Gender Theory is Wrong

A Genealogy of Sex-Irrealism, Why it Fails, and How We Can Restore a Meaningful Understanding of Natural Facts.

Well, dear subscriber, my book on gender theory is finally published.

I have been trying to get a book published that is critical of queer gender theory since 2023. Indeed, it was astonishing difficulties in getting published in this domain that forced me into the substack space. If you follow any of the gender-critical scholars who have managed to break through the Rainbow “sensitivity” walls that have been ingeniously built around almost all mainstream publishing houses, there is nothing special about my struggle.

The wonderful renegade outfits “Sex Matters” and “SEEN in Publishing” commissioned researcher Matilda Gosling to explore whether gender-critical scholars receive fair treatment in the academic and trade-book publishing contexts. Gosling’s findings show systemic bias against gender-critical scholarship itself. You can read her carefully researched document “Everyday cancellation in publishing” here.

This is how Anne Fine OBE described Gosling’s report:

An astonishing report that lays bare how a once open-minded publishing world has allowed a minority of activists to bully it into so far abandoning its core principles that is has begun to work, not only against its own ethos, but also against its own interests.

I am in good company in being knocked back time and again, and in having my manuscripts (yes, this is my second entire book manuscript on this topic) held onto for months and months before getting an apologetic decline. But Cascade has taken me on yet again, and they have actually published my book. God bless America!

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Whilst my book ‘Gender Theory is Wrong’ is about the development of theoretical and academic trajectories, I have tried to make it as accessible as possible to the non-philosopher as I can. The basic argument - which seems counter-intuitive at first - is that Queer Gender Theory is the natural brain-child of the Enlightenment.

If your understanding of the Enlightenment is not very scholarly and somewhat romantic, this will be hard to believe. For surely, the Enlightenment is about rejecting superstition and speculation and embracing the pure light of science and logic? How could the objective scientific realities of the male and female reproductive sex-binary be denied by prominent gender theorists and this be continuous with the Enlightenment?

In my book I name Immanuel Kant - the quintessential Enlightenment thinker - as the patron saint of queer gender theory. If my publisher had asked me what I wanted on the cover, I would have used a portrait of Kant, have him waving a rainbow flag, cut his face out, and have Judith Butler peeping out of the Kantian face hole. (Perhaps fortunately, my publisher did not ask for my opinion, and Mike has done a fine cover!)

When it comes to the philosophy of science, Kant is what scholars call an anti-realist. That is, to Kant our knowledge of the perceived world is not a knowledge of objective reality itself, it is the knowledge of our own perceptions. The rejection of objective knowledge applies to logic as well with Kant. ‘Reason’ is not some feature of an ordered and meaningful cosmos, it is simply how our own minds work. So science and logic are made entirely anthropocentric by Kant, and this removes any need for faith and metaphysics concerning any supposed knowledge of reality itself. The Enlightenment in Kant’s hand is all about purifying science from faith and purifying reason from metaphysics, and putting the human knower at the centre of all knowledge claims. Kant thought this would liberate us from superstitious faith and speculative metaphysics and make knowledge entirely contained within the scope of human mastery. But he was wrong. Judith Butler has followed his pathway and now both science and reason are entirely human imaginative constructions, defined by language and performance any way we choose. Thus dies the Enlightenment at its own hands.

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The problem we now have is that what might be called ‘The Enlightenment Mystique’ has captivated our high intellectual culture for the past quarter of a millennium. Step by step the anthropocentric and humanly constructed nature of Enlightenment knowledge and reason has shepherded us towards madness, all the time singing the songs of liberation from religion and superstition and proclaiming the gospel of ever advancing progress towards a rational and materialist heaven on earth. So our high culture basically agrees with Gender Theory because this is the logical end point of the Enlightenment. Lobbying and legal activism to one side, this is why we cannot get the academy itself to simply dismiss Gender Theory as impossible bullshit. This is why our judges and tribunals keep trying to make the legal protections of male transwomen in female-only spaces ‘work’. This is why our publishers are so scared of supporting Rainbow heretics. But, what if Gender Theory is, well, simply wrong?

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Gender Theory can (as regards theory) only be shown to be wrong if Kant’s Enlightenment Project can be shown to be wrong. This is what I seek to do in my book. But there are good reasons to suspect that both Gender Theory and the Enlightenment Project are wrong, even before we start. When a ‘science and reason’ Enlightenment mystique leads us to be unable to know the objective difference between a male and a female human, and when fancy linguistic ‘logic’ games can be used by - for example - Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner to totally obfuscate the most straightforward questions about what a man and a woman are, we know things have gone wrong. The Enlightenment Project has not worked. Science and Reason are not being promoted, they are being discarded.

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My book argues that science needs faith, and reason need metaphysics, to be truth concerned about reality. If you do not have faith in the at least partial capacity of sensory perception combined with mathematical formulations and theoretical constructions to reveal actual objective truth about natural realities to us, then you cannot do science. For science is a truth-seeking enterprise, it is not just formulations, techniques, and methodologies the deliver power (that is called sorcery). Kant’s Enlightenment anti-realism leads to Butler’s postmodern irrealism, and both are a denial of science as even partially truth-revealing. If you cannot allow metaphysics as a truth-seeking exploration that stands prior to human logic, then human logic is only our own mind game and has no connection to reality. Metaphysics is premised on the cosmos being both intelligible and embedded in essential meanings and qualitative realities that stand prior to human reason and knowledge. That is, there are essential and qualitative meanings that are beyond and above our own constructions of truth and value. Metaphysical piety (respect for Meaning and Value) keeps human reason from going mad. For as the ancient sophists and contemporary postmodernists well illustrated, you can make reason ‘prove’ any argument at all if you can master the tricks and slippages of human language and treat meaning and value themselves as mere tricks of human language.

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In my book I argue that the Enlightenment is wrong, and this is why Gender Theory is wrong. That is, we cannot have science without at least some degree of faith in the truth revealing powers of scientific endeavor, and we cannot have meaningful and valuable reason without a metaphysical respect for Meaning and Value. The Western intellectual traditions that gave birth to modern science and that undergirded logic and learning in our universities are embedded in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. That tradition is the heritage that makes science and reason viable. Throw that heritage out, and we are forced to embrace madness. To turn from madness all we have to do is recover something of the traditional foundations of Western science and reason. And that tradition is integral with, well, commonsense.

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The people (usually women) at the front line of resisting gender theory madness are not often scholars, they are ordinary people of commonsense, such as Sandie Peggie, Sall Grover, Moira Deeming, and J.K. Rowling. And they are right. The scholars have gone mad. Our intellectual high culture has gone mad. For however qualified you are, whatever position of authority and power you have, however fancy your argument, and however moralistic and committed you are to your trans-ideology, you are just wrong if you think a man can become female. Commonsense agrees with the West’s pre-Enlightenment intellectual traditions. And this is a much more serious matter than some arcane theoretical disagreement. Respecting the realities of biological facts, protecting women from sexually predating men, and upholding the goodness of the naturally-sexed bodies of our children, youths, and young adults, is a matter of safety, of dignity, and of protecting the vulnerable from irreversible and unconscionable harm. Alas, bad theory can produce serious harms and can legally and institutionally entrench serious social and psychological pathologies.

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Gender theory is wrong, it is mad, and it is harmful. All people of commonsense and truth-concerned commitments must stand against it. I hope my book can be of some help for people trying to understand how this terrible attack on the natural goodness of the sexed human body ever came to be accepted, and how there are good reasons to reject it.

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The book is available from Cascade directly here, or from Amazon etc.