What the hell does gender identity have to do with fracking?

On the blacklisting of eco-feminists

by Tara Prema

It’s a plot filled with anonymous denunciations, secret meetings, betrayal, dissidents, blacklists and infiltrators. For those just tuning in, this shitshow is the latest infighting on the left, where ideological purity and individual identity are all the rage – literally. Welcome to a new era of #LeftFail, where identity politics trumps everything, including strategy.

When we subtract the drama, what’s happened is that a couple of social justice groups (mostly hyper-moral ultra-leftist white college kids) has launched a campaign to blacklist people who disagree with their answer to a philosophical question. It’s not a question about the nature of capitalism or justice or exploitation or some other relevant topic, though. The question that’s tying the left in knots is: “What is a woman?”

If you answer, “An adult female human,” you could be blacklisted. The correct answer nowadays is, “Anyone who identifies as a woman.”

This begs the question: “What does it mean to ‘identify’ as a woman?” The correct answer here is, “To feel like a woman; to feel as if one is a woman.”

If you ask what it means to “feel like a woman,” there is no coherent answer, just the word: “Transphobe!”

So what is a transphobe? Anyone who recognizes that men can take hormones, get surgery, and sometimes pass as women, but they cannot become female.

Anyone who wants to abolish gender roles, meaning masculine and feminine stereotypes that dictate how boys and girls are expected to behave.

Any person or group who defines “woman” as “adult human female.” That is, someone born female, with female biology.

This list includes midwives, traditional communities, radical feminists, and many others. It includes peace activist Cindy Sheehan and comedian Roseanne Barr. It includes Deep Green Resistance.

Radical feminists find that gender is a ridiculous set of oppressive stereotypes that have nothing to do with biology. Gender is not a spectrum or a binary or some kind of fluid – it is a hierarchy. Gender stereotypes dictate that men are masculine and dominant, and women are feminine and submissive, and that is what you are.

Rejecting useless and harmful gender stereotypes is a basic principle of feminism, widely accepted since the 1970s. But nowadays when we try to discuss it, academics and activists alike denounce and blacklist us.

There is a difference between a person’s sex and his or her gender. Radical feminists believe that sex is innate – it’s the biology we are born with, our DNA and secondary sex characteristics, like breasts and testes. Sex is in-born, and gender is constructed – that is, imposed on us by societal stereotypes.

On the other hand, genderists believe that gender is innate – that somehow we are born with some form of masculine or feminine essence baked in. Biological sex, therefore, is constructed, by means of surgery and hormones.

Genderists: “If your internal sense of pink lace or ball games doesn’t match your genitalia, you need opposite-sex hormones and an operation! Or at least a whole new set of clothes, makeup, and a name change. And a million bucks. And a reality show. And a magic mirror to whisper flattering things.”

Midwives are being told they can’t use the term “women” when referring to those of us who give birth and nurse children. Because that is transphobic. Midwives face blacklisting by their own professional association for refusing to call mothers “birthing parents.”

A traditional matrilineal community was harassed about having women’s circles until they started holding them in secret, away from the white dudes.

White dudebros arriving at a traditional indigenous encampment: “Hey, you’re doing gender wrong. Let me mansplain to you about why this postmodern theory I just read about is superior to your traditional teachings passed on for hundreds of generations. Wait, where you going?*

Anti-feminists have infiltrated radical feminist groups to spy out where their events are being held, so they can disrupt them by barging in or by phoning in death threats. In another case, a police informant joined a west coast radical environmental group and used the wedge issue of gender identity politics to start a faction fight that ended when everyone quit.

And now we find ourselves watching as mass media celebrate transwomen as the epitome of womanhood. And we find we are ostracized by the gender cheerleaders at universities, conferences, and within the environmental movement.

WHITE MALE LEFTISTS SAY WOMEN ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO DEFINE FOR OURSELVES WHO WE ARE AND WHO OUR SISTERS ARE.

Stop the Frack Attack (STFA) recently unleashed a spasm of horizontal hostility on the environmental left. This anti-fracking coalition is led by Rising Tide, which has staked its ideological purity on denouncing those who consider biological sex to be a material human condition. Here, Rising Tide is targeting not frackers, but Deep Green Resistance, and its radical feminist members, because – we are told – those feminists are evil “cis” oppressors.

Note that only feminists are singled out here. This big, broad coalition includes Christians and gun clubs, anarchists and peaceniks. But feminists are the one group that must be denounced or beaten down, according to some trans advocates.

Along with the radicals, STFA includes the Idaho Conservation League, the United Christian Church, and the Denton Stakeholder Drilling Advisory Group. Did STFA’s central committee interrogate these good citizens on where they stand on the burning question of “What is a woman?” Are we to assume they all agree 100% that the categories of male and female no longer exist, except as semantics?

And if the Denton Stakeholders issued a public statement that Caitlyn Jenner has only changed clothes and makeup, not sex – would Stop the FA excommunicate them too?

Or is shunning a punishment reserved only for feminists?

And – final question – what the hell does this have to do with fracking?

One thing for sure: the oil and gas executives are laughing all the way to the bank. They know what some of us don’t – that infighting is like civil war: the only winners are the vulture capitalists.