Sexed: A History of British Feminism

The eye-catching, and perhaps misleading to many, title of Susanna Rustin’s book is brought to earth by its sober subtitle. Rustin sets out to chronicle in detail the progress of British feminism which, as she rightly says, is much less well-known than the history of US feminism, with the honorable exception of Mary Wollstonecraft, and one or two more British heroines.

Rustin sets out her stall very clearly from the outset writing that her book “goes against the grain of much recent feminism by emphasizing the biological reality of sex, and what this has meant historically.”

Britain, according to Rustin and others, is currently an outlier in its attachment to “gender-critical feminism, or sex-based rights, though some activists prefer to be called radical feminists or, simply feminists. What they have in common is a belief that biological sex remains relevant in politics and that women have specific needs, linked to their sexed bodies, that must be catered for by policy makers. They are committed to resist efforts to replace sex and sex discrimination with an alternative set of concepts: gender, gender identity, gender equality and so on.”

We are only on page two and already Rustin will have lost many potentially interested readers! Where to start with a reasonable critique of the position she espouses?

Let’s start with her preferred terminology, this being a very terminology-heavy book.

“Sex-based” is equivalent to “gender-critical” in the world of British feminism. The very term “gender-critical” has been mocked by other experts in the field (including by Judith Butler who is mentioned, several times but in passing, by Rustin) as surely ironic, in that the sex-based feminists show no evidence of a critical understanding of what “gender” means, and of the reasons why the term came into being.

The term “gender-critical” might also suggest to the interested layperson, that “gender” is a critical element, whereas “gender-critical” feminists deny the relevance or even existence of gender.

Rustin’s book elaborates on, what might be termed, the J.K. Rowling position, which primarily pits gender-critical feminists against transwomen, though strikingly transwomen’s voices are absent from the text, as are for the most part the other elements of LGBTQIA+ and other acronyms.

She acknowledges however that “lesbians are an important presence in the British gender-critical movement—because they are same-sex attracted and reject the idea of biologically male lesbians.” And that “homophobia is one of the drivers of trans identification . . . some teenagers opt to identify as the other sex, turning same-sex into heterosexual orientation.” More discussion required!

While she acknowledges and supports the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 that enabled trans individuals “to change their birth certificates to reflect their acquired gender” and the Equality Act of 2010 which made gender reassignment “a protected characteristic along with sex, race, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief,” what Rustin and her ilk cannot accept is self-identification without medical evidence. She cites other countries in support of her position: “India, Ireland, Norway, Spain, and the United States and many other countries have also mobilized in defence of sex-based rights and against the principle of self-ID.”

In defence of her closely researched Sexed, Rustin has pulled together an enormously detailed chronicle of British feminists and their works, many of whom and which, will be unfamiliar even to students of the genre (sorry!), and who certainly deserve to be better known.

What is critically missing from this publication, and which makes it feel desperately old-fashioned, and unfortunately “right-wing” is its unquestioning commitment to binary thinking . . . from the Introduction to the Epilogue. Women are not the only individuals with “sex-based rights” and very few medical scientists would feel comfortable with the assertion that human bodies are neatly divided into two. Sex and Gender/Nature & Nurture are not separate and opposed categories (where they are still recognized) but mutually infused.

The anti-trans dialogue would take volumes to refute but even here Rustin does not seem up to speed with the enemy! And only deals with transwomen.

The interested reader should be entranced by the title, and will still benefit greatly from Rustin’s chronical of the thinking and actions of some important but unknown British feminists, but should maintain a  very “critical” eye on her framework for analysis.