Danger: The Intersectionalism Trap

For the past several months I have experienced social isolation and bullying over my opposition to intersectionalism. In the fight for transgender rights, I have been down but I am not out. I am starting to understand my experiences and will try to share my understanding in this out-of-sequence blog post. What is the historical context, what is intersectionalism and what should we do to resist it?

When the Johns Hopkins and other university-based gender clinics closed down in the late 1970s, it was actually the best thing that could have happened to transgender people. Although it seemed like it was a blow to transgender progress in terms of research, advocacy and treatment, it resulted in a free provider market. A free market grew up outside of the academy which was not dominated by religion or traditional cultural ideologies. The providers gave us affirmative treatments and diverse and improved medical procedures. Freedom from academia allowed Liberal values to support our political and civil rights, despite current backsliding.

But now the university gender clinics have returned and are growing rapidly. This is generally a good thing for transgender people. It improves the availability of services, but it comes with the risk of harmful academic influences. Academics have their own priorities and they are not always aligned with the best interests of trans folks. Their primary interests and biases are, of course, tenure and improving their status in the academy which requires getting grants, research, publishing papers, going to faculty teas and sometimes even teaching. Being inbred, they are subject to trends which like eugenics take decades to dissipate. In the past, they tried to “cure” us using a trendy array of injurious methods. The recent closing of the CAMH gender center, with providers from the University of Toronto hopefully put an end to some of these methods for children. They enforce membership in their subculture through peer review and academic networking. I got enough of a taste of this life so that I went out into private industry.

But in addition to these biases, academics are now being heavily influenced by what is called intersectionalist politics on campus. Intersectionalists may talk about being advocates for transgender rights but their real aim is power–raw unmitigated power over the universities and ultimately society. They violate Classical Liberal traditions of free discussion, free markets and science to get what they want. By Classical Liberal traditions I do not mean those currently practiced as current leftist “liberal” positions, I am referring to Enlightenment notions of free inquiry, free speech and freedom of action. Instead they offer a Marxist perspective in which the only thing that matters in society is the power to dominate those beneath them in what they consider to be an oppressive power hierarchy.

Some background on intersectional politics is in order here. The idea of intersectionalism started, innocently enough, out of job discrimination cases in which jurists did not use common sense in their interpretations. If a law was written to protect, say the categories of national origin and religion, some judges narrowly ruled that the plaintiff had to show statistical discrimination within one of these categories. If a person were, say both a Russian émigré and Catholic, they had to prove discrimination in one or the other category but the intersection of categories did not matter even if there was clear evidence by an employer of intent to discriminate against such a person.

The notion of intersectionalism became influenced by Marxism because it views interactions in society from the point of view of a hierarchy with the people at the top having power and those at the intersection of minorities accorded lower status. Intersectionalists view society as a hierarchy of privilege in which those at the top are typically white male leaders. According to the intersectionalists, these leaders have set up a hierarchy of economic and civil rights oppression with respect to minority groups. Where one ends up in this hierarchy depends on the number of groups to which a person belongs. Thus, white females are subordinate to white males and those in multiple minority groups, say those who start out as poor/white/transgender/female/lesbian/Welsh/veterans (that is me) have even lower status. The intersectionalists view society as a struggle for power in this hierarchy and they use this to rationalize their anti-social activities. The truth is that our Liberal values and the “invisible hand of Adam Smith” force society to provide the same economic and political freedoms to all and objective science supports these freedoms although there are discontinuities.

Intersectionalism has been characterized as being like a cult or religion in which intersectional believers are formed into a group and outside opinions are not welcome, similar to what heretics and apostates are considered in religion. When dealing with minority groups, they maintain that only people in that minority group are in position to know about that group, including science. Those in the hierarchy above are to “shut up and listen” and are not able to understand or represent people in general. They have their own language and Trojan horse meanings of words including “woke” (getting with the program), “safe spaces” (no disturbing talking allowed), inclusion (only intersectionalist positions can be uttered), “equity”(automatic equal pay rather than equal opportunity). Intersectionalists deny biology and believe in the tabula rasa, that biology has no influence and everything is learned.

While it may appear that they are supporting a given minority, intersectionalists use this support to gather power on campus and society. They hold rallies, suppress free speech in curricula and classes, and intimidate professors. They have been successful getting apostate professors fired (e.g. Evergreen State), been successful in influencing campus administration policies/rules and take over parts of campus such as buildings or gateways (e.g. Berkeley). They use force of numbers and physical violence, character assassination, and shouting down anyone who opposes them. They preach against capitalism and want public ownership of property—which, of course, they will control when they are in power.

Intersectionalism is thus directly opposed to Western Liberal traditions, capitalism and science. Classical Liberalism views everyone as equal in the sight of the law and free and open discussion are important for democracy and freedom. Economic freedom and political freedom are synergistic; hurt one and you injure the other. The role of government is to set up the rules for political and economic competition. The democratic system has its flaws but it is the best we have devised. The scientific method is imbued with the idea that it does not matter who makes a statement or who does the experiment and encourages free and open discussion as a recursive means for honing in on the truth. As Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, frequently points out, we should not forget the catastrophic experiments during the 20^th century in collective authoritarianism, socialism and pseudoscience that resulted in the deaths of millions of people. These are the opposite of Liberal philosophy, capitalism and science.

We might not expect academic events to influence transgender advocacy outside of the academy but since the new gender clinics are usually part of university health systems, intersectionalism can influence these clinics and their faculties, and the research performed there. And faculty outside of the gender clinics can be influenced by intersectionalism with regard to research and scholarship and scientific meetings. And outside of the academy, intersectionalism is creeping, nay galloping, into transgender affairs. They view us as convenient poster children or tokens to be used to gain power in the hierarchy. Some transgender people have joined the bandwagon for self-preservation of their careers or at least until they understand what is going on.

So, what can we do to contain this problem?

1. As I have written in a previous blog post, WPATH is trying to encourage community participation in research studies. Participate, if you can, but try to steer the studies away from intersectionalist influences. The researchers can always push back against intersectionalist ideologs that someone from the community forced them to do things in a certain (right) way.

2. Do be visible but do not become a token for intersectionalists. Do talk out publicly but stay true to what “brung” us here to an environment wherein we can flourish, albeit one that is not perfect. What “brung” us here was the Liberal political tradition, science and capitalism and the sweat equity of transgender people.

3. If you can, support private practitioners who are unaffiliated with the academy. They want to be free like you, whether they know it or not.

4. Point out in our writing, blogposts, FB posts and social media when we see intersectionalism. Advocate for Liberalism, science and free economy.

I have already experienced the intersectionalist onslaught. By opposing their behavior, I am already an outcast and apostate in the eyes of some. But don’t worry about me, I have been there before; I have plenty of experience, as you probably have, in being an outcast because of being transgender. Transgender people are all outcasts and outlaws from the larger culture, intersectionalism is just a new trap to be avoided. Trendy intersectionalism probably will not go away for a couple of decades, so we will have to learn how to deal with it.

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