Men and women were considered to be very different, and women were considered to be inferior. Feminism was the sex/gender heterodoxy then. This isn’t ancient history, it was true as recently as the 1970s, but it’s history, nonetheless. 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.
- The following piece is taken from the “Preface” section of the book titled “Gender-Critical Feminism” by Holly Lawford-Smith. The book is a call for feminism to rediscover its radical edge. Here, the author with her learly and engaging writing argues that gender is not something to be embraced and celebrated, but a system of oppression which should be rejected.
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 masculine, 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 different, and women were considered to be inferior. Feminism was the sex/gender heterodoxy then. This isn’t ancient history, it was true as recently as the 1970s, but it’s history nonetheless. 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 gender. 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. 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’. Women-centred language is ‘exclusionary’ if it refers to biological traits. 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. 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 distinction, 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, 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’).
