Queering the Census
The 2023 Census is an attempt to cover up and legitimize the queering of sex. By queering we mean making something appear as its opposite, that is the inversion of reality, essence as appearance. Marx used it to denote the essence of labour exploitation appearing as a fair exchange in the market. In the present context, the reality of the homophobic patriarchal family appears as performative forms of its opposite, the liberation of transwomen and transmen from sex oppression. Here, performative means the postmodern idea that if we act out our fantasies, they become part of a self-chosen real-life.
For example, AGP (Autogynephilia – the male fetish of being a woman) is now the license to build back patriarchy better. By this we mean that sex must be abolished and transed away as the sexist homophobic answer to same sex attraction. Lesbian girls are pressured into becoming transmen. Men terrorise them to mutilate their own bodies. Men who cannot get women’s consent for sex (Incels – involuntary celibates who cannot penetrate the ‘cotton ceiling’) are now state licensed to become ‘transwomen’ and lesbians who demand the right to rape real lesbians in state institutions.
The reality of girls transing to escape men, and grown men transing to oppress women has a common cause. Both are the result of a new attack on women, particularly lesbians. Trans ideology in the 21st century is a reactionary throwback to the historic overthrow of women’s control of their reproduction, in order to exploit them as sex slaves and break their resistance to the overthrow of patriarchal capitalism.
The modern form of patriarchy is the queering of sex as gender. Gender, men’s oppression of women, is celebrated as a cultural/legal tool to erase women completely. It does not need to repeat the horror of original patriarchal overthrow of women to gain control over their bodies as a force of production. It is worse. It subjects girls and women to self-mutilation and rape to overcome their resistance as a potentially revolutionary force capable of taking back the forces of production and our restore harmony with nature.
So today when capitalism is facing its terminal crisis, women, the sex that has represented the fightback of nature against the patriarchy and parasitic capitalism, must be neutralised and enslaved. To do this the patriarchy re-enacts its historic ritual domination of women to legitimize them as sex slaves. So there arises a new form of patriarchy in the 21st century to complete the job of oppressing women, erasing their existence as a biological sex. They are re-named, re-stereotyped, and re-counted as a gender ‘identity’ open to men as acts of free choice all recorded and validated in the Census!
The Census enables gender ideology and the re-enslavement of women. Gender becomes an independent variable (not dependent on any external social factor) along with age and ethnicity to be used in describing the NZ population. Sex is coded as an ‘identity’ completing the fiction that it is ‘assigned’ at birth as a gender. All the information collected by the Census will therefore be shaped to reflect the delusion that gender, rather than sex, is a determinant of the ‘life chances’ of individuals. By abolishing biological sex, a structural determinant of social life, the fact that capitalist social relations defines ones position in society is replaced by the belief that an act of ‘free will’ can over-ride social determinants as a simple matter of personal choice. Gender oppression is thus rendered as gender freedom.
The ideological denial of biological and sexual social relations in the Census will have a major impact in masking of the reality of 21st century capitalism. The power of women as a biological sex class in playing a key role in leading the working class in the overthrow patriarchal capitalism is critically compromised. In its place are egocentric fantasists whose postmodern denial of reality celebrates a dying capitalism taking humanity to its grave.
Karl Marx and Fred Engels made a path-breaking critique of post-modernism at its very inception in The German Ideology around 1847. Their targets were the German bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, in particular Max Stirner, whose bourgeois radicalism amounted to the belief that individuals are determined, not by biology or society “as it is” but by their own creative imaginations. What matters as real is not the events that shape us behind our backs, that is ‘nothing’, but our ‘self-discoveries’ of our ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ reflected in the mirror. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03d.htm
The call by Speak Up for Women to #boycottcensus23 is the only response possible for women and men who support them to resist the coding of their oppression as a human right for men in the database of the patriarchal capitalist state.
