Feminism’s final triumph was indeed more or less to abolish the word “sex”. Or at least to corral it safely in pornography and biology. Instead in any other context we were taught to use the word “gender”. The word is borrowed from grammar, where, as anybody who has studied Latin or German will know, nouns or substantives belong to one of three genders: masculine, feminine or neutral.

That linguistic gender is arbitrarily assigned was a godsend to the feminist purpose; that there are three of them has turned out to be something of a Trojan horse.

All was going swimmingly for feminists until the fashion for transsexuality appeared. This, as a moment’s thought will show, depends for its plausibility on the idea of gender. If social conditioning makes a man a man or a woman a woman then social conditioning can, just as easily, change the one into the other. Or indeed into whatever combination of the two takes one’s fancy. Hence the multiplying of preferred pronouns (also taken from grammar of course): he, she, they, etc.
...
These are the woke, the generations which, knowingly or not, are the disciples of Tony Blair’s guru and that charlatan’s charlatan, Professor Anthony Giddens.

His book, The Social Construction of Reality, has shaped a whole world view, in which the social construction of gender is a mere chapter. Giddens’s message, shorn of its original obscurity and turgidity, is simple: things are what you want them to be. This is solipsistic consumerism draped in sociological jargon.

Which is both its strength and its weakness: it is psychologically strong, but intellectually weak. Indeed, wokeness is not really an intellectual position at all, more a form of wish-fulfilment. Or, somewhat to dignify it beyond its merits, a sort of pseudo-religion. (Like Marxism. ed))

Which is why it replicates so many of the forms of religion: the attachment to dogma; the absurd fetishisation of correct language (“people of colour” good; “coloured people” bad etc.); the revival of heresy and the enthusiastic burning (aka “cancellation”) of heretics such as Professor Stock or, indeed, myself; the incantatory formulae (“trans women are women” rather than “Hail Mary”); and above all the way in which wokeness, like religion, becomes part of the identity of the wokester, which to question challenges the very identity of the person in question. Hence the passions, the demonstrations, the uninhibited violence of the language and even real violence.
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2021/welcome-back-to-reality-feminists/

When the Frankfurt School introduced “critical theory,” it served as a code word for Marxism. As insecure refugees in the United States, they did not want to flaunt their Marxism. With little understanding of its original parameters, American academics attached “critical” to such terms as critical race theory, critical pedagogy, critical sociology, critical geography, and critical readings.

But where is the Marxism? “Critical race theory,” the most public and successful of these endeavors, shows little evidence of (or interest in) Marxism. It is an ideology of anti-racism.

The postmodern bent of Marxism turns it into a sludge of miscellaneous concepts and issues. A working class vanishes. Take a recent contribution by Kathi Weeks, a Marxist feminist based at Duke University, who has the bona fides that she coedited a volume of Frederic Jameson’s work: “The most useful Marxist work today theorizes capitalism in its historical development as a system best characterized as colonial, settler, racial, heteropatriarchal capitalism.”



A long article, here
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/american-marxism-academia-critical-theory


Be told, leftards.