In April 2023, broadcaster Sean Plunket asked then-prime minister Chris Hipkins: “How do you, and how does this government, define a woman?” Footage of Hipkins struggling to answer went viral. He eventually gave the accepted progressive response: “People define their own genders.”
The question may sound odd but it’s celebrated by an unusual coalition of conservatives and feminists who believe Hipkins was wrong: the simple and true answer is “an adult human female”, a contested definition at the heart of an increasingly bitter debate over gender-related issues: trans athletes in sports; access to women-only spaces, paediatric gender care…
Britain’s Supreme Court ruled last month that only biological women meet the definition of a woman for the purposes of its Equality Act. In the US, the Trump administration has passed a number of executive orders aimed at rolling back transgender rights.
In New Zealand, Associate Health Minister Casey Costello has directed Te Whatu Ora to use the term “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people” in its communications. And Winston Peters has announced a New Zealand First member’s bill to define gender based on biology rather than self-identification.
They’re pushing back against recent advances in transgender rights, a movement that takes many of its ideas from an intellectual tradition promoting a radical reinterpretation of human nature.

Non-identity
How did an obscure branch of academic theory become one of the most divisive topics in mainstream politics?
Herculine Adélaïde Barbin was born in southwest France in 1838. She was precocious, winning a scholarship to study at a convent school. After graduating she became an assistant teacher at a girls school. She had health problems, and in 1860 she was examined by a doctor who found that while she had a small vagina, she also had a penis and undescended testicles.
Although she identified as a woman the French legal system reclassified her as male. She lost her job, moved to Paris and committed suicide at the age of 29 after writing her memoir, which sat undisturbed in the archives of France’s Department of Public Hygiene for more than 100 years until it was discovered and published by the philosopher Michel Foucault.

One of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers, Foucault was interested in the role scientists, doctors and the academic disciplines played in the politics of modern societies. He believed they asserted a covert form of power through “discourse”: by making ideological assertions about what was healthy and normal and “true”, presenting these claims as objective scientific facts that could not be questioned.
Their beliefs were embedded into institutions: schools, prisons, hospitals, legal systems and other state bureaucracies. When mid-20th century doctors diagnosed gay men as mentally ill, was this medicine? Or politics and ideology concealing itself behind a scientific guise?
Foucault argued that cases like Herculine Barbin called the very notion of a “gender binary” – that all humans could be categorised as either male or female – into question. Barbin defied such a simple classification, but the scientific and legal authorities could not accept this ambiguity. Faced with a case in which their framework broke down, science simply overruled reality, imposing its theories on the bodies and lives of its subjects.He was building on ideas developed by the feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir, who had separated out anatomical sex from the gender roles invented and created by society – roles which, de Beauvoir noted, led to the political oppression of women but were presented as biological facts, natural and inevitable.

Foucault observed, “The idea that one had a true sex, a true identity, beneath the appearances, was born not out of repression, but out of the deployment of a new system of truth.”
In the 1970s and 80s, the ideas of Foucault and de Beauvoir were foundational to the emerging study of gender theory. This examined the means by which societies constructed gender roles, teaching children how to dress, what games to play, how to behave. And when they grew up, which occupations, relationships and forms of sexuality were available to them, all while insisting that these constructed roles were natural. The theory became a framework for understanding people who were transgender. There was simply an incongruity between that person’s biology and gender identity. They had been “born in the wrong body”.
The Butler did it
The American philosopher Judith Butler identifies as non-binary, neither male nor female, and uses they/them pronouns. It’s an increasingly common practice but it was Butler who popularised it.
In the 1990s, they took the ideas of de Beauvoir and Foucault to a radical conclusion. For Butler, there is no anatomical basis for classifying people into men or women; no biological classification of sex at all. There are merely bodies with diverse features, and any attempt to assign gender to them without their consent is a form of oppression.
Gender is a form of subtle social conditioning embedded across our culture and institutions, but we internalise it so that our assigned gender feels natural, compelling us to play out the roles we’ve been given, which we pass on to subsequent generations. It is a kind of play-acting; a performance we’ve mistaken for reality. “Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act … a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’,” Butler wrote.

Biological facts
Butler was never interested in having their theories validated by science, but during the 1990s and 2000s, new discoveries and developments in biology and medicine seemed to support their ideas. The era was a golden age for molecular biology, revealing that human sexuality was more complex and ambiguous than the traditional notion that sex was determined via the presence or absence of a Y chromosome (with men having XY).
Consider androgen insensitivity, in which a mutation in a gene for a hormone receptor means that people with Y chromosomes present as typical female bodies. Their status as “men” could be determined only via a genetic test. There were a multitude of genetic conditions – trisomies, translocations, chimeras – that confounded the conventional gender binary. Intersex bodies were more common than previously understood. The boundaries around biological men and women were increasingly blurred.
Medicine became an important domain for trans activism. It had imposed the gender binary on society.
It’s rare for philosophers to win a debate in their field, especially during their lifetime. There are always rival schools, competing theories, embittered critics. Butler had a tiny cohort of detractors – social critic Camille Paglia, philosopher Martha Nussbaum – but they were quickly drowned out.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Butler’s model of gender theory became ubiquitous, not just in humanities departments, but across academia: the natural and social sciences, law and medicine. Courses in women’s studies or feminist theory were replaced with gender theory. Everyone agreed with this trajectory, at least in public, for one could endanger a career by publicly questioning this new orthodoxy, which was a political cause as much as a philosophical project.
To the gender barricades
Butler had created a new mode of political activism that was deeply attractive to academics and intellectuals. They could change the world by challenging society’s hitherto unquestioned ideas around sexuality and gender, disrupting the conventional male/female binary.
Butler never felt any affinity to either female or male gender identities. It became increasingly common for queer activists and their allies to self-identify as non-binary, adopting alternate pronouns, typically they/them; to publicly perform alternative gender roles, dressing or presenting in ways that confounded the limits society had imposed on them (blue and/or purple hair are popular nonbinary signifiers).
Medicine became one of the most important domains for trans activism. It had imposed the gender binary on society, and many healthcare workers resolved to roll it back. Health communications would no longer refer to “women’s health”, “pregnant women”, “breastfeeding” or other gendered language, because this discriminated against trans, non-binary and intersex persons.
People who were assigned female at birth but self-identified as men – and therefore were men – could get pregnant. Trans women were women, and therefore a woman could have a penis. It wasn’t the role of doctors or hospitals to police gender boundaries.

Many people experiencing gender dysphoria experience psychological trauma when they are misgendered – referred to by an assigned sex rather than their chosen identity. Self-registration laws allowing trans, intersex and non-binary people to change their classification in official documentation became important policy areas for left-wing governments.
Transgender athletes, like New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, were celebrated as pioneers, applauded for breaking down boundaries. Drag queen story hours, commonly held at community libraries, became an important institution for progressive parents, exposing their children to the idea that there were gender options available to them outside the traditional boundaries of cis-heterosexuality.
All of this drove conservatives wild with rage. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson rose to global prominence opposing his university’s pronoun regulations. In February, Destiny Church stormed a drag story event at Auckland’s Te Atatū Peninsula Library. Gender activists were confident that the battle for trans rights would go the same way as the struggle for gay marriage. Love would win. Hatred and bigotry would lose.
What they did not expect was criticism from the left – from lesbian activists, feminist theorists and, famously, one billionaire children’s fantasy author – who would accuse the trans community itself of hatred and bigotry and become fellow travellers with the political right. The 2010s and early 2020s saw the rise and early triumphs of gender-critical feminism, or as their enemies refer to them, the Terf movement.

Gender Trouble
Terf stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. The term began as a slur but seems to be being reappropriated by Terfs themselves (biological realists and women’s rights activists are also popular alternatives). Their criticism of gender ideology is simple: feminism was and is the fight for women’s rights, but if you erase the entire concept of women as a category, you’re erasing those rights that have been so hard won.
This counter-revolution regards gender theory as a regressive, misogynistic movement presenting itself as something progressive. Judith Butler is an intellectual fraud; academia and the progressive left have been captured by a fad, throwing real women under the bus to advance the interests of men who are pretending to be women.
Gender-critical feminists firmly reject the notion that trans women have a right to self-identify with their preferred gender. One alternative label they use is autogynephilia, a wildly controversial, deeply disputed concept advanced by Canadian psychologist Ray Blanchard, who suggests many trans women are men who are sexually aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women.
Judith Butler told The Guardian that opposition to gender theory was a form of fascism. There is a deep and sometimes violent enmity between the two groups.
Terfs believe real feminists should not be in the business of indulging the sexual fantasies of men – especially when it puts women in danger by giving those men the right to enter women’s spaces: changing rooms, women’s refuges, prisons. Gender self-recognition laws must be rolled back. The project of erasing women by writing them out of medical literature – describing them using degrading terms like “bodies with vaginas” – must stop. The participation of trans women in women’s sports – in which everyone pretends there is no biological difference between the bodies of female athletes and trans women who have gone through puberty – is a travesty. If they speak up about these issues they are threatened by trans activists who deluge them with rape threats. This is all virulent misogyny, and the world has gone mad.
From the perspective of trans activists, the Terfs are bigots who delight in cruelty and persecution. Many trans people experience dysphoria long before adolescence; the idea that their identity is a sexual fetish is absurd.
Gender-critical feminists are fully aware of the distress caused by misgendering trans people, yet take great delight in doing so. They claim to be feminists but ally themselves with conservatives who’ve long opposed women’s rights.
A 2024 conference in Wellington titled “Unsilenced” featured talks from Destiny Church leader Brian Tāmaki, former National Party MP Simon O’Connor and British activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (also known as Posie Parker) appearing via video-link. In 2023, Judith Butler told The Guardian that opposition to gender theory was a form of fascism. There is a deep and sometimes violent enmity between the two groups.

Back to biology
In 2021, the Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was promoting her book T, a study of testosterone, and she used it as a platform to critique some aspects of gender theory. She argued humans, like most vertebrates, were a sexually dimorphic species, with the vast majority of the population separating into male and female categories, determined by the size of their gametes: large eggs or small sperm. The bodies of the different populations had significant average differences – height, muscle mass, sex organs – determined by gene effects.
This didn’t invalidate trans or intersex identities, Hooven explained, and people should respect them and use preferred pronouns. But it was wrong for biologists and doctors to teach their students that sex was purely a social construct.
The response was rapid and vehement, with members of the faculty and groups representing queer and trans students alleging that by issuing these statements, Hooven had harmed them, making Harvard an unsafe space for vulnerable gender minorities. As the backlash grew, Hooven stood down from her position, citing a lack of support from the administration.
Her case highlighted a problem facing progressive institutions and left-wing political parties. There were some aspects of modern gender theory that seemed important or persuasive, other tenets that were highly dubious – but the theory was not open to debate. It was an ideology, non-negotiable, embedded in institutions in precisely the way Foucault critiqued conventional medical science in the 1960s and 70s.
They did not expect criticism from lesbian activists, feminist theorists and a billionaire fantasy author.
At the same time, left-wing political parties were bleeding their traditional constituencies to the right, and one of the most popular explanations for this phenomenon was “wokeness” – a preoccupation with arcane academic theories of race, gender and language over the material concerns of the majority of voters.
Last year, a Trump campaign ad showed US Democratic presidental candidate Kamala Harris expressing her excitement about delivering taxpayer-funded gender affirming surgery for trans prisoners. The ad ended with the tag, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”
Polling determined that the ad resonated strongly with suburban women. After Trump’s victory, the influential centre-left commentator Matthew Yglesias advanced a manifesto for Democrats advocating they should “embrace commonsense moral values and move away from academic fads”. It elaborated that, “Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.”
After the UK court decision defining sex as grounded in biology, Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer agreed that, “a woman is a biological woman”. Whatever that means.
Conservatives and gender-critical feminists sense the tide of history is shifting in their favour, while centrists attempt to walk a rapidly vanishing path between condemning attacks on trans people by the populist right and litigating the more radical claims advanced by activists and the academic left. Both sides furiously reject any attempt at moderation. The issue of gender in politics is starkly binary.
Danyl McLauchlan heroically struggled through texts by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler during his master’s degree.