Slavoj Žižek vs. transgender people

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, public intellectual, and anti-transgender activist. Žižek has contributed to anti-trans publications, including Compact and The Spectator.

Background

Slavoj Žižek was born on March 21, 1949, in Ljubljana, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). In 1975, Žižek earned a doctorate from University of Ljubljana, followed by a second doctorate from Université Paris VIII in 1985. In 1989, Žižek published The Sublime Object of Ideology, which mixed German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and cultural criticism.

In 1990, Žižek ran for the Presidency of Slovenia during the country’s first democratic elections, narrowly losing.

In 2012, Žižek co-founded the Institute for Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London.

Anti-trans activism

Žižek frames transgender people as a philosophical problem about identity, subjectivity, and social norms.

In the 2016 essay The Sexual Is Political, Žižek argued that all people experience a gap between their inner sense of self and the sexual identity assigned to them at birth. Using protests about an anti-trans bathroom ban in North Carolina, Žižek presents transgender people (which Žižek calls “transgenderism”) as an example of this universal tension:

If they so proudly insist on their “trans-,” beyond all classification, why do they display such an urgent demand for a proper place? Why, when they find themselves in front of gendered toilets, don’t they act with heroic indifference–“I am transgendered, a bit of this and that, a man dressed as a woman, etc., so I can well choose whatever door I want!”? Furthermore, do “normal” heterosexuals not face a similar problem? Do they also not often find it difficult to recognize themselves in prescribed sexual identities? One could even say that “man” (or “woman”) is not a certain identity but more like a certain mode of avoiding an identity… And we can safely predict that new anti-discriminatory demands will emerge: why not marriages among multiple persons? What justifies the limitation to the binary form of marriage? Why not even a marriage with animals? After all we already know about the finesse of animal emotions. Is to exclude marriage with an animal not a clear case of “speciesism,” an unjust privileging of the human species?

According to Žižek, both conservative attempts to enforce rigid gender roles and radical attempts to eliminate gender categories altogether (which Žižek calls “postgenderism”) misunderstand the deeper psychological conflict at the heart of sexuality:

The reason for this failure of every classification that tries to be exhaustive is not the empirical wealth of identities that defy classification but, on the contrary, the persistence of sexual difference as real, as “impossible” (defying every categorization) and simultaneously unavoidable. The multiplicity of gender positions (male, female, gay, lesbian, bigender, transgender…) circulates around an antagonism that forever eludes it. Gays are male, lesbians female; transsexuals enforce a passage from one to another; cross-dressing combines the two; bigender floats between the two… Whichever way we turn, the two lurks beneath.

[…] This brings us back to what one could call the primal scene of anxiety that defines transgenderism. I stand in front of standard bi-gender toilets with two doors, LADIES and GENTLEMEN, and I am caught up in anxiety, not recognizing myself in any of the two choices. Again, do “normal” heterosexuals not have a similar problem? Do they also not often find it difficult to recognize themselves in prescribed sexual identities? Which man has not caught himself in momentary doubt: “Do I really have the right to enter GENTLEMEN? Am I really a man?”

We can now see clearly what the anxiety of this confrontation really amounts to. Namely, it is the anxiety of (symbolic) castration. Whatever choice I make, I will lose something, and this something is NOT what the other sex has. Both sexes together do not form a whole since something is irretrievably lost in the very division of sexes. We can even say that, in making the choice, I assume the loss of what the other sex doesn’t have, i.e., I have to renounce the illusion that the Other has that X which would fill in my lack. And one can well guess that transgenderism is ultimately an attempt to avoid (the anxiety of) castration: thanks to it, a flat space is created in which the multiple choices that I can make do not bear the mark of castration.

In a 2019 article, Žižek argued that contemporary LGBT+ discourse contains a tension between the idea that gender is socially constructed and the idea that gender identity is innate and essential. Žižek also criticizes how capitalism and liberal politics engage with gender issues:

Although partisans of LGBT+ like to dismiss psychoanalysis as out of date, many of them fully participate in the ongoing repression of basic Freudian insights. If psychoanalysis taught us anything, it is that human sexuality is immanently perverted, traversed by sadomasochist spins and power games, that in it, pleasure is inextricably interlinked with pain. What we get from many LGBT+ ideologists is the opposite of this insight, the naive view that, if sexuality is not distorted by patriarchal or binary pressure, it becomes a happy space of authentic expression of our true selves.

[…] Many observers noticed a tension in LGBT+ ideology between social constructivism and (some kind of biological) determinism: if an individual biologically identified/perceived as man experiences himself in his psychic economy a man, it is considered a social construct, but if an individual biologically identified/perceived as man experiences herself as woman, this is read as an urge, not a simple arbitrary construct but a deeper non-negotiable identity which, if the individual demands it, the demand has to be met by sex-changing surgery.

In 2023, Žižek signed The Westminster Declaration, and open letter signed by many key anti-transgender extremists who claim to be a group of “free speech champions” who oppose the “censorship industrial complex.”

Žižek has expressed skepticism about trans healthcare for minors and supports remaining sex-segregated traditions like housing in prison.

References

Zelle, Melanie (March 2, 2023). Žižek Has Lost the Plot. The Swarthmore Phoenix https://swarthmorephoenix.com/2023/03/02/zizek-has-lost-the-plot/

Erlij, Evelyn July 31, 2019). McKenzie Wark: reinventing the future. Palabra Publica https://palabrapublica.uchile.cl/2019/07/31/mckenzie-wark-reinventing-the-future/ [archive]

Cavanagh, Sheila L. (June 26, 2019). Transgender Psychoanalysis: Lacan, sex, and sinthomes. Public Seminar https://publicseminar.org/essays/transgender-psychoanalysis/

Lain, Douglas (January 25, 2017). The Fate of Slavoj Žižek. Thought Catalog https://thoughtcatalog.com/doug-lain/2017/01/the-fate-of-slavoj-zizek/

Gossett, Che (September 13, 2016). Žižek’s Trans/gender Trouble. LA Review of Books https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/zizeks-transgender-trouble/

Miell, Sam Warren (August 15, 2016). Interrogating the père’s version: a response to Slavoj Žižek. Different coloured hats https://differentcolouredhats.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/interrogating-the-peres-version-a-response-to-slavoj-zizek/

Miell, Sam Warren (August 3, 2016). Slavoj Žižek is wrong about stuff. in Coffman, Chris [editor] (2022). Queer Traversals. Bloomsbury. p. 98. ISBN 9781350200005.

Selected writing by Žižek

Žižek, Slavoj (January 17, 2026). Neither (Biological) Sex nor (Cultural) Gender but Sexuation. Goads and Prods https://slavoj.substack.com/p/neither-biological-sex-nor-cultural

Žižek, Slavoj (February 22, 2023). Wokeness Is Here To Stay. Compact https://compactmag.com/article/wokeness-is-here-to-stay

Žižek, Slavoj (May 31, 2019). Transgender dogma is naive and incompatible with Freud. The Spectator https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/transgender-dogma-naive-freud/ [archive]

Žižek, Slavoj (August 14, 2016). A Reply to My Critics, Part Two. The Philosophical Salon https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/reply-to-my-critics-part-two/

Žižek, Slavoj (August 2016). The Sexual Is Political. The Philosophical Salon https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-sexual-is-political/

Media

I Would Prefer Not To with Slavoj Žižek (August 24, 2025). Slavoj Zizek — Why I’m Against Both Sides in the Transgender Debate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sLJkQq38fs

I Would Prefer Not To with Slavoj Žižek (February 28, 2024). Slavoj Zizek — Transgenderism, Wokism & Cancel Culture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqf2nfhd32w