The War on Norms: Derrick Jensen Traces Anarchism, Queer Theory, and Trans
11 December 2025
With Derrick Jensen
Global
Derrick Jensen traces the documented intellectual lineage running from anarchism through Foucault and Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex" to contemporary trans ideology, examining how the rejection of all social norms — including those protecting children — became embedded in academic theory and eventually in clinical and legal practice. The conversation is grounded in primary sources most policymakers have never read, and speaks directly to the theoretical foundations underlying the gender-medicine policies that several European countries are now actively reversing.
Derrick Jensen is an environmental philosopher and the author of more than twenty-five books, known for applying rigorous analytical scrutiny to the dominant culture. In this conversation he turns that same method on the intellectual movement that has reshaped gender medicine, child safeguarding and institutional policy across the Western world. His interest is not primarily polemical but archival: he examines the founding texts, their authors' stated intentions, and the path those ideas travelled from academic theory into clinical guidelines and law. The thread Jensen traces begins with anarchism's wholesale rejection of social norms and runs through French poststructuralism into the academic field of queer theory. Two primary sources anchor the discussion. The first is Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay "Thinking Sex," which proposed a radical reclassification of sexual practices and questioned the special protection society extends to children from adult sexuality. The second is Michel Foucault's documented advocacy — in signed petitions and published interviews — for the abolition of age-of-consent laws. Jensen's argument is that these are not fringe positions incidental to the field but foundational ones, and that the collective reluctance to examine them openly has had practical consequences for law and policy. Child protection is a recurring thread throughout the conversation. Jensen contends that a theoretical framework which treats all social norms as arbitrary expressions of power is structurally liable to erode precisely the norms that exist to shield children from harm. He connects this to Karen Horney's psychoanalytic concept of womb envy and to Peggy Reeves Sanday's cross-cultural anthropological research on the social conditions associated with high rates of sexual violence. Both bodies of work, he argues, complicate the narrative about gender and power that has come to dominate institutional thinking in health and education. Jensen also recounts the professional cost of attempting a published critique. His publisher held the manuscript for five years before dropping it, explicitly because it criticised queer theory — a sequence that is itself a data point in the wider question of whether dissent from gender-identity orthodoxy is institutionally tolerable. The episode also examines DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — a pattern identified in research on abusive relationships. Jensen applies it to institutional responses to critics of gender-identity ideology, arguing that the reflex of recasting dissenters as persecutors follows a structurally identical logic. For those tracking the European evidence base, the conversation provides important background. Sweden, Finland, Denmark and England have each conducted systematic reviews in recent years that resulted in significant restrictions on paediatric gender medicine, citing in every case the absence of a robust clinical evidence base. Understanding the theoretical commitments that originally drove the expansion of those services — and the intellectual genealogy those commitments carry — is directly relevant to explaining why contrary evidence was discounted for so long, and why the institutional correction, when it arrived, was as swift as it was far-reaching.
