The purpose of this essay is to propose an alternative to what I call the standard framework for thinking and speaking about transgender issues and for waging our political and legal battles with the Sexual Orientation Gender Identity movement (SOGI) more generally. In the standard framework, SOGI issues appear in two main guises. On the one hand, they present themselves as a contest of freedom and rights, whether a negative freedom for self-definition or a positive entitlement to recognition and social benefits, in tension with the rights claims of parents, religious groups, employers, and other societal interests. On the other hand, they appear in a clinical, therapeutic, or pastoral guise, that is, under the rubric of personal and public health.[1]
Superficially, the civil rights and public health faces of SOGI may appear as a pair of Janus faces juxtaposed to one another, but they are in fact mutually reinforcing in ways that should be become clearer as we proceed.
I should acknowledge at the outset that acceptance of this standard framework is often the price of admission to what’s left of the public square and that the necessity of winning particular legal and political battles often compels defenders of the reality of nature to argue within its parameters. Nevertheless, I do not think that accepting its terms will enable us to win the War for Reality or to see the full extent of what it would mean if we were to lose it; nor do I think necessity should prevent us from understanding what we’re up against or calling things by their proper names whenever we can. I should also say that I don’t think that I am breaking any new ground here. I see myself as doing little more than drawing out the implications of what many others have said. But since it is the most obvious things that are often hardest to see, I think they are worth saying anyway.
“Sex” and “gender” are not facts of nature just lying there waiting to be discovered by the neutral rationality of science. And the distinction between a merely biological “sex” and a social or psychological “gender” is not a scientific distinction. It is not the discovery of detached empirical observation or the result of experimental testing but is an a priori interpretive lens for processing empirical and experimental data whose conceptual origins lie elsewhere.[2] It is not science, therefore, when a physician from the Mayo Clinic’s Transgender and Intersex Specialty Care Clinic says on the clinic’s website: “Some people erroneously think transgender patients make a choice to change their gender. Rather, it’s about confirming their identity and wanting to live authentically. Being transgender indicates diversity, not pathology.” Identity, authenticity, and diversity, suffice to say, are not empirical data or the findings of a double-blind experiment. When a professional scientific organization such as the Endocrine Society asserts in its 2021 report that “sex is a biological concept” while “gender includes the perception of the individual as male, female, or other, both by the individual and by society,” when it defines “gender identity” as “a psychological concept that refers to an individual’s self-perception,” and when it adopts the “gender assignment” or “cisgender” nomenclature as if these were self-evident facts of nature, it abuses the immense authority that our society confers upon science and conceals what it is in fact doing when it makes such statements, which is articulating a philosophy with a dubious historical and intellectual patrimony.[3]
In other words, the distinction between sex and gender, both in its historical origins and in its essence, is an irreducibly philosophical distinction. While it is crucial that we recognize this, it is not enough. Rather, if we want to see what this distinction really means and how it functions, we must ask what kind of philosophy it is. My colleagues and I at the John Paul II Institute have spent years arguing that SOGI presupposes, advances, and enforces a reductive, bi-furcated, and ultimately posthuman theory of human nature and that controversies over restrooms, women’s sports, so-called “gender affirming care,” and parental rights are really proxy arguments about whether men and women are real and whether this post- and ultimately sub-human vision of human nature is going to be imposed as the official philosophy of the United States by force of law, now reduced to a blunt ideological instrument in a low grade civil war and by forces deeper, more extensive, and more powerful than law even in this degraded sense. This diagnosis remains inevitably and unavoidably true, because in the order of reality, which is an order of ontological and logical necessity, metaphysics and natural philosophy are first philosophy. It is not possible to expunge philosophical assumptions and judgments from science or even to bracket them out so that they cease to be operational because such judgments are simply not optional, though it is not only possible but indeed quite common to be deceived about that and naively imagine that “science” and the objective pursuit of scientific “truth” free us from this necessity.[4] Turns out it is also politically quite useful.
However this may be in the order of reality, in the order of intention, things are different. As others have shown, the sex-gender distinction is the bastard offspring of feminist theory and the mid-twentieth-century biomedical atrocities of John Money, who himself belonged to a strain in the history of experimental medicine that can be traced back to Weimar Germany.[5]
This is not an unnatural liaison. Both are essentially revolutionary forms of thought which perpetually seek to overcome the constraints of givenness, which is why “scientific revolution” is not a one-time historical event in the seventeenth century but our permanent modus vivendi. Feminism undertakes this revolution in the name of liberation, science in the name of “truth,” by which it really means what is “possible” or “successful.”
This is why naïve appeals to the authority of “science,” while perhaps tactically useful, are ultimately self-defeating despite the welcome evidence that this vast, unaccountable science experiment performed on the world’s children is a failure measured by the sociological and psychological outcomes originally used to justify it. “Science” is not a brake upon our descent into unreality, but its engine. From the scientific and biotechnical point of view, “nature” is simply whatever happens or can be made to happen. It measures truth, what things are, by our power, what we can do. “Nature” viewed scientifically provides no inherent limit to biotechnical power except the limit of possibility, which can only be discovered in the process of attempting to violate it. (Creating transgender mice, e.g.) There is no way from within this form of reason and its corresponding vision of nature even to pose the unavoidable question of what things are or what they might mean; nor does it offer any reason to think that they might be or mean much of anything. This is also why feminist thought from Margaret Sanger to Shulamith Firestone and from Donna Haraway to Judith Butler has depended on the “utopian” possibilities of biotechnology for its project of freeing women from the “oppressive” constraints imposed on them by society and their own bodies. The revolutionary possibilities of gender theory and the revolutionary possibilities of biotechnology are made for each other; indeed, they are made by each other, a fact to which I’ll return.
The point at present is simply that while the sex-gender distinction harbors a world of ontological assumptions and implications that it perpetuates and enforces, it is not the product of a speculative
philosophy intent on understanding “the truth of human nature,”
categories which are in fact abjured by advanced gender theory. Rather, it is the product of a political philosophy and a technical form of thinking for which “understanding” is unnecessary and even discredited. For those of an Aristotelian or scholastic bent, you might say that while a genuinely speculative anthropology that sought to understand the truth of the human being would be per se ontological and political per accidens, gender theory is per se political and ontological per accidens. The distinction between biological sex as a meaningless mechanical substrate and gender identity as something other than and thus already opposed to sex (which are both abstractions from the living whole whose actual, undivided existence is at once natural, historical, cultural, and free) was in its very conception a political instrument, or to be still more precise, an anti-political
instrument in the revolutionary project of liberation from social, political, and biological constraint. Of course I am speaking objectively, at the level of origin and essence, not imputing insincerity or ulterior motives to all those who identify as trans. No doubt there are many people who are both sincere and confused. But in the real (as opposed to the imagined order), the transgender rights movement is not a politics undertaken on behalf of a new kind of human being, real or fictitious. Transgender identity is the invention of a new kind of human being on behalf of a revolutionary politics. Gender theory, it turns out, is not theory—theoria—at all. If I may borrow from Karl Marx, the point of gender theory, its very essence and raison d’être, is not to comprehend human nature but to change it, and thereby to change our social and political reality. But if the point is only to change human nature and not comprehend it, then gender theory and its stock concepts need only be functional, effective at producing the desired result. They need not, indeed better
not, be true.
Gender ideology… is antithetical to the idea of reason itself and to the common experience of a common world lying behind it. What is left is a world where “everything is possible and nothing is true,” which profoundly perverts the very nature of language and ideas. … Change the language, you change the reality. Gain control of the language, and you control reality.
The distinction between sex and gender, then, is not only irreducibly philosophical, but irreducibly political
and—not to put too fine a point on it—ideological. By ideology I mean something fairly precise and technical, not the colloquial meaning that identifies ideology with any philosophy whatsoever, or with a theory lacking the imprimatur of scientific authority, or as a synonym for “ideas I don’t like.” This first sense denies the very possibility of philosophical truth (by which I simply mean truth as something other than logical coherence, the sum of historical and social conditions, or mathematical and experimental function). The second rests on the naïve understanding of science just criticized, which is essential to the establishment of gender ideology as a ruling regime. And the third is stupid. Rather, in speaking of gender ideology I mean something akin to what Marx meant in describing it as a cognitive superstructure generated by underlying material conditions. An ideology is an essentially instrumental form of thought whose true nature and function are other than what they appear and profess themselves to be. Ideology in this sense is inherently deceptive and often most deceptive to its sincerest adherents. In this case, what presents itself as a “fact of nature” and thus, by turns, as a matter of civil rights and public health—and at a deeper level, a discourse of truth, of what is—is really the instrumental concept of a scientific and political revolution fundamentally at odds with the democratic republic we imagine ourselves to be. Whether this outcome is in fact at odds with the ideals of liberal democracy or the logical outworking of its deepest presuppositions—or somehow both at once—is a question for another day. (Though the answer is “yes.”)
However, if this is true, then the true meaning of the “transgender moment” which may or may not be passing cannot be apprehended within the framework of civil rights thinking. Neither can it be apprehended by medicine, and it should not be entrusted to the authority of endocrinologists and clinical psychologists, much less their professional associations who are late comers to this game. A historical survey of the DSM confirms this. Mayo’s Transgender and Intersex Specialty Care Clinic, which pronounces with such authority on the science of identity, authenticity, and diversity, did not even exist until 2015, until after—a cynic might think—Obergefell
had established a stable market for it.[6] The ever-growing medicalization of all human phenomena legitimates the subsumption of every facet of life under the rubric of public health and insinuates the state and its proxies into the heart of all human relationships. It invokes the authority of science to enforce a false empathy devoid of understanding to forestall any serious questioning and to justify anonymous and unaccountable exercises of political power. We should be deeply wary of this. It’s not as if we don’t have ample historical precedent for what happens when state power is fused with ideologized science and medicine. I continue to be amazed at how little the atrocities of the last century, when the international eugenics movement represented scientific consensus, factor into our present reflections. We can be grateful to Covid for bringing the contemporary form of this machinery more clearly into the light.
Rather, the meaning of the “transgender moment” is principally a question of political and social philosophy. Specifically, confrontation with a mass psychosis as sudden and swift as we’ve experienced over the past decade presents the sort of question taken up by Hannah Arendt and theorists of the 1950s when confronted with the fact that the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 40s had depended upon mass support. Incidentally, this ought to be a caution against thinking that democracy and totalitarianism are opposites. What were the social and political conditions, to say nothing of the metaphysical and spiritual conditions, that could induce large masses of people to embrace the psychotic unreality of National Socialism? How could something so fantastic have ever happened? And on such a scale? One need not indulge in a mindless reductio ad hitlerum conflating SOGI and Nazism to see that the question—and at a formal level, the comparison—is apt.
Totalitarianism, according to Arendt, is a thoroughly modern phenomenon, dependent upon the modern machinery, the industrial, medical, and communication technology necessary to subordinate the totality of meaning to political control. There has been tyranny from time immemorial, but there simply could be no such thing as totalitarianism prior to the 20th century because its scientific, technological, and economic preconditions were not yet present. Totalitarianism is discontinuous with and unanticipated by classical political theory, because totalitarianism itself is not a proper political
form but something else, consequent upon the destruction of political community and the sorts of human experiences that are its prerequisite. And its novelty cannot be comprehended within normal categories of political thought, ancient or modern. Totalitarianism is not oligarchy, democracy, or tyranny. It is not nationalism. It is not authoritarianism. It is not even fascism. It is not the absolute rule of party or state.
Totalitarianism rests upon what Arendt calls a “contempt for reality.” (Augusto Del Noce calls it “a rebellion against being.”[7]) Masses who embrace totalitarianism, she says, “do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience. They do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations…What convinces masses are not facts,” Arendt writes, “and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”[8]
Totalitarianism is thus “an escape from reality into fiction,” or more precisely, a fictional system whose full arrival is perpetually postponed to some indefinite distant future, a possible world rather than the actual one.[9] Totalitarianism is not identical to party or state but is, above all, a movement that identifies itself with the movement and meaning of history itself, a closed system of thought from which it deduces the meaning of everything, in the service of which party, nation, law, state, even oneself and the movement’s own ideological contents are mere instruments, and for the sake of which all of these can be willingly negated, sacrificed, and destroyed.[10] “Perhaps the most disturbing factor in the success of totalitarianism,” says Arendt, “is the true selflessness of its adherent…” that he is unlikely “to waver when the monster begins to devour its own children and not even if he becomes a victim of persecution himself…To the wonder of the whole world, he may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is untouched.”[11] If we remember that gender theory is a revolutionary political philosophy before it is anything else, and that the prevailing concept of gender is an essentially functional or instrumental concept in service of the revolution that gives history its meaning, then the astonishing indifference of WPATH, transgender activists, and transgender medicine itself to the actual health of the people who identify as transgender, its willing negation of even its own ideological content, begins to make sense. If transgender health must be sacrificed on the altar of the revolution, if transgenderism must commit matricide against the feminism that gave it birth, if the T in the LGTBQ+ movement must logically annihilate the L and the G, then so be it. The crucial thing is that the given constraints of the present—natural, social, moral, and political—are perpetually surpassed and the revolution continues on.
Totalitarianism lays claim to the totality of meaning, the meaning of nature and the meaning of history. Or rather, it identifies the meaning of nature with the progressive movement of history. This is one reason why totalitarian regimes are so deeply and sometimes quite brutally and bizarrely invested in experimental science. For its rule to be total, it must govern us internally as well as externally, our thoughts and speech as well as our action. For the former, it is necessary to seize control of education and even the language as components of an endless feedback loop of propaganda. For the latter, it must terrorize the population into conformity with the possibility that its omnipresent power might descend upon anyone at any time. But in neither event is totalitarianism compatible with the shared reality disclosed through our common, pre-ideological language, or the common world and common non-political bonds that are the presupposition of properly political community. And since totalitarianism depends on mass support, it can only take root where the grip on these common things has been lost and where a profoundly isolated and alienated people, having lost faith in the underlying mythos and principles of their civilization, sense that “everything is possible and that nothing is true.”[12] In other words, among what theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century called mass humanity. “Mass propaganda,” Arendt explains, “discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”[13] She goes on to describe how, under conditions of such social disintegration, people will embrace a lie not in spite but because of its untruth, because all the old pieties have shown themselves to be false, and the idea of truth itself has been discredited.
The challenge for those who still believe in truth and philosophy is enormous. It is of course impossible to argue with opponents whose argumentative first principles are incommensurable, but the difference, in this case, runs even deeper than that. The disagreement is not just about argumentative first principles, but about the very nature of reason and truth—where these really exist—and thus about what it means to argue. It is difficult to defeat an opponent on grounds that his theory is false when its very untruth—or its position outside the binary of true and false—is the very ground of its appeal.
The non-identity of the totalitarian movement with the nation and the state becomes visible when the symbols of the movement—the swastika, the hammer and sickle, (the rainbow flag?)—begin to appear alongside or even to supplant traditional national insignia and when what you might call the civic liturgy of the nation, which was traditionally tied to the liturgical calendar of the Church, is replaced by the sacral festivals of the movement: the Nuremburg Rallies and Heroes’ Memorial Day in Germany, October Revolution and International Workers Days in the Soviet Union, and, perhaps, Pride Month and Transgender Visibility Day, formerly known as Easter Sunday. And this non-identity of movement and nation becomes operational through the inevitable distinction between real and ostensible or invisible and visible government, which Arendt describes as a kind of “planned shapelessness.”[14] She notes that Hitler never bothered revoking the Weimar Constitution or abolishing its nominally democratic institutions. He simply disregarded them, ruling with “the force produced through organization” outside these structures.[15] The subsequent multiplication of offices functioned, on the one hand, to make the actual seat of power something of a mystery—one was never quite sure whom to obey—and at the same time to make its felt presence immediate, conveying the sense “that the will of the Fuehrer can be embodied everywhere and at all times.”[16]
Writing in 1950 in the immediate aftermath of the war and naturally focusing on Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia as the only two fully realized instances of totalitarianism yet to have appeared on the earth, Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism seems to think that death camps and Das Führerprinzip were essential features of totalitarianism. By the time The Human Condition was published in 1957, she seems willing to consider an evolution of sorts in which the last stage of government in the nation state would conclude not in the rule of one, but in the rule of nobody, that “what we traditionally call state and government” would give way to “pure administration.”[17] Such an evolution of “organization,” may or may not require the death machinery of earlier stages of development. However, while perhaps less reliant on brutality and terror for its efficacy, it would be no less absolutist and might well be total, more adept at ruling us from within as well as without, for being impersonal.
My thesis, if it is not already clear, is that totalitarianism is not an accidental by-product of SOGI ideology. If it were, then the enforcement mechanisms of our cultural revolution would not be systematic, but merely an ad hoc collection of isolated excesses that might yet be tamed with a good dose of liberal tolerance and a redoubled emphasis on free speech. In other words, we might view SOGI ideology through the lens of classical liberalism as one of the many opinions that can be accommodated within a pluralist society, which is of course how it is tacitly framed in its “civil rights” guise. But this is an illusion. The problem with our recent censorship regime is not that it abolished free speech—it has always been possible to say all manner of outlandish things—but that it abolished the truth. It abolished the truth because the truth cannot coexist alongside SOGI ideology. And the truth cannot exist alongside SOGI ideology because this ideology is inherently and essentially totalitarian, asserting political control over the meaning of nature and history (as a history of perpetual revolution or progressive liberation). The adoption and enforcement of this ideology as America’s official theory of human nature thus marks a pivotal moment in a long process of America’s transformation from a liberal democracy into an absolutist but post-political form of rule, the rule of nobody that I call “biotechnocracy.” Let me try to sketch out this argument in a few points. I trust the affinities with Arendt’s analysis, beyond those I’ve already sketched, will be obvious.
Gender ideology, as we have seen, is essentially an anti-political political phenomenon. Revolutionary, in other words. But it is also a biopolitical phenomenon to borrow Michel Foucault’s phrase, determining through the fusion of political and scientific power the meaning of nature, life, and history in at least three inter-related senses.[18] It is biopolitical in origin, both in the sense that its paternity lies in the history of experimental medicine, but more fundamentally, because biotechnology supplies its condition of theoretical and practical possibility. We could never imagine that a man might really be a woman if we did not also imagine we could transform him into one through gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy. It is biotechnical in essence because it presupposes the bifurcated conception of the person and the reductive and mechanistic conception of the body that I alluded to earlier. And, most importantly for my present purposes, it is biopolitical in its practical and political implication in the two-fold sense that realization of this brave new world as a human norm requires, as a matter of personal and public health, the fusion of state power and what Rachel Levine called “the complex and nuanced field of transgender medicine,” and, conversely, because organized medicine, professional associations, and public health bureaucracies become the organs of the invisible government through which the rule of nobody diffuses its sovereignty.
The public health regime is only one aspect of this invisible government, however. As we have suggested, gender theory as a totalitarian ideology imposes on the totality of meaning not only a fictitious reality, but a closed system of thought. Ask Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson or Secretary Levine what a woman is and you will find that you have pushed the play button on an endless loop of ideological Muzak impervious to criticism or questioning, whose first principles are never allowed to emerge into the light of day. What matters is the inner consistency of the system, even or perhaps especially if it is absurd. Incidentally, if there is a legitimate role for some branch of psychology, it would seem to be here, at the nodal points of politics and psychosis, where people find themselves trapped inside the closed loop of this fictional world. Again, there is ample evidence in modern history and on TikTok to suggest that politics and psychosis are not strangers to one another.
The concept of gender identity performs this same function. The only criterion for the “truth” of gender identity is authenticity—that is why it is identity—fidelity to one’s own inner feeling which is entirely self-referential. It can thus be neither true nor false or something one could ever be “wrong” about, which is also why it is incoherent. “I was assigned a male gender at birth because of my anatomy, but I identify as a woman because I feel like a woman.” All this can really mean is “I feel like I feel what a woman must feel like.” It’s turtles all the way down. Because “authenticity” has no criterion of verification outside itself and cannot be rationally adjudicated, assertions of identity act as “conversation stoppers.” They mark the point beyond which it is impossible to reason or speak, beyond which questioning itself becomes an act of violence. One is sometimes tempted to think, amidst the revolution’s interminable assault on the moving target of language, that the trans movement will not be satisfied until we are all reduced to an inarticulate grunting. But it turns out that even silence is violence. Only recognition suffices, and only then, in the precise terms that are permitted in the moment. Arendt observes that in Stalin’s Russia, “the most perfect education in Marxism and Leninism was no guide whatsoever for political behavior. One could follow the party line only if one repeated each morning what Stalin had announced the night before.”[19] We will have to read the paper to see what forms of recognition are permitted tomorrow.
Gender ideology thus amounts to a renunciation of our common reason; indeed, it is antithetical to the idea of reason itself and to the common experience of a common world lying behind it. What is left is a world where “everything is possible and nothing is true,” which profoundly perverts the very nature of language and ideas. Ideas are no longer ordered to understanding, but to their political function. The language which is our common possession no longer seems to disclose this common reality, for there is no longer a common reality to disclose. Language is instead treated as an instrument for creating reality and, thus, an instrument of the will to power, though the true nature of language as the medium of truth is inadvertently affirmed even in the attempt to deny it.[20] Change the language, you change the reality. Gain control of the language, and you control reality.
This is what the pronoun war is really all about. The contested pronouns are not the reflexive first-person pronoun (I), which is used for self-reference, nor the second-person pronoun (you), which is a form of address. The battle is over third-person pronouns (he, she, it), which denote the place of human beings within the shared world of things. The attempt to control third person pronouns is not an attempt to control how people are spoken to, but how they are spoken and thought about in and amongst this world of things. This once-common world is destroyed in speech and recreated as a private possession. But because we are not really identitarian atoms, and because language is itself is public by nature, it is impossible to redefine human nature for just one person. If any
of us is merely the combination of a meaningless material substrate and a psychological and social gender identity, then all of us are. This is why I often say that we are all transgender now, even if our sex and gender happen to align. And we have discovered in real time that this transgender conception of human nature, and the redefinition of something as fundamental as man and woman, mother and father, means the destruction and re-creation of everything else that is premised upon this primordial reality: not just language, but familial relations, education, morality, history, law, and medicine.
Fulfilling this extraordinary demand requires extraordinary power, not only the power of biotechnology to re-engineer our physical nature, but a veritable reality machine with the power both to create this brave new world in speech and to impose and enforce it in the external world of bodies and things. We cannot answer the question previously posed, how an ideology so revolutionary and so fantastic could have triumphed so suddenly—at digital rather than analog speed, one is inclined to say—without comprehending the nature of this machine and the new forms of power it represents which operate both internally and externally in ways that we have not yet fully comprehended. I am speaking at least in part about the digital revolution, without which the lightspeed victory of the transgender revolution would have been unthinkable. Tendentious objections to the characterization of so-called rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), on grounds that there do not exist sufficient studies to consider ROGD a clinical diagnosis, miss altogether the level at which this new form of power is operative in reshaping our subjectivity, a phenomenon analyzed in its proper philosophical (rather than superficial and clinical) depth by Antón Barba-Kay.[21] It is not just that the virtual world social media creates is a space in which alienated adolescents can be embraced by virtual communities affirming them in their non-conforming identities, though this may well be an empirical factor in the explosion of transgender identities among young people. It is rather that our new virtual reality is an un-carnate, dematerialized reality, indifferent to the friction of time, space, and the body, which reforms all of our “identities” in immaterial terms.[22] The connections between the un-carnate reality of this new “digital gnosticism” and the widespread adoption of a dematerialized conception of identity have yet to be explored in the necessary depth, but their coincidence and the astonishing speed of their mutual triumph cannot be fortuitous.
This new immaterial reality is not without material effect. These new forms of power have engendered capacities for surveillance and mass manipulation that would have been the envy of twentieth-century totalitarians. You don’t need a Stasi when you have smartphones and the mutual surveillance of all against all. “Rule by internet” may be the most perfect realization to date of the ambitions of Hobbes’ Leviathan
to erect a common power which, in the absence of a common good
and a common world, rules by keeping us in awe. The digital Leviathan rules, or rather, compels us to rule ourselves by inducing what Shoshana Zuboff calls “anticipatory conformity” over the mere possibility that the furies might descend to destroy, deplatform, and de-person anyone, anywhere, anytime, for any act of wrongthink.[23] “Rule by internet”—the rule of everybody and nobody at once—is certainly shapeless, and therefore capable of exerting great political power without identifiable political agency or responsibility. But it is not exactly unplanned.
Amused by the dustup over Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, I recently became acquainted with the Associated Press Stylebook which, if I even knew it existed, I had never paid any mind to. I have since become enthralled with it—or at least as enthralled as one can be without paying $34.95 for a subscription. It reads (and operates) like an owner’s manual or a user’s guide for the reality machine. It instructs the reporters of its 235 news bureaus, whose stories are published by over 1,300 newspapers and broadcasters in 94 countries and are immediately available to the world, as well as the many other publications that look to the Stylebook as the journalistic gold standard “not to use the term “transgenderism,” which “frames transgender as an ideology.” The Stylebook matter-of-factly states that “gender refers to internal or social identity and often corresponds but is not synonymous with sex,” which “refers to biological characteristics such as chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive anatomy, which can also vary or change in understanding over time or be medically and legally altered.” It therefore concludes that a child is not “born a boy or a girl” but that sex “is usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate.” It declares that “a person who is assigned female at birth and transitions to align with their identity as a boy or man is a transgender boy or transgender man, and a person who is assigned male at birth and transitions to align with their identity as a girl or a woman is a transgender girl or woman.” It establishes predictable standards for the use of gender-specific pronouns and lists examples of gender identities including “nonbinary; bigender; agender; gender-fluid; genderqueer,” and so on, and instructs its reporters against “deadnaming,” even if you’re dead. All of this it does on the authority of organized “science.” “Experts from organizations including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and American Psychological Association say “gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only males and females.” And it directs its reporters not to “quote people speaking about biology or athletic regulations unless they have the proper background.” And here I’ve been wondering why the AP hasn’t called.
The power to determine what people think about and the language through which they think it is extraordinary, far more potent, and much deeper and more extensive in its governance, than even the power of law. The power to determine what people do not think about, what is never permitted to enter their mind, what they never even miss, is more extraordinary still. Earlier I characterized totalitarianism as the subordination of the totality of meaning—the meaning of nature and the meaning of history—to political control, and for this reason I said that it must govern us internally as well as externally. There is no totalitarianism so total as the power to make thoughtlessness compulsory. At the surface level, I have proposed as an alternative to the standard framework of civil rights and public health that we think of transgenderism as a totalitarian political ideology, but the deeper proposal is that we cease to think of transgender theory as theory at all. It is only a discourse of truth per accidens, that is, insofar as truth claims are ontologically impossible to avoid. Per se, it is an instrument of power, a weapon, in an unending War on Reality. We cannot hope to survive this war, much less to win it, unless we see it for what it is. This calls for thinking and understanding. For it is only by thinking and understanding that the reality machine can be broken.
[1] This is ironic, needless to say, considering that “gender affirming care” proceeds by harmfully inflicting systemic change on otherwise healthy bodies.
[2] On the philosophical origins of the sex-gender distinction, see Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2022).
[3] Aditi Bhargava, Arthur P. Arnold, et al, “Considering Sex as a Biological Variable in Basic
and Clinical Studies: An Endocrine Society Scientific Statement,” Endocrine Reviews, vol. 42, no. 3 (2021), 221–26.
[4] See Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[5] See Favale, The Genesis of Gender, 85–105, 145–50; Margaret H. McCarthy, “The Emperor’s (New) New Clothes: The Logic of the New Gender Ideology,” Communio: International Catholic Review 46 (Fall 2019), 620–59.
[6] The sudden appearance, seemingly out of nowhere, of so-called “gender affirming medicine” fulfills a prophetic observation frequently made by Leon Kass long before this branch of medicine was imaginable, namely, that without a philosophically adequate conception of wholeness, which is the unspoken basis of our medical and biological standards of health, the awesome technical powers of medicine can (and will?) be harnessed to any end whatsoever. See Kass, Toward a More Natural Science (New York: Free Press, 2008), 157–248.
[7] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968), xxxii. Augusto Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014), 34.
[8] Ibid., 351.
[9] Ibid., 352.
[10] “The difference between the elite and the mob notwithstanding, there is no doubt that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frightened respectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it” (ibid., 332).
[11] Ibid., 307. Such spectacles of self-accusation have become common in our own time, as people routinely broadcast to the world groveling confessions of their various forms of “privilege” in a futile attempt to atone for the sin of being and having been and in the hope of placing themselves on the right side of history.
[12] Ibid., 382.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., 402. On the important distinction between ostensible and real government, see 397–98.
[15] Ibid., 418.
[16] Ibid., 405.
[17] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 45.
[18] See Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 135–59. Giorgio Agamben defines Foucault’s biopolitics as “the growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the calculations of modern power.” Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1998), 119.
[19] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 324.
[20] In other words, the attempt to escape reality is destined to fail. Truth and goodness are affirmed as a matter of ontological necessity in the very act of speaking despite the attempt to deny their reality; “If only our opponent will only say something,” said Aristotle, he will inadvertently demonstrate the impossibility of really disbelieving in truth and goodness. For if there were no truth, or, what amounts to the same thing, if “all are alike both wrong and right, one who is in this condition will not be able either to speak or to say anything intelligible; for he says at the same time both ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ And if he makes no judgment but ‘thinks’ and ‘does not think, indifferently,’ what difference will there be between him and a vegetable? For why does a man walk to Megara and not stay at home, when he thinks he ought to be walking there? Why does he not walk early some morning into a well or over a precipice, if one happens to be in his way? Why do we observe him guarding against this, evidently because he does not think that falling in is alike good and not good? Evidently, then, he judges one thing to be better and another worse. And if this is so, he must also judge one thing to be a man and another to be not-a-man, one thing to be sweet and another to be not-sweet. For he does not aim at and judge all things alike, when, thinking it desirable to drink water or to see a man, he proceeds to aim at these things; yet he ought, if the same thing were alike a man and not-a-man…Therefore, as it seems, all men make unqualified judgements, if not about all things, still about what is better and worse”(Aristotle, Metaphysics
IV.4, 1006a13, 1008b5-27).
[21] A 2023 article in The Scientific American is a perfect object lesson in how the reality machine comprised of digital media and public health experts create and enforce this alternate, biotechnocratic reality. Calling on the authority of the now-discredited World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to dismiss the phenomenon of ROGD on grounds that it lacks the support of clinical studies, the article asserts without thought or argument that “[m]any transgender people experience gender dysphoria, meaning that the gender that was assigned to them at birth and their gender identity don’t align, causing distress” (O. Rose Broderick, “Evidence Undermines ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ Claims,” Scientific American [August 24, 2023]),
[22] See Antón Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 49–56. Incidentally, for reasons not unlike those I’ve offered here and elsewhere, Barba-Kay concurs that this new “virtual” social reality is “at an unprecedented odds with the conditions of political life as such” (131). Barba-Kay considers this emerging “post-political” reality from the perspective of digital formation and does not consider the fusion of the digital and the biotechnical. For more on the latter see Michael Hanby, “Homo Biotechnicus,” The Lamp Magazine (August 2, 2024); and “Resist the Conception Machine,” First Things
(December 1, 2024).
[23] Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015), 82.
