Purity Spirals and True Believers
One Woman’s Religion Is Another’s Neo-Religious Zealotry
I loved cultural studies at university. When I enrolled in a humanities degree, I didn’t really even know what it was. I was offered a course where I could study movies, books and examine the ways we constructed meaning in culture, and I couldn’t believe my luck. As young students, we began to realise that ideas that we had held as “true” or “natural” had a history and may be specific to our culture. What I found fascinating about the post-structuralists in the early 1990s, was the examination of the practice of ideas. Not just the great thoughts that philosophers put forward, but how the practice of ideas became useful to individuals and to governments.
Foucault wrote about “practices of the self.” He noted how the Catholic and protestant practices of confession to an authority and to oneself were adopted by the vocation of psychiatry and in popular culture as forms of truth-telling. These confessional practices were adopted by secular institutions, and we see them today in anti-racism and diversity training.
In cultural studies, we looked at the way the Christian soul was “invented” over a historical trajectory— how the idea of the soul was subject to cultural re-interpretation and practical application in various settings. As a young devout Christian, I was a little shaken by this as were many of my fellow students, but I learned to accept that various seemingly conflicting concepts can be true at once. Rather than embrace the nihilism that post-structuralism was for so many, I accepted that I was free to believe in a “soul,” that Christian practices can transform a life and they can change and develop over time, and that these same practices can be used by governments as forms of population control. Studying in this way taught me a kind of objectivity about the cultural practices of my faith and that purity of belief was not uniquely a religious practice.
In the twenty years since I left university, gender studies appear to have emerged from the discipline that used to be called women’s studies but with the post-structuralists theoretical approaches we used in cultural studies. To be fair, gender is a legitimate target for cultural studies, since gender is the way culture gives meaning to sex. The invention of the “gendered soul” would be a fascinating topic for a cultural studies thesis.
But this is not the kind of critical independent analysis that has emerged. Methodologies of cultural studies and ideologies of gender studies have been employed by LGBTIQ organisations to put sex rather than gender under a microscope, to make claims that sex is an invented cultural construct.
By situating sex as constructed, claims are then made that gender is innate, like a type of gendered soul. I say “soul” but the widely distributed material designed for children, “The Genderbread Person” define gender as “your psychological sense of self.” This deliberately confuses the modern idea of “gender identity” with the way gender has been defined for decades as the cultural expression of sex. Children are told to distrust the culturally constructed idea of their gender developed in their own culture and by their own family.
The Genderbread person tells children that their instinct regarding their own gender “is almost unanimously wrong.” The state and capital sponsored learning of modern “sexuality” education, present children with alternative models of gender that, in all likelihood, have been developed in the same kind of humanities department where I learned to deconstruct cultural ideas. So, the modern state is effectively constructing gender “selves” and “souls” in citizens, in the same way it once handed them a Christian soul.
The final step in the process of this sinister and deeply illiberal social experiment, is that psychologists have been lobbied into saying that gender dysphoria is actually a disease of society. That wrong gender constructs are leading humans to feel distress with their innate gender. That sexed bodies can be aligned with our gender soul. Gender souls that state institutions are themselves inventing. The gender dysphoric individual, as both a person with a vulnerable mental state and someone who is unable to express their true self because of cultural censure, has become the subject of a very powerful civil rights movement In reality this is a cultural re-engineering project.
The dysphoric adult and child are vital to justify the government and capitalist intervention into the cultural lives of individuals. The susceptibility of gender-diverse individuals to “hate” and “bullying” and resulting suicide, has become the justification of a range of speech and policy mandates, similar to public health campaigns throughout the western world. Coincidentally, this justification is useful, not just for re-inventing gender in citizens but also for managing political dissent to the left-wing governments that promote gender ideology.
Gender identity management is part of a broader “social justice” movement including semi-religious "race practices" of repentance from “whiteness” that has been named “woke." But the authoritarian reach of these initiatives, I believe, is greatly underestimated.
Those of us that dissent to this neo-religion make strange bedfellows. Gays, lesbians, conservatives, right-wingers, feminists, Christians, classic liberals and ex-champagne socialists, all sitting together in aghast at ludicrous “truths” that have been adopted by governments, medical associations and a raft of professional activists.
Throughout various liberal democracies, the two-party left/right democratic systems have shown themselves inadequate in the face of the complete institutional capture by this new religious zeal. But as we clamour to oppose it, we are finding our rat-bag alliances difficult to consolidate.
My reactionary journey took what seems to be a familiar path of initially following some anti-woke podcasters. The intellectual dark web, as they came to be known collectively, was tracing the beliefs of the new “progressives” back to the kind of humanities departments from which I heralded, even if their grasp of the underlying theorists has not always been great. Suffice to say, when a mathematician becomes the self-proclaimed leader of a crusade against “wokeness,” he is bound to lump groups of ideas and people in a pile of sinners and offenders that are nothing of the sort.
The anti-feminist current among what I came to call “the anti-woke blokes” is what drove me to take up my pen, again as a feminist. Since then, I have noticed some major issues, not just among the ranks of feminists but in the resistance to the progressive left that need to be urgently addressed if we are going to limit the harm they cause to our society, and that we cause to each other.
We can imagine purity spirals as a series of increasingly strict questions that turn quite a large group of general believers into a smaller and increasingly devout group. Such spirals seem to be in operation for the progressive left to concentrate power and for the resistance groups to divide power.
When I was on the political left, for instance, the questions to be included in the group may have been, “Do you believe in the equality of all?,” “Do you believe in free education?”, “Do you believe in universal healthcare?”, “Do you believe in the right to form unions?” All of these questions I can still say “yes” to. But as the social justice religion took hold, we began to get a new set of beliefs, “Do you believe in same-sex marriage?” And now, “Do you believe trans women are real women?” The political purity spiral is designed to make a group smaller and smaller and concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands. Ultimately with the last question to those who are prepared to lie to maintain their place in the progressive religious hierarchy. Nobody actually believes trans women are women. It’s a question of allegiance, it’s a purity test.
But among the resistance, purity spirals are also creating groups of fundamentalists. The aforementioned mathematician has been shunned and has shunned others, his ex-writing partner (Helen Pluckrose) has declared that trans women are more oppressed than women, bickering has ensued over COVID-19 vaccines and paranoia about being labelled “right-wing” has made a broad feminist movement forget that women did not gain anything from allegiance to the theories of dead white guys.
I regret to inform you that abortion is the perfect issue to examine the purity spirals in the women’s movement because the female reproductive system lies at the heart of feminism. While absolute control of the individual over her reproductive system is a logical argument for the atheist radical feminist, the moral complexities that this involves is an impossible position for many, including Christians like myself. I have very few arguments on Twitter about this, but one I did have was when I agreed that abortion to birth is theologically consistent for the socialist radical feminist but involved a form of tyranny in a liberal democracy.
Of course, a RadFem had kittens. I provided a real-life example of a friend who is a midwife and refused to attend a late-term abortion. The doctor left it to her conscience and found someone willing, and then my friend had to listen to the baby cry for hours alone before it died. The RadFem (radical feminist) called me a “liar,” called my friend unprofessional for telling me the story, and then she said that anyone who would refuse to assist an abortion is not worthy of the profession of midwifery. I have, of course, been told many times that I have no right to call myself a feminist because of my moral limitations in accepting abortion.
In Christianity the word “fundamental” is used to describe that type of adherence when we bring principles back to their base, making them absolute in a variety of matters. We have the absolutist principle of the “sanctity of life” that has made its way into common law, not just for religious purposes but because it avoids forms of tyranny of the state, by removing from the state, the power over life. I brought my Twitter adversary to the point that I did, because I wanted to highlight that she too was bringing a fundamentalist position to a complex issue. And that the application of her position required a form of tyranny over women’s right of conscience.
She avoided the trap by retreating into a purity spiral. In the purity spiral of feminism, if you cannot answer the question “Does a woman have a right to demand abortion up until birth?” in the affirmative, you are part of the patriarchal oppressor. In all socialism, the oppressor is equivalent to the devil. It is a moral framework brought into political thought.
We all find it almost impossible to resist bringing our ideology into our politics. I developed an argument about individual liberty because I ultimately wanted to save the life of the child. At that late-term, the child was viable, it had to be born anyway, the abortion was for “social” reasons, I wanted the state to save the life. The RadFem had to make the child die in order to fulfil her own ideological framework of the absolute authority of the woman over her reproductive organs. We were never going to agree, but she made me out to be the bad person in this debate.
The great dividing of the saint from the heathen is the purpose of the purity spiral and I can only think it is a natural human phenomenon. The problem here is that we have two competing ideological systems and in the current gender-critical movement we would have many more. Purity spirals solve complex issues with absolute moral positions that you must hold to maintain your place in the power structure or in the cohort of true believers.
People retreat into their ideology because it taps into their identity. I am not unsympathetic to that, I am a working-class daughter of a cockney and a cleaner, I cried when I first voted conservative. Julie Bindel taps into her own working-class heritage to say that people like me are dangerous to ally with. But it’s all bullshit. The left has done very little for women. They handed our daughters to pornography, to gender ideology, and women like my mother had to fight unions tooth and nail to be included in the labour movement.
Kara Dansky, a more pragmatic RadFem, has said that there is no way that she and conservatives will ever agree on abortion, and we have to put this issue aside and work towards a common goal. She lives in a country where Christians do hold serious power, I don’t think this is the case in Australia or the UK. I’ve seen Jane Clare Jones advocate many times that she will not align with conservatives. She is a true believer. But I have also noticed that she has been grateful for the assistance of classic liberalism in fighting for rights for women more than once. Politics is a relentlessly morally compromising business.
The solution to purity spirals in Christianity is the doctrine statement. We’ve been at this purity business a long time. If churches allowed purity spirals to continue, they would become broke, which of course many do, for this very reason. The most successful of churches have a broad doctrine statement that is specific enough to exclude non-believers and people who would continually fight, but broad enough to allow it to be a useful organisation.
Radical feminists are neither going to win this fight alone nor can they provide the sole moral framework for it. To get the work done we all need a broader agreement, a doctrine statement of sorts. Maybe what we agree on is:
• Humans are sexually dimorphic creatures, male and female.
• Sex will stay with a person from conception to death.
• Males and females have different propensities to violent and sexual crime. There is no evidence that these propensities alter with a change in gender identity.
• Gender is a word we use to describe the meanings and stereotypes that cultures place on sex.
• Gender can not change sex.
• Gender is not a stable concept to encourage children to place identity in.
• Gender identity placed over sex in law will lead to an erosion of women’s rights and safety.
• Gender non-conformity should never be pathologized as a symptom for cultural and medical intervention.
• Gender Dysphoria (GD) is a well-documented serious mental health issue that should be dealt with under the supervision of a medical professional.
• Children cannot be transgender. Non-gender conforming children are to be accepted as such.
• Masculine boys and feminine girls should be free to wear the clothes of their choosing.
• Rigid gender stereotypes encourage healthy GNC girls and boys into harmful paths of surgery, sterility, sexual dysfunction, confusion and loneliness.
• Self ID is a dangerous legal concept that will allow women to become vulnerable to a range of trans-identifying males.
• Sports have to remain sex segregated for fairness. GNC children should be free to play in the team of their sex to encourage gender expression diversity. There is nothing wrong with a footballer in a skirt.
• Gender issues are not “trans” issues, they are human issues.
• The elevation of “gender” as innate, is harmful.
Foucault knew that power didn’t just exist in the sovereign—power exists in the ways we interact as humans. Power is involved in the complex interactions that we choose and the way we implement our beliefs as practices. Ultimately, we don’t understand why humans strive to place an ideological framework in the state and enforce it on everyone, we don’t understand why we cling to angel versus demon moral world views. History tells us that these things lead to nowhere good. We must somehow forge an alliance as women and take control of our own definition in law.
It is possibly hardest for those who think themselves the political “renegades” to accept that they are imposing their “own ideas and practices as rules of conduct” on others, as JS Mill observed in relation to the never-ending patterns of human behaviour. If we are to access the collective power of our sex, we have to avoid the purity spirals that dilute our power.
I promise I don’t want to be in your club, I don’t need to be your friend and I won’t be persuaded by your ideology. Like so many, I am looking to the rights of my daughters who, for the first time in hundreds of years, may inherit fewer rights than their mother was born with.