Gender Theory
What it is, and why some people even believe it.
Funnily enough, why certain types of people believe in Gender Theory is much easier to explain than defining what Gender Theory is. Grasping the bull by the horns, then, let us start with the harder challenge.
It is hard to answer the question ‘what is Gender Theory?’ because ‘it’ is not ‘a’ theory, and this ‘not a theory’ is most centrally about what ‘gender’ is not. Have you got that? Gender Theory is the {not a theory} that is {not about gender}. If that made sense, you were not paying attention. But, for a better illumination of this presumably profound mystery, let us go straight to the Gender Theory oracle (Judith Butler) and see what sense we can make of one of her/theys clearest ecstatic utterances on this topic.
Gender Theory is not ‘a’ theory
Judith Butler is up front about the theoretical undecidability of Gender Theory. On the opening page of her 2024 book, she notes
… certain feminists have distinguished between [“sex” and “gender”], associating “sex” with either biology or legal assignment at birth, and “gender” with sociocultural forms of becoming. At the same time, feminists and other scholars in gender studies disagree among themselves about which definitions and distinctions are right. The myriad, continuing debates about the word show that no one approach to defining, or understanding, gender reigns.[1]
This brings to mind the sage observation by Maurice Blondel from the opening line of his 1893 book L’Action:
There are no problems more insoluble than those that do not exist.
Leaving to one side the possibility that discovering the truth about the meaning of what Bulter calls “the word… gender” might be an insoluble problem because it does not exist, let us proceed.
“Scholars in gender studies” do not agree on the very basic question of what gender is. Put slightly differently, gender theorists do not agree on what it is that they are theorizing. Remarkably, this has not stopped government policies and laws being drafted and put into place inserting a conspicuously undefined notion of “gender-identity” into the public domain. Major legal and policy ‘definitions’ of gender in the UK and Australia, for example, are astonishingly unspecific. Most of them say what gender is not defined by (which is sex, though it also can be sex related), but they do not say what gender is defined by in any objective and scientifically determinate manner.
Significantly, this objective undecidability about gender is a feature rather than a bug. With such a ‘non-definition’ only each individual can specify what their gender is, and they can specify their own gender however they choose. Provided, that is, their gender is not objectively defined by their real and natural sex. One cannot have the gender-identity of being a woman because one is female, for that would be impossibly exclusionary of transwomen. One is allowed to have a Cis-woman gender-identity, which requires one to acknowledge that there is no defining relationship between one’s biological sex and one’s gender, for a Cis-woman only has an accidental alignment of their (as Butler puts it) “sex” with their “gender”. So one’s gender-identity is not really as objectively undecidable as it might seem. Tough luck for sex-realist women (including same-sex attracted lesbians who don’t want to be hit on by male transwomen claiming to be lesbians).
Butler thinks that her/theys hyper-liberal, individualistic, and objectively indeterminate approach to ‘what gender is’ is an intellectually valid and morally virtuous stance. Only unsophisticated and uneducated people will hubristically think that they know better than “scholars in gender studies” and can objectively define “gender” (and “sex”), and only immoral and illiberal people will assert that any individual or society is entitled to foist their definition of gender onto any dissenting individual. In the final analysis gender theorists hold that there must be as many views of what gender is as there are individuals. For whatever else gender is not, Gender Theorists maintains that gender is a personal and subjective identity that every individual is entitled to have, as a moral right. According to this stance, to deny the validity of any person’s self-designated gender identity (other than sex-realist-linked gender identities) is to perform identity genocide against that individual. Hence, “mis-gendering” someone is considered to be hate speech, which must not be permitted in any public or on-line forum, and – in an increasing number of jurisdictions – it is a legally actionable hate crime.
The key definitional issue here is that there is no universally accepted theory of what gender is amongst the advocates of gender identity, and this absence of a definition is considered intellectually and morally virtuous by its advocates. But let us home in on how exactly not defined gender must be to Gender Theorists and what such a non-definition actually does in law.
‘Gender’ is explicitly undefined in Gender Theory
In simple terms, there is no real definition of gender put forward by gender theorists to either defend or attack, as gender is only ever ‘defined’ in a circular manner.
To say that a Jabberwocky is a creature defined as having the subjectively felt property of Jabberwockiness, or possessing an innate inner sense of its own Jabberwockery, tells us nothing about what a Jabberwocky actually is. (And it might even be entirely fictitious!) Self-referential definitions are no definition at all.
Andrew Doyle[2] in his carefully researched investigative program on the scandal of the leaked WPATH Files,[3] notes three clear examples of circular “definitions” of “gender identity” thus:[4]
From the World Professional Association for Transgender Health: “Gender Identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal, intrinsic sense of their own gender.”
From Stonewall: “[Gender Identity refers to] a person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female or something else… which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.”
From the National Health Service (UK): “Gender Identity is a way to describe a person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female, or non-binary, which may not correspond to the sex registered at birth.”
We see the same circularity in Australian law. Note this ‘definition’ from Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act (1984), as amended to remove actual and objective definitions of men as adults of the male sex and women as adults of the female sex, in 2013. See Part I, Section 4:
“Gender identity means the gender-related identity, appearance or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of a person (whether by way of medical intervention or not), with or without regard to the person’s designated sex at birth.”
Thanks to the ‘not a theory’ of Gender Theory, gender itself is ‘defined’ only in a circular and undefined manner, yet (and here at least we get some clarity) ‘gender’ explicitly has no necessary relation (or, incoherently, non-relation) to sex. So Gender Theory is not a theory, and it is not about gender. Interesting! But – to steal from their own argument – let us look at what Gender Theory ‘does’ rather than what it undecidably ‘is’ (and at the same time ‘is not’).[5]
What Gender Theory does
Subjective personal gender-identity feelings now have strong anti-discrimination legal rights, even though they are entirely subjective and circular. Further, after 2013 in Australia, the actual biological sex-identity of women, as females, within a so-called Sex Discrimination Act, has no legally defined status. What an astonishing switch of the objectively real and definable for the subjectively intuited and the undefinable! What were my legislators smoking when they made this 2013 amendment?
So the actual effect of inserting Gender Theory into Australian law is that sex-based rights for women now have no legal meaning. Indeed, sex-based rights for women have been revoked. This is what Gender Theory does for 50% of all Australians.
Ironically, the 2013 ‘amendments’ to the Federal Sex Discrimination Act (1984) are in a piece of legislation that’s central object remains compliance with the internation convention known as CEDAR (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women). When CEDAR was drawn up in the 1980s, ‘woman’ unequivocally meant a human adult of the female sex, and did not ‘include’ males gender-identifying as females. Legislation that still has its objective as the promotion and protection of Sex-based anti-discrimination rights for women is now the very means of ensuring that women have no sex-based rights.
Although we cannot theoretically define gender, we can practically define it. ‘Gender’ is the linguistic tool that is used by Gender Theorists to exclude women’s sex-based rights from having any legal meaning.
But perhaps there remains some genuinely theoretical ways of defining what Gender Theory is. Could Gender Theory be an ideology?
Is Gender Theory an ideology?
The Trump Executive Order of 20 January 2025 (“Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism…”) refers to what I have thus far called “Gender Theory” as “Gender Ideology.” However, opponents of sex-based rights reject the Trump administration’s assertion that they are advocates of “Gender Ideology”. The basic reason for this is that the word ‘ideology’ has a distinctively Marxist meaning in their ears.
Marx held that ‘ideology’ and ‘politically manipulative mystification’ are pretty well identical. An ideology is here understood as an imagined justification for a culturally embedded power relationship. Such imagined justifications appeal to immaterial things like moral truths, divine authority, and complex metaphysical speculations, all of which justify some supposedly good and natural material inequality in wealth and power between different classes of people. In contrast to ideology, the material reality of how power relationships are really structured is unveiled by looking at how labour is divided, who controls the means of production, and how wealth and power are unequally distributed in society. That is, an empirical understanding of the economic structures and inequalities of any given society tells you the reality of how it is organized, but ideology only tells you an imagined justification myth that seeks to legitimate unequal relations of work, wealth, and power. Ideology is what is propagated in common cultural beliefs so that the majority of people (who do the real productive work) agree to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful ruling minority.
Outside of Marxism, ideology does not necessarily mean a politically manipulative and dishonest mystification myth. It can simply mean a system of theoretical ideas which are usually connected to different political understandings of the common good.
When the Trump Executive Order of 20 January 2025 uses the phrase “Gender Ideology” this clearly has the same sort of negative connotation as the Marxist sense of ‘ideology’ has. ‘Ideology’ in the EO means a deceptive and false mythology that justifies the reconfiguring of power relationships in society so as to uphold an unfair power relationship between an elite minority (academics and legally privileged queers) and the unwashed masses (sex realists who are usually heteronormative ‘normal’ people). But, to a Marxist framed gender-identity advocate, sex-defined-gender is the ideology, and ‘Gender Theory’ unmasks the false mythology that there are only two sexes and that all males are people of a masculine gender, and all females are people of a feminine gender. Materially – so the Marxist framed argument goes – gender is a mythic governance structure that decides whose sex/gender identity is normative and acceptable, and whose sex/gender identity is deviant and unacceptable. Gender norms are hence governance structures that oppress non-normative sex/gender minorities.
This last move is an interesting departure from Marxism. For now sex-based-gender-ideology works against an oppressed minority, rather than against the oppressed majority. Marxism has here evolved into a minority empowerment political program focused on oppressed marginal victims, rather than a majority liberation political program focused on addressing objective economic inequalities. For this reason, Marx himself (who admittedly claimed he was not a Marxist) would probably not support Gender Theory were he among us today. Gender Theory seems to be establishing a new elite ruling power class that is materially disempowering the majority.
Is Trump right about Gender Theory actually being Gender Ideology?
I agree with the Trump EO that gender-identity beliefs are grounded in objective and material falsehoods (“junk science”), they are dangerous to women and vulnerable children, they are internally incoherent, and they seek to coerce the majority of normal people who do not agree with the DEI gender-identity belief system into complying with words, behaviours, and power arrangements they believe are false and illegitimate. Further, I cannot see how anyone could deny that Gender Ideology promotes the interests of a small and sex/gender norm-deviating minority over the safety and wellbeing of women, children, and the sex/gender normal majority. Further, sex-defined non-conforming minorities – lesbians in particular – receive particularly poor treatment under Gender Ideology. See here. Hence I think the Trump EO is accurate in describing gender theory as an internally incoherent, false, and dangerous ideology.
But if Trump is correct (and I think he is), why do at least some sorts of people believe Gender Theory to be valid (I won’t say ‘true’)? Anyone using a Marxist lens (or not!) can see why queer minority people believe in Gender Theory, for it is their power justifying mythology. But why do most non-queer members of our elite knowledge class go along with Gender Theory even if they do not believe it to actually be true? This is the interesting question.
Our Knowledge Class believes we cannot know reality
I have been over this sort of ground a few times in my substack, but until we really grasp why the internally incoherent and natural reality denying Gender Theory (that is not a theory and is not about gender) is persuasive to our intellectual elites, we will not be able to effectively combat it.
Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment aim was to remove speculative metaphysics from philosophy and to remove faith from science. That is, reason must be purely rational and empirical knowledge must be purely sense dependent. Traditional high beliefs and faith were thus purged from the ‘Age of Reason’ trajectory of Western knowledge over 200 years ago.
Kant’s purification enterprise was no easy intellectual challenge. Kant achieves his aim, but at a price. Reason and Sense can be properly pure only if we restrict our inquiries into the world as it appears to us, not to the world as it really is. Kant embraces a phenomenological approach to valid knowledge (phenomena being how things appear to our minds) and rejects any claim to know or understand reality itself (noumena). This makes human knowledge a function of our own consciousness. It also makes knowledge an inherently culturally situated and linguistic artifact, with no transcendent or divine horizon of meaning overshadowing nature and gifting it with any essential meanings or purposes.
This thoroughly Enlightened view is why the contemporary philosophy of science is now almost entirely anti-realist. That is, science is not understood as giving us a true knowledge of reality, rather, it only tells us about our own ever shifting knowledge constructions. Late nineteenth and twentieth-century positivism – the idea that empirical knowledge gives us a true knowledge of material reality – tried to counter scientific anti-realism. However, due to positivism being heavily influenced by Enlightenment materialist atheism, it also refused metaphysical speculation and theological faith, so it died at its own hands, as any Aristotelian could have told you it must.
Aristotle’s approach to First Philosophy (see his Metaphysics, Book 1, chapter 2) recognizes that the first principles of sensory and rational truth cannot be justified by sensory or rational knowledge. One must trust sense and reason as truth revealing, or else one will go around in endlessly sceptical non-justification circles, which will lead to a purely instrumental approach to language and power. To an Aristotelian, Kant’s purification of knowledge from metaphysical and theological first principles amounts to the destruction of truth in human knowledge. Kant, as mentioned, tries to sidestep the difficulties of pure sense and pure reason by simply dodging reality. By the late twentieth century it was clear that we either had to return to some sort of Aristotelian ‘impure’ but true sense and reason, where metaphysics and faith had a place in the grounds of a reasonable and at least partially true understanding of reality, or we had to become pragmatic sceptics and linguistic sophists.
My sympathies lie with Aristotle here, but alas, the academy in general chose postmodern sceptical sophistry and amoral pragmatism over any sort of metaphysical and theological return to truth. This all kicks in with the invention of a new academic fashion in the 1970s that we now call postmodernism.
What all this means is that Judith Butler is academically mainstream. But what I think she actually shows us is that her anti-naturalist, anti-essentialist, and linguistic constructivist approach to all meanings and norms, is complete madness. Kant was obviously wrong. Aristotle – when it comes to trusting in the metaphysical and theological warrants of ordinary sense and reason – was right. But now we have the problem that the Western academy has had over 200 years of believing itself to be so very grown up, so very rational, so very not medieval, so very materially fact grounded, and so very not superstitious, which is all to say, so very self-confidently and progressively enlightened! To abandon that exulted image of ourselves and say perhaps the Enlightenment was a mistake, is just too hard on our intellectual pride.
And we have done something else over the past 200 or so years. The West has become a post-Christian civilization in its high knowledge culture which is by now filtering down into our broadly Western cultural normality as well. At a widespread cultural level, we have lost our civilizational religious anchoring to common truth itself, which makes us spiritually vulnerable to the normalization of manipulative lies. Not having any meaningful shared notions of the inviolately sacred has serious collective problems when it comes to truthfulness. From the late nineteenth-century science was concertedly displacing religion as our culture’s first public truth discourse. By the 1970s, this displacement was effectively accomplished. But modern science never really had what it takes to be more concerned with truth than it is with power.
Our intellectual culture is now so terribly sophisticated about the uncertainties of scientific truth that it can no longer accept the obvious truths that there are only two human sexes, and that a male cannot become a female. Our political culture is now so pragmatic and instrumentally manipulative, that truth is not even an issue in politics; popularity, electoral success, and above all, image and information management seem to define political necessity. With these sort of academics and these sort of politicians, what chance has traditional conventions about appropriate behaviours and spaces for men and women, and any commonsense commitment to obvious natural truths, got in public life?
Our only hope is a grass-roots revival of a commonsense respect for natural reality and a concerted push for the legal recovery of sex-based public gender norms
It seems unavoidably apparent that there is now a clear division in the Western world that largely cuts a line between our knowledge class of highly educated elites, and everyone else, who are still in some traditionally recognizable sense, normal. If one wants to be affiliated with all the smart and important people who are running the show, then the ‘progressive’ beliefs, and the counter-factual categories of ‘virtue’ assumed in the post-truth, post-metaphysical, post-moral-reality, post-Christian academy, must be assumed to be sensible and correct. We must also assume, however much we do not actually live this way, that all language is simply a manipulative tool of power and we and everyone else are just making meanings and values up out of nothing. Postmodern, posthuman, queer gender-identity minorities are actually the most mainstream members of the type of society our academic culture thinks is good and desirable.
As an academic I cannot help but feel a certain pity and sympathy for my progressive and highly educated peers. The experiment has gotten out of the lab, and its consequences are that we must all play verbal and morality games that we know to be lies, but it is our experiment that has gotten lose, we cannot denounce it now!
Traditional gender norms uphold protected sex-specific spaces for women and children, so that they are not vulnerable to sexual predation from overpowering, unscrupulous, and often sexually perverted men. Traditional commonsense understands that it is simply an irrefutable truth of nature that there are only two sexes and that no-one can actually change their sex. Both of these traditional belief and practice norms are now anathema to our mainstream academic culture. Judith Butler is with the intellectual elites, and she feels righteously opposed to the majority of normal but non-academically indoctrinated common people. She particularly opposes popularist leaders who want to conserve aspects of traditional values and beliefs (labelled “The Far Right”) and traditional Christians (labelled “The Religious Right”). Both the Centre Left and the Centre Right (and the Far Left) are largely under the spell of the postmodern and pragmatic fashions of our intellectual high culture, so it is only uneducated popularists and religious conservatives that she has not yet crushed into compliance with her queer reformation of all sex and gender norms. Hence her vitriolic hatred of and non-engaging disdain for people like me (a heteronormative Christian academic who, on the issue of sex-based rights for women, will vote for the “Far Right” if there is no centrist alternative).
If we are to uphold sex-based rights for women, if we are to protect our children from a fantasy and fetish promoting cult consciousness that effects their sterilization and sexual mutilation, then we need to recognize that there will be very few Centre Left or Centre Right allies we can rely on in our pragmatic political class, and very few thinkers in our elite knowledge class will even be able to voice their objections within the knowledge class domain. Consequently, we will be attacked as bigoted and ignorant by the high culture authorities of our society, and the rights of women and children to be sexually safe will be increasingly eroded so that queer sex and gender non-conformists can validate their non-normativity as requiring the respect and protection from the old-fashioned normative majority.
It is time the majority (i.e., old-fashioned normal people) rose up. Non-conformist minorities in sexual behaviour and gender non-conformists should still expect the sort of minority (where legal) protections they have had since the 1980s, but the minority should not impose its own norms on the majority, whether the majority likes it or not – that is simply not liberal and not democratic. Indeed, a return to something liberal and democratic is exactly what we need. But we must take the queer linguistic morality gag off the public and off dissenting academics, so that the majority can tell our sexually confused and nature-denying elites how we wish to live.
[1] Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? Doublin: Allen Lane, 2024, 3.
[2] Andrew Doyle is an Oxford educated gay opponent of gender-identity. See his fascinating book, The New Puritans, London: Constable, 2022.
[3] Mia Hughes, “The WPATH Files”, Environmental Progress, 4 March 2024,
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files
[4] Andrew Doyle, “The WPATH Files: One of the biggest medical scandals of the century.” Free Speech Nation, GBN, March 10, 2024. These citations are in the concluding section of this investigative documentary, which you can view on YouTube.
[5] For a biological reality denying attempt to make a performative virtue out of the supposed indefinability of (as Judith Butler often puts it) “sex”, see Paisley Currah, Sex Is as Sex Does, New York: New York University Press, 2022.
Great point-
"If we are to uphold sex-based rights for women, if we are to protect our children from a fantasy and fetish promoting cult consciousness that effects their sterilization and sexual mutilation, then we need to recognize that there will be very few Centre Left or Centre Right allies we can rely on in our pragmatic political class, and very few thinkers in our elite knowledge class will even be able to voice their objections within the knowledge class domain. Consequently, we will be attacked as bigoted and ignorant by the high culture authorities of our society, and the rights of women and children to be sexually safe will be increasingly eroded so that queer sex and gender non-conformists can validate their non-normativity as requiring the respect and protection from the old-fashioned normative majority".