When Q-theorists look at a conservative religious woman, dressed in modest, feminine clothing, a woman who is under the thumb of her husbandâs control, a woman who has been indoctrinated in to a religion that divorces her from the agency of her power of creation, a woman who works day and night in the home to serve her husband and children, whose entire existence is secondary to the men in her life, they do not see an oppressed person. They do not see her suffering. They see a woman who is in her correct place, they see her as âcis.â
When Q-theorists see a woman performing a high degree of feminine beauty standardsâcapitalist manufactured standardsâand self harming through hook up culture, desperately seeking a sense of value and approval through beauty and how many men will want to fuck her, they do not see an oppressed person. They do not see her suffering. They see a woman who is in her correct place, they see her as âcis.â
Q-theorists do not look deeply in to the internal lives of women. They do not analyze how harmful capitalist beauty standards affect womenâs sense of self worth and self love, how all the patriarchal roles that many women will accept with a smile on their face (in order to surviveâwomen who eschew femininity are all too often cast out from society) truly affect our experience of the world. They see the smile and take that at face value. They accuse those of us who speak out as turning women in to victims, and they claim that victimhood dehumanizes women.Â
Yet, we feminists are women, and we know these experiences ourselves, because we have lived them. The Q-theorists exist for the purpose of preventing women from uniting around our shared experience of oppression, so they must deny that our experiences exist, or that if they do, they are isolated, personal, and not political.
When women want to organize around the harm done to our bodies under patriarchy, they use obscuring language to deny us a sense of class consciousness, and all in the name of social justice. But in the end, they serve the interests of male supremacy by doing so.
Feminists criticize gender as an artificial social construct which exists as a caste system to oppress women, and must be destroyed. Q-theorists insist that gender is a spectrum, a playground, and an ethereal innate facet around which oneâs self identity must be built. Only a class privileged within such an axis of oppression could view gender in such a manner. Gender is the tool of male supremacy which is used to validate womenâs oppression.
So who is the âcis womanâ? She is an imaginary being without a soul, without an internal life, without inner conflict, without humanity. She is a zombie who blindly and happily accepts her role under patriarchy. She is the submissive and breedable stereotype that fascists want all women to be. She only has a voice in Q-theorist spaces when she is agreeing with the status quo, and when she disagrees, she must be removedâbecause the Q-theorist space does not exist to support her.
The decline of womenâs rights correlates with the rise of Q-theory, because the Q-theorists have used obscuring language to overtake womenâs spaces, so that now, there will be no space where women are free to organize against our oppressors. We are told that our oppressors can speak for us, that they are us, but we are not them. That they are all real women, that they know everything that we know, they experience all that we experience, that they can speak for us, but we can not know what they know, we can not experience what they experience, and we can not speak for them. Differences can only be acknowledged between us when it suits their narrative and their power over us in what should be our spaces, and differences that highlight our oppression and our struggles must be ignored. We women are once again relegated to a lower status, once again having our voices silenced in favor of dicktatorship.
Q-theory serves the interests of fascists by reinforcing the sexism of the gender hierarchy and validating the idea that women have a natural sense of identity formed around our patriarchal role.