Why Gender Performativity Is Wrong and Anti Trans

Why Gender Performativity Is Wrong and Anti Trans

I want to talk about why the idea of 'gender performativity', the idea that gender is performed, is wrong, and also transphobic. Gender performativity is part of the wider set of ideas that consider gender to be a social construct, and is an influential idea within queer theory.

Firstly, there is no evidence to support the idea that gender is a performance. In other words, this idea is not evidencebased, it has no observable evidence in the real world to clearly support it, and it is therefore incompatible with the spirit of empiricism. This is the problem with the 'academic left' in the late 20th and early 21st century West: a lot of their theories simply lack a solid foundation of observable evidence to back it up. This, in turn, reflects a rejection of the importance of empiricism, which is partly caused by the rise of unempirical philosophical schools like critical theory and postmodernism.

Secondly, I think it is reasonable to argue that a 'performance' is only a 'performance' if it is being deliberately 'performed', which implies that there must be a personal choice in it. The fact that trans people suffer from gender dysphoria is proof that we cannot choose the 'gender' that we 'perform'. Therefore, the very existence of trans people basically disproves gender performativity.

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