![]() But if the impasse between Beauvoirian, gender-critical feminists on the one hand, and Butlerian and queer feminists on the other, is ever to be overcome, it is essential to acknowledge the philosophical basis as well as the practical implications of their disagreement. Any discussion of trans identities and politics must start with trans authors. ![]() And of course, the trans experience did not begin with Butler. Liberation from the patriarchy would be won alongside gay, lesbian, transgender and queer rebels against heterosexism.įeminists do not need to have read Butler or Beauvoir to be influenced by them many Marxists, after all, have not read Marx. Rather than treating their sexed bodies as the underpinning of their politics, she argued, feminists should embrace the fluidity of gender. But the idea that a woman is made (“not born”) out of a female body was mostly accepted until the early 1990s, when the US philosopher Judith Butler sought to overturn it.īutler’s argument, set out in her books Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, is that sex is “no longer a bodily given” but a discursive concept: “a process of materialisation that stabilises over time”. Scholars, including Avtar Brah in the UK and Kimberlé Crenshaw in the US, offered crucial insights into the ways that white feminism erases the experiences of black and minority-ethnic women. Later authors developed these ideas, introducing the term “gender” and taking feminist approaches into fields including history, law and literary studies, as well as activism. “The body being the instrument of our grasp upon the world, the world is bound to seem a very different thing when apprehended in one manner or another,” she wrote. But she believed biological differences as well as social forces were important. She was determined to unpick the masculine/feminine hierarchy that made women subordinate. Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book The Second Sex set the stage for feminists in postwar Europe. But I think this avoidance also reveals a lack of interest in feminist political philosophy – and the rift that has opened up between adherents of two key thinkers. With the topic routinely described as “toxic”, it’s unsurprising that many people’s reaction is to avoid it. ![]() But they exploded again in the buildup to last week’s announcement by the UK government that it has decided against changing the law to allow people to change their legal sex without a medical diagnosis, although the process will be made easier and cheaper. During the early months of the pandemic, hostilities were partly suspended. These arguments featured at the start of this year, after some candidates for the Labour leadership signed a “trans pledge” that labelled the feminist campaign group Woman’s Place UK a “hate group”. But debate on these issues has exposed a faultline with wider implications. The immediate cause is a conflict of opinion about transgender activism and the reasons behind an increase in the number of girls referred for treatment for gender dysphoria in England, from 32 in 2009/10 to 1,740 in 2018/19. Why am I writing this now? Because recent events have forced me, like many others, to think much harder than I have been used to about feminism. “We think back through our mothers if we are women,” she wrote in her seminal essay about female exclusion, A Room of One’s Own. She thought about ideas, and where they come from, all the time. That’s one reason why Virginia Woolf is such a pivotal figure – and why Woolfian is one more exception to the rule above. Intellectual life has mainly been stewarded by men. It’s obviously no great puzzle to work out why this is.
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