Refuting Gender Theory: a Disenchantment

Behind the radical claim that sex and gender vary independently

By Scott Miller (Historian)

If the core positions of gender theory aren’t familiar to you, they will certainly be familiar to the upcoming generation — the entire movement is poised to transition from a theoretical to a normative view. In 2015, the government of Ontario under Kathleen Wynne introduced a new sex-ed curriculum which included units on gender identity and LGBT concerns and, although the curriculum in Ontario has sometimes been subject to a political tug-of-war between liberal and conservative governments, the Ford government’s revision of the curriculum in 2019 did nothing to oppose the teaching of gender identity theory (short of moving the relevant units from grade 6 to grade 8).¹ The Ontario Health and Physical Education Curriculum, Grades 1–8, freely available to read online, maintains that gender identity is not determined by sex, and is not defined by sexual orientation. It states: “Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense or feeling of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere on the gender spectrum, which may or may not be the same as the person’s birth-assigned sex.”²

The discussion to follow will chart several key developments in the argumentation of gender theory: what thinkers are behind the radical claim that sex and gender vary independently? What sorts of logic do they rely on in order to assert their positions and how might the conscientious heteronormative objector present solid opposition? It is argued here that it won’t be enough to simply say “that’s wrong,” or “that’s stupid,” or “I don’t get it.”  They’ve taken the intellectual and cultural high ground, they’ve taken the schools already, they’ve taken the universities. An objector must study something of the theory in question, gender theory, must know something of its constituent parts and how it goes together, if he or she should hope to take it apart and dismantle it.

Robert Stoller, psychiatrist, UCLA

The origin of the term “gender identity”: The term “gender identity” was coined in a 1964 paper penned by UCLA psychiatrist Robert Stoller.³ Stoller was an influential though low-profile sex theorist, an ardent liberal progressive, a straight man with a family who used his position and image as an ordinary values professional to carry out what was essentially gay activism: as early as the 70s he would slip in case studies involving transexuals during lectures given to medical students in order to “queer” their thinking; he would call for inclusive hiring and accuse university hiring staff of “homophobia” (the supposed lack of gay academics would seem to be contradicted by the fact that Stoller hosted a weekly invitation-only meeting at UCLA called the “Gender Identity Clinic” which was attended, mainly, by gay academics).⁴ 

It is important to note, however, that Stoller’s vision of “gender identity” is not the concept that it would become in the hands of the radical theorists and transexual activists of today. For Stoller in the early 60s and after (and for his collaborator, Ralph Greenson), gender identity entails a person’s awareness ‘I am male,’ or ‘I am female.’⁵ The original meaning of “gender identity” was thus a gender binary and, in Stoller’s view, a “biological force” influenced gender identity meaning that there is a strong correlation between a person’s biological sex and a person’s gender identity. However, Stoller also held that, in rare individuals, something may obstruct the relation between gender and sex and part of his practice involved treating transgender patients; here he tended toward conversion therapy (with the aim of having the patient accept their biological sex as their gender identity) and he staunchly opposed childhood gender reassignment.⁶  Inspired by the radical (some might say criminal) psychologist John Money, John Hopkins university launched a sex-change surgery clinic in 1968 despite the fact that surgery was opposed by most health experts of the time. Stoller accepted surgery as recourse for adult transgender patients, but only those extreme cases: a man who had been feminine since childhood, had never accepted a masculine role or derived sexual pleasure in his current form.⁷The takeaway about Stoller is not that he had invented a problem: the problem was a real clinical phenomenon, that is, patients with transgender something. Before Stoller, and in his own practice, that something would easily be understood as transgender disorder. The takeaway is that, while Stoller continued to treat this phenomenon as a disorder, his notion of gender identity would soon be reformulated by the radical theorists of the next generation and used as a means to invalidate heteronormativity itself.

The radicalization of gender identity — enter queer theory: 

Judith Butler, American Philosopher, UC Berkley

The person who served as the founding director at the Critical Theory Program at UC Berkley, and whose writings underpinned much of queer theory generally, is the non-binary, lesbian, they/them pronoun using American philosopher (her initial field of study was philosophy, although I hesitate to acknowledge her as such) known as Judith Butler.⁸ 

For Butler, there is no “normal,” and of course no heteronormativity, concomitantly, there is no objective; there is no biology and there is no biological connection to gender, and one step further, there is no biological connection to sex! Having dispensed with every rational concept of human sexuality that had wittingly or unwittingly existed up until her pronouncements, Butler was free to make a new claim: both gender and sex are socially constructed.⁹ Such a position is not unwittingly incoherent, rather it is wittingly incoherent: it deliberately omits scientific observations about sex and sex differences as part of its postmodern activist strategy. In recognizing the postmodernist tactic of disrupting firm definitions and stable categories as a means of agitating against power structures, Butler had a ready-made formula to advance her own agenda: hence, her own “queer theory” produces the verb “to queer” which is, likewise, an exercise in intellectual subterfuge and implies the disruption of categories and norms.¹⁰ The agenda of such nonsense wizards is to leave you with the notion that the real is as imagined as the imaginary, and when you are thoroughly stupefied by their mental gymnastics, you will, they hope, cede the intellectual high ground to them.  

Butler is one among many theorists to employ models of social constructionism for various activist purposes, however her queer theories are distinctive in their use of her argument for gender performativity. A performative speech act is a pronouncement which makes something come into being by virtue of itself: for example, declaring “I name this sailing ship Titanic” will cause the ship to be referred to as “Titanic” in the future. At the core of Butler’s argument is the claim that medical staff are executing a performative speech act when a child is born and they say “it’s a boy!”; the ubiquitous radical assertation that this constitutes “assigning sex at birth” rests on this Butlerian claim. Butler can then move on to assert that, since a performative assigns a value to something in the social world, the thing given a value in such manner (in this case, the sex of an infant) is socially constructed.¹¹ 

However, such logic is far from unassailable. Analyst Alex Byrne rejects the validity of Butler’s arguments here on several grounds:

“It’s a boy!” is not a performative: A performative utterance should contain an action verb as in “I name this sailing ship Titanic.” The word “is” in “It’s a boy!” is not an action verb, rather is a state of being verb, i.e. it refers to the state of existence of something. The doctor is in effect simply acknowledging the state of existence of something: he is making an observation. Put simply, Butler is technically wrong in representing “it’s a boy!” as a performative utterance, and, as Byrne states, “the Performative Argument is a complete failure.”¹²

Sex is not a social construct: Since Butler asserts that sex is assigned at birth by virtue of a performative speech act (which is wrong), she goes on to maintain that sex is socially constructed; if sex is socially constructed, it would also follow that sex comes about as a result of its realization within a society or social organization. Here Byrne makes the objection that would be obvious to an unbiased intellect: “Clearly many animals have belonged to the category female (or male) without existing within a society of any kind. Indeed, there would have been females and males even if life on Earth had been destroyed by an asteroid half a billion years ago and humans had never evolved. Female and male are therefore not socially constructed categories; that is, sex is not socially constructed.”¹³

Better Theories — Why Sex Is Not a Social Construct: 

We ought never to constrain ourselves to jumping through the mental hula-hoops thrown our way by radical theorists, for this constitutes a concession of sorts. In doing so, we have ceded to them the prerogative to set the terms of our inquiry, our comprehension, a boon if there ever was one to Butler’s willful incoherence. To really dismantle gender theory, one need only observe with due diligence the picture of human nature advanced to us by the sociobiologists.  

Edward O. Wilson, founder of Sociobiology, Harvard University

The field of sociobiology arose in the 1970s following the publication of the work of its key proponent: Edward O. Wilson. Against the intellectual zeitgeist of the 70s, socio-biology firmly insisted that human nature does exist and that the scientific method was the best way to investigate that nature. Sociobiology is “a scientific discipline, the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in organisms, including humans.”¹⁴ Unlike the biology of the time, it included a focus on the problem of hard-wired human impulses and instincts as a way to get at the question of human nature — where sociobiology focuses especially on the problems of human nature like this, it also became known also as evolutionary psychology (but the latter term is just a synonym).¹⁵ 

Should sex be deemed a biological construct or is it really just in our heads? According to Wilson: “we are a biological species arising from Earth’s biosphere as one adapted species among many; and however splendid our languages and cultures, however rich and subtle our minds, however vast our creative powers, the mental process is the product of a brain shaped by the hammer of natural selection upon the anvil of nature.”¹⁶ 

In a chapter on sex in his work On Human Nature, Wilson establishes an explanation of why the human species has two sexes (it is the most efficient strategy for our species to pursue genetic diversity) (p. 123-124, 137); an explanation of why women tend to marry up (p.126), and why men tend to achieve higher results in athletic competitions and to act as the hunters rather than the gatherers — it is not primarily cultural but biological  (p. 127-130, 137, 139). Some of this information may strike the reader as common sense. However, in voicing an opposition to gender theory, one is now taking on the official ideology of the educational establishment: common sense is not enough, one needs to be able to cite chapter and verse of an established intellectual authority such as Wilson. It isn’t enough to say i.e. “Jordan Peterson says so” because, as compelling as Peterson’s discussions drawn from sociobiology are, he tends not to cite or name his sources: one must know where the arguments are published and articulated and be able to repeat this information in order to take on the establishment.

The Political Agenda at work in Social Constructionism: 

Is there a political dimension to social constructionism, the mode of analysis which prefigures gender theory? Of course there is. In an earlier essay for Woke Watch Canada, I advanced the view that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of collectivism (and thus, of socialism, Marxism and communism), had already called the tune of the social constructionists in his philosophical writings. Naturally, Rousseau was writing some one hundred years before Darwin published his Origin of Species, so one couldn’t expect him to be Darwinian in his positions. The point, however, is that in adopting a radical reformist position (Rousseau thought that Western civilization itself was a blight upon the human condition) and in theorizing a moral reformation through education (Rousseau’s treatise on education entitled Émile assumes that social institutions can absolve the student of immorality by isolating him from corrupt Western civilization), the point is that Rousseau had anticipated modern radical left social constructionism by conceiving of human nature as pliable and mutable, subject primarily to social convention, and subject to remolding by institutional pressure.¹⁷

The agenda of the social construction theorists is always to propagate an elaborate analysis which implicates the establishment in the act of socially constructing human perceptions and behaviors; having discredited their opposition (if only in their own minds and the minds of  conformist academia), they cede to themselves the prerogative to redraw the terms by which social construction will commence. Social construction theory is prevalent among Marxist and feminist intellectuals and its obvious why: neither intellectual has any genuine appreciation of Darwin. Marxism is essentially the claim that historical oppression is the social construction of the upper class, while feminist theory replaces the upper class with the patriarchy (the ideological roots of feminism are in socialism).¹⁸ What is the solution? New social construction. As Lawler notes, the Marxist intellectual holds that, by means of utopian theorizing, “we can finally socially construct a world without the socially constructed domination of some human beings by others. This new world will be populated by a “new man” — a new human type — who has never existed before.¹⁹

In his work The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker examines the politics of the modern sciences in a chapter devoted to the subject. He characterized the academic zeitgeist of Wilson’s time as follows: “In the 1970s many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of the ruling class.’ The traditional misgivings about human nature folded into a hard-left ideology, and scientists who examined the human mind in a biological context were now considered tools of a reactionary establishment.”²⁰ Pinker’s description of the treatment which Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, received at campuses in the 1970s should call to mind the deplorable academic intolerance and ideological possession that we are seeing on campuses today: “At Harvard there were leaflets and teach-ins, a protester with a bullhorn calling for Wilson's dismissal, and invasions of his classroom by slogan shouting students. When he spoke at other universities, posters called him the ‘Right-Wing Prophet of Patriarchy’ and urged people to bring noisemakers to his lectures. Wilson was about to speak at a 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science when a group of people carrying placards (one with a swastika) rushed onto the stage chanting, ‘Racist Wilson, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide.’ One protester grabbed the microphone and harangued the audience while another doused Wilson with a pitcher of water.”²¹

Was Wilson, a life-long democratic liberal, aware of the nature of the ideological bias that sought to discredit him? His mind was as keen for politics as it was for the intricacies of natural theory. In a preface to the twenty-five year edition of his book Sociobiology: the New Synthesis (written in the year 2000), Wilson wrote this about his opposition: “Who were the critics, and why were they so offended? Their rank included the last of the Marxist intellectuals, most prominently represented by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin. They disliked the idea, to put it mildly, that human nature could have any genetic basis at all. They championed the opposing view that the developing human brain is a tabula rasa [blank slate]. The only human nature, they said, is an indefinitely flexible mind. Theirs was the standard political position taken by Marxists from the late 1920s forward: the ideal political economy is socialism, and the tabula rasa mind of people can be fitted to it...”  He adds that in the 1970s “the Old Marxists were joined and greatly strengthened by members of the New Left in a second objection, this time centered on social justice.”²²

Conclusion and Queer Pedagogy:

The preceding essay began with the information that the Ontario governments of Wynne and Ford have introduced queer theory into elementary school education and that children in this provenance will now be told that gender exists along a spectrum, not male and female, but a potentially limitless spectrum defined, evidently, only by the limits of imagination. The discussions which followed traced the roots of the term “gender identity” together with the radicalization of “gender identity” under Judith Butler; additionally, the examination of the nature of academic opposition to sociobiology will have indicated to the reader something of the intense political and ideological bias which existed then and which serves now to entrench Butlerian gender ideology in Ontario classrooms and classrooms across the West.  

With this perspective in mind, I conclude with a description of Queer pedagogy from Matthew Thomas-Reid (2018) writing in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia. The reader is now well equipped to discern that such words as “assumptions,” “challenge,” “disrupt,” “safety,” and “praxis” are in no way intrinsically academic, but are laden with the agenda of the left of liberal movements:   

“Queer pedagogy is an approach to educational praxis and curricula emerging in the late 20th century, drawing from the theoretical traditions of poststructuralism, queer theory, and critical pedagogy. The ideas put forth by key figures in queer theory, including principally Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, were adopted in the early 1990s to posit an approach to education that seeks to challenge heteronormative structures and assumptions in K–12 and higher education curricula, pedagogy, and policy.

Queer pedagogy, much like the queer theory that informs it, draws on the lived experience of the queer, wonky, or non-normative as a lens through which to consider educational phenomena. Queer pedagogy seeks to both uncover and disrupt hidden curricula of heteronormativity as well as to develop classroom landscapes and experiences that create safety for queer participants.

….This queer praxis, or queer as a verb, involves three primary foci: safety for queer students and teachers; engagement by queer students; and finally, understanding of queer issues, culture, and history.”

Bibliography

Byrne, Alex. 2018. Is Sex Socially Constructed? Examining the arguments. Medium.com. https://medium.com/arc-digital/is-sex-socially-constructed-81cf3ef79f07

Byrne, Alex. 2023. “The Origin of ‘Gender Identity.’” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2023).

Herdt, Gilbert. 2020. “Robert T. Stoller in the Clinic and in the Village.” Psychoanalysis and History 22.1: 15–34.

Green, Richard. 2010. “Robert Stoller’s Sex and Gender: 40 Years On.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 39: 1457–1465.

Pilcher, Jane and Imelda Whelehan. 2016. Key Concepts in Gender Studies (2^nd Edition). London: Sage Publishing.

Pinker, Steve. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books. 

Pluckrose, Helen and James Lindsay. 2020. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody. Durham, N.C.: Pitchstone Publishing.

Wilson, Edward. 1978. On Human Nature. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press. 

Wilson, Edward. 2000. Sociobiology: the New Synthesis (25^th Anniversary Edition). Cambridge, M.A.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Readers interested in furthering their knowledge and appreciation of sociobiology might consider this selection of works recommended by E. O. Wilson himself:

Alcock, John. The Triumph of Sociobiology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Barkow, Jerome H., Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds. The Adapted Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Degler, Carl N. In Search of Human Nature: The Decline & Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Segerstråle, Ullica. Defenders of the Truth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read Feminism and the Janus-Face of Modern Politics

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1. https://toronto.citynews.ca/2019/08/20/new-sex-ed-curriculum-to-be-released-wednesday-sources/

2. To view the Ontario Physical Health and Physical Education Curriculum, Grades 1–8, visit: https://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/2019-health-physical-education-grades-1to8.pdf . The Quote just given was taken from page 282. For similar perspective on what is being taught to school children in Ontario, see the website of the municipality of the Niagara region: https://www.niagararegion.ca/health/schools/curriculum/human-development-sexual-health/gender-and-sexual-diversity-gr8/default.aspx  - click the link “Gender and sexual diversity core knowledge content” under the heading “Core Knowledge Content.” 282

3. Byrne 2023.

4. Herdt 2020, 16–20.

5. Byrne 2023.

6. For these characterizations of Stoller, see Herdt 2020, 23;  Green 2010. Some characterizations of Stoller’s positions are also available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stoller 

7. Green 2010, 1459.

8. Butler’s current pronoun preferences and other biography can be reviewed at her Wiki and her UC Berkely research page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler Judith Butler | Research UC Berkeley

9. Following the summary of Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020, chapter 2. One can see such claims at play in Butler’s 1990 word “Gender Trouble” page 10, where she writes: “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”  In this comment, Butler is attempting to reanalyze sex as social construction, not a biological reality.

10. Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020, chapter 2. For the debt of Queer theory to Michel Foucault’s writings on sexuality, see also Pilcher and Whelehan 2016, 126.

11.  Paraphrasing the synapsis of Byrne 2018. His summary statement in its original wording is more technical: “if performatives can be used to bring it about that a thing belongs to a category, that category is socially constructed.”

12. Byrne 2018. See also: https://webpages.uidaho.edu/~morourke/404-phil/Summer-99/Handouts/Philosophical/Speech-Act.htm

13.  Byrne 2018.

14. Wilson 1978, xvi (Preface 2004)

15. Following Wilson 1978, ix–x (Preface 2004).

16. Wilson 1978, xiv (Preface 2004).

17. https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/the-utopian-whimsy-left-politics

18. For the roots of feminist ideology in socialism, see my comments about the man who coined the term “feminism,” Charlies Fourier, at the follow WWC essay: https://wokewatchcanada.substack.com/p/the-utopian-whimsy-left-politics

19. For a discussion of the use of social construction theory by Marxist and feminists see: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-rise-and-fall-of-sociobiology . 

20. Pinker 2002, 106.

21. Pinker 2002, 110–111.

22. Wilson 2000, preface to the 25^th anniversary edition.