Mick Hartley

At the Allison Bailey tribunal, Victoria Smith notes a bizarre defence from the Garden Court Chambers barrister:

Bailey, a barrister and longstanding LGB rights campaigner, is claiming unlawful discrimination for holding the view that gender identity should not be prioritised over biological sex when considering the rights of women and girls.

Seeking to argue that this is not a standard feminist viewpoint, barrister Jane Russell, representing Garden Court Chambers, argued that “there is a very longstanding history of feminism that has nothing to do with gender critical belief”, using Wollstonecraft and the suffragettes as examples of this. On what basis this might be true was not made clear.

True, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft’s 1792 classic, is not known for taking issue with pronouns in email signatures, the prescribing of puberty blockers or gender-neutral toilets in the Barbican. It is, however, critical of gender.

“Gender critical feminism” may be a relatively new term, but the concept it is not. Like “cis woman”, it is a way of defining a concept we already know — feminism, woman — because the original term has been co-opted. Earlier feminists were not “gender critical” only in the sense that the linguistic contortions imposed on them were of a different nature to those imposed on feminists today. We should not infer from this that their beliefs were any different.

Like modern feminists, Wollstonecraft distinguished between the exploitation of female people as a sex class — “one class presses on another; for all are aiming to procure respect on account of the property” — and the socially constructed differences used to justify this exploitation —“those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence”.

In other words she understood the difference between sex and gender, even if she didn't use our current terminology. She knew that sex was immutable, but gender was a matter of imposed stereotypes which have been foisted on women to mark out the limits to their social engagement.

Throughout A Vindication, she attacks the impact of gendered socialisation and the conflation of femaleness with the artifice of femininity:

“The child is not left a moment to its own direction, particularly a girl […] To preserve personal beauty, woman’s glory! the limbs and faculties are cramped with worse than Chinese bands, and the sedentary life which they are condemned to live, whilst boys frolic in the open air, weakens the muscles and relaxes the nerves […] Pursuing these reflections, the fondness for dress, conspicuous in women, may be easily accounted for, without supposing it the result of a desire to please the sex on which they are dependent.”

I doubt that the woman who wrote those words would now be persuaded that those female people who wish to “frolic in the open air” should squish themselves into binders and change their pronouns to they/them, while those with a “fondness for dress” should check their cis privilege. The woman who railed against “the absurdity […] of supposing that a girl is naturally a coquette” would have had no time for Mermaids and their Barbie to GI Joe gender spectrum. A true radical, she was already thinking beyond such regressive nonsense….

Wollstonecraft did not use the term “gender”, or indeed “feminism”, because her work predated them. Nonetheless, the only reason I would hesitate to describe her as a gender critical feminist is because I’d rather the “gender critical” part was taken as read. 

Feminism has always been critical of gender as a social hierarchy. It is not the fault of feminism if others have arrived on the scene with such a poor understanding of what gender is and how it functions in relation to biological sex and power.

The problem with rebranding feminism “gender critical feminism” — much like rebranding women “cis women” — is that it turns our most essential social and political concepts into mere subcategories of broader, looser concepts defined by others. Moreover, such a rebranding repositions feminism as a response to trans activism, denying the longstanding nature of feminism’s rejection of gender. It denies us our legacy, making it that much easier for outsiders to claim women such as Allison Bailey and Mary Wollstonecraft have nothing in common. This is just not true. 

This ridiculous co-opting of early feminists to the trans cause reminds me of Grace Lavery's claim that George Eliot was some kind of trans pioneer because she used a male pen name.