Gender rows bode ill for justice

In March, a decision from the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) used the words “a person with a vagina” to refer to a sexual assault victim instead of simply writing “a woman.” It was reminiscent of the infamous United States Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022, during which she couldn’t define the term “woman.” It also harked back to a 2023 decision by the SCC, in which the court stated that the terminology around gender identity continues to evolve beyond the “binary of ‘male’ or ‘female.’”

These word games baffle and anger many, but it ought to be said that undermining the term “woman” has been the intentional project of gender theorists for decades.

Discrediting the idea that the word “woman” properly represents a person of the female sex was an explicit project of Judith Butler’s 1990 landmark text, Gender Trouble. The SCC’S evolving language is entirely in line with, and shows an institutional acceptance of, Butler’s unreasonable contention that “there is very little agreement after all on what it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute, the category of women.”

But by signalling approval for gender theory, the court is standing on incredibly shaky ground, because Butler’s work to dispense with the word “woman” is founded on irrational and politically dangerous principles.

Gender theory came about as a result of the combination of Friedrich Nietzsche’s radical skepticism and Karl Marx’s theories of power structures and class oppression.

Following Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, Butler believes language does not capture objective reality, but only our faulty impressions and categorizations. She contends that binary understandings of gender or sex are fictions constructed by our language — “gender fables (that) establish and circulate the misnomer of natural facts.” The statement, “She is a woman,” is therefore not a factual one, according to Butler.

Assuming that gender is merely a cultural construct, gender theorists understand the term “woman” to represent and uphold the oppressive power structures of human society, which Butler calls “phallogocentrism.”

For gender theorists then, it follows that disrupting our use of language can reshape reality. This is why gender theorists have felt the need to enforce the use of preferred pronouns; if the words we use to identify ourselves (such as pronouns) construct our identities, then the failure to use the right word is an oppressive, violent affront to an individual’s existence.

Thus, the SCC’S aversion to the word “woman” in March’s decision would be seen by theorists as a subversive act, undermining the oppression that emanates from the term. That the highest court in the land now seems to accept this logic is a victory for Butler and the gender theorists who sought a day “when the subject of ‘women’ is nowhere presumed.”

All of this, however, to use a favourite term of the theorists, is deeply problematic. First, it is madness to use words to claim that words have no relation to reality, as the ideas underpinning gender theory do. This is self-defeating and irrational.

Second, once we accept the premise that there is no external reality or truth, as all critical theorists do, an immediate corollary is that there is no true justice. Without objective truth, what we call “justice” is merely the interests of the stronger. Accepting gender theory without criticizing its presuppositions risks undoing the philosophical foundation which has allowed for 2,000 years of genuine progress, pushing us back into pre-socratic sophistry.

In their abuse of language, Nietzsche and Butler fit right in among the sophists, Socrates’ seemingly rational but quickly dispensed with adversaries in Plato’s Dialogues. Plato, as the foundational thinker of western political philosophy, argued against the cynicism of those who dismissed the reality of justice and the skepticism of those who questioned the capacity of language to communicate objective truth.

Like the cynical sophists, gender theorists see all language as propaganda and all communication as coercion; they disbelieve in even the possibility of genuine justice in the world.

In his aptly titled book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, German philosopher Josef Pieper noted the connection between Nietzschean philosophy and the totalitarianisms he witnessed in the 20th century. He wrote, “The abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word ... the latent potential of the totalitarian poison can be ascertained ... by observing the symptom of the public abuse of language.”

Pieper argues that when language is abused, when all communication is reduced to propaganda, human interaction degrades into “relationships based on mere power” yielding the “fertile soil” in which totalitarianism can “hide and grow and get ready.”

Ultimately, gender neologisms, with their foundation in Nietzsche’s abuse of language, contain the “latent potential” for totalitarianism. The SCC’S seeming acceptance of these terms, and gender ideology altogether, bodes ill for the preservation of a just society in Canada.