There are quite a few male trans-activists who aren't even trans themselves.
, whose express intention is to "deconstruct", to disrupt/dismantle/destroy traditional sociocultural normality in all its forms. Interestingly, many leading queer theorists are women.
"The Fairy Godmothers of Queer Theory
Queer Theory evolved out of a postmodern view of sex, gender, and sexuality. Its three founding figures were Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and they drew heavily upon Foucault to lay the cornerstones of queer Theory in the mid-1980s."
(Pluckrose, Helen, James Lindsay, and Rebecca Christiansen. Social (In)Justice. Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2022. p. 82)
"[Q]ueer Theory is fundamentally different from the liberal feminism and LGBT activism that came before it. The success of universal liberal approaches to freeing sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people contradict queer Theory’s claim that theirs is the only way. The liberal activism and thought that predates Theory focused on changing prejudiced attitudes by appealing to our shared humanity, and to universal liberal principles. Trans activism could also benefit from this, if queer Theory weren’t actively trying to subvert universal liberalism.
Instead, queer Theory aims to modify or unmake our concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality, which alienates most members of the society it wants to change. Queer activists who rely on queer Theory tend to act with surprising entitlement and aggression by ridiculing mainstream sexualities and genders and depicting them as backward. People generally don’t appreciate being told that their sex, gender, and sexuality aren’t real, or are wrong, or bad—you would think queer Theorists would appreciate this better than anyone."
(Pluckrose, Helen, James Lindsay, and Rebecca Christiansen. Social (In)Justice. Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2022. p. 92)
"Queer Theory is about freedom from the normal, especially when it comes to gender and sexuality. It says that oppression happens every time language constructs a sense of what is “normal” by defining categories—such as sex (male and female), gender (masculine and feminine), sexuality (straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and so on)—and slotting people into them. These seemingly straightforward concepts are seen as oppressive, if not violent, and so the main objective of queer Theory is to examine, question, and subvert them in order to break them down.
To do this, queer Theory uses the postmodern knowledge principle—which rejects the possibility that an objective reality is attainable—and the postmodern political principle—which sees society as structured in unjust systems of power. Queer Theory’s ultimate purpose is to identify the ways linguistic categories create oppression, and to disrupt them. It also uses the postmodern themes of the power of language (language creates the categories, enforces them, and scripts people into them) and the blurring of boundaries (the boundaries are arbitrary and oppressive, and can be erased by blurring them).
Queer Theory values incoherence, illogic, and unintelligibility as tools to flout the norm in favor of the “queer,” which it proudly calls an “identity without an essence.” It’s vague by design and largely irrelevant in the real world except through social erosion, but it has profoundly influenced the development of postmodern Theory into its more recent applied forms, such as gender studies, trans activism, disability studies, and fat studies."
(Pluckrose, Helen, James Lindsay, and Rebecca Christiansen. Social (In)Justice. Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2022. pp. 71-2)
"Freedom from the Normal:
Queer Theory is about liberation from the normal, especially where it comes to norms of gender and sexuality. This is because it regards the very existence of categories of sex, gender, and sexuality to be oppressive. Because queer Theory derives directly from postmodernism, it is radically skeptical that these categories are based in any biological reality. Instead, it sees them quite artificially—wholly as a product of how we talk about those issues. It thus ignores biology nearly completely (or places it downstream of socialization) and focuses upon them as social constructions perpetuated in language. This does little to encourage its accessibility with most people, who rightly see it as being quite mad.
Queer Theory presumes that oppression follows from categorization, which arises every time language constructs a sense of what is “normal” by producing and maintaining rigid categories of sex (male and female), gender (masculine and feminine), and sexuality (straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and so on) and “scripting” people into them. These seemingly straightforward concepts are seen as oppressive, if not violent, and so the main objective of queer Theory is to examine, question, and subvert them, in order to break them down.
This is all done in ways that explicitly rely on the postmodern knowledge principle—which rejects the possibility that an objective reality is attainable—and the postmodern political principle—which understands society to be structured in unjust systems of power that reinforce and perpetuate themselves. Queer Theory makes use of these to satisfy its ultimate purpose, which is to identify and make visible the ways in which the linguistic existence of these categories create oppression, and to disrupt them. In doing so, it exhibits an almost unmodified manifestation of the postmodern themes of the power of language—language creates the categories, enforces them, and scripts people into them—and the blurring of boundaries—the boundaries are arbitrary, oppressive, and can be erased by blurring them into apparent absurdity. Together with its goal of subverting or rejecting anything considered normal and innate in favor of the “queer,” this can make queer Theory frustratingly difficult to understand, since it values incoherence, illogic, and intelligibility. This in turn makes it obscure by design and largely irrelevant, except to itself. Nevertheless, it has been profoundly influential on the development of postmodern Theory into its more recent applied forms, particularly in domains like gender studies, trans activism, disability studies, and fat studies."
(Pluckrose, Helen, and James Lindsay. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity; and Why This Harms Everybody. Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2020. pp. 89-90)
"Queer Theory is dominated by the problematizing of discourses—how things are spoken about—the deconstruction of categories, and a profound skepticism of science. Following Foucault, it frequently examines history and points out that categories and discourses that were accepted as obviously sensible or true in their own time are not accepted as such now. This is used to argue that the categories that seem so obvious to us now—male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual—are also socially constructed by dominant discourses. This, to the queer Theorist, is reason to believe not only that we will be able to think and speak about and categorize sex, gender, and sexuality differently in the future, but also that we may consider such categories largely arbitrary and nearly infinitely malleable.
This is where the word queer comes in. “Queer” refers to anything that falls outside binaries (such as male/female, masculine/feminine, and heterosexual/homosexual) and to a way of challenging the links between sex, gender, and sexuality. For example, it questions expectations that women will be feminine and sexually attracted to men, and it also disputes that one must fall into a category of male or female, masculine or feminine, or any particular sexuality, or that any of these categories should be considered stable. To be queer allows someone to be simultaneously male, female, or neither, to present as masculine, feminine, neuter, or any mixture of the three, and to adopt any sexuality—and to change any of these identities at any time or to deny that they mean anything in the first place. This is not merely a means to individual expression but also a political statement about the socially constructed “realities” of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Like the other postmodern Theories, queer Theory is a political project, and its aim is to disrupt any expectations that people should fit into a binary position with regard to sex or gender, and to undermine any assumptions that sex or gender are related to or dictate sexuality. Instead, they should defy simple categorization. In general, then, queer Theory’s political agenda is to challenge what is called normativity—that some things are more common or regular to the human condition, thus more normative from a social (thus moral) perspective, than others. The main industry of queer Theorists is to intentionally conflate two meanings of “normative,” and deliberately make strategic use of the moral understanding of the term to contrive problems with its descriptive meaning. Normativity is considered pejoratively by queer Theorists and is often preceded by a prefix like hetero- (straight), cis- (gender and sex match), or thin- (not obese). By challenging normativity in all its manifestations, queer Theory therefore seeks to unite the minority groups who fall outside of normative categories under a single banner: “queer.” This project is understood to be liberating for people who do not fall neatly into sex, gender, and sexuality categories, along with those who wouldn’t if they hadn’t been socialized into them and weren’t constrained by social enforcement. It produces a de facto coalition of minority gender and sexual identities under the appropriately unstable set of acronyms that tend to begin with LGBTQ."
(Pluckrose, Helen, and James Lindsay. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity; and Why This Harms Everybody. Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2020. pp. 93-4)
