The author J.K. Rowling set off a minor firestorm in early June when 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 discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth." In a long blog post published on her website a few days later, Rowling expanded on her "gender critical" position, one shared by a number of academics, suggesting that any challenge to mainstream understandings of sex and gender is a threat to sex-based rights. This can be an appealing sentiment; it is of course important to be able to name and critique sexism. If the concepts needed to do that were under attack, it would, indeed, be a problem. But Rowling's ideology itself deprives us of the tools to analyze and critique our world.

The arguments of gender critical feminists, like those of Rowling, recapitulate much older views, which have been repeatedly revised in the history of feminist thought. We begin with “the gender binary,” which purports that there are two sorts of humans in the world: men, who are male, and manly, and attracted to the second sort of human, women, who are female, and feminine, and attracted to the first sort. Women are dainty, and nurturing, and in need of male protection; men are bold, and daring, and want to conquer things. The gender binary binds together this whole array of things: biological underpinnings, social roles, and gender stereotypes.

The gender binary is of a piece with the larger project of naturalizing social roles in 19th-century scientific thought, parallel in its way to race science. In their 1889 book The Evolution of Sex, biologists Patrick Geddes and John Arthur Thompson asserted the reality of fundamental difference between the sexes: "The more active males, with a consequently wider range of experience, may have bigger brains and more intelligence; but the females, especially as mothers, have indubitably a larger and more habitual share of the altruistic emotions." These differences are innate, immutable, and ancient. "What was decided amongst the prehistoric Protozoa,” they wrote, “cannot be annulled by an Act of Parliament." 

In the mid-20th century, the gender binary was a central object of critique for the second wave of feminist thought. In a widely used slogan, feminists asserted that gender is the social meaning of sex. But that idea can be interpreted in several ways. In The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone argued in 1970 that binary gender was a social phenomenon constructed on top of the biological reality of binary sex. Just as class oppression was the inevitable outcome of different productive roles, gendered oppression was an inevitable outcome of the two reproductive roles. Her program therefore was to abolish sex through technologies such as birth control and artificial wombs.

Others took a different position, one Gayle Rubin articulated in her 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." If gender is a social construct, Rubin argued, then we can construct different ways of doing gender. In this figuration, dichotomous sex remains an immutable biological base. But the meaning we give to it can be changed. The distinction between sex and gender marks the distinction between the biological (immutable) and the social (mutable). To understand human society—both how it works and how it might be changed—we shouldn’t attribute to one what is explained by the other.

That gender was merely a mutable product of biological reality was a powerful idea for second-wave feminism. But the social construction of gender also suggests a simple question: why only two? Why is it that these social constructions must line up neatly with an underlying biological reality? These questions were made especially pressing by the movements for queer and trans liberation, the very movements that Rowling and her allies are currently reacting to. Pull away the veil of the gender binary and you find a thousand different ways of doing this thing called gender. As queer theorist Eve Sedgwick wrote in her 1990 Epistemology of the Closet, "People are different from each other. It is astonishing how few conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact." 

“We might have classified the diversity of human bodies in any number of ways; the one we call ‘sex’ is just another concept we have imposed on that profusion. That concept isn’t ‘given’ to us by biology, and we can question whether it’s the best one for a given purpose.”

Black feminists have articulated ways to deal with this conceptual gap between social construction and biological reality. In 1977, the Combahee River Collective wrote in their "A Black Feminist Statement," "We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual." Here we see the seeds of what Kimberlé Crenshaw named "intersectionality" in her 1989 "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex." Our different identities intersect in different ways: a black lesbian's experience of womanhood is not the same as a rich British woman's is not the same as a trans woman in Mongolia. Cramming all these ways of being in the world into two monolithic genders "Man" and "Woman" is itself a distortion of reality.

By the 1990s, the supposedly dichotomous and immutable concept of sex was being called into question by scientists, not just feminists. In her 1993 article "The Five Sexes" and 2013 article "The Five Sexes Revisited," biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling argued that the human species didn’t divide into two neat categories, male and female. "Absolute dimorphism disintegrates even at the level of basic biology,” she wrote. “Chromosomes, hormones, the internal sex structures, the gonads and the external genitalia all vary more than most people realize." In other words, modern science tells us that the notion of binary sex forces a wide range of human biodiversity into two socially constructed categories, male and female.

This is why some third-wave feminists reject the second-wave distinction between sex and gender. Judith Butler wrote in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, "If the immutable character of sex is contested, 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." In other words, the particular importance we assign to certain biological facts is itself a cultural construct. We might have classified the diversity of human bodies in any number of ways; the one we call "sex" is just another concept we have imposed on that profusion. That concept isn’t "given" to us by biology, and we can question whether it’s the best one for a given purpose.

Like other gender critical feminists, Rowling has retreated from the profusion of diversity to comforting simplicity. Gender-critical backlash to queer theory and trans activism is becoming widespread, especially in the U.K. In "Doing Better in Arguments about Sex, Gender, and Trans Rights," six notable gender-critical thinkers offered a consensus statement of gender-critical philosophy as one can find. The authors proposed the analytic reduction of gender-terms such as "woman" to sex-terms such as "female"—expressed in the famous slogan, "woman = adult human female." As co-author Rebecca Reilly-Cooper argued, this is necessary because the oppression of women is specifically about the exploitation of female reproductive labor.  Thus, according to gender-critical feminists, this definition is essential to being able to name, understand, and fight the oppression of women. 

This is odd, though, because the gender-critical position is simply the gender binary in different words. There are two kinds of humans: the ones who bear children, and all that that entails, and the ones who don't, and all that that entails. And this outdated position makes it difficult to talk about oppression in an accurate way. Gender-critical analysis prevents any women from outside a narrow subset from naming and discussing their experiences and oppression.

"Sex," as Rowling imagines it, isn’t real. Yet this is no obstacle to the articulation of desire, to the exploration of the boundaries of one's heart—as any trans-inclusive lesbian could tell her. Reality is a messy thing, not susceptible to binary analyses. Yet we can have truth without essentialism and coalition without theory. We don’t need a grand theory of the true nature of Woman to talk about period poverty, abortion rights, workplace discrimination, misogynoir, or transmisogyny. What erases the lived reality of women globally isn’t the existence of trans women—it’s the insistence that these lived realities all conform to a single experience of discrimination on the basis of reproductive role.

Image Credit: Wild Flowers by Kathryn on Flickr 2017 | CC BY-ND 2.0