Reading List – On Gender & Sexuality

Homophobia in drag

Sylvester, an androgynous disco icon of the 1970s and 1980s, was once asked what gay liberation meant to him. He answered, ‘I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones’.

The Queers Versus The Homosexuals

The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. Because heterosexuality is the overwhelming norm, and homosexuality the exception, and because society is nothing but a complex of oppression, homosexuals are defined by their rejection of heteronormativity. To be queer is inherently to exist on the margins; to be odd, peculiar, weird, queer, hated, oppressed, and in revolt and rebellion. To be queer is to be dedicated to subversion, to mock conventions, to deconstruct language, to dismantle the human body, to defy “nature” and, above all, to liberate humankind from the prison of gender.

Harvey Weinstein Is Monster of the Moment, but the Whole System Is Rigged

I confess I found it refreshing to shelter briefly in a world where sex was just something people did together, not a trauma in the making.

University Rejects Calls to Fire Camille Paglia

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women’s studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects,” she said. “The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.” Paglia has said that she supports equal rights and does not object to people defining their sexual orientations and gender identities as they wish — including in ways frowned upon by traditionalists. But she has defended the right of scholars to question some of the stances taken by some who support transgender rights. Via email, she said that she identifies as being transgender — and that she regularly talks about the great contributions made to art and society by people who cross gender boundaries.

Transgender ideology will lose Biden the election

The Cass report simply found what a growing chorus of Americhttps://brighterthansunflowers.com/2023/08/21/guest-post-on-zero-sum-nonmonogamous-family-and-consent/ans suspected: Our capacity for tolerance was preyed upon by radicals in academia, business, and media who foisted an experiment on children en masse.

Helping Trans Kids Means Admitting What We Don’t Know.

To the radical, the easiest way to win a debate is to insist that the only choice is between opposing poles. If you oppose any element of their argument, you have endorsed the enemy. If the criticism is tempered and credible, this only makes them regard it as more dangerous.

How Pride lost itself

In the ultimate betrayal of the gay rights movement, steeped in liberationist and civil libertarian politics, the Pride flag has come to represent a thoroughly intolerant, authoritarian tendency. The gender identitarians are not interested in liberation or equality or tolerance. They demand affirmation – submission. They are in the business of both compelling and suppressing speech, of threatening the livelihoods and reputations of dissenters, of disrupting their opponents’ ability to peaceably assemble, of politically and socially ostracising those who think differently.

The mystery of gay animals

Science is meant to be about striving to better understand our world, just because it’s interesting, “because it’s there”, because we can. For politicised areas, a dose of plain, unmotivated interest is especially needed. If we stigmatise whole realms of research, well-meaning scientists will avoid showing an interest in sensitive topics, and only those with an axe to grind remain. Scientists must actively commit to protecting curiosity for curiosity’s sake. Asking why the sky is blue need not carry the subtext that it ought to be some other colour instead.

Being gay is not biological

It’s a shame that this view of homosexuality, as neither fixed biological orientation nor “radical” disruptive force, has been forgotten. Key victories in gay rights have not given way to a “post-gay” moment of self-reflection for those who feel predominantly same-sex desire see themselves not as “other” but as universally human. Instead, we see a doubling down of identitarianism, particularly online, where every kink, feeling and sexual experience is ripe for categorisation.

The six key things from Piers Morgan’s interview with Rishi Sunak

“we should have enormous compassion and tolerance and understanding for those who are questioning their gender and identity.”
Mr Sunak said: “But we have to recognise the challenges that that poses, particularly for women’s safety. For me… whether it’s sex, whether it’s women’s spaces, whether it’s prisons, biological sex really matters.”

The emptiness of being queer

Relatedly, a serious historical inquiry might ask: how did Stonewall move from defending the rights of homosexuals in the Nineties to arguing in 2022 that lesbian women should date members of the opposite sex — that is, males who identify as women — or else be judged as motivated by “social prejudice” and even “sexual racism”? And while historians were at it, they might also consider how our society has moved from the laudable aim of depathologising homosexuality, to a now fairly widespread acceptance of the chemical castration of confused gay youth, under the guise of “transitioning” them — a fate horribly reminiscent of the one meted out so vindictively to Turing. All fascinating historical questions, none of which are remotely likely to be asked within the glossy corporate-friendly walls of Queer Britain, I predict.

Pride is no place for homosexuals

This, surely, is the stuff that matters. It’s the stuff we once used to care about, before a fragile generation started treating polite disagreement as “genocide” and our rebranded community acquired a reputation for cry-bully tantrums. One day, I hope, the gender wars will end and we can return to those more proportionate values.

Richard Dawkins: There are two sexes and that’s all there is to it

There are two sexes. You could talk about gender, if you wish and that’s subjective.

Piers: But when people say there are 100 genders?

Richard: I’m not interested in that. As a biologist, there are two sexes and that’s all there is to it.

The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count 

The women’s movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women — and for men, too.

Debunking “Trans Women Are Not Women” Arguments

Transgender People and “Biological Sex” Myths

I live in a sexual and romantic world without women, where no patriarchy could definitionally exist, a subculture with hookups and relationships and marriages and every conceivable form of sexual
desire that straight men and women experience as well. And you know what you find? That men behave no differently in sexual matters when there are no women involved at all. In fact, remove women, and you see male sexuality unleashed more fully, as men would naturally express it, if they could get away with it.

Hot Joel Summer

Perfecting his body became the price of entry, a way to make himself visible and viable.

The Bittersweet Silliness of Hulu’s Fire Island

The script does not judge drugs or sex, but it is attuned to the comedown, and moreover, to them what’s next that yawns between highs.

Fire Island review: A sweet, queer rom-com that takes aim at Jane Austen’s ‘hetero nonsense’

The script does not judge drugs or sex, but it is attuned to the comedown, and moreover, to them what’s next that yawns between highs.

Has the gay movement turned down the wrong path? Bill Andriette talks with Pagliaabout sex, violence, gaybashing, and liberation

I think that that is a trap the gay movement fell into. Stonewall should have been about liberating all sexuality. The argument in my work is to try to convince heterosexuals that they have in them potential homosexual impulses that are pleasure-giving, and that there is absolutely nothing to fear from now and then expressing them. I would think that this would be in the interest of gay people to think that the whole world is open for homosexual expression. 

But gay activism, by insisting on this sharp polarity, has insured its own defeat, has insured that the world will hate it. There will always be a liberal minority that will tolerate homosexuality, the art world and so on. But the majority of people now and forever in the future will always be attracted to the opposite sex. So the more you insist on the separation of gay versus straight, the genetically innate separation, the more you insure the defeat of gay objectives. I think the only way true tolerance will come is for people to be convinced that bisexual responsiveness is a perfectly achievable ideal. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to convince people that, “So you had sex with another man, oh, big deal.”

How to Stop Rushing Into Love

There are no good people or bad people here. We only risk becoming something static when we decide that we’ve got it all figured out and that our moral code can be absolute. We will all do good things and bad things, and we will all hurt the people we love. Sadly, we will probably hurt them the most in the service of what we believe is right. What makes you good is not perfection in action or strictness to code, but the willingness to question, to change, and to listen to your heart when your life stops matching it.

Sex, lies and legal consent: Can deceit turn sex into rape?

Sex, lies and legal consent: Can deceit turn sex into rape?

When Does a Watershed Become a Sex Panic?

If the presumption of innocence is rooted in the idea that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than risk jailing one innocent person, then the policing of sex seems to assume that it’s better to have ten times less sex than to risk having a nonconsensual sexual experience. The problem is not just that this reduces the amount of sex people are likely to be having; it also serves to blur the boundaries between rape, nonviolent sexual coercion, and bad, fumbling, drunken sex. The effect is both to criminalize bad sex and trivialize rape.

Discussing Consent in Gay Spaces Requires Nuance, Not Sex Panic

To suggest that the initial placement of a hand is in itself assault, however, completely betrays this contract and willfully ignores that consent can work differently in different contexts

Cruising in the Age of Consent

For women, sex remained “a bargaining tool”—something too socially significant to be casual, and something that could be taken, possibly by violence. At The Club, by contrast, everybody really was after the same thing: sex for the sake of sex. Brute coercion didn’t appear to be an issue. She walked away wishing that she had her own bathhouse to go to—that such free pleasure might be possible for women, too. And yet something still nagged at her. “Is this fuck palace the ultimate conclusion of sexist logic,” she wondered, “or is it erotic freedom?”