Hidden Agender: Transgenderism’s Struggle Against Reality – Book Review

Gerard Casey and the Clash of Rights that Shouldn’t Exist

“There really shouldn’t be any reason for this book to exist,” Gerard Casey writes in the introduction to his new book, the existence of which “says something—and not a good something—about the deep intellectual, moral and legal confusion of the times in which we live”. Hidden Agender: Transgenderism’s struggle against reality does exist now, however, and so the historiography of reactions to transgender ideology has added a new volume. Casey finished his book four years ago, offering now a snapshot of darker times that were not so long ago, before Maya Forstater won her appeal, and criticism of transgenderism’s ideas was held worthy of respect in a democratic society again.

Ideas come in for relentless critique in this book. People do not. Casey takes no issue with ‘transgender people,’ or any other kind of person, and takes minimal aim at any individual. Charges of hatred, of ‘transphobia,’ will not stick to this Teflon text. “Fighting transphobia isn’t about ending discrimination against trans people,” Casey writes, “it is about silencing moral views that are now considered unacceptable; it is about turning certain beliefs into heresies”. Casey invokes his liberty to challenge totalizing ideas. He wants to interrogate “philosophical thought, not least in metaphysics, which is the philosophical approach to what is fundamentally real,” to take part “in philosophical anthropology, a philosophical investigation of the nature of the human person,” areas where transgenderism has claimed dominion. Casey’s ethos of liberty is recognizably libertarian. He is a zealous defender of his own conscience. The Judith Butlerian jihad of gender repels him because “there is, for her, no reality” in the evolved, immutably sexually dimorphic human body, “no given, just the ersatz-Nietzschean raw exercise of power”.

His core libertarian principle is “zero-aggression,” or freedom from coercion, and gender identity is always coercive, “technocratic and bureaucratic and has a smiley face.” It has gotten this far because “those being coerced have internalised the dynamics of coercion and so no longer are even aware that they are being coerced”. In 2020, transgender ideology was “a dogma that has moved from weirdness to orthodoxy with a speed that is breath-taking” because no one was allowed to challenge it. “We are called upon to valorise a lie, and our refusal to do so is to be considered a social solecism and a demonstration of bigotry. Even more seriously, a refusal to cooperate in untruth-telling may, in certain circumstances, be deemed a crime.” For whatever reasons, Casey’s manuscript has only seen light when that is becoming no longer the case in the UK, and advocates of transgenderism are gaslighting, revising the past to pretend the era of ‘no debate’ ever happened. The “quasi-political sham” of gender identity legislation has unraveled in the British Isles. Gerard Casey’s book is now a testament to the moment when a book that should never have been needed became needful.

Because it is a snapshot in time, in this book Jamie Shupe has not re-embraced his autogynephilia, retransitioned, and refashioned himself as Eliza Rae Shupe yet. Keira Bell’s case had not triggered the Cass Review, either. Casey is critical of the European Court of Human Rights, which has turned out to be surprisingly resilient against capture by transgender ideology in the meantime. “The Equality Act,” proposed legislation in the United States Senate, sought “to install in the US legal system a novel anthropology of sexual identity, including transgender identity, under the remit of which there appears to be little or no room for religious or free-speech exemptions” at the time of writing. Today it remains tabled, unlikely to ever see a procedural vote. Timeliness is unimportant to the historian of ideas, however. For example, Casey’s book records that Labour politicians were actually claiming sex was not anatomical. “Just ten years ago, not to mention at any previous time in recorded history, that statement would have been regarded as so absurd that only a satirist or an opponent of rationality would have written it.” The pendulum seems to be swinging back hard, and soon we will need help remembering it was ever swung the other way.

Casey systematically demolishes “the idea that we all have a gendered essence that is distinct from our biologically male or female bodies and that it is possible to change one’s sex”. Deliberate conflation and confusion of the words “sex,” on the one hand, and “gender,” which used to be “a kind of twee Victorian genteelism for sex,” on the other, is “a conceptual two-step” in which they are “sometimes the same thing, and sometimes not the same thing,” destabilizing the cognition of the recipient of the argument. Confidence art and fraud, especially the academic and intellectual varieties, keep “discussants permanently on the wrong foot” by design this way. Other notable philosophers, least of all Kathleen Stock, have analyzed this bait-and-switch game as well. Freedom of thought, and preservation of the liberty to question the new orthodoxy of gender, is Casey’s primary concern in this book, however, and that is why it seems timely, despite the long incubation period.

Microgenders, those absurdities of bored Queer Theory students, give the game away. Casey compares them to a Terry Pratchett novel. “My up-to-date list contains three hundred and seventy -four types of gender. There would appear to be some duplicates among them, but then, who can tell for sure?” How much political power and social mobility are we expected to give the first boggogender astronaut, the first openly-virusgender musician, the first maverickgender candidate to declare a run for president, after we have given applause to any number of “nonbinary” mediocrities? “You may think that not all of these genders are meant to be taken seriously but, then again, why should we take any of them seriously? What incontestable criterion would you employ to distinguish the serious from the non-serious?”

Casey disposes of some red herrings, such as intersex conditions, otherwise known as disorders or differences of sexual development (DSDs), used to distract the public. He is not fooled by the demands of the dysphoric. “Transgender ideologists insist indignantly that their condition is not an illness, but it is hard to see how this conclusion is to be avoided if it’s insisted also that it is a condition that must receive medical or quasi-medical treatment,” Casey observes. “Illnesses that require treatment do not constitute anyone’s identity.” Confession of one’s inner feelings does not constitute proof of anything except the feelings themselves. No one can truly feel themselves to be something they never shall be. “How does a tree feel?”

Can one transform themselves into a duck, one little part at a time? “Is knowing you’re a man the result of having some kind of irrefragable inner experience that is unchallengeable in a way that having an inner experience that one was a duck wouldn’t be irrefragable?” Words have meanings. The word “irrefragable” means that something is beyond question or falsification, that is, a sacred spiritual idea protected by taboos. “We can, to a certain extent, understand what it is like to be a bat, but we cannot have a bat’s actual experience,” Casey wrote. Again, much has changed. One year after he finished his manuscript, Francis Aaron was already singing rap lyrics to popularize that very point: no matter how much Batman believes himself to be a bat, he remains a man dressed as a bat.

Citing historian of philosophy Eric Vogelin, Casey recognizes the belief in a gendered soul or essence as a form of modern Gnosticism. Asceticism, and self-harm as transformation, are very common in these new religions. For the modern Gnostic believer, the “first principle is the non-recognition of reality. Anyone who has the temerity to point out reality must be silenced—the boy who tells us that the Emperor has no clothes must be shunned”. Freedom of expression has to be stifled for the magic to work in reverent silence. “One might be inclined to think that Gnosticism is a matter that would be of interest only to historians of the early Church, but Gnosticism hasn’t actually gone away,” Casey argues. “It has never completely disappeared and it is an ever-present intellectual temptation.”

Indeed, the book acknowledges a spiritual crisis underlying the ideas it criticizes. While Transgenderism often rejects traditional religion, “in certain respects transgender ideology appears itself to be quasi-religious,” or what Vogelin called “ersatz religion”. The promise of a revised body “bears a striking similarity to goeteia,” the ancient Greek term for alchemical magic, or what we now call Hermeticism. Breaking the body is also a frequent symptom of spiritual sicknesses that fester in the First World conditions of “ecumenical empires,” per Vogelin. Logical incoherence is to be expected in “a functional voluntarist or nihilist” system of “magic” that “consists in believing that tinkering with language can effect changes in reality,” Casey writes. Changing the world requires “praxis,” per Karl Marx, and the results of such magical thinking are frequently bloody because the rationale was always magical thinking.

Unlike Hegel and Marx and their intellectual heirs – Vogelin calls them “sorcerers” and their books “grimoires” – Gerard Casey prefers logical proofs and evidence. Enlightenment rationalism is worth defending against the irrationalism of activist mystics. Social conservatism, the standing athwart of history to shout “stop,” informs his perspective here, and it is not out of place. Leftist critics of gender identity may not like it, but any honest criticism of gender ideology must be grounded in a substantial critique of the sexual revolution and its excesses, as Casey has done. Western culture has dissolved in the new paganism brought on by that revolution. Casey correctly identifies the wellspring of ‘gender identity’ within radical feminism, responsive to said revolution, and notes that the worst abuses of transgenderism are familial. Feminists will surely understand.

“One way to think of the struggle between radical feminists and transgender activists for supreme victimhood status is to see it as a kind of family quarrel which, like many family quarrels, is characterised by a degree of nastiness not normally seen in afamilial human hostilities!” It is a rare exclamation point in Casey’s writing. He is not wrong: the narcissism of small differences is a common cause of schism in radical social movements. Presented with the question of whether a man can be a woman, radical feminism split into trans-inclusionary and trans-exclusionary factions during the 1970s. This is where the acronym TERF, for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, originated. In 2020, Casey sees “a rapidly-escalating victim war between transgender activists and radical feminists,” signs which “all point towards [the] imminent implosion” of transgender ideas. He has been right about that, but because he is a rationalist, not a prophet.

In the wake of the Cass Review, seismic changes are taking place in the parliaments of the United Kingdom. Four years ago, this book foresaw “the repealing of the Gender Recognition Acts, root and branch, and by the deletion of all mention of gender and gender identity from equality legislation”. History still has time to vindicate that position, but we have come a long way in what now seems a very short time. Social media pressure mobs have lost the power they enjoyed when Gerard Casey wrote this book, yet the text does not suffer for the change. Rather, it is already aging well. Hidden Agender: Transgenderism’s struggle against reality objects to the new totalitarianism in ways that have stood the test of time, so far.

I am happy this book exists. Mr. Casey did not want to write it but did so out of a sense of obligation. He found it was his “most difficult” book to compose, but I am glad for his labor. His book is suitable reading for anyone interested in the fundamental clash of rights over transgender ideology.