In the beginning was the Word — and in the late 20th century, the Word became negotiable. That, in essence, is the founding myth of the intellectual movement that has re-engineered medicine, policy, and even childhood under the banner of "gender." The project is not medical; it is linguistic engineering. Change the language, and you reshape the institutions. The casualty is not only clarity but the vulnerable young people caught in the crossfire of theory, activism, and adult abdication.
This is not progress. It is conceptual vandalism masquerading as compassion.
Begin with the substitution. For centuries, sex referred to the biological binary rooted in gametes. Gender belonged to grammar. A tidy division. Then mid-century euphemism crept in. "Sex" sounded crude; "gender" sounded polite. By the 2010s, most people treated the terms as interchangeable. That was the opening. Enter the theorists.
In the 1960s, influenced by post-structuralist thought, academics reframed gender as a social construct, separate from biological sex. These departments were not biology labs; they were humanities programs applying philosophical frameworks to human identity. Judith Butler and others argued that sex itself is interpreted through culture — a contestable, provocative thesis in philosophy, but one that leapt from lecture theatres into clinical settings without the scientific scrutiny such a move requires. The claim was not that people should be treated humanely — a universal value — but that biological categories were themselves contingent. Once that idea entered public institutions, the distinction between empirical science and interpretive theory blurred.
The word "gender" became the linguistic gateway. Its scientific sheen allowed cultural arguments to permeate medicine, law, and education: bathrooms reclassified according to identity; women's sports opened to male-bodied competitors; pronouns multiplied beyond practical use. Meanwhile, dysphoria replaced dysmorphia, subtly shifting responsibility outward. A patient with anorexia is treated as suffering from a mistaken self-perception. But a teen who believes they are the opposite sex? The new orthodoxy holds that institutions must adjust to the perception rather than examine its origins. This is not therapeutic caution. It is epistemological vertigo.
The most famous early experiment in gender socialisation was the 1960s case of David Reimer, following a catastrophic surgical accident. The attempt to raise him as female collapsed, with tragic consequences. The lesson was clear: psychosocial theories cannot override biological reality. Yet the episode was selectively represented for decades, shaping clinical thinking long after the evidence contradicted the doctrine.
Before 2010, childhood gender dysphoria was rare. After 2015, referrals skyrocketed among teenage girls, often appearing in friend clusters and online communities. The pattern resembles other well-documented psychosocial contagions. Sweden, Finland, and the UK have already re-evaluated and restricted medical pathways for minors after systematic reviews found insufficient evidence of long-term benefit and significant risk. Australia has been slower to reassess. The prevailing "affirmation" model — socially transition, then blockers, then hormones — has become institutional default despite limited data, especially for adolescent-onset cases. This is not careful medicine. It is policy accelerating faster than evidence.
Imagine a new discipline: Zenergy Studies. Zenergy is declared socially constructed yet measured in joules and correlating 0.99 with kinetic energy. Physicists would laugh. Gender Studies often performs an equivalent manoeuvre: measuring gender identity in binary categories; correlating it almost perfectly with biological sex; then declaring biology irrelevant. This is not empirical reasoning. It is category drift repackaged as scholarship.
The solution is not cruelty; it is clarity. Use precise language — sex for biology, gender for roles or norms. Support distressed young people with evidence-based mental health care, not irreversible medical pathways lacking long-term data. No medical intervention for minors without rigorous assessment and mature consent, as the European reviews now recommend. Acknowledge desistance data, especially in childhood-onset cases. Allow open debate without branding disagreement as hatred. The body is not an ideology. The mind is not a legislature.
The current regime of gender deconstruction represents the triumph of linguistic theory over biological fact, policy over evidence, and institutional enthusiasm over caution. Humane treatment of all individuals is non-negotiable. But humane treatment requires truthful categories, not categories engineered to satisfy academic fashion or activist pressure. We are not "assigned" male or female at birth. We are observed. Gametes do not negotiate. Chromosomes do not bend to theory. What bends — precariously — is policy.