Intersectional transphobia
Hate makes strange bedfellows out of activists. Right wing tub thumpers, Islamic reactionaries, Catholic Popes, and gender critical women, a queer brew indeed. Much is made of the hyped up gender critical feminist position that sex is all that matters, and that all bodies should be policed simply because a set of chromosomes was conceived in a certain way. What is less critiqued is that gender critical discourse is built off the back of Catholic second wave feminist beliefs, which in turn were fermented in the wake of Vatican 2. Janice Raymond’s anti-trans rhetoric drew from her Catholic faith, and much of the current gender critical discourse reinforces the patriarchal religious fundamentalism of those seeds.
Many of the current anti-trans measures are rooted in Christian and Islamic dogma, with people like Riley Gaines and Chloe Cole in the US and Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce getting some or all of their funding from Christian donors. Gender critical voices will decry me linking the two, pointing to the fact that to make women feel safe men must be excluded from their spaces and sports, yet the world mocked Mike Pence when he stated he is never alone in a room with another women besides his wife. Islam teaches that women and men need to be segregated, ultra-Orthodox synagogues segregate on sex, and Catholics still refuse to allow women to be priests. There is a deep intersectional line to be…
