Feminism

Sex is real. So is gender. The anatomy of propaganda.

I’ve tried to resist entering ‘the discourse‘ when it comes to analysing whether famed author JK Rowling is a TERF - a ‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’. For the record, Rowling’s actions suggest those of a TERF. Kat Blaque’s video embedded below addresses this better than I ever could:

Instead, I want to turn a critical eye to one element of Rowling’s now-infamous January tweet about a UK employment discrimination case that can teach us a useful lesson about how propanganda works.

Sex essentialism 101
I’m not going to go over all the myriad ways Rowling’s tweet oversimplifies and misrepresents the details of Maya Forstater’s failed legal challenge - the full text is available here and I recommend everyone take the time to read it. This was clearly a test case intended to set a legal precedent, and it fell over at the very first hurdle. Instead I want to focus on the line ‘sex is real’ because it’s a slick and in my opinion powerful bit of disinformation. The idea that gender critical feminists - and from hereon out I will try to use their preferred terminology - are simply defending the empirical proposition that ‘sex is real’ (and are not just, say, disguising anti-trans bigotry) is likely to become an enduring feature in this little culture war.

The phrasing demonstrates how propaganda can simultaneously set up a straw man about the position of so-called ‘gender theorists’, while obscuring the true position of the sex essentialists. No one of any consequences who supports trans rights says that sex isn’t real. The default position - accepted by academics, activists and, I would dare to add, broadly understood by the lay public - is that sex and gender refer to two separate English-language concepts and that which one to use to depends on the context. Gender typically refers to socially-constructed rules, norms and expectations which attach to categories of people on the basis of their behaviour and appearance. Sex, on the other hand, refers to bimodally distributed clusters of biological traits which are usually - but far from exclusively - linked in some way to reproductive function. It’s not that sex isn’t real, it just that it isn’t meaningful in many social contexts. When I listen to or read the works of trans people, they constantly and repeatedly emphasise that they are keenly aware of the ‘reality’ of biological sex. For many, though not all, trans and non-binary people, this reality is the cause of significant distress and their experiences are to a significant degree shaped by the effort it takes to manage the incongruence between their sex characteristics and gender identity.

Here’s the thing. The true position of gender critical feminists is in fact that gender isn’t real. That’s what they won’t - or can’t - admit, because it’s so extreme. They either believe that a social construction can’t be ‘real’ (at all!); or that any incongruence between sex and gender is the result of mental disorders deserving of sympathy, but not respect; or that the only relevant social category in (almost) all circumstances is sex. Either way, references to a person’s gender in ordinary English usage can refer to their biological sex and only their biological sex. As self-proclaimed critics of gender, they’re attempting to argue that socially constructed categories aren’t or shouldn’t be real, and that therefore attempting to modify or reform them in any way impossible and perverse.

If gender critical folks had their way, it would be linguistically impossible for anyone to identify with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, and their personal identification and social role would have no consequences. A trans woman would be treated by society for all intents are purposes as a man and a trans man as a woman. The medical, psychological and social evidence is that this position - long the historical default - causes harm to trans individuals, and enforces hierarchical and rigid notions about gender relations that end up also causing low-level anxiety for the vast majority of cis people. In the words of the British judge, it is a belief incompatible with the rights and dignity of other citizens.

By obfuscating their true position, gender critical feminists are attempting to hide the absolutism inherent in their nugatory beliefs. They’re sex essentialists in exactly the same way that self-proclaimed hereditarians are ‘race essentialists’ and the Stalinist/nazbol crowd are ‘class essentialists’. It’s a neat dogwhistle, because the lay reader (perhaps including JK Rowling?) is unlikely to recognise the trick being played on them. And it’s also a perverse bit of psychological projection, because they end up portraying their opponents - not themselves - as the defenders of an indefensible, unscientific position.

When does sex matter?

The essence of any good faith debate over the relevance of sex and gender centres around identifying the contexts in which each system of categorisation is most relevant. The progressive position, which I hold, is that for most social purposes gender is the most relevant categorisation, and that therefore there is wide scope for this system to be critiqued, challenged and reformed - or even abolished if we chose to. The reactionary position - shared by conservatives and gender critical feminists alike - is that sex is the most relevant categorisation more often than not, and that as a result that options of critique, challenge and reform are limited. Instead, (cis-) women must organise on the basis of sex in order to achieve social power and status equal to (cis-)men.

The first, and far and away most significant, context in which sex is the most relevant category is when it comes to health and medical treatment. A trans man may need to see a gynaecologist, and trans women may need to check for prostate cancer. Many diseases and health conditions affect sex characteristics differently, and it is in everyone’s self-interest that trans individuals, though socially and culturally of their chosen gender, receive medical treatment and advice best suited to the biological characteristics they actually possess. A menopausal cis woman, an intersex individual and a trans person may all require hormone treatment. In this way, “Good morning ma’am, have you experienced any discomfort in your penis?” is a perfectly logical English construction.

Secondly, we should recognise that romantic and sexual attraction is built in complicated ways on both sex and gender. Most people describe being attracted to some weighted combination of social performance and sexual characteristics, and some people are highly attracted to combinations of traits that are uncommon or transgressive. Some people may be highly motivated by the opportunity to reproduce and limit their choice of partners to those they can produce viable offspring with - ending relationships with infertile partners who they are otherwise attracted to. Some may be attracted to a person of the opposite gender but draw the line at same-sex genitals. But others may be totally comfortable with a feminine penis or male vagina. Many people will believe that what matters most is chemistry, personality or some other abstract quality. Since every adult human is entitled to full and absolute autonomy in their choice of partner - and to interfere with that choice is a crime - then people for whom some arbitrary sexual characteristic is a deal-breaker will always be able to act on those desires with any adult human who’d have them! Plenty of people have sexual desires that are considered socially questionable in some form or another.

Finally, we come to the vexed issue of sports. Sport is segregated in the interest of an abstract social goal of ‘fairness’. Sex and gender are merely being used as proxy variables for this goal. Defining what does, and does not, constitute an unfair competitive advantage is a complicated sociological question and by a process of trial-and-error most societies with professional athletics have prohibited a variety of chemical interventions while allowing unlimited funds to be spent on training, facilities and athlete development. Whether sex or gender, both or neither, are relevant to fair competition is as yet an open question. One trans athlete may outperform a cis person, but how much of that advantage is due to their biochemistry and how much is due to the social encouragement and development opportunities they might have received pre-transition? The burden of evidence is heavy, given both the statistically tiny number of trans athletes and the general physical exceptionalism of most athletes. Even if trans women were shown to have longer bones and wider shoulders than cis women on average, we would have no statistical reason to believe this difference would also exist among professional athletes. It’s also hard to avoid the impression of racial bias in these discussions, as many of the most exceptional trans- and intersex athletes (including notably Caster Semeya) have been non-caucasian.

The most plausible resolution to me right now seems to be a convergence on testosterone standards (in some sports) under which both trans- and cis- women can compete fairly, while excluding most cis-men, doping (cheating) athletes and athletes with rare medical conditions that might give them an unfair advantage. The widespread availability of hormone treatments also means any excessive innate biochemical advantage can be treated and reversed, if desired. Such tests would be simple for professional sports to apply, while amateur sports (where widespread blood testing might be infeasible) could continue to rely on gender as a low-cost proxy.

Gender rules

Once we accept the proposition that ‘gender is real’, we can subject it to serious criticism and debate. Many people - both cis and trans - are at ease with their gender roles; others think gender hierarchies should be deconstructed and rebuilt in more fluid or egalitarian ways; others are simply gender abolitionists, believing that all social norms, rules and behaviours based on stereotyped characteristics should be abolished entirely. All of these arguments and propositions are prima facie valid, because social structures can be remade by social beings however we’re able. Sex essentialists would take all these options from us, because they reduce behaviour to fixed biological traits that cannot be changed.

Nowhere is the debate between sex essentialists and gender realists less productive than when it comes to ‘women’s spaces’ such as bathrooms, refuges and prisons. The radical argument that everyone with a penis poses a threat to everyone with a vagina at all times makes sense within the gender critical framework, but appears puritanical and impractical as a guide to public policy to most people. On the other hand, gender realists argue that violence against women is a product of patriarchy - toxic socialisation which causes male-identified individuals to feel entitled to have access to or control women’s bodies. Whenever people in womens’ spaces - either cis or trans - are identified as predators then those individuals should be treated as the criminals they are, and sanctioned on the basis of their behaviour, not their identity or gender performance.

These are sometimes difficult questions. But when lay people appear uncertain or uncomfortable about these issues, and become susceptible to gender critical propaganda, it’s likely not because their instinctive beliefs about sex and gender are being called into question. It’s because they don’t know - and likely have never even thought before - about how those beliefs should apply in particular edge cases. That’s totally normal. But the propagandandist exploits that ambiguity and uncertainty to drive a wedge between people and their beliefs, whereas the activist is there to help and guide the public through unfamiliar terrain.

The problem with liberal feminism is its liberalism, and that's OK

Growing up as a 90's kid, the 'liberal feminism' of the Spice Girls era was a dirty word. Cultural conservatives, who dominated the airwaves then as they do now, lambasted the perceived decadence of Gen X and millennial women. But the opinion of the radical feminists who taught me political and social science at university wasn't much better - they lamented then, as they do now, the superficiality of many modern day feminists who take the victories of the past for granted. Paradoxically, the version of woman-centric politics embraced by the vast majority of both women and men was treated by most commentators as politically irrelevant, and beneath serious notice.

Liberal feminism gets a bum rap. It's lack of a political edge is precisely why it’s so ubiquitous in culture. I suspect, though I can't prove, that the anti-feminist politics of the 2000s stems in part from the relative invisibility of liberal feminism, in a way that both prefigured and reflected the broader populist backlash against the neoliberal assumptions of the era. But as with modern liberalism as a whole, liberal feminism is a richer intellectual tradition than it's often given credit for and offers a coherent - if perhaps insufficient - response to the problems facing women as individuals under capitalism.

It’s not all bad

Liberal feminism shares all the same features, faults, history and values of liberalism as a whole. It would be incorrect to simply stereotype ‘libfems’ as a superficial modern gloss on an older, more radical tradition - an inferior copy, branded and corporatised. Liberal feminists including Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill (yes, that JS Mill) long preceded the twentieth century, but fought for the fundamental rights of women using arguments and tactics that were considered extreme for the time. For all its contemporary blandness, liberalism was once a radical tradition – indeed, THE radical tradition. We may have reservations about the extremism of Lenin and friends - but the bolsheviks learnt how to be revolutionaries from liberals, sometimes literally.

Liberal feminism, like many ideologies that grew up in and around the current Western cultural and ideological context, is fundamentally oriented around answering the central paradox of that ontology: if all people are in some sense supposed to be equal, how is it that some are more equal than others? At its best, egalitarian feminism argues that sex and gender are arbitrary social categories and that social rules, norms and structures should be set up in such a way that these categories play no role in outcomes for individuals. Wherever there is evidence that individuals and groups do not experience broadly equitable outcomes, laws and social programs should be put in place to rectify the disparity. So far, so Rawlsian.

But liberalism is a broad church. Many mainstream feminists, particularly of the white, upper/middle-class variety, are centrally focused on equality of opportunity and concern themselves with more equitable representation at the highest levels of government, corporate and cultural power. Rather than quotas and viewpoint diversity being a necessary remedy for structural inequality, they become an end in themselves. But this blindspot is shared by all liberals, for whom an open and broadly representative ruling class is more important than questioning the existence of ruling class in the first place. Like all liberals, libfems can be shockingly dismissive of or tokenise the concerns of poor women of colour and ignore entirely the issues facing women in developing economies.

At its more conservative leaning end, we even find 'classical liberal' or self-described 'equity' feminists – such as Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Summers – who focus on freedom solely in the negative sense: so long as legal, state discrimination is impossible (a battle won, they claim, by the suffragettes), then everyone is responsible for their own fate in life. Whether naivete or willful blindess, the effect is the same. And, similarly, a shallow, libertarian emphasis on personal choice can produce a feminism that is consumerist and marketed as a lifestyle ‘girlpower’ brand while reinforcing existing gender relations.

Radicals and Liberals

Radical feminists, including myself, who operate within universalist traditions claim that the social position of women cannot be understood solely as a deviation from the liberal universal ideal - an error, soon to be fixed. Rather, patriarchy – a social hierarchy of subordination based on sex and gender – is universal to the human experience and exists outside of capitalism – it significantly pre-dates bourgeois economics and has been seamlessly incorporated into it. This gendered social structure has to be critiqued in order to understand the social roles of men and women: it’s a feature, not a bug. Of course, radicals disagree – often vehemently – as to whether the patriarchy is orthogonal and unrelated to other economic and political structures, whether it strictly co-evolves with them (as socialist feminists and social reproduction theorists hold), or whether those structured interact in complex and multifaceted ways (i.e. intersectionality, the broadest conceptual approach). But all agree that liberalism can't – or won't – deal with this more fundamental inequality. on its own.

Excluded from this typology are the anti-liberal feminists - the sex essentialists and difference feminists - who believe that there are intrinsic differences between men and women, and that the goal of feminist politics is not to eliminate or alleviate those differences, but to organise politically on the basis of sex in order to obtain power for women as a group. This is a shallower and more pessimistic form of identity politics, which shares significant similarities with both reactionary understandings of gender, and other supremacist formations who seek defence against, dominance over or separation from other groups. There's a reason beyond just their common enemies why TERFS/gender critical feminists, conservatives and lesbian separatists often work together – it's because they share common beliefs about the essential nature of sex and the incommensurability of gender categories. But individual men do not oppress individual women: rather, men and women (but mostly women) are both defined by and oppressed by a social structured (‘patriarchy’) that is created and enforced by both men and women (but mostly men).

Feminist politics and ideology is complex, and often seems like a labrinthine minefield to those, such as myself, on the outside looking in. It may be that this attempt to understand its various currents through the lens of other philosophical traditions is reductionist and incomplete. But for me, at least, it’s been helpful to understand how feminism relates to the broader struggle.

The Structure and You! Privilege, Preference and #MeToo

The left-of-centre streamer Destiny has argued in a series of recent videos that the Left needs to do a better job at persuasion: that we've lost the capacity to argue effectively for our positions. This is a task I also identify and take up in my own book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". One of Destiny's principle talking points has been that while the Left is often good at identifying structural injustice in society (as I put it: the Left is liberalism plus structural critique), we often critique it in a way that's perceived by the ordinary voter who participates in those structures as an attack on their personal identity. 

This is an important point worth engaging, because it recurs in a range of policy areas. Take, as an example, the recent back-and-forth between YouTubers Arielle Scarcella and Contra Points over personal sexual preference. The disagreement between the two sides is not whether racist or transphobic (or ableist or fat-shaming) preferences in one's choice of intimate partner are legitimate (both insist they accept this), but rather whether academic critique of the cause and consequences of those preferences at a social level undermines that principle of individual choice. This twitter spat, of course, is merely a pop culture manifestation of the TERF argument that trans lesbians seek to invalidate the identity of cis lesbians (defined in terms of attraction to female sex characteristics). And it also carries echoes of the lower profile but long-running debate over racism and transphobia in gay male pickup culture. 

Most people have little difficulty reconciling the idea that social cues play a role in the formation of their sexual preferences, even cues coded on problematic categories such as race or age (or gender roles or even dominance hierarchies). We all go about our dating lives, secure in the knowledge that our law and culture renders us sovereign over our choice of intimate partner and the pursuit of our own definition of happiness. Trans people are merely the latest in a long line of formerly marginalised minorities to go through the process of winning greater social visibility and respect; they are not the first step on a slippery slope to the erasure of gay identity or the erosion of the bedrock principle of sexual consent. Most of us are fine with being a little hypocritical now and then when it comes to getting laid. 

A bigger problem: Virtue and Vice

But trans acceptance is merely the tiny tip of a very large social iceberg. Perhaps the principle way in which most people experience this phenomenon is when it comes to feminism, or more precisely: the concept of the patriarchy. Most of us have very little exposure of academic feminism, and even those few men (and women!) that do often hesitate to label themselves as feminists. Why? Surely, we can all agree that sexual assault is a very bad thing and that women should not be harassed or intimidated or made subject of violence. But - they insist - #notallmen are like that, by which of course they mean *I* (or my husband, or my father, or my son) am (is) not like that. Rather than putting aside their own identity to listen to the subjective experience of women about how you (yes you!) have contributed to and likely benefitted from a hierarchy that inhibits women's careers and violates their personal autonomy, they complain that feminism has gone too far and threatens their identity as men. 

There are echoes of this too in the discussion of "working class whites", racial privilege and identity politics. The Left critique of structural racism and the way it privileges white identities is qualitatively and quantitatively rigorous. And yet the fact remains that due to widespread economic inequality, many white voters do not *feel* privileged - or indeed racist - at all! Despite the fact that Democratic Party policies would have done more to alleviate their material disadavantage than Republican ones, many conservative white voters chose to support an actual bigot over the candidate who put them in the "basket of deplorables". Most of Trump's supporters have no real attachment to white nationalism. But they will continue to be activated by a backlash bias against politicians who they perceive as attacking their sense of self as 'good people'.

The reality is that while formal philosophy largely focuses on deontological (or rule-based) and consequentialist ethics, most people continue to act as if their virtue was all that mattered. We all have a psychological need to see ourselves as good people, who do only good things for good reasons. We can recognise when bad things happen, but these bad things are done by bad people for bad reasons. In many ways, getting people to think this way about unjust structural categories is a victory. By the 21st century, most people agree that racist behaviour is bad and that people who perform racism are racists who deserve social ostracism. Social movements largely stop the act of persuasion at that point, because we've effectively won. But using categorical rhetoric to persuade people who think categorically limits our capacity to keep fighting when society moves on and new issues arise. We were so successful in convincing ordinary voters that legal racism or homophobia was bad that when we go back and ask them to recognise that ending legal discrimination left behind persistent structural inequalities (such as the treatment of trans people), they reject us on the same rhetorical grounds that we ourselves taught them to use. 

The whole point of intersectionality and solidarity as a practice is to get people to listen and consider their place in society in relation to others. The centre and the right do not reject 'identity politics' because marginalised groups label themselves as victims: they oppose 'identity politics' because it serves to place them in the role of oppressors, a role that is at odds with their own sense of self. Solidarity ultimately is a two-way street: we have to persuade people not only of the justice of a single cause, but to be part of a perpetual movement of interlocking causes. But by the same token, we on the Left must avoid using our own categories in ways which are politically detrimental to the construction of such a solidaristic movement. 

Where does that leave us?

One of the great advantages of evolution-centric thinking is that it conditions you to think in terms of the properties of populations, and not the properties of individuals. In this vein, racism, heteronormativity, homophobia and transphobia are measurable properties of the the social structure and thus should only be used to categorise society as a whole. Individuals, on the other hand, are not completely determined by categories: behaviour is probabilistic and therefore at least partially contradictory. People don't *feel* accurately defined by the labels like racist or transphobe because they often have subjectively good intentions and often blind to the negative consequences of their behaviour, which may be casual or incidental. As a result, they feel that critiques of structural categories are inherently personal.  

So I think our starting position has to be that structural categories can only properly describe populations and behaviours, and not individuals. We can and should talk about how our collective decision-making leads to adverse consequences that disproportionately help or hinder certain categories of person. We can and should talk about the behaviour sets that effectuate and perpetuate those decisions. But we should be extremely reluctant to attribute a category to individuals or sub-populations. Structural racism, for example, is an unequal relationship between constructed racialised categories and is not the defining identity of any one group, even if that group disproportionately benefits from that unequal relationship. Transphobia, too, is a systematic pattern of oppression of trans individuals that is sustained by recurring patterns of discriminatory behaviour and belief, not the malicious intent of any specific individual or sub-group. 

Of course, some people are just assholes. We can and should question how the individual chooses to relate to the structure. The vast majority of the time, they will be neutral or passive towards it. Sometimes, as with the patriarchy, they will actively benefit from it. Rarely, they will serve as active enforcers of structural inequality: punishers of deviance and propagators of supporting ideology. When people have power, and choose to use that power to sustain inequality, then it's fair to call them out for being bigots. But when people lack power and merely benefit passively from the structure, we need to be delicate in prying them from their attachment to the status quo. In particular, we need to find ways to break the identification between group identities and the self-appointed leaders of groups, so that our critiques of those with power aren't received as attacks on the powerless. 

It's OK to be a little uncool sometimes

Progressives, generally, are more comfortable with ambiguity than conservatives. We more readily accept that it's ok to be uncool and hypocritical sometimes. That passively benefitting from racial privilege or only wanting to be intimate with people with vaginas doesn't make us any less of an ally to our comrades-in-arms. Authoritarians have a harder time with this: they are compelled to reconcile their personal identity with social contructed categories. Ultimately, our long-term goal should be to bring about social conditions that make more people into progressives, rather than merely constructing new social structures that cause conservatives to follow our behaviourial lead. Because we're going to want things (now and in the future) that we haven't yet socialised conservatives into supporting. And if we move forward without a way of doing so, the backlash will continue to be strong and fierce. 

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The colour analogy

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In this 'dark age' of intense political and ideological contestation, it's inevitable that some people should express (again) a strong desire for universal ’truth’ in social and political life. Genuine ideologues are immune to such concerns: for us, discourses create narratives for our moral instincts and power is the explanatory variable which mediates between ideas and reality.

Centrists also have moral intuitions but often appear to lack confidence that the narrative justifications for their instincts provide sufficient epistemological certainty. Such 'skeptics' dismiss ideology as a social contruct unsuitable for ethical inquiry, but often end up replacing it with appeals to authority and nature in the form of scientism or 'realism'. Not all centrists are skeptics in this definition: many are ideological utilitarians who believe they can calculate optimum social outcomes. But in philosophical terms, the so-called skeptics argue that certain kinds of intuitions (i.e. their own) have ethical consequences because they can be demonstrated scientifically. 

This appeal to the empirical comes at a potentially dangerous time for the infant sciences of evolutionary sociology and psychology. For the first time, the social and biological sciences can offer coherent accounts of the origins and evolution of human culture. While the default philosophical position is that natural facts do not create moral ones, this distinction may be break down when culture is (correctly) understood as part of, rather than distinct from, the natural world. And it should worry the left that right-leaning centrists have noticed and begun to mis-apply cultural evolution to discredit and devalue other positions. To my mind, such people oversimplify the complex implications of cultural evolutionary theory, and in particular the idea of gene-culture co-evolution. This blog attempts to correct those misconceptions, and it does so using a device I'm rather fond of: the colour analogy. 

The colour analogy

The electromagetic spectrum is continuous and infinite; light can possess almost any wavelength and no wavelength is particularly differentiated from any other. Out of this infinite variety, we can think of the visible spectrum as those wavelengths which convery potentially useful information on a planet like Earth, which is composed of certain elements at certain temperatures. What this implies is that it's useful for agents to know, for example, that most plants are 'green'; but linguistic colour categories ike red, blue and green are arbitrary linguistic constructs with no basis in physics. Firstly, since wavelengths are continuous, where we draw dividing lines between categories is completely random (or so it seems). And secondly, we have no way of guaranteeing that two agents see a colour distinction in the same place. We can agree that a plant is the same colour, but experience that colour in relation to others completely differently.

For the sake of the further analogy, consider light's wavelength a natural, scientific fact and subjective categorisation of that colour (a cultural construct) as their social construction of its meaning. 

For a long time in the twentieth century, this insight was the central underpinning of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the idea that language categories were essentially arbitrary, and moreover these arbitrary categorical differences altered how individuals perceived the world. Anthropologists showed how different cultures described and experience colour in vastly different ways, and historians also noted the relatively paucity of words and concepts describing colour in the ancient world. This was a view of culture and language at home with the then-dominant 'blank slate' thesis of human psychology and the strict separation enforced between biology and culture in the aftermath of the discrediting of Social Darwinism. 

Yet in 1969 (and in continuing work since), Berlin & Kay showed that there was an underlying pattern to all this diversity. Colour terms did not emerge randomly, but appeared to follow patterns that the researchers believed corresponded with economic and social development. First, a society distinguished between light and dark, then red, then yellow and green, then blue, then brown, and finally orange, purple and grey. There were exceptions within this pattern, of course: some variation caused by randomness, others by specific adaption to particular ecologies. But on the whole, Berlin & Key had discovered that colour terms evolved in a common way amongst humans, suggesting an underlying structural pattern. The following explainer from Vox does the topic some justice:

In fact, this universality amongst the human experience of colour may be hard-wired into our biology. Like all Old World primates, but unlike most mammals, humans are trichomats - with three types of colour receptors in our visual system attuned to short- (blue), medium (green), and long- (yellow-red) wavelengths. It would uncontroversial to assert that the particular combination of visual receptors found in our biology are the product of adaption to the natural environment through natural selection: being a trichromat at these wavelengths conveys an evolutionary advantage (in the form of electromagnetic data) at acceptable cost. Similarly, it should be uncontroversial to state that the way we use and analyse that data socially is subject to selection effects based on whether our categorisations of colour convey socially and environmentally useful information at acceptable cost. 

Gene-culture coevolution contains both these premises, but also something extra: the types of colour category that can emerge culturally are constrained by our common biological inheritance (and vice-versa). In other words, cultural variation and adaption is not infinite, but shaped by genetic factors common to all homo sapiens - cultural evolution is path dependent and part of that path is a universal biological inheritance. Any human society, pre-loaded with red, green and blue colour visual receptors and operating in an Earth-like natural environment will develop colour terms in a (relatively) predictable fashion depending on its level of social complexity. The same is true of all culture: tolerable variations in behaviour must be suited to a bipedal, social animal with consistent biological needs such as food, water and shelter.

Sex and Gender

Let's consider what these insights mean for social policy, choosing an example with clear biological and cultural elements. Opponents of so-called 'gender ideology', a.k.a. the completely obvious conclusion that sex and gender are different things and gender is socially constructed, argue that biological categoriesof sex create an inarguable moral case against culturally recognising non-binary genders. Yet sex, like light wavelength, is not a strictly binominal category: biological sex is made up of a number of different indicators (i.e. reproductive role, secondary sexual characteristics etc) each of which in turn encloses some degree of variation. When these variances are given weights and summed for a species like humans that reproduces sexually, we would likely see two clusters of sexual characteristics with distinct statistical peaks but some variation and potential for overlap. Not a binary, but bimodal. 

Scientists can treat these clusters of biological averages as distinct 'sexes', and we can think of our day-to-day ability to distinguish between them our 'sex receptors'. While gender roles are a social construct, evidence that even very young children are sensitive to sex differences in adults suggests that there is at least some part of our developmental biology that is tuned to probabilistically distinguish sex categories. Thus, most (but far from all) human societies have developed binary gender roles because the cultural evolution of gender is influenced (but not dictated) by sexual dimorphism. But what's important is that there is clearly no barrier to recognising additional gender(role)s or different ones or none altogether - plenty of cultures have done so.  As societies become more open and tolerant of individual self-expression and definition, we can and should re-examine our existing social categories of gender and be more tolerant of categorical innovation. This really isn't that hard! 

Moral Colours

So let's bring this back to moral philosophy. I've mentioned Jon Haidt, his Moral Foundations Theory, and my problems with both him and it before. Haidt is becoming something of a guru to centre-rightists and 'classical liberals', but I feel this is because he has drawn the wrong ethical conclusions from his own research (a risk for any scientist). To summarize briefly, Haidt and his collaborators posit that humans are equipped with modular cognitive capabilities relating to ethical and social reasoning. The most well-studied of which are our aversion to physical harm (i.e. 'care'); our biases towards fair outcomes (or 'proportionality'); mechanisms for resolving stresses caused by social hierarchy (i.e. 'loyalty'); a slider for resolving the Omninove's Dilemma (i.e. 'openness to experience'); and a sensor to avoid potentially harmful substances (disgust or 'sanctity'). All of these biological modules make sense for a social species operating in a potentially hostile environment, and can be demonstrated in human populations of all levels of social organisation. 

Where Santa Barbara-style evolutionary psychologists, Haidt and their respective followers go wrong, however, is to leap immediately from these universal biological constraints to ethical rules, without considering culture or evolutionary history as intermediary variables. They believe, like sex-essentialists, that science has provided them with universal and objective 'truths' that can and should form the basis for universal ethical philosophy. Because Popperian science provides standards of falsifiability and objectivity, they believe their ethical conclusions are superior to conventional philosophy and ideologies. But all they have done is cloak their naive intuitionism with a naturalist fallacy.

The correct response to such claims is not to keep human culture and ethics separate from biology, but to understand that biological and cultural evolution both partially (and validly) contribute to social norms and practices. In other words, we can accept Haidt's claim that certain moral instincts (with both genetic and environment-driven variability) are universal to the human species. But we must also recognise that these merely weight the sorts of cultural systems humans can develop and do not determine them. In philosophical terms, our evolved intuitions may provide a useful short-hand way of resolving simple ethical questions, but complex societies require more complex and nuanced rules. Cultural rules and norms must always contend with these intuitions and biases (as the behaviourial economists believe), but they work together as often as against one another. Whether genes and culture are complementary or antagonistic depends on the types of social problem a society is trying to solve. 

As is common with sorts of enquiry, it turns out that complex philosophical and ethical problems don't actually have simple solutions. Reasonable people can and will disagree about what the categories of 'right' and 'wrong' include, in much the same way as we might disagree on distinguishing 'purple', 'magenta' and 'mauve'. While evolutionary science may be putting the intuitive case on firmer foundations, a full appreciation of cultural evolution must also recognise and knowledge that ideologies and culture are no less adapted to solving the sorts of social problems we face as a society.

Why I’m a radical feminist (but not THAT kind of radical feminist)

This is a long one. Stay with me!

Once upon a time, as a first-year political science undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, I was taught feminism 101 by Sheila Jeffreys. Jeffreys, perhaps the archetypal “radical lesbian separatist” was and remains controversial figure. But unlike many of my classmates (several young conservative women made a show of boycotting the compulsory course) I found a lot to like in her radical critique of gender relations. I’ve subsequently crossed paths with Jeffreys a couple of times professionally, in ways that have highlighted the problematic aspects of her attitude towards sex workers and trans individuals. 

This is a blog about feminism. While the composition of groups, classes and interests that make up a society is variable, there is one “identity” – gender – which is just about ubiquitous across humankind because it is built on top of a universal biological scaffold: sex* [see below]. While I personally believe we can build ideologies without reference to social identities, I suspect that this cannot be done satisfactorily without addressing gendered inequalities. Thus, while we can [in theory] debate socialism or capitalism without considering differences in race or religion, a separate critique of patriarchy is a necessary co-requisite to any progressive politics.

What follows is my effort to engage with these questions, noting that I am not a woman, am incapable of experiencing the female perspective, and have not seriously engaged with the key texts. In other words, nothing below counts for very much beyond my own perspective. 

Back to Basics

It is now broadly recognised that sex and gender refer in English to two distinct concepts: the former biological, the latter social. Importantly, sex itself is not a simple categorical concept but an index of variations (in primary or reproductive sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, endocrinal systems, neural structures etc) which may or may not co-vary in any given individual. While intersex individuals who defy traditional categorisation based on their chromosomes or primary sex characteristics are often considered the 'exceptions who prove the rule', people struggle to accept (as a recent special issue of Scientific American pointed out) that we are all sexual chimaeras to some degree. Each individual mixes stereotypically ‘male’ and ‘female’ biological and cultural traits as a result of our own particular genetic legacy, developmental history and social conditioning. We can take broad averages of particular traits, but the probability that any given individual has one hundred per cent of the biological markers statistically characteristic of their assigned sex is extremely low. 

Gender, on the other hand, is the set of social roles and expectations which are constructed around sex variability. It is likely that unequal social roles based on biological sex at least partially predate society, and even the human species itself; children seem innately tuned to pick up on and reproduce gendered behaviours. Much as minor genetic differences which vary with geography (such as in antibody expression) become associated with visible but unrelated ‘tags’ (such as skin colouration or cultural practices) which are in turn constructed into racialized social hierarchies, gender is a social construct based on superficial difference markers (e.g sexual characteristics) with complex links to ultimately irrelevant biological differences (such as chromosomal make-up or hormone regulation). Our mental desire to categorise reduces all this wonderful diversity into binary [oppressive] social roles with vast consequences: male and female.

I am a radical feminist because I believe that these constructed gender inequalities pre-date all other forms of social oppression (including race and class), and there is a credible argument that gender hierarchies are the model for all other forms of exploitation and hierarchy. I further believe that gender inequality is based first and foremost on the exploitation of reproductive capacity, which is largely (but not exclusively) determined by sex. Children were the original “capital good”: the input and output of all other forms of production. Women controlled that means of production by the contribution of their labour and men constructed elaborate norms and roles to unjustly seize most of that surplus value for themselves. The modern idea of gender is constructed, like Frankenstein’s monster, from a motley set of high-salience but low-information signals in order to build a hierarchical structure that (primarily) benefits men.

Power and Patriarchy

While not every human society is patriarchal, a sufficiently large percentage of them are that it is accurate to describe gendered inequality as being representative of our species. We are neither chimpanzee (enforcing male reproductive rights through violence) nor bonobo (using social sex and uncertain parentage as a social glue), but something in between. Monogamy has deep enough roots in our species to justify the hypothesis that biology heavily weights human cultural outcomes towards equilibrium norms that enforce and reproduce it (i.e. patriarchy). But we retain sufficient behaviourial flexibility to challenge and re-write those norms when conditions allow. As I have written elsewhere, we are behaviorial omnivores who balance precariously between established practice and experimentation with new social patterns. 

I am a radical feminist because (like a good Gramscian) I believe that these patterns of gendered behaviour are the result not only of the formal laws and rules that constitute society but implicit patterns of power between genders that are reproduced regardless of law. In other words, mere legal equality and the reform of discriminatory statutes so as to ensure equality of opportunity between the sexes is inadequate because gendered behaviours are embedded in a something more primal and powerful: cultural patriarchy. Discourses, beliefs and expectations about gendered behaviour will continue to reproduce the patriarchy even, perhaps especially, if laws and expectations are changed along socialist or capitalist lines to promise legal equality.

Over the years, I’ve have had senior colleagues of mine, both male and female, admit out of confidence in my discretion that they prefer to hire male over female staff. On the flip side, I’ve had well-meaning bosses offer to improve working conditions for women primarily by offering more family leave. No matter how far feminism has reformed laws in the global West, so long as expectations of the exploitation of female reproductive labour continue to be reproduced at home and through our culture, these gendered patterns of hierarchy and oppression will continue to find expression.

It’s in this regard that the critique of patriarchy also holds the potential to benefit men. While gendered roles and expectations undoubtedly offer men a privileged position, inhabiting those roles can be stressful (or dare I say, toxic) – especially when they are at odds with the legal structures of society. One interesting piece of research that bubbled up during the whole “Google Memo” fiasco was that gendered behaviourial differences may have increased in the West as formal equality became entrenched. This is not, it turns out, because women have become more stereotypically ‘feminine’, but because men have responded to their reduced relative status by increasing the practice of ‘masculinised’ behaviours. The liberation of both men and women from these stressful and harmful gendered expectations is the only just goal of a radical, emancipatory agenda.

Not THAT kind of Radical Feminist

Radical feminism has a bad reputation. Like all progressive movements, it has been prone to bitter internal sectarianism (e.g. regarding sex work and the place of trans individuals) over the past several decades. Some of these fights can be understood as manifestations of the authoritarian/libertarian axis, as I’ve written previously. Invariably, the losers of these arguments (like their Trotskyist forebears) continued to argue that they, and they alone, represent continuity with “true” radicalism while acting like puritanical asshats. Few take Trotskyists to be true representatives of socialism; nor should we treat TERFS or SWERFS as being truly representative of [radical] feminism. To be clear, if I am to describe myself as a radical feminist, it is as one who is both trans- and sex worker-inclusionary.

Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFS) like Jeffreys and another Australian export, Germaine Greer, share with all authoritarian radicals the belief that when constructed but flawed social categories (i.e. gender) are abolished they will be supplanted by the "correct" essentialist, ones. Like Marxists who believe in the elevation of intransient class identity over bourgeois interests, they argue the abolition of gender will expose the permanent antagonism between biological (reproductive) sexes. For TERFS, the willing identification with and performance of gender roles (even as a transgression) merely reinforces the patriarchy, much like participation in the market reinforces capitalism.  TERF views have historically been disavowed even by other radicals including Catherine McKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem.

Even if the origin of biological sex differences in the brain prove hard to pin down, and gender identity (like all other personality traits) is understood as emerging from the complex interaction of genes, developmental and cultural factors, the left-libertarian instinct must be offering priority to the subjective lived experience of others and trust in their capacity to make (informed) decisions about their own wellbeing. Acceptance of trans- and gender-non conforming people is not only the correct liberal individualist thing to, but also one of the best tools radical feminism has to deconstruct and upend the fixed notion of gender categories that underpins the patriarchy.

In much the same vein, a (slightly larger) fraction of radical feminists take a strongly proscriptionary approach to prostitution and pornography. Sex worker exclusionary radical feminists (SWERFs) have lobbied with conservatives, often successfully (as is the case with the so-called “Swedish model”), for the outlawing of the sex industry. I recognise as a socialist that as both sex and work, prostitution and pornography sit at the intersection of two very potent power relations: capitalism and the patriarchy. The intersection of these oppressions creates opportunities for exploitation, such as sex trafficking, that are unique in their odiousness.

However, the intersection of these patterns of oppression merely means that the democratisation of sex work is more necessary than in any other part of the economy. In prostitution and pornography, worker control of the means of production means first and foremost ensuring the enthusiastic consent of the participants. People, both men and women, may freely choose to be sex workers. The correct approach is not to critique their choices, but to make sure their decision is truly free, and not forced upon them as a result of material necessity (what I call in my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age" ‘decision slavery’)

In the end, therefore, while the left needs to integrate a critique of patriarchy into our everyday work, we must root that critique in the same individualistic and democratic framework that we apply to other forms of hierarchy and exploitation. Progressives, especially men, must be equipped with the tools to fight and win these arguments, and not see them as being somehow separate from concerns about poverty and class.