Gender Identity
Games Fascists Play: The Psychology of Supremacy
GENDER IDENTITY
According to the world there’s male and female, rich and poor. According to the Way there’s no male or female, no rich or poor state. [i]
-Bodhidharma
Set up: I’m Right and You’re Wrong, so I will humiliate you in the process.
Clinical explanation: From their perception, White lived in a community lacking in LGBTQ+ community members and a prevalence of conservatives with a traditionalist background. After one year of psychotherapy, White told Dr. Black that she was struggling with “self-identity” and that she did not know who she was looking for in an intimate partner. She had been socialized as a girl by her parents. However, she excelled at lacrosse, swam with her shirt off in the summer, and preferred to “play with the boys.” In adolescence and beyond, White had been with sexual partners across various gender and sexuality categories.
In what turned out to be a final psychotherapy meeting, White told Dr. Black that she had recently consulted with a surgeon. The consultation was based on a desire to have her breast tissue removed: “I don’t want them.” The way the information was presented felt provocational. White seemed to be setting up a dynamic where they would get Kicked.
Dr. Black was hooked into the game by cultural conditioning related to a concept known as “gender.” The concept of gender is categorized as “reality,” in many minds, rather than cultural conditioning. This sets the stage for the supremacist version of the I’m Right, You’re Wrong [About Gender] game. When Dr. Black asked White if she having surgery to remove her breasts, “Won’t make it harder to find people to date?”, White felt Kicked. The final move in the game was when White immediately emailed the writer to terminate services. On the social level, “the TA approach to therapy isn’t what’s best for me. I need an outlet to be able to process through daily things that are weighing on me, and right now none of that involves my interactions with other humans.” On the psychological level, “I’m Right, You’re Wrong,” so I’m going to get rid of you.”
Original game: Gender Identity has similar game dynamics as the War game version of Kick Me and the Media game version of Ain’t It Awful (AIA). Therefore, Gender Identity falls into that family of games that use provocation and the collection of injustices. As a form of supremacy, “gender” is used by moralizers to enforce patriarchal world views as a maintenance of power and the status quo. This avoids revolutionary discussions on sexuality, especially as it relates to children and adolescents. Games of the AIA variety are different from a good faith “dialogue” on the human animal, socialization, and the extinction of natural resources.
For example, Gender Identity is like the Climate Change game. In both games, White has moralistic presuppositions: eco-activism and civil disobedience are Wrong because these activities disrupt the lives of ordinary people (Climate Change) and there are only two genders (Gender Identity). Gender Identity is presented as a dialogue, but it is a setup (con) for a moralistic debate. In the end, the “winner” (I’m Right) is cloaked in self-righteousness while holding disgust for Black. Internally, White feels superior.
Thesis: Identity is what the ego does to protect itself. The mechanism is craving: the attachment to what one wants. The etiology and origin of “identity” is conveniently skipped over in the Gender Identity game. Ego is presented as real, and gender “identity” is questioned within the construction of ego. Therefore, the presupposition of ego as reality makes gender identity “reality.” The latter is weaponized by antagonistic parties in what is believed to be “reality,” i.e., cultural conditioning.
In Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, Senator Josh Hawley reveals the roles and maneuvers of the Gender Identity game. In the first pages of his boring and laborious polemic, Hawley complains that American “men” are living at home with their parents, playing video games, watching too much pornography, and not trying hard enough to date and get married. Men are abusing drugs and feeling depressed. The text allows Hawley to play a Biblical version of Ain’t It Awful. For example, AIA “fatherlessness” and AIA “the American left.” In AIA, “the world” is the source of White’s problems. For Hawley (White), modern day liberalism is to blame for all problems related to his idea of “masculinity,” i.e., cultural conditioning.
In Manhood, Hawley immediately reflects on a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing regarding women’s rights. First, White (Hawley) collects injustices: one professor at the hearing doesn’t use traditional female-gendered terms such as “mother” or “woman,” e.g., cisgendered. Hawley’s judgment of the terms triggers his cultural conditioning that “man” and “woman” are made by God as Adam and Eve were. This implies that he is playing Now I’ve Got You, You SOB! and/or a hard game of AIA.
Next, Hawley literally collects mad feelings by writing down on a notepad the number of times the professor states “people with the capacity for pregnancy.” White (Hawley) is no longer responding to stimulus objects in his environment and is instead responding to internal programming. As Hawley notes about the professor’s language choices, “I couldn’t help but start by addressing this strange—yet revealing—verbal tic.” [ii] On the psychological level, Hawley is wearing a t-shirt that says, “I’m Right You’re Wrong.”
On the social level, White asks Black for the meaning of “people with the capacity for pregnancy.” This appears to be a straightforward question as a means of dialogic communication. However, Hawley (White) notes, “Why wouldn’t she just say “mother”?” This is what is occurring on the psychological level for White, which can be colloquially translated to, “You are Wrong!” (Blemish). The supposed questioning of Black’s meaning is meant as a provocation related to the construct of “gender.” This triggers parental views: subjective, judgmental, and moralistic views that are often disguised in the transactions. Therefore, White controls the conversation based on a sense of supremacy until a role switch occurs in Black that ends in withdrawal with unsettled mad feelings.
HAWLEY: I just want to clear one thing up, Professor Bridges. You said several times, you’ve used a phrase, I want to make sure I understand what you mean by it. You’ve referred to people with ‘a capacity for pregnancy.’ Would that be women?
BRIDGES: Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as non binary people who are capable of pregnancy.
HAWLEY: So this isn’t really a women’s rights issue….
BRIDGES: We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.
HAWLEY: Alright, so your view is that the core of this right then is about what?
BRIDGES: So I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic. It opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them.
HAWLEY: Wow. You’re saying that I’m opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies? [iii]
The roles of both White (Hawley) and Black (Bridges) are meant to maintain the “reality” or Truth of subjectivity, e.g., identity. For White, sex and gender are the same; “biological” roots. For Black, how people identify is “reality.” Therefore, God made “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” (White) and there is such a “thing” as transgender males who can get pregnant (Black). But, what is a person?
Both White and Black maintain one-up positions in the game: I’m Right You’re Wrong. Hawley outlines the cross-up that is an inevitable part of the game:
When I suggested this answer, not to put too fine a point on it, absurd, and erased the reality of biological sex—you know, men and women—the professor informed me I was “transphobic” and that views like mine led to violence. Violence. In other words, shut up and don’t question the official line. [iv]
Black (professor) continues the I’m Right You’re Wrong game by parentally asking, “Do you believe men can get pregnant?” On the psychological level, this has the same competitive flavor that disables good-faith discussion as the con, “What is a woman?” Issues of cultural constructionism, genderized roles, compulsive monogamy, property rights, and the history of patriarchal socialization do not fit the framing. For Hawley, the series of transactions with the professor are a vehicle for a diatribe against liberalism. He espouses an “Ain’t It Awful the Epicurean Left?”, and its ideology—never defined—as destroying men or “manhood.”
Aim: White’s aim in Gender Identity is the same as the nineteenth-century Germanic critics: the pursuit of the destruction of the “despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future.” [v] The German mood of cultural despair was the pretext for the twentieth-century embrace of an authoritative führer and the reactionary (irrational) construction of the Third Reich.
Stern (1964) described this neo-conservative movement as an ideological attack on the present ideas and institutions of a secular, liberal, and industrial society. The aspirations of the German cultural critics was for a cultural renewal linked to the past. [vi] In short, the problems of the world (“Ain’t it Awful…”) are due to secular liberalism (and later, “Jews”). Josh Hawley loves to describe the cultural decay and political divisiveness by juxtaposition of biblical stories. This allows him to arrive at a final Truth (Final Solution?). Modernity, individualism, and progress are not vehicles for freedom. He claims, “The Bible is the moral source of the Western tradition.” [vii]
Modern liberalism, however, offers no path forward. It is, in fact, much the source of our present troubles. We must look elsewhere for renewal, farther back and deeper—to a more profound source of truth. [viii]
Gender Identity is especially prevalent at family gatherings and in the Media. On the social level, White asks, “What is a woman?” or “How many genders are there?” The Zen response is, “What is a human being?” In the game, what White is asking (con) is actually a setup for future provocations, i.e., Kicks. On the psychological level, White presumes they “know” that sex and gender are the same thing. This is true whether in the Garden of Eden or at a Pride festival. The absence of critical thinking in the moment allows White to be irrationally reactionary. Gender fluidity threatens the status quo, e.g., nuclear family model, and mysticism (“God”) to attack the “perverted,” liberal, secular, “woke” culture.
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich understood twentieth-century Fascism as not simply a reactionary political movement: “it represents an amalgam between rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas.” [ix] The backwards-facing White might not “know” of the alternative gender practices of the Indigenous peoples. Natives had “hermaphrodites”, so some of the “boys” did the “women’s work.” The Ojibwe term hemaneh translates to “half man, half woman.”
As Wilhelm Reich, MD wrote,
…both sets of sex organs exist side by side or are in some way combined with each other. Such individuals are called “hermaphrodites.” There are men with female pelvic structures and female breasts, and there are women who have a fully developed penis. There are also people whose glands contain tissues of the other sex. [x]
In the seventeenth-century, these two-spirit individuals were recognized with social standing [xi] (even before Tinder). With Gender Identity, the rebellious antagonism of White is due to a lack of understanding of history and sexual development. For example, the moralistic belief that drag queens reading stories to kids is “sexualizing children.” This is a reactionary social idea based on a misunderstanding that we are conceived and develop as sexual (qi) beings with various types of unfolding.
Additionally, from a scientific perspective, until month three of a pregnancy, the fetus has the capacity to develop “male” or “female” genitalia and sexual organs. We are bisexual in the literal sense. At that point, the living organism is both male and female and neither male nor female. What are called “male” and “female” sexual organs develop simultaneously. It is only after month three that certain characteristics predominate, and the others fall behind. As Reich notes in his 1950 essay, The Sexual Rights of Youth, we start out and remain bisexual:
Those rudimentary characteristics which fail to develop fully never disappear entirely, even though they are not capable of performing any function. For example, the female clitoris is nothing more than a rudimentary male penis and the nipples of a man are undeveloped female breasts. [xii]
In the Gender Identity game, Black responds to White’s question on defining a “woman.” This is the response (trap) White has set up. How Black responds determines the direction of the game. If Black says, “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman,” the debate is extended in a circular fashion. This permits White to belittle Black.
Due to feeling attacked and powerless, Black may cross a transaction: “You’re transphobic!” Internally, Black thinks “This Always Happens To Me” or “If It Weren’t For Bigots…” Now, if Black responds by saying, “A woman is a human being with a head, two eyes, a nose, a mouth…usually arms and two legs,” White will have to forego their next ostensible question. If Black responds with, “A biological female,” White collects a self-righteous stamp (I’m Right). Black and White now enjoy a little fascistic chumship: “Fuck the woke mind-virus!”. Subconsciously, White believes that just like Indians and Blacks were an “alien race,” non-conventional gender identities are deemed Other. This AIA Other is draped in sensuality as They are “sexualizing children!”
In addition to being a Media game, Gender Identity (I’m Right, You’re Wrong) is played by couples as well. With approaching intimacy, White will Corner the unsuspecting Black in order to ask them what they think about “transgender people?” Or, the Protest version is, “Do Black Lives Matter or, do, All Lives Matter?”
For White, the objective is to find moral disgust in Black and thus avoid intimacy. This is not to be confused with the Capitalism game called Ultimatum. The latter consists of inflating one’s economic-social value in exchange for a committed relationship, engagement, marriage, sexual intercourse, having children, etc. Ultimatum is a seemingly objective negotiation between multiple Capitalism game players. This is in contrast with the Gender Identity game of Other-ing through humiliation and supremacy. Gender Identity is a Capitalism game in the sense that industrial society required a rigid sense of identity versus the flexibility of postindustrial society. The latter is fixated on achievement and self-optimization. The corporatized economics in the U.S. require more flexible forms of production: “Durability, consistency, and continuity thwart growth.” [xiii]
ANALYSIS
Thesis: “There is a final Truth about gender.”
Antithesis: “Sex is more fun and interesting to talk about than gender.”
Aim: Supremacy: patriarchy (maintaining status quo) versus life-affirming.
Roles: Persecutor, Interviewer, Influencer.
Dynamics: Dualism as “reality”: I’m Right, You’re Wrong and the faux presentation of a “dialogue.”
Examples: (1) Social media influencer/interviewer. (2) Podcaster (3) Couples.
[i] p. 65, Pine, R. (1987). The zen teaching of Bodhidharma. North Point Press: New York.
[ii] p. 8, Hawley, J. (2023). Manhood: The masculine virtues America needs. Regnery Publishing: Washington, D.C.
[iii] https://www.hawley.senate.gov/watch-far-left-berkeley-law-professor-melts-down-when-senator-hawley-asks-her-if-men-can-get/
[iv] p. 8, Hawley, J. (2023). Manhood: The masculine virtues America needs. Regnery Publishing: Washington, D.C.
[v] p. xvi, Stern, F. (1961/1974). The politics of cultural despair: A study in the rise of the Germanic ideology. University of California Press: Los Angeles, California.
[vi] p. xvi, Stern, F. (1961/1974). The politics of cultural despair: A study in the rise of the Germanic ideology. University of California Press: Los Angeles, California.
[vii] p. 10, Hawley, J. (2023). Manhood: The masculine virtues America needs. Regnery Publishing: Washington, D.C.
[viii] p. 9, Hawley, J. (2023). Manhood: The masculine virtues America needs. Regnery Publishing: Washington, D.C.
[ix] p. xiv, Reich, W. (1980). The mass psychology of fascism. Ed. Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael (3rd edition). New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. (orig. pub. in 1933).
[x] p. 199, Reich, W. (1983). Children of the future: On the prevention of sexual pathology. Translations by Dereke and Inge Jordan and Beverly Placzek. Edited by Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael, MD. Farrar, Straus, Giroux: New York. (originally published in 1950 by Orgone Institute Press).
[xi] p. 119-120, Blackhawk, N. (2023). The rediscovery of America: Native peoples and the unmaking of U.S. history. Yale University Press: New Haven.
[xii] p. 198, Reich, W. (1983). Children of the future: On the prevention of sexual pathology. Translations by Dereke and Inge Jordan and Beverly Placzek. Edited by Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael, MD. Farrar, Straus, Giroux: New York. (originally published in 1950 by Orgone Institute Press).
[xiii] p. 44, Han, B.C. (2011/2018). Topology of violence. Translated by Amanda Demarco. The MIT Press: Massachusetts.