Book review The ravages of gender by Pauline Arrighi (Editions du Cerf, 2023).

Pauline Arrighi is presented, on the back cover, as an "independent journalist, specialist in women's rights and bioethics issues". Her work incontestably attests to this. Far from academic canons, it draws its sources and references from the Internet galaxy, blogs and other social networks, as well as from the media universe. This is evidenced by the somewhat chaotic apparatus of notes. However, the intention is explicit: to establish that "gender" in the sense that the term receives today is a conceptual imposture leading to a cascade of individual and social disorders and serving well-understood financial capitalistic interests.

This is indeed a question of devastation, and this is found both on the psychological and relational levels, for individuals, and on the cultural and institutional levels, when it comes to public toilets and changing rooms, not to mention the distortions of the emancipatory struggles of women or homosexuals. According to the author, there is no doubt that the pseudo-theoretical guise of gender rhetoric has, in the space of a decade, disrupted all the representations that we had until then of the difference between the sexes, of the identities that it supported, as well as the constraints to which we were obliged (morally, socially) to respect it. Gender rhetoric introduced the idea that gender identity was a matter of the individual's sole "feeling". In doing so, it closed the door to reality to open wide the door to fantasies, whether they were the most ordinary or the most deleterious.

But, as Pauline Arrighi forcefully points out, these fantasies will be able to admit very real implementations, especially when they are encouraged by the complacent attitude of professionals in the medical sector (psychiatrists, surgeons, prescribers of puberty blockers, etc.), but also on the part of public institutions (National Education, Ministry of Justice, etc.). Implementations whose consequences, for the individuals concerned, as for collective relations, are largely hidden by the public authorities under the effect of the diffusion of the ideology Transidentity and the intense “lobbying” of its organizations and its “influencers” on social networks.

The ravages of gender by Pauline Arrighi therefore seeks to establish both the genesis of the phenomenon transidentitarian, its methods of operation – which range from the exploitation of the psychological alterations of individuals to the targeted action of powerful funding foundations  –, its sometimes cynically pursued excesses and many of its impacts on individual and relational (family and social) psychological balances, without forgetting those, insidious but profound, relating to the image of the woman that we intend to promote.

To do this, the author brings together in distinct chapters arguments with probative value drawn, as we have said, from the fertile resource that is the Internet. However, without these sources receiving the critical examination and problematic incorporation that academic research would have required. This is something we cannot reproach the author for, who does not pursue this goal but rather intends to alert public opinion. And here, it is perfectly successful.

In a first chapter entitled "When gender suppresses sex and makes science obsolete", Pauline Arrighi outlines the history of "queer" ideas that came to disrupt the representations of the sexes still in force at the beginning of the 1990s. Without further precaution, she finds the original source in the dualist philosophy reduced, as is commonly done, to the sole opposition of body and mind. Post-modernism will ensure its posterity by promoting the "decolonial" ideology which in the same movement associates "domination" and "rationality" to focus on the experience of the dominated erected as the absolute standard of truth. Transposed to the question of the sex of people, "queer" ideas profess the same rejection of rationality (biological, experiential and social), advocate the same relativism of norms (sexual binarity becomes spectral) and establish the diktat of the egotistical "fluidity" of sex. Hence the supposed evidence, against which the author never ceases to rebel, that "trans women are women". Pauline Arrighi firmly forbids herself from using the expression "trans woman" to designate men who strive to take on the appearance of women. Because if there is one point that she highlights throughout her book, it is the formal notice that is given to us to comply with the wishes of the transgender person. Especially since the new nomenclature in force in the world of psychiatry (the DSM-V) has also promoted "gender dysphoria" in place of sex dysphoria. The chapter closes with a suggestion from the author: "gender dysphoria actually covers, in the majority of cases, other realities". As we will see later, these most often relate to mental disorders.

Chapter two, the most substantial of the book, tackles the identified reasons for the propensity for "gender transition" among young people, particularly young girls. Confirming observations made in many Western countries over the last decade, many young girls, Pauline Arrighi tells us, sometimes still mentally children of 8 or 10 years old, but precociously affected by puberty, are engaging in so-called "transition" pathways in large numbers. How can we understand this recent and ultimately specific youthful craze? The author provides us here with a non-hierarchical map of the factors generally correlated with engagement in a so-called transition process. Willingly moving from the point of view of the transitioner (generally from his discourse of justification) to the singular conclusions of studies or observations conducted in various fields (from psychiatry to the measurement of public opinion), a picture emerges in which the psychological disorders that can accompany childhood and adolescence are increased by a coefficient of disturbance of which the "gender transition" is too often only the illusory response. It can be a question of an unaffirmed homosexuality, proven autistic disorders, consequences of sexual violence suffered, in short disorders that can go "from simple reactive adolescent depression to psychotic disorder". The demand for "transition" among adolescents can therefore be understood as a symptom of such psychological disorders.

Although they will find in the context of Internet networking (web 2.0 on smartphones) something to receive a kind of amplifying response strongly influenced by the activists, individual or collective, who actively operate there. Children born after 1995 have not known a world without social networks, they resort to them spontaneously despite their virtuality and in doing so expose themselves to their power of influence, via their peers, as via the patented "influencers". The phenomenon of influence, Pauline Arrighi reminds us, has a physiological support and wants that at this age the affective generally prevails over the rational. It therefore offers a very favorable hold to all the affects corroborating their questions or their anxieties of the moment, inconsiderately engaging them to claim on the occasion of "gender transitions", as they say, that is to say sex mutations, as they believe. The influence, adds the journalist, is all the more efficient because the adolescent's conflictual relationship with his family circle has undergone a shift from a universe where authority reigned to one where feeling flourishes - which removes the distance between parents and children and reduces the spaces for the expression of the latter's aggression. The hypothesis is worth exploring, we might find there the base on which the transhumanist superpower that transidentitarianism contains flourishes, as she does not fail to point out later.

The following chapters focus on establishing how the status of social minority was created in favour of the tranny. Conjunction of generosity, when it is not ethical breaches of medical circles, arguments pressure groups and complaints from interested parties relayed Urbi et orbi, the transidentitarian phenomenon was built under the auspices of the oppressed minority, subject to the worst abuses. A slogan sums up the victim stance adopted by the protagonists of the phenomenon: "transphobia kills", in which we find the eternal "phobia" and the idea of ​​hateful ritual murder. However, nothing allows us to establish a criminal prevalence against those who assert themselves tranny, nor that the "transition" protects them from suicide. The work thus tends to reveal the purely rhetorical springs of the slogan.

But, beyond the victim discourse, it is the health risks incurred – proven ones – that are precisely exposed there. The famous puberty blockers administered to children cannot be considered psychological comfort treatments – it is rather psychotherapies that help them, underlines Pauline Arrighi –, they will have, once the moment of mutational euphoria has passed, long-term physiological consequences, sometimes seriously disabling. The propagandists of “transgenderism”, of course, but also the professionals in the medical sector who rush into it, even the social security institutions that reimburse it hand over fist, are thus embarking on an ethically dubious slope, to say the least. Which authorizes the author, at the end of the chapter, to salute the backpedaling carried out by certain countries (Sweden, Finland, Australia, New Zealand) in this matter.

The usefulness of continuing to distinguish between men and women will be discussed in a very enlightening chapter that deals with sport and athletic performance as well as the collective spaces that athletes, like the average person, are led to frequent. "Transgenderism", we are shown, disqualifies the current sports categories, but above all threatens the performances achieved by women, since a "transgender" athlete who is biologically male will always have a performance potential higher than that of a biologically female athlete. From then on, the women's sports category is doomed to only accommodate the performances of transgender men - those, we perfidiously understand, who cannot triumph in the men's category. As for changing rooms, public toilets, or even penal detention spaces, "transgenderism" has no other effect, apart from satisfying the egotistical desires of the "transgender", than to introduce new problems of civility, if not of personal safety.

The final chapter reveals some of the sources of funding for transactivism, thereby establishing what links the esoteric convictions of some business and industrial magnates, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, with the media and political pressure organizations propagating transidentitarian ideology and, through the direct subsidization of scientific research, the orientation of this research in favor of so-called transition practices.

The overview is edifying. The ideology tranny is disastrous, both for many individuals concerned, particularly adolescents who give in to its sirens, and for collective relationships, including the best organized ones such as sports events. While it can soothe anxieties and satisfy the narcissistic expectations of a few – adults who are aware, conscious and responsible for their commitment – ​​it massively conceals intentions and strategies that border on the sordid. Beyond the calculations of interest of the pharmaceutical industry and unscrupulous practitioners, it is the totalitarian processes and aims, on the political and social level, of transactivist militants that are warning. All the more so when they invest in and divert from their initial objectives organizations that had been recognized for their commitment to bringing about more collective causes: the emancipatory cause of women in particular. Such as the Family planning not to name names, but it would be appropriate to take a closer look at the National Education system and the multitude of approved associations that claim to inform dear little blond heads about the sexual life that awaits them.

Pauline Arrighi's book would have perfectly fulfilled its demystifying role if it were not cluttered with formulations, sometimes with sentences, in any case with explanatory pegs that ultimately participate in the same ideology as the one it intends to denounce. How is the understanding of transidentity ideology increased by the formula found on p. 159 and according to which "transgenderism was developed by a handful of white men from the dominant classes"? By admitting that the observation was true, it is to commit a confusion between the establishment of a fact and its capacity to explain another. Unless it is an easy way to give in to the spirit of the times and its pseudo-explanatory clichés, those of "decolonial" thought in this case. On several occasions we will find the same rhetorical process regarding the domination of men over women, social intolerance towards homophilia, when it is not the "taboo" that surrounds the mental health of individuals. Quick formulas, often unfounded and without great explanatory consistency, but dangerously likely to reinforce the ideologies most active in the field of the destabilization of social institutions. Were it not for this reservation, made in the name of the search for coherence in our reasoning, the work proposed by Pauline Arrighi remains most relevant and most useful in these times of great ideological confusion. There is even reason to salute the approach. Pauline Arrighi categorically refuses to give in to "the imperative of blind tolerance" and to "any form of emotional manipulation". Like Kant, she places herself under the banner of sapere aude.