Gender-­Critical Feminism

Gender-­Critical
Feminism
HO L LY L AW F O R D -­SM I T H
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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 For Elisa and Coda.
May you grow up in a world that has real feminism in it;
and grow old in a world that no longer needs it.
 Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgements xiii
1. Introduction 1
1.1 Women’s Issues, from Centre to Margin 1
1.2 What Feminists Can Agree About 6
1.3 Leftist Mansplaining of Feminism 9
1.4 The Great Gulf of Feminism 11
1.5 Gender-­Critical Feminism 13

PA RT I .  W HAT I S G E N D E R- ­C R I T IC A L F E M I N I SM ?

2. Gender-­Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots 21

2.1 Pre-­radical: Female Socialization 26
2.2 The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave 28
3. Gender-­Critical Feminism 47
3.1 Sex Matters 47
3.2 Gender Norms 50
3.3 What Radical Feminist Ideas Does Gender-­Critical
Feminism Leave Behind? 56
3.4 The Constituency of Gender-­Critical Feminism, and
Its Relation to Men 60
3.5 Procedural Commitments 63
3.6 Paradigm Issues 65
4. The Sex Industry 67
4.1 Self-­Ownership as a Red Herring 71
4.2 What We Cannot Buy 73
4.3 Who and What Are Men Buying? 79
4.4 Policy Models 84
5. Trans/Gender 92
5.1 Gender Non-­conforming Women and Girls 95
5.2 Identifying into Women-­Only Spaces 103
5.3 Policy Implications 112
5.4 Is Gender-­Critical Feminism ‘Trans-­Exclusionary’? 115
viii Contents

6. Why Is Gender-­Critical Feminism So Vilified? 117

6.1 Antagonism towards Radical and Gender-­Critical Feminists 117
6.2 ‘Exclusionary’ Feminism 125
6.3 Fundamental Moral Disagreement 129
6.4 Political Propaganda 132
6.5 Public Perception 139

PA RT I I .   HA R D Q U E S T IO N S F O R
G E N D E R-­C R I T IC A L F E M I N I SM

7. Is Gender-­Critical Feminism Intersectional? 143

7.1 The Roots of Oppression 145
7.2 Political Movement for Whole Persons 149
7.3 Alternative Solutions: Limited Intersectionality 152
7.4 Women as Women 156
7.5 Intersectionality as Novel Forms of Oppression 160
8. Is Gender-­Critical Feminism Feasible? 165
8.1 What Does It Take for Something to be Feasible/Infeasible? 167
8.2 Self-­Fulfilling Prophesies 170
8.3 Implicit Moral Constraints 173
8.4 What Does It Take for a Political Proposal to be Feasible? 175
8.5 Compatible Pathways 180
9. Is Gender-­Critical Feminism Liberal? 183
9.1 Liberalism 184
9.2 Liberal Feminism 187
9.3 Liberal Feminism and Autonomy 190
9.4 Gender-­Critical Feminism 193
9.5 Feminism with Teeth 197

C O DA

10. A Gender-­Critical Manifesto 201

10.1  Feminism as a Movement for Women as Women 201
10.2  The List 202

Afterword 207
Notes 209
References 265
Index 289
 Preface

There have been countless moments throughout history when momentous

social shifts occurred. We’ve shifted from thinking the earth was at the
­centre of the universe to realizing it’s just one more planet to orbit the sun.
We’ve shifted from feudal societies where accidents of birth determine who
lives in luxury and who works to pay for that luxury, to societies governed
by the principle of equal opportunity. We’ve stopped believing in ‘humours’,
four fluids that make up the body in different proportions and determine
people’s mental and physical capacities. Many of us have shifted from belief
in a god or gods creating life, to having an evolutionary understanding of
the origins of life. We’ve stopped thinking it’s acceptable to own people, or to
keep people in conditions of slavery or servitude.
We could zoom in on any one of these moments in history and find our
protagonists, people courageously challenging the prevailing orthodoxy, or
working underground to help those harmed the most by that orthodoxy.
Our narrative for these historical moments is often binary: the resisters, the
rebels, the misfits, and the visionaries, versus everyone else. The people in
the mainstream who go along with the status quo, and the people who see
the problem and start to do something about it. The orthodox, and the
heterodox.
There was a binary narrative like this for feminism, once: feminists were
the rebels, the women who first started to ask questions about whether
woman was really destined to be merely the wife and helpmate of man.
Feminism was simple then. It was a single heterodoxy fighting for women’s
rights and opportunities. It challenged the perception that what woman
appeared to be, itself a product of rigid social conditioning, was all she was
capable of being. The orthodoxy it worked against, in place in many con-
servative countries and in many segments of progressive countries even
today, was a set of ideas according to which men were meant to be mascu-
line, women were meant to be feminine, and women were for the servicing
of men and men’s needs. Men and women were considered to be very differ-
ent, and women were considered to be inferior. Feminism was the sex/gen-
der heterodoxy then. This isn’t ancient history, it was true as recently as the
1970s, but it’s history nonetheless.
x Preface

The moment we’re in right now, when it comes to sex and gender, does
not fit this binary structure. Now the heterodoxy is plural, and its factions
are in fierce disagreement with each other. Here are two—very different—
heterodox accounts of sex and gender:
Gender as identity. There is no sex/gender distinction, there is only gen-
der.1 Sex, the idea that humans can be sorted into two biological types, male
and female, is an outdated concept. Sex is a spectrum; or there are many dif-
ferent sexes; or there is really no such thing as sex, just a set of bad ideas
imposed onto arbitrary features of bodies.2 Whatever sex is or was, it doesn’t
matter anymore. What matters is gender, in particular, gender understood as
identity. Every human person has a gender identity, at minimum ‘man’,
‘woman’, or ‘nonbinary’. This new way of sorting people into categories super-
sedes sex, but takes over the role that sex used to play, for example as the
basis of romantic and sexual attractions between people, or as the trait deter-
mining which social spaces can be appropriately used. According to this
view, transwomen are women, transmen are men, and nonbinary ­people are
neither women nor men. A transwoman belongs on a women’s sports team,
or in a women’s prison, or in a women’s domestic violence refuge. Same-­sex
attractions are ‘transphobic’.3 Women-­centred language is ‘exclusionary’ if it
refers to biological traits.4 Wearing pussy hats and t-­shirts with uteruses
printed on them to the women’s march is bad; it suggests a connection
between women and vulvas, women and uteruses.5 But some men have
­vulvas and uteruses (transmen), and some women don’t (transwomen).
Gender as social norms and expectations. There is a sex/gender distinc-
tion, and sex is indispensable to it. There are two sexes, male and female, and
intersex conditions do not undermine this. Gender is a set of social norms
and expectations imposed on the basis of sex. There is no understanding
gender without sex. Women are subject to the expectation that they be fem­
in­ine, men that they be masculine. Men are valued more highly than women.
Understanding gender as norms imposed on the basis of sex allows us to
make predictions, for example about who will be subject to social sanctions
(masculine and other gender norm non-­conforming women, feminine and
other gender norm non-­conforming men). And it allows us to think about
the social construction of femininity, the ways that women have been ‘made’
to be feminine, both throughout history, and within an individual woman’s
lifetime. This understanding allows us to critique a range of social practices,
for example the standards of beauty by which women are assessed. These
may require women to spend more time and money, and accept more pain
and discomfort, than men (for example, to purchase skincare regimens,
 Preface  xi

makeup, hair products, clothing and shoes; to take the extra time needed to
apply makeup and style hair; to have body hair plucked, waxed, or lasered;
to undergo cosmetic surgeries like breast implants, nose jobs, or labiaplast-
ies).6 It is the social construction of woman­hood that causes some women
to dis-­identify with womanhood and in some cases attempt to disaffiliate
from womanhood (‘I am not like that, so I must not be a woman’). And
conversely, it is the social construction of womanhood that attracts some
people who are not female to identify with womanhood and in some cases
affiliate with womanhood (‘I am like that, so I must be a woman’).
It is not uncommon that competing heterodoxies lose sight of the com-
mon enemy they have in the orthodoxy, and focus their opposition upon
each other. For example in the documentary Rebel Dykes (2019), women
involved in lesbian feminism in London in the 1980s describe a social land-
scape in which homophobia was rife, and there was a lack of legal rights and
protections for gay and lesbian people. The second wave feminist move-
ment, starting in the late 1960s and taking off in the early 1970s, had created
a flourishing underground scene of lesbians, many of whom were sep­ar­at­
ists (refusing the company of men entirely). But the radical feminists and
the lesbian separatists were critical of lesbian romance and lesbian sex that
imitated heterosexuality, and they were vehemently opposed to male vio-
lence against women, which they saw lesbian sadomasochism as imitating.
This created a conflict at the time, with the lesbians who wanted to explore
and enjoy all forms of sexuality, including those which could be argued to
be imitating heterosexuality or male violence. The ‘rebel dykes’ were
leather-­wearing, motorbike-­riding, ‘sex positive’ lesbians, many involved in
underground clubs where there were live lesbian sex shows, including per-
formances of sadomasochistic sex. It is clear from the documentary that the
opposition between the ‘rebel dykes’ and the other lesbian feminists was
fierce, with some of the women interviewed in the film describing a raid by
the radical feminists and lesbian separatists on one of their sex clubs, where
the furniture was smashed with crow bars and women were threatened.
A similar opposition has emerged within the sex/gender heterodoxy
today. In the place of crow bars there is excessive social sanctioning. From
both sides there is social media dogpiling, and unpleasant, ad hominem
attacks. From the gender-­as-­identity crowd against the gender-­as-­norms
crowd there are open letters, campus protests, campaigns to get women fired
(some of which have been successful), malicious accusations made in the
media and on social media, campaigns to get women banned from online
platforms (often successful), deplatformings, taking women to court,
xii Preface

forcing women out of political parties, the occasional physical assault, and
more. The gender-­as-­norms crowd are diverted into expending enormous
energy in defending themselves, and their views, rather than simply getting
on with the work of feminism as they understand it.
Disagreement with gender as identity is taken to mean agreement with
conservative or traditionalist views about gender. This is a failure to see
‘beyond the binary’ of disagreement about sex and gender. In this case there
is not just the rebels and everyone else. There are two very different groups
of rebels, who have very different ideas about what is wrong with the status
quo, and what the best methods are for changing it. This is a book about one
group of rebels under siege today, those resisting the political erasure of sex,
and fighting to maintain the understanding of gender as norms, because of
its immense utility in describing, understanding, and challenging sexist
socialization. These rebels call themselves gender-­critical feminists, refer-
ring to the idea that gender is something we should be critical of. I am one
of them.
I wrote this book because I think gender-­critical feminism presents the
greatest challenge to conservative or traditionalist views about gender and
has the best chance of overturning it. I think it is more ambitious, and sig-
nificantly more appealing and coherent, than the alternative heterodox view
of sex/gender. I worry about the future of feminism, because I do not see
how we can fight for women’s liberation when we have ceded any under-
standing of the trait on which women’s oppression is based (namely sex)
and the system which helps to perpetuate it (gender norms). Contemporary
feminism is kind, inclusive, and affirming of women’s choices, whatever they
happen to be. Those traits have value, but they will not overturn thousands
of years of oppression on the basis of sex, or earn women their lib­er­ation.
I hope to persuade you that gender-­critical feminism is the theory and
movement that we need.
 Acknowledgements

The period in which I wrote this book was not an easy one, which is why
I am even more grateful to the people who have helped me with it. From
comments on my original proposal through conversations about issues aris-
ing in specific chapters through reading groups on background material to
feedback on the final chapter drafts, many people have been generous with
their time and expertise. There are some people that I cannot name—such is
the political landscape this book will become a part of, that doing so would
create a risk to them. But they know who they are; I am grateful to them for
their time and support and many interesting conversations.
To those I can name. Kathleen Stock, Sophie Allen, Nin Kirkham, Caroline
Norma, Stephanie Collins, Alex Byrne, Frank Hindriks, David Schweikard,
Katie Steele, Christian Barry, Dana Goswick, Luara Ferracioli, Kate Phelan,
Jess Megarry, Cordelia Fine, Wolfgang Schwarz, John Matthewson, Howard
Sankey, Rosa Freedman, Karen Riley, Rachael Hadoux, Tegan Larin, Bernard
Lane, J. Michael Bailey, Komarine Romdenh-­Romluc, Meghan Murphy, Ani
O’Brien, Axel Gosseries, Anca Gheaus, Siba Harb, Marie Bastin, Eric Boot,
John Thrasher, Dan Halliday, Callie Burt, Adi James, Colin Klein, Zakiya
Deliefde, Lilian Gonzalez, Evie, Ole Koksvik, Sun Liu, Rene Rejon, Will
Tuckwell, and Ryan Cox. Thank you so much.
Kate Phelan, especially, has been immeasurably helpful, and I am hugely
grateful to her for the probably hundreds of conversations we have had
about the topics in this book over the last few years.
I owe a particular thanks to Luara Ferracioli, Stephanie Collins, Ryan
Cox, Alex Byrne, Rene Rejon, and Kate Phelan, as well as to my editor Peter
Momtchiloff and three anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press,
who all read the whole book and made a ton of helpful suggestions for
improvement. I’m also grateful to multiple reviewers, both of the initial pro-
posal for this book and for comments on the full manuscript, many of
which helped me to sharpen my ideas and my arguments. Thank you.
Thanks also to audiences at the Australian National University, University
of Melbourne, Australian Catholic University, Université catholique de
Louvain, York University, University of Manchester, University of Western
Australia, Murdoch University, Victoria University of Wellington, University
xiv Acknowledgements

of Sydney, University of Auckland, Universität Flensburg, and University of

Reading.
There are also some people I’d like to thank for something broader than
the book. First, the philosophers who spoke up early, often at personal cost,
about some of the issues I discuss here: Rebecca Reilly-­Cooper, Jane Clare
Jones, Kathleen Stock, Sophie Allen, Mary Leng, Elizabeth Finneron-­Burns,
Molly Gardner, Teresa Marques, Emily Vicendese, Alex Byrne, Tomas
Bogardus, John Schwenkler, Daniel Kaufman, and Spencer Case. Second,
the philosophers who spoke out in support of my and other gender-­critical
feminist philosophers’ academic freedom to pursue these issues: Brian
Leiter, José Bermudez, Clare Chambers, Cordelia Fine, Edward Hall, Benj
Hellie, Thomas Kelly, Jeff McMahan, Francesca Minerva, John Schwenkler,
Peter Singer, Nicole Vincent, and Jessica Wilson.

Epigraphs Permissions

Excerpts from THE DIALECTIC OF SEX by Shulamith Firestone. Copyright

© 1970 by Shulamith Firestone. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and
Giroux. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpts from The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone are reproduced
with the permission of Verso, through PLSClear. Copyright © 1970 by
Shulamith Firestone.
Excerpts from Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the
Split Self by Kajsa Ekis Ekman ([2010] 2013) are reproduced with kind per-
mission by the publisher, Spinifex Press.
An excerpt from Rebecca Reilly-­Cooper’s essay ‘Gender Is Not a Spectrum’,
26th June 2016, is reproduced with permission of Aeon. https://aeon.co/
essays/the-­idea-­that-­gender-­is-­a-­spectrum-­is-­a-­new-­gender-­prison
An excerpt from The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970) is repro-
duced with the permission of Harper Collins.
  
In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the
revival of a serious political movement for social equality. It is
the second wave of the most important revolution in history. Its
aim: overthrow of the oldest, most rigid class/caste system in
existence, the class system based on sex—a system consolidated
over thousands of years, lending the archetypal male and female
roles an undeserved legitimacy and seeming permanence.
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex.7
 1
Introduction

Something strange has happened to feminism in the last forty years. What
was once a thriving social justice movement, led by women and for the
political advancement of women’s interests, has today morphed into
something else entirely. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to be particularly for
women anymore. It’s about a lot of different issues, some of which involve
women and some of which don’t. For another, it doesn’t seem to be
particularly by women anymore. Increasingly, men claim the authority to
tell women who must be included in feminism, or what feminism must be
like. There were always divisions and often factions, but today there are
tribes and they are so polarized that there seems to be little chance of
reconciling differences. Below I’ll give two examples of how feminism has
changed. Then I’ll spend a little time emphasizing the points of agreement
between different types of feminists, before explaining what I’m trying to do
in this book, and how I’ve organized it.
A brief note on terminology, before we get started. I’ll use ‘male’ and
‘female’ in the standard way, to refer to the two biological sexes. The former
is the sex that all going well produces small mobile gametes (sperm), the
latter is the sex that all going well produces large immobile gametes (eggs).1
The meanings of these terms are contested, with some preferring to use
them synonymously with ‘man’ and ‘woman’ with both referring exclusively
to gender identity. But there are no other terms available to refer to sex, and
the ability to refer to sex is indispensable to my project in this book. So that
is how I will proceed.

1.1  Women’s Issues, from Centre to Margin

Two examples help to illustrate the shift in what is considered to be the sub-
ject matter or concern of feminism.2 The first is about activism, the second
about academia.

Gender-Critical Feminism: Holly Lawford-Smith, Oxford University Press. © Holly Lawford-Smith 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863885.003.0001
2 Introduction

Women’s day march. According to the International Women’s Day (IWD)

website, the 8th of March ‘is a global day celebrating the social, economic,
cultural and political achievements of women’, which ‘marks a call to action
for accelerating women’s equality’. The first IWD gathering was in 1911,
which makes the day more than a hundred years old. The image on their
website linking through to the themes for IWD 2020 included posters
saying ‘I will challenge gender stereotypes and bias’, and ‘I will call out
gendered actions or assumptions’.3 The website is full of photographs of
strong, empowered women: women of colour standing making the ‘equals’
sign with their arms; women working in technology, business, and health;
women in sports and the arts. So far so good—all of this seems like a fairly
standard approach to feminist activism.
And yet, the IWD Melbourne Collective, the group who organize the
march for the city of Australia where I live, issued a list of demands in
advance of IWD 2019 which were puzzlingly distant from this kind of
feminism. This was their full list of demands:

1. Justice for First Nations peoples, Indigenous workers’ rights, and

land rights
2. An end to all forms of violence against women and children
3. An end to all imperialist wars
4. An end to racism
5. Access to permanent residence and citizenship rights for all refugees
and migrant workers
6. Secure and decent employment for all, and equal pay for equal work
7. A living wage for all women in all industries
8. The right to organize unions and take collective action, including
industrial action and solidarity action, free from violence, intimidation,
and legal harassment
9. Health and safety at work, just compensation, and rehabilitation
10. Paid parental leave and affordable childcare
11. Full rights and freedom from violence for people of all sexual
orientations
12. Full rights and freedom from violence for intersex people
13. Listen to sex worker peer organizations, and support the rights, health,
and safety of sex workers, including the full decriminalisation of all forms
of sex work
14. Justice for people with disabilities—freedom from violence, full access
to public spaces, and an end to all forms of discrimination
 Women’s Issues, from Centre to Margin  3

15. Full reproductive rights for all women

16. Free and accessible healthcare for all
17. Affordable housing for all
18. Social security and a just welfare system
19. Free and accessible education for all
20. An end to environmental destruction, and compensation for all victims
worldwide.4

Note the language here. First Nations peoples, Indigenous workers, refugees,
migrant workers, employment for all, parental leave, people of all sexual
orientations, intersex people, sex workers, people with disabilities, healthcare
for all, housing for all, education for all, compensation for victims of
environmental destruction. Out of twenty demands, the word ‘women’
appears only three times: ‘an end to all forms of violence against women and
children’, ‘a living wage for all women in all industries’, and ‘full reproductive
rights for all women’. One might have expected the one day a year that is
about women to have a list of demands relating exclusively to women’s
interests.
My point is not that feminist collectives should limit themselves to
making demands that are good only for women. One of the IWD Melbourne
Collective’s demands was ‘paid parental leave and affordable childcare’. This
is a demand that will benefit both men and women. But it will largely benefit
women, because in most countries—including Australia—workplaces grant
more paid maternity leave than paternity leave, and in many countries there
is not adequate affordable childcare, which creates a structure of economic
incentives that encourage women to spend more time out of work,
sometimes giving up their careers entirely. Some things that are good for
women will have incidental benefits for men, and that they will have these
benefits is no reason at all for feminists not to want them.
But consider another of the collective’s demands, namely ‘justice for
people with disabilities—freedom from violence, full access to public
spaces, and an end to all forms of discrimination’. This will benefit women,
because some people with disabilities are women. But women are not dispro-
portionately represented among the community of people with disabilities
(in Australia it is 17.8 per cent females and 17.6 per cent males).5 This is not
a feminist demand; it’s a demand that could be made by anyone interested
in justice and equality. Most of the collective’s list is like that.
When the list of demands issued by a women’s collective are general
demands for justice and equality, feminism is in trouble. Demands for
4 Introduction

justice and equality are no bad things, but doing global justice and calling it
feminism is a bad thing, because it suggests to the world that there is a lot of
feminism going on, when there is really much less than there appears to be.
Radical and gender-­critical feminists on social media frequently ask, ‘why
are women the only people who aren’t allowed to centre themselves in their
own liberation movement?’6
It’s important to distinguish two questions. One is what is feminism, what
does a theory and movement that deserves the name look like? The other is
whether we should be feminists, which is the same as asking what social
causes we should each choose to fight for. In this book I’ll be talking only
about the former. Women are a little more than half the global population,
and some of the obstacles they face are extremely serious. Whether or not
this is the most important social cause and thus has a claim to everyone’s
time and energy, it’s an important social cause and thus has a claim to at
least some people’s time and energy.
I’m not interested in persuading you that you should abandon disability
justice movements in favour of feminism. We need both. I’m interested in
persuading you that if feminism is the social cause you choose, that cause
might not be what you think it is (and what influential organizations and
self-­styled spokeswomen represent it as being). As radical feminist Julia
Beck has said, ‘if feminism was reduced to one word, it would be “no!” ’7 In
this case, the ‘no’ is an answer to the question ‘would you mind just taking
care of these other 6,789 social justice issues while you’re at it?’.
Women’s studies. The University of Sydney was one of the first universities
in the world to offer a course in women’s studies, taught by Australian
­feminist Madge Dawson in 1956.8 The course was called ‘Women in a
Changing World’, which focused on the social, economic, and political
­situation of women in the liberal democracies of western Europe. Sydney’s
Arts and Social Sciences Undergraduate Handbook 2020 lists no subject areas
under either women’s studies or feminism, but does list gender studies. From
its description it is clear that this is not a shift in name only, but in content:

Gender studies challenges and enriches our understanding of masculinity,

femininity, transgender, sexuality and identity, and provides a framework
for considering social and cultural issues gender impacts, ranging from
debates about marriage equality and new forms of intimacy to gendered
forms of labour, violence and representational practices; and how gender
relates to other salient experiences such as race, coloniality, sexuality, class,
and ability.9
 Women’s Issues, from Centre to Margin  5

Women’s studies is about women; gender studies is about everyone.

Of the top five universities in Australia,10 four don’t have women’s studies
courses anymore (University of Melbourne, Australian National University,
University of Sydney, and University of Queensland) but they do have
gender studies (Queensland only as a minor, the others as a major); only the
University of New South Wales, Sydney, has a course that tries to combine
the two, namely ‘Women’s and Gender Studies’. They describe it as being
about ‘women, feminism, gender, sex, and sexualities’.11
During the school year 1969‒70, Phyllis Chesler—one of the most
prominent feminists of the second wave12—taught one of the first classes in
women’s studies in the United States (US), at what was then Richmond
College in New York City. The class become a minor and then a major. In
her memoir, A Politically Incorrect Feminist, Chesler talks about how she
and five students went and sat in the office of the head of department and
refused to leave until he approved the funding to cover her other teaching,
so that she could teach the class (which she had completed all the paperwork
and had initial approval for, but which at the last minute had been refused
on grounds of insufficient funding).13
Marilyn Boxer said of the time that ‘merely to assert that women should
be studied was a radical act’.14 According to Alice Ginsberg, editor of The
Evolution of American Women’s Studies, women’s studies was political, func-
tioning as ‘the “academic arm” of the women’s movement’, ‘restoring lost his-
tories’, and ‘allowing silenced voices to be heard’.15 In 2009, there were over
800 women’s studies programmes in the US. Ginsberg said ‘we can’t overlook
the significance of the apostrophe in the name women’s studies. Born from
the women’s movement, women are finally claiming their own lost histories
and taking the lead in challenging the social construction of knowledge’.16
While the first class happened in 1956 (and perhaps even earlier else-
where), women’s studies programmes weren’t commonplace until the 1970s,
and they were already starting to be broadened out and renamed in 2009.
Even assuming they became commonplace in the early 1970s, which is
probably a generous assumption, that’s still less than forty years before they
were massively diluted. Not a very long period for women to restore their
lost histories, recover silenced voices, and teach young women about the
history of women’s rights struggles and women’s oppression.
Compare it to classes and courses dedicated to histories of racial
oppression. Universities in New Zealand offer courses in Maori studies,
teaching Maori language, history, politics, and performing arts.17 Imagine if
after roughly forty years of this it was decided that those courses should be
6 Introduction

broadened out to include all minority ethnic and new immigrant groups in
New Zealand, and after a while we renamed all the courses ‘minority ethnic
studies’ and spent most of the time in them talking about Tuvaluan and
Maldivian climate refugees. Or worse: at least that might plausibly be
justified as a ‘focusing on the least well-­off ’ in some possible future state of
New Zealand. Imagine instead all the time is spent talking about economic
migrants from wealthy European countries.
There’s nothing wrong with courses being replaced in principle. Maybe
they’re about technologies that become obsolete, or science that goes out of
date. But these are not good parallels for women’s history. The thousands of
years’ long history of women’s oppression, and the struggle for women’s
rights starting in the United Kingdom (UK) in 1832,18 and still in progress,
would be important even if women had achieved full social justice—it’s
unlikely that we’ll stop teaching civil rights history when we achieve racial
justice. The way people are capable of treating one another is an important
part of human history and something we should all remain aware of, lest
history repeat. But it’s not only history. Women have not achieved full social
justice yet. Women’s studies matters.
This doesn’t mean gender studies programmes shouldn’t exist. There are
different phenomena we may be interested in. One is women’s oppression,
another is the many social groups that have suffered collateral damage in
the oppression of women. For example, as femininity was imposed onto
women and then women were disparaged, femininity came to be disparaged
independently, and this had negative effects on anyone who was feminine
whether they were a woman or not. As superiority was claimed for men,
masculinity was imposed and while this came with benefits it also came
with some harms. We might want to talk about this wider phenomenon,
which would mean talking about all of the social groups—including, but
not limited to, women—that have been impacted by women’s oppression,
looking for common causes and common impacts. But we might just as well
want to focus on the narrower phenomenon, the original victims of sexism,
the group that remains the largest constituency of those harmed by sexism,
namely women. Women’s studies did that; gender studies does not.

1.2  What Feminists Can Agree About

In writing a book about feminism, explaining disagreements and defending

a particular position, it is easy to give the impression that everything is a
 What Feminists Can Agree About  7

disagreement. But that just isn’t the case. Feminists of very different types
can want the same outcomes for different reasons, or the same outcomes for
the same reasons—it’s just that once they’ve secured them, some will stop
and others will carry on. Visions for a feminist future can have different
levels of ambition, so that they overlap in part. One perspective within
feminism has become dominant (on the left at least) and crowded out
alternative perspectives, which has increased the toxicity of disagreements
between its position on particular issues and that of other types of feminism.
I’ll be defending a feminism that has disagreements with the dominant
perspective in three particularly charged areas (the sex industry, trans/
gender, and intersectionality). But that shouldn’t be taken to suggest that
there isn’t, nonetheless, a lot of common ground, at least when it comes to
outcomes. Below are some examples.
Male violence against women and girls. Feminists of all types can agree
that male violence against women and girls is a problem and needs to be
addressed. It is uncontroversial that this includes phenomena like trafficking
into sexual slavery, acid attacks, honour killings, domestic violence, rape,
sexual assault, child abuse, and child marriage (which, when between a girl
child and an adult man, will generally also involve rape).19 Even those who
disagree about the status of ‘sex work’ and how the sex industry should be
regulated (if at all) can agree that the violence within the industry is a
problem, including the murder, trafficking, rape, sexual assault, child abuse,
and physical assault that go on across it.
Full control of reproduction. Feminists of most types (the exception
being some religious feminists) can agree that a woman must have the
right to choose when and whether to have a family. This means having con-
trol over her sexuality (when and whether she has sex, and whether that
sex will risk pregnancy—so she needs sexual autonomy and access to
­contraceptives), and both being able to have an abortion if she decides that
is what she wants, and being able to not have an abortion if she decides that
is what she wants. This means she needs it not to be the case that a control-
ling state, or controlling individual, can force her to do one thing or the
other (a one-­child state policy, or a husband, may force her to abort; a state
where abortion is illegal, or a religious husband, may force her to carry a
pregnancy to term).
Feminists of many, or at least most, types can agree that there are good
reasons why women need to have abortions, regardless of whether they
have further opinions about this. Chesler writes for example, in criticizing
people who protest outside abortion clinics, of
8 Introduction

A woman who requires a medical abortion; a woman who chooses not to

carry a seriously ill fetus to term; a mother of five who cannot afford
another child; a woman who needs radiation for cancer and whose
physician has advised her to have an abortion; a rape-­impregnated victim;
a young woman who cannot afford to raise a child and also work a full-­
time job so she can attend college.20

Sexual objectification and beauty standards. Lisa Taddeo writes in her

book Three Women (2019) ‘One inheritance of living under the male gaze
for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way
a man would’.21 Feminists of all types can agree on the negative impacts on
women that our culture of sexual and aesthetic objectification of women
has had, and be interested in finding ways to disrupt this objectification and
see women represented as, and understood to be, full human persons. This
is likely to mean changes to public spaces (billboards and posters), the
media (particularly advertising), and film and television (how female
characters are depicted). This may also have knock-­on effects for other
feminist issues, like increasing equality of sexual pleasure (women will get
more if men don’t think women are for the sexual pleasure of men), reducing
rape and sexual assault (at least where this is caused by sexual entitlement),
and increasing the representation of women in politics, leadership, and
industries where they have been underrepresented (by impacting
stereotypes and expectations).
Women at work. Feminists since long before the second wave have been
concerned about women’s access to work, whether about their being
permitted to work (or work in particular industries), or about their pay and
benefits in comparison to men, or about their underrepresentation within
specific industries and in leadership positions across all industries.22 Most
types of feminists can agree that equal opportunity is important, so that at
the very least we should be working to get rid of direct and indirect
discrimination. They can also probably agree that it is likely that serious
differences in the numbers of men and women in particular industries
suggest that either there has been discrimination or there is a ‘pipeline
problem’, which means that at some earlier point in time, perhaps even in
early childhood, there have been influences that have steered some towards,
and others away from, those industries.23
It is likely that feminists can agree on early childhood interventions, and
educational campaigns, designed to tackle these inequalities, such as
programmes to get girls interested in science, technology, engineering, and
 Leftist Mansplaining of Feminism  9

maths (STEM). None of this requires signing on to preferential hiring

(where of two equally qualified candidates, preference is given to the
woman), or affirmative action (where preference is given to the woman
even if she is worse-­qualified, so long as she is sufficiently qualified), about
which there is likely to be more disagreement tracking different fundamental
commitments.24 Neither does it require settling why it is important for
women to work, or even saying that they should necessarily work.
Equality of sexual pleasure. Feminists of all different types, even those at
war over the sex industry, can also agree that the sheer quantity of bad and
unwanted sex women are having all around the world is a serious feminist
issue.25 While feminists have long since agreed that rape and sexual assault
are feminist issues, there is not as much attention given to bad and unwanted
sex. This includes sex women have as a matter of duty, perhaps to preserve
relationships; the casual sex women sign up for in the hopes of mutual
satisfaction, but which ends up being unsatisfying; the sex which women
end up having because the ways that they signal its being unwanted are not
heeded by men. Feminists of different types can agree that it would be better
if there were more equality in sexual pleasure, and focus on ways to make
this happen—from more emphasis on consent as a clear and effective
signal,26 through to campus programmes in self-­defence and assertiveness,27
through to programmes in sex education and sexual equality28 (particularly
for boys).

1.3  Leftist Mansplaining of Feminism

‘You should be able to rely on the Left to be on the side of feminists’, wrote
Julie Bindel in 2018. ‘And yet, in recent years, I have experienced far more
direct sexism from these so-­called feminist “socialist” men than Tory ones’.29
She criticizes leftist men for defending men’s consumption of pornography,
including Owen Jones who defended a politician’s consumption of pornog-
raphy at work;30 and for supporting a decriminalized sex industry, which is
exploitative of women. She also complains that these men lecture women
about their understandings of what a woman is, as though they have ­superior
knowledge about that. She writes:

[Owen] Jones is also notorious for lecturing women about who actually
has the right to decide who is female or not; he regularly berates anyone
who dares suggest that people with penises are not actually women. In one
10 Introduction

of his articles, he declared that the group of people he terms ‘transphobes’

(who refuse to accept men as women) will be consigned to the ‘wrong side
of history’ for their views.31

It’s not surprising that someone like Owen Jones, a leftist journalist who
writes frequently for The Guardian, thinks he gets a say in the question of
what a woman/female is, because the dominant form of feminism has
encouraged this by declaring that ‘feminism is for everybody’.32 Jane
Mansbridge, a second-­wave feminist and Harvard professor, says that
feminists in the 1960s and 1970s saw their collectives as ‘pre-­figuring change
in the society’, which means, testing out the changes they desired for wider
society on a smaller scale. She said, ‘I consider the women’s movement the
least hierarchical, the most open and the most inclusive social movement
that I have ever come across’, but worried that the way the movement
handled conflict was ‘adversarial’ and that this didn’t bode well for wider
social transformation.33 On this way of thinking about the feminist
movement, as a precursor to a wider transformation that is something like
justice for everyone, gatekeeping membership doesn’t make a lot of sense.
It might seem appealing to be so warm and inclusive, but here is an
alternative view. Declaring that feminism is for everybody, and welcoming
men into feminism not merely as allies but as people who can be feminist
thinkers, leaders, and activists if they so desire, guts feminism of one of its
most important accomplishments, which is the self-­ determination of
women.34 Women, as an oppressed class/caste,35 have the right to form
political associations to fight sex-­ based injustice and to advance their
political interests. Women have the right to figure out, separately from men,
what exactly they think it means to be a woman, if it means anything at all.
Men, throughout history, have created and imposed femininity onto
women. In order to achieve liberation, women must escape from men’s
ideas about women. From this it follows that men do not get any say in what
a woman is, and men cannot be feminists.36
For those who like the idea that feminism is evolving from a movement
for women into a movement for social justice more generally, it’s worth
asking why it’s women who are being asked to (or are asking themselves to)
take on this enormous project. It’s perfectly conceivable that a division of
labour between groups focused on specific constituencies’ issues would be
more effective, and that all of these groups could link up as allies at some
point—when they have made sufficient gains—in order to form a broader
base for a more general social justice movement. But it’s hardly the case that
 The Great Gulf of Feminism  11

women’s issues, globally, have been resolved and we’ve now got some time
on our hands to take on a bit more work. These issues are far from solved.
And I don’t see anyone telling Black Lives Matter, or Extinction Rebellion,
that they should adopt a broader agenda, and stop being so narrowly
focused on a ‘single issue’.
This question of men’s place in feminism has become particularly fraught
when it comes to transgender issues. It is one thing to say that men like
Owen Jones should be quiet about what a woman is because that’s not a
question he gets to have a say in. It’s another to say that the increasing
numbers of male people who ‘identify as women’ also simply don’t get a say.
Where leftist feminists may disagree over the question of whether men can
be feminists, and that disagreement has practical implications such as
whether it’s permissible for feminists to bring boyfriends to the ‘Reclaim the
Night’ march,37 this doesn’t generally cause a schism where those who
disagree will end friendships and working relationships.
But disagreement does cause this schism when it comes to transgender
issues. Many feminists today tend to use self-­identification as the sole
criterion for being a woman. For them, what it means to be a woman is to
be a person of either sex who identifies as a woman. Identifying as a woman
has no specific content, for example relating to appearance, behaviour, or
character. To identify as something sounds like a mental state, one that
manifests solely in a person’s declaration that they are, in fact, a woman.
When some women refuse to include male people with this mental state
as  feminist thinkers, leaders, and activists, those feminists see them as
­discriminating against women. And of course, all feminists can agree that
feminism is for all women, whether or not it is also for all men. So this
becomes a very serious, and highly moralized, point of disagreement.

1.4  The Great Gulf of Feminism

Reading through accounts of the second wave in the US, it is clear that there
has always been in-­fighting within feminist collectives.38 Phyllis Chesler’s
colourful description of the movement gives a sense of this: ‘In our midst
was the usual assortment of scoundrels, sadists, bullies, con artists, liars,
loners, and incompetents, not to mention the high-­functioning psycho-
paths, schizophrenics, manic depressives, and suicide artists. I loved them
all’.39 Jo Freeman wrote in 1976 about ‘trashing’, the phenomenon of feminist
women attacking and undermining one another. She says ‘It took three
12 Introduction

trashings to convince me to drop out . . . I felt psychologically mangled to the

point where I knew I couldn’t go on’.40
Still, being together inside feminist collectives where there were issues
between some individuals and others, and between some individuals and all
the rest, is something very different to not being together at all. We’ve gone
from fallouts and factions within a somewhat cohesive feminist movement
to tribalism of the most extravagant kind, where feminists of different types
are quite literally protected from hearing each other’s criticisms and
alternative viewpoints. These protections come in the form of social media
mechanisms allowing blocking (including, on Twitter, the option to
subscribe to large blocklists, the most notorious of which inside radical and
gender-­critical feminist circles is ‘TERFblocker’), and muting; and in real
life, cutting ties with people and refusing to participate in the same events
or be on the same platforms.
For example, five days before the conference ‘Historical Materialism’ was
scheduled to begin at the University of Sydney in 2018, the organizers
emailed Caroline Norma—a radical feminist academic—to tell her she’d
been removed from the conference programme and her registration fee had
been refunded. Their reason was that comments made by Norma in an
earlier media piece about the left driving women out were inconsistent with
the conference’s commitment to ‘an inclusive space for people with diverse
gender identities’.41 In the earlier piece, she had argued that transgenderism
was ‘wedge politics’, a way for leftists to purge feminists from their ranks.42
Apparently academics, not usually expected to mindlessly agree with one
another, had decided that women with the ‘wrong’ views on gender must be
excised from a conference programme in the name of diversity. A quick
glance through the conference programme suggests that most of the
speakers were men.43 Norma was eventually reinstated to the programme,
but ended up presenting without the other panellists and to a largely empty
audience, which she speculates was due to an open letter encouraging
conference attendees to boycott.44
Why are we excising our dissidents rather than celebrating them for the
role they play in forcing us all to defend our ideas and think more clearly?
Why has feminism become a matter of tribes, rather than a matter of issues?
In principle, it should be possible to be a feminist who thinks that sex work
is work but transwomen are not women, or transwomen are women but sex
work is institutionalized violence against women.45 But in practice, it is very
difficult to hold this combination of views, because having the ‘wrong’ views
on sex work or trans issues makes you an enemy to the relevant tribe.
 Gender-­Critical Feminism  13

Feminism today is more polarized than ever before, which leads to each
side misunderstanding the other, and sometimes demonizing the other, rather
than having the kind of open dialogue that leads to mutual understanding,
constructive (rather than destructive) disagreement, and the finding of
common ground. This is just as disastrous inside the feminist movement as
it is in democratic politics more broadly.

1.5  Gender-­Critical Feminism

The remedy for the version of feminism that has become about everything
and for everyone is gender-­critical feminism. This is a feminism that has its
roots in radical feminism, influential during the second wave, before the
various cultural influences that broadened out the scope and constituency
of feminism came along. But it won’t do to simply rewind the clock sixty
years. Radical feminists themselves got many things right, but some things
wrong.46 And they couldn’t speak to social conditions that hadn’t yet arisen,
like the massive expansion of the pornography industry, or the institutional
adoption of the ideology of gender identity.
Gender-­critical feminism is both a continuation of radical feminism and
distinct from it. There are many women who describe themselves as gender-­
critical feminists, who are talking and writing and doing activism and
together slowly building a shared idea of what gender-­critical feminism is.
Some think of it as a new name for an old position, while others see it as a
new position. Many perceive it as being focused on a single issue, namely
the social uptake of gender identity. One of the arguments I will make in
this book is that this is a mistake. Gender-­critical feminism is a general
feminist theory (albeit one that is still a work in progress). The fact that it
currently gives the bulk of its attention to a single issue is explained by the
urgency of that issue, and not anything more fundamental to the theory of
gender-­critical feminism itself. It is about being critical of gender, and this
has implications for a wide range of feminist issues, not just gender
identity.47
Philip Pettit made the following observation in a 1993 paper when he
talked about trying to distinguish the political theories of liberalism and
republicanism:

there is a problem facing anyone who tries to describe the intellectual

profile of a tradition like liberalism or republicanism. This is that traditions
14 Introduction

of this kind do not come with their intellectual profile already well defined.
The traditions are identified and unified, individuals are selected as repre-
sentatives and exemplars of the traditions, on a variety of intellectually
incidental bases . . . One basis may be the figures acknowledged as heroes or
anti-­heroes, another texts taken as authoritative or heretical, yet another
the events depicted as glorious or tragic, and so on across a range of
possibilities.48

The same is true for gender-­critical feminism. There is disparate theory and
activism being produced across multiple countries. (The Women’s Human
Rights Campaign, which is gender-­ critical, has country contacts in
Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany,
India, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia,
South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, UK, and the US).49 I will make
decisions about how to unify that theory and activism that may not be to
the liking of everyone who thinks of themselves as a gender-­critical feminist.
My heroes may not be the same as those of another gender-­critical feminist;
the work I take as authoritative may not be the same as what some other
gender-­critical feminists do; I may see particular events in a different light
to other gender-­critical feminists.
We will inevitably end up with something that is covered in my
fingerprints. In talking with other gender-­critical feminists, I have found
my conclusions on the sex industry and trans/gender to be widely shared,
even if not all the ideas that take me to them are. But I have taken particular
liberties with intersectionality. On that topic I am arguing with everyone—
radical, gender-­critical, and liberal alike.
I have three aims in this book. First, I want to convince you that the
version of feminism that gets the most airtime today barely deserves the
name. I don’t mean this in the petty way where we sneer across our
differences of opinion muttering that’s not real feminism.50 Rather I mean,
the socially dominant form of feminism—which is a distorted version of
liberal intersectional feminism—has literally left a gap where a women-­
centred social justice movement used to be. This is an attempt to describe a
theory that fills that gap.
Second, I want to show you how helpful philosophical ideas can be in
diagnosing mistakes in arguments about feminism, explaining disagree-
ments between feminists, and in articulating a clear vision of a feminism that
has re-­centred women. Theory—philosophical and otherwise—sometimes
gets a bad reputation inside social justice movements. As one author puts it,
 Gender-­Critical Feminism  15

‘For many, academic feminism is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron,

selling out feminism’s commitment to everyday [practice]’.51 There seems to
be a sense, from at least some quarters, that feminist theory is elitist and
unnecessary. There are real problems to be solved, on the ground, after all.
In anticipating objections to her radical proposal for women’s ­liberation,52
Shulamith Firestone considers what ‘operates to destroy serious consideration
of feminism: the failure of past social experiments’.53 One reason she gives
for such failures is ‘lack of theory’, commenting ‘one senses the immense
frustration of people trying to liberate themselves without having a well-­
thought-­out ideology to guide them’.54 She goes through a number of
­partially successful and failed feminist social experiments too, diagnosing
the reasons for failure as including ‘There was no development of a feminist
consciousness and analysis prior to the initiation of the experiment’.55
Theory is crucial, and philosophy is a great tool for both creating it and cri-
tiquing it.
Third, I want to reintroduce you to radical feminism, through some of the
ideas of the most interesting and influential figures of the second wave,
women many of whose ideas are lost to feminists today. As Louise Perry
described them in an article for Quillette in 2019, these are ‘women who pro-
duced influential work that is now often forgotten, or else misremembered
by Third Wave feminists keen to distance themselves from their feminist
foremothers’.56 In revisiting their ideas we will be in a better position to
articulate a version of feminism that is both by and for women.
Finally, a note on the organization of the book, and where to look if you’re
after something in particular. I have divided it into two parts, the first
focused on explaining what gender-­critical feminism is, and the second
more reflective, raising further questions for gender-­critical feminism. The
core of the book is the first part, Chapters 2–6. It introduces gender-­critical
feminism and explains that it has its roots in radical feminism, which in
turn warrants a fuller presentation of radical feminist theory and radical
feminists’ ideas (Chapter 2). It then moves back to gender-­critical feminism
and explains some differences between the two (Chapter  3). Having
established that gender-­ critical feminism is a new iteration of radical
feminism, it then picks up on two issues that have been important to each—
the sex industry (Chapter 4) as being central to radical feminist concerns,
and trans/gender (Chapter  5) as being central to gender-­critical feminist
concerns.
I’ll argue for the abolition of the sex industry in its entirety (which means
pornography as well as prostitution); and the continued protection of
16 Introduction

women’s sex-­based rights in the face of attempts by some feminists to

replace sex with gender identity, as well as the regulation of access to
medical and surgical transition for children and adolescents. There are
many issues of concern to radical and gender-­critical feminists, so these
chapters are far from exhaustive; but they are intended to be representative,
to get to the heart of a feminism concerned with sex and sex-­based rights.
(Further elaboration of the gender-­critical feminist agenda is given in the
Coda.) In the final chapter of the core (Chapter 6), I turn to the question of
why gender-­critical feminism has been so vilified, offering a number of
different explanations. If you just want to get a good sense of what gender-­
critical feminism is and what its main disagreements are with other types of
feminism, then you might read just the chapters in Part I.
In Part II of the book, I ask three further questions about gender-­critical
feminism. First, is it intersectional (Chapter 7)? It is more or less taken for
granted in feminism today that feminism ought to be intersectional, so the
extent to which it is, and whether that is defensible, needs to be worked out.
I’ll defend a feminism for female people concerned with a single axis of
oppression, namely the oppression of women as women, meaning, on the
basis of their sex. Second, is gender-­critical feminism feasible? The abolition
of gender norms and the liberation of women are hefty goals; gender-­critical
feminism is vulnerable to the accusation that those goals cannot be realized
(Chapter  8). I’ll argue that gender-­critical feminism is not infeasible, but
that differing assumptions about feasibility—left implicit rather than made
explicit—might be behind some of the apparent disagreement between
gender-­ critical and other types of feminists. Finally, is gender-­ critical
­feminism liberal? The socially dominant form of feminism is arguably a
­version of liberal feminism, and gender-­critical feminism opposes several
­elements of that feminism. Does that mean gender-­critical feminism is not
liberal? And if so, is that defensible (Chapter  9)? I’ll argue that gender-­
critical feminism is liberal, but that there remain open questions about how
deep women’s lack of freedom goes. If you are already familiar with the his-
tory of liberalism and have thought about the relation between liberalism
and liberal feminism and criticisms of liberal feminism then you might skip
Sections 9.1‒9.3. There are some new ideas in Section 9.4, so you could go
straight there.
At the end of the book, added as a coda, there is also a gender-­critical
manifesto, a list of issues designed to be the focus of a feminist movement
that is about all women and only women.
 Gender-­Critical Feminism  17

My target in this book is the type of feminism you generally see repre-
sented in the media, in popular books about feminism, across social media,
and inside feminist activist communities. There is a loose connection
between this type of feminism and the feminist theory worked out by
feminist academics. The connection is strongest to postmodern feminism,
but there is also some connection to liberal feminism and intersectional
feminism, albeit with some serious distortions. Gender-­critical feminism is
in disagreement with academic liberal and intersectional feminism to the
extent that proponents of the latter share the commitments of popular
feminism when it comes to the questions of what feminism is, who it is for,
whether it may permissibly be concerned with a single axis of oppression,
whether the sex industry should be abolished, whether gender is (only)
identity, and whether transition should be regulated to prevent harm to girls.
 PART I

WHAT IS GE N DE R- ­C R I T ICA L
F E MIN ISM ?
 2
Gender-­Critical Feminism’s
Radical Roots

In its insistence upon the importance of sex, gender-­critical feminism is

continuous with radical feminism. Radical feminism is a theory and move-
ment that started in the United States in 1967 with women like ­Ti-­Grace
Atkinson, Shulamith Firestone, and groups like New York Radical Women
(est. 1967), Redstockings (est. 1969), New York Radical Feminists (est. 1969),
and The Feminists (est. 1968).1 The Feminists, for example, split from the
National Organization for Women (NOW) claiming that it was not radical
enough.2 Here’s Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch, describing The
Feminists:

It was not long before intelligent members of NOW realized that their
aims were too limited and their tactics too genteel. One of the more
interesting women to emerge in the movement is Ti-­Grace Atkinson, a
leader of the most radical and elite women’s group, The Feminists—A
Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles. This is a closed group of
propaganda-­makers who are trying to develop the notion of a leaderless
society in which the convention of Love (‘the response of the victim to the
rapist’), the proprietary relationship of marriage, and even uterine preg-
nancy will no longer prevail. Their pronouncements are characteristically
gnomic and rigorous; to the average confused female they must seem ter-
rifying. They have characterised men as the enemy, and, as long as men
continue to enact their roles as misconceived and perpetuated by them-
selves and women, they are undoubtedly right.3

Prior feminist theory had been trying to theorize women’s situation through
existing theory. Atkinson—an analytic philosopher and arguably the first
radical feminist4—wrote ‘Radical feminism is a new political concept. It
evolved in response to the concern of many feminists that there has never
been even the beginnings of a feminist analysis of the persecution of
women’.5 Many of the first-­wave feminists, for example, oriented themselves
Gender-Critical Feminism: Holly Lawford-Smith, Oxford University Press. © Holly Lawford-Smith 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863885.003.0002
22  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

around classical liberalism,6 and argued for women’s empowerment through

education and the vote as equality according to liberal values. Some of the
second-­wave feminists were committed socialists and tried to fit feminism
into Marxism. But neither of these went far enough, according to the
radicals. The problem with liberal feminism was that equality with men on
men’s terms was thought to be under-­ambitious. Gerda Lerner in The
Creation of Patriarchy made this point with a metaphor of a stage, saying
that men had written the play, made the props and costumes, cast all the
roles, and were directing the play, so that even if women were on the stage,
and even if they fought for equal opportunity in getting the better roles, for
liberation the whole stage needed to be dismantled and something genuinely
co-­constructed put back in its place.7 The problem with socialist feminism
was that it ultimately subsumed sex to class as the fundamental axis of
oppression. The radicals did not believe that abolishing class oppression
would be sufficient to abolish sex oppression. Audre Lorde, for example,
wrote ‘in no socialist country that I have visited have I found an absence of
racism or of sexism, so the eradication of both of these diseases seems to
involve more than the abolition of capitalism as an institution’.8 Catharine
MacKinnon described radical feminism as ‘feminism unmodified’, saying
‘just as socialist feminism has often amounted to [M]arxism applied to
women, liberal feminism has often amounted to liberalism applied to
women. Radical feminism is feminism’.9
Feminist women wanted a theory and movement in which sex took
centre stage. Hence, the invention of radical feminism: a theory by women
for women and about women, understood as a sex caste/class. Atkinson
proclaimed in 1969 ‘The [radical feminist] analysis begins with the feminist
raison d’être that women are a class, that this class is political in nature, and
that this political class is oppressed’.10 She described women as ‘a political
class characterized by a sexual function’.11 Shulamith Firestone in 1970
declared ‘sex class is so deep as to be invisible’.12 Kate Millett in the same
year described ‘the situation between the sexes’ as ‘a relationship of
­dominance and subordinance’, ‘in our social order, [it] is the birthright
­priority where males rule females’.13 Later, MacKinnon would take a further
step from sex to sexuality, writing in 1982 ‘sexuality is to feminism what
work is to [M]arxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away’.14
This radical feminist isolation of and assertion of the importance of sex is
crucially important. The radical feminists pushed sex forward as a major
axis of oppression just like class and just like race. They showed that sex
caste could be theorized independently of either, even if it could also be
 Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots  23

theorized together with either or both. This made it possible to consider the
structure of each of race, sex, and class as major systems of oppression, and
draw on both similarities and differences for mutual illumination. It made it
possible to ask about the origins of sex oppression: was it always the case? If
not, when did it start, and how, and why? It made it possible to ask about
the mechanisms by which sex oppression had been sustained throughout
history, and through which it may still be sustained today. It made it possible
to ask who or what is ‘the oppressor’. Once we understand the origins and
the mechanisms, we are then in a better position to understand how to
challenge and ultimately dismantle that system, and achieve women’s
liberation (which, as mentioned already, is not necessarily the same thing as
achieving sex equality).
Radical feminists, during the second wave, worked on all of these
projects. Here is a brief overview—there is more detail in Section 2.2 below.
Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) and Riane Eisler in The
Chalice and the Blade (1987) focused on the historical origins of sex oppres-
sion. Lerner, for example, pieced together a case based on archeological
evidence and argued that patriarchy began around 3100 bce—so about
5,000 years ago. She argued that women were the first slaves, and created the
template for future relations of domination/subordination.15 Andrea
Dworkin gave women as a caste a history, or ‘herstory’ as feminists said at
the time, outlining atrocities against women such as the 1,000-­year period
of footbinding of women in China, the estimated 500-­year period of burn-
ing at the stake women accused of witchcraft,16 and women’s death and
­disease from illegal abortions. She also identified propaganda about wom-
en’s inferiority, such as that built into the fairy tales taught to children.17
Arguably, this makes it possible to claim historical injustice against women
as a caste.
Multiple institutions were identified as helping to achieve the oppression
of women, including marriage, the family, sexual intercourse, love, religion,
rape, and prostitution. Different radical feminists focused their work on one
or more of these institutions, trying to gain a better understanding of how
they functioned. For example, Susan Brownmiller wrote about rape;18
Firestone wrote about love and the family,19 Atkinson wrote about love and
sexual intercourse;20 Millet wrote about sexual intercourse;21 Dworkin and
MacKinnon wrote about prostitution and pornography;22 and there were
many more radical feminists writing about these topics in various
combinations. Some, like Atkinson and Marilyn Frye, wrote more broadly
about the concept of oppression and how it works in the case of women.23
24  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

MacKinnon in particular advanced a more general theory, mentioned

already, that men’s control of women’s sexuality was what united the many
different harms against women and explained women’s oppression—
including rape, incest, pornography, prostitution, discrimination against
lesbians, sexual harassment, and control of abortion and contraception.24
There was fairly widespread agreement at the time on the following cluster
of views. Sex division was the ‘difference’ at the basis of women’s oppression.
Women’s oppression consisted in women being pressed into the service of
men, whether this was primarily sexual or more broadly about personal ser-
vice, sexual service, and ego/emotional service. Women’s oppression ran
extremely deep, with many women having fully internalized men’s views of
women, and exacerbated by the fact that women were distributed among men,
unlike pretty much any other minority group in relation to its oppressor.25
Men were the oppressor (either because men were directly implicated, or
because they maintained the institutions that worked to oppress women).
Heterosexual love and sexual intercourse were deeply compromised in light
of sex hierarchy. Prostitution was institutionalized rape.
There was also a broad range of solutions, and some of these were highly
experimental, aimed at ‘doing things differently’ outside of male power
structures. The radical feminists invented separatism, at its limit the idea of
women living independently of men and avoiding contact with men. They
invented political lesbianism, which on one understanding is simply
separatism with added emphasis on no longer having sex with men,26 and
on another is the rejection of the idea that sexual orientation is necessarily
innate, and the embracing of the idea that lesbianism can be a positive
choice made by women to love women.27 They revived women’s spirituality
from pagan times, focused on celebrating women’s supposed difference
from men and emphasizing women’s closeness to nature. They developed
‘difference feminism’, which focused on articulating and revaluing women’s
supposed difference from men. They engaged in linguistic activism/
conceptual engineering, by reclaiming terms of abuse and inventing new
concepts. They introduced the methodology of consciousness-­ raising,
where women would come together to talk, to begin realizing the shape of
their common oppression, to work through the experience of living in
male-­dominated societies, and start questioning male power structures.
They advocated for the end of ‘sex roles’, some of them by advocating for the
end of sex-­marking altogether. And they established services for women
like domestic violence and rape shelters.
 Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots  25

I see gender-­critical feminism as the revival of radical feminism.

I think it didn’t start out intending to be that. Women were just reacting
against what they saw as unsatisfactory feminist takes on issues like
prostitution, pornography, surrogacy, sexual and beauty objectification,
gender identity ideology, and more. But as more women gathered
together under the label ‘gender-­ critical’, they discovered, or were
pointed towards, continuities with the earlier radical feminist theory.
This in turn made the connection stronger as people began revisiting
that work. Gender-­critical feminists have the same project that the r­ adical
feminists had, in that they are committed to the idea that women are a
sex caste, and to sex oppression as a distinct and important axis of
oppression.
Within that very broad project, women made many different contri-
butions, some of which have come to be associated more strongly with
the idea of radical feminism than others. In my view, virtually none of
these are essential to radical feminism; we could be radical feminists
and disagree with most of the ideas put forward by a particular radical
feminist about the origins of patriarchy, the mechanisms by which
patriarchy (or something like it)28 is sustained, and what the feminist
future looks like. Each of these thinkers’ contributions is a small poten-
tial piece of a very large puzzle, which remains to be solved. Although
I think they got many things right, in principle the radical feminists of
the second wave could have gotten almost everything wrong about how
women’s oppression works and what it would take to dissolve it, and yet
the core insight of radical feminism would remain untouched—that
women are a sex caste/class, and that this fact opens up urgent social,
political, legal, and economic questions. The core questions are why and
how women are oppressed, and what women’s liberation consists in. The
answers are likely to change through time as women’s situation changes,
not least as a result of feminism itself. The answer that I think distin-
guishes the radical feminist from other types of feminists, and therefore
is necessary, has to do with how deep feminine socialization goes. For
the radical feminist, it goes very deep (on which more soon). In the
remainder of this chapter, I’ll describe some of the radical feminists’
contributions in more detail, to provide a sense of the magnitude of the
undertaking that radical feminism was,29 and in order to be able to
clarify in the next chapter which specific ideas gender-­critical feminism
leaves behind.
26  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

2.1  Pre-­radical: Female Socialization

Long before the second wave kicked off, Mary Wollstonecraft30 had made
the case that women’s situation was a result of social causes rather than
anything innate to her ‘soul’ or person.31 At the time of her writing, women
(of her class) must have looked nearly like another species than men (of her
class):32 their central aspiration to be beautiful and to secure good prospects
for their future by getting the right husband; their daily pursuits of pleasures
like needlework and socializing; their opportunities limited to a narrow
range of roles—resentful domestic drudge, coquettish mistress, or bitter
economically dependent relative—relying on their beauty, their social
status, their charm, and a lot of luck. A woman did not receive a meaningful
education, and she depended financially on male relatives (with some
exceptions when it came to inheritance). Most women at this time did not
rail against their inequality with men. Wollstonecraft comments ‘they
have . . . chosen rather to be short-­lived queens than labour to achieve the
sober pleasures that arise from equality’.33
She asks her reader to imagine how different things might be were a
woman at the time encouraged to engage in physical exercise rather than
being confined to her rooms;34 were she parented to stamp out her silly fears
in childhood; were she to receive an education; were she to have the solitude
necessary to pursue knowledge. On the last point, Wollstonecraft comments
on the accomplishments of ‘unmarried or childless men’35 and speculates on
how the constraints of marriage and children might similarly hinder wom-
en’s accomplishments, and also on how women are often surrounded by
­others in their daily lives, for example in the company of other women
­discussing clothing.36 Her conclusion was that ‘men of genius and talents
have started out of a class, in which women have never yet been placed’.37
Wollstonecraft’s drawing attention to the numerous differences in boys’
and girls’—and later men’s and women’s—social treatment would have been
sufficient to inspire agnosticism about whether the social differences
between men and women were the result of biological differences38 between
them. But she went a step further and made an innovative comparison that
suggested socialization was in fact the direct cause of the differences in
men’s and women’s situations, in particular in the number and magnitude of
their accomplishments.
She drew on Adam Smith’s work in A Theory of Moral Sentiments to
compare women’s situation with that of the nobility, commenting ‘if . . . no
great men, of any denomination, have ever appeared amongst the nobility,
 Pre-­r adical: Female Socialization  27

may it not be fairly inferred that their local situation swallowed up the man,
and produced a character similar to that of woman?’.39 Her suggestion was
that wealth and status similarly doom members of the nobility to a life of
trivial pleasures and pull them away from knowledge and substantial
accomplishments. Because the nobility includes men, this is a direct demon-
stration of the difference that different circumstances and opportunities can
make to people’s—men’s—accomplishments. It is harder to explain these dif-
ferences away as a fact of biology or different ‘souls’,40 and indeed it would
have been uncomfortable to do so given the prevailing norms about the
higher social status of members of the nobility.
The idea that women’s situation is explained by social causes was picked
up and developed in much more detail some 150 years later with French
existentialist feminist Simone de Beauvoir’s canonical and best-­selling book
The Second Sex.41 Beauvoir compared the idea of the ‘eternal feminine’ to
the ideas of a ‘black soul’ or a ‘Jewish character’, dismissing them all as
stereotypes. She emphasized the invisibility and depth of social and cultural
discrimination against women, ‘whose moral and intellectual repercussions
are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature’.42
Like Wollstonecraft before her, she accepted that women were in fact at that
time inferior to men, but asked whether that was necessary: ‘their situation
provides them with fewer possibilities: the question is whether this state of
affairs must be perpetuated’.43 She establishes that biology is not destiny,44
and neither is [Freudian] psychology.45 She surveys the subordination of
women across different times, cultures, and mythologies.46 And she explains
in great detail the process of a woman’s socialization from girlhood through
sexual initiation into marriage, drawing on women’s testimony throughout.47
Beauvoir’s driving point is that ‘Woman feels undermined because in fact
the restrictions of femininity have undermined her’.48 Female people are
inculcated into a social system in which they have fewer opportunities, and
they are made complicit in their own subordination by the fact that they
accept the rewards designed to obscure the extent of that subordination
from their full view (for example, the fact that women with class privilege
are often ‘put on pedestals’ by men, and shielded from even minor physical
discomforts).49 This was the point of the soundbite that Beauvoir has been
ground down into,50 namely that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes,
woman’,51 which is so often misunderstood and misused by those concerned
to advance a conception of gender as identity today.52
Many of the ideas in The Second Sex were taken up and developed by
radical feminists, for example ideas about the male gaze and women’s sexual
28  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

objectification,53 the role of the ‘Prince Charming’ myth and the way that
women end up making themselves into what they think men want in order
to secure marriage,54 and the extent to which sex between men and women
is coercive—which led some radical feminists to advocate lesbianism and
separatism.55
These early feminist writers were advancing the idea that there is nothing
about being female that necessitates the differences in behaviour and
interests we might have seen between men and women in 1792, when
Wollstonecraft was writing, or in 1949, when Beauvoir was writing, or
indeed in the late 1960s, when radical feminists started writing. Throughout
history and across time and place women have been subordinated,
considered both ‘different from’ and ‘inferior to’ men. But the content of this
difference has been entirely dependent on time and place. Feminists like
Wollstonecraft and Beauvoir were suggesting that if women were socialized
in the same way as men were, and given the same opportunities, we might
expect to see them accomplish the same things.
What distinguishes Wollstonecraft from Beauvoir is what distinguishes
the liberal feminist from the radical feminist. For the liberal, with
Wollstonecraft as foremother, the main problem is that women are not
treated as equals to men—they are denied crucial rights and opportunities.
The differences between women and men are likely to disappear when their
opportunities are equalized. For the radical, with Beauvoir as foremother,
even if women were suddenly to be treated as equals to men, they are likely
to still be very different, because they have been shaped to be different. The
disagreement between the two is over the question of how deep feminine
socialization goes. For the radical it goes very deep, and compromises
women’s autonomy more than in the case of perhaps any other oppressed
social group.56 Thus a feminist might be committed to the idea of women as
an oppressed caste/class without being a radical feminist, because she thinks
women’s oppression is largely a matter of particular laws and practices
which, once reformed, would largely transform her situation. According to
the radical feminist, the struggle for women’s liberation is both political and
personal.

2.2  The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave

Ti-­Grace Atkinson. Shulamith Firestone. Kate Millett. Germaine Greer.

Mary Daly. Susan Griffin. Christine Delphy. Monique Wittig. Kathleen
 The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave  29

Barry. Robin Morgan. Andrea Dworkin. Adrienne Rich. Marilyn Frye.

Catharine MacKinnon. Audre Lorde. Sheila Jeffreys. Janice Raymond.
Phyllis Chesler.57 These are some of the most prominent radical feminists.
Radical feminism came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
with Ti-­Grace Atkinson as its earliest proponent.58 It was a grassroots move-
ment and, importantly and partly for that reason, not especially unified,
although it is possible to find commonalities.59 Within the movement there
were many disagreements; Phyllis Chesler wrote ‘we were champion hair-
splitters and disagreed with each other with searing passion’.60
When we ask, ‘why are women oppressed?’, two broad types of answer
are possible. The first is to give an origin story. This interprets the question
as ‘how did women come to be oppressed?’ We suppose a time prior to
women’s oppression,61 and then we try to explain what happened in order
that women’s oppression was produced. These stories all presuppose
contingency, because if women’s oppression was necessary in virtue of
something essential to womanhood, then there could not have been any
time prior when women were not oppressed. The second is to give an
explanation of the mechanisms by which women are kept oppressed. These
explanations can be agnostic about the origins, and might even suppose
that the mechanisms themselves have changed a great deal over time.
Identifying mechanisms may or may not involve identifying perpetrators.
I’ll take each of these types of answer in turn in what follows, starting with
origin stories and moving on to mechanisms. Finally, I’ll survey the range of
solutions that radical feminists have given to the problem of women’s
oppression.

2.2.1  Origin Stories

All of the explanations that radical feminists gave for how women’s sub­or­
din­ation got started were oriented around female-­specific biology or physi­
ology, in one way or another.
Mary Jane Sherfey saw women as naturally having an insatiable sexual
appetite, related to her capacity for multiple orgasm. This drive would
disrupt the family unit and leave men uncertain of their paternity if not
subdued.62 Susan Brownmiller saw the root of women’s oppression in the
differences in human anatomy: the penis can be used as a weapon of rape,
the vagina can be a site of rape. Brownmiller describes the possibility of
rape as ‘a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all
30  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

women in a state of fear’.63 Fear leads to domination. Shulamith Firestone

explained women’s oppression as stemming from her role in reproduction.
This made her physically weaker—because more encumbered—during
pregnancy and breastfeeding, and so generated a sex-­based division of
labour in which women were dependent on and thus inferior to men.64
Mary Daly saw women’s power to create life as giving her distinctive
capacities that were then devalued by men.65 Susan Griffin saw women as
closer to nature, similarly creating a difference from men that was then
devalued by men.66
Alison Jaggar criticizes radical feminism for this tendency towards the
biology of femaleness as an explanation for women’s oppression.67 She says
this focus can be dangerous insofar as it naturalizes and hence may seem to
justify women’s oppression, particularly if proposed solutions can be shown
not to succeed. But her criticism is too strong, because she fails to
distinguish biological determinism, biological essentialism, and biological
explanation. Biological determinism is something feminists reasonably
object to, because it holds that biological features of female persons
determine their status as socially inferior (and similarly, that biological
features of male persons determine their status as socially superior). There’s
a kind of fatalism or necessity here: the fact that a group of human persons
has these particular biological features makes it inescapably the case that
they will end up worse off. If the question is ‘how did women come to be
oppressed?’ and the answer is ‘in virtue of their reproductive organs’, it’s easy
to end up thinking that women would have been oppressed in any possible
world, that there’s something about women’s reproductive capacities that
goes hand-­in-­hand with oppression.
But there’s not necessarily anything wrong with biological essentialism—
the idea that biological organisms have essential (necessary) properties—
and there’s certainly nothing wrong with mere biological explanation.
Natalie Stoljar has shown that accusations of ‘essentialism’ (biological or
otherwise) are often overblown in feminist theory, that ‘essentialism’ has
long since become a ‘term of abuse’.68 Single necessary and sufficient
conditions for class membership can be glossed as ‘essential properties’ of
members of classes, but that need not involve any claim about the normative
properties of those members. It does not follow from a mere definition of a
thing that it is good to be that thing, or bad to be it, or that being it is better
or worse than being some other thing.
A radical feminist might say that it is a necessary and sufficient condition
for being oppressed as a woman in the actual history of our world that one
 The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave  31

had a female sexual appetite (Sherfey), a vagina (Brownmiller), a likelihood

of becoming pregnant (Firestone, Daly), or an embodied experience that
was more ‘animalistic’ (Griffin). Another way to put each of these claims is
to say that the relevant property is an essential property of being oppressed
as a woman. This is ‘essentialist’ in a descriptive sense, but it’s not clear why
this should be a term of abuse. So long as we think there are classes of things
and we don’t think they all have vague boundaries, we’ll be interested in
giving definitions.
When feminists object to essentialism because it attributes a fixed and
unchanging nature to women, they conflate biological essentialism and
biological determinism. When they object to essentialism because it will
inevitably exclude some people—namely those without the essential
property—they assume that ‘inclusion’ is so valuable as to require giving up
on biological definitions altogether.69 This is far from obvious.
Finally, it is hard to see any good reason for objecting to mere biological
explanation. Beauvoir, for example, gave an explanation of woman’s
subjugation in terms of her biology, but it was a contingent explanation. On
her account, it happened that at a particular time in early hunter-­gatherer
history, the tools that humans used to defend themselves against predation
were heavy enough that the men in the groups could use them effectively
but the women in the groups generally couldn’t.70 This led to a sex-­based
division of labour where the males defended the group and hunted large
animals, and the females cared for the young and gathered plants and
berries. The explanation depends on biology, in that the relative strength of
male and female people was the difference-­maker in who was able to use
the existing tools effectively. But the explanation is also contingent, because
had the tools been smaller and lighter, everyone could have used them
effectively, and the group might not have ended up with a sex-­based division
of labour.
As Caroline Criado-­Perez discusses in Invisible Women,71 we know that
the decisions that go into the design of tools and technologies are not always
innocent; we might also want to ask who was making the tools in Beauvoir’s
imagined history, and why they weren’t made in a way that everyone could
use. If it was because they wouldn’t have been effective in actually killing the
animals being hunted, then this explanation of the origin of women’s
oppression has no real culpability in it. It just so happens that tools needed
to be this size and weight to do their job, and it just so happens that men
could use tools of that size and weight well while women couldn’t, and for
that reason men and women ended up separating into different roles, and
32  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

from there a lot more got packed into sex roles until we got to where we
were at Beauvoir’s time of writing. Whether or not it’s the right explanation
of our actual history, it’s a good example of an explanation of women’s
oppression that is both biological and contingent.72
Having set aside the worry that explanations of women’s oppression in
terms of their distinctive physiology or biology naturalize and therefore
may seem to justify women’s oppression, we can turn to what seems to be
the most plausible explanation of the origins of women’s subordination that
has been offered by radical feminists. This came from Gerda Lerner in her
book The Creation of Patriarchy.73 Before her book came out, the most
widely accepted account of patriarchy was that offered by Friedrich Engels
in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.74 On Engels’
account, prior to the advent of agriculture men and women had a division
of labour, but equal social status. After it, intensive labour was needed,
which led to men appropriating the labour of others. This in turn lead to the
creation of private property: men owned slaves, and animals, and land, and
so came to own women.75 Beauvoir criticizes Engels for offering no real
explanation of how these developments lead to women’s oppression. She
says ‘[t]he whole account pivots around the transition from a communitarian
regime to one of private property: there is absolutely no indication of how it
was able to occur . . . Similarly, it is unclear if private property necessarily led
to the enslavement of women’.76
Lerner’s account improves on Engels’ and answers Beauvoir’s criticism,
by offering a fuller explanation of one process by which patriarchy came to
be established. (She says that patriarchy is likely to have emerged in different
places at different times and in different ways; she focused on the evidence
available about ancient Mesopotamia, drawing on the laws of archaic states,
remnants of stone tablets, sealed tombs, and other archaeological evidence.)
She argued that patriarchy became established over a process of roughly
2,500 years, between 3100 bc and 600 bc. She puts the origins at ‘the
development of intertribal warfare during periods of economic scarcity’,
which ‘fostered the rise to power of men of military achievement’.77 Groups
coming out of the hunter/gatherer period began to roam and conquer. Men
from the conquered tribes would not have been easy to enslave; it would
take a lot of labour power to oversee them and guard against insurrection.
But women could be enslaved more easily. Their will could be broken
through rape, and more importantly, through rape they could be impreg-
nated, and after giving birth their desire to protect their children would
ensure loyalty to the conquering tribe. Lerner describes this as ‘submission
 The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave  33

for the sake of their children’.78 For these reasons, when one tribe conquered
another, the conquered men were murdered, the conquered women
enslaved.
A further explanation, which entrenches women’s situation, relates to the
shift to agricultural societies, because it became advantageous to groups to
have more children, thereby more labour power. This led to men with
military power exchanging women, in order to furnish more labour power
by furnishing more reproductive power. Lerner writes that ‘the first
appropriation of private property consists of the appropriation of the labour
of women as reproducers’.79 On this view, women were the first slaves, and
men’s capacity to subdue and control women became the template for future
enslavements. There was a shift from the sexual exploitation of women in
the early period of agricultural revolution to the more general exploitation
of human labour after it. The nails in the coffin for women’s equal treatment,
Lerner argued, were the later emergence of organized monotheistic religion,
which reduced women’s position even further through an attack on the
pagan cults worshipping fertility goddesses, along with ancient philosophical
ideas about women’s substandard humanity that would become ‘the found-
ing metaphors of Western civilization’.80
Can Lerner’s historical explanation of how men ended up gaining power
over women, which makes reference to woman’s biology (at first, that she
was rapeable/impregnable; later, that her reproductive labour could be co-­
opted to meet a demand for productive labour power) be considered
biologically determinist? Only if we think what happened according to this
explanation would have happened in any merely possible history too. But as
Beauvoir pointed out, there are possible histories of the world where men
saw women as friends rather than slaves:

Woman’s powerlessness brought about her ruin because man apprehended

her through a project of enrichment and expansion. And this project is
still not enough to explain her oppression: the division of labour by sex
might have been a friendly association. If the original relation between
man and his peers had been exclusively one of friendship, one could not
account for any kind of enslavement.81

Such an origin story is essentialist in the way discussed above, though, in

that it excludes from the history of women’s oppression anyone who didn’t
have the underlying biological feature. But it’s not clear why an explanation
of how women’s oppression got started, which may be crucial in working
34  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

out remedies to that oppression, should be interested in inclusion. How sex

hierarchy got started, and what the physical basis for it was, are explanatory
questions that have answers that can be assessed according to a range of
criteria for theories in science and social science, like coherence, simplicity,
and explanatory power. Inclusiveness is not one of those criteria. Woe be to
science if it ever becomes one.
Does it matter that we figure out what the specific biological feature of
female people was that sex roles were formed on the basis of? Maybe it was
nothing more than the fact that female people were visibly detectable as
different from male people, creating two ‘types’ of humans that could be
used to solve complementary coordination problems (problems that require
a division of different labour).82 Skin pigmentation doesn’t make a difference
to a person’s capacities, but it was still used at various historical junctures as
a biological marker onto which the social meaning of race was piled in
order to justify segregated social roles and social hierarchy. The fact that
female bodies are observably different from male bodies in normal cases is
enough. There is ample documentation throughout feminist literature since
the first wave of the ways in which members of the female sex caste have
been treated as inferior, and socialized to act out exactly the limitations that
men have imposed upon them.83

2.2.2  Sustaining Mechanisms

Other feminist writing focuses less on how the oppression of women got
started, and more on what it is that keeps it in place. For Atkinson it is men
as the oppressor; for Frye it is a broader system of threats and sanctions; for
MacKinnon it is men’s control of women’s sexuality; for Firestone and
Atkinson it is (heterosexual) love; for Wittig, Dworkin, and Atkinson it is
the social construction (and social sustaining) of sex; for Millett, Frye,
Firestone, and others it is the social construction (and sustaining) of gender.
Atkinson argued in her essay ‘Declaration of War’ that the women’s
movement at the time—1969—was being avoidant in the naming of its
enemy. It pointed to ‘society’, meaning something like the social institutions
through which women’s oppression was implemented. But, she asks, who
maintains those institutions? Her answer is men. She says that ‘Women
have been massacred as human beings over history’, and that they must take
the first step, together, from ‘being massacred to engaging in battle
(resistance)’.84 Feminism is the war between women and men, oppressed
 The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave  35

and oppressor. Women remain oppressed because men oppress them (and
because women do not resist).
Frye described women’s oppression as being kept down or caged in.85
Frye wrote about the way that women’s oppression involved them being
pressed into the service of men, including men’s personal service (e.g.
housework, cooking, running errands), sexual service (e.g. providing him
with sex, bearing him children, looking attractive for him), and what Frye
called ‘ego service’ (e.g. giving him support, encouragement, attention, and
praise).86 For Frye, the ‘women’s sphere’ was the service sector.87 But why do
women end up servicing men? Frye thought others’ threats and sanctions
create our masculine or feminine (and not both) behaviour. She says, ‘The
fact that there are such penalties threatened for deviations from these
patterns strongly suggests that the patterns would not be there but for the
threats’.88 She talks about the way in which a ‘double bind’—a conflicting set
of standards—is imposed upon women in a way that makes them damned
whatever they do. On this account, what keeps women’s oppression in place
is the threats, or actual implementation, of social penalties. It is not only
men that make these threats, it is everyone. (Although Frye does not put
things in terms of ‘norms’, this is a way to understand what she was pointing
to. Certain norms about male and female behaviour exist, and individuals
reinforce and uphold those norms by sanctioning departures or violations.
I’ll develop this idea further in Chapter 3, Section 3.2.)
MacKinnon identifies the ‘male pursuit of control over women’s sexuality’
as the key issue.89 For MacKinnon, this male control of female bodies is not
‘about’ biology, but about the way that maleness and femaleness have been
socially constructed, which makes this control of the latter by the former
constitutive of maleness. On her view ‘it is sexuality that determines
gender’.90 This may be realized through rape, (denial of / insistence upon)
abortion, sexual objectification, or sexual use; and it explains why incest,
contraception, abortion, sexual harassment, the treatment of lesbians,
pornography, prostitution, and rape are all feminist political issues.91
There are clear perpetrators on MacKinnon’s account, namely the men
who commit sexual crimes against women. But there is also something
more amorphous, namely the social construction of sex/gender categories.
Social meaning can build up over time without anyone much intending it;
individuals who make culpable contributions, as undoubtedly many
influential men throughout history have done, may be long dead; and even
those who are victims of constructions that position them as inferior
can  help to sustain those constructions. I’ll say more about the social
36  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

construction of sex below in talking about Wittig, Dworkin, and Atkinson;

and I’ll say more about the social construction of gender below in talking
about Kreps, Millett, Frye, Firestone, and others.
Firestone and Atkinson both pointed to love as a mechanism of
patriarchal control. (Atkinson also points to other institutions, including
marriage, the family, sexual intercourse, religion, and prostitution).92
Atkinson thought that ‘uniting’ with the oppressed was a clever strategy
by  men to keep women from organizing.93 Firestone thought women
exchanged love for economic and emotional security and emotional identity
(the latter men can get through work, but women at the time largely could
not).94 She thought that genuine love required mutual exchange, and that
this was not possible when there was an unequal balance of power, which
there always was between men and women.95 This kind of thought is likely
what lead some radical feminist women to advocate separatism from men.
Monique Wittig wrote in her 1976 essay ‘The Category of Sex’ that ‘there
is no sex’, and that ‘oppression creates sex and not the contrary’.96 She insists
that ‘the category of sex does not exist a priori, before all society’.97 Andrea
Dworkin says similarly that not only are masculinity and femininity
culturally constructed, but so too are the biological categories of man and
woman ‘fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs’.98 Atkinson suggests the
same: ‘Traditional feminism is caught in the dilemma of demanding equal
treatment for unequal functions, because it is unwilling to challenge
political (functional) classification by sex’. She continues,

The feminist dilemma is that it is as women—or ‘females’—that women

are persecuted, just as it was as slaves—or ‘blacks’—that slaves were
persecuted in America. In order to improve their condition, those
individuals who are today defined as women must eradicate their own
definition. Women must, in a sense, commit suicide.99

On this view, what sustains women’s oppression is the fact that we sustain
and reproduce sex categories. If we didn’t, there would be no difference that
we could attach differential treatment or socialization to. Everyone who
participates in the ‘social construction’ of sex, which is basically everyone in
the society, would be complicit. (The related solution, which I will discuss in
more detail below, is that we stop constructing sex.)
Instead of identifying the social construction (and sustaining) of sex as
the mechanism by which women are oppressed, other radical feminists
identified the social construction (and sustaining) of gender as the
 The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave  37

mechanism. Bonnie Kreps, for example, identified as the ‘crux of the

problem’ that ‘man has consistently defined woman not in terms of herself
but in relation to him’.100 Like Atkinson, she thought there were a number of
institutions that perpetuated social roles for the sexes (what she called ‘sex
roles’), including ‘love, marriage, sex, masculinity, and femininity’.101
Dismantling the socialization of women into these social roles would go a
long way to liberating women. Others who took roughly this view included
Kate Millett;102 Marilyn Frye;103 Firestone;104 Atkinson;105 and two radical
feminist collectives based in New York, ‘The Feminists’,106 and the ‘New
York Radical Feminists’.107
On this view, there is a complex network of social ideas about what
female people should be like and what male people should be like, and those
ideas include value judgements that allow the positioning of male people as
superior to female people. It is something physical, namely male and female
biological difference, that these ideas are applied to, but it is the ideas
themselves, and the social incentives (threats and sanctions) that create
women’s oppression. This broad picture allows us to capture the basic points
that many feminists have made, including that gender is a role hierarchy, or
that gender is a system of dominance and subordination; it allows us to say
more about how these ideas are socially and culturally transmitted (e.g.
through the family unit, through the media); and it allows us to ask
questions about whose interests this system serves (e.g. men’s, because it
positions men as superior and it secures women’s service for them). It also
allows us to make predictions, for example about how women who are not
feminine and men who are not masculine will be treated by others. All of
these are routes into dismantling the system and therefore relieving women’s
oppression.

2.2.3  Utopias and Solutions

As we have seen, different radical feminists had different solutions to the

problem of women’s oppression. It is possible to discern at least six broad
­categories, although probably there were more: valuing women’s difference;
women’s religion; technological advances; changes to language; consciousness-­
raising; the end of sex differentiation; and the end of the social construction
of gender categories (gender abolitionism). Let’s take these in turn.
Valuing women’s difference. Some radical feminists saw a solution in the
celebration of women’s difference. Bracket what makes men and women
38  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

different (biology, culture, or a combination of the two), and just notice that
they are different. On this view, the problem is not necessarily with the
difference, but with how it is treated. Women are perceived as inferior, when
actually their unique traits are complementary to men’s (and so equal), or
superior to men’s (and so unequal, but in a way that flips the hierarchy).
A  ‘maternalist’ position sees women as more altruistic because they have
maternal instincts, and more virtuous because they have lower sex drives;
women can rescue society from the ‘destruction, competition, and violence’
of men (this position was developed in the first wave).108 Carol Gilligan,
working with prominent male psychologists through the 1970s, noticed
that they focused on separation, autonomy, and independence, while the
women she interviewed all talked about relationships and interdependence.
This lead her to argue that women think differently about moral problems,
and further to conclude that something had gone wrong with men’s moral
development to lead to non-­relational thinking (initiation into maleness
being the likely culprit).109 Women applied her ideas to ethics and developed
a feminist ‘ethics of care’.110
There’s something important here. Women pursuing this solution, who
have come to be known as ‘difference feminists’, were attempting to undercut
the subordination of women by revaluing women’s differences, not as
making them inferior to men, but as making them either equal, or superior,
to men.111 We need not deny the difference; as MacKinnon said, ‘can you
imagine elevating one half of a population and denigrating the other half
and producing a population in which everyone is the same?’.112 But there is
a worry that in celebrating difference we reinforce or perpetuate it, making
it harder for both men and women to act in ways that do not conform to the
supposed differences between them. Stephanie Collins, writing in The Core
of Care Ethics, argues that an ethics of care can (and should) be completely
detached from women, and treated as an ethical system in its own right
which everyone can make use of.113
Women’s religion. In 1971, a small group of women in Malibu started the
Susan  B.  Anthony Coven No. 1, an experiment at the time which turned
into a group of between twenty and 120 women who met twenty-­one times
a year to observe solstices, equinoxes, and full moons. They took as their
starting point Florence Nightingale’s question ‘Do you think it is possible
for there to be a religion whose essence is common sense?’, and answered it
with ‘a common sense that glorifies practical things and the improvement of
our lives right now, not later, after death, which is absurd’.114 They thought
of themselves as feminist witches, practicing a Dianic religion. ‘Diana’ is the
 The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave  39

European name for the Goddess of the Moon; their witchcraft included
worship of this Goddess but also ‘a women-­centred, female-­only worship of
women’s mysteries’.115 But the ‘Goddess’ is really nature: ‘each time we talk
about the Goddess what we really mean is Life—life on this earth. We
always recognize, when we say “Goddess,” that she is the life-­giver, the life-­
sustainer. She is Mother Nature’.116
The women ran a candle shop and practiced stargazing astrology.117
There were priestesses and teachers, psychics, and tarot card readers. For
these women, a ‘witch’ was a woman with spiritual power, and they were
witches.118 They named their coven after Susan  B.  Anthony because of a
remark she made to a reporter when asked mockingly about what she was
going to do in the afterlife, and she replied ‘I shall go neither to heaven nor
to hell, but stay right here and finish the women’s revolution’.119 Within the
manifesto of the Susan  B.  Anthony coven we can find commitments to
women’s control of their own bodies, to sisterhood, to women’s self-­
organization, and to the struggle against patriarchy, as well as criticism of
patriarchal religions.120 The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries promises on its
front cover ‘Feminist witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting, and other
womanly arts . . .’.121
It would be easy to dismiss the practice of feminist witchcraft now, as
pseudo-­science and mysticism. But it did a number of important things,
including reaching back to the pagan religions before patriarchy and
reintroducing some of their more female-­ positive traditions; affirming
women’s rights; building sisterhood and solidarity between women, which
created social ties strong enough to carry political organizing through
tough times; and it made feminism fun, by creating rituals and celebrations,
and by giving social status to women (e.g. as priestesses) that may have been
denied to them in the wider world.
Technological advances. Firestone’s imagined solution was different, in
that it was technological. She located the source of women’s oppression in
their reproduction, and the constraints that imposed for the duration of
pregnancy, breastfeeding, and care of young children. She wanted
reproduction outside of the woman’s body, for example in the laboratory
(this is now discussed under the term ‘ectogenesis’). Freed from physical
burden, a sex-­based division of labour would no longer be necessary.122
Some women worry about technological solutions to problems affecting
women because technology is so often male-­designed and male-­controlled
for male-­profit. And there are a host of feasibility and ethical questions that
this proposal raises. Is it really that the equality of the sexes is impossible so
40  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

long as women still reproduce? Is ectogenesis technologically feasible, at

scale? What moral responsibility does a person who contributes genetic
material (sperm or eggs) have over the baby that results?123 Will
corporations be allowed to control this lab-­based reproduction, or is this a
matter for the state? Will sex selection be allowed? Can we expect this
system to reproduce existing social injustices? Was Dworkin right to fear
this technology, on the grounds that ‘when women no longer function as
biological breeders we will be expendable’?124
Changes to language. Yet another group of radical feminists were focused
on what today we would probably call ‘linguistic activism’, a kind of activism
focused on words, concepts, and meanings. Together with Jane Caputi,
Mary Daly wrote Webster’s First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English
Language. This was full of new words, and new meanings for old words.
Insults were reclaimed: ‘catty’ became ‘Self-­reliant, independent, resilient;
having the Wild, Witchy, and Wicked characteristics of a cat’.125 New
concepts helped women to come to terms with their history and see
themselves as a caste, for example ‘gynocide’ was coined to mean ‘planned,
institutionalized spiritual and bodily destruction of women; the use of
deliberate systematic measures (such as killing, bodily or mental injury,
unliveable conditions, prevention of births), which are calculated to bring
about the destruction of women as a political and cultural force, the
eradication of Female/Bio-­logical126 religion and language’.127 Thousands of
years of male domination can be expected to have become entrenched in
language; this was a direct attempt by women to rewrite some of the more
obvious patriarchal words and concepts, and to make a feminist contribution
to language.
The limits to this kind of solution are that language cannot generally be
changed by decree, but depends upon uptake by the rest of the language
community.128 Furthermore, it’s not clear how much changes in the material
reality of women experiencing domination or discrimination as a result of
language change. J. K. Rowling puts this perfectly through the character of
detective Cormoran Strike in Troubled Blood, when he says to student
activists ‘Reclaim . . . language all you fucking like. You don’t change . . . real-­
world attitudes by deciding slurs aren’t . . . derogatory’.129
Consciousness-­raising. Catherine MacKinnon argued that while some of
women’s oppression was material, some of it was also psychological. She
wrote about ‘the pain, isolation, and thingification of women who have been
pampered and pacified into nonpersonhood—women “grown ugly and
dangerous from being nobody for so long” ’.130 The remedy for psychological
 The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave  41

oppression is consciousness-­raising, which means women coming together

in small groups to talk about their experiences. MacKinnon says that in
consciousness-­ raising ‘the impact of male dominance is concretely
un­covered and analyzed through the collective speaking of women’s experi-
ence, from the perspective of that experience’.131 In the editor’s note to her
paper,  consciousness-­ raising is described as ‘challeng[ing] traditional
notions of authority and objectivity and open[ing] a dialectical questioning
of existing power structures, of our own experience, and of theory itself ’.132
Consciousness-­raising was a way to start unmaking feminine socialization,
first by becoming aware of it, and then by beginning the work of throwing it
off, with support from and in solidarity with other women. This solution
was distinctive to the radicals; it functioned as a response to their diagnosis
of women’s socialization into femininity as running especially deep, as
something that would hold her in place even when her material constraints
were lifted.
As a solution, consciousness-­raising was most crucial when feminism
was new. In a context in which feminist ideas are widespread, and in which
we have good explanations of the mechanisms by which women’s oppression
is sustained and women are made (or attempted to be made) feminine, it is
likely to be less central. However, it may earn its place again in contemporary
feminism, as part of a pushback against socially dominant feminist ideas.
The end of sex differentiation. Some radical feminists thought the solution
to women’s oppression was to end the social practice of classifying people
by sex. Marilyn Frye takes as one of her projects an explanation of sexism,
ending up at the idea that ‘individual acts and practices are sexist which
reinforce and support . . . cultural and economic structures which create and
enforce the elaborate and rigid patterns of sex-­marking and sex-­announcing
which divide the species, along lines of sex, into dominators and
subordinates’.133 Resistance to sexism undermines those structures, and
engages in the project of ‘reconstruction and revision of ourselves’.134 Frye
anticipates Judith Butler when she says that we ‘perform’ gender:

It is quite a spectacle, really, once one sees it, these humans so devoted to
dressing up and acting out and ‘fixing’ one another so everyone lives up to
and lives out the theory that there are two sharply distinct sexes and never
the twain shall overlap or be confused or conflated . . . It is wonderful that
homosexuals and lesbians are mocked and judged for ‘playing butch-­
femme roles’ and for dressing in ‘butch-­femme drag’, for nobody goes
about in full public view as thoroughly decked out in butch and femme
42  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

drag as respectable heterosexuals when they are dressed up to go out in

the evening, or to go to church, or to go to the office.135

She spends much of the essay pointing to the ways in which sex is
‘announced’ through dress, comportment, speech, and behaviour; making
clear that we make a big deal of marking our own sex and of knowing
others’. Her point is that there could not be a dominance-­subordination
structure without caste boundaries, and these particular caste boundaries
depend on the constant identification of sex.136 And here’s the kicker: the
oppression of women ‘could not exist were not the groups, the categories of
persons, well defined . . . the barriers and forces could not be suitably located
and applied if there were often much doubt as to which individuals were to
be contained and reduced, which were to dominate’.137
Frye is pointing towards the solution that many feminists seem to have
taken up with enthusiasm today, namely the project of blurring or entirely
getting rid of sex categories. Sex-­announcing and sex-­marking is deliberately
confounded by some gender non-­conforming people. Some have argued
that we should stop announcing sex in language, by shifting to gender-­
neutral pronouns for everyone.138 Some claim that sex is a social
construct,139 or sex is much more complicated than we have assumed,140 or
that sex is a spectrum.141 Indeed, Frye herself makes a version of this claim
when she says ‘There are people who fit on a biological spectrum between
two not-­so-­sharply defined poles’.142 So does MacKinnon, when she says
‘Sex, in nature, is not a bipolarity; it is a continuum. In society it is made
into a bipolarity’.143 If it is sex that the hierarchy is imposed upon, one
solution is to ‘disappear’ sex (or ‘abolish’ sex, as Monique Wittig put it).144
There are some reasons to think this is not a good solution. First, sex is
not socially constructed. In philosophy, when we talk about ‘social
construction’, we’re generally talking about thoroughly social entities:
paradigmatically, money, universities, corporations.145 For example, if
people didn’t together believe in the authority of the university to award
degrees, universities would not have that authority. There would not be such
things as degrees, conferring status upon people and making them more
employable. There are rocks, mountains, and lakes out there in the world,
and they would be there whether we did anything or not. But ‘universities’
and ‘degrees’, and the ‘authority to award degrees’, are all in the world
because of us, because of our shared beliefs and attitudes. Sex is like rocks
and trees; gender is like money and universities. Sex is out there in the
world, whether we choose to care much about it or not. Gender depends on
 The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave  43

us (or depends in large part on us).146 The content of feminine socialization

has varied across time and place. We’ve created a world that limits women’s
opportunities, and then we’ve pointed to the lack of women’s accomplish-
ments to justify keeping those limits in place. We’ve constructed women as
passive, as objects, as people whose existence is literally for men (while men
are constructed as active, as agents, as people who exist for themselves).147
When radical feminists say that gender is socially constructed, they mean to
highlight the special sense in which some things come entirely from social
attitudes. The ‘glue’ that holds gender together is our human attitudes,
beliefs, and expectations. The same is not true for sex.
Pointing to the fact of social construction when the meaning of a thing is
pernicious, or hurts people, is often a first step in finding a way to
deconstruct it. This is exactly what the second-­wavers were trying to do
when they first made use of the sex/gender distinction. This strategy makes
sense when it’s deployed against things like money and universities
(although once made, it is not necessarily easy to unmake). But it’s absolutely
hopeless against things like rocks and trees. Imagine saying that because
people have been tripping over rocks and falling over, we’re going to stop
noticing rocks and referring to them. That’s going to result in nothing but a
bunch of people pretending not to see something that they very much do
see in the short term, and it’s unlikely to stop people tripping over. Given
that we have noticed rocks, we’d be better to clear them out of the way. If it’s
really sex and not gender that’s hurting people, which is doubtful, we’d do
better to raise awareness about what does and doesn’t follow from being of a
particular sex (which is what the gender abolitionists do, on which more
next), rather than arguing that sex doesn’t exist.148 Because sex is not
‘socially constructed’ in the first place, deconstructing it—including
abolishing it—is not possible.
Second, as above, it’s not clear whether changing our terms and concepts
really precedes meaningful political change, which requires change to
people’s beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Perhaps people will stop referring to
sex, because they learn that this attracts social sanctions. But this doesn’t
mean they’ll stop perceiving sex, or responding to sex, or having sexist
beliefs or expectations. Forcing linguistic or conceptual change does not
necessarily correspond to securing real moral or political change.
Gender abolitionism. An alternative to ‘disappearing’ sex is to ‘disappear’
the mistaken expectations that we pile onto sex instead—all the assumptions
about what follows from the reproductive and other bodily differences
between the sexes. John Stuart Mill149 (ahead of his time), Beauvoir,150
44  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

Frye,151 and others have all argued for the following sceptical conclusion:
we just can’t know that there are differences in men’s and women’s behaviour
or capacities or interests resulting from their biology, because we’ve never
had a context in which that biology was free of structural constraints.152
Many of the second-­wavers saw gender as channelling people into sex
roles, creating a hierarchy that perpetuates male dominance.153 This view
places a heavy emphasis on the environment women are in, and how they
are socialized. They argue that we impose gender onto male and female
people, creating different broad social roles. Worse, these roles are not
equal; women are considered inferior. Atkinson writes in the essay ‘Radical
Feminism and Love’ that ‘A woman can only change her political definition
by organizing with other women to change the definition of the female role,
eventually eliminating it, thereby freeing herself to be human’.154 Similar
comments are made by Firestone.155 This is the project of dismantling
feminine socialization and freeing women to be whatever they want to be.
For those radical feminists who understood gender to be the socialization
of the sexes into social roles (femininity and masculinity), the solution was
obvious: gender abolitionism (sometimes also ‘gender annihilation’).
But the way some radical feminist women interpreted gender abolition
or gender annihilation was as integrating both femininity and masculinity
into a kind of harmony referred to as ‘androgyny’ or ‘unisex’. For example,
Carolyn Heilburn wrote a book called Toward a Recognition of Androgyny
and talked about ‘the realization of man in woman and woman in man’.156
Betty Roszak wrote in an essay called ‘The Human Continuum’ that ‘Perhaps
with the overcoming of women’s oppression, the woman in man will be
allowed to emerge’.157 In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf talked about
there being two powers in the brain, the male and the female, where one
predominates. She wrote hopefully of a time where the two powers would
be more in balance: ‘the normal and comfortable state of being is when the
two live in harmony together, spiritually co-­operating’.158
Other radical feminists, among them Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, and
Jeffner Allen, criticized this vision of gender abolition.159 Rather than seeing
current forms of masculinity and femininity as natural aspects of the human
personality that are cultivated and magnified through socialization and so
could exist in different proportion in each person, we should see current
forms of masculinity and femininity as artefacts of patriarchy, which might
be completely different—and indeed completely absent—without it. Instead
of abolishing gender by incorporating both masculinity and femininity into
each individual, we can search for new conceptualizations of how people
 The Radical Feminists of the Second Wave  45

can be without gender. Raymond compared androgyny as an aspiration for

abolition to putting the concepts of master and slave together to define a
free person.160 Still, androgyny as a vision of what a gender abolitionist
future might look like should not be confused with gender abolition itself,
which is compatible with a number of different futures. We can agree with
Raymond, Daly, and Allen that the harmony version of androgyny or unisex
won’t work, without throwing out the understanding of women’s oppression
and the proposed solution of gender abolitionism entirely.
We won’t know how different masculinity and femininity will be, and
indeed whether they will be much different, until we can ‘run the
experiment’ in a human society without patriarchy. Frye agrees with this
when she says

we do not know whether human behaviour patterns would be dimorphic

along lines of chromosomal sex if we were not threatened and bullied; nor
do we know, if we assume that they would be dimorphous, what they
would be, that is, what constellations of traits and tendencies would fall
out along that genetic line.161

My own suspicion is that physiological differences will create some social

differences between men and women, on average, in any possible future.
The pain and inconvenience of menstruation; the different phenomenology
of sexual intercourse; the fear of rape (even when its incidence is much
lower); the possibility of pregnancy; the facts of pregnancy, breastfeeding,
and the dependency of young children (even when the labour of childrearing
is more equally shared); the impacts of pregnancy on the body (even when
feminine beauty norms have been eroded); the incidence of menopause;
these must all have an impact on what it is like to be female, which may in
turn impact preferences and interests to at least some extent.
There will be many exceptions—just as there are to average differences
between men and women even under our current non-­utopian conditions162—
but it remains plausible to expect some average differences. Still, once society
is no longer marked by male dominance, these differences are unlikely
to  have much in common with the current content of ‘femininity’, which
expects women to be, for example, beautiful, warm, supportive, nurturing,
submissive, and self-­effacing.163
It’s worth noting that of all these solutions to patriarchy or ways of chal-
lenging patriarchy, two in particular are not likely to succeed unless they are
‘women-­ only’. These are women’s religion and consciousness-­ raising.
46  Gender-Critical Feminism’s Radical Roots

Arguably, women’s religion is about creating spiritual bonds between

women, bonds of sisterhood and solidarity. Women return to women some
of the social status that they have not been given by men. In consciousness-­
raising, women discuss their experiences of domination under patriarchy,
and try to find ways forward to free and recreate themselves. Having men
involved in these practices is likely to undermine their aims. This is not
obviously true for the other solutions—men can participate in challenging
patriarchal language, and in working on technologies to free women from
reproduction, for example. (This will be relevant in Chapter  3, when we
come to the place of men in gender-­critical feminism; and Chapter 5, when
we talk about the tensions between gender-­critical feminism and gender
identity activism.)
 3
Gender-­Critical Feminism

No amount of calling myself ‘agender’ will stop the world seeing

me as a woman, and treating me accordingly. I can introduce
myself as agender and insist upon my own set of neo-­pronouns
when I apply for a job, but it won’t stop the interviewer seeing a
potential baby-­maker, and giving the position to the less quali-
fied but less encumbered by reproduction male candidate.
(Rebecca Reilly-­Cooper, ‘Gender is Not A Spectrum’)1

3.1  Sex Matters

It should be clear from Chapter 2 that biological sex—being female—mat-

tered to radical feminists. (As mentioned already, some people use both
‘female’ and ‘woman’ to refer to gender identity; but given that ‘male’ and
‘female’ are the standard scientific terms for the biological sexes, and
especially given that there are no other terms to refer to the sexes, I am
rejecting that usage here.) Sex was key to every explanation offered for the
origins of women’s oppression, whether it related to their reproductive
capacities or to their comparative physical strength or to their sexuality. It
was also a key feature in every explanation of the mechanisms by which
women’s oppression is sustained, however it got started. Babies are
channelled into sex roles depending on what sex they are observed as being.
Children are socialized according to socially constructed ideas about gender
that are attached to people on the basis of sex. Sex is a necessary ingredient
in gender, because it tells us what it is that the social meanings are attached
to. There is no way to eliminate or displace sex—as some of those com-
mitted to gender as an identity want to do2—without a massive loss of
explanatory power.
We can make this point about the importance of sex without any of the
theoretical commitments of radical feminism, though. It’s enough to simply
notice that sex categories have political importance. They allow us to name a

Gender-Critical Feminism: Holly Lawford-Smith, Oxford University Press. © Holly Lawford-Smith 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863885.003.0003
48  Gender-Critical Feminism

caste of people who have been oppressed and excluded from public life. It is
female people, not people who perform femininity or people who identify as
women, who were denied the vote, until 1893 in New Zealand (the first
country to grant full suffrage to women), until 1920 in the United States,
and until 2015 in Saudi Arabia. It is female people who have struggled since
the end of the 16th century to secure rights to abortion, with abortions of all
types (including as a result of rape or incest) still being illegal in twenty-­six
countries today.3 It is female people who were excluded from work and
from public life, for example in Australia women were not elected into the
Commonwealth Parliament until 1943; didn’t have the right to drink in a
public bar until 1965; and were forced to resign from their jobs in the public
service or in many private companies when they got married during the
1960s. Women are still paid 17.5 per cent less than men who do the same
work.4 Women are persistently sexually objectified throughout the media,
and socialized to believe their primary value is in their appearance and in
their capacity to reproduce. I could go on, and talk about sex-­selective
abortions; female genital mutilation; human trafficking, the great bulk of
which is women into sexual slavery; prostitution and pornography; the
distribution of domestic labour; career choice and remuneration; risk of
male violence; underrepresentation in high-­ status employment fields;
underrepresentation at the higher levels of almost all employment areas;
underrepresentation in politics; underrepresentation in sports . . . but I am
sure the point is clear enough.
Because women have historically been the victims of subordination and
exclusion from public life, and because the effects of this subordination and
exclusion have far-­reaching implications which are still being felt today
(even where the formal obstacles have been removed), it remains important
to protect this caste of people. The international law Convention on the
Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was
adopted in 1979 in recognition of the fact that existing human rights law
had not succeeded in protecting women. One way to protect women is by
acknowledging relevant differences, e.g. the physical differences between
male and female people that lead to the former’s having a competitive
advantage in sport.5 Another is by implementing affirmative action policies
in order to increase women’s participation or representation in areas where
they have been historically excluded and remain underrepresented.6
Yet  another is by providing (or maintaining) women-­only spaces, services,
and  provisions, e.g. women’s gyms, women’s health services, women’s
consciousness-­raising groups.7 We cannot offer these protections if we
 Sex Matters  49

cannot clearly identify the class of people to whom they apply. Radical fem­
in­ists think sex is important, but you don’t have to be a radical feminist to
think this.
Reaffirming the political importance of sex also continues the radical
feminist project of correcting for the disproportionate emphasis placed on
the mind over the body, which was a legacy of classical liberalism. Alison
Jaggar calls this ‘normative dualism’, the idea that not only is there a mind/
body divide, but that the mind is the more important and more deserving of
value. Jaggar criticized this view as male-­biased, on the basis that men and
women have very different physical experiences given the difference in their
reproductive role.8 A mind-­focused approach to equal employment policy
might overlook the distinctive bodily needs women have relating to
menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and menopause. Bodily differences
between men and women also matter particularly in the political debate
over sports inclusion policy today. Because going through male puberty
produces a set of physical differences that give men a competitive advantage
in most sports, sports have tended to be sex-­separated in order to allow fair
competition. This sex-­separation is being challenged today on the grounds
of transgender inclusion, with some arguing that transwomen should be
allowed to compete in women’s sports.
Physical differences also matter for the politics of language. Some
organizations are rewording sex-­specific language to make it gender neutral,
in order to accommodate ‘gender minorities’. Women may get pregnant and
breastfeed, women are at risk of cervical cancer, and women are most at risk
of breast cancer. But if transmen are men, and non-­binary females are not
women, then to be maximally accurate and inclusive, we have to say things
like ‘people who get pregnant’, or ‘people with cervixes’.9 This makes invisible
the fact that it’s only a very specific group of ‘people’ to whom these things
happen, namely female people.
Female people have shared interests, as female. It is reasonable for people
with shared interests to organize politically around those interests. This
does not require that all women have the exact same experiences, which
they obviously do not.10 It is enough that there exist patterns that create a
shared threat to them. There can be differential exposure to that threat while
it still being the case that the threat is shared. Rape, for example, can happen
to a woman regardless of whether she is advantaged in ways not relating to
her sex.
Given everything I have said so far, hopefully the need and justification
for a theory and movement that names the female sex caste and the
50  Gender-Critical Feminism

oppression of its members is clear. That theory is radical feminism, and its
latest incarnation, gender-­critical feminism. It is an advantage of this type
of feminism that there are few hard questions about group membership,11
and so no pressure to throw our hands up and repudiate all attempts at a
(non-­circular) definition of ‘woman’.12
It is important to note that while sex is the trait that gender is imposed on
the basis of, sex itself does not have to be part of every specific way that
women are marginalized. In this way, gender-­ critical feminism has a
broader remit than (some versions of) radical feminism. Pressing women
into the unpaid domestic service of men in many countries means they
cannot engage in paid work, and those women have much less money than
men, and are economically dependent upon men. Some of those women
might have succeeded in disengaging from their male partner sexually,
however, and may be childless. So it’s not adequate to say that their
oppression is based in their sexuality, childbearing, or childrearing. It’s
really not about their female body at all. Rather, it’s about the way that
people with those kinds of bodies have been subject to certain kinds of
expectations and pushed into certain kinds of roles on the basis of them. We
need to understand gender norms, the content of women’s subjection to
norms of femininity.

3.2  Gender Norms

In Chapter 2, I quoted Marilyn Frye on the point that it is social threats that
protect against deviation from gender-­conforming behaviour (by which
I  mean, men being masculine and women being feminine), and that the
­patterns of femininity and masculinity would not be there but for those
threats.13 And I mentioned that although she does not use the idea of norms,
that is nonetheless a helpful conceptual framework for understanding what
she was getting at.
Rebecca Reilly-­Cooper, writing for Aeon in 2016, explains gender in this
way. Gender is a set of norms that are applied to people on the basis of their
sex, prescribing one set of behaviours to female people as desirable and
proscribing another set as undesirable; and prescribing another set of
behaviours to male people as desirable and proscribing another set as
undesirable.14 What is desirable for one is undesirable for the other. Reilly-­
Cooper explains:
 Gender Norms  51

Not only are these norms external to the individual and coercively
imposed, but they also represent a binary caste system or hierarchy, a
value system with two positions: maleness above femaleness, manhood
above womanhood, masculinity above femininity. Individuals are born
with the potential to perform one of two reproductive roles, determined at
birth, or even before, by the external genitals that the infant possesses.
From then on, they will be inculcated into one of two classes in the
hierarchy: the superior class if their genitals are convex, the inferior one if
their genitals are concave.15

Most females are raised to be ‘passive, submissive, weak and nurturing’,

while most males are raised to be ‘active, dominant, strong and aggressive’.16
This system constrains human potential and creates social hierarchy.
It is important to distinguish between two different types of norms: social
norms and moral norms. Moral norms are personal. They can differ from
person to person, and do not depend much upon what other people think.
They are requirements we impose on ourselves, and failure to live up to
them can be a cause of guilt or shame. Social norms are social. They are held
in place by social beliefs, social conformity, and social policing. Social
norms start with normative expectations, which means expectations that
have value judgements attached. Cristina Bicchieri gives an account of
social norms as rules of behaviour that people prefer to conform to because
they believe that most other people conform to them, and most other people
believe they ought to conform to them.17 When Bicchieri talks about ‘most
people’, she doesn’t mean most people in the whole world. She means, in a
‘reference network’, which is something like, in the group of people you’re
embedded in. This might be your country, your state, or your community.
For an example of a social norm that fits this account, in Japan, there is a
norm (although it is currently being challenged) of women wearing high
heels to work, usually between 1.9 and 2.75 inches in height.18 For any given
woman who does this, she is likely to believe (because she observes it) that
other women do in fact wear high heels to work, and likely to believe that
people think that women ought to wear high heels to work. Perhaps she has
seen other women get in trouble with their bosses when they don’t wear
high heels, or she has read opinion pieces in the media about the importance
of women wearing high heels, or has heard other women express negative
thoughts about women who don’t wear high heels to work. (The #KuToo
movement is an attempt by Japanese women to raise awareness about the
52  Gender-Critical Feminism

discomfort of working long hours in high heels, and to change this norm in
Japan).19
Gender norms are social norms, but they may also be internalized as
moral norms for many people. Perhaps a woman works to stay in shape, and
does that because she sees a lot of other women doing it, and because she
knows that a lot of people believe women ought to be physically attractive.
But she may also believe that regardless of what any other woman is doing,
she ought to stay in shape, and if she goes through a stressful period where
she cannot exercise as much and gains weight, she may feel ashamed for
failing to live up to this standard that she has imposed upon herself.20
Because gender norms are so pervasive, and because women are encultur-
ated into the norms of femininity since birth, it is not uncommon for at least
some gender norms to be internalized as moral norms, and not just social
norms. When norms are social, they can be changed by challenging con-
formity (for example, getting a lot of women in Japan to stop wearing high
heels to work), and by challenging the idea that conformity is valuable (for
example, by pointing out how much discomfort it causes women to be in
high heels through long days on their feet, and showing how unfair it is that
women are expected to suffer this discomfort while men are not).21 When
they are moral, things are more complicated.22
This should not be taken to suggest that if women were to stop
conforming to gender norms and everyone were to stop policing norms of
femininity tomorrow, women’s oppression would suddenly dissolve and
women would be liberated. The historical imposition of these norms has
created a legacy of ‘structural injustice’, which is injustice that has been
embedded into the law, culture, and major social institutions. For example,
norms about marriage and homemaking imposed historically upon women
meant there were no women in medicine until a particular point in time,
and then few, and now still a minority in some areas (like cardiothoracic
surgery, vascular surgery, and orthopaedic surgery).23 Women form roughly
30 per cent of medical leadership in Australia (medical school deans, chief
medical officers, medical college boards, and committee members).24 This
has meant that medical research has been androcentric to a very large
degree throughout history, and to a significant degree even today. The fact
that there is a lack of research into specific women’s health issues creates
disadvantage for women that suffer those issues (against a counterfactual
baseline of there being no historical injustice, and so no transformation of
historical injustice into structural injustice).
 Gender Norms  53

Feminist philosopher Katharine Jenkins, writing in defence of gender as

identity, acknowledges that gender is a system of norms in roughly the way
Reilly-­Cooper has in mind, but argues that gender identity is taking these
norms to apply to you. Jenkins writes ‘to say that someone has a female
gender identity is to say that she experiences the norms that are associated
with women in her social context as relevant to her’.25 But she also notes
that one may take certain norms to be relevant while also knowing that
‘other people judge their behaviour by reference to norms of (say)
masculinity’.26 According to Riley-­Cooper, there is a system of norms that
tell female people to be feminine;27 according to Jenkins, anyone can take
the norms of femininity to apply to them, and that’s an explanation of what
it is to have a gender identity. But Jenkins is making a mistake about how
norms work. As Reilly-­Cooper said, norms are ‘external to the individual
and coercively imposed’. If they were just ideas, out there in the world and
freely available for people to take to apply to themselves or not, they
wouldn’t be norms, and there would be nothing to explain women’s
oppression. It’s the coercive imposition, what Frye referred to as ‘penalties’
and ‘threats’, that make gender a system of norms in the first place. So a
person who is not female can take feminine norms to apply to them all they
like, but as long as they’re recognizably male, they won’t actually be subject
to those norms (they’ll be subject to the norms of masculinity instead).
A judge in a recent case in the United States involving discrimination on
the basis of transgender status seems to agree with this. Aimee Stevens was
employed at a funeral home while still presenting as male. Stevens told her
employer that she was planning to transition and wanted to start adhering
to the female dress code rather than the male one, and then was fired.28
Elizabeth Hungerford quotes Justice Kagan, whose interpretation of a prior
case was ‘there is another trait . . . conformity to traditional gender roles’.
Kagan joined the opinion of the court, which found that the firing of
Stephens was unlawful for multiple reasons, one of which came from a legal
precedent against sex stereotyping. Hungerford agrees with Kagan when
she writes:

Under a gender non-­ conformity analysis, Aimee Stephens’ firing was

clearly unlawful. Again, this reasoning requires that we hold Stephens’
biological sex as male in order to assess which gender roles he is expected
to conform to and/or has deviated from. It also avoids creating an
assumption that people with ‘transgender status’ are more harmed or
54  Gender-Critical Feminism

more burdened by the enforcement of gender roles than other people are,
specifically those people who share the trait of gender non-­conformity.29

When we understand gender as a system of norms imposed on the basis of

sex, we are able to make predictions about how people will be policed. It is
because Stevens was male that she was fired for wanting to dress in male-­
atypical clothing. If we suppose that Stevens was female, then it’s a mystery
why she was fired, given that no other women in the workplace were fired
for wearing male-­atypical (i.e. female-­typical) clothing. If we suppose that
this was about transgender discrimination, then we miss the fact that a gen-
der non-­conforming woman (for example, a butch lesbian)30 who wanted to
adhere to the male dress code in the same workplace might similarly be
fired. This is an important point: it is not just trans people who face dis-
crimination on the grounds of gender non-­conformity. And yet it is only
trans people who there is a serious social effort to protect from this kind of
discrimination.
Some will argue that it can’t be sex that norms are imposed on the basis
of. After all, some people are routinely mis-­sexed. The feminist philosopher
Lori Watson writes:

more often than not, I am identified by others, who do not know me, as a
man; I would conjecture that in everyday interactions with strangers, I am
taken to be a man over 90 percent of the time. This identification started
happening regularly about sixteen years ago when I cut my hair very short.
(I had always dressed in ‘men’s clothing’ since my teenage years. Add to
this that I am nearly six feet tall and have broad shoulders and a ‘healthy’
frame. This is the body I was given.) In fact, others so routinely identify
me as a man that I am often caught off guard and surprised if someone
correctly identifies me as a woman . . . I am not a man. I do not identify as a
man. I don’t want to be a man, trans or otherwise. I am a woman . . .31

Does this show that it’s not sex, but something else, that norms are applied
on the basis of? Feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger, in a well-­known
paper on race and gender, seemed to think so. She seemed to roughly agree
with the norms picture, describing being a woman as being marked as a
target for subordinating treatment. But she claimed that women were not
marked as targets because they were female, but because of ‘observed or
imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological
role in reproduction’.32 Haslanger is one of the philosophers who decoupled
 Gender Norms  55

sex from gender, and used ‘woman’ as a gender term, so that ‘one can be a
woman without ever (in the ordinary sense) “acting like a woman”, “feeling
like a woman”, or even having a female body’.33 Because she takes gender to
be a social position (a position in a social hierarchy), she’s interested in how
people are viewed and treated, and how their lives are structured. So long as
someone is viewed and treated in the way that female people generally are,
and has one’s life structured as female people’s lives generally are, one can be
a ‘woman’ even when one is not ‘female’.
This might initially seem appealing. After all, it will be true that the norms
of masculinity are applied to some people who are female (like Watson,
above), and the norms of femininity are applied to some people who are
male. But what is the ultimate explanation of why they are applied? Is the
norm that ‘female-­looking people ought to be feminine’? Do pretty boy
babies get channelled into the female sex role? The answer is no, in either
case. The reason why people apply norms of masculinity to male-­looking
people is that they assume they are male. When they find out they had made
a mistake, they generally don’t continue to apply the norm (as long as they
believe what is being said). Suppose a female-­looking male person is taking
an Uber Pool with a few other male passengers when the driver’s GPS messes
up. One of the men jokes that he’ll navigate, because ‘she’ probably isn’t any
good with maps. All the female-­looking male person has to do is point out
that he’s in fact male for this sexist assumption to fall away.
To make the point in a slightly sillier way, suppose that there is a black
market in zebras because people will pay excellent money for their striped
hides, and an entrepreneur comes up with the idea of painting donkeys to
look like zebras and then charging hunters for access to the land where
these ‘zebras’ are.34 If we wanted to describe the killing of zebras for human
economic gain as morally repugnant, would we say, ‘zebras are hunted
because hunters can make serious money from selling their hides’, or would
we say ‘animals are hunted on the basis of observed or imagined bodily
features presumed to be evidence of being a zebra, because hunters can
make serious money from selling their hides’? It seems quite obvious to me
that we wouldn’t say the latter, which raises the question of why Haslanger
introduced this cumbersome locution in the first place. Perhaps it is because
by 2000, the feminist desire to be ‘inclusive’ when it came to the category
‘woman’ and the constituency of feminism was already well on its way to
being fully internalized.
Understanding gender as a system of norms imposed on the basis of sex
helps to make clear that gender is a social problem. Radical feminism and
56  Gender-Critical Feminism

gender-­critical feminism are in agreement that we need social solutions to

social problems, not individual solutions to social problems. Women are a
social group (class/caste). That group has a history of oppression. Its
members are likely to face many of the same issues and obstacles. This
makes it important for women to organize politically in order to advance
their interests as a group. And it makes it important for women to describe
patterns of abuse, harassment, exploitation, discrimination, disadvantage,
etc., to understand where these are feminist political issues, rather than
issues merely arising for individuals within their specific contexts and
relationships. One of Janice Raymond’s complaints about the phenomenon
of transsexualism (which she refers to as ‘transgenderism’) during the
second wave was that it proposed individual, medical solutions to the social
problem of constraining ideas about gender.35 This was also Reilly-­Cooper’s
complaint against so-­ called ‘nonbinary’ or ‘agender’ identifications. She
describes individuals’ claims that they are nonbinary or agender as ‘try[ing]
to slip through the bars of the cage while leaving the rest of the cage intact,
and the rest of womankind trapped within it’.36

3.3  What Radical Feminist Ideas Does Gender-­Critical

Feminism Leave Behind?

I’ve said already that virtually none of the ideas put forward by the radical
feminists of the second wave are necessary to radical feminism as a theory
and movement. This is even more the case for the proposed solutions they
offered. Many of these were ‘experiments in living’, and not all of those
experiments had positive results.
Gender-­critical feminism leaves behind the strong belief in women’s
difference as it relates to personalities and preferences. It does not believe
that women are naturally better with intuition, feeling, or emotion. This
does not leave us committed to the view that the human mind is a ‘blank
slate’ just waiting to be imprinted by different sets of social arrangements;
but the sex differences gender-­ critical feminism can accommodate are
unlikely to provide a rationalization of many of the social differences
between the sexes we have seen in the past, or still see today. For example, it
is highly unlikely that any ‘innate’, ‘hard-­wired’, or ‘predisposed’ traits in
female people would be sufficient to justify women’s underrepresentation in
politics, or in leadership positions in the business world, or throughout
science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) subjects.
 Radical Feminist Ideas Left Behind  57

Gender-­critical feminism leaves behind women’s religion, and all of the

spiritual aspects of ‘women’s culture’, including witchcraft, that some radical
feminists were concerned to build.37 (It is only incompatible with such
practices, however, if/when they conflict with a scientific worldview and a
receptiveness to empirical evidence.) Its concern with women’s culture is
limited to a concern to protect women-­only spaces, services, and provisions
(which includes events aimed at celebrating femaleness and aspects of
womanhood that have been devalued by men), and is rationalized by
women’s right to establish and enforce boundaries—important when so
many women have had their personal boundaries violated by acts of child-
hood sexual abuse, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and so on—
and by women’s right to freedom of association and self-­determination.
Gender-­ critical feminism is supportive of lesbianism, but it has no
commitments that make it unacceptable (or a betrayal) for women to have
sexual or romantic relationships with men. On this point, it is in agreement
with the criticism of earlier radical lesbian feminism made by intersectional
feminist bell hooks, who says that the suggestion that real feminists are
lesbians alienates too many women from feminism.38 Far from thinking
that all feminists ought to be lesbians, gender-­critical feminists have an
internal disagreement over the moral status of political lesbianism, with
some vehemently rejecting the idea that it is possible for a woman to choose
to be a lesbian.39 Gender-­critical feminism is also not separatist more
generally (sex/romance aside) when it comes to feminist theory or activism.
Gender-­critical feminists will generally work with men and appreciate the
support of male allies. Again this puts gender-­ critical feminism in
agreement with criticism made by hooks, in this case that separatism is
most appealing to white women, who do not feel solidarity with white men
in the way that black women do with black men, or as do other women who
share an axis of oppression with men.40 (Note that the fact that gender-­
critical feminism is not separatist in the strong sense, advocating for
women’s withdrawal either entirely or as much as possible from men,
doesn’t mean it never values separation. Gender-­critical feminists value
female sex-­separated spaces, which means that separation from men is a
commitment, just in a much more limited number of domains).
Finally, gender-­critical feminism has a broader remit than at least some
versions of radical feminism. While it cares a great deal about biological sex
and the female bodily experience, it does not restrict its attention to wom-
en’s sexuality, or women’s childbearing or childrearing. The explanation for
this is somewhat complicated, and relates to the feminist idea of
58  Gender-Critical Feminism

‘intersectionality’. (I take up this issue in detail in Chapter 7.) Gender-­critical

­feminism focuses on a single axis of oppression, namely sex. That means it
neither considers multiple axes of oppression in one movement nor focuses
on the intersections of multiple axes.41 Examples of the former include
ecofeminism (combining environmentalism and feminism), black feminism
(combining black liberation and feminism), and socialist feminism
(­combining class liberation and feminism). An example of the latter is
focusing on the way that being working class and being female can interact
to create negative stereotypes of working-­class women. One study from
1985, for example, found working-­class women to be rated higher than
middle-­class women as being each of ‘confused, dirty, hostile, illogical,
impulsive, ­incoherent, inconsiderate, irresponsible, and superstitious’.42
This helps to illuminate one of the major disagreements gender-­critical
feminists have with other types of feminists, who tend to be intersectional.
But it goes further than that too, because some women who consider
themselves to be gender-­critical feminists also consider themselves to be
intersectional. In Section 7.6, I defend a limited way in which this is
possible, but in general I will argue that gender-­critical feminism is not, and
need not be, intersectional.
If you think oppression depends upon the complex combination of
features a person has, then you’ll need to be sensitive to all the ways in
which a person might be oppressed, both visible and invisible. Combine
this with two further influential feminist ideas—one, that we should focus
on the situation of the worst-­off women; and two, that marginalized people
have specialist knowledge and should be deferred to—and you get a
situation in which within feminist groups, white women are supposed to
defer to black women, able-­bodied women are supposed to defer to women
with disabilities, straight women are supposed to defer to lesbians, white
straight able-­bodied women are supposed to defer to black lesbians with dis-
abilities . . . and so on. Someone who is oppressed across multiple axes may fill
the position of ‘the worst off ’ in a particular feminist group and thus have a
claim to their issues receiving the bulk of the group’s attentions and energies,
and their testimony being deferred to. Contingencies about which women
happen to be in the group will determine the feminist agenda of that group.
If we instead maintain that feminism is a single-­axis movement for wom-
en’s liberation, then the members of feminist groups are equals in that con-
text, so long as they’re all women. If we changed the context so that all the
same women were at a Black Lives Matter meeting, the white women would
need to learn to be quiet and find out how to be good allies to black people.
 Radical Feminist Ideas Left Behind  59

But in the context of a feminist meeting, where the focus is and should be
on sex-­based oppression, there is no further hierarchy between women that
is of relevance to the feminist movement. No one needs to apologize and
defer within such a group; women have done enough apologizing and defer-
ring in human history to last a lifetime.
A feminism that refuses to combine multiple issues, and refuses to be
intersectional, is actually less hubristic. It is hard enough to get a firm grip
on the mechanisms by which women are oppressed as a caste, and the
things that need to change in order for women’s liberation—as women—to
be secured. Feminism hardly needs the added challenge of figuring out class
liberation at the same time. That is not to assume that ‘we’ feminists are not
working class; it’s to assume that there is one set of questions about what the
origins, sustaining mechanisms, and solutions are when it comes to sex
oppression, and another set of questions when it comes to class oppression.
Answering these questions deserves the full attention of a social justice
movement. When these movements each come up with good answers, they
can form alliances with each other to boost political support and solidarity.
This is a vision for feminism which sees it as just one piece of the puzzle
when it comes to social justice. Its contribution affects half of the human
population, but it does not affect them in all aspects of their lives.
Furthermore, this approach helps to avoid the politics of deference that can
distort debate and undermine political progress. The fact that someone is a
member of a marginalized group is a reason to think they know something
about being a member of that group, from experience. But it is no reason at
all to think that they are an expert in the issues facing that group, or that
they are well-­informed about the political disagreement between members
of that group, or could fairly and accurately represent the group to others.
When intersectional feminists inside an activist group defer to one woman
because she has a disability, for example, rather than because she can
reasonably claim to represent a community of people with disabilities, they
risk making things worse, not better, from the point of view of social
justice.43 And when disability activists inside a feminist group, for example,
add sex-­neutral disability issues to the feminist agenda, they risk making
things worse, not better, from the point of view of justice for women
as women.
Still, gender-­critical feminism is left with the challenge of articulating
what it is for feminism to be about ‘women’s liberation’ when so many
women are also unfree in virtue of their race, class, or other social group
features. I’ll give a fuller answer to this question in Chapter  7, but very
60  Gender-Critical Feminism

briefly, we can give a theory of what it means to be oppressed as a woman by

having a clear definition of ‘woman’ and a clear understanding of the ways
that women are socialized into femininity. (‘Woman’ is a contested term. It
is less important that people sign up to our usage of it, than that they agree
the group we refer to with it has interests worth protecting.) For gender-­
critical feminists, ‘women’ are adult human females.44 This became a classic
assertion of gender-­critical feminists’ during the UK consultation over the
Gender Recognition Act, made prominent by grassroots feminist cam-
paigner Posie Parker’s billboard featuring the definition.45 Adult human
females are people most of whom46 have faced lifelong and concerted
attempts at socialization into femininity. So gender-­critical feminists consider
something to be a feminist issue (aimed at the liberation of women as women
rather than as persons more generally) whenever it relates to that socialization.

3.4  The Constituency of Gender-­Critical Feminism,

and Its Relation to Men

Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in
­uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except
the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off.
(Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch)47

As we have seen, gender-­critical feminism accepts the radical feminist focus

on female people as a class/caste.48 The constituency of feminism, for
gender-­critical feminists, is female people. We do not apologize for this, no
matter how hard anti-­feminists and non-­radical feminists work to extract
such an apology (on which more in Chapter 6). Its central goal is abolition
of the norms of femininity (of gender in its entirety), one of the most
pervasive of which has been self-­effacement. Gender-­critical feminism, like
radical feminism before it, does not apologize for putting women first. It
does not see itself as a small part of another, bigger movement. It sees
women’s liberation as an important movement in its own right.
Contrary to the representation of radical and gender-­critical feminism
coming from some quarters as ‘SWERFs’, or ‘sex-­ worker-­ exclusionary
radical feminists’,49 gender-­critical feminists do include prostituted women/
sex workers in their constituency. They are female, and they are some of the
worst-­off women in the world, so they are not only included but often
prioritized (the work of women like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea
 Gender-Critical Feminism, and Its Relation to Men  61

Dworkin during the second wave, and the work of women like Kajsa Ekis
Ekman, Julie Bindel, Meagan Tyler, and Caroline Norma today is an
example of this).
But the accusation behind ‘TERF’, or ‘trans-­exclusionary radical feminist’,
is partly correct. Gender-­critical feminists are not exclusionary of trans
people per se, but they include in their constituency transmen rather than
transwomen, and female nonbinary people rather than no/all nonbinary
people. Gender-­ critical feminists do this because our constituency, as
already explained, is female people. Far from excluding trans people per se
from the constituency of feminism, gender-­ critical feminists are very
concerned with the situation of transmen and female nonbinary people. We
are very concerned with the massive increases of young girls reporting to
gender clinics,50 with the risk clinical ‘affirmation’ policies for trans people
pose to young lesbians and to lesbian culture, and with the increasing
numbers of detransitioned women speaking out about their experiences.51
What about men? (What about men?!) Deborah Cameron makes a
distinction between different ways to think about what feminism is, which
are helpful in thinking about the place of men.52 Feminism might be a
collective political project, an idea, or an intellectual framework (a ‘mode of
analysis’). If it is an idea, for example that women and men are moral equals,
then clearly men can be feminists. If it is a collective political project, or an
intellectual framework, then it depends on the details of these things. For
some ways of understanding what the project or framework is, men can be
feminist allies at best. (One role of an ally is to amplify women’s voices,
particularly to demographics that might be more responsive to men.)
Finn Mackay’s book Radical Feminism contains interviews with British
women who have been involved in the ‘Reclaim the Night’ protest, and does
a nice job of tracking some of the disagreement over the place of men in
feminism.53 The point about men’s place is well made in relation to that
particular protest. The point of Reclaim the Night is for women to access
public space that is ordinarily denied to them as a result of narratives about
keeping themselves safe from assault. If an individual woman had a male
chaperone, she wouldn’t have any problem in accessing that space. So the
symbolism is in women together reclaiming the streets and the night. If
men join them, even with the best intentions, they undermine the very
reclamation women are setting out to pursue.
What if the collective political project is women’s self-­determination?
Women’s oppression has literally determined their self-­conception, which
means that women’s liberation centrally involves self-­ determination,
62  Gender-Critical Feminism

recreating what it means to be a woman. Men who attempt to participate

in that self-­determination—again, even with the best intentions—under-
mine that very self-­determination. They are a part of the ‘other’ who had
been determining woman all along. So if feminism is a collective political
project, and that project is self-­determination, then men can’t be feminists.
The same is true if feminism is an intellectual framework, and that frame-
work is consciousness-­raising. The whole point is for women to reveal
their experiences as women living in a male-­dominated society. Including
the experience of men will distort the mosaic that is pieced together from
those experiences, and will affect women’s collective self-­understanding.
For these reasons, most gender-­critical feminists think that men cannot
be feminists, only allies. But I think it would be too strong to say that if you
don’t accept this, you are not a gender-­critical feminist. A gender-­critical
feminist could formulate her position as an idea, e.g. that women are a sex
caste, or as a collective political project, e.g. that feminism requires working
for the protection of sex-­based rights and the elimination of sex-­based
marginalization, and cheerfully accept men as gender-­critical feminists.
Nothing about these specific understandings of the gender-­critical feminist
idea or project precludes men’s involvement.
This question of the place of men in feminism is a source of tension
between gender-­critical feminists and other types of feminists. Many of the
former relegate all male people to the position of ally, at best. Most of
the  ­latter include transwomen (and sometimes nonbinary people) as part
of the group concerned to self-­determine, or raise consciousness. Yet those
same feminists may simultaneously be happy to exclude all people who
identify as men. For the gender-­critical feminists committed to the exclu-
sion of all men, this is aggravating. The explanation of why the collective
political project, or intellectual framework, is needed has nothing to do with
identity and everything to do with treatment as a sex caste.
Marilyn Frye wrote in The Politics of Reality that there is a distinction
between being male, on the one hand, and being masculine or ‘a man’ on
the other. Here she does as some feminists do, and uses ‘male/female’ as
sex terms and ‘man/woman’ as gender terms, rather than both as sex
terms. The distinction creates a way for a male person to work to avoid
complicity in women’s oppression. Frye says ‘I have enjoined males of my
acquaintance to set themselves against masculinity. I have asked them to
think about how they can stop being men, and I was not recommending a
sex-­change operation’.54 She draws a parallel between being a man and
being white, accepting a similar responsibility in herself to avoid
 Procedural Commitments  63

complicity in racial oppression, and commenting ‘I do not suggest for a

moment that I can disaffiliate by a private act of will, or by any personal
strategy. Nor, certainly, is it accomplished by simply thinking it possible.
To think it thinkable shortcuts no work and shields one from no
responsibility’.55
Although she’s reflecting in that paragraph on disaffiliating from
­whiteness, the same point can be made for masculinity. One cannot escape
masculinity by fiat, or with a simple thought; with masculinity comes
responsibility and to escape it takes work. This point applies to all those
socialized into masculinity who would call themselves feminists or feminist
allies, including transwomen and male nonbinary people. Gender identity
cannot circumvent sex-­ based privilege and complicity in women’s
oppression. This is what Frye describes as ‘a private act of will’, a ‘personal
strategy’, a thinking possible, an attempt at a shortcut, an avoiding of
responsibility.
There are open questions that remain to be resolved in figuring out what
it takes for a man to disaffiliate from masculinity.56 Resolving these would
allow gender-­critical feminists to articulate their disagreement with other
feminists and gender identity activists, about their disagreement with the
claim that a transwoman is, in virtue of being a transwoman, already
disaffiliated from masculinity in the way that feminists want all men to be.
Disaffiliating is not as easy as merely disclaiming or repudiating; there is
some work to be done in shrugging off the impacts of a lifetime of
socialization into masculinity, and it remains to be seen exactly what that
work consists in and how women can reliably identify those who have done
it and those who have not. If gender-­critical feminists do not ask and answer
these questions, they risk taking the ham-­fisted approach of rejecting the
involvement in feminism (whether as feminists or as allies) of anyone who
has been socialized into masculinity.

3.5  Procedural Commitments

Three quick final points, all relating to issues internal to feminist activism:
equality, leadership, and criticism.
Radical feminism’s commitment to real equality led to policies like hav-
ing no leaders, or having no specialist roles. For example, The Redstockings
in their 1969 manifesto say ‘We are committed to achieving internal democ-
racy. We will do whatever is necessary to ensure that every woman in our
64  Gender-Critical Feminism

movement has an equal chance to participate, assume responsibility, and

develop her political potential’.57 Such a group might have a system of rotat-
ing roles, where someone who had not been in the role before would get it
next, so that all women had a chance to increase their skills, and no woman
gained power through being irreplaceable.
These groups often didn’t last long. Some roles require specialist skills—
like treasurer, for example—and so passing them to someone new every
month will generally mean many more mistakes, some of which could be
serious. There’s inefficiency in ‘flat hierarchy’, which many women who have
been involved in feminist activism will attest to. Even Firestone, who writes
approvingly of radical feminism’s commitment to internal democracy,
comments that ‘it goes to (often absurd) lengths to pursue this goal’.58
Gender-­critical feminism should learn from these experiments, and try to
strike the right balance between principles and productivity rather than
sacrificing productivity at the altar of principle.
In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, bell hooks criticizes the
feminist movement for its mistaken conception of power. She says feminists
have confused leadership qualities in women with attempts at domination,
which means they have worked to cut down or cut out women who could
have made valuable contributions.59 Jo Freeman’s essay ‘On Trashing’ from
1976 makes a similar point, although it extends to other ways women cut
each other down.60 In her memoir, Phyllis Chester writes:

Feminists spent years accusing each other of being ‘male identified’ and
elitist. According to Ruth Rosen: ‘One of the strangest consequences of
such anti-­elitism was that activists pressured one another to write without
bylines. Writing anonymously has been required of modest ladies of the
nineteenth century. Now, in the name of solidarity, some women’s lib­er­
ation­ists asked that no woman take credit for her work’. My friends . . . were,
like me, subjected to these insane pressures. Charges of plagiarism, espe-
cially against Robin, were fierce. But at the time it was impossible for me to
know what or whom to believe. That was what the radical feminists were
doing—eating their leaders, destroying their own best minds.61

Gender-­critical feminism should not make this mistake. So far, leaders have
emerged naturally from grassroots activism, but there has not been a
complete absence of trashing. Insofar as this is motivated by an incorrect
perception that any leadership is domination, it should not be any part of
gender-­critical feminism. (Neither should trashing more generally, but that’s
another story.)
 Paradigm Issues  65

A final important procedural commitment is the welcoming of constructive

criticism and disagreement. Christina Hoff Sommers’ book Who Stole
Feminism? is a ruthless fact-­checking and debunking of data frequently
cited by feminists, on the silencing of women in the classroom, domestic
violence, and rape, among other hot-­button feminist issues. If we are to
retain credibility we must respond to critics not as villains, but as people
interested in what the truth of the matter is, so that they or others can make
informed decisions about where to put their energies. If Sommers is right,
for instance, that campus rape-­prevention activism is a privileged people’s
hobby, then perhaps we’ll want to pour our feminist attention into other
areas.62 This kind of evidence-­responsiveness will help prevent gender-­
critical feminism from becoming ideological in the pejorative sense; it cares
about women’s sex-­based rights and interests because they are necessary for
women’s liberation. If it could be established that women weren’t oppressed,
or women were in fact already liberated, or women had no distinctive sex-­
based interests, then there would be no need for gender-­critical feminism.
These questions have to be settled by evidence, not assumed to be settled in
advance as though tenets of faith.
All of this means that as gender-­critical feminists, we should make a
conscious decision to seek out, engage with, and respond to criticism,
whether from anti-­feminists, feminist-­agnostics, or feminists of other types.
We shouldn’t dismiss anyone who disagrees with us as acting in bad faith;
we should try to get comfortable with respecting and even admiring each
other despite our disagreements, rather than only when there is agreement.
As Jane Clare Jones puts it, gender-­critical feminists can and do disagree
with each other, because ‘we’re not a frickin cult’.63 Back in 1859, John Stuart
Mill celebrated dissent as creating value at the social level by making truth
more likely to emerge. Some on the left have lost sight of this contribution
today, and tend to treat critics of social justice movements as morally
abhorrent people who need to be shut down as quickly as possible. Gender-­
critical feminists can set a (re)new(ed) precedent, celebrating its apostates
and heretics rather than trying to cancel them.

3.6  Paradigm Issues

As we saw in Chapter  2, the radical feminists were concerned with an

impressive breadth of issues. But perhaps paradigmatic among them was
their concern with prostitution and pornography, which they saw as
seriously harming the women directly involved, and as degrading to all
66  Gender-Critical Feminism

women. (Before the third wave, there was more widespread agreement
among feminists of all types about the harms of prostitution and
pornography.) There’s a widespread perception that gender-­ critical
feminism is ‘about’ opposition to trans rights, which is inaccurate, but
somewhat understandable given the amount of space the trans issue is
taking up inside gender-­critical feminism at the current moment. A way to
gain more insight into each, then, is to consider in more detail these
two  paradigm issues. This will also help to make clearer the continuities
between the two, and to establish the claim that gender-­critical feminism is
concerned about gender identity ideology because it is concerned with
women as a sex class/caste, and the ongoing fight for women’s liberation. It
will also help to bring back into focus one of the huge issues waiting for
gender-­critical feminists’ attention when the fight against gender identity
ideology is exhausted. Rather than simply survey existing views on these
topics, I will take these topics up afresh, from the perspective of a feminism
committed to sex class/caste. In Chapter  4, I’ll talk about the challenges
to  women’s liberation posed by the sex industry (combining prostitution
and  pornography), and in Chapter  5, I’ll talk about the challenges to
­women’s liberation posed by contemporary gender identity ideology and its
accompanying activism.
 4
The Sex Industry

It is his false consciousness that is the basis of all prostitution

because he shuts his eyes to what he knows to be true: that she
does not desire him or even like him.
(Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought)1

There is vitriolic disagreement between feminists of different types about

the sex industry. Feminist activists on either side of this disagreement tend
to pay selective attention to particular figures within it. Those in favour of
the industry often rely on the figure of the empowered student who chooses
sex work as a way to put herself through college. Those against the industry
often rely on the figure of the ‘exited woman’, a woman who has left prostitu-
tion, and carries a litany of abuses. Despite these different narratives, it is
clear that both types of women exist, and they experience the sex industry in
very different ways. Contrast the following first-­ personal accounts, for
example:

I had a roommate at the time, um, that was a dancer, and she knew an
agent his name was Jim South. He said hey, there’s a producer that saw
your picture and he’d like you to come do a movie, how would you like to
do a movie? And I said, ah, well I’ve never done a movie before, but sure
I could do it, no problem. I went down, and I had braids like Bo Derek at
the time and, did my first scene. It was a three-­way. I had never even
been with a woman, I didn’t know what to do with a woman. I had no
idea what I was doing. But the minute those lights hit me, I swear that
was where I was supposed to be. Everyone said do it, do it, do it. And the
more you do the more money you can make dancing on the dance cir-
cuit, the more magazines you can do, the more you’re exposed, you can, I
mean gosh, ‘have a sex toy line! Now we want to do an action figure of
you!’ All of it was just like, cool, yeah, sign me up. I was just having
a blast.2

Gender-Critical Feminism: Holly Lawford-Smith, Oxford University Press. © Holly Lawford-Smith 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863885.003.0004
68  The Sex Industry

And:
Drug and alcohol abuse are endemic. We are all used to the stereotype of
the heroin addict who enters street prostitution to feed her habit. This
happens in prostitution, I’ve seen it; but what I’ve seen far more regularly
is women developing addictions in prostitution that they never had in the
first place, usually to alcohol, valium and other prescription sedatives, and
to cocaine. These substances are used to numb the simple awfulness of
having sexual intercourse with reams of sexually repulsive strangers, all of
whom are abusive on some level, whether they know it or not, and many
of whom are deliberately so. These substances offer an effective release
and escape.3

The first comes from a porn actress known simply as ‘Houston’, who is best
known for the 1999 pornographic film The World’s Biggest Gangbang 3: The
Houston 620, in which she broke the world record at the time for the greatest
number of sexual partners in a single day (apparently 620 in under eight
hours).4 Interviewed in the Netflix documentary After Porn Ends, Houston’s
narrative is one of enthusiasm and ambition; glad of opportunities and
active in expanding her own career. We can try to tell stories about how
women like this are brainwashed by the patriarchy but such an explanation
sits uneasily: there doesn’t seem to have been an obvious ‘patriarch’ on the
scene exercising undue influence at the time, and if it’s the patriarchy more
broadly, why is Houston enthusiastically pursuing the idea of having sex
with 620 men in a single day, while other women aren’t?
The second comes from Irish woman Rachel Moran, a survivor of
prostitution who is now an anti-­prostitution advocate, who tells her story in
her 2013 book Paid For. Moran became homeless as a teenager after having
problems at home, entered street prostitution and then later brothel and
escort prostitution, working across all three areas (which, she says, is
unusual). She describes how she felt about prostitution and how she and the
other women felt about the men who paid for them. Contrary to popular
narratives about indoor sex work being better, Moran comments that of all
the men she met for paid sex, some of the most brutal and contemptuous
men were at high-­end hotels.
These two women’s perspectives couldn’t be more different, and the differ-
ence is not only whether or not there’s a camera on the scene while the sex is
happening. Women enter the sex industry for very different reasons; some
become trapped in it and cannot leave while others actively choose to
remain; some can exercise control over where and how they work, and which
 The Sex Industry  69

clients they take, and others can’t (or cannot to any significant degree); some
are protected from abuse and can make use of formal systems when they are
subject to crime while others can’t; some have many other options, while
­others have none. These are the real differences that make a difference to
women’s experiences in the sex industry. And they create the possibility of
feminists talking past each other, because they’re paying selective attention to
women with very different experiences of the sex industry.
Phyllis Chesler describes the debate over pornography during the second
wave of feminism as ‘diverse and highly charged’.5 She distinguishes five
factions. The first were concerned about state censorship and eager to avoid
a repeat of history where women’s sexuality was under the control of men.
The second were concerned about the battered wives and the women who
were victims of child abuse being used in pornography. The third were
focused on the positive possibilities of pornography, in leading to arousal or
enjoyment that might not otherwise have been had. The fourth thought
pornography could be educational, and might reduce rape.6 And the fifth
maintained that pornography caused men to see women as sex objects and
led to the degradation of all women.7 The first, second, and fifth concerns
apply equally to prostitution.
There is something that these factions have in common with each other,
though, namely that some (the first, third, and fourth) are concerned with
the positive potential of pornography, while others (the second and fifth)
are concerned with its negative actualities. In discussing this subject of
disagreement among feminists, Jessica Joy Cameron argues that we should
think not only about the content of a theory or position but about its affect.
How do these theories make the women who hold them feel about
themselves? She argues that quite aside from what Andrea Dworkin, for
example, might have gotten right in her characterization of heterosexual
sex, women don’t want to see themselves as passive objects that become
property through being fucked by men; don’t want to think of themselves as
participating in their own oppression when they enjoy heterosexual sex.
Cameron says ‘false consciousness arguments’—you think you’re enjoying
this but really you’ve just internalized a patriarchal view of what women are
for—‘are condescending and infantilizing’.8
The view of pornography (and prostitution) that focuses on its
transformative and educative potential involves more positive affect: it lets
women feel like ‘active social agents capable of making informed, self-­
affirming decisions’.9 Feminists with this view can work on making
pornography better. This might mean featuring more diversity in who has
70  The Sex Industry

sex and how they have it, or broadening out what ‘sex’ means from
penetrative, penis-­in-­vagina intercourse to all forms of sexual pleasure-­
giving and -receiving, including self-­ administered.10 It might mean
featuring more content that is explicitly educative, teaching men how to
give women pleasure—something that is sadly lacking in heterosexual sex,
with a recent study in Archives of Sexual Behaviour reporting that while
95 per cent of heterosexual men said they orgasmed during sexual intimacy,
only 65 per cent of heterosexual women could say the same.11 It might
mean creating porn in a way that is palatable to women who for religious,
cultural, or other reasons have been sexually repressed and are under-­
informed about the capacities of their own bodies.
But a point Phyllis Chesler makes about the hijab (in the context of a
Women’s March in the United States) provides a helpful analogy here:

As to the hijab: I know too much about girls and women who are beaten,
even murdered by their families for refusing to cover their head, face, and
body properly; thus, I view veiling as the sign and symbol of women’s sub-
ordination. The sight of American women virtue-­signalling by donning
headscarves or hijab (a symbol of oppression) as if it were a gesture of soli-
darity with freedom fighters and opposition to alleged Islamophobia was
both alarming and Orwellian. Confusing conformity with resistance is
unwise.12

We can make the same point about a feminism that supports prostitution
and pornography by maintaining that ‘sex work is work!’.13 We might say
that we know too much about the girls and women who suffer childhood
sexual abuse, domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction, and severe
poverty who end up being exploited in prostitution or pornography.14 And
we might say that we have come to view the sex industry as the sign and
symbol of women’s subordination. That is compatible with there being
women who freely choose it, just as there are undoubtedly women who
freely choose the hijab. Feminists holding placards proclaiming that ‘sex
work is work!’ at marches and demonstrations, who have themselves never
been involved in sex work and did not experience the conditions that make
women and girls vulnerable to sexual exploitation, are doing the equivalent
of what the American feminists wearing headscarves at the Women’s March
were doing. They’re attempting to virtue-­signal. But signalling support for a
global industry that involves the trafficking and brutalization of women is
not virtuous.
 Self-­O wnership as a Red Herring  71

4.1  Self-­Ownership as a Red Herring

In the context of discussing surrogacy,15 Chesler makes the following com-

ment: ‘I knew that many feminists supported surrogacy for another reason
too: They believed that women own their bodies and therefore have the
right to an abortion, the right to sell sex, the right to rent out their wombs,
and the right to sell the fruit of their womb’s labour’.16 This is the philo-
sophical conception of self-­ownership, which says my body is my property
and I can do with it what I like. Many people have this view. But there is
serious opposition to this view, too. Its opponents put forward difficult cases
in order to argue that the principle of self-­ownership has its limits. Can a
person really sell herself into slavery? Can she offer herself up to a cannibal?
Can she choose the time and manner of her own death? Or more to the
focus of this chapter, can she sell herself into sexual slavery? Can she
exchange sex, whether on-­camera or off-­camera, for money or for economic
security (or for other material rewards)?
But focusing on what she can do with her own body, although it has
dominated feminist discussion of prostitution and pornography, is actually
a red herring here. When we think about the selling of organs, we don’t
waste time arguing that desperately poor people have the right, grounded in
the principle of self-­ownership, to sell off parts of their bodies so that they
can pay the rent or buy food or support their families. It can be perfectly
rational to make choices like these, and we need attribute no ‘false
consciousness’ to the people who make them. When we focus on the choices
of the exploited we deflect from the real issue, which is the actions of the
exploiters. Let’s keep our attention squarely where it should be: on the
question of what people with money and power should be able to buy. We
surely think it is morally unacceptable that wealthy people should be able to
simply replace their non-­working body parts with those of people less
fortunate. Most countries make a trade in organs illegal for precisely
this reason.
There are obviously differences between a trade in organs and a trade in
sexual access to women’s bodies, not least in that there is a much more
limited possible supply of organs. But they have in common that the more
important question is about what (privileged) people should be able to buy,
rather than what (marginalized) people should be able to sell. One of the
great tricks of the pro-­prostitution activists is that they have managed to
keep men almost entirely out of the question.17 But men are crucial to the
question. Exited woman Michelle Mara, in an interview with radical
72  The Sex Industry

feminist journalist Meghan Murphy about decriminalization in New

Zealand, says the following about the men who buy women:

It’s not like you see warning signs in one in a hundred men, you see it in
every second dude. It’s not like these are just, you know, nice guys on a day
out. They are men who do not respect women. They are men who
obviously don’t respect their partners, because they’re out there cheating.
They are men who want to experience what it’s like to do certain things
they can’t do with ‘normal’ women. They . . . the reason they’re there is
because they can’t get access to whatever they want to have access to
without paying for it.18

The moral question here is, what are the moral limits to what people may do
with other people’s bodies, even when the other person consents to it being
done? Some people think there is no such limit, that consent is everything.
Others think there are many such limits. Courts have found a number of
actions impermissible in spite of consent, notably cannibalism.19 One of the
current preoccupations of feminists is whether men may choke women
during sex, a question that has arisen given the increasing numbers of
women dying during sex, with their male partners alleging ‘sex games gone
wrong’.20 Radical and gender-­critical feminists say that he should not be
inflicting this kind of violence on her during sex, no matter what. Intimate
partner strangulation is now a distinct offence in New Zealand, having been
found to be one of the most lethal types of domestic violence.21
Is the sexual use of another person’s body the kind of thing that is
appropriately commodified for exchange in a market? Is it morally
permissible for men to buy sexual access to a woman, as in prostitution; or
to pay22 to watch other men rape, brutalize, or use women’s bodies, as in
pornography? Money changes incentives, and so its involvement can lead to
coercion or exploitation. One way to safeguard against this outcome is to
rule money out of the picture.
Our answer to the moral question (and whether taking these industries
off the market would be a good way to support that answer) does not
necessarily settle the policy question. Public policy is a matter of the public
good, which means we need to think carefully about the balance of benefits
and harms. It might be that alcohol does so much harm that it should not be
available on the market, but that people are so adamant about drinking that
any attempt to take it off the market will fail and just bring about more harm
(as attempts at prohibition demonstrated).23 If we end up being anti
 What We Cannot Buy  73

pornography and prostitution because we’re anti harm to women, then it

would be rather absurd to endorse a policy that will ultimately bring
about more harm to women. So once we’ve considered the moral ques-
tion and its implication for whether sexual use is appropriately com-
modified, we need to consider the policy options and their likely harms
independently. This is in line with the procedural commitment outlined
in Section 3.5, that gender-­critical feminism prioritizes empirical evi-
dence over ideology.

4.2  What We Cannot Buy

In this section, I’ll draw on three different discussions where there is contro-
versy about what people should be able to buy. The first is persons and parts
of persons. I’ll talk about both slavery and the buying of other people’s
organs. The second is entertainment in the form of sports that involve a
high risk of physical injury to their players. I’ll focus on boxing and draw a
parallel between boxing, on the one hand, and prostitution and porn­og­
raphy, on the other. The third is access to competitive goods where there is
an issue of merit. I’ll focus on admissions to prestigious universities.
Together, these parallels establish a strong case against men being able to
buy the sexual use of women’s bodies. I’ll cement this case in the following
section, where I survey the harms to women in the sex industry.
Persons and person-­parts. Slavery was wrong for many reasons, but a
fundamental reason was that it involved the buying and selling of persons.
Alastair Campbell argues that for something to be appropriately treated as a
commodity, it must meet three conditions. This is an evaluative rather than
a descriptive claim, which means we can acknowledge that something is in
fact commodified while asserting that it should not be, that it is inappropriate
to commodify it. The three conditions are ‘alienability’, ‘fungibility’, and
‘commensurability’. An object is alienable when I have the right to ‘alienate’
(i.e. separate) myself from it, to ‘sell, mortgage, lease, give away or destroy’
it. It is fungible when it is interchangeable with other objects of the same
type. And an object is commensurable when it can be valued on a common
scale with other goods, where that common scale is usually money. (Things
are incommensurable when there is no common scale, for example in trying
to ‘rank’ a beautiful sunset against a delicious meal.) When an object meets
all of these conditions then it is a commodity, which means it is appropriate
to think of it as having market value.24
74  The Sex Industry

Campbell considers the case of a ‘desperate father selling himself into

slavery in order to raise enough money to feed his family’, to test the idea of
persons as commodities, and says ‘a human person is not an alienable
object, which is fungible . . . and commensurable with a monetary sum’.25
(He seems to be imagining a one-­time payment for being sold into slavery.)
In its most violent and degrading form, slavery involved the kidnapping of
people from their home countries, their transport to other countries, and
their forced labour for the profit of a slave-­owner. Adding a pay cheque to
these violations—whether before they commence or as they unfold—does
not miraculously transform their status. Even if the labour the slave is
forced to undertake is labour that he might have been prepared to undertake
for fair remuneration in another context, the fact that he did not have that
choice means we cannot treat the one case as the other.
But this has all the same features as human trafficking into sexual
exploitation.26 The woman is kidnapped, transported across state or country
borders, and forced to work in prostitution and/or pornography. Generally
she is not paid. But even when she is, that doesn’t transform her situation
into ‘work’. If it is not permissible for the desperate father to sell himself into
slavery, because this turns a human person into a commodity, then it is not
permissible for the desperate mother (and any other woman) to sell herself
into prostitution, because in exactly the same way, this turns a human
person into a commodity. Persons are not things that anyone should be
able to buy.
Campbell then asks, what if we’re not talking about whole persons, but
only body parts? Some such parts are alienable: I can choose to separate
myself (with a little help from a surgeon) from my kidney, liver, pancreas,
heart, and lung.27 He thinks this doesn’t help, because the parts of the body
make up the whole body, and the body is fundamental to personhood. Still,
he explains, those who think of personhood primarily in terms of the
mind—reason and rationality—might not be particularly moved by this. If
the person really is just the thoughts, or the thoughts are more important
than the body, then why should we be particularly bothered about what
happens to the body? For people who are inclined towards this view (in
Chapter 3 we saw that Alison Jaggar called it ‘normative dualism’), Campbell
offers a second argument, this time based in opposition to exploitation.
This argument runs by way of considering the likely impacts of a legal-
ized market in organs. Sellers are likely to be socially and economically vul-
nerable people. In Iran, ‘the market has resulted in widespread pleading by
the poor to have their organs purchased’.28 And this exploitation cannot
 What We Cannot Buy  75

even be given a consequentialist defence in terms of making more organs

available and thus saving more lives: research has found that when there is a
market in organs family members are less likely to donate and people are
less willing to donate after death.29 Instead of trying to solve the problem of
demand for organs with legalized markets that commodify persons and
exploit the poor, we might make public health interventions to reduce the
need for organ transplants, or initiate campaigns to increase the rate of
organ donations after death.
The exploitation argument is equally applicable to prostitution, which
will become clearer in the next section, where we talk about who and what
men are actually buying. It is not wealthy women with stable family
backgrounds, generally, who are working as prostitutes. As Moran put it,
women enter street prostitution because they are destitute, and escort or
brothel prostitution because they are desperate.30 So when men are enabled
to buy access to women’s bodies, it is the worst-­off women who will end up
being bought.
Human persons are not the kinds of things that should be bought and
sold. Intimate access to one’s body is not ‘alienable’, one’s body cannot be
parted with. There is no separation of body and self; the body and the self
are one.31 Intimate access to one’s body is not ‘fungible’, either, because it
does come with a loss to the ‘owner’/person (these losses are catalogued
in more detail in Section 4.3). And intimate access should not be commen-
surable, despite a long history of its being treated as such. Just as wealthy
people who drink too much and ruin their livers shouldn’t be empowered to
simply purchase the livers of the world’s poor, so too the sexually entitled
men who treat women in a way that leaves few or any willing to have sex
with them shouldn’t be empowered to simply purchase the use of a woman’s
body to masturbate with.32 (I think the same is true, in both cases, for p
­ eople
who are not responsible for the fact of their need/want).33 The moral costs
of commodification and exploitation are too high.
Entertainment with high risk of physical injury. Should sports fans be able
to pay to attend live boxing matches, or for subscriptions to watch televised
matches? We can argue that they shouldn’t, because of the physical harm to,
and exploitation of, the boxers themselves. Boxing involves blows to the
head, and blows to the head cause chronic brain damage. Studies from the
1980s found that 64‒87 per cent of then-­current and former boxers had
measurable brain damage. Boxing can also result in cuts, fractures, and eye
damage. The American Medical Association proposed in 1984 that boxing
be banned.34
76  The Sex Industry

Precisely because professional boxing involves taking these risks in order

to acquire wealth, Nicholas Dixon focuses on the moral case against
professional boxing (rather than including amateur, and therefore all,
boxing). Many if not most boxers will be under-­informed about the risks
and long-­term health impacts of the profession; their managers have an
interest in not informing them. Boxers often come from disadvantaged
backgrounds,35 such that the sport may represent ‘their only means of
escaping from dangerous, poverty-­stricken neighbourhoods’.36 If boxers
were mainly in it for the love of boxing, we’d expect to see more
representative demographics, whereas in fact most boxers come from poor
backgrounds. For many boxers, then, boxing is exploitative.37
But all of this is true for prostitution. It comes with high risk of physical
harm (rape, sexual assault, physical assault) and long-­term health impacts
including disassociation and post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Many
prostituted women are likely to be under-­informed about the risks or are
too desperate to be able to afford to care about them. They are very often
from disadvantaged backgrounds (having experienced e.g. homelessness,
child abuse, or domestic abuse). Most prostituted women don’t ­independently
desire to have sex with either the punters (in the case of prostitution) or their
on-­screen partners (in the case of pornography). ‘Sex work’ is coercive. Even
sex worker rights activists Juno Mac and Molly Smith38 do not seem to
­disagree with this: they say repeatedly in their book Revolting Prostitutes that
sex work is a survival strategy which allows women to secure resources.39
Paying to watch a boxing match is a better parallel to paying to watch
pornography than it is to paying for the sexual use of a prostitute. In both
boxing and pornography, the ‘entertainment’ involves another person being
physically and/or psychologically harmed. In prostitution, it is more like a
boxing fan paying to get in the ring and punch the other guy, while the
other guy has to put up just enough of a resistance to make the consumer
feel like he’s genuinely won the match. The ‘entertainment’ is actually doing
physical and/or psychological harm to another person. While many
consumer industries involve risks of harm (e.g. workplace injuries) few
involve injury as so central a part of what is being consumed.
Dixon ultimately defends a compromise solution: rather than a complete
ban on professional boxing, ‘a complete ban on blows to the head’.40 This
leaves the sport largely intact while taking out the worst of its physical
harms. But if it’s the constant sexual use by men that leads to drug
addiction,41 disassociation, and PTSD42 in prostituted women, then there’s
no way to ban the worst of the physical harms of prostitution without also
 What We Cannot Buy  77

banning prostitution. Sexual use is not an aspect of prostitution that can be

removed, leaving the rest of the practice intact. It is the practice. This is an
argument for banning it.
Distortions of meritocracy. At first glance, it might seem that the question
of buying admission to university (usually a parent buying a place for their
child) has little to do with prostitution and pornography. After all, this isn’t
a question of generally desperate people selling something that is either a
part of their body or at least the use of their body for a period. It’s not bodily
at all. When it comes to buying university admission, the controversy is
usually around the use of wealth and power to secure something that is
unearned or undeserved. Robert Goodin and Christian Barry, for example,
discuss the moral issue of benefiting from others’ wrongdoing using the
running case of a person who discovers later in life that his father bribed a
Harvard official in order to secure his (the son’s) admission. They write ‘it
was . . . wrong that you were admitted to Harvard (your test scores just didn’t
merit admission)’.43 They argue that because the first person’s Harvard
education benefited them, at a cost to a second person whose deserved
place was lost, the first person is morally obliged to disgorge the benefits.
This means something like, attempt to quantify the benefits in monetary
terms and then pay this in compensation to the person whose place
was taken.
This is actually a surprisingly helpful way to think about men buying sex
from women. As Michelle Mara said of men who use prostitutes, ‘they can’t
get access to whatever they want to have access to without paying for it’.44
Sex, like admission to a university, should be the kind of good that a person
gets access to for reasons that have nothing to do with money. Universities
have entry requirements that must be met, and prestigious universities offer
limited places to exceptionally well-­qualified individuals. If you do not earn
your place, you should not have a place.45 Similarly, women have individual
tastes and preferences and boundaries and desires, all of which determine
who she will be interested to have sex with and what kind of sex she wants
to have. It might be with a long-­term partner who she is in a loving and
committed relationship with, and it might be with an attractive stranger
who she thinks is a good prospect for a mutually enjoyable one-­night stand.
While women do in fact tolerate large quantities of bad sex with men,46 few
if any would actively seek it out.
If a man is to have sex with a woman, it should be because a woman
desires him; not because he wants access to a woman’s desire, cannot get it,
and so bribes her for it. Sex should be mutually desired and mutually
78  The Sex Industry

beneficial. But the idea that a woman’s pleasure has any role to play in
prostitution or mainstream pornography is unrealistic. The reporter on the
World’s Biggest Gangbang III filming talks about one of the ‘few men’—in
this case man number 407 out of 620—who goes down on Houston during
the gangbang.47 He comments, ‘Houston does not come once during the
day’.48 It seems the event has nothing to do with her pleasure and the men
involved all found that unremarkable. In fact, it was the man who thought it
did have something to do with her pleasure that attracted attention.
When wealthy parents in the United States—including celebrities and
CEOs—were discovered to have been buying university admissions for
their children, they were charged and many will spend time in prison.49
This sends a strong signal that those with wealth and power are not beyond
the law; the same rules that apply to everyone else apply to them. If they
want their children to go to university, they had better teach those children
to work hard enough to earn a place. What they cannot earn on their own
merits, they should not have. So too for sex. Socialization into masculinity
inculcates the belief that women owe men service, sexual and otherwise.50
But women are not for men. Women are not for anything. What he cannot
earn on his own merits, he should not have. If he is not funny, or charming,
or likeable, or intelligent, or interesting, or fit, or handsome, then he will
have to limit his sexual pleasure to what he can provide himself. The sooner
that men reconceptualize sexual pleasure and sexual access in this way,51
the better for women.52
Noxious markets. In her book Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale,
Debra Satz provides a way to unify some of the considerations above, by
offering a set of parameters for when a market is ‘noxious’ and therefore a
candidate for being banned or constrained. The parameters are harmful
outcomes for individuals, harmful outcomes for society—particularly where
the market ‘undermine[s] the social framework needed for people to
interact as equals’, weak/asymmetric knowledge/agency, and extreme
vulnerability. Selling person-­parts involves all four parameters—it is one of
the clearest cases of a noxious market.53 Boxing involves harmful outcomes
for individuals (the boxers), and to the extent that boxers are drawn from
a marginalized social group, for society. It also involves asymmetric k­ nowledge.
Buying university admissions involves harmful outcomes for society.
In her chapter ‘Markets in Women’s Sexual Labour’, Satz addresses prosti-
tution specifically, saying that it counts as a noxious market in virtue of the
social harm it causes. Against a backdrop of sex inequality, prostitution sus-
tains the social subordination of women and in doing so harms women as a
 Who and What Are Men Buying?  79

class. It has effects on how men perceive all women, and how women per-
ceive themselves. She says ‘prostitution is a theatre of inequality’.54 This is an
interesting argument because it takes social structures seriously (on which,
more in Chapter 9), but does not require any claim about the buying/selling
of sex being intrinsically wrong. There could be some possible, sex-­equal
future, where buying/selling sex did not harm women as a class, and did not
meet any of the other parameters, so did not count as a noxious market.

4.3  Who and What Are Men Buying?

Many people think it’s morally impermissible to buy factory farmed meat,
because of the suffering the animals experience. Many people think it’s
morally impermissible to leave greenhouse gas emissions unchecked,
because of the suffering people in low-­lying countries and poor countries
experience, and future people will experience. Many people worry about
sweatshops and blood diamonds and conflict minerals and unfair trade, for
all the same reasons. In this section, I want to show that consuming the
products of the sex industry is unethical consumption par excellence, and
belongs in the same category as these other, more familiar, cases. At the
start of the chapter, I said it’s clear that the types of women held up by
different groups of feminists, in the first case to defend the sex industry and
in the second case to argue against it, both exist. In this section, I will show
that nonetheless, the type of women the radical and gender-­critical feminists
are worried about are the large majority of all women used in the industry.
Let’s start with prostitution alone (prostitution without filming). In the
European Parliament’s 2014 report ‘Sexual Exploitation and Prostitution
and Its Impact on Gender Equality’, authors Erika Schulze, Sandra Isabel
Novo Canto, Peter Mason, and Maria Skalin lament the lack of reliable data
on prostitution and sexual exploitation. They say ‘There is no clear picture
of the number of prostitutes and their clients, and their revenue and profits
(including for the pimps)’.55 This means policy-­makers are forced to rely on
estimations. They note that qualitative social research on the selling of sex is
often biased, towards either the regulatory or the abolitionist approach (on
which more soon). They quote one of the researchers they take to be an
exception to this bias, saying ‘the knowledge base for evidence-­ based
policies on prostitution is weak’.56 They comment that the abolitionist data
unhelpfully blurs the distinctions between ‘women selling sex and women
[who are] sexually exploited’.57 They seem to have in mind the difference
80  The Sex Industry

between a woman selling sex consensually who is subject to violence at the

hands of clients, and a woman who is trafficked or pimped58—although
they do include earlier in the report that there are issues with whether any
consent to prostitution can be authentic.59 Finally, they recognize that the
evidence on men buying women is also scarce, and relies on estimations,
which range from ‘few’ to ‘one third’ of all men.60
Prostitution is estimated to involve forty to forty-­two million people
globally, 75 per cent of whom are between 13 and 25 years old, and 90 per
cent of whom depend on third parties (pimps and madams).61 On the most
conservative estimate, roughly 14 per cent of prostitutes being sold in
Europe are trafficked; on the estimates of some European Community
countries between 60 and 90 per cent of the prostitutes being sold in their
countries are trafficked. Most trafficking is for sexual exploitation.62 The
United Nations’ ‘Global Report on Trafficking in Persons’ gathered data
from 155 countries, finding that 79 per cent of human trafficking was for
the purpose of sexual exploitation, and that the predominant victims of
sexual exploitation were women and girls. Based on aggregated data from
2006, 66 per cent of trafficking victims were women and 13 per cent were
girls. Other purposes of trafficking included exploitation as domestic
servants and wives.63
A Dutch study published in 2000 reported 79 per cent of the women in
their study being in prostitution by force.64 An interview-­based study of 854
people (mostly women) in prostitution across nine countries found that
65‒95 per cent were sexually assaulted as children; that 70‒95 per cent were
physically assaulted in prostitution; that 60‒75 per cent were raped in
prostitution; that 75 per cent of those in prostitution had been homeless at
some point; that 89 per cent of 785 people interviewed wanted to escape
prostitution; that 68 per cent of 827 people interviewed had severe
symptoms of PTSD; and that 88 per cent experienced verbal abuse.65
Things will be different in each country, and in some cases in each state
of each country. But we can learn something about the commonalities by
considering some specific cases.
Eaves Housing for Women, a London-­based charity focused on violence
against women which closed in 2015, attempted the ambitious project of
mapping the sex industry across London in the second half of 2003. Their
key findings were that between 2,972 and 5,861 women were selling sex
from ‘flats, parlours and saunas’ in London, and between 1,755 and 2,221
women were selling sex as escorts in London; that only 19 per cent of the
former women were from the United Kingdom (they found 25 per cent
 Who and What Are Men Buying?  81

were Eastern European; 13 per cent South East Asian; 12 per cent Western
European; and smaller numbers of people from other regions),66 and only
20 per cent of the latter women were from the United Kingdom (33 per cent
were Eastern European, 13 per cent South East Asian, 12 per cent Western
European, and there were smaller numbers of people from other regions).67
A detailed study of street-­based sex workers conducted through a series
of interviews in the British city of Stoke-­on-­Trent in 2007‒8 found that drug
dependency was the primary reason why women in that cohort entered
street-­based sex work, and that other reasons included being coerced by
pimps, and needing money to pay off debts, or to pay for rent or food.
Homelessness was a pathway into prostitution, with most women homeless
at the time that they started selling sex (this was Moran’s pathway: running
away from an abusive home as a teenager, becoming homeless, and
eventually turning to prostitution).68 Debt, whether drug debts, missed rent
payments, or police fines, kept women in prostitution even after they
managed to kick their drug habits. Violence and rape at the hands of punters
was routine.69 The researchers in this study also found that the key triggers
of homelessness were leaving home as a result of sexual abuse, physical
abuse, neglect, and other problems/conflicts; domestic abuse by a partner;
leaving state care and not maintaining contact with social services; and the
impacts of traumatic experiences.70 Fifty-­seven per cent of their cohort
were homeless by age 16, and some left home when they were as young as
10 years old.71 These women were ‘a very vulnerable population with
significant and extensive welfare and support needs’, almost all of whom
had a criminal record and most of whom had been in prison, most of whom
had drug dependencies, and most of whom had experienced domestic
violence.72
In Australia, the Prostitutes Collective of Victoria in 1990 received up to
fifteen reports a week of rape and violence against prostitutes.73 Research
undertaken in Victoria with twenty-­three women in 1996 found that all had
been raped, bashed, or robbed by a punter and all had been forced to have
sex without a condom.74 A study run by the group Child Wise in 2002
found there to be 1,205 children under 18 working as child prostitutes in
Victoria.75 Research from 1994 found that of the street-­based prostitutes in
St. Kilda in 1994, 80 per cent were drug addicted, 70 per cent were homeless,
25 per cent had a psychiatric disability, 20 per cent were addicted to alcohol,
and 10 per cent had an intellectual disability.76
So, who or what are men buying? There are no definitive statistics on the
ratio of women who are trafficked compared to women who entered
82  The Sex Industry

prostitution in another way, or the ratio of women whose reasons for

entering and staying in prostitution severely compromise the validity of
their ‘consent’ to sell their bodies compared to the women who can
genuinely be said to consent. But we have enough information to know that
the odds of any given man encountering a non-­exploited and genuinely
consenting woman when he goes to buy sex are very poor. In fact, the
website punternet.com includes reviews of prostitutes’ services written by
punters, and ‘frequently refers to men buying sex with women who are
clearly unhappy, unwilling, frightened and/or in pain’.77 The chances are
that what the man is buying is sexual access to someone who has been
trafficked, and/or who is from an abusive background (whether at the hands
of her family or her intimate partner), and/or who is or has been homeless
and desperate, and/or who is addicted to drugs or alcohol. These are women
who are in a precarious social and economic position and who generally
have no other way of meeting their basic needs.
This is not to say that there are no women working as prostitutes who
have a range of decent options and nonetheless choose prostitution. There
surely are a few. But we can hardly justify the existence of a huge global
industry absolutely full of female suffering by holding up a few happy
‘workers’ and pretending that the literally millions of other women don’t
exist. There might be someone in the world who would be enthusiastic
about selling a kidney for a decent price rather than working the hours it
would take to earn the equivalent sum. He has two; he’ll probably get by just
fine with one; and he quite likes the idea that one of his organs might be
used to save a life. (Not quite enough to donate it, though.) We don’t hold
this man up as our sole argument for establishing a legal trade in organs. We
think that the actual and likely harms to the global poor outweigh whatever
weak reasons this man’s mere preference might have given us.
Is it the same story for pornography? There are more possible defences
here: some pornography is focused on the woman’s pleasure, and so is
reciprocal and mutually pleasurable in a way that makes it more like sex
should be (although the vast, vast majority is not like this). But again, we
should not let these rare exceptions obscure what the great majority of
women inside the industry are actually experiencing.
A 2015 documentary Hot Girls Wanted follows 18‒25-­year-­old women in
America, working in the porn industry. The film explains the huge demand
for ‘amateur’ pornography with young girls. It tells the story from the girls’
perspective, their hopes for making big money, having fun, and becoming
famous. One of the most disturbing parts of the documentary is its study of
 Who and What Are Men Buying?  83

‘forced blowjobs’, which involve men grabbing women roughly by the heads,
and fucking them in the throat until they vomit. This is male violence
against women and girls. Some porn apologists will try to say that some
women like to be dominated, and this is something that the women being
filmed might find a turn-­on. But this claim is quickly dispelled when the
two women involved in such scenes talk about them. One says ‘the physical
part it’s just . . .’ (someone off-­camera suggests ‘temporary’) ‘. . . yeah. I’m here
to put on a show, I’m not here to be comfortable. I come and put on a show
and make myself uncomfortable, so you can get off so I can get paid and be
comfortable on my own time’78. Another woman talks about being flown in
to film a blowjob scene, and only being told after arriving that it would be
forced. These are not women who are enjoying what they’re doing, they’re
women who are willing to do it for other reasons, not least to get paid.
It’s also important to note that porn is addictive.79 In order to keep
receiving the ‘hit’ of arousal, novelty is required, which means new girls,
and new things being done to them. This demand for ‘innovation’ in porn
has driven producers to ever more violent and degrading extremes (the
forced blowjobs mentioned already are one example—in a scene featuring
the woman quoted above, after she has thrown up, a man off camera can be
heard directing her to ‘lick it up’; another example mentioned in the Netflix
series Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On is pushing a girl’s head into a toilet bowl
and flushing it while fucking her from behind (episode 1). This stuff is
brutal. Women and girls are being treated in ever more creative degrading
and demeaning ways, in order to satisfy men’s constantly ratcheting-­up
sexual demands.
In summary, the men who buy the use of women’s bodies (or who watch
other men having access to women’s bodies that others have paid for the use
of), are using (watching the use of) women who are much more likely than
not to have been trafficked, abused, homeless, destitute, and/or drug-­
addicted, and to be suffering from severe PTSD. Even those who entered
prostitution or pornography as the result of an apparently free choice are
likely to have been coerced into doing things that they are not comfortable
with. There is so much harm in the sex industry and so little good that
considering the industry in isolation seems to give us sufficient reason to
shut it down.
Still; the argument is not won simply by cataloguing the harms of the sex
industry, either globally or within a particular country. A further question
has to be asked: what is the expected harm reduction—and what are the
independent harms likely to be caused by—the policy models we might use
84  The Sex Industry

to address these identified harms of the sex industry? There’s no point

ending one lot of harms by replacing them with another, or attempting to
end one lot of harms with a proposal that in fact just ends up making them
worse. So we have to think carefully about what’s being proposed and
whether it works. That is the focus of the next (and final) section.

4.4  Policy Models

It is common for feminists to distinguish three policy models: legalization,

decriminalization, and the Nordic Model. Many feminists today tend to
support decriminalization80 while radical and gender-­critical feminists tend
to support the Nordic Model.81
In Revolting Prostitutes, Mac & Smith argue that this typology misses
important distinctions.82 They survey five policy alternatives instead, all
implemented in different parts of the world: partial criminalization, full
criminalization, asymmetrical criminalization (also known as the Nordic
Model), legalization, and decriminalization. These are basically what they
sound like.

• Partial criminalization: criminalizes some aspects of prostitution and

not others, as in England, Scotland, and Wales where it is legal to buy
and sell sex, but illegal to solicit clients, facilitate the buying/selling of
sex, or work indoors with others selling sex.
• Full criminalization: criminalizes all aspects of prostitution, including
all parties involved in it (e.g. sex workers, managers, landlords, ad­vert­
isers), as in the United States, South Africa, Russia, and China.
• Asymmetrical criminalization: (the Nordic Model) criminalizes the
buyers of sex, but not the sellers, aiming to eliminate demand. This is
the model in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, France, and Canada.
• Legalization: makes all aspects of the sex industry legal, but usually
comes hand in hand with regulations like mandatory health checks or
registration as a sex worker (perhaps for this reason, Mac & Smith
refer to it as ‘Regulationism’ instead). This model is in place in Germany
and the Netherlands.
• Decriminalization: shifts sex work entirely out of the criminal law and
makes regulation a matter of labour law. It has in common with le­gal­
iza­tion that involvement in the sex trade is no longer criminal, but it
tends to avoid the bureaucracy that comes along with legalization in
 Policy Models  85

the countries that have implemented it. This is the policy model in
New Zealand.83

Mac & Smith—both themselves sex workers, and to all appearances both
extremely well-­ informed about, and well-­ networked into, sex worker
collectives and communities around the world—defend a clear ordering of
these policy models from worst to best. Criminalization (full, partial, or
asymmetric) is the worst, driving sex workers into increasingly unsafe and
risky practices, empowering police and officials to do further harm to
already extremely marginalized communities (e.g. confiscation of earnings
as the ‘proceeds of crime’, eviction, deportation), and making it even harder
for desperate people to meet their basic needs. Legalization is better, but still
bad for all the women who can’t or won’t meet the bureaucratic require-
ments, who are then still criminalized. Decriminalization is by far the best,
because it gives sex workers labour rights, it makes them safer, it removes the
power of police to interfere, and it increases workers’ bargaining power with
managers and negotiating power with clients. (Although the authors are
keen to stress that there are still improvements that can be made upon the
way decriminalization has been implemented in New Zealand.)
This might be taken to imply that Mac & Smith are pro sex work, but
that’s not entirely obvious. Although they are sex worker rights activists,
and critics of the anti-­prostitution positions of many radical and gender-­
critical feminists, they still imagine a future that is largely without sex work:

To make sex work unnecessary, there is much work to do . . . If everybody

had the resources they needed, nobody would need to sell sex . . . If we are
then able to end poverty and borders (and the litany of other ills discussed
here), sex work might indeed whither [sic] away and effectively be
abolished for all but the small number who genuinely love it.84

This shows that abolitionism is not synonymous with the Nordic Model;
feminists of very different types can hold abolition as an end goal, while
disagreeing about the policy pathway we should use to get there.
Mac & Smith make a persuasive case for decriminalization, based on a
concern to alleviate the material harms currently experienced by sex
workers, but see this as a way (together with other policy measures like
poverty reduction and reduced border control) to work towards a future in
which there is virtually no sex work. There may be some talking past each
other between feminists of different types depending on whether they’re
86  The Sex Industry

talking about the ideal end state, or the policy measure we should use to get
to it. But the main disagreements between those who side with Mac & Smith
and those who side with their radical and gender-­critical counterparts seem
to be in two areas. First, Mac & Smith focus on mitigating harm to sex work-
ers, rather than on the balance of harms to all women.85 Second, they are
more or less fatalistic about women entering prostitution, given socio-­
economic precariousness (they mention the deterrence effects of alternative
policies only a few times in their book, and never with any concrete data).
Kajsa Ekis Ekman comments on the ‘myth of the sex worker’ (prostituted
woman as worker) that ‘There is resignation, cynicism, and an absence of
hope for a better world. The best thing that could happen, according to this
story, would be if prostitutes were murdered a little less frequently and had
somewhat nicer places to work in’.86 While Mac & Smith do have hope for a
better world, they are not unreasonably characterized by Ekman’s
description of the best thing that could happen anytime soon.
We make a value judgement about the best policy pathway by thinking
about who is harmed and who is helped, and by weighing up harms,
whether the same types of harms (more straightforward) or different types
of harms (more difficult). Are we thinking about the most marginalized
women, and therefore focused on the sex workers themselves, or are we
thinking about all women, and therefore interested in the impacts of
prostitution on women more generally? Are there some lines we will not
cross (e.g. no woman can be ‘sacrificed’ to deportation or a high risk of rape
or murder in order to secure fewer women working in prostitution), or is
everything thrown into the utility calculation? What do we hold fixed, in
terms of thinking about what human societies are like? Assumptions of
the  following kinds are frequent throughout Mac & Smith’s book, and
largely  unacknowledged: that police will always abuse their power; that
criminalization will not stop women selling sex but only make it more
dangerous for them; that mandatory health testing will not stop infected
people working but only drive them away from health facilities; that drug
users will not stop using no matter how high the financial and physical price
of securing drugs; that migrants will not avoid prostitution just because it is
illegal, but rather will just do it under more dangerous conditions; and so on.
Mac & Smith argue that radical feminists have been too concerned with
the ‘symbolic’ aspects of prostitution, to the exclusion of how sex workers
are materially impacted by particular policies in the here and now.87 And
indeed, in a review of their book on the Nordic Model Now! webpage, Anna
Fisher writes that:
 Policy Models  87

prostitution works to subordinate women en masse . . . [because it]

implicitly positions women and girls as objects for male sexual
consumption, rather than as subjects in their own right. This implies that
men are human and women are lesser, sub-­human, or second class, and it
affects how all men see women and how women see themselves. This is
strengthened and legitimised whenever prostitution is normalised, for
example, by considering it a form of regular work.88

We can accept that subordination is harmful while agreeing that it is a harm

of a different quality to material impacts. In 1993, feminist philosopher Rae
Langton defended the idea that pornography is a ‘speech act’, combining a
judicial decision that pornography is speech with Catharine MacKinnon’s
argument that pornography is an act.89 Since then, it has been common to
consider pornography as a speech act, focusing either on its ‘locutionary’
effects (what that speech means), its ‘illocutionary’ effects (what that speech
does), or its ‘perlocutionary’ effects (what that speech or speech act causes,
downstream). For example, when a woman is depicted as an object to be
moved around at will and fucked for the man’s pleasure, the scene may
mean that women are objects for men’s sexual gratification. The same scene
may degrade or defame or oppress female people. Rosemary Tong, writing in
1982, argued that hardcore pornography was ‘harmful to all women to the
degree that [it is] meant to degrade and defame females’.90 And the same
scene may cause the men watching it to later treat women in real life in
sexually demeaning, disrespectful, or harmful ways. The links between the
first two categories and the last are difficult to establish. A person who
wishes to make a decision about policy based on material harms will not be
able to do much with the meaning and the doing of pornography. It might
be true that pornography does symbolic harm in sustaining the idea that
women are sex objects, and true that pornography degrades women, defames
women, oppresses women, and yet not be true that either of these things
cause women material harm. Unless Fisher connects the subordination of
women to material outcomes, she is vulnerable to Mac & Smith’s objection.
Fisher responds to Mac & Smith by saying that the existence of prostitu-
tion does do material—not just symbolic—harm to women, citing research on
the correlation between rape, sexual harassment, and violence ­perpetrated
by men against women, and their buying of sex. She points to a study by the
United Nations of violent men across six countries which found that men
who buy sex were almost eight times more likely to rape than other men,
and that buying sex was the second most significant factor that men found
88  The Sex Industry

guilty of rape had in common.91 This shows that in order to defend an alter-
native policy model against Mac & Smith, we don’t need to defend merely
symbolic harms as outweighing harms like the deportation of migrant
women for sharing a flat while selling sex (which in the UK is classed as
brothel-­keeping).92 We can compare the whole slew of harms to both
women involved in the sex industry and women impacted by the sex indus-
try’s existence, to the likely harm-­alleviation of decriminalization.
So the question becomes, do prostitution and/or pornography lead to
material harms against women? A similar question arose over video games
in the mid-­2000s: does playing violent video games make players more
violent? Controversy arose when it was revealed that Grand Theft Auto let
its players

pick up a hooker, take her out in the woods, have sex with her many times,
then let her out of the car. Then you can shoot her, pull over, beat her with
a bat, then you can get into the car and run her over. Oh, and don’t forget
to pick up the money you paid her for sex.93

These games clearly have locutionary and illocutionary effects, the question
is whether they have perlocutionary—i.e. causal—effects too. Meta-­analysis
of empirical studies reported on in 2003 found that violent video games
were ‘significantly associated with’ increased aggressive behaviour, and
decreased prosocial behaviour (which means, behaviour that involves
helping others). Frequent exposure to violent video games has been linked
to fighting at school and violent criminal behaviour like assault and
robbery.94
Is the same true for prostitution and pornography? Are the (heterosexual
and bisexual) men who watch porn more likely to subject women to bad
sex? Are the men who watch violent porn more likely to be sexually violent
with women? Are the men who use prostitutes more likely to violate
women’s boundaries in sex, to care less about real consent, to be sexually
violent? We know that younger and younger people are accessing porn, and
that porn has become, for many people, sex education. This surely has
negative effects on the sex that is being had. But is there evidence?
Paul Wright and Robert Tokunaga gathered data from college men
attracted to women, aiming to test the thesis that ‘the more men are exposed
to objectifying depictions, the more they will think of women as entities
that exist for men’s sexual gratification . . . this dehumanized perspective on
women may then be used to inform attitudes regarding sexual violence
 Policy Models  89

against women’.95 They were interested in objectifying media more broadly,

including pornography but also reality television and men’s magazines. The
most important attitudes for our purposes were those ‘supportive of
violence against women’. They found that, indeed, ‘men who viewed women
as sex objects had attitudes more supportive of violence against women’.96
This meant agreeing with statements like ‘Being roughed up is sexually
stimulating to many women’, ‘Many times a woman will pretend she doesn’t
want to have intercourse because she doesn’t want to seem loose, but she’s
really hoping the man will force her’, ‘Sometimes the only way a man can get
a cold woman turned on is to use force’, ‘When women go around braless or
wearing short skirts and tight tops, they are just asking for trouble’, and
‘A woman who is stuck-­up and thinks she is too good to talk to guys on the
street deserves to be taught a lesson’.97
This does not yet show actual violence against women; it is conceivable
that men with high exposure to women-­objectifying media are more likely
to condone other men’s violence against women but do not perpetrate it
themselves. Given that sexual assault is a crime, it will be a lot harder to
get  reliable data on the causal connection that matters the most. A meta-­
analysis of nine studies involving 2,309 participants got a little closer, in that
three of the ‘attitudes’ it covered were about likelihood of performing certain
acts: likelihood of rape, likelihood of sexual force, and likelihood of sexual
harassment. As the researchers explain, these are scales ‘used to measure
the hypothetical potential of a man to rape or commit similar sexually
aggressive acts given the assurance that he would face no punishment’.98
They found a significant correlation between the consumption of porn­og­
raphy and attitudes supporting violence against women, and further that
violent pornography was more likely than non-­violent pornography to
have this association.99
A 2018 study in South Korea looked at the connection between men
using prostitutes and men committing sex crimes in order to challenge the
common argument that prostitution reduces the incidence of sexual
violence against women. Seo-­Young Cho looked at a sample of 480 men
imprisoned for sex offences, and found that ‘buying sex significantly
increases the probability that one commits various further forms of sex
crimes—sexual assaults in general and forced sex with a stranger or
partner’,100 and that ‘furthermore, the experience of paying for sex with an
underage prostitute exacerbates the severity of sex crimes committed by sex
offenders’.101 (A limitation of the study was that there could be a common
cause of a person’s use of prostitutes and committing of sex crimes.)
90  The Sex Industry

Finally, Paul Wright and his colleagues conducted a meta-­analysis of

twenty-­two studies from seven countries to try to answer the hardest ques-
tion, namely ‘Is pornography consumption correlated with committing
actual acts of sexual aggression?’ They understood physical sexual aggression
as the use of threat or physical force, and verbal sexual aggression as verbally
coercive but not physically threatening (for example, threatening to break up
with your partner unless sexual intercourse is had). The researchers found
significant associations between pornography consumption and physical
sexual aggression (more so in the case of violent compared to non-­violent
pornography),102 but concluded very cautiously, saying only that ‘violent
content may be an exacerbating factor’.103
Given all of this, and given what prostituted women say about their
­experiences even when they are ‘high-­end’,104 it seems to me highly unlikely
that decriminalization is going to emerge as the preferable policy. The
industry permits men to buy what no one should be able to buy, the sexual
use of women who are highly likely to be extremely vulnerable. It involves
serious harm to the women working in it, and that harm is integral to the
nature of the work, making reform impossible. And its existence may be
contributing to male violence towards women who are not part of the
industry, too. Decriminalization focuses too much on harm reduction in the
short-­term and for a narrow group of women, rather than in the short- and
long-­term and for all women.
It is useful at this point to make a distinction between the ‘perfect’ and
the ‘good’. The perfect is the thing that is morally desirable in principle. For
radical and gender-­ critical feminists concerned with the trafficking,
coercion, exploitation, domination, and abuse of women across the sex
industry, and the impacts this industry has on all women (materially and
symbolically), what is perfect is sex industry abolitionism. Women’s
liberation is ultimately incompatible with the existence of prostitution, or
with pornography in anything like its current form. The buyer is the
problem, for his sexual entitlement is what creates demand. The Nordic
Model is a policy pathway that responds to this without further harming the
women caught up in the sex industry. So the ideological commitment of
gender-­critical feminism should be to abolitionism via the Nordic Model.
But what is good depends on what will do the most to reduce male violence
against women and girls, and advance the cause of women’s liberation.
If  sufficient evidence can be provided to show that decriminalization
beats  the Nordic Model on these measures (unlikely, but possible), then
 Policy Models  91

gender-­critical feminists ought to choose to support it. Not letting the per-
fect become the enemy of the good means that we shouldn’t let ideological
commitments get in the way of reducing harm and advancing women’s
practical interests. We should always remain responsive to the evidence
about what will bring more good to women.
 5
Trans/Gender

The oppressed is keenly aware of the humanity of the privileged.

For the privileged, on the other hand, the oppressed is an
enigma living in a magical, half-­human world.
(Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought)1

At the heart of the disagreement gender-­critical feminists have with other

types of feminists over trans issues is ‘the woman question’, which is, what
does it take to be a woman? A lot depends on the answer to this question,
for it tells us who feminism is for and what it is about. Our answer to this
question has implications for what we think about the permissibility of
excluding certain people, and certain issues. As we have seen, gender-­
critical feminists think that to be a ‘woman’ is to be an adult human female;
a member of a sex class that has a history of oppression and whose mem-
bers are still oppressed in some countries, or are dealing with the lasting
structural effects of historical oppression in others. For gender-­critical
feminists, feminism is about female people. We use the terms ‘female’ and
‘woman’ interchangeably to refer to these people. Gender-­critical feminists
do distinguish sex from gender, viewing sex as a biological fact and gender
as a system of norms imposed on the basis of sex. But these distinctions
pick out the same class of people, not different ones. So even if gender-­
critical feminists were to use ‘female’ for sex and ‘woman’ for people subject
to certain norms and expectations on the basis of that sex, they’d still
ultimately be talking about female people in both cases. (Most gender-­
critical feminists instead use ‘femininity’ to talk about the gender norms
imposed on females.)
Importantly, this is not a mere disagreement about words. Gender-­
critical feminists think there are good reasons for female people to hang on
to the word ‘woman’, not least because it is used synonymously with ‘female’
throughout domestic and international law designed to protect sex-­based
rights. But even if they were to cede the word ‘woman’, they would still think
that female people were a subordinated class2 in need of its own theory and

Gender-Critical Feminism: Holly Lawford-Smith, Oxford University Press. © Holly Lawford-Smith 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863885.003.0005
 Trans/Gender  93

movement. For them, the fact that some activists today are trying to change
the meaning of the word ‘woman’ doesn’t change any of the underlying facts
about the importance of sex and the history of sex-­based oppression. At
best, it would simply create a new social group, and new questions about
whether this group was itself subject to any historical or contemporary
injustice.
Some feminists, though, think ‘the woman question’ is different from ‘the
female question’, because they use ‘woman’ as a gender term and reject the
understanding of gender as a system of norms imposed on the basis of sex.
Some think that gender, rather than being something that is done to us, is
something that we do, something that we ‘perform, produce, and sustain’
through our voluntary actions.3 Others think that gender is an identity, a
way that we feel about ourselves and that we alone have authority over.4
When pushed, many of the feminists who subscribe to either of these views
will admit to a sex/gender distinction. But at the same time, many support
legal and political reforms that effectively eliminate sex and replace it with
one of these views of gender. For example, there was considerable support
among British feminists for changes to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act
(GRA) that would make self-­declared gender identity the relevant attribute
for almost all social and legal purposes where sex had formerly been
relevant (with a narrow range of exceptions where sex was still considered
relevant).5 Or to give an example from my own state, many Victorian
feminists supported the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration
Amendment Bill 2019, which made it the case that legal sex could be
changed on the basis of a statutory declaration of belief. For example, any
male person could declare that he believed himself to be female, and thereby
secure the legal status ‘female’. This gives that person access to all and any
spaces, services, and protections available to female people, with the sole
exception of competition in elite sports. So even if the feminists who
support these changes admit to sex as a biological category, they repudiate
its significance or importance as a political or social category.
For feminists who think gender is a performance or an identity, anyone
who performs femininity or identifies as female/woman is a woman. For
them, feminism is for all of these people. So feminism is for some males
(although many would refuse to call them that, given the close association
between ‘male’ and ‘man’ in ordinary language). From the perspective of
these feminists, the gender-­ critical feminists’ attempt to restrict the
constituency of feminism to female people is exclusionary, keeping some
women out of a political project that is meant to be for all women. Very
94 Trans/Gender

often, both sides lose sight of the fact that they disagree about what it means
to be a woman, and fall into accusing each other of various transgressions
against the sisterhood. Gender-­critical feminists are accused of failing to
learn from feminist history, and treating men with gender identities in just
the way that the ‘white feminists’ (read: white, middle-­class, etc., feminists)
treated more marginalized women in the past.6 Other types of feminists are
accused of being such victims of feminine socialization that they have
become handmaidens for the patriarchy, so self-­effacing that they’re willing
to put men first even inside feminism.7 The debate is ugly, and it has been
ugly for a long time.8
The feminists who think gender is a performance or an identity appear to
believe that there is no loss to women in shifting to an alternative
understanding of gender, and therefore a new constituency for feminism
(and in many places, redrawn boundaries of the group eligible for protection
as female/woman under the law and in social policy). The aim of this
chapter is to show that they are wrong. Gender-­critical feminists, following
radical feminists, are concerned with women as a sex class. We care deeply
about harms to this group. ‘Gender identity’ is an imprecise term given to a
cluster of very different people with very different underlying issues. There
are no diagnostic criteria for gender identity; we are simply asked to take a
person’s word for it that they have one, and what it is. In the law in my state,
‘gender identity’ is an attribute protected from discrimination, but its
definition is ‘a person’s gender-­related identity’, and ‘gender’ is not defined.9
The ideology of gender as identity, and the activism that doggedly pursues
its introduction into law and policy, is harmful to women, and creates a
conflict of interest between women as a class and trans people as a
social group.
Although considerable energy has been expended by opponents of
gender-­critical feminism characterizing it as ‘anti-­trans’,10 this conflict of
interest does not put gender-­critical feminism and support for trans rights
in tension. While gender-­critical feminists reject legal conflation between
sex and gender identity, and advocate for continued protection of sex under
the law, there is no tension with also supporting the protection of gender
identity, transgender status, or gender expression.11 The limit to our support
for these things is that we do so without believing that they change a person’s
sex. Gender-­critical feminism is not anti-­trans. In fact, characterizing it as
‘anti-­trans’ is a kind of anti-­feminist propaganda, distortion of a movement
and theory for women and women’s sex-­ based rights by labelling it
according to what it is not about (more in Chapter 6). It would be like the
 Gender Non-­c onforming Women and Girls  95

‘pro-­life’ side of the abortion debate insistently referring to the ‘pro-­choice’

side as ‘anti-­foetus’. Just as a woman does not terminate a pregnancy because
she hates foetuses, and it would be patently absurd to claim that she does, a
gender-­critical feminist does not deny ‘transwomen are women’, or reject
sex self-­identification in law, because she hates transwomen. There is no
hatred or other ‘anti’ sentiment anywhere in the view.12
In the first part of this chapter, I’ll focus on the harms of gender identity
ideology to gender non-­conforming women and girls, in the second part of
the chapter on harms to women and girls more generally.

5.1  Gender Non-­conforming Women and Girls

Danish comedian Sofie Hagen, one of the founding members of The Guilty
Feminist podcast, announced in 2019 that she was ‘non-­binary’, giving as
reasons that people in comedy paid a lot of attention to her sex, which felt
wrong, and that wearing trousers ‘felt so right’.13 In societies that value
males more, and that give opportunities to males that are not given to
females, is it any surprise that women and girls would come to dis-­identify
with femaleness, and identify more with maleness? In a 1946 poll, a quarter
of the women respondents said they wished they’d been born the opposite
sex.14 Are we to believe that a full quarter of women were transgender then?
Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone made this point in 1970 (in the
section this passage comes from she’s giving a feminist reinterpretation
of Freud):

As for the ‘penis envy’, again it is safer to view this as a metaphor. Even
when an actual preoccupation with genitals does occur it is clear that
anything that physically distinguishes the envied male will be envied. For
the girl can’t really understand how it is that when she does exactly the
same thing as her brother, his behaviour is approved and hers isn’t. She
may or may not make a confused connection between his behaviour and
the organ that differentiates him.15

Firestone’s point is that what Freud called ‘penis envy’ wasn’t literally envy
of the penis, but rather envy of males’ superior social status. Simone de
Beauvoir made the same point in 1949 when she said: ‘if the little girl feels
penis envy it is only as the symbol of privileges enjoyed by boys. The place
the father holds in the family, the universal predominance of males, her
96 Trans/Gender

own education—everything confirms her in her belief in masculine

superiority’.16 Clara Thompson and Karen Horney made the point as early
as 1939 (summarized a little later by Thompson): ‘that cultural factors can
explain the tendency of women to feel inferior about their sex and their
consequent tendency to envy men; that this state of affairs may well lead
women to blame all their difficulties on the fact of their sex’.17 Feminists
have been making this point for a long time, but back then they were
making it against insufferable male theorists like Freud and Sartre, not—as
they must do today—against clinicians, mental health professionals,
counsellors, teachers, and all the other professionals who support the
affirmation of any young girl’s claim that she is really a boy. Radical feminist
Janice Raymond criticized the medicalization of what was at her time of
writing transsexualism rather than transgenderism (the difference being
whether mere self-­ identification, as opposed to having undergone sex
reassignment surgery, was taken to be sufficient for trans status) as being an
individual solution to a social problem.18
Gender-­critical feminists do not find it surprising that girls wouldn’t
identify with their gender. On the contrary, that is exactly what our
understanding of gender predicts and explains. If all women were naturally
inclined towards femininity, there wouldn’t need to be so much effort
expended in policing conformity, in offering social and economic rewards
for conformity and punishments for non-­conformity. Some women might
get lucky, and happen to genuinely prefer what they would be pushed into
even if they didn’t prefer it. But we can expect many women not to be in this
position. Those women are not all transgender. Gender non-­conforming
women, that is, women who are not feminine in every or even any respect,
are not a minority variation on the statistically normal feminine woman.19
Gender non-­conforming women are normal.20
We seem to have utterly lost sight of this basic feminist point today.
Clinicians, school counsellors, mental health providers, and other
professionals are being increasingly encouraged to ‘affirm’ the beliefs of
children who claim to be the opposite gender.21 As I was finishing the
writing of this book, law was introduced in Victoria, Australia, condemning
failure to ‘support or affirm’ a person’s gender identity.22 An affirmation-­
only approach makes it more difficult, when a female child claims to be a
boy, to question them about other aspects of their life, in order to try to rule
out other possible explanations than that they are transgender for why they
might be thinking of themselves this way. There are high rates of mental
health issues,23 family dysfunction,24 childhood sexual abuse,25 autism,26
 Gender Non-­c onforming Women and Girls  97

and same-­sex attraction27 within cohorts who identify as trans, any of

which might be a better explanation of their wish to transition than that the
individual is, in fact, trans.28
One clinician, interviewed anonymously by Michele Moore, an Honorary
Professor in Health and Social Care at the University of Essex, and Heather
Brunskell-­Evans, who was a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College
London, said:

You don’t just see one child and understand gender identity is not innate,
but once you’ve seen a hundred you’ve seen ‘the Reddit kid’, you’ve seen ‘the
teenager with autism’, ‘the one who might be gay’, you’ve seen ‘the girl who
was sexually abused and hates her body’, or whose mother has been sexu-
ally abused and hates her body and doesn’t want the same for her child. We
know that by not examining what is behind the onset of dysphoria, and
going straight for ‘self-­affirmation’ that the patient is transgender, we are
subjugating children’s needs to an ideological position.29

‘The Reddit kid’ here refers to the likelihood of a social contagion around
identifying as transgender. In a (2018) paper, Lisa Littman introduced what
she called ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria’, identification as trans that appears
suddenly during or after puberty (rather than from a very young age), and
generally after exposure to transgender-­identifying peers or transgender
social media content.30 In the friend groups reported in Littman’s study, the
average number of friends in the same group who began to identify as
transgender was 3.5, and 60.7 per cent of those adolescents and young
adults who announced that they were transgender experienced increased
popularity among their peers.31
In the UK, there has been a 4,400 per cent increase in girls being referred
for transitioning treatment in ten years, with drugs (specifically puberty
blockers) being offered to children as young as 10.32 In the five years
between 2015 and 2020, there was a 400 per cent rise in referrals to the
Tavistock centre in the UK, which is the only public health clinic treating
children with gender identity issues.33 The majority are girls who identify as
boys, generally without having shown signs of dysphoria in childhood.34 In
Sweden, there has been a 1,500 per cent rise between 2008 and 2018 in the
diagnosis of girls aged 13‒17 years old as having gender dysphoria.35 This
suggests we’re going to be seeing more and more ‘trans kids’, mostly
identifying as boys. It is unlikely that these kids would have met older diag-
nostic criteria.36
98 Trans/Gender

In February 2020, the well-­known gay Australian writer Benjamin Law

tweeted (from his account with 106K followers) ‘And even if there were
more trans people in 2020, what would be the problem exactly? Let’s face it:
so much of this conversation stems from an aversion to—and hatred of—
the existence of transgender people’.37 This makes use of a familiar idea
from the gay rights movement, namely that when people worried about
‘social contagion’, or gay adults influencing children to be gay, there was no
real explanation of why it should be objectionable that there are more gay
people unless there’s something wrong with being gay.
As we have just seen, there are a lot of different explanations for why
people might wish to transition. Now imagine there’s a similar range of
explanations available for why people claim to have feelings of attraction to
the same sex, many of which suggest that they are not actually gay. Perhaps
of all the people claiming to be gay, some of these were only bisexual, some
were straight but just experimenting, some were rebelling against their
parents, some were avoiding partners of the opposite sex because of past
sexual abuse by people of that category, and so on. Imagine there were peer
group incentives to claim to be gay, and this was especially appealing to
people who had no other marginalized identities and were sick of being
accused of being ‘privileged’. Suppose there was a kind of social contagion
where groups of kids were coming out as gay at the same time, in groups of
friends, after exposure to online information about gay communities.
What’s the worst that can happen during a period of a person thinking
they’re gay when they’re not? They experiment with some people of the
same sex, who they will later end up ruling out as sexual or romantic
partners. Is this a bad thing? It doesn’t seem so. Experimentation, sexual
and otherwise, is commonplace. There’s no harm at all to affirming as gay
people who are not gay. On the other hand, there is risk of serious harm in
refusing to affirm such people. At worst there is ‘conversion therapy’, where
gay people are subject to attempts to make them straight. This has been
linked to depression, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, low self-­esteem,
sexual dysfunction, harm to interpersonal relationships in particular with
partners and parents, alienation, loneliness, and social isolation.38 Short of
conversion therapy, refusal to affirm may cause a gay person to experience
shame and self-­loathing, to remain ‘in the closet’ for a long period, to feel
unconfident about trusting others—which can negatively impact the quality
of their interpersonal relationships, and to miss out on caring romantic and
sexual relationships. Ultimately, there is no reason at all to refuse to affirm
claims about sexual orientation on the basis of wanting there to be fewer gays.
 Gender Non-­c onforming Women and Girls  99

More gays, fewer gays, it doesn’t matter. No one is harmed by being gay
(except, of course, by people who don’t like gays and are willing to act
on that).
But the idea doesn’t apply to trans people as straightforwardly as Law
seems to assume. The potential harms of affirmation are very different when
it comes to gender non-­conforming kids who consider themselves trans.
First of all, they may fail to receive support for possible underlying issues of
the kinds mentioned already, including autism, histories of childhood
sexual abuse, mental health problems, family dysfunction, and same-­sex
attraction.39 Second of all, they may start taking harmful drugs. Kids who
consider themselves trans may be prescribed puberty blockers40 (these do
what they say, and block the onset of puberty) and later, cross-­sex hormones.
In the UK, cross-­sex hormones have been prescribed to kids as young as 12.41
Much of this medical treatment is experimental. Despite the World
Professional Association for Transgender Health recommending the use of
puberty blockers, there is disagreement among paediatric endocrinologists,
psychologists, psychiatrists, and ethicists about whether they should be
used.42 The UK National Health Service (NHS) website used to describe the
effects of Gonadotropin-­Releasing Hormone agonist (GnRHa) treatment as
‘fully reversible’, but this was changed in late May 2020 to say ‘little is known
about the long-­term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children
with gender dysphoria’, ‘it is not known what the psychological effects may
be’, and ‘it’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the
development of the teenage brain or children’s bones’.43
One key study looking at puberty blockers suggested that they might
contribute to gender dysphoria persisting.44 This study looked at seventy
young people between 12 and 16 years old, who had started on puberty
blockers. All of these children went on to the next stage of transitioning.45
In the UK, evidence assessed by the High Court showed that ‘practically all
children / young people who start P[uberty] B[locker]s progress on to
C[ross] S[ex] H[ormones]’.46 This suggests pathway dependence: that once
children take the first step (puberty blockers) they are highly likely to take
the next (cross-­sex hormones). (Although the Court of Appeal has recently
provided evidence suggesting the connection is less strong.)47 There are
eleven papers showing that children with strong feelings of childhood
gender dysphoria tend to ‘desist’ when left unmedicalized.48 Canadian
psychologist James Cantor says that the studies all come to a very similar
conclusion, namely that ‘very few trans-­kids still want to transition by the
time they are adults’.49 If most of the children who are put on puberty
100 Trans/Gender

blockers and/or cross-­ sex hormones persist as trans, and most of the
children who are not put on puberty blockers and/or cross-­sex hormones
end up desisting, then whether we put a kid on puberty blockers and/or
cross-­sex hormones or not determines to a large extent whether or not they
will be trans as an adult. This medicalization doesn’t treat trans people, it
creates trans people.50
The High Court in the UK in a case at the end of 2020 stated that in order
to demonstrate the competence to consent to puberty blockers, a child
would have to ‘understand, retain and weigh up’ the following relevant
information:

• The immediate physical and psychological consequences of the

treatment.
• The fact that most children who take puberty blockers then go on to
sex hormones (so, understand that puberty blockers are a
cross-­
pathway to greater medical intervention).
• The relationship between cross-­sex hormones and later surgeries, and
the implications of those surgeries.
• The potential loss of fertility caused by cross-­sex hormones.
• The impact of cross-­sex hormones on sexual function.
• The impact of puberty blockers as the first step along this pathway on
current and future relationships.
• The unknown effects of puberty blockers; and the fact that the evi-
dence base for puberty blockers is ‘as yet highly uncertain’.

They found it to be unlikely that people under the age of 16 would be able
to understand all of these things, and so unlikely that they have the compe-
tence to consent to puberty blockers.51 The Court of Appeal later found
that the High Court should not have made this declaration, which ef­fect­
ive­ly directed children and young people wanting puberty blockers and
cross-­sex hormones to the courts, instead of leaving the matter with chil-
dren and young people, their parents, and their clinicians. But they did not
disagree with the reasoning in terms of what consent would involve,52 and
urged that clinicians ‘take great care before recommending treatment to a
child and be astute to ensure that the consent obtained from both child and
parents is properly informed by the advantages and disadvantages of the
proposed course of treatment and in light of the evolving research and
understanding of the implications and long-­term consequences of such
treatment’.53
 Gender Non-­c onforming Women and Girls  101

There is also ongoing debate over the effects of puberty blockers on bone
density,54 and interest in the question of whether hormonal treatment
impacts brain development.55 A study on a nonbinary teenager taking
puberty blockers reported that ‘their bone mineral density has regularly
fallen and is now in the lowest 2.5 percentile’. The authors go on to explore
the risks of impaired fertility and low bone density, as they trade off against
the benefits of treating the teenager’s ‘gender dysphoria and anxiety’.56
Gender non-­conforming kids who consider themselves trans may also
end up getting invasive surgeries and other cosmetic interventions. Most
common among transmen are chest surgery reduction or ‘reconstruction’
(a  euphemism for double mastectomies) and hysterectomy,57 and most
common among transwomen are electrolysis and vaginoplasty.58 It’s note-
worthy how much more common invasive interventions on girls and
women are compared to boys and men: 36 per cent of transmen in the
United States have had chest reduction or reconstruction surgery while only
12 per cent of transwomen have had vaginoplasty or labiaplasty. That’s three
times as many transmen as transwomen undergoing invasive surgeries.
(Although one explanation for this may be that breasts are physically obvi-
ous and make it harder for transmen to pass as male).
What about the harms of refusing to affirm as trans people who are in
fact trans? There is little data on this. Although legislation is being
introduced in multiple countries to prevent ‘conversion therapy’ on the
basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the legislation seems to be
justified with reference to research that is disproportionately about sexual
orientation.59 Furthermore, refusal to affirm a gender identity is not
equivalent to rejection or outright disbelief. The clinical alternative to the
‘gender-­affirmative’ model is the ‘watchful waiting’ model, which explores
with the child in therapy their other issues, and makes sure to affirm a trans
identification only if and when other explanations are ruled out. As Diane
Ehrensaft—Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California
San Francisco (UCSF), and Director of Mental Health at the UCSF Benioff
Children’s Hospital Child and Adolescent Gender Centre—explains, ‘Since
a large majority of gender nonconforming young children seeking services
at gender clinics desist in their gender dysphoria by adolescence, best
practices would be to wait and see if the child persists into adolescence
before making any significant changes in the child’s gender identity’.60 The
harms of affirming kids who are not trans as trans are likely to far outweigh
the harms of failing to affirm as trans kids who are trans, especially if the
alternative is watchful waiting.
102 Trans/Gender

If being trans were just like being gay in that it didn’t impact a child’s
health, then affirming everyone who considers themselves trans as trans
might not be a problem. More trans people, fewer trans people, who cares.
But it’s not like being gay, because it tends to involve medical interventions,
invasive and painful surgeries, and uncertain long-­term health impacts.
Kids who consider themselves trans are at risk of being put on a conveyor
belt to a lifetime of medical dependency. And these negative outcomes are
now disproportionately impacting girls. A 2017 UK government survey on
108,100 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) or intersex
individuals in the UK found 57 per cent of trans respondents under the age
of 35 to be non-­binary,61 26 per cent to be transmen, and 17 per cent to
be transwomen. Other studies have found between two and five times more
females than males identifying as nonbinary.62 The authors note that
the percentages are in line with referrals to gender identity services, ‘where
the majority of referrals in 2016‒17 were for people assigned female at birth
(1,400 of the 2,016 referrals—69%)’.63 This reveals a generational shift in
trans identification, with more girls than boys now considering themselves
trans.64
We also find disproportionate impacts when we look at sexual assault in
trans communities. As we might have expected given what we know about
the differential rates of sexual assault outside of trans communities, female
people face disproportionate impacts. An Australian survey from 2018
showed that trans people experienced sexual violence at higher rates than
the general public, but it was transmen and female nonbinary people who
experienced the highest rates, with 61.8 per cent of those respondents
answering ‘yes’ to the question ‘Have you ever been forced or frightened
into doing something sexually that you did not want to do?’.65 Of the
transwomen and male nonbinary participants, 39.3 per cent answered ‘yes’
to this question. Female nonbinary people were the most at risk (66.1 per
cent), followed by transmen (54.2 per cent), then male nonbinary people
(44.5 per cent), and finally transwomen (36.1 per cent).66 Feminists who
consider transmen to be men cannot consider this to be a specifically
feminist issue, even though it is a rate of sexual coercion three times higher
than that experienced by female people neither trans nor nonbinary.
The UK government survey mentioned above found something similar,
asking trans people about their experience of ‘incidents’ including verbal
harassment, coercive or controlling behaviour, physical harassment or
violence, and sexual harassment or violence. They found that ‘trans men
were notably more likely to have experienced an incident (58%) than trans
 Identifying into Women-­Only Spaces  103

women (40%) and non-­binary respondents (47%)’, and that ‘6% of trans
men said they had experienced physical harassment or violence, compared
to 4% trans women and 4% of non-­binary respondents’.67
Accepting the redrawn boundaries of ‘woman’ and therefore the new
constituency of feminism proposed by those feminists who think that
gender is an identity or a performance would therefore lead to the dismissal
of significant harms at the intersection of being female and being trans-­
identified, as not being feminist issues. Gender-­ critical feminism
accommodates the interests of the most vulnerable people in the trans
community. Trans is a feminist issue, just not in the way that most feminists
today think it is.

5.2  Identifying into Women-­Only Spaces

In Iran in 2015, the national women’s soccer team had eight transwomen
players.68 In the UK in 2017, a transwoman was elected to Women’s Officer
for the Labour Party for the constituency of Rochester and Strood,69 and in
2018 the same transwoman was elected National Women’s Officer for
Labour Students.70 A transwoman was appointed as the keynote speaker for
the British Film Institute’s 2018 ‘Woman with a Movie Camera Summit’.71
One of the ‘lesbians’ acting as an advisor to Stonewall, the UK’s most
prominent LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and
intersex plus) charity, is a transwoman.72 There was a transwoman on the
‘Top-­ 100 Female Champions’ list, produced for the annual ranking
‘HERoes: champions of women in business’ (which has a separate male
list).73 There are transwomen in women-­ only prisons—including in
Australia one who struck two people in the head with an axe, in Sweden one
who went to jail for murdering and mutilating their girlfriend, and in
Canada one who raped and murdered a 13-­year-­old girl.74 Transwomen
have been admitted to women’s shelters, for example at a shelter for women
recovering from substance abuse in Canada.75
The explanation of why there are so many transwomen in women-­only
spaces today is the influence of gender identity ideology, the idea that what
it is to be a woman/female (man/male) is to identify as a woman/female
(man/male), and that this subjective identification supersedes facts about
sex class membership. Identification as a transwoman is allowing male
people to be included in spaces and services originally designed for and
dedicated to women, understood as members of the female sex.
104 Trans/Gender

In Sister Outsider, radical feminist Audre Lorde wrote ‘I grew up in

largely female environments, and I know how crucial that has been to my
own development. I feel the want and need often for the society of women,
exclusively. I recognize that our own spaces are essential for developing and
recharging’.76 She went on to make a similar point about black-­only spaces:

As a Black woman, I find it necessary to withdraw into all-­Black groups at

times for exactly the same reasons—differences in stages of development
and differences in levels of interaction. Frequently, when speaking with men
and white women, I am reminded of how difficult and time-­consuming it is
to have to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message.77

Many women value sex-­separated spaces. If a ‘woman’ is anyone who identi-

fies as a woman, then women-­only spaces are no longer female-­only spaces.
If the space only serves its purpose when it is single-­sex, then this under-
mines it.
In a piece for the Verso blog in 2018, feminist philosophers Lorna
Finlayson, Katharine Jenkins, and Rosie Worsdale summarized (in order to
oppose) what they took to be the feminist case against transwomen’s
inclusion as women in the context of reform to the UK GRA:

The argument runs as follows. Men as a group systematically oppress and

inflict violence on women. And trans women—or at least some of them—
share, albeit to varying extents, in the features which make men more
likely to inflict violence against, and otherwise to oppress, women. First,
they may have certain bodily features, such as a penis, testes, and higher
levels of testosterone. Second, they have been treated for at least part of
their lives as boys or men. The first factor is often referred to by saying that
trans women (or some trans women, at least) are ‘biologically male’ (or
simply ‘male’). The second is expressed in the statement that trans women
have a ‘history of male socialisation’, and in the associated claim that they
are bearers of ‘male privilege’. Note that this part of the argument doesn’t
rely on claiming that trans women are more likely than cis men to be
violent or oppressive to women. The claim is that trans women (or at least,
those who are substantially similar to cis men in the respects just outlined)
are just as prone to commit violence against women as cis men are.78

This is a fair summary of the opposition to the reform, although gender-­

critical feminists wouldn’t beat around the bush describing ‘shared features’
 Identifying into Women-­Only Spaces  105

as though it’s a surprising coincidence that transwomen and men both

have these.
Feminist women opposing the GRA reform weren’t worried about
transwomen in particular; they were worried about male people in general,
and didn’t make an exception for those who identified as women. If there’s a
reason to keep sex-­separated spaces, then there’s a reason to worry about
people identifying into them. Finlayson et al. do make an exception: for
transwomen. They argue that while it’s true that ‘men commit violence
against women at much higher rates than women commit violence against
either women or men’, we don’t know that the basis of this difference lies in
male biology or male socialization. They say that taking it to be biological
risks naturalizing it (assuming it to be innate or hardwired, and thus
excusing it), and that taking it to be socialized assumes that transwomen are
socialized to the same effect. But the fact that transwomen identify as
women, and other men don’t, shows—those feminists think—that they can’t
have been socialized to the same effect. These authors say ‘it is, to say the
very least, not obvious that gender identity makes no difference to the way
in which either biological and social factors manifest themselves’.79 They are
supposing that having a gender identity could make a relevant difference,
one that would justify treating transwomen as exceptions to generalizations
made about males.
It’s hardly surprising that some feminists have been reluctant to take it on
trust that transwomen don’t share the propensities of males, given that what
differentiates them—their ‘gender identity’—is an imprecise and unverifiable
idea that covers a range of very different people.
Maybe a review of the empirical evidence can help us to work out
whether there are differences that should justify treating transwomen
differently when it comes to exclusion from, or inclusion in, women-­only
spaces. From a gender-­critical perspective, there is no automatic right to
inclusion, because these spaces are part of a package of political provisions
designed to improve women’s participation in public life, or increase
women’s representation in areas where they have been historically
underrepresented, or correct for structural, institutional, and interpersonal
discrimination against women. But there might nonetheless be reasons to
choose to include transwomen, if it can be shown that they are ‘like women’
or ‘unlike men’ in the respects that rationalize the spaces.
To try to resolve this question, I’m going to draw on work done by
sexologists in the 1980s and 1990s. This is likely to raise the question, why
not draw on work that is more up-­to-­date, given that we surely have a more
106 Trans/Gender

sophisticated understanding of trans issues today? The problem lies in the

conceptualization of ‘trans’ status over time, which has changed so much
that there is very little overlap with the original cohort. There has been a
shift away from the understanding of trans as ‘transsexual’, and towards an
understanding of trans as ‘transgender’.80 A review of 2,405 articles on trans
health published between 1950 and 2016 notes that ‘there has been a
massive shift in ideology and treatment’, and further concluded that there
was ‘an overall lack of high-­quality research’.81 Trans identification has
become politicized. As the transgender population expanded to include
more people, differences were flattened out into a single notion of ‘gender
identity’,82 and attempts to complicate that picture vehemently resisted (as
evidenced by, for example, the dogpiling of Lisa Littman when she published
her study suggesting that social contagion might be playing a role in
transgender identification today).83
In the 1980s and 1990s sexologists worked with transsexual populations,
and we have evidence from that time. We have no real way of knowing how
many transwomen today would have been transsexual in the past, but the
fact that 88 per cent today have not had sex-­reassignment surgery suggests
most would not.84 It could be that people with the same underlying trait are
now choosing not to have surgery; but it could also be that the underlying
trait has changed as the group expanded, and/or there is no longer any
underlying trait.85 ‘Gender identity’ cannot play the role of an underlying
trait, because it is a philosophical concept, not a scientific one. It is not
useful to ask empirical questions about what makes someone trans, or
whether trans cohorts share certain attributes, if the cohort itself is not
unified by any underlying trait. (Compare this to asking empirical questions
about what makes someone gay, or whether gay cohorts share certain
attributes, while working with a concept of ‘gay’ that includes a mixture of
gay and straight people).86 Considering the evidence from a time where
there was, arguably, an underlying trait (or two distinct underlying traits—
as we shall soon see) is at least a start.
Prior to 1989, Ray Blanchard had been working with gender dysphoric
males, and noticed that there seemed to be two distinct types. There were
‘homosexual transsexuals’, males attracted to males who tended to have
feminine boyhoods and transition earlier in life; and there were ‘non-­
homosexual transsexuals’, males attracted to females, or to both males and
females, or to neither, who tended to have masculine boyhoods and
transition later in life. Blanchard’s innovation was to suppose these two
types of transsexualism to have different explanations and to correlate with
 Identifying into Women-­Only Spaces  107

different sets of behaviours and experiences. The most prominent of

these differences was ‘erotic arousal in association with cross-­dressing’.87
Blanchard divided a clinical population of transsexuals into groups accord-
ing to their sexual orientations, and found that most non-­homosexual
transsexuals had a history of erotic arousal associated with cross-­dressing,
while most homosexual transsexuals did not.
Blanchard suggested that cross-­dressing was a result of ‘autogynephilia’, a
term he coined to mean ‘love of oneself as a woman’, rather than a result of
feminine identification, and confirmed that non-­homosexual transsexuals
showed less feminine identification than homosexual transsexuals88
(a finding already made in 1974 about asexual transsexuals). He proposed
that in the diagnosis of transsexuals for clinical research, identifying ‘fetish-
istic arousal’ directly would be difficult, but that distinguishing according to
sexual orientation would be a reliable proxy.89
Anne Lawrence, who self-­ describes as an autogynephilic transsexual,
summarizes the two very different explanations as follows: ‘Androphilic MtF
[male-­to-­female] transsexuals were extremely feminine androphilic men
whose cross-­gender identities derived from their female-­typical attitudes,
behaviours, and sexual preferences. Nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals, in
contrast, were conventionally masculine, fundamentally gynephilic men who
resembled transvestites in that they experienced paraphilic arousal from the
fantasy of being women (autogynephilia); their cross-­dressing identities
derived from their autogynephilic sexual orientations’.90 She also notes that
Blanchard found bisexual transsexuals to have the highest scores on the
‘Core Autogynephilia Scale’, and that he had hypothesized that they were
pseudobisexual, meaning that they were actually heterosexual but had devel-
oped an attraction to men primarily motivated by seeking validation of their
femininity.91
Michael Bailey advanced Blanchard’s typology in his popular science
book The Man Who Would Be Queen which focused on feminine boys, as
did Anne Lawrence later in her book Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies.92 After
publication of his book, Bailey was the subject of vicious personal attacks by
several high profile transwomen.93 Together with Kiiri Triea, Bailey argues
that Blanchard’s typology has greater explanatory value than two proposed
alternatives, the ‘feminine essence’ narrative, and the ‘brain-­sex’ narrative.
The feminine essence narrative is basically gender identity, but ramped up
to be considered innate. According to the brain-­ sex narrative, male
transsexual brains are more similar to female brains than non-­transsexual
male brains. But it’s pretty hard to make the latter work, given that there’s a
108 Trans/Gender

huge debate over whether it even makes sense to talk about male and female
brains.94 Bailey and Triea say that Blanchard’s theory ‘is based on far more
data, with respect to the number of both studies and subjects; no published
scientific data in the peer-­ reviewed literature contradict it; and other
investigators in other countries have obtained similar findings’.95
There is some disagreement between Julia Serano (who is transgender)
and Blanchard over whether his typology accounts for all transsexual people
or only some. Serano thinks it’s some and Blanchard thinks it’s all; Lawrence
provides some persuasive reasons for how it can be all even when the data
don’t show that (one being that in some clinics, access to treatment has
depended on fitting a particular description).96 But their disagreement is
only about the comprehensiveness of Blanchard’s typology. As Serano says,
‘nobody seriously doubts the existence of cross-­gender arousal’,97 and as
Blanchard says, ‘the existence of autogynephilia as a distinguishable form of
sexual behaviour is scarcely in doubt’.98
Why is it so important to pay attention to this distinction, rather than
collapsing it under the heading of ‘gender identity’ as is standard practice
today? Because being aroused by the thought of being a woman doesn’t
make you a woman.99 In a 1987 study, out of 125 males presenting to a
gender identity clinic over a four and a half year period, fifty-­two were
homosexual and seventy-­three were heterosexual.100 Less than half of the
transwomen at the time were homosexual transsexuals. Homosexual
transsexuals have a claim to being ‘like women’ and ‘unlike men’, at least in
some respects. (As noted above, Blanchard found that they showed more
feminine identification).101 Autogynephiles do not, or at least, do not in
virtue of their autogynephilia. Perhaps there is some other trait that makes
them ‘like a woman’, but it remains unclear what that trait could be. This
ratio of homosexual to autogynephilic transsexuals is likely to be even lower
today than it was then, as advances in gay rights and gay acceptance have
removed some of the incentives for feminine same-­sex attracted males to
transition to live as women. Men who experienced feminine boyhoods may
have experienced some socialization and some discrimination that is similar
to what girls experience, so provisions set up to mitigate this experience
may be fairly extended to them. But that doesn’t get transwomen in general
a foot in the door, it gets a small number of transwomen a foot in the door.
Autogynephiles, who had masculine boyhoods and transitioned later in life,
are not in this small group.
This point is further reinforced when we add in what we learned in
Section  5.1 about changes to the transgender community since roughly
 Identifying into Women-­Only Spaces  109

1990. It is clear that there’s more going on today than just homosexuality
and autogynephilia.102 Other factors mentioned already include social
contagion, autism, family dysfunction, and childhood sexual abuse. And
there’s politics. Sandy Stone and Leslie Feinberg popularized the idea that
transgender is a political identity, and this continues to be influential
today.103 But no male who has merely adopted a gender identity for political
reasons is going to have any legitimate claim to women-­only spaces.
I cannot see why we should expect any of those outside Blanchard’s typology
and captured by the ‘more going on today’ idea to be ‘like women’.
It is unclear whether Finlayson, Jenkins, and Worsdale would accept that
cross-­gender arousal, social contagion, or political identity, for example, are
enough to make a male into a woman. I suspect they would not. If that is right,
then we should only be talking about the inclusion in women-­only spaces of
those transwomen who might have a better claim. But if they would accept
that all of these things are sufficient to make a male into a woman, then we
can return to treating transwomen as an undifferentiated community and
simply ask for evidence of differences between this community and men in
general that would justify including this community among women for all
political, legal, and social purposes. There is little such evidence currently
available. A Swedish study that compared rates of violent crime (‘homicide
and attempted homicide, aggravated assault and assault, robbery, threatening
behaviour, harassment, arson, or any sexual offence’)104 in cohorts of trans-
sexual women to male controls found that transsexual women ‘retained a
male pattern regarding criminality’.105 Even more striking were the study’s
findings comparing cohorts of transsexual women to female controls: adjust-
ing for their higher psychiatric comorbidities, transsexual women were 18.1
times more likely than female controls to have been convicted for violent
crime; and without that adjustment, transsexual women were twenty times
more likely than female controls to have been convicted for violent crime.106
I noted earlier that most transwomen today are not transsexual, so it is
not clear whether and to what extent we should expect the Swedish study’s
findings to generalize.107 From the armchair, it seems we’d have substantially
less reason to expect transwomen to be ‘like women’ and ‘unlike men’.
Consider those transwomen who only begin to identify as women in
adulthood, having shown no signs of childhood gender dysphoria. We’d
have to suppose that any influence of male biology, male puberty, and male
socialization from birth to whatever age identifying as trans happened, were
all rendered void by the mere fact of the sudden claiming of a gender iden-
tity. This is highly implausible.
110 Trans/Gender

There is no basis for a presumption of inclusion. The burden of proof lies

with those who support including transwomen in women-­only spaces.108
Perhaps this will be the impetus the trans rights movement and its existing
feminist allies need to stop opposing relevant research and the publication
of research findings,109 and to start producing research that actually
supports the claim that ‘gender identity’, at whatever point it sets in, actually
blocks the effects of male biology, male socialization, and/or the interaction
of the two.
The point I am going to make now is speculative, but I think it’s worth
considering. We’ve talked a lot about the impact of gender norms on
women, so far, but on the topic of transwomen including themselves in
women-­only spaces, or indeed identifying themselves as women, it’s worth
talking about the impact of gender norms on men. Suppose that the full
spectrum of human expression left unchecked runs from what we today
describe as ‘masculine’ all the way to what we today describe as ‘feminine’,
and there are no reliable correlations between a boy child’s sex and his inter-
ests, in how he wants to dress, what toys he wants to play with, how he wants
to play, how extroverted or confident he is, what kinds of imaginative games
he plays, what he says he wants to be when he grows up, and so on. All of the
ways that people can be, which we today so doggedly categorize as either
‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and police departures from, would just be ways that
humans can be.110 If that is the unchecked expression of children, then there
would need to be a lot of cajoling, sanctioning, suppressing, encouraging, and
shaping going on to get them to fit into one or the other category. And
indeed, there is evidence of this kind of pressure everywhere you look.
But people chafe under this kind of unfreedom. Eventually there will be
people who feel strongly enough about what they want to do and how they
want to be that they will do and be it anyway. It’s an interesting separate
question what makes some people willing to live as they want to regardless
of social sanctions and other people not willing. Cristina Bicchieri calls the
former ‘trendsetters’, and gives them a crucial role in bringing about social
norm change in the context of global development.111 Her general picture
seems to be that there are just some people who are, for whatever reason,
willing to do what they think is right for the world, or best for themselves,
regardless of the social sanctions others will impose on them. Perhaps they
do not feel those sanctions as much as others, being less sensitive to peer
dis-­esteem; perhaps they do but avoiding dissonance between their beliefs
and their choices is more important to them.112 Think, for example, about
 Identifying into Women-­Only Spaces  111

the first feminists, or the people who were openly gay when it was still
illegal, or the people fighting for abolition when slavery was still legal, or
even just the people willing to defy their parents’ expectations to follow
their own dreams.
If we ignore that this is a general character trait, we may be led to observe
that gay people tend to feel so strongly about their sexual orientation that
they will risk everything to express it, or that trans people tend to feel so
strongly about their gender identification that they will risk everything to
be recognized in that gender.113 And this may lead us to think of being gay
or being trans as innate identities that resist suppression and that matter
enormously to the people who have them. But what if there are just as
many—or more!—people who experience same-­ sex attraction, or who
desire a different gender expression, but who don’t have these ‘trendsetter’
character traits, and so who make different choices? If that’s right, then it
would predict that as the social sanctions reduce to nothing, more people
emerge as having these statuses. We have certainly seen that in the case of
sexual orientation; since the social sanctions reduced and the social
protections increased (including legal recourse against discrimination)
more people came out as gay.
Gender identity activists will say that it’s just the same for trans—as the
stigma reduces, more people will come out as trans. But if trans just is
strongly felt gender non-­conformity, then the categorization of these people
as trans in the first place depends on keeping strong norms of gender in
place. (If it has more to do with bodies, as it did on the older diagnostics,
then it does not.) If we retain highly rigid ideas about masculinity, then
more and more men will not identify with the norms of masculinity, and as
the social sanctions against non-­conformity reduce, more and more men
will come out as non-­masculine. Depending on the direction we’ve taken,
perhaps they will come out as non-­men or non-­males too—the rising
numbers of nonbinary people show that this is already starting to happen.
And at this point it depends on the numbers. If most men are non-­
masculine, and most women are non-­feminine, what’s the point of having
‘trans’ or ‘nonbinary’ as categories? This is not to rule out that there can be
oppressed majorities; the question will be whether there are still social
rewards attached to being a feminine woman and a masculine man, despite
the change in demographics and social attitudes. More colloquially, gender
non-­conformity is ordinary and should be expected. If everyone is trans
then no one is trans.
112 Trans/Gender

5.3  Policy Implications

There are two policy implications that follow from this discussion. The first
is an answer to the question of what forms the legal protection of trans
people should take.114 The second is how to approach the issue of harms to
gender non-­conforming women and girls.
Legal protection. Is discrimination against transwomen related to women’s
sex-­based oppression? Patriarchy began as the sexual enslavement of
women, and developed through the control of women’s reproductive labour,
into a broader system of exploitation and control of women by men. The
victims of patriarchy, and relatedly, sexism/misogyny, are women. Through
an understanding of the origins and the sustaining mechanisms of
patriarchy, we have a coherent explanation of why, on what basis, and how
women came to be and remain (to a greater or lesser extent depending on
the country) oppressed. We should not lose sight of this explanation.
Still, we can retain coherence while admitting that there has been
collateral damage to other social groups along the way. Focusing on the
primary victims of patriarchy means keeping the bulk of our attention on
how feminine gender norms have been constructed to constrain and control
women. But this shouldn’t stop us noticing that in the policing of women,
people may sometimes make mistakes about who in fact ‘deserves’ policing
treatment (if a woman looks like a man she may evade that treatment, and if
a man looks like a woman he may receive it). In devaluing femininity, men
may come to devalue feminine aspects of persons whether or not they
appear in female people. In asserting the superiority of male people and of
masculinity (and in seeing the two as synonymous), men may come to feel
anger or even rage towards males who they perceive as ‘betraying’ men by
violating or repudiating masculinity.
Discrimination against ‘passing’ transwomen (transwomen who
strangers perceive and treat as female) is related to women’s oppression
because those transwomen are assumed to be members of the class that is
singled out for a particular type of treatment. Discrimination against ‘non-­
passing’ transwomen (transwomen who strangers perceive and treat as
male) is something different, namely the sanctioning of males for violating
the norms of masculinity. Those sets of norms are connected as two parts of
a broader social system that keeps both male and female people ‘in their
places’. The difference is that these norms benefit men in general even as
they harm some individual males. Is this connection enough to justify pro-
tecting transwomen as women?
 Policy Implications  113

If the argument for protection is based merely on being collateral damage

in women’s oppression, then it’s not just transwomen who should be
protected as women, it’s also gay men, effeminate men, and gender non-­
conforming men as well. For they are all just as much ‘connected’ to women’s
oppression. This is a problem for the feminism that accepts gender as
identity. It does not propose that all those negatively impacted by patriarchy
be protected as women. What it wants is to class all female people together
with all people who identify as women. But it cannot offer a coherent
explanation of the oppression of that particular combination of people.
There is no origin story for the oppression of women and also people with
feminine gender identities.
As we have just seen, there may be a common system behind the
mechanisms that sustain the oppression of women and also people with
feminine gender identities, in particular, social norms that support the idea
of males being masculine and females being feminine and so sanction
deviations in both cases. But the people with feminine gender identities
who are visibly male will be subject to different mechanisms than women,
namely the mechanisms that socialize males as masculine and push men
into a superior social position on the axis of sex/gender. This common
system may give women and gender non-­conforming men a reason to be
allies in fighting for both groups’ rights and interests, but it is not sufficient
to show that gender non-­conforming men need legal protection as the
opposite sex.
Any story that gender-­as-­identity feminists can give is dependent on the
one told by radical and gender-­critical feminists, for example that the
devaluation of women in combination with the constructing of women as
feminine led to the devaluing of femininity wherever it was found. (This
explains the mistreatment of effeminate gay men and transwomen.) But
from this common devaluation, again, it does not follow that we should
collapse the distinctions between the groups.115 It is a good reason for those
who have been collateral damage in the oppression of women to be allies to
women in women’s fight for liberation. After all, women’s liberation will be
good for them too. Unfortunately, though, this is not how things have gone.
Gender-­as-­identity feminists have been so busy being allies to transwomen,
that they’ve forgotten to ask transwomen to be allies to women.
Most trans people today are aptly described as gender non-­conforming.
That means they do not conform to the norms and expectations that are
imposed on them on the basis of their sex. But there are, and have long
been, plenty of gender non-­conforming people. This is nothing new or
114 Trans/Gender

different. Gay and lesbian people are gender non-­conforming insofar as

they defy one of the central norms of masculinity—namely to be attracted
to women—and of femininity—namely to be attracted to men—respectively.
Bisexual people are gender non-­conforming insofar as they defy the norm
of being exclusively attracted to the opposite sex. Butch lesbians and
masculine-­presenting women (including drag kings and transmen) are
gender non-­conforming insofar as they defy norms of appearance for
female people. Effeminate gay men and feminine-­presenting men (including
drag queens, cross-­dressers, and transwomen) are gender non-­conforming
insofar as they defy norms of appearance for male people.
Having had a double mastectomy and grown your body hair out while
female (as many transmen and nonbinary females do) makes you gender
non-­conforming, but it doesn’t make you a man, or not a woman: many les-
bians and feminists have grown their body hair out and many breast cancer
survivors have had double mastectomies. Having grown breasts and lasered
your body hair off while male makes you gender non-­conforming, but it
doesn’t make you a woman: many overweight men have breasts, and cyclists,
some gay men, and some male models, have had their body hair lasered.
This means there’s a large group which have something in common,
namely non-­ conformity with the current norms of masculinity and
femininity. This group might need political protection, for as long as it
remains stigmatized. We can protect it by adding gender expression (or
presentation) to the list of protected attributes in our countries’ Equality
Acts. This makes a lot more sense than saying that anyone who identifies as
a woman should be legally protected as female, and able to access the full
range of legal protections put in place to mitigate women’s historical
oppression and ongoing underrepresentation and disadvantage.
Regulation of medical and surgical transition. If we return to Satz’s
parameters for noxious markets from Chapter  4, we can see that the
transitioning of girls is likely to count. There is weak and asymmetric
knowledge and agency: they’re not adults, their ability to make a fully
informed decision is compromised by the long-­term nature of the decisions
(especially given pathway dependence), and they cannot have full
information about the risks because some of the medical interventions are
experimental. There is harm to transitioners, whenever the risks detailed in
Section 5.1 materialize, and to detransitioners. There is vulnerability, in the
fact of being children and adolescents. And there is social harm, in that girls
are deciding, against a backdrop of sex inequality that subordinates females
and elevates males, that they are not girls, and being ‘affirmed’ in this belief.
 Is Gender-­Critical Feminism ‘Trans-­Exclusionary’?  115

For these reasons, access to medical and surgical transition should be

heavily regulated. This is the opposite of what many countries are doing with
a clinical policy of ‘affirmation’, especially one backed up by the threat of
criminal sanctions for ‘conversion’ of children’s gender identities.116 There
should be no medical or surgical transition for people under the age of 18,
at least not while there is a culture of fear and silence inside gender-­based
medicine which is likely to prevent clinicians from really making sure that a
child who identifies as trans is actually trans.117 Over the age of 18, we
should think of surgical interventions similarly to how we think of cosmetic
surgeries. Many feminists have argued that these are a harmful social
practice.118 Trans surgeries, which appear to be an increasing part of a social
and political movement which confers social status and esteem,119 may
need to be considered in the same way.
If we want to reduce harms to gender non-­conforming girls short of such
policy measures (which may not be easily won), there are two things we can
do. First, we can keep working against sex inequality, which creates the
understandable response in girls that they ‘are not female’ or ‘are not girls’,
because they dis-­identify with negative stereotypes and expectations of
femininity. Second—and this may be difficult for gender-­critical feminists
to swallow—we can support the trans rights movement’s efforts to decouple
sex and gender identity.120 The more that gender non-­conforming girls feel
that they can be ‘boys’ or ‘men’ without medical or surgical transformations,
the fewer harms of the kind outlined in Section 5.1 there will be. The fine
line to get reduced harm to girls and protection of women’s sex-­based rights
is to support the decoupling while insisting that both categories matter—
rather than that gender identity displaces sex.

5.4  Is Gender-­Critical Feminism ‘Trans-­Exclusionary’?

We saw in Section 3.4 and at the start of this chapter that gender-­critical
feminism is regularly accused by other feminists of being ‘trans-­
exclusionary’ and ‘anti-­ trans’. Is it? My answer is ‘no’. Gender-­ critical
­feminism is feminism for females, not feminism for feminine ‘gender identities’
or feminism for feminine ‘gender performances’. Because of this, it includes
transmen, and excludes transwomen. It does not exclude trans people in
general: on the contrary, it is very concerned to include transmen and
female nonbinary people, because it is concerned with the harms done on
the basis of female sex and as a result of the (attempted) imposition of
116 Trans/Gender

norms of femininity. Because some women don’t fit those norms or find
conformity to those norms comfortable, they end up thinking that they are
not women, or being convinced by others that they are not women. When
they then identify as transgender, whether as nonbinary or as transmen,
this can come along with negative health impacts for the individual and
have adverse consequences for society, impacting lesbian culture, diversity,
and feminism.
Lesbian culture is impacted when lesbians repudiate this status and claim
to be straight men instead. It is impacted when the lesbian partners of
transmen feel under pressure to change their publicly claimed orientations
because they no longer fit with those partners’ gender identities. Diversity is
impacted when women look around and see only a narrow version of
femininity represented under the label ‘woman’, because non-­ feminine
females now identify as nonbinary or as transmen. And finally, feminism,
understood as a political project aimed at women’s liberation, is impacted
when its goal is downgraded so substantially, from gender abolitionism to a
mild form of gender revisionism.121 Gender abolitionism is the only sensible
response to a harmful system of norms that constrains people’s life choices
and impacts on their well-­being. Accommodating gender identity means
leaving in place a system that harms women in general because that system
is desirable from the perspective of a small group of trans people. No
feminism worth its salt should be willing to make that trade.
 6
Why Is Gender-­Critical Feminism
So Vilified?

There is an extraordinary amount of antagonism towards radical and

gender-­ critical feminists. It stands in need of explaining. In 2020,
J.  K.  Rowling was viciously attacked across social media, oftentimes with
the worst misogynistic slurs, for stating that sex is real and matters.1 She is
the most high-­profile target of abuse, but her targeting is illustrative of the
targeting of gender-­critical feminists in general. After giving some more
detailed examples of how gender-­critical feminists are treated, I will offer
three explanations for this antagonism.2 The first is that the gender-­critical
position on trans issues has been associated with ‘exclusion’ in a way that
links it to previous failures of feminism for which there is justifiable moral
indignation and resentment. The second is that such antagonism is in at
least some cases the natural expression of fundamental moral disagreement,
because moral commitments generally come with strong feelings, and yet
when they are ‘basic’ they cannot be argued for, which causes frustration
that tends to spill over as hostilities. The third explanation is more cynical:
the vilification of gender-­critical feminism is politically propagandistic, a
manoeuvre by lobbyists for the sex industry and activists for gender identity
to demonize their opponents as a way of putting off potential supporters
and so making political gains.

6.1  Antagonism towards Radical and

Gender-­Critical Feminists

Antagonism and hostility towards radical and gender-­critical feminism and

feminists is widespread, and not only from the places you might expect. It
would be natural enough to expect it from anti-­feminists, and from those
conservatives who see the threat to traditional gender roles as either
dangerous or wrong-­headed. But in fact the main sources are not these

Gender-Critical Feminism: Holly Lawford-Smith, Oxford University Press. © Holly Lawford-Smith 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863885.003.0006
118  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

groups, but rather other feminists, and others from the allegedly progressive
left. This hostility shows up in academia, in activism, on social media, and
even sometimes manifests as violence against radical and gender-­critical
feminist women. Dehumanizing language has long been linked to violence;
at the time of writing there was increasingly widespread dehumanizing
rhetoric against so-­called ‘TERFs’ (trans-­exclusionary radical feminists)
and ‘SWERFs’ (sex-­worker-­exclusionary radical feminists), but few cases of
violence. Many women fear that a rise in violence is likely to follow.
Consider the following examples of hostility.
Vaishnavi Sundar is an Indian filmmaker who spent three years creating a
documentary about workplace sexual harassment, interviewing women from
across all strata of Indian society. In a podcast interview with Meghan Murphy
for Feminist Current, she says that the roadblocks she encountered in getting
help from other feminists in India were immense. They refused to help con-
nect her with women to interview, they refused to help her crowdfund, and
later, when the documentary was finished, they refused to help her find places
to screen it.3 A screening of the film in New York was cancelled a week before
the event. Why? Sundar is a women’s rights activist. She says ‘I spend my time
advocating for equal opportunities, contraceptive rights, education and the
empowerment of women and girls. I centre women in all my work’. Her film,
But What Was She Wearing?, was the first feature-­length documentary on
workplace sexual harassment in India.4 Surely she is exactly the kind of
­person who other feminists should be throwing their support behind.
The answer is that Sundar is a threat to the dominant form of feminism,
being not just a heretic, but an apostate. She did subscribe to its perspective,
but she saw problems and she talked about them, and eventually she
repudiated that type of feminism entirely and became a radical feminist.
Sundar doesn’t pull any punches about that fact, recently describing
culturally dominant feminism (she says ‘liberal feminism’, but we mean the
same thing) in an article for Spiked as ‘a cult that extols men, who are often
not really “queer” but who want to take advantage of “self-­identifying” as a
woman in order to gain oppression points and external validation’.5 She was
openly critical on Twitter about the politics of gender identity, including
raising questions about whether transwomen should be allowed to compete
in women’s sport, be housed in women’s prisons, or use women’s changing
rooms.6 The New York organizers of her film screening cited her ‘transphobic
views’ as the reason for cancelling the event.7 Sundar says ‘I was simply not
the right flavour of woke for the postmodern, queer-­theory espousing desis8
of Manhattan’.9
 Antagonism towards Gender-Critical Feminists  119

At a Vancouver event on gender identity and media bias, protesters

expressed opposition to the panel, which featured Meghan Murphy
(Feminist Current),10 Anna Slatz (The Post Millennial), and Jonathan Kay
(Quillette). One woman held up a cardboard guillotine—arguably a symbol
of violence against women11—saying ‘Step right up!’ and down each side,
‘TERFS’ and ‘SWERFS’.12 Journalist Meghan Murphy was the woman being
specifically targeted with the cardboard guillotine; first ‘cancelled’ in Canada
for her views on prostitution and pornography, and later again for her views
on transgenderism. While working for the Canadian online magazine
Rabble, a petition was circulated to have her permanently deplatformed
(‘cease offering a platform for hate’), which included accusations of racism,
bigotry, transmisogyny, whorephobia, and dehumanization of and disrespect
for women.13 Rabble later did an audit of her work and published a state-
ment saying ‘In our opinion, her writing is not transphobic or racist’.14
Murphy holds views that would generally be described as radical feminist,
although she does not use any particular label for herself.15
In Being and Being Bought, Kajsa Ekis Ekman writes about the cultural
debate over prostitution ‘[t]here is hardly a text written about “sex workers”
that doesn’t vilify radical feminists; it doesn’t even seem possible to tell the
story of sex work without an introductory tirade about radical feminists who
think that all prostitutes are victims and who prevent anyone else from speak-
ing’.16 She notes further that ‘these tirades never include a definition of what
radical feminism is, though; it is always portrayed by way of sweeping gener-
alizations as an extreme approach: dogmatic, man-­hating and sex-­hostile’.17
This is something I noticed about the media debate over changes to the
understanding of sex in the law, which were billed as positive for transgender
people and inconsequential for women. Radical feminists were generally vili-
fied, but no one writing the articles ever seemed to be able to say what radical
feminism actually was, and actually answer the concerns that radical
­feminists have about the proposed reforms. Caricature and misrepresenta-
tion were rife. For example, in a piece for The New York Times in 2019, Sophie
Lewis introduced her topic by talking disapprovingly about two British
gender-­critical feminist activists, Kellie-­Jay Keen-­Minshull (better known as
Posie Parker) and Julia Long, then claiming ‘The term coined to identify
women like Ms. Parker and Dr. Long is TERF, which stands for Trans-­
Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In Britain, TERFs are a powerful force’.18 At
no point in the article are we told what this radical feminism—alleged to be
trans-­exclusionary—is. One could be forgiven for assuming that it’s about
excluding trans people, which, I’ve already argued, it isn’t.
120  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

Lewis finishes her article by mentioning that Keen-­Minshull spent time

at the Heritage Foundation while in the United States.19 Why bother trying
to characterize the political, moral, and intellectual disagreement, when you
can just namedrop a conservative boogie-­monster and let that do the work
of letting everyone know which side they should be on? Or in another The
New York Times piece in 2019, Carol Hay does not bother to say what radical
feminism is, but uses the slur ‘TERF’ throughout, and says she considers
radical feminist Janice Raymond’s 1979 book on transsexualism to be ‘hate
speech’.20 Again, anyone reading this piece might think that radical
feminism is all about excluding trans people. Again, it isn’t.
Katelyn Burns, writing for Vox, does at least attempt to explain radical
feminism, but she throws in a heavy dollop of misrepresentation when she
writes of radical feminists who do not ‘support trans women’ that ‘They now
prefer to call themselves “gender critical”, a euphemism akin to white
supremacists calling themselves “race realists” ’.21 What? White people are
the dominant social group when it comes to race, and ‘races’ have been
shown not to be the precise biological categories they were at one time
believed to be. White supremacists calling themselves ‘race realists’ in order
to justify discrimination against people of colour is ignorant and
propagandistic. For the parallel to gender-­critical feminism to hold up,
gender-­critical feminists would have to be a dominant social group when it
comes to sex/gender, the concept of sex would have to be based on outdated
science, and calling ourselves ‘gender-­ critical’ (a name we chose for
ourselves) rather than ‘trans-­exclusionary radical feminists’ (a name made
up by our opponents) would have to be a euphemism for what we really are.
Given that we’re into the sixth chapter of a book about gender-­critical
feminism, it probably barely needs explaining that gender-­critical feminists
are not a dominant social group when it comes to sex/gender, we’re part of a
subordinated social group: women. The concept of sex is not based on
outdated science, despite what a few academics desperate to be on ‘the right
side of history’ may write in the opinion sections of prominent science
journals.22 And finally, we don’t call ourselves ‘trans-­exclusionary radical
feminists’ because, as I have already said, gender-­critical feminism is not
about trans people. It has implications for trans people, in that it includes
transmen and not transwomen. But those implications fall out of its larger
feminist analysis, and are only important because they come into conflict
with gender identity activism, which is currently enjoying widespread
institutional power.23 Our calling ourselves ‘gender-­ critical’ is not a
euphemism for anything. Rather, the new generation of radical feminists
 Antagonism towards Gender-Critical Feminists  121

tend to self-­describe as gender-­critical rather than radical in part to carve

themselves some space to do things differently without being accused of
getting radical feminism wrong. It’s not surprising that when high-­profile
venues like The New York Times and Vox publish claims like these, an under-­
informed public end up siding with transwomen-­including feminists and
gender identity activists, and trans people themselves begin believing that
they are under siege from parts of the feminist community.
It is unlikely that Yale philosopher Robin Dembroff labours under false
beliefs about what gender-­critical feminism is. Their (Dembroff identifies as
nonbinary) representation of gender-­critical feminism is strongly political
in character. For example, in their recent reply to Alex Byrne’s journal article
‘Are Women Adult Human Females?’,24 Dembroff says ‘ “woman are adult
human females” is a political slogan championed by anti-­trans activists,
appearing on billboards, pamphlets, and anti-­trans online forums’. Later
they say ‘Conservative groups insist that “there are only two genders”, and
that “a woman is an adult human female”; liberal groups claim that “trans
women are women” and that “gender is not binary” ’.25 In the second sen-
tence, Dembroff packages two sets of claims together which need not go
together, and characterizes the first set as ‘conservative’ and the second set
as ‘liberal’.
In fact the slogan—which is actually ‘woman: adult human female’26—
originated with left-­ wing or ‘politically homeless’ women. (‘Politically
homeless’ is a self-­description used by women who are alienated by the left’s
uptake of identity politics and failure to advocate for women’s issues, and
who feel that there is no party that adequately represents them.)27 The slo-
gan has been used as part of a thriving resistance movement in the UK
made up of mostly left-­wing and trade unionist women. In Australia, all of
the radical and gender-­critical feminists I am networked with (a little under
600 women), self-­describe as left-­wing or politically homeless, and most
endorse the slogan.
Dembroff is making an affective move here, which works first by
packaging the claim about the gender binary together with the ‘adult human
female’ claim, making it impossible to disagree with the one without the
other so a reader feels compelled to reject both; and second by associating
the two claims with ‘conservatives’ in readers who are likely to identify with
left-­wing politics, so that they think of the issue in polarized terms. ‘We
reject the gender binary and a biological understanding of womanhood’, the
reader is supposed to think. ‘They do not’. But the two claims are not a
package. Gender-­critical feminists don’t think gender is identity, but if they
122  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

did they’d probably agree that there are more than two such identities
(personalities). That would put them on the ‘liberal’ side in Dembroff ’s
pairings: ‘gender is not binary’. Gender-­critical feminists think gender is a
set of norms, and that there are two sets of norms. That would seem to put
them back on the ‘conservative’ side in Dembroff ’s pairings: ‘there are only
two genders’. But if ‘there are only two genders’ refers to sets of norms, then
it is false that conservatives believe this. For conservatives (or ‘gender
traditionalists’), gender is a set of innate traits determined by sex. So
conservatives are not ‘conservative’ on this pairing.
There are at least three senses of ‘gender’ operating in Dembroff ’s
sentence: a set of innate traits determined by sex (conservative), a set of
social norms attached to sex (gender-­critical), and gender as identity (trans
activist). The meaning of a term should be held fixed across its use in a
sentence or paragraph, but if ‘gender’ is held fixed in Dembroff ’s claim,
using any one of those three senses, then what that claim says is false. The
ambiguity creates plausible deniability. Pairing the claims means a negative
reaction against one (we disagree with conservatives!) can be exploited to
elicit a negative reaction against the other (I guess we must disagree that
women are adult human females, too). This is the same type of strategy Kajsa
Ekis Ekman describes being used by pro-­prostitution feminists, who use
particular words in describing prostitution that associate it in the reader’s
mind with luxury and status, thus obscuring the realities of what prostitu-
tion really is.28
Twitter has exacerbated this situation by introducing a ‘Hateful conduct’
policy intended to protect the participation of marginalized groups, but
which has the actual effect of constraining open debate between feminists
(and between feminists and other left-­wing activists) and silencing one part
of it. While the letter of the policy specifically includes prohibition of
‘deadnaming’ (using a transgender person’s pre-­ transition name) and
‘misgendering’ (using sex-­ based pronouns to refer to a transgender
person),29 the policy appears to have been interpreted more widely, resulting
in suspensions and bans from Twitter for people making claims about
biological sex in dialogue with or about transgender people. The upshot is
that feminists cannot use one of the world’s most prominent open platforms
for debate in order to advance or explore claims about the reality of
biological sex as distinct from gender identity; the meaning of the words
‘woman’ and ‘female’ and ‘lesbian’ and ‘mother’, etc., if those don’t include
transwomen; or the meaning of the terms ‘woman’ and ‘female’ if those
attach to sex rather than gender identity. I don’t think progressive people
 Antagonism towards Gender-Critical Feminists  123

should endorse these restrictions on debate, particularly as they conflict

with and threaten to set back the women’s rights movement. But before
almost any of that discussion could be had, Twitter’s policies have made
particular feminist views practically unsayable on their platform.30 This has
the further effect that media outlets can report in shocked tones of people
like Meghan Murphy (and me, for that matter) that we’ve been ‘banned
from Twitter for violating its hateful conduct policy’,31 without explaining
what the hateful conduct policy is, whose interests it serves, and how many
women are routinely silenced on its basis.
At an event I attended in Edinburgh in June 2019 on the future of
women’s sex-­ based rights, radical feminist speaker Julie Bindel was
subjected to an attempted assault by a transwoman who uses the name
‘Cathy Brennan’,32 who had been part of a protest against the event. Bindel
says ‘he was shouting and ranting and raving, “you’re a fucking cunt, you’re
a fucking bitch, a fucking Terf ” and the rest of it. We were trying to walk to
the cab to take us to the airport, and then he just lunged at me and almost
punched me in the face, but a security guard pulled him away’.33 Bindel
makes the point that this is not an isolated incident in which sole
responsibility for the attempted assault lies with the perpetrator. Rather, she
says, it was made more likely by the climate at the University of Edinburgh
in the lead-­up to the event. The day of the event, all twelve members of the
university’s staff pride network committee resigned after the university
intervened on their vocal public criticism of the event, asking them to
‘support the university . . . or be quiet’.34 Bindel says ‘I think the lecturers and
other staff who stoked the flames of this by calling women bigots and
fascists and Nazis because we were holding an event to discuss women’s
rights, should take responsibility for this’.35
The perpetrator had some time earlier incited violence against radical
and gender-­critical feminist women (those most frequently targeted by the
term ‘TERF’) by tweeting ‘any trans allies at #PrideLondon right now need
to step the f**kup and take out the terf trash. Get in their faces. Make them
afraid. Debate never works so f**k them up’.36 And on another occasion, in
reply to criticism, ‘I am a member of the trans community and we are
already in danger. Rather than blame me for endangering the trans
community we should be seeking to deplatform the GC [gender-­critical]
movement which has fostered this hostile environment. By any means
necessary’.37 In the aftermath of the attempted assault, some criticized Bindel
for ‘misgendering’ her would-­be assailant,38 this fact apparently being more
significant that the fact that there had been an attempted assault on a
124  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

feminist by a male, after a talk on violence against women, in the name of

trans rights activism. Brennan was cautioned and charged with threatening
and abusive behaviour by Police Scotland.39
In 2017 there was also an incident of violence after a meeting titled ‘We
Need to Talk about Gender’ in Hyde Park in the UK.40 Gender-­critical
feminist Maria MacLachlan, a 60-­year-­old woman, was kicked and punched
to the ground by trans rights activists, in addition to having her camera
smashed and its memory card stolen.41 One of her assailants, transwoman
Tara Wolf, was convicted of assault for the crime, and fined £430 in fines
and court costs. Wolf was found guilty of ‘assault by beating’.42 Jen Izaakson
writing for Feminist Current describes the bizarre atmosphere of the court
case, in which Wolf was accompanied by twenty-­ four people, mostly
anarchist men dressed in all black, three with fighting dogs, and the group
carrying a sound system playing loud death metal.43 One of the four
witnesses who testified in Wolf ’s defence admitted to working to get the
feminist meeting’s original venue cancelled, and said ‘TERFs hate trans
people’, ‘TERFs are fascists’, and ‘TERFs are a danger to queers’.44 This is
interesting because it reveals that the media and popular misrepresentation
of what it means to be a radical or gender-­critical feminist (slurred with the
term ‘TERF’) is actually feeding into a climate of fear and hostility in which
male violence against women is perversely rationalized as self-­defence. They
hate us, so we are justified in hurting them, goes the thought.
This is far from an exhaustive catalogue of the ways that radical feminists
have been treated by other feminists and by people who see themselves as
progressives (anarchists, environmentalists, anti-­ racists, trans rights
activists). Antagonism against radical feminism is real, and has very real
consequences, from a chilling effect on feminist speech, through impacts on
women’s careers and livelihoods, to psychological health impacts in
managing the stress of protest and vilification, to physical violence. Why,
though, is there so much antagonism? On the face of it, these are groups
that surely agree about a lot more than they disagree about. Moreover, the
antagonism is asymmetric. It’s not just that within social movements there
are warring sub-­groups and in some cases they can behave in absolutely vile
ways towards each other. That would be less surprising. Attempts at
silencing, cancelling, shunning, inciting violence, damaging careers and
livelihoods, slurring, etc., are directed by some feminists, and by trans rights
activists, sex worker rights activists, and other supposed ‘progressives’, at
radical and gender-­critical feminists; but not generally by radical feminists at
other types of feminists and those in the groups just mentioned. In general,
 ‘ Exclusionary ’ Feminism  125

radical and gender-­critical feminists are fighting for the right to speak at all.
What explains this rather strange situation?

6.2  ‘Exclusionary’ Feminism

In Who Stole Feminism? Christina Hoff Sommers talks about attending the
National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference in Austin,
Texas, in 1992:

Being aggrieved was a conference motif. The keynote speaker, Annette

Kolodny, a feminist literary scholar and former Dean of the Humanities
Faculty at the University of Arizona, opened the proceedings with a brief
history of the ‘narratives of pain’ within the NWSA. She reported that ten
years ago the organization almost came apart over outcries by our lesbian
sisters, that we had failed adequately to listen to their many voices. Five
years ago, sisters in the Jewish caucus had wept at their own sense of
invisibility. Three years later the disability caucus threatened to quit, and
the following year, the women of colour walked out. A pernicious bigotry,
Kolodny confessed, persisted in the NWSA. Our litanies of outrage
overcame our fragile consensus of shared commitment, and the centre
would no longer hold.45

Kolodny was attesting to a history of fragmentation in the NWSA: the

lesbian caucus, Jewish caucus, disability caucus, and women of colour
caucus had all aired grievances with the organization over the years. Note
that the content of these grievances might have had to do with recognition
and respect within the NWSA (which is to do with the relations between
women within a particular women’s group), and might have had to do with
uptake of specific caucuses’ interests within the aims, goals, and projects of
the NWSA (e.g. in curriculum design or design of conference themes). This
is an important distinction. Feminism can be accused of being ‘exclusionary’
either because the theorists who create it, or activists who practice it, have
exclusionary attitudes or practices or because their focus excludes particular
goals or projects.
Set aside the actual content of the caucuses’ grievances for a minute, and
imagine a way that things could have gone. Suppose, for the sake of
argument, the lesbian and Jewish caucuses were making claims relating to
being gay women and being Jewish women, while the disability and women
126  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

of colour caucuses were making claims relating to being disabled and being
black (or people of colour).
First, consider two complaints related to the women’s studies curriculum.
Suppose the lesbians thought that teaching on workplace sexual harassment
was overly focused on women who conform to feminine gender stereotypes,
and left as invisible the harassment of butch and masculine women. And
suppose the Jewish women thought that teaching on marriage overlooked
issues impacting Jewish women, particularly the Jewish religious law
requiring a get (a document which must be presented by a husband to his
wife in order to initiate divorce). This religious law permits men to keep
women ‘chained’ in bad marriages (she cannot remarry, and the laws of
adultery still apply to her). Imagine that in both cases, the accusations are
presented in an antagonistic way: the lesbian and Jewish women are hurt
and frustrated that their issues are never front and centre; and the straight
and atheist (and other religious) women are defensive and embarrassed. But
eventually it is agreed that these grievances are entirely justified, and the
women of the NWSA vow to do better when it comes to gay women’s and
Jewish women’s issues.
But now imagine that soon afterwards—with the women of the NWSA
still reeling a little from the realization that no matter how progressive and
inclusive of ‘all women’ they feel, they still make big, embarrassing
mistakes—came complaints from two other caucuses, this time to do with
conference themes. Suppose the disability caucus wanted a session on urban
design and architecture, focused on the way that design and construction
choices can lead to the exclusions of people with disabilities. And suppose
that the women of colour wanted a session on institutionalized racism in
education. I will argue in more detail in Chapter 7, Section 7.3 that if there
are no sex differences when it comes to social group issues, then those issues
are not within the scope of radical or gender-­critical feminist theory or
activism (its goals, aims, or projects). Supposing for the sake of argument
here that I am right about that, then the disability and women of colour
caucuses would not be justified in these grievances, because these are not
feminist issues. (They are issues that affect some women, in virtue of their
having disabilities or being people of colour, but that is not the same thing
as their being feminist issues, or so I will argue later.)
The point I want to make here is that if these grievances are presented
antagonistically, in much the same way as with the earlier groups, then we
can imagine their being accepted more easily. After all, the women of the
NWSA have now learned their lesson, and have a little more humility when
 ‘ Exclusionary ’ Feminism  127

it comes to their capacity to make mistakes. They are a little more deferential
to women who are differently situated, and willing to hear their criticism.
So instead of critically examining the content of the claims that the disability
and women of colour caucuses are making, we can imagine that they simply
wave them through. Indeed, taking time to critically examine them, rather
than accepting the criticism and apologising immediately, may be seen as
adding further insult to the injury of the original exclusion.
For all I know, the actual history of the NWSA was very different to
this—perhaps all the caucuses’ grievances were justified, perhaps none
were. What actually happened inside the NWSA is not my main focus. The
general point of the story I have imagined is that women accustomed to
being accused of ‘exclusion’, particularly when they actually were being
exclusionary and have learned from those mistakes, may be less critical
about future accusations that share a similar pattern.
Here’s Natalie Stoljar, explaining the exclusionary nature of feminism at
one time: ‘white middle-­ class feminism has developed a norm that is
inapplicable to other women. Implicitly conceiving of all women as white
and middle class, and developing a feminist politics on this basis, has
excluded and ostracized other women to the extent that many now resist
identifying with the feminist movement’.46 Although ‘white middle-­class
feminism’ or ‘white feminism’ have become a frequent characterization of
the second wave, it is worth noting the extent to which they may be over-
stated rather than simply accepting outright this narrative that feminism
has been marked by exclusion.47 There are many exceptions to this general
characterization of feminism as white/exclusionary who are almost never
acknowledged, such as Marilyn Frye in her essay ‘On Being White: Toward a
Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy’,48 or Gloria Steinem,
who was known to insist on speaking alongside African American women,
most often Flo Kennedy.49 Even bell hooks, who has been one of the most
outspoken critics of feminism’s failure to fully integrate issues of race, seems
to swing between blaming the low numbers of African American women in
the American second wave on the racism and exclusion of white feminists,50
and the more concessive acknowledgement that the opposition feminists
created between themselves and men was difficult for black women, who
were used to standing together with black men in confronting racism.51
So far, we have a partial explanation of how the agenda of feminism was
broadened out, namely as a result of an increased sensitivity to accusations
of exclusion. Feminists learned the important lesson that feminism must be
for all women, not just some women. A succession of accusations of
128  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

‘exclusion’—many of which were justified—established a general pattern in

which feminists were open to criticism and committed to learning from
their historical mistakes. But this created a situation in which they were not
as vigilant as they might have been about unjustified accusations of
exclusion. Women who have been marginalized within feminism may
nonetheless present issues which are not strictly speaking feminist issues
(on which more in Chapter 7), and people who are justifiably excluded from
feminism, because they are not women, may present issues which feminists
nonetheless take seriously because they appear to be structurally similar to
other issues that they do take seriously. Prostituted women are marginalized,
so when the collectives representing them say they want better workplace
rights rather than campaigns to abolish prostitution, feminists may then be
insufficiently critical about assessing how the demand of the group trades
off against core feminist commitments. When transwomen showed up
claiming that the feminist agenda was involved in ‘trans(women’s) exclusion’,
feminists acclimatized to charges of exclusion will have been primed to
apologize and accommodate, rather than critically assess and potentially
reject, their claims.
It is easy enough, given all this, to identify a source of antagonism
towards gender-­critical feminists. Women who are sensitive to the feminist
capacity to exclude, or who belong to groups that feel themselves to be
inadequately represented within feminism, will empathize with others
claiming to be excluded. Claiming to represent the interests of prostituted
women while working for policy solutions many of them actively repudiate
will not look like appropriate deference. And on trans issues, because there
is already disagreement over whether transwomen are women, due to the
more basic disagreement about what it means to be a woman, some will
view radical and gender-­critical exclusion of transwomen as amounting to
the exclusion of some women. In particular, feminists who think that
gender is identity, who accept that we should generally prioritize the
interests of the most marginalized women, and who believe the oft-­repeated
claim that trans people are the most marginalized social group (they are
not),52 will see transwomen as both a clear part of the constituency of
feminism and a clear candidate for being prioritized within feminism. For
those feminists, the gender-­critical position is not just objectionable, it is
repugnant. But it is important to remember that there is only ‘exclusion’ if
those other matters are already settled, namely that transwomen are women;
that we should prioritize the interests of the most marginalized women
 Fundamental Moral Disagreement  129

(rather than e.g. issues affecting the greatest number of women, or issues
affecting some women in the worst ways); and that trans people are the
most marginalized social group. None of those matters are in fact settled.

6.3  Fundamental Moral Disagreement

Sometimes moral disagreement is fundamental. It can happen that two

people just can’t get beyond the fact that ultimately they disagree. Is
disagreement about what gender is, and so what it means to be a woman,
like this?
In On Certainty, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put forward the
idea of a ‘hinge proposition’.53 These are particular sorts of claims,
specifically those where it is not possible to give further reasons in support
of them. Ordinarily, the reasons we give to demonstrate the truth of our
claims are stronger than the claim itself. For example, suppose I say ‘this
person is male’, and then I am asked ‘how do you know?’ and I provide my
reasons: ‘his physique, his facial features, the pitch of his voice’. These
reasons—referring to typical sex differences that are apparent in appearance
and social interaction—are stronger than my initial assertion that the
person is male.
But sometimes, the strongest reasons that we have are in the claim itself.
In trying to defeat the sceptics who doubted everything including the
existence of the external world, G. E. Moore asserted that he knew that he
had hands. But although he can try to come up with things to say if he is
asked how he knows that, Moore won’t be able to come up with anything
that’s stronger. Or to put this another way, the plausibility of the reasons he
can give, e.g. that he can see his hands, or feel them, will depend on the
plausibility of his original claim to have hands, not the other way round.54
But the job of reasons is to resolve doubts, and in order to do that, the
reasons will need to be stronger than the original claim. Hinge propositions
are the claims that cannot be supported by reasons (because no reasons are
as strong as the claim itself) and yet that cannot be rationally doubted to be
true. That Moore had hands is like this. But so is that the world has existed
for a long time, and that 12 x 12 is 144.55
This idea is a bit stronger than what we need for the point I want to make
in this section. It doesn’t need to be that a person cannot rationally doubt a
claim (which means, that if they were to doubt it they would be doing
130  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

something irrational). But it does need to be that a claim is the ‘end of the
chain’ when it comes to giving reasons. In the moral context, this is basically
what moral philosophers like G.A Cohen refer to as fundamental moral
values (principles, commitments), the things about which there can be
fundamental moral disagreement, and that are at the end of the line once we
exhaust a chain of ‘why?’ questions that might involve both empirical facts
and moral principles, values, or commitments that are not fundamental.56
Richard Rowland defines fundamental moral disagreements as disagreements
that would persist even in ideal conditions, and says: ‘I’ll understand ideal
conditions as conditions in which agents are fully informed of all the
empirical and non-­moral facts, are fully rational, are unaffected by cognitive
biases, don’t hold any conflicting beliefs, and have engaged in the very best
reasoning processes about normative ethics’.57
Again, this is a bit stronger than we need. When moral philosophers talk
about conditions like this they are usually trying to resolve the question of
whether in an ideal world ­people would agree on moral issues, and it’s just
things like having biases, and being differently informed about the facts, that
cause us all to disagree so much. But we don’t need to resolve that question
here. For our purposes, it’s enough to note that when gender-­critical fem­in­ists
and our opponents disagree, there will be some cases of disagreement that are
not explained merely by other things of the type Rowland lists. Rather, the end
of the chain—the ‘hinge proposition’ in Wittgenstein’s terms, the ‘fundamental
value’ in Cohen’s, and the ‘fundamental moral disagreement’ in Rowland’s (with
two of these ideas weakened appropriately)—is a moral disagreement about
which it isn’t possible to provide any further ­reasons or justifications. For sim-
plicity, I’ll refer to these as fundamental values.
A good example of a fundamental value is equality. A great many people
are committed to this value and think for example that all humans are morally
equal, and that this means we must work for equality between the sexes, and
the races, and anywhere else where there is inequality without a good justify-
ing explanation. Different people can be committed to the same fundamental
value while having an ongoing discussion about what exactly it means, which
is what we see in the discussion between moral philosophers over whether it
should mean equality of outcomes, equality of opportunity, equality of recog-
nition, or something else.58 But if someone were to disagree, and say that they
didn’t care about equality and thought that instead the best people should have
all the stuff (however they wanted to fill in the details of what makes you the
best), there wouldn’t be all that much we could say to them.59
 Fundamental Moral Disagreement  131

While these fundamental commitments can’t be argued for, they can be—
and generally are—felt. Disagree with someone who is passionate about
equality and expect for them to be angry with you, or even disgusted. Some,
perhaps even many, people who discover that you do not share their basic
value commitments will not be interested in having much more to do with
you. This is part of the explanation of group polarization, where people tend
to talk more with others who share their beliefs, which then reinforces those
beliefs because there’s no outside criticism coming in.60
Now all we need to explain the depth of feeling against gender-­critical
feminists is to notice that they disagree with particular fundamental values
held by other types of feminists, gender identity activists, and other leftists.
One such value is something like ‘it is crucially important to respect people’s
self-­identifications about sex/gender’.61 Another is ‘it is crucially important
to respect women’s choices about their bodies’. Yet another is ‘priority
should be given to the least-­well off women’ (where ‘women’ is transwomen-­
inclusive).62 There is no arguing about these values, from some leftists’
points of view. Many simply refuse debate.63 If this is right, then what
is being expressed by all the hostile and antagonistic rhetoric in this debate
is no more or less than we don’t share the same values.
Radical and gender-­critical feminists can’t stop asking questions at this
point. It is not the ‘end of the chain’ for us. We value collective political self-­
determination, and so see blind acceptance of identity claims (at least
supposing that they determine political inclusion) as a threat, not a value.
We want to know why the importance of a woman’s choices about her own
body imply that we should care about men’s choices to exploit women. We
want to know why it would be out of the question to orient feminism
around projects that are good for all or most women, rather than the worst-­
off women. We want to know why it is important to respect self-­
identification about sex/gender but not about any other axis of oppression
(or why self-­identification in every other case comes along with some
material facts that make the identification justified, except in the case of
gender). We want to know why ‘inclusion’ is given so much weight when
there are other values that matter morally.
But asking these questions is generally met with moral outrage. In 2019,
three leftist academics were so affronted by finding out they were featured
on the same webpage as three gender-­critical feminists (two academics and
one journalist) that they deplatformed themselves by retracting their
contributions. In a subsequent statement they wrote
132  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

We considered our inclusion in the . . . ‘debate’ to have been a non-­consensual

co-­platforming, for which we sought redress through the retraction of our
contributions . . . We object . . . to any ‘debate’ that questions transgender
­people’s fundamental legitimacy as people who are entitled to the same
respect as any other person.64

For the record, none of the gender-­critical contributions, which are still
available, questioned the entitlement of transgender people to equal
respect.65
This is roughly the kind of response we might expect from someone
hearing that we do not care much for equality. But the fundamental values
of these feminists are nowhere near as widely accepted. Encountering the
pushback against radical and gender-­critical feminists for the first time,
you’re likely to go one of two ways. If you happen to already share the values
of those pushing back, then you’re likely to perceive things in moralized
terms and be morally appalled by gender-­critical feminists. And if you don’t
share those values, you’re likely to be left completely confused about the
intensity of feeling coming from many feminists and other leftists over what
seem like commitments that are somewhat plausible but certainly leave a lot
to be discussed. Acting as though their values already enjoy the wide
consensus of a fundamental value like equality is a way for those who
disagree with radical and gender-­critical feminists to strongarm the public
discourse and subvert the usual mechanisms of open deliberation and
consensus-­building. New values need to be argued for, not stipulated.

6.4  Political Propaganda

In How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley puts forward the view that there
are two main kinds of political propaganda, ‘supporting’ propaganda and
‘undermining’ propaganda.66 These are roughly what they sound like. Both
are kinds of speech that sidestep rationality and use emotional or other
non-­rational mechanisms, the first to support or bolster particular ideals,
the second to undermine or erode particular ideals. This speech might
appeal to nostalgia, sentiment, fear, or other categories of affect (emotions
or feelings).67 An example of supporting propaganda is ‘the use of a
country’s flag . . . to strengthen patriotism’.68 Stanley thinks undermining
propaganda is much more complicated than supporting propaganda,
because it exploits existing ‘flawed ideological beliefs’.69 An example of a
 Political Propaganda  133

flawed ideological belief is ‘the ideology of the corporate-­funded anti-­

climate science movement’, which can be exploited in undermining
propaganda like the ‘expertise’ of someone working as a member of a
climate change team yet ‘declaring environmental concerns to be “junk
­science”  ’.70 There is also a third type of propaganda, which Stanley refers to
as ‘technicist’, which masks flawed ideology with scientific or technological
language.71 In a way, this can be understood as the inverse of ‘supporting
propaganda’, in that instead of sidestepping rationality with emotion, it
sidesteps emotion—where it would have been appropriate—with rationality.
It’s easy enough to spot speech that sidesteps rationality. One recent
example comes from Mark Lance, writing for Insider Higher Ed. Lance
opens his essay by describing a 1702 ‘theological/philosophical reflection on
the nature of the American continent and its inhabitants’, which ‘asserted
that the heathen savages that Europeans had met here were probably put
here by the devil, likely lacked souls, were more akin to beasts than humans
and absolutely must be at least converted, and if not, removed (i.e. killed)’.
His point is that in the context these remarks were made, namely ‘the dawn
of the 18th century, as a mass influx of Europeans are launching one of the
largest campaigns of ethnic cleansing and genocide in human history’, ‘these
remarks are violence. They are an endorsement of genocide and played a
very real role in facilitating it’.72 Lance then smoothly segues into the claim
that ‘Recently, a small but highly visible group of scholars has taken to
arguing against the growing acceptance of the gender self-­identifications of
trans people’.73 He’s drawing a parallel between not affirming transgender
people’s identity claims, and genocide. Don’t worry though!—he doesn’t
mean to suggest that what gender-­critical philosophers are up to is ‘as grim
as the genocide of Native Americans’. He says there are ‘differences of
quantity, and some of content’ between that particular genocide and the
gender debates.74 Here emotional reactions to the thought of genocide are
harnessed to build antipathy towards feminists.75
When this kind of tactic is used in support of the right ideals, then it is
merely an example of ‘supporting propaganda’. For it to be undermining
propaganda, we’d need to establish a flawed ideology. But how do we decide
what’s a ‘flawed ideology’ and what isn’t? For Stanley, a flawed ideology is a
rationalization of undeserved privilege, likely to emerge in societies marked
by injustice, particularly in the form of large material inequalities.76 We
know that there is exactly this kind of injustice between the sexes, so we can
expect flawed ideology to emerge to protect threats to male interests.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Stanley’s accounts of both flawed
134  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

ideology and propaganda are correct, do they help us to identify propaganda

in the debates over the sex industry and trans/gender, and thus help to
explain the apparent animosity against the gender-­critical position on both?
Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s book Being and Being Bought contains an extremely
helpful set of explanations of how so many people have ended up supporting
the sex industry, a particularly surprising change when it comes to feminists,
who were generally united in fierce opposition to pornography during the
second wave of feminism.77 The first move was to distort the meaning of
‘victim’. To be a victim is to have something unjust done to you by another.
It is perfectly compatible with your exercising agency. For example, suppose
you are confronted by a mugger, who points a blade at you and demands
your wallet and jewellery. You can exercise agency by making the judgement
that being stabbed is worse than being robbed, and so decide to hand over
the goods. In being mugged, you have been made a victim, but you also
exercised agency throughout the mugging. Ekman explains that pro-­
prostitution lobbyists have deliberately conflated the concept of ‘victim’
with ideas like being weak, passive, powerless, helpless. This makes it easy to
argue that prostituted women are not victims, by demonstrating that they
exercise choice and agency at various junctures. Prostituted women choose
to sell sex, in order to make money. So they can’t be victims.78 This gets us
on the path to the contemporary ‘empowered woman’ archetype of the
prostituted woman.
Next, we get a commodification-­inspired dualism where what is sold is
turned into a product, which in turn allows those thinking about
prostitution to abstract away from what is actually being bought and sold.
First it was ‘sex’ that was being sold, a product; then it was ‘sexual services’, a
service. This allows us to have a discourse about prostitution and
pornography without talking about how ‘sex’ and ‘sexual services’ differ as
products from most other things in the marketplace. Ekman reports on a
conversation she had in Barcelona with a woman called Maria who worked
in escort prostitution, who used the following example. When you are a
chef, the product is food, and you can create it and have the waiters deliver it
to the client. You don’t need to like what you’re cooking, you never need
consume it yourself, and you need not ever interact with the people who are
eating it. ‘The chef can be a vegetarian and still prepare meat; s/he does it
because it is their job’.79 With prostitution, on the other hand, it ‘is as if the
chef were forced to sit down and eat with all the patrons and say that it was
delicious, that it was the best meat s/he had ever eaten, even if they were a
vegetarian’.80 This obfuscation of what is actually being sold, namely the
 Political Propaganda  135

intimate use of one’s own body, one’s own self, serves the interests of those
who wish to continue to use or profit from the sex industry.
But it is even more complicated than that. For it is not only that this is a
convenient way for the discourse around prostitution and pornography to
be reshaped from the perspective of consumers and other beneficiaries, but
that sex workers themselves will tend to talk this way to preserve their own
dignity, and this will mean that feminists committed to listening to sex
workers, at least those feminists who don’t have an understanding of what
this kind of talk actually means, may end up buying into it. As interview-­
based research shows, prostituted women tend to distance themselves from
what they are doing, they refuse to kiss, they mark parts of the body as off-­
limits to the client, they refuse to perform particular acts, they adopt fake
names, they retreat ‘into the head’ while their bodies are being used.81 This
is an attempt to distinguish the ‘body’, the thing being prostituted, from the
‘self ’, the thing the women are trying to protect through these various
manoeuvres. Many prostituted women have ‘somatic dissociative syndrome’,
which means they can no longer feel certain parts of their bodies.82 On the
basis of interviews with 854 prostituted women83 across nine countries,
researchers found that 68 per cent of 827 met the criteria for post-­traumatic
stress disorder,84 and that prostituted women’s symptoms were in the same
severity range as combat veterans, battered women, rape survivors, and
refugees from state-­organized torture.85
When a feminist is committed to listening to sex workers, and she hears
them say ‘it’s not me, it’s just my body’, she may need to go a little further
than just hearing that and thinking I guess prostitution is fine! Sex work is
work!—and consider what it could mean to separate ‘me’ and ‘my body’.
When she finds out it means that the ‘work’ is so repugnant and damaging
to the ‘worker’s’ dignity that she must take steps to distance herself from it,
and that this may end up causing psychological damage, e.g. disassociation,
in the long-­term, she may need to revisit her commitment to ‘supporting
sex workers’ by advocating for the prostitution industry.
Still, if we’re going to blame anyone, we should start with the men who
buy sex and buy the watching of sex that is bought for other men, the third
parties who traffick and pimp women for other men to buy or watch being
bought, and anyone else who profits from this industry which involves mas-
sive amounts of female suffering.
Are these three moves—conflating victimhood with passivity, presenting
a man’s use of a woman’s body as a ‘product’ or ‘service’, and advancing the
idea that we should defer to someone who has a self-­protective reason to
136  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

deflect—propagandistic? They certainly pretend to uphold ideals, like

respect for a woman’s agency, respect for market transactions, and respect
for testimony or ‘lived experience’. Do they undermine those ideals while
pretending to uphold them? Do they exploit a flawed ideology? It’s not hard
to locate the flawed ideology, given the thousands of years of women’s sexual
subordination to men, which secures for men women’s sexual service.
Flawed ideology is likely to emerge to rationalize the sexual privilege men
have, in the form of claims about what women want or what’s good for
women. And indeed it looks like it has; by waxing lyrical about ‘agency’,
‘choice’, and ‘deference’, these speech acts in fact undermine respect for
women’s choice, agency, and lived experience, and perpetuate sexual
inequality.86 The clinical descriptions of selling sex as a ‘product’ or ‘service’
are good examples of technicist propaganda.
Is the same true in the case of feminist uptake of gender identity ideology?
One transgender philosopher seems to have seen the potential for a similar
explanation, and attempted to get ahead of it by accusing gender-­critical
feminists of propaganda before they could accuse gender identity activists
(and the feminists who support them) of it. Transgender philosopher Rachel
McKinnon (who currently goes by ‘Veronica Ivy’), a well-­known advocate
for transwomen being permitted to compete in professional women’s sports,
had a brief symposium piece87 published in the journal Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research in 2018 which claimed that in the corpus of
‘TERF propaganda’ are claims like:

trans women are not, and never could be, women. At best, they’re deluded
men, playing at womanhood—or perhaps they’re ‘constructed’ females,
but not authentically female. Moreover, trans men are really women,
deluded by the patriarchy into abandoning masculine (often butch dyke)
female identities. This is the heart of the TERF (flawed) ideology.88

Radical and gender-­critical feminists assert that the word ‘TERF’, which
McKinnon uses freely, is a slur.89 McKinnon says that the claim that ‘TERF’
is a slur is itself propaganda. If McKinnon has things right, then we’re to
believe that the claim that gender norms constrain male and female people
in different ways, and the claim that we should keep our focus on these
norms in order to free people—women in particular—from domination,
are ‘flawed ideology’ because they do not immediately cede ground to the
claim that gender is identity. This allegation is made in face of ample
empirical evidence for the existence of gendered social treatment.90
 Political Propaganda  137

The tactics that are used within gender identity activist and gender
identity activist-­supporting feminist rhetoric are much better candidates for
being propaganda than are the radical and gender-­critical feminist attempts
to grapple with them. The most significant of these is pronouns. As a result
of extravagant social media dogpiling, petitions, open letters, and the like, it
has become a common perception that ‘misgendering’ is a morally egregious
thing to do to a trans person. ‘Misgendering’ (more accurately, ‘mis-­
pronouning’) involves referring to a trans person by sex-­corresponding
pronouns rather than pronouns that refer to their gender identity, for
example calling a transwoman ‘he’ rather than ‘she’. Is misgendering morally
egregious?
It might have been, circa the roughly thirty years 1960‒1990 when there
were small numbers of transsexual women many of whom had generally
experienced severe and distressing gender dysphoria during feminine boy-
hoods, and most of whom transitioned surgically—which signals a very
serious commitment, and for whom it would be psychologically painful to
be denied recognition, or for it to be made evident that other people do not
see them as they see themselves. But as discussed in Chapter 5, the com-
munity of people who count as ‘trans’ today is much broader, and contains
people with none of this history. It even contains people who say explicitly
that they are nonbinary for political purposes, as a way of ‘­dismantling . . . [the]
gender system’.91 It is just not plausible that people who are trans for
­political purposes, or who have been swept up in the social contagion of
gender identity ideology, are seriously harmed by misgendering. It is
­plausible for the people who would have counted as trans on the older
diagnostic criteria (i.e. who are transsexual). According to the figures in
Chapter 5, that might be as few as 12 per cent of the current cohort. The
question then becomes whether the hurt experienced by this much smaller
group is a sufficient reason not to ‘misgender’. If there were no countervail-
ing reasons, then I think it would be. But there are.
These claims by activists have led to a widespread perception that mis-
gendering is morally egregious, and that makes it very hard to do it. But
‘misgendering’ is accurately referring to sex, and the ability to accurately
refer to sex can matter a lot. For example, female athletes in Connecticut
recently initiated a court case to challenge transwomen’s participation in
their sporting category (which was permitted on the basis of identifying as
female). The plaintiffs and their counsel referred to the transwomen athletes
as ‘male athletes’ or ‘males’, and the court reprimanded this language and
said that it was ‘needlessly provocative’, and that ‘transgender females’
138  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

should be used instead because that was ‘consistent with science, common
practice and perhaps human decency’.92 A judge in the UK in late 2019
decided that referring to a trans person by their sex might be ‘incompatible
with human dignity’, especially in cases where that person has a Gender
Recognition Certificate.93 But as soon as you’re forced to talk about ‘trans
female athletes’, it sounds a lot like one set of women showing prejudice
towards another.94 When we’re trying to oppose the sending into a female
prison of a male person who murdered and mutilated their girlfriend and
we’re forced to do this referring to them as ‘she’ or ‘her’,95 or when we’re
trying to talk about male overrepresentation in politics and trying to defend
female-­only shortlists but forced to refer to a transwoman candidate as a
‘woman’ or as ‘female’, or we’re trying to explain how women in rape shelters
need to be away from men but we’re made to refer to ‘transwomen’, the
points become much, much harder to make. And that may be why activists
for transwomen’s inclusion in women’s spaces are so insistent about that
language.
If we’re talking about a group of women, then picking up on the fact that
some are trans to justify not letting them compete in women’s sport, or not
be housed in the women’s prison estate, or not be elected to a women’s
officer position, or not be admitted to a rape shelter, looks like ‘punching
down’.96 It may look like we’re finding a further disadvantaging feature that
some women have and then discriminating (by attempting to exclude) on
the basis of it. But feminism is not supposed to be for some women, it’s
supposed to be for all women. As Jennifer Saul writes, in opposition to
gender-­critical feminism, ‘I hesitate to attach the label feminist to any view
that is committed to worsening the situation of some of the most
marginalized women’.97 It is this kind of reasoning that allows the parallel to
past acts of exclusion or failure of consideration by more privileged women
towards more marginalized women (as explained in Section 6.2). Middle-­
class white feminists haven’t been sufficiently inclusive of lesbian women,
black women, women with disabilities, or Jewish women in the past; isn’t
this just another example of (some of) them failing to be sufficiently
inclusive of transwomen?
Except that it isn’t, because we don’t all agree that we’re talking about a
group of women. We’re disagreeing about what it takes to be a woman, with
some of us saying that it takes being a female person and therefore being a
member of the class of persons to whom feminine gender norms have been
systematically applied, and others of us having accepted the criterion of
self-­identification as a woman. Then on the basis of that disagreement, some
 Public Perception  139

of us are classing transwomen as male/men, and others of us are classing

transwomen as female/women. Only if it’s true that transwomen are female/
women, which means only if it’s true that gender is identity and nothing
else, is it reasonable to consider attempts to exclude transwomen from
women-­only spaces, services, and provisions as discriminatory. But the
enforcement of ‘progressive’ language choices, that transwomen must be
referred to as ‘women’ not men, and must be referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her’
rather than ‘he’ and ‘him’, attempts to settle that argument in advance, because
it implements the language of one side.98 Twitter is perhaps the most
­prominent enforcer of this language, but it has been adopted across many (if
not most) media outlets. (You may wonder why I have used this kind of
­language myself at some points in this book. I was asked to by my publisher.)
All of this is propagandistic. The social injustice consists in the norms of
femininity that are imposed upon female people to channel them into the
service of men; the idea that women are for others, particularly men and
children, not for themselves; that refusing to centre men or service men is a
violation of a right that men have. This can be expected to produce a flawed
ideology in which men rationalize their own domination, for example
seeing non-­conforming women (in this case, radical and gender-­critical
feminist women) as selfish, exclusionary, hateful. Because those women are
bad and wrong, it’s justifiable that they be ignored, and even censured. It
becomes possible to claim that they’re the ones with the flawed ideology,
they’re the ones making propagandistic claims, when they say something as
simple as that it’s not possible to change sex, or that sex matters politically.
It’s propaganda with a side of gaslighting.
The institutional enforcement of the language of one side distorts the
ongoing argument by framing the entire issue as a conflict between women
in which some are discriminating against others. But it isn’t; it’s a conflict
between the sexes in which some are attempting to protect their sex-­based
rights. Dismissing women with legitimate political concerns as ‘hateful’,
‘bigoted’, ‘racist’, ‘whorephobic’, ‘transphobic’, and so on is just a convenient
way to justify not listening to what they’re actually saying, or having to
engage with the substance of their arguments.99

6.5  Public Perception

The explanations presented in this chapter are not exhaustive, merely those
I think are the most plausible and interesting. There is more to be said, in
140  Why Is Gender-Critical Feminism So Vilified?

particular, about the way that attacks on radical and gender-­ critical
feminists help to shore up in-­group solidarity between feminists from
different ‘tribes’. The remaining challenge is for gender-­critical feminists to
find a way to show the public that these deeply emotional attacks are
grounded in assumptions and values that are not widely shared, and that
there is after all a conflict of interest between two social groups, which
needs constructive public discussion and deliberation.
 PART II

HA R D QU E ST IONS F OR
G EN DE R-­C R IT IC A L F E M I NI SM
 7
Is Gender-­Critical Feminism
Intersectional?

Something strange happened to feminism during the later stages of the

second wave. Instead of being focused on the rights, needs, and interests of
female people as a class, ‘feminism’ became about all sorts of other issues
not obviously connected to being female, or being female in a particular
social and cultural context. Here’s Phyllis Chesler, writing about Gloria
Steinem: ‘Over time, Gloria’s brand of institutional and media iconic
feminism was increasingly less about violence against women and more
about racism, prison reform, climate change, foreign “occupations”, and
nuclear war—all important issues but not exactly “on message”, or likely to
appeal to women of all political persuasions’.1 While this may have been
unusual in the second wave, it is mainstream today. The @UN_Women
Twitter account defined ‘feminist’ in January 2019 as ‘a person who believes
in & stands up for the political, economic, and social equality of human
beings’.2 This definition makes three amendments to the historical radical
feminist line, where a feminist was a woman (men could only be allies) who
stood up for the liberation (not merely equality with men on men’s terms) of
women (not of all human beings). On this modern retelling, feminism is for
everybody and about social equality generally understood.
Is it a good thing that the definition of feminism has been transformed,
from a movement by women for the liberation of women to a movement by
anyone for the equality of everyone? That depends on whether the
transformation is justified by good reasons. I suggested one explanation of
the shift already in Chapter 6, Section 6.2, where I talked about the stream
of accusations of ‘exclusion’ that made feminists less critical about what is
and isn’t a feminist issue, and relatedly, who is and isn’t part of the
constituency of feminism. But that explanation didn’t amount to a
justification, because it remains unclear whether the refusal to defer to sex
workers about their preferred policy solutions and the refusal to accept
transwomen as women and centre their issues are justified or unjustified.

Gender-Critical Feminism: Holly Lawford-Smith, Oxford University Press. © Holly Lawford-Smith 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863885.003.0007
144  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

In this chapter, I’ll suggest two further reasons to think the revised def­in­
ition is a good thing. One is that the oppression of women is either caused
by another, more fundamental, type of oppression or it is mixed together
with another type of oppression at the foundations (Section 7.1). This means
focusing on ‘women’s issues’ is artificial, a kind of arbitrary privileging of
one symptom out of many of a deeper disease. Redefining feminism as for
everyone and about everything would then be a good thing, because it goes
directly to the disease itself, the roots of all oppression that affect everyone.
The other reason to think the revised definition is a good thing is that
feminism is about making women’s lives better, not only as women but more
generally as people (Section  7.2). This means we have a constituency of
people we care about, but once we really consider what it would take to
make the lives of those people better, we simply end up with a movement
that is for (pretty much) everyone and about (pretty much) everything.
All of these ideas have something to do with the theory of
‘intersectionality’, which has become a key methodological commitment of
all contemporary forms of feminism.3 Disagreement about these three
potential justifications—that feminism should be for everyone and about
everything so as to avoid being exclusionary; that feminism should be for
everyone and about everything so as to treat the root problem rather than a
mere symptom of it; and that feminism should be for everyone and about
everything because that’s what it takes for it to do its job, which is to actually
make women’s lives better—is reasonable, in the technical sense sometimes
used by philosophers to refer to disagreements in which two people can
come to different conclusions even while both are competent and have
engaged with the relevant considerations.4 But I will argue that ultimately
these justifications are mistaken. Considering them leaves us with a good
understanding of how we got to this point in contemporary feminism, but
they offer us no justification for thinking we got to the right point. On the
contrary, they suggest that feminism has been undermined—by feminists
themselves.
I will argue that women need to reclaim feminism, by refocusing on the
idea of feminism as a movement for women as women (not as people)
(Sections 7.3‒7.4).5 Gender-­critical feminism is not inclusive (of men). It
can be about women’s oppression alone because it is possible to separate
that from other forms of oppression. It is not intersectional in the sense of
being interested in ‘the whole person’. It is about women’s issues as women.
When gender-­critical feminists talk about ‘women’, we certainly mean all
women: black women, women of colour, women with disabilities, poor
 The Roots of Oppression  145

women, prostituted women, women exploited as surrogates, lesbian women,

transmen, female nonbinary people. But the as women part is important
too: for us, feminism is not concerned with the issues women with
disabilities have in common with men with disabilities. Or so I shall argue.
Before I do that, a quick note of warning. The idea that feminism should
be ‘intersectional’ has become virtually indistinguishable from the idea that
feminism should be anti-­racist. And because feminism (and every other
social justice movement) should obviously be anti-­racist, this makes it hard
to escape the idea that it should be intersectional. As Jennifer Nash explains
in Black Feminism Reimagined, ‘debates about whether one is “for” or
“against” intersectionality almost always seem to become referendums on
whether one is “for” or “against” black feminism, and perhaps “for” or
“against” black woman herself ’.6 So even if you are convinced by some of the
ideas in this chapter, I wouldn’t recommend simply announcing at the next
meeting of your feminist activist group that you think the group should
take the commitment to intersectionality out of its manifesto. Discussions
on this topic will have to be approached with sensitivity about what they
may be assumed to mean.

7.1  The Roots of Oppression

The concept of intersectionality, although it wasn’t always referred to by that

name, originated with black feminists.7 Probably the first person to talk
about it was Anna Julia Cooper in 1892.8 Although it is commonly invoked
across feminism today, it is rarely given a precise definition.9 According to
the International Women’s Day Australia (IWDA) website, intersectional
feminism is ‘really just about acknowledging the interplay between gender
and other forms of discrimination, like race, class, socioeconomic status,
physical or mental ability, gender or sexual identity, religion, or ethnicity’.
To make this point clearer, they explain ‘the barriers faced by a middle-­class
woman living in Melbourne are not the same as those of a queer woman
living in rural Fiji’.10
This makes sense: women experience inequality differently depending on
the multiple and different ways in which they are discriminated against. But
there’s more packed into the word ‘interplay’ than you might glean from
reading this sentence. After all, if it were merely that the queer woman
living in rural Fiji also faces barriers as a result of homophobia or poverty,
there would be absolutely no reason why feminism should be intersectional.
146  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

So long as there’s a flourishing LGB (lesbian, gay, and bisexual) movement,

and strong support for welfare provisions, we can expect such a woman to
be served by independent social justice movements in a way that stands to
represent all of her justice-­related interests.
So what more might there be to the claim that there is an ‘interplay’
between different forms of discrimination? Cooper’s claim was that race,
class, gender, and region are interdependent.11 The Combahee River
Collective stated that ‘the major systems of oppression are interlocking’.12
Frances Beal and Deborah King thought the categories of gender, race, class,
and sexuality were mutually constitutive.13 Crenshaw claimed that ‘the
intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism’.14
Even the United Nations seems to have glommed on to this—the phrase
‘multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination’ is included four times in
the agreed conclusions of the 61st Commission on the Status of Women.15
All of these claims are slightly different, but together they get at something
like the claim that sex discrimination cannot be considered on its own.
In her book Feminist Theory, bell hooks argues that ‘all forms of
oppression are linked in our society because they are supported by similar
institutional and social structures, one system cannot be eradicated while
the others remain intact’.16 Taken literally, this means feminism as a
movement for women’s liberation is incoherent. You can’t fight women’s
oppression alone, you can only fight the institutional and social structures
that uphold all oppression. The conceptual point, that things which appear
or are treated as distinct might all be connected, is true. For example, in The
Industrial Vagina, Sheila Jeffreys notes that most of the academic and
feminist literature on sexual exploitation which uses the term ‘sex work’,
which signals ideological disagreement between feminists, tends to make
distinctions between types of prostitution—e.g. child/adult, trafficking/
prostitution, forced/free, legal/illegal, west/non-­west.17 But, she says, ‘all
these aspects of sexual exploitation depend upon and involve one another’.
She establishes the case for that throughout the book. She is making the
case that apparently distinct things are ultimately interdependent. The same
could be true for all forms of oppression. The question is whether, in
fact, it is.
Women’s oppression is grounded in beliefs about natural female
inferiority, and in expectations of femininity imposed upon female people.
The idea that it is more worrying for a man with a family to lose his job than
a woman with a family, because women are naturally better carers and men
naturally better providers, is grounded in beliefs and expectations of this
 The Roots of Oppression  147

type. The content of these expectations is fairly specific: there is a whole set
of norms of femininity, and a whole set of norms of masculinity, with not
much overlap between them—and these can be articulated precisely enough
to be the basis of psychological research.18 What ‘institutional and social
structure’ are these sets of norms linked into, and is it really the same as for
racism, classism, and other forms of discrimination? This seems unlikely.
Some further insight can be gleaned from hooks’ discussion of the family,
which she thinks is the first site of domination for most people. Children
witness the sexist domination of the mother by the father, and are thus
‘primed to support other forms of oppression’, including heterosexism (the
domination of gay people by straight people).19 Here, hooks seems only to
be saying that sexism feeds into other modes of oppression, so that ‘struggle
to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for
such domination strengthens other liberation struggles’.20 But this doesn’t
sound any more like support for her claim that all forms of oppression are
linked. It sounds like she thinks there’s a sense in which sexism is the first
form of oppression, and that getting rid of it would have positive
implications for other forms of oppression. But this doesn’t do anything to
establish that all forms of oppression are supported by the same structures,
or that one couldn’t be eradicated without the others. Perhaps homophobia
is partly supported by sexism, in that it is just another form of a social
domination that was learned in the family home, but it still seems plausible
that we could target homophobia directly and get rid of it without making a
dent in sexism. That would be one being eradicated without the others.
When it comes to what the underlying structures are, hooks seems to
have in mind ‘the Western philosophical notion of hierarchical rule’.21 She
says that ideologies of group oppression ‘can be eliminated only when this
foundation is eliminated’.22 But this is a rather extraordinary claim. Does
hooks think there was no oppression prior to or outside of Western
civilization? Surely not, given that women in ancient China clearly had a
status subordinate to men’s,23 and that there was caste hierarchy in ancient
India.24 Perhaps she is not so much making a distinction between Western
and non-­ Western societies, as maintaining that all societies have now
integrated Western philosophical notions to do with hierarchy, and placing
blame for domination at the feet of these notions. Again, this seems a little
lavish: surely other traditions with their rich, long histories can lay claim to
their own explanations of contemporary social injustice. Ultimately, the
claim that there’s a single unifying idea, ‘the Western philosophical notion
of hierarchical rule’, and that this underpins all oppression everywhere, is an
148  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

empirical one. hooks does not offer any evidence for it, beyond a citation to
one philosopher.25
Without being able to resolve that empirical question here, a few
comments from the armchair might still be helpful. Australia has made
progress on workplace gender equality26 and legalized gay marriage, but it
still has not offered reparations to indigenous communities for stolen land
or stolen generations. This looks like serious progress on the sex and sexual
orientation systems of oppression, but not much progress on the race
system. We can tell different stories about different countries, which are for
various reasons better on some social justice issues and worse on others.
Progress is not the same thing as eradication, so hooks may ultimately be
right that we cannot eradicate one system of oppression without eradicating
them all. But I am sceptical. If we can make serious differential progress, it
would seem we can probably get rid of one and not others. So there is reason
to think it’s not true that all systems of oppression are linked.
If they were, we’d have a straightforward argument for intersectional
feminism, understood as a theory which includes all the different ways that
people can be oppressed. After all, if there’s no separating one from the
other we have no choice but to take them all if we want the one. The one we
want is sexism, but the others would all come along with it. And if there’s no
eradicating one without the other, we have no choice but to work on them
all by working on one. This seems to be hooks’ understanding of, and vision
for, feminism:

To begin feminist struggle anew, to ensure that we are moving into

feminist futures, we still need feminist theory that speaks to everyone, that
lets everyone know that feminist movement can change their lives for the
better . . . Feminist revolution is needed if we are to live in a world without
sexism; where peace, freedom, and justice prevail; where there is no
domination. If we follow a feminist path, this is where it leads.27

Gender-­critical feminism denies virtually all of these claims. It might be

true that feminism can change everyone’s life for the better—I have said
already that there will be incidental gains for other social groups. But it is
not feminism’s job to secure peace, freedom, justice, and no domination.
These goals are too burdensome for a single social movement. Just as
women do not have to be all things to all people, and are allowed to centre
their own interests in their own lives, so too for their political movement.
Feminism does not have to secure all goods for all people. It is allowed to
 Political Movement for Whole Persons  149

centre the interests of its constituency, female people, in its own politics.
Feminism is not for everybody and about everything, because the origins of
patriarchal oppression are distinct from the roots of other kinds of
oppression, and the mechanisms which sustain sexism and misogyny are
different from those that sustain racism and ableism (e.g. norms of
femininity applied to female people, like ‘be warm, caring, nurturing, kind’).
Not all gender-­critical organizations in fact take this view. The radical
feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) in the United
States, for example, seems to endorse bell hooks’ understanding of the
foundations of oppression. In their Statement of Principles from 2014, they
give roughly the standard radical feminist line: female humans as a class are
oppressed by male people as a class; patriarchy is organized around the
extraction of resources from women by men; that gender is a hierarchical
caste system and must be abolished. But they add a fourth point which is
‘intersectional’ in the way just described: ‘we are enmeshed in overlapping
systems of sadistic power built on misogyny, white privilege, stolen wealth,
and human supremacism, and all of those must be dismantled’.28 A radical
feminist collective determined to abolish gender as a hierarchical caste
system is going to struggle with that already momentous undertaking if it
also sees as part of its remit racial equality, distributive justice, and animal
liberation.
Among other things, WoLF also say they work to ‘analyze and resist all
systems of oppression, because until all women are free no woman is free’.
That takes us into the next explanation, because it assumes that the project
of feminism is to free women as people, rather than women as women.

7.2  Political Movement for Whole Persons

In a 1980 interview, black radical feminist Margo Jefferson made the

following comment:

I was worn out, I was exhausted, I seemed to have lost energy and interest
in something called the black movement, in politics that means. And
I began doing feminist theory and I said oh, it is possible for me to use
every part of myself, and still be political. I don’t have to say, well, that part
of me is . . . is female and that’s not important we don’t have to talk about
that. This part, as the exclusively black part, is fine; or this part, as the
leftist part, you know and not the black part, is fine if I’m at a white leftist
150  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

meeting. All of a sudden it was possible for me not to have to deny huge
portions of myself to be politically active. And when I say ‘me’ you know
I speak for—I suspect—most black women who encountered feminism.29

Jefferson’s saying that feminism allowed her to be a ‘whole person’: she

didn’t have to separate the parts of herself into those that were relevant to
these sorts of politics, and those that weren’t; or to ‘deny huge portions of ’
herself. Imagine how frustrating it would be, to be a black woman in the
1980s going to meetings of the black movement and being told that
‘women’s issues’ weren’t relevant, and going to meetings of the women’s
movement and being told that ‘black issues’ weren’t relevant. It would be a
relief to find a movement that accommodated both aspects of your
experience.
This gives us a tempting reason to accept intersectional feminism,
understood as a movement for women as ‘whole persons’. This doesn’t
have to mean feminism is for everyone, it can still be for women, but it
has to be for women in all their parts, not just women in some particular
capacity, say as women, asking them to leave their race, their class, their
disability, their religion, etc., at the door. On this view, feminism is a
movement to make women’s lives better. But there are lots of things that
make women’s lives go badly—not just women’s issues, but all sorts of
other issues too. So feminism is about much more than just women’s
issues in the narrow sense.
The problem with this is how it might change the scope of feminist activ-
ism. In Chapter 6 (Section 6.2), I made the distinction between the relations
between women within feminist activism and the focus of feminist activism
in terms of its goals, priorities, and projects. Certainly if most of the
feminists in a particular activist group were middle-­class and classist, this
would create an obstacle to solidarity with working-­class women in the
group, and undermine effective working relationships between those
sub-­groups of women. But what if they weren’t, or at least, everyone did the
best they could and were receptive to criticism. Do feminists have reason to
resist incorporating the goals, priorities, and projects of additional social
groups that some of their constituency are members of? If feminism is a
movement for women as people then the answer is ‘no’. If feminism is a
movement for women as women then the answer is ‘yes’.
Here’s the problem with answering ‘no’. Suppose that we have a small
group of women, and it’s so diverse that it’s almost like we designed it to
showcase diversity (like the television show Glee). It contains only women,
 Political Movement for Whole Persons  151

but it has a woman from every other socially, economically, or politically

marginalized social group you can imagine. Some women are in only one
other such group, others are in two, others are in three, and so on, for
however many marginalized social groups we think there are. To give you a
small selection, Adaeze is an international student in Australia from
Nigeria, Hui-­ju is a Taiwanese-­Australian lesbian, Kirra is an Aboriginal
Australian, Manaia is Maori with dual Australian and New Zealand
citizenship and who is Christian, and Emma is a white Australian living
with bipolar disorder. Now suppose that feminism is a movement for whole
persons, and this means that all the issues that affect women are on the table
as feminist issues.
That means all the following are feminist issues: treatment/status of
international students, immigration from Nigeria and New Zealand, religious
rights and freedoms for Christians, treatment/status of lesbians, Taiwanese-­
Australian ethnicity, racism against Nigerian, Aboriginal, and Maori people,
treatment/status of dual citizens, and treatment/status of those with bipolar
disorder. And the list goes on. For every woman in the group, added to the
feminist agenda is every further marginalized social group membership she
brings with her. This is enough of a problem when we’re talking just about a
particular feminist group in a particular city. Now imagine we’re talking
about feminism, the theory and the activism, globally understood. If this
thing is a theory about all women and a movement for all women, and we
understand this to mean women as persons rather than women as women,
then suddenly virtually everything is a feminist issue. That’s because for all
the women that there are, they’re going to be in virtually all of the further
marginalized social groups. Notice that this also means that feminism is
about an awful lot of men’s issues too. There are autistic women. If feminism
is about women as persons, then it’s about autism. But if it’s about autism,
then it’s about an issue that affects men too.
This helps to explain how we got not only to ‘about everything’ but also to
‘for everyone’. If the only people left out of feminism are the small numbers
of men who don’t belong to any other marginalized social groups at all—the
wealthy, white, heterosexual, middle-­class, atheist, able-­bodied, etc.—then
it’s barely worth making the distinction: ‘feminism is for all women and
most men but not all men!’. We could insist that feminism is only for women
while being good for men, seeing the gains for autistic men, gay men, men
with disabilities, black men, working-­class men, religious men, etc., as
incidental gains rather than the point and purpose of feminism. But this
still leaves us with feminism being about virtually everything.
152  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

It’s also not entirely clear why we’d call this thing ‘feminism’. It doesn’t,
anymore, seem to have much to do with women, except that women were
the starting point from which it collected all its issues. Given that such a
social movement would be virtually indistinguishable from a generalized
global justice movement, that would have the consequence of leaving a gap
where a women’s movement used to be. But women would still have all sorts
of issues as women that deserved priority within a movement rather than
just being one thing among many in a movement about everything. Women
are one of the largest constituencies of marginalized people, within a
country, and across the globe.
Reading ‘women’s liberation’ or ‘women’s equality’ to mean the liberation
or equality of women as persons, rather than as women, gives us one
explanation of how we might have ended up with a generalized social justice
movement that, perplexingly, calls itself ‘feminism’. If the explanation is
right, then we still need a women’s movement. This is not a merely verbal
issue. It’s not about what gets called ‘feminism’, it’s that there needs to be a
theory and movement for women as a sex class.
If we want to accommodate ‘all the parts’ of Jefferson, it seems we’ll have
to accommodate all the parts of all the other women too, and it’s not clear
how to stop this from over-­burdening feminism with a million different
issues. In the next section, I’ll consider some ways that we might try to limit
intersectionality in order to accomplish this.

7.3  Alternative Solutions: Limited Intersectionality

One way to try to retain the accommodation of ‘whole persons’ Jefferson

spoke so enthusiastically about is to limit the social group memberships
that are ‘on the table’ for addition to the feminist agenda. One obvious way
to do that is to simply stipulate relevant groups. For example, bell hooks’
early concern was with the intersection of race and sex,30 as was Kimberlé
Crenshaw’s.31 We could try to argue that this is the only relevant intersection,
and so restrict intersectional feminism to race/sex. At least then it’s only all
the race issues, and all the women’s issues, and all the issues where these two
things meet, that are on the feminist agenda.
But what could the principled reason be to limit attention to the
intersection of race and sex, when class is such a major system of oppression?
Across different countries, race, sex, or class will be the major dividing line
when it comes to disadvantage (arguably race in South Africa, sex in
 Alternative Solutions: Limited Intersectionality  153

Afghanistan, and class in the United Kingdom). Writing earlier than

Crenshaw and hooks, Cooper talked about the interdependence of race,
class, gender, and region;32 and the Combahee River Collective talked about
‘the major systems of oppression’.33 Later, Spelman talked about race, sex,
and class.34 I can’t see a way to justify the addition of the race/sex
intersection without also defending the addition of the class/sex
intersection. This might help a bit with the bloating of the feminist agenda,
but all race and class issues (as they affect at least one woman) is still a
massive addition.
Note also that both race and class have their own theory and movement:
Marxism created theory and movement against class oppression (and
determinedly refused to be hijacked by sex oppression),35 and Critical Race
Theory theorizes race oppression (as well as the more country-­specific
programmes like Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, etc.) while movements
like Black Lives Matter advocate for social justice along racial lines. Why
should feminism be any different? Even if there are ‘intersections’ between
these major systems of oppression, we surely still need theory and
movement of each major system, and we need to settle the question of how
to accommodate their interactions too.
Another way to prevent bloating of the feminist agenda would be to
think about the size of the social groups in question, and their proportion of
the overall population of female people. While everything would technically
be on the agenda, this would be a way to triage in order to get a narrower
list of priorities. One of hooks’ complaints against Betty Friedan’s seminal
text The Feminine Mystique was that she focused on bored housewives while
‘more than one-­third of all women were in the work force’.36 If we cared
about the size of the social groups, this would actually vindicate Friedan’s
approach: substantially many more women were affected by the predicament
she outlined in her book. (This is compatible with hooks’ main criticism,
which is that she wrote in a way that suggested she was articulating the
predicament of ‘women’ in general, rather than a specific group of women).
Let’s think in more detail about how this would go. Take the group of all
female people, then list separately all the social group memberships that are
a source of disadvantage37 for at least one such person, and then tally up
how many members the group of female people with each such group
membership has. Most women are women of colour. Most women are poor.
Most women will not be able to protect themselves from the effects of
climate change. Many women are uneducated. Some women are trafficked,
or prostituted, or exploited in contract pregnancy. Some women are
154  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

lesbians. And so on. Perhaps the ‘intersections’ that feminism should limit
its attention to are just those that affect the largest numbers of women. That
would seem like a reasonable approach—but what if it turned out that the
issues affecting the largest numbers of women, e.g. the negative impacts of
beauty norms, were less morally serious than those affecting much smaller
numbers of significantly worse-­off women, e.g. being exploited in contract
pregnancy and prostitution? The number of women affected by different
social issues is likely to work out quite differently in different places. Perhaps
in a rich country the worst-­off social group combinations will be women/
cancer or women/infertility. In some countries, it will be a minority of
women, not a majority, who have the woman/poor combination, and so this
may not end up a priority.
An alternative, which solves that problem and still limits the feminist
agenda, would be to think not about the size of the social groups but about
how badly off they are. A ‘prioritarian’ (meaning priority-­based) approach
justifies focusing on the worst-­off, so if a social group with a particular set
of intersecting characteristics, for example poor/black/women were the
worst-­off then we could argue for giving them priority on those grounds.
That would be true even if they were a very small proportion of the group of
all women (although in this case they are not). Philosophers have tended to
be sympathetic to prioritarian approaches, brought into prominence by
John Rawls in A Theory of Justice,38 and having particular uptake in the
movement for ‘effective altruism’. We can implement such an approach at
the global level, in thinking about what the global priorities for feminist
movement should be, and we can implement it at the national, state, and
community levels too.
If we take this approach, questions about the fineness of description of
social groups have to be addressed. ‘Women’ is a huge social group, making
up half the population of the whole world. ‘Black women’ is a smaller social
group, but it’s still huge. ‘Black lesbian women’ is smaller, and ‘black lesbian
women with disabilities’ even smaller than that. What is the right level of
description when it comes to thinking about women’s issues, and setting
priorities for theory and activism? Many have pointed to ‘fragmentation’ as
the death of social justice movements, including feminism,39 so it’s worth
being wary about the possibility that with more complex social group
descriptions we risk creating antagonism and in-­fighting between sub-­
groups, over perceived difference, perceived status, and competition for
resources. Uta Johansdottir put this point nicely: ‘Intersectionality: A
process of dividing ourselves by ever-­more-­parsed grievances, effacing our
 Alternative Solutions: Limited Intersectionality  155

common humanity, until we are 7.6 billion factions-­of-­one calling each

other toxic. It is the literal opposite of successful politics’.40 To avoid that
risk, we might choose to stay at very broad social groups, going only one or
two levels deep (e.g. women; black women; women of colour; working-­class
women; poor women; disabled women; gay women; etc.).
One further problem with taking the approaches discussed so far is that
we have only been thinking about the major and familiar social group
memberships that bring disadvantage, like being gay or working-­class. But
what about all the other ways that women can be disadvantaged, for example
by being: in a warzone; a refugee or migrant worker; unemployed; a survivor
of childhood abuse; a survivor of sexual and/or domestic violence;
prevented from unionizing in order to pursue her interests at work;
adversely affected by health and safety issues at work; unable to afford the
time off work she wants to spend post-­pregnancy; unable to afford childcare
when she wants to return to work; subject to discrimination on the basis of
having a difference of sexual development (DSD); subject to risk of violence
as a result of sex work; lacking opportunities in virtue of being uneducated;
displaced as a victim of climate change harms?
These are not ‘social groups’ in the sense more familiar from what has
come to be known as identity politics, but they are salient ways in which
women can be made worse-­off. Is there any reason to care about the groups
we’ve talked about so far, and not these groups too? If not, we’re back facing
the problem of a hugely expanded feminist agenda.
The most serious problem with all of these ways of limiting the social
groups in order to get a more manageable set of feminist issues is that we
still haven’t found a principled way to make sure feminism is focused on
women. On the ‘whole persons’ approach it starts with women, but it soon
ends up at (almost) everyone. We look at working-­class women, we add
class to the agenda, and then we end up working on lots of class issues that
affect working-­class men equally. We look at black women, and we add race
to the agenda, and then we end up working on lots of race issues that affect
black men equally. Feminism ends up ‘doing the work’ of both sex and class
movement, or both sex and race movement, while class movement and race
movement remain focused largely on class and race respectively.41 Why
should the women’s movement allow itself to become diluted, to the
advantage of other social justice issues? Why can’t women do what the
Marxists did, and say, firmly, the women’s movement is about women’s
issues—as women—and all these other things are just outside its scope? In the
next section, I explain one way that it can do exactly that.
156  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

7.4  Women as Women

A feminism centred on women as women is a feminism concerned with all

of the ways in which women are oppressed or disadvantaged in virtue of
their sex-­based rights and interests. Some of these are grounded in the
material facts about their bodies, while others are grounded less in bodies
and more in the politics of how people with those types of bodies are
treated. This will include issues relating to:

• Sex and sexual subordination

(e.g. female genital mutilation (FGM), child brides, incest and abuse
against girl children, rape, sexual assault, prostitution and porn­og­
raphy, trafficking into sexual slavery)
• The female reproductive role
(e.g. period poverty, reproductive rights, breastfeeding in public, preg-
nancy and in/fertility healthcare, flexible work during pregnancy,
maternity leave, non-­discrimination against pregnant or breastfeed-
ing employees)
• Female-­specific medical conditions
(e.g. cervical cancer, breast cancer, endometriosis, and comparative
research funding for women’s medical issues)
• Female sports
(e.g. comparative speed, strength, agility, and the comparative under-­
funding of women’s sports compared to men’s)
• The way that product design caters to men’s bodies not women’s,
including legislation for female-­specific design where there is mor-
tality risk
(e.g. bullet-­proof vests not fitting female police officers well,42 airbags
in cars being designed to protect male bodies,43 personal protective
equipment used by female healthcare workers treating COVID-­19 fit-
ting poorly because designed to fit men44)

More generally such a feminism will be concerned with the norms, ex­pect­
ations, and stereotypes applied to women, which constrain their options and
set the standard against which they are assessed (e.g. ‘a ­ gender non-­
conforming’ woman is a woman who fails to realize the standards of fem­in­
in­ity), and the treatment of women who violate those norms.
 Women as Women  157

If we focus feminism in this way, we will have returned to the original

insight of feminism, that ‘Women are oppressed, as women’, as Marilyn Frye
says.45 She elaborates as follows:

One is marked for application of oppressive pressures by one’s membership

in some group or category. Much of one’s suffering and frustration befalls one
partly or largely because one is a member of that category. In the case at hand,
it is the category, woman. Being a woman is a major factor in my not having a
better job than I do; being a woman selects me as a likely victim of sexual
assault or harassment; it is my being a woman that reduces the power of my
anger to a proof of my insanity. If a woman has little of what she wants to
achieve, a major causal factor in this is that she is a woman. For any woman
of any race or economic class, being a woman is significantly attached to
whatever disadvantages and deprivations she suffers, be they great or small.46

Or as Andrea Dworkin said: ‘The nature of women’s oppression is unique:

women are oppressed as women, regardless of race or class’.47 Dworkin
acknowledged that this did not mean the ‘primary state of emergency’ for
any given woman was as a woman. Jewish women in Nazi Germany would
have experienced as their primary state of emergency being Jewish; many
Native American and African American women at a particular time would
have experienced it as being their race.48
This focus explains the priorities of the first and second waves of
feminism in English-­speaking countries. The first wave was focused almost
exclusively on women’s political enfranchisement. The second wave gave a
great deal of attention to ending sexual violence against women, but also
included issues like equal pay for women; abortion, contraception, and
maternity rights; women’s issues in the educational curriculum; women’s
economic independence and empowerment; women’s workplace rights;
sexist language; and police treatment of women victims and survivors.49
The easy test of whether something is an issue for women as women or
women as persons is to ask whether the men of the further social group face
the same issue. Take the sex/race combination. Black women involved in
the civil rights movement in the United States talked about the sexual
violence and harassment endemic in the movement, which was often
suppressed as a matter of showing solidarity with, or not breaking rank
with, black men.50 The way that white people historically perpetrated racism
158  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

against black people, especially under slavery, involved sexual violence

against black women.51 In both cases, we ask whether black men suffered
the same issues. If they did, this was a race issue, not a feminist issue. But, in
general, they didn’t. Black women felt conflicted about revealing sexual
violence in the civil rights movement, but black men were usually the
perpetrators of that particular violence, not the equal victims of it.52 White
violence against black women under slavery was sexualized, but white
violence against black men generally was not. So both of these are issues
that should be part of feminism understood as being for women as women.
Similarly, women with intellectual disabilities are raped or sexually
assaulted at a substantially higher rate than people without intellectual
disabilities. We can ask whether men with intellectual disabilities face the
same issue. If they do, this is a disability issue, not a feminist issue. But they
don’t—the rate is 7.3 per 1,000 for women, and 1.4 per 1,000 for men, with
disabilities. The rate for men with intellectual disabilities is lower than the
rate for women without. So this is a feminist issue, too. (And as per the
discussion in Chapter 6, Section 6.2, the invisibility of butch and masculine
women in discussions of workplace sexual harassment, and the Jewish
religious law of get, are both feminist issues too.)
Consider also the cases where the same tests reveal the issue not to be a
feminist one. Police violence against African American people in the United
States affects black men more than black women; it is a race issue, not a
feminist issue (although sexualized police violence affects black women
more than black men, and so is a feminist issue).53 Building access for
people with physical disabilities affects men and women with physical
disabilities equally, and so is a disability issue, not a feminist issue. HIV
awareness and protection affects gay men more than gay women, so is an
LGB issue, not a feminist issue. Kosher food requirements affect all Jewish
people equally, so are a Jewish issue, not a feminist issue. And so on.
What if the issue doesn’t clearly relate to women’s sex-­based rights and
interests, but still affects more women than men? Because the world’s poorest
women are often restricted to their homes, they’re more at risk from climate
disasters (finding it harder to escape floods, and harder to access food and
clean drinking water when there are droughts, for example).54 If more
women than men are the victims of climate injustice, even though climate
injustice doesn’t relate to the embodied or political aspects of women’s sex-­
based oppression, should climate justice be on the feminist agenda?
More women than men will be adversely affected because more women
than men are restricted to the home, in turn because there tend to be strong
 Women as Women  159

gender expectations in the world’s poorest societies that lead to women

being in that situation, e.g. expectations to raise children, care for the home,
and prepare food. All of these things, relating centrally to women’s
reproductive role and gender expectations applied on the basis of her being
female, will be on the feminist agenda as we’ve outlined it. But climate
justice won’t be. Climate justice is an everyone issue, not a feminist issue.
And that’s a good thing, because as I have been arguing, when it becomes
feminism’s job to smash capitalism and fight climate change there’s a serious
risk that feminism simply becomes debilitated by being stretched too thinly,
by having too much asked of it.
A significant implication of this refocusing of feminist theory and
activism is that it removes the automatic assumptions about hierarchy
within feminist groups that contemporary identity politics has put in place.
Women as women are all equal. It is perfectly likely that the most negatively
affected person in the group is the woman who looks to have the most
‘privilege’ when all her social group memberships are taken into account.
Middle-­class white women may yet have suffered histories of childhood
sexual abuse or been raped. Middle-­class white women may have been
bullied and harassed throughout their lives for not performing femininity
in the right way. The number of marginalized social group memberships
that a person has are no guide at all to the extent of her oppression as a
woman.55 This restores equality among women when it comes to feminist
solidarity, and feminist projects. This doesn’t mean such women don’t need
to be careful when it comes to the interpersonal relationships between the
women in the group, which obviously can be disrupted by causal racism,
ableism, homophobia, etc. But it means ‘privileged’ women don’t need to
spend all their time apologizing, and ‘the most marginalized’ women
(according to identity politics) don’t automatically deserve the deference of
the other women in the group, or take priority when it comes to setting the
group’s goals and priorities.
This equality should help to restore the possibility of solidarity among
women. The important questions for setting feminist goals and priorities
are not what further marginalized social groups the women in the group
belong to (which can lead to the unstable situation in which a new member
joining means a complete rethinking of the group’s aims, because the focus
is always on ‘the most marginalized’ person whoever she happens to be),
but which of the issues on the agenda deserve priority, which might be
settled in different ways, e.g. issues that affect the greatest number of
women; issues that affect women in the most morally serious way; issues
160  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

that the group has the expertise to cover; issues delegated through a division
of labour with other groups; and so on.
Opponents of gender-­critical feminism are likely to say that this version
of feminism works to the benefit of middle-­class white women, because
these are the women who are only oppressed as women, and so it is a
feminism that therefore pursues their interests. This is false for two reasons.
First, it is a version of feminism that works to the benefit of all women as
women, even if it does not solve the further problems of all women as
people. Any feminism that pursues the interests of all women as people will
suffer from being impossibly broad, and there is no principled way to limit
it. Second, many of the issues mentioned at the start of this section—FGM,
child brides, period poverty, trafficking into sexual slavery, reproductive
rights—are more likely to affect globally poor women and women of colour.
Once we map out the feminist agenda for this version of feminism, gender-­
critical feminism, and we set priorities in the ways discussed above, it is
highly unlikely that what we’ll have is a movement to prioritize the interests
of middle-­class white women alone.

7.5  Intersectionality as Novel Forms of Oppression

It’s time to take stock. We’ve considered several potential justifications of

the fact that we’ve ended up with a feminism which is considered to be for
everyone and about everything. All have to do with mistakes taking hold.
The first was that feminism had better be for everyone otherwise it’s
excluding some people (from Chapter  6). The second was that feminism
had better be about everything otherwise it’s just putting band-­aids over
symptoms rather than getting to the root cause of oppression. The third was
that feminism is for (almost) everyone and about (almost) everything,
because it’s about making women’s lives better, and there are all sorts of
things that make women’s lives (as whole persons) go worse. I’ve rejected all
of these justifications, and defended a narrower focus for feminism on
women as women.
But where does this leave intersectionality? It wouldn’t be quite right to
equate these three explanations with intersectionality and leave things
there, because there are many different theorists who give many different
versions of intersectionality, some more plausible than others. In this final
section of the chapter, I want to present Kimberlé Crenshaw’s version,
which I think is the most plausible, and argue that incorporating this into
 Intersectionality as Novel Forms of Oppression  161

gender-­critical feminism—or indeed, any version of feminism—would lead

to significantly less bloating than the other versions discussed so far.56 But,
ultimately, there is still a question about whether it is feminism’s job to
account for the forms of oppression that this version of the theory identifies.
In Crenshaw’s presentation, intersectionality is not just about
membership in two or more marginalized social groups. If that were all
there was to it, we wouldn’t need movements to be intersectional. One
movement could address race oppression, and another could cover sex
oppression, and between them they’d have black women covered. But this
won’t do, Crenshaw argues, because there is discrimination that occurs
specifically at the intersection of blackness and femaleness (hence the term,
‘intersectionality’). Crenshaw thought this intersectional discrimination was
greater than the sum of its parts, and that its discovery had implications for
both the feminist movement and the anti-­racism movement.57 One example
she gave was of a case in which a company had laid off all its black women
employees, and yet couldn’t be prosecuted for employment discrimination
because it had both black employees (men) and women employees (white).
The court said it was reluctant to ‘creat[e] . . . new classes of protected mi­nor­
ities . . . by . . . combination’.58 The court wanted to leave discrimination at
race and sex, not create a further minority class out of race and sex.
This suggests there are four ways that a black woman may face
discrimination: as a woman, as black, as black and as a woman, and as a
black woman, the latter being understood as its own particular thing. It is
perfectly possible that a black woman could face discrimination and know
that it is related to one of her social group memberships rather than another.
Most obviously, if this discrimination involves slurs or insulting comments,
it is easy to identify what they relate to. Shirley Chisholm, the first woman
and first African American to run for president of the United States, said
she faced much more discrimination during her time in politics as a matter
of her sex than her race. In her words: ‘I had met far more discrimination
because I am a woman than because I am black’.59 It’s the last category, as a
black woman, that is most interesting to us here.
Crenshaw was specifically interested in race and sex, although as
discussed earlier, there’s no principled reason to limit our attention to only
this intersection. The logic of the idea extends naturally to other
marginalized social group memberships. But I’ll stick with race and sex
here just to keep the discussion simple. If discrimination as a black woman
is something entirely new, then it’s not clear that it fits into the method
outlined in Section 7.4. There we talked about starting with all women, then
162  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

looking at further social group memberships like being black, and then for
any given issue asking whether it is held in common with black men, or
uniquely faced by black women. But how would that go with this unique
form of discrimination as a black woman? There’s no comparison class that
contains men that will let us ascertain whether this is a feminist issue or
another movement’s issue. Because the issue is novel, it’s not obvious whose
jurisdiction it falls into. Crenshaw clearly thought it belongs to both. The
anti-­racism movement should care about discrimination as black women,
and the feminist movement should care about discrimination as black
women. If that means some doubling up, so what? Maybe the issue will be
solved more quickly.
Perhaps Crenshaw is right. But it’s worth pointing out that this is not the
only answer. Once we consider that this is also true for other intersections,
we’ll notice that it’s a lot of additional content for each movement to take
on. And it is not the only option that all existing movements with a single
social group focus (sex, race, class, disability, sexual orientation, etc.)
incorporate all intersectional issues where those groups are part of what’s
intersecting. That would mean instead of disability rights activism being
about e.g. building accessibility, it would need to also be about all of the
issues occurring at the intersections of female/disabled, black/disabled,
working-­class/disabled, gay/disabled, black/female/disabled, working-­class/
gay/disabled, and so on, and so on. There is a risk of fragmentation and a
risk of over-­burdening the group so that its energies are spread too thinly
and it can accomplish nothing.
There are three alternatives, at least in theory, which leave the
intersections out of the existing movements with a single social group focus.
One is the creation of additional social justice movements for intersectional
groups, e.g. a movement for black women as black women specifically.
Audre Lorde appears to take this view, when she says ‘As Black women, we
must deal with all the realities of our lives which place us at risk as Black
women’,60 and ‘Black women have particular and legitimate issues which
affect our lives as Black women’.61 She goes on, ‘As Black women we have the
right and responsibility to define ourselves and to seek our allies in common
cause: with Black men against racism, and with each other and white
women against sexism’.62 Black women here are conceived as a distinct
social group that has common cause with other social groups, black men,
and white women. On this alternative, gender-­critical feminism is a theory
and movement for all women, including, obviously, black women as
women—which, as discussed earlier, includes racial issues with a differential
 Intersectionality as Novel Forms of Oppression  163

impact on women, but excludes racial issues impacting the sexes equally.
But there would also be an independent theory and movement for black
women as black women (as there already is). And so too for all the other
social groups that describe novel forms of oppression.
A risk of this first alternative is fragmentation. There is no guarantee that
women will have the energy to participate in two or more distinct
movements (the feminist movement and a specific intersectional
movement), and if the consequence is that any woman dealing with novel
forms of oppression (arising from her multiple social group memberships)
leaves the feminist movement then this is bad news for the feminist
movement. Perhaps this is the ultimate explanation of why the feminist
movement has simply embraced the intersections, and so become for
(almost) everyone and about (almost) everything: in a choice between
having a small and non-­diverse movement with a clear, narrow focus, and
having a large and diverse movement with an impossibly broad focus, the
latter is more appealing.
Another alternative is a division of labour between the existing
movements to avoid doubling-­ up on issues and to keep the agenda
manageable. For example, black women’s intersectional issues might be
incorporated into feminism, but women with disabilities’ intersectional
issues might be incorporated into the disability rights movement. The
problem with this alternative is that social movements are ‘bottom-­up’,
meaning they emerge from grassroots activism in sometimes spontaneous
or chaotic ways, rather than being carefully organized or orchestrated ‘top-­
down’. A division of labour like this would require careful top-­ down
organization, or at the very least, a lot of mutual responsiveness between
movements.
Finally, it could be that instead a new, comprehensive ‘intersectional
social justice’ movement should rise up to claim the novel forms of
oppression at all the intersections. Indeed, I think what has actually
happened is a version of this alternative. As described in Section  7.2,
feminism has been reconceived as a movement for women as whole persons.
Then, that movement has also claimed the novel forms of oppression at all
the intersections. The feminist movement has become an intersectional
global justice movement. The problem is not that there is such a movement.
Such a movement is a good thing. The problem is rather that this new
movement still calls itself ‘feminism’. This gives the impression that it is a
women’s movement, focused on women as women, comparable to
movements focused on race, class, disability, sexual orientation, and so on.
164  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Intersectional?

While there are pockets of holdouts, most notably the radical and gender-­
critical feminists, the culturally dominant form of feminism is not a
movement focused on women as women. (It is not clear that it is even a
movement focused on women as people; it may be closer to a movement
focused on people as people). But this leaves a serious gap in the social
justice landscape. We need a women’s movement. Even if there is loads of
intersectional discrimination, there is still, also, just good old plain vanilla
discrimination against women, for being women.63
 8
Is Gender-­Critical Feminism Feasible?

. . . there are no precedents in history for feminist revolution—

there have been women revolutionaries, certainly, but they have
been used by male revolutionaries, who seldom gave even lip
service to equality for women, let alone to a radical feminist
restructuring of society.
(Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex)1

The gender-­critical feminist utopia is characterized by liberation for all

female people from patriarchal oppression. For gender-­critical feminists,
this means no more gender norms, either masculine or feminine. This in
turn means no more patterned male violence against women and girls (rape,
domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse), no more sex industry (no
more trafficking, no more prostitution, no more pornography), no more
sexual objectification of women and girls—whether by individuals or
through cultural institutions like the media and advertising, no more sexual
coercion, no more discrimination against women and girls (whether the
result of individual attitudes or of institutionalized biases). It means no
more self-­destructive behaviour by women and girls as a result of having
internalized standards of femininity that they feel themselves not to be
meeting. So no more cutting, no more anorexia or bulimia, no more sex
asymmetry in the suffering of depression,2 no more elective double mastec-
tomies (breast removal) or phalloplasties (neopenises, sometimes created
out of women’s forearm flesh) inspired by ideas about gender identities, or
caused by feelings of inadequacy relative to gender norms.3
People have written about utopias of many different kinds: ‘there are
socialist, capitalist, monarchical, democratic, anarchist, ecological, feminist,
patriarchal, egalitarian, hierarchical, racist, left-­wing, reformist, free love,
nuclear family, extended family, gay, lesbian, and many more utopias’.4
A utopia need not be perfect in all respects. If there is more than one value
it is seeking to maximize then it will often be the case that it cannot be:

Gender-Critical Feminism: Holly Lawford-Smith, Oxford University Press. © Holly Lawford-Smith 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863885.003.0008
166  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Feasible?

sometimes values are linked, so that more of one means less of another, for
example freedom and security. Citizens in a democracy may reasonably
disagree about the correct balance of different values, and end up choosing
perfection in some at the expense of imperfection in others. In fiction,
utopias often contain serious injustice. In Naomi Alderman’s The Power,
female empowerment comes with a lot of electrocuting of men (although
to  be fair, it is often in retribution for injustice).5 In Kurt Vonnegut’s
Harrison Bergeron, an egalitarian utopia is accomplished by ‘levelling down’
(handicapping the clever, talented, and beautiful).6 Thomas More’s 1516
Utopia contained patriarchy, slavery, and restricted freedom.7 The gender-­
critical utopia is perfect only in the respect of having eliminated sex
oppression. This follows from its being exclusively about women’s liberation,
rather than combining multiple movements, or incorporating the intersections
of multiple movements (see also discussion in Chapter 7).
In the gender-­critical feminist utopia, sex is likely to be acknowledged,
because the pathways taking us there will have required anti-­discrimination
protections that tracked sex. But it is not something that people will use as a
basis for making predictions about people’s personalities or preferences
(except, most likely, when it comes to preferences about sexual and romantic
partners). While there will still be the same people who think of themselves
as ‘transmen’, ‘transwomen’, or ‘nonbinary’ today, they will not use those
labels, because ‘feminine’ will be a way that males can be, ‘masculine’ will be
a way that women can be, and ‘androgynous’ will be a way that anyone can
be. The idea of being ‘gender non-­conforming’ won’t make sense to anyone
in the utopia, because gender will be a system of oppressive norms that
people living there have long-­since gotten rid of, so there will be nothing
left to conform to. When we get to the utopia, there will be no more need
for a feminist movement—except as a matter of protection against
backsliding.
The realization of these feminist goals might also come with incidental
gains for other social justice projects. For example, if freeing women from
patriarchal oppression means eliminating systematic male dominance entirely,
and systematic male dominance was a common cause of both widespread
female subordination and the failure to take radical action against climate
change, then female liberation could end up a major catalyst for climate
justice. The large-­scale social changes involved in realizing gender-­critical
feminist goals, and the potential incidental gains involved, are difficult to
fully anticipate. Because the same mechanisms that oppress women have also
involved collateral damage to gay people, non-­masculine men, non-­feminine
 What Does It Take for Something to be Feasible?  167

women, trans people, and fun people (by which I mean people—especially
men—who like to exercise a little creativity over their presentation), it is
likely that none of these groups of people will still be oppressed in the
gender-­critical feminist utopia. Some of these people are male, so their lib-
eration was not the point of the feminist theory and movement that
achieved the utopia, but is an incidental gain of female liberation.
For any major social shift to overturn injustice, there’s usually an opponent
in the wings waiting to accuse the reformers of having a vision the imple-
mentation of which is infeasible. Those working against the institution of
slavery were told that people wouldn’t produce more than they needed for
subsistence if they weren’t forced.8 Those working for women’s suffrage
were told that women didn’t want the vote.9 Advocates for marriage equality
in the early days were told there wasn’t the political will to support it.10 It’s
important to note that for all the social justice movements that have suc-
ceeded, there are many more that didn’t. But the fact that some did estab-
lishes that the opponents were not always right.11
We can assume the same criticism will be made against the gender-­critical
feminist movement, and also, independently, against its major commitments,
for example to the asymmetric criminalization of the sex industry (crim­in­
al­iza­tion of punters, pimps, pornographers, and other third parties);12 and
to its stubborn insistence that gender is harmful norms rather than identity,
given how much uptake the ideology of gender identity has already had. So
let’s get on with figuring out what that criticism means, and what it would
take to show that it’s unwarranted.

8.1  What Does It Take for Something

to be Feasible/Infeasible?

Suppose the accusation of infeasibility is made in a general way, without any

further specification of the aspects in which this is supposed to be the case.
Suppose someone just proclaims that ‘what gender-­critical feminists want
isn’t feasible’. Perhaps, if pushed, they will insist that the exchange of sexual
intercourse for money is like alcohol or marijuana in that appetites are not
much suppressed by illegality, and where there is appetite there will be
provision, so abolition of the sex industry is infeasible. Or perhaps they
have a story to tell about what men are like (there seem to be an infinite
supply of these stories) which would make it infeasible to get rid of sexual
assault or domestic violence or even just sexual objectification.
168  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Feasible?

In a 2017 TEDx talk in Canberra, Australia, Nicholas Southwood offered

the following set of dangers that come along with the ‘just not feasible’
conversational device (which he says is ‘utterly ubiquitous’):

1. Self-­fulfilling prophesies: ‘we may reject as infeasible an idea that is

only infeasible insofar as and because we judge it to be infeasible’.
2. Conflation: ‘we may reject as infeasible an idea that is merely unlikely
to happen because we are unlikely to try to make it happen’.
3. Implicit constraints: ‘we may reject as infeasible an idea that is perfectly
feasible within a broader temporal horizon and given a more
permissive understanding of the ways it might be brought about’.
4. Loss of symbolic value: ‘we may reject altogether an idea—even if it is
really infeasible—that nonetheless has value and should somehow be
kept alive’.13

Let’s take abolition of the sex industry as an example to explain each of

these dangers, because it’s simpler to talk about one component of the
gender-­critical utopia than all of it at once, and because this is an absolutely
key component.
If we decide that getting rid of the sex industry, either in one country or
globally, is infeasible, then we won’t be motivated to try to get rid of it. Why
would we waste our energy on something hopeless, when we could be doing
something more constructive with our time? This makes infeasibility a self-­
fulfilling prophesy, because it’s the very fact that we declare abolition of the
sex industry infeasible that it becomes infeasible. It is infeasible because we
won’t, not because we can’t.
Or alternatively, we may judge that abolition is not that likely to succeed
even if we try, or that it will be costly to try, or that it will be really difficult
to pull off. Sometimes ‘infeasibility’ is confused with nearby notions like
this. But it’s important to get clear on what’s really being said, because they
raise different follow-­up questions. Why is it not that likely to succeed, and
is there anything we can do to make it more likely? How costly will it be, and
what kinds of costs will it involve? Is that a price worth paying given what
we stand to gain? How difficult will it be? Lots of things are difficult, but
worth doing. Because claims about infeasibility often involve conflation
with other concepts, it is important to find out what is meant.
The third ‘danger’ was that when people dismiss something as infeasible
they’re sometimes making particular assumptions that aren’t made fully
available for inspection. Imagine someone says to me that asymmetric
 What Does It Take for Something to be Feasible?  169

criminalization of prostitution is infeasible in my home state, Victoria, but

when I press them their reason is that ‘the Labor government has already
thrown its weight behind decriminalisation’. It turns out they’re assuming a
timeframe of this year, or before the next election, and our conversation
might go differently with a longer timeframe in mind.
These assumptions can also be moral: we may disagree about what is feasible
because we disagree about what is morally permissible (and therefore ‘on the
table’). Juno Mac & Molly Smith think that reducing harm to prostituted
women by introducing asymmetric criminalization is infeasible.14 One of
the reasons seems to be that they consider it morally repugnant to select a
policy that would put already vulnerable women at even more risk. Making
men scared of arrest means prostituted women having to go to more secluded
locations with punters. So for Mac & Smith, criminalization is ‘off the table’ as
an option. If we don’t have a basic income or a decent welfare provision in
place, and don’t commit to offering support like retraining to women exiting
prostitution, then they may be right that it should be off the table.
Because our assumptions might not be shared, it’s good to get them made
explicit so that they can be assessed. Not all projects for the public good can
be done in a way that involves gains for some without any losses to others,
and in those cases it should be on the table whether these losses can be
justified by potential gains. Perhaps increased risk to prostituted women in
the short-­term, and fewer punters, is worth it if it means those women end
up moving out of sex work and the sex industry is eventually squashed.
Finally, the last danger was that in dismissing something as infeasible—
even if it actually is—we lose something important. Suppose we’ll never
quite fully get rid of the sex industry, we’ll only manage to reduce its size a
bit while driving it underground. Still, given all its manifold harms, and
given the massive roadblock it throws up for sex equality, we should
maintain its abolition as an ideal, and do the best we can to get close to it.
Even if infeasible, abolition can function as an endpoint against which we
measure our success.
Out of these four, I suspect that much of the disagreement between
feminists over the abolition of the sex industry is a version of self-­fulfilling
prophesies and implicit constraints, and that the implicit constraints are
moral rather than empirical. In the next two sections, I’ll make the case for
that in more detail. There is also room for a disagreement about the
feasibility of realizing the gender-­critical feminist utopia even without any
of these mistakes. Feasibility is not easy to establish (although the converse
is also true, and this should give us pause whenever we hear anyone throw
170  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Feasible?

‘that’s infeasible!’ around as a conversation-­stopper). So in Section 8.4, I’ll

sketch out some of the considerations that go into a judgement about
whether the gender-­critical feminist utopia, or specific components of it, are
feasible or not. Then in the final section, Section 8.5, I’ll make a point about
pathways to utopia which shows that there need not be any disagreement
between higher and lower ambition—reformist and revolutionary!—
feminist proposals, at least in terms of first steps.

8.2  Self-­Fulfilling Prophesies

It is possible to be so cynical about the chances of change that we don’t even

try. Some people defend a market in organs on the grounds that for some
very poor people, selling their organs is a way to make some money,
which will make them a little better off. Similar arguments are made about
surrogacy (‘reproductive prostitution’, Ekman calls it)15 and about prostitu-
tion. Destitute and desperate women are very badly off, but at least if they
can sell their organs, sell sex, or sell their capacity to reproduce, then they
can improve their situation a little, for at least a little while. That’s better than
the alternative, surely.
The argument seems to be that there are only these two choices, and so
ruling one of the choices out means condemning poor people to a very bad
situation. We can either leave the desperately poor to their poverty, or we
can allow wealthier people to exploit them in a way that makes them
marginally better off for a short while. If that’s what someone thinks about
what is possible, then it’s hardly surprising that she would defend to the
death the continued existence of the surrogacy, organs, and prostitution
industries. One would have to be entirely lacking in compassion to argue to
take away the slightly better options that very poor people have available.
This kind of argument showed up in Revolting Prostitutes, discussed in
Chapter 4. Mac & Smith assume that if we try to criminalize part or all of
the sex industry it will just be run illegally, but in a way that is worse for
women. There is almost no discussion, anywhere in the book, of a deterrence
effect from any policy proposal, even though the whole book is about
comparing and contrasting policy proposals. The assumption seems to be
that there will always be a sex industry, or even that these particular women
will always work as prostitutes, so the only question is about the conditions
in that industry, and of that work. Sheila Jeffreys reports another example of
this reasoning, namely Diane Otto’s argument against the United Nations
 Self-­F ulfilling Prophesies  171

prohibiting its staff from having sex with anyone under 18, where she
reconceives child prostitution as ‘survival sex’ and focuses on the child’s
exercise of agency in making trades that protect her from the starvation that
poverty would otherwise make inevitable.16
There might really be some cases where there are only two very bad
options. If all the street prostitutes in a specific area are drug- or alcohol-­
dependent, and the social services to transition them into other kinds of
work are not particularly good, and don’t include drug and alcohol
rehabilitation, then it’s fairly likely an abolitionist campaign won’t succeed
in transitioning those women out of the sex industry, and that (so long as
there remains some demand, even when buying sex is made illegal) they
will keep selling sex. After all, they have no other means to survive, and
most people do what they need to do in order to survive.
But it is unlikely that for all the cases where exploitative industries are
defended on the grounds that they make the exploited better off, exploitation
really is the only alternative. Usually there is enough latitude in a budget
that local governments could decide to put more resources into policing and
prosecuting men who buy sex, and into the social services to help prostituted
women exit the industry. They could also put more money into training
programmes so that women have better options than prostitution. Women
who are exploited in these ways are some of the most vulnerable women in
any society, who have a very strong claim to being prioritized.
The same is true, at a conceptual level, for gender as identity versus
gender as norms. Gender as identity is a low ambition project. It seems to
suppose that we can’t make things much better for all the people who are
hurt by the policing of gender norms. Instead of thinking about how to
change the social structures that cause some people to identify as trans, it
focuses on the individual solutions of transition and medicalization. It
doesn’t worry about the fact that it is entrenching gender norms, by
signalling that ‘feminine’ is not a way to be a man, and ‘masculine’ is not a
way to be a woman. It is as though the gender as identity crowd think the
choice is between just two options, one being to carry on with roughly the
gender binary we have now, the other being to free up some people to opt
out of one side of the binary and into the other, or to opt out of both and
into a third category (nonbinary).17 But where is the justification for think-
ing that these are our only choices?
In both of these cases, it is possible that feminists are creating the
infeasibility of ending women’s exploitation, and the infeasibility of securing
women’s liberation from gender norms, by taking the cynical view that very
172  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Feasible?

little is possible in the way of reform, and so justifying a ‘second-­worst’

solution as being equivalent to the practical ‘best’ solution. But the burden
of proof should be on those who defend these reforms, who seem to be
assuming that we can only make things a bit better, to prove that this is the
case. If they can’t, then we have no reason to limit ourselves to just the
options they have bothered to consider.
One shortcut to defeating a claim about infeasibility that smuggles in a
self-­fulfilling prophesy is to show that better options are actual in some
places.18 The Nordic Model (also known as asymmetric criminalization)
for  prostitution is actual in a number of countries—although not for
pornography, somewhat inconsistently.19 These include Sweden, Norway,
Iceland, Canada, Northern Ireland, France, Ireland, and Israel. (There are a
few countries where pornography is illegal, but these tend to be countries
that are socially repressive for women.)
Domestic violence and sexual violence are illegal in many countries,
although in many where that is the case the crimes are not particularly well-­
policed or prosecuted. There is much less sexual objectification of women in
some countries, to the point that men and women are comfortable sharing
saunas (where there is full nudity) and changing rooms. No country is a
gender-­critical feminist utopia, but some—like Sweden—show how much
progress it is realistically possible to make.
At the opposite extreme from self-­fulfilling prophesies—being so cynical
about the possibility of change that you talk yourself out of trying to achieve
it—is caring so much about ideals that we insist something is feasible when
it isn’t, in a way that causes more harm. Another way to refer to this is as
‘ideological puritanism’. Mac & Smith complained about this when they
talked about radical feminists worrying about the symbolic nature of
prostitution, rather than about real harms to sex workers.
I said at the end of Chapter 4 that gender-­critical feminists mustn’t let the
‘perfect’ be the enemy of the ‘good’. Perhaps what is perfect is no exploitation,
and that means no sex industry. Still, what is good is less suffering, rather
than more. We shouldn’t let the one become the enemy of the other by being
so immovable on our commitment to no exploitation, therefore make the sex
industry illegal! that we end up licensing more, rather than less, real harm to
women, even when we shift to thinking about all women. That would be
ideological puritanism, because it puts the symbolic value of the commitment
above the pragmatic value of compromising where necessary to make gains
for women. (This issue is especially salient among radical and gender-­critical
feminists over questions about political alliances.)20
 Implicit Moral Constraints  173

Of course it is not clear-­cut when and where we should compromise, not

least because sometimes the long-­game commitment to ‘the perfect’ will
bring greater benefits that are not comparable to the smaller benefits
achieved by a pragmatic acquiescence to ‘the good’. If MacKinnon is right
about it being a pervasive gender expectation of women that they are for men
to fuck, then allowing the sex industry to go on, just with better working
conditions for the women in it, is incompatible with dissolving pernicious
gender expectations, and so capitulation in the name of the good is only
going to make things worse for a greater number of women for longer.
There is no option but to simply put all these considerations out on the table
and do the work in thinking them through.

8.3  Implicit Moral Constraints

The idea behind implicit constraints was that we can disagree about what is
feasible because we have different ideas about what the constraints are that
we’re working within. One specific form this can take is that we disagree
about what is morally permissible, and that leads us to have different things
on the table.
Mac & Smith were doing something like this when they argued against
making things any worse for sex workers.21 The moral constraint is
something like it is impermissible to make things any worse for groups that
are already very badly off. When law-­makers talk about developing their
legislation by ‘listening to sex workers themselves’ they are also employing
this kind of constraint.22 But both the constraint and whether the constraint
applies in the case of prostitution may be questioned.
First of all, while it’s true that asymmetric criminalization may make
some prostituted women worse off in the short-­term, in the sense that they
will lose punters and may be pushed into accepting riskier jobs, it is not
clear whether this makes them worse off in the longer term. There is a risk
here of assuming implicit constraints about time periods, and being cynical
about how things will go. But why should we only be interested in the very
short-­term? (One obvious answer is that we can be more confident
about being able to accomplish short-­term plans; another is that restricting
our plans to time periods that fit between elections mean a particular gov-
ernment can enact them. But this does not suffice to establish that we cannot
pull off longer-­term plans, and the length of time between elections does
not rationalize planning to an even shorter term.) Why should we assume
174  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Feasible?

that asymmetric criminalization is paired with poor policing, so that

there will still be punters, they’ll just be scared of being arrested and so
take prostitutes to more secluded locations where they are more at risk?
If policed properly, the result is simply no more punters, and if paired
with adequate welfare support, healthcare, and retraining, there’s no reason
at all to think that this would make prostituted women worse off rather
than better off.
Second, even if it was the case that such policy reform would make pros-
tituted women worse off, it’s open to us to push back on the moral con-
straint. Obviously we should try very hard not to make things any worse for
groups that are very badly off. Ideally, we would make improvements for
some groups without making any other groups or individuals worse off.
Where that isn’t possible, it would be good to design improvements so that
if they had to make anyone worse off, it would be those who are already
very advantaged. But as I said in Chapter 4, the existence of the sex industry
has implications for all women. And when we consider which policy makes
women better and worse off, it is no longer completely straightforward
whether it is impermissible to make things worse for groups that are already
badly off. There’s no easy answer to how the goods of a gain to a social group
must be distributed among its members. We would clearly have a problem if
reforms made things better for the best-­off and worse for the worst-­off, but
what about in all the other cases?
Moral disagreements, smuggled in as implicit constraints on what can be
done and how, are likely to be behind much of the critics’ objections that the
gender-­ critical feminist utopia, or particular of its components, are
infeasible. For example, (real) liberal feminists place a heavy emphasis on
the importance of freedom from state interference, and on the importance
of the freedom to make choices—for people to pursue their own good in
their own way, as it is usually stated. They reject paternalism over adults.
Even if a person is clearly making a mistake, they argue that it’s her life to
make mistakes in. Radical and gender-­critical feminists are generally happy
with the idea that state interference can be used to secure non-­domination,
and with the idea that the set of choices available to people should exclude
those which are incompatible with women’s full humanity (e.g. men’s ‘choice’
to buy the use of women’s bodies, whether for reproduction or prostitution).
This is a moral disagreement between liberal and radical feminists, and
one that can mean they will impose a different set of constraints on the
‘available options’.
What Does It Take for a Political Proposal to be Feasible?  175

8.4  What Does It Take for a Political Proposal

to be Feasible?

Suppose two feminists are sitting down for a coffee together and disagreeing
about their respective visions for women’s liberation, but that neither are mak-
ing any of the mistakes just discussed. Both are aware that cynicism can lead to
a lack of motivation that actually creates infeasibility; neither confuse ‘infeasible’
with ‘unlikely’; they’ve established common ground in what the constraints are
and what’s morally off the table; and they both agree that sometimes infeasible
ideas have symbolic value and so should be held onto as ideals. But they still
want to establish whether it is really possible to get rid of all pornography;23 to
eliminate prostitution, and surrogacy, and trafficking, and forced marriage, and
rape, and sexual assault, and domestic violence; to completely change the way
women are viewed, from aesthetic and instrumental (sexual, service) objects
to full human persons; to end all forms of discrimination against women.
We can advocate for all of these things at once, but the different compo-
nents are separate projects. They will require different types of legal reforms
and reforms to policing, different types of public information campaigns,
different measures for changing how women are represented. For example,
there is a campaign underway at the moment to have Pornhub shut down,
initiated by Laila Mickelwait and having attracted nearly 2.2 million signa-
tures.24 Shutting down Pornhub would be a huge victory in the feminist
fight against pornography. It is the website with the tenth highest internet
traffic in the world, and the second biggest pornography website.25 Gail
Dines writes for the campaign to shut it down:

For too long pornography has been framed as a moral issue, but from over
forty years of empirical research, we know that it is an issue of harm.
Pornhub is in the business of commodifying and monetizing violence
against women and children. There is no place for Pornhub in a world
committed to sexual equality, dignity, and social justice.26

Still, even without pornography, long-­standing cultural ideas about what

women are for, cemented by the existence of pornography—even when it
has become just an embarrassment of the past, a historical injustice against
women whose many reparations cases have begun weaving their way
through the courts of countries all around the world—will take some undoing.
A separate but complementary project is to increase and improve the
176  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Feasible?

representation of women characters in entertainment media, in order to

provide depictions of women as full human persons, and create a challenge
to the perception of women as objects. In her book Norms in the Wild,
Cristina Bicchieri draws on evidence showing that television and radio soap
operas can have a huge influence in shifting social norms, including gender
norms.27 In Brazil, soap operas have been credited with reducing the number
of children women have from an average of seven to an average of two.28
The point is that when feminists want to explore questions about feasibil-
ity, it will be more tractable to consider these distinct components sep­ar­
ate­ly, than to try to account for everything all at once. This is compatible
with acknowledging that it is likely that as more progress is made on sep­ar­
ate components there will be a kind of ‘snowball’ effect where it becomes
easier to implement components that have a similar underlying rationale or
justification. In what follows, I’ll talk about a few different specific compo-
nents of the gender-­critical feminist utopia in order to explain some of the
considerations that need to go into making a judgement about feasibility.
Here’s one way of thinking about feasibility: something is feasible if we’d
be reasonably likely to succeed in bringing it about if we tried.29 This is a
useful way of thinking about feasibility because it means something can be
feasible even when we won’t try to do it: even if we won’t try to eliminate the
sex industry, it would be feasible to do so, because if we were to try, we’d
likely succeed. If people object to the gender-­critical feminist utopia by
claiming that it’s infeasible (rather than that it’s immoral, which I talked
about in Chapter 6),30 and we can show that we could bring it about if we
tried, it’s only that we won’t try, then we have defeated the objection.
Suppose I tell you ‘you should stop commenting on your female colleagues’
appearance’, and you say ‘but I won’t’. Neither of us would think that was
equivalent to saying it’s infeasible for you to stop.
Securing more convictions against domestic violence, and thus creating a
deterrent for perpetrators, is feasible in this way. Domestic violence is
already illegal. More resources could easily be put into policing it, and more
could be done to combat the androcentrism in policing that causes under-­
policing and under-­prosecution. Jess Hill’s book See What You Made Me Do
discusses domestic violence in Australia, and contains two examples of
policing that have been effective in reducing domestic violence against
women.31
This way of thinking about feasibility is all or nothing: something either
is or isn’t feasible, and whether it is or isn’t depends on what counts as a
‘reasonable’ likelihood. A way to complicate this idea and make it more
What Does It Take for a Political Proposal to be Feasible?   177

useful for political decision-­making is to make it a matter of degrees instead:

something is more or less feasible, depending on how likely success would
be, given trying.
What does this likelihood depend on, though? A lot of things are relevant
here: economic, institutional, and cultural facts, and facts about people’s
incentives, psychologies, and motivations.32 Take the gender-­ critical
insistence that gender is harmful norms, and resistance to the idea that
gender is identity. Bringing a legal case to challenge the use by transwomen
of women-­only spaces (as a way of defending women’s sex-­based rights) will
cost money. In the UK, cases like these have generally been crowdfunded. If
the people who support the case don’t have much money to donate, it will
be less likely to succeed.
Many institutions have already adopted gender identity ideology into the
way they operate, either through infrastructure like gender-­ neutral
bathrooms; signalling like pronouns in email signatures; or policy like
diversity quotas including ‘gender minorities’. The more institutionalized
gender identity has become, the harder it will be to unwind. People can gain
social status from signalling their allegiance to ostensibly ‘progressive’
norms, like using preferred pronouns, and espousing pseudo-­science about
sex and sex differences; and conversely, they risk social sanctions by failing
to signal that allegiance, or by actively speaking out against these things.
These incentives all make resistance harder to accomplish. People like to
think of ‘inclusion’ as a positive value, and may not think to question the
use of ‘inclusive’ to describe a policy of opening women-­only spaces up to
transwomen. This makes it psychologically difficult to get the gender-­
critical feminist argument across, which depends on the right of oppressed
groups to exclude.
One more factor that determines the likelihood of success is that many
people have a lot going on, and may be already committed to alternative
social justice causes. So even if there are a lot of motivated, passionate,
gender-­critical women advocating for change (and resisting alternative
proposals for change), people just may not have the capacity to support them.
These are all things that can make achieving the specific commitments
of gender-­critical feminism less feasible. Thinking about it this way, we
don’t use ‘that’s infeasible!’ as a way to dismiss ideas, taking only the
‘feasible’ ones forward in deciding which to really work for. Rather, we use
information about how feasible an idea is, together with other information
like how risky it is, and how desirable it is, to make informed decisions
about what to do.
178  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Feasible?

Some have worried about thinking of infeasibility in this way, because of

cases involving individuals where it looks like someone can’t try, say because
they have a serious phobia, addiction, compulsion, or something like that
tied to their capacity to follow through on their intentions or desires
(Southwood 2018). Suppose for the sake of argument that the only way to
get rid of pornography is through a consumer boycott, which means
people—predominantly men—stopping watching it, and especially stopping
paying for it. Then we ask for each porn consumer whether it’s feasible for
him to stop. What establishes that, in turn, is how likely he is to stop if he
tries. But for the men with porn addictions, it may well be that even when
they try to stop, they fail. It looks like we end up in a situation in which we
have to declare something to be feasible when we know it won’t happen,
because addiction will interfere with the relevant men’s ability to try.
This objection isn’t obviously important for the kinds of legal and political
reforms we’ll largely be interested in.33 No one has a phobia against
asymmetric criminalization policy. It’s clearly true that some men have
addictions, compulsions, and serious weaknesses of will when it comes to
sexual gratification. But as anyone who has tried to eat healthily will know,
one of the best ways to manage weakness of will is to scaffold our immediate
environments in ways that help us to get what we ultimately want, namely
to not have junk food in the house. The same is true for prostitution and
pornography. If it’s not available, then weakness of will can’t be what its
consumption depends on. The existence of addictions and compulsions
might at best give us reasons to offer mental health care to men along with
the reforms as they happen. The objection also tells us that we should not
approach the abolition of pornography and prostitution solely through
consumer boycott strategies. But that’s not how boycotts generally function
anyway. Usually the idea is to get a groundswell of social support that forces
the targeted companies to change their practices. This can happen without
all consumers being on board, and generally does.
Another problem with thinking about infeasibility in this way is that it
creates issues with who the ‘we’ is supposed to be, when we figure out the
likelihood of succeeding if we try. If who tries? In earlier work, I suggested that
claims about what is feasible must always be made relative to agents, whether
those agents are individual humans, or organized groups like corporations and
states.34 Being an ‘agent’ means being the kind of thing that is in control of
what it does, that can make decisions on the basis of evidence about how to act.
This doesn’t mean their ‘trying’ is limited to mobilizing their members—it
might mean mobilizing a whole lot of people who aren’t members, but who
they merely have influence over. What this means is that when we assess a
What Does It Take for a Political Proposal to be Feasible?   179

claim like ‘asymmetric criminalization of the sex industry in Victoria is

infeasible!’, we have to think about who would be trying to bring it about, who
they have influence over, and how likely they are to succeed when they try.
There might be a number of different agents all of whom could try and each of
whom would have different probabilities of success.
Let’s take the question ‘what is the likelihood of CATWA (the Australian
branch of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women) stopping
­decriminalization and gaining support for asymmetric decriminalization in
Victoria, assuming that the organization tries its best?’ Answering this ques-
tion involves thinking about everything it would take to succeed, and how
likely that is given all the various constraints and variables. This includes the
stability of the relationships between members; how well-­organized they
are; how well-­resourced they are (money, research assistants, resources for
staging political actions and running campaigns); how motivated they are;
how many setbacks they can endure without losing hope; and what position
all their prospective supporters are in when it comes to donating money,
adding real names to public statements, lobbying members of parliament
(MPs), volunteering in campaigns, and so on. And even allowing that
CATWA would be fairly likely to succeed if it tried, there is still a further
question when it comes to whether it should try, which is how those costs
trade off against the desirability of the outcome and the risks incurred by
pursuing it or securing it, given the opportunity costs, which means, other
things they could be doing.
Still, it can’t be just any agent who could try. Transgender Victoria, an
organization utterly committed to gender as identity, could try to implement
the gender-­critical commitment to gender as harmful norms, and if it did it
would probably succeed. Still, it is not going to try, because that is some-
thing entirely outside the remit of what the organization is set up to do and
what its members want it to do.35 For some agents, there is just no realistic
sense in which it is an option for them to try to do particular things, not
because they’re lazy or unmotivated, but because they are constituted so as
to do otherwise (in the case of corporations and organizations) or because
of their most fundamental value commitments and ideological beliefs (in
the case of individuals). So we should consider the best-­placed agent, under-
stood as an agent who has it as a realistic option to try to bring about a spe-
cific gender-­ critical commitment, or indeed the whole gender-­ critical
feminist utopia, and think about what the chances of success are if it tries.
The Victorian parliament wouldn’t even have to try very hard to intro-
duce asymmetric criminalization of the sex industry. If they wanted to do it,
they could. But CATWA is less likely to succeed, because their success
180  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Feasible?

would depend on mobilizing a large segment of Victorian society, and not

facing significant opposition, which is unlikely when it is large numbers of
paid sex lobby activists against small numbers of grassroots feminists, and
when group polarization has led to large numbers of women supporting the
sex industry, as discussed in Chapter  4. The lowest chances come when
there’s no organized group yet, so we’re starting with just one motivated
individual hoping to bring people together and start a social movement.
This has been incredibly successful in some times and places on some issues,
and incredibly unsuccessful in other times and places, on other issues. The
more that other people have been independently concerned about something,
the easier it will be for a single activist to unite them into action. The less, the
harder. All of these things affect the likelihood of success.
I had experience of this in 2019, when the slow-­paced organizing of a
new radical feminist group, Feminist Action Melbourne, was interrupted and
a breakaway group formed specifically to address a bill before parliament
attempting to make sex in Victoria a matter of statutorily declared self-­
identification. We called ourselves the Victorian Women’s Guild. Immediately
we began a campaign of sending letters out to MPs, organizing meetings
with MPs, sharing information via a new website and social media page,
writing for the media and giving interviews, and running a public event to
raise awareness of the bill and voice opposition to it. These are all long-­
established tactics.36 If someone had asked, ‘how feasible is stopping sex
self-­identification in Victoria?’ we probably would have been the best agent
they could base their assessment on. As far as I’m aware, we were the only
group formally opposing the bill. I’m sure they would have assigned us a
fairly low probability of success. We were highly motivated, but we were few,
and we only had a couple of months’ notice. We also faced extensive op­pos­
ition from those convinced that kindness and inclusion meant supporting
the idea that gender identity should determine which legal sex category one
belongs to. In the end the bill went through, and sex became a matter of
statutorily declared self-­identification on the 1st of May 2020 (while I was
still writing this book).

8.5  Compatible Pathways

It seems that at least some of the disagreement gender-­critical feminists

have with other types of feminists comes down to a disagreement over what
is feasible. The gender-­critical feminist’s vision for women’s liberation is more
 Compatible Pathways  181

ambitious than the vision for women’s equality that many feminists today
seem to have as their ideal. But this need not mean that they disagree about
what needs to be done, at least when it comes to the first steps along the
pathway from this world to the worlds they each desire. I talked in Chapter 1
about the many things that these feminists actually agree about, agreement
which tends to be overshadowed by the heatedness of their disagreements
over the sex industry and transgenderism. Here I want to re-­emphasize that
point, but not in terms of issues, rather in terms of overlap in pathways.
Take the example of women and work, for example. Gender-­critical
feminists can agree with other types of feminists about the importance of
women having equal access to meaningful work, even if they disagree about
why this is important. Betty Friedan, the liberal feminist whose 1963 book
The Feminine Mystique kicked off the second wave in the United States,
argued for the importance of women being in meaningful work on the
grounds that it was important for women to have something for themselves.
She thought the social status and confidence that would come along with
having this kind of challenging and meaningful project would be a remedy
for the malaise of the large segment of the population who were housewives
at the time, and bored out of their minds. Some of her reasons for wanting
women to work are a little odd, looking back; one is that women are too
domineering over their husbands and children. Because she has nothing for
herself, the woman as mother and housewife rests all of her self-­conception
on her husband and children, and this makes her overbearing. This seems
to be an argument from the point of view of men who want their wives to get
off their backs, not an argument from the point of view of the women who
have been forced into this unbearable situation. Radical feminists might
prefer to argue for women in work by talking about women’s financial
independence from men, and how that facilitates non-­domination.
But the fact that they want the same thing, or at least that there is some
overlap in what they each want, gives them common cause. Gender-­critical
feminists might be able to agree with other types of feminists that a basic
income is desirable. Liberal feminists may desire a basic income because they
care so much about autonomy, and autonomy is increased when women have
more choices (see also the discussion in Chapter 9). Gender-­critical feminists
may desire a basic income because they care so much about ending the
domination of women by men in the surrogacy, prostitution, and pornography
industries, and financial independence is a good mechanism for protecting
against domination. A basic income removes the possibility of arguing that
there are only two choices when it comes to work that is exploitative and
182  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Feasible?

degrading and we must preserve a woman’s right to choices that make her
better off, even if not by much. It expands the range of choices, removing the
objection that ‘the choice for some women is prostitution or starvation, and if
you make prostitution illegal you’re condemning them to starve!’.
In addition to fighting for the implementation of a basic income, all types
of feminists might be able to agree that it is good to work to close the gender
pay gap, achieve more equality between the sexes in leadership positions,
and achieve more equality between the sexes in industries that have been
typically dominated by one sex (e.g. women in education, men in engineering).
This is compatible with some thinking that is all they want to work for,
perhaps because they think that women’s liberation simply requires the
removal of formal obstacles, and that sex equality signals that those obs­
tacles have been removed; and others thinking there is much more to be
done. Feminists with more positive welfare commitments and gender-­critical
feminists might be able to go further together, fighting for flexible work,
carer’s leave, alignment of the work and school day, matched paternity leave,
and the realigning of salaries to address the differential social value attached
to what has typically been considered ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’.
Perhaps the pathways to liberation for each type of feminism overlap at the
start, on exactly these measures, and then depart, with gender-­critical
feminists going on to do more work against the social structure in which
these incremental reforms are made possible.
This common cause won’t exist when incremental reforms start us down
a pathway (or worse, lock us into a pathway) that makes it very hard to
achieve the more radical reforms. This point is commonly made about the
design of the common keyboard: QWERTY is not the most efficient system,
but almost everyone who types in English has learned it, and it would be
massively inefficient for everyone to relearn typing just so that the typing
they do afterwards can be done more efficiently.37 The decriminalization of
prostitution might be like this. It shifts prostitution as an industry out of the
criminal law and into labour law. Doing this may shift social perceptions
about the moral legitimacy of the industry, further encouraging the sex-­
industry-­supporting feminists’ refrain that ‘sex work is work!’. It may be
harder to roll back from decriminalization to asymmetric criminalization,
than it would be from alternative policies like full criminalization. So this is
not a case where gender-­critical feminists can find common cause with
other types of feminists in measures to make things a bit better and a bit
safer for prostituted women. Making things a bit better and a bit safer for
prostituted women means ensuring that they won’t be made much better
and much safer for all women.
 9
Is Gender-­Critical Feminism Liberal?

What I have been referring to as the socially or culturally dominant form of

feminism throughout this book is generally referred to as ‘liberal feminism’
by other radical and gender-­critical feminists. Vaishnavi Sundar, for example,
writes ‘It was when I began voicing my opinion on the perils of liberal
feminism that cancel culture started making sense to me. I could see that
women were being banned for speaking against patriarchy’.1 Or Jindi Mehat
writes ‘Liberal feminists stop debate by crying “choice” when radical feminists
unpack the context and impact of choices—especially choices that reinforce
male supremacy’.2 Raquel Rosario Sánchez wrote a piece for Feminist Current
in 2017 titled ‘Liberal Feminists Ushered Ivanka Trump into the White
House’, criticizing among others those ‘leading the charge’ of ‘liberal feminism’
in the US, particularly Jessica Valenti and Andi Zeisler.3
If the dominant form of feminism is liberal feminism, and gender-­critical
feminism is opposed to that form of feminism, it would seem that gender-­
critical feminism is not liberal. But that would surely be a bad thing, given
the important values that liberalism protects, chief among them freedom
and autonomy (on which more below). There is some reason to think that
gender-­critical feminism is at least not fully liberal. The radical feminists
deliberately gave up existing, male-­authored theory and worked to build a
new theory of their own. So it would be surprising if that theory fully
coincided with liberalism. Gender-­critical feminism is continuous with
radical feminism, so the same is true of it. But there is also some reason to
think gender-­critical feminism is fully liberal. Just because an influential set
of ideas is casually referred to as ‘liberal feminism’ by its detractors is no
reason to think it has any genuine theoretical connection to liberalism. In
turn, then, there’s no reason to think that opposing that set of ideas means
opposing liberalism. I said in Chapter 1 that the culturally dominant form
of feminism seems to be influenced in a loose sense by academic feminism,
mostly postmodern feminism, but in a more distorted way also liberal and
intersectional feminism. The distortion could account for a lot of the

Gender-Critical Feminism: Holly Lawford-Smith, Oxford University Press. © Holly Lawford-Smith 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863885.003.0009
184  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Liberal?

disagreement between gender-­critical and the dominant form of feminism,

and in the end we might all be liberals.4
Before we look more closely at the relation between gender-­ critical
feminism and liberalism, it’s worth noting that the explanation of why there
is this heated disagreement between gender-­critical and other types of
feminists today might not in fact have much to do with the underlying
theory at all. Perhaps there is no more to it than that some influential
women in the past disagreed with each other, and further women tended to
side with one or the other of them, and these groups turned into factions
and the factions splintered off and feminism turned into a war among
competing tribes—liberal v. radical—and here we are. Perhaps it is entirely
contingent that some issues got grouped together with others, like support
for sex work with self-­identification for sex, and it could easily have been
otherwise. Perhaps there is no deeper explanation of why some feminists
tend to bang on about choice and autonomy, and other feminists (including
radical and gender-­critical) tend to bang on about unjust social structures.
The more that these things are true, the more that this chapter will be an
imposition of method onto madness, rather than a revealing of the method
that was always there.

9.1 Liberalism

There’s no single understanding of what ‘liberalism’ is. Russell Blackford in

The Tyranny of Opinion, for example, variously distinguishes ‘so-­ called
liberalism’ (for US-­ style liberalism), ‘classical liberalism’, ‘Enlightenment
liberalism’, ‘revisionist liberalism’, and ‘identity liberalism’ (these last two are
roughly synonymous).5 The traditional form of liberalism he refers to as
Enlightenment liberalism, which held firm to ‘such Enlightenment and
post-­Enlightenment liberal values as reason, liberty, free inquiry, individuality,
originality, spontaneity, and creativity’.6 For the purposes of understanding
the relation of gender-­critical feminism to liberalism, which will help us to
understand the differences between it and the dominant form of feminism,
a brief survey of traditional liberal values will do.
Limitation of state power. One of the earliest liberal philosophers was
John Locke. In A Letter Concerning Toleration, written in 1689, Locke argued
for the separation of church and state, with the church having domain over
the personal and the state having domain over the protection and promotion
of life, liberty, and welfare. As he put it (although in Latin), ‘I esteem it above
 Liberalism  185

all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government

from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one
and the other’.7 Locke saw the state as a society of men (and he really meant
men) created to secure, protect, and advance their civil interests, which he
understood as life, liberty, health, and absence of pain; and possessions such
as land, money, etc.8
Locke argued for impartial laws securing these things, and not doing any
more than that, in particular, not concerning itself with ‘the salvation of
souls’.9 While it was more significant at his time of writing to clearly
demarcate the business of the state from the business of the church, the
precedent for limiting the domain of the state’s actions was very important
for subsequent liberal philosophy. It tracks through to some of the
disagreements between liberals even today, for example between what we
now call ‘libertarians’ on the right who prefer less state intervention and
what we now call ‘liberals’ on the left who prefer more state intervention,
even while both appeal to liberty as a justification.
Toleration. Locke also argued for religious toleration, an early version of ‘live
and let live’ (which for Locke at the time did not extend to atheists). He wrote,

The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so

agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of
mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive
the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.10

He argued that no one had the right to discriminate against someone in a

way that affected his civil interests (listed above) on the basis of that person’s
church or religion.11 Locke’s idea of ‘the mutual toleration of private persons’
is the beginning of the mutual toleration we see in secular states today,
where people of different religions, cultural backgrounds, and opinions are
able to live and work side by side in relative harmony.
Individuality. Liberalism is individualistic, in the sense that it takes human
individuals to be the fundamental unit of importance, rather than, say,
communities or societies or nations. In this respect it has a dispute with all
communitarian modes of social organization, which sacrifice the individual
good to the good of the group. Note that this does not mean that theories with
their roots in liberal values cannot be collectivist, it just means that the
individual is the entity that has rights and entitlements. Individuals may come
together with others to pursue common interests, and in association. But this
does not change where the rights and entitlements sit.
186  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Liberal?

Reason. The liberal tradition takes human mental capacities, particularly

the capacity for reason and rationality, to be central to human nature. This
is generally understood as a matter of the means taken to given ends, and
not of ends (‘ends’ are thing like projects and aspirations, while ‘means’ are
the routes to achieving them). For example, here’s the prominent liberal
philosopher John Rawls: ‘the concept of rationality must be interpreted as
far as possible in the narrow sense, standard in economic theory, of taking
the most effective means to given ends’.12 The value of reason is clearly
related to the value of individuality. It is individuals that have the capacity
to  be rational, and all individuals have that capacity in equal measure.
(Historically, this meant that men were assumed to have this capacity in
equal measure.) Liberals tend to see reason as working in the service of
more fundamental values, either autonomy or self-­fulfilment.
Liberty. Perhaps the best-­known liberal defence of the value of liberty
was given by John Stuart Mill, who was himself both a liberal and a feminist
ally. In On Liberty, written in 1859, one of the ways that Mill defended the
liberty of the individual was by arguing for limitations to the power of
society over the individual. Where Locke before him had argued to limit the
power of the state over the individual, Mill was more concerned with the
power of public opinion (Blackford’s title, The Tyranny of Opinion, is a hat tip
to Mill’s idea). Mill agreed that a person’s actions could be hurtful or injurious
to others, and in that case could justifiably be limited. This included both
violations of other people’s rights, and failures to do a fair share of collective
labour, e.g. for the defence of the country or other persons.13 But ‘when a
person’s conduct affects the interests of no person besides himself ’, he said,
the person should be legally and socially free to do what he likes and accept
the consequences.14
Mill justified this by pointing out that each of us is the person most
interested in our own well-­being, and therefore best-­placed to advance it.15
He thought the best argument for limiting the authority of society over a
person’s conduct was the likelihood ‘that it interferes wrongly and in the
wrong place’,16 meaning that majority opinion is just as likely to be wrong as
right. People have different tastes and preferences, and some feel strongly
about what others do (Mill proceeds, in the relevant chapter, to give several
colourful examples).17 But that does not give them any right to control what
those others do.
There has been much philosophical debate over liberty, particularly over
whether the best understanding is ‘negative liberty’, being free from certain
things, like physical violence,18 or having more than one option to choose
 Liberal Feminism  187

between;19 ‘positive liberty’, in fact having shaped your own life,20 or being
provided with certain things, like healthcare or education;21 or ‘republican
liberty’, being free from domination, understood as possible violation of
negative liberty.22
These different approaches to liberty have become the basis of distinct
positions in political theory: libertarianism, emphasizing negative freedom;
contemporary liberalism, emphasizing positive freedom; and republicanism,
emphasizing non-­domination (although republicanism can be traced back
to a much earlier time, as Philip Pettit discusses).23 Liberty probably became
the distinguishing value because there is widespread agreement on most of
the others, in particular toleration, individuality, and reason, which means the
locus of disagreement has shifted—from liberalism itself as an alternative to
other kinds of social arrangements, like theocracy or feudalism—to the finer
points of liberalism. Libertarianism is what we think of as the ‘conservative’
or right-­wing position in many liberal democratic countries today, and
contemporary liberalism is what we think of as the ‘progressive’ or left-­wing
position. It is not clear whether republicanism is really represented within
contemporary politics.
Because there has been the greatest amount of disagreement between
theorists of all types over limitation of state power and over the correct
understanding of liberty, we can expect these two values to have also
produced divisions between feminists.

9.2  Liberal Feminism

Liberal feminism has aimed at ensuring women are fully included within
the liberal view, which meant historically that women were considered to
have the same capacity for reason as men, and so were deserving of all the
same rights and liberties that men had as a result. (Note that here I mean
real liberal feminism, as theorized by academic feminists, as opposed to
what gets dismissively called ‘liberal feminism’ today by disenchanted
feminist activists). Liberal feminism emphasizes liberal values: autonomy,
self-­determination, self-­fulfilment. A woman must be able to decide on her
own good in her own way, and she should not be obstructed in the pursuit
of her interests as she defines them. Insofar as it stays close to traditional
liberalism, the scope liberal feminism has to criticize a woman’s choices is
limited to cases where (i) she did not take the relevant means to her ends
(and is therefore criticizable against reason/rationality) or (ii) it is possible
188  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Liberal?

to demonstrate that there has been an interference with autonomy, for

example that a woman has been coerced or indoctrinated. So the liberal
feminist can criticize a wife’s ‘choice’ to remain in a marriage when she
is  subject to coercive control, but cannot criticize a sex worker’s
‘choice’ to engage in sex work (unless, for example, she was trafficked or
otherwise forced).
Some notable liberal feminists were Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart
Mill,24 Harriet Taylor Mill, and Betty Friedan,25 as well as the leaders and
members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Women’s
Equity Action League (WEAL) in the United States.26 Wollstonecraft in
particular emphasized women’s capacity for rationality as being equal to
men’s. Wollstonecraft, Mill, Taylor, and Friedan were all concerned with the
formal and informal obstacles that prevented women from obtaining an
education equal to men, or the opportunity to access paid work in the way
that men could. Rosemary Tong writes ‘We owe to liberal feminists many, if
not most, of the educational and legal reforms that have improved the quality
of life for women’.27 Friedan was probably the most prominent liberal
feminist of the second wave.28
Janet Radcliffe Richards is an influential liberal feminist philosopher who
wrote a book called The Sceptical Feminist in 1980. In Chapter 3, ‘Enquiries
for Liberators’, she took up the question of exactly what the liberation of the
women’s liberation (and more generally feminist) movement was meant to
be. She says ‘Freedom is a central issue in feminism, since even in those parts
of the movement which do not actually call themselves “Women’s Liberation”
it is generally agreed that freedom for women is one of the things that must
be achieved’.29 However, this word has created a lot of confusion; she says
‘ “freedom” is like “natural” in having such good connotations that people are
only too delighted to take advantage of any confusion to juggle with half a
dozen meanings of the word at once in order to confuse their opponents
and win political points’.30
Radcliffe Richards thinks the best account of freedom is being in control
of one’s own destiny, and not being controlled by other people or other
‘alien forces’.31 And, she says, freedom on this understanding is generally
considered to be more important than happiness, as evidenced by the fact
that many people would refuse interventions that would improve happiness
at a cost to freedom (her examples are a miserable artist being offered drugs
that would make them happy but cause a loss of artistic ability, and a political
dissident living under an oppressive regime being offered ‘re-­education’).32
It’s easy to see the liberal values here: a heavy emphasis on negative freedom
 Liberal Feminism  189

and the exercise of personal autonomy. What’s most interesting is that

Radcliffe-­Richards uses these commitments to raise questions about the
feminist commitment to ‘liberating’ women.
One point she makes is that if feminists are committed to women being
in control of their own destinies, we might expect to see them helping women
to get what they want. But, she says, we often see just the opposite. Women
who happily choose a traditional division of labour within marriage are
criticized, not celebrated, as are women participating in beauty pageants, or
working as strippers or prostitutes. She comments

the true liberator can always be recognized by her wanting to increase the
options open to the people who are to be liberated, and there is never any
justification for taking a choice away from a group you want to liberate
unless it is demonstrable beyond all reasonable doubt that removing it will
bring other, more important, options into existence.33

Still, the feminist who wants to reduce a woman’s options has one available
justification. She can show that the woman’s choice to take a particular
option is conditioned, which means something like, created through the
process of her socialization. The best way to understand such conditioning
is as either ignorance or bad habits that themselves intervene on a woman
being able to get what she desires. But interference on this basis must meet a
high bar. Radcliffe Richards says ‘the only case in which it would be reasonable
to override a woman’s wishes in the name of her freedom would be where it
was absolutely certain that she was conditioned, and equally certain what
she really wanted and how it could be brought about’.34
We cannot simply tell by looking at the content of a woman’s preferences,
she thinks, that the woman’s choice was ‘conditioned’. If we get things wrong,
then we are acting paternalistically by attempting to impose our own ideas
about what other people should want onto them. And given the importance
of autonomy in the liberal vision, this would be a very serious violation. For
this reason, Radcliffe Richards argues that feminists should limit themselves
to two kinds of general interventions: alleviate ignorance by increasing
women’s understanding of how things came to be as they are; and offer help
and support to women who decide on the basis of this new understanding
that they want to change their habits, because these are getting in the way of
their new desires.35
Her conclusion was that as long as people are in a position to choose,
then we should prioritize their freedom to do so. When they are not, then
190  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Liberal?

we should prioritize the minimization of suffering (and not, contrary to

some utilitarian liberals, the maximization of happiness).36

9.3  Liberal Feminism and Autonomy

If we stopped here, then it would be possible to offer an explanation of the

disagreement between gender-­critical feminists and other feminists. Those
who subscribe to the dominant feminist perspective tend not to criticize
women’s choices. Stay at home with the kids; put the kids in childcare and
go back to work. Shave your legs and wear makeup; grow out your body
hair and don’t wear makeup. Wear almost nothing; completely cover up.
Post streams of selfies and nudes to Instagram; eschew social media all
together. Whatever she chooses is a feminist choice because it is what she
has chosen. This is a way in which the dominant feminist perspective is
liberal. The role of the state, they maintain, is to remain neutral between
women’s competing conceptions of what a good life looks like, and simply
protect their ongoing capacity to choose from a broad range of options. They
maintain that because the state should remain neutral and not interfere, it is
inappropriate for it to be banning industries like prostitution or pornography,
which women have chosen to work in, or regulating access to ‘sex reassign-
ment’ or other body-­modifying medicines or surgeries, which women have
chosen to have. These, they claim, are all just conceptions of the good and it
is disrespectful to women’s autonomy to presume to know better than her
what is good for her.
Because this liberal respect for choice tracks the dominant feminist
position so well, it is plausible to think that this is roughly the version of
liberal feminism that has trickled down from academia and into popular
culture. If this is liberal feminism, then it is true that gender-­ critical
feminism is not liberal, and neither was the radical feminism before it. Both
want to criticize the background conditions against which women’s choices
are made, the reasons why she comes to make the choices she does, the
incentives that push her to choose one way or the other. But it’s not clear
that this is where liberal feminism stops.
Mary Gibson challenged the liberal view that every individual is an
authority on her own interests, and reason/rationality is a matter only of
assessing the way that she pursues those interests. She gives two examples that
she thinks we should obviously be uncomfortable with, the first a voluntary
master-­slave society,37 the second a voluntary sadist-­masochist society.38
 Liberal Feminism and Autonomy  191

She objected to the fact that even if particular ends are ‘inegalitarian,
exploitative, or otherwise morally repugnant’, liberals have no grounds for
criticism.39 Her particular target in the paper was the liberal philosopher
John Rawls. She said liberal theory ‘provides no basis for criticizing a society
whose institutions systematically promote, and whose members acquire and
act upon, objectionable desires and ends, including some that would, on a
less neutral conception of rationality, be termed irrational’.40 But surely we
want to be able to criticize societies like these, which means either that lib-
eralism will need to gain the ability to criticize some voluntarily chosen
ends or that we should not, after all, be liberals.
This brings us back to a point from Section  9.1. Reason works in the
service of a more fundamental value, autonomy or self-­fulfilment. There is
disagreement over the correct interpretation of liberty, with some taking it
to mean we have in fact shaped our own lives. There seems to be a question
of what exactly liberals mean by ‘autonomy’, and whether their conception
of autonomy gives them any way to criticize some of the choices people
make. If it doesn’t then Gibson is right, and moreover, there is room for an
alternative theory that does allow criticism of choices. Perhaps radical
feminism is that theory, at least in the domain of sex oppression.
But let’s give liberalism a chance. Clare Chambers argues that liberalism,
and so liberal feminism, does after all have the ability to criticize some choices.
She distinguishes two ‘levels’ of autonomy, the first over big decisions about
what kinds of lives we want to lead, the second over more everyday deci-
sions about what we want to do (including, in particular, about whether to
follow particular social rules and norms). This helps to show that there are
four possible ways to have (and lack) autonomy. We can have autonomy
over the big and the small decisions, e.g. we make an autonomous choice to
be a philosopher, and in being a philosopher we constantly question the
social norms. We can have autonomy over the big but not the small, e.g. we
make an autonomous choice to be in the army, or to become a nun. We can
have autonomy over the small but not the big, e.g. a child sent to a progres-
sive school who didn’t get a say in which school she went to, but once at the
school was taught to routinely question social norms. And finally, we can
have neither kind of autonomy, e.g. we can have the misfortune to live under
a fundamentalist religious dictatorship, which we didn’t choose but were
born into, and can’t leave, and which restricts what it is possible for us to do
on a daily basis.41
Liberals care about people being able to pursue their own conceptions of
the good life. Some liberal feminists have thought that only autonomy over
192  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Liberal?

big decisions, but not over small ones, matters.42 In other words, autonomy
matters only at the level of choosing what kind of life you want to lead.
Someone should not be born into or pushed into a religious life where they
lack daily autonomy, but if they choose that life for themselves, then it
would be paternalistic to insist that it is not an acceptable conception of the
good life. It’s not that autonomy is so good that people need to be exercising
it absolutely all the time.
Chambers’ view, however, is that liberals have the grounds to criticize
decisions that forego everyday autonomy when they are substantially
harmful, when they depend only on a social norm, and when using the state
to ban or regulate them wouldn’t be a disproportionate interference. Take
breast implants, for example. Breast implants are chosen under patriarchy, a
social context of inequality between the sexes. Many women feel that breast
implants are necessary for career success.43 But there is nothing about breast
implants themselves that brings benefits to women; it is only that there is a
pernicious social norm regulating how women should look, particularly
that women should be sexually attractive to men and that this involves
having large breasts. Chambers writes ‘The answer, then, is not to educate
women but to alter the social circumstances that justify the harmful practice,
and banning the practice is a good way to do this’.44 Bans solve situations in
which social norms are just going to keep producing harm unless nearly
everyone stops complying at once; they are a way to ensure widespread non-­
compliance. On Chambers’ view, ‘nobody should have to harm themselves
to receive benefits that are only contingently related to that harm, and where
the contingency is a social one’.45
This is presented as a liberal view that nonetheless allows us to look at
background social structures, social inequalities between groups like men
and women, and social norms that have grown up over time to create
incentives that may lead to one group taking on substantial and harmful
costs in order to secure particular benefits. If Chambers is right, and we
take her more sophisticated understanding of autonomy into account, then
we are likely to be in a better position to accommodate the concerns of the
gender-­critical feminists under the umbrella of liberal feminism.
Furthermore, we are also in a better position to criticize the feminism
that has become so widespread today. In operating with a limited version of
liberal feminism, this feminism has found itself largely unable to criticize
women’s choices, and this means its hands are tied even when it is revealed
that hundreds of thousands of women are making the same choices in a way
that fit into patterns of unjust relations between the sexes. The dominant
 Gender-­C ritical Feminism  193

form of feminism is thus status-­quo biased. It has ended up propping up the

interests of the male-­run and male-­profiting sex industry,46 by supporting
the ‘autonomous choice’ of women to sell men the right to use their bodies,
even when those choices are made by women whose only other option is
destitution. It has ended up cheerleading for women’s self-­objectification,
standing by while huge numbers of women turn to surgery in order to
‘perfect’ their bodies according to unrealistic beauty standards. And it has
ended up supporting the claims of young gender non-­conforming girls that
they need medical or surgical interventions to make their bodies more like
the opposite sex.

9.4  Gender-­Critical Feminism

What was the core insight of radical feminism, that has been picked up and
continued by gender-­critical feminism? If we can answer this question then
we will be in a position to work out whether gender-­critical feminism is
liberal, and can be fully accommodated within the framework of liberalism.
Radical feminists talked about unfreedom, for example in Frye’s metaphor
of the cage or the idea of women being in a double bind,47 and in MacKinnon’s
discussion of psychological unfreedom.48 They talked about objectification
and ‘thingification’,49 exploitation,50 and domination.51 There was discussion of
the role of fear of male violence.52 There was discussion of the importance
of recovering women’s lost history.53 They were centrally concerned with the
social inequality between the sexes, with men’s control of women (including
through institutions), with women’s internalization of sexist ideas about
herself. They talked about the appropriation of women’s labour, both physical
and mental.54 Atkinson wrote

we are so violated by another group/groups as to deprive us of our humanity.

Our mental processes are absorbed, so that choice and evolution are denied
us. We are not discrete. We are not unique. Our time and activities are
used, not to the end of each of our unique constructions, but as parts and
additions to other individual’s ends.55

Radical feminists also made frequent reference to liberation as opposed to

‘mere’ equality. Germaine Greer, for example, positioned women’s liberation in
opposition to women’s equality saying that the former rejects the possibility
of equality with men on men’s terms.56 Gerda Lerner made a similar point,
194  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Liberal?

describing patriarchy through a metaphor of a theatre, in which ‘the stage

set is conceived, painted, defined by men. Men have written the play, have
directed the show, interpreted the meanings of the action. They have
assigned themselves the most interesting, most heroic parts, giving women
the supporting roles’.57 She says

What women must do, what feminists are now doing is to point to that
stage, its sets, its props, its director, and its scriptwriter, as did the child in
the fairy tale who discovered that the emperor was naked, and say, the
basic inequality between us lies within this framework. And then they
must tear it down.58

Liberalism can account for some of this. Arguably even libertarianism, the
most minimal version of liberalism, can care about sexist social norms,
insofar as they constitute a violation of individual liberty by treating people
according to group traits rather than as individuals. Liberalism permits
‘paternalistic’ interference in childhood, to protect a child’s future options,
so they have scope to interfere with particular choices made there (this is
relevant to the issues of Chapter  5, but also makes room for a feminist
­education, including the teaching of women’s history, as a way to increase
options). And as we have seen, liberals can criticize and even ban some
choices, particularly ones that are caused by sexist social norms and are sub-
stantially harmful. In this way they can go a long way to making sure that
women have independence from men, and are not controlled by men either
at the level of decisions about how they want their lives to go or in the more
banal everyday choices they make.
Still; it is not clear that gender-­critical feminism can be fully accommodated
within the framework of liberalism. This is for four reasons.
First, liberalism is for and about everyone. Liberal feminism works to
make sure women are part of that ‘everyone’. But gender-­critical feminism is
not for or about everyone, as I have already argued. And it is not satisfied to
merely achieve equality with men, according to male standards for what that
means. Gender-­critical feminism is for and about female people (women
and girls). It thinks feminism should be for and about female people. It wants
female liberation. On this understanding, feminism cannot give us advice
about legal, social, political, and economic reform that is decisive. I don’t
think it’s feminism’s job (or indeed, the job of any social justice movement)
to present demands that are decisive. Suppose that gender-­critical feminists
demand six months of mandatory paid parental leave, taken by both
 Gender-­C ritical Feminism  195

parents, in order to correct for hiring and advancement discrimination in

the workplace. This proposal might secure gains for women and be neutral
for other social groups, or secure gains for women and come with some
costs to other social groups that are justifiable, or secure gains for women at
a cost to other social groups that is unjustifiable. It is too much to ask all
social justice movements to formulate their demands with a perfect aware-
ness of what every other group needs and is demanding. It’s enough to stay
on top of what your own group needs, especially when that group is women—
half of the whole human population. Governments and policy-­makers, and
where appropriate the people through democratic mechanisms, must decide
between competing demands in the final instance, and make evidence-­
based decisions about costs and trade-­offs.
Second, liberalism is intended as a comprehensive theory, which means,
a total theory, of social and political justice. Liberal feminism works to make
sure women are fully included in that theory. Gender-­critical feminism is
not intended as a comprehensive theory. I don’t think feminism should be
thought of as a comprehensive theory—although some people have tried to
make it so, e.g. by claiming that sex oppression is the root of all other
oppression, or by going ‘intersectional’ in a way that brings in all other
causes. We could accomplish gender-­critical goals and still be in a world
with a lot of injustice in it. In my view, social justice movements cannot do
everything, and so they should remain focused on a single axis of oppression
until their goals are substantially accomplished. That does not prevent
alliances and strategic coalitions where those will produce mutual gains for
all parties.59 This is not motivated by a failure to care enough about social
groups other than women, or a failure to care about social justice more
generally. I think oppressed communities are better served by having social
justice movements focused on their interests, than by movements for which
they are just one part of a much broader set of concerns. I also worry about
the instability caused by a constant shifting of priorities when those with
authority over agenda-­setting inside movements are concerned to focus on
the least well-­off, because as noble a goal as this is, who is least well-­off can
change rapidly.
Third, radical feminism was the first type of feminism to assert that
women are oppressed as women, and deserve a theory and movement in
their own right. Gender-­critical feminism inherits this commitment. This sets
gender-­critical feminism apart from other feminist theories that originated
with men. It would be somewhat perverse given this historical achievement
of radical feminist theory to then attempt to argue that it is, after all, merely
196  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Liberal?

a version of an older, male-­authored political theory, namely classical

liberalism, revised and updated over time. If gender-­critical feminism fit
perfectly within the liberal framework then this perversity wouldn’t be a
reason to resist the classification of gender-­critical feminism as liberal,
but it doesn’t fit perfectly, and the fourth reason may be the most decisive
in establishing this.
The fourth reason is that liberalism is centrally concerned with auton-
omy. This captures something of what gender-­critical feminists have been
worried about. But it does not capture it all. I have said at multiple points in
this book that feminism is a political movement for women’s self-­
determination. I think it is crucially important that the androcentrism of
human history, at least since the beginning of patriarchy some three and
a  half thousand years ago, has so deeply shaped the world we live in.
Particularly, I am concerned with how men have created ideas about what a
woman is, and what women are for, and how these ideas have served men’s
needs particularly well by providing them with sexual and domestic service.
Perhaps more than any oppressed group throughout history, women have
internalized their oppressors’ ideas about themselves. Women’s liberation is
not possible without women being able to get free of these ideas. It is not
clear that autonomy, even on Chambers’ more sophisticated conception,
gets to the heart of this point. A woman whose desires have been thoroughly
‘constructed’ under patriarchy may choose, both at the level of big decisions
and at the more everyday level, in ways that nonetheless work to the
advantage of men. Self-­objectification, a willingness to sell sex, and the view
that one is ‘not a woman’ (or girl) may all be explained in this way.
What is the ‘self ’ when it has been so thoroughly constructed, by others,
to be for others? Lerner wrote:

Women’s lack of knowledge of our own history of struggle and achievement

has been one of the major means of keeping us subordinate. But even those
of us already defining ourselves as feminist thinkers and engaged in the
process of critiquing traditional systems of ideas are still held back by
unacknowledged restraints embedded deeply within our psyches. Emergent
woman faces a challenge to her very definition of self. How can her daring
thought—naming the hitherto unnamed, asking the questions defined by all
authorities as ‘non-­existent’—how can such thought coexist within her life as
woman? In stepping out of the constructs of patriarchal thought, she faces, as
Mary Daly put it, ‘existential nothingness’.60
 Feminism with Teeth  197

Women in the 1960s who threw absolutely all of their energies into their
husbands and children, and were then told by Betty Friedan to get into paid
work so that they had something for themselves, must have struggled to
know what this would even mean. What did they want, in and of themselves?
What did they like? If you haven’t had a chance to find these things out,
then you may have no idea at all. When women join together in political
associations they can begin to discuss these things, and work out ways to
reject men’s ideas about women, and work out what they want to be, as
women and as individuals. (These kinds of discussions started in the
women’s consciousness-­ raising groups of the second wave.) Although
Friedan herself is usually considered a liberal feminist, she seems to agree
that there is the problem I’m pointing to here. She said ‘a woman could only
exist by pleasing a man. She was wholly dependent on his protection in a
world that she had no share in making: a man’s world. She could never grow
up to ask the simple human question, “Who am I? What do I want?”  ’.61
This issue cannot be captured in the usual way, as a lack of negative freedom,
or a constraint upon autonomy. It is not that men are stopping women from
doing something in particular, the problem comes earlier than that. And it is
not that if only women had more resources, or more information, or were
less in the grip of social norms, they could do the things they knew they
wanted to do. They may not know what they want to do, and this is part of
the problem. There is a problem in the very construction of the ‘self ’. Atkinson
wrote in 1970 ‘It is one of the many nightmares of feminism, that to even
conceive of what could count as significant changes for women, one must
begin by jumping off one cliff after another’.62
The disagreement between gender-­critical and the culturally dominant
liberal-ish feminism is not a disagreement over whether to be liberals. Broadly
speaking, we are all liberals. It is a disagreement over how deep the lack of
(the possibility of) autonomy goes, and where it is permissible for the state
to intervene to take certain choices off the table for everyone.

9.5  Feminism with Teeth

The gender-­critical feminist is not concerned to avoid the ‘paternalism’ of

interference with choices that are rational responses to sexist social norms.
She’s concerned with building a world in which women are not dominated
by men, in which there is not social inequality between the sexes. If she can
198  Is Gender-Critical Feminism Liberal?

build a strong case that there is domination or inequality, and that some
women’s ‘choices’ are caused by it, or reinforce it, then she will be critical of
those choices. She may even think it appropriate that the law be utilized in a
way that will ultimately take those choices off the table. But her motivation
is to take away men’s choices to treat women in particular ways. The gender-­
critical feminist is fundamentally opposed to women’s slavery, subjection,
domination, exploitation, and vulnerability. Her vision of women’s liberation is
a society in which the law gives women robust protection from all of these
things. Worrying about how this interferes with women’s choices is like
worrying about the abolition of slavery on the grounds that some slaves
enjoyed the work. Gender-­critical feminism is uniquely positioned to take
patterns of domination seriously, because it looks at women as a class, and
so social patterns, rather than at individual women. And it is uniquely
positioned to criticize the status quo. It is feminism with teeth.
C ODA
 10
A Gender-­Critical Manifesto

10.1  Feminism as a Movement for Women as Women

As I hope this book has shown, it’s far from obvious that feminism should
be ‘inclusive’. We should be particularly cautious about inclusiveness in
response to men’s needs. One of the commitments of feminism is to resisting
feminine gender stereotypes, and one prevalent feminine gender stereotype
is that women need to focus on men’s needs. It is also far from obvious that
feminism should be ‘intersectional’, at least when that means ceding ground
to other movements or combining together with them. It’s not obvious that
we get a better, more coherent, or more effective social justice movement
out of focusing on women as people rather than on women as women. The
former loses sight of the original source of women’s oppression, and
overburdens feminist activists and theorists with more content than they
can possibly manage. This is all a way of imploding feminism from the
inside, making it hopelessly broad and unfocused.
Being female is a discrete source of oppression, and all women, as
women, need a theory and movement to tackle that oppression. Women
need to work to reclaim a coherent and effective version of feminism, one
that is focused on the oppression of all women as women. Below is a female-­
focused list of demands, formed in consultation with gender-­critical women
across multiple social media sites in 2019.1 It’s not meant to be the final say,
not least because there is still work to be done in applying the test suggested
in Chapter 7 to figure out which of the further social group issues has a
sex-­differentiated element. But it is an indication of the seriousness of
the difference from the list many feminists today seem to be working to, of
which the International Women’s Day (IWD) Melbourne Collective’s was
an example (see Chapter 1).
Because it refuses to combine multiple movements, it does not include
issues that affect women in virtue of other aspects of their identities, unless
the impacts on women are disproportionate in a way that is ultimately
explained by sex and the treatment of the sexes. Because its constituency is

Gender-Critical Feminism: Holly Lawford-Smith, Oxford University Press. © Holly Lawford-Smith 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863885.003.0010
202  A Gender-­C ritical Manifesto

female people, it does not include any issues that impact male people, unless
those issues impact female people and mitigating them will merely bring
side benefits for men. Because it is about all women, and it aims at women’s
liberation in the long-­term, it is opposed to prostitution and pornography,
which feed the sexual objectification of women in general and enact
violence against women, both those working in the sex industry and likely
those outside of it.
Many of the items in the list are about women’s specific physiology
(especially in sections I, III, and V). That is a reassertion of the importance
of women’s bodies in feminism (as opposed to, say, ‘gender identities’ or
‘femininity’ regardless of body). The list includes protection from
discrimination for women’s lesbian and bisexual sexual orientations, which
can’t be a priority for a feminism that has replaced sexual orientations with
attractions between gender identities.2 It includes protection for feminist
speech, which won’t be secured by a feminism busy cancelling its detractors
for ‘whorephobia’, ‘transphobia’, or ‘white feminism’.
The list is a starting point, not the end point, for a refocusing of feminist
priorities. It may be most useful inside gender-­critical feminist collectives,
newly formed and deciding where to channel their energies. Feminists who
have a clear sense of their constituency, of what women’s subordination
consists in, and of which issues affect the greatest number of women and
which issues affect women the worst, will be in the position to stand firm
against accusations of ‘exclusion’ when they are not justified, will refuse to
cede ground to other movements, and will centre women and advance
women’s interests in all their work.

10.2  The List

I. An end to male violence against women and girls

1. An end to female genital mutilation (FGM)
2. An end to female infanticide
3. An end to child brides
4. An end to forced marriage
5. An end to rape and other forms of sexual violence
6. An end to domestic violence
7. Criminalization of intimate partner strangulation as a separate offence
8. No ‘sex games gone wrong’ defence for men’s killing of female sexual
partners
 The List  203

9. Criminalization of the purchase of sex (the Nordic Model)

10. Criminalization of the making of professional pornography3
11. Freedom from violence for female intersex people
12. Freedom from sexual violence for women with disabilities
13. Freedom from sexual violence for women living in refugee camps
14. Recognition of torture and slavery as domestic (non-­state) offences
15. Criminalization of all forms of paid surrogacy
16. An end to all forms of male violence against women and girls

II.  Addressing contributors to male violence against women and girls

1. An end to the sexual objectification of women in advertising
2. Portrayal of women as whole persons in film and television
3. An end to the hypersexualization of black women
4. Education on the tactics used by domestic abusers, to aid in the
prevention of women and girls becoming victims of domestic
­
violence
5. An end to all enforced modesty of women and girls
6. Legal reform to enable police to bring domestic family violence and
sexual offence criminal charges without complainants, to alleviate
pressure on survivors

III.  Protecting women’s health and bodily autonomy

1. Adequate healthcare to prevent deaths in childbirth
2. An end to period poverty
3. Increased funding for research into women’s health
4. A call for all new pharmaceuticals and medical devices to have their
effects on women evaluated
5. An end to the ‘default male’ assumption in healthcare research
6. Support for the health and safety of prostituted and exited women
7. Full reproductive rights for all women, including free and accessible
abortions4
8. Reassertion of the importance of female-­only spaces (bathrooms,
changing rooms, prisons, etc.)
9. Free, accessible vaccination for women and girls against human
papillomavirus (HPV) strains 16 and 17 (which cause the bulk of
cervical cancer)
10. Reassertion of the right of women and girls to request female doc-
tors and healthcare professionals for all intimate examinations and
procedures
204  A Gender-­C ritical Manifesto

11. More research into the causes of the rise in teenage girls reporting
to gender clinics
12. In order to avoid creating a market for women’s organs, zero fund-
ing for research into womb transplants into male bodies
13. Support for female survivors of male violence, in particular in
housing and mental health services
14. Access to midwives for high quality maternity care
15. Intrapartum and postpartum healthcare to prevent postpartum
depression, postpartum psychosis, post-­traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD), and maternal suicide
16. An end to obstetric violence

IV.  Protecting women’s freedom of conscience and freedom of thought

1. Women-­only shortlists to secure the increased participation of
women in politics
2. Demand for women’s equal participation in politics
3. Rejection of transwomen acting as women’s officers for any party
(regardless of their gender identity)
4. Reassertion of the importance of female-­ only spaces (political
groups, women’s festivals, etc.)
5. A reassertion of the importance of language that refers to female
people and articulates political problems affecting female people,
including the terms ‘woman’, ‘female’, ‘lesbian’, ‘mother’, and ‘wife’
6. Acceptance of the political choice some women make to refuse to
extend female pronouns (she/her/hers) to transwomen, particu-
larly in cases where those people have engaged in or threatened
violence against women and girls, or exemplified toxic masculinity
7. Reaffirmation of the sex/gender distinction
8. Rejection of concept creep from ‘accurately referring to sex’ to
‘misgendering’
9. A rejection of all forms of misogyny perpetrated in the name of
religion, in particular against Muslim women
10. Reassertion of women’s right to organize politically to pursue their
interests
11. Rejection of all pressure on women to include other causes in their
feminism or to prioritize male interests in their feminism
12. Education on patriarchal domination, and rejection of all social
conditioning that tells women and girls to put boys’ and men’s
needs before their own
 The List  205

13. In order to avoid violations of women’s bodily autonomy
(­specifically their reproductive choices) premised on poor science
understanding, universal education on pregnancy and the process
of gestation

V.  Women’s access to and full participation in public life

1. An end to pregnancy discrimination
2. An end to breastfeeding discrimination
3. Reassertion of the importance of women’s sex-­based rights
4. Protection from discrimination for lesbian and bisexual women
5. Protection from discrimination for gender non-­conforming women
6. Protection from discrimination for transmen
7. Increased incentives for women to enter science, technology,
engineering, and maths (STEM) subjects
8. A living wage for all women in all industries
9. Generous paid parental leave and affordable childcare
10. Generous welfare support for parents who wish to care full-­time for
children with special needs
11. Women’s equal pay for equal work
12. An end to the ‘default male’ assumption in product design
13. Better education about sexual orientation in teenage years, in
particular lesbian and bisexual orientations
14. Better support for women’s pursuit of criminal proceedings against
fathers who fail to pay child maintenance
15. Flexible work and paid leave for women in the workplace going
through menopause, difficult pregnancies, and painful menstruation
16. Preservation of female sporting categories
17. Increased recognition and respect for professions dominated
by women
18. Respect for women’s human rights
19. Consultation with women on all matters that affect them, including
reform to laws for who will be housed in the female prison estate,
and reform of laws determining who may access single-­sex services
more generally
 Afterword

I’ve always been fascinated by the people we might think of as ‘moral prophets’,
the people who lived amidst terrible injustice that was at the same time
completely ordinary and accepted, and yet saw it for what it was. There are
many celebrated examples—some of my favourites are in Adam Hochschild’s
account of the early movers in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire1—
although for all the examples that we celebrate, there are surely many more that
are lost to history.
The early feminists were moral prophets in this sense. It is hard now,
looking back, not to underestimate the magnitude of the accomplishment
that feminism is.2 We know so much about what women are capable of that
we cannot fully inhabit a mindset in which they are virtually another species
than man, and thought to be capable of so much less. But that was the
mindset of almost everyone in the period when feminism first emerged.
Imagine being such a woman, at various points over the last several
thousand years: looking around and seeing enormous differences between
men and women, not just in terms of dress, mannerisms, and behaviour,
but in terms of opportunities and probable life outcomes too. Women and
men look different, behave differently, and seem to be good at different things.
Where there is religion, that religion generally reinforces those differences as
good; where there is science, that science generally explains those differences
as natural. Almost everyone accepts the situation. Women themselves are
not railing against it; many seem quite happy with it.
It would be enormously tempting for a woman who noticed something
amiss at one such point in history to make an exception of herself, rather
than to reach a conclusion about all women. She might think, well, women
are indeed different from men, and inferior to men, but I am not like them,
I am more like a man. And perhaps she would dress up as a man, or take the
pseudonym of a man, to access men’s opportunities. The early feminists did
not make exceptions of themselves, however. They did something much
more ambitious.
They argued that women as a group were being limited in ways that at
least partly created their inequality with men. This was a class analysis—not
208 Afterword

in the technical Marxist sense, but in the colloquial sense that they saw
themselves as part of a bigger social group impacted by a common set of
circumstances. Because they saw a common problem for women, they
began to work to convince women that this problem existed, that as women
they were capable of much more than they had been led to believe.
What an uphill battle this must have been! Some women would have
found the whole idea absurd; other women might have believed it,
ultimately, but just not been up for the lifelong struggle that comes when
the scales fall from your eyes and you see injustice clearly. After all, we only
get one life, and we might rationally choose to spend it on other projects
than a potentially futile struggle for equality, or liberation, or both.
Nothing has ever seized my attention and refused to relax its grip like
feminism has. I have cared about social justice issues, most significantly in
recent years climate justice, but I have never been consumed by them. With
feminism, in particular with feminist thinkers, I can’t get enough. I want to
read everything, although even working on this project virtually full-­time for
several years, there is much more to read than I could possibly get through.
My respect and admiration for the earliest feminists, who had the convic-
tion that woman was more than she appeared to be, and imagined a future
in which she could realize her full potential, is limitless. I wish that we all
knew more about the first wave feminists’ struggle to get women the vote,
and the second wavers’ struggles for the many legal reforms that have greatly
advanced women’s equality with men, so that we would not take those gains
so much for granted. But what I am most fascinated by is the radical feminist
strand of feminist theory, the intellectual work women had to do to imagine
woman differently, to see a path to liberation, to articulate a sex-­equal future,
to uncover all the insidious ways that women had been made to believe
(and act) as though they were lesser than men.
I hope that this book has made you just as excited about feminism as I
am, and that knowing more about feminist ideas from the period at which
feminism re-­emerged as a movement and became a full-­blown theory will
help to provide an antidote to some of the less exciting ideas of the
contemporary feminist movement.
 Notes

Preliminary material

1. ‘there is no “objective” or natural sex . . . it is performatively constructed’

(Morgenroth & Ryan  2018, p. 40); ‘perhaps this construct called “sex” is as
culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender
with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to
be no distinction at all’ (Butler  1990, pp. 9‒10); ‘sex is, then, a cultural thing
posing as a natural one. Sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from
gender, is itself already gender in disguise’ (Srinivasan 2021, p. xii).
2. ‘Two sexes have never been enough to describe human variety’ (Fausto-­Sterling
2018); ‘sex and gender are best conceptualized as points in a multidimensional
space’ (Fausto-­Sterling 2000, p. 22); ‘I suggest that the three intersexes . . . deserve
to be considered additional sexes each in its own right. Indeed, I would argue
further that sex is a vast, infinitely malleable continuum that defies the con-
straints of even five categories’ (Fausto-­Sterling 1993)’; ‘we now know that sex is
complicated enough that we have to admit, nature doesn’t draw the line for us
between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and inter-
sex, we actually draw that line on nature (Dreger 2011, 06:15‒06:30).
3. Riley Dennis is a transwoman and gender identity activist who creates content
for YouTube (as of September 2021 Dennis had 111K subscribers). In a video
from 2017, Dennis argues that it’s ‘cissexist’ to ‘only be attracted to people with
one kind of genitals’. Sexual orientations are described as ‘preferences’ and these
‘preferences’ are claimed to be shaped by ‘implicit biases’. The video has since
been deleted (it got a lot of backlash), but there’s a transcript at (Dennis 2017),
and parts of the video are still available as part of a response video by gender-­
critical feminist activist Magdalen Berns (Berns 2017). For a more recent and
milder version of this claim, the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan wrote in
the London Review of Books that ‘Trans women often face sexual exclusion from
lesbian cis women who at the same time claim to take them seriously as women’,
and mused about ‘whether there is a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our
desires’ (the last bit comes from reflecting on the many social groups marginalized
in sex and dating, including but not limited to transwomen) (Srinivasan 2018).
4. Lauren Dinour writes about breastfeeding that ‘By using gendered terms like
woman and mother when conducting and reporting lactation research, making
infant feeding recommendations, or implementing breastfeeding policies, we
210 Notes

risk alienating an already marginalized population’ (Dinour 2019, p. 524). She

goes on, ‘several studies have reported how using heterosexual and woman-­
focused lactation language in obstetric and pediatric practice settings can mis-
gender, isolate, and harm transmasculine parents and non-­heteronormative
families’ (p. 524), and recommends replacing female-­specific language with
‘breast/chest feeding’, and ‘human/parent’s milk’ (p. 527). About pregnancy and
birth, she recommends that ‘gestational parent’ or ‘birthing parent’ replace
‘mother’ (p. 527). There is also a useful table in the paper identifying all the
peer-­reviewed journals publishing breastfeeding-­related articles that mandate
‘inclusive’ language (p. 528). A number of organizations have now made a move
towards ‘inclusive’ language for female-­specific issues. For example, in 2017 the
British Medical Association circulated an internal document to staff advising
on terminology to avoid offence, including the replacement of ‘expectant mothers’
with ‘pregnant people’. They said this terminology was a way to ‘include intersex
men and transmen who may get pregnant’ (Donnelly 2017). More recently, in
Australia, there were divisions within the Australian Breastfeeding Association
after a new transgender-­inclusive guide was released which referred to ‘chest-
feeding’ and described how lactation could be induced in males (Lane 2019).
5. A nonbinary author wrote for Seventeen magazine ‘for a group of activists who
cite “inclusion” and “intersectionality” on the signs that they carry and the
chants that they shout, they should reconsider whether donning a pussy hat is
actually in alignment with what they preach . . . the idea that biological sex
determines gender proves itself time and time again to be outdated and
transphobic. When it comes down to it, not all women have vaginas and not all
people with vaginas are women’ (Mandler 2019).
6. This is just one example where there are many. In the book, I’ll talk about two
more. I’ll talk about the socialization of women into the sexual service of men,
as a perspective on the prostitution and pornography industries (Chapter  4).
And I’ll talk about the construction of what it means to be a woman, in addition
to merely being female (Chapters 2 and 3).
7. Firestone (1970, p. 15).

Chapter 1

  1. For discussion of various plausible views of biological sex, see discussion in
(Stock 2021, ch. 2).
2. Re. the heading of this section, cf. hooks’ subtitle ‘From Margin to Centre’
(hooks [1984] 2000).
3. See internationalwomensday.com accessed 20th March 2020. This website, the
first Google search result for ‘international women’s day’, is run by a private
company that does ‘gender capital management’ (The Minefield 2020).
 Notes  211

4. The list was posted in the ‘About’ section of their public Facebook event page.
Online at https://www.facebook.com/events/381589392387395/?active_tab=about
accessed 28th December 2019.
5. https://www.and.org.au/pages/disability-­statistics.html
6. For various examples, search ‘women + centre themselves + movement’ in
Twitter, sorted by ‘Latest’.
7. https://youtu.be/7Yu9enVjNs8
8. Kaplan et al. (2003).
9. http://sydney.edu.au/handbooks/arts/subject_areas_eh/gender_studies.shtml
10. According to the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings data
from 2019. Online at https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-­
universities/best-­universities-­australia accessed 20th March 2020.
11. https://www.arts.unsw.edu.au/hal/study-­us/subject-­areas/womens-­gender-­studies
12. The ‘waves’ model of feminist history is not universal, but specific to the United
States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, and
Germany.
13. Chesler (2018).
14. Jaschick (2009).
15. Ginsberg in Jaschick (2009).
16. Ginsberg in Jaschick (2009).
17. See e.g. https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/study/study-­options/find-­a-­study-­option/
maori-­studies.html
18. This is the date of the first women’s suffrage petition in the UK, presented to
Henry Hunt MP by Mary Smith from Yorkshire. See https://www.bl.uk/votes-­for-­
women/articles/womens-­suffrage-­timeline
19. See e.g. https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/themes/health/and https://iwhc.org/
resources/facts-­child-­marriage/
20. Chesler (2018, p. 43).
21. Taddeo (2019, p. 2).
22. Fine et al. (2020).
23. Cf. Pinker (2002), who argues that some of the sex inequality across indus-
tries can be explained by average differences in male and female preferences
(stemming from average differences in natural aptitudes that have a biological
basis).
24. See also Radcliffe Richards (1980, pp. 392–393).
25. Greer (2018).
26. Bolinger (2019).
27. Kipnis (2017).
28. A good example of positive education for women’s sexual pleasure is OMGYES,
a website that surveyed 20,000 women between 18 and 95 years old, in
partnership with researchers from Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute.
See https://www.omgyes.com accessed 7th June 2020.
212 Notes

29. Bindel (2018).

30. O. Jones (2015).
31. Bindel (2018).
32. hooks (2000).
33. Mackay (2017).
34. Second-­wave feminism was determinedly women centred, while third-­wave
pushback began opening the movement up to men. On the second-­wavers, see
discussion in Chapter 2; for one prominent version of the third-­wave ‘feminism
is for everybody’ (meaning, is also for men) line, see hooks (2000).
35. I’ll say ‘caste/class’ in Chapters 1–3, rather than ‘class’ alone, to avoid confusion
with Marxism. Neither term is perfect; the important point is that ‘women’ is a
social group with political interests, parallel to groups like ‘New Zealand Maori’,
or ‘the working class’. Shulamith Firestone uses both ‘class’ and ‘caste’
(Firestone 1970). For a defence of the term ‘caste’ being used in connection with
women, see Daly (1973, pp. 2–3). In the rest of the book, I’ll use ‘class’ alone, for
simplicity.
36. There is further discussion of the place of men in gender-­critical feminism in
Chapter 3, Section 3.4.
37. Mackay (2015).
38. For the origin of this section’s title, see n. 36 to Chapter 9.
39. Chesler (2018, p. 3).
40. Freeman (1976). See also discussion in Lawford-­Smith (forthcoming).
41. Norma (2018).
42. Norma (2015).
43. https://hmaustralasia.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/schedule-­hm-­2-­dec-­19.pdf
44. Norma (2018).
45. Lori Watson is an academic feminist who holds the latter combination of views,
see e.g. Watson (2016) and Watson & Flanigan (2020).
46. See further discussion in Chapter 3, Section 3.3.
47. Women started calling themselves ‘gender critical’ around 2014. This coincided
with increased disagreement about trans/gender issues, but was explained by
radical feminist commitments. An article at Bitch Media in 2014 commented
on ‘modern-­day feminists [who] continue to actively question the inclusion of
trans people in women’s spaces’, and said ‘These feminists refer to themselves as
“radical feminists” or “gender critical feminists” ’ (Vasquez  2014). This is the
same year that the Reddit feminist community r/GenderCritical (now banned)
was created. From its inception to mid-­2017, it had less than 10K subscribers.
As of late May 2020 it had 60.4K members, and its top two keywords, at more
than double the frequency of the next, were ‘womanhood’ and ‘radfem’.
(‘Radfem’ is the colloquial term for ‘radical feminist’). Its description began
‘Feminism is the movement to liberate women from patriarchy’, and while it
placed an emphasis on resistance to gender identity ideology, it also cited
 Notes  213

radical feminist concerns like respect for lesbian sexuality, reproductive

freedom, and opposition to the exploitation of women by men in prostitution
and pornography. (These details were accurate as of 22nd May 2020, and can
currently still be viewed at https://subredditstats.com/r/gendercritical. By the
30th of June 2020, r/GenderCritical had been banned from Reddit for ‘violating
Reddit’s rule against promoting hate’. See the notice at https://www.reddit.
com/r/GenderCritical/.) A 2015 article in Slate reported on two transwomen,
Helen Highwater and Miranda Yardley, as ‘part of . . . a dissenting faction of trans
people, one that’s often described as “gender-­critical” ’. The author goes on to
write that ‘To be gender-­critical is to doubt the belief, which its critics call “gen-
derism”, that gender is some sort of irreducible essence, wholly distinct from
biological sex or socialization’ (Goldberg  2015). Perhaps the best-­ known
gender-­critical feminist in the world (her own choice of labels aside) is the
British feminist activist Kellie-­Jay Keen-­Minshull. Keen-­Minshull, better known
by the alias Posie Parker, has a YouTube channel with 38.6K subscribers (as of
mid-­September 2021). In one of her videos, released just before the UK con­sult­
ation over the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) opened, she articulated concerns
with the proposed reforms to the law including that it would mean an end to all
women-­only space; the legal category of sex becoming a matter of mere self-­
identification; a shift from ‘gender reassignment’ to ‘gender identity’ as a require-
ment for a man to demand social treatment as a woman (with no definition of
gender identity given); impacts on women’s ability to request same-­sex service
providers; and impacts on women’s sports given that men would be able to
compete against women merely by identifying as them (Keen-­Minshull 2018).
These reasons are all about how proposed legal changes designed to advance
the interests of trans people work to set back the interests of women. The
rationale for opposition to the reforms is a specific set of feminist commitments.
48. Pettit (1993, p. 163). In-­text citation removed.
49. https://www.womensdeclaration.com/country-­info/ accessed 15th May 2020.
50. Lori Watson, for example, uses ‘self-­identified feminists’ to refer to feminists
who don’t share her view on trans issues (Watson 2016, p. 246); Jennifer Saul
says she ‘hesitate[s] to attach the label feminist’ to the gender-­critical position
on trans issues (Saul 2020).
51. Morley (1999).
52. Firestone’s proposal was complete freedom from reproduction and child-­
rearing, and political autonomy based on economic independence, integration,
and sexual freedom (Firestone  1970, pp. 184–187). We’ll talk about her more
later in the book.
53. Firestone (1970, p. 189).
54. Firestone (1970, p. 191).
55. Firestone (1970, p. 197).
56. Perry (2019).
214 Notes

Chapter 2

1. Catharine MacKinnon, probably the best known of the radical feminists,

understands radical feminism much more narrowly than I do. In a 1983 paper,
she said that radical feminism was methodologically post-­Marxist, could not
rest on a naturalist understanding of gender, and could not be classically liberal.
She said that Andrea Dworkin and Adrienne Rich were good examples of
radical feminists in this sense; Mary Daly, Shulamith Firestone, and Susan
Griffin (normally thought of as radical feminists) were not (MacKinnon 1983,
p. 639, fn. 8).
2. There were also prominent Australian, British, and French radical feminists,
not least Germaine Greer, Sheila Jeffreys, and Monique Wittig, but the earliest
essays do seem to be exclusively by the Americans. Interestingly, the splintering off
of the radicals from the reformers seems to have happened the other way around
in Australia; first came the women’s liberationists, inspired by the American
radical feminist movement, then came the Women’s Electoral Lobby, who con-
sidered themselves reformers rather than liberationists (and in that regard were
a correlate of the NOW). See further detail in the documentary Brazen Hussies
(2020), see https://documentaryaustralia.com.au/project/brazen-­hussies/
3. Greer (1970, pp. 334–335).
4. See n. 58, this chapter.
5. Atkinson (1974a, p. 41).
6. Insofar as liberal feminism had disagreements with liberalism and began to
critique it, it has some claim to being somewhat female-­authored, but it still
owes a great intellectual debt to the classical liberals, who were mostly men. See
discussion in Wendell (1987).
7. Lerner (1986, pp. 12–13). The full quote is in Chapter 9.
8. Lorde ([1984] 2007, p. 64). From the essay ‘Sexism: An American Disease in
Blackface’, first published as ‘The Great American Disease’ in 1979.
9. MacKinnon (1983, p. 639).
10. Atkinson (1974a, p. 41).
11. Atkinson (1974a, p. 52).
12. Firestone (1970, p. 3).
13. Millett (1970, pp. 24–25).
14. MacKinnon (1982, p. 515).
15. Lerner (1986).
16. Dworkin (1974, p. 130). Dworkin says that the ratio of women to men burned
has been estimated as being between 20:1 and 100:1, so that ‘Witchcraft was a
woman’s crime’. A paper in the American Journal of Sociology puts the number
of people executed as witches in continental Europe between the early 14th
century and 1650 at between 200,000 and 500,000, 85 per cent or more of these
executions being of women (Ben-­Yehuda 1980, p. 1). A more recent economic
 Notes  215

study collected data on ‘more than 43,000 people prosecuted for witchcraft
across 21 European countries between 1300 and 1850’ (Leeson & Russ 2018,
p. 2067). The country with the highest number of persons tried for witchcraft in
this period was Germany, with 16,474 persons (p. 2078).
17. Dworkin (1974).
18. Brownmiller (1976).
19. Firestone (1970).
20. Atkinson (1974a ).
21. Millett (1970).
22. E.g. Dworkin (1974); MacKinnon (1991b, 1993).
23. Atkinson (1974a); Frye (1983).
24. MacKinnon (1989).
25. For an early discussion on this point, see Hacker (1951).
26. The Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group wrote ‘We do think that all feminists
can and should be political lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a
woman-­identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory
sexual activity with women . . . we think serious feminists have no choice but to
abandon heterosexuality’ (1981, p. 5).
27. For a contemporary statement of this view, see Julie Bindel’s video for The
Guardian, ‘I’m a lesbian, but I wasn’t born this way’, 22nd April 2015. Bindel
asks ‘are we born gay, or is it possible to make a positive choice to reject
heterosexuality, and decide to switch sides? Of course it is. Sexual attraction
normally comes about as a result of opportunity, luck, or curiosity’. She says her
view of sexual orientation came from the feminists she met in the 1970s, ‘who
helped me understand that loving women can be truly liberatory’. Online at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDKwYbV1jQs
28. Pateman (1988).
29. These are nearly Kate Phelan’s words: in a forthcoming paper she talks about
‘the magnitude of the achievement that feminism is’. See Phelan (forthcoming).
30. Other interesting ideas I don’t have the space to discuss in this section can be
found in Pizan (1405); Gouges (1791); Taylor Mill (1851); and (Mill 1869).
31. Wollstonecraft ([1792] 2017, ch. IV). Wollstonecraft is generally thought of as a
liberal feminist, as a result of her views about the equality of men and women in
terms of rational personhood, and the importance of equal education for
women (see e.g. Tong 1989, pp. 13–17). Here I’m tracking a specific point she
made, and the way it anticipates (and surely influenced) the later development
of radical feminism.
32. Wollstonecraft talks about women in general; here, in thinking about how the
differences between men and women must have seemed at the time, I’m making
a more limited claim about the men and women of Wollstonecraft’s class.
33. Wollstonecraft ([1792] 2017, p. 76). A notable exception to this ‘choice’ was Anne
Lister, dubbed the first modern lesbian, who lived in the late 1700s to the early
216 Notes

1800s, and was gender non-­conforming in presentation, a lesbian, self-­educated,

and engaged in business and travel highly atypical for women at the time.
34. Simone de Beauvoir makes a similar point about the role of physicality in The
Second Sex (1949, Volume II, Part I, ch. 1, esp. pp. 311, 320, 354–358).
35. Wollstonecraft ([1792] 2017, p. 87).
36. Wollstonecraft ([1792] 2017, pp. 102–103).
37. Wollstonecraft ([1792] 2017, p. 104).
38. Or, in the theistic worldview of the time, the result of their having different
types of ‘souls’—or perhaps of women not having ‘souls’ at all.
39. Wollstonecraft ([1792] 2017, p. 80).
40. Aristotle, for example, thought that people had different souls, and that these
were distinguished by their proportions of rationality/irrationality (alternatively
intellect/appetite). Slaves of either sex were virtually all appetite/irrationality,
women (free females) were a little rationality/intellect and a lot irrationality/
appetite, and men (free males) were all or mostly rationality/intellect, none or
only a little irrationality/appetite (Spelman 1988).
41. While both Alison Jaggar (1983) and Rosemary Tong (1989) classify Beauvoir
as an existentialist feminist rather than a radical feminist, there is so much in
her book that looks like early radicalism, which can be taken up quite
independently of her existentialism, that I will tend to talk about her together
with the radicals in this book.
42. Beauvoir ([1949] 2011, p. 15).
43. Beauvoir ([1949] 2011, p. 13).
44. Volume I, Part I, ch. 1.
45. Volume I, Part I, ch. 2.
46. Volume I, Parts II and III.
47. Volume II.
48. Beauvoir ([1949] 2011, p. 433).
49. See discussion in Volume I, Part II, ch. 5.
50. In a 2014 piece for New Statesman, Helen Lewis wrote ‘As an intellectual
movement, Second Wave feminism has suffered more than most by being
ground down into soundbites, its leaders flattened into caricatures. It is nothing
less than an outrage that so little should remain of, say, Andrea Dworkin’s
legacy that her most famous utterance is something that she never actually
wrote or argued. Her peers have similarly been crushed by a feminist movement
whose primary method of moving forward often seems to be kicking against its
foremothers’ (Lewis 2014).
51. Beauvoir ([1949] 2011, p. 293).
52. See e.g. Butler (1986). Butler begins the paper by quoting Beauvoir, but then
goes on to say ‘Beauvoir’s formulation . . . suggests that gender is an aspect of
identity gradually acquired’, and then moves to decouple sex and gender so-­
understood (as an identity): ‘The presumption of a causal or mimetic relation
 Notes  217

between sex and gender is undermined. If being a woman is one cultural

interpretation of being female, and if that interpretation is in no way necessitated
by being female, then it appears that the female body is the arbitrary locus of
the gender “woman”, and there is no reason to preclude the possibility of that
body becoming the locus of other constructions of gender’ (Butler 1986, p. 35).
Where Beauvoir was making a point about what is done to female people, Butler
is reifying what is done into an ‘identity’ that people of either sex can take up.
Butler does not own up to this innovation, but rather declares that it was
Beauvoir’s all along: ‘ “being” female and “being” a woman are two very different
sorts of being. This last insight, I would suggest, is the distinguished contribu-
tion of Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation “one is not born, but rather becomes,
a woman” ’ (Butler 1986, p. 35).
53. Volume II, Part I, ch. 1.
54. Volume II, Part I, ch. 2.
55. Volume II, Part I, ch. 3.
56. MacKinnon put it like this: ‘Where liberal feminism sees sexism primarily as an
illusion or myth to be dispelled, an inaccuracy to be corrected, true feminism
sees the male point of view as fundamental to the male power to create the
world in its own image, the image of its desires, not just as its delusory end
product. Feminism distinctively as such comprehends that what counts as truth
is produced in the interest of those with power to shape reality, and that this
process is as pervasive as it is necessary as it is changeable’ (MacKinnon 1983,
p. 640).
57. Most of these women were Americans. The emergence of radical feminism in
the UK is a little more complicated. In 1977, Sheila Jeffreys published a short
article defending the idea of ‘revolutionary feminism’, which was, just like
radical feminism, a reaction against socialist feminism and an articulation of a
theory of women’s oppression as a distinct phenomenon. Jeffreys acknowledged
radical feminism but said that it seemed to have gone into hibernation.
Revolutionary feminism was also more centrally separatist, seeing the source of
woman’s oppression in her reproductive labour, and a solution in her complete
withdrawal from men and refusal to perform this labour. Revolutionary
feminists advocated for political lesbianism. One way to understand it is that
radical feminism emerged at different times under different names in the
United States and the United Kingdom. But this can’t be entirely accurate, given
what Jeffreys said about radical feminism, and given that in 1970 several key
radical feminist books were published and available in both countries, including
Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, and
Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. So, more accurate might be to simply say
that radical feminism really only caught on in the UK in/after 1977, with Jeffreys
as the catalyst. See Jeffreys (1977) and Jeffreys’ answer at ~01.26.00 here: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDHq4WJKsNM
218 Notes

58. At least, Atkinson seems to have the published piece with the earliest date on it; the
paper ‘Abortion’ published in her collection Amazon Odyssey (1974a) is recorded
in a footnote as having been given at the National Conference of the NOW in
November 1967. Another piece, ‘Vaginal Orgasm as a Mass Hysterical Survival
Response’, is recorded as having been given in April 1968 at the National Conference
of the Medical Committee for Human Rights. The next radical feminist papers
to appear after that seem to have been in the magazine Notes from the First Year,
published by New York Radical Women in June 1968, and featuring contributions
from Shulamith Firestone, Anne Koedt, Jennifer Gardner, and Kathy Amatniek.
59. As indeed Alison Jaggar does, see esp. Jaggar (1983, chs. 5 and 9).
60. Chesler (2018, p. 3).
61. Prior to the innovation of agriculture, skilled labour was generally sex-­
differentiated (e.g. male large-­game hunters and female small-­game hunters
and foragers), but contributions were thought to be valued equally, and females
are thought to have had control over choices about sexual partners. See
discussion in Kelly (2000); Marlowe (2010).
62. Sherfey (1970).
63. Brownmiller (1976, pp. 4–5).
64. Firestone (1970).
65. Daly (1978).
66. Griffin (1980). All of these examples are discussed in Jaggar (1983, pp. 88–98).
67. Jaggar (1983, pp. 106–113).
68. Stoljar (1995, p. 261). She cites Fuss (1989, p. xi) and Schor (1994, p. 42) saying
something very similar.
69. Natalie Stoljar refers to these as the ‘naturalizing argument’ and the ‘diversity
argument’ against essentialism. On the first, she cites Elizabeth Grosz’s
discussion of ‘naturalism’ (as opposed to ‘biologism’), which ‘analyzes woman’s
essence in terms of “natural” characteristics which may be biological but need
not be—characteristics such as being emotional, irrational, passive, etc.’
(Stoljar  1995, p. 288, fn. 5). On the second, she cites Spelman (1988). Stoljar
herself makes a version of the diversity argument, after defending essentialism
against the naturalizing argument. She rejects the idea of there being ‘a natural
and intrinsic property constituting universal womanness’ on the grounds that
‘the only genuine candidate’ for this property is the type ‘female human being’,
and this type excludes what she calls ‘sexually indeterminate people’, as well as
‘transvestites . . . as well as transsexuals’ (Stoljar 1995, p. 273).
70. She writes, ‘[i]n the past, when it was a question of carrying heavy clubs and of
keeping wild beasts at bay, woman’s physical weakness constituted a flagrant
inferiority: if the instrument requires slightly more strength than the woman
can muster, it is enough to make her seem radically powerless’ (Beauvoir [1949)
2011, Volume I, ch 3, p. 63).
 Notes  219

71. Criado-­Perez (2019).

72. Whether Beauvoir understood her own explanation as contingent is slightly
confused by the fact that she says later in the book ‘The devaluation of women
represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity’ (Beauvoir 1949, p. 86).
But this may be a reference to Hegel’s similar claim about the master/slave
dialectic, and mean only that this stage was necessary in order to produce
human development as we currently know it, rather than necessary in a strict
sense (true in all possible worlds).
73. Lerner (1986).
74. Engels (1891).
75. Beauvoir (1949, Volume I, Part I, ch. 3, p. 64).
76. Beauvoir (1949, Volume I, Part I, ch. 3, p. 65).
77. Lerner (1986, p. 46).
78. Lerner (1986, p. 47).
79. Lerner (1986, p. 52; her emphasis).
80. Lerner (1986, p. 10; see also p. 220).
81. Beauvoir (1949, p. 67).
82. O’Connor (2019).
83. See e.g. Wollstonecraft (1792); Beauvoir (1949); Firestone (1970); Millett
(1973); Frye (1983).
84. Atkinson ([1970] 1974d, p. 49).
85. Frye (1983); this metaphor of the cage was also pre-­empted in Wollstonecraft
([1792] 2017, p. 77); and later Firestone (1970, p. 25).
86. Frye (1983, pp. 9–10).
87. Other groups have been pressed into service, but none have been so co-­opted as
to internalize—as a class—this service role as their self-­conception as woman
have. There is still much work to be done in articulating what ‘woman’ is when
she is not pressed into the service of men. That is why self-­determination must
remain an important goal of feminism.
88. Frye (1983, p. 36).
89. MacKinnon (1989, p. 112).
90. MacKinnon (1989, p. 111).
91. MacKinnon (1989, pp. 111–112).
92. Atkinson (1974a, pp. 41–45).
93. Atkinson (1974a, p. 43).
94. Firestone (1970, p. 125).
95. Firestone (1970, p. 116).
96. Wittig (1976, p. 64).
97. Wittig (1976, p. 67).
98. Dworkin (1974, p. 174); quoted in Jaggar (1983, p. 99).
99. Atkinson (1974a, p. 48–49).
220 Notes

1 00. Kreps (1973, p. 234).

101. Kreps (1973, p. 239).
102. Millett (1973).
103. Frye (1983).
104. Firestone (1970).
105. Atkinson (1969).
106. The Feminists (1973). The Feminists were also known as ‘The Feminists—A
Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles’. They split from the NOW in 1968,
and were active in New York from 1968 to 1973. Their most prominent member
was Ti-­Grace Atkinson; their membership also included Anne Koedt (until 1969
when there was another split), Sheila Michaels, Barbara Mehrhof, Pamela Kearon,
and Sheila Cronan. The Feminists believed that women were subject to false
­consciousness as a result of their internalization of oppressive sex roles. They
were separatists, who advocated for the development of women’s culture.
107. New York Radical Feminists (1973). The New York Radical Feminists (not to be
confused with The Feminists or New York Radical Women) was founded in
1969 by Shulamith Firestone (having left the Redstockings) and Anne Koedt
(having left The Feminists). Both Firestone and Koedt left the group in 1970,
but it carried on until the mid-­1970s.
108. See discussion in Lerner (1986, p. 27).
109. Gilligan (1982); Gilligan (2018).
110. E.g. Noddings (1984). I’m not sure whether Gilligan, Noddings, and other
women advocating an ethics of care thought of themselves as radical feminists.
But the ethics of care tradition is clearly related to maternalism, and Lerner
identifies Dorothy Dinnerstein, Mary O’Brien, and Adrienne Rich as maternalists.
Rich, at least, was a radical feminist. See discussion in Lerner (1986, p. 28 and
fn. 38, p. 248).
111. Difference feminist reasoning shows up in an influential strand of transgender
theory. Julia Serano writes in Whipping Girl (2007) ‘because anti-­trans discrim-
ination is steeped in traditional sexism . . . we must also challenge the idea that
femininity is inferior to masculinity and that femaleness is inferior to maleness’
(p. 16); and ‘until feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from
the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it—weakness, helplessness, fragility,
passivity, frivolity, and artificiality—those meanings will continue to haunt
every person who is female and/or feminine’ (p. 341).
112. MacKinnnon (1987, p. 37).
113. Collins (2015, pp. 7–9).
114. Budapest (1980, pp. xi–xii).
115. Budapest (1980, p. xiii).
116. Budapest (1980, p. xiii).
117. Budapest (1980, p. xiii).
118. Budapest (1980, p. xvii).
 Notes  221

1 19. Budapest (1980, p. xviii).

120. Budapest (1980, p. 2).
121. The Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft is a church founded in the United
States in 2018, and follows in this tradition—Budapest’s book is listed as one of
their Tenets of Faith. See https://pussychurchofmodernwitchcraft.com/about/
and discussion at Reilly (2018).
122. Firestone (1970, ch. 10).
123. See discussion in Shiffrin (1999).
124. Dworkin (1974, p. 191).
125. Daly (1987, p. 112).
126. ‘Bio-­logical’ is defined as ‘characterized by Life-­loving wisdom and logic’ (Daly
1987, p. 108).
127. Daly (1987, p. 77).
128. For more detailed criticism of the contemporary version of this project, which
is known as ‘conceptual engineering’, see Sankaran (2020).
129. Rowling (2020, p. 492).
130. MacKinnon (1982, p. 520). MacKinnon goes on in the same paragraph to
acknowledge that this psychological aspect can be difficult for those who are
(only) materially deprived to see as a form of oppression, including ‘women
whom no man has ever put on a pedestal’.
131. MacKinnon (1982, pp. 519–520).
132. MacKinnon (1982, p. 515).
133. Frye (1983, p. 38).
134. Frye (1983, p. 38).
135. Frye (1983, p. 29).
136. Frye (1983, p. 33).
137. Frye (1983, p. 33; my emphasis).
138. Dembroff & Wodak (2018a, 2018b).
139. Butler (1990), see also discussion in Morgenroth & Ryan (2018, pp. 240–241).
140. Fausto-­Sterling (1993, 2000, pp. 19–22, 2018).
141. For sex to be a ‘spectrum’ we’d have to be able to start with a male-­typical set of
sex characteristics at one end of a line and a female-­ typical set of sex
characteristics at the other, and then show that there were fine gradations of
those characteristics occupying all of the space in between. That is not what is
established by Differences of Sexual Development (DSDs) / intersex variations.
Fausto-­Sterling (together with several co-­authors) estimated the percentage of
intersex people at 1.7 per cent (Blackless et al. 2000). The philosopher Carrie
Hull corrects several mistakes in their analysis, bringing the figure down to 0.37
per cent (Hull 2003). Leonard Sax gives an even lower estimate, at around 0.018
per cent (Sax 2002), which Alex Byrne puts together with Hull’s corrections to
reach an even lower estimate of 0.015 per cent (Byrne  2018). Why does the
percentage matter? Because the higher the number, the easier it is to make the
222 Notes

case that there are no clear boundaries between male and female, so even if sex
is not a ‘spectrum’ it is at least a conceptual space with a large, blurry middle
area. If 1.7 per cent of all humans are in this blurry area this puts a lot of pres-
sure on the idea of sex as a binary, at least. But if only 0.015 per cent of people
are in this blurry area, it seems more plausible to say that sex is roughly what
we thought it was, but that there are some outlier cases.
142. Frye (1983, p. 25).
143. MacKinnon (1987, p. 44).
144. Wittig ([1976] 1982), p. 68). Shulamith Firestone also wrote of eliminating sex:
‘the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist
movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction
itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter cul-
turally’ (Firestone 1970, p. 11).
145. See e.g. Searle (1995, 2005); Hindriks (2012).
146. There is reasonable disagreement over the extent to which sex differences
would create/attract social meaning in any possible world, and thus produce a
limited form of gender (albeit different in content from gender as we know it).
See discussion from 29.40 in ‘Gender-­critical Philosophers | Kathleen Stock &
Holly Lawford-­Smith’ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjXshdq4ZlQ&
147. Beauvoir (1949).
148. See nn. 1 and 2 to the Preface; and n. 2 to Chapter 3.
149. Mill (1869).
150. Beauvoir (1949).
151. Frye (1983).
152. Mill (1869); see also discussion in Beauvoir (1949), Frye (1983), Burgess-­
Jackson (1995), and Chapter 4.
153. Kate Millett wrote of the socialization of the sexes, including ‘the concept of sex
role, which assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to all females
and the rest of human interest, achievement, and ambition to the male; the
charge of leader at all times and places to the male, and the duty of follower,
with equal uniformity, to the female’. She advocated for a ‘sexual revolution’ that
would bring about ‘the end of separatist character-­structure, temperament, and
behaviour, so that each individual may develop an entire—rather than a partial,
limited, and conformist—personality’, and ‘the end of sex role and sex status’
(Millett [1968] 1973, in Koedt et al. (Eds.) 1973, pp. 366–367). She talks in more
detail about the sex role system in Sexual Politics, ch. 2 (Millett 1970). Ti-­Grace
Atkinson wrote ‘The class of women is formed by positing another class in
opposition: the class of men, or the male role. Women exist as the corollaries of
men, and exist as human beings only insofar as they are those corollaries’
(Atkinson  1969, in Atkinson  1974a, pp. 41–42). The Feminists (a collective)
wrote ‘all those institutions which were designed on the assumption and for the
 Notes  223

reinforcement of the male and female role system such as the family (and its
sub-­institution, marriage), sex, and love must be destroyed’ (The Feminists
1973, p. 370). The subtitle of their essay, also the longer version of their name,
was ‘A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles’. The New York Radical
Feminists (another collective) wrote ‘Radical feminism recognizes the
oppression of women as a fundamental political oppression wherein women
are categorized as an inferior class based upon their sex. It is the aim of radical
feminism to organize politically to destroy this sex class system’ (New York
Radical Feminists 1973, p. 379). Naomi Weisstein wrote ‘I don’t know what
immutable differences exist between men and women apart from differences in
their genitals; perhaps there are some other unchangeable differences; probably
there are a number of irrelevant differences. But it is clear that until social
expectations for men and women are equal, until we provide equal respect for
both men and women, our answers to this question will simply reflect our
prejudices’ (Weisstein 1973, p. 196). Andrea Dworkin wrote, at the end of Woman
Hating, ‘We must make a total commitment . . . no longer to play the male-­
female roles we have been taught . . . We must refuse to submit to all forms of
behaviour and relationship which reinforce male-­ female polarity, which
nourish basic patterns of male dominance and female submission’ (Dworkin 1974,
pp. 192–193). Shulamith Firestone proposed a dramatic solution for ending sex
roles, namely ‘The freeing of women from the tyranny of reproduction by every
means possible, and the diffusion of the child-­rearing role to the society as a
whole, men as well as women’ (Firestone 1970, p. 185). She talked about artifi-
cial reproduction as allowing this freedom (p. 185).
154. Atkinson (1974a, pp. 42–43).
155. Firestone (1970, ch. 9).
156. Heilburn (1973, p. xv), quoted in Raymond (1975).
157. Roszak (1969, p. 304), quoted in Raymond (1975).
158. Woolf (1929, p. 102), quoted in Raymond (1975).
159. Raymond (1975); Daly (1975); Allen ([1986] 2001). Alison Jaggar attributes the
criticism that androgyny ‘fails in the naming of difference’ to Adrienne Rich
(Jaggar 1983, p. 88), but provides no reference. As far as I have been able to find,
this line is actually from Jeffner Allen’s ([1986] 2001).
160. Raymond (1975); discussed in Jaggar (1983, p. 88).
161. Frye (1983, p. 36).
162. See e.g. Joel (2015); Fine (2017); Joel & Vikhanski (2019).
163. These haven’t changed so much over the years. A 1912 text describing British
stereotypes of France—the whole country!—as feminine included traits like
being charming; having graceful manners, a lack of strong-­will; being under-­
ambitious, frugal, delicate, a perfectionist, precise; lacking in emotional discipline;
and being exuberant (de Pratz  1912, pp. 8–9). Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
224 Notes

mentions as feminine virtues those of patience, docility, good-­humour, and

flexibility (she comments, ‘virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion of
intellect’—Wollstonecraft [1792] 2017, p. 80).

Chapter 3

1. Reilly-­Cooper (2016).
2. See nn. 1 and 2 to the Preface. It is straightforward to state the gender-­critical
project in terms that feminists who think sex is a social construct can accept.
Money is a paradigmatic social construct. But now that it has been constructed,
it is real. We can point to the fact of its social construction to highlight that it is
contingent, not necessary, that we have it; and to inspire thinking about how
we might organize society without it. But once we have decided that we want to
dismantle (‘deconstruct’) it, simply acting like it doesn’t exist seems like a poor
strategy, given that some people have a lot of money, and some people have
almost no money, and in the short-­term having money still makes a huge
difference to how people’s lives go. Similarly for sex. Even if Judith Butler and
those who follow them (Butler has recently announced a nonbinary gender
identity) are right that sex is socially constructed out of arbitrary physical
differences—some bodies have one kind of reproductive anatomy, other bodies
have another, and on this view that is about as significant as having big or small
earlobes, or being tall or short (see also discussion in Ásta  2018)—once sex
assignments are in fact made, children are subject to different treatment on that
basis. There are significant average differences between men and women, not
least when it comes to the perpetration of violent crimes. The ‘sex as a social
construction’ line rules out a biologistic explanation of those differences, but it
does not rule out a socialized one. Once we have socially constructed sex, sex is
real. It may be contingent, and we may be able to eliminate it, but we’re stuck
with it for now, just like money. And that means we’re stuck with the effects of it
for now, which include the way that these ‘arbitrary’ assignments of bodies to
categories have in fact shaped the individuals in each category. We can accept
that those persons could have been otherwise—a boy baby instead assigned ‘girl’
and raised ‘girl’ could have become ‘girl-­like’—without believing that they are
not now the way that they have been shaped to be. Thus feminists following
Butler can accept that the best route to dismantling the system of sex/gender is,
in the short-­term, to pay attention to the way persons have been shaped on the
basis of (constructed) sex/gender, in particular to make sure that the category
constructed as inferior/subordinate, namely those ‘assigned female at birth’, has
equal opportunities with the category constructed as superior/dominant.
3. http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-­w here-­abortion-
­is-­illegal/
 Notes  225

4.
https://www.humanrights.gov.au/education/students/hot-­topics/womens-­rights
5.
Chambers, manuscript.
6.
Chambers, manuscript.
7.
By ‘women-­only spaces’, I have in mind sex-­separated prisons, changing rooms,
fitting rooms, bathrooms, homeless and drug and alcohol shelters, rape and
domestic violence refuges, gyms, spas, sports, schools, accommodations, shortlists,
prizes, quotas, political groups, clubs, events, festivals, and teams.
8. Jaggar (1983, pp. 41–42).
9. See examples in n. 4 to the Preface.
10. Christina Hoff Sommers, a vocal critic of a number of prominent feminists and
feminist ideas, has criticized the idea of women as a caste for allowing privileged
women to claim that they are hurt whenever a disadvantaged woman is hurt.
She writes: ‘you need not have harmed me personally, but if I identify with
someone you have harmed, I may resent you . . . Having demarcated a victimized
“us” with whom I now feel solidarity, I can point to one victim and say, “In
wronging her, he has betrayed his contempt for us all”, or “Anyone who harms a
woman harms us all”, or simply “What he did to her, he did to all of us” ’
(Sommers 1994, p. 42). We can imagine a world in which Sommers is quite
right. Suppose that every country except one has securely achieved the real
social, political, legal, and economic equality of the sexes; women’s liberation is
won. These aren’t necessarily ‘privileged’ women, but they are women who
don’t have a complaint when it comes to sexism. But in the one remaining
country, there is still systematic discrimination against girls and women. It
might seem a stretch, then, for women in the other countries to say that they
are hurt when those women are hurt. In our world, however, rather than the
world we have to imagine to make Sommers’ criticism reasonable, there is
enough of a pattern that it is reasonable for women to consider some harms to
specific women as harms to all women. The existence of prostitution and
pornography are good examples of this. Even though it is the women working
in those industries who are most harmed, it is also true that all women are
negatively impacted by the fact that it is possible for men to buy the use of
women’s bodies, or watch other men have the bought use of women’s bodies
(more in Chapter  4). No matter how privileged, a woman can point to the
degradation of women in pornography and truly say ‘in wronging her, he has
betrayed his contempt for us all’. This is partly because in using her as an object,
he regards her as interchangeable with other ‘objects’ relevantly like her.
Sommers’ claim also puts her in a tricky position relative to other social groups.
Would she deny that it can be true for Jewish people that when one is subject to
anti-­Semitism, contempt has been betrayed for all Jewish people? Or that it can
be true for all Aboriginal Australians, that what was done to one (at least when
motivated by racism) was done, symbolically, to all? There is simply too much
evidence of group-­based discrimination or hatred for it to be plausible to deny
226 Notes

it, and if Sommers doesn’t deny that it exists in general, then she owes us an
explanation for why it should exist in the case of social group characteristics
like race and religion, but not sex/gender.
11. The hard questions that do exist relate to specific and rare intersex variations,
not to gender identities.
12. See discussion in Barker (1997).
13. Frye (1983, p. 36).
14. Reilly-­Cooper (2016).
15. Reilly-­Cooper (2016).
16. (Reilly-­Cooper (2016).
17. Bicchieri (2017, p. 35).
18. Rachelle (2019).
19. Rachelle (2019).
20. For a discussion of beauty norms as ethical norms, see Widdows (2018).
21. For further discussion on norm change, see Bicchieri (2017, chs. 3–5); for an
alternative account of norms, see Brennan et al. (2013).
22. There’s an interesting discussion of moral norm change, focused specifically on
norms about honour, in Appiah (2010).
23. Dickinson & Bismark (2016).
24. Aubusson (2019).
25. Jenkins (2018, p. 728; see also pp. 728–736).
26. Jenkins (2018, p. 729).
27. The exact details of what this means can be filled in more precisely and may be
somewhat context-­dependent.
28. R.G. & G.R Harris Funeral Homes v EEOC & Aimee Stevens.
29. Hungerford (2019). What she means is that anyone gender non-­conforming,
such as an effeminate boy or a tomboy girl, can be burdened by the social
enforcement of gender roles, not just trans people.
30. There is commentary on stone butch lesbians who passed as men in the 1950s
United States in Feinberg (1993).
31. Watson (2016, p. 247).
32. Haslanger (2000, p. 39).
33. Haslanger (2000, p. 38).
34. An Egyptian zoo actually did this—see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
cnqa9Ma5CXY accessed 23rd May 2020. A similar example (put to the use of
ruling out relevant alternatives when making claims to knowledge) appears in
Dretske (1970, pp. 1015–1016).
35. She wrote, ‘The claim for tolerance, based on the notion that transgenderism in
all its forms is a form of gender resistance, is alluring but false. Instead,
transgenderism reduces gender resistance to wardrobes, hormones, surgery,
and posturing—anything but real sexual equality. A real sexual politics says yes
to a view and reality of transgender that transforms, instead of conforms to,
 Notes  227

gender’ (Raymond  1979, p. xxxv). Her discussion in chapter  5 is particularly

interesting. She says that trans people are in a unique position to turn their
gender dissatisfaction into rage against the society that creates it (p. 124); that
there is more freedom in feminism, as a liberation project, than in conformity
through surgery (p. 127); and that one cannot give truly informed consent when
one hasn’t even considered the role that a sex-­stereotyping and homophobic
society has played in the creation of the desire to change sex.
36. Reilly-­Cooper (2016). For further criticism of gender identity ideology as an
unambitious solution to the social problem of gender norms, see Lawford-­
Smith (2020a).
37. See especially Budapest (1980).
38. hooks ([1984] 2000, ch. 11).
39. I don’t know of any articles covering the recent controversy on this topic, which
has regularly blown up on Twitter in the last few years. But Julie Bindel talks
about political lesbianism in a few places, and describes the ‘born this way’ view
as the alternative. See e.g. Bindel (2009) and her video for The Guardian ‘I’m a
lesbian, but I wasn’t born this way’, 22nd April 2015. Online at https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=PDKwYbV1jQs
40. hooks ([1984] 2000, ch. 5).
41. It might focus on a limited set of intersections; see further discussion in
Chapter 7.
42. Landrine (1985, p. 73).
43. For more discussion of both allyship and deference in matters of social groups,
see discussion in Lawford-­Smith & Tuckwell, manuscript. On speaking on
behalf of social groups, see Lawford-­Smith (2018).
44. The definition has been defended at length by philosopher Alex Byrne (2020).
45. BBC (2018). See also n. 47 to Chapter 1.
46. I say ‘most’ rather than ‘all’ because there are some exceptions. In some cases,
other axes of privilege/oppression will trump: the Queen might not have been
socialized into femininity because her socialization as sovereign took priority
(see also Stoljar  1995). In other cases, the socialization will not have been
lifelong: transmen who pass as men, or butch lesbians who are sometimes mis-­
sexed, may escape it earlier or in part. In yet other cases, it may be possible to
escape it: e.g. daughters raised by fathers as sons (and in social isolation, as in
the wild) (there are some accounts of this in de Beauvoir 1949).
47. Greer (1970, p. 335).
48. Firestone (1970).
49. See discussion in Mehat (2015).
50. Journalist Helen Joyce writes ‘Until the past decade, hardly any teenage girls
sought treatment for gender dysphoria; now, they predominate in clinics
around the world. British figures are typical. In 1989, when the Tavistock clinic
opened, there were two referrals, both young boys. By 2020, there were 2,378
228 Notes

referrals, almost three-­quarters of them girls, and most of those teenagers’

(Joyce  2021, p. 91). The Economist reports an increase from 41 per cent of
adolescents referred to the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS)
being female in 2009, to 69 per cent being female in 2017 (The Economist 2018).
51. See discussion in Littman (2021). Littman surveys a hundred detransitioners,
with 69 per cent of participants being female and 31 per cent male. She notes
that ‘Only 24.0% of participants had informed the doctor or clinic that facilitated
their transitions that they had detransitioned’ (p. 11), which may help to explain
previous assumptions that rates of detransition are extremely low.
52. Cameron (2019, p. 2).
53. Mackay (2015).
54. Frye (1983, p. 127).
55. Frye (1983, p. 127).
56. For some ideas coming from men, see Jensen (2017) and Pease (2019).
57. Redstockings (1969).
58. Firestone (1970, p. 37).
59. hooks (1984).
60. Freeman (1976).
61. Chesler (2018, p. 140). The Robin she refers to here is Robin Morgan.
62. Sommers (1994, pp. 212, 218–222).
63. Twitter @janeclarejones ‘I’m also going to disagree with Rosa on something
here . . . (We can do this . . . Because we’re not a frickin cult)’, 15th November 2018
at 7.45 p.m. See also Twitter @janeclarejones ‘We’re not a cult, we not all singing
from the same sheet’ [sic], 2nd December 2018, 1.48am.

Chapter 4
1.
Ekman ([2010] 2013, p. 111).
Houston, in Wagoner (2012).
2.
3.
Moran (2013, p. 5).
4.
Bisch (1999); Pennyworth (2003).
5.
Chesler (2018, p. 149).
6.
There is no evidence that this is true, and some evidence that it is not, see e.g.
Cho (2018).
7. Chesler (2018, p. 149).
8. Cameron (2018, p. 32).
9. Cameron (2018, p. 32).
10. For one recent discussion using this broader notion of sex, see Danaher
(forthcoming).
11. Frederick et al. (2018).
 Notes  229

12. Chesler (2018, p. 229).

13. See e.g. Grant (2014); Mofokeng (2019).
14. See e.g. Jeffreys (2009a), Dines (2010), Tyler (2011), Ekman ([2010] 2013),
Moran (2013), Bindel (2017); cf. Mac & Smith (2018), Watson & Flanigan (2020).
15. Some feminists prefer ‘contract pregnancy’ as the more accurate term, given
that the gestational mother is a real, not a substitute, mother. See e.g. Satz (1992,
p. 107, fn. 2); Finn (2018).
16. Chesler (2018, pp. 246–7).
17. Ekman ([2010] 2013, ch. 1).
18. Murphy (2020b). Rachel Moran, a woman exited from prostitution in Ireland,
says much the same thing in her memoir Paid For (2013): ‘this really is one of
the cornerstones that support the sex industry—the male insistence on
offloading onto another class of women perversions they cannot reasonably
expect to present to the women in their lives’ (pp. 85–86). An empirical study of
103 London men who buy sex found that for 20 per cent of the men, their
reason for buying sex was that they couldn’t get what they wanted from their
current relationship (Farley et al. 2009).
19. Fickling (2006); BBC (2015). A less extreme example, discussed in Chapter 5, is
legislation that bans practices aimed at the ‘change or suppression’ of a person’s
sexual orientation or gender identity, even when an adult consents to that
practice and has good reasons for desiring it (relating for example to religion,
culture, or family).
20. There is documentation of cases in which ‘rough sex’ was used as a defence
here: https://wecantconsenttothis.uk/
21. MacLennan (2018); McCulloch (2018).
22. I include being subject to advertisements on free porn sites under this
description.
23. Thornton (1991).
24. Campbell (2016, pp. 167–168).
25. Campbell (2016, p. 168).
26. Some feminists attempt to draw a bright line between trafficking into sexual
slavery and commercial prostitution. There are certainly some differences, relating
to the degree of coercion exercised and the amount of freedom the victim / sex
worker has. Juno Mac & Molly Smith argue that, however, on the pro- sex industry
side, this bright line is illusory because attempts to migrate using people smug-
glers can turn into trafficking when debts accumulate or there is deception
about the work available upon arrival (Mac & Smith 2018, ch. 3).
27. Campbell (2016, pp. 165).
28. Campbell (2016, p. 172), citing Dehghan (2012).
29. Campbell (2016, p. 171).
30. Moran (2013, p. 96).
230 Notes

31. See also Pateman (1988, 2002); Ekman ([2010] 2013, ch. 1–3); and discussion in
Chapter 6, Section 6.2 of this book.
32. I take this description from the Netflix documentary After Porn Ends, where
one of the male porn actors—Randy West—said ‘I used to say it’s like borrowing
somebody’s body to masturbate with. Excuse me, if you’re not busy, you mind if
I jerk off into your pussy with my dick? Ah, it’s kind of like that . . . which is not
bad, I mean, you know, better than real jerking off’ (Wagoner 2012, 19.01‒19.31).
33. Project Respect make this point well in arguing against the National Disability
Insurance Scheme in Australia funding the use of sex workers. See their position
statement: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/projectrespect/pages/15/
attachments/original/1526432652/Position_Statement_sexual_services_on_
NDIS_FINAL.pdf?1526432652 accessed 24th May 2020.
34. Dixon (2001).
35. Mike Robillard & BJ Strawser (2016) make a similar point about recruits to
the army.
36. Dixon (2001, p. 326).
37. Dixon (2001, p. 327).
38. ‘Molly Smith’ is a pseudonym. See https://www.theguardian.com/profile/molly-­
smith accessed 10th April 2020.
39. Mac & Smith (2018, e.g. pp. 49, 50, 115, 215).
40. Dixon (2001, p. 324).
41. Moran (2013, p. 5).
42. Farley et al. (2004); Ekman ([2010] 2013). See also discussion in Chapter  6,
Section 6.4.
43. Goodin & Barry (2014, p. 373).
44. Murphy (2020a).
45. For simplicity, and because the parallel to prostitution and pornography is what
matters here rather than university admissions in their own right, I’m ignoring
complications to do with when structural obstacles have affected who meets the
entry requirements or is in the pool of well-­qualified applicants. There is no
good parallel to this when it comes to sex, because sex is not a distributive good,
and no one has a right to it.
46. See discussion in Greer (2018); Gavey (2019).
47. Bisch (1999, p. 5).
48. Bisch (1999, p. 4).
49. Shamsian & McLaughlin (2020); McLaughlin (2020).
50. Pateman (1988); Frye (1983).
51. I feel compelled to add a #notallmen here, because clearly not all men need to
reconceptualize their ideas about sex and sexual pleasure. But those who do are
not limited to those who buy sex. There are plenty of men who don’t pay for sex,
and yet who do not bother to ensure that sex is mutually pleasurable, and who
 Notes  231

feel entitled to sex from their partners. There are also plenty of men who don’t
pay for sex in the strict sense, but in another sense do, e.g. by granting wealth
and resources (often in the context of a marriage) in exchange for sex.
52. In this section, I deliberately take up Debra Satz’s directive, that ‘if we are
troubled by prostitution . . . we should direct much of our energy to putting
forward alternative models of egalitarian relations between men and women’
(Satz 2010, p. 154).
53. Satz (2010, p. 96).
54. Satz (2010, p. 148).
55. Schulze et al. (2014, p. 6).
56. Schulze et al. (2014, p. 10).
57. Cf. n. 26 to this chapter.
58. Schulze et al. (2014, p. 10).
59. Schulze et al. (2014, p. 7).
60. Schulze et al. (2014, p. 10).
61. Schulze et al. (2014, p. 6).
62. Schulze et al. (2014, p. 6). The authors of the report distinguish sexual exploitation
from prostitution according to whether sex is sold ‘under conditions of coercion
or force’. If it is, then it’s sexual exploitation, and if it isn’t, then it’s prostitution,
according to them.
63. UNODC (2009).
64. Bindel & Kelly (2003).
65. Farley et al. (2004).
66. These were 2 per cent from the South Pacific; 6 per cent from Scandinavia;
5  per cent from the Indian Subcontinent; 1 per cent from the Middle East;
1 per cent from North America; 6 per cent from South America; 3 per cent from
the Caribbean; 2 per cent from Africa; and another 5 per cent with ethnicities
not recognized in the study (Dickson 2004, p. 21, table 3).
67. Dickson (2004, pp. 10, 27).
68. See discussion in Moran (2013).
69. Reeve et al. (2009, pp. 6–7).
70. Reeve et al. (2009, p. 7).
71. Reeve et al. (2009, p. 7).
72. Reeve et al. (2009, p. 9).
73. Bindel & Kelly (2003, p. 16).
74. Bindel & Kelly (2003, p. 48).
75. Bindel & Kelly (2003, p. 50).
76. Bindel & Kelly (2003, p. 43).
77. Dickson (2004, p. 11).
78. Two to Tangle Productions, at ~59.58‒1.00.58.
79. See discussion in Alarcón et al. (2019).
232 Notes

8 0. E.g. Rosewarne (2017).

81. See e.g. the Woman’s Place UK Manifesto (2019), which demands that we
‘Recognize prostitution as sexually abusive exploitation which is harmful to all
women and girls’, and ‘Implement the abolitionist model, criminalising those
who exploit prostituted people (including pimps and sex buyers) and decrimi-
nalising the prostituted, providing practical and psychological exiting support’.
Online at https://womansplaceuk.org/wp-­content/uploads/2019/09/Printable-­
manifesto.pdf accessed 24th May 2020.
82. Mac & Smith (2018).
83. See discussion in Mac & Smith (2018, chs. 4‒8).
84. Mac & Smith (2018, p. 215). On the same page, they talk about ‘the humane
abolition of sex work’, saying that this ‘can only happen when marginalised
people no longer have to sustain themselves through the sex industry; when it
is no longer necessary for their survival’ (Mac & Smith 2018, p. 215).
85. Amia Srinivasan (2021) does the same thing in her essay ‘Talking to My
Students about Porn’, focusing on the harms to women in porn rather than the
harms to all women affected by porn (arguably, all women). She does this even
while reporting on conversations she has had with her students, and groups of
high school students, about porn, which suggests this is a conscious decision to
focus on those she considers to be the worst-­off (or perhaps, the most-­affected).
But it is a decision that is not made explicit, or defended.
86. Ekman ([2010] 2013, p. 115).
87. Mac & Smith (2018, see e.g. pp. 2–3).
88. Fisher (2019).
89. Langton (1993).
90. Tong (1982, p. 14).
91. nordicmodelnow.org, n.d.
92. Mac & Smith (2018).
93. Quoted in Zeller (2006).
94. Anderson (2003).
95. Wright & Tokunaga (2016, p. 955).
96. Wright & Tokunaga (2016, p. 960).
97. Wright & Tokunaga (2016, p. 955).
98. Hald, Malamuth, & Yuen (2010, p. 17).
99. Hald, Malamuth, & Yuen (2010, p. 18).
100. Cho (2018, p. 13).
101. Cho (2018, p. 13).
102. As they understand it, violent pornography depicts sex without consent, with
coercion or aggression, while non-­violent pornography depicts consensual sex,
without coercion or aggression (Wright et al. 2015, pp. 8–9).
103. Wright et al. (2015; my emphasis).
104. E.g. Moran (2013).
 Notes  233

Chapter 5

1. Ekman ([2010] 2013, pp. 39–40).

2. On the terminology of class/caste, see n. 35 to Chapter 1.
3. Butler (1990, p. 522). Gender-­critical feminists need not deny that there is
performance. What is important is that we lay the blame for that performance
elsewhere. We focus on what causes the performance, e.g. the socially imposed
constraints, rather than on the performance itself. Focusing on the performance
itself might count as ‘victim-­blaming’ insofar as it suggests that women could
simply choose to perform differently. Butler talks of a ‘collective agreement to
perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders’, and comments that
‘The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions’ (Butler 1990, p.
522; quoted in Morgenroth & Ryan  2018, p. 241). But this ignores the social
costs to women of violating gender expectations and the social rewards for
conforming, which some women cannot afford to forego.
4. Bettcher (2009).
5. Inside academic philosophy, the proposed reform to the UK’s Gender Recognition
Act was what brought gender-­critical feminism to widespread awareness. The
philosopher Kathleen Stock wrote an essay titled ‘Academic Philosophy and the
UK Gender Recognition Act’, noting that while there was a ‘huge and impassioned
discussion’ going on outside the academy over the proposed reforms, ‘nearly all
academic philosophers—including, surprisingly, feminist philosophers—are
ignoring it’ (Stock  2018). She proposed calling the position that transwomen
shouldn’t be counted as women under the law, and therefore that the proposed
reform should be rejected, ‘the gender-­critical position’. Gender-­critical feminists
do indeed oppose moving to sex self-­identification (which we think conflates
sex with gender identity), but there is more to gender-­critical feminism than its
position on sex self-­identification, and that position follows from its more
general view on what feminism is and who it is for.
6. The Cambridge University Student Union Women’s Campaign released a brochure
‘How to Spot TERF Ideology’ (‘TERF’ stands for ‘trans-­exclusionary radical
feminist’) which included the claim ‘Terf ideology fails to recognise that women
are not homogeneous, and face many different kinds of intersecting oppressions;
Black “womanhood” and white “womanhood” are not the same, just as trans
“womanhood” and queer “womanhood” are not the same’ (online at https://
www.womens.cusu.cam.ac.uk/how-­to-­spot-­terf-­ideology/). Academic Alison
Phipps spoke about ‘TERFs’ and ‘SWERFs’ (sex-­worker-­exclusionary radical
feminists) to Pink News, commenting ‘It’s rooted in disgust . . . It’s a white bourgeois
disgust in bodies that are unnatural, or bodies that are not respectable enough, and
not wanting those bodies to be part of our feminism. It’s a disgust at difference,
which is really deeply bourgeois’ (Parsons 2020). For a radical feminist commen-
tary on the concept of white feminism, see the excellent (MacKinnon 1991a).
234 Notes

7. Katelyn Burns, writing in Vox about what she terms ‘anti-­trans “radical” feminists’,
described ‘80-­plus replies to a tweet . . . by prominent feminist writer Sady Doyle
promoting a piece she wrote denouncing TERFs’, and said ‘some accused Doyle
of being a handmaid of the patriarchy’ (Burns 2019).
8. To give just a couple of examples (there are more in Chapter  6), division
between feminists over this issue lead to the collapse of the Michigan Womyn’s
Music Festival (Michfest), a women’s music festival that had run for forty years
(McConnell et al. 2016). Women who run female-­only services and stand their
ground against the inclusion of transwomen have been targeted. In one recent
case, a transwoman in Vancouver managed to have the city funding withdrawn
from Vancouver Rape Relief, which is Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre
(Murphy 2019a). The centre has also been targeted with vandalism and death
threats, and had a dead rat nailed to its door (Hickman 2019).
9. In full: ‘gender identity means a person’s gender-­related identity, which may or
may not correspond with their designated sex at birth, and includes the
personal sense of the body (whether this involves medical intervention or not)
and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech, mannerisms, names
and personal preferences’. This definition was introduced in the Change or
Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021 (VIC), amending the
previous definition in the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 (VIC) which made
reference to sex (‘the identification . . . by a person of one sex as a member of the
other sex . . . by assuming the characteristics of the other sex, whether by means
of medical intervention, style of dressing or otherwise . . .’). The new definition
is similar to that used in the Yogyakarta Principles.
10. Gender-­critical feminists are routinely smeared as ‘TERFs’. Feminist philosopher
Jennifer Saul characterizes us in The Conversation as ‘anti-­trans activists’, people
who are ‘committed to worsening the situation of some of the most marginal-
ized women’ (Saul  2020). Feminist philosopher Carol Hay wrote in The New
York Times that gender-­critical feminists are inspired by Janice Raymond’s 1979
book The Transsexual Empire and comments ‘for the record, many of us who are
critics of TERFs consider Raymond’s book to be hate speech’ (Hay 2019). (For
the record, it is a mistake to consider Raymond’s book as the inspiration for
gender-­critical feminism, a mistake that comes from thinking of gender-­critical
feminism exclusively in terms of its position on trans/gender. Janice Raymond
was a radical feminist, the author of many feminist books, and her position on
the exclusion of transsexual women from women-­only spaces was explained by
her wider feminist commitments. As I have already argued in Chapters 2 and 3,
gender-­critical feminism is an evolution of radical feminism, not a new fem­in­
ism ‘about’ trans/gender.) For other characterizations of gender-­critical fem­in­
ism as ‘anti-­trans’, see also Burns (2019); Lewis (2019); and Dembroff (2021).
11. Different states protect trans people according to one or more of these attributes.
 Notes  235

12. For further discussion of whether gender-­critical speech, in particular, can

plausibly be characterized as either hate speech or harmful speech, see Lawford-­
Smith, manuscript.
13. https://www.sofiehagen.com/newsletters/2020/2/26/also-­im-­not-­a-­woman-­2019
accessed 19th May 2020.
14. Hacker (1951, p. 62).
15. Firestone (1970, p. 49).
16. Beauvoir (1949, Volume I, Part I, ch. 2).
17. Thompson (1943). See also Horney (1939, ch. 6) and Thompson (1941, 1942).
18. Raymond (1979).
19. Here I’m drawing on a description of sexual orientation, to deny that sexual
orientation and gender non-­conformity are relevantly similar: ‘Homosexuality
was removed from the World Health Organization (WHO) ICD-­10 classification
in 1992 . . . Same-­sex orientation is regarded as a normal, acceptable variation of
human sexuality’ (Griffin et al. 2021, p. 291).
20. The same is true for boys/men.
21. Doward (2019); Lane (2019); Evans (2020).
22. https://www.legislation.vic.gov.au/bills/change-­or-­suppression-­conversion-­
practices-­prohibition-­bill-­2020. See also my commentary in Lawford-­Smith
(2020b); Deves & Lawford-­Smith (2020a, 2020b); and Lawford-­Smith (2021).
23. Warrier et al. (2020); Griffin et al. (2021).
24. Thirteen per cent of the adolescents referred to a gender identity clinic in
Finland in a two-­year period were in foster homes (Griffin et al. 2021, p. 294, fig. 3).
25. Griffin et al. (2021, p. 296) cite testimony from female detransitioners as reasons
for detransitioning, including ‘realised the dysphoria was a result of abuse’.
Abuse was present for more than 20 per cent of the female and more than 10
per cent of the male referrals to the Tavistock in 2012 (Griffin et al. 2021, p. 294,
fig. 4, citing Holt et al. 2016).
26. A dataset of 641,860 individuals found that ‘transgender and gender-­diverse
individuals have, on average, higher rates of autism, other neurodevelopmental
and psychiatric diagnoses’ (Warrier et al.  2020). At the Royal Children’s
Hospital in Melbourne, which is the busiest youth gender clinic in Australia, 45
per cent of patients showed mild to severe autism in screening (note further
that 275 of the total 383 patients are female). Tony Attwood, a world expert on
Asperger’s, has called for an inquiry into the overrepresentation of autistic people
in gender transition (Lane 2020). There is disagreement between researchers over
the relation between being autistic and being transgender. Reubs Walsh and
colleagues present two hypotheses about the relation (Walsh et al. 2018). One is
that ‘autistic traits may in some way cause, or create an illusion of, trans identity’
(p. 4070). For example, rigid thinking might lead to a misinterpretation of
gender-­atypical interests as meaning one is trans, or hypersensitivity to touch
236 Notes

could lead to a preference for clothing that is gender-­norm violating (p. 4071).
One of the papers cited on the latter possibility includes case studies of two
autistic boys preoccupied with ‘feminine objects and interests’, speculating that
‘This preoccupation may relate to a need for sensory input that happens to be
predominantly feminine in nature (silky objects, bright and shiny substances,
movement of long hair, etc.’ (Williams et al.  1996, p. 641). (It is worth noting
that when I discussed this hypothesis with acquaintances who are autistic, par-
ents of autistic kids, or work with autistic people, they all said they found this
hypothesis implausible on the grounds that every autistic person is different, so
any touch-­hypersensitivity preferences are unlikely to track lines of sex, or pro-
vide a general explanation of autistic kids’ disproportionate identification as
trans). The other hypothesis is that ‘individuals with autism are more prone to
reject ideas they perceive as flawed or logically inconsistent, such as social con-
ditioning and social norms, and this facilitates “coming out” ’ (Walsh et al. 2018,
p. 4071; in-­text references omitted). The authors themselves seem to favour this
second hypothesis. They found elevated rates of nonbinary gender identities in
a cohort of autistic people (100/675), and commented ‘The finding that non-­
binary identities are most elevated seems to support hypotheses focused on
autistic resistance to social conditioning’ (p. 4074). On this picture, we all have
gender identities, but ‘typical’ (i.e. not autistic) people suppress theirs as a result
of sensitivity to social conditioning, while autistic people claim theirs, as a result
of rejecting or resisting that social conditioning. Walsh et al. do not provide any
evidence between these two main hypotheses. But their preferred hypothesis
does not support autistic people in fact being trans. It predicts their being gen-
der non-­conforming. What that means depends on whether gender is norms
(external) or identity (internal). If it is norms, then it is perfectly normal, and
indeed desirable, to be gender non-­conforming; it is not evidence of being
trans. And if it is norms, then autistic women and girls are at particular risk,
from a medical establishment and broader cultural messaging that will treat
their gender non-­conformity as evidence of being transgender, and potentially
put them on a pathway to medical and surgical interventions. (The Australian
comedian Hannah Gadsby, who is a gender non-­conforming lesbian with an
adult autism diagnosis, said in her stand-­up show Nanette (2018) that she has
been pressured by fans to ‘come out as trans’).
27. One group of authors providing information about a sample of 577 children
and 243 adolescents referred to a gender identity service between 2008 and
2011 found that 76 per cent of the girls were lesbians, and commented
‘[a]nother parameter that has struck us as clinically important is that a number
of youth comment that, in some ways, it is easier to be trans than to be gay or
lesbian. One adolescent girl, for example, remarked “If I walk down the street
with my girlfriend and I am perceived to be a girl, then people call us all kinds
of names, like lezzies or faggots, but if I am perceived to be a guy, then they leave
 Notes  237

us alone’ (Wood et al. 2013, p. 5). Another group found that only 8.5 per cent of
the females referred to the gender identity service in London were ‘primarily
attracted to boys’, another way to say being that at least 91.5 per cent were
lesbian or bisexual (Holt et al. 2016; cited in Griffin et al. 2021, p. 294). See also
n. 39 to this chapter.
28. The Swedish documentary Trans Train has a good discussion of these issues. There
is some discussion at (Gender Health Query 2019), and the documentary itself is
available on YouTube. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJGAoNbHYzk
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73-­mLwWIgwU
29. Quoted in Lane (2019). Lane’s article is a lightly edited collection of excerpts
from Moore & Brunskell-­Evans (2019). The quote comes from their pp. 245–246.
There are minor differences in grammar and capitalization from the original,
and the word ‘clinical’ appears in the original: ‘we are subjugating children’s
clinical needs to an ideological position’ (p. 246).
30. Littman (2018). On trans identification as a social contagion, see also
Marchiano (2017) and Shrier (2020). The Coalition for the Advancement and
Application of Psychological Science released a position statement on ‘rapid
onset gender dysphoria’ (ROGD) claiming that there is a ‘lack of rigorous
empirical support for its existence’ (they seemed to assume that Littman
intended it as a diagnosis). James Cantor (2021) provides an excellent response.
He says ‘The question has never been (and isn’t supposed to be) whether ROGD
exists: The question is whether the recent and explosive increase in trans
referrals being reported across the world represents one of the previously well-­
characterized profiles (so we would know what to do) or something new
(wherein we can’t)’ (Cantor 2021; in-­text citations omitted).
31. Littman (2018, pp. 17–18). Littman’s paper was re-­reviewed by the journal
PLOS One after activists complained, but the conclusions of the paper remained
unchanged. As Littman herself put it in a later note, ‘Other than the addition of
a few missing values in Table 13, the Results section is unchanged in the updated
version of the article’ (Littman 2019). See also commentary in Bartlett (2019).
32. As reported in The Telegraph: ‘There are concerns among some MPs that drug
treatment is being offered too readily to children—some of them as young as
10—without fully understanding what lies behind their desire to change sex. In
2009/10 a total of 40 girls were referred by doctors for gender treatment. By
2017/18 that number had soared to 1,806. Referrals for boys have risen from 57
to 713 in the same period. Last year 45 children referred for NHS treatment
were aged six or under, with the youngest being just four, though younger
children are not given drugs’ (Rayner  2018). The point about drug treatment
being offered to children as young as 10 was confirmed in the High Court’s Bell
v. Tavistock judgement, which said ‘Puberty blocking drugs can in theory be,
and have in practice been, prescribed for gender dysphoria through the services
provided by the defendant to children as young as 10’ (point 5); and, ‘As it is, for
238 Notes

the year 2019/2020, 161 children were referred by GIDS for puberty blockers
(a further 10 were referred for other reasons). Of those 161, the age profile is as
follows: 3 were 10 or 11 years old at the time of referral’ (point 29).
33. Evans (2020).
34. Evans (2020).
35. Orange (2020).
36. See discussion in Vincent & Jane (forthcoming).
37. This tweet came from Law’s account @mrbenjaminlaw, on the 12th of February
2020 at 7.58 a.m. It was part of a thread which he had started by accusing The
Australian journalist Bernard Lane of ‘attacking . . . transgender children and
kids’ hospitals’, linking to an article at junkee.com whose headline was ‘The
Australian Has Compared Being Transgender to Having Coronavirus’. Online
at https://twitter.com/mrbenjaminlaw/status/1227010643267444736 accessed
14th June 2020.
38. Shidlo & Schroeder (2002, pp. 249, 254–256).
39. Same-­sex attraction is particularly significant given that the same marker—
gender non-­conformity—that might be used to infer or attribute trans status
correlates strongly with non-­heterosexual sexual orientation. One study of
2,428 girls and 2,169 boys ‘found that the levels of gender-­typed behaviour at
ages 3.5 and 4.75 years . . . significantly and consistently predicted adolescents’
sexual orientation at age 15 years’ (Li et al. 2017, p. 764); another using data from a
longitudinal study of 5,007 young people said ‘Gender nonconformity was
strongly associated with later male and female nonheterosexuality’ (Xu et al. 2019,
p. 1226); a paper discussing the relationship between the science of sexual orien-
tation and the politics of it notes ‘childhood gender nonconformity—behaving
like the other sex—is a strong correlate of adult sexual orientation that has been
consistently and repeatedly replicated’, and explained further, ‘In girls, gender
nonconformity comprises dressing like and playing with boys, showing interest
in competitive sports and rough play, lacking interest in conventionally female
toys such as dolls and makeup, and desiring to be a boy’ (Bailey et al. 2016, p. 57).
40. The term ‘puberty blockers’ refers to a Gonadotropin-­Releasing Hormone agon­
ist (GnRHa), originally developed to treat prostate cancer, and also used to
delay abnormally early puberties. An endocrinologist in Amsterdam in 1994
used it ‘to stop normal puberty altogether’ (Biggs 2019, p. 1). A 2011 experimental
study in the UK gave puberty blockers to forty-­four children. University of
Oxford sociologist Michael Biggs uses information obtained under the Freedom
of Information Act to argue that the results of this ‘experiment’ were more nega-
tive than positive, and concludes that negative evidence has been ignored or
suppressed (Biggs  2019). The NHS themselves admit that GnRHa ‘was not
licensed for use in addressing dysphoria in gender identity disorders’, although
they say that this is common (NHS 2019). The Society for Evidence-­Based Gender
 Notes  239

Medicine summarize a review—undertaken in 2020, published in 2021—by the

UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE): ‘The review of
GnRH agonists (puberty blockers) makes for sobering reading. Its major find-
ing is that GnRH agonists lead to little or no change in gender dysphoria, men-
tal health, body image and psychosocial functioning. In the few studies that did
report change, the results could be attributable to bias or chance, or were
deemed unreliable. The landmark Dutch study by De Vries et al. (2011) was
considered “at high risk of bias,” and of “poor quality overall.” The reviewers
suggested that findings of no change may in practice be clinically significant, in
view of the possibility that study subjects’ distress might otherwise have
increased. The reviewers cautioned that all the studies evaluated had results of
“very low” certainty, and were subject to bias and confounding. The review of
cross-­sex hormones identified similar shortcomings in the quality of the evi-
dence. The reviewers noted that “a fundamental limitation of all the uncon-
trolled studies in this review is that any changes in scores from baseline to
follow-­up could be attributed to a regression-­to-­the-­mean,” rather than the
beneficial effects of hormone treatment. No study reported concomitant treat-
ments in detail, meaning that it is unclear if positive changes were due to hor-
mones or the other treatments participants may have received. The reviewers
suggested that hormones may improve symptoms of gender dysphoria, mental
health, and psychosocial functioning, but cautioned that potential benefits are
of very low certainty and “must be weighed against the largely unknown long-­
term safety profile of these treatments” ’ (SEGM 2021).
41. Lyons (2016).
42. Vrouenraets et al. (2015).
43. Kirkup (2020).
44. de Vries et al. (2011); see also discussion in Kearns (2019).
45. de Vries et al. (2011).
46. Bell v. Tavistock Judgement, paragraph 56, p. 14 of PDF.
47. Their judgement acknowledged one expert saying that ‘of the adolescents who
started puberty suppression, only 1.9 per cent stopped the treatment and did
not proceed to cross-­sex hormones’, but also cited another, saying that of forty-­
nine children and young people who had accessed endocrinology services ‘only
55% (27 individuals) were subsequently approved for or accessed cross-­sex
hormones during their time with GIDS’ (paragraph 26, p. 9 of PDF).
48. See discussion in Kearns (2019); and e.g. Wallien & Cohen-­Kettenis (2008);
Ristori & Steensma (2016); and Steensma & Cohen-­Kettenis (2018). Studies on
desistance tend to be based on people who experienced childhood gender
dysphoria, so it’s not clear whether the same findings will apply to the ‘rapid
onset gender dysphoria’ that is more common in adolescents and young adults
today, especially girls.
240 Notes

49. Quoted in Kearns (2019).

50. See further discussion in Moore & Brunskell-­Evans (2019). The Bell v. Tavistock
judgement also supports this point about pathway dependence: ‘The evidence
shows that the vast majority of children who take PBs [puberty blockers] move
on to take cross-­sex hormones, that Stages 1 and 2 are two stages of one clinical
pathway and once on that pathway it is extremely rare for a child to get off
it’ (point 136). Although, cf. the Court of Appeals judgement, paragraph 26
(details in n. 47).
51. The judgement (Bell v. Tavistock) is online here: https://www.judiciary.uk/
wp-­content/uploads/2020/12/Bell-­v-­Tavistock-­Judgment.pdf
52. They did question the empirical claims made in two of the points, namely
whether there really is pathway dependence between puberty blockers and
cross-­sex hormones, and whether puberty blockers really are an ‘experimental’
treatment. Court of Appeals, paragraphs 63 and 64, pp. 18–19 of PDF.
53. Court of Appeals, paragraph 92, p. 25 of PDF.
54. Cohen & Barnes (2019); Ferguson & O’Connell (2019).
55. E.g. Schneider et al. (2017).
56. Pang et al. (2020).
57. According to ‘The Report of the 2015 U.S.  Transgender Survey 2015’, 36 per
cent of transgender men had had chest surgery reduction or reconstruction, 14
per cent had had a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), 2 per cent had had
metoidioplasty (creation of a ‘neophallus’ or new penis out of clitoral growth
created by taking testosterone), 3 per cent had had phalloplasty (construction
of a penis using skin grafts from the arm, leg, or torso), and 6 per cent had had
another procedure not listed. Of those surveyed who hadn’t had the procedures
yet, 61 per cent wanted chest surgery reduction or reconstruction, 57 per cent
wanted a hysterectomy, 49 per cent wanted metoidioplasty, and 43 per cent
wanted phalloplasty. In comparison, among girls who identified as nonbinary,
only 6 per cent had had chest surgery reduction or reconstruction and only
2 per cent had had hysterectomies, although 42 per cent wanted the former and
30 per cent wanted the latter (James et al. 2016).
58. According to ‘The Report of the 2015 U.S.  Transgender Survey 2015’, 48 per
cent of transgender women had had hair removal or electrolysis, 12 per cent
had had vaginoplasty or labiaplasty (in trans cases this means the construction
of a ‘neovagina’ or ‘neolabia’ and/or ‘neoclitoris’ from existing genital tissue),
11  per cent had had augmentation mammoplasty (breast construction or
enhancement), 11 per cent had had an orchiectomy (removal of the testicles),
7  per cent had had facial feminization surgery, 5 per cent had had a tracheal
shave (reduction of the Adam’s apple), 3 per cent had had silicone injections,
1 per cent had had voice surgery, and 6 per cent had had other procedures not
listed. 54 per cent of those surveyed who hadn’t had the procedures yet wanted
 Notes  241

to have vaginoplasty or labiaplasty, and over 40 per cent wanted to have hair
removal or electrolysis, augmentation mammoplasty, orchiectomy, and facial
feminization surgery (James et al. 2016). A 2016 study by the Williams Institute
put the number of transgender people in the United States at 0.6 per cent of the
population, most common in the 18‒24-­year-­old age bracket.
59. For example, the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute considered thirty-­five peer-­
reviewed studies, and concluded ‘peer-­reviewed empirical studies indicate that
SOGI [sexual orientation and gender identity] conversion practices have
significant and prolonged harmful effects on people subjected to them. These
include depression, loneliness, alienation, increased risk of drug abuse, and
suicidal ideation and suicide attempts’ (Tasmanian Law Reform Institute 2020,
p. 15). But only thirteen of the papers even mention gender identity.
Conclusions about sexual orientation seem to have been generalized to gender
identity; it is unclear whether this is simply because there has been a habit of
pairing sexual orientation and gender identity as ‘SOGI’ since the Yogyakarta
Principles were drafted, or because the structure of the two is assumed to be the
same, or for some other reason.
60. Ehrensaft (2017).
61. It is unfortunate that the research report did not announce the sex breakdown
of the nonbinary respondents, although they did collect the data. The report is
linked here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-­lgbt-­survey-­
summary-­report see ‘National LGBT Survey: Research Report’, p. 19, fig. 3.3;
and Annex 2, Question 3, p. 272.
62. An Australian study from 2018 reported on nonbinary identification by sex,
finding that of 1,613 trans and gender diverse respondents, 53.5 per cent were
nonbinary, with a ratio of 39.2 per cent female to only 14.3 per cent male (the
study uses the phrases ‘assigned female at birth’ and ‘assigned male at birth’)
(Callander et al.  2019, p. 6). A large American study from 2015 on 27,715
transgender respondents asked about the sex respondents were ‘assigned at
birth, on [their] original birth certificate’, and found that of the 35 per cent non-
binary respondents, 80 per cent were female, and only 20 per cent male (James
et al. 2016, p. 45). So it seems fairly safe to assume that the UK data (see n. 61
above), had it been reported, would have also shown a skew towards female
people being identified as nonbinary.
63. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-­lgbt-­survey-­summary-­
report/national-­lgbt-­survey-­summary-­report#the-­results
64. A similar trend has been observed at a clinic in Wellington, New Zealand, with
a ‘particular increase in referrals for people under age 30, as well as an
increasing proportion of people requesting female-­to-­male (FtM) therapy so
that it is now approaching the number of people requesting male-­to-­female
therapy (MtF)’ (Delahunt et al. 2018, p. 33).
242 Notes

65. Callander et al. (2019, p. 10).

66. The study left it unclear whether these experiences happened while trans-­
identified or could be what led girls to identify out of girl-/womanhood.
67. Government Equalities Office (2018, p. 57).
68. Winer (2015). Note that homosexuality is illegal in Iran, and the state subsidizes
sex reassignment surgery. This means it is likely that at least some of the people
who have had sex reassignment surgery in Iran are in fact gay men, not
transwomen (and so my description of the soccer team’s players may be
incorrect). See discussion in The Economist (2019): ‘Gay Iranians face pressure
to change their sex regardless of whether they want to, say activists and
psychologists in Iran’.
69. Bannerman (2017).
70. Rodgers (2019).
71. Pulver (2018).
72. Strudwick (2015); Bartosch (2018).
73. Darbyshire (2018); Bannerman (2018).
74. Ekman (2018); Sutton (2019); Hunter (2020).
75. Brean (2018).
76. Lorde (1984, p. 78).
77. Lorde (1984, p. 78).
78. Finlayson et al. (2018).
79. Finlayson et al. (2018).
80. Kathleen Stock dates this as starting around 1990, with Judith Butler’s influential
book Gender Trouble (which directed people to ‘trouble’ the existing binary
gender categories), but really taking off in the 2000s, getting a big boost in 2007
with Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl (which proclaimed that gender identity is
what makes a person a woman or man). Stock says the word ‘transgender’ got its
contemporary meaning in 1992, ‘trans’ in 1998. Before that it was ‘transsexual’
and this meant specifically a person who had had sex reassignment surgery. See
discussion in Stock’s book Material Girls, ch. 1 (Stock 2021).
81. To quote them more fully: ‘from an academic standpoint the medical field is
suffering from a paucity of published data on the care of transgender patients
and outcomes related to this care, especially in core medical journals. This is
likely a result of a dearth of submissions from physician-­researchers, lack of
original research, and an overall lack of high-­quality research. Our review
demonstrates that most of the published work that exists is not primary
research, and there are very few studies that look at long-­term outcomes. Even
fewer studies are prospective in nature, and only 11 were randomized controlled
trials. While we acknowledge that such research design may not always be
feasible or ethical, carefully designed studies will ultimately be the driving
factor in moving the field towards a more evidence-­based model of medicine.
This, combined with longer patient follow-­up and more prospective trials, will
 Notes  243

improve our overall quality of research and allow us to better care for our
patients’ (Wanta & Unger  2017). The authors also noted that there were only
forty-­six articles on the epidemiology of transgenderism, the most robust of
which came from only six European countries, and no comprehensive epidemio-
logical studies done in the United States (Wanta & Unger 2017, p. 122).
82. For a more detailed discussion of the idea of ‘gender identity’, told in ‘eight key
moments’, see discussion in Stock’s Material Girls, chs. 1 and 4 (2021).
83. McCook (2018); Wadman (2018); Marcus (2020).
84. See n. 58 to this chapter.
85. For the considerable expansion of the community considered ‘trans’ today,
see the ‘Transgender Umbrella’ image from The Gender Book, online at www.
thegenderbook.com and reproduced in Griffin et al. 2021, p. 292).
86. ‘Queer’ arguably is such a concept, so imagine that all the people doing
empirical research into sexual orientation could now only work with cohorts of
people who self-­identify as ‘queer’, which might mean that they are heterosexual
but polyamorous; heterosexual but claim a cross-­sex or no-­sex gender identity;
or heterosexual but in some other way feel the label ‘queer’ is appropriate
to them.
87. Blanchard (1989, p. 324).
88. Blanchard (1989, p. 325).
89. Blanchard (1989, p. 327).
90. Lawrence (2017, p. 41).
91. Lawrence (2017, p. 41).
92. Bailey (2003); Lawrence (2013). Lawrence reports on some of the personal nar-
ratives she collected from autogynephilic males over thirteen years. Here are
just a few, to illustrate: ‘My sexual fantasies all include myself in female form,
either being forced to become female or voluntarily. Frequently they involve a
submissive element on my part: I am either forced to be a woman or forced to
behave in a particularly submissive manner’ (Lawrence 2013, p. 47). ‘I know that
I don’t simply have a cross-­dressing fetish, because my greatest sexual fantasy is
going through puberty again as a girl and experiencing breast development, as
well as being in pillow fights and bubble-­gum blowing contests with other girls’
(p. 48). Lawrence summarizes the major themes of the 249 informants’ personal
narratives as follows: ‘Usually concede that they were not overtly effeminate
during childhood but instead displayed many male-­typical interests and behav-
iours’; ‘Often report that autogynephilic erotic arousal has continued through-
out their lives, including after sex reassignment’; ‘Usually give a history of erotic
arousal associated with the fantasy or act of wearing particular items of wom-
en’s clothing’; ‘Almost always report a history of erotic arousal associated with
the fantasy or reality of having female breasts or genitalia’; ‘Sometimes give a
history of erotic arousal associated with fantasies of menstruating, breast-­feeding,
or being pregnant’; and ‘Often report a history of erotic arousal associated with
244 Notes

the fantasy or act of engaging in behaviours considered typical or characteristic

of females’ (Lawrence 2013, pp. 53; for the full summary see pp. 53–54).
93. Documented in detail in Dreger (2008).
94. See e.g. Joel (2015); Fine (2017).
95. Bailey & Triea (2007, p. 527).
96. Blanchard (1985); Serano (2010); Lawrence (2017, p. 42).
97. Serano (2010, p. 177).
98. Blanchard (2005, p. 444).
99. Serano (2010) claims that it’s natural for gender dysphoric people to fantasize
about their sex lives ‘inhabiting the “right” body’, and even suggests that doing
so is a ‘coping mechanism’ (Serano  2010, p. 184). But it’s hard to square this
sanitized version of autogynephilia (which she calls ‘cross-­gender arousal’)
with what autogynephilic people actually say, for examples of which see
(Lawrence 2013) and n. 92 above.
100. Blanchard et al. (1987, p. 143). Compare this to the women: out of seventy-­two,
seventy-­one were homosexual and one was heterosexual. It seems there is no
sexual excitement to be found in dressing like a man or being treated like a man,
perhaps because maleness is not subordinated and therefore not culturally taboo.
101. See n. 88 to this chapter.
102. There’s an excellent discussion between counsellor Sasha Ayad and psycho-
therapist Stella O’Malley about boys who identify as transgender in the podcast
Gender: A Wider Lens, episodes ‘Gender Dysphoria in Boys: Part 1’ and ‘Gender
Dysphoria in Boys: Part 2’ (episode 20, 23rd April 2021; and episode 21, 30th
April 2021). Both agree that there is a category of boys today that don’t fit the
older typology. As Ayad puts it ‘there’s something else going on here’ (episode
20, 00:01:46). Online at https://gender-­a-­wider-­lens.captivate.fm/episode/20-­
gender-­dysphoria-­in-­boys-­part-­1
103. Stone (2006); Feinberg (2006). For a more recent version, see Dembroff (2018).
104. Dhejne et al. (2011, p. 3).
105. In full: ‘regarding any crime, males-­to-­females had a significantly increased risk
for crime compared to female controls . . . but not compared to males . . . This
indicates that they retained a male pattern regarding criminality’ (Dhejne
et al. 2011, p. 6).
106. The adjustment for psychiatric morbidity was thought necessary because

‘transsexual individuals had been hospitalized for psychiatric comorbidity
other than gender identity disorder prior to sex reassignment about four times
more often than controls’ (Dhejne et al. 2011, p. 4). It’s not clear that women
should be interested in what the risk of violent crime by transsexual women
would be if four times as many transsexual women as other males didn’t have
psychiatric comorbidities. Arguably, we should be interested in the actual risk,
given the comorbidities. The data comparing rates of violent crime in transsexual
women relative to ‘birth sex’ (i.e. male) controls is available in table S1, and
 Notes  245

relative to ‘final sex’ controls (i.e. female) is available in table S2 in the section
‘Supporting Information’ for the paper online: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885#s5
107. If we consider only the data for all transsexual subjects in the study, rather than
considering transsexual men and transsexual women separately, then this
mixed-­sex cohort is more likely to have been convicted for any crime or violent
crime than non-­transsexual controls (Dhejne et al. 2011, p. 6). This finding was
significant in the time-­divided cohort 1973–88, but there was inadequate data
to reach a conclusion for the 1989–2003 cohort. (Some commentators have
slipped into claiming that the finding was not significant in the later cohort, or
was only significant in the earlier cohort, both of which are strictly true, but
misleading.) Emphasizing this point allows the speculative explanation that it
was the social conditions pre-­1989 that explained the findings. Dhejne et al.
comment on the improved survival of transsexual subjects in the later cohort
that it ‘might be explained by improved health care for transsexual persons
during 1990s, along with altered social attitudes towards persons with different
gender expressions’ (Dhejne et al.  2011, p. 6). But even if that speculative
explanation were correct, in considering whether we could expect it to generalize
we would need to consider that (i) most transwomen today are not transsexual;
and (ii) most live in countries that are not Sweden, and so may not have
Sweden’s post-­1990 social conditions.
108. Let me be absolutely clear that the issue here is sex (being male or female), not
gender identity or transgender status (specifically, being a transwoman).
Dhejne et al. are also clear on this point, noting that their male-­pattern crime
finding had nothing to do with sex reassignment and everything to do with
being male. They said ‘Criminal activity, particularly violent crime, is much
more common among men than women in the general population . . . In this
study, male-­to-­female individuals had a higher risk for criminal convictions
compared to female controls but not compared to male controls. This suggests
that the sex reassignment procedure neither increased nor decreased the risk
for criminal offending in male-­to-­females’ (Dhejne et al. 2011, p. 6). There is no
claim being made, either by them or by me, that being trans in general, or being
a transwoman in particular, involves specific traits that make that group
dangerous to women. (For an example of this misunderstanding, see e.g.
Rebecca Solnit (2020), who wrote ‘One of the really weird fears about trans
women is that they’re men pretending to be women to do nefarious things to
other women’.) The issue is maleness. Gender-­critical feminists do not need to
take a stand on whether it is male biology, testosterone, male socialization, sex-­
differentiated evolved psychology, or any other of a range of competing hypoth-
eses that account for observed differences between the sexes, particularly when
it comes to physical and sexual violence. None of these hypotheses plausibly
rule in non-­trans men and rule out transwomen.
246 Notes

1 09. See e.g. Weale (2017); McCook (2018); Marcus (2020); and Gliske (2020).
110. See also Bailey (2003).
111. Bicchieri (2017).
112. Kuran (1990).
113. I am wary of discussing being gay and being trans together, given their recent
pairing in conversion therapy legislation around the world, which applies data
about attempts to change or suppress sexual orientations over to gender
identities in order to mandate strict affirmation policies. They are not the same.
But many gender non-­conforming boys will turn out to be gay, so it is relevant
to discuss them together here. On feminine boys, see Bailey (2003).
114. How trans people are protected at the moment is complicated and differs
between countries. In Victoria, Australia, any transwoman who has secured a
legal change of sex (which is just a matter of a statutory declaration) is legally
female. All other transwomen are protected via ‘gender identity’, which is a
protected attribute. In all cases where there are exceptions to anti-­discrimination
legislation on the basis of sex, e.g. to permit some single-­sex activities or spaces,
gender identity trumps sex (so such spaces could exclude a non-­trans man, but
not a transwoman). The only exception is elite sports, where it is permissible to
exclude on the basis of both sex and gender identity. So when I say ‘protected as
the sex they identify as’, I mean either by being classed as legally that sex, or by
their status as a person with a gender identity trumping sex as a protected
attribute and so effectively securing the same thing as if they had the legal sex.
115. Frye’s essay ‘Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement: Another View of
Male Supremacy, Another Separatism’ makes a persuasive case against thinking
that gay men and lesbian women have anything much in common—she says
that their ‘femininity’ is ‘a casual and cynical mockery of women, for whom
femininity is the trappings of oppression’ and a ‘serious sport’ (Frye 1983,
pp. 128–151).
116. Legislation passed recently in Victoria, Australia, for example makes it a

criminal offence to engage in a ‘change or suppression’ practice (defined as a
failure to ‘support or affirm’ a person’s gender identity, with limited exceptions)
where that practice results in injury or serious injury. The original target of
such legislation, a version of which already exists in Queensland and the
Australian Capital Territory, was to prohibit the ‘conversion’ of homosexual
sexual orientations by faith groups. Gender identity has simply been added in
alongside sexual orientation, as though it has the same status and history. See
references in nn. 22 and 59 to this chapter.
117. An employment tribunal in the UK awarded £20,000 to Sonia Appleby, the
child safeguarding lead for an NHS gender identity clinic, who was subjected
to hostile treatment in the workplace after raising concerns about the clinic’s
practices (Griffiths & Das  2021). There is testimony throughout Michelle
Moore & Heather Brunskell-­Evans’ book Inventing Transgender Children and
 Notes  247

Young People from clinicians and other practitioners about the ‘affirmation-­
only’ culture inside gender medicine (Moore & Brunskell-­Evans 2019). The
Society for Evidence-­Based Gender Medicine were not allowed to have a stand
at the recent American Academy of Paediatrics conference (SEGM  2021).
Endocrinologist Will Malone said, on the podcast Gender: A Wider Lens, that at
the conference where affirmative-­care standards were introduced, there was no
counterpoint presented (unlike every other session, where one expert argues
for a new medical intervention and another expert argues the counterpoint)
(Ayad & O’Malley  2021, 00:20:24‒00:23:47). The Care Quality Commission
Report (January 2021) of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust’s
Gender Identity Services (GIDS) rated the service ‘inadequate’, and noted that
‘Staff did not always feel respected, supported, and valued. Some said they felt
unable to raise concerns without fear of retribution’ (p. 4).
118. See e.g. Chambers (2008, ch. 5); Jeffreys (2014, ch. 8).
119. As discussed in Littman (2018).
120. See also Vincent & Jane (forthcoming).
121. For more on gender abolitionism versus gender revisionism, see Lawford-­
Smith (2020a).

Chapter 6

1. She tweeted ‘If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-­sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the
lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but
erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully
­d iscuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth’ (J. K. Rowling @jk_rowling,
6th June 2020 at 8.02 a.m., online at https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/
1269389298664701952). Some of the abusive responses to her have been collated
here:https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-­k-­rowling-­and-­the-­trans-­activists-­a-­story-­
in-­screenshots-­78e01dca68d posted 9th June 2020 accessed 13th June 2020.
2. A fourth explanation, which I don’t have space to develop here, is that such
antagonism is tribal, less about the gender-­critical feminists who are the targets
of the animosity and more about what expressions of animosity signal socially.
For more on this theme, in connection with the use of slurs, see Nunberg (2017).
3. Murphy (2020a).
4. Sundar (2020).
5. Sundar (2020).
6. Murphy (2020a).
7. Sundar (2020).
8. ‘Desi’ means something like ‘ex-­pat’; Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi people
who live abroad.
9. Sundar (2020).
248 Notes

10. Murphy says she thinks those who most frequently oppose her tend to be leftist
men, anarchists, and college student activists, as well as women who are sex
worker rights activists and trans rights activists. Those who petitioned to have
her fired from Rabble in 2015 describe themselves as ‘feminists, grassroots
community groups and organizations that support intersectional feminism’—
see nn. 13 and 14.
11. In 1793 the feminist Olympe de Gouges was executed by guillotine in Paris, one
of roughly 370 women to be killed this way during the French Revolution.
Historian Oliver Blanc told Haaretz ‘She [Gouges] is much more than the first
feminist in the modern era. She is one of the first women who entered political
life. She was a model for other women, and for that she also paid with her life’
(Bar  2017). In 1943, Marie-­ Louise Giraud was executed by guillotine for
performing illegal abortions—one of the last five women to be executed this
way in France (Conerly 2017).
12. Acosta (2019).
13. https://www.change.org/p/rabble-­ca-­we-­demand-­that-­rabble-­ca-­end-­your-
­association-­with-­meghan-­murphy-­as-­editor-­and-­columnist
14. https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/rabble-­staff/2015/05/statement-­on-­review-­
meghan-­murphy-­petitions
15. Murphy, p.c.
16. Ekman ([2010] 2013, p. 116).
17. Ekman ([2010] 2013, p. 116).
18. Lewis (2019).
19. The Heritage Foundation hosted an event called ‘The Inequality of the Equality
Act: Concerns from the Left’, featuring speakers Julia Beck, Jennifer Chavez,
Kara Dansky, and Hasci Horvath (a full video is available on their website). The
event was initiated by Katherine Cave of the Kelsey Coalition, which is non-­
partisan. In an interview with Meghan Murphy for Feminist Current, Julia Beck
explains that ‘Cave spent four years searching for anyone willing to speak
publicly about how “gender identity” impacts children and their parents. She
asked every left-­leaning think tank she could find, but they either flatly refused
with accusations of “transphobia”, or simply did not reply. Eventually, Cave and
WoLF [radical feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front] worked
together to plan a panel of left-­ leaning people to speak at The Heritage
Foundation. At the beginning of 2019, no other platform with half as much
political influence as Heritage even dared to challenge the status quo, and that
remains the same today’ (Murphy 2019c).
20. Hay (2019). Murphy (2019b) is a useful reply to Hay.
21. Burns (2019).
22. See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-­ 018-­
07238-­8 and https://
www.nature.com/news/sex-­redefined-­1.16943
 Notes  249

23. To give some examples: laws in Australia, Canada, the UK, the United States,
and a number of other countries have been rapidly changed to introduce gender
identity ideology, in sex self-­identification bills, conversion therapy bills, and
vilification/hate speech bills. In my own state, Victoria, Australia, since 2019,
we have had the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Amendment Bill
(sex self-­identification), the Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices
Prohibition Bill (conversion therapy), and Racial and Religious Tolerance
Amendment Bill (vilification). The first makes change of legal sex obtainable by
statutory declaration, the second prohibits the change or suppression of gender
identities, and the third will prohibit vilification on the grounds of gender
identity. Major lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) charities have
become preoccupied by gender identity activism (for example, Stonewall in the
UK—see discussion in Siddique 2021). University policies are entrenching the
ideology through diversity and inclusion policy. My own university, the
University of Melbourne, in 2021 issued a draft ‘Gender Affirmation Policy’ for
consultation, which would give gender identity activist groups on campus veto
power over events on campus (at my time of writing this, a revised draft was
due to be released). Oxford sociologist Michael Biggs has collated data on the
words ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, and ‘transgender’ appearing in annual reports
over the years for Stonewall, the Equality Network, LGBT Youth Scotland, and
the Human Rights Commission, most showing a radical increase for (and
contemporary disproportionate focus on) ‘transgender’ over time; as well as
funding from Big Lottery Fund, BBC Children in Need, and academic grants,
to trans-­related projects; and increases in funding over time to Mermaids, a UK
trans-­focused charity. See https://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0060/LGBT_figures.
shtml#GLAAD
24. Byrne (2020).
25. Dembroff (2021, pp. 1 (abstract) and 11). Page numbers correspond to the pre-­
print of paper, archived at https://philpapers.org/rec/DEMETN 20th April 2020.
26. To be even more precise, the slogan as it appears on billboards and pamphlets
(as Dembroff described) is ‘woman [line break] wʊmən [line break] noun [line
break] adult human female’. There is an image of a billboard put up by the cam-
paign group Speak Up For Women New Zealand in 2021 in Wells (2021).
27. Some women have gotten so fed up of leftist identity politics and its failure to
take adequate action on issues that affect women that they’ve given up
memberships in left-­wing parties, and in some cases given up identifying with
‘the left’ at all. This happened recently in the UK, when members of the UK
Labour party signed a pledge to expel members who had expressed ‘transphobic’
views. See discussion in Parker (2020). Needless to say, this doesn’t make those
who left the party ‘conservative’.
28. Ekman ([2010] 2013, p. 22).
250 Notes

29. This comes under the heading ‘Repeated and/or non-­consensual slurs, epithets,
racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone’. The policy
reads ‘We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content
that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes
about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming
of transgender individuals’ (my emphasis). Online at https://help.twitter.com/
en/rules-­and-­policies/hateful-­conduct-­policy
30. See further discussion in Lawford-­Smith & Megarry (forthcoming).
31. Macandrew et al. (2019).
32. I say ‘uses the name’ rather than is named, as does Libby Brooks writing for The
Guardian (Brooks  2019), because bizarrely, this transwoman seems to have
taken the name ‘Cathy Brennan’ from a prominent radical feminist activist in
the United States.
33. Davidson (2019a).
34. Brooks (2019).
35. Davidson (2019a).
36. Davidson (2019a).
37. Twitter, @TownTattle, Replying to @fem_dr, 8th May 2019, 12.09 a.m. (my
emphasis).
38. Baynes (2019).
39. Davidson (2019b).
40. Izaakson (2018).
41. Vonow (2017). The Sun reports the Hyde Park event as a talk titled ‘What is
Gender? The Gender Recognition Act and Beyond’ (Vonow 2017). But seeing
as the Sun reporter describes MacLachlan as ‘a member of TERF’—and
describes the altercation in the rather colourful terms, ‘Fists went flying at
Speakers’ Corner, London, when the Trans-­Exclusionary Radical Feminists
(TERFs) and their enemies Trans Activists clashed in the bust-­up about 7pm on
September 3’ (Vonow 2017)—I’m going to assume that Feminist Current has the
more accurate information.
42. Pearson-­Jones (2018).
43. Izaakson (2018).
44. Izaakson (2018).
45. Sommers (1994, p. 29).
46. Stoljar (1995, p. 265).
47. In the first book-­length indictment of this kind of feminism—arguing for the
conclusion that there is no such thing as ‘women as a class’ and denying that
white middle-­ class women are oppressed—the antagonists identified as
deserving a chapter of their own were the following rather curious bunch:
Plato, Aristotle (neither generally considered a feminist), Simone de Beauvoir
(writing more than a decade before the second wave began), and Nancy
Chodorow (Spelman 1988). A few other culprits have been named elsewhere,
 Notes  251

most notably Betty Friedan, named by bell hooks ([1984] 2000, pp. 1–3), and
Mary Daly, named by Audre Lorde in ‘An Open Letter to Mary Daly’
(Lorde 1984). Friedan’s mistake was writing about the predicament of a majority
of American women (roughly two-­ thirds, according to hooks) without
acknowledging that they were only a majority, rather than ‘women’ in general
(hooks [1984] 2000, p. 2). Friedan’s mistake may have been less in failing to
acknowledge that some women were black, as in failing to acknowledge that
half of all black people were women. Daly’s mistake was in writing about
ancient goddesses from the European tradition, and failing to mention the
African goddesses (Lorde 1984, pp. 66–71).
48. Frye ([1981] 1983, pp. 110–127).
49. Peoples (2016).
50. hooks (1982, ch. 4).
51. hooks ([1984] 2000, ch. 5, esp. pp. 69–70).
52. For example, the Human Rights Campaign resource, ‘5 Things to Know to
Make Your Feminism Trans-­Inclusive’, is focused on transwomen and includes
the section ‘Centering the Most Marginalized Is Key’ (https://www.hrc.org/
resources/5-­things-­to-­know-­to-­make-­your-­feminism-­trans-­inclusive). See also
Saul (2020), who describes transwomen as ‘some of the most marginalised
women’. Obviously, which social groups come out as ‘the most marginalized’
will depend on what we consider to be marginalization, and how we
conceptualize the social group (consider the difference between lesbians, on the
one hand, and the LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, and
asexual plus), on the other; or transsexuals, on the one hand, and anyone with
an atypical gender identity (relative to their sex), on the other). But there is
evidence that some of the claims about marginalization frequently repeated
across the media, for example about murder and suicide rates, are false. See
discussion in Biggs (2015) and Reilly (2019).
53. Wittgenstein (1969).
54. See discussion in Pritchard (2011, pp. 524–532).
55. Pritchard (2011, p. 528).
56. See discussion in Cohen (2003).
57. Rowland (2017, p. 812).
58. See overview in Gosepath (2007).
59. Flynn (2000).
60. See e.g. Sunstein (1999).
61. Judith Butler has said, for example, ‘every person should have the right to deter-
mine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives’ (Williams n.d.).
62. Another might be, ‘if a social group has high rates of suicide ideation we should
give them whatever they’re asking for’. (Suicide ideation is thoughts about
suicide, including thinking about, considering, or planning it.) Suicide ideation
tends to be weaponized by trans activists—a mother threatening the Tavistock
252 Notes

gender clinic in the UK with litigation to stop her autistic daughter being
medicalized says that suicide is used as ‘emotional blackmail to show why we
should capitulate with every single demand around trans rights’ (Lane 2019). A
problem with this ‘value’ is that suicide is a problem for adolescent males in
general, not just those who identify as transgender. Suicide is the third most
common cause of death for adolescent males globally, and in Australia the
leading cause of death for males aged 15–25 years old (King et al. 2020, p. 1).
One group of researchers have argued that norms of ‘ideal’ masculinity
contribute to this, finding that ‘greater conformity to heterosexual norms was
associated with reduced odds of reporting suicide ideation’ (p. 5). In other
words, less masculine-­conforming males were more likely to have thought
about suicide. This may be because conformity to gender norms has a
‘protective effect’ (p. 6) (conformity is rewarded while violation is sanctioned).
This is likely to implicate transgirls and transwomen, but it is significant that it
is not limited to them. The result persisted even when sexual minorities were
removed from the sample.
63. Most recently, gender identity activist Peter Tatchell pulled out of a podcast
debate with gender-­critical feminist Kathleen Stock, after pressure from other
gender identity activists (Kelleher 2021). See also discussion in (Turner 2018).
64. Dembroff et al. (2019).
65. Stock et al. (2019); see also discussion in Lawford-­Smith (2019).
66. Stanley (2015).
67. Stanley (2015, p. 53).
68. Stanley (2015, p. 58).
69. Stanley (2015, p. 57).
70. Stanley (2015, p. 60).
71. Stanley (2015, p. xiv).
72. Lance (2019).
73. Lance (2019).
74. Lance (2019; my emphasis).
75. To be fair, some of the radical feminists were guilty of these tactics. Janice
Raymond wrote that ‘all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real
female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves’
(Raymond 1979, p. 104; my emphasis). Jo Freeman does the same thing, writing
that ‘[t]rashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination which
amounts to psychological rape’ (Freeman  1976; my emphasis). Shulamith
Firestone, herself Jewish, wrote in The Dialectic of Sex that love—specifically
men’s love of women—was a holocaust (Firestone 1970, p. 119).
76. Stanley (2015, pp. 3–8).
77. Sheila Jeffreys, p.c.
78. Ekman ([2010] 2013, pp. 15–30).
79. Ekman ([2010] 2013, p. 104).
 Notes  253

80. Ekman ([2010] 2013, pp. 104–105).

81. Ekman ([2010] 2013, pp. 94–100).
82. Ross et al. (2004) see also discussion in Ekman ([2010] 2013, pp. 102–103).
83. For six of the countries in the study (Canada, Colombia, Germany, Mexico,
Turkey, and Zambia—a majority), data is gathered on ‘women’, but for three (South
Africa, Thailand, and the USA), it’s ‘people’ (allowing for the men, children, and
trans people who work in prostitution) (see Farley et al. 2004, p. 48).
84. Farley et al. (2004).
85. Farley et al. (2004, pp. 33–34, 56); see also discussion in Ekman ([2010] 2013,
p. 102).
86. ‘Listen to sex workers’ (deference) (Scarlet Alliance 2011); ‘The Convention on
the Rights of the Child (CRC) takes a similar approach, promoting measures
that curb and punish the activities of those who sexually exploit children,
without any reference to the emerging sexual rights and agency of children and
young people’ (agency) (Otto 2007, p. 269, in-­text references removed); ‘I want
people to engage in educated conversations and disagreements so we can get to
the best possible place to protect surrogates and the intended parents’ right to
make the choice that works for them’ (choice) (Rosen 2020. See also Rudrappa
(2010) and Riggs (2016) for extensive commentary on narratives about ‘choice’
in contract pregnancy.
87. McKinnon’s contribution was not peer-­reviewed. This is standard practice for
book symposiums at the journal.
88. McKinnon (2018, p. 484).
89. Allen et al. (2018a and 2018b). See also https://terfisaslur.com/and https://www.
reddit.com/r/terfisaslur/ for examples of its use.
90. See e.g. the empirical evidence collected in Fine (2010).
91. Dembroff (2018). The full paragraph is: ‘I consider nonbinary identity to be an
unabashedly political identity. It is for anyone who wishes to wield self-­
understanding in service of dismantling a mandatory, self-­reproducing gender
system that strictly controls what we can do and be’.
92. https://adfmedialegalfiles.blob.core.windows.net/files/SouleDisqualifyMotion
AndMemo.pdf p. 36 (page numbers correspond to the PDF, not to page headers
or document page numbers). In response to a follow-­up question by the
Plaintiff ’s council, the court allowed that the transwomen athletes could be
referred to as ‘transgender athletes’, and that it was acceptable to refer to their
having ‘male bodies’, and having gone through ‘male puberty’. The bright line
was that they not be referred to as simply ‘male’. In their later motion to dis-
qualify, arguing that the court’s request with respect to language showed bias,
the Plaintiff ’s council wrote ‘The use of the word “male” to describe individuals
who have been genetically male since conception and possess male bodies is
accurate, consistent with timeless use as well as formal definitions of “male”, and
follows widespread usage in legal contexts in which accuracy is required’ (p. 8).
254 Notes

93. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5e15e7f8e5274a06b555b8b0/
Maya_Forstater__vs_CGD_Europe__Centre_for_Global_Development_and_
Masood_Ahmed_-­_Judgment.pdf It’s worth noting that in reaching judgements
like this, courts seem to be relying on outdated understandings of who is ‘trans’
(as discussed above). It’s clearly not a violation of human decency or human
dignity to call a politically motivated nonbinary person, or a person who has
transitioned because of social contagion, by their sex-­corresponding pronouns.
94. Posie Parker makes a similar point in an interview for Triggernometry in 2019:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdpc2r4cBxQ&t=2220s
95. Ekman (2018).
96. ‘Punching down’ refers to targeting people who are positioned lower than you
in the social hierarchy, while ‘punching up’ refers to targeting people who are
positioned higher than you. This is possibly best-­known as a rule in progressive
stand-­up comedy circles: don’t punch down, only punch up.
97. Saul (2020).
98. A similar point is also made, albeit with a needlessly incendiary analogy to a
date rape drug, in Kerr (2019).
99. It is noteworthy that a lot of the vitriol coming from journalists and academics
is coming out of the United States, which has substantially worse protections in
place for transgender people, and being directed at women speaking out in
countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, which have
substantially better protections in place for transgender people. It’s not clear
whether this is strategic. If it is—a contribution to a global political debate
designed to make domestic political gains—then it belongs under the umbrella
of this section (it is political propaganda). The alternative explanation is less
charitable, namely that the Americans making these interventions are simply
ignorant about the significant differences in context between themselves and
those they are arguing against, and they are ‘universalizing’ the American context.

Chapter 7

1. Chesler (2018, p. 227).

2. @UN_Women, Twitter, Jan 5th 2019. Online at https://twitter.com/UN_
Women/status/1081469111975272448?s=20
3. I’ll use the term ‘intersectionality’ to cover all of the discussion within black
feminism about incorporating multiple axes of oppression within a single
movement. This may be idiosyncratic relative to the contemporary discussion,
in which intersectionality is most often associated with Kimberlé Crenshaw,
who coined the term. But I think the intellectual history is continuous, that
many women were getting at the same or a similar idea, and that Crenshaw
simply proposed one refinement of it. Because that idea is most closely associated
with the term ‘intersectionality’ today, that’s the term I’ll use. So when I go on to
 Notes  255

argue that gender-­critical feminism need not be intersectional, what I mean is

both that it need not be about multiple axes of oppression (it can be about sex
alone) and that it need not be about the intersections between sex and other
axes that create novel forms of oppression (it can be about non-­intersectional
oppression alone, in this refined sense).
4. Wong (2010).
5. I say ‘refocusing’ rather than ‘focusing’ because this is an old idea that has
gotten lost in contemporary feminism, not a new idea. Janet Radcliffe Richards,
for example, wrote in 1980 ‘If, for instance, there are men and women in slavery,
it is not the business of feminism to start freeing the women. Feminism is not
concerned with a group of people it wants to benefit, but with a type of injustice
it wants to eliminate’ (Radcliffe Richards 1980, p. 24).
6. Nash (2019, p. 36).
7. See discussion in Nash (2019).
8. Cooper (1892).
9. Kate Phelan and I argue that it is possible to distinguish at least six understandings
of intersectionality across the black feminist literature. There are experiential
claims (about what it is like to be multiply oppressed), epistemic claims (about
what a multiply oppressed person knows), legal claims (about ways in which a
multiply oppressed person lacks legal protection), explanatory claims (about
what ultimately explains people’s oppression), political claims (about what is
best in eliminating oppression), and metaphysical claims (about what oppression
ultimately is) Lawford-­Smith & Phelan 2021).
10. https://iwda.org.au/learn/what-­is-­feminism/
11. Cooper (1892).
12. Combahee River Collective (1977; my emphasis).
13. Beal (1969); King (1988).
14. Crenshaw (1989; my emphasis).
15. UN Women (2017, pp. 5, 8, 9, 13).
16. hooks ([1984] 2000, p. 37).
17. Jeffreys (2009a, p. 9).
18. E.g. Morton et al. (2009).
19. hooks ([1984] 2000, p. 40).
20. hooks ([1984] 2000, p. 40).
21. hooks ([1984] 2000, p. 118–120); following Hodge (1975).
22. hooks ([1984] 2000, p. 118).
23. https://www.ancient.eu/article/1136/women-­in-­ancient-­china/
24. https://www.ancient.eu/article/1152/caste-­system-­in-­ancient-­india/
25. For those who are curious, the philosopher is John Hodge. See discussion in
hooks ([1984] 2000, pp. 36–39).
26. https://www.wgea.gov.au/data/fact-­s heets/gender-­w orkplace-­s tatistics-­
at-­a-­glance
27. hooks (2000, pp. xiv‒xv).
256 Notes

28. http://womensliberationfront.org/document-­statement-­of-­principles/ accessed

18th May 2020.
29. Jefferson (1980).
30. hooks ([1984] 2000). In later work, bell hooks added class to her previous focus
on race/sex, and claimed that these must be addressed together. She said ‘class
structure in American society has been shaped by the racial politic of white
supremacy; it is only by analysing racism and its function in a capitalist society
that a thorough understanding of class relationships can emerge. Class struggle
is inextricably bound to the struggle to end racism’ (hooks 2000, p. 3).
31. Crenshaw (1989, 1991).
32. Cooper (1892).
33. Combahee River Collective (1977).
34. Spelman (1988).
35. See discussion in Phelan, manuscript.
36. hooks ([1984] 2000, p. 2).
37. Nothing important hangs on the word ‘disadvantage’ here, I mean to include all/
any of disadvantage, discrimination, marginalization, exploitation, oppression.
38. It’s worth noting that in Rawls’s case, prioritarianism came after equality.
Departures from an equal distribution of material resources were justified only
if they were to the benefit of the least well off. It’s not clear what this would
mean for feminism. Perhaps: we should focus on issues that affect all women
(baseline of equality) unless focusing on issues that affect some women would
mean that the worst-­ off women became better-­ off than they were in the
baseline. If there are ‘trickle-­down’ benefits, this could justify focusing on the
best-­off women. For example, imagine that closing the pay gap between actors
and actresses in Hollywood would actually improve the situation of the worst-­
off women. This is likely to strike many feminists as deeply unintuitive.
39. See e.g. Cox (2016).
40. Uta Johansdottir @UtaJohansdottir in reply to Kirsten Gillibrand @SenGillibrand,
5th December 2018 at 3.49 p.m. Online at https://twitter.com/UtaJohansdottir/
status/1070178335051915264
41. To the extent that intersectionality has caught on in the leftist popular im­agin­
ation, all movements will be urged to be intersectional, and what I am describ-
ing for feminism will happen elsewhere too. Maybe this will be a good
thing—instead of many specialized movements with a narrow focus, there will
eventually just be one big movement supporting all the social justice projects.
The worry remains though that a movement that tries to do everything will end
up being able to do virtually nothing.
42. Criado-­Perez (2019).
43. Criado-­Perez (2019).
44. Topping (2020).
45. Frye (1983, p. 16).
 Notes  257

46. Frye (1983, p. 16).

47. Dworkin (1974, p. 23).
48. Dworkin (1974, pp. 23–24).
49. Woman’s Place UK @Womans_Place_UK, 28th September 2019 at 7.05 p.m.
Online at https://twitter.com/Womans_Place_UK/status/117787189455032320
1?s=20.Seealsohttps://womansplaceuk.org/2020/02/03/50-­years-­of-­womens-­liberation-­
in-­the-­uk-­pragna-­patel/
50. Jefferson (1980).
51. Crenshaw (1989, pp. 158–159).
52. See e.g. testimony from women in the documentary On The Record (Dick &
Ziering  2020), or Phyllis Chesler’s discussion of this issue (Chesler  2018,
pp. 197–286). Kate Phelan and I discuss these issues in Lawford-­Smith &
Phelan (2021).
53. See discussion in Jacobs (2017–2018).
54. Scotland (2020).
55. Cf. Natalie Stoljar, who writes ‘Consider a white, able-­bodied, heterosexual
woman who is privileged along the first three dimensions of her identity, yet
disadvantaged by virtue of being a woman. Can this woman be said to suffer
discrimination when her overall individual situation is one of privilege?’ (Stoljar
2017, p. 69). For the antidote, see MacKinnon (1991a).
56. Those who associate intersectionality with Crenshaw are likely to find this
remark odd. For a fuller explanation, see n. 3 to this chapter.
57. Crenshaw (1989, pp. 139–140).
58. Crenshaw (1989, p. 142; case in n. 8).
59. Freeman (2005).
60. Lorde (1984, p. 52).
61. Lorde (1984, p. 60).
62. Lorde (1984, p. 52).
63. As Shirley Chisholm experienced in the 1970s; and as Rose McGowan, who
would surely be described as ‘privileged’ if anyone is, experienced in the 1990s,
and as was revealed as part of the global #metoo movement revealing women’s
experiences of sexual abuse and sexual harassment (Levin & Solon 2017).

Chapter 8

1. Firestone (1970, p. 203).

2. Salk, Hyde, & Abramson (2017).
3. Bodily autonomy will still be important (this is something all types of feminists
agree about), and it’s possible that as surgeons become more proficient—currently
they are much more proficient in transforming male bodies than in transforming
female bodies—demand for ‘designed’ bodies, including bodies designed to
258 Notes

look as the opposite sex, will increase. This interacts with increased interest in
‘transhumanism’ too, the improvement of human life using technological advance-
ments, including integration of the physical body with technology. There are
interesting treatments of this issue in the British television series Years and
Years (BBC & HBO 2019), and the novel Inappropriation by Lexi Freiman
(2018). On the philosophy of transhumanism, see e.g. More (2013).
4. Sargent (2010, p. 21).
5. Alderman (2016).
6. Vonnegut (1961).
7. More ([1516] 2000).
8. Anderson (2014, p. 16).
9. Abbott (1903).
10. See discussion in Williams (2013).
11. As Nicholas Southwood and David Wiens (2016) have pointed out, it’s not
always the case that something’s becoming actual establishes that it was feasible,
because some actual things were fluky. If something comes about by fluke, then
it may not count as feasible in the sense that moral and political philosophers,
and policy-­makers and activists besides, are interested in. I’ll proceed on the
assumption that the success of the major social justice movements I’m using as
examples wasn’t fluky.
12. I’m aware that asymmetric criminalization is normally considered a model for
prostitution not including pornography, but because I don’t see any meaningful
difference between the two industries, I also don’t see any meaningful difference
in how they should be dealt with. See also Chapter 6.
13. Southwood (2017).
14. Mac & Smith (2018).
15. Ekman ([2010] 2013).
16. Jeffreys (2009b, pp. 124–125).
17. See further discussion in Lawford-­Smith (2020a).
18. So long as, as I said earlier, they aren’t actual and the result of a fluke. See n. 11.
19. See discussion in Cox (2017).
20. Some argue against particular alliances, e.g. between radical feminists and con-
servatives, on symbolic grounds—almost as though there is a moral taint
involved in working with people who we disagree with on other issues. Others
argue against it on more pragmatic grounds, e.g. that it may damage the
progressive credentials of the radical feminists, or that it may lead to backsliding
on feminist issues because it ultimately empowers conservatives. The former is
ideological puritanism because it can mean refusing to make alliances that
would actually be successful in securing gains for women. The latter is not (so
long as the pragmatic concerns are well-­founded).
 Notes  259

21. Mac & Smith (2018).

22. See discussion in Aroney & Crofts (2019).
23. For simplicity here I’m just talking about pornography simpliciter rather than
specific kinds of pornography. Some might think that this is too broad, because
there can be ‘feminist pornography’. Women working from their bedrooms via
webcams, solo porn, lesbian porn filmed by women, and porn designed from a
woman’s perspective for a woman’s enjoyment are all candidates for morally
acceptable pornography. The counter-­argument, inspired by MacKinnon (1989)
is that the most entrenched gender expectation for women is sexual availability
to men, which is behind both women’s sexual objectification and sexual violence
against women and girls. If this is right—and I agree with MacKinnon that it’s a
big part of the story even if it’s not the whole story—then even solo porn, lesbian
porn, and porn by women for women will still be viewed by men as confirming
their stereotypes and prejudices about ‘what women are for’, and in that sense
‘feminist pornography’ is an oxymoron. So I will proceed on the assumption
that the gender-­critical feminist is committed to full abolition. This doesn’t
mean that in the utopia some form of pornography couldn’t re-­emerge, from a
novel starting point and with none of the baggage of porn under patriarchy.
24. See the original petition here https://www.change.org/p/shut-­down-­pornhub-­
and-­hold-­its-­executives-­accountable-­for-­aiding-­trafficking and the current
version of the petition here https://www.traffickinghubpetition.com/
25. https://www.similarweb.com/website/pornhub.com
26. https://traffickinghub.com/
27. Bicchieri (2017, pp. 147–153).
28. Hudson (2012).
29. For an overview of alternatives, see Southwood (2018).
30. Some think these two ideas go together: something can be judged to be in­feas­
ible because it’s immoral. This is one version of implicit constraints, discussed in
Section 8.3. For criticism of this idea, see Lindauer & Southwood (forthcoming).
31. Hill (2019).
32. Gilabert & Lawford-­Smith (2012, pp. 813–814, 2013, p. 255).
33. It is an objection to a general theory of political feasibility, which would ideally
apply to both individuals and legal/political reforms. For alternative approaches
to feasibility, see discussion in (Southwood  2018), who has work in progress
defending a novel approach likely to come out in the next couple of years.
34. Lawford-­Smith (2013).
35. For debate over this idea of ‘remit’, see discussion in Collins & Lawford-­Smith
(2016); cf. Berkey (2019).
36. See discussion in Anderson (2014).
37. See discussion in Stamp (2013).
260 Notes

Chapter 9

1. Sundar (2020).
2. Mehat (2015).
3. Sanchez (2017).
4. An alternative way to make sense of the radical/liberal distinction is in terms of
whether the feminist takes a revolutionary or an incremental/gradualist approach
to reform. This does seem to describe the difference between activist groups, e.g.
The Feminists (radical) breaking away from the National Organization for Women
(liberal) in the United States, and the Women’s Electoral Lobby (liberal) breaking
away from the Women’s Liberationists (radical) in Australia. It’s not clear whether
it also describes the theoretical disagreement. Aside from some dismissive talk
about ‘reformers’ (as opposed to e.g. revolutionaries) by the radical feminists,
there’s not much explicit discussion about this difference as being a key or
relevant distinction between radical and liberal feminism. So I won’t say more
about it here.
5. Blackford (2018, p. 16).
6. Blackford (2018, p. 16).
7. Locke (1689, p. 6). Page numbers correspond to the PDF here: https://socials-
ciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/locke/toleration.pdf
8. Locke (1689, p. 6).
9. Locke (1689, p. 7).
10. Locke (1689, p. 6).
11. Locke (1689, p. 12).
12. Rawls (1971, p. 14), cited in Gibson (1977, p. 194); see also Jaggar (1983, ch. 3).
13. Mill (1859, p. 73).
14. Mill (1859, pp. 74–75).
15. Mill (1859, p. 74).
16. Mill (1859, p. 81).
17. Mill (1859, ch. IV).
18. Berlin (1969).
19. Jean-­Paul Sartre talked in Being and Nothingness (1956, p. 553) about this kind
of freedom. Wherever there was the alternative of ‘suicide or . . . desertion’, there
was free choice. He applies the same reasoning to rape in marriage, arguing that
women are merely ‘self-­deceived’ and attempting to distract themselves from
the ‘pleasure’; she had the choice of suicide instead of sex and chose sex, so she
is free (see discussion in Frye 1983, p. 55). Frye’s description of this is enjoyable:
‘Sartre took this economical route to freedom and embraced the absurd condition
as profundity . . . It should not be surprising that the same small mind, embracing
a foolish consistency, cannot recognize rape when he sees it and employs a
magical theory of “bad faith” to account for its evidence’ (Frye 1983, pp. 54–55).
20. Taylor (1979).
 Notes  261

21. Gaus (2000, ch. 5).

22. Pettit (1996, 1997).
23. Pettit (1993).
24. Cf. Burgess-­Jackson (1995), who argues that Mill was a radical feminist.
25. Also Elizabeth Holtzman, Bella Abzug, Eleanor Smeal, Pat Schroeder, and Patsy
Mink, although these names are likely to be less familiar (Tong 1989, p. 13).
26. Tong (1989, p. 28); following Eisenstein (1986, p. 176).
27. Tong (1989, p. 28).
28. Gloria Steinem had a higher public profile than Friedan, but there is controversy
about how to classify her, with many classifying her as liberal and her classifying
herself as radical.
29. Radcliffe Richards ([1980] 1994, p. 94–95).
30. Radcliffe Richards ([1980] 1994, p. 97).
31. Radcliffe Richards ([1980] 1994, p. 98).
32. Radcliffe Richards ([1980] 1994, pp. 104–105).
33. Radcliffe Richards ([1980] 1994, p. 108; her emphasis). It might seem that
radical and gender-­critical feminists want to do exactly what Radcliffe Richards
is describing when they advocate for the Nordic Model (which criminalizes the
purchase of sex). But the Nordic Model is justified in terms of taking away men’s
right to buy sex, not taking away women’s right to sell it in order to ‘liberate’
them (even though abolishing the sex industry is one key component of ending
up in a future in which women are, in fact, liberated from male domination).
(See also Chapter 6.)
34. Radcliffe Richards ([1980] 1994, p. 120).
35. Radcliffe Richards ([1980] 1994, pp. 120–121).
36. In an essay titled ‘The Great Gulf of Feminism’, published in an updated edition
of The Sceptical Feminist in 1994, Radcliffe Richards distinguishes ‘egalitarian
feminism’ from ‘liberal feminism’, saying that there is a difference between a
feminism that wants to get rid of a sexual double standard and see men and
women treated the same no matter the background political theory, liberal or
otherwise (this she called ‘egalitarian feminism’), and a feminism specifically
committed to liberalism that wanted to see liberal values realized equally in the
cases of women and men. She thought the ‘great gulf ’ was actually between
egalitarian feminists, who worked for equality within the status quo whatever it
was, and ‘radical’ feminists, who challenged the status quo. (I use quote marks
for ‘radical’ because she seems to be referring to difference feminism in the
examples of thinkers and ideas that she gives, rather than the broader range of
views I’m talking about as radical feminism in this book.) Given how much
work would actually have to be done to achieve equality, she thinks ‘egalitarian
feminism’ is actually ‘radical’ (here she seems to mean more ambitious than its
critics give it credit for): ‘[t]he feminism that seeks equality within the status
quo, properly understood, is as radical as any movement there has ever been’
262 Notes

(Radcliffe Richards [1980] 1994, p. 395). In Chapter  4, I suggested we should

leave much of difference feminism behind, so her criticism of what she’s calling
‘radical’ feminism does not apply to the radical, and then gender-­ critical,
feminism that I’ve been defending throughout this book.
37. Gibson (1977, pp. 200–208).
38. Gibson (1977, pp. 208–209).
39. Gibson (1977, p. 200).
40. Gibson (1977, p. 193).
41. Chambers (2008, pp. 162–164).
42. Chambers criticizes a prominent liberal feminist, Martha Nussbaum, for focusing
on autonomy over big decisions but not the more everyday ones. This was not
an oversight: ‘Nussbaum argues that her position . . . allows people to live nonau-
tonomous lives, for autonomy may be counter to their conception of the good,
particularly if that conception is religious’ (Chambers 2008, p. 164). Chambers
argues that Nussbaum’s view is inconsistent, based on Nussbaum’s feminist
commitment against female genital mutilation (FGM). If it were only a matter
of choosing at the level of big decisions, then a girl could in principle decide
that she wants to lead a life where she has FGM and so can marry within her
community. This would be a sacrifice of everyday autonomy, especially in deci-
sions about sexual pleasure which would be entirely foregone. But it doesn’t
look structurally different from the case of choosing to enter the army or the
convent. But Nussbaum thinks FGM is wrong. Chambers thinks Nussbaum is
right about FGM, and that her reasoning about it extends to other kinds of cases,
like the social practice of women undergoing cosmetic breast implant surgeries.
43. Chambers (2008, p. 194).
44. Chambers (2008, p. 194).
45. Chambers (2008, p. 196).
46. Jeffreys (2009a).
47. Frye (1983).
48. MacKinnon (1982).
49. MacKinnon (1982).
50. Jeffreys (2009a).
51. Miriam (2005).
52. Brownmiller (1976).
53. Ginsberg in Jaschick (2009).
54. Atkinson (1974c; Frye (1983)).
55. Atkinson (1974c, p. 110). [Sic.]
56. Channel 4 News (2018).
57. Lerner (1986, p. 12).
58. Lerner (1986, p. 13).
59. Firestone wrote in 1968 that the abolitionists had sold out women: ‘The
Abolitionists, who had been glad to accept the alliance with women all along,
 Notes  263

suddenly decided that now it was “the Negro’s hour,”—that the cause of women
was too unimportant to delay for a minute any advances in the liberation of the
blacks. Needless to say they had forgotten that HALF of the black race was
female, so they sold out their own cause as well’ (p. 5). This might sound
‘intersectional’, like she’s making the point that it doesn’t make sense to put
black liberation before women’s liberation when some black people are women.
But I read her as making a point about alliances. She goes on to say, ‘Once again
the principle was proved that unless oppressed groups stick together, and on
alliances of self-­interest rather than do-­goodism, nothing can be accomplished in
the long run to dismantle the apparatus of oppression’ (Firestone 1968, p. 5; my
emphasis). Indeed, she says a little later in the same article ‘we should keep in
mind that revolutions anywhere are always glad to use any help they can get,
even from women. But unless women also use the Revolution to further their
own interests as well as everyone else’s, unless they make it consistently clear
that all help given now is expected to be returned, both now and after the
Revolution, they will be sold out again and again’ (p. 5).
60. Lerner (1986, p. 226). Although Lerner is not the only person to attribute these
words (‘existential nothingness’) to Daly, I have not been able to find them in
Daly’s work. Another source provides a reference to The Church and the Second
Sex, p. 70—but at least in my copy, they are not there; Google Books turns up
the same source, p. 68—but again, in my copy, they are not there.
61. Friedan ([1963] 2013), p. 83).
62. Atkinson (1974c, p. 111).

Chapter 10
1. See also an alternative list of demands put together by Woman’s Place UK with
feedback from the gender-­critical feminist community at https://womanspla-
ceuk.org/wpuk-­manifesto-­2019/ and the global Declaration on Women’s Sex-­
Based Rights at https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-­womens-­
sex-­based-­rights-­full-­text/
2. The Victorian Parliament’s Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices
Prohibition Act 2021, which was passed in February 2021, redefines sexual
orientation as a protected attribute under the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 (p.
15), from ‘homosexuality (including lesbianism), bisexuality or heterosexuality’
to ‘a person’s emotional, affectional and sexual attraction to, or intimate or
sexual relations with, persons of a different gender or the same gender or more
than one gender’ (pp. 39–40).
3. The first ten items are derived from a thread by Alessandra Asteriti—@
AlessandraAster—on Twitter, 29th March 2019. The thread is here: https://twitter.
com/AlessandraAster/status/1111709720258203648?s=20 The full list that
264 Notes

appears here was published to Medium on the 7th of June 2019. That post is
archived here: https://hollylawford-­smith.org/radical-­feminist-­wish-­list-­2019/
4. John Schwenkler challenged me on this demand, on the grounds that some
women are pushed into having abortions they don’t wish to have by partners,
and noting that state support can skew women’s incentives in either direction
(free and accessible abortions might signal a preference for abortion in cases of
uncertainty, whereas a strong programme of support for pregnancy and maternal
health might signal the opposite. I think these are fair points. ‘Full reproductive
rights’ should be taken to include rights to abortion if that is what is wanted,
and rights not to have abortions if that is what is wanted. In either case, control
should not rest with male partners (although cf. Mathison & Davis 2017, esp.
p. 318, whose discussion of ‘ectogenesis’—the development of a foetus entirely
outside the womb—has interesting implications for how much say prospective
fathers should get in decisions about abortion). On the issue of state policy,
I have less to say, because as Cass Sunstein has observed, there’s a ‘nudge’ either
way (see e.g. Sunstein 2019). That’s just how it goes with policy—we have to
choose which nudge is worse. I think restricted access to abortion is a worse
nudge in terms of social outcomes for women.

Afterword

1. Hochschild (2005).
2. On this point, see also Phelan (forthcoming); and see n. 29 to Chapter 2.
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 Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

abortion  7–8, 23–4, 35, 47–8, 71, 94–5, 157, biology  x, 1, 21–40, 42–4, 47, 54–5, 57–8,
248n.11, 264n.4 92–3, 104–5, 109–10, 120–3, 210n.5,
addiction (drug and alcohol)  68, 70, 178 211n.23, 218n.69, 239n.47, 245n.108
affirmation (of gender identity)  61, 95–7, 99, biological determinism  30–1
101–2, 114–15, 133, 246nn.113,117, biological essentialism  30–1
249n.23 biological explanation  30–1
affirmative action  8–9, 48–9 black feminism  57–8, 145–8, 152–3, 160–2,
agency  78, 114, 134–6, 170–1 254n.3, 255n.9
Alderman, Naomi  165–6 black women  57, 127, 149–50, 154–5, 157–8,
Allen, Jeffner  44–5, 223n.161 161–2, 203
alliances  59, 172, 195 Blanchard, Ray  106–9
allies  10–11, 57–9, 61–3, 110, 113, 143, 162–3 bodies  27, 34, 35, 39–40, 45, 49–50, 54–5,
androgyny  44–5, 223n.159 71–5, 77, 81–3, 97, 111, 134–6, 156, 174,
Anthony, Susan B.  38–9 192–3, 202, 204, 216n 52, 224n.2,
appropriation (of women’s labour)  33, 149, 193 225n.10, 230n.32, 233n.6, 244n.99,
Atkinson, Ti-Grace  21–4, 28–9, 34–7, 44, 252n.75, 253n.92, 257n.3
193, 197, 218n.58, 222n.153 Boxer, Marilyn  5
Australia  2–5, 47–8, 52, 81, 96–8, 102–3, 121, Brazen Hussies  214n.2
148, 150–1, 168, 176, 179, 209n.4, breast implants  x–xi, 192, 240n.58,
214n.2, 230n.33, 235n.26, 238n.37, 262n.42
241n.62, 246nn.114,116, 249n.23, breastfeeding  29–30, 39–40, 45, 49, 156,
251n.62, 254n.99, 260n.4 205, 209n.4
autism  96–7, 99, 108–9, 235n.26 Brownmiller, Susan  23–4, 29–31
autogynephilia  106–9, 219n.99, 243n.92 Brunskell-Evans, Heather  97, 237n.29,
Ayad, Sasha  244n.102 240n.50, 246n.117
Budapest, Zsuzsanna  38–9, 221n.121
bad sex  77, 88 burning (of witches)  23, 214n.16
Bailey, Michael  107–8
Barry, Kathleen  28–9 Cameron, Deborah  61
beauty standards  x–xi, 8, 45, 153–4, Cameron, Jessica Joy  69
192–3, 226n.20 Caputi, Jane  40
Beavoir, Simone de  27–8, 31–4, 43–4, 95–6, care ethics (ethics of care)  37–8, 146–7,
216nn.34,52, 218n.70, 219n.72 220n.110
Beck, Julia  4, 248n.19 caste  xv, 10, 22–3, 25, 28, 34, 40, 42, 47–51,
bell hooks  57, 64, 127, 146–9, 152–3, 210n.2, 55–6, 59–60, 62, 65–6, 147–9, 225n.10
250n.47, 256n.30 CATWA 179–80
Bindel, Julie  9, 60–1, 123–4, 215n.27, 227n.39 CEDAW 48–9
290 index

Chambers, Clare  191–2, 196, 262n.42 disabilities (women with)  59, 81, 125, 144–5,
Chesler, Phyllis  5, 7–8, 11–12, 28–9, 69–70, 154–5, 158, 163, 203
143, 257n.52 discrimination
child brides  7, 156, 160, 202 against lesbians and/or gay men  23–4,
child abuse  7, 69, 76, 155, 165 111, 202, 205
childhood sexual abuse  70, 99, 108–9, 159 against women  8, 27, 40, 48–9, 225n 10,
Chisholm, Shirley  161, 257n.63 55–6, 105, 156, 163–4, 165, 175,
choice  xii, 71, 74, 83, 94–5, 131, 134–6, 174, 194–5, 205
181–4, 187–94, 197–8, 253n.86, 260n.19 all forms  3, 145–7, 256n.37
Cho, Seo-Young  89 compatibility with privilege  257n.55
class/sex 152–3 intersectional 161–4
comorbidities  109, 244n.106 legislation (anti-discrimination)  205,
conceptual engineering  24, 40, 43, 221n.128 246n.114
consciousness-raising  15, 24, 37, 40–1, 45–6, on the basis of gender non-conformity  54,
48–9, 61–2, 197, 226n.35, 229n.19 108, 112, 205
consent  9, 72, 79–82, 88, 100 on the basis of intersex status  155
contraception  7, 23–4, 118, 157, 203, 212n.47 on the basis of transgender status  53–4,
contract pregnancy  25, 153–4, 170, 181–2, 94, 112, 205
203, 229n.15, 253n.86 dissidents 12
conversion therapy  96–9, 234n.9, 235n.22, domestic labour  35, 47–8
241n.59, 246n.113, 249n.23, 263n.2 domestic violence  7, 24, 57, 65, 70, 155, 165,
Cooper, Anna Julia  145–6, 152–3 167, 172, 175–6, 202–3
Crenshaw, Kimberlé  146, 152–3, 160–2, domination  23, 29–30, 40, 45–6, 64, 90–1,
254n.3 136, 139, 147–9, 174, 181–2, 186–7, 193,
Criado-Perez, Caroline  31–2 197–8, 204, 261n.33
criminality (male-pattern)  109, 244n.105 double bind  35
cross-sex hormones  99–100, 226n.35, Dworkin, Andrea  23–4, 28–9, 34–6, 39–40,
239n.47, 240n.52 60–1, 69, 157, 214nn.1,16, 216n.50,
222n.153
Daly, Mary  28–31, 40, 44–5, 196, 212n.35, dysphoria (gender)  97, 99–101, 107–9,
214n.1, 250n.47 227n.50, 235n.25, 237nn.30,32,
Dawson, Madge  4 238n.40, 239n.48, 244n.102
deadnaming  122–3, 250n.29 (see also ‘feminine boyhood’)
defence (rough sex)  72, 229n.20
deference  58–9, 126–9, 135–6, 143, 159, ectogenesis  39–40, 264n.4
227n.43, 253n.86 Eisler, Riane  23
dehumanization  88–9, 117–19, 250n.29 Ekman, Kajsa Ekis  67, 79–80, 85–6, 92, 119,
Delphy, Christine  28–9 122, 134–5, 170
desisters  99–101, 239n.48 empowerment (women’s)  21–2, 118,
detransitioners  61, 114, 228n.51, 235n.25 157, 165–6
Deves, Katherine  235n.22 Engels, Friedrich  32
Dianic religion  38–9 equality  xv, 2, 8–9, 21–3, 26, 39–40, 63–4,
difference feminism  24, 261n.36 78–9, 114–15, 130–2, 135–6, 143, 145–6,
differences of sexual development  x–xi, 148–9, 152, 159–60, 165, 167, 169, 175,
102, 155, 203, 209nn.2,4, 221n.141, 180–2, 192–5, 197–8, 207–8, 211n.23,
226n.11 215n.31, 225n.10, 226n.35, 256n.38,
Dines, Gail  175 261n.36
disassociation  58, 76, 135 essentialism (biological)  30–1
disability  4, 59, 81, 125–6, 144–5, 150, 154–5, evidence-based feminism  57, 65, 72–3, 88,
158, 162–4, 203, 230n.33 90–1, 105, 109
 index  291

exchange of women  33 (includes ‘gender identity ideology’, ‘gender

exclusion  x, xiii, 62, 93–4, 104–5, 115–17, identity activism’, ‘gender identity
125–9, 138–9, 143–4, 202, 209n.3 disorders’, and ‘gender identity clinic’)
exploitation  33, 55–6, 71–2, 74–6, 80, 90–1, gender non-conformity  x–xi, 42, 53–4,
112, 131, 144–5, 153–4, 170–2, 181–2, 95–103, 111–15, 139, 166, 192–3, 205,
193, 197–8, 256n.37 215n.33, 226n.29, 235nn.19,26,
(see also ‘sexual exploitation’) 238n.39, 246n.113
gender norms  xii, 16, 50, 52, 92, 110, 112, 136,
family dysfunction  99, 108–9 138–9, 165, 171–2, 227n.36, 228n.62
female-genital mutilation  47–8, 156, 160, gender presentation  114, 166–7,
202, 262n.42 226nn.26,33
female sports  x, 47–9, 93, 118, 136–8, 156, Gender Recognition Act  59–60, 93, 212n.47,
205, 212n.47, 246n.114 233n.5, 250n.41
feminine boyhood  106–9, 137, 238n.39, gender studies  4, 6
239n.48, 243n.92 Gibson, Mary  190–1
femininity  x–xi, 4, 6, 10, 27, 36, 40–1, 44–5, Gilligan, Carol  37–8
47–8, 50–3, 55, 59–60, 92–4, 96, 107, Ginsberg, Alice  5
112–13, 115, 139, 146–9, 159, 165, goddess  33, 38–9, 250n.47
214n.11, 227n.46, 246n.115 Greer, Germaine  21, 28–9, 60, 193–4,
feminism is for everybody  10, 143, 148–9, 214n.2, 217n.57
212n.34 Griffin, Susan  28–30, 214n.1
feminist pornography  259n.23
Feminist Action Melbourne  180 harm (to girls)  17, 87–8, 90, 115
Firestone, Shulamith  xv, 15, 21–4, 29–31, Heilburn, Carolyn  44
34–7, 39–40, 44, 64, 95–6, 165, 212n.35, herstory 23
217n.57, 218n.58, 222nn.144,153, heterodoxy ix–xii
252n.75, 262n.59 hijab 70
Fisher, Anna  86–8 Hill, Jess  176
footbinding 23 Hoff Sommers, Christina  65, 125, 225n.10
Forstater, Maya  254n.93 homosexual transsexuals.  106–9
fragmentation  125, 154–5, 162 human trafficking  47–9, 74, 80, 175
freedom of association  57 Hungerford, Elizabeth  53
Freeman, Jo  11–12, 64, 252n.75
Friedan, Betty  153, 181, 188, 197, 250n.47, identifying as a woman  11, 103, 110, 137–8
261n.28 (see also ‘sex self-identification’)
Frye, Marilyn  23–4, 28–9, 34–7, 41–5, 50, 53, identity politics  121, 155, 159, 249n.27
62–3, 127, 157, 193, 246n.115, 260n.19 ideological puritanism  172, 258n.20
fundamental disagreement  8–9, 117, 129–32 ideology  1, 15, 25–6, 72–3, 94–5, 103, 105–6,
132–7, 139, 167, 177, 179, 212n.47,
gender abolitionism  37, 43–5, 116, 247n.121 227n.36, 233n.6, 249n.23
gender expression  94–5, 110–11, 114, 234n.9, incest  23–4, 35, 47–8, 156
245n.107 inclusion  31, 33–4, 49, 105, 109–10, 131–2,
gender identity  ix, 1, 13, 15–16, 25, 45–7, 53, 137–8, 177, 180, 210n.5, 212n.47,
63, 65–6, 93–5, 97, 101–3, 105–11, 234n.8, 249n.23
115–23, 131, 136–7, 167, 177, 180, 204, innateness  24, 26, 56, 97, 105, 107–8,
212n.47, 224n.2, 227n.36, 229n.19, 111, 121–2
233n.5, 234n.9, 235n.24, 236n.27, International Women’s Day  2, 145, 201, 210n.3
238n.40, 241n.59, 242n.80, 243nn.82,86, intersectionality  6–7, 14, 57–8, 144–5, 152,
244n.106, 245n.108, 246nn.114,116,117, 154–5, 160–1, 210n.5, 254n.3, 255n.9,
248n.19, 249n.23, 251n.52, 252n.63 256n.41, 257n.56
292 index

intersex  x–xi, 102, 155, 203, 209n.2, 209n.4, MacKinnon, Catharine  21–2, 28–9, 42, 60–1,
221n.141, 226n.11 87, 214n.1
intimate partner strangulation  72, 202 male
Izaakson, Jen  124 biology  105, 109–10, 245n.108
privilege  104, 222n.144
Jaggar, Alison  30, 49, 74, 216n.41, 218n.59, socialization  105, 110, 245n.108
223n.159 violence  xi, 7, 47–8, 82–3, 90–1, 124,
Jefferson, Margo  149 165, 202–4
Jeffreys, Sheila  28–9, 146, 170–1, 214n.2, Mansbridge, Jane  10
217n.57, 252n.77 Mara, Michelle  71–2, 77
Jewish women  125–6, 138, 157 Marxism  21–2, 153, 212n.35
Johansdottir, Uta  154–5, 256n.40 masculinity  4, 6, 36–7, 44–5, 49–51,
Jones, Jane Clare  xiv, 65 53, 62–3, 78, 111–14, 146–7, 204,
220n.111, 251n.62
Keen-Minshull, Kellie-Jay  119, 212n.47 mastectomy (double)  114
Kennedy, Flo  127 maternity leave  3, 156
Kreps, Bonnie  36–7 medical conditions (female-specific)  156
Mehat, Jindi  183
labiaplasty  101, 240n.58 Melbourne  xiii–xiv, 2–3, 5, 145, 180, 201,
Langton, Rae  87 235n.26, 249n.23
language mental health  95–6, 99, 101, 204, 238n.40
dehumanizing 117–18 meritocracy 77
politics of  37, 40, 42, 45–6, 49, 93–4, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival  234n.8
132–3, 137–9, 209n.4 Mickelwait, Laila  175
sex-specific  x, 49, 204, 209n.4, 253n.92 Mill, Harriet Taylor  188
Lawrence, Anne  107–8, 243n.90, 243n.92 Mill, John Stuart  65, 186
Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group  215n.26 Millett, Kate  22, 28–9, 36–7, 217n.57, 222n.153
leftist men  9, 248n.10 misgendering  123–4, 137–8, 204, 250n.29
Lerner, Gerda  21–3, 32, 193–4 mispronouning  137, 204
lesbians  xi, 24, 27–8, 35, 41–2, 57–8, 61, 103, monotheistic religion  33
113–14, 116, 126, 151, 153–4, 215n.26, Moore, Michele  97
217n.57, 226n.30, 227nn.39,46, 236n.27, moral disagreement  117, 129–30, 174
251n.52, 263n.2 Moran, Rachel  68, 229n.18
Lewis, Helen  216n.50 Morgan, Robin  28–9
LGB  145–6, 158 Mother Nature  38–9
liberalism  13, 16, 21–2, 49, 183–5, 187–8, Murphy, Meghan  xiii, 71–2, 118–19, 122–3,
191, 193–6, 214n.6, 261n.36 248n.19
liberal feminism  16, 21–2, 118, 183–4,
187–8, 190–5, 214n.6, 217n.56, Nash, Jennifer  145
260n.4, 261n.36 National Organization for Women  21, 188,
liberation (of women)  xii, 3–4, 10, 16, 21–2, 214n.2, 218n.58, 220n.106, 260n.4
25, 28, 57–62, 65–6, 90–1, 113, 116, 143, New York Radical Feminists  21, 36–7,
146–7, 149, 152, 165–7, 171–2, 175, 220n.107, 222n.153
180–2, 188, 193–6, 201–2, 208, 225n.10, New York Radical Women  21, 218n.58,
226n.35, 248n.19, 257n.47, 262n.59 220n.107
linguistic activism  24, 40 New Zealand  5–6, 47–8, 71–2, 85, 150–1,
Lister, Anne  215n.33 211n.12, 212n.35, 241n.64, 249n.26,
Littman, Lisa  97, 105–6 254n.99
Long, Julia  119 nonbinary  x, 55–8, 61–3, 102, 111, 114–16,
Lorde, Audre  21–2, 28–9, 104, 162–3, 121, 137, 144–5, 166, 210n.5, 224n.2,
250n.47 240n.57, 241nn.61–2, 253n.91, 254n.93
 index  293

non-domination  174, 181,187 Pornhub  175, 259n.24

Nordic Model  84–6, 90–1, 172, 203, 261n.33 pornography  9, 13, 15–16, 23–5, 35, 47–8,
Norma, Caroline  xiii, 12, 60–1 65–6, 69–72, 74, 76–8, 82–3, 87–91, 93,
normative dualism  49, 74 134–5, 165, 172, 175–6, 178, 181–2, 190,
norms 201–3, 210n.6, 212n.47, 225n.10,
moral norms  51–2 230n.45, 232n.102, 258n.12, 259n.23
social norms  x–xi, 51–2, 113, 122, 175–6, preferential hiring  8–9
191–2, 194, 197, 235n.26 prioritarianism  154, 262n.38
noxious markets  78, 114 product design  156, 205
propaganda  23, 94–5, 132–7, 139, 254n.99
objectification  40–1, 193 prostitution policy
sexual objectification  8, 25, 27–8, 35, 165, decriminalization  71–2, 84–5, 87–8, 90–1,
167, 172, 201–3, 259n.23 168–9, 179, 182
beauty objectification  8, 25 partial criminalization  84
O’Malley, Stella  244n.102 full criminalization  84, 182
oppression asymmetrical criminalization  84, 167,
interdependent systems of  146 169, 172–4, 178–80, 182
interlocking systems of  146, 148 legalization 84–5
mutually constitutive systems of  146 psychological oppression  40–1, 193,
novel forms of  162–4, 254n.3 221n.130
single axis of oppression  16–17, 57–8, 195 psychological unfreedom  193
multiple axes of oppression  57–8, 254n.3 PTSD  76–7, 80, 83, 135, 204
oppressor  22–4, 34, 196 puberty blockers  97, 99–101, 237n.32,
organs  30, 49, 71–5, 82, 95, 170, 204 238n.40, 240nn.50, 52
orthodoxy  ix, xi (see also ‘cross-sex hormones’)
public policy  7, 49, 72–3, 84–5
Parker, Posie  59–60, 119, 212n.47, 254n.94 (includes ‘one-child state policy’, ‘equal
paternalism  174, 189, 191–2, 194, 197–8 employment policy’, ‘sports inclusion
paternity leave  3 policy’ and ‘policy models’)
pathway dependence  99–100, 114,
240nn.50,52 queer  103, 118, 145–6, 233n.6, 243n.86
patriarchy
the creation of  21–3, 25, 32–3, 39, 112, race/sex  152–3, 256n.30
165–6, 196 Radcliffe Richards, Janet  188–9, 255n.5,
current forms of  44–5, 74, 93–4, 112–13, 261nn.29,32–6
136, 183, 192–4, 234n.7, 259n.23 radical feminism  13, 21–2, 25, 28–30, 44,
abolition of  44–6, 149, 165–6, 193–4, 47–50, 55–8, 61, 63–4, 119–21, 124–5,
196, 212n.47 183–4, 190–1, 193, 195–6, 212n.47,
penis envy  95–6 214n.1, 215n.31, 217n.57, 222n.153,
period poverty  156, 160, 203 234n.10, 261n.36
Perry, Louise  15 rape  7, 8, 9, 23–4, 29–30, 32–3, 35, 45, 47–9,
phalloplasty  165, 240n.57 57, 65, 72, 76, 81, 86–9, 135, 137–8, 156,
Phelan, Kate  xiii, 215n.29, 255n.9, 257n.52 165, 175, 202, 225nn.7–8, 252n.75,
policy  7, 45, 49, 72–3, 83–8, 90–1, 94, 112, 115, 254n.98, 260n.19
122–3, 128–9, 169–71, 174, 177–8, 194–5, (see also ‘sexual assault’)
249n.23, 250n.29, 258n.11, 264n.4 rapid onset gender dysphoria  97, 237n.30,
(see also ‘prostitution policy’) 239n.48
political lesbianism  24, 57, 215n.26, 217n.57, Raymond, Janice  28–9, 44–5, 55–6, 95–6,
227n.39 120, 234n.10, 247n.6
political identity (transgender as a)  108–9, Reclaim the Night  11, 61
253n.91 Redstockings  21, 63–4, 220n.107, 228n.57
294 index

reformers  165–7, 214n.2, 241n.59, 259n.22, sexual pleasure (equality of)  8–9, 69–70, 78,
260n.4 211n.28, 230n.51, 262n.42
Reilly-Cooper, Rebecca  xiv, 47, 50 sexual revolution  222n.153
religion  23–4, 36, 38–40, 45–6, 145, 184–5, sexual subordination  27, 32–3, 38, 48–9, 70,
204, 207, 225n.10, 229n.19 78–9, 87, 135–6, 156, 166–7, 202
reproduction sex roles  21, 24, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 41–2, 44, 47,
control of  7, 23–4, 39–40, 112 50, 53–4, 117–18, 194, 220n.106,
reproductive power  33 222n.153, 226n.29
reproductive rights  3, 156, 160, 205 sex-selective abortion  47–8
reproductive role (female)  25, 49, 51, sex self-identification  11, 94–5, 103, 110, 131,
71, 156 137–9, 180, 212n.47, 233n.5,
revolution (feminist)  xv, 39, 148, 165, 243n.86, 249n.23
222n.144, 262n.59 sexual slavery  7, 47–8, 71, 156, 160
revolutionary feminism  217n.57 Sherfey, Mary Jane  29–30
Rich, Adrienne  28–9, 214n.1, 220n.110, slaves  23, 32–3, 36, 197–8, 216n.40, 229n.26
223n.159 slur  40, 117, 120, 124–5, 136, 161, 247n.2,
Rosario Sánchez, Raquel  183 250n.29
Roszak, Betty  44 social construction  x–xi, 5, 34–7, 42–3, 47,
Rowling, J.K.  40, 117, 221n.129 136, 197–8, 209n.1, 216n.52, 218n.65,
224n.2
same-sex attraction  98, 111, 238n.39, 247n.1 social contagion  97–8, 105–6, 108–9, 137,
(see also ‘lesbians’) 237n.30, 254n.93
Satz, Debra  78, 230n.51 social groups  6, 112, 139–40, 148–51, 153–5,
self 159–63, 194–5, 209n.3, 225n.10,
-determination  57, 61–2, 131, 187–8, 227n.43, 251n.52
219n.87 society for evidence-based gender
-objectification  192–3, 196 medicine  238n.40, 246n.117
-ownership 71 solidarity  2, 39–41, 45–6, 57, 59, 64, 139–40,
separatism  24, 27–8, 36, 57, 235n.14, 246n.115 150, 157–60, 225n.10
service (personal, sexual, emotional)  24, 35, Sommers, Christina Hoff  65, 125, 225n.10
37, 78, 134–6, 139, 175, 196, 210n.6, sports  x, 2, 47–9, 73, 75, 81, 93, 136, 212n.47,
222n.153 225n.7, 238n.39, 246n.114
sex Steinem, Gloria  127, 143, 261n.28
sex-based rights  62, 65, 92–5, 115, 123, Stock, Kathleen  xiii–xiv, 218n.68, 222n.146,
139, 156, 177, 205, 263n.1 233n.5, 242n.80, 243n.82, 252n.63
sex games gone wrong  72, 202 Stoljar, Natalie  23, 127, 218n.68, 218n.69,
sex-marking  31, 41–2 257n.55
sex worker -exclusionary radical feminist  suffrage  47–8, 167, 211n.18
60–1, 117–19, 233n.6 Sundar, Vaishnavi  118, 183,
sexual abuse  81, 98, 257n.63 247nn.4–5,7–9, 260n.1
sexual assault  7–9, 76, 89, 102, 156–7, 165, surrogacy  25, 71, 153–4, 170, 181–2, 203,
167, 175 229n.15, 253n.86
sexual exploitation  9, 33, 70, 74–7, 79–82, suicidal ideation  98–9, 241n.59, 251nn.52,62
146, 172, 212n.47, 231n.62, 232n.81, SWERF  60–1, 117–19, 233n.6
253n.86
sexual harassment  35, 55–7, 67, 89, 102–3, Taddeo, Lisa  8, 211n.21
118, 126, 157–8, 257n.63 technological solutions  39–40
sexual orientation  24, 98–9, 101, 107, TERF  115–21, 233n.6, 250n.41
111, 162–4, 205, 215n.27, 229n.19, The Feminists  21, 36–7, 220nn.106–107,
235n.19, 238n.39, 241n.59, 243n.86, 222n.153, 260n.4
246nn.113,116, 263n.2 the good  90–1, 172, 185, 190–2, 262n.42
 index  295

the perfect  90–1, 165–6, 173 gender-critical  165–70, 172, 174, 176,
thingification  40–1, 193 179, 259n.23
Tong, Rosemary  216n.41, 232n.90, 87, 188,
261nn.25–27 vaginoplasty  101, 240n.58
third wave feminism  15, 65–6 victim-blaming  233n.3, 235n.24
trafficking  7, 47–8, 70, 74, 80, 90–1, 146, 156, Victorian Women’s Guild  180
160, 165, 175, 179, 229n.26, 259n.24 vilification  88, 117, 119, 124–5, 249n.23
transgender  4, 11, 49, 53–4, 94–8, 102–3, violent crime  47, 89–90, 109, 244n.106,
105–6, 108–9, 115–16, 119, 122–3, 245nn.107,108
132–3, 136–8, 179, 189, 209n.4,
220n.111, 226n.35, 235n.26, 238n.37, whorephobic  119, 139
240nn.57–58, 241n.62, 242nn.80–81, witchcraft  23, 38–9, 57, 214n.16, 221n.121
243n.85, 244n.102, 245n.108, 246n.117, Wittig, Monique  28–9, 36, 42, 214n.2
249n.23, 250n.29, 251n.62, 253n.92, Wollstonecraft, Mary  26, 188, 223n.163
254n.99 woman (the word)  x, 2, 21, 36–7, 44, 47,
trans-exclusionary radical feminist  65–6, 49–50, 54–5, 59–60, 62–3, 67, 92–4,
115–21, 233n.6, 250n.41 103–4, 116, 122–3, 134, 157–8, 196, 204,
transhumanism 257n.3 216n.52, 218n.70, 219n.87
transition (gender)  15–17, 32, 53, 96–100, (includes ‘exited woman’ and ‘empowered
106–8, 114–15, 122–3, 137, 171, 228n.51, woman archetype’)
235n.26, 254n.93 women as people  149–50, 160, 163–4, 201
transmen  x, 49, 61, 101–2, 113–16, 120–1, women as women  16, 59–60, 65–6, 144–5,
144–5, 205, 227n.46 149–51, 156–60, 162–4, 201
transphobic  x, 9–10, 119, 139, 210n.5, women’s culture  57–8, 115–16, 220n.106
249n.27 (includes ‘lesbian culture’)
transsexual  95–6, 105–9, 137, 234n.10, Women’s Electoral Lobby  214n.2, 260n.4
242n.80, 244n.106, 245n.107 Women’s Equity Action League  188
transwomen  x, 12, 49, 61–3, 94–5, 101–6, Women’s Human Rights Campaign 
108–10, 112–16, 118, 120–3, 127–9, 131, 14, 251n.52
136–9, 156, 166, 204, 209n.3, 212n.47, Women’s Liberation Front  149, 248n.19
233n.5, 234n.8, 235n.14, 245nn.107,108, Woman’s Place UK  232n.81, 257n.49, 263n.1
251nn.52,62, 253n.92 women’s religion  23–4, 35, 37–9, 45–6, 57
trashing  11–12, 64 women’s sexuality (men’s control of)  4, 22–4,
trendsetters 110–11 33–5, 39, 47, 50, 69, 112, 193, 212n.47
Twitter  12, 122–3, 136, 138–9, 143, 211n.6, women’s spirituality  24, 39–40, 44–6, 57
227n.39, 231n.63, 238n.37, 247n.1, women-only space  45–6, 48–9, 57, 103–5,
250n.29, 250n.37, 254n.2, 256n.40, 108–10, 138–9, 177, 203–4, 212n.47,
257n.49, 263n.3 225n.7, 234n.10
Tyler, Meagan  60–1 women’s sport  x, 47–9, 93, 118, 136–8, 156,
205, 212n.47, 246n.114
underrepresentation  8, 47–9, 56, 105, 114 Woolf, Virginia  44
unwanted sex  9 work  3, 8–9, 29–30, 36, 47–8, 50–2, 54, 70, 74,
utopia 85, 118, 126–8, 135, 148, 153, 155–8,
egalitarian  165–6, 231n.52, 261n.36 170–1, 181–2, 188, 190, 194–5, 197, 205