I started reading the Duty from September 23 by the article “Sexuality education divides in Europe”, written by journalist Stéphane Baillargeon. The uneasiness that has been plaguing me for a long time was a little more confirmed.
Any form of reluctance to gender theory or certain of its conceptions is quickly reduced to a “phobia”. I found the full expression of my unease in a recent column by Jean-François Lisée which ended with an injunction: “Pause! » Like many LGB people, I seriously question the inconsistencies in current queer discourse.
For my part, I walked in the Gay Pride parades in Montreal, Toronto, Paris and Istanbul (quite a few more rough in Istanbul, where the stakes suddenly seemed higher; no allegorical floats of big banks, but hostile looks everywhere), marching for the right to indifference, first and foremost with regard to gender stereotypes. Trans theory is part of an essentialization of masculine and feminine. The trans flag and its colors added to the queer coalition rainbow: pink and powder blue. All this to come back to this binary conception?
To be born in the wrong body is to accept the idea that there is a sexualized spiritual self, a feminine or masculine soul. We would all be two spirited “. What do we do with homosexual atheists? These are undoubtedly bad gays who don’t want to drink the Kool-Aid, as they say.
And, indeed, I’m not a fan of Kool-Aid. What GRIS (Social Research and Intervention Group) is doing in Quebec schools with the full support of the Ministry of Education is, to me, akin to a version of conversion therapy. “If you’re six years old and like to wear dresses and dance like Beyoncé in her videos, maybe you’re really a girl? » I don’t know what happened so that in a few years, what we were trying to push out through the front door – gender essentialism – came back to us through the back door.
For my part, I fully agree that we must be consistent with the social rules that we have established: at 18 years old, I do not see in the name of what principle we would prohibit anyone from having the right to modify their identity and their body as they wish — tattoos, symbolic scarifications, botox, hormone therapy or transitions. But before 18?
The son of a late friend had scored a double: a coming out accompanied by the news that he had found love through a website: a man in his forties. He was then 14 years old. He was already sexually active. My friend and her husband told him: your homosexuality poses no problem to us; on the other hand, there is no way you are going to meet this man. He called his parents fascists and homophobes, said so on social media. Did he really know what was best for him at 14?
Where are the alarm bells ringing in the Quebec press about the “ affirmative care » which began to sound in Europe, in the countries which have been at the forefront on this subject since at least 2003-2004? They all pause to analyze twenty years of data collected from trans people. All this information is available not on orthodox or conspiracy religious sites, but in The Economist (“ What America Gets Wrong About Gender Medicine », of April 8) or in a recent article in New York Timesa media not particularly anti-wokist (“ How a Small Gender Clinic Landed in a Political Storm “).
On this point alone, and although I am gay, have voted left all my life and I wish all vaccinated and consenting adults to be left alone about their intimate lives, I am quite violently classified as being a morally panicked reactionary, talking point systematic of supporters of genderism.
My LGB friends and I have no intention of voting for Pierre Poilievre and Marine Le Pen, and we are burdened by the fact that politically, so far, the questioning of genderism has only been the work of politicians populists, who are also anti-gay, anti-abortion and who find natural allies among the religious orthodox.
However, am I ready to let a 12-13 year old child or teenager believe as troubled as I was, who woke up every morning in the 1970s asking myself “why did this happen to me?” “, that he is perhaps in the “wrong body” and that this theoretical conception becomes the new doxa?
Curiously, I found the antidote (temporary, I’m afraid) to my morning malaise in the article from Duty on Catherine Lemieux and her book Lourdes. She says this: “What is violent is the feminine we. […] That is to say, we include a person in a collective without asking their opinion. This is not unique to feminists. This is how any form of ideological oppression works. » A reactionary, no doubt, but not particularly panicked, it seems. I will read his book.