Nancy a couple of the largest founders of transactivism in the US are right-wing Republicans. Jennifer Pritzker is probably the most well-known, but there is also Martine Rothblatt, named as the highest paid female CEO after transitioning.
Then there is Jon Stryker’s Arcus Foundation: he is known as a liberal philanthropist but his fortune comes from the medical technology industry and he is involved in transhumanism, of which sex transitioning is only a part. Transhumanism is an array of research projects pushed by largely libertarian tech moguls interested in the way technology could allow people to transcend human limits. For instance, Peter Thiel was involved in transfusing the blood of younger people into the (wealthy) middle-aged in attempts to increase longevity, while the founders of Google have talked about ending mortality itself. Elon Musk wants to study implanting AI into human brains.
It’s is a very big stretch to imagine that any of this coincides with the goals of leftism or even liberalism.
The proposed Equality Act in the US, while doing what ENDA was meant to do in 2009 — outlawing discrimination against sexual orientation — ALSO redefines “sex” in Titles VII and IX of the Civil Rights Act to mean “gender identity,” in one stroke eliminating sex-based rights for women.
Right now, under the Hopkins v. Price Waterhouse Supreme Court decision, it is illegal to discriminate in employment against someone’s gender expression. So TW actually have more federal job protection right now than gays and lesbians do.
Meanwhile, in upholding the rights of transboys to change in female locker rooms, one of the appellate courts has ruled that the Constitution does not provide girls the “right to visual privacy.” Provided no one touches them, as they do have rights against that, girls can me forced by schools to undress in front of boys who identify as girls — and remember that schools cannot ask, under medical privacy law, for any proof is such identifying. The ONLY proof is the boy’s word.
Mary Louise Singleton, a midwife activist, has already raised alarm at the implications of chipping away at the rights to bodily privacy for women in the US, because that unwritten right is THE legal foundation upon which women’s rights to both birth control and abortion rest.
This is NOT a feminist project. In fact, it’s an anti-feminist project. The fact that some Republicans are against legislating that transwomen are women (and not all — there are many conservatives who support transitioning for the exact same reason Iran does, as a means of “curing” homosexuality) does NOT mean that feminists who are against such legislation share the same beliefs. Our reasons for opposition are diametrically opposed.
Conservatives want to enforce gender constraints; radical feminists want to abolish them. Genderism serves to reify gender: it was the Obama administration whose regulations stated that agencies can recognize that a transwoman is a woman if the transwoman engaged in “female behavior and mannerisms” and wore “female attire.” This is the problem: to define gender identity in law, the law must codify just what those female behaviors and mannerisms are — these become the defining answer to: what is a woman?