Dan gives his opinion on some of the issues with Islam.
Public arguments about biological sex often become tangled because several different questions are treated as though they were the same. Chromosomes, hormones, genital development, secondary sexual characteristics, and identity are placed into one conceptual pile, and the resulting complexity is then offered as evidence that sex itself must be a spectrum.
In his 2025 commentary, “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes,” Colin Wright argues that this confuses the definition of sex with the mechanisms that determine it and the traits that ordinarily develop from it.
His central claim is straightforward: in anisogamous species, including human beings, sex refers to one of two reproductive functions. Male organisms are organized around the production of small gametes, or sperm; female organisms are organized around the production of large gametes, or ova. There is no third gamete type and, therefore, no third reproductive sex.
The qualification concerning biological function matters. Children, elderly people, infertile adults, and people with developmental conditions do not become sexless because they are not presently producing gametes. They belong to the reproductive class their bodies developed toward, even when that reproductive system is immature, impaired, or nonfunctional.
Five Sources of Confusion
Wright addresses five arguments commonly used to deny that sex is binary.
First, some fungi and slime moulds are said to possess hundreds or thousands of sexes. Wright explains that these organisms have numerous mating types: compatibility categories determining which organisms can reproduce with one another. Mating types are not sexes because they are not organized around the production of sperm and ova.
Second, variations such as XXY, X0, XX males, and XY females are offered as evidence that chromosomes create more than two sexes. This confuses how sex is determined with what sex is. Different species use chromosomes, temperature, environmental signals, or other mechanisms to direct sexual development. These mechanisms vary enormously, while the two reproductive functions remain the same.
Third, differences or disorders of sex development are presented as positions along a sexual continuum. These conditions demonstrate that sexual development is complicated and can produce ambiguous outcomes. They do not, however, produce a third kind of gamete or reproductive system. Difficulty classifying a rare individual does not create another reproductive class.
Fourth, sex is sometimes described as a cluster of chromosomes, hormones, anatomy, neurological features, and secondary characteristics. Since these traits vary, the argument goes, sex must also vary along a spectrum.
Wright’s answer is that these traits are causes, indicators, or consequences of sex, not its definition. A trait can only be described as male-typical or female-typical because males and females have already been identified by some independent standard. Remove the reproductive distinction, and the labels “male-typical” and “female-typical” lose their biological reference point.
Finally, multilevel models speak of chromosomal sex, hormonal sex, anatomical sex, behavioural sex, and sometimes gender identity as though each were a separate component of an individual’s sex. Such models may help physicians describe a patient’s particular biology, but description should not be confused with definition. A medically useful inventory of sex-related traits does not establish the existence of additional sexes.
Variation Does Not Abolish the Categories
The most useful distinction in Wright’s paper is between variation in sex-related characteristics and variation in the number of sexes.
Hormone levels vary. Bodies vary. Secondary sexual characteristics overlap. Sexual development can proceed atypically, and a small number of people may be difficult to classify unambiguously. None of this is denied by the reproductive definition.
A category can contain substantial variation without becoming a spectrum of categories. Human beings vary enormously in height, strength, appearance, fertility, and hormone levels, but this variation occurs within and between the two reproductive classes. Complexity at the level of traits does not generate additional reproductive functions.
A competing commentary by Brian Earp, Morgan Carpenter, and Sebastian Porsdam Mann accepts the existence of two gamete-based reproductive plans, but argues that “sex” can have additional, context-dependent meanings when classifying actual bodies in medicine or public policy. That is a serious practical consideration: a physician may need more information than a male-or-female box can provide.
It does not, however, refute Wright’s biological argument. Medical forms may require detailed information about anatomy, hormones, medications, pregnancy capacity, or surgical history. Recording those facts improves patient care without turning each combination of traits into another sex.
What the Paper Does — and Does Not — Establish
Wright’s paper is a scholarly commentary synthesizing evolutionary and developmental biology, not a new experiment or dataset. It provides a clear biological definition and tests several prominent objections against it.
Its argument is directly relevant when someone claims that chromosome variations, intersex conditions, overlapping characteristics, or numerous fungal mating types prove that human beings have more than two sexes. They do not.
The paper does not, by itself, settle every dispute involving transgender people. Biological description and public policy are related but separate questions. How society should handle identity, medical treatment, legal documentation, privacy, or sex-separated spaces requires additional evidence and moral reasoning.
That boundary strengthens rather than weakens the argument. Human dignity does not depend upon pretending that biological categories are unreal, and biological categories do not spaces requires additional evidence determine how every person must be treated in every circumstance.
There are two sexes because sexual reproduction in human beings is organized around two gametes and two corresponding reproductive functions. Developmental variation is real, sometimes medically significant, and deserving of humane treatment. It does not supply the missing third gamete required to create a third sex.
Complexity should improve our descriptions. It should not be used to erase the biological distinction that makes those descriptions intelligible in the first place.
Evidence note: Wright’s article was published as a commentary in Archives of Sexual Behavior. He is a salaried employee of the Manhattan Institute and has provided paid expert testimony on related issues; both are disclosed in the paper. The article is open access and can be read in full here.
Arvo Pärt’s Salve Regina is a contemplative setting of the Marian antiphon for mixed choir and organ, lasting approximately 10–12 minutes. A quiet, steady organ pulse supports restrained choral writing that gradually expands from unison into as many as eight independent voices. Its recurring 3/4 metre follows the natural rhythm of the Latin text, while the music progressively becomes denser, darker, and more concentrated before reaching a powerful but controlled conclusion. Characteristically economical in its materials, the piece depends upon excellent tuning, sustained breath, rhythmic steadiness, and a unified choral tone rather than overt virtuosity
Scope note: Ending contact can be necessary when there is genuine abuse, violence, or coercion. This essay examines a narrower pattern in which parental disagreement is redefined as harm and estrangement becomes a means of enforcing ideological agreement. It describes a possible mechanism, not every estranged family.
Imagine your child comes home one day, sits down at the kitchen table, and announces a new identity.
You are surprised. Perhaps there were warning signs you missed; perhaps there were none. You ask how long this has been going on, what the words mean, where the conclusion came from, and whether puberty, loneliness, autism, bullying, sexuality, depression, or social pressure might be involved.
These seem like ordinary parental questions. You have known this person since infancy and remember illnesses, temperaments, friendships, fixations, fears, and earlier versions of the story your child is now telling.
The questions, however, do not begin a conversation. They provoke accusations. You are not listening. Your hesitation is invalidating. Your request for time is harmful. Even your memories may be dismissed because you supposedly never understood the “real” person underneath.
Then comes the warning: affirm this identity, or risk losing the relationship.
The parent thinks the conversation has just begun. The child may have been taught that it was settled before anyone sat down at the table.
The Conversation Before the Conversation
Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans, or PITT, publishes first-person accounts from families encountering gender identity in schools, therapy, medicine, and their own homes. These accounts are generally anonymous and selected for publication, so they cannot establish prevalence. They can show us what the pattern looks like when it occurs.
In one account, a mother writes that her daughter encountered a school module on identity, researched transgender identity on TikTok, and adopted a new name and pronouns, which the school then used without informing the parents.
Another account comes from a former social-justice organizer who had socially transitioned her young son. She describes a gender therapist advising parents to eliminate contact with relatives and friends who would not affirm the identity. The therapist also helped parents compose letters setting the conditions for continued contact: use the new name and pronouns, embrace the identity, or lose access to the child.
These are different families, but the sequence is similar. An identity is declared after an interpretation has already been supplied and possible objections have been morally classified. By the time the family receives the announcement, the argument may have been rehearsed and the conclusion already reached.
How Disagreement Becomes Danger
One way to understand this process is through the activist vocabulary shaped by Critical Theory. It is not the only influence; therapeutic culture, adolescent development, peer dynamics, and social media also matter. Critical Theory helps explain the particular move by which disagreement is recast as evidence of oppressive power.
Parents do not need a graduate seminar on Horkheimer, Foucault, queer theory, or critical pedagogy. Nor does a child need to have read any of them. Ideas enter popular culture through institutions, professional practices, activist language, and social media long after their academic origins have disappeared from view.
Within the simplified activist framework, biology, objectivity, parental authority, and professional neutrality may no longer provide common ground. They are understood as products of a society organized by unequal power, with the family serving as one of the institutions through which its norms are reproduced.
Parental disagreement therefore takes on a different meaning. The question of whether the identity claim is true, incomplete, mistaken, or one possible explanation among several recedes from view. Attention moves to the people asking it, whose doubts can be attributed to prejudice, social conditioning, fear, or a desire for control.
Authority then passes to those believed to possess the correct understanding. The child has privileged access to an authentic inner identity, while affirming peers, activists, educators, or therapists supply the language needed to interpret it. The parents may possess years of intimate knowledge, but that knowledge counts for little once they have been classified as captives of the system being challenged.
The resulting message often sounds something like this:
This is who I am, and my identity is not open for discussion. Questions are invalidating, and invalidation causes harm. The people supporting me understand what I need. If you cannot affirm me, you are not safe for me to be around.
A child’s distress has now become proof of a particular explanation, while listening has become indistinguishable from affirming it. Parents cannot evaluate the claim because the act of evaluation has already been classified as abuse.
The Strongest Argument for Affirmation
There is a serious objection to this account. Gender-related distress can be real and severe, while some parents respond with ridicule, threats, relentless interrogation, or attempts to frighten the child into silence. Even gentle questions may be experienced as rejection by an already distressed adolescent.
A clinician may also believe that immediate affirmation protects the child. Research has associated family rejection with worse mental-health outcomes among LGB and transgender young people, while family acceptance is associated with better outcomes. Limiting contact with non-affirming relatives may therefore appear less like ideological enforcement than suicide prevention.
That evidence matters, but it does not establish everything subsequently attached to it. The foundational Family Acceptance Project research was observational and included rejecting conduct such as verbal and physical abuse, exclusion from family activities, attempts to change sexual orientation, and blocking access to friends and resources. Later studies involving transgender participants also found associations between acceptance and better outcomes, but they did not establish that parental questioning is equivalent to rejection or that estrangement improves outcomes.
Research showing that family hostility can harm children does not prove that affirmation is the only form of support. The Family Acceptance Project itself emphasizes educating and preserving families, not casually removing them.
Many parents, teachers, and clinicians navigate these questions in good faith without producing estrangement. The problem is not that every affirming adult intends to divide a family. It is that a framework which equates evaluation with harm makes that division easier to justify.
Short-Circuiting the Triangle
A healthy relationship between a child, parents, and helping professionals should resemble a triangle because each party knows something the others do not. The child knows what the distress feels like; parents know the child’s developmental, medical, and familial history; and teachers observe the child in another environment. Counsellors may add specialized knowledge, but none possesses the entire picture.
The triangle is short-circuited when an outside adult forms an interpretive alliance with the child against the parents. Rather than helping the child bring a difficult question into the family, the adult explains the parents’ anticipated response beforehand. The parents enter the conversation with their role already assigned: they are no longer participants whose knowledge might matter, but obstacles against which the identity must be defended.
Adolescents are not empty vessels in this process. Some actively seek communities and explanations that offer certainty, belonging, moral purpose, or relief from distress. They may intensify the framework more aggressively than the adults who introduced it. Social influence works through participation as well as instruction.
Nor does short-circuiting the triangle require an organized plan. Peers and social media can produce the same effect because the vocabulary is already circulating throughout the child’s social world. An accountable professional should support the child without quietly appointing himself the child’s replacement parent.
From Hidden Identity to No-Contact
The framework carries something resembling a gnostic hierarchy of knowledge—not a direct historical lineage, but a similar shape. The child’s visible body and remembered history can be displaced by an authentic identity hidden within. The child feels that truth, affirming adults possess the language to interpret it, and dissenting parents remain trapped within an oppressive understanding.
Yet the child is simultaneously told that no one else can determine who they are and guided through a remarkably specific collection of approved concepts. What presents itself as entirely personal discovery can become difficult to distinguish from a closed explanatory system.
Once disagreement has been converted into harm, estrangement begins to look like self-preservation. Continued contact exposes the child to harmful beliefs, while parental objections to the separation appear to confirm their controlling nature. Even capitulation may validate the strategy by suggesting that only a sufficiently firm ultimatum could make the parent change.
The relationship itself becomes leverage:
Accept the interpretation, use the required language, and confess the harm you caused—or lose access to your child.
Noelle Mering, speaking with Peter Boghossian about the no-contact movement, describes a wider cultural shift in which ideological commitments can supersede inherited relationships. A chosen family can be invaluable to someone abandoned or abused by relatives. It can also become fragile when “chosen” means perpetually subject to being unchosen.
Families are difficult partly because they place us in enduring relationships with people who remember us, irritate us, and sometimes tell us things we do not want to hear. That friction can become cruel, but it can also produce humility, forgiveness, negotiation, and growth. Removing everyone who contests our preferred self-understanding also removes many of the people capable of telling us when we might be wrong.
Boundaries or Ultimatums?
None of this means that a person must remain accessible to an abusive parent. Violence, sexual abuse, sustained emotional cruelty, coercive control, stalking, credible threats, and repeated violations of clear boundaries can justify temporary distance or permanent estrangement. Family membership is not permission to torment someone indefinitely.
The relevant distinction is between identifiable abusive conduct and ideological disagreement. A parent who threatens, assaults, stalks, or deliberately humiliates a child has done something morally different from a parent who asks questions, requests time, remembers events differently, or declines to affirm a contested claim.
Calling both situations “unsafe” does not make them morally equivalent.
A boundary identifies conduct that another person may not direct at you. An ideological ultimatum requires another person to adopt your beliefs as the price of remaining in your life. Both may use therapeutic language, but they do very different things.
Remaining a Person in Relationship
Near the end of the podcast, Mering introduces high differentiation from Bowen family-systems theory. The term sounds technical, but the practice is not.
A well-differentiated person knows what they believe and can express it when appropriate, yet remains capable of hearing disagreement without experiencing it as the destruction of the self.
This allows a parent to say:
I love you. I believe your distress is real. I will listen, and I will help you. But love does not require me to surrender my judgment, lie about what I believe, or treat questions as violence.
The child must eventually be permitted the same independence. Growing up involves disagreeing with parents, testing their beliefs, making mistakes, and sometimes reaching conclusions the parents will never share. Neither side can develop if remaining in relationship requires the surrender of judgment.
High differentiation offers something difficult but humane: two people remaining distinct without treating that distinction as danger.
No-contact may sometimes be the final protection against demonstrated abuse. It should not become the opening move in a conversation the parents were never permitted to have.
Did You Want to Know More?
- Peter Boghossian and Noelle Mering — “Why Disagreement Now Counts as Violence”
The conversation that prompted this essay, including no-contact, ideological estrangement, chosen families, and high differentiation. - PITT — “When a Quarter of the Class Identifies as Trans”
A first-person account involving school instruction, social-media influence, and a name and pronoun change made without parental knowledge. - PITT — “True Believer”
A former social-justice organizer describes socially transitioning her son, later questioning the framework, and receiving advice to restrict contact with non-affirming relatives. - Family Acceptance Project research
Studies examining associations among family acceptance, rejection, and later health outcomes: Ryan et al., 2009, Ryan et al., 2010, and Pariseau et al., 2019. - The Critical Theory Two-Step (Actually Three Steps)
Our broader explanation of how shared standards are disqualified, the questioner is placed on trial, and interpretive authority passes to the critically conscious.
Here are my feet.
They have appeared on this blog before. In 2011, I published an essay called “Heteronormativity—Beware of the Male Toering”, defending my decision to wear two gold rings on my index toes. Fifteen years later, the rings remain. They have recently acquired a companion: a simple brass band on the middle toe of my right foot. Apparently, this is how empires begin.
The conclusion of that old essay has aged better than the theoretical machinery I used to reach it. Jewellery still cannot make a man gay, other people should still mind their own feet, and I still think toe rings look cool. I am rather less convinced that every raised eyebrow reveals the grinding machinery of patriarchal oppression. Some people are enforcing a social convention. Some are uncomfortable with men who wander beyond ordinary masculine presentation. Others simply think toe rings look silly. They are entitled to be wrong.
Same feet, less theory.
The toe rings were never the whole story, anyway. I simply prefer being barefoot.
Shoes Are Tools
A shoe is a useful piece of equipment. It protects the foot from cold, sharp objects, hot pavement, workplace hazards, and the many botanical weapons concealed in my yard. What it is not is a natural extension of the human body that must remain attached whenever we are awake.
At home, I am barefoot. For light yardwork, I am barefoot. When the task involves shovels, burrs, thorns, or other objects likely to make me regret my principles, I wear my gardening sandals.
Edmonton winter also imposes certain limits upon the project. I wear boots outside because I may be an idiot, but freezing off my digits would be an excessive commitment to the bit. Once inside, however, the boots come off and the Birkenstocks go on.
Teaching? Barefoot in my Birks.
Working at the University? Barefoot in my Birks.
Choir? You guessed it: barefoot in my Birks.
Yes, I recognize that wearing sandals is not technically barefoot. In ordinary conversation, however, “barefoot in my Birks” communicates the important fact: no socks have been permitted to interfere with relations between my feet and the surrounding world.
The Modest Case for Bare Feet
There are health claims to be made here, but they should remain modest. Research on minimalist footwear—not quite the same thing as padding around one’s house barefoot—has found that giving the foot more work to do can increase foot-muscle strength. One six-month study reported a substantial increase among people doing ordinary daily activity in minimal shoes. Another found that walking in minimalist shoes strengthened foot muscles about as effectively as a programme of targeted foot exercises.
That is interesting, but it is not permission to construct a wellness religion. A systematic review of habitual barefoot walking and running found only limited evidence for long-term effects on biomechanics and health. Barefoot living will not align your chakras, draw electrons from Mother Earth, purge toxins, or otherwise perform the usual miracles advertised by people selling something.
My argument requires none of that.
Feet move, flex, spread, grip, and feel the surface beneath them. Shoes necessarily alter some of that experience in exchange for protection. Sometimes the exchange is worthwhile; sometimes there is nothing present from which the foot needs protecting. If I am sitting on my couch, walking across the kitchen, or wandering through soft grass, a shoe has no urgent work to perform.
Comfort is also a legitimate good. Not every preference needs to be converted into a medical intervention before we are allowed to enjoy it. I like the feeling of cool floors, warm decks, grass, and bare heels resting on the edge of a chair. I dislike the constriction and accumulated warmth of socks. That is not a clinical trial, but it is entirely adequate evidence about which state makes my own feet happier.
This Is Not Medical Advice for Everybody
There are people who should not follow my example. Diabetes, neuropathy, poor circulation, impaired sensation, wounds, balance problems, and other medical conditions can make an unnoticed foot injury dangerous. Anyone dealing with those risks should follow medical advice rather than the example of a barefoot blogger from Edmonton.
The environment matters as well. Wear proper footwear around broken glass, machinery, chemicals, extreme temperatures, heavy objects, and workplaces with safety requirements. Do not stride onto someone else’s construction site and announce that The Arbourist has liberated your toes.
This is a defence of sensible freedom, not a demand for podiatric anarchy.
Free the Toes—Within Reason
Most of us spend our lives moving between two unnecessary extremes. At one end, shoes become compulsory equipment even when nothing requires them. At the other, barefoot evangelists promise that direct contact with the lawn will repair modern civilization.
There is a comfortable middle path. Wear shoes when they have a job. Take them off when they do not. If going barefoot feels good and the ground is safe, let your feet out for a while. If it hurts, put the shoes back on. No consciousness-raising session is required.
Does wearing a toe ring make a man gay? Still no.
Does going barefoot make him enlightened? Also no.
It may simply mean that his feet are comfortable, his increasingly numerous toe rings remain visible, and the socks have once again been defeated.
Sources
- Curtis, Robert, et al. “Daily Activity in Minimal Footwear Increases Foot Strength.” Scientific Reports 11 (2021). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98070-0
- Ridge, Sarah T., et al. “Walking in Minimalist Shoes Is Effective for Strengthening Foot Muscles.” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 51, no. 1 (2019): 104–113. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30113521/
- Hollander, Karsten, et al. “Long-Term Effects of Habitual Barefoot Running and Walking: A Systematic Review.” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 49, no. 4 (2017): 752–762. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27801744/
- American Diabetes Association. “Diabetes & Your Feet.” https://diabetes.org/diabetes-and-your-feet
Have you ever held your tongue during an otherwise friendly conversation because you could see exactly what would happen if you spoke your mind? Not because you lacked an answer, but because answering would transform the conversation into a trial of your character.
Scope note: Critical Theory is a diverse and disputed intellectual tradition. This essay offers a broad introduction to a recurring mechanism in contemporary woke politics; it does not claim that every critical theorist thinks alike or that every systemic criticism is false.
Why can saying that sex is a biological reality make you a transphobe? How can defending merit-based standards make you a racist? Why can asking that factual claims be judged by shared evidence turn you into a Western imperialist? Why can asking how 215 radar anomalies came to be reported as the remains of 215 children make you a colonialist or denialist? How can requesting concrete examples of systemic racism become proof that you are too privileged—or possess too much “false consciousness”—to recognize it?
Any of those questions may be reasonable, mistaken, or badly phrased. The tell is not whether the questioner is right. It is whether the question gets answered—or the questioner gets morally diagnosed.
“The argument ends before it begins. Instead of the claim being examined, you are.”
The argument ends before it begins. Instead of the claim being examined, you are.
You walk away wondering whether you really are the latest variety of “-phobe,” “-ist,” or some other socially shameful thing. Perhaps you were insensitive. Perhaps you missed something. Or perhaps you encountered a system of thought in which disagreement is not processed as information but reclassified as further evidence of your moral or ideological conditioning.
Well, dear reader, you have probably met Critical Theory without being formally introduced.
The Theory Beneath the Argument
Critical Theory emerged from the Western Marxist tradition associated with the Frankfurt School. Its foundational statement is usually traced to Max Horkheimer’s 1937 essay, Traditional and Critical Theory. We do not need the complete family tree here. The important distinction is between a theory that tries to describe and explain society and one that also intends to transform it.
The contemporary pattern did not travel unchanged from Horkheimer. It combined with later theories of power, identity, standpoint, and language before being simplified into activist practice. We are tracing that recurring logic, not claiming that every modern slogan came directly from Frankfurt in 1937.
Nor is self-sealing reasoning exclusive to the woke Left. Religious, nationalist, conspiratorial, and right-wing movements can do it as well. This essay examines the contemporary critical form because that is the form at issue here.
Critical Theory begins with a reasonable observation: societies do more than make laws. Families, schools, religions, media, professional bodies, and governments also transmit the values and categories through which people understand the world. The stronger claim is that these institutions reproduce existing power. What society calls normal, objective, reasonable, or meritorious may be the ruling order explaining itself in flattering language.
This is hegemony in plain English: power becomes secure when its assumptions feel like common sense. Social construction describes how language, customs, and institutions shape social categories. Critical consciousness is the claimed ability to recognize the power beneath those apparently natural arrangements.
These ideas are not useless. Institutions can possess blind spots. Rules written without discriminatory intent can produce unfair effects. Testimony from outsiders can expose facts that insiders overlook. A society genuinely interested in justice must be able to examine patterns extending beyond one malicious person or one explicit rule.
The trouble begins when power becomes the master explanation, and when the framework stops asking whether a particular institution is unjust and begins presuming that its apparent neutrality is how the injustice hides.
The Critical Theory Two-Step (Actually, Three Steps)
Imagine that an employer uses an examination to select applicants, and one demographic group passes at a lower rate. A serious inquiry asks whether the examination measures skills required for the job, whether applicants had equal preparation, whether discrimination affected the process, or whether another explanation better fits the evidence. The examination might be sound, biased, partly useful, or indefensible. We investigate because we do not yet know.
A critical analysis asks another legitimate question: who defined merit, and might the examination reward the experiences and expectations of the dominant group? That question can reveal something important. It becomes ideological when its answer is assumed in advance and protected from ordinary correction.
This is where the Critical Theory Two-Step begins.
Step one: disqualify the referee.
The standards normally used to settle the disagreement—objectivity, evidence, neutrality, consistent definitions, individual responsibility, and equal treatment—are redescribed as products of the dominant system. They cannot be trusted to judge that system because they help reproduce it.
Step two: put the questioner on trial.
Once common standards have been disqualified, attention shifts from the claim to the person questioning it. Why are you demanding evidence? Whose interests does your objection serve? What privilege shapes your perspective? What fragility, unconscious bias, or false consciousness prevents you from recognizing the deeper truth?
You cannot appeal to neutral standards because those standards are said to be compromised. You cannot challenge that conclusion because your challenge demonstrates how thoroughly the system has compromised you.
This is not merely an internet caricature. In a 2017 paper on feminist and critical-race philosophy classes, Alison Bailey cautions that resistance can be difficult to interpret, but calls one category “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback.” She describes it as “willful ignorance,” rather than scepticism or critical thinking, and recommends treating it as a “shadow text” alongside the assigned reading. The problem remains: the instructor using the framework decides which objection is genuine and which merely exposes the student’s privilege. Step two carries us directly into step three.
That is the deer-in-the-headlights moment. You entered expecting a discussion about whether something was true and discovered that the real proceeding concerned whether you were morally qualified to ask.
This pattern explains why neutrality becomes complicity, silence becomes violence, disagreement becomes harm, and equal treatment becomes a means of preserving inequality. These are not random contradictions. Once the system is presumed guilty, refusing the critical interpretation helps the guilty system continue.
Who Gets the Whistle?
Disqualifying neutral standards does not eliminate authority. It relocates authority.
The person with critical consciousness claims to see what ordinary consciousness cannot. Lived experience may supply the evidence, while academics and activists supply the framework explaining what that experience means. When members of the same group disagree, the dissenter can be diagnosed as having internalized the dominant ideology. The new hierarchy favours the critically conscious expert over the compromised expert, and approved lived experience over dissident lived experience.
Liberal inquiry accepts that the referee may be biased and allows everyone to challenge the calls. Ideological Critical Theory declares the rules corrupt, dismisses the referee, and then quietly hands the whistle to those who possess the correct consciousness.
The pattern now has three steps: disqualify the supposedly neutral standards, scrutinize the person who appeals to them, and transfer authority to those with critical consciousness. The referee has not disappeared. A new one has taken the whistle—and its calls are no longer open to challenge on equal terms.
The Negative Utopia
Where is this process supposed to lead?
Critical Theory can name its shiny future in moral terms: liberation, justice, equality, and freedom from domination. It is much less clear about the institutions that will produce those things. Horkheimer stated the difficulty himself. Its basic commitment was the “abolition of social injustice,” but he acknowledged that the transformed society could not be concretely known until it existed. If the concepts of the present society are part of the problem, they cannot be trusted to describe the solution.
The result is a future described by subtraction: what we have now, only without racism, sexism, hierarchy, exclusion, exploitation, oppressive norms, and unequal outcomes. Ask who will exercise authority, how competing rights will be reconciled, or what limits will bind the new institutions, and the answer often restates the wish: power will be shared, institutions equitable, and outcomes just.
This is the negative utopia. The criticism can be ruthless while the construction remains hazy. If the existing order reproduces domination, tearing it down can count as progress even when the replacement remains a hope that something better will emerge.
If reformers can name the replacement institutions, admit their trade-offs, limit their authority, and explain how their failures will be corrected, then they have answered this criticism. Their proposal must then be judged on its merits.
The existing liberal society is then compared not with another functioning society but with an imagined condition free of its imperfections. Every distance between liberal principles and liberal practice becomes another crack in the structure. Critical Theory pours itself into those cracks and freezes there, widening genuine failures into evidence that the whole arrangement is illegitimate. The new damage exposes further cracks, which invite another application of the theory.
Imagining a better society is not the problem. Liberal reform requires moral imagination. The danger begins when the imagined society is judged entirely by its intentions while the existing society is judged by every one of its failures.
This places the self-correcting mechanism in the wrong location. When the theory collides with reality, its premises rarely enter the dock. Failure is attributed to entrenched power, social conditioning, backlash, co-option, insufficient commitment, or incomplete transformation. Harmful reforms show that reform did not go far enough, resistance demonstrates false consciousness, and contrary evidence reveals who controls what counts as evidence.
The theory does not lose. Society merely proves how much more theory it requires.
That helps explain why dismantling an institution can count as progress without a workable replacement. If stability means stabilized injustice, disruption acquires moral value of its own. Revolution becomes a permanent process of identifying, delegitimizing, and breaking whatever reproduces the old society.
The Liberal Answer
Classical liberalism does not pretend that knowledge falls from the heavens untouched by human interests. Knowledge is produced by limited people inside fallible institutions. Power can distort research, experts can protect one another, and a comfortable consensus can be wrong.
The liberal answer is not an impossible view from nowhere. It is a society in which views from everywhere may collide.
Liberal inquiry does not abolish authority; it makes authority contestable.
Jonathan Rauch condenses this system of “liberal science” into two rules: no one gets the final say, and no one has personal authority.
No one gets the final say because every public claim remains open to criticism and correction. Society needs provisional conclusions, but longevity, popularity, credentials, and institutional endorsement do not make them permanently incontestable.
No one has personal authority because identity, experience, and social position cannot settle a public claim. Experience may provide evidence others lack, and demonstrated expertise deserves serious weight. Neither lived experience nor professional status grants immunity from examination.
Free speech is therefore more than permission to say unpleasant things. It is part of liberal democracy’s error-correcting machinery. John Stuart Mill understood that a suppressed opinion might be true, partly true, or usefully wrong. Even a correct belief becomes little more than inherited prejudice when nobody is permitted to test it.
The liberal system does not guarantee that truth will win every argument. It prevents any faction from acquiring permanent authority to decide which arguments may occur.
This is the answer to the claim that knowledge is socially constructed and hegemonically reproduced. Yes, knowledge is socially produced. That does not mean it is socially determined. Reality constrains what can survive honest investigation, while open disagreement allows people with different interests and blind spots to expose one another’s errors.
We can socially decide that a red light means stop. We cannot socially decide that an unsafe bridge will remain standing. Culture creates some meanings; it does not create every fact those meanings describe.
Liberal institutions can certainly betray these principles. Universities can punish dissent, governments can conceal information, journalists can become conformist, and professional organizations can convert consensus into dogma. When that happens, the critical diagnosis earns some of its force.
The liberal remedy is more contestability: open the records, protect the dissenter, disclose the conflict, replicate the finding, permit the rival explanation, and let the argument continue. Liberal democracy can repair its cracks without declaring the entire structure fraudulent.
What to Notice Next Time
The next time a disputed claim turns into an examination of your moral character, watch for the two-step. Were the shared standards of evidence first declared compromised? Did scrutiny then move from the assertion to the identity, motives, or consciousness of the person asking about it? Who acquired the authority to interpret the dispute after the ordinary referee was dismissed?
Then ask the questions that every theory and every proposed remedy should have to survive. What evidence would prove the claim wrong? What competing explanation has been considered? What will replace the institution being dismantled? Who will exercise power afterward? How will that power be challenged and removed?
Critical Theory can identify real cracks in a liberal society. Its ideological power begins when those cracks can confirm the theory while almost nothing can disprove it.
Not every appeal to power, identity, or systemic effects completes this pattern. If an argument supplies evidence, answers objections without diagnosing the objector, specifies its remedy, and identifies what would count against it, then it remains contestable. It may be right or wrong, but it is not the closed system described here.
You are not obligated to accept that arrangement. The question itself is not evidence of guilt.
Liberal inquiry promises no final destination—only an open road on which every claim may be questioned.
Would You Like to Know More?
- The Woke Machine
How grievance becomes identity, identity becomes a special authority to know, and disagreement becomes further evidence of guilt. - The Woke Machine in the Wild
What happens when the machine escapes the seminar room: friend–enemy sorting, exception ethics, institutional conflict, and versions of the pattern on both Left and Right. - Woke for the Rest of Us
A pocket field guide for recognizing the script in real time, complete with diagnostic tests and conversational escape hatches. - When Disagreement Becomes Guilt
How a theory stops processing objections as information and begins treating them as evidence of the dissenter’s moral corruption. - The DSA’s Utopia Begins by Breaking the Society We Have
Why a movement without a credible institutional destination can still possess a revolutionary direction: dismantle the existing order first and discover what follows later. - “Hate” as a Governance Tool
How moral language can perform administrative work by reclassifying disputed arguments as harms that institutions may suppress rather than answer. - Beyond the Oppressor/Oppressed Lens
A deeper examination of the binary framework that sorts people by group power and struggles to accommodate agency, context, mixed motives, or individual responsibility. - Reading: Cynical Theories
An introduction to the postmodern knowledge principle: how suspicion of objectivity, language, and universal categories merged with an analysis centred upon power.
References
- Horkheimer, Max. Traditional and Critical Theory (1937), in Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Columbia Law School-hosted PDF: https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/critique1313/files/2019/09/Horkheimer-Traditional-and-Critical-Theory-2.pdf
- Institut für Sozialforschung. “The History of the IfS.” https://www.ifs.uni-frankfurt.de/history.html
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Critical Theory (Frankfurt School).” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/
- Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty (1859). https://eet.pixel-online.org/files/etranslation/original/Mill%2C%20On%20Liberty.pdf
- Rauch, Jonathan. Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. University of Chicago Press, expanded edition, 2013.
- Rauch, Jonathan. “The Constitution of Knowledge.” National Affairs, 2021. https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge
- Bailey, Alison. “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes.” Hypatia 32, no. 4 (2017): 876–892. https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/fpphil/4/
- Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. “Unmarked Burial Sites / Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund,” June 5, 2026. https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1772556985244/1772557018851
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