Now my big idea is everywhere. It shows up especially in the talking points about trans rights, and policy regarding trans athletes in sports. It is being written into laws that essentially threaten repercussions for anyone who suggests that sex might be a biological reality. Such a statement, for many activists, is tantamount to hate speech. If you take the position that many of my ’90s-era debating opponents took—that gender is at least partly based on sex, and that there really are two sexes (male and female), as biologists have known since the dawn of their science—uber-progressives will claim you are denying a trans person’s identity, which is to say, wishing ontological harm upon another human being.

If I had known, 20 years ago, that my side in the ideological wars over gender and sex was going to win so decisively, I would have been ecstatic. Back then, I spent many evenings at the pub or at dinner parties debating gender and identity with other graduate students; or, really, anyone who would listen—my mother-in-law, my relatives, or just a random person unlucky enough to be in my presence. I insisted that there was no such thing as sex. And I knew it. I just knew it. Because I was a gender historian.

This was, in the 1990s, the thing to be in history departments across North America. Gender history—and then gender studies, more generally, across the academy—was part of a broader group of identity-based sub-disciplines that were taking over the liberal arts. History departments across the continent were transformed. When the American Historical Association surveyed the trends among major fields of specialization in 2007, and then again in 2015, the single largest field was women’s and gender history. This was right up there with social history, cultural history, and the history of race and sexuality. Each of these fields shared the same worldview as I did—that just about every identity was a social construction. And, that identity was all about power.

Back then, quite a few people disagreed with me. Almost nobody who hadn’t been exposed to such theories at a university could bring themselves to believe that sex was wholly a social construct, because such beliefs went against common sense. That’s what makes it so amazing that the cultural turnaround on this issue has happened so quickly. Reasonable people might readily admit that some—and maybe a lot—of gender identity is socially constructed, but did this really mean that sex doesn’t matter at all? Was gender solely based on culture? Yes, I would insist. And then I would insist some more. There’s nothing so certain as a graduate student armed with precious little life experience and a big idea.

And now my big idea is everywhere. It shows up especially in the talking points about trans rights, and policy regarding trans athletes in sports. It is being written into laws that essentially threaten repercussions for anyone who suggests that sex might be a biological reality. Such a statement, for many activists, is tantamount to hate speech. If you take the position that many of my ’90s-era debating opponents took—that gender is at least partly based on sex, and that there really are two sexes (male and female), as biologists have known since the dawn of their science—uber-progressives will claim you are denying a trans person’s identity, which is to say, wishing ontological harm upon another human being.

I’m sure that I don’t need to instruct Quillette readers in all the ways in which this social constructionist logic has pervaded our culture. But what I can offer is a mea culpa for my own role in all of this, and a detailed critique about why I was wrong then, and why the radical social constructionists are wrong now. I once made the same arguments that they now make, and so I know how they are mistaken.

I have my full social-constructionist membership card. I finished that PhD in gender history and published my first book on the subject, The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada, way back in 2007. The title promised more than it delivers; it’s actually five case studies from the mid 20^th-century, all centered on Vancouver, in which there was a public discussion of the “masculine” aspects of society. The examples I used were based on car culture, capital murder, a mountaineering club, a terrible incident of workplace violence (the collapse of a bridge), and a royal commission into the treatment of a group of military veterans. I won’t go into detail. But I’m ashamed of some of the contents—especially in regard to the two latter examples.

The book didn’t win any awards, but it seems to have become one of those books scholars sometimes cite whenever they want to write about the history of masculinity. Look, they’ll say, someone else wrote about this: That Canadian fellow Dummitt did way back in 2007. (Google Scholar tells me it has been cited 112 times as of July, 2019. That isn’t much. But Canadian history is a small field and citations numbers are usually quite low for everyone.) These days, masculinity—especially of the “toxic” variety—is a hot subject. But at the time, there were few books written about masculinity in Canada, and so mine got more than its share of attention.

I also published an article out of my Master’s thesis, which probably had a wider reach than my scholarly work. This was a fun article called Finding a Place for Father: Selling the Barbecue in Postwar Canada, which looked at the connection between men and barbecuing in Canada in the 1940s and 1950s. (Yes, this is the sort of thing that academics do.) First published back in 1998, it has been republished several times in textbooks for undergraduate students. Plenty of young university students, first learning about Canada’s history, have been forced to read that article to learn about the history of gender—and the social construction of gender.

The problem is: I was wrong. Or, to be a bit more accurate, I got things partly right. But then, for the rest, I basically just made it up.

In my defence, I wasn’t alone. Everyone was (and is) making it up. That’s how the gender-studies field works. But it’s not much of a defence. I should have known better. If I were to retroactively psychoanalyze myself, I would say that, really, I did know better. And that’s why I was so angry and assertive about what I thought I knew. It was to hide the fact that, at a very basic level, I didn’t have proof for part of what I was saying. So I stuck to the arguments with fervor, and denounced alternative points of view. Intellectually, it wasn’t pretty. And that’s what makes it so disappointing to see that the viewpoints I used to argue for so fervently—and so baselessly—have now been accepted by so many in the wider society.

My methodology worked like this: First, I would point out that, as a historian, I knew that there was a great deal of cultural and historical variability. Gender had not always been defined in the same way at all times and in all places. It was, as I put it in The Manly Modern, “a historically changing set of concepts and relations that gives meaning to differences between men and women.” How could you say that being a man or a woman was rooted in biology if we had evidence of change over time? What’s more, I insisted that “there are no ahistorical foundations for sexual difference rooted in biological or some other solid foundation that exists prior to being understood culturally.”

And I had my favourite examples, eventually working them into pithy anecdotes I could use in lectures or conversation—about Louis XIV and what I called his manly-calf pose, which would have been seen as the height of manliness back in the 1600s, but looks rather effeminate by today’s standards. Or I would talk about blue and pink, pulling out quotations from the 1920s that showed people saying little boys should wear pink because it was fiery and earthy, and girls should wear blue because it was airy and ethereal. And these would get a laugh and make my point. What we thought of as the absolute certain truth of gender had actually changed over time. Gender wasn’t binary: It was variable and maybe infinite.

Second, I would argue that whenever you came across someone saying that something was masculine or something was feminine, it was never just about gender. It was always, simultaneously, about power. And power was, and remains, a kind of magical word in academia—especially to a graduate student first reading Michel Foucault. Recall that we were then in the midst of endless discussions about “agency” (who had it? who didn’t? when? where?). So if someone denied that gender and sex were variable, if they suggested that there really was something timeless or biological about sex and gender, they were really making excuses for power. They were apologists for oppression. Sound familiar?

In my article on why men barbecued, for instance, I claimed to know that this spatula control was really about power more generally. “Can we view men’s involvement in domestic matters [barbecuing] as one small step in a progressive evolution?” I asked. No, of course not. Instead, the way people talked about men’s barbecuing “redefined and re-articulated older divisions between public and private and masculine and feminine.” In The Manly Modern, I was more explicit: “Gender is also about power…To refer to two concepts in a way that codes one as masculine and the other as feminine is to set up a hierarchy between the two.” There was never just a description of gender. Ideas about masculinity in the past were always created “for political purposes.” The particular ideas I talked about in the book, I argued, showed how people in the past, in describing things as masculine or feminine, had “provided an explanation of men’s and women’s differences and a powerful justification for inequality.”

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