we were it wouldn't matter anyway, would it?  Nope, no way!

It is perfectly possible to disagree with someone's religious view without hating them or the group they are part of, when you're civilized.  It's essential for the person disagreeing who has rights too.

 

.  .  .

 

Even if you can't hear them so well on Twitter, the rest of the internet finds many thinking similarly too, including many we'd yet to notice:

Pippa Fleming:  "Come on, people, it’s time to have a 'Come to Jesus' moment, where we tell the truth and shame the devil. If you aren’t hip to the historical racism, sexism and homophobia that the black American lesbian has faced and continues to battle, try picking up a book like 'This Bridge Called My Back,' 'Sister Outsider' or 'Toward a Black Feminist Criticism' and you’ll get the picture. Patriarchy and sex-based oppression are real, and they remain the driving force behind the invisibility of black lesbians. The gender-identity movement’s attempt to rebrand the lesbian as queer, and the pronouncement that 'anyone can be a lesbian,' are nothing short of erasure."

Erasure?  Little harsh, huh?

Or so we would have thought anytime before relatively recently?

But we can totally see how she got all the way there today.

 

 . . .

 

For one thing, everybody knows there's more than two genders now, right?  Sometimes!

Along those lines, someone(s) keep anonymously sending these next two links as supposed evidence of something.  But we're not sure they're producing the desired effect.

According to this LGBTQIA wiki, gender is a continuum or a spectrum except when it isn't for you, and then it's not.  It also is or is not a binary that also is or is not male versus female, but only when you say so.  

Also, "gender identity is a person's internal, deeply-held sense of their own gender (or lack thereof)?"

OK, but that's faith.  Plus circular reasoning?

According to Medicine Net there are 72.  

As for gender creating more gender, it's right up there.  We say "we don't have a gender" but according to Medicine Net that might render us not just agender or genderblank or genderqueer but possibly gender void.  There's also a null-gender.  

Our gender identities are now null and void.  Voided?

Or possibly just, "68.  Gender witched: The person is inclined toward the notion of having one gender but does not know which."

Well, there you go.  

But that's a hell of a lot of gender they insisted we must sort through, just to say . . . thank you, no.

. . . .

Here's roughly American Generation X on gender:

FIRST STAGES:  Gender was invented by feminists in the seventies.  We don't know the best URL to link because this sounds more like "gospel truth" to us?

But if you click here you'll see:  Folks seem to agree, including CNN, Time, and the Encyclopedia Brittanica!

So feminists in the seventies hauled off and invented gender from scratch when we were still too young to stop them.  Just kidding!  We couldn't have seen into the future either, especially because internet porn didn't exist yet. 

Also because gender was all halcyon days back at the beginning.  It just meant nobody had to commit to a totally pink or stereotypically blue box according to their biological sex.  Girls could be athletic and tomboyish if they liked, and boys could be Isaac Mizrahi! 

Everyone thought gender meant "free to be you and me!"  Because back then, mostly true.  

However, in that very same "hindsight is 20/20" way, some notice that many Americans who are bashful about saying "sex" when they really mean biological sex start using "gender" more "politely" instead,  conflating the two into complete confusion.  And all so no one would think they were naughtily discussing having sex while they were less naughtily not.

Many now say it should have been obvious this confusion would eventually cause problems.

When the meanings of words are aggressively shifted so often that folks don't even understand the sentences coming out of their own mouths?  

Foolishness ensues.  It's guaranteed, which is pretty much the point of postmodernism.

 

 

SECOND STAGES:  Now that everyone's thoroughly confused, gender is snatched from feminists and sucked into "gender studies" . . . in which mostly men and sexist women make gender all about them plus academic-sounding syllables.  

(Some of the definitions created during this period are already above.) 

"Academic-sounding" because everyone is too afraid to mention how no one can define gender without circular definitions and sexist stereotypes . . .  or able to explain why relying on sexist stereotypes ever does anything good for women.

They also know too many people will worry all those academic-sounding syllables mean they're too stupid or uneducated to understand.  So they won't question something that seems too complicated, even when it is supposed to apply to them.  (This was exactly where we were until this then this happened!)

Because all those syllables do sound super smart!  It's also gratifying to many to be sexist, now with a progressive-sounding, academic-sounding excuse.  It's not hard to see how gender easily became a religion for some.

But we've now decided that if you can't define your concept without sexist stereotypes and circular definitions, it shouldn't be required.  So here we are.

 

All this sexism plus confusion sets us right up for the next stages.

 

 

FINAL STAGES:  Once perverted into sexism by academics, capitalism latches onto all sexist tropes and all body parts and really goes to town.  Everybody's everything is eventually commodified into titanic tons of streaming porn.

You've heard "Rule 34:  If it exists, there's a porn of it," right?  In the entire history of humanity we imagine there was never anything more pornifiable than gender.  Like custom made.

According to many still calling this academia, your "gender," your orientation, your personal identity, your sexuality, anything having to do with you plus sex . . . it's all according to whatever all the corporate porn out there says it should be, because there's so very much of it.  Porn.  Titanic tons.

If you object or try to use your own syllables instead, you're probably not "cisgender," so you'll need to pick some other genders asap.  Hell, you might not even be a woman anymore, hard to say!

Gender's been in a feedback loop with porn now for a while, and porn is usually sexist.

So is religion.  

 

. . . 

 

XXs who fail to conform to genderporn's ideas of femininity are criticized, now on both the far right and far left.

One resource is collecting stories:  “Feeling alienated by femininity is a near-universal female experience, especially for gay and bisexual women — not something that means you’re not a woman at all,” wrote one contributor.

Another woman compared her experience within LGBTQ+ today as uncomfortably similar to growing up in the Mormon religion, “where women are subservient in every way that matters ... We are allowed to have no leadership positions without the permission or surveillance of men, even in our own organizations… I was excited to join LGBT spaces and meet people like me. But it wasn’t like that. I left one cult and found out that what awaited me was another. In LGBT and other “progressive” circles, women don’t have the right to assemble without the presence of males who, by nature of being male, have no ability to relate to the experiences of female people. Just like my old religion, you aren’t allowed to question the ideology (in this case transgenderism) without being ostracized… Just like my old religion, men’s feelings and sensibilities must be taken into account in everything that women do.”

 

. . .

 

Here are two more authors with big books on these topics:  Jane Clare Jones interviewing Helen Joyce.

 

What do you mean by ‘gender identity ideology’?

"The claim that what makes you a man or a woman is what you say you are and what you say you feel like, as opposed to your biology."

 

"Some commentators have argued that trans ideology is similar to a religion or a cult, with its arcane technical terms and rules for pronouns. What are your views on this?"

"I do think it is a neo-religion – a godless neo-religion. It is an incredibly dualistic belief system, which sees us not just as our bodies. I am the sort of atheist who sees us very profoundly as only our bodies. Our bodies are amazing – we think with them. Our whole body is us. We are not just a vessel carrying around a little homunculus behind the eyes. I do not think there is a separate thing inside our body, but they [proponents of trans ideology] talk about it as though there is. They would say to you, that is just a way of speaking – that they cannot express what they are trying to feel."

 

"Something like the ineffability of God?"

"Exactly. I was brought up Catholic, although I do not believe any more. If you talk to somebody who is a profound and interesting religious thinker as an adult, you struggle to talk to each other, because they say that they are trying to express something ineffable. But what can you go on, except for what they say? I do not think anything useful is explained by this concept of gender identity, any more than anything useful is explained by the soul. They are concepts we do not need."

 

"What do you think are the main harms that have been caused by gender identity ideology, as you define it, so far?"

"There are a lot of them, more than I realised when I started writing about it. I would put them into three categories: women, children and gay people. But actually, I think it is harmful for everybody, because it is a very sexist ideology, and that is not good for anyone. If you deny the reality of sex, it is women rather than men who suffer, by and large, because the man is the default human and the world we live in has been organised for men to move around in. Unless you specifically account for women, you are making a world that suits men . . . "

" . . . I want to limit the harm done to individuals and institutions before the pendulum swings back. And then, hopefully, we can come back to a proper equilibrium and to proper accommodations of people who think about themselves differently – as we do with Orthodox Jews or vegans. We are in a pluralistic society; people can have many different ideas about themselves."