I have been invited to speak in Sydney about my new book on climate change at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in August. Filling out the author information form, I have been asked to nominate my gender. In fact, the form asks me to nominate my “Gender Identity” and gives four options.
The options presuppose that sex, biological sex, is either irrelevant or subsumed within the category of “gender identity.” The word “identifying” quietly installs the premise that sex is a matter of self-ascription rather than biological fact.
The question has been designed in such a way that to answer is to capitulate to gender ideology. In philosophy this is known as a “presupposition fallacy.” Linguistically, it’s a power play. The act of answering legitimizes the framework because the question has smuggled in an assumption that I may not accept but would be endorsing by ticking one of the boxes presented to me.
The festival’s gender question is Foucault in action because it exemplifies how institutional power normalises a particular “regime of truth”. It is doing so not through argument but through bureaucratic procedure. The form is not trying to persuade me that gender identity supersedes biological sex. I am simply being administered on that assumption.
Foucault argued that a system of everyday rules and institutional routines is far more powerful than overt argument precisely because it presents itself as neutral data collection. The festival organisers do not say “we believe gender identity supersedes sex”; they simply act as though it is already settled fact, just common sense.
Rather than skip the question, I decided to tick the “Other” box. When a space for explanation popped up, I wrote in it: “I am not male identifying. I am male”. It seems, though, that I have been Othered.
Having solved that problem, the author form next asked me to nominate my pronouns.
Note that the form does not ask me to nominate my “preferred pronouns”. It turns out that “preferred” should not be used because “identity is not a choice”.
Foucault would be proud.
Government bureaucracies across Australia now routinely administer us as if self-assigned gender trumps biological sex. The courts have embedded this Foucauldian theory into law so that now it is unlawful to act as if sex should have priority over gender in, for example, women-only spaces.
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas presents itself as Australia’s most audacious and thought-provoking event, one that is, in the words of one of its speakers Stephen Fry, “a rare corner of the world where free expression isn’t just tolerated, but celebrated.” It boasts about making those who attend feel uncomfortable. Well, the author form did that for me.
Apart from a soft discussion about J.K. Rowling with a Youtuber in 2024, I cannot find in the festival’s program any discomforting gender critical feminist voices.
Once the idea of objective truth is discarded, we all drown in a post-truth world where nothing counts but opinion and subjective feeling.
Source: Dodgy Pronouns and Phantom Identities – Clive Hamilton