This article examines the gender identity controversy through a distinction between ideological and cosmological worldviews. It explains why contemporary debate is dominated by legal and institutional critique, while deeper mythological and symbolic questions are neglected. Drawing on Jung, depth psychology, and Western philosophical traditions, it clarifies why the conflict feels immediate, moralised, and unresolved.
The public dispute over gender identity is often framed as a conflict of “views” or “values”. That is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Much of the controversy turns on a structural mismatch: many participants are arguing within an ideological worldview, while others are (sometimes unknowingly) arguing within a cosmological worldview. When these levels are conflated, debate becomes both overheated and repetitive. It overheats because the stakes feel existential. It repeats because the parties are frequently not contesting the same kind of claim.
- An ideological worldview is, in the first instance, a framework for how society ought to be organised. It is a theory of legitimacy. It selects moral priorities, defines harms, establishes authorised categories, and proposes institutional remedies.
- A cosmological worldview is, in the first instance, a framework for how reality is structured and how a human life is oriented within that structure. It is a theory of meaning. It addresses personhood, the relationship between body and psyche, the limits of what can be changed without rupture, and what counts as “given” versus “made”.
The gender identity controversy is a particularly clear case because it has been dominated by ideological argumentation, even while it relies on unexamined cosmological assumptions. The result is a public conversation that is urgently procedural and frequently legalistic, but comparatively thin in mythic or symbolic imagination. That thinness is not merely an aesthetic concern. It helps explain why the debate readily becomes total, why compromise can feel like betrayal, and why institutions behave as if they are responding to an emergency rather than holding an enduring plural disagreement about meaning.
Why ideology tends to dominate the present debate
In liberal democracies, ideology is often the first language of public conflict because institutions are where disagreement becomes consequential. Schools, employers, healthcare systems, prisons, sporting bodies, charities, and regulators must decide what they will do in practice. They need definitions, policies, risk controls, training materials, and compliance rules. That structural requirement pulls the conversation toward ideological and administrative forms, even when the underlying disagreement is metaphysical or symbolic.
In the UK, this dynamic has been intensified by legal clarification on statutory interpretation. The Supreme Court’s judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers (16 April 2025) concerns the interpretation of “man”, “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 in light of the Gender Recognition Act 2004. It is explicitly a matter of legal meaning and practical coherence, rather than a settlement of metaphysics. That clarity has immediate institutional consequences because organisations interpret it as requiring policy decisions, and the controversy becomes, almost by definition, operational and urgent.
The urgency is predictable, but it comes at a cost: law and policy are not designed to carry the full weight of existential meaning, and yet they are repeatedly asked to do so.
This produces a recognisable pattern. People speak as if they are discussing profound questions of identity and being, but the language becomes managerial. Others treat the dispute as purely about compliance, but they encounter moral intensity that suggests the argument is also about deeper commitments. These are signals that cosmological material is present but disavowed, while ideology is doing most of the visible labour.
The cosmological substrate: body, psyche, and the question of personhood
Cosmological questions in this context are not mainly about the physical universe. They are about the structure of reality as it pertains to persons. What is the body? What is the psyche? What is identity? What can legitimately be transformed? These are ontological questions, not only ethical ones.
Even a secular society has cosmology in this sense, whether it admits it or not. A secular society still holds assumptions about what counts as real, what is mutable, and what is given. The gender identity controversy presses precisely on those boundaries:
- whether sex is a foundational category anchored in the body;
- whether gender is a social role, an inner essence, a self-description, or a metaphysical truth;
- whether language can change reality or merely describe it;
- whether medicine is an instrument of alignment, liberation, or denial;
- and whether institutional recognition functions as accommodation, affirmation, or coercion.
Many arguments here are competing cosmologies of the self. One cosmology leans toward the primacy of inward identity, treating the person as most truthfully defined by self-apprehension and self-declaration. Another leans toward the primacy of embodied sex, treating the person as defined by a biological reality with social and symbolic implications that cannot be dissolved by assertion.
There are many intermediate positions, but the central point remains: these are not merely political preferences. They are claims about what kind of entity a human being is.
Where cosmology is not engaged explicitly, it often returns as moral absolutism. People become certain not only that an action is harmful, but that it is wrong at the level of reality itself. This is one reason appeals to “civility” so often fail. The conflict is not mainly about tone. It is about rival pictures of personhood, embodiment, and meaning.
What is meant by a “lack of mythological engagement”
By mythological engagement, I do not mean settling public policy by appealing to ancient stories. I mean the capacity to recognise that human beings interpret themselves through symbolic structures, and that conflicts about identity routinely involve archetypal patterns that exceed the categories of law and administration.
In many modern institutions, myth is treated as an embarrassment and symbol as merely “subjective”. Yet, institutions routinely mobilise symbolic material. Rituals of affirmation and apology, mandatory language conventions, performative declarations of belonging, and public narratives of harm and redemption all function symbolically, whether or not they are described as such. When symbolic power is used without symbolic literacy, it tends to become brittle and coercive. The symbol then behaves as ideology: it demands compliance rather than inviting interpretation.
This helps explain why the debate can feel oddly evacuated of imagination. It is saturated with identity language, but thin in symbolic nuance. There is little sanctioned space to ask what psychic need is being expressed across the camps: what longing, what fear, what wound, what aspiration. The legal and procedural frame is not designed to hold these questions, and the political frame often treats them as distractions or as bad faith. The result is a conversation that becomes more urgent, while becoming less psychologically articulate.
What Jung would likely have noticed first
Jung’s first move would not have been to produce a policy stance. He would have asked what psychic reality is trying to speak through the controversy. That is not moral neutrality, but it is diagnostic rather than programmatic. Jung’s method assumes that the psyche expresses itself through images, symbols, and recurring patterns, and that modernity does not escape this, even when it believes itself to be purely rational.
Jung repeatedly turned to what he understood as symbolic precedents of the Western psyche: Hellenistic religion and philosophy, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, alchemy, and Christian mysticism. He treated these not as quaint relics, but as archives of psychic experience and symbolic grammar. If one applies that sensibility to the gender identity controversy, several observations follow without requiring any reductionism.
First, modern disputes about identity can be read as conflicts about symbolic order: the categories by which psyche and society organise meaning. Second, when a culture cannot tolerate ambiguity, it may inflate one pole of a tension into a total explanation. Third, when a culture loses confidence in inherited symbols, it often produces substitutes that function like religion while insisting they are not religious.
Jung’s basic warning was that when living symbols collapse, the unconscious does not go quiet. It produces new images and new demands, often with numinous intensity. A society that cannot speak mythically will still act mythically, but in an unrecognised form. The cost of that unrecognised myth is often literalism: symbolic language is treated as direct reality, and disagreement is treated as sacrilege.
Precedent ideas in the depth psychology canon: why they matter here
Jung’s intellectual genealogy matters because it provides tools for distinguishing cosmological from ideological claims, and for noticing when one is smuggled into the other.
Kant is a useful starting point because he makes “cosmology” problematic in a precise way. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that reason generates totalising questions about the world, the self, and God, but that these questions produce antinomies when treated as objects of straightforward knowledge. Kantian antinomies are pairs of opposing claims that human reason can prove with equal force when it tries to grasp the world as a complete totality rather than as an object of possible experience.
Each antinomy consists of a thesis and an antithesis, both of which appear rationally defensible. Applied here, a Kantian caution would ask whether the “self” is being treated as a final, reportable essence in a way that overclaims what can be known or settled, and whether the argument is mixing empirical categories with transcendental ones.
Schopenhauer intensifies the picture by placing the ground of experience in something pre-rational: will, striving, a force beneath representation. Even without endorsing his metaphysics, Schopenhauer offers language for understanding why identity questions can feel prior to argument, and why suffering can arise when inner and outer do not cohere. The cosmological question, according to Schopenhauer, becomes not “what policy is best”, but “what kind of being am I, and what is the ground of my experience?”
Nietzsche, in turn, disrupts the inherited sense of moral certainty by revealing how moral systems can conceal power dynamics and psychological needs. In contemporary debate, this is relevant across the camps:
- the temptation to convert a contested symbolic question into a moral litmus test;
- the use of institutional authority to compel speech;
- and the habit of presenting coercive norms as mere compassion or mere rationality.
A serious Nietzschean stance does not simply sneer at morality. It remains suspicious of any position that claims innocence while demanding obedience.
In contrast, Piaget offers a developmental lens that can be used without turning culture into a simple stage-theory. His account of schema, assimilation, and accommodation suggests that people experience distress when inherited categories no longer fit, and that adaptation involves both revising categories and defending them. One can read the gender identity controversy, in part, as a conflict over category revision: what counts as “man”, “woman”, “sex”, and “gender”, and what kind of revision is cognitively and socially sustainable.
Moreover, William James provides a pragmatic and psychologically sensitive approach to belief and experience. He attends to what beliefs do, how they shape conduct, and how they respond to existential need. A Jamesian move here would ask what experiences are being reported, what remedies are being sought, what forms of recognition are being requested, and what the practical consequences are for plural coexistence.
This matters because the debate often oscillates between a sterile bureaucratic language that cannot speak to suffering and a moralised language that cannot tolerate disagreement.
Finally, Hermetic and Gnostic currents matter because they supply symbolic patterns that modernity often reenacts without naming.
- Gnostic patterns can appear as a story of a true inner self trapped in an alien or false world, seeking liberation through saving knowledge and a new name.
- Hermetic patterns can appear as the conviction that transformation is available through a kind of inner alchemy, and that outer reality is relative to, while not necessarily mirroring inner truth.
These patterns are not “causes” of contemporary identities. They are interpretive lenses for recognising recurring psychic narratives. Jung’s approach took such continuities seriously, which is why he treated late antique and esoteric traditions as psychologically instructive rather than historically ornamental.
Jung was not concerned with the efforts of his patients to describe their personal concerns, their relationships and their feelings. Instead, Jung sought to draw his patients to consider their dreams, the symbolic and the numinous through acts of reflection, active imagination and letting go of the ego to contemplate holistically the larger ‘self’ and the collective unconscious in which it operates.
The ideological critique and why it feels so immediate
If the cosmological layer asks, “what is a person?”, the ideological layer asks, “what must institutions do?” This is where the controversy is most often fought because institutions cannot suspend judgment indefinitely. They must manage risk, fairness, conflict, service delivery, and legal exposure. Ideology enters through concepts such as rights, harms, recognition, inclusion, equality, dignity, and freedom of expression. These are not minor. They are the grammar of liberal democratic governance.
However, ideology becomes distorted when it tries to settle cosmological disputes by fiat. In practical terms, this can look like treating the institution as the arbiter of metaphysical truth. When a policy demands not only outward accommodation but inward assent, it crosses from governance into creed. Conversely, when a policy treats lived experience as irrelevant and reduces everything to an administrative category, it crosses from governance into denial. Both moves weaponise the institution, just in different directions.
In the UK context, the Supreme Court judgment has created new incentives and pressures. Some organisations interpret the legal clarification as requiring rapid revision of policies that rely on contested definitions. Others emphasise that the Equality Act continues to include protections connected to gender reassignment, and that proportionate and justified decisions remain central. Many organisations fear litigation, whichever course they take. This is a classic symptom of ideological conflict: the practical question becomes “what is defensible?”, and the deeper question “what is true?” is either postponed or forced into the wrong arena.
Toward a more adequate conversation
A more adequate conversation would not attempt to replace ideology with cosmology, or cosmology with ideology. It would keep them distinct and then deliberately connect them. It would acknowledge that law and policy operate in the register of workable categories and institutional justification, while also acknowledging that people experience identity as a matter of deep meaning, sometimes with numinous intensity. It would treat myth and symbol as interpretive resources rather than as instruments of compulsion.
From a Jungian-hermeneutic angle, the immediate task is to resist moral inflation. This is the temptation to treat one’s position as wholly compassionate, wholly rational, wholly scientific, or wholly emancipatory, while projecting all aggression and bad faith onto the other camp. The controversy contains genuine suffering and genuine fear. It also contains status competition, institutional capture dynamics, and forms of rhetorical coercion. A depth approach does not deny the political, but it refuses to imagine that politics is the whole story.
The discipline required is simple, but not easy. When making a claim, ask whether it is ideological or cosmological. If it is ideological, state the practical objective, the trade-offs, and the limits of what policy can legitimately demand. If it is cosmological, state the metaphysical assumption, acknowledge plural disagreement, and resist converting it into compulsory public doctrine. The controversy may not become comfortable, but it can become more truthful. That is a precondition for any durable civic settlement.
Endnotes
[1] UK Supreme Court press summary: For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers (16 April 2025).
[4] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason: selection on the Antinomies and “pretended pure rational cosmology”.
[5] Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: William James (pragmatism, belief, religious experience).
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