What is a woman? As the odyssey of Matt Walsh and Kelly-Jay Keen have confirmed, a woman is an adult human female. Yet, in public discourse and popular culture, the question remains muddy enough to transform our legal system into an unsexy slip ‘n’ slide. Conceptions of gender—uncoupled from biological sex—continue to take precedence over biological realities in toilets, dressing rooms, and sports.
The Paris Olympics has seen several transgender and intersex athletes compete, with the most controversy gathering around the two boxers of ambiguous sex who took home gold medals in the women’s welterweight and featherweight categories. Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, having previously been disqualified by the International Boxing Association after failing the gender eligibility test, were given licence to compete in the 2024 Games by the International Olympic Committee.
The spectacle that followed was branded an outrage.” Khelif’s first victim, Angela Carini, fell to her knees in surrender within 46 seconds of the first bell. Her nose was broken. “I have never felt a punch like that,” she said. Carini surrendered her hard-won chance at Olympic gold in order, as she put it, to “preserve my life.” Prominent gender-critical figures such as J.K Rowling and Elon Musk condemned the IOC, over which Khelif—secure in the knowledge of his boxing prowess—filed a harassment lawsuit.
Sex Matters’ Jo Bartosch is not far from the truth when she describes this whole debacle as “domestic violence made into a spectator sport.”
Despite the backlash, the scenes Matteo Salvini has described as “truly … un-Olympic” continued at the Paralympics. The first transgender Paralympian—Valentina Petrillo—competed in the women’s T12 class visually impaired sprint. Petrillo is a fifty-year-old biological male who claimed 11 national titles whilst competing as a man. Undergoing gender hormone therapy at the age of 41, Petrillo began competing in the women’s category and soon after claimed two bronze medals at the world championships.
All this raises an obvious question: Why does the pretence continue? Are we expected to believe human males who pop on a few oestrogen patches and don a dress become indistinguishable to biological women?
No, we are not expected to believe this. But we are expected to accept it quietly and, at crucial moments, parrot it.
We are told over and over again that ‘transwomen are women.’ They are the sex they say they are because the body is immaterial to a person’s ‘felt sense’ of gender. He thinks, therefore she is. Thus, access to gender transition hormones and surgery is a human right and life-saving medical treatment … but also immaterial to a person’s legal status as ‘trans.’ Girls need their breasts amputated by the tax-payer (so that they might live their authentic lives), but should a man be required to become eunuch—or at least shave—before he strips naked in front of seven-year-old girls? That is transphobia!
Double Standards
Some have raised the question as to whether there is a double-standard at play in the media’s depictions of people who identify as transgender. We are told implicitly not to notice that the majority of females identifying as trans are distressed teenage girls, while the majority of males identifying as trans are middle-aged men with sexual fantasies. And we are certainly not meant to ask whether the former has anything whatsoever to do the latter.
Given how often we hear the mantra that ‘transwomen are women,’ it is natural to ask why we so rarely hear the corresponding claim that ‘transmen are men,’ Shouldn’t their identity be respected? Shouldn’t they be joining their male compatriots on Olympic teams? The answer is, “Of course not!” Why? “Well, they wouldn’t stand a chance.” And why is that? Polite society replies, “Let’s not go there.”
But I am not overly concerned with politeness.
If it’s clear that making a transman compete against a biological man would be disadvantageous and dangerous, why can’t the same be said of transwomen—men—competing against women? Controversies around other trans-identified male athletes—such as swimmer Lia Thomas, cyclist Emily Bridges, and weightlifter Laurel Hubbard—are in no short supply, not to mention the countless instances of schoolgirls being robbed of medals and scholarships and confidence in regional competitions. Year upon year, the number of men permitted to compete against women mounts. This is because the disenfranchisement of ambitious women and girls is regarded as a reasonable trade-off if it manifests an ‘inclusive society.’
It is natural, then, to ask, “When did imitations of womanhood come to be regarded as more female than womanhood itself?” Put otherwise: when did the femina simulacra come to be valued above the female?
‘What is a man?’
Just as we hear far more about transwomen than transmen, similarly, the question ‘What is a woman?’ is far more common than the similarly crucial ‘What is a man?’
Answers to this question tend to have less to do with biology than secondary characteristics, virtues, and vices. A man is tall. He is strong. He is a leader. He is analytical. He is brave. He is decisive. He doesn’t take out the bins enough. This is no different from mainstream discussions of women; too many are unable—or unwilling—to be clear about a woman’s primary characteristics and instead delve into her secondary traits.
Feminists—academic ones of the second and present wave above all—must bear some responsibility for this blurring of the definition of ‘woman,’ for they, like trans and gender activists, have resisted describing women by their biological characteristics. Throughout history, women have striven to prove themselves to be ‘a match’ to men, sometimes priding themselves on the things they could do that men could not, sometimes by besting men at their own game and thus challenging man’s conception of woman. In recent decades, this attempt to challenge the social perception and definition of ‘woman’ has centered around uncoupling the female from ‘sexist stereotypes’—from the body, from the domestic space, from the maternal, and even from the feminine. They argue that a woman should not be defined merely by her anatomy, and that doing so is an error they call ‘biological existentialism.’
Sound familiar? The rejection of ‘biological existentialism’ is the foundational belief of transgenderism. Both trans rights activists, like Julia Serano, and feminists (of the kind who take their cues from Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler) have argued that not all women menstruate, not all women get pregnant, and not all women will give birth, although for entirely different reasons. For the trans rights activists, womanhood is not defined by anatomy because womanhood is a felt sense. It is a self-perceived kinship with femininity—with motherhood and nurturing; with dresses and breasts and being penetrated.
Even without Helen Joyce, one is able to see why this definition of ‘a woman’ might, well, anger some females of the species—and some gay men, too.
For some feminists—often known as ‘gender critical’ or ‘trans-exclusionary radical’ feminists (derided as ‘TERFs’)—a woman is no less of a woman because she does not become a mother, or because she experiences infertility, or because she has a mastectomy in order to beat cancer. As Aristotle points out, a three-legged dog is still a dog. A cat born without one of its two eyes is still a cat. And, it would seem, a snake is a snake if it sheds its skin or puts on a dress. In the words of Jordan Peterson, biological sex, “It’s older than the trees. It’s older than flowers. It’s older than the vertebrate nervous system. It’s old, man.”
But ask these same feminists, “If not her anatomy, what does make a woman?” the under-versed will again begin to ramble about a ‘femininity’ and a ‘felt sense’ as the Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique have taught them. They find themselves at a stalemate with smug trans rights activists, unable to explain why a biological male’s felt sense of the female is different and less legitimate than the biological female’s felt sense, particularly when, according such feminists, what is ‘female’ is a social construct.
The contradictions in the arguments of both parties are plain.
“A woman should not be defined by her anatomy because she has an important life beyond her body.” True. But she must also ground her argument for single-sex spaces and equality in her body, its vulnerability and its immutability compared to men’s. This is the position being advanced by some third-wave feminists, like Germaine Greer, who have now turned ‘gender critical’; and is beginning to be synthesised by writers like Louise Perry and Mary Harrington.
For trans rights activists, thought—who often also view themselves as feminist, like Sara Ahmed and Julia Serano—the definition of womanhood can never be founded in the biological because it negates the transcendent ‘feminine’ sense by which they identify themselves. The reality of sexed anatomy delegitimises their argument and undermines the rationale for having equal access to female spaces. It is in the illegitimacy of biological essentialism where, to their minds, the ‘lady dick’ gains its legitimacy. Yet, simultaneously, the criteria by which transwomen define their womanhood is stereotypes originating from the female form: “I don’t have breasts, but I feel like I should.”
Many transwomen list their taste for dresses, heels, lingerie, make-up, ‘receiving’ in sex, or being the ‘submissive’ one in a relationship as evidence of their being female. Further still, some even believe they would enjoy menstruation and being pregnant and that they would make excellent mothers and housewives. Indeed, most believe they would be better than real women at these things because, unlike real women, they have an enthusiasm for it—because they believe they want it more than these selfish ‘real women.’
This reductionism is an insult to women, and is damaging the self-perception of young girls. And yet, whilst it is noble to console a woman who has lost her breasts to cancer and tell her that she is no less of a woman, there is a reason she is crying over their loss. In turn, distressed young girls would not be seeking mastectomies and hysterectomies if they felt their sexual organs had nothing to do with their sex, and the destiny that is implied there. Perhaps some feminists have been coy in declaring the significance of anatomy; perhaps it is time the subject were revisited.
In an interview with Andrew Gold on the podcast Heretics, Julie Bindel—UK lesbian and women’s rights activist—admits that she “went too far” in the fight against sexist stereotypes in the 1980s. In retrospect, she concedes to the significance of biology in the formation of a safe and fair society and places her emphasis instead upon personal autonomy within the confines of biological reality. This attitude is best reflected in the attempts being made by some Millennial and Zoomer women to reclaim the ‘femininity’ which feminists of previous generations had hollowed out and discarded. They assert publicly, on social media, their ownership over motherhood and homesteading and its independence from queer theorists and trans activists. They flaunt their battalion of children whilst baking cookies and feeding chickens. The ‘trad wife’ is fast becoming a vacuous and unrealistic aesthetic but there is much to be said for “cringemaxxing.”
This biological foundation does not prevent strong, protective qualities being attributed to the female, nor gentle, nurturing qualities to the male. And similarly, a female who never becomes a mother can remain a woman, and a male who fathers no offspring remain a man, by definition.
‘Extreme misogyny?’
But this does not fully explain why the same controversy doesn’t exist around transmen as it does transwomen. The answer is a simple one: women identifying as men make no material difference to the men’s lives.
Females identifying as male do not, generally speaking, want to participate in men’s sports. Few transmen dare to use the men’s bathrooms. Whilst identifying as men, they know all too well what anatomy exists beneath their baggy clothes, and why men and women have for centuries have segregated themselves in vulnerable situations. Whilst women are often intimidated to challenge the man who enters their bathroom in a dress, men have little qualms about saying to a woman, “I think you’re lost, love.” This is because the biological female presents no physical threat to him.
To this end, men have been able to ‘check out’ of the trans debate. Whilst a handful of noble men have joined women in the fight to preserve sex-based rights—like Graham Linehan, Andrew Doyle, and James Esses—and a few unfortunate fathers have been dragged into the debate after their child declared themselves trans, the trans debate has not been imposed upon men as it has women.
Whilst it is undeniable straight, white men are forbidden from objecting to the discrimination they face in hiring practises, they do not face the same threats of violence as women do when it comes to protesting against their disenfranchisement. Not only are women expected to submit and remain silent, as these men are, they also are expected to—often quite literally—watch as mentally-ill men and fetishists undress in the segregated spaces created for women’s comfort, safety, and dignity.
In an ordinary world, these assaults and degrading imposition upon women would be deemed ‘misogynist.’ And this week, following several vicious knife attacks on women and girls—including at a Taylor Swift dance class in which three primary school age were butchered and more injured—Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announces that “extreme misogyny” is to be classed as a new form of extremism.
If you breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that this legislation was going to be used to finally crack down upon men exploiting ‘trans inclusion’ to invade women’s space, or rob them of them of opportunities and achievements, or, indeed, used to eradicate once and for all the prolific rape of English girls by gangs of Pakistani Muslim men, or, disperse the Sharia enclaves, or, tackle the 50% increase in sexual attacks against women on trains in the last two years, you had better check your thinking! ‘Extreme misogyny’ legislation exists because Jess Phillips MP receives mean tweets from housebound incels.
Gender critical feminists wait to be reassured that ‘transwomen’ will not be included in the definition of ‘women,’ lest their online assertions that biological men should not be in female changing rooms be classed as “pushing harmful and hateful beliefs” and land them on a terrorism watchlist. Whilst I am the last person who would insist that a woman has to agree with other women on account of their being a woman, one is inclined to question why it is easier for female government ministers to make accusations towards Elon Musk, and target deluded Andrew Tate fans, than tackle the things are having the most significant impact upon the quality of life of women and girls: ‘trans rights activists,’ the mass immigration of men from Islamic countries, human trafficking into the UK, paedophiles, prostitution, child exploitation material, and pornography.
The sacrifice of women and girls to progressive ideologies is a choice that our society is making. We can, and should, change course.
