00:00Gender ideology does exist and deserves to be in the classroom.
00:03It was Marx who taught us that ideology is essentially
00:07a socially produced way of seeing the world,
00:10which makes us take for granted phenomena that are actually cultural constructs.
00:16Therefore, ideology represents a distortion of reality.
00:21a form of schizophrenia.
00:22Marx also suggests that power is reproduced through ideology
00:27because it is capable of convincing us that the forms of domination
00:31that prevail in each era are natural and inevitable.
00:35Well, gender is a form of ideology.
00:39The distinction between sex and gender is blurred.
00:42Broadly speaking, sex refers to the sexual morphology of bodies,
00:47while genre refers to interpretation
00:50that each culture makes of said sexual morphology.
00:54How to establish hierarchies, presuppose that roles exist
00:57or codifying ways of dressing, to name just a few examples.
01:02That's why gender, as Judith Butler says,
01:05It is not an essence derived from anatomical sex,
01:09but an identity that is constructed through the performative repetition of social norms.
01:16Denying the distinction between sex and gender
01:18It has been one of the main ideological banners of the new right.
01:23But this denial is comparable to assuming
01:26that cultural interpretations of bodies
01:29They truly correspond to nature.
01:32It means assuming that cultural forms of dress and behavior,
01:37hierarchical relationships and divisions of roles between the sexes
01:42These are natural conditions.
01:44It means being unaware of the role played by the mechanisms of power.
01:48when setting social norms according to the sexual morphology of bodies.
01:53It means reducing social constructs to biology,
01:57thus distorting reality.
01:59It means provoking a collective schizophrenia.
02:02Even worse, it involves categorizing them as aberrations
02:05behaviors that distance themselves
02:08of the dominant cultural interpretations of each era.
02:11That's why denying the dividing line between sex and gender
02:16It is a frontal assault against the democratic values of freedom and equality.
02:21The new right has been around for more than a decade.
02:24accusing the left of promoting gender ideology in classrooms.
02:29But bringing gender ideology into the classroom
02:31It means nothing more than fostering the development of critical thinking skills
02:37so that girls and boys are able to identify
02:41the cultural interpretations of their own bodies.
02:45To recognize the mandates assigned to their bodies
02:48as discourses through which power is reproduced.
02:53Understanding that deviations from dominant cultural interpretations
02:58They are not an aberration, but simply the body that breathes.
03:02To insist otherwise is to try to keep the girls.
03:06and to the children in the dark ages, possessed by the schizophrenia of ideology.
03:11Hello, I'm Santiago Vargas, sociologist and columnist for El Espectador
03:14And I invite you to read my latest column
03:17In defense of gender ideology on elespectador.com.
