The reactionary misogyny of contemporary transgender ideology

On the appropriation of the commodified feminine

Ok, third strike this morning.

I'm just going to say it outright. Contemporary trans discourse is deeply reactionary.

It not only fosters a structural (discursive and material) dependence on industrial technology and capital. It not only reproduces what I'd term "spectacular epistemology", i.e. the notion that narrative, and especially mass-marketed narrative, equals truth.

It also strongly synergizes with neoliberal ideology in that it ritualistically destroys the very notion of conceptual and metaphysical barriers for consumer license and product demand.

Now, even your embodied human nature is to be customized in accordance with your concupiscent preferences.

The transgender discourse’s fundamental anti-epistemology, which is at the heart of all of this, manifests in how the mainstream of this ideology emphasizes a radical anti-essentialism, in which is implied the position that nature and being are totally malleable, and that narrative, that intentions, can actually transform reality at its very foundations.

This is the explicit extension of capitalism’s colonizing operations into the sphere of self-identity, manifesting an ethics of commodified desire.

Daily Mail

The transgender discourse, particularly in its mass-marketed, spectacular form, also to a very great extent relates to reified and commodified expressions of the sexes.

We’re not just dealing with a soft expansion of the norm structure around gendered behaviour.

Rather, the feminine form (and to a lesser extent the masculine), which by the participants is desired and integrated into themselves, has become an exaggerated commodity, the product of an inherently exploitative capitalist propaganda apparatus.

Pornography is so obviously the wellspring of a vast part of the images which supply the material, particularly for the reconstituted feminine form.

What’s more, the transgender discourse has an inherent affinity to neoliberal ideology since it embodies the notion of a radical self-authentication in synergy with market forces and consumer agency.

And this is precisely why the rainbow state apparatus has become one of the main auxiliary ideologies of empire.

It namely functions towards a radical reification of the capitalist order of production through an affirmation of the system’s capacity to shape, mold and reconstitute the very core of your human being.

It reproduces the system’s relations of production and consumption, not only in your external reality or in terms of the fruit of your tangible labour. It invites them into the very foundation of your being, into the heart of what your are, and how this identity is maintained.

And when situated therein, they inevitably tend towards your self-alienation.

Transgender ideology and the rainbow ISA additionally imbues the imperial system of domination with this aura of the saviour, of the white knight champion for the oppressed and down-trodden, in that only capitalism's technology can adequately allow for people's innate and sacred individual natures to fully flourish, to come to their true expression. And this is also reflected in the fundamentally reactionary political attitudes of the contemporary proponents, quite the far cry from Stonewall. See the Williams quote below.

What I’m writing here is not intended to be reductive, though - the experiences exploited and commodified through these mechanisms are obviously real. Equally obviously, there are many other ways to express and process them apart from this thoroughly alienating spectacle. I.e. it wasn’t inevitable to constitute the entire trans discourse as an auxiliary ideology of spectacular, scientistic consumer society.

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The expansion of transgender rights has gone hand in hand with an expansion of state and institutional (both public and private) regulation of speech and behaviour.

This highlights a significant difference between today’s transgender activists and the gay rights movement of a previous era. Whereas the gay rights movement was about demanding more freedom from the state for people to determine their sex lives unconstrained by the law, the transgender movement demands the opposite: it calls for recognition and protection from the state in the form of intervention to regulate the behaviour of those outside of the identity group.

Whereas in the past, to be radical was to demand greater freedom from the state and institutional authority, today to be radical is to demand restrictions on free expression in the name of preventing offence.

(Joanna Williams, The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology)

And to contextualize Williams here - since the commodified trans discourse’s enactment of performative identities must be made manifest in a social reality, the inevitable tendency will be towards the corporate state’s active maintenance of this performative space as a consumer product - especially since it synergizes with the imperial state apparatuses.

This will be done through coercion, if necessary.