Gender Ideology? Up Yours!
By Mallory Moore
Originally posted on Medium. Cross-posted with permission.
Editor notes: this post notes an important date correlation in the UK, namely the increase in propaganda material immediately surrounding the proposal to review the Gender Recognition Act in 2016. This pattern is also important in the US, as it overlaps with the election campaign of Donald Trump that relied heavily on rightwing media support. His campaign and eventual presidency served as a petri-dish for more cross-over between the right and left in following years.
Additionally, some links are in the process of being updated and replaced with archive links. This is due to them being broken, a desire to reduce traffic to transphobic sites, or protection against both. Any dead links that couldn’t be located will be noted.
Author note: updated 31st January 2019. Some amendments and typo fixes were made in response to feedback, where possible these have been annotated as such
I’ve been feeling recently a bit like the popular online discourse around transphobia and trans liberation is living in another world and to the extent that social media is very much still a media world that’s the truth. This was prodded most abruptly by yesterday seeing Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (I’ll call them TERFs from now on) visibly annoyed that prominent Queer Theorist, Judith Butler, had written an article for the New Statesman on Gender Ideology and hadn’t condescended to mention them even once!
This gave me some pause for thought about the last several months worth of campaigning in both legacy and social media and the gap from my experiences offline regarding the wider issue of the fight over what is being billed as “Gender Ideology” in general.