This is a follow up theory to my previous article on how trigger avoidance could explain the spike in people being transgender. While that article was micro – thinking about each individual, this article is macro and looks at the effect of this as a movement. I am examining five big questions about oppression and what the movement is doing.
1. Why are there Groups?
My first point is that oppression is one of the ways, maybe the main way, that “groups” are created. When I say “Groups” (hereinafter capitalized), I mean the socially constructed groupings that have a center, meaning a shared understanding of an exemplar of the group; for example, there is a prototype black person that people more or less agree on in the sense that there is a shared consciousness about what it means to be more or less black, or Black (capitalized). The concept of a prototype white person is different – it is less defined, because the othering by those in power is what creates the Group.
I say this without proof, and know that many people would argue against it, claiming that the determinants of oppression (like skin color) are observable facts, not socially constructed. But so are height and left-handedness and hair color, and those variables have not made Groups in the same way. Those who see an opportunity for claiming superiority will push a particular variable into shared consciousness and will therefore create the Group. Any body characteristic (or any other characteristic that is not discretionary) could be one of those variables, but some are used more than others. In particular, color, sex, disability, genetic-ethnic characteristics, sexual orientation, age, heath, language, and national origin are used the most often. But the determinants change over time. When I was a child in the US, one Group was “Orientals” (mainly southeast Asia) while someone from Pakistan was not in a Group at all; but now the Group is known as Asians as a whole and has less granularity and extremely vague edges. I’m not saying this is a change for the better or worse, but just that a lot of effort goes into shifting shared consciousness about these things, effort that is exerted in order to benefit someone.
As a working definition, oppression can only exist if one can document a widespread pattern of instances of bias and discrimination, such as specific persons being denied entry, a loan, a job, a promotion, a vote, or a political appointment due to some non-discretionary aspect of their body or speech. Or, crimes against them are overlooked, or systematic under-representation or other grievances are not addressed. Or a soft form of discrimination is simply being excluded in the social hierarchy. Being denied a benefit based on a discretionary thing, like an opinion or clothing choice, is not strictly oppression, as one can simply dress differently or profess a different belief to gain access to the thing. Also, I don’t think speech about a Group or widespread ridicule of a Group constitutes oppression without specific acts of discrimination, but in practice it usually goes together.
Culture, language/accent, and religious belief are gray areas (in this theory of “oppression creates groups”), in the sense that those characteristics can be used as determinants of discrimination, but are semi-discretionary – fairly permanent for most people but with effort could be changed.
If you are very autistic or young, you might not see Groups at all; you would only see each individual as unique, and not associate them with others. But once you learn about it, your mind would be poisoned with awareness and could never again dismiss skin color or sex as irrelevant. But if you imagine a society constantly referring to people by their height-Group and how useless and meaningless that would be, you can possibly imagine that all the non-discretionary variables being treated that way. In my imagination of a more perfect future, people might say that someone is black or white, but it would sound the same and feel the same as it was mentioned that someone is short or tall. When we say “tall” we mean relatively tall, or we might say “very tall”, and we know that others may judge differently and we are not putting them in a Group of talls. In the same way, we might say someone is very white, without implying a group, and it would only come up in a context where it makes sense, like selecting makeup colors.
2. How do we know something is anti-oppressive?
My hope is that all forms of systematic discrimination are corrected, and as that happens, socially constructed Groups will fade in prominence and tomorrow’s children will grow up without a mental map of those edges that put people in boxes. There is a politically centrist view of how to combat oppression that sounds similar but is not quite the same: their idea is to de-emphasize Groups and labels, and treat everyone the same, such that it all goes away over time (the antecedent is reversed compared to what I’m hoping for). One criticism of either view is the assertion that it erases cultural variations and makes everyone the same, if it were to be successful. I think though that it is actually oppression that erases cultures, and if society had no Groups, we would still have variation and different cultures, and maybe the richness of culture could increase.
Another criticism is that de-emphasis is so slow that it is equivalent to doing nothing. The criticism is “it will never self-correct; we have to push it”. Any form of pushback against oppression appears to create a “Reactive Group”, which matches the Group originally created by the oppression. Those people are working against discrimination, but they are also defining Group edges; so both sides of the battle end up doing the same thing in terms of social construction of Groups, and this makes it hard to see that only the oppressing side originally created the Group. The Reactive Group, solidified in acts of defiance, may self-police the dividing lines more than anyone else.
Under those conditions, a sense of strict rules of membership comes to be, and any de-emphasis message can appear dangerous even if it is coming from someone who is a member. I suppose this can make the fight exceed the bounds of the actual problem, or miss it. As an example, some messaging has circulated that all police forces exist only for the purpose of keeping black people down, and will kill them indiscriminately. But then if one black person says they have only had pleasant interactions with police, it threatens the integrity of the whole Reactive Group.
When a Reactive Group is successful enough to get corrective policy enacted – that is, something beyond de-emphasis – then it appears the political process usually eschews extremes. The history of civil rights, affirmative action, and now “diversity-equity-inclusion” has sought to enable equal participation by certain people using roughly the same granularity and edges as taken by the original form of discrimination, although coarse. In those policies, there has to be a test of membership which is objective, not just claimed. In each case where a legal form for reparation or correction has been proposed or tried, there has had to be a proof of belonging to the Group to be approved for a benefit. For example, paperwork for public education or other public services often survey the ethnicity of applicants, so that the institutions can know and respond to trends, or in some cases give preference.
So my second main point corresponding to the theory that oppression creates Groups, is that anti-oppression mirrors those Groups. We know something is anti-oppressive because it is grounded in the actual acts of oppression that have occurred, and objectively makes access to voting, jobs, and the other things listed above more equal.
3. Are women a Group?
Looking at the variables of sex and gender in relation to my my groupless dream of the future: suppose there was no sex discrimination, then would we have socially constructed groupings of men and women at all, or would it become a thing that is easily noticed but unremarkable, like height?
As of now, there is still oppression, and therefore women are still a Group, though advances have been made. Not everyone agrees, but my reasons are that women still face a glass ceiling in jobs, and sex crimes against women are relatively overlooked (many unreported, and those that are reported are cleared at a lower rate than other violent crime). Another way to study whether we are a Group or not would be cross-culturally. For example in Iceland, where women are in high positions of power and their anti-discrimination policies have been notably successful, the test would be to see whether women turn to each other in solidarity and support in the same way as is done in the US, or if women there only have a more minor sense of union, more like how tall people might only experience some minor affinity with each other. In the tiny sample of Icelandic movies and reading I’ve been exposed to, it jumps out to me how little sex plays a role in the stories or relationships, so that suggests to me that affinity or solidarity among women is highly influenced by the level of discrimination.
One argument that women will always be a Group is that sex is the main body characteristic that is binary, so in that sense, nature provides the line between sexes. For everything else, like the line between black and white, the line is more socially constructed. I doubt this is a valid argument though, because of the Icelandic contrast, but I’m not sure how to know this any more fully at the moment.
I once wrote about how variation in sex and gender occurs in seven distinct flavors: chromosomal sex, primary sex, secondary sex, brain sex, internalized gender, assigned gender, and gender presentation. The naive conclusion that I wrote is that you can be any collection of these things, so it is technically not a binary distribution. That point is being made ad nauseam these days. But the thing I’m sorry about writing that I didn’t clarify back then was that all the variation is fairly rare, so the actual result is that it is in all practical senses a binary distribution. It could have also been a mistake to assume brain sex and internalized gender are different. Of those seven flavors, only one is definitely under your control – presentation. Your way of relating and in general how your gender feels to others can be acted up to a point, but I think there is a reality under the act, which is not under your control.
As the so-called transgender movement became nationally visible in the last couple years, the edges of the Group of women have become blurrier for some, and the flavors of sex and gender that have fallen under partial control has shifted for a larger group of people. Secondary sex is being hacked more readily with medications and surgery, and primary sex to some extent, so these are semi-discretionary variables. But how does this affect actual oppression? Oppressive acts against women are not based on all seven of those flavors. Specifically no one knows the chromosomes or the internalized sense of gender of another person by sight, so those things cannot be the target of sex crimes, which is almost all about the body. The glass ceiling is possibly also based on internalized gender, which affects how you interact with people. But it seems like the more discretionary forms of femininity, like dress and presentation, are not a target of discrimination. They may be a source of ridicule but in all the complaining I hear, there is never something solid like a loss of property rights or an overlooked crime. And so by that reasoning, the presence of the transgender movement has not dramatically shifted how women are a Group, or what the edges are that define women.
It’s interesting to me how the blurring of the Group (or threat of blurring) seems to cause anxiety for conservative men more than women, and conservatives in general more than others. The urgent quest to find out what a woman even is anymore feels very linked to oppression of women, because of all of the above – that society needs to define edges more strictly in order to discriminate. At the same time, regular women (bio-women) are forming a tighter Reactive Group in some circles, specifically drawing the lines of that group along nature’s lines and not using those flavors of sex and gender that are discretionary.
My conclusion now for the third point of this essay is that women are still a Group and it is still mostly defined by body sex characteristics, because those are still the determinants of discrimination.
4. Is the transgender movement anti-oppressive?
My fourth question here is whether the transgender movement is anti-oppressive. Those in the movement might say that is its central aim, but I do not think it can be substantiated.
This part is based on what I understand the rapidly-changing ideology of the movement to be at the time of this writing, which is:
(1) A new flavor of sex/gender is added to the mix of seven listed above, and this one is what I call the verbal demand. (Previously whether you used “he” or “she” for someone was a side effect of their visible characteristics, but now it is an independent variable in the sense that a person can demand a certain pronoun irrespective of their presentation or body sex. The verbal demand can also be a claim of “identity” when used in the phrase “I identify as…”)
(2) Groups may be created through verbal demands, and membership can be claimed by verbal demands. (Some sources call this “self-ID”)
(3) Failure of an onlooker to assign gender based on the verbal demand, or failure to recognize Group membership, is an act of oppression.(They are called transphobic.)
(4) Any such recently created Group is marginalized because others fail to recognize its legitimacy.
(5) Addressing discrimination against these Groups is equally or more urgent than any other common form of discrimination, such as by sex, language or ethnicity.
(6) As a kind of inverse to all of the other points, one can resign from being in the Group of women, or any group, simply by verbal demand, and discrimination against the resignee will cease.
I get that listing out the ideology this way makes it sound ridiculous and overly systematic. These cornerstones may be based on unreasonably amplified TikTok fringes, and maybe it is not really that extreme for everyone who is in that movement. But I have first- and second-degree connections that bear this out, so I’m not ready to dismiss its accuracy. The rest of the essay will assume this is a fair statement of the ideology.
The doublespeak is a lot to unpack, and I’m going to try to do this fairly so it legitimately follows from parts 1-3 of this essay. The main points of unpacking are as follows.
(A) There is a difference between social construction and individual construction. Social construction of Groups is based on oppression, not on isolated or random acts of creativity. Anything that is internal and private to yourself (what people are calling “identity”) is not visible to others and therefore could not be used as a determinant of discrimination.
(B) Groups created by verbal demands do not have the same dynamics as Groups created by discrimination. If you are pulled over by a cop and then seen to be black, and you are distrusted and ultimately handcuffed or shot, and then the white officer is let off the hook, then it is that act of racism along with many other similar acts that makes blackness into a Group*. Verbal demands do not have consequences like that.
(C) Disregarding the verbal demands of others is not an act of discrimination. It may be triggering and feel bad to someone who is making the demand from a basis of trigger-avoidance. But oppression cannot be substantiated by a lack of public belief in a person’s internal state (chosen group-identity, in the sense of trans-identification). Ridicule and dismissal are not equivalent to a lack of voting rights or some other documented act of discrimination.
(D) If the ideology were true, there could be no objective test of belonging; thus any effort to have reparations or corrections could never successfully identify the beneficiaries, and would fail. It is like a house of mirrors where you cannot locate the truly deserving beneficiary because of all the myriad reflections.
The question of this section (if the transgender movement is anti-oppressive) is similar to asking whether discretionary or private characteristics of a person can be protected in the sense of a legal response to discrimination. If those characteristics were somewhat objective and they were known to be used as determinants of discrimination, a test of membership could be agreed upon using those characteristics, and policies could be conceived of that provide access to previously denied rights, then it would be an anti-oppressive movement. But I’m seeing only slight evidence of this, and no evidence in the case of people whose only non-aligned flavor of gender is in the area of verbal demands.
I’ve seen more evidence from social media that people are actually baiting discrimination by intentionally changing their appearance and verbal demands. Specifically they seem to be choosing increasing levels of noncompliance with social norms, until they reach the level where they get excluded from something. Once they reach that level it is a “win” because they have found the limit of acceptance and possibly pushed it. They may be using the words of oppression, as if being intentionally bizarre-looking or irritating enough to be kicked out of a library is equivalent to someone who was killed for being Jewish. Often it does not even get to the level of being kicked out of a library, but just to the level of being addressed in the way that is not in keeping with their verbal demands. One video I saw showed acts of baiting and subsequent joy at being the victim of “hate crimes”. This video only demonstrates how easy it is to get someone to dislike you by being annoying, but to the person in the video, it warranted the same terminology as genocide.
A gender-nonconforming aesthetic that may accompany verbal demands includes things like unnatural hair colors and piercings. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it intuitively feels to me that these adornments are actions that attract attention to artifices while hiding or uglifying the body, rather than adorning for a sense of beauty. So in that sense the aesthetic is part of the baiting.
Aside from the newspeak and the false equivalencies, this discrimination-baiting that gets so much social media airtime may have an anti-oppression effect through its unique form of agitation. For example, a school principal who enforces a sex-based dress code or uniforms may get worn down from agitation to eventually relax the rules, and allow for more freedom of dress. I suspect, however, that the people doing this are those who were faced no serious discrimination before they started discrimination-baiting; they are not people who were previously excluded who are seeking inclusion.
There are also people who are discriminated against because of non-discretionary gender characteristics (unrelated to the voluntary aesthetic). For example they may be intersex or androgynous in their appearance or relational style and they are threatened or excluded, and may face a glass ceiling in jobs. People who are excluded will naturally adapt as far as possible to be included, but some cannot because that is what non-discretionary means. That has been generally my experience. Such people would not be inclined towards exclusion-baiting. From what I’m seeing, this is a tiny minority and this group does not follow the ideological points above. It is not clear to me if that set of people ever formed a Reactive Group, and it seems unlikely because there is no common trait that they all share other than not fitting expectations.
My tentative conclusion on this fourth part is that the movement is not anti-oppressive at its core because it does not mirror any significant oppression – those characteristics are mostly discretionary or verbal demands, and were not discriminated against. But the agitation may help loosen rigid societal norms for appearance based on sex.
As a side note, Seuss’s book “The Sneetches” gives an interesting parallel from 1961. In the book, oppression exists based on a non-discretionary characteristic – whether they have a star belly or a plain belly. Then the arc of the story is that someone develops a way to hack the variable by medically adding or removing the star, so everyone who was previously oppressed can change, but fashion keeps dictating that the opposite way is better; crazy levels of medical transition ensue to no rational end. The medical advance broke the structure of oppression in the book; in reality though, when one variable is hacked, they pick another variable rather than reversing the direction of oppression. Also the book makes no distinction between modified and unmodified sneetches, and the “gender” of the star is one-dimensional, so I think this book is not a close parallel to current society.
5. What is the actual effect of the transgender movement?
The endgame, as seen from within the ideology, is apparently the erasure of all labels and ending discrimination, but done through the proliferation of labels. Simultaneous belief in opposites is a hallmark of ideological thinking so it is not surprising to see that confusing duality.
One actual result that appears to be happening is to prevent discussion of, and policies to address actual discrimination and oppression, by overshadowing it with invented oppression of verbal demands. Basically a school or other group gets all its oxygen taken up over whether one person is being called the right pronouns – the princess syndrome. It is as if all other social ills have magically been completely solved and this one thing is the last remaining detail before we achieve a perfect society. It is dangerous as it is placing the capricious “needs” of a vocal minority over everyone else.
I think it goes beyond overshadowing though. It is not just taking up time and focus; the doublespeak is attempting to redefine membership in Groups to be completely self-claimed. For a wider context, we sometimes get our claims wrong, so self-claiming can never be the final word. There is a powerful sense of belonging that comes from a self-identification with, say, your ethnic ancestry, your neurotype or personality type, or some other affinity, but only when it is followed up with community confirmation. In soft-membership settings, that confirmation comes in the form of emotional embracing as being “one of us”. In the case of language describing you (including pronouns) community confirmation is seen when people naturally talk about you in the way you have talked about yourself (not just because they are capitulating to verbal demands). In other contexts, confirmation can include a professional diagnosis or formal recognition.
In stricter settings, self-claimed membership would prevent any application of civil rights, reparations, or any other correction concerning any kind of actual discrimination, because the benefits would go to whoever claims it the loudest. In this manner, the ideology of self-claiming may perpetuate established power structures.
The prevention of reparations seems most relevant for the Group of women, who, as I argued above, are still oppressed based on primary sex. If anyone can claim membership, there can be no test of membership and therefore no corrective policy. This is blatant in some cases where bio-males strangely choose to post videos of themselves making the verbal demand of being a transgender woman while looking, acting, and being threateningly aggressive in exactly the same way as dominant men have responded when they are defensive about any loss of power.
It is not a leap to see these behaviors as colonizing the Reactive Group of women to prevent that group from achieving equality. But I doubt it is the most common thing going on and doubt it is particularly conscious as a goal.
A second major actual result of the movement is to strengthen support for conservative and authoritarian leaders as a backlash to the doublespeak and agitation. From what I see (knowing social media is not a research tool) is that many people who are grounded in critical thinking are moving right and even voting for right-wing politicians because the cringe-factor and distaste for this transgender movement is so great that they will take anything else but that.
Part of the ideology has a predatory aspect that may actually be a nascent form of oppression. They label anyone who questions the ideology openly, or makes a speech error by failing to capitulate, as “transphobic”. That has the same feeling to me as name-calling to minimize the other, like when white people use the N-word to minimize blackness by infusing it with an inseparable bugaboo of filth. Being called transphobic is not as consequential yet, but it may increase and create a Group of “transphobe filth”. The transphobic label even applies to people who are just speaking naturally according to their own culture, so it seems offensively xenophobic to me. Again, I don’t believe the use of either term is oppression in itself, but ridicule usually goes along with acts of discrimination. The transgender movement would be oppressive if they were successfully enacting discriminatory policies against a set of people based on non-discretionary characteristics. That does not appear to be happening, but some instances of university policies against free speech could be signs of their growing power, and that does go along with the right-wing attack on civil rights.
To recap, the princess syndrome, prevention of any test of Group membership, and stalling progress in actual civil rights appear to be the direct and unfortunate results of the movement, and the fueling of conservative backlash is an important secondary result. A potentially positive result in my mind is the agitation that may erode the power to enforce appearance standards. My fear though is that the size of this issue could be significant enough to swing the US into an authoritarian, white-nationalist era, which would make all other outcomes insignificant.
6. An alternative?
All of this ideology and its repercussions feel regressive to me, so here I will try to say what a healthier response could be. I sense that many people who are not facing hard discrimination are still feeling malaise about their situations, and perhaps a lot of soft exclusion, especially if they feel boxed in by rigid gender expectations. As mentioned in the previous article, the economy is changing to define an ever-narrowing set of people as acceptable and everyone else may feel they need to undergo Herculean adaptations to secure the most basic job. Or maybe most people are lonely and they erroneously think they are in a minority. There is then a mass consciousness rising to form Reactive Groups to combat something that is so vague that it can’t be battled. Anyone who claws their way up the ladder with the power of solidarity in a Group tends to sever the ladder below them, further marginalizing those with the least power.
Slavery and women’s inequality were ended on paper – affecting 20% and 50% of the US population respectively. Then gay and lesbian rights affected 5-15% of the population depending on your sources. I get the impression that the dominant progressive theory is the biggest Groups’ battles have been mostly won or at least on the way, and now we’re on to the next set of smaller Groups, and eventually every possible Group will get its time. But that set of miscellaneous others – millions of people – have no common basis to coalesce, and will never form a Group of everyone.
It helps me to look at the opposites of the elements of oppression, namely full access to opportunities, and social inclusion. These are things we can measure and work towards, and they don’t rely on knowing by which variable someone “identifies as” something. The arrow of time is not automatically pointing towards justice; work has to be done continuously to make it go that way. The real work seems to lie in deprogramming ideologies, becoming aware of the mechanics of actual oppression, and promoting policies that have a rational basis in achieving more full inclusion.
Footnote
* I’m using blackness in a few examples because anti-black oppression appears to exceed all other forms of oppression in the US today in its pervasiveness and level of violence. It therefore serves as a contrast to other, questionable forms of oppression.
Star Ford 
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