Is The Gender Critical Movement Bound to Remain Rudderless?

By Ian David

A Movement Without A Horizon

For all its apparent moral clarity and empirical grounding, the gender critical movement suffers from a deep structural weakness. It lacks a horizon, a vision to move toward. Though move it does, it is rudderless, hitting targets on its way to nowhere definite or well-defined.

And without any clear vision, it’s destined to remain merely reactive, the reluctance or inability to say what it’s for or what kind of world it’s attempting to bring into being likely to ensure its eventual failure to win institutional power or systemic reform.

Every transformative movement needs the vision of a future worth defending beyond merely resisting the course of events and the GC project is no different.

I’ve deliberately labelled it ‘transformative’ because, like it or not, at this moment it’s pushing back on what have now become institutional assumptions and accepted protocols when it comes to the issue of ‘trans rights’ (think of all those organizational bodies fully embracing ‘affirmation’, ‘sex assignation’ at birth and ‘gender affirming care’). GC interventions in other words, find themselves trying to force a rollback of policies that were adopted outside consideration of the public, but which have nevertheless become profoundly entrenched.

As such then, the movement resists but doesn’t envision what its own success looks like, thereby confining itself to the conceptual and institutional boundaries set by the very ‘gender industrial complex’ it opposes.

Techno-Capital’s Vision: Identity as a Programmable Frontier

The ‘trans-activist’ (or ‘sex denialism’) side, in contrast - along with the wider techno-capital system in which we, and it, find ourselves situated does have a vision – a horizon toward which it’s heading. It imagines a future where everything about us is flexible, modifiable, and optimizable. A world where identity, bodies, and even ordinary life can be upgraded, medicalized, data-tracked, and endlessly redesigned, all framed as liberation or ‘becoming your truest self.’

But underneath the uplifting language a simpler logic is at work: turn everything into something that can be engineered, monetized, connected, or (ideally) all three.

Against this, the gender-critical worldview offers a response that’s necessary but incomplete- a firm ‘no’ without any fully articulated ‘yes’; a critique without counter-vision; a diagnosis without any direction.

So, I think we need to explore why this leaves GCs structurally disadvantaged in the face of a system that does have one, and how the current landscape can be understood by combining two related perspectives: those of ‘following the money’ and a broader systems-ontology of techno-capital itself, as explored in such detail by this site.

Because the truth, uncomfortable as it may be to some, is this. The oligarchs and organizations Jennifer Bilek has tracked and described so effectively aren’t just architects of their horizon, they’re its servants and agents as well. And unless we better understand both sides of that relationship, we’re unlikely to comprehend much of the present at all.

Tech-driven capitalism today has its own kind of momentum. Once the rate of profit in material production went into decline, the system sought and found new frontiers - first attention (social media, surveillance capitalism) then reproduction and the body itself. It consumes the world not out of malice but because expansion is what it does and what it has to do to survive. In this landscape, gender identity becomes just another area the system can work on. It’s endlessly medicalizable, easy for institutions to measure and manage, and capable of generating lifelong data and pharmaceutical use - i.e. revenue.

Put another way, it’s the ideal entry point for a form of capitalism that now treats the human body and personal identity as further sites to extract value from.

This is why “gender” has become a privileged site of transformation. It isn’t uniquely ‘fragile’ (as some would so vocally claim) but it is viewed by the system as uniquely modifiable making it a space perfectly suited for ‘optimization’, where the ‘optimal’ is simply the continued expansion of the system itself.

How Gender Became Technologically and Economically Actionable

Its emergence as a site of conceptual, legal and medical intercession however didn’t arise in a vacuum and needs situating within a broader historical context.

Post-1945 liberal democracies and the ‘Open Society’ created an unprecedented environment. Defined by individual rights, pluralism, tolerance of experimentation, the weakening of traditional authorities and a deep faith in progress and self-improvement, these conditions enabled both the theoretical interrogation of sex and gender and the use and development of technologies capable of transforming the body. Neither alone was sufficient. Together, they proved revolutionary.

To put this another way, while post-1945 liberalism didn’t produce the gender-identity industry directly, it did produce the intellectual, legal and moral conditions in which gender could first be questioned, then conceptualized as mutable, then eventually made available for technological and economic exploitation. It created a space for ideas that later became economically actionable.

So unlike race, caste, religion or class - all constrained by historical, social, and structural forces, “gender” was rendered fluid by decades of intellectual effort within sexology, feminism, queer theory and eventually cyberfeminism/Xenofeminism and tech-optimism.

Post-1945 liberal-democratic norms then, offered an environment in which theorists could contest the category of ‘gender’ itself, not merely how people were treated within it, while technical capabilities – some pre-existing - were progressively activated, refined and repurposed in tandem.

And the notion of ‘gender flexibility,’ now armed with technological and medical possibilities (hormones, surgeries, puberty blockers, legal recognition etc.), produced a uniquely programmable axis of identity.

Activist networks, institutional support and market incentives further amplified this effect, turning it into a frontier for experimentation and systemic integration in ways other identity categories couldn’t replicate. The familiar retort ‘why can’t I identify as Black?’ misunderstands the historical sequence. Race was never subjected to the same half-century scholarly siege that declared “gender” a pure social construct detachable from the body; no equivalent of Butler’s performativity or Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto ever dissolved the category ‘Black’ into free-floating signification before the surgeons and pharmacists arrived. No comparable body of theory systematically detached it from history, ancestry or embodied experience in the same way.

“Gender” though was painstakingly prepared as a programmable axis for years and that prior intellectual demolition is what makes its medical and legal capture possible in a way that remains unthinkable (so far) for race.

But, looked at through a different lens, identity ceases to be an ideology and becomes something more like an infrastructure upon which techno-capital has built a perfect and growing marketplace. Such a view thus makes sense of the network of philanthropists, foundations, corporate alliances, medical lobbies, and activist NGOs advancing “gender-identity” (and often transhumanist) legislation globally this site has so meticulously documented.

Players of course include the Pritzkers, Martine Rothblatt, Jon Stryker, Tim Gill, the Soroses, Arcus, Tides and others and Bilek’s research traces not speculation but verifiable capital flows through:

• endowments to medical schools;

• investments in biotech and synthetic biology, including technological reproduction;

• funding for legal advocacy;

• grants to academic departments;

• media partnerships;

• alliances with pharmaceutical giants.

  
  

The individuals named above however do more than fund organizations and advocate policy change – though they unquestionably undertake both. But they operate within a system whose logic shapes them as much as they shape it. And success in that system depends on producing objects that are compatible with institutional logic.

For Rothblatt, Pritzker, Stryker, and others, those ‘things’ have taken the form of visions of human life - identities, bodies, and social structures that can be measured, refashioned and scaled within the broader system, precisely because it rewards and amplifies such forms.

And while these visions don’t just arise out of nothing neither do they follow a single, linear path.

The advent of certain biotechnologies for example reveals a self-reinforcing feedback loop involving scientific breakthrough, theoretical critique, institutional acceptance and capitalist growth. Such technologies (isolation of testosterone for e.g.) often start as specialized medical tools, then spread into subcultural or underground uses with theoretical models stepping in next. Such theoretical work often aligns with grassroots calls for increased access and greater autonomy which in turn encourages institutions to legitimize and medicalize the technologies in the guise of rights, health equity and personal choice.

And once theory and activism bring those things into the mainstream, markets quickly respond by supplying and improving them to meet rising demand. In this ongoing loop, capital not only meets needs but also draws on activist and theoretical ideas to create new products and services, deepening the ties between bodily change and market-driven biopolitics while sustaining profits and reliance. Though the exact starting point of early subversive uses is often unclear, the cycle quickly gains its own momentum through continual interaction between innovation, critique, institutions and commerce.

Thus, the interplay of language, intellectual tools and practical capability makes identity – indeed life itself - newly conceivable as programmable, editable and institutionally codifiable, a shift visible in the present moment, where children’s understandings of their own bodies - especially sexed and reproductive anatomy - are being reshaped to align with advancing medical technologies and the ongoing deconstruction of biological sex.

In all cases however, the system not only rewards certain kinds of action, but renders those actions comprehensible and practicable by drawing on a conceptual apparatus developed by theorists and activists, which is what makes those ideas, and their origins, structurally significant.

Can we reasonably assert then that Rothblatt, Pritzker, Stryker, Gill and others rely on theoretical constructs (such as Haraway, Plant, Butler, Preciado, Rubin et al and the Yogyakarta Principles)? Demonstrably, yes though not because every billionaire is a scholar but rather that these ideas circulate in the networks they inhabit, informing policy, institutional strategy and funding priorities. For example:

• Rothblatt cites cybernetic identity and post-human theory in Virtually Human, explicitly engaging with concepts of mutable and programmable identity.

• Pritzker foundations fund programs and institutions that operationalize frameworks drawn from human-rights law, queer theory, and feminist thought;

• Stryker, Gill, and others work through advisory boards, think tanks, and institutional networks that translate abstract theory into and across medicine, education and social policy.

  
  

So, these actors don’t just behave strategically within the system. They inhabit and propagate the concepts that make their visions of human life interpretable by and amenable to the logic of techno-capital.

And the frameworks they use matter because they provide the meaning that justifies institutional action. Money moves with ideas; ideas and money move institutions; institutions move lives.

Beyond Critique: The Need for a Generative Counter-Vision

All of which brings us back to the initial problem - that the gender-critical perspective is largely diagnostic, not architectural.

While it sees issues accurately (dissolution of sexual boundaries, institutional capture, un-necessary medicalization of children, corporate influence, ideological overreach) it rarely answers the question ‘what are we aiming to create’?

For them, what indeed is the horizon?

True, you’ll often hear things like a call for ‘a return to material reality’ or to ‘reaffirm biological sex’, ‘protect children’ and ‘restore boundaries’ all of which may be true and essential.

But, once again, these are reactive imperatives, not generative visions. They defend what they think exists (which itself is becoming debatable) but do not articulate what comes next.

A horizon represents what people are for rather than what they’re against. And in creating one you have to ask some of the really big questions.

What kind of embodied beings are we? What limits enable human flourishing? What is a humane relationship to technology? What institutions safeguard the vulnerable in an age of biocapital? How do we structure society so that the human cannot be medicalized, monetized or abstracted out of existence?

I mentioned just now the notion of ‘identity becoming infrastructure’ suggesting the system rewards those who fit such a paradigm and I’d suggest this view has explanatory power, pointing at why medicalization spreads, institutions align, appeals to morals often fail, narratives replicate faster than arguments and ‘embodiment’ becomes politically inconvenient.

It’s not a moral actor, this system. It simply optimizes, using bodies, laws, attention and humanity itself as substrate.

If we’re to resist something that dissolves the human, more than critique must be offered and a genuine alternative articulated. Without this, the system’s horizon will win by default. Humans move toward images, not arguments. Movements without vision are always in second place.

In summary then, the fight isn’t with an ideology or a handful of oligarchs alone. Instead, we’re confronting a system that rewards abstraction, monetizes identity, medicalizes distress, colonizes language, dissolves categories, treats the body as improvable hardware and inserts markets wherever meaning once stood.

Understanding Bilek’s documented oligarch networks, their intellectual underpinnings as well as the structural, cybernetic (automatic control & communication) pressures of techno-capital itself is essential. Each explains the other’s blind spots. Each illuminate why identity politics, medicalization, and institutional alignment appear so unstoppable.

Therefore, if we’re to compete with a system that imagines the human as plastic, we must build an alternative that is:

• grounded in embodiment, erotic polarity, and complementarity;

• technologically wise but subordinated to life;

• interdependent and protective;

• offering visions of victory rather than prohibitions.

  
  

To be clear, I’m not defending ‘tradition’ here but proposing the first civilization in history that’s fully technologically potent yet fully committed to remaining biologically human, technologies that serve life instead of replacing it; a legislative order that protects the reality of sexual dimorphism the way environmental law now protects wetlands and an understanding that the female body isn’t a planetary resource to be financialized, data-mined, or rented out as a gestational service.

The first side to fully articulate the future may very well win it. Not because it has the most moral authority, but because it has the most compelling imagination and currently only one side appears to be trying. Critique alone won’t suffice. GCs must build the world they want to defend.

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Ian David is a former journalist & business founder with an interest in Kairos Shock and the ontological rupture humanity is currently undergoing. He was Editorial & Policy Director at a news, information & knowledge pooling service to the UK public sector, focusing on technology, service delivery, and processes.

You can find more of Ian’s work at his X feed.

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Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist who has tracked the funding of the gender industry for over a decade. She is creator of the The 11th Hour, a platform highlighting the connections between technology, transsexualism, and transhumanism. Her research into the philanthropic backers of the gender industry has been utilized for legal briefs, and platformed in myriad publications, films, and other media in the US and internationally. She has appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show, Steven Bannon’s War Room, and James Patrick’s Big Picture, and on various other platforms and podcasts. She has been featured in films such as No Way Back (2023), Gender Transformation (2023), and The Gender Delusion (2023). Her work has been published in numerous books and magazines, among which: First Things, Tablet, Human Events, The Federalist, The Spectator World, The American Mind, and in the anthology Female Erasure. She is the author of Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches From the 11th Hour.