On matters of sex (that is, whether one is male or female) and of gender (whether one sees oneself as male or female), people on the Left demand the power to decide how categories are defined and even how many categories there are. They declare that their goal is gender equality, but that they must first achieve equity – everyone treated the same, but only after everyone is treated differently.
Leftists aren’t really confused. Confusion is the point. Most people, if they understood what the Left is doing on sex and gender, would oppose it, so it is to the leftists’ advantage to use unclear language and twisted logic.
The Gates Foundation provides guidance to groups around the world on how to discuss issues of sex and gender. Groups like the Women’s Empowerment Forum of India make verbatim use of boilerplate provided by the foundation. Gates Foundation influence on these issues is magnified by the foundation’s vast resources; people seeking Gates money must toe the line. Other grantmaking bodies, from nonprofits to governments, follow the foundation’s example.
Melinda French Gates is a leftwing feminist – see the accompanying article on her personal donations to leftwing feminist groups – and her stamp is on the organization long known as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “I founded this institution. My values are baked into that institution [the foundation],” she said. Bill has not shown great personal interest in these issues as he has in, say, environmental and health matters; he mainly delegated such matters to Melinda. Although the Gateses have divorced and she has left the foundation, there has been no apparent change in the Gates Foundation’s direction.
Consider a Gates Foundation project called the Gender Equality Toolbox, available at https://www.gatesgenderequalitytoolbox.org/ and described this way: “The Gates Foundation’s Gender Equality Toolbox is made up of tools that can guide foundation staff and partners in designing, managing and measuring the results and impact of gender intentional and gender transformative programs and investments.”
Part of the toolbox is called A Conceptual Model of Women and Girls’ Empowerment. The “conceptual model” asserts that focusing on empowerment leads to women and girls becoming agents of change for empowerment, as their consciousness is raised and they gain critical consciousness – an internal change that enables them to exercise agency.
Right.
I’m not making this up. Here is an excerpt.
“A focus on empowerment requires a shift away from seeing women and girls as beneficiaries of health and development programs to viewing them as agents of change for their own individual and collective empowerment. Beyond providing resources or benefits, programs that aim to empower women and girls must involve a process of social transformation, ultimately enhancing the control that women and girls have over their own lives. . . .
“Women and girls gain critical consciousness when they identify and question how inequalities and power operate in their lives and affirm their sense of self and their rights. As a woman or girl gains critical consciousness, her ‘power within’ is transformed and her aspirations and sense of self-awareness, confidence, self-esteem, and self-efficacy grow. It is this internal change that enables her to exercise agency. The development of collective critical consciousness among women and girls can also be a strong driver of collective action and social movements that challenge and transform critical issues of gender discrimination. Research has shown that the transformative effects of empowerment initiatives can be intensified by actively engaging women in consciousness raising.”
The foundation pays lip service to the idea that, eventually, some day in the future, people will be treated equally, and special treatment based on identity will no longer be necessary. In the case of gender, “gender mainstreaming,” which is seeing everything through a “gender lens,” is critical, and “The ultimate goal of mainstreaming is to achieve gender equality for all.” (See below for more on the “gender lens.”)
Just as the stated goal of Communists is the withering away of the state, but totalitarianism must come first, the stated goal of leftwing feminists is equality, but equity, its opposite, must come first. Equity means treating people differently based on their categories, to compensate for different treatment in the past. As noted by Ibram X. Kendi, the leading theorist of what the Left calls anti-racism: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Likewise, the only remedy to sexist discrimination is more discrimination.
This inherent contradiction – opposing discrimination but supporting it – is on display in the Gender Equality Toolbox, which in one section promotes equity and in another section promotes equality.
In one part, it says: “Gender Equity / Fairness in treatment of all people regardless of sex or gender identity and/or expression. / The concept of gender equity recognizes that individuals have different needs and power based on their sex or gender identity and/or expression, and that these differences should be identified and addressed in a manner that rectifies inequities. To ensure fairness, affirmative action is often used to remedy gaps and compensate for historical and social disadvantages that prevent individuals from otherwise operating as equals. Gender equity is a strategy that can lead to gender equality using targeted time-bound policies.”
In another, it says: “Gender Equality / The state of being equal in status, rights and opportunities, and of being valued equally, regardless of sex or gender identity and/or expression. / In a state of gender equality, people are free to develop their personal abilities and make choices without the limitations set by stereotypes, gender norms, or prejudices. Gender equality is widely recognized as a fundamental human rights concern and a precondition for advancing development, reducing poverty, and promoting sustainable development. Gender equality implies that the interests, needs and priorities of both women and men are taken into consideration and that achievement of development outcomes does not depend on an individual’s sex or gender identity and/or expression.”
The line about “targeted time-bound policies” only papers over the inconsistency.
I should note that it’s easy to follow a path consistent with one’s values when one’s values are in direct contradiction with each other.
GENDER AS OPPOSED TO SEX
Another section of the Gender Equality Toolbox deals with gender as a concept separate from that of sex.
From the lexicon in the Gender Equality Toolbox: “Sex / The biological categorization of a person as male, female, or intersex / Sex is assigned at birth based on biological indicators, including hormones, sex chromosomes, internal reproductive organs, and external genitalia. Sex and gender are commonly conflated, which contributes to widespread erroneous beliefs that cultural practices, roles, and norms around gender are biologically determined and therefore cannot be changed.”
On the other hand, in the foundation’s view, a person can be classified as “cisgender,” “transgender,” or something else. “Gender Identity and/or Expression / A person’s own sense of being male, female, or another identity beyond this binary, and how they choose to manifest this externally. / Gender identity includes how individuals experience their own gender, as well as what they call themselves. A person’s gender identity and/or expression may or may not align with the biological sex assigned at birth. When it aligns, the person is cisgender. When it does not align, the person may be transgender and identify as male or female, or they may use different terms to describe themselves, such as non-binary, genderqueer, agender, bigender, and more. Unlike gender identity, gender expression is observable to others. Gender expression includes how people show their gender through clothing, appearance, behavior, personal gender pronouns, among other forms of expression. An individual’s gender expression does not automatically imply one’s gender identity. Individuals may choose to change their gender expression over time or based on circumstances where they feel comfortable or safe.”
The foundation describes these as “genderqueer, agender, bigender, and more.” Other genders widely recognized by advocates of gender spectrum theory include gender neutral, pangender, two-spirit, et al., a total of 58 or 68 or 72 or an infinite number.
This takes us to the matter of pronouns.
From the Gender Equality Toolbox lexicon: “Personal Gender Pronouns / Third-person pronouns that can be used by an individual to convey their gender identity. / Personal pronouns are parts of speech used to refer to a person other than the speaker or listener (i.e., ‘third person’). In English, the most commonly used personal gender pronouns (PGP) for an individual are ‘she/her/hers’, ‘he/him/his’, and ‘they/them/theirs’. However, there are many other PGPs that people choose, including ‘sie/hir/hirs’, ‘zie/zir/zirs’, that reflect the diversity of gender identities outside the gender binary of male and female. Some individuals may use more than one set of pronouns (e.g., ‘she/ her/hers’ and ‘they/them/theirs’) or take ‘any and all’ pronouns. An individual’s PGPs may also change depending on the place, time, or audience. For example, individuals may choose to use their preferred non- binary pronouns only in spaces where they feel safe to do so. Asking an individual about their pronouns and referring to an individual by their preferred pronoun based on the context is an important signal of respect and acceptance of that person’s gender identity.”
What does all this mean?
As the terms are used by advocates of gender theory, “genderqueer” means not following male/female gender norms, “agender” means having no gender, “bigender” means being alternately male and female (or being both), “pangender” means having many or all genders, and “two-spirit” means having multiple genders plus being descended from indigenous people. In gender theory, transgender means being born (advocates would say “assigned at birth”) in the male or female category and later coming to believe (advocates would say “realize”) that one is actually in a different category. A male in a female’s body, a female in a male’s body.
“There is no fixed number of gender identities. They occur on a spectrum, which really means that the possibilities are infinite,” claims MedicalNews Today. On the other hand, Pope Leo XIV, when he was a bishop in Peru, opposed an initiative to promote gender ideology in schools, saying, “The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist.”
Science says that most people are born as clearly male or female, but it is possible for a person to have a mix of male and female characteristics. Depending on how strictly anatomy and biochemistry are examined, the number of people in such a situation appears to be somewhere between one-in-a-hundred and one-in-2,500. The vast majority of those who regard themselves as transgender base their sex classification entirely on how they see themselves, not on any biological evidence that they were misclassified at birth.
As for pronouns and names, the point of the leftist approach is that it imposes on everyone the obligation to recognize gender choices even if we believe they are absurd or rooted in indoctrination (e.g., tomboys being told by authority figures that they are “really” boys). We are told that refusing to use a person’s choice of pronouns, or referring to a person’s birthname (“deadname”) when he or she has chosen a new name, is evil, verbal violence and hate speech.
Progressivism, rooted in resentment, requires new sources of resentment continually, and in this case resentment is produced by turning the use of a pronoun or a given name into an assault on a person’s identity.
I try to get along with people. If someone asks me to call her Fred, I’ll do so unless there’s a good reason not to. I don’t ridicule people over the way they dress or the way they look. But this is the ideology that has led to serious harm, ranging from cheating at women’s sports, to exposing children to misogynistic minstrel shows (“drag”), to efforts by radical teachers to alienate children from their parents (“I’m your parent now,” it says on a poster seen in schools), to the sexual mutilation of children.
A GENDER LENS/GENDER MAINSTREAMING/GENDER INTEGRATION
Progressivism requires that every issue be seen from the same perspective, through the same “lens.”
The Gates Foundation, through the Gender Equity Toolbox, pushes the use of a “gender lens.”
With a gender lens in place, every project the organization undertakes and every decision it makes is judged based on how it affects people of different genders – those genders being “men, women, those who identify as non-binary” and the countless genders that the foundation and its allies believe exist on a spectrum.
From the Gates Foundation:
The goal is “gender mainstreaming,” which the foundation defines this way: “Gender mainstreaming is the process of integrating a gender lens into all aspects of an organization’s strategies and initiatives, and into its culture, systems and operations. . . . Gender mainstreaming requires building both capacity and accountability across an organization.”
To ensure ideological consistency in all projects (called “investments”) funded by the Gates Foundation, the foundation produced a set of questions by which all projects must be evaluated, called a Gender Integration Marker. It’s introduced with this:
Thus, every proposed project (“investment”) is to be evaluated based on whether it helps “realize the foundation’s vision of becoming a gender intentional organization by strategically applying a gender lens” across the foundation’s work.
From the guidelines: “Will the implementation team include someone with expertise in gender equality programming that is dedicated to ensuring effective gender integration? This question aims to ensure that the investment is staffed appropriately so that there is someone with gender equality programming experience to guide any gender intentional or transformative activities. . . . It is important to ensure this position is resourced [funded] equivalently to other key members of the implementing team.”
It is often said, regarding Non-Governmental Organizations, that the main purpose of the NGO Community is to provide jobs for people in the NGO Community. So it’s notable that the guidelines require the hiring of gender consultants.
INTERSECTIONALITY
Using a lens that is not just a gender lens but an intersectional lens (one at the intersection of age, class, race, ethnicity, caste, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other social markers of difference) is the key to understanding empowerment.
From the foundation’s A Conceptual Model of Women and Girls’ Empowerment: “The advantages or disadvantages that a woman or girl faces depend on how gender intersects with her age, class, race, ethnicity, caste, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other social markers of difference. . . . [U]sing an intersectional lens [emphasis in the original] that considers gender and the multiple aspects of identity and status is crucial to understanding a woman or girl’s relative empowerment or disempowerment.”
At every level, the Gates Foundation looks through a gender lens, or maybe an intersectional lens that includes gender.
Another term for that: “blinded by ideology.”
Dr. Steven J. Allen is an NLPC Senior Fellow.
