The concept of Gender Identity itself comes from medicine and the work of John Money and Alfred Kinsey. The modern acceptance of gender as a fluid identity stems from the academic discipline Queer Theory.
Queer Theory is a branch of critical theory. Although Queer Theory is an academic discipline, it is strongly tied to activism for social change. Queer Theory seeks to corrupt (“queer”) any behaviours it names as “normal”. This is often situated around sexuality and heteronormativity – the idea that heterosexuality is normal. Whereas traditional liberalism focused on equality for gays, lesbians and bisexuals, Queer Theory informs activists that the the concept of “normal sexuality” is meaningless and can be destroyed.
Queer Theory is concerned with power relations. Specifically, with breaking down existing power structures by “queering” them. The incantation “trans women are women” is an incantation
Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex
Although conspicuously missing from Wikipedia’s entry on Queer Theory, the Gayle Rubin is widely considered to have sparked the creation of this discipline with her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex“.
In it, Rubin examines the societal reactions against various forms of “abnormal sex” such as transsexuals, fetishists, ‘sex for money’, and what she terms ‘cross-generational sex’ i.e. pedophilia.
The struggle of society is simply “where to draw” an arbitrary line of acceptable behaviour.
Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value.
Thinking Sex
Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid. … The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.
Gayle Rubin uses the image of a wall constructed at an arbitrary point on the line between accepted and “way out” sexual practices.
Most systems of sexual judgment – religious, psychological, feminist, or socialist – attempt to
Thinking Sex
determine on which side of the line a particular act falls.
Rubin constructs adults who are into “way out” (her term) sex as “sexual minorities” who are disadvantaged by stigma oppressed by a stuffy system and its laws against “victimless crimes”. By this, Rubin means statutory rape.
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