Stealing Sex

I was glad to learn that Penguin was releasing some of Andrea Dworkin’s books as modern classics. I was glad for many reasons. One was that we would now have closer to hand evidence that radical feminists have offered strong critiques of the idea of biological sex.

This paragraph is from Dworkin’s Woman Hating,

Hormone and chromosome research, attempts to develop new means of human reproduction (life created in, or considerably supported by, the scientist's laboratory), work with transsexuals, and studies of formation of gender identity in children provide basic information which challenges the notion that there are two discrete biological sexes. That information threatens to transform the traditional biology of sex difference into the radical biology of sex similarity. That is not to say there is one sex, but that there are many. The evidence which is germane here is simple. The words “male” and “female,” “man” and “woman,” are used only because as yet there are no others.

Dworkin’s arguments are important but not exceptional. Feminists from many different intellectual traditions have suggested that the division between the sexes is a social division that is mostly masked as a natural one.

Still, I rather suspect I was foolish to be glad, at least for this reason. The feminists who argue that is sex is real and immutable– sometimes called “gender critical” feminists – have shown over and over again that they are willing to ignore any evidence that disrupts their core claims even if that means ignoring so much feminist history.

Having evidence is not sufficient. We already had evidence.

The argument that feminism depends on accepting biological sex as a “given” has a function. It is how “gender critical” feminists present critiques of sex as foreign to feminism. This is the story they have told and sold. Having more evidence that it is false will not get us very far if the point of the story is not to be true but to hold.

What’s the story? That until postmodernists and queer theorists and trans people came along there was just plain old sex. It was common sense. Not contested.

AND IT HAS BEEN STOLEN!

Sarah Franklin has described “gender critical” feminists as “feminism’s Brexiteers.”

It remains a stunningly accurate description.

Brexit too was premised on a fantasy of a past when we had control and of a future when we will have control.

Brexit ...