Modern progressives are revolting against nature

Artillery Row

By

Douglas Hedley

7 November, 2025

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A young woman recently recounted her surprise on receiving information from Addenbrook's Hospital about "breastfeeding/chest feeding workshops" designed for "expectant women, birthing people". Conscious that a man is no more likely to give birth to a baby than a tomcat will produce a litter of kittens, she was perplexed by the linguistic convolutions of such a prestigious medical facility. I shared my own surprise upon the discovery of a large tampon machine in the "Gentlemen's" lavatory in the University library in Cambridge. In an age when the university financial woes are much discussed, this would seem to be an egregious misallocation of funds! Nor are these anomalous instances of a refusal of nature in the fens; the proudly all female Cambridge institution, the university's oldest women only college, Newnham, admits biological men identifying as women.

The advocates of such measures are, of course, in tune with the Zeitgeist of shared pronouns and talk of "gender neutrality". They, she, etc. consistently claim that this is the sign of a confident and progressive society, throwing off the shackles of oppressive binary structures; the sanguine and steady affirmation of diversity, equity and inclusion at work. Yet perhaps it is the opposite. Maybe it is the sign of an "age of anxiety"! This term (originally used by the poet W.H. Auden for the sombre and chastened post-war mood in the twentieth century) was deployed by the eminent Oxford Hellenist E.R. Dodds in a seminal work to describe the mood of Late Antiquity. One pervasive ideology of that age was "Gnosticism". This is a much-contested term but the Gnostics were united in a deeply pessimistic view of the natural world. The various Gnostic groups developed theories of "escape" from nature, and our own era shares certain common characteristics. Dodds viewed the surrounding culture, including Gnostic currents, as symptomatic of a general fretfulness and unease. Contemporary attempts to deny "nature", such as the pretence that men might need tampons or could give birth, is not the liberating credo of an optimistic society but the symptom of depressive malaise.

Of course, one might note that talk of "birthing people" or "trans women" is the result of the proliferation of the rights debate, especially claim rights. Previously, liberal Western societies tended to stress those negative rights which protect an individual from inference to his or her body or property. Claim rights or positive rights were traditionally very limited but have recently expanded with the result that trans rights have come to clash with the rights of biological women. This has certainly been reinforced by the penchant on the left to replace issues of class with those of gender and race.

If the legal aspect of this debate has been in the forefront, there is also a philosophical dimension: the ancient question of nature versus nurture. There has been a strong aversion to any emphasis upon "nature" in the sense of inherited characteristics among progressive educationalists and social theorists. Ideas of innate or natural characteristics, such theorists have claimed, could fuel elitist or even exclusionary ideologies. This has become a dogma among the "gender" theorists. Simone de Beauvoir claimed, "one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman", and Judith Butler, the doyenne of gender theory, claims that gender is constituted by a repetition of acts. Here the rejection of the physiological essence of the feminine is clear. Being a woman is a social construction on this theory.

Yet beyond the legal question of rights and the broad philosophical debate about nature versus nurture, there is a theological dimension. The creation and blessing of humanity as a male-female duality is a profound aspect of the Western inheritance. In the book of Genesis 5.2 we read that as God made mankind: "male and female created he made them; and blessed them" and there are many parallels with other cultural traditions: Shiva Shakti in Hinduism, Yin/Yang in Chinese thought. The doctrine of Butler and other gender theorists that we create our own identities at this level not only flies in the face of simple biology but is at odds with a profound theological and cultural tradition. In the West, the blessings bestowed by the deity upon his creation, upon humanity as male and female, is grounded in the idea that the supreme reality is good, and his goodness is reflected in the created order. Yet this conviction that creation is good was challenged by the Gnostics, who believed that this cosmos is the product of an evil architect.

Such widespread and otherwise irrational and perplexing features of contemporary ideology may well be signs of resurgent Gnosticism

Late Antiquity from the 2nd to the 4th century AD was obviously a period of anxiety that the Roman Empire would not be able to fend off invaders from its borders. E.R. Dodds, somewhat controversially viewed a deep affinity between both pagans and some Christians in their pessimism about the state of society and culture, and Gnosticism is a useful, if somewhat sweeping, term for a range of pessimistic theories of that period. Many writers have attempted to draw parallels between the consternation and disquiet of Late Antiquity and our own age. The declining birth rate and the attempt to deny the most basic biological differences amount to an intransigent refusal to recognise the most fundamental aspects of human "nature" and its limits. Chesterton said once "Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural". Pretending that men need tampons or can give birth is either to feign belief in the impossible or to extol the unnatural.

Such widespread and otherwise irrational and perplexing features of contemporary ideology may well be signs of resurgent Gnosticism in the sense of Dodd's celebrated analysis of Late Antiquity. The hubristic denial of nature is the logical expression of our own "age of anxiety".

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