The increasingly acrimonious dispute over trans rights is now centre stage in the culture wars that rage on across the campuses of the United Kingdom. Universities that actively oppose transphobia are routinely accused of stifling freedom of speech, and the 2025 Supreme Court ruling on women-only spaces has raised dilemmas of inclusion that remain unresolved.Footnote 1 Yet in the enormous discourse generated by the flashpoints, commentators have rarely explored the connections between the trans issue and the other big battles of the academic culture wars: calls for reparations for slavery, and efforts to decolonise the curriculum. In what follows, I argue that universities will struggle to rise to these challenges until the connections between them are addressed; and it is disciplinarity, I suggest, that provides the site for this reckoning. Critical approaches to the epistemology of academic structures have appeared recently in decolonial studies, Black studies, and trans studies, with scholars often noting the Eurocentrism of the academy and the colonial origins of the disciplinary branches. The thinker I most frequently return to here is Sylvia Wynter. With her striking account of how the coloniality of knowledge sustains the schisms of race, gender, and class, Wynter offers a powerful lens through which to assess our conjuncture. If my Wynterian analysis of the trans crisis is correct, then what’s required is a new modality of study—a remaking of the disciplines that transforms the academe and the episteme.
Why should disciplinarity be important for the gender wars? As scholars have observed, the trans dispute is not just ontological (concerning the category woman, for example) but also epistemological.Footnote 2 Anti-trans activists insist upon the universal and commonsense truth of binary immutable sex, urging politicians, judges, vice chancellors, and the general public to reject the “fantasies” of trans experience and “choose reality.”Footnote 3 Aligning themselves with the familiar traditions of the European scientific method, anti-trans activists are often willing to espouse a positivist vision of sex as a purely biological domain.Footnote 4 Sex, they contend, is an unchanging fact, a natural fact, available to neutral and objective observation. They believe sex comprises a natural order that society contravenes at its peril. To adopt such positions, one must assiduously ignore the pivotal scholarship in feminist philosophy and science studies that has exposed the omissions, exclusions, and presuppositions necessary for the creation of a God’s eye view.Footnote 5 And the dismissal of this important work has been facilitated by the disciplinary separation of fields of study.
Disciplines produce forms of segregation—“academic apartheid,” as Chela Sandoval puts it—that maintain established structures of knowledge and power by preventing the cross-pollination of ideas and methodologies.Footnote 6 While many working in the natural sciences have, of course, appreciated the achievements of the humanities and social sciences, the disciplinary division has authorised the view that questions of privilege and oppression are none of science’s business. This myth of scientific neutrality has enabled a containment of the epistemic revolutions that feminist interventions have often threatened to ignite within the fundamentals of the sciences and the everyday ways of knowing they inform.Footnote 7 Little wonder that trans scholars have long sought to problematise the disciplines. According to Cameron Awkward-Rich, for instance, “trans names a project of undoing (gender, disciplines, selves).”Footnote 8
Due to the academy’s noted contributions to white supremacy, there are strong resonances between the trans distrust of the disciplines and the critiques found in Black studies, decolonial studies, and postcolonial studies.Footnote 9 “Discipline is empire,” Katherine McKittrick explains.Footnote 10 The categorisation of knowledge follows the methodology of violent taxonomies, emulating “positivist classificatory thinking (thinking that is produced in the shadows of biological determinism and colonialism).”Footnote 11 Many scholars agree. “All modern disciplines are racialized,” according to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a sentiment echoed by S. A. Smythe, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Walter Mignolo.Footnote 12 For Lewis Gordon, the hardening of disciplinary boundaries results in the insularity that universalises European knowledge.Footnote 13 But what is it, precisely, that connects the gendered and racialised dimensions of disciplinarity? And what can be done? Can the academy meet Achille Mbembe’s call for “the radical refounding of our ways of thinking and a transcendence of our disciplinary divisions”?Footnote 14
1. Interrupting the episteme of Man
Sylvia Wynter offers some answers. The disciplines are already doomed, she declares: they have been marked for destruction ever since Frantz Fanon’s work on the sociocultural formation of the psyche.Footnote 15 Fanon’s point is that the sociogeny of the psyche was neglected by Freud, leaving psychoanalysis bereft of the tools required to understand the effects of racism and colonialism.Footnote 16 With a stunning leap of philosophical imagination, Wynter expands on Fanon to theorise sociogenesis as the concept that has to be repressed in general—excluded from study, forgotten, rendered impossible—in order for coloniality to be sustained.Footnote 17 The academic disciplines participate in this repression, she claims, by upholding a biocentric picture of human formation that occludes sociogenic factors. To accept Wynter’s argument is to find the culture wars reframed and the academy implicated. If Wynter is correct, and if, as scholars have recently suggested, biocentrism is also the wellspring of the notion of biological sex defended by the anti-trans movement, then two consequences appear.Footnote 18 Firstly, it becomes difficult to deny the coloniality of the anti-trans movement. Secondly, there is the potential for universities to take anti-colonial action by transforming their disciplinary structures. To examine the viability of these conclusions, let us consider Wynter’s claims in more detail.
Wynter’s determination to challenge biocentrism by bringing sociogenic processes to light is motivated by her understanding of the colonial order of knowledge: the episteme. Truth and knowledge have been colonised on a global scale, she argues, by what Foucault calls “Man,” the image of human subjectivity that arose during the Renaissance, and which remains an emblem of the dominance of the Global North.Footnote 19 For Wynter, however, Man is also a “genre,” a way of being human that the self-representation begets. To be more specific, Man is formed through valorisations of masculinity, whiteness, rationality, and affluence. It is the putative neutrality of these norms that enables Man to mistake itself for the human in toto, a synecdochal “overrepresentation” in which a fragment stands for the whole.Footnote 20 Wynter explains the sociogenesis of Man—the simultaneous creation of the image and the genre—in terms that lay out the epistemology that concerns us here. Drawing on the work of leading scientists, she argues that Man, like all human genres, is produced through neurological responses to narrative language practices, especially collective storytelling.Footnote 21 Origin stories, cosmogonies, and ontological descriptions of human nature contain dualistic codes that symbolically valuate the world, thereby stimulating the opioid receptors in human brains that motivate adaptive behaviours. Aspects of the narratives that are positively codified (whiteness, for example) trigger a pleasure response, while negatively codified aspects (Blackness) induce discomfort. Through these valuations, genres form in counterpoint to each other, as outsiders are stigmatised (as infidels, savages, etc.), while the in-group perceives itself as good (the chosen people, the civilised, etc.). Crucially, neurochemical rewards are only delivered to those who believe these narratives to be true, not humanly invented, incentivising the repression of the awareness that creativity and imagination underpin the process.
Unwittingly, then, all human genres occupy epistemic ecologies of their own making, epistemes in which local stories are mistaken for universal truths. This is clearly a recipe for colonialism, and it is Wynter’s primary explanation for oppression; it is also the target of her “epistemic disobedience,” to borrow Mignolo’s expression.Footnote 22 Wynter aims to interrupt the stable reproduction of the episteme of Man by undermining its biocentrism, its commitment to narratives that assert the “natural” origins of the species and minimise the sociocultural. In addition to refuting biocentrism and demanding liberation from the violent scripts of colonial modernity, Wynter proposes a “New Studia,” a research programme devoted to the sociogenic and autopoietic systems of genre formation.Footnote 23 If there are opportunities for the arrival of the New Studia, then there are also countless obstacles, returning us to the two hypotheses mentioned above: following Wynter, the coloniality of the anti-trans movement is undeniable, and the academic disciplines have anti-colonial potential. Regarding the first, it is evident that all biocentric narratives bolster the episteme of Man, inadvertently or otherwise. Can the anti-trans lobby be described as anything other than biocentric? Sex is more important than gender, for trans-exclusionary feminists: sex is natural and enduring, while gender is social, cultural, and contingent. Sex is a scientifically verifiable reality; gender is subjective, perhaps illusory. With this defence of traditional science, common sense, and the nature/culture binary, the anti-trans movement nominates itself as perhaps the most dynamic and implacable biocentric force in contemporary discourse.
The anti-colonial potential of the academy, on the other hand, is less immediately apparent. As “the privileged site for producing and legitimating cognitive injustice,” the university might seem as much of an obstacle to anti-colonial praxis as the anti-trans movement.Footnote 24 For Wynter, however, the academy can contribute to transforming the episteme through the restructuring of the disciplines. She alights upon a key disciplinary partition, the separation of the natural sciences from the humanities and social sciences. The division of knowledge into these two silos—“the Two Cultures,” as CP Snow famously called them—is fundamental to the colonial truth regime. Needless to say, Wynter is not denying the importance of the natural sciences, but, quoting Aimé Césaire, she describes them as “half-starved.”Footnote 25 Against biocentrism, Wynter defines the human as a hybrid of the biological and the discursive, arguing that the discovery of this “bios/mythos” hybridity is hindered by the disciplinary partition.Footnote 26 The sciences will not apprehend hybridity until they are able to study biological sociogenic phenomena using the tools developed elsewhere to study the effects of signs and narratives; the tools, in other words, of literary studies.Footnote 27 By tearing down the silos and instituting the New Studia, universities could cease reproducing the colonial episteme and start interrogating it.
2. Toward a pluriversal New Studia
The academic transformation that I’m broaching is undoubtedly radical. But the fault lines of the culture wars only deepen within the neoliberal paradigm. Recall the bewilderment with which universities received the repeal of trans rights by the Supreme Court in April 2025. Ruling that the term “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers only to “biological sex,” which it considers immutable, the Supreme Court makes it legal to exclude trans women from women-only facilities.Footnote 28 This was followed by guidelines from the Equality and Human Rights Commission stating that public service providers now have a legal obligation to prevent trans women from using those facilities.Footnote 29 Such requirements present huge operational challenges to universities, as well as undercutting the trans-friendly message of their equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) policies. Additionally, however, the academy faces the embarrassment of the scientific doctrine that informs the ruling. Let me be clear that I’m not blaming biology professors personally for the concept of “biological sex” now enshrined in UK law—many of them have, in fact, publicly denounced it.Footnote 30 However, as Sara Ahmed pointed out following the ruling, biology is a discipline with a strongly gendered history.Footnote 31 So although universities cannot be expected to govern general knowledge, the academy bears some responsibility for the ubiquity of this confused and outdated notion of sex. As Wynter indicates, the discipline of biology has furnished the episteme with an incomplete picture of the human, and the best efforts of scientists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling are yet to turn the tide.Footnote 32
The topics of race, coloniality, and disability have been glaringly absent from the discourse on trans rights in the United Kingdom. A Wynterian reading brings their connections into sharp relief, revealing that biological determinism is an ever-present danger within a biocentric order of knowledge.Footnote 33 To the extent that they uphold this biocentrism via the disciplinary partition, universities are structurally racist, ableist, and sexist—the liberal platitudes of their EDI statements notwithstanding. This might explain why the biological concept of race lives on in the public imagination. After twenty years of scientific consensus, and despite the work of legions of educators and researchers, the idea that race is a social construct is yet to be widely accepted.Footnote 34 Meanwhile, ideological projects to revive eugenics and scientific racism appear to be gaining ground, imperilling the lives of disabled people, migrants, and all racialised people.Footnote 35 If our biocentric episteme is indeed fertile ground for violent attempts to entrench white supremacy and cisnormativity, then the urgency of the academic intervention that I’m proposing is obvious.
However, it is important to stress that the purpose of the New Studia is not to bring about the triumph of the pro-trans lobby. The aim cannot be to create a reformed discipline of biology that generates trans-affirming science; that would just be more positivism. Nor can the aim be to comprehensively disprove binary sex and replace it with a trans-affirming alternative; that would just be more universalism, the continued colonisation of sex. Rather than crowning a winner of the culture wars, the Wynterian epistemic shift would expose the coloniality of all such oppositional formations, replacing the university with what decolonial scholars call the “pluriversity.”Footnote 36 It would be naïve to assume that any of our current political projects would be vindicated by programmes of study operating within the “trans-disciplinary, trans-epistemic, trans natural-scientific cum trans-cosmogonic modality” of a pluriversity.Footnote 37
Scepticism regarding the plausibility of an academic revolution is to be expected, and critics such as David Marriott have challenged the Wynterian framework that I’ve used here.Footnote 38 I will not pretend that it is easy to imagine any university in the United Kingdom transforming into a pluriversity, dissolving the Two Cultures, and devoting itself to the New Studia. But the higher education sector is in crisis, its funding model utterly discredited, and the humanities are yet again under attack. What future does the university have in a neoliberal world? Perhaps, rather than allowing itself to be gradually eroded, demoralised, privatised, and then quietly dismantled, the academy should fight back. Decolonial epistemology does not provide a roadmap for this, of course, but it does supply a meticulous analysis of the academy’s role in the colonial order. To address this complicity and pursue anti-colonial praxis, the university must transition. Anti-trans commentators will declare this impossible, as they always do. Impossibility, however, is an epistemic operator: when the episteme shifts, possibility does too.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: C.G.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no competing interests.
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