The Social Position of Gender Ideology

Like so much leftist doctrine, gender ideology claims to speak for the vulnerable, while being in reality an ideology of managerial control (1,500 words, 7 minutes)

Yesterday (Monday, 07 July 2025) saw three Canadian venues publish articles on the emotive subject of gender ideology:

• The Globe and Mail defended gender ideology, in the course of attacking Alberta Premier Danielle Smith here; and

• The National Post’s Mia Hughes introduced biological facts, here;

• Melanie Bennet (

  Melanie Bennet, True North.
  ) of the startup
  Juno News
  revealed documents on teenage sex-change operations in Nova Scotia, here.

The paper of Canada’s managerial classes pushes gender ideology, its main street conservative competitor publishes medical facts, and the insurgent Juno News exposes alarming details of child sex changes. The social position of the three papers reflects the social position of gender ideology: it is an elite ideology, pushed from above and resisted from below. The resistance is gaining strength.

The occasion for The Globe’s defence of gender ideology is a legal challenge to Danielle Smith’s Bill 26, prohibiting what is euphemistically called “gender-affirming care.” More concretely, Smith’s bill prohibits hormones and sex-change operations on minors. It is a gruesome topic, which is why it requires a euphemism.

By “gender ideology,” I mean the currently powerful ideology that posits an immutable and demanding gender identity, and makes this identity the basis of a person’s claims to constitutional rights. This ideology flies a constantly mutating set of pastel-coloured flags, insists on the rights of a population defined by an equally expansible LGBTQ-QWERTY+punctuation initialism, insists that there are an indefinite number of genders, puts pronouns in as many places as possible, speaks of “sex assigned at birth,” puts drag shows and graphic sexual material in schools, insists that a man can be a woman, and in its most gruesome iteration streams confused teenagers into sex-change operations.

Hardly anyone is in favour of some but not all of these things. It’s a package deal, and for the ideologues, it is bigotry akin to Jim Crow to question any significant part of it. (More on this ideology, in the person of Liberal Senator Kristopher Wells, one of its more voluble ideologues, here.)

Debates about gender ideology follow a familiar pattern, illustrated by the three articles I began with. The ideologues of gender talk about identity and rights, while their critics reply with medicine and biology. The former think gender ideology is a civil rights issue; the latter point to the facts of biological sex. Obviously, the critics are right that humans are sexually dimorphic, and that one can no more decide to “identify” as the opposite sex than I could decide to identify as young and handsome.

There is a third way to understand gender ideology, and that is to look at gender ideology as a social and political phenomenon. Gender ideology needs to be understood sociologically, as a function of class, status, and power. As a class ideology, it functions as one of Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs, becoming a marker of status, identifying the holder as a progressive and sophisticated person. This goes some distance towards explaining how mystical “genderwang” (ht Jon Kay) woo-woo commands so much elite and institutional support, even in circles otherwise inclined to go on about “the science.”

Gender ideology is also justificatory of state power. By positing the existence of a suffering minority oppressed by repressive parents and needing the care of professionals, gender ideology both calumniates the traditional family, and justifies the existence of whole fields of bureaucratically administered knowledge.

The social status of gender ideology (and dissent therefrom) is reflected in the social position of the three papers I began with, and also in the personalities of the three authors. The Globe’s author is Dr Katharine Smart, a pediatrician and former president of the Yukon and Canadian Medical Associations. She is the voice of credentialized institutional authority. Mia Hughes of The National Post is a journalist who began by tweeting about gender ideology and women’s spaces, has spent the past five years researching gender medicine, and is now with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Melanie Bennet of Juno News is a citizen journalist who writes about the Marxist theories of critical pedagogy that have taken over school boards, a topic adjacent to gender ideology. Credentialized authorities push gender ideology in the most prestigious of papers; citizen journalists respond with facts in the venues open to them, initially on X or Substack, now in The National Post.

Mia Hughes’ appearance in The National Post has provoked recent gate-keeping complaints from Globe contributor Stephen Marche, here; see Hughes’ comment here. The elite’s need to push back is a sign that credentialized authority feels that its position is getting weaker.

The establishment would like to tell a familiar story of socially conscious expertise attacked by upstarts peddling rage-farming misinformation in down-market venues. The problem is that the upstarts are deeply knowledgeable, and have their facts right. As Hughes has documented in her “WPATH Files” exposé (WPATH being the World Professional Association for Transgender Health), medical institutions have been captured by transgender activists. And like Hughes, Bennet in Juno News has the receipts, in her case, internal reports from within Nova Scotia’s healthcare bureaucracy.

Disturbingly, Dr. Smart refers to WPATH as though it were authoritative, and ignores Hughes’ work. Yorkville’s national newspaper has not reported on the WPATH scandal at all, nor has it reported on the recent US Supreme Court Skrmetti decision, which also exposed problems in transgender medicine. The Globe has only mentioned the UK Cass Report, which resulted in the closure of the Tavistock Clinic, in passing and in opinion columns. The Globe has a habit of ignoring inconvenient stories (I give other examples here).

Dr. Smart begins by striking a libertarian pose — politicians should not interfere between a doctor and patient, “full stop” — but this is belied by her patronizing and dismissive attitude to parents, consultation with whom hides behind an “ideally.” In her world, families are secondary to doctors. The managerial state is a jealous master, and brooks no competitors.

Doctors are products of a state-adjacent and state-funded bureaucratic system, and this is true even in the United States. Their ideology is a product of that social environment. Gender ideology was produced in the universities, is propounded by legal, medical, and educational bureaucracies, and finds its class base among the employees of the state, including public sector unions and a plethora of government-funded activist organizations.

Among the activist organizations are Egale¹ and Skipping Stone², so-called NGOs suing Alberta over Premier Smith’s protective Bill 26 legislation. NGO of course stands for “Non-Governmental Organization”, but a state-funded “non-governmental organization” is a contradiction in terms. They might better be called “Near-Governmental Organizations,” as they are effectively auxiliaries to the permanent bureaucratic state.

The fact that these organizations are funded by Ottawa and suing Alberta points to a problem of federalism wrapped up in the emotive arguments about gender ideology.

Legitimating the State

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas has pointed out that the more power the state accumulates and the more extensive its intervention in citizens’ lives, the greater the state’s need for legitimation. Across the modern West, the state meets its need for legitimacy by setting itself up as the defender of oppressed minorities. Traditionally, the state justified its power with reference to external defence on the one hand and law and order on the other. This leaves the Canadian state in a particularly embarrassing situation, given that the Americans look after defence, and that Ottawa is no longer much good at law and order. Here in Canada, the need for more minorities is particularly acute.

As an undistinguished commentator put it (link on image):

This brings us back to Premier Smith’s bill protecting youth from gender and trans ideology, the ideology defended by Dr. Smart. The Premier confronts an ideology constructed by and serving the interests of the permanent bureaucratic state. In our society, class conflict often takes the form of conflict between elected leaders and the permanent bureaucracy. On the level of class, the electorate confronts the managerial class that staffs the bureaucracy, and its surrounding panoply of near-governmental organizations and elite newspapers. Inevitably, and without conscious irony, the managerial class deems the elected leaders a threat to democracy, and in this country, to Canadian values.

Premier Smith speaks for popular resistance to the bureaucratic state, and to the class that provides both its ideological validation and its permanent staff. This is one reason why Yorkville’s national fishwrap, the paper of the managerial class, is happy to provide space for the ideologues of gender, but never for their opponents. Indeed, they do their best to deplatform opponents. For oppositional views, we must listen to oppositional voices like Mia Hughes and Melanie Bennet, in oppositional or at any rate less prestigious venues.

1. Egale is Canada’s best known gay-rights organization. Having won the gay rights battle, they have gone on to gender ideology (link on image).

2. Skipping Stone’s site, does not mention the federal government, though it does receive some federal funding. It is also funded by the City of Calgary. In the aggregate, it is 40.26% state-funded (h/t Jamie Sarkonak in The National Post https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-liberal-funded-charity-stops-alberta-from-protecting-minors-from-gender-ideology

Source: https://apps.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/hacc/srch/pub/dsplyRprtngPrd?q.srchNmFltr=skipping+stone&q.stts=0007&selectedCharityBn=719337081RR0001&dsrdPg=1

Federal grants: https://search.open.canada.ca/grants/?page=1&sort=agreement_value+desc&search_text=%22skipping+stone%22; and skippingstone.ca