From Seminar Room to State Doctrine: The Unquestioned Ascent of Queer Theory
Dwight Panozzo’s framing of gender identitarianism as a belief system—not a science—is both timely and courageous. But we must go deeper, to the intellectual taproot of the current crisis. Gender identity, as a concept, did not simply arise from clinical observation or democratic consensus. It is the operational child of queer theory—a radical academic project with unapologetically subversive aims.
Queer theory was never intended as a descriptive tool to map human variation. It was designed to destabilize: to undermine stable sexual and gender identities, to "trouble" the normative, and to celebrate the transgressive. As a rhetorical and intellectual strategy, it wore its anti-foundationalism as a badge of honour. As long as it remained cloistered within humanities departments, it seemed like a harmless exercise in postmodern provocation. But it didn’t stay there.
What followed was a slow, undemocratic metastasis. Over a span of two decades, queer theory’s core commitments—instability, anti-essentialism, and the sacralization of individual self-narration—were smuggled into medicine, education, corporate governance, and law. This migration happened without scrutiny, without legislative or public review, and most egregiously, without an ethics panel ever asking: What are the long-term effects of teaching children that identity is infinitely fluid and self-generated? Or: What moral or psychological risks attend the institutionalization of a framework that elevates transgression to a virtue and sees normativity as oppression?
Imagine if any other theoretical movement—say, one rooted in sociobiology or IQ determinism—had tried to insert itself this deeply into public life. There would have been alarm bells. Editorials. Senate hearings. But queer theory, cloaked in the moral force of inclusion and the academic prestige of poststructuralism, evaded such interrogation. Its greatest rhetorical achievement was to render critique suspect, if not outright hateful.
Panozzo rightly identifies gender identitarianism as a new religious movement, complete with dogma, blasphemy codes, and rituals of purification. But unlike most religions, this one did not grow from grassroots spiritual needs—it was constructed, piece by piece, in graduate seminars. That in itself is not a crime. But handing such a system over to institutions—schools, clinics, courts—without public understanding or consent is a moral and civic failure of the highest order.
What began as theoretical mischief in the academy became state-sponsored ideology. Deconstruction, once a literary game, is now written into school policies and medical protocols. And yet there has been no reckoning. No retrospective examination of how we got here. No pause to ask: Was this wise? Was this ethical?
Panozzo’s piece opens a door. Let’s walk through it with moral seriousness. Let’s ask why a society that claims to value evidence, deliberation, and pluralism allowed such a destabilizing belief system to become its new civic religion. Let’s ask why those who raised questions were dismissed as bigots rather than heard as citizens.
And above all, let us insist that future ideas—no matter how “inclusive” their branding—face the ethical and evidentiary tests that queer theory never had to endure.
If the gender woo is "recognized" as a religion, as Scientology has been, they will get all the tax breaks and other special benefits bestowed on religions. They will also be permitted to teach their religion to their children in parochial schools, and no one will be able to protect those kids from indoctrination into mutilation beliefs and practices.
Gender identity ideology resembles religion in many striking ways. It offers a comprehensive worldview rooted in metaphysical premises, establishes moral hierarchies, prescribes rituals, and harshly disciplines heresy. It asks believers to affirm unfalsifiable truths (e.g., that a man can literally be a woman), speak a new liturgical language (e.g., "assigned male at birth"), and participate in public rites (such as pronoun declarations and name changes) that resemble conversion ceremonies. At first glance, it looks like a religion in all but name.
And yet, paradoxically, it is also a product of postmodern academic currents—particularly queer theory and critical theory—that are deeply anti-religious in their origins. These traditions reject metaphysical certainty, natural law, and the authority of sacred texts. Their animating goal is not to replace religion but to destabilize all normative structures—including religion itself. This contradiction complicates any attempt to treat gender ideology as a religion in the formal or constitutional sense.
Still, could it qualify as one under U.S. law?
Maybe. U.S. courts and the IRS define religion in ways that are surprisingly expansive. First Amendment jurisprudence protects both traditional and nontraditional belief systems, including secular ones like ethical culture and secular humanism, if they function in a person’s life with the same depth and authority as a theistic religion. The IRS, meanwhile, considers a flexible 14-part test to grant religious status for tax exemption—looking at things like structure, doctrine, ceremonies, and membership, but not requiring all boxes to be checked. Scientology ultimately succeeded in winning recognition after years of litigation and lobbying, despite its non-theistic and often secretive nature.
On that basis, one could imagine a gender-identity-centered organization adopting a religious frame—emphasizing its creed, its rituals, its moral code—and making a plausible bid for legal recognition as a religion. If successful, such a group might claim tax breaks, curricular autonomy in schools, and constitutional protection for inculcating children with its doctrines, regardless of the medical or developmental consequences.
But this is where the case for gender ideology as religion begins to fall apart.
First, gender ideology does not claim to be a religion. Its advocates insist it is grounded in science—psychology, neuroscience, and medicine—not faith. That claim, however flawed, is central to its credibility. If it were reclassified as religion, its authority in public schools, hospitals, and courts would collapse. The movement depends on its scientific guise to justify puberty blockers, surgeries, and policies affecting civil rights. Embracing religion status would be politically suicidal.
Second, it lacks key organizational features of a religion. There is no formal clergy, no sustained congregational life, no theology beyond slogans, and no institutional apparatus explicitly organized for worship or spiritual practice. It is instead a diffuse cultural and political movement embedded within education, media, and healthcare institutions—not a centralized belief system seeking to regulate life from cradle to grave in the manner of traditional religions.
Third, its philosophical foundations are self-defeating in this context. The very theorists who laid the groundwork for gender ideology—Foucault, Butler, Derrida—explicitly opposed the metaphysical commitments that religions entail. They denied universal truth, deconstructed identity itself, and sought to unmoor belief from any fixed structure. A system founded on the rejection of stable meaning cannot easily rebrand itself as a religion without internal incoherence.
So while the comparison between gender ideology and religion is rhetorically powerful—and reveals important truths about the way belief, identity, and moral fervor operate today—the legal case for treating gender identity as a religion is tenuous. Not impossible, but deeply conflicted and, ultimately, self-defeating for the movement itself.
In the end, gender ideology may be like a religion in its intensity and reach, but it is not one—at least not yet. It is something more unstable: a quasi-religious belief system masquerading as medical consensus. And that hybrid nature is what makes it both so powerful and so hard to challenge.
From Seminar Room to State Doctrine: The Unquestioned Ascent of Queer Theory
Dwight Panozzo’s framing of gender identitarianism as a belief system—not a science—is both timely and courageous. But we must go deeper, to the intellectual taproot of the current crisis. Gender identity, as a concept, did not simply arise from clinical observation or democratic consensus. It is the operational child of queer theory—a radical academic project with unapologetically subversive aims.
Queer theory was never intended as a descriptive tool to map human variation. It was designed to destabilize: to undermine stable sexual and gender identities, to "trouble" the normative, and to celebrate the transgressive. As a rhetorical and intellectual strategy, it wore its anti-foundationalism as a badge of honour. As long as it remained cloistered within humanities departments, it seemed like a harmless exercise in postmodern provocation. But it didn’t stay there.
What followed was a slow, undemocratic metastasis. Over a span of two decades, queer theory’s core commitments—instability, anti-essentialism, and the sacralization of individual self-narration—were smuggled into medicine, education, corporate governance, and law. This migration happened without scrutiny, without legislative or public review, and most egregiously, without an ethics panel ever asking: What are the long-term effects of teaching children that identity is infinitely fluid and self-generated? Or: What moral or psychological risks attend the institutionalization of a framework that elevates transgression to a virtue and sees normativity as oppression?
Imagine if any other theoretical movement—say, one rooted in sociobiology or IQ determinism—had tried to insert itself this deeply into public life. There would have been alarm bells. Editorials. Senate hearings. But queer theory, cloaked in the moral force of inclusion and the academic prestige of poststructuralism, evaded such interrogation. Its greatest rhetorical achievement was to render critique suspect, if not outright hateful.
Panozzo rightly identifies gender identitarianism as a new religious movement, complete with dogma, blasphemy codes, and rituals of purification. But unlike most religions, this one did not grow from grassroots spiritual needs—it was constructed, piece by piece, in graduate seminars. That in itself is not a crime. But handing such a system over to institutions—schools, clinics, courts—without public understanding or consent is a moral and civic failure of the highest order.
What began as theoretical mischief in the academy became state-sponsored ideology. Deconstruction, once a literary game, is now written into school policies and medical protocols. And yet there has been no reckoning. No retrospective examination of how we got here. No pause to ask: Was this wise? Was this ethical?
Panozzo’s piece opens a door. Let’s walk through it with moral seriousness. Let’s ask why a society that claims to value evidence, deliberation, and pluralism allowed such a destabilizing belief system to become its new civic religion. Let’s ask why those who raised questions were dismissed as bigots rather than heard as citizens.
And above all, let us insist that future ideas—no matter how “inclusive” their branding—face the ethical and evidentiary tests that queer theory never had to endure.
If the gender woo is "recognized" as a religion, as Scientology has been, they will get all the tax breaks and other special benefits bestowed on religions. They will also be permitted to teach their religion to their children in parochial schools, and no one will be able to protect those kids from indoctrination into mutilation beliefs and practices.
Is Gender Ideology a Religion? A Closer Look
Gender identity ideology resembles religion in many striking ways. It offers a comprehensive worldview rooted in metaphysical premises, establishes moral hierarchies, prescribes rituals, and harshly disciplines heresy. It asks believers to affirm unfalsifiable truths (e.g., that a man can literally be a woman), speak a new liturgical language (e.g., "assigned male at birth"), and participate in public rites (such as pronoun declarations and name changes) that resemble conversion ceremonies. At first glance, it looks like a religion in all but name.
And yet, paradoxically, it is also a product of postmodern academic currents—particularly queer theory and critical theory—that are deeply anti-religious in their origins. These traditions reject metaphysical certainty, natural law, and the authority of sacred texts. Their animating goal is not to replace religion but to destabilize all normative structures—including religion itself. This contradiction complicates any attempt to treat gender ideology as a religion in the formal or constitutional sense.
Still, could it qualify as one under U.S. law?
Maybe. U.S. courts and the IRS define religion in ways that are surprisingly expansive. First Amendment jurisprudence protects both traditional and nontraditional belief systems, including secular ones like ethical culture and secular humanism, if they function in a person’s life with the same depth and authority as a theistic religion. The IRS, meanwhile, considers a flexible 14-part test to grant religious status for tax exemption—looking at things like structure, doctrine, ceremonies, and membership, but not requiring all boxes to be checked. Scientology ultimately succeeded in winning recognition after years of litigation and lobbying, despite its non-theistic and often secretive nature.
On that basis, one could imagine a gender-identity-centered organization adopting a religious frame—emphasizing its creed, its rituals, its moral code—and making a plausible bid for legal recognition as a religion. If successful, such a group might claim tax breaks, curricular autonomy in schools, and constitutional protection for inculcating children with its doctrines, regardless of the medical or developmental consequences.
But this is where the case for gender ideology as religion begins to fall apart.
First, gender ideology does not claim to be a religion. Its advocates insist it is grounded in science—psychology, neuroscience, and medicine—not faith. That claim, however flawed, is central to its credibility. If it were reclassified as religion, its authority in public schools, hospitals, and courts would collapse. The movement depends on its scientific guise to justify puberty blockers, surgeries, and policies affecting civil rights. Embracing religion status would be politically suicidal.
Second, it lacks key organizational features of a religion. There is no formal clergy, no sustained congregational life, no theology beyond slogans, and no institutional apparatus explicitly organized for worship or spiritual practice. It is instead a diffuse cultural and political movement embedded within education, media, and healthcare institutions—not a centralized belief system seeking to regulate life from cradle to grave in the manner of traditional religions.
Third, its philosophical foundations are self-defeating in this context. The very theorists who laid the groundwork for gender ideology—Foucault, Butler, Derrida—explicitly opposed the metaphysical commitments that religions entail. They denied universal truth, deconstructed identity itself, and sought to unmoor belief from any fixed structure. A system founded on the rejection of stable meaning cannot easily rebrand itself as a religion without internal incoherence.
So while the comparison between gender ideology and religion is rhetorically powerful—and reveals important truths about the way belief, identity, and moral fervor operate today—the legal case for treating gender identity as a religion is tenuous. Not impossible, but deeply conflicted and, ultimately, self-defeating for the movement itself.
In the end, gender ideology may be like a religion in its intensity and reach, but it is not one—at least not yet. It is something more unstable: a quasi-religious belief system masquerading as medical consensus. And that hybrid nature is what makes it both so powerful and so hard to challenge.
Fascinating and extremely well thought out post! Each paragraph is worthy of a lengthy discussion.
I am in favor of the gender movement defeating itself. Second choice would be for it to fade into the background like Scientology has arguably done.