Negotiating the Identity Wars

A Review of Four Books

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1. Jennifer Bilek (2024), Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from the 11^th Hour. 207 pp with List of Acronyms and Index.

2. Kajsa Ekis Ekman (2023), On the Meaning of Sex: Thoughts about the New Definition of Woman (trans Kristina Mäki) first published in 2021 in Swedish. 312 pp with References and Index.

3. Laura Lecuona (2024), Gender Identity: Lies and Dangers. 378 pp with Bibliography and Index.

4. Silvia Guerini (2023), From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg: A Critique of Gender Ideology. 158 pp. with footnotes.

The above four books were published recently by Spinifex Press, and provide feminist critical analyses of gender identity ideology.[1] This review aims to contribute to conversations that challenge the myth of gender identity, the overturning of women’s rights and the restrictions on free speech being imposed by gender ideologues. They examine the question ‘What is a woman?’ that has migrated out of the academic realms of theory to become a heated debate in LGBTQ+ and legislative politics and popular culture.

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But, firstly, allow me an apparent diversion, to consider claims about the intelligentsia identity made in an editorial of left-leaning Australian Arena journal last year. The global protests against the Gaza war centred in universities, including here in Australia, were celebrated in an editorial of the Arena journal, rather strangely to my mind, as a “renewal of collective self-recognition by intellectuals, students and other groups of the ‘intellectually trained’.[2] Those protests rightfully decry the continued injustice of the Gaza war being savagely carried out by Israel against Iran-backed Hamas and its Palestinian people. And the editorial explained that the focus of their protests is the hypocrisy and duplicity by authorities in the academy—once the home of critical thinking—while these same authorities hide their role in the military industrial complex that is feeding the Israeli war machine.

All well and good. However, what easily gets lost in this validation of intellectual identity and protest is the questionable morality of the killing machine of war itself, wielded by men in the names of both Jewish and Islamic identity and State. Protesters focus on Israeli persecution of the Palestinians as victims who are enduring calamitous suffering but are muted about the Islamic Jihad persecution of Israel in the Hamas assault from the Gaza Strip against Israel on 7 October, 2023, which killed more than 1,200, primarily Israeli citizens, and provoked Israel’s excessively brutal retaliation.

Admittedly, my aversion to male violence and war had led me to avoid reading details of the Gaza conflict. I couldn’t remain uninvolved while writing this review as I saw similarities and differences between the Gaza war and the new sex war of gender identity that need to be drawn out. The Gaza data are horrific and verify the death and suffering that has been more widespread and extreme for the Palestinians under the intense and protracted Israeli military strikes. The suffering caused by gender identity ideology is less visible, less immediate. Yet claims about transgender oppression have quickly gained legitimation in a new branch of clinical medicine and its gender clinics, in ‘gender inclusive’ legislative reforms and in revised curricula for youth education, for example. More muted has been the suffering caused by gender identity ideology and its agents, such as the long-term effects of gender medicine and surgery, loss of women’s spaces in sport, in public toilet facilities, in lesbian culture and the acts of discrimination and violence online and in physical confrontations.

Israel-Hamas War Wikipedia

The emotional passion fuelled by identity, religion, history, anger and a sense of injustice is familiar, echoing the deep societal divisions engendered by gender identity ideology in another escalating global conflict—a new form of the sex war in gender ideology. Although not formally recognised as a religious force, gender identity zealots have made sure to capture the State within their belief system and cause, using a human rights strategy of justice established in the Jogjakarta principles (2006, 2017) and a political strategy set out in the Denton’s document (2019). Women and others are being subjected to violent acts and language, character assassination, deplatforming, loss of livelihood, and so on.

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In this new form of the sex war, a stealth strategy mobilises gender identity propaganda to convince medical experts, governments and vulnerable people to enter the battlefield. Medical experts validate the concept, wield their weapons of surgery and chemical castration and carve out new specialisms; governments legalise the fictitious concepts of gender and oppressed gender minorities; and young people have their bodies and minds conscripted in martyrdom to the gender cause. Scientific truths are denied, the sexed body is devalued, and dissociation is promoted to claim a different sex. Beyond those clinical and legislative battle grounds lie even more far-reaching damaging political and cultural effects: in the loss of sex-based rights for lesbians and other women, for gay men and for countless misguided young people and other vulnerable groups swept up in this late modern madness of alienated identity.

The authors of the four books in this review expose the failure of gender warriors (who have sprung like Mao’s Red Guard out of tertiary institutions) to see their own illogical, contradictory theory and practices. Indeed, those ideologues are using online activism, legal and other regulatory systems to obscure the significant harm gender identity ideology is wreaking on their own class.

Many of those New Intelligentsia enjoying a “renewal of collective self-recognition,” as forces uncritically fighting the oppression of Palestine, are also proving resistant to critically analysing their own claims of oppression of new ’gender identity’ minority groups. And it’s not just intellectuals, but also those working in government, law, media, medicine and schools who have been seduced by the successes of the women’s and gay liberation movements, to become uncritical warriors for the rights of TQ+ and assorted other groups with newly manufactured identities. Making critical analysis even harder is the deep polarisation of debate leading to information overload, compassion fatigue and cynicism.

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All four authors join a growing number of left-leaning activists made politically homeless with the rise of gender ideology’s challenge to long-held understandings of the body, sex and gender. Spinifex Press has given them a voice. They have been marginalised for their courage to critically analyse the gender industry and gender ideology that fuels it, despite their long-held progressive political convictions. Two of the authors are well-known gender critical feminist activists located in North America (the US and Mexico) while the other two are in Europe (Italy and Sweden). I share their overall sex realist positions: maintaining the necessity of biological sex as a defining characteristic of what it means to belong to the sex class of humans. Sex has been and continues to be a vital socio-economic and political tool for defending the rights of women and girls to be freed from unequal power relations in patriarchy.

1 Those of us living in the English-speaking world are possibly most familiar with Bilek’s name. Jennifer Bilek lives in New York City and describes herself as anartist, activist, and investigative journalist. The chapters in her book have been drawn from her blog (The 11^th Hour); she also has a Substack newsletter. Bilek has been pilloried and ‘deplatformed’ for airing her sex realist views that expose the gender industry—how it is funded, who benefits and how it aims to normalise disassociation from sexed reality to pave the way into a transhuman future. She publishes prolifically in outlets outside what she calls ‘Big Media,’ over a wide political spectrum and in documentaries and WDI (Women’s Declaration International) webinars.

Bilek’s main theme is a critique of the role of corporations and certain rich white men within a capitalist system in the production and promotion of disembodied ‘manufactured sexes’ in service to a transhuman propaganda agenda. She is scathingly critical of the ‘new, new, liberal left,’ an ‘unrecognizable left,’ and a ‘hijacked new LGBT movement,’ that foolishly has ‘climbed into bed’ with the Big Banks, Big Pharma and Big Tech while at the same time loudly protesting about human rights; a ‘glaring inconsistency of human rights for corporate profiteering off young adults’ and children’s bodies.’ (p. 44)

2 Silvia Guerini is an Italian feminist who is described on the Spinifex website as a ‘radical ecologist of Resistenze al Nanomondo, editor of the newspaper L’Urlo della Terra, and one of the founders of FINAARGIT (International Feminist Network Against All Artificial Reproduction, Gender Ideology and Transhumanism).’ Guerini is ‘one of the founders of the Coalizione Contro Ogni Nocivata (Coalition Against Every Harm), which launched a mobilisation campaign against the entry of GMOs into Europe and later a campaign against nanotechnologies.’ Her previous books have been published in Italian and this, her most recent and the first translated into English, brings this investigative journalist and radical activist to a wider audience.

Guerini acknowledges the influence of Bilek as well as Janice Raymond in the development of her ideas, concluding with a chapter on ‘the new transhumanism and posthuman humanity.’ Her overall theme is large for a small book (in page number and size), bringing together new reproductive technologies, genetic engineering and surrogate motherhood to meet at the ‘last bioethical barrier to be yielded to, so-called, ”transhumanist” demand’ (p. 151).

3 Ekman is a Swedish journalist, activist and Marxist feminist who has been sacked for her views on sex and gender. She has written books on women’s rights (including Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self), as well as on capitalism and economics. She has been published on Swedish language platforms; in the English language in Savage Minds (now a Substack that provides ‘investigative reporting and social commentary on public culture, the arts, science, and politics’) and interviewed by Canadian, Megan Murphy on her Feminist Current podcast.

In 40 chapters spread over three parts, Ekman firstly describes how ‘a new theory on sex (has) become hegemonic and commonplace in a short period of time,’ then develops her in-depth analysis of gender identity theory, to finish by examining its expression in an ideology and its consequences (p. 5). Her book opens with examples of claims about how we are entering a new ‘feminist utopia,’ a view shared by the Swedish Left Party in rejecting the established binary model of sex and expanding what it means to be human, while using words like ‘tolerance’ and ‘acceptance of diversity’ (pp. 10-11). You can find similar claims by members of the Greens and Labor in Australia, were I live. An initial discussion by Ekman of the weaknesses of gender identity ideology leads us in a deep dive into her extensive critique for the rest of the book. Ekman concludes with her Marxist feminist assertion that ‘a dialectical materialist approach, with terms like base and superstructure in its toolbox, is able to see how gender identity theory is emerging as the superstructure of contemporary patriarchal sexuality.’ With clarity of insight and language, she ends with: ‘Gender identity theory has become hegemonic precisely because it reflects the shifting baselines of male supremacy. The hard side: male domination of politics, sports, sexuality, public space and online debate, is perpetuated, while any possible resistance to this posed by the women’s movement is disarmed by the dissolution of the category woman. Males are perpetuated, females dissolved’ (p. 308).

4 Laura Lecuona is a Mexican philosopher, an editor and translator in the fields of philosophy and social sciences. She is a feminist activist and writer who combines regular lectures with her activism as a member of a group against violence against women that she has belonged to since her youth. As well, she founded Feministas Mexicanas contra Vientres de Alquiler (Femmva), a grassroots organisation against surrogacyand is also the Mexico country contact for Women’s Declaration International (WDI).

Lecuona’s book was ‘born out of a commitment to feminism and to freedom of speech’ (p. 1) and aims ‘to show the big picture, to provide information and evidence, and to bring some order and clarity to discussions where confusion, personal attacks and lack of sobriety reign supreme’ (p. 7). She manages to do this well in only 6 chapters. Like Ekman, she offers us an evidence-based analysis. She concludes with an appeal to feminists that ‘the reality of transgenderism is very different from the progressive façade that its propagandists show us. … Feminism has rarely faced such a brutal onslaught, and never have so many women who consider themselves feminists had such a decisive role in the war against themselves. Women’s rights are on the line and so is the freedom to come together as a movement to watch over those rights and to speak out in their defence’ (pp. 333-334).

I commend these four books as ‘must reads’ for greater understanding from a wider radical feminist perspective.

Endnotes

[1] I use the term ‘gender identity ideology’ in terms of a system of ideas that supports the recently invented concept of ‘gender identity’, one that has never been explained satisfactorily without circular argument and weak evidence.

[2] Rundle, G, 2024, ‘The responsibility of the New Intellectuals,’ Arena Quarterly, Winter, No. 18, p. 4, https://arena.org.au/issue-18-reconstituting-politics/.