I think I'll stop now

And thanks, dear subscribers

A couple of weeks ago I finished writing a book manuscript with the highly nuanced title of “Gender Theory is Wrong.” If I can ever find a publisher for it I will post the triumphant message of its release into the world on this substack. But otherwise, I’m going to call it a day for GCPT.

After unsuccessfully looking around for a publisher for over 2 years for a manuscript which I finished writing in early 2023 titled “Questioning Transgender Orthodoxy” I am not hugely holding my breath about the likelihood of this new manuscript flying. However, I have written the new manuscript with the aim of getting published, which was not something I consciously thought about in the earlier manuscript. So it might work. If I was a lesbian, an atheist, a radical feminist, or a journalist, I would likely have better prospects in the brave but struggling Gender Critical publishing world, but being a white male conservative Christian theologian, well... (Not that it was in any sense easy for amazing and powerful writers such as Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, Holly Lawford-Smith, and Hannah Barnes to get published. They are very fine and deeply researched writers of genuine intellectual merit.)

Many thanks dear subscribers for your interest. When I started up last year I experienced an amazing sense of freedom to be able to write and platform my thoughts without having to apologize for or hide where I was coming from. This is a very heavily speech curtailed domain, and the normal standards of academic freedom do not apply here either. One might assume that as a theologically conservative Christian there would be plenty of Religious Right forums I could pursue to get published in. But I am not of the Religious Right, and theologically conservative forums that are not RR are largely trying to be as kind and inclusive to “queer theology” as they can be at present. It has only been on my own substack that I can simply say what I think, and explain my reasons. This was wildly intoxicating, and I apologise, as I probably over did it. Giving you 5,000 word pieces to read almost every week was probably a bit much!

There are a couple of reasons why I am stopping. At present I am getting enormously depressed by this arena. Being of a sunny disposition, this is not normal for me. But spending 8 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, on my computer researching this domain is doing my head in. And it is not going to bring my trans-identifying daughter to her senses or back into contact with me. I have to find other ways of dealing with that father’s anguish. Further, since joining the substack family I have been receiving very good, but typically very depressing news about this arena from wonderful sex-realist advocates, and you just can’t find a lot of this information any other way. But I have too many feeds, this is getting too obsessive, I am drowning in it, and I need to pull out before I go under.

And then, I am wondering, perhaps we have achieved a Tower of Babel moment in our culture such that the common language of publich truth has simply disintegrated. If there is really nothing I can say that will be heard or taken seriously by anyone who does not already agree with me then what is the point of writing? This is a very troubling thought, and I must say I am experiencing something like metaphysical depression as I ruminate on it. I am not sure how to proceed at present, and need to take time to pop out to the wilderness and hope to hear the whispers of God about this.

For my parting post, I am going to attach the 3,000 word introduction to the book I am hoping to publish.

Once again, thank you so much for your interest, dear subscribers. (And particular thanks to Tom and Ulrik who even paid good money to be subscribers!)

Regards

Paul

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Gender Theory is Wrong

A Genealogy of Sex-Irrealism, why it Fails, and how we can Restore a Meaningful Understanding of Natural Facts.

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Introduction

If Gender Theory was only a matter of academic interest it would be entirely sensible for most people to ignore it. For let us be blunt: what science-respecting person really and honestly believes that if you are male, but you feel like a woman, then you are in fact female? Even though non-queer people may not believe Gender Theory to be true, most of us are not going to object to queer people performing whatever imaginative gender-identity they like amongst themselves, and good luck to them. But why should non-queer people even know about Gender Theory, let alone comply with its aspiration to make sex and gender queer for everyone?

The answer to the above question is that through legislative means a gender-identity reformation is now being imposed on us all by a well-organized and strategically influential cohort of deeply committed Gender Theory advocates. Further, this reformation is decidedly not liberal or democratic. Whether the large majority likes it or not, we are all now required to accept that single-sex spaces, sex-defined sporting categories, and factual sex-identity categories in any context, are no longer permitted. Breastfeeding associations, maternity wards, and gynaecologists, for example, must adopt inclusive language that no longer uses exclusionary words like ‘woman’, ‘breast’, and ‘mother’, and under no circumstances are they to exclude any XY sex-chromosomed person who wants to be included. We are – it seems – legally required to meekly comply with this rainbow revolution even though it obviously turns the clock back on sex-defined women’s rights, it is unfair and can be dangerous in sporting contexts, and it creates entirely new domains of women’s and children’s sexual safety and wellbeing risks. We now live in a world where you can set up a lavender soccer league that is only for “queer women, nonbinary, and trans people” (an excellent idea), but you cannot have a woman’s soccer league for females only.[1]

The fact is, Gender Theory has really caught on in the circles of knowledge and power. Complex arguments promoted by respected academics that nobody seems to really understand are now being accepted as authoritative. Well-resourced gender-identity advocates have been remarkably successful in achieving a sweeping range of significant legislative and institutional captures. Our intellectual and governing elites have largely come to accept that the queer reform of all society is a moral imperative. Thus, long established linguistic and social conventions around sex-linked gender, for everyone, are now being frowned on and outlawed. Even more disturbingly for concerned parents, the gender-identity reformation has deeply penetrated the on-line world in which our children and young adults now seem to live and move and have their being.[2]

There indeed are academic reasons why Gender Theory has caught on in our high intellectual culture, but this is now no merely academic matter. Our knowledge and power classes are now imposing a queer sex and gender reformation on us all. Through legislation, media, corporate culture, and education, the Gender Theory reform movement surges forward at speed. Gender Theory is no longer only of academic interest.

But what if Gender Theory really is wrong? What if the normal commonsense and science-respecting assumptions of people who are not deeply invested in the gender-identity reformation are not backward and bigoted? What if it is simply true that there are only two sexes, no matter who says it or who refuses to say it?

This book will argue that whilst there indeed are demanding intellectual justifications for Gender Theory, those justifications are not ultimately persuasive, and there are good reasons to believe that Gender Theory indeed is wrong. I will argue that Gender Theory arises as a symptom of larger intellectual pathologies in Western intellectual development over the past two or three centuries, thus Gender Theory cannot be adequately understood in isolation from the big sweep of ideas. If we are to understand the intellectual justifications for Gender Theory then we need to understand why the modern West suffers from a lack of confidence in the truth revealing powers of science, and why we suffer from a lack of confidence in our ability to discern any real natural meanings in the world. But the appeal of Gender Theory is not simply an intellectual failure, for there are things we really like about making up knowledge and meaning to suit ourselves. Indeed, the main reasons why Gender Theory seems to ‘works’ is because we want it to work rather than because it is true. So there is a conflict between power and interest on the one hand, and truth and natural meanings on the other hand at the core of this matter. At present, scientific truth and commonsense natural meanings are getting a very serious hammering. This is because our knowledge and power elites have largely embraced the background intellectual assumptions of our times where reality is unknowable, so only power and interest really define knowledge and meaning.

In this book I wish to take you on a journey out of Gender Theory’s intellectual captivity to unreality. This is going to be demanding, though I am not writing for academic specialists. This book is for anyone who finds themself unwillingly swept along by the rainbow reformation, but they do not know how to critically engage with the world of Gender Theory that justifies this reformation.

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Outline

The first chapter addresses the question of whether it even makes sense to ask if Gender Theory is right or wrong. On the one hand, the linguistically slippery and reality denying nature of Gender Theory makes one uninclined to take it seriously. On the other hand, people – intelligent people, boards of directors, and legislators – do take Gender Theory seriously, which is why it has gotten itself embedded in power. Hence, we must engage with it.

Chapter two aims to provide the reader with a workable conceptual handle outlining what the phrase ‘Gender Theory’ at least functionally means.

After these opening chapters we leap into the genealogical core of the book.

A genealogy is a family history. You have to know someone’s family history to really understand them. We cannot understand what Gender Theory is, let alone why it has been such a fabulous recent success, unless we know its generative history. My argument about that history concerns the way in which some of the defining signatures of Enlightenment thinking have produced Gender Theory. Specifically, it is Immanuel Kant’s determination to purify knowledge from faith and reason from metaphysics which eventually produces Gender Theory. The sequence goes something like this. The Enlightenment purging of science and reason from anything religious or speculative begat nineteenth and twentieth-century anti-realism, positivism, linguistic deflation, and rational formalism, which all in different ways beget late twentieth-century postmodernism, which begat the Gender Theory of today.

The central theoretical argument in this book is that the purifying methodology of the Enlightenment ends up killing its noble aim. The noble aim of the Enlightenment is liberation from ignorance and inhumanity by means of science and reason. I think the aim of the Enlightenment is excellent, but it now also seems undeniably clear that Kant’s purifying methodology crashes the Enlightenment’s noble aim. Intractable difficulties in trying to make science and reason spotlessly pure (i.e., rigorously self-justifying) produced a spiral into madness. For one must have faith in the truth revealing powers of science if one is to uphold the sacred epistemic responsibility of being rigorously transparent and truth concerned, otherwise science collapses into a tool of manipulative power. Philosophically, pure positivism fails to justify itself, and the move to treat science as an entirely phenomenological construction of human power and interest destroys the philosophical truth integrity of science. Likewise reason degrades into a meaningless logical formalism where arguments for the most preposterous fantasies cannot be distinguished from arguments that connect with the obvious and real meanings of natural reality. One must have some metaphysical conception of a meaningful natural world if reason is not to descend into madness. Hence, I argue, attempting to purify knowledge from faith and reason from metaphysics has crashed the noble Enlightenment aim. The anti-science and linguistic constructivism of Gender Theory is, alas, the natural outcome of that crash.

Chapter four continues the developmental story of where Kantian purity takes us. We trace a reactive chain of ideas expressed in the key nineteenth-century Continental thinkers, Hegel and Marx. Marx, inverting Hegel, plays a significant role in the materialist Progressive background assumptions of Gender Theory. Other Continental thinkers from this time of formative relevance to postmodernism will come up in chapter seven.

Chapter five looks at positivism. This is the idea that science without any traditional religious warrants gives us truth. Although, modern positivism has always been at least quasi-religious as it starts out as a form of atheist yet explicitly religious rationalism in revolutionary France. This is a fascinating aspect of our genealogy as it is the inevitable failure of positivism to deliver truth, under the conditions of Enlightenment purity, that is a signature formation influence on Gender Theory.

Chapter six takes a far-ranging look at the long history of linguistic deflation and analytical formalism in the West. Linguistic deflation is the art of purifying words from any high meaning. Analytic formalism is the art of purifying logic from any cosmic significance and making it just about the grammar of arguments. Both of these trends are very prominent in twentieth century modern philosophy, but the surprising fact is, they both have roots in the twelfth century. Playing games with language and logic to do tricky things with commonsense and to attack metaphysical meaning is a very old Western intellectual craft, and it is integral with Gender Theory.

Chapter seven looks at postmodernism. This movement did not start in the 1970s. The Counter-Enlightenment had been steadily evolving since the eighteenth century. We briefly examine the Christian Counter-Enlightenment with Hamann and Kierkegaard, though this was largely a road not taken. We then briefly examine the anti-Christian counter-Enlightenment with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, who take us firmly in the direction of the complete destruction of the Enlightenment aim. These latter two thinkers are radical nihilist advocates of mythopoetic perspectivism and creatively asserted will and power, and their impact on postmodernism is very strong. An appreciation of the Counter-Enlightenment leads naturally into a quick description of recent and contemporary postmodern thinkers, such as Derrida and Butler.

There are significant features of postmodernism that should be taken very seriously, as the ‘pure’ modernity that Kant bequeathed to us indeed does not fly. But this does not mean that the postmodern dismissal of any true knowledge of reality, and the devolution of philosophy into sophistry, are actually justified. So we work our way up to the 1970s and beyond and look at how this movement shapes Gender Theory.

At chapter eight we arrive at the present, and at Gender Theory. This signals the completion of our genealogy. At this point we are in a position to appreciate just how well Gender Theory fits in with the present times. Now that we understand these reasons we can seriously ask, is Gender Theory wrong?

Chapter nine gives practical and commonsense arguments for why Gender Theory indeed is wrong.

Chapter ten gives more radical attention not only to why Gender Theory is wrong, but how the Enlightenment aim of liberation through science and reason can be retrieved. It is not enough to just say that Gender Theory is practically wrong; we must show how science and reason can be recovered, as truth revealing, so that Gender Theory will no longer seem persuasive to our intellectual elites.

Chapter eleven concludes the book in a summary way, and points towards what sort of work needs to be done to free ourselves from the bane of Gender Theory.

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Defining ‘sex-irrealism’ and ‘sex-realism’

Before we take off I should outline the meaning of a word that appears in the sub-title of this book – ‘sex-irrealism’ – and its nemesis, ‘sex-realism’.

An irrealist thinks the question of whether something is real or not, does not apply. Simply put, sex-irrealists think ‘sex’ is a term that is far too complex in its shades of use and meaning to be pinned down to any crude factual definition. In contrast, sex-realists think we can have a true knowledge of what the sex of any given person is, which is not difficult to objectively determine. This needs a bit more unpacking.

To a sex-irrealist there are no obvious and objective meanings for the words man, woman, male, and female. These four words do have meanings, but they are always meanings in use. Further, their use is always situated within ever-shifting and interactive matrixes of identity, power, nature, and culture. Hence, to a sex-irrealist anyone who thinks there is an objective meaning to those four words is not only hopelessly naïve, but they are also oppressive bigots. Sex-irrealists boldly uphold the complexity and diversity of the uncontainable meanings of sex and gender, and the right to freedom of sex and gender identity expression. They are reformers fighting against the out-of-date sex-realist prejudices of the uneducated, the oppressive, and the bigoted. A righteous and crusading ethos is common amongst committed sex-irrealists.

Trans Rights Activists (TRAs) are sex-irrealist who do not well tolerate or engage with their primary opponents, who are sex-realist. TRAs are often disruptively opposed to sex-realists even expressing their stance publicly. TRAs are often convinced that any public statement of a sex-realist understanding of the world is ‘hate speech’ displaying the same sort of bigotry and genocidal intention as a Nazi swastika. The moralized framing of TRA opposition towards sex-realists is at a very shrill level, and it usually has legislative and institutional support. As a result, sex-realists typically experience concerted and often vitriolic opposition to them simply stating their reasons for rejecting sex-irrealism in any public context. But sex-realism is by no means indefensible.

A sex-realist believes that there are uncontroversial scientific ways of separating the entire human race into only two sexes: male and female.[3] Upholding a commitment to the validity of scientific truth, sex-realists maintain that it is the case that in clearly observable objective reality there are only two reproductive human sexes. Sex-realists hold that the human reproductive sex binary is a matter of objective fact, it is not a matter of bigoted or any other value-inflected opinion. It is also a matter of demonstrable and incontrovertible fact that humans have no natural or artificial means of changing from being one reproductively functional sex to being the other reproductively functional sex. It follows, then, that to a sex-realist there is no such thing as a male who really is a woman. Transwomen, as males who gender-identify as women, certainly exist, but they are not, and never will be, real reproductive females.

Sex-realists often understand ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to be more primarily sex-defined terms than they are gender-defined terms.[4] Even so, there are highly diverse ways in which people express their sexuality. To the sex-realist, males, for example, can express their sexuality as heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, drag-queens, transwomen, any performative fantasy category you can think of, autogynephilia, sado-masochistic eunuchs, or whatever, but they remain males and they remain men; they do not in reality become females or women, even if they can effectively ‘pass’ as a woman. Being female is not a performance, it is not a cultural construction, it is not a cross-sex hormonal or cosmetic surgical construction, it is a natural fact. A real woman is a natural female. Anyone who is performing being a woman who is not a natural female, is a man.[5]

In sum, the sex-irrealist denies any fixed and objective meaning to male and female sex and insists that the “gender-identity” categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ must be defined only by the free choice of each individual. The sex-realist affirms the objective and knowable reality of the human reproductive biological sex binary and insists that no male can be a woman, and female-only spaces, contests, and forums should not include males.

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The academic expertise this book draws on

Finally, as regards introductory matters, I wish to make some quick disclosures about what sort of scholarship informs the arguments of this book.

My doctorate was in the sociology of knowledge, and I have other post-graduate qualifications in philosophy and theology as well as an undergraduate social science degree majoring in politics. All four of these domains are useful in understanding Gender Theory.

Significantly, Gender Theory is not a scientific theory, it arises out of literary criticism, postmodernism, and the queer movement, so mainstream biology is not relevant to understanding Gender Theory.[6] Even so, sexologists, such as Debra Soh, and biologists, such as Richard Dawkins, are astonished at how unwelcome their knowledge expertise is to the domain of Gender Theory.[7]

On science, in recent years I have done considerable work with my colleague at the University of Queensland, the renown historian of science, Professor Peter Harrison.[8] Understanding the nature of modern scientific facts is an important area of my research which is also highly relevant to understanding Gender Theory. For one of the most prominent features of Gender Theory is its distinctive way of culturally constructing all knowledge claims, including scientific claims. Gender Theory’s fabulous dexterity in being linguistically tricky with factual knowledge claims is the central engine of its ideological power.

In what follows you can expect me to draw on all areas of my academic expertise, but I am explicitly endeavouring to write what is called a trade book rather than a book for scholars. So I will not presume the reader has a specialist philosophical knowledge background, but I do presume the reader is intelligent, curious, and interested in doing some serious thinking.

Because the problem (Gender Theory) has philosophical roots, the reader will need to be prepared to be philosophically educated. This will be conceptually demanding in places. But I do believe the picture will come into focus as we go, even if you may be learning more about the past 250 years of Western philosophy than you thought you ever wanted to know.

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[1] Sarah Barker, “Lavender League creates a safe space for queer women, nonbinary, and trans people,” TheFemaleCategory, 20 March 2025,

Lavender League creates a safe space for queer women, nonbinary, and trans people

Interestingly, in another of Baker’s articles about the aborted Oxford Union debate with Imane Khelif (19 November 2024, “Did Mara Yamauchi’s question scare Imane Khelif off?”) there is a link to a YouTube story examining the 2016 Olympics where first, second, and third place winners in the women’s 800-meter track event were all 46 XY DSD males. When I clicked on the link (here in Australia) I was informed that this video was unavailable in my country. It seems that in Australia our disinformation filtering authorities will not let me see this piece, presumably because it would be bigoted hate speech to even ask if excluding biological females from any place on a women’s elite sporting podium is fair.

[2] See Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation. How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing and Epidemic of Mental Illness, Dublin: Allen Lane, 2024. Haidt here explains how the world our children and young people now inhabit has inbuilt reality excluding features in it that make normal human development, and a normal relationship with human and natural reality increasingly hard for them to know and experience. The on-line world encourages reality-disconnected (magical) thinking. This has very serious mental illness implications for the young. And as Hannah Barnes points out, there is strong anecdotal evidence from parents of mentally unwell children spending large amounts of time on-line, that their children are easily influenced by transgender activists into embracing a transgender identity as a solution to their anomia, depression, and social isolation. See Hannah Barnes, Time To Think, London: Swift, 2023, 83–89.

[3] Sex-realists fully appreciate that a very small proportion of the human race are people with genetic Disorders of Sexual Development. DSD people are unlike non-DSD trans people, for such trans people have a medically unambiguous male or female sex and then undergo hormonal and surgical treatments to reconfigure their sex appearance often at the cost of making themselves sexually infertile. Which is to say that genetic abnormalities of sexual development in no manner invalidate the full humanity of the person who suffers with such a natural abnormality (they are often infertile, if having children is a blessing then infertility is a suffering) but neither does it render the normal male/female reproductive sex binary for the vast majority of people in any way complex or obsolete.

[4] To be more nuanced, Simone de Beauvoir famously noted that one is not born but rather becomes a woman. A sex-realist would say, one is born female though, and only a female can become a woman. A person who is born male cannot become a woman, as cultural and social formation are not the only reasons why a person becomes a woman; the most significant and indeed physically defining reason why anyone becomes a woman is that they are, from conception and until death, female.

[5] The fact that there is a very small population of people who are born with medically identifiable disorders of sexual development, and at some point, such people may undergo surgical interventions should they or their parents decide to remove sex-presentation ambiguity, is the exception to the above comment, but it is in no manner a meaningful rule applicable to people who are unambiguously born either male or female.

[6] Gender Theorists have been working on re-constructing biology itself so as to make it compatible with a fluid, performative, spectral, and culturally interpreted account of what sex ‘is’. Anne Fausto-Sterling is a lead figure in this innovative domain. See Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body. Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, New York: Basic Books, 2020. You can see, just from the sub-title of her book, that ‘politics’ and ‘construction’ are key features of her approach to ‘sexuality’. This is not the broadly mainstream conception of science, which most practising scientists assume, where science is understood as a non-political and objective truth concerned knowledge enterprise.

[7] See Debra Soh, The End of Gender, New York: Threshold Editions, 2020; Richard Dawkins, “Race is a Spectrum. Sex is Pretty Damn Binary.” https://richarddawkins.com/articles/article/race-is-a-spectrum-sex-is-pretty-damn-binary

[8] See Peter Harrison & Paul Tyson, (eds.), New Directions in Theology and Science, London: Routledge, 2022; Peter Harrison & John Milbank, assisted by Paul Tyson (eds.), After Science and Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022; Paul Tyson, (ed.) Astonishment and Science, Eugene: Cascade, 2023.