I have been invited to speak in Sydney about my new book on climate change at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in August. Filling out the author information form, I have been asked to nominate my gender. In fact, the form asks me to nominate my “Gender Identity” and gives four options.
The options presuppose that sex, biological sex, is either irrelevant or subsumed within the category of “gender identity.” The word “identifying” quietly introduces the premise that sex is a matter of self-ascription rather than biological fact.
The question has been designed in such a way that to answer is to capitulate to gender ideology. In philosophy this is known as a “presupposition fallacy.” Linguistically, it’s a power play. The act of answering legitimizes the framework because the question has smuggled in an assumption that I may not accept but would be endorsing by ticking one of the boxes presented to me.
This situation would be instantly recognised by the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci who explained how the dominant power uses its hegemonic position to make its own standpoint seem like common sense. Most festival invitees, maybe all of them including headline act Salman Rushdie, will breeze through the form, ignoring any hesitations they may have, and tick a box out of haste or politeness.
Bureaucratic procedure
Rather than Gramsci, the French post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault provides the best guide to what is happening here. Foucault explained how obedient citizens internalise the beliefs and values of the dominant class. He studied how the system of language and thought we use to understand the world dictates which questions can be asked and what kind of answers are legitimate. It is this “discourse” that determines what counts as intelligible.
The festival’s gender question is Foucault in action because it exemplifies how institutional power normalises a particular “regime of truth”. It is doing so not through argument but through bureaucratic procedure. The form is not trying to persuade me that gender identity supersedes biological sex. I am simply being administered on that assumption.
Foucault argued that a system of everyday rules and institutional routines is far more powerful than overt argument precisely because it presents itself as neutral data collection. The festival organisers do not say “we believe gender identity supersedes sex”; they simply act as though it is already settled fact, just common sense. So if I tick the “Male Identifying” box I will have been coerced by simple bureaucratic procedure into endorsing an ideology I do not agree with, in fact one I believe deprives others of their legitimate rights.
It should go without saying that I am among the large majority of Australians who believe that trans people should be treated with dignity and respect; I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to experience a change in one’s gender. However, I do not agree that trans rights trump other rights, which is the essential premise of gender ideology.
He/him/his, xe/xem/xyr
Returning to the author form’s loaded question, the only way to be true to one’s values in a situation like this is to refuse to answer. Rather than skip the question, I decided to tick the “Other” box. When a space for explanation popped up, I wrote in it: “I am not male identifying. I am male”. It seems, though, that I have been Othered.
Having solved that problem, the author form next asked me to nominate my pronouns. There was no list to choose from. After all, for those inclined there is now a smorgasbord of “neo-pronouns”, such as xe/xem/xyr, to choose from. To add to this head-spinning brew “a person may use he/him without being a man”, according to an influential guide to pronouns by Ariane Resnick.
If it all sounds too confusing to get pronouns right, Resnick tells us in the faintly Stalinist tone often adopted by gender activists that “it’s everyone’s responsibility to use those pronouns correctly … [because] the usage of incorrect pronouns is yet one more act of violence against them.” Violence is a strong word, borrowed from Foucault. It’s deployed to scare off critics but serves to devalue the real violence trans people experience.
Note that the form does not ask me to nominate my “preferred pronouns”. It turns out that “preferred” should not be used because “identity is not a choice”. Gender emerges from the inner self, although trans advocates elsewhere insist that gender is socially constructed. Many organisations, such as the University of NSW, the Queensland Human Rights Commission and the Australian Government Style Manual, go along with this language policing, which attempts to settle a contentious argument about fundamental rights by linguistic fiat. Foucault would be proud.
The butler did it
Foucault developed his conceptual apparatus—ideas like discursive formation, regime of truth, and the merging of power with knowledge—in the service of progressive politics, the kind that today embraces gender ideology. It was appropriated by queer theory; in fact, wrote one expert, the philosopher’s “analysis of the interrelationships of knowledge, power and sexuality was the most important intellectual catalyst of queer theory.”
The work of Judith Butler in the 1990s stands out as the most influential voice in queer theory. Gender, Butler declared, is not given and natural but socially constructed and performative. Forget chromosomes and anisogamy (sperm + ova, i.e. why you are here reading this), gender is a discursive practice. Bodies are not naturally sexed, and gender (‘sexuality’ ) is whatever it is constructed to be. Don’t look in your pants for evidence, only words and thoughts count.
The diffusing of this kind of social constructivism into institutional practice and everyday language has been possible because of the goodwill towards LGB people built over decades, culminating in the equal marriage legislation. For most well-meaning people, the move from sex to gender seemed like a natural next step and in 2013 it passed easily into the Sex Discrimination Act.
Few understood where trans activists would take it. (I certainly didn’t.) Government bureaucracies across Australia now routinely administer us as if self-assigned gender trumps biological sex. The courts have embedded this Foucauldian theory into law so that now it is unlawful to act as if sex should have priority over gender in, for example, women-only spaces.
Turning the tables
There is nothing in Foucault’s powerful method that immunises “progressive” discourses like gender ideology from the same critique using the same tools. In fact, the very discourse that most enthusiastically inherited Foucault has become exactly what Foucault taught us to be suspicious of—an institutional, administrative normalization of a particular truth, presented as self-evident, a procedure that shuts down dissent by making it literally untickable.
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas presents itself as Australia’s most audacious and thought-provoking event, one that is, in the words of one of its speakers Stephen Fry, “a rare corner of the world where free expression isn’t just tolerated, but celebrated.” It boasts about making those who attend feel uncomfortable. Well, the author form did that for me.
Apart from a soft discussion about J.K. Rowling with a Youtuber in 2024, I cannot find in the festival’s program any discomforting gender critical feminist voices, such as Kathleen Stock, Jenny Lindsay or Helen Joyce, despite the roiling public debate over these very dangerous ideas. Had one been invited, the author information form would have been called out before now.
What most animates me in this debate is gender ideology’s post-structuralist assault on science and the dismissal of the material facts of biology. Science has been under attack on many fronts in recent times, including the highest level of health administration in the United States. It’s one thing to turn the social constructivist torch on power structures in order to challenge their legitimacy; it’s quite another to turn it on science and the realities of mammalian life. Once the idea of objective truth is discarded, we all drown in a post-truth world where nothing counts but opinion and subjective feeling.
(Read my commentaries on ‘Gender ideology vs free speech’ here and ‘Genderism and colonialism’ here.)