US Politics & Feminist Resistance to Gender Identity Policy-Part 1

Setting the stage

Last week, UK journalist Julie Bindel unleashed a scorching rebuke of US feminists, progressives, and Democrats for their failure to understand and resist gender identity policy and law. Because there is no substantive “left” in the US, Bindel writes, and mainstream feminists are liberal individualists, they are unable to comprehend leftist British feminists’ “reasoned opposition” to transgender ideology and therefore chalk it up to right wing bigotry. These Americans are a wily lot; both too ignorant to understand British reason, yet at the same time, able to lead astray UK progressives in media, academia, and politics because they “eagerly follow… the Americans on culture war issues.” Bindel warns that the Democrats are not guaranteed a victory in November and if they don’t change course on gender identity policy and law, voters may throw the election to Trump.

If the Democrats lose, it is unlikely to turn on gender identity policy, however much some of us care about this issue. Polls consistently show the economy as the top issue for voters; abortion rights continue to be an urgent concern for women activists of all political persuasions, and a recent survey indicated that 20% of voters in swing states are less likely to show up at the polls due to President Biden’s handling of the war on Gaza. One pollster described the war as a “stone-cold loser for Biden,” causing him to bleed votes “from the left, right, and center.” Indicating, perhaps, that the left is not entirely dead in the US, given that leftist politics and feminism are anti-colonialist.

Bindel’s piece appears to be inspired by Robert Jensen’s more thoughtful analysis, published days earlier both in Counterpunch and on her Substack. Jensen describes how he began his study of left politics and radical feminism at around the same time and that:

Both radical feminism’s critique of patriarchy and the political left’s critique of capitalism and imperialism offer analyses of systems and structures of power.

He found both crucial for his political awakening about the ways in which systemic oppression and social inequality constrain individual choice and action. Yet he learned that when it came to pornography and prostitution, most leftists abandon that mode of analysis:

Instead of sticking with the analysis of systems and structures of power, most leftists suddenly became champions of individual choice. When men buy and sell objectified female bodies for sexual pleasure, the left said that’s not necessarily exploitation but rather individuals’ free choices. Usually the left would focus on the conditions under which people make choices—how power creates those conditions and ideology obscures the severity of constraints. Apparently, that approach isn’t relevant when men’s sexual pleasure is at stake.

Jensen says the left fails similarly when it comes to analysis of gender identity politics by embracing its “liberal, individual, medicalized response” to patriarchal gender norms. As with the “choice” framing of pornography and prostitution, Jensen recognizes transgender politics as anti-feminist.

Though transgenderism is, as Jensen says, a response to oppressive gender norms, as a political movement it is fundamentally a backlash against feminism that subverts our rhetoric and theory and deploys it against us. Consider Title IX, the education amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights act that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded educational institutions. Nothing has worked as well as gender identity policy to undermine what Kathleen Kelly has described as the biggest piece of civil rights legislation for women since the right to vote. Women organized, gathered data, and presented Congressional testimony on multiple occasions to successfully beat back attempts to exempt football and revenue-producing sports from equitable distribution of funding for women and men, as well as the attempt to roll back the proportionality rule. Only gender identity, with its slippery notion that anyone who identifies as a woman or girl is one, and the power of the trans lobby to get that idea enshrined in policy, has managed to begin to claw back for males women’s share of resources and opportunities.

Once one understands gender identity politics as a men’s rights movement, it becomes clear that neither a public scolding from a feminist across the ocean, nor a rational call for consistency in leftist political analysis will be effective. The problem is not an inability to understand or analyze systemic inequality and structural oppression. It is instead a vested interest in resisting such analyses, consciously or not, because of where they will lead. (Note to Bindel: UK male leftists have a similar problem.)

How some academic feminists became ensnared by gender identity ideology is a complicated story that I cannot do justice in a blog post. Briefly, women and racial-ethnic minorities gained greater access to academia after the civil rights and women’s movements. Once there, they were confronted with social and political theories and histories constructed largely by the oppressor class of white men. At around the same time as these subordinate groups began to gather their own data and construct their own theories, postmodernism arrived on the scene.

Postmodernism as a movement in academia was, in part, a reaction to Western intellectual traditions that created universalizing or “grand” theories to explain human behavior, history and society. Postmodernism rejects such theorizing because the objectivity required for validity is not possible. In other words, human beings cannot transcend their history, culture, and social location to create unbiased accounts of how the world works.

It was a development feminist philosopher Nancy Hartsock regarded as “highly suspicious.”  She asked:

Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic? Just when we are forming our own theories about the world, uncertainty emerges about whether the world can be theorized?

I contend that these intellectual moves are no accident (but no conspiracy either).¹

Paradoxically, postmodernism was, at the same time, useful to feminist scholars because it allowed both a basis for challenging purportedly objective male-authored theories and a method for checking their own tendency to generalize based on the experiences of their own social class and race. What should have remained an analytic tool for developing more accurate accounts of human experience and society, became for many scholars, male and female, an end in itself.

Postmodern theories are unmoored from material conditions, assert that language and text are what primarily construct experience, posit categories and meaning as unstable, and are hostile to the concept of linear time. From this miasma of incoherence emerges gender identity ideology and the key question of its doyenne, Judith Butler:

Does feminist theory need to rely on a notion of what it is fundamentally or distinctively to be a “woman”?²

Now thoroughly propagated in popular culture, institutionalized, and backed by a well-funded lobby that boasts “near-daily contact with Biden officials and congressional Democrats to plot strategy,” resisting and rolling back gender identity policy is an enormous task complicated by the co-option of the issue by the radical right and extremely polarized politics.

Recent Pew research found that while a majority of Americans do not agree with some of the trans agenda, they also support transgender rights generally. Sixty percent assert that “gender” is determined by one’s birth sex, and 58% support policies that require transgender athletes to compete on teams that correspond to their sex rather than gender identity, with only 17% opposing; yet, 64% also support laws that protect trans-identified persons from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces such as restaurants and stores. 

So while a majority of the public is amenable to sex-based rights, they are turned off by some of the extremist rhetoric deployed by the far right about trans-identified persons that is reminiscent of past attacks on LGB people. Further, they may not support other issues packaged with it. For example, after the Covid outbreak, right wing parents’ groups hounded school boards over mask mandates, teaching of “critical race theory,” and gender identity policy. In Loudoun County, Virginia, when newly elected Governor Glenn Youngkin, in response to these groups, banned mask mandates and CRT, other parents’ groups, including one for disabled children, rose up to sue the Governor over the mask mandate. 

In other states, parents groups with considerably fewer resources than right wing operatives provide their parents’ groups, have also organized to oppose book and CRT bannings. Meanwhile, feminists who attempt to organize opposition to gender identity policy are either co-opted by the radical right or driven underground by threats of doxxing, attacks on their livelihoods and potential violence by trans activists - especially if they were once part of those communities.

Jensen’s observation that the left abandons structural and class analysis when it comes to feminist issues is as true today as it was back in the 1960s when women realized that to advance their issues they would need to start their own movement. One of their principal tasks was to consciousness raise for theory building, which, in turn, informed more effective strategies and actions. We need to return to our radical roots and rebuild our movement. My hope is that this series of essays will make a contribution towards that goal.

Check out Part 2 - Development of the Conflict Between Women’s Rights and the Demands of trans-identified males - and the growth of the transgender lobby.

In Part 2, I describe the first of two relevant political factions that have developed over the last several decades - the trans lobby. In Part 3, I will discuss the second faction, the Council for National Policy (CNP), a network of think tanks, policy advocacy organizations and media to advance corporate interests and theocratic goals that developed in response to the social movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s - and is now poised to implement Project 2025.  Part 4 will analyze the emergence of organized feminist resistance to gender identity policy and the direction it took.

1. Hartsock, Nancy. “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” Feminism/Postmodernism. Linda J. Nicholson, ed. New York: Routledge, 1990. Pp163-4.

2. Butler, Judith. “Gender Trouble: Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytic Discourse.” Feminism/Postmodernism. Linda J. Nicholson, ed. New York: Routledge, 1990. P324.