Books

From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Postmodern Cyborg: A Critique of Gender Ideology

By Silvia Guerini   Available from Spinifix Press

If the human being is allowed to be genetically manipulated and made by artificial means in the laboratory in an unstoppable crescendo of experimentation, what will be left to defend? This book is a radical critique of gender ideology and transhuman design. Silvia Guerini shows how the TQ+ rights agenda is being pushed by eugenicist capitalist technocrats at the top of Big Business, Big Philanthropy, Big Tech and Big Pharma companies. She argues that dissociation from our sexed bodies leads to dissociation from reality, with the human body transformed into a permanent construction site besieged by synthetic and artificial interventions. Erasure of the material dimension of bodies and sexual difference is an erasure of women. She explains how fundamental struggles such as the fight against genetic engineering and the fight against artificial reproduction can only advance in conjunction with an opposition to gender ideology. By linking ‘gender identity’ to the genetic modification of bodies, she warns that humanity itself is at risk of becoming a synthetic life form with synthetic emotions within a virtual, fluid, deconstructed metaverse. Today, being revolutionary means preserving everything that makes us human. It means defending the living world and nature as entities to be respected, not as parts that can be broken down and redesigned in a laboratory world. The idea of the ‘neutral’ body and body modification pave the way for the construction of the post-human cyborg and the genetic engineering of bodies. Is the last bioethical barrier about to be breached to give way to transhumanist demands? And at what cost?

When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents

By Stella O'Malley, Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano   Available from Swift Press

There have been many books written for parents who are facilitating a child’s gender transition, but almost none for parents who decide that social or medical transition is not the best option for their child. Written by three professionals working in the field – Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano and Stella O’Malley – When Kids Say They're Trans is explicitly a resource for parents who want their children to flourish, but do not believe that hasty medicalisation is the best way to ensure long-term health and well-being. Parents who have successfully helped their children navigate gender distress without resorting to surgery and hormones have done so by actively taking the reins, not waiting until they found the right therapist or doctor. When Kids Say They're Trans will tell you all you need to know, and will give you the confidence to trust your own instincts.

Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader

By Edited By Alice Sullivan, Selina Todd   Available from Taylor & Francis

Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader is a much-needed exploration of the relationship between sex, gender and gender identity. Its multidisciplinary approach provides fascinating perspectives from the sciences, social sciences and humanities, as well as biology, neuroscience, medicine, law, sociology and English literature. The 15 chapters are original contributions, authored by scholars who are leaders in their respective fields. This thought-provoking collection offers significant methodological, theoretical and empirical insights into one of the most fraught debates in contemporary politics and academia. It provides a broad-ranging introduction to the issues central to questions about how and why sex matters from a range of disciplinary perspectives, drawing out the social, political and legal implications.

Binary: Debunking the Sex Spectrum Myth

By Zachary A Elliott   Available from Amazon

Binary is the ultimate guide for understanding and dismantling the sex spectrum, the new cultural belief that sex exists on a continuum and that male and female are social constructs. By analyzing its ten most popular arguments, Zachary Elliott reveals how the tenets of the sex spectrum deny evolution, development, and genetics. Using the primary biology literature, the book provides the reader with a comprehensive scientific understanding of how the two sexes are universal phenomena and how complex genetic networks consistently result in a simple yet profound outcome: male or female.

Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans: Tales from the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Kids

By Dina S. · Josie A.   Available from Magers and Quinn

A medical scandal is currently unfolding across Western liberal societies. As Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans reveals, the primary victims are vulnerable, socially awkward kids with normally developing bodies who fall for the Internet-fueled promise that they can solve their emotional, psychological, or physical discomfort by adopting an opposite-sex identity. With deep reservations about the new gender orthodoxy that informs this promise and the irreversible one-size-fits-all medical prescription that comes with it, the parent contributors to this anthology share deeply personal stories about transition and desistance that won't be told at the gender clinic. They also offer practical advice based on hard-earned experience that won't be found in mainstream media. Whether progressive or conservative, gay or straight, secular or religious, they all share the aim of protecting children from the physical and emotional harms of the gender industry and seek to empower and encourage other parents and individuals to combat gender ideology at home, in schools, in clinics, and beyond.

Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy

By Holly Lawford-Smith   Available from Amazon
Image of Book Cover for Sex Matters

Sex Matters addresses a cluster of related questions that arise from the conflict of interests between rights based on sex and rights based on gender identity. Some of these questions are theoretical, including: who has the more ambitious vision for women's liberation, gender-critical feminists or proponents of gender identity? How does each understand what gender is? What are the arguments for the refrain that 'trans women are women!', and do they succeed? Other questions taken up in the book are more applied to specific issues in law and policy including: should there be a right to exclude people who are biologically male from women-only spaces? How do the interests of all stakeholders to bathrooms, in particular, trade off when it comes to moving from sex to gender identity as the basis for self-inclusion? If we think about types of transition, or gatekeeping requirements on transition, as providing assurance to women who are asked to accept the opening up of women-only spaces to transwomen, are any such assurances sufficient? Is 'TERF' a slur, as some radical and gender-critical feminists have claimed? And finally, is gender-critical speech 'hate speech', as it has been classified by some social media platforms, or at least harmful speech?

The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

By Andrew Doyle   Available from Amazon

The puritans of the seventeenth century sought to refashion society in accordance with their own beliefs, but they were deep thinkers who were aware of their own fallibility. Today, in the grasp of the new puritans, we see a very different story. In The New Puritans, Andrew Doyle powerfully examines the underlying belief-systems of this ideology, and how it has risen so rapidly to dominate all major political, cultural and corporate institutions. He reasons that, to move forward, we need to understand where these new puritans came from and what they hope to achieve. Written in the spirit of optimism and understanding, Doyle offers an eloquent and powerful case for the reinstatement of liberal values and explains why it's important we act now.

Feminism Against Progress

By Mary Harrington   Available from Swift Press

In Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington argues that the industrial-era faith in progress is turning against all but a tiny elite of women. Women’s liberation was less the result of human moral progress than an effect of the material consequences of the Industrial Revolution. We’ve now left the industrial era for the age of AI, biotech and all-pervasive computing. As a result, technology is liberating us from natural limits and embodied sex differences. Although this shift benefits a small class of successful professional women, it also makes it easier to commodify women’s bodies, human intimacy and female reproductive abilities. This is a stark warning against a dystopian future whereby poor women become little more than convenient sources of body parts to be harvested and wombs to be rented by the rich. Progress has now stopped benefiting the majority of women, and only a feminism that is sceptical of it can truly defend female interests in the 21st century.

Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children

By Hannah Barnes   Available from Amazon

This urgent, scrupulous and dramatic book explains how, in the words of some former staff, GIDS has been the site of a serious medical scandal, in which ideological concerns took priority over clinical practice. Award-winning journalist Hannah Barnes has had unprecedented access to thousands of pages of documents, including internal emails and unpublished reports, and well over a hundred hours of personal testimony from GIDS clinicians, former service users and senior Tavistock figures. The result is a disturbing and gripping parable for our times.

Coming In

By Urs Mattmann   Available from Wild Goose Publications

The issue of homosexuality has become one of the most contentious within the Christian church today. Urs Mattmann shows that the spiritual and indeed practical aims of gay and lesbian people are no different from those of others on the path of true spirituality throughout the ages; in fact, their particular lifestyles and experiences put them in a better position to work for good in the world. Gays and lesbians reclaiming the spiritual journey. The author, a member of an ecumenical Christian order, explores a mystic spirituality for gay and lesbian people and describes numerous practical steps that they can take in order to connect with their innate spiritual nature. He provides prayers, meditations, rituals, exercises and other suggestions to foster spiritual discovery. With a Foreword by Richard Rohr.