Bamboo is an amazing plant: it springs up suddenly and grows at breakneck speed. It comes, in fact, from a seed planted years ago, but that was not seen. The same, say the authors of this book, happens with the trans-queer phenomenon, which Amelia Valcárcel describes in the prologue as "collective delirium."
And we are talking about the belief that a man becomes a woman, or vice versa, just by declaring it. If the trans law is approved, anyone can go to the Registry and change her legal sex without any requirement. This is the result of some new ideas that are spreading like oil stains.
Sex (biological) and gender (cultural stereotypes) are confused; it is affirmed that there are not two sexes, but "a spectrum"; intersexuality (a pathology that affects 0.018%), transsexuality (with surgery or hormones) and transgenderism (without physical change) are put in the same bag; a new concept is invented, “gender identity”, a kind of soul that sometimes has the wrong body, and so on.
To the point that the Secretary for Women of the British Labor Party stated, undaunted: "Babies are born without sex", and our Minister for Equality, Irene Montero, wondered aloud: "Do men and women exist?" .
After a first chapter that clarifies biological questions, Errasti and Pérez Álvarez address the most interesting part of their book: the seeds from which queer thought sprouts. Rather, his vulgate. Well, Judith Butler's The Disputed Gender, the book that is at the origin of everything, is very complex (not to say unreadable), but what has reached public opinion and regional laws are ideas as simple as that a girl who plays football and pulls hairpins out of his hair is a boy. I'm not making anything up: read "educational" children's books, like The Big Mistake or In Daniel's Skin.
Some of these seeds are evident: the prevailing sentimentality and narcissism, the obsession with identity, the self-help discourse centered on a happiness that nests within us... And an opulent society that despises material realities, in which the client always has reason, and that sees itself as a set of individuals, with nothing collective mattering. As someone told me on Twitter: "What does it matter to you that there are women with penises?"...
Along with this social analysis, there is a more political one. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, the left, searching for new causes and oppressed minorities, has drifted towards tribalism based on feelings. Thus, it converges with a market that sells identities and manufactures desires, and a right that has individual freedom and the market as supreme values.
Not to mention the big companies, delighted with this new flag, "diversity", which gives a progressive patina without the need for social justice. Let us not forget either what Valcárcel points out: perplexed by feminism, a large part of society, which has never accepted effeminate men, tomboyish or homosexual women, welcomes the explanation of the wrong body with relief.
Finally, there are less visible but very effective seeds: “gender identity” is a business. Think of what it can cost to build an artificial penis, or of the thousands of healthy adolescents destined, if they declare themselves trans, to need hormones for the rest of their lives. The corresponding industry has gone in five years from being worth 8,000 million euros a year to more than three billion.
Errasti and Pérez Álvarez's book is a bit irregular. There are serious chapters and others that are almost humorous; some very worked, others not so much. But it has two great merits: to x-ray a new phenomenon, placing it in a social, political, and economic context, and to do it in an accessible and entertaining way. The success it is having (four editions in a month) is undoubtedly deserved.
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