The War on Norms: Derrick Jensen Traces Anarchism, Queer Theory, and Trans
11 December 2025
With Derrick Jensen
Global
Derrick Jensen traces the intellectual lineage connecting anarchism, queer theory, and the trans movement, arguing that what unites each stage is the systematic rejection of social norms — including those that protect children. The episode examines founding texts most policymakers have never read, from Gayle Rubin's 'Thinking Sex' to Michel Foucault's advocacy for abolishing age-of-consent laws. Jensen also describes being dropped by his publisher for criticising queer theory — a pattern of suppression the Cass Review recognised in UK clinical settings.
Derrick Jensen is an environmental philosopher and the author of more than twenty-five books. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley and Dr Bret Alderman, he traces the intellectual genealogy connecting nineteenth-century anarchism, twentieth-century queer theory, and the contemporary trans movement, arguing that what unites each stage is a defining commitment to rejecting social norms — including those that exist specifically to protect children. Jensen directs attention to founding texts that most people encountering queer theory in policy or educational settings have never read. Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" argued for dismantling the hierarchies that distinguish between licit and illicit sexual behaviour. Jensen also discusses Michel Foucault's active advocacy for abolishing age-of-consent laws — a position largely absent from the mainstream reception of his work but which Jensen treats as essential to understanding what the theory originally licensed. Both Rubin and Foucault are canonical references in academic literature that has shaped gender policy across NHS services, school curricula, and public-sector equality frameworks in the UK. Jensen's own experience with the publishing industry illustrates the pattern of suppression that has been documented in clinical settings. Having written "The Culture of Make Believe" as a diagnosis of the extreme right, he began a companion examination of the left. His publisher held the manuscript for five years before dropping him entirely on account of his criticism of queer theory. The Cass Review's 2024 final report identified a structurally similar dynamic in gender medicine: legitimate clinical concern treated as ideological transgression, with professional consequences for those who voiced it. The conversation also introduces several psychological tools for understanding that dynamic. Jensen discusses DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender — a pattern from abuser psychology that he argues has become a routine rhetorical move against gender-critical researchers, clinicians, and advocates. He draws on Karen Horney's concept of womb envy and Peggy Reeves Sanday's cross-cultural research on sexual violence to situate the current debate within a longer feminist tradition that predates, and substantially contests, queer theory's foundational premises. The relevance to the UK is direct. British institutions — the NHS, schools, universities, regulatory bodies — spent more than a decade adopting frameworks derived from queer theory without substantive engagement with those frameworks' founding arguments. NHS England's 2024 decision to withdraw routine prescribing of puberty blockers for under-eighteens, and the wider evidence review led by Dr Hilary Cass, both reflect a belated recognition that the ideological assumptions embedded in clinical practice had not been subjected to adequate scrutiny. Jensen's reconstruction of what those assumptions actually are, and where they came from, is a useful contribution to that ongoing reckoning. Stella and Bret also ask Jensen about his viral "Queer Theory Jeopardy" exchange, which demonstrated how few institutional advocates of the theory could accurately describe what its founding texts argue. That gap — between confident institutional promotion and basic familiarity with source material — is precisely the kind of evidentiary failure the Cass Review was designed to address, and that UK courts and Parliament continue to grapple with as gender policy is progressively revised.
