Gay hypocrisy

There’s an enormous unaddressed hypocrisy in the attitudes of existing gays and liberal activists toward the trans movement. Everyone wants to say that the thing we knocked down and the thing we changed about the world, that was a good thing. But what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to change is crazy, it’s not the same thing. It’s not a liberation or advancement, and it’s in conflict with existing established institutions and values and undermines existing, functional, dearly-won identities.

They’re not wrong about that last bit, they’re just not any different from the people who last made such claims. And the people coming after them, raising threats that arouse the current old-guard liberals, aren’t any different either.

It wasn’t that long ago that conservative and traditionalist figures were raising the exact same concerns that even many liberals complain about today. If you deconstruct the teleogy of sex to allow for the normativity of homosexuality, by transforming a behavior into an identity, what’s to prevent people from deciding they can identitize and normalize anything? What’s to prevent people from giving up on traditional marriage altogether, or embracing polyamory, or sadomasochism, or forming relationships with artificial partners, or even deciding that gender itself doesn’t mean anything fixed? What’s to prevent men from getting confused about what it means to be a man and women about what it means to be a woman, and for everyone to just decide that sex and gender and relationships are just whatever we want them to be an innate and unquestionable identities, resulting in psycho-sexual anarchy (in the technical sense) and the collapse of the family, the most basic social building block?

People said all these things at the time. And of course the liberals of the time pooh-poohed all of that. They said that was ridiculous and insane exaggeration and fear-mongering, and would never happen. They said there was no serious shift in our understanding of sex occurring, just a minor correction. All that talk was a bunch of crazy paranoia. And now here we are a couple decades on and gay activists are complaining that trans activists are attacking the very foundation for our understanding of our sexuality and identity with fantastic, deluded, self-indulgent, mental illness made into the vogue of health. They hurl literally the same objections that were once raised against (and dismissed) by them.

Once you remove the teloleology of sex, what does confine it? What prevents a continuous movement toward deregulation and deconstruction of any defined meaning or structure, apart from the assumptions and preferences of each succeeding generation, that move with each generation? If you remove the idea that sex has a specific purpose, and say that it’s just whatever you want it to be, then what, for example, actually prevents you from taking the same axe to the inhabited aspect of sex that you did to the performative aspect of sex? If there are no rules to what sex is supposed to be when you do it, nothing it is for or any structure that confines it and what it’s supposed to be and be for, then what is supposed to prevent you from assuming the same about what sex is when you are it?

Most young people draw a straight line in their minds from their stance on gay rights (the right to decide what performative sex is and what it means for you) to trans rights (the right to decide what inhabited sex is and what it means for you). And I don’t think they’re wrong to do so. And I don’t see that the complaints of gay people now are really any different that those that preceded them. Of course trans and gay rights are in conflict with one another and don’t fit together easily. But the thing they have in common that does unite them, even though in reality they’re in conflict over much of the same territory and have incompatible assumptions, is their practice and justification.

Sex, after all, isn’t just something you are, it is something you do. We use the same word for both, and with good reason; they’re deeply connected. The act of inhabiting a role and the status of inhabiting a role are deeply intertwined. And if you can knock one out, is it really such a different thing to knock out and deregulate the other? Isn’t it possibly the next logical extension of the concept? Love is love means sex is sex, which really means that sex is whatever I want it to be and to be for. I wasn’t made for it, to fit some predetermined structure, it was made for me, to be defined and enjoyed by me as I am inclined.

Sex under this ideological conception isn’t constrained by any innate structure, something that it is and is for, a teleology, a crystallized ideal to which some things conform and others don’t. Love is love. Did you really expect the world to hold still after that? That the big change you made to the world would be the last one? Your advance the final frontier? That you would be the last to have a right to see themselves as a liberator of humanity from some long-standing tyrannical structure? That no one else would ever be able to raise the kinds of challenges you did, or that you would never be subject to challenge yourself?

All gay people wanted was to be treated like what they were doing with sex wasn’t any different from anything else you could do. All trans people want is to be treated like what they are doing with sex isn’t any different from anything else you could do. And both require, as a prerequisite, the simple adjustment to the idea of sex (the act and relationship) as something without any confined teleology. That sex is sex, that it’s for us, for whatever we want it to be. It’s not one thing that all individuals participate in, it’s an individual thing no greater cis-ideology defines.

Sex isn’t for bringing men and women together, it’s not for creating children by sexual reproduction, it’s not for creating traditional generational families, it’s not for honoring God with our bodies or using them within our roles as members of specific sex with a specific duty of how to use that body and that gender in relationship with another. Your sexuality belongs to you. Not to someone else, not to the species, not to another gender, not to your potential children. It belongs to you, it’s yours to dispose of as you see fit.

So why should your gender, your behavioral expression of your sexuality in society, be any different? Why should your sex, the inhabited nature of your sexuality, be any different? If sex is fundamentally something to dispose of and define as you wish, not something to be confined by society, family, another sex, other people, social and familial and relationship roles, or biological obligation, why can’t I do just that?

Does having a penis obligate me to put it in a woman, fulfilling some duty to biological design? If not, if having a penis doesn’t obligate me to “act like a man” in some extended psycho-social-sexual sense, if I can refuse it and deconstruct it, sex as a performative teleological identity, why am I obligated to sex as a behavioral or inhabited identity? Why can’t I be free in that as well? And can you enforce it on me without in some sense endangering your performative freedom? Without wielding some club of external obligation and authority? How can you seperate the two safely? When both freedoms turn on the question of identity, teleology, and obligation?

As someone who watched the whole status of gay relationships play out in his lifetime, it’s hard not to see the irony and hypocrisy. I’m hearing literally the same arguments, the same complaints. I think some gay people are truly struggling to define what makes their situation different from that of trans people. And as long as they can’t do that, they won’t convince anyone. They’ll get branded as traitors and hypocrites and bigots. But something in them still revolts, if only because their own identities are threatened and they now find themselves as old and rigid relics ripe for deconstruction and criticism, where once they believed they were the freedom fighters living on the edge of creativity. And perhaps that is the great lesson of history. We all live to see ourselves become the past that must be left behind. And we wonder what it all meant, when the world is leaving us behind and forgetting all we fought for.