The declarative gender framework doesn’t work: here’s how to change it.
Perhaps you’ve heard that the person accused of the murder of several people in a gay club in Colorado, Anderson Lee Aldrich, identifies as non-binary. The immediate reaction to this news from media and activists was that this identification is false and likely a ploy to avoid extra hate crime penalties. Nevertheless, Aldrich was just charged with 48 counts of hate crime acts, one for each of the people who were in the club that night. There is a lot going on here, and it’s quite a mess. Under all of this are much larger contradictions in the theoretical frameworks of identity, hate, and especially of what I describe as “declarative gender.”
Non-binary identification and transgender identification both currently operate on the “declarative” model. That means that once you declare it, it’s true, and no one can judge otherwise. So, if I am male-bodied but tell you I am a woman, then I am a woman. To contradict my statement is to be seen as a bigot, a transphobe, a reactionary, or all manner of other bad things. In fact, to even believe that gender or sex are related to the physical body is, in the view of many social justice identitarians, to be a proto-fascist or an actual fascist.
I said these things “currently” operate on the declarative model, and this is important. Non-binary and transgender identity are very new names for phenomena that are deeply human, just as “gay” and “lesbian” are new names. These are not all just new names, however, but new ways of looking at and categorizing kinds of human behavior.
The Shifting Frameworks of Sexuality
To get a small sense of the larger problem here, consider someone like myself, a man who exclusively desires other men. I’m very happily married to a man, and I have only ever had any sexual desire for men throughout my entire life. In our current order and current way of seeing such things, the sort of person I am is labeled gay, or same-sex attracted. Until just a few years ago, I’d have been called a homosexual, but this term is now considered verboten by many social justice identitarians, and so you and I are both not supposed to call me that. Don’t worry, though—I’m fine with that term.
Now, one hundred and thirty years ago, homosexual and gay were not terms in use for what I am. Instead, there were other terms. These older terms and also the new ones were products of specific ways of thinking about human sexuality.
Here are a few of those older terms.
Continued…
