Judith Butler has redefined feminism with spectacular success so that it is no longer “exclusively” for females. After Gender Trouble, feminism is now Diverse, Inclusive, and pursues radical Equality by not discriminating against anyone based on sex. Feminism is now sex blind. More than being blind to sexual difference, Butler gives us an anti-naturalist “feminism” which denies the natural reality of the female and male sexes. Now, any naturalist account of the human sex binary cannot be the decisive, or even a peripheral, defining locus of feminism. Biological males can now identify as woman, compete in women’s sport, have some the right to have sex with lesbians [1], and can now freely inhabit formerly women only intimate and safe spaces. Janice Raymond was right: the transsexual making of the “She Man” is the end of feminism as it was previously known. Could this be a new assault on biological women, in – of all things – the name of feminism?
Masters of anti-naturalist linguistic gymnastics like Judith Butler have destroyed feminism as a movement that is for and about biological women. The sundering of gender from sex has placed a subjective feeling of gender identification as ‘woman’ at the core of ‘feminism’ and ejected the objective fact of embodied female sex from feminism. This is not feminism, it is queerism. Feminism has been queered and is no longer recognizably a woman’s movement. Perhaps it is time for women – and men who want women to have female only rights and safe spaces – to abandon feminism.
What would post-queer femalism look like?
I put it to you that identity confused young people, and immature non-heteronormative people are the only people interested in the imagistic and auto-erotically defined Ken, Barbie, and Allan hyper-gender stereotypes. Here, your sex and your identity are simply a fashion and social projection accessory. Sex and identity could not be more superficial. Such a commercial and display-centric construct cannot carry real meaning or real relationally bonded and stable identity. The real world of human sexuality has nothing to do with such plastic fantasies. And indeed, as the opening of the recent Barbie movie makes clear, the sixties was all about narcissistically hedonizing sex and identity, and to do so it had to separate naturally and relationally bonded sexual reality from personal and constructed gender fantasy. A woman is no longer someone with the unique natural potential to be a mother. Women can now be anything, do anything, and be or not be child-bearers, as they choose. One’s sex (reproductive powers) is now optional, and frankly, a poor option for any woman. Smash those babies, be self-infatuatedly ‘sexy,’ and play any professional identity game you like; but do not play Mother, Wife, Sister, Daughter. One cannot even be a Female Lesbian exclusively attracted to Female women. We must now negate our biological sexual reality, and we must now respect no traditional sacred meaning for Woman and Man. De-repoductionize, de-relationalize, de-sacralized human sexuality at all costs.
The cost may be humanity itself. No-one becomes a human but through human sexuality, and all the most deeply bonded relationships that define our humanity are sexually produced. But Butler-styled “feminism” is proudly post-human. Transsexualism and transgenderism laud our powers to be liberated from natural biology and natural reproduction by technology. At last, we can joyfully leave behind natural humanity with all its reproductive sex, its sexually defined bonds. This post-human, post-sexual utopia – queer “feminism” insists – is the real pathway to Freedom. Or could it be a natural-body-hating pathway to identity and relational chaos?
But why should I care about femalism? I am a man and there are plenty of contexts where the sex of my colleagues and friends is entirely unimportant. But then again, there are deep and profoundly significant relationships in my life where the actual sex of the person I am bonded to by kin or marriage, is deeply important. My mother is a woman (and – as far as my in utero and then profoundly dependent early relationship with her goes – essentially a woman), my life-partner is a woman, and with and through her body, with and through her love and goodness, I am a father of daughters. And I am a brother of sisters. The most important relationships in my life, the ones that deeply define who I am, are all sexually produced or sexually bonded relationships, and the sexual differences between men and women are of integral importance to all reproductive relationships. And guess what, if we do not have safe, durable, and reproductively functional sexually defined female-to-male relationships, it is curtains for humanity.
In our modern and liberal way of life we rightly celebrate the place that gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual people, and – for whatever reason – single people, have in our society. These are important people and communities, but they are largely sexually non-reproducing communities and will always be minority communities if there is a heteronormative and reproducing majority. But if we are all now required to be post-sexually defined beings so that queer sex-denying identity minorities can feel normal, this is promoting the destruction of humanity as we known it. Normalizing queer ideology for us all is simply crazy and produces enormous confusion about gender-identity and the meaning of sexual difference.
Femalism is not a call for gender policing. A woman can be a mother, a CEO, lesbian, a nun, a Tom-boy, but still embrace her biological sex as the central defining feature of what it means to be a woman. That is all. But that is something Butler’s feminism now denies women. Feminism is now anti-female. It is time for women and men of nature respecting sense to drop this queer new ‘feminism.’
Hyperlinks:
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-57853385
Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position.
Good article. Kellie Jay Keen started to use the term femalism but it is tricky, partly because of the unfamiliarity and pronunciation confusion.
Pretty good really ! A discussion of sex difference which is not overly sexist is quite hard to do . Also he points to what is theoretically wrong with Butler whereas I just get angry at the obvious nonsense and wonder why anyone takes it seriously for a minute .