"Something Like" Sex

The declarative gender framework doesn't work: here's how to change it.

Perhaps you’ve heard that the person accused of the murder of several people in a gay club in Colorado, Anderson Lee Aldrich, identifies as non-binary.

The immediate reaction to this news from media and activists was that this identification is false and likely a ploy to avoid extra hate crime penalties. Nevertheless, Aldrich was just charged with 48 counts of hate crime acts, one for each of the people who were in the club that night.

There is a lot going on here, and it’s quite a mess. Under all of this are much larger contradictions in the theoretical frameworks of identity, hate, and especially of what I describe as “declarative gender.”

Non-binary identification and transgender identification both currently operate on the “declarative” model. That means that once you declare it, it’s true, and no one can judge otherwise. So, if I am male-bodied but tell you I am a woman, then I am a woman. To contradict my statement is to be seen as a bigot, a transphobe, a reactionary, or all manner of other bad things. In fact, to even believe that gender or sex are related to the physical body is, in the view of many social justice identitarians, to be a proto-fascist or an actual fascist.

I said these things “currently” operate on the declarative model, and this is important. Non-binary and transgender identity are very new names for phenomena that are deeply human, just as “gay” and “lesbian” are new names. These are not all just new names, however, but new ways of looking at and categorizing kinds of human behavior.

The Shifting Frameworks of Sexuality

To get a small sense of the larger problem here, consider someone like myself, a man who exclusively desires other men. I’m very happily married to a man, and I have only ever had any sexual desire for men throughout my entire life. In our current order and current way of seeing such things, the sort of person I am is labeled gay, or same-sex attracted. Until just a few years ago, I’d have been called a homosexual, but this term is now considered verboten by many social justice identitarians, and so you and I are both not supposed to call me that. Don’t worry, though—I’m fine with that term.

Now, one hundred and thirty years ago, homosexual and gay were not terms in use for what I am. Instead, there were other terms. These older terms and also the new ones were products of specific ways of thinking about human sexuality.

Here are a few of those older terms.

Invert

Invert comes from a framework in which men who have sex with men are seen to have “inverted” genitals, meaning that they are actually women but their vaginas were “inverted” into penises. A woman who desires women likewise suffered from this condition: her penis was “inverted” into a vagina. The underlying belief within this scientific system (yes, it was a scientific theory for many decades) was that no real man would desire other men; because only women desired men, an invert man must be somehow really a woman.

Uranian

Uranian arose around that same time in Germany, and has mythic rather than scientific origins. In Greek myth there are two Aphrodites. The first and most well known is Aphrodite Pandemos, and she was said to be born from Zeus and Dione. The other Aphrodite is a much older goddess found in Semitic cultures imported into Greek culture: Urania, or Aphrodite Urania.

Aphrodite Urania was said to have born not from a woman but a man, specifically from the severed genitals of Uranus. Therefore, she was a kind of “celestial” love rather than a physical love. Incidentally, she held somewhat the same position in Greek belief as the Roman Juno Regina Caelorum and also Diana as the “queen of heaven” or “heavenly queen” and is sometimes depicted with a crown of stars.

When it was in use, uranian denoted a man whose desire didn’t require a woman to manifest it, just as Aphrodite Urania didn’t need a mother to be born. The idea here was that the erotic desire of a person was a larger force, and for most men it could only be consummated or manifested with a woman. Uranians, on the other hand, could manifest love and desire with men.

Pederast

The third term in use during that time was pederast, which is still preserved in the French slur “pédé.” Pederasty was a Greek social form in which an older man became the guardian of an adolescent male of noble birth. The pederast’s role was to be the adolescent’s tutor, foster father, guardian, and sponsor into society.

The role of the pederast is most known for being a sexual one, but this is more complex than the way we see it now. Greek male society had a peculiar sexual arrangement which persisted for a very long time also in Arabic, Persian, Slavic, and Turkish cultures. Sex between men was not seen as immoral at all, but it nevertheless had very specific rules. Men of higher social standing (age, class, rank, etc) could only engage in penetrative sex with other men, never in receptive sex. Men of less social standing were thus more likely to have receptive sex, but of course they could have penetrative sex with men of even less standing or with women.

The pederast existed within that already-existing framework as a kind of stable relationship that benefited the younger partner. By protecting him from other men—those of higher standing or those of lower—the pederast helped him avoid losing social standing. It was a time-limited monogamous pact, where only the pederast could engage in sexual relations with the younger until he entered into full society.

Like all the previous labels, pederasty was a product of a certain way of thinking and part of a specific cultural understanding. It does appear to have continued outside of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic societies into European society among certain nobles and also within priesthoods and monasteries, but the specific later use of the word was as a pejorative. A pederast was someone who was corrupting upper class youth. For instance, the initial charges against Oscar Wilde hinged on his relationship with Alfred, Lord Douglas, a noble adolescent of higher social standing than Wilde.

Sodomite

The most common term, which is still in use by some Christians, is sodomite. The label is derived from the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, in which God rains down fire and turns Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt (sparing Lot and his daughters, who then rape their father in the middle of the night) as punishment for the townsfolk’s actions.

The punishment for those two towns was actually not because the cities were full of men having sex with men, but specifically for the way they treated two visiting male angels. When the celestial messengers arrived, the men of the town demanded to be able to have sex with them. In Semitic society, as in Greek, this would have involved a loss of social status for the angels, so the morally-superior Lot offers his two virgin daughters to the mob instead. (It’s those two daughters who later rape their father, perhaps in retaliation). Later, Lot is warned that God will destroy the town for the way they treated the angels, and so he flees.

The belief that the “crime of Sodom” was that men were having sexual relations with men is obviously reductive, yet nevertheless this was the dominant understanding in Christian Europe, and sodomy laws even still persist in some states in America. In many cases, sodomy referred to all anal and often also oral sex, even between a man and a woman, since these were all sexual activities “contrary to nature” (non-reproductive sex).

Bugger

There is a final term worth mentioning. I didn’t introduce it earlier, because it’s quite unlike any of the previous ones and is also my favorite: buggery.

Bugger as a verb specifically refers to the act of penetrating another person through the anus. As a noun, a bugger refers to someone who has buggered someone. However, the term doesn’t imply or denote that a person who has buggered someone inherently desires to bugger, only that he has done so.

The difference here may seem quite subtle and perhaps even irrelevant, but it’s actually quite important. Whereas all the other terms in use now refer to something inherent or intrinsic to a person, buggery refers only to something one has done. In other words, a person who has buggered isn’t presumed to desire men over women, only that he’s done so at least once.

What’s particularly fascinating about this term is that it’s derived from a heretical Eastern Orthodox sect, the Bogomils. Active in the Balkans (especially in Bulgaria) during the 11th and 12th century, they were Gnostics who rejected all church hierarchy and were rumored to engage in sexual orgies and to consume their own ejaculate during rituals. Whether this actually happened is unclear, but at least as far as the legacy of same-sex activity in Semitic, Slavic, Greek, and Turkish cultures, it’s unlikely that Christian ideas about sex had fully destroyed the older forms in such a short period of time.

Again, the difference of this term from the others is that buggery was something you engaged in, not something that you were. Unlike the modern terms we have to describe what is happening, there was never a sense that buggering another man made you a different kind of man, only that you’ve done something you shouldn’t have.

Contrast this with homosexual or gay and you can see the real implications. A homosexual is someone who desires people of the same sex, being gay is being a man who is attracted to other men. Any man, on the other hand, could be a bugger. The term encompasses both the situational or singular male-male sexual activities common in prisons, ships, military deployments, or drunken nights with mates, and also the guys like me who do this sort of thing more often.

In other words, it’s part of a framework where what you do doesn’t define who you are. There is no identity attached to the activity: they are completely separate spheres.

Declarative Gender isn’t the only framework possible, and it’s anyway falling apart.

Why does this all matter? First of all, in order to talk about what is happening now, we must understand that our categories and labels are products of frameworks and can only be understood within those frameworks. Secondly, and related to that point, frameworks change, shift, become displaced by other frameworks, are often quite temporary and transitional, and also recur in different forms.

The framework which created the term invert, for example, lasted only a few decades. It was later displaced by the psychological model that birthed the idea of the homosexual, which is now dying out and being replaced by another model. However, the model that is replacing the one that created homosexual reworks a core idea of inversion. An invert was someone who was ‘really’ the opposite sex internally from what they appeared to be externally. A person who is transgender is seen also as being ‘really’ the opposite of their apparent physical sex, except that the mechanism is psychological, not physical. Also, there is no associated sexual desire implied: a transgender person in this newer framework need not swing one way or the other. Inversion, on the other hand, involved a sexual desire for the same sex as one appeared to be externally.

There’s a third reason that long discussion of varying labels and framework for same-sex activity is relevant: it gives us a sense that underneath the ideological frameworks is something very human which has always been with us. How sex among men or sex among women is explained changes according to the cultural framework in which it is occurring, but the important part is that is occurs and seems to always occur.

The very same thing can be said about gender variance, or what we currently call transgenderism, non-binary identity, or gender non-conformity. These are all new labels that are produced by the current framework, and these labels are in transition and flux along with that framework.

In my upcoming book, Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other, I call this framework the “declarative gender” framework and devote quite a lot of ink to tracing its roots and implications, especially its contradictions and problems. Again, a crucial thing to keep in mind is that variance is a human phenomenon, and there are other frameworks than the Western one for this. The current framework which dominates Western society is actually at odds with the majority of these other frameworks, because it’s one of the only ones that doesn’t propose sacred roles for variant people.

So, for example, a person who is “‘two spirit” in First Nations cultures (which, incidentally, is a modern term adopted as a catch-all for the hundreds of different titles for variant people in these cultures), has a sacred role for the rest of the people within each culture. Thanks to Christianity and then later the “Enlightenment,” we have no such ideas of sacred roles, and thus can only understand variance through a scientific or medical frame.

In those other societies (again, the majority of societies), a person is recognized by the people or by spiritual elders as being “called” to those spiritual roles. The person in question might even initially reject or deny this calling and insist on trying to live in accordance with dominant sexual roles.

In Western societies, on the other hand, it’s the individual who declares their variance to others. In this model, anyone can declare themselves to be anything without any community involvement or recognition rites. This is the “declarative gender” model, and it’s what is at the core of all the conflicts around women-only spaces, especially in prisons, domestic shelters, and bathrooms and changing rooms. When anyone can declare themselves to be anything without any community involvement or verification process, there is nothing to stop those who might try to “game” the system from doing so.

Activists usually tell us that this “doesn’t really happen,” that no one would claim trans or non-binary identity in order to game a system. And yet we’re now being told that someone who killed several gay, lesbian, and trans-identified people just did exactly that. Now, of course there are many, many other examples of this happening elsewhere, especially in US and UK prisons, but activists and mainstream “left” figures (see, for example, Owen Jones) usually deny these incidents or quickly change the subject.

I’ve argued many times here and also in my upcoming book that the denial of these problems by the left is what is fueling the far-right backlash against transgendered and non-binary identified people. To be clear, it’s not the cause of the backlash: I have never suggested, nor will I ever suggest, that people like Matt Walsh are in any way justified in their virulent moralist crusades. What I mean specifically instead is that, by denying there are problems with the declarative gender model and related medical care models, they hand people like Walsh a dangerous weapon: the truth. All people like him need to do is to show a few contradictions and denied abuses, and the entire left becomes discredited.

It’s important here to emphasize that there have been trans-identified figures pointing this problem out, too. In fact, one of the people pushing for more honesty about these problems has been clinical psychologist Dr. Erica Anderson, who identifies as a trans woman and specifically works with gender dysphoric children.

There are really profound shifts occurring in the medical treatment framework right now. The United Kingdom looks likely to follow the Netherlands, Finland, and Sweden in changing the model of treatment of gender dysphoric kids away from puberty blockers and hormones at early ages and instead more holistic therapeutic models. Extremist activists have labeled these models “conversion therapy,” which is quite an enraging deception. Conversion therapy for gay and lesbian kids involved electroshock, confinement, and other psychological manipulation to “scare them straight.” The therapeutic models for gender dysphoria are designed to help kids talk through their suicidal ideation, depression, and other disorders so that the care providers can determine if gender dysphoria is their cause or their effect.

In other words, the “holistic” model of care is closer to non-Western understandings of gender variance, and is nothing like conversion therapy.

Countries who were once prescribing immediate transition or puberty blockers for children have now stepped back from that position, while the move in the United States is in the other direction: more, faster, and younger. This push is what is adding the air of legitimacy to far-right accusations of “grooming” children and the media-stoked outrage against teaching declarative gender in kindergarten and elementary schools.

That reaction is already violent in some places, and it is beginning to expand beyond trans and non-binary identification towards gays and lesbians as well.

“Something Like”

So, let’s return to the point I made in the introduction of this essay regarding Anderson Lee Aldrich, the shooter at that club in Colorado. Aldrich claims to be non-binary and there was really intense outrage about this claim. Many activists attempted to prove that Aldrich could not possibly be non-binary, but this directly contradicts a core tenet of the declarative gender framework. In order to be non-binary or trans, you need only declare yourself to be. So, if someone claims to be, that must be the case no matter how you feel about what that person’s motives really are.

This isn’t a tenable or sustainable framework. Abuses of the framework abound, as much as many activists go out of their way to deny they happen. I don’t think they are only abuses, however, but are rather inevitable results of the framework itself. No, I don’t mean the abusers are products of this way of thinking, but rather that, because declarative gender proposes itself as a universal theory of all gender and sexual identity it makes it impossible to think otherwise about these problems.

Again, these variances are human. To borrow from a brilliant way of looking at frameworks across cultures that Gordon White uses in Ani.Mystic, “something like” transgenderism has always existed, just like “something like” homosexuality has always existed. Other cultural frameworks describe these things differently and situated them in different contexts of meaning, so it is false to take the current terms and apply them across cultures or throughout time.

Underneath all the terms is a persistent human experience, and recognizing this is the only way to change our current way of thinking about it into something less contentious, less contradictory, less open to abuse, and more dignified for the people all these terms poorly describe.

The only path to a different framework is being honest about the problems in the current framework. Of course, this comes with some risk, since anyone who concedes certain points made by rabid critics on the right becomes immediately smeared as likewise rabid. However, such prominent and vitriolic figures only exist because they speak some degree of truth about these matters, even as they weave those truths into rather violent ideologies.

We’d need to be honest about the extremist views and entrenched positions of activists who hold to the declarative gender model as well. Many of the most prominent activists are careerists gaining social capital for themselves without really doing much to help the people for whom they claim to speak. Some of them are just as vile as their opponents on the other side—even if they have less power to sway their followers to violence.

Being honest would then allow us to interrogate why the current model leads to such virulent backlash and also so much abuse. In Here Be Monsters I offer one way of understanding how this happens: buried within the declarative gender framework is an unacknowledged but nevertheless persistent view of the gendered soul. This is seen in the fact that a person is said to have an inner or felt sense of gender that is independent of their body.

Where is it, then, if not in the physical body?

The problem here is that the secular Western framework was shaped by Christian theological and metaphysical conceptions. This inheritance led to the Cartesian dualism which saw body and mind as separate things completely, with the body being inferior to the mind.

Other soul frameworks exist and are much more common than the Western one. In many, many other cultures, humans have two or even more souls, and these exist as companions to each other within the same person. The body soul and the wandering soul live together, and they together compose who we are. The First Nations idea of “two spirit” individuals derives from this kind of framework: you can have a male body soul and a female wandering soul, or the other way around, while for most people your body soul and wandering soul are more similar to each other.

It’s crucial to note that in many societies with this framework, being “something like” two-spirit doesn’t mean you are therefore really the opposite sex from your body. In other words, “something like” being transgender doesn’t therefore mean you are really the opposite sex, but rather that you occupy a different role within the society. In many cultures, most notably the Bugi culture in Indonesia which has five roles that are “something like” gender roles, each position comes with certain societal roles, obligations, and meaning.

That points us to the most crucial point we need to confront now: our modern cultures don’t actually create special societal roles for anyone. There is no sense now that being “something like” transgender, non-binary, gay, lesbian, or anything else means you have a specific role, importance, or meaning to society. But then again, being a father or a mother, an elder or a grandparent, or an artist or a mystic doesn’t really mean anything to us anymore, either.

That’s the root of the problem, and also the path to something better. Thinking about each other and ourselves as being important in relation to each other—that what we can teach, what we can offer, and especially how our experiences can become gifts that enrich each other and show us more about what it means to be human—is the only way out of this mess.

Of course, that would require us to abandon ideology and return instead to a more relational way of being together and allowing in again a sense of the sacred. Along the way, we’d have to transform everything else about ourselves also.

Or we can just all keep fighting each other.

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Like this essay? You’ll probably really like Here Be Monsters when it is released in September, 2023. Until then, you might also like my recent collection of essays, The Secret of Crossings. You can buy it with a 20% discount (use code 2022 at checkout) here.

Also, please note: because of how contentious such things can be, I’ve taken the rare step of limiting comments on this post to paid subscribers only. Thanks for understanding.