Extremely insightful article, Glenna! You captured the contradictions of Queer Theory perfectly, and you reminded me again of encountering Queer theorists in person when I was in graduate school studying American literature at Tulane in New Orleans. In the early 1990s, a graduate student conference was hosted by the university with a keynote panel event featuring Michael Warner and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. (This conference happened a couple years after Sedgwick had come to campus for a guest lecture about Henry James.) After their panel kicked off the conference, Warner and Sedgwick hung around to attend sessions together, happily cheering on budding grad student Queer theorists. But, then, a comical scandal happened, rocking the whole department. One of my grad student friends presented a paper about Queer theory and the slow 1990's job market for English professors (by the way, job prospects for English professors are even worse now!). In her paper, my friend speculated that, even though she is heterosexual, she could imagine being tempted to claim a Queer (lesbian or bisexual) identity to increase her chances of being hired, given that of the scarce jobs advertised, quite a few mentioned a preference for candidates with training in gay literary studies. Predictably, the you-know-what hit the fan! During her session's Q&A, Warner and Sedgwick melodramatically castigated my friend for daring to suggest that Queerness as they conceive it seems to be a flexible concept that she might identify with. Outraged, when the session ended, Warner and Sedgwick marched over to the English department chair to insist that my friend be sanctioned. The next day she had to meet with the chair for a lecture about her allegedly immoral mistake and was ordered to apologize to Warner and Sedgwick.
What in the world?! They got to dictate terms because they'd acquired power within academia and not because their arguments had any intrinsic value.
Too many people have been sparring with the empty "ideas" put forward by queer theorists when they should be investigating the lives of queer theorists. Probably a lot of psycho behavior that would really illuminate the enterprise.
It's long been my belief, since my undergraduate days 1991-1994, that postmodernism is essentially a competition within academia to discredit more capable job market rivals. I posted a video here: https://youtu.be/LL6qroy84TU
Guy Sorman made these claims in a French-language interview with France 5 on March 9, 2021. The Sunday Times (a British newspaper with a conservative bent) amplified them three weeks later (March 28, 2021), framing Foucault as an architect of “woke ideology” and American “identity politics.” Conservative media and influencers throughout the anglosphere repeated this story enthusiastically. None subsequently reported its collapse.
When the French press actually investigated, Sorman admitted to having fabricated key details. He initially claimed to have witnessed Foucault “buying” children at a cemetery; under questioning, he admitted to having seen no such thing; he’d rather “heard” about it from “some Mohammed.” He initially specified seeing boys aged 8 to 10 years old; later, he admitted he “couldn’t distinguish a young ephebe [i.e, a ‘twink’] from a 14-year-old.” Finally, he reduced his own story to “a troubling convergence of indices.”
But there’s more. In fact, Foucault wasn’t even in Sidi Bou Saïd in 1969. He’d already returned to Paris to teach at Vincennes. The Sunday Times’ claim that he “lived there in 1969” was false.
Meanwhile, Chantal Charpentier (Sorman’s companion at the time and his sole corroborating witness) explicitly contradicted Sorman’s sexual allegations. She described boys running after Foucault while he threw coins. She stated: “I have no proof that he abused them.” Her account removed all sexual connotations from the scene Sorman described. Besides that, Charpentier’s reliability as a witness is itself questionable: she claimed that philosopher Gilles Châtelet accompanied them to visit Foucault in Tunisia, yet Châtelet himself stated in a 1999 interview that he “regretted not having time to meet Michel Foucault.” Charpentier’s was the only testimony Sorman could produce to corroborate his allegations.
But setting these facts aside, Sorman’s purported timeline should have elicited skepticism in the first place. When he actually *was* in Tunisia, Foucault had publicly supported university students who were being arrested and tortured by the Bourguiba regime. He lived under police surveillance and had been physically threatened by them. Believing that he “paraded” through a village with boys he was ostensibly abusing, in a police state, surrounded by expatriates, while living under the most intense scrutiny of his life, means believing that he was fool enough to advertise uncontroversially criminal activity at the precise moment when he would be in the most imminent danger of arrest, imprisonment, torture, and execution. If Sorman’s claims were true, the police would likely have appreciated being handed relatively uncomplicated justification for arresting a foreigner whose presence they were keen to eliminate.
By his own words, Sorman confabulated this particular story to support his intended portrayal of Foucault as an example of a “detestable white male” and a “hideous colonialist.” (Meanwhile, Foucault’s Tunisian students and colleagues described him as engaged, supportive, and courageous in defending activists against the dictatorship.) Even the German newspaper Die Zeit, which also helped to amplify these allegations, misrepresented David Macey’s authoritative biography: Die Zeit reported Macey as recounting a moment in which Foucault was “caught off-guard early morning with young children,” where Macey’s actual text describes Foucault reading Feuerbach to children and notes that village rumors portrayed him as a “mage or diviner” (so... not a predator).
Sorman himself told L’Express in September 2021 (linked above): “I’m not particularly interested in Foucault. I wrote two lines about him in a 300-page book.” Yet, at least among the chattering classes of the anglophone world, the lie that he invented when questioned about those two lines still circulates five years after he tried feebly to walk it back.
The mischaracterization of Foucault’s actual scholarly work only deepens the bitter irony of this situation. You’re absolutely right to criticize characters like Butler and Sedgwick, but you’re wrong to paint them as good (or even halfway competent) pupils of Michel Foucault. They’ve managed to be quite the opposite.
In a few words, the man’s entire intellectual project was to explicate how modern power operates through the invention and management of “identities,” how “governmentality” means inducing us to internalize abstract categories that alienate us from the immediacy of concrete experience, do nothing good for *us* (yet quite a lot of good for special interests who manipulate us by means of them), and train us to police ourselves according to their strictures. Crediting him as “the” or even “a” father of contemporary identity politics requires a nearly comical misreading of his work. (But that’s assuming anyone actually reads him at all. Many of the anglophone “scholars” citing him seem to have found themselves incapable of reading past page two.)
Foucault diagnosed the disease of Western modernity. Others have exploited his diagnosis to peddle their sophistries more effectively. But a thinker who explicates how power functions bears no responsibility for those who deploy that knowledge mendaciously or incompetently, no more than Max Planck bears responsibility for the atomic bomb or René Descartes for modernity itself.
I can’t help noticing that this context is *always* omitted by anglophone authors in their attempts to reckon with our cultural crisis. Foucault appears to have become an opportune scapegoat for our unhappy mess. But complicity in that scapegoating is an especially unfortunate choice for an essay analyzing “how the normalization of gay people posed a crisis for queer theorists,” published in the spirit of advocating for “LGB people” in an increasingly confusing, confused, and adversarial climate. You’ve repeated slander against a homosexual man whose work could do much to clarify the mechanisms that steer the very politicization you aim to expose.
It appears you didn’t personally investigate these claims before repeating them. This is understandable, particularly given the language barrier. But consider what this situation demonstrates.
Conservative anglophone media outlets and influencers spread Sorman’s accusations in spring 2021, recognizing in them an instrument with which to attack contemporary identity politics (in service of their own alternative identity politics) by linking a celebrity name of contemporary political philosophy (both the substantial and the sophistical) to pedophilia. When Sorman’s story dissolved in the French press over subsequent months, those outlets and influencers declined to correct themselves. Five years later, the slander persists as secret, shameful fact.
This is how mass manipulation *actually* works: (1) amplify sensational accusations, (2) ignore subsequent refutation (language barriers help), (3) use emotional resonance to advance political objectives. Targets include Foucault’s reputation (useful to blacken, given his value for understanding how power operates) and anyone associable with him, however thinly. When accusation becomes a technology of power, no accusation needs to be true. It needs to be repeatable: this is the only thing that still matters.
That a writer combating the ideological capture of homosexuality itself should participate in this slander (however unwittingly) is extremely unfortunate, first because it sustains what’s known to be a lie, and second because it calls into question her grasp of both the history she invokes and the forces arrayed against us (and against every honest person).
Understanding Foucault’s analysis of how power operates through language, the management of licit terminology and identities, and the construction of categories that are made to seem natural even as they serve private interests which are incompatible with any notion of a common good... would *illuminate* how we arrived where we find ourselves today. But instead, we’re being deceived, despite our best intentions, by people who ***do not care about the truth*** any more than our most obvious adversaries.
French sources documenting this have been available since 2021. That anglophone writers continue repeating Sorman’s fabrications without consulting them represents a failure of due diligence that undermines the cause this essay seeks, in good faith, to serve. This ignorance both makes and keeps us vulnerable to the very mechanisms of manipulation that we must unconditionally oppose—everywhere.
"Queer had been picked up by academics — particularly in the literary criticism and feminism fields — who thought it was a good “lens” through which they could interpret other social phenomena with the same insider/outsider, normal/stigmatised dynamic. They were tickled by Michel Foucault’s view that identities related to sex and sexuality were actually just a kind of social control, self-enforced by sheep-like normies.
"Homosexuality, Foucault had claimed, is not an innate identity that one has, it’s just a thing one does. Whether or not you do it (and get condemned for it) is a product of the social forces prevalent in your lifetime.
"He was particularly incensed at the medical pathologisation of homosexuality, transsexuality, hermaphroditism, and paedophilia that was dominant while he was alive. But he also probably had a personal interest in absolving himself for his alleged rape of poor boys in Tunisian graveyards. It’s not that having sex with children is airquotes bad, he posited, it’s just that contemporary society has artificially labelled it so. Something something Greek and Roman pederasts."
Whether or not Foucault actually had sex with boys, the fact remains that he argued that sex with children could be viewed as acceptable because of Greek and Roman pederasts. Greeks also widely engaged in infanticide. You could probably resurrect and normalize any horrific human act by invoking past societies. It's exactly that moral relativism of the French post modernists that many Americans and Canadians are so affronted by.
You’re shifting from “Foucault raped children” to “even if he didn’t, his ideas are dangerous.” These aren’t the same. The first is a factual allegation that collapsed when investigated, yet was cited without inventory. The second is a philosophical disagreement that should be argued on its merits, not smuggled in through slander. If you think demonstrating that moral categories are historically contingent rather than natural equates to “moral relativism,” then argue that. But don’t use fabricated accusations of child rape as a rhetorical bludgeon, then pivot to philosophy when the fabrication is exposed. That’s not honest argumentation. It’s exactly the kind of discursive shifting that makes truth impossible to pursue.
I appreciate the distinction between the factual question (did Foucault commit such acts or not?) and the philosophical question (what did Foucault actually argue?). These are indeed separate concerns. But my intention is to press on both.
So, on the factual point: I didn’t point out Sorman’s fabrications simply to exonerate Foucault personally, but to demonstrate something about how nearly all contemporary discourse, particularly on topics of gender and sexuality, is prey to mass manipulation. The essay I responded to presented these allegations as established fact (“had sex with boys aged 8–10 in Tunisia”). When accusations of child rape are deployed as rhetorical instruments to discredit ideas, and when the subsequent collapse of those accusations goes unreported by the very outlets that amplified them, we’re witnessing a technology of power that Foucault himself analyzed. The truth or falsehood of such claims matters absolutely, not because Foucault deserves exoneration (the dead require neither our defense nor our accusation), but because *we* deserve not to be deceived.
On the philosophical point: In your summary of the linked article, you suggest that Foucault argued “sex with children could be viewed as acceptable because Greek and Roman pederasts.” This is reading his genealogical method as prescriptive when it was descriptive and diagnostic. When Foucault studied how ancient Greeks thought about human sexuality very differently from how we do—namely, that they had literally no concept corresponding to our “homosexuality,” and organized their erotic categories around active/passive roles rather than object-choice—he wasn’t arguing “therefore we should adopt their practices.” (His usual angle was to argue something closer to: “Why would you adopt anyone else’s practices at all? Find your own”—hence he was roundly criticized by Marxists for conceding to liberal individualism.) He was demonstrating that what we experience as natural, transhistorical categories (“the homosexual,” “the sodomite,” “the pedophile”) are historically contingent concepts with specific political functions. This is simply true. It doesn’t mean the *phenomena* that we now call “homosexuality” (exclusive attraction to members of one’s own sex) or “pedophilia” (structurally narcissistic attraction to a juvenile victim of either sex, who is ideated as innocent and defenseless; hence one speaks of the psychology of *predation*) “don’t really exist,” even if many morons—some of whom are academics at universities like Columbia, Berkeley, and wherever else—find themselves reading it that way and would very much like you to do the same.
Accordingly, the point isn’t moral relativism (“everything is ‘constructed,’ therefore anything goes”) but to recognize how power operates through the production and management of identity categories that are presented as natural, “scientific” discoveries (which itself betrays a misconception of what “science” is/does) rather than political constructions. Morality is not self-evident from nature: we agree on precisely this point. And in fact, we agree with Foucault on this point.
This is why I wrote that blaming Foucault for contemporary identity politics requires misreading him: his entire project was to show how the proliferation of sexual identities serves mechanisms of control. (Which is *merely* an observation, and not a moral critique of “control” per se.) Naming, classifying, and managing demographics through categories with which they can be taught to identify themselves at an even biological level (race? “gender identity”?) is precisely how modern governance functions, far more effectively than when it relied on crude prohibitions and obligations or the physical violence that enforced them.
You write: “Greeks also widely engaged in infanticide. You could probably resurrect and normalize any horrific human act by invoking past societies.” *Yes, exactly.* But Foucault didn’t attempt that normalization; he showed that it’s possible, indeed historically commonplace, and sought to describe exactly how. Apparently without realizing it or meaning to, you’re effectively citing him—or at least the philosophical milieu of which he’s representative—when you write these words. He aimed to denaturalize our own categories by situating them in historical contexts just as you’ve done by pointing to the Greeks, to show that many things we experience as timeless truths about our own nature are, in reality, contingent arrangements that always serve particular interests. This is uncomfortable because it means we can’t simply appeal to this “nature” to settle our moral questions. At least not in good faith. But discomfort with that conclusion *doesn’t* transform genealogical analysis into moral prescription. That is what “queer theory” has done, or has attempted to do.
Foucault did sign the 1977 petition regarding age-of-consent laws in France. This deserves forthright acknowledgment and serious criticism. Yet even here, the context complicates that judgment: the petition concerned cases where teenagers *near* the age of majority were in relationships with adults, and the sentencing was widely agreed to be disproportionate and to represent a particular dysfunction in the French judicial system. The petition was ill-conceived and morally obtuse in its argumentation, and in my opinion Foucault's participation in it was a serious misjudgment. Not because it advocated removing all age-of-consent protections (it didn’t do that), but because its arguments about consent and coercion were philosophically naïve and failed to adequately account for power differentials. This was a failure to apply his own stated principles, not advocacy for abuse. But “argued to abolish age-of-consent protections for teenagers in specific legal contexts” is quite different from “argued that sex with children is acceptable because Greeks did it,” and *both* of these are categorically different from “raped boys aged 8–10 in Tunisia.”
When we collapse those distinctions by allowing “signed a moronic petition about age of consent” to be transformed into “argued philosophically for normalizing pedophilia by reference to Greek pederasty” to be further transformed into “literally raped children in Tunisia,” we participate in exactly the kind of discourse that abandons truth for rhetorical convenience. Even as that’s the entire problem we face in “queer”… everything. And we do this, ironically, while claiming to defend moral clarity against postmodern relativism.
Foucault’s observation that moral categories are historically contingent doesn’t entail that “anything goes” any more than observing that property law is historically contingent means theft is acceptable. The genealogical insight is that *because* our categories are constructed and serve particular interests, we must be more vigilant, not less, about examining whose interests they serve and at what cost. This is the opposite of relativism. It’s a demand for greater moral seriousness precisely because we can’t hide behind appeals to nature or divine command.
You note that “many Americans and Canadians are affronted by” French postmodern moral relativism. But what we’re witnessing isn’t philosophical debate. It’s the weaponization of fabricated sexual offenses to (a) conjure a fitting scapegoat whose apparent perversion can conveniently “explain” our current crisis, and (b) foreclose engagement with ideas that genuinely undermine certain arrangements of power. The fact that conservative media amplified Sorman’s fabrications, then went silent when they collapsed, while the essay above has repeated them five years later apparently without due diligence demonstrates in itself that truth isn’t the prevailing concern in these debates. The concern is to attach the name “Foucault” to “pedophile” so effectively that anyone interested in his diagnostic tools for understanding how power works through identity categories (not only the “queer” ones) can be summarily dismissed.
I don’t ask you to admire Foucault. *I* don’t admire him. I ask that we distinguish between what someone actually did, what he actually argued, and what serves the rhetorical interests of those who invoke his personage. The author repeated a known falsehood in an essay meant to clarify our cultural confusions. That error undermines the very cause the essay was written to serve. And it demonstrates precisely one of the mechanisms Foucault analyzed: how accusation, once launched, continues circulating regardless of truth because it serves interests that have nothing to do with justice or reality.
So my point isn’t to excuse Foucault’s every position. It’s to *actually* be truthful by declining to credit slander, thinking carefully about what is actually being claimed when we read an argument (if we bother to read it ourselves), and maintaining a solid distinction between “this person said things I find immoral” and “this person committed heinous acts.” They aren’t the same kind of claim, and we impoverish our capacity for both moral reasoning and clear analysis of our actual cultural situation when we treat them as interchangeable.
I didn't shift anything. I stated that it may or may not be the case that Foucault had sex with boys in Tunisia, but that his comments about sex with children are not merely a philosophical disagreement. Developmentally, its well supported that most children do not come away from sex with an adult without some level of psychological damage. It is generally agreed worldwide that children less that about 15 cannot consent to sex with an adult. Or are you going to make the case for Jeffrey Epstein?
I did not say this:
"You’re shifting from “Foucault raped children” to “even if he didn’t, his ideas are dangerous.”
I said this:
"Whether or not Foucault actually had sex with boys, the fact remains that he argued that sex with children could be viewed as acceptable because of Greek and Roman pederasts. Greeks also widely engaged in infanticide. You could probably resurrect and normalize any horrific human act by invoking past societies. It's exactly that moral relativism of the French post modernists that many Americans and Canadians are so affronted by."
I am not interested in this long diatribe about Foucault. I'm not even that opposed to some of Foucault's ideas, but the philosopher Ian Hacking is better than Foucault on social construction. Not all categories are socially constructed. Biological sex is not socially constructed. Many aspects of childhood development are mostly not socially constructed.
I am not interested in a moral indictment of Foucault specifically. What I am interested in the constant refrain, which you are amplifying here, that anglophones are ideologically and philosophically stunted and Puritanical. I reject that.
These ideas about biological sex being mutable came originally from Europe (Germany, specifically), as Glenna has well documented. Foucault followers such as Judith Butler (a darling of the French Left) have had a hand in the current destruction of women's rights worldwide.
Exactly. We naturally would rather hear that a single person (all the better if he’s French, homosexual, notoriously weird) sits at the source of it all. This would be easier to swallow than recognizing that the upheaval Western culture faces today is much more fragmented and diffuse, that it serves numerous interests which align only in commodifying and exploiting the most intimate and vulnerable domains of human experience for purposes which often aren’t even compatible with each other, and that the whole tornado is sustained by much that we ourselves take for granted and don’t seem prepared to give up or at least think about more carefully.
That we do this at the cost of our own integrity is apparently a marginal note. But our constant choice for convenient beliefs helps keep the vortex spinning.
I'm sure Foucault would have appreciated your support, but the evidence is not as you present it here.
Long before 2021, during the late 1970's, Foucault made it known that he was part of the movement in France to abolish the age of consent, and to free those men who had been imprisoned for sexual predation of children. That anyone had been convicted of this crime in France itself was remarkable, as in that country until very recently, prosecution depended on proving the use of coercion rather than the existence of the sexual act itself.
The interesting aspect to the Guy Sorman allegations is not their veracity, but Foucault's defenders’ reaction, including that of one superfan who went to that same part of town to interview the elders. It wasn't true that he had paid for sex with children; they were teenage boys, said his defenders. They didn't have sex on the tombs, as Sorman alleged, but under the trees in the cemetery. Big difference, eh?
As an elite member of French academia with a wealthy upbringing, Foucault had a blind spot when it came to his power relations with Tunisian rent boys.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I thought I had conducted exhaustive research, but I may be mistaken. Do you have sources available to review? Particularly regarding this:
> and to free those men who had been imprisoned for sexual predation of children
and this:
> It wasn't true that he had paid for sex with children; they were teenage boys, said his defenders. They didn't have sex on the tombs, as Sorman alleged, but under the trees in the cemetery.
Who are the "superfans" you're referencing?
To reiterate, I'm not arguing Foucault was a morally clean man. I hardly know, though his frequent self-description as "amoral" seems accurate. I'm arguing that it matters whether specific claims are true or false, particularly when they are as morally serious as these.
It warrants notice that two petitions for changes to age-of-consent laws were filed in 1977, one in January and one in May.
The January petition was authored by the self-proclaimed pedophile Gabriel Matzneff, signed by 69 people, and published in Le Monde. This one specifically addressed the "Affaire de Versailles," defending three men in pre-trial detention for sexual relations with children aged 12–13 and calling for their release.
Foucault did not sign this petition. Many of his contemporaries (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and others) did.
The May petition was made to parliament. This one was signed by a broader group including Foucault, Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Louis Althusser, Felix Guattari, and others. It addressed the Penal Code Revision Commission about sentencing reform for cases of legal adults who entered sexual relationships with teenagers near the age of majority, and discrimination in age-of-consent laws (particularly the higher age for homosexual relations), not about freeing any specific convicted individuals or group of individuals.
This would be consistent with how the villagers actually described Foucault, as reported in the L'Express link above. The investigations found that if sexual contact occurred, it involved individuals aged 17–18, not children or vaguely "teenagers." Meanwhile, the villagers characterized the talk of cemeteries, tombs, and trees as "hautement fantaisistes."
Foucault seems unscrupulous and hypocritical relative to his own insights. Unfortunately, this is basically normal. That isn't a justification. It's a reality that deserves lucid scrutiny it rarely receives. Misconstruing Foucault's particular (and still only rumored) wrongs as evidence (or rumor) of something quite different doesn't seem acceptable, and conflating these issues diverts rather than promotes that necessary self-examination.
I agree that Foucault had a rather egregious blind spot, as you call it, as to how even small age differences (as that between teenagers and adults, which the May 1977 petition addressed or rather failed to address) are distinctly inflected with the exact power dynamics he sought to expose elsewhere. This does indeed make him a hypocrite or at least a bit stupid. If you read my other comment you know I haven't claimed otherwise. But I've never encountered the two claims you make above, they don't seem reconcilable with these facts, and I would like to read further.
The above covers Foucault's antics in the cemetery, as well as the allegation that he was required to relinquish his academic job because of seducing another teenager.
The version I previously read in English was credited to someone else, which was why I said fanboy rather than fangirl, sorry.
Foucault's opposition to age of consent as a concept was covered in detail in a 1978 radio interview, summarised here:
Thank you for providing these sources. They clarify both the factual record and Foucault’s actual positions, including where those positions deserve serious criticism.
On the Jeune Afrique investigation: The article reports sexual activity but specifies details that differ from your summary and align with what L’Express also found.
Ages: “jeunes éphèbes” of 17–18 years old, stated explicitly by the witness Moncef Ben Abbes, a local villager—not a fan or a partisan defender.
Location: “dans les bosquets sous le phare voisin du cimetière”—in the groves under the lighthouse near the cemetery—not inside it. To me, this seems less like hairsplitting over tombs versus nearby trees and more like how people naturally describe locations in a small coastal village. The story about the cemetery was explicitly rejected by locals as a perverse fantasy.
Ben Abbes spoke plainly: “Foucault n’était pas pédophile mais était séduit par les jeunes éphèbes.” The distinction between prepubescent children and young men of 17–18 isn’t trivial. Sexual relations with 17–18 year olds certainly do bear their own moral weight, as we’ve discussed, but they’re fundamentally different from the allegations Glenna’s essay repeated.
Regarding Foucault’s departure from Tunisia: The article presents conflicting accounts. Daniel Defert (Foucault’s companion) said police bribed an 18-year-old to give compromising testimony (the age of legal majority in Tunisia at the time was 20). Fathi Triki (former dean at Sfax, Foucault’s student) said Foucault had already signed with Vincennes. Neither account involves pedophilia.
On the 1978 radio interview: I agree that this transcript is genuinely troubling. This is Foucault’s personal argument against French age-of-consent laws as they were being formulated at the time, and it illustrates his hypocrisy or blindness or both quite vividly.
When he says “the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves,” he’s making an uncomfortable but realistic claim about a psychological possibility without ever acknowledging what’s most essential: that the behavior of the adults in a child’s life is what determines what that child is capable of ideating, desiring, or saying “yes” to in the first place. This is indeed an extraordinary failure to maintain his own insights about how power structures situations and relationships. The gap between his usual analytical sensitivity and his reasoning here is stark.
That said, Foucault is arguing more broadly that consent, being merely “a contractual notion,” is inadequate to adjudicate morality. Consent alone can’t determine whether something is right or wrong. This critique has become commonplace in recent decades: we now recognize (or remember) that consent can be manufactured, that power dynamics complicate it in ways that the notion of “mutual consent” simply obscures, and that even the fully lucid agreement of everyone involved doesn’t make an action morally right.
Once we (culturally speaking) accepted that right and wrong could be mediated by establishing the presence or absence of consent, we committed ourselves to reasoning out ever more casuistical ways to certify what counts as authentic consent. This is why we now conventionally find ourselves having to say: a child can say the literal word “yes,” but cannot in any case or degree “consent.” Mediating morality through consent makes the difference between right and wrong a merely technical difference that can only be specified legally, which means politically; the authority of medicine is supposed to counterbalance that, but it brings with it the problems that attend medicalization (below). And in the process, the actual evil—someone is being harmed by someone else, in a very specific, egregious, and bizarre way—tends to slip out of sight, at least in certain quarters. Such is Foucault’s infamous criticism of “consent.”
On medicalization: Foucault criticized how psychiatry defines new categories of “dangerous individuals” (the “pedophile”) rather than addressing harmful acts directly. This connects to a psychoanalytic (as opposed to psychiatric) understanding of predation and transgression. French analysts like Élisabeth Roudinesco, Maurice Hurni, and Giovanna Stoll have examined in great depth how pedophilia frequently expresses an appetite for the violation of taboos and the projection of innocence and helplessness onto a victim, who is made into a kind of puppet and stage for the perpetrator to externalize an internal drama. The concern is that strengthening cultural taboos through formal classifications and legal instruments risks amplifying perverse incentives by facilitating these projections: the more sacred the child, the greater the incentive to defile her. (Sorry, this is terribly dark, but it’s the argument.) This is *not* in itself to argue against legal protections but to recognize that law alone can’t protect the vulnerable. Foucault’s dismissal of diagnostic description and legal instruments as a *part* of safeguarding seems extremely flippant and short-sighted, at best.
Meanwhile, though, medicalizing such perversion through the concept of “pedophilia” risks enabling what (further) medicalizing autogynephilia etc. through “gender dysphoria” has enabled: the construction and eventual *legitimation* of identity categories possessing all the authority and moral weight that people are socially pressured to grant to anything validated by “medical science.” “It’s natural,” after all, or at the very least “it’s a ‘medical condition.’”
To be clear, Foucault doesn’t make these specific analyses explicitly, but he seems to reference them constantly and they fit coherently with his work on how power operates through the production and management of identity categories—unlike the sophistries of Butler and others who claim his influence.
Foucault’s interest in Greek virtue ethics reflected his search for alternatives to legalistic moral reasoning. He didn’t formulate such an alternative himself, but his critique of consent-as-moral-paradigm wasn’t wrong, and today most people understand that viscerally even if we find it difficult to articulate exactly why or what might take its place. What remains troubling is Foucault’s apparent disinterest in articulating what protections children and other vulnerable people require given that consent alone is inadequate. But we haven’t resolved this ourselves, not at cultural or institutional levels. Our latent sensitivity to that truth is, I suspect, one reason why so many blogs like this one exist, and why we’re so attached to the conceptual paradigms that, although they’re roughly fashioned, often gravely flawed, and wind up making us vulnerable to entirely new and unforeseen forms of manipulation, are the best tools we have at hand to make moral discernment and accountability remotely tenable.
So in all, the interview you link shows Foucault making arguments that are philosophically incomplete and extraordinarily naïve. He failed to connect his insights about power to a domain where they are most obviously applicable. Why? I have no idea. Maybe he just didn’t understand children. Maybe he was indifferent. Maybe he was a monster in some unknown way. But two things are clear: First, the specific allegations that prompted this discussion—that Foucault raped children aged 8–10 on cemetery tombs in Tunisia—collapsed under investigation because they were fabrications. Second, these fabrications served a politically convenient purpose: discrediting a thinker who makes a remarkably ideal scapegoat if you’re seeking narrative control over certain cultural crises and whose work illuminates mechanisms of power that many, many interests would like to keep obscured.
Foucault made stupid arguments about age of consent. The slander against him was false. Both of these “bad facts” are worth understanding fully.
Thank you again for the sources. They help establish both what is true and what is not.
You're welcome. I don't think it possible with this mostly hearsay information to state that any accusation is definitively true or false. Sorman's allegations are probably exaggerated for attention, and the version of the defence of Foucault I read in English was not completely accurate to the French version. For example, I don't recall any mention of a lighthouse previously.
What troubles me about the modern distinction between paedophile and pederast is that it attempts to set puberty as the barrier between tolerable and intolerable sexuality. Puberty can start as young as nine years old, and we know from the 'puberty blocker' debacle that some children develop adult sexual characteristics very early. In my primary school there was one such girl, who had a body of adult appearance at the age of eleven, leading to rumours about her in the town.
We also know that some seventeen-year-olds can be extremely naive and trusting of adults. So I reject this framing of adult exploitation of children and teenagers as being sometimes progressive or liberating, depending on individual circumstances.
Regarding Foucault himself, his defence of the paedophile does appear to be motivated reasoning. Recent court cases in France have highlighted that the boomer generation in the Republic did contain a number of self-justified libertines who saw no need for any limit on sexual exploitation, including of members of their own families. (Judith Butler can give them all high-fives if she visits the prisons of her belovèd France).
Supposing Foucault believed in the paedophile/pederast distinction, and wished to safeguard his legacy by making clear that he was opposed to the sexual use of prepubescent children by adults, he had plenty of opportunities to do that, in print, on TV and radio, as an academic celebrity of his day. Yet he made no such distinction that I know of, and refused to support an age of consent in principle. He supported lowering the age of consent as a stepping stone to abolishing it, a short-term measure which would have helped the pederasts in jail at the time.
I therefore conclude that calling Foucault a paedophile may be technically incorrect if we accept the paedophile/pederast distinction as meaningful, but also that Foucault was certainly a powerful advocate within the French and international intelligentsia for the decriminalisation of literal paedophilia under that distinction. That is made plain in his 'History of Sexuality' and also 'Abnormal'.
It is probably unquantifiable how many children were harmed by paedophiles and pederasts inspired by his academic or intellectual circle, and the popular culture downstream of it.
To be absolutely clear, when you write: “So I reject this framing of adult exploitation of children and teenagers as being sometimes progressive or liberating, depending on individual circumstances.”
That’s Foucault’s framing, not mine, and if you read what I wrote, you’re well aware that I reject it, too. But I reject it for what it is: framing the exploitation of teenagers ~*~near~*~ the age of consent (whatever that may be in a given judicial context) as just fine by pointing to (a) the way age of consent varies, being in practice a purely legal and thus political contrivance, supposedly grounded by medical expertise, which brings its own problems (you note one of them by stressing the ambiguity of how to specify maturity medically if, for medicine, it’s tied to the process of puberty, which can begin as early as 9 and finish as late as the mid-20s); and (b) the simple fact that such near-majority teenagers are at least not children. These are the sorts of arguments that Foucault made, and they’re naïve and irresponsible at best. But they are what they are and they aren’t what they aren’t.
Your original claim was that Foucault’s “fans” found he raped not 8–10 year olds, but vaguely “teenage” boys in a cemetery, that he was “required to relinquish his academic job” because of this, and that “defenders” merely quibbled about location details while awkwardly admitting the substance. The source you provided shows an investigative journalist, not a “fan,” who found that:
> Ages were 17–18, not 8–10
> Location was among groves of trees under a lighthouse, near (not in) the village cemetery
> Locals explicitly rejected all rumors about “cemetery antics” as fantastical
> Departure accounts conflict, the one most compatible with what you described speaks of an 18-year-old boy being bribed by police to give compromising testimony, and neither involves pedophilia
In my opinion, this actually matters. We either make the effort to hold ourselves accountable for the accuracy of the things we say about others or we’re just as fraudulent and hypocritical as any of the people regularly criticized on this blog. YMMV.
When you now write that calling Foucault “a paedophile may be technically incorrect” and that Sorman’s allegations were “probably exaggerated,” you’re tacitly acknowledging these factual corrections while pivoting to a much more vague accusation about “unquantifiable harm” from his “intellectual circle.”
The initial story was itself hearsay, and it doesn’t hold together. Acknowledging that directly would be more honest than quietly shifting goal-posts.
You write: “It is probably unquantifiable how many children were harmed by paedophiles and pederasts inspired by his academic or intellectual circle, and the popular culture downstream of it.”
I think that’s at least fair insofar as Foucault has been so extensively referenced, however unfaithfully, by sophists like Butler and worse, and those references are enabled partly by his own obscurity, inconsistencies, and unscrupulousness. But given how many texts “inspire” people to excuse themselves for doing horrible things, yet we don’t blame their authors for that relationship, and given that such people aren’t engaging in earnest self-examination so much as exploiting words and clever reasoning to justify themselves at will regardless of truth or consistency with any principles they might claim to hold, this way of thinking about what we’re looking at cultivates its own misunderstanding of what’s actually happening in our culture. I don’t think that misunderstanding is without consequence.
More importantly, this new framing is itself “hearsay” of the most diffuse kind: perfectly unfalsifiable, unquantifiable, based on posthumous influence and association rather than acts. That’s a world of difference from the specific allegations that, again, are what prompted this discussion. If we’re going to discuss Foucault’s actual philosophical claims, their credible motivations, and their cultural consequences, that’s worth doing carefully with specific citations—as I did above, and as you’ve neatly sidestepped here. But that’s a different conversation from the one we started, which was about whether he raped children in Tunisia.
According to every local person asked, he simply didn’t.
Thank you for correcting me. I thought it was a newsletter examining “the misbegotten, sometimes fraudulent movement for ‘transgender’ rights from a legal and historical perspective.” That, and the title, gave me the impression that facts mattered. My mistake! :-)
>after a long evening of thinking about studying in the NYU law library
LOL!
>I knew one thing: anywhere that reprimands a drunk chick for making fun of penises is not an authentic lesbian establishment
>queers should have published dozens of books by now about men who ejaculate after a stranger calls them Ma’am. But they’re silent on this magnificent phenomenon.
>Ever since then we’ve just been dealing with queer theory in its belching zombie form as it staggers from one socialist die-in to another.
Great series, thanks! Could we say, in the spirit of this post, that queer provided useful cover with their queerying of sex and spectrums etc, while the sexologists led to gender identity as the stable essence and provided the key move, with trans supplanting sex parasitically rather than being across a vague range of norm breaking? Anyway, fascinating stuff.
I would suggest that by decentering expert knowledge in favour of ‘lived experience’, the postmodernists enabled gender woo to leak out of the psychiatric system and become part of consumer ‘healthcare’. Rather than challenge psychiatric abuse of gender non-conforming people, they spread it further than it ever would have got, because they are essentially sadomasochists. Hurt people hurt people.
I wouldn't insist that everyone involved is sado-masochist, I think the trauma history is a huge factor. Cynical power manipulation is a form of sadism though I suppose.
How are sadomasochists made, except by trauma, I wonder? Someone can be victim and perpetrator at the same time. In my view, we should be concentrating resources on helping people overcome their self-hatred.
Yes, I guess some of those terms are a bit unfamiliar in a treatment context but I agree worth recognizing and treating. Generally the task for all of us is to process the trauma rather than reproject it.
I was just listening to a podcast by a psychiatrist saying that they fear negative online reviews which could harm their practice. So, nowadays they are biased towards giving patients what they want, rather than what they need.
It seems that there was a lot going on at the fringes in the 1990s at the UN, in the UK and in the US. Many of the more monied trans activists such as Susan Stryker and Judith Butler regularly attended events and conferences in both the US and Europe, so it is not surprising that there was cross pollination of trans activism between the US, the UK and European trans movements.
You state at the end of this write up that the Democrats adopted these policies. But that doesn't seem to have happened until about 2008 (one year after the UN adoption of the Yogyakarta Principles). It seems that Obama's election in 2008 was funded in part by trans activists such as the Pritzker family.
You mention Chase Strangio and the ACLU. Kara Dansky has written extensively about the takeover of the ACLU by the trans agenda, but that didn't happen until about 2014. (Chase Strangio started working at the ACLU in 2013.)
So what happened between 2000 and 2012? How did the Democratic Party come to the point of subsuming the rights of women underneath trans activism? Surely campaign financing played a large part. Maybe this is beyond the scope of your writing, but without a lot of funding from a small contingent of very wealthy trans activists, I doubt that the trans agenda would have come to dominate the policy agenda of the Democratic Party, the Liberal Party of Canada, and the Labour Party in the UK in the way that it has.
One only have to attend a Pride march to see the current status of queer theory. In short, the queers won. This is why respectable, liberal assimilationist gays like Andrew Sullivan decry them.
This made me remember Trough Man- a bloke who used to appear in venue toilets around Sydney in the 90’s/ ‘00’s. He would lie in the men’s urinals wearing a gas mask and army fatigues, waiting to be urinated on. He was a bit of a fixture. Ordinary blokes would piss on him and come back to their pint and have a laugh about it with their mates. Sometimes he’d just sit at the side of the trough, seemingly on a break. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8i2hik
"Warner feels entitled to cruise (pick up strangers in public and have sex with them on the spot) at the Hudson River piers near the West Village and other public lands"
If he's cruising on Christopher Street in the 90s and 2000s, he's picking up underage boys and young men who have been abused and ran away. He knows that. Every gay in the village in NYC knew that. I bet you know that too. He's advocating for sexual exploitation of minors and sexually abused boys who grew up to be rough trade. Warner can go fuck himself.
Great read: For a key name in trans in parallel to Andrew Sullivan for gays, you need look no further perhaps than Lynn Conway who was a brilliant computer scientist but also incessant behind-the-scenes trans activist. He spoke at a very small event I was involved in the year 2000, and in 1:1 conversation I realized his language was utterly bonkers, and he was astonishingly well-connected.
Arguably he created the main trans online and political playbook in the late 80’s and helped innumerable nascent teams to figure out how to talk about trans.
It’s not by accident that trans ideologues all say the same things the same way - from refusal to engage, systematically distorting trans prevalence, the trans brain, affirmation, medical gatekeeping, harmlessness of puberty block.
I’d review his background, you might find a huge number of connections which were never really clear. He was also one of the first to “come out” as trans when the climate changed on it.
"Lynn made the decision to come out in 1999, beginning with close friends and later telling the world about her past life. She knew that not only would her previous work now belong to her again in doing this, but that she could be a source of strength and inspiration for people like her. Since coming out, Lynn has consulted with many tech companies on equal opportunity hiring and employment protections for transgender workers, and many of them have adopted such protections, such as Apple, HP, Intel, Kodak, Lucent, NCR, Verizon Wireless, Xerox and even IBM."
Lynn Conway convinced men (gay and straight). While Conway's influence was positive in some respects on reducing homophobia and transphobia within the electronics industry, their advancement of the "trans-women are women" agenda was harmful to women in that it focused tech companies onto trans issues and away from issues such as improving maternity leave.
In particular his guide to trans which - considering it’s perhaps 26 or so years old - is the most perfect distillation of all trans rhetoric I can think of, including all sorts of bizarre inconsistencies - and one of the first which speak of “trans behavior” rather than “being a woman”. From it you can see some origins and inconsistencies in linkage with the gay community.
The entire piece is written as though he is an advanced professor of sociology and biology, rather than simply “making shit up” as he goes along, relentlessly. It’s impressive when you’ve utterly committed, and with some science background, you can evoke a feeling of science precision when it’s a farce.
It is also intentionally written in a childlike tone which fails now and then, but if you’re unhappy and don’t read critically I’m sure it’s pure catnip.
He also presents the script for attack - No Trans Research can ever be allowed - and if it does occur it is unethical. It’s the Michael Bailey attack, in which decades ago Conway’s own case was completely refuted.
His life presents as an ordinary gay man, with stereotypical male rough-and-tumble behaviors like outdoor adventurism, and delight in things and not people. Reading between the lines he becomes distressed at wrong feelings at some key events. He begins ever more elaborate schemes to hide his being male, even at the risk of losing his job, friends and family. (There’s a reason which it sounds exactly like a compulsion like alcoholism). Decades later he is able to enter into a gay relationship, though all his genitals have been removed, and finally so secure in the success of his mimicry, he allows the mask to slip.
The frightening part is the relentless cheerleading - sexual feelings, orgasm? all there! Side effects? none! Sex partner? Super easy. Acceptance? Not a problem. All of those bizarre positions are in no small part coming from his documents and the utter self-delusion and compulsion he has. The cheerleading is a major trans strategy. Never Question, Never Admit.
The mask slips over and over, and he exhibits one of the more bizarre and famous issues - an obsession with showing the sites of genitals which have been removed. The effect of showing emasculation without showing an ordinary vulva is remarkable, one would think that no woman has a pubic fat pad (“mons pubis”), or that the labia major were not mostly fatty tissue doe cushioning. He obsesses over vulvas which most resemble pre-pubescent girls. I’m not an anatomist, and being gay I really don’t look for illustrations of vulvas but to be crass I know a pussy when I see one.
With Carver Mead, Conway was a key developer of Very Large Scale Integration and microprocessors in the 1970s. She's revered within Silicon Valley and the IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). While often promoted as one of the earliest women in electronics, most of her collaborators knew she was trans. Certainly, Carver Mead, her primary collaborator, knew this.
Some of Carver Mead's and Conway's VLSI and microprocessor research was funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Defense Projects Agency), a subdivision of the Pentagon that funds electronics research and development.
Conway's status as a trans person became more well known in the late 1990s. From about 2000 to her death, she was highly influential at the IEEE and her advocacy influenced IEEE DEI policies.
Given the homophobia of the defense electronics industry in the 1950 and 1960s, I wonder if Conway might originally have been struggling with internalized homophobia.
I had a quick look at Conway's website. To be honest, I'm not interested in the details of the surgeries.
Many people in the electronics community knew that Conway was trans well before 2000. Most electronics engineers were accepting of Conway's trans identity, didn't pay it much attention, and were far more interested in Conway's technical work. However, most also didn't know about the degree of Conway's trans activism. Most in the electronics industry wouldn't have paid much attention to how Conway's trans activism might be impacting the advancement of women in STEM. DARPA was still promoting Conway as a "Woman in STEM" in 2018 when they invited her to a commemoration of the DARPA funded development of VLSI and the microprocessor. There's a thing about that on Conway's website.
I've only recently become aware of the way that Conway bullied Michael Bailey and teamed up with others like Andrea James to do that. Most in the electronics industry are not aware that Conway bullied a sex researcher and tried to have them fired.
That being said, I'm not sure that Conway was an AGP, a gay man with gender dysphoria, or both. I don't think any of us will ever know that, and if Michael Bailey was accusing Conway of being an AGP, I doubt he had the basis of evidence on which to draw that conclusion.
In my mind, the biggest outstanding question about Conway is her enablement of the "no debate" stance within the trans community. Maybe your could point out where on Conway's website one can find that information.
I spoke to Conway 1:1 at an electronics industry event on trans in 2000, he didn’t say “no debate” but he stated that there was no purpose in debate because the science was settled.
The website had a link to “about trans” or something like that, and if you delve into that you’ll see the pattern, along with snide remarks a bit anything which smacked of scrutiny.
From this link, it's clear that Conway invested considerable effort to trash Michael Bailey's book (The Man Who Would be Queen), research and person. Conway then relentlessly pursued the thesis that trans women are simply "born in the wrong body" and are, in fact, women in all respects.
So there's the caveat: according to a couple of people that a journalist seeking to defend Foucault spoke to, who were not direct witnesses, about alleged incidents decades before.
What's missing from this narrative is the voices of the men and/or boys who were Foucault's sex objects. Both the accusation and defence are insubstantial.
All we can say for certain is that Foucault staked his professional reputation on defending men who had sex with children, at a time when sexual abuse by radicals from elite social groups was all too common, as we now better understand.
I’d be quite careful in statements about Foucault, children, and age of consent, for reasons you cite and others.
When Foucault was 18, our age of consent in the US today, the age of consent in France was 13. Today the age of consent is still lower in France, at 15.
It’s entirely possible that Foucault found 18 ridiculous because it was older than the age when he first had sex, and older than in his native country.
We cannot know.
As you point out, nobody knows how old individuals were in areas where he traveled, but this was also a period of intense problems between France and North African states, and it’s not simple to separate antipathy and reality.
Of all the nonsense generated around Foucault’s ideas, the once’s about pedophilia simply don’t ring true.
I learned about Foucault's support for paedophilia by reading Foucault, not from his detractors. That French law failed to safeguard many children from sexual abuse until very recently is irrelevant.
The very permissive legislation of the 1970s was still not permissive enough for Foucault, which is why he campaigned against it, on behalf of men convicted of sexually exploiting young girls.
It is past time that the postmodernists gave up their hero worship of this man. The clever things Foucault said were motivated by the pursuit of his own privilege, as a member of France's elite who wanted the freedom to do whatever he wanted, regardless of the consequences for others.
In that respect, he was attempting to create a new, 'progressive' aristocracy for men who would become fully above the law.
Thanks for this three-part essay, Glenna. I'm broadly in agreement, but would highlight a couple of points.
I don't think queer theory is an intellectual movement; rather, it is a psuedointellectual cult among certain academics. It's the elite, ivory tower counterpart to Aleister Crowley's mumbo-jumbo, permitting everything and criticising nothing, other than ‘the normal’. This is why you won't see debates between queer theorists and any other academics from outside of their private club: there is nothing to discuss.
Secondly, I don't think queer theory has ended or gone away. It is currently in retreat at the organisational level, because people are now getting caught and sent to prison after putting queer theory in to practice. (See for example Pride in Surrey in the UK). Stonewall and Mermaids could go bankrupt. But the ideology has been embedded in the minds of a whole generation in the affluent West.
In my view, we need a deradicalisation programme for the Anglosphere, like the one implemented in Germany eighty years ago, to help young people escape this indoctrination.
Why do you keep badgering me about radical feminists? I'm not a radical feminist. There's actually a podcast where I explain to Kara Dansky why I'm not a radical feminist, and one of the reasons I cite is their insistence (though not all do this) that sexual orientation isn't innate. Do you just assume all lesbians are radical feminists? Do you not realize there are different schools of feminism?
Rothblatt played a role in promoting trans ideology but I never pin the whole thing on him. He's one of dozens of figures I write about. It seems like you're confusing me with someone else.
I'm tired of your sarcastic ignorant attacks on me. Please cut it out or I'll block you across platforms.
Was a subscriber to Kara Dansky's substack for a while. Attended one WDI conference.
It seems facile, dogmatic, and detached from experience to assume that sexual orientation is entirely *not* innate. There have been many studies in human sexuality over the years to investigate this question. Most of the studies indicate that sexual orientation has innate and socially developed components which vary for each individual.
I find WDI's position that "gay marriage is a capitulation to normie patriarchy" to be detached from biological and social reality. Almost all societies in the world allow for some type of longer term bonding, socially, financially, legally and for family formation. You'd have to be living on a remote island and unwilling to observe human societies or be a Marxist idealogue not to acknowledge this.
I agree that Martine Rothblatt is one of the funders of the trans agenda, but with a little homework, one could name twenty other major funders of trans ideology in the US, UK and at the UN.
Mia Hughes is from the UK. I had never heard of her until about two years ago when she started working for Genspect and was promoted by the MacDonald Laurier Institute in Canada. It's hard to find her bio. It would seem naive to believe that Rothblatt alone is responsible for the dominance of the trans agenda.
Basically, their position is that they support the right of lesbians to form private domestic agreements. This doesn't address what happens when the domestic agreement breaks down. Who arbitrates child custody, support payments, etc.?
Regarding marriage between male and female persons, they have this to say:
"Marriage as we know it is one of the most ancient institutions of patriarchy (that is, the universal power of all men over all women). It was created by societies that treated women as men’s property that would be exchanged for money, goods, or a peace treaty between warring tribes of men. This fundamental exchange between the bride’s father and the groom or his father did not change with the medieval rise of knights, chivalry, troubadours, and romantic love. In fact, an elopement done without the transaction of the patriarchs was seen as theft, just as rape was – a property crime against the victim’s father (or husband, in the case of rape)."
This doesn't acknowledge that matriarchies also functioned in many societies and that outside of very wealthy ruling elites, patriarchies were dependent on matriarchies just to survive. Some of this is informed by my conversations with older women in the traditional villages of the Pindos mountains of Greece where my husband's family are from. Women there formed their own societies to care for children, cook, clean, make clothing, trade, defend their villages from invaders and even act as resistance fighters in the 1940s.
The experience of the women in my own family in rural southern Quebec between 1800 and 1930 also doesn't reflect a situation where women were oppressed by patriarchy. They were highly regarded by male family members. There were a lot of "elopements" and most couples formed around rural gatherings, the "sugaring off (maple syrup harvest), and crop harvesting.
I'm not saying that patriarchy doesn't exist, but the developments in the twentieth centuries, where women became isolated at home in a nuclear family, are very recent.
WDI's position on marriage seems dominated by the experience of a handful of British feminists.
Thank you for making these points. Marriages do exist in matriarchal societies; they're just not lockboxes that parasitize off women. And on lesbian marriages, that is currently the easiest way for us to get rights that straights take for granted, in a whole range of areas: hospital visitation, inheritance, some 1000 benefits as famously listed earlier in this century. Many of us held out for decades (in my case, 40 years) before taking this legal and economic step, for practical reasons.
>Basically, their position is that they support the right of lesbians to form private domestic agreements.
You disagree with this? It's already true in every state in the US, not only for lesbians, but for anyone of either sex in any combo. And I presume in every other western country as well.
>This doesn't address what happens when the domestic agreement breaks down. Who arbitrates child custody, support payments, etc.?
That should be spelled out in the contract. That's the whole point of having a private contract: the parties can agree in advance to how these things are to be settled. Then the administration of the agreement is governed by civil contract law.
I really do not see how you can possibly disagree with any of this. It's just basic human freedom.
"Domestic partnerships and marriages differ significantly in legal terms, impacting couples’ rights and responsibilities. Marriage is a legally binding contract recognized by all states, providing spouses numerous benefits like joint tax filing, inheritance rights, and decision-making in healthcare. Domestic partnerships, which are not recognized in all states, offer limited legal protections and may lack benefits such as certain tax advantages and automatic inheritance rights."
So yeah, using a private domestic agreement instead of civil marriage could leave one in an endless legal battle over taxes, inheritance or struggling with legal minutia in a health crisis.
I don't think WDI should be handing out legal advice on domestic partnership agreements versus civil marriage. What works in the UK, where there is the notion of common law marriage for domestic partnerships, is likely very different from the way these laws work in the US.
Why would one employ the legal framework of a private domestic agreement rather than a civil marriage? It seems that the laws of precedent around civil marriage would be more comprehensive and less legally laborious, risky and expensive than a private domestic agreement.
"That should be spelled out in the contract."
You only need to look at all the ways that prenuptual agreements go wrong to see that it is very difficult to foresee all the ways that a domestic partnership could go wrong. I don't see that a private domestic agreement contract is in any way less patriarchal than civil marriage. The whole objection of radical feminists to the civil marriage laws of today on the basis that they are patriarchal seems highly contrived.
It's not freedom to have to hire a lawyer to iron out all this out. People want private contracts, have at it. Most of us are satisfied with getting the legal and economic and medical rights in one easy step.
The quote is from a previous commenter who deleted their comment. But, in fact, Sheila Jeffreys, one of the most prominent women at WDI, in 2004 stated that she was categorically against all forms of marriage:
"The impulse of some in gender critical circles to pin trans on rich, pervy, powerful men (and to exonerate women and feminism completely) is irresistible."
Cannot agree with you more!
Certainly, monied families with a pro-trans agenda have funded the mainstreaming of the trans agenda. Many of these families are dominated by dominant male figures.
But what does one make of Judith Butler, Sonia Corrêa (Brasil), Johanna Olson-Kennedy, Sedgwick, Halberstam, and Nancy Kelley (UK, very pro-trans, former head of Stonewall in the UK)?
Recently, Skate Canada issued a fatwa stating that they were entirely behind men competing as women in professional skating. 6 of 13 administrators at the head of Skate Canada are female. This is everywhere, not just at Skate Canada.
In the liberal enclave where I grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, male or female, it's now entirely normative to embrace the entire trans agenda without question.
So, yeah, it's not just a handful of powerful, wealthy men who are behind this.
Rothblatt is a ‘trans humanist’, but he’s also a wealthy man with a autogynephilic sex fetish and an agenda to fund the global ‘trans’ agenda. And yes, he’s by no means alone. Other huge contributors include James ‘Jennifer’ Pritzker of the Hyatt Hotels family, cousin of JB Pritzker, governor of Illinois. He is in a financial position to hold hundreds of institutions to ransom for his fetish. And he does. This movement is well-funded and highly motivated. It’s is not a grassroots movement. It’s a top- down, fetish-led ideological drive. But it’s also true that there is a social contagion going on here. And a dawning realisation amongst some of us that the overload of extreme porn, more and more easily accessible due to social media and consumed by sexually incontinent men, that has enabled this explosion of their fetish into the mainstream. Not to emotion the stealthy way that DENTONS Solicitors helped them along by advising on how best to slide their fetishist activists’ agenda into the cultural and institutional mainstream.
So whatever we all may believe about the innateness or genetic tendency or environmental influences or just plain choice of homosexuality, or any other human sexual attribute, the proclivity of men to be misogynist and to be sexually aroused by mimicking ‘the all-consuming mother’ has been around forever. It’s only in the last few decades that they have managed to bring it out of the shadows and into the mainstream. Gay rights in the west has been won, Stonewall had no further reason to exist & Covid took all our eyes off what was happening as we dived stupidly into the online universe.
The worst of it is that now they are coming for the children…
But -- speaking as a Canuck, as a Canadian -- I'm certainly rather peeved, putting it mildly, with our erstwhile fearless leader -- Justin Trudeau -- who once insisted -- on International Women's Day, no less, and from the Prime Minister's Office [PMO] -- that:
PMO: With a disturbing recent rise in anti-transgender hate here in Canada, we reiterate today that trans women are women and we will always stand up to hate whenever and wherever it occurs.
What is particularly galling is that I probably voted for the dude several times over the years -- he had been the 7th longest-running Prime Minister until he'd been turfed out recently:
But Justin and his ilk have been rather too quick to peddle and promote transgender ideology -- which has kind of corrupted and rotted out much of our previously solid governance -- or so as the Party line had it. However, several Canadian Provinces -- notably Alberta headed by the estimable Danielle Smith -- have, more or less, quite commendably, drawn a line in the sand with that rather toxic if not demented ideology:
QUOTE; CBC News (2024; Pravda West): Premier's [Danielle Smith's] announcement on transgender policies surprised Alberta Health Services advisory group; Internal records obtained through freedom of information request ....
Among other things, the government's proposed policies would ban top and bottom surgeries for anyone under 18 (Doctors say bottom surgeries aren't performed on youth and top surgeries are rare.)
Puberty blockers and hormone therapies would not be permitted for those under 16, unless someone has already started treatment.
Teens aged 16 or 17 could start hormone therapies if they are deemed mature enough and have parental, physician and psychologist approval. UNQUOTE
Maybe still somewhat short of ideal, but certainly a step in the right direction.
Glenna, this series should become a book! Thank you for plumbing the depths.
And thank you for the laugh:
A woman with an unfashionably neat haircut hurried toward me, hands clasped together like a docent at the Holocaust Museum.
“I’m going to ask you to please be respectful,” she said. “Some of our customers use these items for gender play.”
My favorite line is:
"queer theory in its belching zombie form as it staggers from one socialist die-in to another."
lol
Extremely insightful article, Glenna! You captured the contradictions of Queer Theory perfectly, and you reminded me again of encountering Queer theorists in person when I was in graduate school studying American literature at Tulane in New Orleans. In the early 1990s, a graduate student conference was hosted by the university with a keynote panel event featuring Michael Warner and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. (This conference happened a couple years after Sedgwick had come to campus for a guest lecture about Henry James.) After their panel kicked off the conference, Warner and Sedgwick hung around to attend sessions together, happily cheering on budding grad student Queer theorists. But, then, a comical scandal happened, rocking the whole department. One of my grad student friends presented a paper about Queer theory and the slow 1990's job market for English professors (by the way, job prospects for English professors are even worse now!). In her paper, my friend speculated that, even though she is heterosexual, she could imagine being tempted to claim a Queer (lesbian or bisexual) identity to increase her chances of being hired, given that of the scarce jobs advertised, quite a few mentioned a preference for candidates with training in gay literary studies. Predictably, the you-know-what hit the fan! During her session's Q&A, Warner and Sedgwick melodramatically castigated my friend for daring to suggest that Queerness as they conceive it seems to be a flexible concept that she might identify with. Outraged, when the session ended, Warner and Sedgwick marched over to the English department chair to insist that my friend be sanctioned. The next day she had to meet with the chair for a lecture about her allegedly immoral mistake and was ordered to apologize to Warner and Sedgwick.
What in the world?! They got to dictate terms because they'd acquired power within academia and not because their arguments had any intrinsic value.
Too many people have been sparring with the empty "ideas" put forward by queer theorists when they should be investigating the lives of queer theorists. Probably a lot of psycho behavior that would really illuminate the enterprise.
It's long been my belief, since my undergraduate days 1991-1994, that postmodernism is essentially a competition within academia to discredit more capable job market rivals. I posted a video here: https://youtu.be/LL6qroy84TU
Respectfully: your essay repeats allegations against Michel Foucault that collapsed under scrutiny five years ago, six months after they were raised.
https://www.lexpress.fr/idees-et-debats/michel-foucault-et-la-pedophilie-enquete-sur-un-emballement-mediatique_2148517.html
Guy Sorman made these claims in a French-language interview with France 5 on March 9, 2021. The Sunday Times (a British newspaper with a conservative bent) amplified them three weeks later (March 28, 2021), framing Foucault as an architect of “woke ideology” and American “identity politics.” Conservative media and influencers throughout the anglosphere repeated this story enthusiastically. None subsequently reported its collapse.
When the French press actually investigated, Sorman admitted to having fabricated key details. He initially claimed to have witnessed Foucault “buying” children at a cemetery; under questioning, he admitted to having seen no such thing; he’d rather “heard” about it from “some Mohammed.” He initially specified seeing boys aged 8 to 10 years old; later, he admitted he “couldn’t distinguish a young ephebe [i.e, a ‘twink’] from a 14-year-old.” Finally, he reduced his own story to “a troubling convergence of indices.”
But there’s more. In fact, Foucault wasn’t even in Sidi Bou Saïd in 1969. He’d already returned to Paris to teach at Vincennes. The Sunday Times’ claim that he “lived there in 1969” was false.
Meanwhile, Chantal Charpentier (Sorman’s companion at the time and his sole corroborating witness) explicitly contradicted Sorman’s sexual allegations. She described boys running after Foucault while he threw coins. She stated: “I have no proof that he abused them.” Her account removed all sexual connotations from the scene Sorman described. Besides that, Charpentier’s reliability as a witness is itself questionable: she claimed that philosopher Gilles Châtelet accompanied them to visit Foucault in Tunisia, yet Châtelet himself stated in a 1999 interview that he “regretted not having time to meet Michel Foucault.” Charpentier’s was the only testimony Sorman could produce to corroborate his allegations.
But setting these facts aside, Sorman’s purported timeline should have elicited skepticism in the first place. When he actually *was* in Tunisia, Foucault had publicly supported university students who were being arrested and tortured by the Bourguiba regime. He lived under police surveillance and had been physically threatened by them. Believing that he “paraded” through a village with boys he was ostensibly abusing, in a police state, surrounded by expatriates, while living under the most intense scrutiny of his life, means believing that he was fool enough to advertise uncontroversially criminal activity at the precise moment when he would be in the most imminent danger of arrest, imprisonment, torture, and execution. If Sorman’s claims were true, the police would likely have appreciated being handed relatively uncomplicated justification for arresting a foreigner whose presence they were keen to eliminate.
By his own words, Sorman confabulated this particular story to support his intended portrayal of Foucault as an example of a “detestable white male” and a “hideous colonialist.” (Meanwhile, Foucault’s Tunisian students and colleagues described him as engaged, supportive, and courageous in defending activists against the dictatorship.) Even the German newspaper Die Zeit, which also helped to amplify these allegations, misrepresented David Macey’s authoritative biography: Die Zeit reported Macey as recounting a moment in which Foucault was “caught off-guard early morning with young children,” where Macey’s actual text describes Foucault reading Feuerbach to children and notes that village rumors portrayed him as a “mage or diviner” (so... not a predator).
Sorman himself told L’Express in September 2021 (linked above): “I’m not particularly interested in Foucault. I wrote two lines about him in a 300-page book.” Yet, at least among the chattering classes of the anglophone world, the lie that he invented when questioned about those two lines still circulates five years after he tried feebly to walk it back.
The mischaracterization of Foucault’s actual scholarly work only deepens the bitter irony of this situation. You’re absolutely right to criticize characters like Butler and Sedgwick, but you’re wrong to paint them as good (or even halfway competent) pupils of Michel Foucault. They’ve managed to be quite the opposite.
In a few words, the man’s entire intellectual project was to explicate how modern power operates through the invention and management of “identities,” how “governmentality” means inducing us to internalize abstract categories that alienate us from the immediacy of concrete experience, do nothing good for *us* (yet quite a lot of good for special interests who manipulate us by means of them), and train us to police ourselves according to their strictures. Crediting him as “the” or even “a” father of contemporary identity politics requires a nearly comical misreading of his work. (But that’s assuming anyone actually reads him at all. Many of the anglophone “scholars” citing him seem to have found themselves incapable of reading past page two.)
Foucault diagnosed the disease of Western modernity. Others have exploited his diagnosis to peddle their sophistries more effectively. But a thinker who explicates how power functions bears no responsibility for those who deploy that knowledge mendaciously or incompetently, no more than Max Planck bears responsibility for the atomic bomb or René Descartes for modernity itself.
I can’t help noticing that this context is *always* omitted by anglophone authors in their attempts to reckon with our cultural crisis. Foucault appears to have become an opportune scapegoat for our unhappy mess. But complicity in that scapegoating is an especially unfortunate choice for an essay analyzing “how the normalization of gay people posed a crisis for queer theorists,” published in the spirit of advocating for “LGB people” in an increasingly confusing, confused, and adversarial climate. You’ve repeated slander against a homosexual man whose work could do much to clarify the mechanisms that steer the very politicization you aim to expose.
It appears you didn’t personally investigate these claims before repeating them. This is understandable, particularly given the language barrier. But consider what this situation demonstrates.
Conservative anglophone media outlets and influencers spread Sorman’s accusations in spring 2021, recognizing in them an instrument with which to attack contemporary identity politics (in service of their own alternative identity politics) by linking a celebrity name of contemporary political philosophy (both the substantial and the sophistical) to pedophilia. When Sorman’s story dissolved in the French press over subsequent months, those outlets and influencers declined to correct themselves. Five years later, the slander persists as secret, shameful fact.
This is how mass manipulation *actually* works: (1) amplify sensational accusations, (2) ignore subsequent refutation (language barriers help), (3) use emotional resonance to advance political objectives. Targets include Foucault’s reputation (useful to blacken, given his value for understanding how power operates) and anyone associable with him, however thinly. When accusation becomes a technology of power, no accusation needs to be true. It needs to be repeatable: this is the only thing that still matters.
That a writer combating the ideological capture of homosexuality itself should participate in this slander (however unwittingly) is extremely unfortunate, first because it sustains what’s known to be a lie, and second because it calls into question her grasp of both the history she invokes and the forces arrayed against us (and against every honest person).
Understanding Foucault’s analysis of how power operates through language, the management of licit terminology and identities, and the construction of categories that are made to seem natural even as they serve private interests which are incompatible with any notion of a common good... would *illuminate* how we arrived where we find ourselves today. But instead, we’re being deceived, despite our best intentions, by people who ***do not care about the truth*** any more than our most obvious adversaries.
French sources documenting this have been available since 2021. That anglophone writers continue repeating Sorman’s fabrications without consulting them represents a failure of due diligence that undermines the cause this essay seeks, in good faith, to serve. This ignorance both makes and keeps us vulnerable to the very mechanisms of manipulation that we must unconditionally oppose—everywhere.
Róisín Michaux (Irish) on Foucault:
https://peaked.substack.com/p/the-first-rule-of-queer-club
"Queer had been picked up by academics — particularly in the literary criticism and feminism fields — who thought it was a good “lens” through which they could interpret other social phenomena with the same insider/outsider, normal/stigmatised dynamic. They were tickled by Michel Foucault’s view that identities related to sex and sexuality were actually just a kind of social control, self-enforced by sheep-like normies.
"Homosexuality, Foucault had claimed, is not an innate identity that one has, it’s just a thing one does. Whether or not you do it (and get condemned for it) is a product of the social forces prevalent in your lifetime.
"He was particularly incensed at the medical pathologisation of homosexuality, transsexuality, hermaphroditism, and paedophilia that was dominant while he was alive. But he also probably had a personal interest in absolving himself for his alleged rape of poor boys in Tunisian graveyards. It’s not that having sex with children is airquotes bad, he posited, it’s just that contemporary society has artificially labelled it so. Something something Greek and Roman pederasts."
Whether or not Foucault actually had sex with boys, the fact remains that he argued that sex with children could be viewed as acceptable because of Greek and Roman pederasts. Greeks also widely engaged in infanticide. You could probably resurrect and normalize any horrific human act by invoking past societies. It's exactly that moral relativism of the French post modernists that many Americans and Canadians are so affronted by.
You’re shifting from “Foucault raped children” to “even if he didn’t, his ideas are dangerous.” These aren’t the same. The first is a factual allegation that collapsed when investigated, yet was cited without inventory. The second is a philosophical disagreement that should be argued on its merits, not smuggled in through slander. If you think demonstrating that moral categories are historically contingent rather than natural equates to “moral relativism,” then argue that. But don’t use fabricated accusations of child rape as a rhetorical bludgeon, then pivot to philosophy when the fabrication is exposed. That’s not honest argumentation. It’s exactly the kind of discursive shifting that makes truth impossible to pursue.
I appreciate the distinction between the factual question (did Foucault commit such acts or not?) and the philosophical question (what did Foucault actually argue?). These are indeed separate concerns. But my intention is to press on both.
So, on the factual point: I didn’t point out Sorman’s fabrications simply to exonerate Foucault personally, but to demonstrate something about how nearly all contemporary discourse, particularly on topics of gender and sexuality, is prey to mass manipulation. The essay I responded to presented these allegations as established fact (“had sex with boys aged 8–10 in Tunisia”). When accusations of child rape are deployed as rhetorical instruments to discredit ideas, and when the subsequent collapse of those accusations goes unreported by the very outlets that amplified them, we’re witnessing a technology of power that Foucault himself analyzed. The truth or falsehood of such claims matters absolutely, not because Foucault deserves exoneration (the dead require neither our defense nor our accusation), but because *we* deserve not to be deceived.
On the philosophical point: In your summary of the linked article, you suggest that Foucault argued “sex with children could be viewed as acceptable because Greek and Roman pederasts.” This is reading his genealogical method as prescriptive when it was descriptive and diagnostic. When Foucault studied how ancient Greeks thought about human sexuality very differently from how we do—namely, that they had literally no concept corresponding to our “homosexuality,” and organized their erotic categories around active/passive roles rather than object-choice—he wasn’t arguing “therefore we should adopt their practices.” (His usual angle was to argue something closer to: “Why would you adopt anyone else’s practices at all? Find your own”—hence he was roundly criticized by Marxists for conceding to liberal individualism.) He was demonstrating that what we experience as natural, transhistorical categories (“the homosexual,” “the sodomite,” “the pedophile”) are historically contingent concepts with specific political functions. This is simply true. It doesn’t mean the *phenomena* that we now call “homosexuality” (exclusive attraction to members of one’s own sex) or “pedophilia” (structurally narcissistic attraction to a juvenile victim of either sex, who is ideated as innocent and defenseless; hence one speaks of the psychology of *predation*) “don’t really exist,” even if many morons—some of whom are academics at universities like Columbia, Berkeley, and wherever else—find themselves reading it that way and would very much like you to do the same.
Accordingly, the point isn’t moral relativism (“everything is ‘constructed,’ therefore anything goes”) but to recognize how power operates through the production and management of identity categories that are presented as natural, “scientific” discoveries (which itself betrays a misconception of what “science” is/does) rather than political constructions. Morality is not self-evident from nature: we agree on precisely this point. And in fact, we agree with Foucault on this point.
This is why I wrote that blaming Foucault for contemporary identity politics requires misreading him: his entire project was to show how the proliferation of sexual identities serves mechanisms of control. (Which is *merely* an observation, and not a moral critique of “control” per se.) Naming, classifying, and managing demographics through categories with which they can be taught to identify themselves at an even biological level (race? “gender identity”?) is precisely how modern governance functions, far more effectively than when it relied on crude prohibitions and obligations or the physical violence that enforced them.
You write: “Greeks also widely engaged in infanticide. You could probably resurrect and normalize any horrific human act by invoking past societies.” *Yes, exactly.* But Foucault didn’t attempt that normalization; he showed that it’s possible, indeed historically commonplace, and sought to describe exactly how. Apparently without realizing it or meaning to, you’re effectively citing him—or at least the philosophical milieu of which he’s representative—when you write these words. He aimed to denaturalize our own categories by situating them in historical contexts just as you’ve done by pointing to the Greeks, to show that many things we experience as timeless truths about our own nature are, in reality, contingent arrangements that always serve particular interests. This is uncomfortable because it means we can’t simply appeal to this “nature” to settle our moral questions. At least not in good faith. But discomfort with that conclusion *doesn’t* transform genealogical analysis into moral prescription. That is what “queer theory” has done, or has attempted to do.
Foucault did sign the 1977 petition regarding age-of-consent laws in France. This deserves forthright acknowledgment and serious criticism. Yet even here, the context complicates that judgment: the petition concerned cases where teenagers *near* the age of majority were in relationships with adults, and the sentencing was widely agreed to be disproportionate and to represent a particular dysfunction in the French judicial system. The petition was ill-conceived and morally obtuse in its argumentation, and in my opinion Foucault's participation in it was a serious misjudgment. Not because it advocated removing all age-of-consent protections (it didn’t do that), but because its arguments about consent and coercion were philosophically naïve and failed to adequately account for power differentials. This was a failure to apply his own stated principles, not advocacy for abuse. But “argued to abolish age-of-consent protections for teenagers in specific legal contexts” is quite different from “argued that sex with children is acceptable because Greeks did it,” and *both* of these are categorically different from “raped boys aged 8–10 in Tunisia.”
When we collapse those distinctions by allowing “signed a moronic petition about age of consent” to be transformed into “argued philosophically for normalizing pedophilia by reference to Greek pederasty” to be further transformed into “literally raped children in Tunisia,” we participate in exactly the kind of discourse that abandons truth for rhetorical convenience. Even as that’s the entire problem we face in “queer”… everything. And we do this, ironically, while claiming to defend moral clarity against postmodern relativism.
Foucault’s observation that moral categories are historically contingent doesn’t entail that “anything goes” any more than observing that property law is historically contingent means theft is acceptable. The genealogical insight is that *because* our categories are constructed and serve particular interests, we must be more vigilant, not less, about examining whose interests they serve and at what cost. This is the opposite of relativism. It’s a demand for greater moral seriousness precisely because we can’t hide behind appeals to nature or divine command.
You note that “many Americans and Canadians are affronted by” French postmodern moral relativism. But what we’re witnessing isn’t philosophical debate. It’s the weaponization of fabricated sexual offenses to (a) conjure a fitting scapegoat whose apparent perversion can conveniently “explain” our current crisis, and (b) foreclose engagement with ideas that genuinely undermine certain arrangements of power. The fact that conservative media amplified Sorman’s fabrications, then went silent when they collapsed, while the essay above has repeated them five years later apparently without due diligence demonstrates in itself that truth isn’t the prevailing concern in these debates. The concern is to attach the name “Foucault” to “pedophile” so effectively that anyone interested in his diagnostic tools for understanding how power works through identity categories (not only the “queer” ones) can be summarily dismissed.
I don’t ask you to admire Foucault. *I* don’t admire him. I ask that we distinguish between what someone actually did, what he actually argued, and what serves the rhetorical interests of those who invoke his personage. The author repeated a known falsehood in an essay meant to clarify our cultural confusions. That error undermines the very cause the essay was written to serve. And it demonstrates precisely one of the mechanisms Foucault analyzed: how accusation, once launched, continues circulating regardless of truth because it serves interests that have nothing to do with justice or reality.
So my point isn’t to excuse Foucault’s every position. It’s to *actually* be truthful by declining to credit slander, thinking carefully about what is actually being claimed when we read an argument (if we bother to read it ourselves), and maintaining a solid distinction between “this person said things I find immoral” and “this person committed heinous acts.” They aren’t the same kind of claim, and we impoverish our capacity for both moral reasoning and clear analysis of our actual cultural situation when we treat them as interchangeable.
I didn't shift anything. I stated that it may or may not be the case that Foucault had sex with boys in Tunisia, but that his comments about sex with children are not merely a philosophical disagreement. Developmentally, its well supported that most children do not come away from sex with an adult without some level of psychological damage. It is generally agreed worldwide that children less that about 15 cannot consent to sex with an adult. Or are you going to make the case for Jeffrey Epstein?
I did not say this:
"You’re shifting from “Foucault raped children” to “even if he didn’t, his ideas are dangerous.”
I said this:
"Whether or not Foucault actually had sex with boys, the fact remains that he argued that sex with children could be viewed as acceptable because of Greek and Roman pederasts. Greeks also widely engaged in infanticide. You could probably resurrect and normalize any horrific human act by invoking past societies. It's exactly that moral relativism of the French post modernists that many Americans and Canadians are so affronted by."
I am not interested in this long diatribe about Foucault. I'm not even that opposed to some of Foucault's ideas, but the philosopher Ian Hacking is better than Foucault on social construction. Not all categories are socially constructed. Biological sex is not socially constructed. Many aspects of childhood development are mostly not socially constructed.
I am not interested in a moral indictment of Foucault specifically. What I am interested in the constant refrain, which you are amplifying here, that anglophones are ideologically and philosophically stunted and Puritanical. I reject that.
These ideas about biological sex being mutable came originally from Europe (Germany, specifically), as Glenna has well documented. Foucault followers such as Judith Butler (a darling of the French Left) have had a hand in the current destruction of women's rights worldwide.
We are literally on the same page. Declining to read what I wrote only means there is no use attempting to engage further. Best.
And the institutions treating what they do as scholarship.
Exactly. We naturally would rather hear that a single person (all the better if he’s French, homosexual, notoriously weird) sits at the source of it all. This would be easier to swallow than recognizing that the upheaval Western culture faces today is much more fragmented and diffuse, that it serves numerous interests which align only in commodifying and exploiting the most intimate and vulnerable domains of human experience for purposes which often aren’t even compatible with each other, and that the whole tornado is sustained by much that we ourselves take for granted and don’t seem prepared to give up or at least think about more carefully.
That we do this at the cost of our own integrity is apparently a marginal note. But our constant choice for convenient beliefs helps keep the vortex spinning.
And thanks for your kind words.
Alternative views of Foucault
#1:
Can We Criticize Foucault?
Jacobin Magazine
https://jacobin.com/2014/12/foucault-interview/
#2
Was Foucault a Paedophile?
https://savageminds.substack.com/p/was-foucault-a-paedophile
#3
Poststructuralism as a Regime of Truth: Foucault and the Paradox of Philosophical Authority
https://philosophynews.com/poststructuralism-as-a-regime-of-truth-foucault-and-the-paradox-of-philosophical-authority/
I'm sure Foucault would have appreciated your support, but the evidence is not as you present it here.
Long before 2021, during the late 1970's, Foucault made it known that he was part of the movement in France to abolish the age of consent, and to free those men who had been imprisoned for sexual predation of children. That anyone had been convicted of this crime in France itself was remarkable, as in that country until very recently, prosecution depended on proving the use of coercion rather than the existence of the sexual act itself.
The interesting aspect to the Guy Sorman allegations is not their veracity, but Foucault's defenders’ reaction, including that of one superfan who went to that same part of town to interview the elders. It wasn't true that he had paid for sex with children; they were teenage boys, said his defenders. They didn't have sex on the tombs, as Sorman alleged, but under the trees in the cemetery. Big difference, eh?
As an elite member of French academia with a wealthy upbringing, Foucault had a blind spot when it came to his power relations with Tunisian rent boys.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I thought I had conducted exhaustive research, but I may be mistaken. Do you have sources available to review? Particularly regarding this:
> and to free those men who had been imprisoned for sexual predation of children
and this:
> It wasn't true that he had paid for sex with children; they were teenage boys, said his defenders. They didn't have sex on the tombs, as Sorman alleged, but under the trees in the cemetery.
Who are the "superfans" you're referencing?
To reiterate, I'm not arguing Foucault was a morally clean man. I hardly know, though his frequent self-description as "amoral" seems accurate. I'm arguing that it matters whether specific claims are true or false, particularly when they are as morally serious as these.
It warrants notice that two petitions for changes to age-of-consent laws were filed in 1977, one in January and one in May.
The January petition was authored by the self-proclaimed pedophile Gabriel Matzneff, signed by 69 people, and published in Le Monde. This one specifically addressed the "Affaire de Versailles," defending three men in pre-trial detention for sexual relations with children aged 12–13 and calling for their release.
Foucault did not sign this petition. Many of his contemporaries (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and others) did.
The May petition was made to parliament. This one was signed by a broader group including Foucault, Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Louis Althusser, Felix Guattari, and others. It addressed the Penal Code Revision Commission about sentencing reform for cases of legal adults who entered sexual relationships with teenagers near the age of majority, and discrimination in age-of-consent laws (particularly the higher age for homosexual relations), not about freeing any specific convicted individuals or group of individuals.
This would be consistent with how the villagers actually described Foucault, as reported in the L'Express link above. The investigations found that if sexual contact occurred, it involved individuals aged 17–18, not children or vaguely "teenagers." Meanwhile, the villagers characterized the talk of cemeteries, tombs, and trees as "hautement fantaisistes."
Here is that link again: https://www.lexpress.fr/idees-et-debats/michel-foucault-et-la-pedophilie-enquete-sur-un-emballement-mediatique_2148517.html
Foucault seems unscrupulous and hypocritical relative to his own insights. Unfortunately, this is basically normal. That isn't a justification. It's a reality that deserves lucid scrutiny it rarely receives. Misconstruing Foucault's particular (and still only rumored) wrongs as evidence (or rumor) of something quite different doesn't seem acceptable, and conflating these issues diverts rather than promotes that necessary self-examination.
The January petition (with signatures): https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1977/01/26/a-propos-d-un-proces_2854399_1819218.html
A 2020 article regarding it: https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2020/01/02/matzneff-les-signataires-d-une-petition-pro-pedophilie-de-1977-ont-ils-emis-des-regrets_1771174/
The May petition (PDF): https://archive.org/details/letter-scanned-and-ocr
I agree that Foucault had a rather egregious blind spot, as you call it, as to how even small age differences (as that between teenagers and adults, which the May 1977 petition addressed or rather failed to address) are distinctly inflected with the exact power dynamics he sought to expose elsewhere. This does indeed make him a hypocrite or at least a bit stupid. If you read my other comment you know I haven't claimed otherwise. But I've never encountered the two claims you make above, they don't seem reconcilable with these facts, and I would like to read further.
Thanks.
Thanks for your considered reply. Here's the original retort from Foucault's defender Frida Dahmani, who went to the location to interview witnesses:
https://www.jeuneafrique.com/1147268/politique/tunisie-michel-foucault-netait-pas-pedophile-mais-il-etait-seduit-par-les-jeunes-ephebes/
The above covers Foucault's antics in the cemetery, as well as the allegation that he was required to relinquish his academic job because of seducing another teenager.
The version I previously read in English was credited to someone else, which was why I said fanboy rather than fangirl, sorry.
Foucault's opposition to age of consent as a concept was covered in detail in a 1978 radio interview, summarised here:
https://www.artandpopularculture.com/Sexual_Morality_and_the_Law
This also sets out Foucault's position that children seduce adults.
Thank you for providing these sources. They clarify both the factual record and Foucault’s actual positions, including where those positions deserve serious criticism.
On the Jeune Afrique investigation: The article reports sexual activity but specifies details that differ from your summary and align with what L’Express also found.
Ages: “jeunes éphèbes” of 17–18 years old, stated explicitly by the witness Moncef Ben Abbes, a local villager—not a fan or a partisan defender.
Location: “dans les bosquets sous le phare voisin du cimetière”—in the groves under the lighthouse near the cemetery—not inside it. To me, this seems less like hairsplitting over tombs versus nearby trees and more like how people naturally describe locations in a small coastal village. The story about the cemetery was explicitly rejected by locals as a perverse fantasy.
Ben Abbes spoke plainly: “Foucault n’était pas pédophile mais était séduit par les jeunes éphèbes.” The distinction between prepubescent children and young men of 17–18 isn’t trivial. Sexual relations with 17–18 year olds certainly do bear their own moral weight, as we’ve discussed, but they’re fundamentally different from the allegations Glenna’s essay repeated.
Regarding Foucault’s departure from Tunisia: The article presents conflicting accounts. Daniel Defert (Foucault’s companion) said police bribed an 18-year-old to give compromising testimony (the age of legal majority in Tunisia at the time was 20). Fathi Triki (former dean at Sfax, Foucault’s student) said Foucault had already signed with Vincennes. Neither account involves pedophilia.
On the 1978 radio interview: I agree that this transcript is genuinely troubling. This is Foucault’s personal argument against French age-of-consent laws as they were being formulated at the time, and it illustrates his hypocrisy or blindness or both quite vividly.
When he says “the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves,” he’s making an uncomfortable but realistic claim about a psychological possibility without ever acknowledging what’s most essential: that the behavior of the adults in a child’s life is what determines what that child is capable of ideating, desiring, or saying “yes” to in the first place. This is indeed an extraordinary failure to maintain his own insights about how power structures situations and relationships. The gap between his usual analytical sensitivity and his reasoning here is stark.
That said, Foucault is arguing more broadly that consent, being merely “a contractual notion,” is inadequate to adjudicate morality. Consent alone can’t determine whether something is right or wrong. This critique has become commonplace in recent decades: we now recognize (or remember) that consent can be manufactured, that power dynamics complicate it in ways that the notion of “mutual consent” simply obscures, and that even the fully lucid agreement of everyone involved doesn’t make an action morally right.
Once we (culturally speaking) accepted that right and wrong could be mediated by establishing the presence or absence of consent, we committed ourselves to reasoning out ever more casuistical ways to certify what counts as authentic consent. This is why we now conventionally find ourselves having to say: a child can say the literal word “yes,” but cannot in any case or degree “consent.” Mediating morality through consent makes the difference between right and wrong a merely technical difference that can only be specified legally, which means politically; the authority of medicine is supposed to counterbalance that, but it brings with it the problems that attend medicalization (below). And in the process, the actual evil—someone is being harmed by someone else, in a very specific, egregious, and bizarre way—tends to slip out of sight, at least in certain quarters. Such is Foucault’s infamous criticism of “consent.”
On medicalization: Foucault criticized how psychiatry defines new categories of “dangerous individuals” (the “pedophile”) rather than addressing harmful acts directly. This connects to a psychoanalytic (as opposed to psychiatric) understanding of predation and transgression. French analysts like Élisabeth Roudinesco, Maurice Hurni, and Giovanna Stoll have examined in great depth how pedophilia frequently expresses an appetite for the violation of taboos and the projection of innocence and helplessness onto a victim, who is made into a kind of puppet and stage for the perpetrator to externalize an internal drama. The concern is that strengthening cultural taboos through formal classifications and legal instruments risks amplifying perverse incentives by facilitating these projections: the more sacred the child, the greater the incentive to defile her. (Sorry, this is terribly dark, but it’s the argument.) This is *not* in itself to argue against legal protections but to recognize that law alone can’t protect the vulnerable. Foucault’s dismissal of diagnostic description and legal instruments as a *part* of safeguarding seems extremely flippant and short-sighted, at best.
Meanwhile, though, medicalizing such perversion through the concept of “pedophilia” risks enabling what (further) medicalizing autogynephilia etc. through “gender dysphoria” has enabled: the construction and eventual *legitimation* of identity categories possessing all the authority and moral weight that people are socially pressured to grant to anything validated by “medical science.” “It’s natural,” after all, or at the very least “it’s a ‘medical condition.’”
To be clear, Foucault doesn’t make these specific analyses explicitly, but he seems to reference them constantly and they fit coherently with his work on how power operates through the production and management of identity categories—unlike the sophistries of Butler and others who claim his influence.
Foucault’s interest in Greek virtue ethics reflected his search for alternatives to legalistic moral reasoning. He didn’t formulate such an alternative himself, but his critique of consent-as-moral-paradigm wasn’t wrong, and today most people understand that viscerally even if we find it difficult to articulate exactly why or what might take its place. What remains troubling is Foucault’s apparent disinterest in articulating what protections children and other vulnerable people require given that consent alone is inadequate. But we haven’t resolved this ourselves, not at cultural or institutional levels. Our latent sensitivity to that truth is, I suspect, one reason why so many blogs like this one exist, and why we’re so attached to the conceptual paradigms that, although they’re roughly fashioned, often gravely flawed, and wind up making us vulnerable to entirely new and unforeseen forms of manipulation, are the best tools we have at hand to make moral discernment and accountability remotely tenable.
So in all, the interview you link shows Foucault making arguments that are philosophically incomplete and extraordinarily naïve. He failed to connect his insights about power to a domain where they are most obviously applicable. Why? I have no idea. Maybe he just didn’t understand children. Maybe he was indifferent. Maybe he was a monster in some unknown way. But two things are clear: First, the specific allegations that prompted this discussion—that Foucault raped children aged 8–10 on cemetery tombs in Tunisia—collapsed under investigation because they were fabrications. Second, these fabrications served a politically convenient purpose: discrediting a thinker who makes a remarkably ideal scapegoat if you’re seeking narrative control over certain cultural crises and whose work illuminates mechanisms of power that many, many interests would like to keep obscured.
Foucault made stupid arguments about age of consent. The slander against him was false. Both of these “bad facts” are worth understanding fully.
Thank you again for the sources. They help establish both what is true and what is not.
You're welcome. I don't think it possible with this mostly hearsay information to state that any accusation is definitively true or false. Sorman's allegations are probably exaggerated for attention, and the version of the defence of Foucault I read in English was not completely accurate to the French version. For example, I don't recall any mention of a lighthouse previously.
What troubles me about the modern distinction between paedophile and pederast is that it attempts to set puberty as the barrier between tolerable and intolerable sexuality. Puberty can start as young as nine years old, and we know from the 'puberty blocker' debacle that some children develop adult sexual characteristics very early. In my primary school there was one such girl, who had a body of adult appearance at the age of eleven, leading to rumours about her in the town.
We also know that some seventeen-year-olds can be extremely naive and trusting of adults. So I reject this framing of adult exploitation of children and teenagers as being sometimes progressive or liberating, depending on individual circumstances.
Regarding Foucault himself, his defence of the paedophile does appear to be motivated reasoning. Recent court cases in France have highlighted that the boomer generation in the Republic did contain a number of self-justified libertines who saw no need for any limit on sexual exploitation, including of members of their own families. (Judith Butler can give them all high-fives if she visits the prisons of her belovèd France).
Supposing Foucault believed in the paedophile/pederast distinction, and wished to safeguard his legacy by making clear that he was opposed to the sexual use of prepubescent children by adults, he had plenty of opportunities to do that, in print, on TV and radio, as an academic celebrity of his day. Yet he made no such distinction that I know of, and refused to support an age of consent in principle. He supported lowering the age of consent as a stepping stone to abolishing it, a short-term measure which would have helped the pederasts in jail at the time.
I therefore conclude that calling Foucault a paedophile may be technically incorrect if we accept the paedophile/pederast distinction as meaningful, but also that Foucault was certainly a powerful advocate within the French and international intelligentsia for the decriminalisation of literal paedophilia under that distinction. That is made plain in his 'History of Sexuality' and also 'Abnormal'.
It is probably unquantifiable how many children were harmed by paedophiles and pederasts inspired by his academic or intellectual circle, and the popular culture downstream of it.
Yes.
To be absolutely clear, when you write: “So I reject this framing of adult exploitation of children and teenagers as being sometimes progressive or liberating, depending on individual circumstances.”
That’s Foucault’s framing, not mine, and if you read what I wrote, you’re well aware that I reject it, too. But I reject it for what it is: framing the exploitation of teenagers ~*~near~*~ the age of consent (whatever that may be in a given judicial context) as just fine by pointing to (a) the way age of consent varies, being in practice a purely legal and thus political contrivance, supposedly grounded by medical expertise, which brings its own problems (you note one of them by stressing the ambiguity of how to specify maturity medically if, for medicine, it’s tied to the process of puberty, which can begin as early as 9 and finish as late as the mid-20s); and (b) the simple fact that such near-majority teenagers are at least not children. These are the sorts of arguments that Foucault made, and they’re naïve and irresponsible at best. But they are what they are and they aren’t what they aren’t.
Your original claim was that Foucault’s “fans” found he raped not 8–10 year olds, but vaguely “teenage” boys in a cemetery, that he was “required to relinquish his academic job” because of this, and that “defenders” merely quibbled about location details while awkwardly admitting the substance. The source you provided shows an investigative journalist, not a “fan,” who found that:
> Ages were 17–18, not 8–10
> Location was among groves of trees under a lighthouse, near (not in) the village cemetery
> Locals explicitly rejected all rumors about “cemetery antics” as fantastical
> Departure accounts conflict, the one most compatible with what you described speaks of an 18-year-old boy being bribed by police to give compromising testimony, and neither involves pedophilia
In my opinion, this actually matters. We either make the effort to hold ourselves accountable for the accuracy of the things we say about others or we’re just as fraudulent and hypocritical as any of the people regularly criticized on this blog. YMMV.
When you now write that calling Foucault “a paedophile may be technically incorrect” and that Sorman’s allegations were “probably exaggerated,” you’re tacitly acknowledging these factual corrections while pivoting to a much more vague accusation about “unquantifiable harm” from his “intellectual circle.”
The initial story was itself hearsay, and it doesn’t hold together. Acknowledging that directly would be more honest than quietly shifting goal-posts.
You write: “It is probably unquantifiable how many children were harmed by paedophiles and pederasts inspired by his academic or intellectual circle, and the popular culture downstream of it.”
I think that’s at least fair insofar as Foucault has been so extensively referenced, however unfaithfully, by sophists like Butler and worse, and those references are enabled partly by his own obscurity, inconsistencies, and unscrupulousness. But given how many texts “inspire” people to excuse themselves for doing horrible things, yet we don’t blame their authors for that relationship, and given that such people aren’t engaging in earnest self-examination so much as exploiting words and clever reasoning to justify themselves at will regardless of truth or consistency with any principles they might claim to hold, this way of thinking about what we’re looking at cultivates its own misunderstanding of what’s actually happening in our culture. I don’t think that misunderstanding is without consequence.
More importantly, this new framing is itself “hearsay” of the most diffuse kind: perfectly unfalsifiable, unquantifiable, based on posthumous influence and association rather than acts. That’s a world of difference from the specific allegations that, again, are what prompted this discussion. If we’re going to discuss Foucault’s actual philosophical claims, their credible motivations, and their cultural consequences, that’s worth doing carefully with specific citations—as I did above, and as you’ve neatly sidestepped here. But that’s a different conversation from the one we started, which was about whether he raped children in Tunisia.
According to every local person asked, he simply didn’t.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
That is so funny.
Thank you for correcting me. I thought it was a newsletter examining “the misbegotten, sometimes fraudulent movement for ‘transgender’ rights from a legal and historical perspective.” That, and the title, gave me the impression that facts mattered. My mistake! :-)
It's a substack. You know how substacks work, right? The substack owner writes the posts, not a random commenter.
So many great lines!
A few of my favorites:
>after a long evening of thinking about studying in the NYU law library
LOL!
>I knew one thing: anywhere that reprimands a drunk chick for making fun of penises is not an authentic lesbian establishment
>queers should have published dozens of books by now about men who ejaculate after a stranger calls them Ma’am. But they’re silent on this magnificent phenomenon.
>Ever since then we’ve just been dealing with queer theory in its belching zombie form as it staggers from one socialist die-in to another.
Or, "Sure, the queers still had pedophilia."
Great series, thanks! Could we say, in the spirit of this post, that queer provided useful cover with their queerying of sex and spectrums etc, while the sexologists led to gender identity as the stable essence and provided the key move, with trans supplanting sex parasitically rather than being across a vague range of norm breaking? Anyway, fascinating stuff.
I would suggest that by decentering expert knowledge in favour of ‘lived experience’, the postmodernists enabled gender woo to leak out of the psychiatric system and become part of consumer ‘healthcare’. Rather than challenge psychiatric abuse of gender non-conforming people, they spread it further than it ever would have got, because they are essentially sadomasochists. Hurt people hurt people.
I wouldn't insist that everyone involved is sado-masochist, I think the trauma history is a huge factor. Cynical power manipulation is a form of sadism though I suppose.
How are sadomasochists made, except by trauma, I wonder? Someone can be victim and perpetrator at the same time. In my view, we should be concentrating resources on helping people overcome their self-hatred.
Yes, I guess some of those terms are a bit unfamiliar in a treatment context but I agree worth recognizing and treating. Generally the task for all of us is to process the trauma rather than reproject it.
I was just listening to a podcast by a psychiatrist saying that they fear negative online reviews which could harm their practice. So, nowadays they are biased towards giving patients what they want, rather than what they need.
That's terrible to hear and speaks to the reality of it superceding medicalism as consumer choice model.
Good! Hard to read, but the primer on Halberstam, Denny and Warner is elucidating.
Have you read Róisín Michaux's essay on trans activism in the UK in the 1990s? She specifically discusses two individuals, Whittle and Burns:
'Intersex' activism is Trans Activism
https://peaked.substack.com/p/intersex-activism-is-trans-activism
There's also the Yogyakarta Conference in 2006 which Michaux also wrote about:
The Plot to Redefine Conversion Therapy
https://peaked.substack.com/p/the-plot-to-redefine-conversion-therapy
What about Susan Stryker?
It seems that there was a lot going on at the fringes in the 1990s at the UN, in the UK and in the US. Many of the more monied trans activists such as Susan Stryker and Judith Butler regularly attended events and conferences in both the US and Europe, so it is not surprising that there was cross pollination of trans activism between the US, the UK and European trans movements.
You state at the end of this write up that the Democrats adopted these policies. But that doesn't seem to have happened until about 2008 (one year after the UN adoption of the Yogyakarta Principles). It seems that Obama's election in 2008 was funded in part by trans activists such as the Pritzker family.
You mention Chase Strangio and the ACLU. Kara Dansky has written extensively about the takeover of the ACLU by the trans agenda, but that didn't happen until about 2014. (Chase Strangio started working at the ACLU in 2013.)
So what happened between 2000 and 2012? How did the Democratic Party come to the point of subsuming the rights of women underneath trans activism? Surely campaign financing played a large part. Maybe this is beyond the scope of your writing, but without a lot of funding from a small contingent of very wealthy trans activists, I doubt that the trans agenda would have come to dominate the policy agenda of the Democratic Party, the Liberal Party of Canada, and the Labour Party in the UK in the way that it has.
One only have to attend a Pride march to see the current status of queer theory. In short, the queers won. This is why respectable, liberal assimilationist gays like Andrew Sullivan decry them.
This made me remember Trough Man- a bloke who used to appear in venue toilets around Sydney in the 90’s/ ‘00’s. He would lie in the men’s urinals wearing a gas mask and army fatigues, waiting to be urinated on. He was a bit of a fixture. Ordinary blokes would piss on him and come back to their pint and have a laugh about it with their mates. Sometimes he’d just sit at the side of the trough, seemingly on a break. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8i2hik
"Warner feels entitled to cruise (pick up strangers in public and have sex with them on the spot) at the Hudson River piers near the West Village and other public lands"
If he's cruising on Christopher Street in the 90s and 2000s, he's picking up underage boys and young men who have been abused and ran away. He knows that. Every gay in the village in NYC knew that. I bet you know that too. He's advocating for sexual exploitation of minors and sexually abused boys who grew up to be rough trade. Warner can go fuck himself.
Great read: For a key name in trans in parallel to Andrew Sullivan for gays, you need look no further perhaps than Lynn Conway who was a brilliant computer scientist but also incessant behind-the-scenes trans activist. He spoke at a very small event I was involved in the year 2000, and in 1:1 conversation I realized his language was utterly bonkers, and he was astonishingly well-connected.
Arguably he created the main trans online and political playbook in the late 80’s and helped innumerable nascent teams to figure out how to talk about trans.
It’s not by accident that trans ideologues all say the same things the same way - from refusal to engage, systematically distorting trans prevalence, the trans brain, affirmation, medical gatekeeping, harmlessness of puberty block.
I’d review his background, you might find a huge number of connections which were never really clear. He was also one of the first to “come out” as trans when the climate changed on it.
Interesting! Do you think Conway influenced gay men? I want to figure out how the trans/gay man alliance formed, probably in the 80s.
"Lynn made the decision to come out in 1999, beginning with close friends and later telling the world about her past life. She knew that not only would her previous work now belong to her again in doing this, but that she could be a source of strength and inspiration for people like her. Since coming out, Lynn has consulted with many tech companies on equal opportunity hiring and employment protections for transgender workers, and many of them have adopted such protections, such as Apple, HP, Intel, Kodak, Lucent, NCR, Verizon Wireless, Xerox and even IBM."
https://news.sparkfun.com/7203
Carver Mead, a key Lynn Conway collaborator, may possibly be gay. He is still alive.
https://carvermead.caltech.edu/
Lynn Conway convinced men (gay and straight). While Conway's influence was positive in some respects on reducing homophobia and transphobia within the electronics industry, their advancement of the "trans-women are women" agenda was harmful to women in that it focused tech companies onto trans issues and away from issues such as improving maternity leave.
I would suggest in his own words reading what when on :
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
In particular his guide to trans which - considering it’s perhaps 26 or so years old - is the most perfect distillation of all trans rhetoric I can think of, including all sorts of bizarre inconsistencies - and one of the first which speak of “trans behavior” rather than “being a woman”. From it you can see some origins and inconsistencies in linkage with the gay community.
The entire piece is written as though he is an advanced professor of sociology and biology, rather than simply “making shit up” as he goes along, relentlessly. It’s impressive when you’ve utterly committed, and with some science background, you can evoke a feeling of science precision when it’s a farce.
It is also intentionally written in a childlike tone which fails now and then, but if you’re unhappy and don’t read critically I’m sure it’s pure catnip.
He also presents the script for attack - No Trans Research can ever be allowed - and if it does occur it is unethical. It’s the Michael Bailey attack, in which decades ago Conway’s own case was completely refuted.
His life presents as an ordinary gay man, with stereotypical male rough-and-tumble behaviors like outdoor adventurism, and delight in things and not people. Reading between the lines he becomes distressed at wrong feelings at some key events. He begins ever more elaborate schemes to hide his being male, even at the risk of losing his job, friends and family. (There’s a reason which it sounds exactly like a compulsion like alcoholism). Decades later he is able to enter into a gay relationship, though all his genitals have been removed, and finally so secure in the success of his mimicry, he allows the mask to slip.
The frightening part is the relentless cheerleading - sexual feelings, orgasm? all there! Side effects? none! Sex partner? Super easy. Acceptance? Not a problem. All of those bizarre positions are in no small part coming from his documents and the utter self-delusion and compulsion he has. The cheerleading is a major trans strategy. Never Question, Never Admit.
The mask slips over and over, and he exhibits one of the more bizarre and famous issues - an obsession with showing the sites of genitals which have been removed. The effect of showing emasculation without showing an ordinary vulva is remarkable, one would think that no woman has a pubic fat pad (“mons pubis”), or that the labia major were not mostly fatty tissue doe cushioning. He obsesses over vulvas which most resemble pre-pubescent girls. I’m not an anatomist, and being gay I really don’t look for illustrations of vulvas but to be crass I know a pussy when I see one.
Read it. It’s fascinating.
Yikes! Thanks, I'll check it out
With Carver Mead, Conway was a key developer of Very Large Scale Integration and microprocessors in the 1970s. She's revered within Silicon Valley and the IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). While often promoted as one of the earliest women in electronics, most of her collaborators knew she was trans. Certainly, Carver Mead, her primary collaborator, knew this.
Some of Carver Mead's and Conway's VLSI and microprocessor research was funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Defense Projects Agency), a subdivision of the Pentagon that funds electronics research and development.
Conway's status as a trans person became more well known in the late 1990s. From about 2000 to her death, she was highly influential at the IEEE and her advocacy influenced IEEE DEI policies.
Given the homophobia of the defense electronics industry in the 1950 and 1960s, I wonder if Conway might originally have been struggling with internalized homophobia.
Some links:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-design-innovator-lynn-conway
https://www.historytools.org/people/lynn-conways-legacy-more-than-the-first-superscalar-computer
https://computerhistory.org/profile/lynn-conway/
Oh; I have a first edition to their book. Conway claims Mead was unaware of her sex mimicry.
I agree with you on the self-hatred - have you read his story on his website?
I had a quick look at Conway's website. To be honest, I'm not interested in the details of the surgeries.
Many people in the electronics community knew that Conway was trans well before 2000. Most electronics engineers were accepting of Conway's trans identity, didn't pay it much attention, and were far more interested in Conway's technical work. However, most also didn't know about the degree of Conway's trans activism. Most in the electronics industry wouldn't have paid much attention to how Conway's trans activism might be impacting the advancement of women in STEM. DARPA was still promoting Conway as a "Woman in STEM" in 2018 when they invited her to a commemoration of the DARPA funded development of VLSI and the microprocessor. There's a thing about that on Conway's website.
I've only recently become aware of the way that Conway bullied Michael Bailey and teamed up with others like Andrea James to do that. Most in the electronics industry are not aware that Conway bullied a sex researcher and tried to have them fired.
That being said, I'm not sure that Conway was an AGP, a gay man with gender dysphoria, or both. I don't think any of us will ever know that, and if Michael Bailey was accusing Conway of being an AGP, I doubt he had the basis of evidence on which to draw that conclusion.
In my mind, the biggest outstanding question about Conway is her enablement of the "no debate" stance within the trans community. Maybe your could point out where on Conway's website one can find that information.
I spoke to Conway 1:1 at an electronics industry event on trans in 2000, he didn’t say “no debate” but he stated that there was no purpose in debate because the science was settled.
The website had a link to “about trans” or something like that, and if you delve into that you’ll see the pattern, along with snide remarks a bit anything which smacked of scrutiny.
Thanks! I'll have a look at that part of the website.
I had a look at this link:
Lynn's Review of Bailey's Book:
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/LynnsReviewOfBaileysBook.html
From this link, it's clear that Conway invested considerable effort to trash Michael Bailey's book (The Man Who Would be Queen), research and person. Conway then relentlessly pursued the thesis that trans women are simply "born in the wrong body" and are, in fact, women in all respects.
Subsequent studies such as this one:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-03053-7
confirm that much of Michael Bailey's thesis about autogynephilia and transfeminine behavior were correct.
So there's the caveat: according to a couple of people that a journalist seeking to defend Foucault spoke to, who were not direct witnesses, about alleged incidents decades before.
What's missing from this narrative is the voices of the men and/or boys who were Foucault's sex objects. Both the accusation and defence are insubstantial.
All we can say for certain is that Foucault staked his professional reputation on defending men who had sex with children, at a time when sexual abuse by radicals from elite social groups was all too common, as we now better understand.
I’d be quite careful in statements about Foucault, children, and age of consent, for reasons you cite and others.
When Foucault was 18, our age of consent in the US today, the age of consent in France was 13. Today the age of consent is still lower in France, at 15.
It’s entirely possible that Foucault found 18 ridiculous because it was older than the age when he first had sex, and older than in his native country.
We cannot know.
As you point out, nobody knows how old individuals were in areas where he traveled, but this was also a period of intense problems between France and North African states, and it’s not simple to separate antipathy and reality.
Of all the nonsense generated around Foucault’s ideas, the once’s about pedophilia simply don’t ring true.
I learned about Foucault's support for paedophilia by reading Foucault, not from his detractors. That French law failed to safeguard many children from sexual abuse until very recently is irrelevant.
The very permissive legislation of the 1970s was still not permissive enough for Foucault, which is why he campaigned against it, on behalf of men convicted of sexually exploiting young girls.
It is past time that the postmodernists gave up their hero worship of this man. The clever things Foucault said were motivated by the pursuit of his own privilege, as a member of France's elite who wanted the freedom to do whatever he wanted, regardless of the consequences for others.
In that respect, he was attempting to create a new, 'progressive' aristocracy for men who would become fully above the law.
Thanks for this three-part essay, Glenna. I'm broadly in agreement, but would highlight a couple of points.
I don't think queer theory is an intellectual movement; rather, it is a psuedointellectual cult among certain academics. It's the elite, ivory tower counterpart to Aleister Crowley's mumbo-jumbo, permitting everything and criticising nothing, other than ‘the normal’. This is why you won't see debates between queer theorists and any other academics from outside of their private club: there is nothing to discuss.
Secondly, I don't think queer theory has ended or gone away. It is currently in retreat at the organisational level, because people are now getting caught and sent to prison after putting queer theory in to practice. (See for example Pride in Surrey in the UK). Stonewall and Mermaids could go bankrupt. But the ideology has been embedded in the minds of a whole generation in the affluent West.
In my view, we need a deradicalisation programme for the Anglosphere, like the one implemented in Germany eighty years ago, to help young people escape this indoctrination.
"As long as people marry, the state will continue to regulate the sexual lives of those who do not marry."
Is this supposed to make sense to anyone at all?
"As long as people drive cars, the state will continue to regulate the ambulatory lives of those who do not drive cars."
"As long as people practice medicine, the state will continue to regulate the medical lives of those who do not practice medicine."
"As long as people buy alcohol, the state will continue to regulate the hydration of those who do not buy alcohol."
hey i have a hard time taking you 100% seriously with the ai slop in every article. could you please stop?
I hadn’t seen these essays of yours yet! Excited to dig in later!
Why do you keep badgering me about radical feminists? I'm not a radical feminist. There's actually a podcast where I explain to Kara Dansky why I'm not a radical feminist, and one of the reasons I cite is their insistence (though not all do this) that sexual orientation isn't innate. Do you just assume all lesbians are radical feminists? Do you not realize there are different schools of feminism?
https://karadansky.substack.com/p/listen-to-womans-hour-the-terf-report-3f4
Rothblatt played a role in promoting trans ideology but I never pin the whole thing on him. He's one of dozens of figures I write about. It seems like you're confusing me with someone else.
I'm tired of your sarcastic ignorant attacks on me. Please cut it out or I'll block you across platforms.
Was a subscriber to Kara Dansky's substack for a while. Attended one WDI conference.
It seems facile, dogmatic, and detached from experience to assume that sexual orientation is entirely *not* innate. There have been many studies in human sexuality over the years to investigate this question. Most of the studies indicate that sexual orientation has innate and socially developed components which vary for each individual.
I find WDI's position that "gay marriage is a capitulation to normie patriarchy" to be detached from biological and social reality. Almost all societies in the world allow for some type of longer term bonding, socially, financially, legally and for family formation. You'd have to be living on a remote island and unwilling to observe human societies or be a Marxist idealogue not to acknowledge this.
I agree that Martine Rothblatt is one of the funders of the trans agenda, but with a little homework, one could name twenty other major funders of trans ideology in the US, UK and at the UN.
Mia Hughes is from the UK. I had never heard of her until about two years ago when she started working for Genspect and was promoted by the MacDonald Laurier Institute in Canada. It's hard to find her bio. It would seem naive to believe that Rothblatt alone is responsible for the dominance of the trans agenda.
>I find WDI's position that "gay marriage is a capitulation to normie patriarchy"
That's not an actual quote, and should not be in quotation marks.
Furthermore, the words "patriarchy" and "marriage" appear nowhere in the Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights, the primary document of WDI:
https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/
WDI statement on marriage:
https://womensdeclarationusa.com/the-wdi-usa-lesbian-caucus-on-marriage/
Basically, their position is that they support the right of lesbians to form private domestic agreements. This doesn't address what happens when the domestic agreement breaks down. Who arbitrates child custody, support payments, etc.?
Regarding marriage between male and female persons, they have this to say:
"Marriage as we know it is one of the most ancient institutions of patriarchy (that is, the universal power of all men over all women). It was created by societies that treated women as men’s property that would be exchanged for money, goods, or a peace treaty between warring tribes of men. This fundamental exchange between the bride’s father and the groom or his father did not change with the medieval rise of knights, chivalry, troubadours, and romantic love. In fact, an elopement done without the transaction of the patriarchs was seen as theft, just as rape was – a property crime against the victim’s father (or husband, in the case of rape)."
This doesn't acknowledge that matriarchies also functioned in many societies and that outside of very wealthy ruling elites, patriarchies were dependent on matriarchies just to survive. Some of this is informed by my conversations with older women in the traditional villages of the Pindos mountains of Greece where my husband's family are from. Women there formed their own societies to care for children, cook, clean, make clothing, trade, defend their villages from invaders and even act as resistance fighters in the 1940s.
The experience of the women in my own family in rural southern Quebec between 1800 and 1930 also doesn't reflect a situation where women were oppressed by patriarchy. They were highly regarded by male family members. There were a lot of "elopements" and most couples formed around rural gatherings, the "sugaring off (maple syrup harvest), and crop harvesting.
I'm not saying that patriarchy doesn't exist, but the developments in the twentieth centuries, where women became isolated at home in a nuclear family, are very recent.
WDI's position on marriage seems dominated by the experience of a handful of British feminists.
Thank you for making these points. Marriages do exist in matriarchal societies; they're just not lockboxes that parasitize off women. And on lesbian marriages, that is currently the easiest way for us to get rights that straights take for granted, in a whole range of areas: hospital visitation, inheritance, some 1000 benefits as famously listed earlier in this century. Many of us held out for decades (in my case, 40 years) before taking this legal and economic step, for practical reasons.
So glad you were finally able to be married!
>Basically, their position is that they support the right of lesbians to form private domestic agreements.
You disagree with this? It's already true in every state in the US, not only for lesbians, but for anyone of either sex in any combo. And I presume in every other western country as well.
>This doesn't address what happens when the domestic agreement breaks down. Who arbitrates child custody, support payments, etc.?
That should be spelled out in the contract. That's the whole point of having a private contract: the parties can agree in advance to how these things are to be settled. Then the administration of the agreement is governed by civil contract law.
I really do not see how you can possibly disagree with any of this. It's just basic human freedom.
From Findlaw:
"Domestic partnerships and marriages differ significantly in legal terms, impacting couples’ rights and responsibilities. Marriage is a legally binding contract recognized by all states, providing spouses numerous benefits like joint tax filing, inheritance rights, and decision-making in healthcare. Domestic partnerships, which are not recognized in all states, offer limited legal protections and may lack benefits such as certain tax advantages and automatic inheritance rights."
So yeah, using a private domestic agreement instead of civil marriage could leave one in an endless legal battle over taxes, inheritance or struggling with legal minutia in a health crisis.
I don't think WDI should be handing out legal advice on domestic partnership agreements versus civil marriage. What works in the UK, where there is the notion of common law marriage for domestic partnerships, is likely very different from the way these laws work in the US.
https://www.findlaw.com/family/domestic-partnerships/domestic-partnership-vs-marriage-what-are-the-legal-difference.html
Just to be precise here, the statement under discussion is attributed to the Lesbian Caucus of WDI, and not to WDI as a whole.
Why would one employ the legal framework of a private domestic agreement rather than a civil marriage? It seems that the laws of precedent around civil marriage would be more comprehensive and less legally laborious, risky and expensive than a private domestic agreement.
"That should be spelled out in the contract."
You only need to look at all the ways that prenuptual agreements go wrong to see that it is very difficult to foresee all the ways that a domestic partnership could go wrong. I don't see that a private domestic agreement contract is in any way less patriarchal than civil marriage. The whole objection of radical feminists to the civil marriage laws of today on the basis that they are patriarchal seems highly contrived.
I think people should have the choice. And currently they do. You want to take that choice away from people. I do not believe that this is wise.
But whaever either of us thinks, there is zero chance of it happening.
It's not freedom to have to hire a lawyer to iron out all this out. People want private contracts, have at it. Most of us are satisfied with getting the legal and economic and medical rights in one easy step.
WDI's position that "gay marriage is a capitulation to normie patriarchy"
Can you please cite your source? This does not sound like the WDI I know.
The quote is from a previous commenter who deleted their comment. But, in fact, Sheila Jeffreys, one of the most prominent women at WDI, in 2004 stated that she was categorically against all forms of marriage:
https://sheila-jeffreys.com/the-need-to-abolish-marriage/
That is Sheila Jeffreys's personal opinion. Can you please cite your source that this is WDI's position?
Here is the WDI Lesbian Caucus statement on marriage:
https://womensdeclarationusa.com/the-wdi-usa-lesbian-caucus-on-marriage/
I couldn't find any other statement on the WDI website about their position on marriage. If you find one, please let me know.
Doesn't sound like the WDI position is that "gay marriage is a capitulation to normie patriarchy."
"The impulse of some in gender critical circles to pin trans on rich, pervy, powerful men (and to exonerate women and feminism completely) is irresistible."
Cannot agree with you more!
Certainly, monied families with a pro-trans agenda have funded the mainstreaming of the trans agenda. Many of these families are dominated by dominant male figures.
But what does one make of Judith Butler, Sonia Corrêa (Brasil), Johanna Olson-Kennedy, Sedgwick, Halberstam, and Nancy Kelley (UK, very pro-trans, former head of Stonewall in the UK)?
Recently, Skate Canada issued a fatwa stating that they were entirely behind men competing as women in professional skating. 6 of 13 administrators at the head of Skate Canada are female. This is everywhere, not just at Skate Canada.
In the liberal enclave where I grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, male or female, it's now entirely normative to embrace the entire trans agenda without question.
So, yeah, it's not just a handful of powerful, wealthy men who are behind this.
Rothblatt is a ‘trans humanist’, but he’s also a wealthy man with a autogynephilic sex fetish and an agenda to fund the global ‘trans’ agenda. And yes, he’s by no means alone. Other huge contributors include James ‘Jennifer’ Pritzker of the Hyatt Hotels family, cousin of JB Pritzker, governor of Illinois. He is in a financial position to hold hundreds of institutions to ransom for his fetish. And he does. This movement is well-funded and highly motivated. It’s is not a grassroots movement. It’s a top- down, fetish-led ideological drive. But it’s also true that there is a social contagion going on here. And a dawning realisation amongst some of us that the overload of extreme porn, more and more easily accessible due to social media and consumed by sexually incontinent men, that has enabled this explosion of their fetish into the mainstream. Not to emotion the stealthy way that DENTONS Solicitors helped them along by advising on how best to slide their fetishist activists’ agenda into the cultural and institutional mainstream.
So whatever we all may believe about the innateness or genetic tendency or environmental influences or just plain choice of homosexuality, or any other human sexual attribute, the proclivity of men to be misogynist and to be sexually aroused by mimicking ‘the all-consuming mother’ has been around forever. It’s only in the last few decades that they have managed to bring it out of the shadows and into the mainstream. Gay rights in the west has been won, Stonewall had no further reason to exist & Covid took all our eyes off what was happening as we dived stupidly into the online universe.
The worst of it is that now they are coming for the children…
Great summary. Yes, I would add the Pritzker family and the Dentons global law group. Other big time funders of trans ideology:
Stryker Family (including Jennifer)
Tim Gill
Stonewall UK
George Soros
There's also the capture of most of the UN. I don't know how this happened or who funded this.
As you know, Jennifer Bilek has covered a lot of this:
https://jbilek.substack.com/p/how-a-handful-of-billionaires-created
Denton's international law group is not a contributor to the gender ideology lobby. They were hired by that lobby.
Canada has completely lost its collective marbles. And the women are the worst culprits. They look like a nation of simpletons.
😲 "I resemble that!" 😉🙂
But -- speaking as a Canuck, as a Canadian -- I'm certainly rather peeved, putting it mildly, with our erstwhile fearless leader -- Justin Trudeau -- who once insisted -- on International Women's Day, no less, and from the Prime Minister's Office [PMO] -- that:
PMO: With a disturbing recent rise in anti-transgender hate here in Canada, we reiterate today that trans women are women and we will always stand up to hate whenever and wherever it occurs.
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2023/03/08/statement-prime-minister-international-womens-day
What is particularly galling is that I probably voted for the dude several times over the years -- he had been the 7th longest-running Prime Minister until he'd been turfed out recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Canada_by_time_in_office
But Justin and his ilk have been rather too quick to peddle and promote transgender ideology -- which has kind of corrupted and rotted out much of our previously solid governance -- or so as the Party line had it. However, several Canadian Provinces -- notably Alberta headed by the estimable Danielle Smith -- have, more or less, quite commendably, drawn a line in the sand with that rather toxic if not demented ideology:
QUOTE; CBC News (2024; Pravda West): Premier's [Danielle Smith's] announcement on transgender policies surprised Alberta Health Services advisory group; Internal records obtained through freedom of information request ....
Among other things, the government's proposed policies would ban top and bottom surgeries for anyone under 18 (Doctors say bottom surgeries aren't performed on youth and top surgeries are rare.)
Puberty blockers and hormone therapies would not be permitted for those under 16, unless someone has already started treatment.
Teens aged 16 or 17 could start hormone therapies if they are deemed mature enough and have parental, physician and psychologist approval. UNQUOTE
Maybe still somewhat short of ideal, but certainly a step in the right direction.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-ahs-transgender-policies-danielle-smith-1.7186280
So hopefully, there are still many of us who haven't, yet, lost all of our marbles, at least on that issue ... 😉🙂
The men driving this "transgenderism" lobby are the worst culprits.