ABSTRACT
Is sex a constant part of human material reality which has been with us throughout our history, or is it a cultural and historical construct? This chapter argues that, while ideology conventionally tries to make something historical appear natural, trans ideology is uniquely distinguished by the effort to make something natural appear historical. The function of historicisation in this context is not, therefore, to excavate a narrative of the reification of a social or historical phenomenon but to recount the history by which sex has falsely been posited as historical. This chapter tells the intellectual history of the development of trans-ideological thinking, focusing on the work of its two key architects, Stephen Whittle and Martine Rothblatt, and the support they have drawn from the work of academics, such as Anne Fausto-Sterling, Judith Butler, Thomas Laqueur and Maria Lugones. The author explores three key strategies used by trans-ideological thought: (a) the claim that intersex people prove that ‘sex is a spectrum’ and that the designation of humans as male and female is therefore an arbitrary historical artefact created by medical science and (b) the claim that this binary classification was imposed on other cultures in the process of Western imperialism and that, therefore, thinking humans are sexed is an artefact of colonial history. In contrast to historicisation in the Foucauldian vein, which often presents a particular history as sufficient evidence itself of a phenomenon being historical, the author also critically interrogates these two claims to demonstrate why they are both biologically and historically unsupportable.
