When you are under attack, fighting is fighting back. I think that is why I keep writing. And why I keep reading. To fight back is find in our histories of struggle against oppression, many resources. I am fighting for feminism too, which today means fighting against feminists whose anti-trans and anti-queer agenda have led them to form alliances with the patriarchs and the oligarchs, and to erase so much feminist work including our critiques of sex, of race, of biology, of nature.
We need these critiques now more than ever, which is another way of saying: we need that no.
I am writing this newsletter in part to discuss the problem of “gender critical” feminism, a movement that is better described as sex uncritical feminism or sex realist feminism (to be sex uncritical is to end up gender conservative as I explained here). I am also writing to document how opposition to institutional change is increasingly channeled into a critique of DEI/EDI by government, anti-woke commentators and companies. And I write as someone who has been critical of institutional diversity in dialogue with many practitioners tasked with doing the work.
So how did sex realist feminists respond to Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
The order.
There are only two genders: it’s a policy statement.
We only recognise two genders. You will be boy or girl, man or woman.
Boys will be boys. Girls will be girls.
Gender fatalism: how some are told who they will be. Who they won’t be.
Almost by fiat.
This might be obvious, but it still needs to be said:
Policies have deadly consequences. Not to be recognised as existing is to be deprived of the material support you need to exist.
Hence to fight back is also to support each other the best we can. I am inspired by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let this Radicalize You. We sustain the fight, we sustain each other, organising as being receptive, learning justice as life lessons.
Back to my question: how did sex realist feminists respond? On social media, I read descriptions of the order as “beautiful” and “clear.” I heard some dismay that the word gender and not sex was used (that sex and gender switch places should teach us something about the nature of language and usage but that’s not a lesson being learnt).
I heard a yes to the order.
Yes!
Susan Dalgety wrote
“Trump’s New Executive Order on ‘Male and Female’ It’s a huge failure of the left/progressives that the material reality of sex had to be confirmed by Trump.”
J K Rowling wrote
“A noisy part of the left still refuses to step outside their sex-is-a-social-construct bubble and acknowledge that their embrace of gender identity ideology has been a calamity. They were warned the right was capitalising on their betrayal of women and girls. They didn't listen.”
So those noisy progressives, who show that sex is socially constructed (that is, that sex is made as well as material, shaped by labour) are to blame for the executive order?
We didn’t listen to the people who agree with Trump?
Sex realist feminists call feminists who are trans inclusive (or who understand feminist liberation as trans and queer liberation) genderists because it is assumed we all believe in “gender” or “gender identity ideology.” I am not sure if they believe that is what we believe, but it useful for them to dismiss our work as genderism.
So, I guess if we are genderists that makes them sexists.
Sex realism = sexism
The executive order is sexist and sex realist. It is hard to see how it is feminist unless your version of feminism is about protecting women and enforcing sex segregation.
That version exists. As does the patriarch. The patriarch protects women.
Trump said
“I’m going to protect them [women]. I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in. I’m going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things.’”
Protecting women as protecting the nation against foreign people and foreign places.
Protecting women as protecting our property.
Women as property: it is not about being protected from abuse by the patriarch but how that abuse is justified.
A natural order.
You will be girl. You will be woman. You will be protected.
Or else.
That’s quite an order.
If Trump by saying there are only two genders confirms “the material reality of sex,” then you have been given evidence that there is something wrong with how you understand “the material reality of sex.”
Just think of “material reality.” What is material is mutable. If sex is material, sex is mutable. Sex is not given and fixed or beyond culture or history. Biology is part of our historical situation.
And oh dear, “sex-is-a-social-construct bubble.”
That’s a feminist bubble you are speaking of, blown from the mouths of so many.
Why use hyphens-between-the-words to create a compound out of so much complexity? Who are you blowing away?
Recall that radical feminists such as Shulamith Firestone who used terms like “sex class” spoke of the feminist political project as abolishing “the sex distinction.”
Not reinforcing it by executive order or any other kind of patriarchal order.
Speaking of radical feminism, Andrea Dworkin challenged “the traditional biology of sexual difference” based on “two discrete biological sexes” and turns to “a radical biology of sex similarity.”
She adds, “that is not to say there is one sex, but that there are many.”
So many feminists have demonstrated how sex is organised - how sex is reproduced and stratified. Why? We need to explain how we are stopped from proliferating, from becoming “too much” or “too many.” That is what it means to approach sex and gender, sociologically. We need to understand power in terms of control as well as discipline.
Sex can be a figure
A stick figure
A sign on the door
Also a story
Sometimes letters
F or M
A sign plus an arrow
With a point
Go that way
When sex is a sign on a door, sex is real.
When sex is a sign on a door, sex is social.
When sex is a sign on a door, sex is architectural.
When sex is a sign in a door, sex signifies.
Sex is shaped by human labour; made to mean something, made to do something.
How much do you miss when you make sex natal or native or nature!
Or is that the point: to miss? Is the point of treating terms and concepts introduced by feminists as foreign to feminism to make certain people foreign to feminism: trans people, non-binary people, plus their noisy allies in that sex-is-a-social-construct bubble.
Treating some people as ideologies. How ideological. As Melissa Gira Grant notes, “There’s no need for ‘gender ideology’ to mean anything more than this: an enemy to be defeated. But there is no such enemy ideology. There are only people.”
Queer too is being treated as an enemy ideology. I have noticed an increase in anti-queer gesturing by sex realist feminists and their patriarchal pals: as if questioning boundaries, how they are made, how they are enforced, means not having any, as if to affirm queer is not to be able to oppose child abuse. As if the most dangerous place for children and women wasn’t the family. That old norm.
It is sex realism that describes the project of liberation from coercive sex-gender regimes as “gender identity ideology,” or to use the terms of the order, “gender ideology extremism.” As Sian Norris argues “the extreme gender ideology is the one that tries to push women into oppressive boxes, ban abortion, and seek to abolish the existence of trans people and the LGBTQ+ community more widely.”
“Gender identity ideology” has not been a calamity. It is sex realism that has been the calamity. When you read that order, that’s you. That’s your reflection. It is you who helped give the right the right to threaten so many freedoms we fought for. Not that they needed help. And yet, you helped.
In the UK, the over-platforming of sex realist and sex uncritical feminists has been a disaster for feminism as well as for the LGBTQIA+ community. It is now so much harder to do the work of creating a radical feminist opposition. But we are still here. We are still fighting. Willing to be the noisy part.
Even without everything else, it's sickening how many (GC) feminists are praising an EO that has a personhood-at-conception argument as if that's not a prominent refrain against abortion rights.
Then again, I also saw members of the GC crowd joking that "at least the Taliban knows what a woman is" while lambasting Malala Yousafzi for supporting trans rights, so I'm not sure what I was expecting.
Good article but I don't know why you're quoting friend of the TERFS Sian Norris. She's right in that piece, so it seems she's had a change of heart. Not sure what her game is.