STEEL MANNING QUEER THEORY

Binary Thinking on Steroids - The Insane Stupidity of Anti-Essentialism (Part 6)

HEY NEVERMORONS,

More than a year ago, I began a series of critiques of post-modernism called The Insane Stupidity of Anti-Essentialism.

I believe that this series, which has been a collaboration between myself and Paul Cudenec, is the most thorough metaphysical anarchist critique of postmodernism which has appeared to date. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

That series began as a way of obliquely criticize trans ideology, which back in 2022 I was reluctant to directly attack.

Along the way somewhere, some woke dipshits called Nevermore out for transphobia, at which point I decided to take the gloves off and say “I am whatever you say I am, bitches”.

The fifth instalment of THE INSANE STUPIDITY OF ANTI-ESSENTIALISM admitted that my critiques of postmodernism were intended as critiques of trans ideology.

After posting six essays detailing everything that is wrong with trans ideology, moral relativism, postmodernism, and gender theory, I still have more to say.

This time, I will give queer theory fair play. I recently came across an interesting essay by a Substacker by the name of Ceri Black, in which she gives a “steel man” interpretation of queer theory.

This is a worthy endeavour, and I applaud Ceri Black for her efforts. Most critics of trans ideology have a hard time getting past a default position of either a) “these people are insane”, b) “these people are idiots”, or c) some combination of positions a and b.

If you want to give queer theory a fair hearing, this is a good place to start.

Queer Theory

Ceri explains:

In essence, queer theory holds that Western thought is based around binaries – black and white, night and day, men and women, straight and gay. One side of the binary is privileged, the other devalued. These apparently fundamental, essential binary categories are created through performance. You don’t identify somebody as a man because you have performed a genital inspection. You identify them as a man because they are downing a keg of beer at a party whilst their friends shout “chug.” Even the act of holding up a baby and saying “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl” is performative. Butler thinks that this utterance speaks a gendered subject into being, in the same way that “I hereby pronounce you man and wife” speaks a marriage into being.

For the record, I am on board with the idea that gender is performative - anyone that has seen how macho hockey bros behave in front of their teammates versus how they behave when they’re at grandma’s house knows that. Society has certain expectations of how men should behave and we all try to live up to that. From a male perspective, the expectations appear to be much less rigorous for women, but I understand that women feel a ton of social pressure to meet certain societal standards. Why they think this is a uniquely female problem is beyond me, but that’s a subject for another day.

Back to Ceri Black:

The binary categories are policed in a variety of ways. This can be literal policing (through laws that forbid homosexuality, for example). The binary can also be policed at other levels. For example, a teenage magazine that asks teenage girls “are you ready yet” isn’t asking a neutral question. The “yet” indicates that the reader will, at some point, be ready. The question is often put in the context of “really” having sex vs “messing around,” which privileges specifically penis in vagina sex, and devalues all other types. The question isn’t “what are you ready for,” but “are you ready for this specific act of penis in vagina sex.” A different question might be, “how can you say no to sex in a forthright way.” The “are you ready yet” question does not describe experience; it creates it, and polices girls’ experience as it does so.

This is where queer theory begins to lose me, because the implication is that categories have some kind of mystical power to oppress people, and that simply isn’t true. Categories are concepts that exist in people’s minds. Political oppression doesn’t occur in the realm of the imagination. Political oppression occurs in the realm of material reality, especially where the decisions of individuals are constrained by institutions.

I don’t deny that people feel oppressed by their own minds, by the way - I myself struggled with mental illness and self-hatred for many years. But let’s be clear - there is a major difference between feeling oppressed and actually being oppressed. The former problem calls for a psychological or spiritual solution, whereas the latter calls for a political solution. If political activism is seen as a way of publicly raging against one’s inner demons, good things are unlikely to result.

One thing is that is evidently true is that many people do feel:

1. Uncomfortable in their own bodies

2. Oppressed by society’s expectations of them

3. Deeply unhappy

4. Desirous of a way to escape reality

This brings us to the Queer Epiphany, the joyful transgression of social boundaries.

QUEER EPIPHANIES

Queer theory is particularly interested in moments that break through this policing, and “queer” the binary. For example, in Jane Eyre, when she says “I am not a bird and no net ensnares me” she asserts her independence – but in that same moment throws herself into abject penury. She breaks out of her role as a woman, a dependent, and asserts herself, refusing male control over her, thus breaking social taboos around sex and class, but she also reinforces her belief in the prevailing social and Christian mores, that bigamy is wrong, and that she will not be a mistress. She both breaks through social norms, and in the same moment reinforces them, that both asserts her independence, and destroys it. It’s a very “queer theory” moment.

To be honest, I haven’t read Jane Eyre, but I have a feeling that this queer epiphany is a moment where a woman has a break through and is able to imagine herself as a free being for the first time in her life. It sounds like quite a powerful moment, and it seems like it has quite a bit to do with gender.

Queer theory thus equates transcending limitations as freedom itself, the triumph of the individual over society dragging them down. That’s the appeal of trans ideology.

YES, BUT…

Some people say “yes but hold on” at this point, because all this gender stuff is fine, of course people “perform” gender, but there are still men and women. Some things are still black and some white. There are male and female bodies under the performance. Jane Eyre might break society’s expectations on her as a woman, but they are not placed there because of her performance of gender, but because of her biological sex.

If we are to understand Jane Eyre’s transcendent feeling of her selfhood as existing in and of itself, beyond the ability of the male imagination to contain it, we would have to conclude that what she was experiencing was, in a sense, beyond gender. She is experiencing herself as an individual defined autonomously, rather than judged in relation to a feminine ideal she previously judged herself against.

This sounds to me very much like enlightenment, which is to say total cognitive freedom. It sounds profound. But what does it have to do with biology? Perhaps gender roles are socially determined, but some people have dicks and others don’t. So what is the point of deconstructing how reality is socially constructed if that doesn’t change that reality?

There are two answers to this in queer theory. The first is that biology is complicated – there are “intersex” people, for example, and people who “pass” as the opposite sex. This is easiest to defeat; the existence of trans and intersex people does not mean that there is a third sex or that the binary is non-existent or invalid; everybody is still male or female. This is the most used one by proponents of trans ideology - perhaps because it is most easily understood. I doubt many people have really got to grips with the second one - which is both more central to queer theory understandings of the world, and harder to defeat.

The second queer theory contention is this: when you say “look at THIS thing which makes biological sex real” you are, essentially, pointing at the thing. You are performing it. You are producing more text that refers to it. You are not, in fact, inserting a body into an argument, but instead, you are using the discourse of bodies and biological sex to wield power and reinforce the binary. You are, in fact, yourself, in the very moment that you point to a physical body, performing the gendered binary and enforcing power through discourse.

This sounds counter intuitive. it also sounds very abstract and pretentious. It isn’t the kind of theory you would develop, let’s say, between changing a nappy and comforting a crying toddler. Most people really believe in a material reality somehow underneath language. If you don’t believe in the material reality of bodies, then try going without water or oxygen, or even, let’s say, dealing with a serious disability, or giving birth. It was much easier to believe in queer theory before I gave birth.

At this point, Ceri Black reveals that she is definitely not a proponent of trans ideology. She is merely trying to understand it.

I’m trying to give a fair run to queer theory, to steel man it, so let’s try a thought experiment that illustrates this point about language not simply describing the world, but creating it. That there isn’t any way to experience the world, except in the chunks that language cuts it into. Wherever you are, look around you. You might see a phone, a computer, a bed, a chair, a window if you’re lucky. You know what they are. You have concepts for all of the things in your field of vision. You know what they are for. Now, instead of cutting up your field of vision into recognised objects, try to see it simply as a visual field of colour and light. Experience it the way that somebody who doesn’t know what cricket is would experience a test match. Experience it the way that a baby might experience it, on first opening its eyes. You will not be able to, unless you are an experienced meditator, and even then, only for short periods. But the effort itself will help you understand the extent through which we understand the world through language - there is no underlying structure to reality as we perceive it, until it is mediated through language.

Here is where queer theory opens up on some very real and interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between language and reality. Language does not merely describe reality - it also creates it. There are infinite ways to slice reality up in different ways. But let’s not forget that language doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Words are ways of communicating ideas, and communication has a purpose. Biologically, human communication can be seen as an adaptation that increases our odds of survival.

I’m all for reimagining gender and gender roles… but there are certain things that don’t go away when you stop believing in them. Biological sex is one of them.

Black continues:

Queer theory also argues that there is no getting “outside language” to experience the world as it is. We can only know the world as mediated and carved up through text. Any attempt to understand the world as having a material reality, outside of text, is doomed to failure. There is always and everywhere only language and performance, binaries and blurring of boundaries. Any attempt to deny this is, itself, an attempt to wield power, and create reality in discourse. In the moment you deny it the most, in that very moment, you are reinforcing it the hardest.

This is where queer theory crosses the lines into pure, unadulterated nonsense, because it assumes that reality is something created by our minds, rather than something we must adapt ourselves to. Basically, queer theory boils down to solipsism. It’s bunk.

It’s frustrating that this is the current state of discourse in academia, because people have known for a long time that reality is real.

As Claude Levi-Strauss put it in Myth and Meaning (1978):

There was in philosophy from the time of the Greeks to the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century - and there still is to some extent - a tremendous discussion about the origin of mathematical ideas - the idea of the line, the idea of the circle, the idea of the triangle. There were, in the main, two classical theories: one of the mind as a tabula rasa, with nothing in it in the beginning; everything comes to it from experience. It is from seeing a lot of round objects, none of which were perfectly round, that we are able nevertheless to abstract the idea of the circle. The second classical theory goes back to Plato, who claimed that such ideas of the circle, of the triangle, of the line, are perfect, innate in the mind, and it is because they are given to the mind that we are able to project them, so to speak, on reality, although reality never offers us a perfect circle or a perfect triangle.

Now, contemporary researchers on the neurophysiology of vision teach us that the nervous cells in the retina and the other apparatus behind the retina are specialized: some cells are sensitive only to straight direction, in the vertical sense, others in the horizontal, others in the oblique, some of them to the relationship between the background and the central figures, and the like.

So… this whole problem of experience versus mind seems to have a solution in the structure of the nervous system, not in the structure of the mind or in experience, but somewhere between mind and experience in the way our nervous system is built and in the way it mediates between mind and experience.

In other words, no matter your metaphysical perspective, individuals do have to adapt themselves to both material reality and social reality, which emerges as a result of acquiring language skills. The former is immutable and inescapable on this plane of existence, but the latter is quite mutable, and depends greatly on language, culture, and context.

This mutability is the kernel of truth upon which queer theory is built. Critics of queer theory would do well to note that the queer theorists are absolutely right on this point.

If we are to offer an actually-helpful anarchist response to queer theory, it would likely point out that the cultural contexts of colonized peoples are downstream from the ideology of their conquerors. Many of our social institutions, including many gender roles, were not voluntarily chosen by free people, but imposed by hostile powers.

Our social reality reflects our socioeconomic and political reality, which is that we are ruled by ultra-rich psychopaths who oversee a vast economic system whose purpose is to extract maximum value from the Earth and its people.

People who wish to be free in this world place themselves in opposition not only to the ruling class, but also many social institutions produced by a class society in which social reality is constructed according to the wishes of the ruling class.

If you don’t understand that civilization is a class war waged by the rich on the poor, you don’t understand politics.

The rich decide what will be taught in schools, what is promoted through the mainstream media, and so on. We live in a world that is largely of their making. We are brainwashed with their prejudices from a young age in government-run indoctrination centres.

So should we be critical of social reality itself? Hell yes, we should! That’s always been the anarchist position. It’s also the position of anyone who takes the slightest interest in philosophy, spirituality, psychology, linguistics, ethics, or science.

Queer theory also argues that there is no getting “outside language” to experience the world as it is. We can only know the world as mediated and carved up through text. Any attempt to understand the world as having a material reality, outside of text, is doomed to failure. There is always and everywhere only language and performance, binaries and blurring of boundaries. Any attempt to deny this is, itself, an attempt to wield power, and create reality in discourse. In the moment you deny it the most, in that very moment, you are reinforcing it the hardest.

So if there is only text and power, what’s the point of anything? How are we supposed to “do” theory. It’s all just discourse, right? No. The aim of queer theory is to “queer” the binary. That is, to show up the performative and controlling workings of power, of attempts to police ways of being in the world. To turn things on their head. To find performances which subvert the restrictive binaries and allow meanings to proliferate.

One way to do this is to make “performances” which “queer” the binary, that show up the performative and controlling nature of attempts to police it. For example, we can perform our gender in a way that is, in and of itself, likely to make the gender binary seem absurd. I’m not against this.

Neither am I. Far from it. By this definition, I’m vociferously pro-queer. I’m all for weird acts of self-expression that defy people’s expectations. That’s what clowning is all about. By rendering the ordinary strange, the strangeness of reality is revealed. That’s the magic that is at the heart of everything carnivalesque. This ethos is found in burlesque, circus, drag, punk, surrealism, Dadaism, Situationism, and the ideology of the Burning Man movement. These are anarchist ideas, perhaps best expressed in Hakim Bey’s masterpiece Temporary Autonomous Zone.

I have no problem with people transgressing social boundaries for the sake of play, pleasure, exploring new possibilities, or just for the hell of it.

My problem is that trans ideologues want their inversion of reality to be treated as a new Official Reality, which strikes me as dreadfully humourless, demented, and deranged. It also seems to miss the point the point of queering binaries to begin with.

If Queerness is about joyful transgression of social boundaries, count me in. I’m all for that, although I prefer to call it by the name “punk”.

If Queerness is about creating a new Official Reality policed by finger-wagging woke pharisees, you can count me out.

As Ceri Black puts it:

My wife and I are both women, which is already binary breaking. We play with gender binaries in our relationship too. I wrote about it recently - we are both dappled. She is velvet wrapped in steel, I’m steel wrapped in velvet. I love the moments of liminality, for example, when people I know vaguely realise that I’m a lesbian, and that lesbians really can look the way I do, is perfection. In fact, as a lesbian, it is a radical act to refuse to be confined to the devalued side of the binary - to burst out in songs of praise for women and for same sex attraction. I am not against it. I’m not.

Neither am I. I’m all for it, in fact. I want people to be themselves. It takes courage to be yourself, whether you’re a cis-gendered straight white male (like me) or a married lesbian mother (like Ceri Black).

Despite all these grand attempts to transgress boundaries, find liminal spaces, queer everything, queer theory holds that any such attempt to break out of the binary is always ultimately doomed to failure. Marx said, more or less, that men make history, but not in ways of their own choosing. In queer theory, you can only ever temporarily escape the chains of binary language. Any such breakthrough is likely to either be policed out of existence, or policed in a way that creates a proliferation of meaning, or itself become the dominant narrative.

So what’s the point in a woman pretending to a man, then? If queer theory ultimately holds that attempts to break out of binaries are ultimately doomed to failure, aren’t people who get unnecessary surgeries simply setting themselves up for massive disappointment?

This, in my view, is where we have to take queer theory on. We need to point out, for example, that it is no longer transgressive and binary breaking to be “non-binary,” for example. First, the second you say “non-binary” you create a binary between things that are binary and things that are not. There is no escape, no matter what you wear. You can’t just opt out of discourse by adopting an identity. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the way identities are constructed, even from within a queer theory standpoint. Even Foucault would be embarrassed.

Amen to that. Foucault certainly would be embarrassed, because he was deeply familiar with the ideas of the Structuralists, who had a very sophisticated take on binary thinking.

Which brings me back to Claude Levi-Strauss’s Myth and Meaning.

WHAT STRUCTURALISM CAN TEACH US ABOUT BINARY THINKING

In the introduction to Myth and Meaning, Wendy Doninger explains:

[Levi-Strauss] asserted that all mythology is dialectic in its attempt to make cognitive sense out of the chaotic data provided by nature, and that this attempt inevitably traps the human imagination in a web of dualisms: Each dualism (such as male/female) produces a tension that seems to be resolved by the use of a mediating term (such as androgyny), but then that new term turns out to be one-half of a new dualism (such as androgyny/sexlessness) ad infinitum.

Myth is a form of language, and language itself predisposes us to attempt to understand ourselves and our world by superimposing dialectics, dichotomies, or dualistic grids upon data that may in fact be entirely integrated. And underneath language lies the binary nature of the brain itself. Right and left, good and evil, life and death—these are inevitable dichotomies produced by the brain that has two lobes and controls two eyes, two hands. We are split creatures literally by nature, and we organize data like a simple digital machine. Our common sense is binary; the simplest and most efficient way to process experience seems to be by dividing it in half, and then to divide the halves in half, reformulating every question so that there are only two possible answers to it, yes or no.

There you go: by creating the category of non-binary, one is creating a binary between binary and non-binary.

So, basically, trans ideology does not escape the “gender binary” at all - it merely creates a new binary.

All that does is create a new way to queer the binary - although it seems tricky to simultaneously reject the male/female gender binary and the binary/non-binary gender binary. Maybe this is what all those Queer Studies grad students are working on.

At a certain point, people will inevitably conclude that the utility of binaries is in their usefulness. These linguistic categories wouldn’t exist were it not for language, and the purpose of language is to communicate ideas. What is it exactly that queer theorists want to communicate?

Clearly, it is that “things don’t have to be this way” and “we should do something about it by breaking unstated social rules.” If this is the core message of queer theory, I agree wholeheartedly.

Beyond that, though, why do queer theorists focus so much on gender? Why not queer other binaries which exist in human language, such as the binary between hot and cold, or between pleasure and pain?

Why is it boundaries around gender and sexuality which queer theory has been particularly interested in queering? The experience of night and day, light and dark are perhaps even more central to human experience than that of sex - certainly, our far distant ancestors experienced light and dark before they moved from cloning themselves to sexual reproduction. So where are all the academic tomes “queering” that binary? What is it about sex and sexuality that is of such great interest?

I think I can answer that question. Personally, I think that the Powers That Shouldn’t Be want us focusing on our differences. Biological sex is the most primal binary separating human beings, because males and females play opposite and complementary roles in sex and procreation. The reason that sociology departments teach people to focus on their differences is because true understanding of the structure of contemporary society leads one to an inescapable conclusion - things are the way they are because we are ruled by a psychopathic predator class which has designed an economic system to funnel wealth upwards. That’s the conclusion that any honest study of sociology will lead you to, and that’s precisely what the ruling class doesn’t want people to figure out. So they encourage people to focus on their differences, namely those that cannot be changed by political activity - race and gender.

THE RISE OF NORMAL THEORY

My main argument against queer theory is simple - It’s WWIII.

What the world needs right now is not playful subversion of binaries, but a new basis of unity for a political movement capable of resisting militarism, fascism, totalitarianism, and statism. What we need now isn’t queer theory focusing on our differences. We need some NORMAL THEORY to focus on the things that we all have in common. If we want a populist movement with broad appeal, then we should appeal to normal people.

Why? Because most people are normal. Check out the definition of the word normal:

If you ask me, it’s time to stop queering around and get down to reality - the ground of existence that we all experience. Things like pain, hunger, thirst, desire, happiness, sadness, fear, love, etc.

I’m a straight white man, but if you cut me, I bleed. No matter your race or gender, if I cut you, you bleed too. That’s what I propose as a starting place for a new school of thought called NORMAL THEORY (which is probably catchier than neo-Structuralism).

When we communicate our desires as individuals in the most basic terms possible, we will quickly realize that we all want the same things - safety, shelter, food, fun, pleasure, sex, belonging, love, opportunities for learning and self-expression, recognition, etc.

QUEER THEORY IS A QUEST FOR RECOGNITION

That last point is extremely important. At the end of the day, people are attracted to queer theory because they want to be recognized for who they are. Many people reject the social categories they are expected to conform to, as well they should. The options offered to us in the twilight years of neoliberal consumer capitalism are less than appealing to many. Many hunger and thirst for something else, something different… but they don’t know what it is precisely that they are looking for.

Queer theory takes this youthful angst, which was (and is) the motivating force behind the punk movement, and steers it directly into a dead end. If you ask me, this is no accident. It is by design. The Powers That Shouldn’t Be have found a new way to take people’s dissatisfaction with consumer capitalism and sell it back to them as a lifestyle. It’s twisted, but kind of brilliant (in an evil way). It certainly took me a long time to figure out.

But yeah, basically what I’m trying to say is that queer theory isn’t cool and people should just go back to being punks.