On this topic, however, things did not go smoothly. After the book was completed, due to the controversial nature of the material, the press sent it out to 26 readers for peer review. Most accepted the invitation — then backed out once they saw the manuscript. Only one delivered a report, criticizing my work for being “unfair” to gender theorist Judith Butler and “gratuitously unkind to trans people.” My insistence on embodiment — Beauvoir’s insistence — was treated as an embarrassing throwback. In 2025, the contract was terminated. 

I then sent the manuscript to several other presses, who also declined to take it forward. One respected university imprint rejected the book as “too controversial.” Another told me it did not publish books on “individual thinkers” — then six months later issued a book casting Beauvoir as a pro-trans icon. A third prestigious press told me my book “did not fit its list” — and went on to publish a title called Sex Is a Spectrum, inspired by Beauvoir.

The attempt to repurpose Beauvoir to shore up gender-identity orthodoxy represents an all-out attack on her thinking, and erases the actual contents of The Second Sex, a foundational work of feminist theory, first published in 1949. 

Suggested article

Is this the end of genderism?

By Kathleen Stock

Beauvoir is controversial today because she was the ultimate sex realist; she refused to separate body from identity, and believed that it was only through understanding women’s embodied reality that we could combat patriarchal cultural norms. Her essential position can be summed up simply: sex is the material ground of women’s lives, gender the cultural elaboration of that ground, and liberation comes not from denying the body, but by transforming the meaning imposed upon it.

She began The Second Sex with research on biology, spending long hours in France’s National Library, sifting through centuries of the science on reproduction. Biology is not everything, she argued. It does not condemn us to lesser lives — but nor is it nothing: nature commandeers a woman’s body, from puberty onward, for the service of the species. These facts don’t make us unequal, but social structures and norms turn reproductive realities into inequality.

In almost every species, Beauvoir emphasized, organisms are defined by the gametes they produce. Large gametes (ova) define the female, small gametes (sperm) the male. In humans, this is “a biological given, not a moment in human history.” We are born male or female, always in relation to each other — what Beauvoir, borrowing from Heidegger, called Mitsein (“Being-with”). Such sex differences themselves are not hierarchical, but patriarchy makes them so.

“One is not born, but becomes, a woman,” she famously wrote in The Second Sex. But this does not mean that gender floats free of sex. For Beauvoir, sex is the foundation; gender its cultural elaboration. A female body is defined by the norms of femininity of its time and place. These norms can change — and Beauvoir’s work aimed to push them toward liberation. Meanwhile, both biology and culture shape the body’s meaning, power, and visibility, qualities that change over a woman’s lifetime as she shifts through the various forms of girl or mother, or menopausal or old woman.

Today, however, Beauvoir is mostly taught through the lens of foundational gender theorist Butler, who claimed to extend her work. But as I argue in my book, Butler actually ignored Bouvoir’s book, collapsing the notion of “becoming a woman” into performance, where repeated gestures conjure the illusion of sex. In Butler’s version, gender is the creator of sex. She makes no mention of puberty, childbirth, or aging.

Butler’s understanding of what a woman is has shaped two generations, and has had noxious consequences for women. If “sex” is only an idea, then puberty itself can be rejected; the category “girl” is something to exit, hormonally or surgically. This is framed as liberation, but in practice, it erases female experience: it turns puberty into a pathology, encourages girls to disidentify from their own bodies, and makes womanhood optional or disposable. What drops out of view is feminism’s starting point — that sex is the basis of women’s oppression. And crucially, the rejection of women’s bodies and of femininity today does not generate demands to transform those constraining norms, but instead points girls toward escape by “becoming boys” — as if freedom lay only on the other side of sex.

Beauvoir’s difference from Butler matters because without sex, feminism loses its compass. If we cannot name sex, how do we name sex-based oppression? 

I have long felt the weight of trans orthodoxies in the classroom and the conference hall. When I teach that, for Beauvoir, the body is not a blank slate, students protest: “using ‘sex’ as a category rationalizes prejudice.” Later, their essays come in as cool hagiographies to Butler, scare quotes around the word “woman.”

In the past, I kept my feelings to myself, wary of complaint. At conferences, I heard how Beauvoir’s emphasis on freedom and authenticity meant that she would definitely support trans identities. When I reminded my fellow academics that Beauvoir explicitly said: “No woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex,” they looked away in embarrassment, and muttered that Beauvoir was being “weaponized by TERFs in the service of transphobia.”

To deny the female body is to dissolve womanhood into the ether. That is why Beauvoir is awkward today. She insisted that women are animals — embodied, vulnerable, enduring — not cartoons, cyborgs, or avatars. 

Nor, in reality, is the female body easily dismissed: it is a body that betrays us, bleeds, and contracts on its own schedule; it intrudes on our consciousness and ruins our plans. Beauvoir writes bluntly, even brutally, about menstruation, childbirth, and abortion. Some critics have called her misogynist. But nothing she said is false — if anything, she was understating the situation.

Erasing women’s biology and erasing Beauvoir go hand in hand. In syllabi, Beauvoir has become a footnote — and when she is taught, “becoming a woman” is misread as affirming gender identity, the opposite of her words.

Suggested article

How gender self-ID is being abused

By Julie Bindel

I’ve felt this erasure before. As a child, visiting my mother’s Spanish family, I encountered a strident machismo: speaking about politics and having opinions, were for men, not women; I was told to join the women in the kitchen. And it has persisted in subtle ways throughout my career. As an undergraduate at Oxford, my tutor told me, frustratedly, “You are very polite,” unaccustomed to this feminine constraint in what had been, until two years earlier, an all-male college. It was a habit that stuck with me; I found myself overly cautious, and less willing to take the imaginative leaps needed for originality.

The sting of being told to disappear has never left me. That is what today’s distortion of Beauvoir feels like: an instruction to step aside, to be silent, while others rewrite reality.

Beauvoir’s discovery was that sex cannot be evaded. Even though as a young woman she rejected the category “woman” — she “thought like a man,” she said, holding her own in a male world — she eventually realized she had been one all along, defined by her body and by patriarchy’s myths. “If I want to define myself,” she wrote, “I first have to say, ‘I am a woman’; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth.”

That insistence is what makes her urgent now. A feminism that cannot speak of puberty, pregnancy, menopause, or frailty abandons women. Identity without the body is not liberation, but denial.

When publishers canceled my book, they wanted me to cut my critique of Butler. I refused: this lay at the core of my endorsement of a Beauvoirian feminism. That refusal is why I write now — because freedom begins from naming the body we inhabit and at the same time refusing to let it dictate our destiny.

Beauvoir would not have recognized this denial as liberation. Her project was to remake the meaning of womanhood — to expand it, not abandon it. To challenge the myths and constraints that keep women from fulfilling our potential. That is why I call for a Beauvoirian feminism: a vision of woman as both flesh and freedom, subject and agent, irreducibly real.

According to this account, feminist writers had devoted themselves to rooting out the scourge of “neurosexism”, and they had been all too successful. By rejecting the idea of inherent sex difference, writers such as Cordelia Fine (in Delusions of Gender) and Rebecca Jordan-Young (in Brain Storm) had effectively undone the very class they claimed to represent. The most appealing part of this story is, of course, that it takes a particularly virulent attack on women’s rights and pins the blame for it on women.

But it also has a germ of truth to it: there is a strand of feminism that has always seemed deeply uncomfortable with the idea of sex difference. “Born this way” might make strategic sense as a slogan for other civil rights movements, but for the women’s movement, it would have come close to an admission of defeat: born to be underpaid and sexually harassed. No wonder there was an insistent pull towards a form of blank slatism for some feminists.

At its most extreme, this becomes the “gender performativity” theory offered by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, which claims that gender and sex are shaped by social influence. And it’s a theory that goes even further back. In the 1969 book Sexual Politics, for example, Kate Millett quoted approvingly from the work of sexologists to support the argument that “Psychosexual personality is… postnatal and learned.” Regrettably, the particular sexologist she was referring to in this section was John Money. And though Money was much cited and widely respected, he would also be entirely discredited before the end of the century.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

Money’s most influential work was probably the twin study now widely known as “John/Joan”. In 1965, a pair of male twins were born in the Canadian city Winnipeg, named Bruce and Brian Reimer. At seven months old, their mother noticed that their foreskins seemed to be closing up, and they were advised to have both boys circumcised. In the event, only one would be operated on: the first procedure was botched so badly that Bruce’s penis was entirely burned, and eventually (in the journalist John Colapinto’s account) “dried up and broke away in pieces”. Brian was left alone after that.

For the family, this was a dreadful event. For John Money, it was an opportunity. Money had already achieved some measure of fame as a pioneer of (what were then called) “sex change operations”, and also worked with (again, what were then called) intersex patients. In both cases, his aim was to use surgery and hormone treatments to bring about alignment between what he called the “psychological sex” and the “sex glands”.

Now Money had the perfect opportunity for a rare empirical study of his theories. The uninjured twin would be the control, while the injured twin would be the test. The baby was castrated and furnished with a rudimentary vulva, and the parents were given strict instructions on how to raise their newly-minted daughter as a girl. Brian would become Brenda. And, up until 1997, all the public knew of this experiment was that it had been a huge success — because all they knew was Money’s version. In his book Sexual Signatures, he described the case like this: “by the time the children were four years old, there was no mistaking which twin was the girl and which the boy. At five, the little girl already preferred dresses to pants, enjoyed wearing her hair ribbons, bracelets and frilly blouses, and being her daddy’s little sweetheart.”

It was, continued Money, “dramatic proof that the gender identity option is open at birth for normal infants”. It appeared to be indisputable evidence that the brain was plastic, and gender a work of culture rather than nature.

The real child had a very different experience. Far from the stereotypically girlish interests listed by Money, Brenda enjoyed playing with model aeroplanes and CB radios. By the age of 11, Brenda was struggling with anxiety and social isolation, and suffered (according to a clinician’s report) from “strong fears that something has been done to her genitals” and “suicidal thoughts”. As signs of puberty kicked in, other girls treated Brenda with suspicion and cruelty: they could tell this child was not like them. Compounding the trauma, Money forced the twins into sexual roleplay under the belief that this was necessary to gendered socialisation.

In 1980, Brenda was finally told the truth. He immediately made the decision to live as a boy, and adopted the name David. Money never reported that his experiment had been a failure. It wasn’t until 1997 that the sorry episode was added to scientific literature, in an article by Milton Diamond; this was followed by Colapinto’s Rolling Stone article (expanded into a book called As Nature Made Him in 2000), which brought the case to wider public attention. Gender plasticity was declared over. The harm to David Reimer was not: in 2004, he killed himself. His family squarely blamed Money’s experiment.

This awful episode perhaps demonstrates little except that sexologists should be treated with grave suspicion: it is so extreme and grotesque, it can hardly be treated as indicative of anything in normal childrearing. Certainly, if Money’s twin experiment had any influence on the development of gender identity theory, it surely ought to have been discrediting, given Money’s direct involvement in medical transition.

But instead, it seemed to sow the seeds of what was to come. The New York Times’ report on the 1997 revelations had ended like this: “And it is the head, Dr. Diamond added, that holds the primary sexual organ, the source of one’s identity, and the organ that does not lie.” In other words, gender is in your head. One reading of this was that the experiment on Reimer was not wrong because it mauled the body of a child; it was wrong because it put the brain and body out of alignment.

The Nineties were also a time of considerable public interest in the idea that “masculine” and “feminine” had a biological basis. John Gray’s blockbusting 1992 book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus had established a popular narrative of psychological sex difference as a kind of relationship self-help. (Men couldn’t help being inconsiderate — they were born that way!) In 2003, Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference had brought a neuroscience gloss to the position. As he summarised it in his introduction: “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”

The Noughties critics of neurosexism were not, or were not all, rejecting the idea of sex difference in totality. As Fine wrote in her 2010 book Delusions of Gender: “There are sex differences in the brain. There are also large (although generally decreasing) sex differences in who does what, and who achieves what. It would make sense if these facts were connected in some way, and perhaps they are.”

But the way in which they were widely claimed to be connected was, plainly, influenced by sexism more than science. Baron-Cohen’s questionnaires used items like “I enjoy participating in sport” and “I try to avoid doing household chores if I can” to establish someone’s “systematising quotient” — as though women had equal access to sports, as though there was anything “systematic” about not doing the washing up, and as though playing in a team didn’t demand a certain level of empathy.

Suggested reading

The taboo trans question

By Sarah Ditum

The ultimate implication of The Essential Difference was that men were designed for thinking, and women for caring. It is substantially the same vision of gender that you can see in the notorious Mermaids “Barbie to GI Joe” gender scale. And this is a very appropriate thing for feminists to critique, especially when the level of “empirical” evidence underpinning it is so flimsy. Applying a rigorous eye to the science of sex difference is hardly the denial of sex difference: you could even call it a systematising impulse.

Fine herself has written, in a 2021 article, about the threat that gender identity theory poses to women’s rights. Replacing the category of woman as sex class with the category of woman as gender essence potentially deprives women of “the concepts to explain the disadvantages they face in virtue of their sex, and a commitment to accurate data to test and understand it”. In other words, when you make the idea of sex taboo, you make sexism impossible to name, or to counter.

Jordan-Young, however, took a very different direction, and ended up arguing not only against the idea of men and women having different brains, but against sex categories altogether. In 2019, she coauthored an article arguing that Caster Semenya (who is chromosomally male) should be eligible for women’s competition, which stated it was “simply not true” that testosterone played any role in athletic performance — a position that not only stands in opposition to every race result ever recorded, but which is also belied by the observable outcome of doping regimens.

It is hard to understand how anyone could be at once so deeply in denial about reality, and so cavalier about fairness to female athletes. The answer, perhaps, is fear. Like Kate Millett, Jordan-Young correctly deduces that sex difference has been used as the alibi for sex discrimination; in order to prevent the discrimination, one must therefore deny the difference.

Or as the science writer Angela Saini (author of the book Inferior) put it in a 2019 radio discussion: “We have to be careful that we don’t treat women as categorically different, and the reason we have to be cautious of this is because in the past this is a stick that is used to beat women with.” There is logic here, but a fragile, partial kind. Turning away from science may be tempting after the ways science has been abused to further sexism, but if you base your claim to sexual equality on the idea that men and women have no meaningful differences, your claim will fail.

Gender identity theory required two parents. One of them, yes, is the fearful strand of feminism that tends towards science denial. But the other was the tradition of scientific chauvinism in which femaleness amounted to being “daddy’s little girl” or doing chores: a tradition in which sex is reduced to stereotypes. If the only lesson we learn from this century’s strange diversion into gender identity mysticism is that we should blame women alone, then we’ve learned nothing at all.

“When I saw her,” wrote Sante, referring to Lucy, “I felt something liquefy in the core of my body. I trembled from my shoulders to my crotch. I guessed that I had at last met my reckoning.” This was not a sudden whim for Sante, then aged 66, but a longstanding fixation made finally undeniable. As evidence, Sante included in the letter a list of recurrent “masturbation scenarios”, all of which involve coerced feminisation: “cast as a girl in the school play, then persuaded to go out on the town in costume; hired as an assistant by a wealthy society woman who amuses herself by dressing me up as a girl; new roommate assigned to me in college has been dressing as a girl for years and has a full wardrobe.”

Sante’s friends were uniformly warm and positive in response. One female colleague wrote back to say it was “exciting to have another great female writer”. Only one person replied critically — a trans woman, who told Sante: “My only note so far is that I wouldn’t mention your crotch in connection with a realisation about your gender identity, because any mention of genitalia or crotches instantly brings up all sorts of bizarre paranoid delusions that trans women are just transitioning as part of some kind of sexual fetish.”

Sante bridled a little at the judgement, given that this was a private letter to a small group, but changed the word “crotch” for “belly”. And then — this is the fascinating part — reverted to “crotch” for the least private possible audience, republishing the original letter in a new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name. In fact, Sante seems entirely blithe about the crotch mentions, announcing near the end of the book that: “my dysphoria was never centred on or even especially concerned with genitalia. (Although it is extremely exciting to have tits.)” Bottom surgery is presumably not on the to-do list.

More from this author

How Elliot Page escaped womanhood

By Sarah Ditum

It hardly seems to require any “bizarre paranoid delusion” to see evidence of a fetish at work. But for Sante’s trans woman correspondent, the anxiety was presumably about saying the quiet part out loud. Since the start of this century, trans activism has pushed a “born this way” narrative of gender identity — and at the same time, aggressively rejected any implication that a man might have a sexual motivation for identifying as a woman.

This is despite the fact that we are supposedly in a more permissive era than ever before. “Kinkshaming” is the great taboo: it’s a worse faux pas to wrinkle your nose at someone else’s peccadillos than it is to flaunt your own. And yet this is also an era with a great intolerance of male displays of sexuality in culture. While the underworld of pornography propagates unchecked horrors, the oversexed male mainstream writer is a subject of open derision. There are few more crushing satires than the “men writing women” meme: “She breasted boobily to the stairs and titted downwards…”

A lot of men’s writing about women has been ludicrously sexist, and in recognition of that fact, a great many male authors today — who come, on the whole, from the nice liberal side of the tracks, and would be alarmed at being cast as “anti woman”, especially in a heavily feminised publishing industry — have tended to stow their libidos. By contrast, the big filthy beasts of the 20th century look tawdry and dated: Philip Roth, John Updike, Martin Amis, standing awkwardly in the corner with their dicks in their hands. In the mid-to-late 20th century, their openness about desire was revelatory — part of the great post-war liberation. In the 21st century (and especially after #MeToo) they’re treated with more suspicion: less literary explorers of the libidinous underworld, more cringy self-pleasurers. The only heirs left to that literary tradition seem to be trans women writers, such as Sante or Torrey Peters, whose novel Detransition, Baby is a riot of sissy porn and flopping testicles. Perhaps the stigma about “breasting boobily” goes away when the male authors in question have grown their own.

Male desire can be a forbidding subject for women. Whether as a consequence of nature or nurture, men’s sexuality tends to be a more consuming presence in their lives than it is for women. In a bell curve distribution, there will be significant overlap — but men in general have higher sexer drives than women. Men also tend to have weirder sex drives than women: paraphilias, the fancy sexologist work for “kink”, are considerably more common in men than in women.

This is uncomfortable knowledge, and for women it can be nicer to ignore it.  For men, meanwhile, sustaining a “decent” life while suspecting yourself of being thoroughly indecent within can become intolerable. Sante writes often about the strain of repression. And the trans writer Debbie Hayton described managing autogynephilia as “like someone trying to hold down a beach ball underwater, only for it to force its way to the surface”. Alasdair Gray — author of Poor Things, and one of the greatest of all literary perverts — wrote that “unless we bring one of our wicked little dreams just a wee bit to life we live like zombies”.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

Women, often, would simply rather not know about this aspect of men. It is disturbing, alien, disruptive. That perhaps explains why Sante’s woman colleague was able to skip past the “crotch” sentence and arrive at the comfortable conclusion that Sante was now “female”. It explains why many female readers of Detransition, Baby seemed to overlook the dirty bits and neuter it into being a novel about “womanhood”.

But it explains too why there was a response of unmitigated disgust from some women who recognised Detransition, Baby for the work of honest filth it is. When Peters was long-listed for the Women’s Prize in 2021, the objection from some gender critical campaigners was not only that it should have been ineligible by dint of Peters’ sex (a fair point), but also that its content made it illegitimate.

“Had a female author submitted a culturally regressive, sadomasochistic, misogynistic ‘surrendered wife’ narrative to the Women’s Prize, it would rightly have been ignored by the judges,” said one angry open letter to the Women’s Prize. Actually, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, with multiple scenes of sadomasochistic sex between its two protagonists, was long-listed in 2019, so this criticism doesn’t ring true. What was objectionable about Peters’ book was maybe that, unlike the melancholic Rooney novel, it appeared to be written by someone who was having a thoroughly good time getting mucky.

Yet men’s sexuality seems, on the whole, to be something women ought to be interested in. After all, almost all of us live with or alongside men. Some of us sleep with them too. The truth should be more valuable than the nice-guy mythology: knowing what a man wants entails no obligation to consent to it. To respond with disgusted calls for men to censor themselves — or worse, with the ladylike self-censorship of Butler — is to wilfully choose ignorance.

There’s a complication, though. Desires are not just inherent: they’re also imitative. Part of Sante’s journey to transition is the slow-burn of a lifetime of fantasy; part of it is the easy access to an online community that reinforces the wish. For most of Sante’s existence, “becoming a woman” was an impossible urge. Only when technology makes it tangible did it become a consuming obsession. There should be space in the world for the honest — and hopefully intelligent — disclosure of the male libido, as for the female. But it may be men who pay the highest price for that knowledge.

They’s most renowned sentence, which won the 1998 Bad Writing competition in the journal Philosophy & Literature, runs as follows:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

It is a glorious racket, and you can’t help admiring it. I like to picture Judith as a snake-oil purveyor on a travelling show in the days of the pioneering Wild West, sat in the wagon after the sell, in a box-coat and a tall hat, lighting a cigar with a ten-dollar bill and having a good chuckle with the missus at the dumb rubes in the crowd. “Honey pie, those bozos sucked it up!” There’s something very funny about seeing bourgeois idiots being taken for schmucks and grandly fleeced. “Good for you gal!” you want to shout. 

If this were only a few bottles of liniment sold to a few stooges it would have a roguish charm. But with the explosion of higher education and of social media, these laughable ideas are increasingly seeping out into wider society. 

Judith is the undisputed master of the form, but such specious claptrap is a game anyone can play. 

Let’s have a go. You take a social phenomenon or a piece of art (high or low, that doesn’t matter) and subject it to theory. To pluck a random, recent example let’s take current hit BBC drama Vigil. We might say that in its depiction of a female detective investigating a murder mystery on a submarine that it posits interiority citationally as a partial détournement of the ideological power structures of the late-capitalist ideations of guilt and innocence. 

More from this author

The toxic world of fandom

By Gareth Roberts

Thanks to my university days — thirty long years ago now, but already riddled with this stuff, which goes back a lot longer than people think — I can spew this out. Once you’ve grasped the basics, it’s easy. 

The difference is that back in 1992, when I’d completed my dissertation on gender norms in Carry On Loving (1970) and got my 2:1, I emerged into the real world with real people in it, and didn’t have to think about this trash again apart from as an amusing memory shared with fellow sufferers. 

No such luck for the graduate of 2021, who will find the mainstream media and the arts awash with theory jargon such as “lived experience”, “intersectionality” and “equity”. 

Theory stems from the deconstruction popularised, if that’s the word, in European academia in the middle of the last century — taking social conventions and art to bits to see how they work (which is something Aristotle was doing two thousand years ago, to be fair). It can be very interesting to see how ideas operate, particularly in the then under-examined and comparatively new mass popular culture. The differences in taboos and hierarchies across cultures are fascinating. And abstract, unfamiliar concepts can obviously be hard to convey and to understand. 

But critical theory tips buckets of nonsense over these reasonable, even banal foundations. It has no truck with the obvious reality of humans as evolved animals like any other. All of its observations stem from the false premise of the human being as a wholly nurtured blank slate, so everything that follows on is just plain wrong. It is like a series of whodunnits where the murderer is “the capitalist hegemony” every time. It gulps down for its inspiration art, beauty and humanity — and vomits them back up as pabulum. 

The observations of early pioneers in linguistics — Ferdinand de Saussure in particular, with his painstaking deliberations over the meanings of words across human languages and the way humans frame the world through language — became the baloney of saying that words actually physically change reality, so all you have to do is change words to change reality. Judith’s new Guardian interview is a shining example. Hocus pocus, alakazam — woman as a category is redefined to include blokes. The cabinet is thrown open, and the lady has disappeared. 

More from this author

How The Office ruined comedy

By Gareth Roberts

So now we have queer theory, gender theory, critical race theory, out in the open. And this stuff is dangerous when it metastasises. 

Because it’s not merely an irritant. It weakens and debilitates us. It amplifies neurosis and further damages already damaged people — the shouty unicorn-avatar children of Twitter have been driven out of their tiny minds by it, to their and our detriment. It has had a terrible, deadening effect on the arts, reducing a lot of drama to nothing much more than grievance and resentment.

The irony of this situation is that loopy ideas so obviously contrary to sanity and reality as Open Borders, Defund The Police or every human interaction being racist could only have sprouted from the soil of liberal, western capitalist consumer societies. Theory is the most western belief system imaginable. Picture an intellectual movement posturing against the central tenets of Chinese or Saudi Arabian society, embedded at the heart of the academic establishment in those countries, being funded by their peoples, disinterested governments nodding it through. You can’t, because its exponents would be lucky to last the week. 

Deconstruction never deconstructs itself. If it ever looked in the mirror, it would see that it is old establishment down to its toenails, a ruling class ‘progressive’ pose that belongs more to the eleventh century than the twenty-first (it’s surely no accident that the younger royalty is keen.) It’s as much a product of capitalism, and about as left-wing, as a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. It is — oh, irony of ironies! — all about strengthening existing class structures and power relations, its arcane lexicon an etiquette system. Objecting to it, or breaking a taboo by saying for example that one tries not to see race, or that there are two immutable sexes, marks a person as low-status. It is a mechanism for preserving inequalities, keeping people in their place and making racial strife worse to enhance position and keep the cash rolling in. 

Suggested reading

The intellectual shabbiness of Judith Butler

By Sam Leith

Its opponents, on both the Left and Right, are far too squeamish. Detractors suggest that these bad ideas can be argued against and rejected — the excellent Cynical Theories by the estimable Helen Pluckrose et al makes this case immaculately. But you cannot argue with these fallacies and their perpetrators, as they grant no space to their opponents, who are by their definition oppressors, i.e. heretics. Theory cannot brook enlightened debate, because it is pre-enlightenment, a feudal power grab.

The only way to deal with it is to defund the academic institutions and courses that expound it. It must go. 

Or perhaps, as Judith might say, this whole article has been an attempt to reify hegemonic power structures, resisting praxis by codifying reified systems of meaning as normative. Who can possibly tell?

Social media praise for the article seemed to suggest she had. “Rigorous critique and affirmative feminism,” said one tweet. “Magisterial,” said another. “Thoughtful, reflective, theoretically and historically rich,” said another. “If you’re confused about trans people and trans rights, I can’t recommend this interview with Judith Butler enough,” said Owen Jones.

I think Prof Butler deserves our attention. I don’t share the reflex sniggering at the opacity of some of her prose — sometimes complex ideas need a complex expression — and in this interview she was for the most part perfectly clear and conversational. But “magisterial”? “Theoretically and historically rich?” Not on the strength of this interview. What she had to offer was intellectually threadbare. Rather than bringing some analytical clarity, she did no more than cloak crude rhetorical strategies in academic grandiloquence.

By way of a disclaimer, I don’t say this because I’m a member of some terf-cult, and I don’t mean it as a motivated intervention in the trans wars. It seems to me that this is an area that admits of good faith disagreement, that there’s a noticeable lack of that in the public discourse, and that — even from so revered a figure as Judith Butler — we should call that lack out when we see it.

The interview began with her being asked about “how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics”. She responded:

“I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.”

This preoccupation with what’s mainstream and what’s marginal is just eccentric — especially coming from a theorist who has spent a lot of time, quite rightly, considering the stifling effects of normativity. Leaving aside the uninterrogated and question-begging use of loaded terms such as “transphobia” and “trans rights”, the arguments at issue should stand or fall on their merits, not on their relation to the mainstream. Liberation movements of the type Prof Butler might approve have, after all, been founded on “marginal” positions. To appeal to the mainstream is to fall into the fallacy called “argumentum ad populum”, and it’s something philosophers usually try not to do.

She’s then asked about JK Rowling’s stated concern that Self-ID could “throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman’, potentially putting women at risk of violence”:

“If we look closely at the example that you characterise as ‘mainstream’ we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.”

Prof Butler might legitimately argue that these concerns are theoretical and/or exaggerated, as many advocates for self-ID do. One writer I respect recently tweeted: “Honestly the best ‘argument’ I have in this is nothing to do with theoretical stances on the definition of gender (which we’re never going to all agree on anyway), it’s: ‘Ireland brought in gender self-ID in 2015 and the things you are afraid of have not happened’”.

But instead there are two things going on here rhetorically, neither of which redound to Prof Butler’s credit. She is pathologising or gaslighting those on the other side of the argument (using “fantasy” or its cognates four times in a paragraph). And she is straw-manning their position.

A fairer representation of the case would have been to say: “The feminist who holds such a view presumes […] that someone with a penis could identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside.”

This would be a good-faith representation of the gender-critical position on single-sex spaces. But it would require the hard work of arguing against it on material evidence, rather than dismissing it as hysteria or fantasy.

When challenged on the idea that “terf” might be understood as a slur, she responds with a high-handed run of rhetorical questions, or what sometimes gets called epiplexis.

“I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women’s spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists?”

Here is something close to the etymological fallacy. As Prof Butler will surely know, given her famously subtle engagement with the eddies and currents of power in discourse, you can’t reliably nail the connotations of a term by appeal to its literal meaning. Here is an argument not much more grown-up than the person who tells you that you misuse antisemitism because “Arabs are semites too, actually”, or rejoice in having noticed that the Nazis claimed to be socialists, or who might think that because something is derived from the Latin word for black it’s no more than a neutral descriptor.

If Prof Butler is interested in attending to what we now like to call “lived experience”, she might attend to the lived experience of those who — being on the receiving end of it — very much consider “terf” to be a slur. To say words to the effect of “well, they’re trying to exclude trans women from their toilets so why not call them exclusionary? If the cap fits, wear it” will not do. If she wonders what they’d prefer to be called, why not ask them? Most, as I understand it, are happy with the term “gender-critical feminists”.

When encouraged to comment on the online trolling that the novelist JK Rowling has faced in response to her public remarks on the issue, Prof Butler responded:

“I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling’s view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.”

This seems to me to be nothing more sophisticated than garden-variety whataboutery. It’s practically a snowclone of the formulation Jeremy Corbyn used to use when asked to make a full-throated condemnation of antisemitism: namely that he condemns all kinds of racism. Immediately Prof Butler pivots from the question asked to bring up the street harassment of trans people in Poland or Romania. This is an irrelevant false equivalence. Telling JK Rowling to choke on a dick doesn’t stop trans people being harassed in Romania; and finding the former objectionable doesn’t green light the latter.

Gaslighting ad-hominems, wilful obtuseness, straw-manning, deflection and whataboutery: this is quite the catalogue of intellectual shabbiness coming from a philosopher of Prof Butler’s standing. If the supposed grown-ups in the room are debating like this, no wonder the discussion is in such a state.

“I think we are living in anti-intellectual times,” Butler remarks later in the interview. You said it, sister.

Above all, the life into which they enter will be a bare one. Even where each constituent part of student life remains in place, it will be hard to act with confidence, fluency or grace amid the uncertainty. The “student experience” was always a dismal expression; now it is a sad joke.

But this is not the only threat that incoming students face. Universities are front and centre of the new culture war and the dominant culture in the humanities and arts is soaked in an anxiety-ridden politics of negation. It is a world with which I am all too familiar, from many years’ involvement in the far-left, which — stripped of materialist analysis and class content — increasingly finds its base in the university. I had come to see those years as misspent but essentially inconsequential and a little embarrassing.

What is remarkable is not that I found these politics wanting — most who move through these scenes eventually do — but that, shorn of their economics, they now appear culturally hegemonic and unassailable. Today these politics represent what Wesley Yang described as the “successor ideology”, the default politics of a new elite coming of age, and this language is the currency of the professional managerial class in the English-speaking world. They do not seem so inconsequential anymore.

I spent my teenage years immersed in Marxist and anarchist circles and literature, at protests and occupations, squats and reading groups. I would listen to ageing Cockneys give talks on class interest and exploitation in the backrooms of dusty pubs. It may not have been much, but it did at least feel like we could lay claim to the heritage of a genuine radicalism.

When I arrived at Cambridge a decade ago, then, I was taken aback to encounter many like me. Indeed most of the students studying the arts and humanities were well to the left of Labour, which was regarded as a bit of a joke. There were differences, of course, with my previous political world: at Cambridge, the talk was of activism and oppression rather than organising and exploitation. Political economy and class were downplayed and gender, race, colonialism, sex work and mental health came to the fore. This allowed participants to see themselves not as the guilty children of the elite, but as subjects of a politics of anti-oppression in their own right. It felt less like a historical reenactment society and more contemporary, urgent even.

That this ancient institution was saturated with radicalism posed a problem for my self-image. Calling yourself a communist or anarchist was just not very interesting anymore. As we occupied university buildings and demanded the impossible from the safety of our cloisters, it seemed to me that the age-old debate between left-communists and anarchists who believed in the spontaneous uprising of the working class, and the Trotsykist idea of an intellectual vanguard at the helm of the revolutionary movement, was decisively resolved in favour of the latter.

Some blame academics for the radicalisation of students, but in truth self-selecting mechanisms ensured many of us arrived pre-radicalised, and from there it spread memetically, not didactically. The internet was a far bigger radicaliser than Left-wing academics. The handful of academics involved with the political scene were outliers and most were political liberals.

The next three years played out predictably. The organiser of a gay night was denounced for playing a song by Katy Perry because another song of hers was deemed problematic. A rare working class boy had his Union Jack flag stolen and set on fire during a commemoration for the Queen, while students (many of whom from one elite international school in Geneva) denounced him as a racist. We queued round the block for Judith Butler and we tried, sometimes successfully, to get others blocked from public platforms altogether.

Rumours would circulate about people who were “problematic”, often socially awkward men whose problem was that they interrupted people. Talks on sex work and the radical possibilities of kink proliferated. One of my more sordid memories is of person after person taking turns at a public assembly to declare themselves “disabled”, presumably by nature of their mental disorder, and therefore oppressed. A good friend was condemned in a public blog by his ex for the crime of suggesting that her new activist friends might not have been making her very happy.

Suggested reading

Who gains from the great university scam?

By Mary Harrington

At first, there was a rush — the feeling of belonging to a community, particularly one defined so clearly against an other, gave meaning and purpose to life. Taking part in “action”, the more covert the better, strengthened this sense of conspiracy. But over time the world darkened and lost colour. Our intellectual world shrunk and everything was subjected to the same dreary analysis. Real conversation became impossible, replaced with irony, intersectional bromides and endless talk of mental illness.

The college was a bucket of crabs and happiness itself suspect, a mark of privilege, as with the rugby lads who had the audacity to actually enjoy themselves. When there was laughter it was heavy and jarring, filled with irony and bitterness, never light or free. The elitism of the university discounted even appreciation of the beauty of its buildings or the surrounding countryside, although by then we were probably too far gone to notice. Though we were aware of our enormous privilege we contrived to see our time at Cambridge as some grim fate foisted upon us.

Right now, the discourse is centred on “cancel culture”. It was not cancellation but closure that defined our social-political scene, and that now characterises the culture at large — the ideas left unexplored, the varied uses of the English language reduced to greyscale, and, in the end, the elimination of joy, curiosity and wonder from our lives. (This closure plays out just as surely among liberal and Right-wing culture warriors, who are reduced to dull defences of free speech. This essay, in its own way, contributes to that closure too. Life is good and there is so much more we could talk about!)

Few have described this process as well as Philip Roth in American Pastoral. The lifelessness of it all and the impossibility of any lightness or dialogue, as he put it: “The monotonous chant of the indoctrinated, ideologically armored from head to foot — the monotonous, spellbound chant of those whose turbulence can be caged only within the suffocating straitjacket of the most supercoherent of dreams. What was missing from her unstuttered words was not the sanctity of life — missing was the sound of life.”

Roth wrote of the manipulative potential of compassion, the only recognised virtue: “There may not be much subtlety in it, she may not yet be its best spokesman, but there is some thought behind it, there’s certainly a lot of emotion behind it, there’s a lot of compassion behind it…” On top of this there was the moral certainty that erases any concern about means. “Rita was no longer an ordinary wavering mortal, let alone a novice in life, but a creature in clandestine harmony with the brutal way of the world, entitled, in the name of historical justice, to be just as sinister as the capitalist oppressor Swede Levov.”

Suggested reading

Is woke culture totalitarian?

By Eric Kaufmann

Unhappiness brings with it power over others. Where compassion is the highest virtue, this power is almost limitless. Misery also provides the motive to wield this power, and mental blindness to one’s own culpability in its exercise. The principal protagonists of this scene nestled into their unhappiness and woke politics was the form of emotional manipulation its outward expression took. Its obscure language games were about codifying the rules of social engagement so that its anxious subjects could navigate social life as much as they were about prohibition.

Whenever a clip goes viral of a person, clearly in some mental distress, repeating the usual platitudes, it is impossible not to see the anxieties of life under late modernity writ large. They are there in the voice, constantly on the point of breaking, in the incredulous, widening eyes, and in the earnestly furrowed brow. It is a recognisable form of distress, but not one found among those at the sharp end of genuine political tyranny or destitution. It is hard not to conclude that a whole generation has been terribly misled about how best to pursue a life of meaning and resilience.

Social theorist Mark Fisher described from first-hand experience the manipulation of this scene as a Vampire Castle which “feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups — the more marginal, the better — into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampire Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering — those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.” The Vampire Castle recruits on the promise of community and self-healing. The reality is an ouroboros of emotional manipulation, stripped of the political and of all that makes life interesting and worthwhile.

So when Black Lives Matter adopts the same therapeutic language in their description of their praxis — “we recommit to healing ourselves and each other… we intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depletive… we practise empathy… we are self-reflexive… we support each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another” — it makes my skin crawl. I dread the thought of anyone that I love getting sucked into this false community.

Undergraduate wastefulness, self-absorption and misery are nothing new, but the form they took presaged what was to come. In another age, we would have been conservatives — frightened of the outside world, haunted by anxiety and guilt, unafraid to speak or think freely. But instead, the politics of my old friends set the national agenda.

We would have laughed at the idea we formed an elite and we certainly didn’t act like one. But we were the vanguard for a movement that has swept the English-speaking world in the subsequent decade. We still professed to be fighting the old powers — patriarchy, white supremacism, the nuclear family, colonialism, the university itself. But in truth we represented what Christopher Lasch called psychological man, “the final product of bourgeois individualism,” and were being trained in elite formation for the therapeutic age just as surely as our forerunners had been for the previous, paternal age.

Suggested reading

Why shouldn't the curriculum be 'Eurocentric'?

By Nigel Biggar

In the past two months, this new elite has discovered its collective strength. The cultural politics of the emerging professional managerial class have joined with the rage of those with first-hand experience of police oppression. The anxieties of the milieu I left have found in white guilt a steady resting place. The emotional manipulation developed in elite institutions has developed a motte-and-bailey style of argument (superbly analysed by Jacob Siegel) which is impossible to push back against without seeming callous. And every institution, public or private, has simply buckled.

Towards the end of American Pastoral, the protagonist Swede Levov — poor Swede Levov — wonders whether he tried to be too understanding of his daughter’s descent into the furthest reaches of the political fanaticism of the late 1960s: “Perhaps the mistake was to take seriously what was in no way serious.” He gave an inch to the madness of his daughter’s utopian ideology and she took a mile, blowing up a suburban post office and killing two people. Yet this doctrine has graduated out of the elite universities where it first festered and is rewriting our institutions and our history. It must be taken seriously.

Last year I argued in American Affairs that the way through the culture war was a radical economic settlement that gave people security and order; socialist means to achieve conservative ends. This now looks naïve. The material genesis of the radical cultural politics that has shown its strength in the last few months lies in the overexpansion of higher education, which produced a new middle class that is materially discontented and uncomfortable in its own skin. The globalisation of American pathologies has given this new urban class, present across the Western world, a politics that is carving through our institutions.

Providing decent work and the possibility of home ownership in big cities, therefore, combined with the longer term goal of overhauling higher education, seemed the best strategy for overcoming the listlessness of an elite fraction disenfranchised from a world that failed to live up to its promise. Perhaps it still is. But the embrace of this movement by the rich, and the profound philosophical break it represents with the old order, suggests it has a logic and a momentum of its own and its potential is without limit. It is a politics of negation and renunciation and there is no end-point. There is always more work to be done.