What is Gender Ideology?

In the past few years, a trend has arisen among religious and political groups, claiming that a "radical gender ideology" has taken hold in the world, and must be stamped out. Groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the Catholic church, and now even the US government have identified gender ideology as a novel threat. Not merely a subject of disagreement, but an actual danger to the common person. These groups articulate a definition of gender ideology as something akin to "the belief that gender is a separable concept from biological sex". And of course, there is a corollary implicit assertion that biological sex falls neatly into the two categoris of male and female.

Setting aside the clear harm that this rhetoric is intended to inflict through stigma against gender and sexual minority groups, the definition is clearly flawed in its conception. You may not frame a conflict in terms of "these people have an ideology, and we don't". It's silly. For there to be a difference of opinion, centered in the way that one understands the world, there is in fact a conflict of multiple ideologies. There are many ways of being a human in this complicated world. We live alongside many people who have different ideologies from us and work to achieve peace and justice among all. But no real conversation can be had until we begin to understand that the perspectives we hold are in fact perspectives. Even the gods may disagree on what is True.

Gender Ideologies

So, in a world with competing ideologies around gender, where is this conflict arising? The Inannan church recognizes that there are clusters of primary and secondary sex characteristics among humanity, bimodally distributed, but not binarily. These sacred characteristics exist, sometimes at birth, through the hormonal changes introduced with puberty, or in some cases through the choices of an individual to determine their own sexual characteristics, through the grace of Inanna. Around 1.7 percent of the world's population is estimated to live with intersex characteristics, and some unclear percentage of the population has elected to modify their own sexual characteristics to suit their own understanding of their gender. Whether it is cisgender men having breast reductions for gynecomastia, transgender people taking hormones, or the host of interventions that are available via plastic surgery, many people take posession of their own bodies and choose to undergo transformation of their sexual characteristics, for any number of reasons.