If you want to be seen as a decent human being, I would strongly recommend you dont use the phrase “gender ideology.” Wikipedia says this – and if you are gender-critical (GC), to be clear, there is significant evidence to back this all up:
The anti-gender movement is an international movement which opposes what it refers to as “gender ideology”, “gender theory” or “genderism”. The concepts cover a variety of issues and have no coherent definition. Members of the anti-gender movement include right-wingers and the far right, right-wing populists, conservatives, and Christian fundamentalists.
Members of the anti-gender movement oppose some LGBT rights, some reproductive rights, government gender policies, gender equality, gender mainstreaming and gender studies departments. Anti-gender rhetoric has seen increasing circulation in trans-exclusionary radical feminist discourse since 2016.
The term gender ideology has been described by the academics Stefanie Mayer and Birgit Sauer as an “empty signifier” and by Agnieszka Graff as a “catch-all term for all that conservative Catholics despise”.
The idea of gender ideology has been described by scholars as a moral panic or conspiracy theory, as it alleges that there is a secret cabal out to undermine society. A report by the European Parliament linked the rise of the anti-gender movement in Europe to disinformation campaigns that are sponsored in large part by Russia.
The movement derives from Catholic theology and can be dated to the late twentieth century, but the protests that brought the movement to attention did not start until around 2012–2013. The historian Andrea Pető states that the anti-gender movement is not a form of classical anti-feminism but instead “a fundamentally new phenomenon that was launched to establish a new world order”.
Now it’s not for me to tell gender-critical people what language they use. Of course, trans activists use pretty offensive language, too; accusing GC people of being bigots and fascists is pretty common these days.
As the Wikipedia entry shows, the GC is from varied backgrounds and has different causes. Further, some have been described as “soft GC”, while at the extreme end, there are gender-critical people who call for the genocide of trans people and our allies.
When I pointed this out to a GC person, he kicked back, saying he was not a hater at all, that he respected the rights of trans people and that he was far from being a Tory.
He is, in fact, a BIBS – a believer in biological sex – who doesn’t accept the gender revolutionaries’ concept of man or woman and calls those who think differently as being in the clan of “gender-ideology”.
He believes that ‘sex is real’; he believes in the binary and that sometimes that is important. And in some issues, he is right; in medical situations, for example, trans men should not ignore having regular cervical smear tests, and yes, I have a prostate. And I guess I am a gender traditionalist, because I was happy to surgically change my body.
But the phrase gender ideology is not pleasant, so perhaps the label “gender revolutionary” would be better.
Who knows.
History will judge who will win the gender war – but with the 2021 census showing there are many more young trans people on the way, trans people are here to stay – and they are not an ideology; they are people.
