A comprehensive article about the reality of gender ideology

Professor Dianna Kenny is a Binary Ambassador and special contributor to our book: Devastated, How gender ideology is tearing Australian families apart. 

On the 26th of February, Prof. Kenny wrote an article first published on Mercatornet titled "Wake up, world! Wokeism is on the wane…

Read the article below or download the PDF

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True greatness is undoubtedly in this obscure struggle where, deprived of enthusiasm of the crowds, a few individuals, putting their lives on the line, defend, absolutely alone, a cause around them despised (from The White Rose, Inge Scholl). 

The White Rose is a tragic account of the resistance of German students to Hitler during World War II. Three of them were captured and sentenced to death for high treason. The newspapers carried reports of “irresponsible lone wolves and adventurers, who by their acts had automatically excluded themselves from the community of the Volk.”

What is “wokeism”?

Wokeism" derives from African American vernacular English and carries the definition “awake” or being aware of issues related to systemic oppression and social justice. As with many movements, it has become extreme in its precepts and activism, particularly with respect to advocacy for marginalized groups. Nowhere has it been more successful than in the field of transgenderism involving young people. 

Wokeism has infiltrated key institutions that currently endorse policies of extreme political correctness, silence dissenting voices, engage in cancel culture, and even launch criminal prosecutions of braver souls who continue to state the obvious, for example, that sex is dimorphic and that transwomen are not women. 

In 1895,Gustave Le Bon wrote in his prescient book The Crowd: A study of the popular mind: 

Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength. In the natural world beings exclusively governed by instinct accomplish acts whose marvellous complexity astounds us. Reason is an attribute of humanity of too recent date and still too imperfect to reveal to us the laws of the unconscious, and still more to take its place. The part played by the unconscious in all our acts is immense, and that played by reason very small. The unconscious acts like a force still unknown. If we wish, then, to remain within the narrow but safe limits within which science can attain to knowledge, and not to wander in the domain of vague conjecture and vain hypothesis, all we must do is simply to take note of such phenomena as are accessible to us and confine ourselves to their consideration. Every conclusion drawn from our observation is, as a rule, premature, for behind the phenomena which we see clearly are other phenomena that we see indistinctly, and perhaps behind these latter, yet others which we do not see at all. 

What are the forces, unconscious and unknown, that are driving gender ideology? 

At a conference in Paris in 2024, psychoanalyst Roberto D’Angelo noted the “complete erasure” of the concepts of vulnerability, risk, and harm associated with gender-affirming care and the remarkable lack of curiosity about the concerns that drive young people to seek such extreme body modifications. “The psychic pain we see in our consulting rooms, and which appears in study after study, is completely exiled from awareness,” he said. 

D’Angelo opined that one possible reason for the abject acceptance of the declarations of transgender-declaring young people is the unconscious guilt and need for penance and absolution of psychiatry for its previous pathologizing of homosexuality. In their righteous rush to affirm, this (unconscious) expiation dynamic hinders their acknowledgement of the psychic pain “humming beneath” trans identification. 

However, while the acolytes, affirming practitioners, and politicians continue to wheel and deal around issues of transgendering minors (i.e., young people under the age of 18), something remarkable has been happening amongst the silent majority. Let’s take a look at three countries.

United States

For the less astute, all the signs of a move away from extreme woke attitudes have been enlarging over the past two years, culminating in Donald Trump’s executive order that there are only two sexes – male and female, in case you were wondering – and restriction of gender care services for minors. The orders also included barring transgender people from military service, and banning transgender women from women’s sports. 

This notice appeared on the US Center for Diseases Control website: 

Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website as of 11:59PM ET, February 14, 2025. Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it. 

Of course, there is now the expected pushback from trans-affirmative groups and civil liberties organizations. But a view is gaining momentum that “transitioning” children and young people who have been brainwashed to think that sex can be changed is medically and morally indefensible. 

Some have argued that a single campaign slogan in the Republican party may have won Trump the presidency – “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” One post-election piece sympathised with the Democrat’s loss of the White House and both houses of Congress, stating that this defeat would necessitate a rethink of their transgender politics. The Democrats had misread the changing tide of public support for the transgender agenda. While they campaigned for greater services and higher subsidies, more gender clinics, lowering of minimum ages for young people to be prescribed puberty blockade, cross sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries, and government subsidies for gender reassignment for adults in the armed and defence forces, the public was quietly re-appraising their vision of the brave new, fantastical world in which sex had become a commodity to be bartered. 

A Gallup poll conducted in 2023 asked Americans about their views on transgenderism. Over half (55 percent) said that it was not right to change one’s sex/gender. Even among people who stated that they knew a transgender person, 67 percent felt that it was not morally acceptable to change one’s sex. This represents a significant shift in public opinion from 2016 in which an international survey reported that 70 percent of respondents agreed that transgender people should be able to have gender-affirming surgery. 

Opinions on LGBTQIA issues in the USA were split along political lines: the majority (84 percent) of Republicans believed it was morally wrong to change one’s sex compared with 29 percent of Democrats. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey reported that 60 percent of Republicans believed that society had gone too far in accepting transgender people, compared with 17 percent of Democrats. 

However, views converged on some questions. For example, when asked about policies for competitive sports that have always had separate teams and competitions for male and female athletes, only 26 percent of the American public stated that athletes should be able to play on teams that matched their gender identity (as opposed to their birth sex); 70 percent agreed that playing on teams that matched their birth sex should be the only available option for athletes. 

The US is not unique in showing population shifts away from acceptance and support for transgender ideology and the bizarre policies and medical treatments that have been spawned from it. 

This shift in public opinion may also be reflected in downturns in the number of young people presenting to gender clinics and hospitals for gender affirming care. Note the trend in California, one of the US’s most trans friendly states.  

United Kingdom 

The British public stance on transgender rights has followed a similar trajectory as the US, showing gradually decreasing support for the pillars of gender ideology. The proposed shifts are broad-ranging. In the last election the Conservatives promised to revise the Equality Act, to revert to biologically based definitions of sex and gender, to ban trans females from single-sex spaces and women’s sport ,and to stop teaching gender ideology in schools. 

Successive government surveys since 2018 have identified downward trends in acceptance and an increasing trend in scepticism towards transgender ideology and trans rights. However, the community remains split on key issues such as allowing individuals to socially identify as a different gender, and permitting them to legally change gender, although 70 percent of respondents agreed that the process for obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate should still require approval by doctors. Most Britons (74 percent) now also oppose trans female participation in women’s sport; 60 percent also felt that transmen should not be permitted to participate in male sports. 

More than half of respondents opposed gender transition treatments being funded and available through the NHS. On the question of transitioning children, the British public was more united, with over 75 percent agreeing that puberty blockers and cross sex hormones should be prohibited. In 2024, the government ceased the prescription of these drugs to young people under the age of 18.

Australia

Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming? Sylvia Plath Australia has not travelled very far in its understanding and treatment of gender dysphoria and transsexualism since the article below appeared in a Sydney newspaper in 2004, describing the harm perpetrated by two rogue psychiatrists who medically and surgically mutilated patients because they had been, according to them, “born in the wrong body.” Their clinic did not keep adequate records and did not have any long-term follow-up of patients to ascertain how they had fared in the years after surgery.  

A similar article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2009 that described in chilling detail the malpractice of gender surgeons and the irreparable damage they wreaked on young people with untreated psychopathologies. 

We must ask ourselves, given the known harms of the misnamed gender affirming care, how have we arrived at the current state of gender affairs? 

In comparison with numerous countries overseas that have halted the prescription of puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries for minors, Australia forges on with these practices, becoming increasingly out-of-step with international developments. 

Nonetheless, there are a few chinks in the armour of woke adherence to these dangerous medical practices. 

Queensland announced this year that it had ceased the prescription of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to minors pending a review. This has been a watershed moment in the struggle against medicalization of minors in Australia, with Queensland the first state to act responsibly as opposed to talking endlessly and obfuscating shamelessly. 

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) continues its practice of conflating the terms “transgender” and “gender diverse.” This is a grave error because gender diverse does not necessarily imply gender dysphoria, nor identification with a gender other than one’s birth sex, nor a wish to live in the opposite binary, nor a desire for medicalization. It is a nebulous construct with no clear definition and should be treated as a distinct category from the transgender population. That not being the case, estimates of this conflated population are as follows (ABS, 2022): 

Some 178,900 Australians aged 16 years and over, or 0.9% of the population, identify as transgender or gender diverse: 0.3% (n= 67,100) identify as trans men, 0.3% (n=52,500) identify as trans women, and 0.3% (n=58,500) identify as non-binary. Young people aged 16-24 years have the highest proportion (1.8%) of trans or gender diverse identifying groups partitioned by age. The greatest numbers are found amongst adolescent girls. 

What does the Australian silent majority think? In February 2025, the Australian Population Research Institute published the results of national survey comprising 3,023 respondents. The survey revealed that most voters did not support the “progressive values agenda”. For example, only 25 percent of Australians agreed that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman and 74 percent did not support the inclusion of trans females in women’s sport. An earlier survey found that 73 percent of men and 53 percent of women believed that trans activists were excessively imposing their views on other Australians. 

Other recent developments in Australia include the Gender transition prohibition bill proposed by Alex Antic, Senator in South Australia, and the passing of the first Australian legislation placing a ban on intersex surgery of children in the ACT. ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr stated that he was “immensely proud to be leading the nation to a better standard of care for people with variations in sex characteristics.” He said these surgeries had to be stopped because they were irreversible and therefore had to be delayed until children were old enough to provide consent to the treatment. Amid the mutual self-congratulations for the passing of this legislation lies a great irony waving its flag in plain sight! 

The legislation states that intersex children cannot consent, and surgery must be halted until they can consent. But gender dysphoric or transgender declaring children apparently can consent to irreversible medical interventions and there is no need for delay. Queer theorists and advocates of transitioning childrenhave long advocated for re-evaluation of age-of-consent laws and the reduction of minimum ages whereby children may undergo life-changing, irreversible treatments. 

We see repeatedly, as in this instance, the shoddy or absent reasoning in those charged with framing our legislation. In the words of Peter, Paul, and Mary (1960), “When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?” 

Perhaps one day, when reasoning returns, and gender wokeness has had its day, those of us who have excluded ourselves from the Volk of gender affirmation will no longer be considered treasonous and will cease to be the recipients of vexatious and venomous complaints that cost the taxpayer many a wasted dollar. I note that Volk insiders currently face no sanctions for their conduct. 

Formerly Professor of Psychology at The University of Sydney, Australia, Dianna Kenny is now in full time private practice specializing in child and adolescent mental health, early trauma, child sexual abuse, and gender dysphoria. She is a scholar of international standing, author of 12 books and over 300 scholarly publications, and a frequent keynote and invited speaker at national and international conferences.