like, what?

It is an uncomfortable one with many implications, that a specific group of people has tried to shut down. These people are often members of White, Anglospheric, or native English-speaking demographics, who may also be queer and from other marginalised intersections. They share an appeal to Anglospheric politics and an ignorance to how their institutions are non-generalisable to other cultures, languages and nations.

Many persons from the aforementioned subset often refuse to acknowledge how localised such gender maps are and reliant upon the collective subjective worldview. This is not without its reasons.

Worldview, which underpins perspective, knowledge models and “common sense”, is informed by culture, religion, local representations, and language models—which are all dependent on history and anthropology of that specific Petri dish.

Language significantly shapes how we understand and express gender. It impacts identity formation. It is derived from local cultures, which has predispositions towards certain archetypal notions. Its usage influences the relational map of human genders to grammatical gender classifications of other nouns. Therefore how we perceive such gendered categorisations of objects and people, constructing and reinforcing gender stereotypes. With the globally dominant language and culture being English and Anglospheric respectively, such has monopoly on queer theory, community and contributes heavily to the international consensus on queer politics and rights.

It should be therefore acknowledged that a delocalised entity is inherently non-binary to local gender maps. When a non-native English speaker, a migrant, or a non-Anglospheric local adopts the terms of an Anglospheric culture, many are making an agentic choice to identify with said term and draw relationships to its referent.

Secondly, that any who are imperfect fits to the divides between gender and sexual categories, who straddles or moves between these—co-opt terms and draws relations to its referents for their own basis of identity, both to enable communication and to conceptualise in accordance to a normative gender map. Such persons may consider themselves to be gender-diverse, fluid and intersex persons, who are often excluded from the discourse that centralises cisheteronormative assimilation.

Thirdly, that as with all use of language, terms offer a “best fit” graph of meaning based on plotted points. When used to describe identity, terms and their referents are not prescriptive, rather descriptive.

Such concerns throws some of the anti-choice beliefs into disarray and has implications on today’s queer discourse.

The reasons that most dominant societies use to “permit” queer persons our rights, is frequently on the basis that queer persons have no other choice but to *be* queer. Many have therefore adopted this rationale to demand basic human rights and liberation from systemic inequity.

The lack of choice in one’s intra- and inter-personal gender experiences are valid and certainly more applicable to some persons than others—but it comes with some nuances.

It is for this reason that the social sciences has focused heavily on the unavailability of free will behind gender and sexual orientation, to legitimise queer politics.

Free Will & Determinism

Queer politics has had to fight against the historical assumptions of queer persons as dysfunctional and/or criminals/intentional deviants, and the inhumane treatments borne from such ideas—such as conversion therapy, correctional 🍇 and other forms of abuse. Determinism, the lack of choice and autonomy in one’s being, has been most effective in this regard.

On the other hand, Free Will and autonomy in one’s identity has been weaponised heavily by anti-TLGB parties to delegitimise queerness, frame queer persons as cultural rebels and deviants, enemies to the status quo who do not deserve legitimisation from the State, nor validation from their communities.

Determinism has been used as an approach against Free Will morality and appeals to nature. Where choosing to be any other way than how nature (or God) intended is immoral, but as long as it is beyond your control, it is justifiable. The extension of this to all queer interactions between agents and their environment, has become the “middle-ground” liberal rationale, which while applicable to some persons, is also done to appeal to the State.

It is therefore especially challenging for queer persons to even begin to address autonomy in gender and sexuality, when doing so could cause them to become liabilities to current queer politics, their communities (which are already scarce) and be subject to endangerment and rejection from all sides.

It causes the splintering of the community into those who operating on choice, versus those who do not. More aptly; it splinters queers central to the Anglosphere and its politics, versus queers who are peripheral to it.

Radicalisation of Identity Politics

The radicalisation of identity politics—that is the legitimisation of such identities without appealing to the state—has always been a topic of intersectional identity politics.

Such has denounced the need for critical queer theory to conform and assimilate into the normative ideas of state-sanctioned personhood, but rather challenges what can be considered human on the basis of maximised autonomy.

Punks, Bulldaggers & Welfare Queens by Cathy J. Cohen (Cohen, 1997)

…rebuff what they deem the assimilationist practices and policies of more established lesbian and gay organizations. These organizers and activists reject cultural norms of acceptable sexual behavior and identification and instead embrace political strategies which promote self-definition and full expression.

While biological predispositions, and socialisation to a smaller extent, have significant roles to play in determining a person’s gender and sexual orientation, deterministic approaches can often deny the autonomy of individuals in favour of assimilation and subjugation to the system. It ignores gender as a performance, a journey with an active agent however shaped by things sometimes beyond their control, and a site of activism.

Hostile parties have consistently attempted to keep any “influence” of queerness from leaking into cisheteronormative curriculums, for the sake of restricting worldviews.

This in turn controls informed ideas of what is possible to be, what is central versus alien, and therefore what deserves the utmost privilege of inclusion and empathy—to the exclusion of the non-normative.

Censorship restricts a person’s autonomy by limiting the paths of self-actualisation availed to them, but more significantly, such ideas of what legitimises personhood, reifies the global white cisheteronormative patriarchal able-bodied classist hegemony.

When the focus is more so on how a person cannot “help” themselves to be, this invites the collective to “fix” an individual in accordance with the status quo—or else to accept the person on a basis of “grace” (typically awarded on the basis of what is most affordable and convenient).

Such has occurred throughout history with the use of psychiatric interventions, conversion camps, “correctional” 🍇, “correctional” bullying, “correctional” behavioural facilities—some of which are now deemed inhumane only on the basis of how much suffering it produces versus how inefficient it is. It however, still deems such methods possible and useful as long as it meets the cost-benefit criteria.

The pivot to the focus on autonomy of individuals challenges the conditional acceptance of queer persons on how conveniently and affordably they fit into the status quo. It strongarms such coercive interventions as violating an individual’s autonomy, their availability of choice and the role of the State and its supporters, in the removal of autonomy.

Assimilation is killing us. We are falling into a trap. Some of us adopt an apologetic stance, stating "that's just the way I am" (read: "I'd be straight if I could."). Others pattern their behavior in such a way as to mimic heterosexual society so as to minimize the glaring differences between us and them….The myth of assimilation must be shattered…Let's make families which promote sexual choices and liberation rather than sexual oppression. (Cohen, 1997)

Intersectional identity politics enables visibility of proximity to privilege across multiple dimensions, and dismantles monolithic ideas of power, status and privilege.

our multiple identities work to limit the entitlement and status some receive from obeying a heterosexual imperative. (Cohen, 1997)

It highlights the inclusion of those who do not necessarily benefit from their pre-existing proximity to state-sanctioned identities, and validates the choice-based membership of persons to their own gendered maps without appealing to the dominant rhetoric for acceptance. Such constitutes transformational politics.

By transformational, again, I mean a politics that does not search for opportunities to integrate into dominant institutions and normative social relationships, but instead pursues a political agenda that seeks to change values, definitions, and laws which make these institutions and relationships oppressive. (Cohen, 1997)

Conclusively

Identity politics has focused primarily on Anglospheric politics so much so it has failed to see how the Anglosphere’s rhetoric has pervaded and dominated international cultures. How international persons and other marginalised groups such as immigrants and ethnic minorities, have co-opted such terms to interact within the Anglosphere and the global sphere. How it has impacted identity politics to queer theory and politics. Prompting inquisitions into the autonomies of individuals in their gender identities that may otherwise remain invisible and overshadowed by the Anglosphere’s intra-discourse.

Deterministic approaches to identity politics excludes queer experiences that do not align with local language and cultural models, overlooks autonomy in identity politics, and reduces the effectiveness of transformational identity politics.

Erasure of diverse experiences, silencing and attacks against publicising these and the liberation of choice, should not be reasoned with appeal to the hegemony.

Genuine transformational politics should not depend on exclusionist rhetoric that establishes monolithic identities and a privileged class upon its proximity to normative identities.

Choice, the autonomy of people in their identification, should be central to discourse. If the cisheteronormative society weaponise against queer persons the liberty to choose one’s gender, then the solution isn’t to deny we have choice or autonomy, but to question why that, to them, is a harmful thing.

The fight has always been about autonomy in identity. Not the removal of autonomy.

REFS

There is no such thing as ‘women’s representation’: intersectionality and second-generation gender and politics scholarship. By Ashlee Christoffersen & Orly Siow. (Christoffersen et al, 2024)

“Black and other feminists of colour have long argued that the category of ‘women’ is not neutral; indeed, it is ‘always already raced as white’ (Lewis, 2017: 117).”

“As part of the process of racially minoritised women’s exclusion from the category ‘women’, white women parliamentarians (including those advocating for gender equality) have been shown to have actively constructed the category in their own image (Christoffersen, 2024a). Contemporary examples of this process also abound within the rhetoric of female right-wing populist anti-gender politicians in Europe (see, among others, Farris, 2017; Sager and Mulinari, 2018; Bader and Mottier, 2020). Thus, the category of ‘women’ fails to encompass all ‘women’, even when it is qualified with references to diversity: ‘once you understand that embedded in the idea of “woman” are the normative values of white, bourgeois cisheteronormativity, then the entire fiction of “woman” is exposed’ (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023: 635). Therefore, despite best intentions, the term remains problematic as a starting point for gender and politics scholarship.”

“For example, in the field of political representation, not only do both white and certain racially minoritised women benefit from white supremacy, but they have also actively sought to maintain racial privileges by policing the borders of ‘womanhood’ and upholding the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ minority ethnic groups through processes of ‘post-racial gatekeeping’ (Saini et al, 2023). It is not therefore self-evident that ‘women’s’ or ‘diverse women’s’ inclusion should be the priority of efforts towards equitable representation. Gender as a social marker is always interlocking with others that change its qualities, meaning that neither ‘women’ nor ‘men’ are an inherently oppressed group. Gender is also not a binary category, as the burgeoning political scholarship on non-binary gender shows (see, for example, Solevid et al, 2021).”

Punks, Bulldaggers & Welfare Queens by Cathy J. Cohen (Cohen, 1997)

By transformational, again, I mean a politics that does not search for opportunities to integrate into dominant institutions and normative social relationships, but instead pursues a political agenda that seeks to change values, definitions, and laws which make these institutions and relationships oppressive.

Assimilation is killing us. We are falling into a trap. Some of us adopt an apologetic stance, stating "that's just the way I am" (read: "I'd be straight if I could."). Others pattern their behavior in such a way as to mimic heterosexual society so as to minimize the glaring differences between us and them….The myth of assimilation must be shattered…Let's make families which promote sexual choices and liberation rather than sexual oppression.

our multiple identities work to limit the entitlement and status some receive from obeying a heterosexual imperative.