Any religion that manifests only within one political dimension is likely more of a political theory than a religion (see my essay on the Satanic Temple), but religions have political implications and it seems sensible to me that each person seek a reconciliation between their religious and political views. For me, the necessary consequence of Satanism is a largely socially-progressive worldview with regards to such political movements as feminism and queer theory, both of which I’ll be examining here in a Satanic context.

The current discourse surrounding opposition to feminism is particularly uninformed and toxic. As evidence to this, do a search for “feminism” on Reddit and browse the results, and compare the results for searches on other philosophical theories (“postmodernism,” perhaps, which is widely maligned but not nearly to the same degree and more often the subject of reasonable, informed criticism; certain political philosophies like Marxism and socialism definitely receive similar levels of vitriol, so I’ll concede at least that feminism is not the only political theory subjected to a toxic backlash). This being the case, I’ll open with a challenge to anyone who may be reading this who considers themselves to hold a universally negative view of feminism. Feminism is a complex and diverse philosophical and political theory that encompasses several different viewpoints, some of them contradictory, and which thus cannot be rejected wholesale by anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty. So my challenge is this: name one feminist theorist whose ideas you respect, even if you ultimately disagree with their conclusions. Outline their basic thesis and what you understand of it and why you agree or disagree with its various propositions. If you’re unable to accomplish this for even a single theorist out of a field of hundreds, what leads you to believe that your position on feminism as a whole is at all informed or reasonable? If you think that, out of the hundreds of theorists, researchers, and scientists operating across multiple fields who have constructed the various forms of feminism, every single one of them is a detestable sophist, does that not indicate some bias on your part?

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at what feminism and queer theory are, in the most general sense, and then I’ll move on to why I believe Satanism necessarily supports positions that could be so classified.

Feminism argues that the institution of the liberal republic — the foremost political system of the last two centuries, which seeks maximum individual liberty — has failed to extend its freedoms equally to all members of society, and to women in particular. It is typically organized into at least three waves. First-wave feminism emerged in the late 19th century around the issue of women’s suffrage (and the fact that women were, for the greater part of American history, unable to even vote, is strong evidence that feminism is founded on solid ground. Either legal and opportunity inequalities were absolutely and finally rectified in 1919, extending thoroughly to every aspect of every institution, or they were absolutely and finally rectified at some subsequent point in American history, or there is still work to be done). Second-wave feminism was a product of the countercultural movement of the 1960’s and sought greater legal and social equality for women. And third-wave feminism emerged in the early 90’s, influenced by poststructuralism to deconstruct the underlying notions of sex and gender and to demonstrate how even the underlying concepts are predicated on hierarchical power structures. This is a very simplistic way of looking at over 200 years of theory, but this is not the place and I am not the person to give an in-depth survey of feminist thought over the centuries. Hopefully the above will be sufficient groundwork for the following, but I encourage anyone who feels that this is insufficient to get a book and do some reading. Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks should serve as a good starting point for general audiences, and I also recommend her book The Will to Change in particular for men who might not understand how feminism could be at all relevant to their experience (about which more later).

I know that there is a perception among some individuals that feminism is anti-man, and unfortunately this is not entirely inaccurate. As I stated, feminism incorporates numerous viewpoints, and bell hooks mentions specifically in The Will to Change that “male-bashing,” especially in second-wave feminism, is one of them. She has her own interpretations of the psychology behind this, but the point is that such a viewpoint should not be taken as a universal, foundational, or necessary component of feminism. Though there may be some obvious selection bias at work here, none of the feminist women that I know (which is most of the women I know at all) subscribe to that viewpoint in any way, and many of the theorists I’ve read have been explicitly critical of it. Within contemporary third-wave feminism, the discourse is more concerned with how patriarchal gender norms are harmful to everyone.

Queer theory might be seen as an outgrowth of third-wave feminism. It’s a complex idea, but it deals largely with the application of social constructivism to gender identity. This is to say, queer theory posits that there is no ultimate, objective fact of the matter as to what someone’s gender is; it exists only as constructed in a social context. This is not at all to say that gender isn’t real; money is likewise socially constructed and there is no ultimate, objective fact of the matter as to what a dollar is worth, but I doubt you’d take that knowledge and start using dollar bills for kindling. Nor is this to say that gender is something that individuals choose, the way that they might choose one brand of breakfast cereal over another. There are certain inner realities that manifest in individuals and which are then interpreted by society as gender in a socially-constructed context. Again, this is a very brief look at a very complex idea, and those interested in learning more might look into Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. Butler’s book is academic, dense, and challenging, and one would be well-advised to familiarize themselves with poststructuralism before attempting it, but I know of no easier introduction to the subject and I’m not sure whether one is possible.

Now to turn to my positions on these subjects. With regards to feminism, I have read that men today are facing a “crisis of masculinity.” You can google that term for ample evidence that this is, at the least, a common subject in contemporary political discourse. A crisis of masculinity implies that the social understanding of the concept of the masculine is perceived as being threatened in some way. What I think is happening is that men have long defined themselves in terms of women, and in a privileged position thereto, and are now having to ask the question, “What am I as a man if ‘woman’ does not mean what I thought it meant? What I was told it was meant by Disney movies? What I was told it was meant by social institutions? What I was told it was meant by the Bible?” The question is a good and important one, because men have been fed bullshit from childhood about what it means to be a man, and now are faced with an uprising of experience that contradicts what they had thought that they had known. There is a substantial and historically-established body of evidence that being a man does not even necessarily mean being male-bodied. And given the backlash to that, I wonder if some men do not go around as little more than embodied penises, which isn’t much at all to aspire to. I think that I have a better idea of what it means to be a man, and it is far more expansive than what some have limited it to. For example, I can conceive of a masculinity so great and so expansive as to not be threatened by a razor blade commercial.

So, one reason that I take a feminist stance in politics is that, one, I am a man, and two, feminism stands opposed to a hegemonically-imposed notion of masculinity that is small, narrow, restrictive, and oppressive. bell hooks documents this extensively in The Will to Change. And as the hegemony in question is largely that of religious institutions, and of Christianity in particular, such a stance is eminently Satanic. Another reason that I take this stance is that I love women, and, having spoken to many of them on the matter and having done my own research into their claims, I am convinced that there are institutional systems of oppression (patriarchy, which I see as an aspect of the Hegemon) that restrict their capacity to be their full selves. To put it another way, the predominantly-Christian hegemony is taking both something that I am and something that I love and deciding for themselves what they are and are not allowed to be. As a Satanist, I reject the Hegemon’s authority to prescribe to me what it is to be a man or a woman or anyone else.

Patriarchy and Christian hegemony go hand-in-hand. Those who have been following my work know that I use the singular “They” to refer to God, using the traditional masculine third-person singular only when quoting from a source. And the traditional designation “He” cannot be written off as being a matter of grammatical necessity resulting from the (also problematic) male-as-default in English; rather, God is otherwise described exclusively in male terms (especially “Father”) throughout the Bible, without any indication that anyone in the history of the authorship of the Bible understood that God must, by logical necessity, be genderless (if we are to make the necessary assumption that God is prior to gender). The implication of a male God is that men are closer to God than women and that certain characteristics of God (such as authority) are vested in men but not in women. This is often reflected in the Biblical narratives themselves. For example, in the second creation narrative in Genesis, the first woman was created for the first man, and the Old Testament in particular seems to treat women as having the legal status of mere property (Numbers 31:32, as one among many possible examples). If one is to challenge the norms established by Christian hegemony, I see no reason why the norms of patriarchy should be exempted from that.

My acceptance of queer theory from my perspective as a Satanist hinges largely on my understanding of Satanism as a religion of rational, critical thought. Given a purely rational evaluation of the facts, queer theory makes perfect sense, and contrary propositions, such as the notion that there are only two genders, seem ludicrous. By way of demonstration on that particular matter, consider what it would mean for there to be only two genders. This would mean that there is a property of something in the universe — something related to incredibly complex social and biological factors — which is exactly and perfectly binary. Such a phenomenon would want for an explanation, but we could also ask, is there any feature of anything else in the universe that is exactly and perfectly binary? Consider stars. Every property of stars exists on a spectrum: small to large, cold to hot, red to blue, young to old… not a single thing about a star is either “this” or “that” but nothing in between. Now consider anything else at all that occurs naturally in the universe and apply the same inquiry. Even sex itself, in its most purely-biological interpretation, exists across a complex bimodal distribution rather than being perfectly binary.

I would propose a different rational argument in favor of trans identity. Acceptance of trans people as the gender with which they identify is the only way for most people to be intellectually consistent, because most of us already accept trans-ness in a generalized way. Gender is a social construct related to sex and sexuality, which are themselves very complex biological features of human beings. Family is a social construct similarly related to sex and sexuality . Offspring are normatively the result of a romantic and sexual relationship between a male and female. But are the familial relationships objectively and exclusively determined by this biological relationship? Imagine a scenario in which an infant is abandoned in a dumpster, rescued, and then adopted by a loving couple. Who are the child’s parents, and for whom is the child their child? Legally and morally, the answer is obviously the adopting couple. Adoptive parents are adopting socially-constructed roles that do not match the biological relationships that are generally assumed to establish such roles, and, perhaps with a few unreasonable exceptions with which we need not concern ourselves, these adopted roles are accepted by society in general. One might counter that adoptive parentage is a relationship that people enter into of their own volition, whereas transgenderism seems to be rooted in unchosen aspects of an individual’s psychology. I believe that that supports my position rather than refuting it. If we accept roles that are generally assumed to be biological but which clearly need not be when someone chooses that role for themselves, why would we not accept roles operating under the same criteria when someone cannot choose otherwise?

To be clear on the matter, regardless of whether you accept the foregoing, it remains that deliberate misgendering amounts to the deliberate dehumanization and erasure of a people. As Judith Butler establishes in Gender Trouble, the designation of a person as being one or another gender is prior to their signification as an individual (“Bodies cannot be said to have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender,” which is just a linguistic reality given the gendered nature of human language). For one to deliberately misgender another is, then, for that person to say that the one being signified does not exist as they are, and may only be allowed to exist on the signifier’s own terms. Thus, the deliberate misgendering of people by such as Ben Shapiro is a definitive attempt to erase a people whose existence they find politically inconvenient.

Satanists especially, having created a religion of the self, should value self-understanding as paramount. Self-understanding is necessarily contextual, which is to say, I can only say that I understand myself in terms of the contexts in which I actually exist. What would it mean to say that I am human if there were only humans? What would it mean to say that I am a man if there were only men? What would it mean to say that I’m a writer or a philosopher if there was nothing else to be? How could I be a Satanist if there were no culturally-dominant religious contexts to subvert and criticize? The broader and more complex the contexts in which we situate ourselves, the greater the self-understanding of which we are capable. The more ways there are of being, the more ways exist in which we can understand our own being. For that reason, I seek the most dynamic and complex social context possible, and such contexts are defeated by the “traditional” hegemonically-administered binary designations not only of gender, but of religion (Christians and heretics) and politics (democrats and republicans) as well. Satanism rejects tradition as being sufficient cause for accepting a given model of the world, and feminism and queer theory unveil a more complex world in which the complexity of my own being is revealed.

Special thanks to my partner and to Darcy Paige (u/Heretic_Chick) for their valuable help in the revision process for this piece.

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