Feminism or Conservatism: Which Is to Blame for Trans Ideology?
A debate over the cause of trans ideology has erupted. Can both parties be correct? Or are they, perhaps, both slightly off-base?
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Many of us formerly-liberal, scientifically-minded, not-so-religious types now find ourselves perpetually bewildered by the contemporary debates surrounding transgenderism. The term “politically homeless” frequently resonates in our circles. We are often bemused to find ourselves aligning with individuals on social media who contradict our beliefs on many other issues, finding relief in their common-sense discourse and well-articulated criticism on the topic of gender identity.
This scenario was starkly illustrated last week when conservative commentator Matt Walsh directed sharp criticism towards author and journalist Helen Joyce on his show, which he uploaded to X (formerly known as Twitter). This was in reaction to pointed remarks Joyce made about him in a podcast interview with Michael Shermer a year ago.
Before we dive into the substance of their disagreement, let me start by saying that as a woman holding a PhD in a predominantly male-dominated, math-adjacent field, and someone who has grown up considering feminism as synonymous with women’s equal rights, I relate to and admire Joyce, who earned a PhD in mathematics prior to pursuing her journalism career. I appreciate her logical reasoning and the coherent arguments she employs. Surprisingly, I find myself frequently in agreement with Walsh too, despite his conservative Christian background. His methodical breakdown of many issues into their essential components often resonates with me. Joyce and Walsh share this rhetorical style, with both frequently emphasizing the need for precise language to accurately depict reality.
So far, so good. However, their perspectives diverge significantly when addressing the origins and perpetuation of the modern transgender movement.
On Michael Shermer’s podcast, Joyce placed considerable blame on Walsh and similarly aligned conservatives for their role in contributing to the rise in children, mostly young girls, choosing to medically transition, which she believes stems from a conservative and traditionalist insistence on adhering to rigid sex roles. Joyce said:
[T]he problem…is that both conservatives like Matt Walsh and the gender ideologues that he’s mocking…both believe that gender stereotypes and gender roles are inherent to what it is to be a woman. One side uses them to define what a woman is, [and] Matt Walsh thinks they’re inseparable. He understands that a man is a male person and a woman is a female person, but he thinks a whole load of things follow from that; about whose in charge, who makes the sandwiches, whose voice gets heard, and all of this sort of thing. Well if you give your average teenage girl the choice between cutting off her breasts, taking testosterone, and having a shot at being seen as the half of humanity that’s regarded as truly human, or accepting that she’s Matt Walsh’s wife in the kitchen making sandwiches and asking him to open the jar…she’ll cut her tits off and take testosterone. So, he’s part of the problem.
There needs to be a genuinely liberatory message to kids, which is yes sex is real, yes sex differences are real—don’t let that hold you back. And this is particularly important for a group that of course Matt Walsh doesn’t give a shit about, namely gay kids, because there’s a strong connection between being very gender nonconforming in early youth and growing up to be gay. Every homophobe knows that. If you’ve got some little boy who wants to wear his sister’s tutu and play with her Barbie dolls, there’s a much stronger chance that boy is going to grow up gay than a boy who isn’t doing that. It’s not set in stone, but it’s a stronger chance. Matt Walsh wants that boy buzz-cut and out there shooting. The gender ideologues want his dick chopped off and turned into a girl. I want him to grow up into a happy gay man who marries whoever the fuck he likes.
Walsh disagrees, and responded by laying full blame at the feet of gender-critical feminists like Joyce, and their intellectual antecedents, for the rise in youth rapidly adopting trans ideology and opting out of their sex. He states:
The gender critical feminists…are critical of trans ideology, but they don’t understand how their own movement created it. The feminists are the ones who first argued that men and women are basically the same aside from meaningless anatomical differences. They are the ones who declared that most sex differences are “social constructs”—sound familiar? …For many decades, if anybody argued that women can compete with men in sports and do everything men can do, it would have been a feminist. Now that argument primarily comes from trans activists, and you want to pretend that they aren’t saying exactly what your club has been saying for like a century? It’s absurd.
Both employ their trademark logic to produce arguments that are at least internally consistent, igniting the question: Can both parties be correct? Or are they, perhaps, both slightly off-base?
Discourse surrounding this topic often elicits broad, categorical statements that frequently fail to capture the entire complexity of the issue. The remainder of this essay will attempt to navigate a middle path between Joyce’s and Walsh’s divergent positions, because a wide spectrum of perspectives is needed to achieve our common goal of dismantling the concept of gender identity and protecting women and children—especially girls—from its harms.
Walsh’s arguments are rooted deeply in his religious beliefs, a fact he often makes clear. Although this stance may invite scorn from the secular Left, it’s worth noting that many evolutionary biologists and anthropologists have made compelling cases that religion could be a product of adaptive evolution, serving as a “cultural glue” that ensures the survival of a group with shared beliefs. They contend that religion exists to reinforce collective behaviors beneficial to the group and underpin certain cultural norms, including those related to gender roles. Evolutionary biology also recognizes various sex-specific roles observed in mammals, including humans. These roles, shaped by thousands of generations of natural selection, are biologically hard-wired in our brains.
However, Walsh does not seem to appreciate that these traits and tendencies represent statistical probabilities rather than ironclad truths, and that some of them might no longer hold adaptive significance or relevance in our modern world. It’s true that human personalities, varying widely amongst individuals, tend to cluster according to sex. When researchers looked at 21,567 subjects and categorized them across 15 dimensions of personality (warmth, emotional stability, assertiveness, gregariousness, dutifulness, friendliness, sensitivity, distrust, imagination, reserve, anxiety, complexity, introversion, orderliness, and emotionality), they found that while there was significant overlap (about 30 percent) between sexes on individual dimensions, the overall overlap was just about 7 percent. This indicates that the personality profile of a randomly selected male is typically more masculine than that of a randomly selected female 93 percent of the time.
In light of these facts, Walsh’s position appears to hold up in general. However, it’s crucial to acknowledge that most does not mean all. A small proportion of individuals, approximately 7 percent according to the study, can justifiably consider themselves “gender nonconforming,” recognizing that they diverge considerably from typical members of their sex. While Walsh critiques Joyce for dismissing gender norms, he may be conflating two distinct arguments: Is Joyce denying that males and females possess different cognitive wiring, on average, or is she arguing against converting these average differences into strict social expectations? While the former stance contradicts common sense, the latter is a defensible opinion against stereotyping. Given Joyce’s full opinion quoted above, it appears Walsh is rebutting a straw-man argument.
Furthermore, when Walsh discusses the purpose of sex roles and common characteristics, his tone and language do not seem to admit the possibility that not all men may share his view of manhood. His interpretation of ideal masculinity may be outdated in our modern society, largely due to the diminished economic value of physical strength in our knowledge-driven economy. Some of these gender-nonconforming men might just be gay, and Walsh’s view does not appear to accommodate this possibility.
On the contrary, Joyce clearly and frequently underscores the potential danger gender ideology poses to pre-LGB youth, a matter she deems profoundly concerning. She accurately separates the LGB from the TQ, whereas Walsh tends to lump these groups together, suggesting an inherent societal problem with being gay. That said, Walsh has previously raised valid concerns about the vilification of males by some feminists through terms like “toxic masculinity” that essentially criticize men and boys for their male-typical traits, which he argues leave some young men rudderless. Ironically, a desire to avoid such reproach might motivate some sensitive adolescent boys to identify as transgender.
A flawed argument presented by Walsh, in response to Joyce’s podcast interview, claims that the emergence of transgender ideology directly following third-wave feminism serves as evidence that feminism—not longstanding conservative values—caused gender ideology to explode. This argument mirrors the flawed logic often used by activist researchers to assert that gender treatments are lifesaving: there’s no control group, other relevant variables are overlooked, and the conclusion attempts to oversimplify an extraordinarily complex issue. A more reasonable explanation is that both feminism and conservative values played a part, with social media serving as the catalyst that propagated this social contagion far and wide among particularly susceptible teenagers.
That said, Joyce would be mistaken to assert—and she has now clarified in writing that she does not believe—that feminism is entirely blameless. However, feminism is not a monolith: it includes second-wave, third-wave queer-theory-based, and gender-critical feminism. Joyce has a strong record of challenging third-wave feminism. There is a critical distinction between those who champion equal rights and opportunities for women based on an ethical argument versus those who promote women’s rights based on the argument that men and women are materially indistinguishable. Would Walsh perhaps place himself in the former category? Would Joyce concede that the overall arc of feminism, despite that she and I would regard it as a net positive, may have had some deleterious societal impacts?
Building on this, it’s important to understand that these potential negative impacts don’t necessarily imply that feminism as a principle is bad. Rather, it suggests that feminism may have unfolded in a manner that contributed to the erosion of the family unit and traditional family values, which in turn caused certain harms. This could partly be attributed to men, as a group, not adapting well to the shift in power dynamics and role changes that occurred over a few generations—an evolutionary blink of the eye. Or perhaps too many adults of each sex acted selfishly, neglecting the time- and energy-consuming task of raising children with secure attachment.
In this context, Walsh’s observations warrant consideration. Walsh frequently—and I believe rightly—calls out immaturity and selfishness as factors that interfere with good parenting. It is undeniable that modern children and teens are experiencing unprecedented levels of mental health struggles, likely due to inadequate parenting and attachment issues but also encompasses many other factors. Poor mental health is undoubtedly a key reason adolescents are vulnerable to the gender identity narrative. Therefore, Walsh’s argument holds some merit. However, it’s not as simple or straightforward as he makes it out to be, and singling out gender-critical feminism as the sole cause of gender ideology misses the mark.
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 | A guest post by
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I don't agree that "conservatism" as a political position has been a contributor at all to the rise of the trans activists. I also don't agree that Second Wave Feminism has been a primary contributor.
I am a clinical psychologist and I have extensive experience working with trans identified clients of the "original type," i.e., many were males with histories of transvestic fetishism. I also have experience working with women who transitioned after living for years as butch lesbians. (Some of these women explicitly identified as butch and some did not). I started working with people with "gender" issues during the 1990's, and the youngest trans (or questioning) clients I saw over the next few decades were born before 1985.
I live in Portland, where conservatives and conservatism have been driven close to extinction. All of the trans identified people I have worked with were liberal Democrats, but most of the men were not highly politically involved. The women were more likely to have been exposed to radical ideas and activism within the lesbian community, but many were not directly involved in feminist or lesbian politics.
Interestingly, the men I worked with were commonly employed in male dominated fields such as high tech or blue collar industrial trades, and some had histories of professional military service. They typically identified as heterosexual and were married to women. A smaller number of the trans identified men had been involved in occupations regarded as feminine, such as hair styling, and those men were more likely to have had histories of gay relationships and to identify as bisexual.
None of the people I worked with from any of the above male groups told me that feminism was an influence in the evolution of their trans identities. Many of the men reported that autogynephilia had developed along with sexualized cross dressing, and that their gender dysphoria increased after that. Shame and fear of being caught cross dressing by their wives or other people caused these men to be isolated within their cross-sex experiences. They generally did not talk to anyone about what they were doing or feeling and were not connected to any of the trans support systems that began to appear near the end of the last century.
The same was not, of course, true for the women who were living as "butch" or some related identifier within the lesbian community. Most of these people dressed in men's clothes for years while in gay settings and some of them dressed in men's clothes all the time. Butch lesbians had been living like this prior to the onset of the feminist Second Wave. During the 1970's and 1980's they were not particularly supported by the new wave of women who joined the lesbian community as university-based feminist activists. Feminism aggressively criticized butch/femme roles as patriarchal. Butch/femme roles did come back into popularity a few decades later, and masculine women began exploring a wide variety of individually labeled sexual identities. This trend was happening among Millennials by the early 2000's, and it appears to have been the predecessor of the current proliferation of sexual and gender identities within Gen Z.
The trans-identified males I saw in my practice mostly had very conventional ideas about feminine and masculine roles. They would talk about their sense of being female as a vague feeling they had, but would support their sense of being female by references to how they preferred to play with girls when they were children, preferred girls over boys' games and so forth. They did not seem to see any conflict with the fact that they chose and excelled at male dominated careers, nor did they change careers when they transitioned. The trans identified females tended to be scornful and phobic about feminine roles and appearance, like teenage boys insecure about their masculinity. So, I would say that most but not all of the trans people I met supported traditional, polarized sex roles without necessarily having a conscious philosophy that favored this position.
All of the trans identified people I saw had a specific image of what they wanted to look like as a member of their preferred sex. The men nearly all cherished a stereotypically bombshell image, such as Dolly Parton. The trans identified women did not necessarily want to be stereotypical he-men, but many of them did want a particular type of male physique.
In summary, both the trans identified males and trans identified females, prior to the recent wave of Gen Z people, generally embraced traditional stereotypic masculine and feminine roles and wanted to look and function as members of the other sex within the traditional set up. The primary effect of feminism that I saw was mostly on the university-based lesbian communities, where the traditional sex roles were for a couple decades at least strongly rejected as a model to emulate.
I have recently been hearing that most of the younger masculine women who previously identified as "butch" or some variant thereof are now medically transitioning, to the dismay of the lesbian femmes who prefer them as partners. One interpretation of the mass transition is that those women did endorse the stereotypic roles (as their butch behavior did convey), and that most of them would choose to be biological males in traditional masculine roles if that were possible.
I think that both the women's movement and the gay liberation movement inspired some trans identified people to want the same kind of movement for themselves, and some trans people chose to become trans activists. The gay and lesbian communities offered an accepting environment for trans identified people as long as they identified themselves as gay. Now that these people have come out as trans it turns out that some of them were actually heterosexual or bi, and have not changed their sexual preference.
The Second Wave feminist movement contributed to the current woke movement its tyrannical emphasis on moralistic political correctness, with the accompanying speech policing and forced conformity to radical ideals. This became a source of horrible divisiveness within the feminist movement as early as the 1970's, and spread to the university-based lesbian communities, where it has flourished until the present day. The elaboration of many named sexual identities also developed within both the lesbian subculture and the gay men's subculture within the past couple of decades, leading to the Gen Z identity spectrum.
So, in my opinion, the evolving feminist, lesbian and gay rights movements were the incubators that enabled the trans movement to arise in its present form. But feminists and gay/lesbian activists generally were not planning on that development. Trans activism emerged organically when trans identified people gained access to medical transition technologies and opportunities to gather together and organize as a demographic with common goals. Trans activists eventually gained enough power to take over both the gay and lesbian communities, such that Gay Pride Day has morphed into (Trans) Pride Month.
Brilliantly articulated but missing a critical element: the economic model within which feminism arose. Because women did not have reproductive freedom and could not provide for themselves and their many children (staying at home as a mother was a luxury not available to the working class), and fathers often abandoned their families leaving them destitute. Or fathers/husbands abused their wives and children and treated them as chattel or slaves as they, themselves, were treated by the more powerful men above them. Therefore, suffragettes fought for political power to change the material circumstances of their lives. They fought for the vote, for financial independence, for freedom from abuse and exploitation.
Matt Walsh, for all the excellent work he's done bringing awareness to the public about the harms of gender ideology, is extremely naive at best, cruelly ignorant at worst. Blaming all of feminism, a movement which does not and cannot represent half the global population, is ludicrous. It's convenient and simple for the traditionalist conservative men who pine for a return to 'old-fashioned values' where men were men and women knew their place. It's seductive to think we can go back there, but it's impossible to expect that.
If anything, it's pornography and the male fetishists with billions of dollars who are trying to dismantle the notion of sexual dimorphism in order to usher in transhumanism and medicalize all human beings as if we're a collection of interchangeable body parts. Women's bodies, in particular, are seen as commodities, for sex, as baby factories, as servants.
Unless/until men start seeing women as fully human, whether or not they choose to be homemakers or career women, we'll never evolve as a species. It's endlessly frustrating to see that patriarchy serves NOBODY - neither men nor women. It serves only the powerful, the oligarchs, the rulers.