Transgender ideology, by Robert Jensen

Part 4 of the series, Not just an ally: Radical feminism for men

When I was invited to write a chapter on men in feminism for a scholarly book, I told the editors that I would have to include discussion of my writing on the radical feminist critiques of pornography and transgender ideology, which are controversial subjects in academic feminism. They assured me that wouldn’t be a problem, but I submitted a draft early because I’ve had editors reject such writing at the last minute. Their response did not surprise me: “The editorial team has met and decided the article does not fit with our mission for the book.”

I’m grateful to Julie Bindel for offering to run the essay on her Substack in installments, starting with an introduction to the challenges for men in feminism. The second part makes a case for radical feminism and analyzes masculinity-in-patriarchy. Part 3 deals with pornography, and Part 4, published here, analyzes transgender ideology. The final installment argues for feminism from men’s self-interest and reflects on dilemmas for men in feminist projects.

Readers of this Substack will recognize some of these ideas from articles of mine that Julie has published over the past few years or from my books Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (2007) and The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (2017).

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Transgender ideology

Like the “sex wars” over prostitution and pornography, the transgender debate has put radical feminists in conflict with many liberal and postmodern feminists. After avoiding the subject for too long, I began writing in 2014, for two reasons. First, the expanding public conversation largely ignored or marginalized a critical feminist perspective, which was clear to me when a newsmagazine ran a cover story on transgenderism as “America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier.” Second, radical feminist friends asked why I stayed on the sidelines when so many women were being attacked for challenging trans ideology.

Because the issue was so emotionally charged, I tried to present a clear, step-by-step analysis in non-inflammatory language. But in that first 2014 essay, my conclusion was clearly stated:

Transgenderism is a liberal, individualist, medicalized response to the problem of patriarchy’s rigid, repressive, and reactionary gender norms. Radical feminism is a radical, structural, politicized response. On the surface, transgenderism may seem to be a more revolutionary approach, but radical feminism offers a deeper critique of the domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of patriarchy and a more promising path to liberation.

A few weeks later, I met with a friend who was a university diversity coordinator and had participated in movements for racial, economic, and gender justice. A local activist bookstore, which I had long supported, had just denounced me in an email blast and announced it would no longer sell my books. Near the end of lunch, my friend hesitantly brought up the controversy, leaning forward to say, quietly, “I don’t dare say this in public, but I agree with you.”

It was reassuring to know she shared my analysis but disheartening that a left/liberal orthodoxy on trans issues silenced people. That was the first time, but certainly not the last, that colleagues and friends confided in me, privately, that they either disagreed with or couldn’t understand the trans analysis.

A few months later, a comrade from a progressive group asked why I was challenging trans activists, whom he saw as political allies. I outlined what is now called the “gender critical” feminist argument, and he said he found little to disagree with. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I don’t really understand a lot of what the trans movement is saying.” I asked him if there were any other issues on which he couldn’t understand a movement’s arguments but still supported its policy proposals. That ended the conversation. Because so many people in local left organizations were denouncing me, I knew he wasn’t going to ask trans activists for a clearer articulation of their arguments, let alone support me.

The reactions to my writing became increasingly more intense. At a few public talks, trans activists tried to shout me down. Several invitations I had received to speak were rescinded after organizers got complaints, even though those events weren’t about the trans issue. Many colleagues kept their distance from me, some even refusing to respond to calls or emails about ongoing projects. Even when I was working behind the scenes, people withdrew from events out of concern for the backlash if members of their group knew I was involved.

Why the dogmatic responses? In a dozen articles and chapters in two books, I have made what I think are clear arguments. Instead of pointing out factual errors or unsound reasoning, critics accuse me of being bigoted or hateful. I’ll summarize the arguments in those book chapters, and readers can judge whether I deserve condemnation.

In my 2017 book, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men, the chapter “Transgenderism: Biology, Politics, Ecology” presented a question, a challenge, and a concern.

The Question: If the claim of people who identify as trans is that they were born into one biological sex category, such as male, but actually are female, what does that mean? Is it a claim that reproduction-based sex categories are an illusion? That one can have a female brain (whatever that means) in a body with male genitalia? That there is a non-material soul that can be of one sex but in the body of the other sex? I struggle to understand, and to date I am aware of no coherent theory to explain it. Claims about sex being a “spectrum” or “multimodal” obfuscate that sex is a binary based on gamete size (sperm from males, eggs from females). The small percentage of people born intersex—now sometimes called differences (or disorders) of (or in) sexual development—raise issues different from the trans movement.

The Challenge: If the claim of people who identify as trans is that they were socialized into one gender category, such as man/masculinity, but feel constrained by the category or feel more comfortable in the norms of the other category, that’s easy to understand. Like most everyone, I have negative experiences with the culture’s rigid, repressive, and reactionary gender norms. But those norms are the product of patriarchy, requiring feminist critique to escape the gender trap. While some in the trans movement identify as feminists, others accept traditional gender norms and don’t embrace a feminist critique of institutionalized male dominance.

The Concern: As one pro-trans writer put it after reviewing the dramatic interventions into the body in so-called sex-reassignment surgery, “It can seem and feel as if one is at war with one’s body.” Is that procedure, along with the use of hormones and drugs—including puberty blockers in children, which stop the body from producing sex hormones in order to interrupt physical development—consistent with the ethic of “first, do no harm”? With so little known about the etiology of transgenderism, is the surgical/chemical approach warranted?

I revisited this analysis in the chapter “Defining Sex/Gender: Beyond Trans Ideology,” intended for my 2024 book, It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics. The publisher had assured me that he wasn’t worried about controversy, but right before the book went into production, he demanded that I cut it. As a compromise, we agreed the printed book would direct people to that chapter on my website, where I made it available for free. That chapter offered an argument similar to the 2017 book but framed a bit differently. I argued that trans activists pursue a politics that is intellectually incoherent, anti-feminist, and at odds with an ecological worldview.

Incoherent: When I have asked for more clarity on trans claims, advocates have told me that it doesn’t matter whether I can make sense of their claims. I should accept the demands made by the movement, which has “the right to not be interrogated by the dominant structures of oppression,” according to one of my Austin critics. That lack of clarity is sometimes even celebrated. The very act of naming and categorizing imposes limits that constrain the imagination, according to one prominent trans theorist, hence the use of an asterisk, “trans*” rather than “transgender.” I will quote at length to make sure no one accuses me of distorting the message:

I have selected the term “trans*” for this book precisely to open the term up to unfolding categories of being organized around but not confined to forms of gender variance. As we will see, the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations. As this book will show, trans* can be a name for expansive forms of difference, haptic [relating to the sense of touch] relations to knowing, uncertain modes of being, and the disaggregation of identity politics predicated upon the separating out of many kinds of experience that actually blend together, intersect, and mix. This terminology, trans*, stands at odds with the history of gender variance, which has been collapsed into concise definitions, sure medical pronouncements, and fierce exclusions. (pp. 4-5)

I don’t quote this passage merely to poke fun at the abstruse language of postmodern academic writing. I can sort of figure out what Jack Halberstam is trying to say, though I can’t see how any of it helps anyone understand anything. Should we not be concerned about an approach that “holds off the certainty of diagnosis” while accepting treatment that permanently changes a human body?

Antifeminist: With no clarity on what trans means, policy disagreements are inevitable. Most liberal and postmodern feminists argue that trans demands are feminist, or at least consistent with feminism. But many women reject, on safety and privacy grounds, the demands that men who identify as women—especially when that can be asserted merely by “self-identification”—be allowed access to female-only spaces and activities such as bathrooms, changing rooms, prisons, and sports. A trans movement that dismisses the legitimate concerns of women is antifeminist.

Imagine a high school boy who identifies as a girl and demands to shower with girls after gym class. Many girls may well find that invasive, for understandable reasons, especially since research indicates that some of those girls likely have been sexually abused, harassed, or exploited by boys and men. Whom do we care about if we treat the internal subjective experience of one boy who identifies as a girl as more important than the psychological consequences for girls? The boy who identifies as a girl could be accommodated in a separate facility (such as a teacher’s shower, temporarily made available to a student) without imposing costs on the girls. To prioritize the interests of the boy is anti-feminist, as I understand feminism.

Ecological: There is a growing awareness of the threats to a long-term sustainable human presence on Earth because of human intervention into ecosystems, what I call an ecological worldview. Left/liberal dogma about so-called “gender-affirming care” ignores unresolved questions about the safety and efficacy of drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgery. But beyond those concerns lies a more fundamental issue: Is interfering in the physiological development of a child through chemicals and hormones consistent with an ecological worldview? Is the surgical destruction of healthy tissue to deal with psychological distress, whether in children or adults, consistent with a commitment to living in harmony with the natural world?

In other writing, I have argued that modern societies should avoid “technological fundamentalism,” the embrace of high-energy/high-technology “solutions” to all problems, including problems created by previous technologies. The trans movement embraces the dominant industrial worldview—the refusal to accept limits on how we intervene in the larger living world, including limits on how we remake the body. In the quest to be “inclusive,” too often we ignore an obvious question that should be asked of all cosmetic surgery: Is this a healthy way for society to address people’s discomfort with their appearance or their distress about not conforming to social norms?

One important footnote: Radical feminists do not endorse every conservative policy on transgenderism. Many conservative critics mock people who identify as transgender and endorse overtly patriarchal gender norms. I empathize with people who experience gender dysphoria, especially when that distress is so severe that medical interventions seem the only route to relief. The radical feminist critique of transgender ideology doesn’t ignore that suffering but instead provides an alternative route to deal with it. A growing number of mental-health professionals practice “therapy first for gender distressed youth.” As I write this, there remains controversy in the medical profession about best practices, but in many countries gender-affirming care is being paused, and U.S. medical groups are beginning to explore other options. The radical feminist critique is not anti-trans, in the sense of unconcerned with the suffering of people who identify as trans.

Next in Part 5: Justice and self-interest

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Robert Jensen is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, will be published by Blue Ear Books in 2026. Jensen is also the author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics (Olive Branch Press, 2024). More information at

https://robertwjensen.org/

or email rjensen@austin.utexas.edu