We Just Can’t Shut Up About Gender: A Review of Gender Identity: Lies and Dangers, by Laura Lecuona

Review by WLRN Staff Writer, aurora linnea

First, a confession: I don’t want to talk about gender anymore. 

There is a part of me that can’t compute how acknowledging the differences, biological and political, between female and male human beings could become my most controversial position. Another part is aghast that I should have to explain such self-evident realities to my adult peers. And the three-pound lump of tissue that is my brain cramps at the prospect of rehashing the same stock talking points: sex is a biological fact while gender is patriarchal fiction; the gender system is a hierarchy, not a binary; persons taking on a “gender identity” affiliate themselves with sexist stereotypes, not any innate bodily reality; it is wrong to perform medical experiments on children in the service of “congruence” with regressive cultural ideals; males are not female and remain members of the dominant sex class regardless of how they “identify,” continuing to pose the very same very real threats to women and girls as do their more straightforward (or less deluded) brothers. 

Talking about gender has grown maddening, in all senses of the word. How grueling, to confront the mindlessness and carelessness people stoop to in order to conform, toe the line, go along to get along. And how boring, the sound of my own voice as I repeat myself. I am bored, too, of people’s cowardice or dishonesty or indifference; I am bored of my own disillusionment, my own anger. Lately, when gender comes up in conversation, I’ve found myself thinking, do I seriously have to go into this again? Can I even stomach it?

Like me, Laura Lecuona, a philosopher, editor, and translator, and one of the first women in Mexico to publicly oppose transgenderism, is keen to stop talking about gender. In fact, she devotes the opening chapter of her book, Gender Identity: Lies and Dangers, published in February by Spinifex Press, to laying out the case for why we should drop “gender” from our feminist lexicon altogether. Poorly defined and deliberately vague, with its origins in misogynist sexology and its assimilation into mainstream discourse owed largely to its power to obfuscate, “gender” has been nothing but trouble. Lecuona’s history of the term is revealing, as she tracks “gender” from the pens of sexologists like John Money through to its institutionalization as internationally sanctioned newspeak, courtesy of the United Nations in the 1990s. Getting its claws into feminism first by way of academia, where female scholars vied for legitimacy in their fraternity of choice by adopting “gender” to shake off the stigmatizing aura of “sex” and “women,” the term quickly became endemic, running rampant like some ruinous brain-eating parasite. 

Thus “women’s studies” turned into “gender studies”; the “feminist perspective” was converted into a “gendered lens”; “sex roles” became “gender roles,” suddenly playful and performative rather than oppressive. “Male violence against women” was euphemized into “gender-based violence”—and now we just can’t tell anymore who’s raping and killing who! The immaterial, metaphysical essence today termed “gender identity” became synonymous with, then superseded, the material reality of sex in feminist analysis and then in law and public policy, such that the protections instated to correct for male dominion’s more brazen manifestations came to benefit any man claiming to be a member of the female “gender.” And because “female” had become but one gender option among many, free to be tried on by men in the construction of their sacrosanct selfhoods, women went “from being an objective material reality to something that occurs subjectively in people’s minds,” as Lecuona notes. Just like that, patriarchy as a political system – one that propels men to the upper echelons while holding women firmly pinned beneath the proverbial boot – is lost to pink- and blue-tinged mists, and females as political subjects are rendered legally invisible and unspeakable. Put bluntly, “gender” makes feminism impossible. 

To bring on the return to a clear-eyed view of the status quo, Lecuona advises that we as feminists quit talking about “gender.” Instead, we’d do well to reacquaint ourselves with the reality-based terminology of our foresisters: sex and sexism, sex roles and sex class, sexist stereotypes, sexual equality, male supremacy and female subordination. 

Although Lecuona makes a watertight case for an immediate end to all “gender” chatter, she is by no means letting those of us tired of the topic off the hook. Instead, the next 300+ pages of Gender Identity: Lies and Dangers present a dauntingly comprehensive itemization of the countless reasons why we must go on speaking out against transgenderism, however delighted we might be to talk about something – anything! – else. She begins by reviewing the questionable ideological foundations and guiding illogic of the transgenderist dogma, casting light on the snarl of self-contradicting incoherent inconsistencies that squirms at its core, like a black hole into which all common sense vanishes. There is, for example, the paradox of proclaiming a progressive yen to “blur” the “gender binary” while at the same time upholding a conservative pink-and-blue vision of “gender expression.” According to this transgenderist vision, even a small child’s “gender identity” can be deduced by whether or not they wish to don a tiara. Should the child prance and pose with the tiara poised sparkling atop its head, clearly that child is a girl. Alternatively, if the child rebuffs the aforementioned tiara, that child must be a boy. (Somehow I am less than edified to learn that hair accessories are granted the same mystical divinatory power by Mexican gender ideologues as they are by their colleagues in the United States). 

Similarly bewildering is the recent transgenderist vogue for “depathologization,” an apparent departure from what Lecuona classifies as the “medical-sexological model” of transgenderism. By this model, an individual’s desire to change sex is recognized as a deviation from good health and diagnosable as “gender dysphoria,” indicating the need for treatment through medical interventions (e.g., synthetic hormones, cosmetic surgery). Today, trans activists are miffed at being marked by a medical diagnosis. No doubt they are special and rare and exquisite and revolutionary, but in no way are they strange, nor are they sick, they tell us, and how appalling that they be stigmatized by the implication that there’s anything “wrong” with being trans. Yet the demand for depathologization goes hand-in-hand with what would seem to be rather medical-sexological lobbying for supposedly life-saving, gender-affirming “healthcare.” In particular, children singled out as “trans” for their failure to conform to sexist stereotypes are purported to require medical treatment. But if nothing at all is “wrong” with these children, if they’re perfectly wonderful just as they are – which, as Lecuona reminds readers, radical feminists consider them to be – then why should they be drugged and/or surgically altered? If there’s no pathology to treat, why set children up as lifelong wards of the medical-industrial complex? 

To illustrate further this absurd “have your cake and eat it too” paradox, Lecuona highlights the trans activist backlash against author Rachael Rooney’s 2019 picture book, My Body Is Me. On account of its imagery of cheerful young people rejecting sexist stereotypes without feeling any urge to seek medical attention, and its counsel that “You’re born in your body, you don’t have a spare, so love it, hug it, treat it with care,” Rooney’s book was attacked as a transphobic polemic, “terrorist propaganda” scrawled by a heartless fiend driven mad by her “hateful world view.” To the transgenderist mind, the kind and loving approach is not to encourage children to accept the organic animal bodies they are by nature, but instead to inform them that their bodies are mismatched with their brains because “birth fairies” got it twisted when whispering into the ear of the obstetrician tasked with “assigning” the children’s sex. Such, at least, is the plot of an “educational resource” distributed by the Mexican gender ideology organization Chrysalis, a book entitled La Gran Equivocion, or The Big Mistake. To the transgenderist mind, then, love is to tell a child she’s a mistake, but supporting boys and girls to play as they please, without reference to sexist prescriptions, is hateful, if not downright savagery. 

The chapters that follow exhaustively enumerate transgenderism’s harms: to women and girls; to the feminist movement; to children confused by the trickle-down teachings of delusional adults as well as children subject to “affirmation” via medical experimentation; to freedom of speech and democracy. None of these harms will be new to readers whose gaze has already been trained to the pastel candy-striped wrecking ball that has been crashing its way through patriarchal industrial civilization for over a decade now. But Lecuona’s inclusion of examples from her native Mexico livens up the grim inventory of offenses, offering less treaded inroads into the dark realm of transgenderism. To give but one example, she writes of a snafu in Oaxaca wherein 17 men claimed government seats reserved for women by posing as “trans.” The theft was denounced by representatives of an indigenous Zapotec “third gender” comprised of feminized men known as “muxes.” The muxe men argued that the other men disingenuously asserted “trans identity” for personal political gain, and because it is our bad luck to live in a Man’s World, the Mexican state took seriously their cries of injustice. The “fake trans” candidates were summarily suspended, and electoral law was amended to include the shiny new crime of “gender identity usurpation.” 

Women, of course, are in no position to lodge analogous complaints against men professing trans-womanhood, because a man is a woman if he says he is: trans women are women. As if the point needed any further driving home, when a similar fraud occurred in Tlaxcala in 2021, the president of Mexico’s National Institute for Women bemoaned that the imposters were stealing “spaces that belong to trans women” and “women in their broadest diversity.” Predictably, females per se were not mentioned. As Lecuona observes, “there can be real trans and fake trans,” but there cannot be “real women and fake women.” By transgenderist dictate, men are the rightful owners of womanhood, so only men can be defrauded. 

The double standard evident in the “gender identity usurpation” bungle exposes the truth behind the transgenderist movement’s incredible ability to attain massive institutional and public support in so little time. Where men are in power, men are the arbiters of social reality: what men say is taken for fact; men possess the capital, the connections, and the confidence to catapult their interests to the top of the political agenda; and people in general – women most of all – are socialized to sympathize with men, reflexively allying themselves with the male master class for love or money or simple survival. To paraphrase Sonia Johnson, we’ve been trained to keep our eyes on the guys. Many women I speak with about gender report being mystified by the transgenderist cultural coup. They simply don’t understand how it could have happened. But while there’s certainly cause for alarm, I see little reason to be confused. Transgenderism is a men’s movement in a male-dominated society: it was destined to succeed. 

For those dissatisfied with the “blame patriarchy” theory of our current predicament, Lecuona offers several supplementary explanations. Her analysis of collective submission to gender identity ideology is informed by an assessment of humanity that is at once cynical and strangely generous. Lecuona presumes that most people who go along with the transgenderist charade are basically well-meaning. Unfortunately, however, they are also inclined to path-of-least-resistance conformism, unpracticed in critical thinking, petrified of conflict, lazy, and self-serving, as people in general are apt to be. Lecuona writes, “There is no need to invent conspiracies. Just follow the money…and remember also that a very common motive is selfishness.” With this, Lecuona manages to humanize the “opposition” without absolving them of their accountability in transgenderism’s harms, reminding us that the current crisis is no case study in human evil, but rather in the spectacular, devastating scope of human compliance. 

This even-tempered clarity, so characteristic of Lecuona’s writing, is what makes Gender Identity: Lies and Dangers an ideal book for introducing the uninitiated and under-informed to the radical feminist critique of transgenderism. With its unfussy but incisive analysis and thorough record of the movement’s real-world consequences, it is difficult to imagine any but the most doctrinaire readers setting Lecuona’s book down without at least a handful of nagging questions planted in their minds. Yet I worry that it may have trouble finding its way into the right hands. For feminists already off the fence and in the trenches, Gender Identity: Lies and Dangers is unlikely to do the work for which it is best suited: in feminist hands alone, passed between readers like you and I, the book will not change minds. To be sure that it does, then, we will have to take it upon ourselves to share it with ambivalent acquaintances, or donate it to our local libraries, or use it to arm ourselves for doing precisely that thing I began this review by declaring I’d rather not do anymore: talk about gender. 

Talking about gender as loudly and as often as we can bear to is no less necessary today than it has ever been, even if we’ve grown weary of it. Even if we feel like we’re repeating the same things over and over, those same things still need to be said. Because, as Lecuona writes, if those of us who recognize transgenderism for the rank patriarchal subterfuge that it is slouch away into passive silence, the “onslaught of gender identity militancy against the rights of women and girls” will continue. If we shut up about it, an already awful situation can only deteriorate.  

And, indeed, Lecuona gives us reason to hope that talking back to the transgenderists may be an even more potent remedy than we realize. “For transgenderism, information and dissidence are dangerous in more than one sense. Its theoretical basis is fragile and better not subjected to [counterargument] … But there is a deeper and more serious implication, which explains its passionate commitment to the gagging of opponents,” she writes. The men leading this movement mandate that we concede to, participate in, and endorse their fantasies because the selfhoods they’ve manufactured for themselves parch and wither when not nursed by a steady drip of external validation. “[An] identity that is acquired with a performative speech act crumbles with speech acts that challenge it.” A man can only become a woman by saying he’s one if everyone else consents to echo his fraudulent claim back to him. In a sense, “trans women are women” not because they say they are, but because we agree with them. Here, then, is where we begin, as feminists, when talking about gender. We pluck men’s words out from our mouths, never making men’s lies our own. When pressed to affirm, we vehemently disagree. That spade in front of us, so glaringly, so unmistakably a spade? We name it for what it is. We call a spade a spade. 

Thank you to Spinifex for kindly providing a copy of Gender Identity: Lies and Dangers for this review. 

Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North American colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.