Nationalism, Decadence, and Trans Panic
In a recent online conversation about the havoc being wreaked across the Scottish independence movement by the intense conflict between the campaigners for transgender rights and so-called ‘gender critical’ reactionaries, I was struck by the framing of a particular dismissal of transgender people:
Western decadents with sexual fantasies, lifestyle choices, and desires that have destroyed our independence movement are really the last thing I give one fuck about.
Absolutely, this was an unguarded comment in a private communication (the source will remain anonymous) intended to insult and offend. Sadly, this is where much of the public discourse on trans rights is at. But there is something else going on in this construct which merits further discussion — especially in the context of the campaign for Scottish independence; the fascinating intersection of Nationalism and transphobia.
Let us be clear, this is nationalism and it is transphobia we are discussing. The belief in the existence of an element in society that has ‘destroyed our [national] movement’ — the stabbed in the back leitmotif — is a common feature of frustrated Völkisch nationalist causes. And the reduction of transgender people to ‘decadents with sexual fantasies, lifestyle choices, and desires,’ together with an expressed indifference to their wellbeing (‘the last thing I give one fuck about’), is transphobia. Yet, and again, let me be very clear; I do not accept that we can describe people as ‘transphobes.’ People are not transphobes, homophobes, and racists. Ideas and the words and actions they produce are transphobic, homophobic, and racist. People’s minds can change. A bad idea remains a bad idea. So the purpose of this article is to challenge these bad ideas and hopefully bring about a change in the minds of the people who hold them. This is not an attack on people.
The assertion that transgender people have destroyed the Scottish independence movement is utterly preposterous. The existence, the private lives, and the campaign for the rights and recognition of trans women and men have no bearing whatsoever on the state-political ambitions of the independence movement. Scottish independence can be won with or without the furtherance of transgender rights and, equally, trans rights can be progressed with or without Scottish independence. These are two entirely discrete concerns. But that they are being linked by many nationalists is interesting.
Before getting into why this is happening, perhaps it will be useful to spell out the actual reasons the cause for independence in Scotland has been stalled. After the 2014 independence referendum, the Scottish National Party quickly acted to subsume the membership of what had been the non-party-affiliated Yes movement; in effect making the party the political vehicle of the wider movement. In the almost eight years since September 2014 the SNP has not advanced the project of independence. In spite of one crisis in the United Kingdom after another, the SNP has failed to budge. The energy of 2014 dissipated and groups, factions, and individuals went their separate ways — and this was only to be expected. The Scottish independence movement and its de facto political leadership were the masters of their own undoing. Of course, it did not help that all of this was happening under the relentless pressure of the British media and government. Eight years was more than enough time to deliver a death blow to the stagnant and frustrated political movement.
There is no such thing as a good Nationalism — and yes, I see why my saying this may surprise some readers. Nationalism is one of the worst ideas in the history of ideas, and since its first appearance in the seventeenth century it has made its presence felt in slaughter and bloodbath and war. Yet, this is not to say that every Nationalism is bad; some — like this so-called ‘civic Nationalism’ — are better, more peaceful than others. But within every Nationalism there is a kernel of exceptionalism, chauvinism, and supremacism. One does not need to be a nationalist to support the state independence of one’s nation. Nationalism is merely an idea and a socio-political and cultural tool among others, and it is not a particularly good one.
It is not in the nature of Nationalism to blame the nation for failure. Frustration and failure, then, have to be located externally (‘the coloniser’) or internally (‘the traitor’). Faced with frustration or failure, a Nationalist movement will seek a scapegoat. Now, this does not mean that a colonial power or an internal faction was not to blame. This may have been the case. What is important to recognise is that, regardless of the facts, elements of the Nationalist movement will seek to blame something or someone other than themselves. Blaming the SNP was never really going to fly for the simple reason that the SNP has positioned itself as the independence movement, leaving the majority of discontented nationalists within the party to seek another scapegoat.
The identification of ‘decadents with sexual fantasies, lifestyle choices, and desires that have destroyed our independence movement’ as a scapegoat should set alarm bells ringing. We have seen this before. It was onto the imagined decadence and sexual excesses of the Weimar Republic that the German far-right latched itself in the decade following Germany’s defeat in World War I and the collapse of the monarchy — that is, the frustration and failure of the Nationalist project which had unified Germany in 1871. In the Nationalist imagination, unwilling to blame the nation, Germany had been ‘stabbed in the back.’ Evidence for this was identified in the imagined unGerman culture taking root in the cosmopolitan and urban centres; ‘Jewish influences’ — ‘degenerate art and theatre,’ ‘sexual deviance,’ ‘capitalism,’ and other apparent signifiers of foreign and corrupting influences.
We must be careful here not to jump to the conclusion that everyone making this identification is on the far-right or a Nazi. This wasn’t even the case in late Weimar Germany. What is important in this analysis is that this opinion gave the far-right and the Nazis an access point through which set the narrative, normalise negative attitudes, and recruit nationalists to their cause. What we have evidence of in some quarters of Scottish Nationalism is not a far-right or a neo-Nazi element, but a fraction of the independence movement — a reactionary and conservative element — which is ripe for the picking by the far-right. This is exactly what we witnessed in the United States from the Tea Party movement to the election of Donald Trump.
Scotland’s independence movement or a segment of the movement is on the far-right pipeline. It is not there yet, but it is moving along the pipe. It would be wrong to say that gender critical (anti-trans) people are all transphobic. This is not the case. But all of the transphobia is coming from those who describe themselves as gender critical. We know this to be true and so too does the internationalised far-right that is actively infiltrating the British gender critical movement both online and on the ground. This is what anti-fascists describe as a ‘red pill.’ As gender critical ideas become more popular, the more we encounter transphobic language, the more it is used by the far-right to red pill movement members to ‘awaken’ them to the broader concerns of the extreme right.
We know the internationalised far-right is using this manufactured trans panic to infiltrate the gender critical movement and recruit followers because the far-right is telling us this. The American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer’s website Radix, in an article by Kat S., The TERFs to Dissident Right Pipeline (21 August 2020), sets out to answer the question as to the origins of ‘Queer Theory:’
The most severe catalysts for any women’s liberation movement are the immediate threats of physical and sexual violence and the lack of ability or opportunity for a woman to support herself or her children if her partner or guardian fails in his responsibilities or if he has passed away. Once these dangers were somewhat mitigated in the West, we see a shift from a genuine women’s liberation movement into the mid-to-late 20th-century Jewish-led feminist theory.
Establishing common ground with trans-exclusionary radical feminism, the far-right excludes transgenderism from the realm of ‘a genuine women’s liberation movement’ and so immediately leaps to the Jews as the source of this distortion. ‘Queer Theory,’ a fuzzy catch-all term employed by the right to describe trans inclusive feminism, is a ‘Jewish-led feminist theory.’ At this point, a perfectly reasonable objection is the observation that here the far-right and the gender critical movement are distinct phenomena. That two groups so happen to share the same idea of sex and gender does not make them part of the same movement. One does not have to be far-right; espousing other far-right ideas, to be gender critical. And this is true, but…
The internal logic of the gender critical argument; that the apparent power of ‘trans ideology’ is the result of a broader liberal or ‘woke’ agenda, positively screams out for justification. It is one thing to say transgender people, as individuals, are thinking wrong; that they are suffering from a mental illness or a delusion — and many do say this. It is something else entirely to label their beliefs an ideology and their campaign for rights and recognition an agenda. Both ideology and agenda presuppose a significant degree of thought and organisation — that there are people behind this.
At the heart of the gender critical Weltanschauung lies the assumption, spoken or unspoken, that trans ideology and the woke agenda are the instruments of a powerful and unseen force in society with a vested interest in destabilising the world by subverting public morals. Exactly who these people are does not need to be said. All that matters is that the discourse of the gender critical movement and the internal logic of its case assume their existence. The answer is latent. Partial answers — that this is the work of ‘Big Pharma’ qua powerful transnational corporations, elites or globalists, and the progressive or radical left — carry gender critical movement members to the point at which they can draw their own conclusions but are afraid to utter the words out loud. All the while the infiltrators from the far-right deploy symbols, dog whistles, memes, and edgy humour to help clear the fog from the emerging image of ‘the Jew.’
It is at this point in the infiltration of any movement by the far-right that we would expect to see members of the infiltrated movement making the connections they are being nudged towards, and this is precisely what is happening. The language of transgender people as ‘decadents’ is of course a massive red flag, bringing us right into the realm of imagined degeneracy typical of the Nazi propaganda of the 1920s and 30s. These people are thought of as degenerates and the culture they produce as degenerate. This summer’s production at The Globe in London of ‘I, Joan,’ a theatrical retelling of the story of Joan of Arc as gender non-binary, was met with an outpouring of gender critical outrage. True to form, one gender critical social media activist, Catherine Heseltine (Twitter, 23 July 2022, 11:31), posted in protest:
Now Joan of Arc is ‘queer’ with they/them pronouns according to The Globe. Was she really ‘questioning the gender binary’ or were medieval dresses just not very practical battle attire?
Following this up in the replies with the statement, ‘Rewriting history to promote a political agenda is something evil regimes very much embrace (26 July 2022, 01:10).’ Theatre, as an artform, is about statements. Its purpose is to communicate thoughts and ideas and to challenge social and political assumptions. Art is not ‘history,’ and theatre goers understand this. Neither its writer, Charlie Josephine, nor any of its producers thought of this as a revision of history. Yet, for Heseltine and others like her this is degenerate art because it does exactly what art is supposed to do — it challenges her assumptions and biases. Moreover, this is dangerous art because it subverts the socially constructed order in which she finds comfort.
What Catherine Heseltine is missing here is that her response is the expected response. An unseen force in society, according to far-right mythology, is actively working to corrode public morals and destabilise the nation to its own benefit. An essential step towards naming the group behind this conspiracy is calling out evidence of its influence — in this case, deviant or degenerate art. This is an exact replay of what was witnessed in Germany in the 1920s. ‘Degenerate art’ or Entartete Kunst was the term used by the National Socialists to describe all forms of art that was considered an ‘insult to German feeling.’ Everything deemed to exhibit Jewish or Communist influence was removed from state musea and galleries.
Evidently, she already imagines an agenda behind such degenerate productions; the driving force behind this is an ‘evil regime.’ Jennifer Bilek, a prolific gender critical writer and activist, is quite happy to name the people behind this evil regime; the ‘Jewish billionaire’ class (Twitter, 22 January 2016, 19:50). On a number of occasions she has promoted the work of the openly neo-Nazi video diarist Keith Woods. She posted a link to his video, ‘Transhuman Judaism: Who Are the Rich, White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology?,’ stating:
I’ve often wondered why so many of the men involved in the transgender/transhumanist agenda are Jewish, and of course I have been accused more than once of promoting a Jewish conspiracy theory. I just report on who the men are, I don’t single them out for being Jewish and I have never really speculated about why so many are.
The old ‘I’m not saying anything, but … [winking emoji]’ dog whistle post. Now the circle is being completed. Just because gender critical people believe the same things neo-Nazis believe about sex and gender doesn’t make them far-right neo-Nazis, sure. But when gender critical people start saying the same things about Jews, then, yes, they have travelled the pipeline. The ‘Western decadents with sexual fantasies’ line I encountered is not in itself far-right. I have no reason to believe the person who wrote it is on the far-right. But it undeniably chimes with a far-right neo-Nazi conspiracy theory about how the Jews are acting in the shadows to pervert society and bring it down in oder that they might, with the help of Capitalism and the banking system, take control (cf The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1903).
We are without doubt witnessing the final stages of a confluence of ideas, where the conspiracist imagination of social conservatives and gender critical agitators is mingling with far-right antisemitism. The Radix (Richard Spencer’s alt-right website) article by Kat S. leaves little doubt the organised far-right is actively infiltrating the gender critical movement to inject a certain language and a set of bad ideas into the discourse — and this is bearing fruit. It is now perfectly acceptable in gender critical circles to use extreme far-right tropes about decadence and degeneracy to describe the identities of others, bringing the gender critical movement right to the very edge of the precipice of overt antisemitism. Where these gender critical ideas are already at home in a Nationalist movement — especially that segment of the Scottish Nationalist movement that sees English Scots as ‘colonists,’ the ‘native born’ as ‘indigenous,’ and the nation as exceptional — the far-right, always masquerading as something more benign (wolves in sheeps clothing), already has a number of open doors. This is a dangerous place to be.
