A league for women now struggles to define the category its own name depends on, revealing deep intellectual roots of confusion.
With the “Women’s” NBA twisting itself into knots rather than plainly defining woman, gender ideology has returned to the forefront of public discourse.
The first problem is linguistic: using “gender” when one means sex invites confusion. Jay Richards explains that gender ideology holds that the sex binary does not fully describe human identity and that a person may possess an internal “gender identity” incongruent with sex.
“The issue is never the issue,” one might say, “the issue is always the revolution.”
This framework helps explain why stating ordinary biological distinctions can provoke extraordinary hostility—such as death threats—when the dispute concerns women’s sports and other sex-separated spaces.
One answer lies in the argument’s broader context: it draws not only on biology but also on a revolutionary tradition that treats inherited institutions and categories as instruments of domination. Hence the old line: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
This intellectual history begins with Marx and Engels, who called for “the most radical rupture with traditional relations” and “traditional ideas,” while attacking private property, religion, and the bourgeois family. Paul Kengor notes that later leftist movements continued this attack on traditional marriage and family.
The path from Marx to contemporary gender theory is not linear. Antonio Gramsci broadened Marxist analysis by emphasizing culture, institutions, and “hegemony” as sources of social power—a shift that birthed cultural Marxism.
Herbert Marcuse looked beyond the industrial working class to marginalized groups as agents of change. Rudi Dutschke popularized the idea of a “long march through the institutions,” while Mike Gonzalez described a Gramscian strategy of a long-term “war of position” aimed at reshaping culture.
Critical theory pushed the analysis further. Frankfurt School thinkers like Marcuse and Max Horkheimer examined capitalism, authority, culture, and repression through a Marxist-Freudian lens. Others treated social structures—including family and sexuality—as mechanisms of domination.
Postmodern and deconstructionist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida converged with critical theory on one crucial point: suspicion toward claims of neutral, universal truth. In this climate, some theorists dismissed truth itself as inseparable from power.
As Bishop Robert Barron has written in a related discussion: “There is no final truth, no ultimate settling of a question. There is always something new.” When inherited categories are treated as products of power, even basic questions—“What is a woman?”—become open to endless renegotiation.
Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble brought these currents directly into gender theory, arguing that gender is performative and challenges the stability of the sex/gender distinction and traditional roles.
This does not mean every advocate for transgender rights is Marxist or that modern gender theory can be reduced to one source. Yet it explains why the rhetoric often sounds revolutionary rather than therapeutic.
When transgender discrimination is labeled the “civil rights issue of our time,” it places gender identity within a familiar oppressor-oppressed framework. Christopher Rufo has noted that some trans activists explicitly describe their movement as a successor to Marxism, with transgender people cast as a new revolutionary vanguard.
This connection holds water: gender ideology did not simply emerge from The Communist Manifesto. It developed amid intellectual traditions that increasingly interpret social categories through power, oppression, liberation, and the deconstruction of inherited norms.
Its political alliances reinforce this point. Gender politics frequently appears among the activist left’s current levers in its war on capitalism and Western civilization. Jonathan Butcher has observed how intersectionality links “identity movements based on gender and racial liberation” through a common theory of social domination.
From Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who describes herself as a “trained Marxist,” to the pro-Hamas red-green alliance that includes Queers for Palestine, these groups repeatedly join causes that appear unrelated but share a politics of oppression and liberation.
The issue is not always literally the issue. Increasingly, the issue is the revolution.
