Materialism and gender theory: Anatomy of a bourgeois-radical train wreck

A dinner party before and after the subject of gender theory comes up ... (with apologies to the French cartoonist Caran d'Ache and the Dreyfusards).

Daniel Lazare

 

“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

 

By many accounts, this may have been the most successful presidential campaign slogan since the “Daisy” ad that LBJ used against Barry Goldwater in 1964.  Campaign ads based on the theme ran some 30,000 times and, according to a Democratic super PAC known as Future Forward, may have shifted the vote 2.7 percent in Donald Trump’s favor.  California Governor Gavin Newsom called it “a great ad” and said that the Harris campaign’s failure to come up with a response made it “even more devastating.”  The Trump campaign said the slogan proved particularly effective among young black and Hispanic men and suburban women, key constituencies that had previously voted Democratic. 

But why was the slogan so effective?  Is it simply that Americans are bigots and that unscrupulous politicians know that trans-bashing is a sure-fire way of drumming up votes?  Or did the slogan work because trans ideology is more problematic than liberals are willing to admit?  

The answer is the latter.  This doesn’t mean that trans should not be defended against rightwing attack.  They should – to the hilt.  But trans ideology is another story.  Years from now, when historians sit down to write about the American left’s wilderness years from the 1980s on, the movement will be a big part of the story.  But it will be less about noble leftists riding to the rescue of a beleaguered minority than of postmodern theorists conjuring up a bizarre intellectual system and middle-class radicals eagerly tagging along. 

The results, as the same historians will undoubtedly note, have been devastating.  Not only did the Democratic Party’s mishandling of the issue possibly provide the margin of victory for the most rightwing and authoritarian administration in modern American history, but it led to furious and debilitating arguments on the left over whether trans women – which is to say males transitioning to female or MTF’s – should be allowed entry into women’s sports or changing rooms.  It led to vicious hate campaigns against “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or TERFs, who dare argue that such facilities should be reserved for “natal” women.  And it led to thousands of young people, most of them teenage girls, undergoing dangerous sex-change treatments for no good medical reason. 

Feminism, a movement supposedly dedicated to the liberation of women, somehow morphed into a force in favor of medical maltreatment of teenage girls.  Efforts to silence opposition added to the damage.  “Trans women are women – no debate,” a British gay-rights group called Stonewall declares.  What this has come to mean is that not only will trans supporters refuse to debate sex, gender, and identity themselves, but they won’t allow anyone else to either.  

Horror stories have mounted.  The author J.K. Rowling was flooded with accusations of bigotry and transphobia after expressing skepticism that trans women – many of whom do not undergo surgical intervention – are really women.  Stars like Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, who made their names in the “Harry Potter” movie series, refused to have anything to do with her, and employees of her own publishing house refused to work on her next book.  When feminists organized meetings to discuss the trans movement’s impact on natal women, trans activists responded with “megaphones, smoke bombs, graffiti, and, at one point, a bomb threat,” according to Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who was hounded out of her job at the University of Sussex in England for expressing doubt.  “Women attendees have been screamed at from close quarters, had water thrown at them, been shoved and blocked from entering.”

 

Katheen Stock

“I know,” Stock says, “because I am one of them.”[1]  

Judith Butler, the doyenne of gender theorists, more or less confirms such accounts.  As she wrote in 2024: 

Who are these people who think they have the right to tell you who you are and what you are not, and who dismiss your own definition of who you are, who tell you that self-determination is not a right that you are allowed to exercise, who would subject you to medical and psychiatric review, or mandatory surgical intervention, before they are willing to recognize you in the name and sex you have given yourself, the ones to which you have arrived.  Their definition is a form of effacement, and their right to define you is apparently more important than any right you have to determine who you are, how you live, and what language comes closest to representing who you are.[2] 

Outsiders are not allowed to doubt or criticize.  Anyone who persists in questioning the unquestionable, as Butler defines it, is guilty of a hate crime and will be punished accordingly.  Stock writes that after “experienc[ing] unusually virulent and personalized attempts to smother” her own writings about sex and gender, she put out a call to fellow academics to see if they had run into anything similar:

I was inundated.  Correspondents told me of their journal submissions and grant applications being rejected on grounds of ‘transphobia’; of editorial positions withdrawn on similar grounds; of academic publishers bullied into delays or retractions; of official university complaints of harassment and bullying against them; of informal chats from departmental heads indicating the likelihood or threat to promotion prospects, and so on.  The result is that academics have largely been cowed into silence.[3] 

In 2020, a young Penn State scientist named Colin Wright retweeted an article about a 1,500-percent increase in gender-dysphoria diagnoses among Swedish teenage girls and then made the mistake of adding a brief comment: “Two words: social contagion.” 

“Within hours,” he says, “colleagues denounced me as a ‘transphobic’ bigot.  Anonymous activists emailed universities to poison my job prospects.  A professional job board even published mock job listings warning others not to hire me.  My academic career never recovered.” 

Yet it is impossible not to debate identity since identity is no less contentious than any other subject.  Zionists have been debating the “who’s a Jew” question since the modern movement took shape in the 1890s.  Americans have been debating Americanism since mass immigration began in the 1830s.  The French have been debating Frenchness ever since the Jacobins decreed that French was to be the sole language of education and government in 1793-94.  Yet when it comes to who’s a woman or who’s a man, Butler has declared the topic off limits. 

What gives her the right to determine what people can and can’t discuss?  How did political discourse turn into such a poisonous swamp as people hurl charges of bigotry at one another and try to blackball opponents from getting work?  It’s strange that an issue few people thought about two or three decades ago would prove so explosive.  Yet that is precisely what’s occurred, with disastrous consequences for the socialist movement.

 

Gender theory and postmodernism

 

How did this happen?  Gender ideology emerged in the 1980s out of an academic milieu that was post-Marxist and postmodernist.  Sixties-style radicalism was passé, the Soviet bloc was collapsing, and Francis Fukuyama was starting work on The End of History, his classic 1992 account of why socialism was kaput and liberalism triumphant.  Alex Callinicos’s 1990 study, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, is an excellent guide to a period in which the strange and difficult writings of French theorists like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault swept across British and American campuses with hurricane force.  Writes Callinicos: 

Despite their many disagreements, all three stressed the fragmentary, heterogenous and plural character of reality, denied human thought the ability to arrive at any objective account of that reality and reduced the bearer of this thought, the subject, to an incoherent welter of sub- and trans-individual drives and desires. 

Callinicos notes how Jean-François Lyotard, who was also influential, summed up the meaning of postmodernism.  It was “incredulity toward metanarratives,” the metanarrative of socialism first and foremost.  Despite his association with an anti-Stalinist group known as Socialisme ou Barbarie, Lyotard now asserted that “there is no question here of proposing a ‘pure’ alternative to the [capitalist] system: we all know now, as the 1970s come to a close, that an attempt at an alternative of that kind would end up resembling the system it was meant to replace.”[4]  

This was a variation on Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum: “There is no alternative.”  Whatever its faults, capitalism was here to stay.  It represented the final stage of human development, and any attempt to replace it with a different system would only make matters worse.  Instead, Lyotard advised focusing on “mini-narratives” that he defined as situational and temporary.  Since neoliberalism was also proscribing other metanarratives at this point such as the welfare state, big government, economic intervention, etc., the trend on both bourgeois fronts, economic and philosophical, was toward small-bore initiatives that were provisional and contingent.[5] 

Martin Jacques, the influential editor of the British journal Marxism Today, waxed eloquent about the end of history: 

Unless the Left can come to terms with those New Times, it must live on the sidelines. ...  At the heart of New Times is the shift from the old mass-production Fordist economy to a new, more flexible, post-Fordist order based on computers, information, technology and robotics.  But New Times are about much more than economic change.  Our world is being remade.  Mass production, the mass consumer, the big city, big-brother state, the sprawling housing estate, and the nation-state are in decline: flexibility, diversity, differentiation, mobility, communication, decentralization and internationalization are in the ascendant.  In the process our identities, our sense of self, our own subjectivities are being transformed.  We are in transition to a new era.[6] 

This was in 1988.  Although published by the Communist Party of Great Britain, Marxism Today was expressing views once associated with post-industrial thinkers like Daniel Bell and more recently with Silicon Valley.  But the bottom line was that the old radicalism was gone.  Observes Callinicos: 

Not only does belief in a postmodern epoch generally go along with rejection of socialist revolution as either feasible or desirable, but it is the perceived failure of revolution which has helped to gain widespread acceptance of this belief.[7] 

While power was still quite real, it no longer had anything to do with the Marxist concept of class.  In the hands of neo-Nietzscheans like Foucault, it turned into something different, a free-floating force with a life of its own.  As Foucault wrote in 1975: 

There is no power-relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor at the same time any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power-relations. 

Power and knowledge were intertwined.  One determined the other, with “discourse” the means by which they were wielded.  Foucault elaborated further in his four-volume study, The History of Sexuality, published beginning in 1976: 

It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies... 

And so on for more than a hundred words.[8]  With power consisting of “a multiplicity of relations infiltrating the whole of the social body,” to quote Callinicos, it could determine anything and everything – what we know, what we think, our very identity.  Given the very nebulousness of the concept, it was a short step to the idea that power could determine sex and gender as well.

 

Enter Judith Butler

 

Judith Butler

This was Butler’s great breakthrough.  Poststructuralism, which mounted a skeptical postmodernist critique of all existing social structures, meant not only a methodology and belief system, but a difficult literary style devoted to “the cult of paradox and ... the insistent demand for complexity,” to quote the theorists Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut.[9]  Gender Trouble, which Butler published in 1990, was therefore wordy and abstruse in the obligatory poststructuralist manner.  But it caught on regardless.  Attacking the feminist call for sexual equality, it declared that equality between men and women was beside the point when sexual division itself was oppressive:  

It is not enough to inquire into how women might become more fully represented in language and politics.  Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of ‘women,’ the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought.[10] 

Why was the concept of womanhood important?  Because: 

The institution of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished thorough the practices of heterosexual desire.  The act of differentiating the two oppositional moments of the binary results in a consolidation of each term, the respective internal coherence of sex, gender, and desire.[11] 

By standing up for women without questioning “womanness,” feminism was letting stand gender divisions that are inherently stifling.  But since biology divides much of the animal world up by gender, it reinforces such norms too.  Gender Trouble thus informs us that “power relations that infuse the biological sciences” have “spawned categorical fictions” that oppress us to this day: 

Any theory of the culturally constructed body ... ought to question ‘the body’ as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse.  There are Christian and Cartesian precedents to such views which, prior to the emergence of vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth century, understand ‘the body’ as so much inert matter, signifying nothing or, more specifically, signifying a profane void, the fallen state: deception, sin, the premonitional metaphorics of hell and the eternal feminine.[12]  

Modern biology is as much a social construct as medieval theology.  Since both are arbitrary, freedom lies in casting them off so as to become what one wants to be: 

That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.  This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the ‘integrity’ of the subject.  In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.[13] 

Biology is a myth, and a coercive one at that.  Instead of changing it, we should replace it with a new reality that we make up on the spot. 

 

What would Lenin say?

 

For those steeped in the Leninist-Trotskyist tradition, this may summon up memories of a not-dissimilar controversy that erupted in the early 1900s when a new philosophical school began invading Russian social democracy.  This was empirio-criticism, a doctrine associated with the German physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916).  It may be unfair to lump Mach in with a professional skeptic like Butler since he believed that scientific facts were to be analyzed and debated rather than dismissed as “phantasms” whose sole function is to prop up heteronormativity. 

The parallels are nonetheless striking.  Like Butler, Mach sought to undermine objective reality – not via social discourse, but by giving primacy to “sensations” we see, feel, and hear.  These are the tangible items that scientists are able to measure and analyze and hence more important than the so-called reality behind them.  The Marxist historian Helena Sheehan sums up the approach: 

In outlining the role of science in the light of this paradigmatic intuition, he took the view that science was an attempt to organize sensations in the most concise possible way, without any ontological significance.  Its purpose was to select, classify, and record the results of experience in order to facilitate manipulation and prediction, not to discover the truth about the world.[14] 

The only things that mattered were experiments and results.  What made this so explosive was Mach’s rejection of materialism as a bygone philosophy too stodgy and old-fashioned to keep up with the fast-moving and paradoxical world of the new physics.  New discoveries about radioactivity, the mutability of elements, and atomic structure were calling into question old assumptions about time, space, and causality, and so materialism, with its simplistic mechanics, seemed to have been left behind in the dust.  Since materialism was a needless encumbrance, idealism, the notion that ideas exist independently of material reality, began making a comeback. 

When a Russian Bolshevik known as Bogdanov (real name: Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky) went over to the Machist side – although he preferred to call his variant “empirio-monism” – orthodox Marxists like Georgi Plekhanov, Lyubov Axelrod, and Lenin reacted with alarm.  Bogdanov’s failure, they said, was in not recognizing that Marx and Engels had revolutionized materialism by introducing the concept of the Hegelian dialectic, thereby changing it from a static philosophy based on discrete events like so many clicking billiard balls to a theory of material development filled with abrupt leaps and transformations – a veritable “algebra of revolution” as Plekhanov put it.  Axelrod argued that the Machist reliance on perception alone was fallacious since it was impossible to determine if perceptions were correct without objective reality serving as a basis of comparison.[15]  For Lenin, the question he posed over and over again in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the book-length critique he published in 1909, was that of pre-existing matter.  If all that matters is what human beings can touch and see, then what about the world that existed before they chanced upon the scene?  Since there was no one to touch and see it, was all that geological and biological history irrelevant, unknowable, or beyond the bounds of legitimate scientific inquiry?  As he put it: 

The earth is a reality existing outside us.  It cannot ‘coincide’ (in the sense of being identical) with our sense-perception, or be in indissoluble co-ordination with it, or be a ‘complex of elements’ in another connection identical with sensation; for the earth existed at a time when there were no men, no sense-organs, no matter organized in that superior form in which property of sensation is in any way clearly perceptible.[16] 

It existed regardless of whether empirio-criticism had a place for it or not.  “Did the earth have the history which is expounded in geology, or was the earth created in seven days?” Lenin asked a few pages later.[17]  Machism’s position was agnostic, which in his eyes was damning. 

 

Is sex a modern invention?

 

The same questions apply to Butler.  Gender Trouble seems to regard sex as a social construct that originated with the “vitalistic biologies” of the nineteenth century.  In fact, it originated some two billion years earlier with the “eukaryotic revolution” that ushered in a new form of reproduction.  Instead of mitosis, in which a single cell reproduces by splitting into two identical cells, the new method involved two different cells combining in such a way as to give rise to a third cell that is genetically distinct.  Sexual reproduction was “risky, time- and energy-consuming,” but at the same highly productive because it allowed cells to combine DNA so as to replaced strands that were broken and degraded.  Genetic recombination led to a high rate of mutation allowed them to evolve rapidly in response to changing environmental circumstances.[18]  Eukaryotes thus became the ancestors of nearly all life on earth – animals, plants, and fungi.  External sex organs appeared some 410 million years ago when the first four-footed creatures ventured onto dry land, while viviparity, i.e. live births, may have originated between 163 and 191 million years BP (before present).[19]

So it is difficult to understand what Butler is getting at when she says that “the category of ‘women’ ... is produced and restrained by ... structures of power” when no such structures existed when the female category arose.  The same goes when, quoting the French feminist Monique Wittig, she declares that “the category of ‘sex’ is a name that enslaves” because “the ‘straight mind,’ evident in the discourses of the human sciences  ... ‘take[s] it for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality.’”[20]  But whether or not “the straight mind” takes it for granted, heterosexuality has been the basis for reproduction long before the straight human mind ever appeared. 

We are thus back in a neo-Machist world in which pre-human reality doesn’t matter because there is no one to touch, see, or socially construct it.  Gender Trouble goes on: 

Is there a ‘physical’ body prior to the perceptually perceived body?  An impossible question to decide.  Not only is the gathering of attributes under the category of sex suspect, but so is the very discrimination of the ‘features’ themselves.  That penis, vagina, breasts, and so forth are named sexual parts is both a restriction of the erogenous body to those parts and a fragmentation of the body as a whole.  Indeed, the ‘unity’ imposed upon the body by the category of sex is a ‘disunity,’ a fragmentation and compartmentalization, and a reduction of erotogeneity.[21]

Like a child, Butler exists solely in the present.  The historical dimension is outside her field of vision.

 

From sex to gender

 

Observes gender critic Kathleen Stock: 

Butler makes the general assumption that anything at all humans can meaningfully think about is socially constructed, ‘all the way down’ as it were.  This means she thinks there are no material facts before language – that is, prior to culturally specific linguistic and social constructions of them.  Linguistic categories, including scientific and biological ones, aren’t a means of reflecting existing divisions in the world, but a means of creating things that otherwise would not have existed.  According to Butler, scientific language in particular creates ‘hierarchies’ of dominance and subordination, entrenching power relations between social groups.  And this also applies to the categories of male and female: they are arbitrary, artificial and do not reflect any prior material division.  What they do reflect is ‘exclusionary power relations,’ dictating who gets to count as a ‘real’ woman or man, and who does not...[22]  

Science is the enemy.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows how deeply such ideas have penetrated into the academic mainstream when it discusses the problem of a small minority of “intersex” infants – less than one in 5,000 on average[23] – born with genital abnormalities:

...to the extent that ... medical practices ... assign intersex infants to one sex or the other, it appears that sexual dimorphism is medically instituted.  Insofar as bodies are made to conform to a particular cultural ideology about sex – an ideology which governs social practice – it makes some sense to say that biological sex itself is, to this degree, ‘culturally instituted.’ 

Makes some sense?  But why is a physician confronted with a case of malformed genitalia any different from one confronted with a cleft palate or malformed limb?  Isn’t the issue at hand not whether to impose a certain cultural stereotype, but to enable the child to live as happily and healthily as possible?  Are doctors ideological cops bent on enforcing cultural conformity?  Or are they scientists trying to work their way through a problem in a constructive and humanitarian way? 

The SEP continues: 

The illusion of a stably sexed body, core gender identity, and (hetero) sexual orientation is perpetuated through repeated, stylized bodily performances that are performative in the sense that they are productive of the fiction of a stable identity, orientation, and sexed body as prior to the gendered behavior ... [I]nstead of a kind of voluntary theatricality donned and doffed by a pre-existing agent, gender performance is constitutive of the agent itself.  For Butler, even though the self is the mere effect of repeated gender performances, it is nonetheless real: There are selves, they are socially constructed.  What is strictly fictional, for Butler, is the view that they are unified cores which exist prior to gendered behavior.[24] 

Material reality is fictional whereas performance is real.  Stock says of Gender Trouble: 

This radical and transgressive line of thought sent thrilled shockwaves through humanities departments in universities at the time of publication, and the aftershocks have been felt ever since.  In the 1990s, the academic discipline of queer theory was forged: a branch of critical theory applied to sex, gender and sexuality, with Gender Trouble a foundational text.  One by one, Women’s Studies departments founded in the 1970s and 80s started to rename themselves as Gender Studies departments, interested in all gender performances and not just the narrow, heterosexual, white and Eurocentric performances of womanhood with which many feminists had mostly concerned themselves to date.[25] 

Why did it generate such shockwaves?  Once again, Lenin seems apropos.  Referring to the controversies ignited by Machism, he says in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism that “it is impossible not to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society.”[26]  Similarly, it is impossible not to see in Butler’s insistence on sex as a social construct as also reflective of class forces.  Just as Fukuyama’s End of History argued that capitalism had been freed of its class fetters and could now grow endlessly, Butler argued that gender had been freed of its material fetters and could blossom as well.  Both empirio-critics and gender theorists saw themselves as radical in the sense of striding off in bold new directions.  But they were in fact reactionary in that they both reflected and reinforced contemporary liberalism. 

Lenin remarked that while Mach and his co-thinkers sought to avoid solipsism, the dead-end belief that existence of anything outside one’s own head is uncertain, “they cannot in fact escape solipsism without falling into howling logical absurdities.”[27]  Much the same can be said of queer theory.  As a Monmouth University sociologist named Guy Oakes explained in a 1995 essay: 

If all social categories are invalidated by demonstrating that they are socially constructed, then this also holds true for the categories essential to the constitution of society, such as the concepts of social action, social meaning, and social relations.  If these concepts are invalidated, the concept of a society cannot even be articulated.  In that case, radical constructionism, which is possible only on the basis of some concept of society, is unintelligible.  As a result, the doctrine undermines its own coherence.[28] 

If everything is a social construct, then the concept of social construction is also a social construct.  The entire field devolves into nihilism.

 

A movement is born

 

So far, so very academic.  But gender theory soon found itself on very different terrain thanks to the great changes of the 1990s and after, e.g. the Balkan wars, 9/11, the 2008 financial meltdown, and so forth.  Instead of remaining in an ivory tower, unsettled new conditions caused it to branch out.  Trans flags began showing up in gay-pride demonstrations, anti-discrimination measures advanced, and bestsellers like Jennifer Finney Boylan’s 2003 memoir, She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, began climbing the charts.  In 2006-07, the International Commission of Jurists, the International Service for Human Rights, and other such groups gathered under UN auspices in Yogyakarta in the Indonesian island of Java to begin drawing up legal proposals aimed at strengthening sexual equality.  The Yogyakarta Principles would eventually include planks calling on national governments to:

n  Provide “a quick, transparent, and accessible mechanism that legally recognizes and affirms each person’s self-defined gender identity.” 

n “Ensure that no eligibility criteria, such as medical or psychological interventions, a psycho-medical diagnosis, minimum or maximum age, economic status, health, marital or parental status, or any other third-party opinion, shall be a prerequisite to change one’s name, legal sex or gender.”[29] 

A fast-growing social movement was now declaring tests, screenings, and medical evaluation to be unnecessary.  Sexual identity was henceforth something people declared entirely on their own.  The UN General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council, and other UN bodies rejected the Yogyakarta Principles repeatedly.  Still, they became the gold standard as far as the new gender movement was concerned.

Finally, numbers began to zoom.  Previously, patients at the Tavistock Institute in London, Britain’s main treatment center for transgender children and youth, were mostly boys whose symptoms disappeared as they entered puberty and, in many cases, transitioned to become “same-sex attracted, cisgender adults.”[30]  But after rising steadily from 2009 on, the numbers saw an exponential increase starting in 2014.  From ten or less, the Tavistock caseload not only mushroomed to 5,000 per year by 2021-22, but underwent a strange mutation.  Instead of boys, the great majority were now girls between the ages of 12 and 16.[31] 

Where did such numbers come from?  With Tavistock plainly overwhelmed, press reports began filtering out about the rampant use of puberty blockers, anti-hormones that prevent sexual development and thus supposedly buy time for children and adolescents to think before transitioning.  In 2019, the Murdoch-owned London Times reported that five Tavistock clinicians had resigned on the grounds that young girls who were really lesbians were being pressured into using puberty blockers and declaring themselves trans. 

“It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,” the Times quoted one clinician as saying.  “I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay.  Young lesbians considered at the bottom of the heap suddenly found they were really popular when they said they were trans.”  Recounted another: “A lot of the girls would come in and say, ‘I’m not a lesbian.  I fell in love with my best girlfriend but then I went online and realized I’m not a lesbian, I’m a boy.  Phew.’” 

“We do not know why this is happening,” a Tavistock psychiatrist named David Bell told the Guardian in 2021.  Co-morbidities such as anorexia, autism, and history of trauma, he said, were not receiving due consideration: “Some of the children are depressed.  It’s said that it’s their gender that is the cause of this, but how do we know?  And why don’t we try to treat that first?”  

But with a trans-advocacy group called Mermaids blaming Tavistock for “not provid[ing] any streamlined route to fast-track puberty blockers” and harboring staff “who are openly unsupportive,” the institute was coming under attack from both directions.  The situation was deteriorating.

 

War on science

 

With reports of soaring caseloads also flowing in from Finland, Australia, Belgium, Canada, and other countries, it was difficult to know what was going on.[32]  Growing trans militancy made it more so.  If doctors have no “right to tell you who you are” and if trans ID is entirely self-determined, then practitioners were hamstrung.  If they tried to discuss with a teenage girl whether she was truly “gender dysphoric” or merely gay, autistic, or depressed, they were guilty of engaging in “conversion therapy.”  Since the increasingly influential Stonewall lobbying group, the largest gay-rights organization in the UK, had defined transphobia as, among other things, “denying ... gender identity or refusing to accept it,” then any physician who hesitated to agree with a 12-year-old that she had been born into the wrong body was guilty of a hate crime.[33]  

Events took an equally disturbing turn in the United States when Lisa Littman, a medical researcher at Brown University, coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” to describe teenage girls who suddenly became convinced that they had been assigned the wrong gender despite giving no indication of “gender incongruence” prior to puberty.  ROGD caused a storm because it suggested that gender dysphoria was not deeply rooted as gender advocates maintained, but something that could be learned or acquired.  The reaction was furious when Littman published the results of a 90-question survey in PLOS One, a peer-reviewed medical and scientific journal, in 2019.  Based on 256 parent responses, the survey found that 82.8 percent of the children or adolescents had been born as girls, that 41 percent had expressed a non-heterosexual orientation before “coming out” as transgender, that 62.5 percent had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder or neurodevelopmental disability, and that, in 36.8 percent of their friendship groups, a majority of members had announced that they were transgender too.  Parents reported that their children’s mental well-being had worsened since declaring themselves trans.  Some 22.7 percent said they were now expressing distrust of non-transgender people, 25 percent said they were refusing to spend time with non-trans friends, 49.4 percent said they were isolating themselves from their families, and 46.6 percent said they only trusted information from trans sources.

 

Lisa Littman

What Littman’s paper presented was merely a hypothesis.  But, then, the idea of trans identity as profoundly innate is merely a hypothesis too. As one reader commented, Littman’s article would hopefully lead to “increasingly sophisticated critical attempts at replication and gathering evidence that will test the thesis presented here.”  It was a call to broaden research so as to pursue all avenues of inquiry.

But her hypothesis did have one advantage.  It fitted the facts in suggesting that peer pressure or social contagion might better explain why the incidence among teenage girls was advancing so rapidly.  Zealots responded with fury.  A gay website called her study “dangerous” because it could lead to “worse mental health outcomes.”  A prominent child psychologist said that surveying concerned-parent websites was akin to “recruiting from Klan or alt-right websites to demonstrate that blacks really were an inferior race.”[34]  The ACLU said Littman “laundered what had previously been the rantings of online conspiracy theorists and gave it the resemblance of serious scientific study.” The MIT Technology Review declared: “The scientific community ... agreed there was no such thing as ROGD.” 

This was wrong.  Nonetheless, Brown yanked a press release announcing the article’s publication, the Rhode Island Department of Health fired her from a part-time consulting position, while a plainly rattled PLOS One forced her to issue a meaningless correction emphasizing that her survey was merely a survey and nothing more.  (Littman had never said otherwise.)[35]

 

Lisa Littman demonized by a trans activist journal

Science strikes back

 

But amid a growing press uproar over troubles at Tavistock, contradictions in trans theory were increasingly difficult to ignore.  In 2020, Britain’s National Health Service commissioned Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, the equivalent of the American Academy of Pediatrics, to conduct a meta-analysis of scientific research dealing with gender treatment.  Her report, nearly 400 pages long, was finally released in March 2024.  Cass laid out the problem in the introduction:

Despite the best intentions of everyone with a stake in this complex issue, the toxicity of the debate is exceptional. ...  There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.  This must stop.

All of which was unquestionably true.  Then she went on to discuss the state of gender science: 

This is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint.  The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.

She noted that whereas physicians are ordinarily cautious when it comes to adopting new treatments:

Quite the reverse happened in the field of gender care for children.  Based on a single Dutch study, which suggested that puberty blockers may improve psychological well-being for a narrowly defined group of children with gender incongruence, the practice spread at pace to other countries.  This was closely followed by a greater readiness to start masculinizing / feminizing hormones in mid-teens, and the extension of this approach to a wider group of adolescents who would not have met the inclusion criteria for the original Dutch study... 

“The adoption of a medical treatment with uncertain risks, based on an unpublished trial that did not demonstrate clear benefit, is a departure from normal clinical practice,” she said.  Studies dealing with the “impact on gender dysphoria, mental health, body image and psychosocial impact were of very low certainty and suggested little change from baseline to follow-up.  The studies that reported bone density outcomes were similarly unreliable so no safety outcomes could be confirmed.”[36] 

Cass would later tell the New York Times: 

The most important concern for me is just how poor the evidence base is in this area ... we have to stop just seeing these young people through the lens of their gender and see them as whole people, and address the much broader range of challenges that they have, sometimes with their mental health, sometimes with undiagnosed neurodiversity.  It’s really about helping them to thrive, not just saying ‘how do we address the gender?’ in isolation. 

Her review’s dissection of improper medical practice continued for page after page:

 

n  “[T]here did not appear to be a formalized assessment process, or standard questions to explore at each session, and it was not possible to tell from the notes why an individual child might have been referred to endocrinology [for hormone treatment] whilst another had not.”

 

n  “The role of psychological therapies in supporting children and young people with gender incongruence or distress has been overshadowed by an unhelpfully polarized debate around conversion practices.  Terms such as ‘affirmative’ and ‘exploratory’ approaches have been weaponized....”

 

n  “One of the given rationales for puberty blockers is that they may improve gender dysphoria or overall mental health.  The evidence to date does not provide strong support for this.”

 

n  “Multiple studies included in the systematic review of puberty suppression ... found that bone density is compromised ... and height gain may lag behind that seen in other adolescents.”[37]

 

Thanks to an aggressive “gender-affirmative” model, health-care workers were hustling young children into treatment programs despite dangerous side effects.  Amid scare stories about heightened suicide risks among young people denied such treatment, the Cass Review found that “evidence does not adequately support” any such finding.[38]

Finally, the review confronted the central claim of gender affirmation, which is that young people were clamoring for treatment because constraints had been removed and their real selves could now emerge.  Liberation had arrived, and young people at odds with their “assigned” gender were clamoring for relief. 

But Cass argued that a growing body of evidence contradicted any such interpretation.  The review pointed to “the exponential increase in numbers within a 5-year timeframe,” which it said “is very much faster than would be expected for the normal evolution of acceptance of a minority group.”  The liberatory model, it noted, did not explain “the change in prevalence from birth-registered males to birth-registered females.”  The review also pointed to “the sharp differences in the numbers identifying as transgender and non-binary ... in Generation Z and younger Millennials compared to those over the age of 25-30.”  If all trans were oppressed, then shouldn’t all age groups be making a dash for freedom?  Yet it mainly involved children and adolescents.  Could it be that young people were identifying as trans for different reasons entirely?[39] 

Finally, the review cited “the failure to explain the increase in complex presentations,” which is to say children suffering from a range of psychological and developmental maladies such as anorexia, autism, and depression.[40]  There seemed to be only two possible explanations.  Either young people were symptomatic because they were gender dysphoric or they were declaring themselves to be gender dysphoric because they were psychologically troubled.  If it was the latter, it suggested that gender dysphoria was merely a manifestation of a deeper problem, one meriting exploration and treatment in its own right before embracing puberty blockers and hormones.

Hillary Cass

 

The trans position collapses

 

The report was damning.  Virtually nothing about gender affirmation had stood up to scientific scrutiny.  Once again, the pro-trans camp went on the warpath, although this time to less effect.  In Britain, more than a hundred academics signed an open letter assailing the Cass Review as “dangerous and potentially harmful” due to its “unsound methodology, unacceptable bias [and] problematic ... conclusions.”  A pro-trans group called TransActual accused Cass of believing that “being trans is an undesirable outcome rather than a natural facet of human diversity.”  (The review says nothing of the kind.)  In the US, a liberal group called Fairness and Accuracy in Media complained that Cass had no prior experience working with trans kids and said her report was “littered with serious methodological flaws.”  A New York Times columnist named Lydia Polgreen called the Cass Review “strange ... a subjective, political document.”  

More serious was a 39-page “evidence-based critique” that Yale Law School posted on its web site a few months after the review’s release.  The Cass Review, it said: 

...repeatedly misuses data and violates its own evidentiary standards by resting many conclusions on speculation.  Many of its statements ... reveal profound misunderstandings of the evidence base and the clinical issues at hand.  The Review also subverts widely accepted processes for development of clinical recommendations and repeats spurious, debunked claims about transgender identity and gender dysphoria.  These errors conflict with well-established norms of clinical research and evidence-based healthcare.  Further, these errors raise serious concern about the scientific integrity of critical elements of the report’s process and recommendations.

Cass lacked integrity, she lacked scientific rigor, and she was guilty of repeating discredited claims such as “the debunked notion of ‘social contagion.’”  The Yale paper’s nine authors reminded readers that, collectively, they had “86 years of experience in caring for more than 4800 transgender youth and have published 278 peer-reviewed studies, 168 of which are in the field of gender-affirming care.”  Based on such expertise, the authors felt confident in accusing Cass of making “grave and misleading errors.” 

Oddly, the authors also accused Cass of “fixat[ing] on evidence quality to the exclusion of many other factors.”  The Yale critique stated: 

If high-quality evidence were a prerequisite for medical care, we would all be worse off.  Moderate, low, and very low-quality evidence ... informs necessary, high-value care at every stage of life. ...  The Review’s desire to see only high-quality evidence dominate this field ... is not realistic or appropriate because no other area of pediatrics is held to this standard. 

Insisting on high-quality evidence was wrong?  Still, the paper had a significant impact due to the Yale Law imprimatur.  Pro-trans groups seized on it like manna from heaven while, in the UK, it prompted a short-lived revolt in the British Medical Association.  In response, the British Medical Journal asked one of its subsidiary publications, Archives of Disease in Childhood, to do a critical appraisal – a review of the review, so to speak.  The Archives published its evaluation in October 2024.[41]  The results for the pro-trans camp were even more devastating a second time around. 

The Archives evaluation described gender medicine – quite rightly – as “a complex and highly sensitive topic, with the shadow of social and political influence looming large over the scientific process.”  It defended the Cass Review as “among the most comprehensive evidence-based reviews of a medical service from the long history of such independent investigations.”  Rather than riddled with mistakes, the Archives evaluation said it was the Yale critique that was guilty of an “unusually high prevalence of error.”  As for the complaint that Cass was too hung up on “high-quality evidence,” the Archives were scathing: 

The very low quality of evidence in gender medicine stems not from a lack of randomized controlled trials, but from poor study design, inappropriate comparison groups, high attrition and inadequate follow-up. 

The gender-affirmation establishment was guilty of shoddy research, yet was blaming Cass for hauling it on the carpet.  The evaluation added that the argument in defense of low-quality research “has the potential to cause considerable harm to children and young people” since the long-term use of puberty blockers has not been thoroughly tested: “the use of a drug for an entirely novel indication without appropriate trials ... cannot be justified.”

Finally, the Archives evaluation complained that the Yale article was not a scientific paper but a legal brief composed by individuals who “serve as paid expert witnesses ... in more than a dozen ongoing court cases.”  Its language was: 

...tailored for the courtroom.  Viewed through this lens, the way in which the authors highlight their perceived authority, with an emphasis on their ‘86 years collectively caring for 4800 transgender youth’ – which would be an unusual addition in a purely academic context – makes more sense.  Similarly, a ‘shotgun’ argumentation approach, where an argument is made to seem more persuasive not by the quality but volume of arguments (fallacious or otherwise) ... is well suited to litigious, adversarial settings.

It was not well suited to a scientific paper.  The Yale critique was lawfare rather than science.  The pro-trans camp had suffered another massive defeat. 

In Britain, the Labor government endorsed a decision banning the gender-affirmative use of puberty blockers and hormones for children and adolescents other than in tightly-controlled research settings.  France, Italy, and the Nordic countries also adopted more cautious policies while the US went further thanks to its hyper-polarized political climate.  After 27 states banned puberty blockers and hormones outright, Trump issued an executive order upon taking office prohibiting the use of federal resources to “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.”  Rightwing groups made heavy use of the Cass Review not because Cass is herself a conservative – she was recently appointed to the House of Lords as a “crossbencher,” meaning a member of no political party – but because it showed how untenable the entire gender-affirmation approach had become. 

Given Butler’s ideological disdain for science, it’s hard to imagine how the movement she helped launch could end in anything other than a scientific debacle. 

 

The Trump assault

 

It goes without saying that the rightwing political response was equally an assault on science.  The Cass Review never said that gender dysphoria doesn’t exist.  To the contrary, it declared: 

Research suggests gender expression is likely determined by a variable mix of factors such as biological predisposition, early childhood experiences, sexuality and expectations of puberty.  For some, mental health difficulties are hard to disentangle.  The impact of a variety of contemporary societal influences and stressors (including online experience) remains unclear.  Peer influence is also very powerful during adolescence as are different generational perspectives.  Pragmatically the above explanations for the observed changes in the population are all likely to be true to a greater or lesser extent, but for any individual a different mix of factors will apply.

Research was needed to tease those factors out.  Yet because the Trump administration has decreed that sex and gender are one and the same, research was off the table.  With disagreement silenced, the Stonewall position that “trans women are women – no debate” had met its rightwing equivalent: “trans women are NOT women – no debate.” 

Trump also banned trans from the military, “leaving tens of thousands of active-duty service members, veterans, and members of military families in fear and uncertainty about their jobs, their healthcare, and their future,” as one pro-trans group put it.  The administration’s decision to cease issuing trans passports marked with an “X” rather than an “F” or “M” means that trans must “out” themselves by revealing their sex at birth when traveling abroad.  Transferring trans women to male cell blocks in federal prisons, another Trump initiative, exposes them to prison violence.  This comes amid growing far-right attacks on gays, women – beginning most spectacularly with the overthrow of the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling in 2022 – and racial minorities, attacks that must be opposed on the grounds that they are part of an all-out economic and political offensive against democracy and the working class in general.  

But trans ideology’s outrageous anti-scientific stance played straight into the far right’s hands.  It made its task easier rather than harder.   The UCLA sociologist Rogers Brubaker points out that trans ideology was initially uncontroversial.  Sexual attitudes by the 1990s and aughts were laissez-faire, with Americans seemingly content to write off transitioning as a private affair to the degree they thought about it at all.[42]  Not only did Trump barely mention gender during his 2016 campaign, but he even endorsed the principle that people should “use the bathroom they think is appropriate.”  An interviewer asked: “So if Caitlyn Jenner were to walk into Trump Tower and want to use the bathroom, you would be fine with her using any bathroom she chooses?” Replied Trump: “That is correct.” 

But 2016 was in fact a turning point, the moment trans issues shifted from a largely private affair to a source of explosive public controversy.  Medical intervention was one reason.  Not only was the use of puberty blockers and hormones growing, but the Journal of the American Medical Association found that, by 2016-20, an average of 736 “gender-affirming surgeries,” mainly “breast and chest procedures,” were being performed per year on US adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18.[43]  An analysis of insurance data indicates that, by 2021-22, the number had jumped to more than a thousand.[44]  Gender affirmation was retracing the steps of the frontal-lobotomy craze of the late 1940s and early 50s when such operations peaked at 5,076 per year.[45] 

Another factor was a “Dear Colleague” letter that the Department of Education and Justice Department sent out in May 2016 during Barack Obama’s final year in office.  It informed college and universities that, to remain eligible for federal funding, they should see to it that all students had access to sex-segregated facilities and activities – with the partial exception of single-sex sports teams – “consistent with their gender identity.”  Trump revoked the policy as soon as he took office, but Joe Biden reinstated it four years later.  “Let’s be clear,” Biden declared.  “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.  There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.” 

This was the high point for the pro-trans movement.  But then came the crash.  The ease with which trans rights had advanced through the federal bureaucracy turned into a liability once public controversy erupted.  People who had paid little attention before were now startled and confused as medical treatments began to soar.  Where did this come from?  How had a radical gender policy become the order of the day with virtually no debate?  Was it a plot?  A liberal conspiracy? 

An increasingly poisonous political climate added to the combustibility.  As Biden’s ringing endorsement of trans rights showed, the movement had benefited handsomely from Democratic Party support.  But now it paid the price as Democratic fortunes plunged.  Just 36 percent of non-college graduates, a stand-in for members of the working class, had voted for a Republican presidential candidate as recently as 1992.  But by 2016, 50 percent of non-college graduates were voting for Trump versus just 43 percent for Hillary Clinton, while, by 2020, Trump was garnering 53 percent of the working-class vote as against Biden’s 45.  In 2024, Democratic support cratered, with 56 percent of non-college grads voting for Trump versus just 42 for Harris.  This was nearly double the 2016 spread.  Economic polarization was clearly a major factor.  With Democrats more and more the party of the upper classes, Democratic policies – not only gender but diversity, equity, and inclusion – were now seen as instruments of a self-serving Brahmin elite.  The fact that liberals had pushed through such highly contentious policies with a minimum of public debate seemed to show how thoroughly the process had been tilted against the working class.  Populism intensified.

 

The trans movement digs its own grave

 

This was not all.  Not only was debate limited, but trans advocates insisted that it remain that way on the grounds that trans rights are a moral issue and therefore not a fit subject for public discussion.  Instead of folding in the face of public criticism, consequently, the movement grew increasingly confrontational and extreme. 

Butler had written that gender theory was “subversive.”[46]  But subversive of what and to what end?  Subsequent theorists filled in the blanks: 

If the medicalized concept of gender dysphoria tacitly takes for granted, identifies with, and thereby reinforces cisgender patriarchal society, a critical theory of gender dysphoria instead approaches the issue from the perspective of trans people, their lived experience and social situation, to offer a critique of society.  While the medicalized concept of gender dysphoria refers to a ‘distress’ caused by living in the ‘wrong body,’ the critical concept of gender dysphoria refers to an alienation as a result of living in the ‘wrong (cisgender patriarchal) society.’ 

So wrote Penelope Haulotte of the University of New Mexico in the 2024 Feminist Philosophy Quarterly.  Rather than gender tolerance, the goal was now gender revolution.  Haulotte said that “trans subjects are the gendered analogue of Marx’s concept of the proletariat” and called for “a political coalition among various distinct but nevertheless similarly aggrieved groups of gendered outlaws, including but not limited to feminists, queers, the intersexed, and various racialized subject formations.”  The goal was “nothing less than the material neutralization of cisgender society.”[47]  

This was breath-takingly reactionary.  The proletariat is the motor force of history, the only element capable of moving society forward.  The more it is weakened, the more society will stagnate or regress.  Seeking to replace it with a tiny coterie of sexual dissidents is even worse.  “Gendered outlaws” have zero social power, so how could they even begin to overthrow an entire social order?  What would they do – launch a coup?  Build barricades in the streets?  Try to peacefully persuade the overwhelming majority that it was in in its interests to abandon heteronormativity?  The very idea showed how unrealistic the movement had become.  Secure in their urban or campus redoubts, trans ideology turned increasingly baroque as trans identities multiplied.  Facebook introduced 56 “custom” gender options.[48]  Stonewall drew up a list that included transgender, transsexual, gender-queer, gender-fluid, non-binary, gender-variant, cross-dresser, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois.”  The University of Kent officially recognized “demifluid” and “demiflux,” i.e. people whose “gender identity is partially fluid, with the other part(s) being static.”[49] 

 

“They/them”

 

This is what made Trump’s slogan so effective.  Its message was that Harris’s loyalties lay with a smug liberal elite imposing a concept of unbridled gender fluidity that no one had voted for and which growing numbers viewed with suspicion or disdain.  Moreover, the elite had done so at a time when working-class conditions were plunging due to inflation, wage stagnation, income polarization, the opiate crisis, and other factors.  Democratic Party credibility was plummeting, yet all it had to offer were puberty blockers, mastectomies, and pronouns, not to mention DEI policies that were also increasingly abusive and anti-working class.[50]  This is why the Harris campaign’s failure to respond to the Trump ads was so damning.  It was a confession of bankruptcy by a party that had supported such policies yet was unable to explain why they merited working-class support. 

But we should not make the mistake of assuming that Trump and the people who voted for him are one and the same.  To the contrary, the contradictions are explosive.  He’s a billionaire while workers are hard-pressed.  He has taken corruption to unprecedented heights while conditions for the majority continue to decline.  After abandoning Democrats in 2024, Trump’s plunging poll numbers are an indication that workers are now abandoning him as well as economic conditions continue to deteriorate and rightwing authoritarianism grows more extreme.  If so, where will they go to next?  In the absence of a viable socialist movement, the great danger is that they will return to the Democratic fold, which means that a poisonous cycle of gridlock, confrontation, and bitter bourgeois partisanship will start all over again.    

 

The socialist response

 

The alternative is a working-class revolt against the bourgeois two-party system .  This, in turn, requires revolutionary socialist leadership capable of creating an alternative.  Yet any such leadership is, for the moment, conspicuous by its absence.  The difference between Lenin’s response to the new idealism of Mach and today’s socialist response to the addlepated gender theories of Butler & Co. shows how profoundly the movement has deteriorated.  After Bogdanov published three volumes in support of the Machist position, Plekhanov fired off a volume against, Axelrod dashed off a major article, while Lenin responded with a volume of his own.  Debate was ferocious.  By contrast, today’s socialists are either too lazy to notice or have actually taken the wrong side. 

Given his bracing 1990 study, Against Postmodernism, one might expect Callinicos to have risen to the challenge.  Instead, the response of the UK Socialist Workers Party, which he heads, has been dismal.  In 2021, the SWP backed ferocious student demonstrations at the University of Sussex aimed at driving Stock out of her job.  (Stock described the know-nothing campaign as “medieval.”)[51]  Shortly later, SWP members joined trans women in hurling sexist abuse at a TERF meeting in London.  (Among the epithets hurled by protesters: “Shut the fuck up, you cunt ... Are you a lesbian? No man would want that ... You call yourself a woman? Die, die, die!”)  In a society like Britain, it would be almost inconceivable for ordinary men to employ such rhetoric, yet it’s somehow permissible among MTF’s.  More recently, the SWP attacked the Cass Review as a “deeply flawed report that boosts Tories, bigots and transphobes” while editorializing in favor of the trans mantra that “biological sex is a spectrum not a binary.” 

The last is yet another example of trans ideology’s egregiously anti-scientific stance.  If biological sex is a spectrum, with a small number of men and women at either end and the rest of the population falling in between, then it follows that gender, the mindset that goes along with physical sex, is no less scattered and diverse.  The 57 varieties of trans would thus appear to have acquired a scientific basis.  But sexual reproduction is not a spectrum – rather, it’s as binary as it gets.  Referring to ova and sperm, both known as “gametes” or reproductive cells, the biologist Joan Roughgarden – who, by the way, identifies as transgender – observes that “‘male’ means making small gametes, and ‘female’ means making large gametes.  Period!”  The biologists Wolfgang Goymann, Henrik Brumm, and Peter M. Kappeler note that males and females do not supply male and female gametes in all species: 

...many corals, worms, octopuses, snails and almost all flowering plants are simultaneous hermaphrodites, combining the production of male and female gametes and functions in the same individual at the same time.  Many fish species, on the other hand, are sequential hermaphrodites, that is, they change their biological sex during their lifetime.  Clownfish (Walt Disney’s Nemo), for example, start their reproductive career as males and only the largest individual of a group turns into a female.  Some cleaner fish, on the other hand, are initially all females and later the largest individuals convert to males.[52]

This is not the case with mammals, however.  To the contrary, only male mammals supply male gametes and only female mammals supply female gametes.  This is why 99.98 percent of human beings fit unambiguously into either of the two categories – because reproduction requires a clear differentiation not only between male and female reproductive cells, but between their male and female donors.[53]  

So Callinicos’s SWP is guilty of pushing scientific falsities for reasons of political expediency.  Other groups that claim to be Marxist have been nearly as bad.  Certainly, the award for silliest headline of the year goes to the International Bolshevik Tendency, which issued a ringing call in March for “Puberty Blockers & Hormones on Demand!”  Given that long-term use of puberty blockers may lead to infertility, sexual dysfunction, blood clots, heart disease, and diminished bone density,[54] is this really the treatment that the IBT thinks that troubled children and adolescents need?  What about double mastectomies – should they also be available on demand?  

The International Committee of the Fourth International, publisher of the World Socialist Web Site, stated flatly in March 2023 that “[t]here isn’t any scientific basis for the attack on gender-affirming care, only a religious one, which is entirely unconstitutional.”  This was after four years of growing controversy in the wake of Lisa Littman’s article on rapid-onset gender dysphoria in PLOS One, controversy directly challenging gender-affirming “science.”  Yet it was a challenge the ICFI chose to ignore.

 

Spartacists, the Internationalist Group, and the “Grantites” of the Revolutionary Communist International

 

Other currents worth examining are the Spartacists of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), publishers of Workers Vanguard, and the Internationalist Group of the League for the Fourth International.  The two have been at each other’s throat ever since the Spartacists expelled Jan Norden in 1996 and Norden went on to found the IG.  What the two groups have to say it about gender, however, is similar – and similarly fallacious. 

Much of “Against Trump’s Blitzkrieg of Bigotry, Labor Must Defend Trans Rights,” which Norden’s Internationalist Group published in May, is a spirited attack on the new administration’s rampant sexual chauvinism, one that all leftists should applaud.  But the article also argues in favor of gender-affirmative care for minors on the grounds that doing away with it could lead “to a sharp increase in the number of suicides” – this despite the Cass Review’s finding more than a year earlier that evidence is lacking that gender-affirming treatment reduces such risks.  The IG dismisses reports of growing numbers of gender-affirming surgeries as “alternative facts” despite JAMA’s 2023 finding of 736 such operations per year as of the late 2010s.  It declares that “decisions on such intimate and consequential questions ... are a matter for the person and their doctor” and includes the cry: “For free, high-quality socialized medicine!  Hands off trans kids!” 

But while privacy is vital, medical treatment is not solely a matter between the individual patient and physician, but a matter of public policy as well.  High-quality socialized medicine means nothing if not medicine of the highest scientific caliber that doesn’t dismiss out of hand data on the long-term negative effects of puberty blockers and hormones.  As for “hands off trans kids,” what does that mean – that 12-year-olds should be free to navigate such questions on their own? 

“Government out of the bathroom!” the Internationalist Group adds.  “Let trans people use the toilets of their choice!”  But shouldn’t the women and girls who use such facilities have a say in the matter?  How do they feel about sharing with anatomical males?  All rights should be respected, those of “cis” females as much as trans.  Socialists should tread with care when it comes to such cultural sensitivities.

“Transgender Liberation: Liberal Betrayal, Marxist Answers,” which the Spartacists published last February, also calls for gender affirmation for minors: 

It is no coincidence that the backlash against trans people has focused so heavily on the question of trans kids.  According to traditional morality, children are asexual beings who have no ability to make choices about their own lives and bodies.  As such, there has been a hysterical campaign against puberty blockers and any sort of gender-affirming care for those legally declared underage. 

Hysterical?  Shouldn’t socialists be the first to protest when the medical establishment subjects young people to dangerous and unproven remedies?  As for children possessing the “ability to make choices about their own lives and bodies,” the statement is nonsense.  As a British academic journal recently argued, patient autonomy is not necessarily a pre-existing natural state, but something the patient helps create with professional assistance, including that of psychotherapists: 

...if a patient holds a false belief about their condition, their decision about treatment is compromised.  Full autonomy requires not only presentation of medical facts but that the patient holds rational beliefs about their condition, the possible interventions, their risks and benefits, but importantly themselves and their psychic nature.[55]

If a girl believes she’s gender dysphoric because that’s what her classmates say, not to mention a small army of trans activists calling for free hormones on demand, she may not have the capacity to make such a decision on her own.  Instead of being supported, her autonomy is being violated because she is deprived of the information and professional guidance needed to make a proper choice. 

Finally, mention should be made of the Revolutionary Communist International run by followers of the late British Trotskyist Ted Grant.  In 2019, the RCI website, “In Defense of Marxism,” published a sophisticated analysis of queer theory in which author Yola Kipcak, a leader of the RCI’s Austrian section, skillfully dissected the philosophical idealism of Butler, Foucault, and the rest.  Noting “the extraordinary importance the postmodernists attribute to language,” she summed up their stance in a single slogan: “Who says that there is such a thing as reality beyond language?  Language is reality!”  Where Mach emphasized sensations that scientists can see, touch, and measure, literary-minded postmodernists say it’s discourse and performance that are the only things that count. 

For all her brilliance, however, Kipcak stops short when it comes to gender dysphoria.  This is the “queer” movement that has turned bourgeois politics upside down, yet the RCI has clearly made a political decision not to venture into such dangerous territory.  At one point, the article notes “the very real problems of many transgender persons in their struggle to gain access to sex reassignment surgery or hormone therapy.”  Yet there is no discussion of the age at which they should be made available or whether individuals should explore psychotherapy or other options before undergoing dangerous treatments.  After criticizing the postmodernist argument that gender “is nothing but a fiction,” it ends up dodging the question of whether gender dysphoria can be considered real merely because individuals say so.  

Gender ideology is a ball of confusion.  Trans advocates maintain that the gender identity one feels is the only thing that counts.  Yet they insist on the right of even children to surgically alter their bodies even though physical sex is supposedly irrelevant.  According to a 2019 US survey, only about 25 to 50 percent of transgender men, i.e. females to males, and only five to ten percent of transgender women, i.e. males to females, have undergone surgery.[56]  Yet if such individuals say they are a different gender, then that’s what they are even if they are physiologically the same .  Trans advocates say it as an article of faith that gender is a social construct.  Yet when anyone dares suggest that gender dysphoria is also a social construct, they accuse them of transphobia.  By insisting that the first-hand testimony of a 12 or 13-year-old is all that matters, the movement echoes the “believe the children” rhetoric of the child-abuse mania of the 1980s when three-year-olds were taken at their word concerning the existence of underground sex dungeons at ordinary day-care centers. 

Curiously, the Spartacists cite the case of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP leader in Spokane, Washington, who passed as a light-skinned black before being outed as white in 2015.  “[J]ust like changing one’s gender,” they argue, “there is nothing inherently wrong with changing one’s race.”  Perhaps.  But if a fair-skinned blond “transitions” to black without otherwise altering his or her appearance, should we be surprised if the result is confusion, skepticism, or hostility?  What if, shades of the 2021 anti-TERF mob in London, wannabe blacks descend on a civil-rights meeting and hurl racist abuse at attendees on the grounds that they are less black than that the WTB’s, i.e. whites to blacks, outside? 

Would the results be comic, tragic, or simply a bizarre racist provocation?  These are not idle questions.  In 2021, a British lesbian group calling itself “Get the L Out” caused a furor when it published results of a survey showing that gay women were feeling pressured to have sex with trans men.  Lesbians complained that they were being urged to “accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ,” according to BBC reporter Caroline Lowbridge, while one said that she received death threats when she made her objections known.  Stonewall issued a reassuring statement to the effect that “[n]obody should ever be ... pressured into dating people they aren’t attracted to,” but added that if gay women “are writing off entire groups of people, like people of color, fat people, disabled people, or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.” 

For decades, gay women had fought for the freedom to make love to the woman of their choice.  Yet here was a leading pro-trans group suggesting they might be prejudiced because they balk at making love with an anatomical male.  When was the last time a supposedly progressive social movement plunged to such strange depths?

 

The nature of the crisis

 

In their horror of anything suggestive of social contagion, trans activists have ruled out another question: whether gender dysphoria is a reaction to stresses and strains caused by deepening capitalist decay. 

An abundance of evidence suggests it is.  Between 1999 and 2017, national surveys in the UK found a substantial increase in mental-health problems among children and adolescents, “with increased anxiety and depression being most evident in teenage girls.”  Between 2017 and 2023, “probable mental health disorder[s]” among children aged eight to 16 rose from 12.5 to 20.3 percent, while rates among young people aged 17 to 19 more than doubled from 10.1 to 23.3 percent.[57]  The situation is much the same in the United States where 13 percent of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 said they experienced at least one major episode of depression in 2017 according to Pew Research, compared with eight percent a decade earlier.  Japan does not appear to have much of a problem in terms of gender dysphoria.  But what it does have is hikikomori, a phenomenon in which hundreds of thousands of teenage boys retreat into their rooms for six months or longer to avoid facing real-world problems.  According to Wikipedia, similar outbreaks have been reported in South Korea, France, Italy, and Spain, as well as North America and Australia.  

Could hikikomori and gender dysphoria be two sides of the same coin?  Countries like Japan, South Korea, and France are advanced capitalist societies in which the pressure to succeed socially and academically has never been more intense.  As economic polarization mounts, the penalties for those falling behind are intensifying.  Young people are therefore rebelling.  But even though the form of protest may differ from one society to another, the content is the same, i.e. a rejection of increasingly brutal competition in which the ranks of “losers” continue to swell.  The upshot is a capitalist breakdown that is taking a growing human toll. 

Given all this, we can perhaps make sense of the current epoch.  With its fragmented worldview and suspicion of grand narratives, postmodernism was clearly a response to the radical disintegration of the 1970s.  Not only had revolution failed, but socialism and other big ideas had failed too.  The gender theory that arose 15 or 20 years later was similarly a by-product of the liberal revival that accompanied the fall of the Soviet bloc.  Old-style revolution was still dead.  But members of the affluent middle class could now mount a personal revolution by re-inventing themselves in whatever way they wished.  Biology was no longer an impediment because sex and gender were now performative, which is to say whatever members of the avant-garde wanted them to be.  If individuals wished to transition to another gender, then all they had to do was to “perform” in a certain way and that would be that.  To quote the Qur’an, all God has to say is, “Be!” – and it is. 

But triumphant individualism did not usher in utopia.  Instead, liberalism ushered in war, financial crisis, economic polarization, and an accelerating trend to the right.  With socialism seemingly discredited, class conflict led in inverted form to a populist-nationalist swamp with increasingly dangerous consequences.  While transgenderism remained little more than a curiosity as long as it existed among consenting adults, it created a storm once it penetrated into restrooms, locker rooms, and women’s sports and started to involve children as well.  The more absolutists insisted that trans should be free to use the changing room of their choice, that a WTF is a woman even if anatomically a male, that the very idea of biology is verboten because it makes us slaves to determinism – given all that, it was to be expected that activism would weaken and grow more isolated while MAGA went from strength to strength.  

A recent decline in students identifying as non-binary or trans appears to confirm the political nature of the phenomenon.  An annual survey of 55,000 to 69,000 US college students by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression shows that the number of students identifying as neither male nor female peaked at 6.8 percent in 2022-23, but has since fallen to 3.6 percent as of 2025.  A survey at the elite Andover prep school in Massachusetts shows that the number of students identifying as non-binary fell from nine to three percent over the same period.  A Brown University student survey shows a drop from five to 2.6 percent of self-identified non-binaries while the US Census Bureau’s “household pulse” survey indicates that the number of 18 to 22-year-olds identifying as trans fell from nearly four percent in early 2024 to 2.6 percent by July-September 2025.[58] 

That is a precipitous fall-off.  Why now?  Like self-cutting, anorexia, bulimia, or other disturbing behaviors that mainly occur among young girls, it could mean that the phenomenon has simply run its course and is beginning to fade as individuals move on to something new.  Curiously, recent data shows a decline in the number of young people who report feeling anxious or depressed.  Could it be that they feel better about themselves as they jettison discredited old beliefs and engage in politics in ways that are more productive?[59] 

Meanwhile, there is not the slightest doubt as to how the larger capitalist crisis is shaping up.  On all fronts – economic, military, diplomatic, etc. – it is intensifying by the week.  This creates dangers for a beleaguered socialist movement, but opportunities as well – if, that is, they can rise to the task.  After digging themselves into a hole over the trans issue, socialists can extricate themselves only by ruthlessly analyzing their short-comings and figuring out how they went ideologically astray.  Otherwise, they will be helpless against the Trump onslaught.

NOTES

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[1] Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (London: Little, Brown, 2021), 7-8.

[2] Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 151.

[3] Stock, Material Girls, 204.

[4] Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 2-4.

[5] K.M. Seethi, “Postmodernism, Neoliberalism, and Civil Society,” Indian Journal of Political Science 62, No. 3 (Sept. 2001), 311-13.

[6] Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 4.

[7] Ibid., 9.

[8] Quoted in Yola Kipcak, “Marxism vs. Queer Theory,” In Defense of Marxism, Dec. 2, 2019; see also Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Random House, 1990), 92-92.

[9] Ibid., 71.

[10] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 5.

[11] Ibid., 30-31.

[12] Ibid., 42-43, 164.

[13] Ibid., 173.

[14] Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (London: Verso, 2017), 122-23.

[15] Ibid., 124-32.

[16] VI Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947), 112.

[17] Ibid., 180.

[18] Elvira Hörandl and Dave Speijer, “How oxygen gave rise to eukaryotic sex,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Feb. 7, 2018, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.2706.

[19] CM Whittington et al, “Understanding the evolution of viviparity using intraspecific variation in reproductive mode and transitional forms of pregnancy,” Biologic Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophica Society, Jan. 30, 2022, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9064913/.

[20] Butler, Gender Trouble, 5, 147.

[21] Ibid., 146.

[22] Stock, Material Girls, 20.

[23] Ibid., 56.

[24] Talia Bettcher, “Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues,” SEP (2014), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-trans/.

[25] Stock, Material Girls, 21.

[26] Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 371.

[27] Ibid., 34.

[28] Guy Oakes, “Straight Thinking about Queer Theory,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 8, No. 3 (Spring 1995), 383.

[29] Principle 31 of the “Yogyakarta Principles Plus 10,” issued in 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20171201043532/http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/principles-en/yp10/.

[30] Hilary Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report, 67.  Available at https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/.

[31] Ibid., 67, 85-86.

[32] Cass, Independent Review, 88.

[33] Stock, Material Girls, 30.

[34] Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2020), 28-29

[35] Ibid., 28-30.

[36] Cass, Independent Review, 13, 73, 76.

[37] Ibid., 79, 150, 155, 178.

[38] Ibid., 187.

[39] Ibid., 118.

[40] Ibid.

[41] C. Ronny Cheung et al., “Gender Medicine and the Cass Review: Why medicine and the law make poor bedfellows,” Archives of Disease in Childhood 110, no. 4.

[42] Rogers Brubaker, “Gender Identity: The Career of a Category,” Theory and Social Inquiry 1 (2025), 1-50.

[43] Jason D. Wright et al., “National Estimates of Gender-Affirming Surgery in the US,” JAMA Network, Aug. 23, 2023, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2808707.

[44] Brubaker, “Gender Identity.”  See also Leor Sapir, “A Consensus No Longer,” City Journal, Aug. 12, 2024, https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-consensus-no-longer.

[45] Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: Wiley, 1997), 228.

[46] Butler, Gender Trouble, 26.

[47] Penelope Haulotte, “Gender Dysphoria for Critical Theory,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 10  (2024), https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/18729?articlesBySimilarityPage=12.

[48] Brubaker, “Gender Identity.”

[49] Stock, Material Girls, 34.

[50] See Daniel Lazare, “Why Trump is NOT a fascist – and why it matters,” June 16, 2025, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2025/06/why-trump-is-not-fascist-and-why-it.html.

[51] The SWP piously declared: “Students are right to protest.  But calls for sackings don’t fit here and should be directed against fascists and organized racists.”  Yet a sacking was the inevitable result, especially once Stock was betrayed by her own faculty union urgent investigation into the ways institutional transphobia operates at our university,” which is to say an investigation into Stock’s own trans-skeptical writings.  See Thomas Scripps, “The Kathleen Stock affair,” Dec. 9, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/10/stoc-d10.html.

[52] Wolfgang Goymann, Henrik Brumm, and Peter M. Kappeler, “Biological sex is binary, even though there is a rainbow of sex roles,” BioEssays, Dec. 21, 2022, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.202200173.

[53] Stock, Material Girls, 56.

[54] Michael K. Laidlaw, “Medical Risks of Gender Affirmative Therapy in light of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” PLOS One, Aug. 16, 2018, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=10.1371/annotation/747e7dee-b53e-4351-8c4a-42734e86e89a.

[55] Alessandra Lemma and Julian Savulescu, “To be, or not to be? The role of the unconscious in transgender transitioning: identity, autonomy and well-­ being,” Journal of Medical Ethics 49 (2023), 65–72, https://jme.bmj.com/content/49/1/65.

[56] Stock Material Girls, 3.

[57] Cass, Independent Review, 111.

[58] Eric Kaufmann, “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans,” Center for Heterodox Social Science Report No. 5 (Oct. 10, 2025), 4-5, https://www.heterodoxcentre.com/research/chss-report-no-5/; Jean M. Twenge, “Is transgender really declining among young adults?” Generation Tech, Oct. 16, 2025, https://www.generationtechblog.com/p/is-transgender-identity-really-declining.

[59] Kaufmann, “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans,” 15-20.

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