How Sex Was Deconstructed

In the 2016 Australian census, approximately 1200 people identified as transgender or gender-diverse. Even allowing for an undefined number who didn’t reveal their gender “status” on census night, the proportion of Australians in this cohort is likely to be minuscule. Statistics from other countries point in much the same direction.

Why, then, have societies across the Western world experienced such a rapid and fundamental shift away from traditional understandings of gender and sex differences? Why have the sufferings of a few triggered what can only be called a revolution in policy, language, and even ontology? Why have we rejected what seems to be biological reality concerning male–female distinctions, replacing it with the often-transient desires of personal psychology? Indeed, why have so many enthusiastically embraced the notion that sex is a ceaselessly mutable product that can be shaped and re-shaped at will? And why are some so eager to inscribe these beliefs into law or education, condemning even the most timorous act of dissent as a sign of unrelieved bigotry?

It’s tempting to explain this cultural phenomenon as a product of progressive activism, coupled with the corporate world’s new-found willingness to turn gender identity politics into a marketing tool. Such an ominous combination has helped inculcate sections of the population with the relatively novel view that outward manifestations of gender—and even biological sex itself—are fluid, largely “performative” constructs. Ideology performs its manipulative work through various means: social extirpation for those who demur, approbation for those who yield, and a general numbing of those minds not properly animated by an alternative metaphysic.

To be sure, there is a good deal of truth to this portrait. Trans-activism has taken a disturbingly sinister turn over the past decade, aided and amplified by social media. Transgender advocates and their allies have routinely denounced, silenced or exiled those who dispute their maximalist claims; their actions have formed a tight, ideological web that narrows the range of acceptable opinions, corralling the unwary into meek acquiescence of the new regime. And as if to buttress that regime through the force of law, various jurisdictions have enacted a raft of trans-affirming legislation, which has had the effect of achieving conformity through compulsion.

All the while, the assertions of trans-activists have grown ever more bespoke. No longer are we simply told that a small class of gender-dysphoric people exist, some of whom urgently require therapeutic support. The genuine (and often distressing) experiences of both transgendered and intersex individuals are now conscripted as evidence that gender expressions are endlessly malleable, and that sexual differences are merely conventional. For anyone who dissents, the full force of social, political, legal and corporate might is brought to bear (deploying instruments of coercion to advance a supposedly liberationist agenda is an irony lost on advocates). When the levers of institutional and cultural power are controlled by an elite willing to enforce the claim that, for example, “men can menstruate”, it’s easy to see how a forcible shift in the Overton Window could be accomplished.

Nevertheless, bullying tactics and herd behaviour don’t seem to explain sufficiently how precepts that commanded almost universal assent a few years ago could be overturned so quickly. Individuals and organisations that were largely innocent of transgender issues as recently as the early 2010s have embraced the new orthodoxy with near-religious zeal. Of course, advocates have hardly been tilling virgin soil; rather, they have exploited a culture primed for the kinds of claim they assiduously promote. Only by understanding the deeper intellectual currents that have sculpted the modern Western mind can we begin to grasp the reasons for such rapid and seismic changes.

The ideas leading to this present moment are many and diverse. If their proponents could sit down in a room together, sharp disagreement would likely ensue. But uniting those claims is the fact that they have all made their mark on the modern West’s evolving conception of the individual, his relationship to the external world, and his basic telos. The unravelling of sexual distinctions and the rejection of biological givenness stem ultimately from the direction Western culture has taken on those basic questions over the past 250 years. 

These unfolding trends correspond to what the US sociologist Philip Rieff argued about Western societies. This is why he remains a crucial guide to the current anarchy and its sources. He presciently described the deeper pathologies of our era using a series of evocative images: “the triumph of the therapeutic” or “the rise of psychological man”. For him, they connoted the underlying logic of modern Western culture: the therapeutic individual now strove for psychological wellbeing as the primary purpose in life, prizing his emotional interior as the locus of all truth and moral authority.

Modern culture, as defined by Rieff, is one “in which the central moral question is individual fulfilment”. This was part of what he viewed as the broader loss of sacred order underpinning society—a unifying metaphysic to which people deferred, binding them together. The therapeutic age has seen that idea forsaken, traded for flickering, unstable alternatives. Reflecting on Rieff’s thought, the English historian Carl Trueman has written that “human flourishing is to be found primarily in an inner sense of well­being”, while individual authenticity is sought through the public expression of inward desires. State action is now permeated by this thinking, such is its ubiquity (as but one example of this ethos, see Justice Anthony Kennedy’s infamous “sweet mystery of life” statement in the 1992 US Supreme Court decision Casey v Planned Parenthood). 

What does this entail for the issues at hand? For one thing, it means the dissolution of universal human nature and the splintering of human ends. This inevitably encroaches upon the way we understand ourselves as embodied individuals: if there is no fact-of-the-matter about what the human person is, then the body becomes just one more blank canvas onto which the autonomous self is able to project his deepest urges in a largely aesthetic project. The primary boundaries on its use are those that coincide with the limits of one’s imagination. Having long penetrated the Western mind, this kind of thinking has come to new expression in the leading edge of the LGBTIQ movement.

A crucial phase in the winding intellectual journey Rieff charted came with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Standing at the intellectual headwaters of Romanticism, Rousseau esteemed an ethics grounded, not in natural ends, nor in divine commands, but in those deep-set attitudes residing within a person. As Trueman has recently argued in his survey of the roots of the modern sexual revolution, ethical action for Rousseau ultimately “arises out of psychological sentiment”. Morality, goodness, truth: these aren’t objective features of our world, but are largely conditioned by the inclinations of one’s inner life.

Of course, we shouldn’t imagine that pre-moderns were unaware of the world “inside”, nor its connection to the shaping of the human person. Writing his Confessions two centuries before the birth of Islam, St Augustine gave autobiographical expression to this idea with an extended meditation on the self, thereby playing a formative part in the developing concept of personal identity. With figures like Rousseau, however, the idea of the pristine self attained new importance in the constitution of personhood, now defined according to one’s psychological interior. He also imagined an almost adversarial relationship between that self and the world. Society and culture were no longer sources of identity; instead, they were re-cast as fundamentally oppressive forces, unjustly inhibiting the individual’s capacity for self-expression. Rousseau’s famous maxim—“man is born free, but everywhere is in chains”—captures the paradox: while human beings are pure by nature, they live in a world that has manacled them.

Authenticity, therefore, is found through emancipation from such restrictive norms so that the individual can truly flourish. As the English academic Peter Abbs once wrote, for Rousseau, the recovery of one’s true self meant escaping from the warping effects of convention and social life. Quite how free, morally unsullied individuals could create corrupt institutions that ensured their imprisonment is something that Rousseau never fully explained. But that did not prevent his model of the self from seeping into broader streams of thought, nor his belief that living authentically meant following one’s internal drives and desires.

Rousseau’s philosophy signalled something of a shift in the conception, not only of the self, but of the source of meaning, morality and the good. Where earlier ages might have sought to locate these things in an order beyond the individual, Rousseau initiated a decisive turn inward. External structures (physical or metaphysical) were rejected in favour of the supposedly pre-eminent value of one’s inner convictions. Current notions of personhood, especially as they pertain to matters of sex and identity, echo the Rousseauvian claim that the truth about oneself and one’s ultimate happiness is located within, apart from—and even in defiance of—any wider, pre-existing framework.

Rousseau’s inward turn and the newly-vaunted place of psychological-emotional conviction was matched by the philosophical erosion of any notion of a stable, transcendent human nature. Here, the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche was seminal. His conception of human essence as a largely mutable, plastic phenomenon has also contributed to modern liquid notions concerning personhood.

A recurring theme in Nietzsche’s writings is that of autopoiesis, or self-creation. In The Gay Science, for example, he comments: “We, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.” Humans (or at least those so capable) are engaged in a project of self-artistry, overcoming those forces that constrain the authentic expression of what one is supposed to be. To the extent that one can speak of goals, their delimitation remains a matter of individual judgment or proclivity. A human being becomes what he wills to become—a claim redolent of both psychological malleability and a deeply voluntarist approach to personal formation. On this view, human nature is neither fixed nor universal. Presaging intuitions now endemic to the modern West, Nietzsche conceived of the self in largely dynamic terms, subject to individual resolve and desires. While recognising the extent to which people have been conditioned by preceding causes and contexts, he didn’t resile from a commitment to autonomy in the service of self-creation.

Whatever their differences, the claims that Rousseau and Nietzsche advanced have played considerable roles in shaping the contemporary concept of the malleable self, especially as it evolved through the twentieth century. Consider modern consumerism, now a ubiquitous feature of the post-war West. At its core, the insatiable covetousness that marks a consumerist society represents the attempt, however inchoate, to apply a philosophy of human plasticity to ordinary life. By vaunting the egoistic individual, consumerism assumes that one can, almost without limit, manifest one’s inner desires, and unleash those impulses through the medium of material re-invention.

Modern consumerism is, of course, generously wreathed in sex, a reflection of the degree to which the modern self has been defined by eros. Following a somewhat Nietzschean line, Sigmund Freud and others took the insights of previous thinkers concerning personhood and the inner life, applying them to the erotic realm. Labouring especially during the first three decades of the twentieth century, Freud argued that a desire for pleasure (and by extension, longings associated with the body) was one of the basic drivers of human aspirations. The modern presumption that such concerns are fundamental to one’s identity, and that regulating them is cruel and unjust, finds nascent expression in Freudian thought.

This erotic project was eventually melded with a political one. Carlo Lancellotti has recently observed that the post-war sexual revolution was no spontaneous outpouring of pent-up passions; it was the product of a fundamental moral and ethical shift in the way the individual and his relationship to society were characterised. Echoing Rousseau and channelling Freud, figures like Wilhelm Reich argued that only when all forms of external “repression”—institutional, religious, cultural—were removed could the individual genuinely engage with his truest desires. Sexual and bodily happiness were seen as the natural extension—indeed, the apogee—of psychological fulfilment, at once an act of personal liberation and political emancipation.

Particularly in the work of left-wing critical theorists such as the German-American Herbert Marcuse—who, like Reich, drew inspiration from Freudian ideas—sexual-bodily freedom was crucial in the radical campaign aimed at subverting the political and cultural order. While Marcuse’s conception of the individual differed from Rousseau’s rather solipsistic version, the beliefs he championed have suffused all levels of modern Western culture. For Marcuse, dismantling traditional codes concerning sex, the body and human relationships was crucial for complete liberation. Maintenance of erotic inhibitions was part of a broader ideological framework; condemned as instruments of bourgeois hegemony, their dissipation could only hasten the advance of societal revolution.

Then there’s the current crop of queer theories, propounded by academics like Judith Butler. Such esoteric formulas have exceeded earlier phases of the LGBTIQ movement: following post-structuralists like Michel Foucault, Butler has called for the complete deconstruction of the sex binary, claiming that its passing is a necessary step in the liberationist project. The supposedly corporeal nature of biological sex is, according to her, no less socially constructed than public portrayals of gender, and what we naively call biological reality reflects a coercive and artificial regime designed to preserve the dominant group’s hold on power. Butler has forcefully asserted that the body is neither given nor limited; for her, apparently irreducible sexual differences—the product of a natural order that governs our lives as embodied beings—are cultural artifacts, subject to endless revision.

The significance of these arguments upon current debates is palpable. Take the fashionable idea of gender fluidity: a direct line of transmission can be traced between the assertion that a person may oscillate between feelings of masculinity and femininity—or neither—and the bizarre arcana promoted by Butler (bodily givenness be damned). Furthermore, the rapidly emerging belief that biological sex itself is a manufactured phenomenon—popularised, for example, in earnest claims about “assigned” sex, “identifying” in a certain fashion, or trans men “being men”—owes something to Butler’s notion of “performativity”. Behind this lies the idea that sex can be constructed through the allegedly reality-building capacity of language. In crucial instances, queer theorists have supplied a distinctive grammar that frames many of the ephemeral experiences people in the modern West have.

Still, it’s doubtful whether such recondite notions would have escaped the cloistered world of academia had they not emerged within a society already catechised by the very ideas I have described. The specific claim that sexual differences are imposed on the individual by society is an extension of previous ideas concerning the natural goodness—and therefore, legitimacy—of the inner life, and its frustration by allegedly oppressive external forces. And what of the rather Nietzschean devotion to self-artistry? A vulgarised version of autopoiesis has long been the de facto philosophy of the average Western citizen; ideas of sexual and bodily re-creation represent the apotheosis of this enterprise.

It’s also difficult not to notice the older, revolutionary note in Butler’s claims. Despite some important differences, it remains part of a wider constellation of liberationist ideas, bearing some affinity with the Marcusian intersection of individual repression and systemic coercion. Her model of sexual constructionism has arguably pushed such trends to their logical (and disturbing) conclusion, but the fact is that those cultural patterns arose well before she made her academic mark, weaving themselves into a kind of social imaginary that large swathes of people now accept as intuitively correct.

Moreover, Butler’s intellectual project, whatever its distinctive features, is reminiscent of what Rieff saw half a century ago: if there is no stable, universal human nature that might impose (natural) limits on individual expression, then the untethered self is free to pursue his own bespoke version of authenticity and fulfilment. Even the sexed body is reduced to another piece of manipulable matter, entirely subject to a person’s often-transient interpretations. As the US philosopher R.J. Snell has recently contended, the ideas propounded by theorists like Butler simply form the capstone to an edifice whose construction began long ago.

And so, we come to the present crisis—a period of sexual dissolution, rampant gender fluidity and multiplying pronouns. While its immediate origins are relatively recent, its intellectual roots go very deep. Indeed, the assumptions underlying today’s confusions have colonised the way many people today think about the individual, his nature and his highest aspirations, even if they hesitate to take those final steps. This is something Rieff foresaw when he argued that psychological fulfilment was now the organising principle of modern culture. True, most people haven’t heard of thinkers like Rousseau or Marcuse, much less read them. But that hasn’t stopped their ideas from insinuating themselves into the public’s consciousness, through the medium of elite advocacy, or the culture-making power of consumerism and technological change. The unmooring of self from body—of the individual will from the givenness of corporeal existence—is but the most startling reflection of that process. 

Mounting a counter-shift under this regime seems unlikely in the short term. While the wider transgender movement is a morass of internal contradictions, efforts to expose its intellectual weaknesses have proved impotent, especially in an age that esteems emotivism over rational discourse and condemns disagreement as a form of grievous harm. Still, there is value in recounting the genealogy of pernicious ideas. For some time now, we have been told repeatedly that only the irrational or the prejudiced could doubt even the most exotic expressions of transgenderism. But those manifestations ultimately rest on a foundation of highly contestable claims. Armed with this realisation, even the lone dissenter may be able to mount a resistance, confident that what others solemnly call “authenticity” is actually an artifact of a particular ideological history. Given the present climate of hostility, intellectual survival is no small accomplishment.

Scott Buchanan has a website at https://scottlbuchanan.wordpress.com