Introduction: The Return of Sexual Politics

Over the past decade, a new feminist movement has grown up in Britain. It started in conversations conducted in person and online in Twitter messages, Facebook groups and Mumsnet discussion threads. It gathered strength in meetings as women organized themselves into volunteer-run associations and wrote about their ideas on the internet, in books and in magazines. Over the past five years, it has provided sufficient donations through crowd-funding appeals for more than a dozen court cases, and overturned a consensus shared by all the main political parties. The new movement's annual conference, held in venues from Glasgow to Portsmouth, attracts more than a thousand participants and has been running for longer than the national women's liberation conferences of the 1970s.

This resurgence of grassroots women's activism in Britain is among the most extraordinary political developments of recent years, particularly given what else has been going on at the same time (Brexit, a pandemic, an increasingly chaotic period of government). But while the movement has achieved a great deal, it hasn't received the recognition it deserves from either politicians or civil society organizations that claim to support women's rights. Instead, it has been traduced, attacked, ignored and misunderstood. This reaction is due to the form of feminism that it espouses. This is usually known as 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 displace sex and sex discrimination with an alternative set of concepts: gender, gender identity, gender equality, and so on.

To an outsider, the difference might seem abstruse. But it is a crucial fault line. For sex-based rights activists, women's needs have a significant basis in the form of female bodies and the risks they are exposed to. For example, girls and women are far more likely than boys and men to be victims of sexual violence, bringing with it the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. With the recent explosion of online abuse and pornography, girls and younger women are particularly exposed to new forms of harmful treatment. Women also have different susceptibilities to various illnesses, including female cancers, and specific requirements from health systems, including birth control, fertility and maternity services. As women get older, they go through menopause as hormone levels drop and fertility ceases. Two-thirds of all people with Alzheimer's in the United Kingdom are female, partly because women typically live longer.1

Other needs are less directly associated with biological sex. Women are typically poorer than men, with lower incomes and less wealth, while black, Asian and ethnic-minority women are among the poorest people in society.2 In 2022, the median hourly wage gap between men and women in the United Kingdom was 9.7 per cent,3 while the pensions gap is estimated to be 35 per cent.4 These kinds of inequalities are usually blamed on social norms that load the burden of unpaid care onto women. But they are also linked to women's role as mothers. While a 'motherhood pay penalty' opens up between women who have children and women who do not, no equivalent financial penalty is paid by fathers.5

Sex-based rights activists believe that women's lower wealth and status, and their vulnerability to specific kinds of harm, cannot be tackled without taking sex into account. This used to be an uncontroversial point of view, but in recent years it has brought them into fierce disputation with trans rights activists and their supporters, who hold a belief that contradicts theirs. This is the claim that everyone has a gender identity, or inner feeling of being male, female or neither, as well as a biological sex. According to this, either a person's gender identity matches their sexed body, making them cisgender, or it does not, making them trans or non-binary. It is a person's gender identity, and not their sex, that makes them a man or a woman. Various reforms derived from this premise have also been proposed, with the overarching aim of making society more inclusive for trans people. Sex-based rights activists do not necessarily oppose all these measures (for example, the increased provision of gender-neutral spaces) but strongly resist the shift away from language about sex and towards gender. It is perfectly possible to disagree fundamentally with trans activist aims while supporting the right of transgender people to be protected against discrimination.6

Arguments between feminists and trans rights activists have a long history. Differences of opinion about whether transgender women, who were formerly known as transsexual women, should be regarded as women formed part of a wider dispute about separatist and sexual politics in the 1970s and later. But whereas previously the expectation was that transsexual people would undergo a medical transition, usually involving hormones and surgery, more recently trans activists have asserted the right to be recognized in their acquired gender, regardless of any medical process and purely on the basis of self-declaration. Many activists in a wider progressive movement that is increasingly focused on personal identity and emancipation are supportive of these changes. To them, sex-based rights advocates are 'terfs' (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), an acronym frequently employed pejoratively.

Legal reforms over the past twenty years granted significant new rights to transgender people. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 enabled them to alter their birth certificates to reflect their acquired gender, while the Equality Act 2010 made gender reassignment a protected characteristic along with sex, race, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief, pregnancy or maternity, and marriage. But over subsequent years activists argued that these measures were insufficient. They sought to change the Gender Recognition Act, making it easier for birth certificates to be altered by removing the requirement for medical evidence. This is the reform known as self-identification, which became one of the most bitterly contested issues in politics across the United Kingdom. Linked to it was the aim of making gender self-declaration a new social norm - so that individuals could decide whether they belonged in women's or men's sports and single-sex facilities, and would tell each other whether they wished to be addressed by male, female or neutral (they) pronouns when meeting each other.

British gender-critical feminists are not the only people to oppose these changes and the philosophy underlying them. Feminists in India, Ireland, Norway, Spain, the United States and many other countries have also mobilized in defence of sex-based rights and against the principle of self-ID.7 Conservative authoritarian leaders and activists and far-right movements also oppose trans rights, albeit for different reasons. While 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 - on the American right, in Russia and in parts of Eastern Europe, attacks on trans rights form part of a wider, illiberal attack on the rights of women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and others who reject sexist stereotypes.

Since Boris Johnson's government abandoned plans to introduce self-ID in 2020, British gender-critical feminists have found themselves in often uneasy agreement with his party on this issue. Under Rishi Sunak, the Conservatives turned opposition to self-ID, and support for women's single-sex spaces, into a prominent theme. This led some left-wing voices to warn that opposition to trans rights could be the thin end of a wider wedge of intolerance and bigotry. But polling data does not back them up. While support for self-ID has fallen in Britain, and only a small minority support the inclusion of transgender women in women's sports, in general British people's attitudes are more liberal than ever.8 Labour, too, has decided against introducing self-ID, though it plans to make the legal gender recognition process easier.

The issue is international, but Britain is an outlier. Gender-critical feminism is stronger there than anywhere else. This has been commented on by opponents as well as supporters, with articles about 'terf island' appearing in the American, Australian and Irish press.9 To understand why the pushback against gender advocacy has been so pronounced among British feminists is the purpose of this book.

It starts in 1792, with the revolutionary writer Mary Wollstonecraft, and ends with the sex-based rights movement of today. Each chapter describes a phase of what we now call feminism, but in the nineteenth century was called something else - women's rights, social reform, suffragism, a 'great crusade'. By examining how previous generations of women's rights activists thought about the place of sex in politics, the book seeks to establish connections between feminism as it is now and as it was then.

Writing and talking about sex-based rights in public has been extremely difficult in recent years. At one of the first gatherings organized by opponents of the proposed self-ID law,...