Under the Stockholm Consensus, the IOC allows transgender athletes to participate in their new gender two years after they’ve undergone genital surgery.

Is the language taken from the Stockholm Consensus?

This paragraph and the one that follows it both link surgical reassignment to gender, rather than sex. The linked Wikipedia article recognises, but does not contest, the idea that the terminology of gender is misused to refer to all aspects of distinction between masculine and feminine, and of distinction between male and female, while ‘sex’ has become limited to references to coital activity. At least in the American mainstream media.

I find this profoundly concerning for two reasons. One is philosophical and the other is political.

Philosophically, there seem to be two different things being analysed as if they were the same thing, which pretty much guarantees people are going to end up wrong about both. Gender is intrinsically self-determinant. Cultural indoctrination may well guarantee that vast numbers of people have no real “choice”, but it’s still in their heads. Masculine and Feminine are constructs. I’m quoting fairly standard feminist theory here, and suspect I’m not saying anything controversial.

Male and Female and Intersex are not constructs, they’re empirical realities. They are also mutable; that’s what sex reassignment surgery is for. What leads me to query this quote is that it seems crucial, to me, that the difference between sex and gender is re-established in popular discourse about this topic.

Too many people already talk as though sex and gender were the same; this leads to errors of thinking, errors of understanding and (ultimately) the categorisation of those who are transexual as being identical to the 15-yr-old boy who wants to experiment with wearing lipstick to school.

That leads me to the second issue, the political one; I don’t think this is an accident. As this article also implies, my reading of the last 30 years is that the conflation of sex with gender is part of the same kind of propaganda that linked “gay man” with “paedophile” in the minds of the Reagan-era public; a link which still gets people I know turned out of social housing, even now.

The Bible Belt are much more scared of the idea that Man and Woman (that is, Male and Female) are mutable rather than absolute concepts, than the idea that guys might wear dresses. If Man can become Woman through a personal choice they make, what does that do to the doctrine of male superiority by Divine right, upon which Fundamentalist suppression of, and violence towards, women is based?

But it’s very very useful, to the heinous jokers who lead the Religious Right, to be able to conjure up scary images of MTF transexuality [1] every time some Kansas teenager decides he wants to wear a skirt around the house to see what it feels like. These people don’t want his parents to think, “Ah, our son is displaying commendable self-reliance and an inquiring mind; we must encourage his exploration of self-hood”.

They want his parents to freak right the hell out, ground his ass for a year and take him down to the local Hellfire ministry for “exorcism” before their precious son becomes an outcast and a pariah. If the irrational can, through cash dollars and saturation repetitions, create a popular narrative which conflates sex with gender, it becomes much easier to pull slight-of-mind scaremongering tricks. Just like what they did to the word “liberal”.

[1] Transexuality in others really shouldn’t scare people, certainly not anyone with a modern education. But when people live in theocratic a places like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Arkansas, they grow up with a monocultural, and medieval, view of such things. They lack any access to a source of data which they are conditioned to trust and which will also tell them the truth. Luminescent mould can scare the medieval mind-set: in areas where it still holds sway, I’m not shocked to find that transexuality can scare fundamentalists.