The War on Norms: Derrick Jensen Traces Anarchism, Queer Theory, and Trans
11 December 2025
With Derrick Jensen
culture-and-ideology
Derrick Jensen traces the intellectual thread running from anarchism through queer theory into contemporary trans activism, showing how a systematic rejection of social norms — including those protecting children — became embedded in academic theory and filtered into institutions. The conversation surfaces founding texts most people have never read, examines how dissent is suppressed at the publishing level, and asks what it means when ideology displaces evidence as the governing framework for child protection.
Derrick Jensen is an environmental philosopher and the author of more than twenty-five books, known for sustained, rigorous engagement with questions of power, culture, and resistance. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley and Bret Alderman, he maps the intellectual genealogy that connects anarchist philosophy to queer theory and from there to the current moment in gender politics. The territory he covers is rarely addressed in mainstream debate, partly because the primary texts are seldom read, and partly because critical engagement with them carries significant professional costs. Jensen walks through two texts he regards as foundational: Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" and Michel Foucault's public advocacy for abolishing age of consent laws. Going back to these sources bypasses the softer institutional language through which queer theory tends to present itself today. What Jensen finds in them is not a set of metaphors about identity but a coherent philosophical case for dismantling all social norms, including those whose primary function is child protection. Understanding the argument on its own terms, he suggests, is a precondition for evaluating it honestly. Jensen's own publishing history provides a case study in how institutional pressure manages dissent. Having written The Culture of Make Believe — a book that anticipated the rise of what he calls the insane right — he attempted a companion volume applying the same critical method to the insane left. His publisher held the manuscript for five years before dropping him entirely rather than publish a critique of queer theory. He also introduces the concept of DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender — originally developed to describe patterns in abusive relationships, and suggests it maps with uncomfortable precision onto how ideological movements respond to scrutiny. The conversation draws on Karen Horney's concept of womb envy and Peggy Reeves Sanday's cross-cultural research on sexual violence — two bodies of empirical work that predate and differ sharply from the theoretical moves under discussion. Their inclusion makes a methodological point: serious, evidence-grounded thinking about sex, gender, and power has a long history. The contrast between that tradition and ideological claim-making is one of the episode's recurring threads. The larger argument is about how ideas travel. The shift Jensen traces — from philosophical norm-rejection to academic theory to institutional practice — tends to escape notice because it moves through legitimate channels: journals, publishers, university curricula, professional bodies. By the time an idea reaches policy or clinical practice, its founding arguments are rarely in view. The viral "Queer Theory Jeopardy" moment that Stella and Bret ask Jensen about captures the same dynamic in miniature: the theory looks very different when stated plainly, outside the specialist vocabulary in which it is usually wrapped. This episode puts the founding arguments back in view, which is precisely what makes it matter.
