On June 1ST, 2022, Political commentator Matt Walsh Released a film on The Daily Wire Named “What is a Woman?”. This film argues for the gender fundamentalist position, arguing that sex determines gender. The film argues this position first by highlighting the lack of a firm response from its interviewees, in addition to alleging that there is a conspiracy to groom children. The film then goes to a village of people that possesses a similar model of gender to that found in European Cultures. This comprises the core of the argumentation.
For a brief Background on Matt Walsh, Matt Walsh is a Right-Wing Political Commentator, known for the documentary described above, and his comments on child marriage in relation to teenage pregnancy, something which is legal in a surprising number of states, in which most notorious words in the leaked recording include comments like “the problem is not [on its own] teenage pregnancy—it's unwed pregnancy” and “Girls between the ages of like 17 and 24 is when they're technically most fertile”. This is in contrast to his comments objecting to the affirmation of gender identity as “prey[ing] upon impressionable children”. Child marriage, the marriage of people under the age of 18, is described by the US federal government as a “human rights abuse”. In relation to the documentary made by Walsh, Alledged by Eli Erlick, corroborated by Kataluna Enriquez and Fallon Fox, is that The Gender Unity Project, A creation of Walsh, was used to lure activists into participating in the documentary under false pretences, alleging this was done to around 50 people. Walsh describes himself as a “Theocratic Fascist” on social media platorm X (Formerly Twitter). It should also be noted that Walsh has no degrees in the fields he talks about.
The next section will be a dissection of Gender Fundamentalism.
Gender fundamentalism is a set of beleifs that ties Gender to a physical characteristic. The general line of gender fundamentalism is generally some version of the described below:
-Gender fundamentalism asserts there are two genders, sorted into a ‘Male’ sex and a ‘Female’ sex. This distinction is made but outlines certain physical characteristics as belonging to each group.-
There are issues with this definition out of the gate. Firstly, the desire to reduce one’s sex into two categories as a model of analysis as is often done by the same fundamentalists becomes immediately complicated when intersex people are even considered in the slightest. An intersex person is someone born with sex characteristics indicative of both the ‘male’ and ‘female’ categorisations. Additionally, there are men (born male) who naturally develop breast tissue. Furthermore, the nipples found on *Checks Notes* all known men are of no known purpose to the man, as they existed in the developmental process of a fœtus before the sex was even factored in, for the fact of the matter every and all fœtuses start female, which, in combination with conception theory of life, a theory usually adopted by most of these same people, every man is a transsexual*. Of course, they like to overlook this fact. Another metric by which they define ‘woman’ is by pointing to the fact that they can give birth to a child. On top of just reducing a woman to a babymaker, alienates women who would still be females by their definition, for some of the female sex are, in fact, infertile.
Additionally, we now live in an age where the sciences have allowed us to alter nearly every aspect of our physiology and, in addition to the above, the direct editing of genetic information is now distinctly approaching possibility. At what point of modification of these physical qualities does a very physical defintion allow the person to qualify as said gender in question? The answer is one that changes, as this position is not about determining a truth, but about not permitting the gender to be aknowledged as anything that differs from what they were marked as on the birth certificate. First, it was about simply passing visually. When methods for this were found and applied for this, the goalposts were shifted. They them made this about genitals and other similar sexual organs. Methods for altering this were found and applied, so the goalposts were shifted. It was shifted to the presence of a womb, though as before, methods were found and they attempted to shift the goalposts. I’ve already noted how many women of the female sex are infertile, and thus unable to birth, thus rendering the redefining of this line as void.
In short, (1) The line between one sex and another is not strictly clear, (2) We have various methods by which the alter these physical characteristics, and (3) The perpetuators of this theory are not concerned with determining truth, but rather to prevent a transition of the “gender”.
The next section will be dissecting the social theory of gender.
The social theory of gender is a set of beliefs that proposes that gender is a set of social clauses and expectations. This almost immediatley falls apart if we attempt to analyse it as a concrete thing. Various cultures possess different social concepts of gender. Various indigenous American cultures possess what is referred to in English as a “Two-Spirit”. Hawaiian cultures have what is referred to as “Humu Kina”. Historically even, western cultures did not have the two-gender system it has now. Historically, there was a view where there was one gender, man, with the woman as a deviation due to hormonal shifts. This older conception of gender bled into the early sciences, and it resulted in situations where trials for medical products aimed at women were tested exclusively on men. Additionally goes the proposition of gender as a spectrum, an idea that has become relatively mainstream in urban centres in the Western world, from which we have models depicted as triangles, circles, and whatever other particular shape can be thought of to describe this system. When asked about these sometimes conflicting models, they betray their postmodernism and refer to gender as whatever a person makes of it. Furthermore, what constitutes the historical defintitions of masculinity and femininity is susceptible. Historically, it was seen as a man’s thing to read, whereäs now reading is seen as effeminate. Historically, men would have adorned red due to its association with blood and conflict, seen as a man’s place, but is now instead associated with that of the flower, seen as feminine, with blue now seen as masculine.
In short, (1) Various cultures have systems that are in many cases conflicting, (2) The addition of postmodernism renders such a thing void, and (3) The notions by which said genders are defined are nebulous and susceptible to wild changes over time.
With The Fundamentalist definition rendered both nebulous and mal willed, the social definition nebulous and inconsistent, what are we left with?
The Abolitionist position of gender argues that gender is an invention of society and is therefore, as the children would say, “cap”. This solves a few problems. For one, it handles the conflicting models of gender by referring to their quality as an invented system to explain these conflicts. It likewise doesn’t trudge itself in drawing lines on gender where they don’t exist. Furthermore, it can question what purpose gender serves in our society, which is typically understood as a tool to induce a false consciousness, as to distract from whom they possess meaningful adversarial relationships by placing one over the other. Due to historically, within European cultures, the conflation of the construct of gender bound into the sex, this placing of one over the other is referred to most commonly as “sexism.” This exists to blind the working class as it has existed throughout recorded history from the reality of their interests as working people.