Mick Hartley

Well here's a surprise: a gender critical piece in the Guardian. It's by no means a tub-thumper – no mention of JK Rowling for a start. It's all understated and intellectual and carefully designed not to give offence – and was, presumably, prompted by Judith Butler's recent interview in the New Statesman. It is nevertheless, undeniably, gender-critical.

Guardian journalist Susanna Rustin – Feminists like me aren't anti-trans – we just can't discard the idea of 'sex':

By adhering to what I have called a Beauvoirian feminism, I don’t aim to invalidate anyone else. I recognise the importance of the concept of gender identity for trans people. But it (and with it, the term cisgender) can’t be forced on to women like me who regard questioning gender roles, while advocating on behalf of our sex, as the whole point of feminism. Nor is it accurate to describe us as “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”, as Butler did last week. Gender-critical feminism is more varied than that. (My own influences, for example, include Kleinian psychoanalysis and evolutionary biology.)

None of this means “GC” feminists are in favour of bigotry, or don’t care about the obstacles and prejudices faced by transgender people, or that we deny the existence of people with differences in sex development. What it does mean is that we think rejecting sex as a way of thinking about ourselves would be a terrible error. And that we urgently want to be able to discuss this, in a respectful way, with those who disagree.

Kleinian psychoanalysis and evolutionary biology? Some cognitive dissonance there, surely. 

But yes, it shows the absurd state we've reached that it should be in any way controversial to argue that sex is real and is, or should be, fundamental to feminism. Or that gender roles should be questioned by feminism, not taken as evidence of a mysterious gendered mind that may or may not correspond to your actual sex. But here we are.

It's a brave move by Rustin. One hopes her Guardian colleagues aren't as horrified by this as they were by fellow Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore, after she published a robust defence of women's safe spaces against the demands of biological men who say they're women. As a result one poor trans worker claimed she was too terrified now to come in, and a large number of Guardian and Observer employees – 338 to be exact – were so horrified that they wrote a letter to Guardian editor Kath Viner, deploring what they saw as the paper’s “pattern of publishing transphobic content”.