Kind. Masculine noun [!]. Verbal derivatives: to gender, to degender, to misgender. Synonym: simili-queer. Antonym: sex.
In all societies, gender differences are semiotized by conventions that affect clothing, hairstyles, and behaviors. We can designate all of these conventions by the term "gender" (or gender as in Victorian England), to avoid any mention of sex, as if gender were a sex ethereal enough to seem proper.
Gender would therefore be the cultural counterpart of biological sex: nothing could be more banal than this observation and no need for gender studies to recognize its trivial character - unless another agenda emerges, with expectations that are not only political, but also theological or at least superstitious.
1/A turning point came when sex began to be opposed to gender: in the mid-1950s, psychologist John Money specialized in intersex patients and coined the notion of "gender." A decade later, founding a Gender Identity Clinic for Transsexualism, he undertook to "cure" a young boy by making him a girl. Reducing sex to the genitals, he neglected that sexual difference is written in every cell of the body and that no surgery, no cross-dressing can change anything.2.
After several decades of casuistry, the choice of genders has become plethoric and Facebook declines 63 identities at the whim of its users. These distinctions have become commonplace to the point of being the subject of official sheets for secondary education, as well as recommendations from the Council of Europe or the UN. For example, sheet no. 5 from Éduscol distributed for schoolchildren explains: "Gender identity refers to the intimate and personal experience of one's gender lived by each person, to the deep feeling of feeling like a woman or a man. [...] Gender refers to the social relationships between women and men based on the assignment of socially constructed roles based on biological sex. These social relationships are asymmetrical and hierarchical, leading to a distribution of power and achievements that is favorable to men and disadvantageous to women. The concept of gender provides a analysis and reading grid which, in its scientific use, in the human and social sciences in particular, allows a comparative study of the situation of women and men from an economic, social, cultural and political point of view. The perspective of these studies is to promote equality of real rights between people" (my emphasis). We see that gender is presented here as a general key, both to the understanding of the social world and to political action3.
3/ Propagated by large Internet firms and taken up by major international organizations, gender "theory" has become a major area of late-capitalist ideology. In Europe, the gender mainstreaming is now becoming established in universities and in research4. In France, the ministerial circular of September 30, 2021 prescribes that schools support, with all the insinuating considerations of which, the gender transition of students - as if the transsexuality of minors fell within their educational missions5
. Thus, any school-age child can claim to be supported by the educational team in their transition, impose a new first name, choose their pronouns and benefit from special access to the toilets. No one questions their intellectual and emotional autonomy, or even their consent to transition “therapies” — often irreversible and thus even more damaging than “conversion therapies” which are precisely penalized by law.6. On the other hand, legislators have set the age of consent for sexual relations at 15. Thus, sexuality is regulated by human law, while transsexuality seems to be a matter of transcendent superstitions that escape it.
Because of the prestige of the higher interests of gender, the rule of law should even be changed. A politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, declared on November 15, 2021: “Freedom of gender, I am for it to be in the Constitution […]. We will guarantee the freedom to change gender.”7.
4/ The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) thus defines the gender dysphoria : "Gender dysphoria is characterized by a strong and persistent identification with the other gender associated with anxiety, depression, irritability, and often a desire to live as a gender different from the sex assigned at birth. Individuals with gender dysphoria often believe themselves to be victims of a biological accident and are cruelly imprisoned in an incompatible body with their subjective gender identity" (emphasis added). The diagnosis of dysphoria is made after questions such as: "Do you feel a sense of discomfort or inadequacy about your human body?"8.According to the DSM-5, "the most extreme form of gender dysphoria is called transsexualism." The latter term is a holdover from earlier editions, and the expression gender dysphoria, will be replaced in the next edition, in 2022, by the expression gender incongruence resumption of the international classification of diseases (ICD11, written in 2019; my emphasis).
The series of substitutions that leads from transsexualism to the gender dysphoria then to thegender incongruence seems revealing: in the first stage, sex is eliminated in favor of gender; in the second, what could seem subjective in dysphoria disappears in favor of an objectification: sex, not named, no longer corresponds to the gender thus objectified, and can therefore be rectified by some prosthetic intervention to reestablish congruence.
Although not recognized as a disease, incongruence nevertheless calls for medical and even surgical treatments. Duly listed, it is treated with the help of post-Hippocratic medicine: it should be treated with hormone blockers at the time of puberty, then with "sex reassignment" surgeries. However, we know that hormone blockers have irreversible effects not only on growth, but on the skeleton and the vascular system. As for sexual mutilations, such as the removal of the testicles or mastectomy, they are also irreversible, but often veiled by various euphemisms, for example torsoplasty, which places them in the benevolent domain of cosmetic surgery9.
Oddly enough, the Council of Europe recommends the expression gender surgery, and advises to avoid reassignment surgery, sex reassignment, sex change surgery, surgical sex reassignment, etc. These laborious substitutions of euphemisms nevertheless suggest that an initial attribution took place by the civil registry and that an erroneous categorization can be repaired by surgery10 ; but also that the goal of gender ideology remains to put an end to sex, which it is better to no longer name.
How then can the soul exiled in a sinful and badly sexed body find its gender, that is to say its astral sex?
4/ Freud once warned Jung of "the dark muddy flood of occultism." However, Butler and other female thinkers rejected Freud and occultism spread into the sphere of sexuality through gender superstitions.
Painful memory of the astral genre, the " gender dysphoria " testifies to the nostalgia for lost identity. By a providential chance, the fallen creature in sexuality remains with this glimmer of its past splendor that the Gnostics compare to a spark: sudden awareness of a buried origin, it is the intimate revelation of gender, glimmer of the soul exiled in a body. Eighteen centuries before Freud, the Gnostics called anamnesis this sudden memory of a now illuminating truth.
Since it no longer corresponds to sex, gender becomes the operator that allows us to move from apparent or assigned sex to deep identity. It then ensures an eminent function of reconduction in what the Neoplatonists called the spiritual circuit : after the fall into the flesh, the spirit can by its works lead the soul back to its celestial nature; but the comparison stops there, because the works of the spirit are now replaced by "gender surgery".
Gender theory thus seems to be a gnosis that promotes the inner revelation of a hidden truth. Speculative, it has of course no need for methodology and empirical confirmations, since it only needs to multiply believers.
5/ Gender theory does not exist, repeat its proponents who attribute this formulation to an extreme right that would make it a scarecrow. Judith Butler herself declares: "When we speak of "gender theory", what the people who use this expression say is that in fact they do not know this field of research and do not want to know it [...]. I think that this term is the sign [...] that they refuse to educate themselves on the very broad and very complex field of gender studies"11
. But don't studies without theory run the risk of being reduced to a logomachy? And in the absence of a theory that defines it and gives it the consistency of a concept, wouldn't gender be a simple keyword, a sign of recognition?
Doubts are growing at least about this notion. They affect first of all its definition, because gender is linked to sex by a circle considered virtuous of reciprocal determinations: gender establishes sex which determines gender. Thus, for Judith Butler, gender "designates the apparatus of production and institution of the sexes themselves"12. And yet, sex determines gender: according to the authoritative Elsa Dorlin, “the concept of gender is itself determined […] by the socially organized sexual polarization of bodies.”13.
Even if out of courtesy we will call it virtuous, this circularity remains the property of wooden languages, which lock themselves in their own references between terms indefinitely reaffirmed but never defined, as the deconstructive tradition has long engaged, from Heidegger to Derrida and the postfeminists who claim it, from Judith Butler to Avital Ronell or Catherine Malabou.
The originality of gender ideology does not lie in the observation that there are social roles corresponding to the difference between the sexes, since all human societies structure relationships of alliance and filiation, major principles of the articulation between nature and culture. To erect this elementary fact into a transversal and "powerful" concept is to abandon all critical distance and condemn oneself to tautology. The distinction of social roles is based on initial observations and cannot be erected into an explanatory category so determining that it would transcend cultures and even the specificities of the various sciences of culture.
Gender ideology then comes down to denying the objectivity of the phenotypes (and genotypes) on which the categorizations are built, obviously cultural: thus, the distinction of the sexes, although attested by millions of species outside our own, would be nothing more than an assignment imposed by patriarchal tyranny.
Common in Gnostic beliefs and the conspiracy theories that they still fuel today, the denial of reality then presents itself as a militant act. The metapolitics of gender sanctions the irruption of a myth in history: those who recognize the difference between the sexes would be the unconscious victims, or, worse, the accomplices of an imaginary that strongly resembles the "collective unconscious" of dubious memory. On the other hand, those who deny it place themselves on the side of the "deconstructed" at first, and of the "awakened" (Woke) in a second; in short, activists of an incantatory policy which consists of denying reality while believing it can transform it.
At this level of radicalism, ideology becomes myth again. The falsely claimed “criticism” turns into superstition, the very one that unifies sectarian groups. Instrumentalized by militant groups, disseminated by international organizations, large states and most digital giants, gender ideology has ended up threatening feminism, accused of universalism. It now fuels various superstitions that in fact divert attention from all sorts of inequalities: for example, a fifth of girls in the world are forced into forced marriages, without the postfeminists busy denouncing transphobia being overly moved by it. Finally, it develops a phobic mysticism of sexuality and serves as a guarantee for the ongoing sexual counter-revolution.
The irrationalism and mass narcissism that inspire it are thus on the verge of achieving a major diversion on the political, economic and ecological levels.
Note — This notice includes, after revisions, extracts from François Rastier, Little mystic of the genre, Paris, Intervalles, 2023. It was written for the Little Mermaid Observatory.