Meet the Inventor of Gender Theory

In April we published Yesterday’s Eugenics, Today’s Infanticide about the link between Darwin’s theory and the German Second Reich. The former became a building block for the latter. “It was the Second Reich, the German regime defeated in WWI, that first found in Darwinism the biological rationale to justify 16 million deaths in the Great War.”

The evil of Naziism is just one example of the modernism which grew from Darwin’s naturalism. Today, though modernism is not altogether dead, it has lost its sheen, to say the least. Postmodern is rapidly engulfing the West. No longer is morality being driven by science, Darwinian or otherwise. Today’s moral codes are reduced to human opinions. Morality is “my morality.” Justice is as I declare it, never mind any reality to the contrary. Neither science nor the law of God makes any difference.

Postmodernism is the soil from which many alien weeds have sprouted. Gender theory is one. Without the abandonment of reason so characteristic of postmodernism, the idea of gender as fluid could never have taken root.

Meet the author of Gender Theory

And now another piece of the historical puzzle is in place. A recent, remarkable disclosure at Quillette reinforces the influence of postmodernism on the transgenderism folly. The writer, Christopher Dummit, is a Canadian “historian of culture and politics.” In the article, “‘I Basically Just Made It Up’: Confessions of a Social Constructionist,” he admits to being one of the early promoters—maybe THE first promoter—of transgender theory as a grad student in his twenties.

If I had known, 20 years ago, that my side in the ideological wars over gender and sex was going to win so decisively, I would have been ecstatic. Back then, I spent many evenings at the pub or at dinner parties debating gender and identity with other graduate students; or, really, anyone who would listen—my mother-in-law, my relatives, or just a random person unlucky enough to be in my presence. I insisted that there was no such thing as sex. And I knew it. I just knew it. Because I was a gender historian. …

Back then, quite a few people disagreed with me. Almost nobody who hadn’t been exposed to such theories at a university could bring themselves to believe that sex was wholly a social construct, because such beliefs went against common sense. That’s what makes it so amazing that the cultural turnaround on this issue has happened so quickly. Reasonable people might readily admit that some—and maybe a lot—of gender identity is socially constructed, but did this really mean that sex doesn’t matter at all? Was gender solely based on culture? Yes, I would insist. And then I would insist some more. There’s nothing so certain as a graduate student armed with precious little life experience and a big idea.

Arrogance plus naivete can go a long way

Dummit is astonished and dismayed to see how quickly his ideas—which he acknowledges as folly—have caught on in society.

And now my big idea is everywhere. It shows up especially in the talking points about trans rights, and policy regarding trans athletes in sports. It is being written into laws that essentially threaten repercussions for anyone who suggests that sex might be a biological reality. Such a statement, for many activists, is tantamount to hate speech. If you take the position that many of my ’90s-era debating opponents took—that gender is at least partly based on sex, and that there really are two sexes (male and female), as biologists have known since the dawn of their science—uber-progressives will claim you are denying a trans person’s identity, which is to say, wishing ontological harm upon another human being.

More than a little academic elitism is at work here. Nothing new about that. For centuries, no doubt, thoughtful mentors have warned newly minted grads against a nearly universal self-deception—seeing oneself as the gift of the gods to a less-educated public.

Was gender solely based on culture? Yes, I would insist. And then I would insist some more. There’s nothing so certain as a graduate student armed with precious little life experience and a big idea.

Today the arrogance of the academy has been matched by the gullibility of the public, groomed as we have been by the abandonment of reason. Absent any concept of transcendent truth, why should anyone push back against gender theory? The meaning of words like truth, human, marriage, sex, love, and more have shifted in this unreality. Sex as God designed it is meaningless. Transgenderism is postmodernism applied in its purest form.

Gender theory will someday share the reputation of eugenics

A recent article in WORLD suggested that a future generation will be as aghast about transgenderism with all its harmful effects as we are appalled at the eugenics of an earlier generation.

Andrew Walker, author of God and the Transgender Debate and a fellow at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, thinks in a hundred years people will look back on this era of medicine the way we now look back on the eugenicist movements of the early 20th century.

While many obvious biological reasons exist for opposing the embrace of transgenderism, Walker says Christians also should be well-versed in the Biblical teaching about God creating people male and female in His image.

Postmodernism comprises a man-made morality completely unmoored from God and His law, and has led (and will lead) to the same atrocities as Social Darwinism.