I have a daily Google alert for online mentions of the phrase “anti-gender movement” and a couple of weeks ago, I got an alert that the phrase had been used in a Taiwanese online magazine called New Bloom. Fresh off the Taiwanese boxing Olympic scandal, I was curious to see if it was being used in the context of noted bloke Lin Yu Ting’s defeat over female boxers in Paris.
An American expat called Jaclynn Joyce was mentioned in the article as one of Taiwan’s “anti-gender movement actors”. When I looked her up, I found out she’s a feminist academic. She’s written for 4W, just like me, and she’s opposed to the erasure of women as a sex class, just like me. She’s also a Substacker.
So I contacted her to tell her she had been listed as a major player in the anti-gender movement of her adopted country, and it turned out it’s a concept she had never even heard of. Fellow professional bigotress Genevieve Gluck then spotted that the article had been sponsored by a new-ish American NGO, spawned by nasty lesbian-fetishist Dave “Susan” Stryker (I don’t know his real name but all transvestites are “Dave” until proven otherwise.)
Stryker is a big wheel down at the gender factory. He wrote some important trans retcon canon that gets cited a lot. Also, in the early aughts, he teamed up with Wythenshawe’s hardest-working lesbophobe, a lesbian called Stephen Whittle, and together they wrote up a piece of scholarship (scoff) that atempted to blend rabildly horny transvestites and Vichy lezzers into one big vague “transgender” puree.
So what is the “anti-gender movement” that Jaclynn was unknowingly the ringleader of?
It is (or was) a kind of catch-all term for anyone with conservative views of the family, reproduction, and sexuality. The term started to be used in the 90s when conservatives were confronted with feminists’ use of the analytical concept of “gender” to talk about the causes of inequality between men and women.
Gender was gradually being introduced in the context of the huge UN conferences that dealt with population “management” aka women’s fertility, and the poverty that comes with failing to control it. The Vatican delegation to these conferences had been keeping an eye on family-wrecking feminists, and they called this newfangled idea “gender ideology”. They came out firmly against it, claiming men and women were sorted by God and nature into Tarzan (capable, strong, rational, finds food) and Jane (little, quiet, simple, organises food into sandwiches) and the idea that anything about society was artificially constructed was laughable.
Feminists, in turn, started to call the conservative protagonists “anti-gender actors”. Which is weird, because you would think they would also be against gender, being as it is a set of suffocating and limiting stereotypes and expectations? It’s complicated.
Indeed, many people have wondered why feminists stopped talking about women and men and start talking about gender instead. One explanation I’ve read is that it was an effort to de-shrillify the discourse, and get taken seriously by the men in suits who had controlled the conversation since basically forever.
Gender took the nagginess out of describing male dominance over women, in that it’s very polite about the perpetrators of a problem. It would be like rebranding femicide simply “murder” because you don’t want to nag the femicidaires. You wouldn’t want to remind the master of the universe of his bitch wife, would you? (“I get enough of this from ‘er indoors!” the men exclaim, filling the Geneva conference chamber with cigar smoke and spittle.)
Whatever. It was a gradual takeover: the word gender appeared only once in the 1979 CEDAW convention (a kind of international bill of women’s rights) — though in that instance, it seems to have been used to refer to biological sex. By 1994, the very important Cairo population conference declaration was gender-free. But by the time the Beijing conference on women came around the following year, in 1995, the word was dotted all through the conference declaration. In the annex to the Beijing declaration, however, conservatives made sure to note that it had been agreed that gender referred to the ye olde binary of men and women, aka a polite synonym for sex.
But ever since Beijing, all bets are off. It’s now wall-to-wall gender.
As we all know, today’s elite-overproduced professional feminists have fallen back in love with stereotypes and rather than tear them down , they build entire careers by signing on to the troonterpretation of gender, which is: girl is when skirt go spinny.
So while gender once denoted roles imposed on people with female bodies, it now refers to putting tits on men so they can act out feminine social roles. For boners. This is shit for women, but it makes autogynephiles feel less bad about their weird sexual kink, and it gives young girls a way scarier way to act out their angst than even cutting or anorexia, given that neither of those social contagions involved anyone else’s misery beyond their own.
Anyway, up until very recently, “the anti-gender movement” had a fairly fixed cast of characters: Vatican movers and shakers, Eastern European hard men, as well as American evangelicals and their neocolonial African prey. But since 2020-ish, this group of baddies has been expanded to scoop up all kinds of people who object to progressive overreach in the “sexual and reproductive rights” domain. It now includes people like me; gender critical feminists, non-compliant gays, even older castrati who think non-binary is nonsense. I have seen it also being used to describe anyone opposed to things like decriminalisation of prostitution, the mainstreaming of sexual fetish movements, or commercial surrogacy.
It gets bundled in with racism and anti-immigration protests, too. Someone even claimed that the anti-gender movement is a backlash against the devolution of power from countries to internationalbodies. First of all, I am a total EU-tard. Secondly, what the fuck does my extreme ick about men like Lia Thomas or Isla Bryson have to do with international diplomacy?
Do they think people jump from: “I read an article about a breastless female who made a hospital remove the word “mother” from it’s breastfeeding facility (a facility she would never have the joy of using) to: the UN security council has too much power, we need to return sovreignty to the states!
This mission has creeped.
Taiwan
So anyway, the article from New Bloom alleged that Taiwanese researchers had committed ethical and methodologial misconduct relating to a paper published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour.
What was the problem? The research paper had revealed that Taiwanese people are underwhelmed by the idea of self-ID, to put it very gently. This is a very bad outcome for genderists, obviously, and they attacked the survey the authors had used (claiming it was a biased sample). But the article was peer reviewed, the journal is pretty respected (as far as I am aware), and Jaclynn contacted the lead author who confirmed that she had not heard of any issues from the editors or reviewers.
The fact that the article was in some way sponsored by an American philanthropic organisation to spread the “anti-gender movement” narrative to Taiwan is very worrying but not surprising. Because about 2 years ago, when I first found out that researchers and activists were beginning to fold TERFs into the retro anti-gender actors trope, I started to see the phrase popping up in funding programmes.
Philanthropic organisations were starting to hand out cash for NGOs to study us, and the only handy conceptual nook they could find into which to shove us was this pre-existing conservative one (the main org involved in this is the Global Philanthropy Project). This is despite the fact that many of the very same women who are being called “anti-gender” were the same crewcut lesbians that proposed and championed “gender” in the first place. It’s such a crazy stretch, but how else can we be categorised without ruining the LGBTQ globo-troon brand?
The daily alerts for “anti-gender movement” are ramping up. The job ads looking for “anti-gender” consultants are also on the rise. And every time I get an alert for this phrase, I check if TERFs are included in the definition, or if it’s the old school holy rollers. Overwhelmingly, we are included.
The same trans derangements are replicated in rich countries all over the world, and Taiwan is no exception. Jaclynn very patiently gave me an overview of the local trans-TERF scene and told me that, despite popular opposition to self-ID (it’s a big sauna culture), Taiwanese people will not hear a single bad word spoken about Lin Yu Ting, the male Olympic FOMP (female on my passport) boxer who is very much a female woman with XX chromosomes, according to the very sensitive penninsular plebs. Very disappointing, obviously, but it’s clear that there are some things that are more important than being reasonable, and even more important than being considered part of the cultural elite: national identity (especially given - gulp - China)
Myself and Jaclynn talked about how it’s practically impossible to break down this tribal barrier and then we ended up getting into it about how homophobic the “third gender” cultural concept is, the mahu in Jaclynn’s home turf of Hawaii, GAMPs, and how (according to JJ) giving men everything their groin desires is never a good idea.
By the way, I tried to find out if gender was borrowed directly from sexology’s study of men who claimed to be women (gender identity theory certainly was), which is just too fucking horrific to think about.
What’s clear is that feminist heroine Kate Millett defo cited John Money and Robert Stoller in her very famous 1970 PhD dissertation, Sexual Politics (waaaay before Judith Butler types).
What, exactly, was the influence of the study of autogynephiles on feminist theorising of gender? Was it already a synonym for sex by the 70s, related as it is to feminine and masculine nouns in language? Please do let me know if you have any knowledge on the subject. Having avoided feminist theory and writings forever, I would love to have the TLDR. Time is (John) Money.
Check out Jaclynn’s writing here!
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Tribe over truth in Taiwan