What does a late-Mediaeval philosopher and an early-modern scientific theoretician have to do with transgenderism? It is how two thinkers in particular were significant in undermining the idea of universals and general categories. When William of Ockham articulated nominalism, whereby he reduced universal categories to mere formal naming with no relation to real categories he began the dissolution of knowledge and higher understanding. When Francis Bacon decreed real scientific knowledge could only be gained by empirical data rather than an Aristotlean methodology where nature was teleological a further blow was struck against higher knowledge, metaphysical and theological.
The long term social consequence of this was the atomisation of the humans in society. General categories and higher universals were seen as arbitrary. And people no longer belonged to real categories. Instead, as Alexander Dugin has argued, all general identities came to be seen as an imposition and something to be liberated from, be that an empire or even gender. As Alain de Benoist has argued, the egalitarian underpinning of the liberal philosophy that emerged in the West is that everyone is the same. Such an idea that abolishes hierarchy and universal higher meaning leads to liberalism. In the crudest sense just as there is no difference between pushpin and poetry, so in the same way as aesthetics, all people are identical units.
What this seems to mean at first with classical liberalism is that because we are all of equal value we must as individuals have rights. That assumption hides the underlying dehumanisation and alienation from human culture, which really means that we are interchangeable atoms and therefore replaceable. No person has his particular and unique place in the community in accordance with a higher meaning and the cultural values of a longstanding community orientated to the transcendent and sacred.
The way this works out in reality can be seen in Socialist revolutionary countries, but, arguably even more so in the West’s fixation with rights, especially those associated with feminism. While there are variants of feminism that do value the universal category of the feminine to an extent and in a distorted sense, in reality feminism is the theory that as we are all individual atoms who do not participate in the higher meaning of gender with all its cultural and social implications, we are interchangeable as men and women. There are no longer social roles that are specifically masculine or feminine and there is no longer any hierarchy, with the Man as the head. Of course a society is complex and hierarchies overlap, the mother over the child, the queen over her subject. All these higher meanings interplay and are overlapped in a traditional society where people have not been reduced to individual atoms as in liberalism.
Feminism must be adhered to as dogma in Western societies. So women are placed in the frontline in policing and the armed forces. This denies that there will be a human reaction from men if a female colleague suffers injury at the hands of an enemy or criminal. If a man loses this instinct to protect a woman and simply regards her as another interchangeable colleague, he will have lost a part of his humanity and will probably also lose the protective instinct for members of his society in general he is supposedly trained to protect.
It is ironic that feminists in particular are opposed to transgenderism in many cases, because they are thereby contradicting their own fundamental ideology that human beings are interchangeable regardless of gender and that gendered roles are an unfair or unjust imposition. While the transgender movement does in one sense reaffirm gender roles, they are only nominalist and cultural constructs - names for non-existent universals and therefore can be applied in an arbitrary way. In their shared idea of reality, as opposed to the world of "social constructs", feminists and transgenderists agree that we are nothing more than identical atoms and the adoption of gender characteristics is nothing more than playing with arbitrary social constructs. Feminism inevitably led to transgenderism or rather both feminism and transgenderism are the inevitable conclusion of Ockham’s nominalist move against universal and metaphysical categories, practically supported by a shift in science towards a focus on the particular and the rejection of teleology by the Baconites.
From a traditional conservative perspective, which is not represented by so-called centre-right parties in the West, but far more by Putin’s government, this is an attack on reality. Conservatives are philosophical realists for whom reality is to be found in the hierarchies and universal categories of tradition. We are not mere atomised units, interchangeable and replaceable. We are persona existing in a social and cultural context. What the reductionists refer to as social constructs is where truth is to be found.
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