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Foucault and gender: discourse produces the subject

Michel Foucault demonstrated how medical and legal discourses produce the categories they claim to describe. Applied to today: 'transgender' is not a discovery but a 20th-century clinical construct that has been massively disseminated via social media since 2010 and is imposed on children as an ideological belief.

Sexuality as discourse

In *Histoire de la sexualité * (1976), Foucault argued that 'sexuality' is not a natural given, but a 19th-century discourse produced by physicians, lawyers, and educators to discipline the population. Categories such as 'homosexual' or 'transsexual' are not discovered, but produced. The analysis fits—unintentionally for queer theory—perfectly the concept of gender identity: a 20th-century clinical invention of John Money and Robert Stoller that proclaimed itself a universal truth.

Central to this is the notion of subjectivation: persons are made into subjects by the categories in which discourse places them. Those who identify as 'transgender' or 'non-binary' today do so in terms that emerged within fifty years, propagated by clinics and, since 2010, accelerated by social media — see diffusion 2010 and Littman ROGD . This undermines any claim that such categories are innate or universal.

Biopolitics and the medical machine

Foucault's notion of biopolitics—power aimed at the management of bodies and populations—explains why the medical profession is so central to the history of transgender care. Clinics such as Johns Hopkins and later Tavistock were not only practitioners but producers of the category system they treated. The Cass Review (2024) documents how Tavistock produced, treated, and normalized categories as evidence-based for decades—without external scrutiny, and without the evidence base ever holding up.

Foucault against Butler — and against contemporary activism

It is striking that Foucault's method—historical deconstruction of categories—also turns against Butler and contemporary gender activism. If 'homosexual' is a 19th-century construct, then 'transgender' is a 20th-century construct. Self-identification as trans is then just as culturally determined as the categories Foucault analyzed. Kathleen Stock (2021) makes this argument sharp: a consistent Foucauldian reading cannot defend 'innate gender identity'—which is precisely the kind of universal truth claim Foucault deconstructed. Activism borrows Foucault's tools and ignores his conclusions.

The circle of diagnosis and care

A consistent Foucauldian reading implies that a physician must be aware of his role in the production of the category he diagnoses. Gender-affirmative care achieves the opposite: through the diagnosis, the practitioner produces the patient whom he subsequently medicalizes. The child enters with social dysphoria and leaves with irreversible interventions. Levine (2022) calls this 'ideologization of medicine'. Resting on this cycle are puberty blockers in children, mastectomies in healthy girls, an emerging detransition cohort , and the wiping out of the category of woman. Criticism is dismissed as hate; clinicians who deviate are silenced — Tavistock fired whistleblowers, Cass participants were personally attacked.

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