Why are Conservatives Obsessed with Gender Identity?

It's because they want to impose their own gender ideology.

Photo by Michał Franczak on Unsplash

This week, Florida extended its “Don’t Say Gay” bill up to 12th grade, banning teachers from mentioning “sexual orientation or gender identity” in the classroom. Of course, sexual orientation and gender identity will continue to be central to a great many lessons; the bill actually means that teachers can’t discuss non-traditional gender identities and sexual orientations. Reading kindergartners a story about a princess who marries a prince, or teaching high school seniors about sexual abstinence in a way that assumes everyone is heterosexual, will continue to be a-ok.

And Florida, by the way, does require that high schoolers be taught sexual abstinence, despite the fact that 95% of Americans have sex before marriage.

In the meantime, anti-trans bills are spreading across the nation, most aggressively in the Republican-run states of the south and midwest. And they seem to be gaining steam, with record numbers of them being proposed and passed.

Conservatives who push and support these bills claim to be concerned about “gender ideology” perverting young minds — telling boys they can be girls and vice versa, allowing men to compete in women’s sports, giving children hormones and genital surgeries. This is all pretty dishonest. Members of the conservative movement aren’t concerned about women’s sports (otherwise they’d be funding them), children’s health (otherwise they’d be fighting the number-one killer of children), or women’s rights (otherwise they wouldn’t be virulent misogynists attacking women’s rights at every turn, banning abortion, and electing rapists to office). They care about liberal “gender ideology” for one reason: Because they want to impose and enforce their own right-wing gender ideology on the public.

Conservative gender ideology is religiously-based and it goes like this: Men and women are fundamentally different, created by God to compliment each other. There is a clear hierarchy: God, man, woman, boy child, girl child. Women are to serve men, produce children, and maintain the home; and in turn, men are to protect and provide for women and children. For Christians, this is the origin story of humankind; it is foundational, the very first building block of humanity and by extension society. It is, essentially, a “separate but equal” view of gender: Men and women have equal dignity, but not equal rights, roles, or responsibilities.

So much has been stacked atop this foundational divide, from expectations of female submissiveness and gentleness to expectations of male aggression and sexual incontinence to aesthetics that have nothing to do with biology and were wholly irrelevant in the time of Adam and Eve (short hair for men, hairless legs for women, pink for girls, blue for boys, and so on). If a young man went to a conservative Christian school wearing the same clothes Jesus likely wore, he’d almost surely be in violation of the dress code.

More importantly, though, a whole series of rights and privileges have been stacked atop this foundational divide, and feminists have been trying to erode the male monopoly on them.