The United States of Queer

You are here. You are Queer. Get over it.

In a Tweet this morning, Megyn Kelly responded to a piece in The Wrap claiming she’d gone on a “transphobic tirade” over Dylan Mulvaney’s partnership with Bud Light. Writes The Wrap’s Benjamin Lindsay, “Kelly intentionally misgendered Mulvaney and ridiculed the company’s ‘embrace of wokeness’” — which it appears is the extent of both Kelly’s “transphobia” and its supposed “tirade.”

Answers Kelly:

Call me whatever names you want. I am speaking the truth. And neither I nor the millions of other women (and men) who believe in biology/reality/fairness will be dissuaded by your attempts to marginalize us with words like “transphobic.”

To many, Kelly’s response will seem perfectly appropriate, just as Lindsay’s claim that Kelly — speaking with Michael Knowles — had engaged in some sort of tirade against the trans community will seem both hyperbolic and hysterical to the vast majority of those who read past the headline. Kelly’s rhetorical crime, Lindsay suggests, is in identifying Mulvaney’s biological sex over his preferred costume, then having the audacity to critique his performance as a “mockery of womanhood and girlhood.” And yet, Kelly — whether she knows it or not — is quite precise in her criticism. To the Queer Activist community, all of sex and sexuality is performativity; there is no sex binary; there is no self, as we’ve been conditioned to see it; you are but a construction of the various power discourses that write “you” into being and that you then complete by performing in concert with their various assumptions; and your job as a permanent cultural critic and Social Justice activist is “to queer” all that appears normal or scientifically irrefutable. You are here to problematize. To blur all boundaries. To fight back against the “fictions” of sex and gender as useful categories. You are all Judith Butler now.

From the perspective of Queer Theory, when Kelly claims to be “speaking the truth,” the very act she lays claim to is an affront to the Queer activist, who doesn’t believe in truth in any important way. What we may call “reality” is to the Theorist, to the extent it is valuative, only a collection of discourses always in conflict. The meta-narratives — the dominant discourses that inform us culturally as we are situated — are where the real power resides: they provide the frames of reference we live inside, and that we are socialized into accepting are the universal truths that determine our ways of knowing.

One of these phallogocentric — male-created and maintained, by way of male privilege and power — meta-narratives is, under the framework of western Enlightenment thinking, “Science,” which must itself be constantly “problematized.” It is science that informs us that humans exist within a sexual binary, with few and rare genetic anomalies. To the Queer theorist, though — and by extension, the Queer activist — this binary must be rejected entirely, because it is nothing more than a white male creation meant to maintain the subjugation of those who exist outside the binary’s demands. Thus, no one is “male” or “female,” just as no one is “gay” or “straight”, but rather on a spectrum, with gayness and straightness in all of us to varying degrees. We are each Schrödinger's Faggot, perpetually and potentially both in and out of the closet.

When you begin to pressure Queer Theory, it falls apart — we as a species are procreative, and that’s not some crying, umbilical-tethered discourse that as the mechanical product of copulation comes gliding into the world glistening of afterbirth — but this is not at all a concern of Queer Theory. Because it exists solely to disrupt and problematize the “normal” and break down categories until every Bacchanalian urge can be intellectually justified as the mere rejection of some arbitrary and unfair norm, Queer Theory rejects attempts to critique it from outside its own intentionally unstable parameters. The Center is not required to hold.

Why any of this is important is because, while Queer Theory would reject its own supremacy as a new meta-narrative it would be tasked with tearing down — like much of Postmodern theory, it bears the fruits of its own destruction, because of course it does, it’s French— its mainstreaming into our social and intellectual spheres is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. It is ascendant. And because it is a product of power that recognizes power as the only legitimate social force, as it moves from the realm of the theoretical into the realm of the applied — generally attached to intersectionality, which grew out of the Critical Race paradigm but has since quickly spread, a kind of cultural kudzu killing off the individual as it infests western spaces — it is explicitly dangerous to a country founded on Enlightenment ideals, and governed through Enlightenment principles.

Even more troubling is that Queer Theory’s applied activist iteration is being adopted by the Democratic Party as part of its evolving political platform. And this means that one of the two major political parties in this country has explicitly rejected classical liberalism, rejected the idea of universal truths, rejected the notion of individuality, rejected the idea of race neutrality, rejected the possibility of assimilation, and rejected the epistemological core of western Enlightenment. That is, it is explicitly leftist and Marxian in its foundational belief in the oppressor / oppressed paradigm, which will necessarily begin being reflected in the social, political, cultural, and legal output of its intellectuals and activists. It is, in a very real and specific sense, alien and anti-American. To allow it purchase is to surrender the host body politic to the cancer that has invaded it.

The single saving grace of Queer Theory’s most adamant adepts is that, because they reject science as anything other than a privileged male discourse, what we would call the classically liberal — albeit entirely misguided — attempt to promote the idea that one is “born trans,” eg., is met with great hostility. Attempts by certain trans activists, modeling the strategy of the gay rights movement, to map “trans” to things like “brain sex” have been met both with rigorous scientific criticism using traditional empirical observation, and with intense push-back from the Queer theorists who would argue that sexual identity cannot be mapped to a particular discourse — and that were it to become so, the potential for eugenics to kill it off arises, and Margaret Sanger’s ghost dances a fiery jig on its Queer bones.

Why this matters is because once “trans” is accepted as an immutable biological trait that can legally override natal sex, as Manhattan Institute Fellow Leor Sapir has noted, “in the American civil rights tradition, if you can convince a judge that being transgender is like being black, then you can tap into this entire body of judicial precedent and civil rights laws that immediately applies and gives you all the policies you want.”

And that would effectively end sex-segregated spaces as a matter of law. Which, it follows, would render the sexual binary no longer materially useful.

As this Theory finds its way into western law and science — usually as a parasitic rider — its absurdity becomes ever more apparent. And yet its influence continues to grow. It is Maoism for the American aesthetic.

The classical liberal system upon which our governing experiment rests is an historical anomaly. Cultural Marxism, as it gains its foothold in western social and legal spaces, is persistent in its aims to return us to a feudal state, a caste hierarchy, the ruler and the ruled. We’ve seen this manifesting more and more recently in unequal application of law; in absurdist rites in traditional medical care; in the exponential growth and power of identity politics as an illiberal force used to erect tyrannical control over speech and information. It’s a hierarchical inversion independent of any ties to the world as it is; it depends solely on power and discourse, and on the will to use those for uninvited buggery, forever and ever, amen.

The irony of a theoretical framework that claims to be fighting oppression but which leads inevitably to such a condition for the mass of humanity, shouldn’t be lost on us.

And yet here we are.

To defeat this type of assault on our epistemology, which is captured both in our founding and then projected in our framing, we must reject its core premises: that there is no such thing as the individual; and that to categorize is to engage in a type of violence.

Too many on the “right” have already accepted the former, as they rush toward white identitarianism or Christian nationalism, both of which are forms of collectivism — though a collectivism that favors their specific interests.

That’s both a strategic and an epistemological mistake, in my view.

While it is perfectly fine to critique social or cultural standards, which can change over time, it is something else entirely to use their potential impermanence to invalidate their usefulness and, indeed, their potential righteousness.

The Democratic Party is embracing disruption and chaos as a guiding philosophical principle. And this fact needs to be continuously exposed. We must repeatedly shout our objections to their aims.

These aren’t your grandparents’ Democrats.

These are the products of an educational apparatus that was forged in the 60s and has worked ever since to take control of a US political party. Their work is almost done. And yet we’re just now seeming to notice.

The libertarian impulse that promotes such self-important and vacuous bromides as “Drag Queen Story Hour is a blessing of liberty” doesn’t, as some argue, expose the fatal flaw in classical liberalism, which believes in ordered liberty, and does not reject the idea of social standards. Instead, it is the very universality inherent to the classical liberal worldview — which is now indistinguishable from what today is called “conservative” and even “far right” — that provides the philosophical armor against relentless subjectivity and relativism.

Don’t surrender it. Because beyond it is the abyss.

*****

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