Tag Archives: trans day of visibility

I don’t usually write in the first person like this. But some arguments are better made from inside the experience than at a careful analytical distance. This is one of them.

There’s a phrase that’s been circulating in certain corners of British public life for a few years now. You’ll have heard it. Gender ideology. Sometimes trans ideology. It gets deployed with a specific kind of confidence: the confidence of someone who believes they are simply describing reality, neutrally, accurately, from nowhere in particular.

I am, apparently, an ideology.

I’ve tried to sit with that rather than immediately reaching for the rebuttal. To actually feel what it means to be told that your sense of self (the thing you have lived with, quietly and not always easily, for your entire life) is a belief system. A set of propositions. Something that can be adopted, spread, and ideally resisted. It’s a strange kind of alienation. Not painful in the sharp way that overt hostility is. More like being told that the room you’re standing in doesn’t exist.

But I’m a policy person as well as a trans person, and I can’t leave it at the feeling. Because the feeling is pointing at something real: a genuine category error that matters beyond the personal offence it causes.

An ideology is a systematic set of beliefs about how society should be organised: about who should have power, what values should govern public life, and what kind of world we should be building. It makes prescriptive claims. It tells you what ought to be true, not just what is true about someone’s experience. Ideologies have premises and conclusions. They identify threats. They generate political programmes. Liberalism is an ideology. Conservatism is an ideology. Socialism is an ideology. They are contestable positions in a debate about collective life. Keep that definition in mind, because we are going to apply it to a couple of things.