Mick Hartley

The state of academic publishing: part 87 in a continuing series. Susan Pickard at UnHerd on the trans co-option of Simone de Beauvoir, and the rejection of her book:

In 2022, I signed a contract with an academic press for a book on Simone de Beauvoir, titled Beauvoirian Feminism. Two years later, I finished the book, which foregrounded the feminist thinker’s claim that biology is key to women’s experience. I’m a full professor of sociology at the University of Liverpool, and publication of finished academic works at my level is usually a matter of course. 

On this topic, however, things did not go smoothly. After the book was completed, due to the controversial nature of the material, the press sent it out to 26 readers for peer review. Most accepted the invitation — then backed out once they saw the manuscript. Only one delivered a report, criticizing my work for being “unfair” to gender theorist Judith Butler and “gratuitously unkind to trans people.” My insistence on embodiment — Beauvoir’s insistence — was treated as an embarrassing throwback. In 2025, the contract was terminated. 

I then sent the manuscript to several other presses, who also declined to take it forward. One respected university imprint rejected the book as “too controversial.” Another told me it did not publish books on “individual thinkers” — then six months later issued a book casting Beauvoir as a pro-trans icon. A third prestigious press told me my book “did not fit its list” — and went on to publish a title called Sex Is a Spectrum, inspired by Beauvoir.

The attempt to repurpose Beauvoir to shore up gender-identity orthodoxy represents an all-out attack on her thinking, and erases the actual contents of The Second Sex, a foundational work of feminist theory, first published in 1949. 

Beauvoir is controversial today because she was the ultimate sex realist; she refused to separate body from identity, and believed that it was only through understanding women’s embodied reality that we could combat patriarchal cultural norms. Her essential position can be summed up simply: sex is the material ground of women’s lives, gender the cultural elaboration of that ground, and liberation comes not from denying the body, but by transforming the meaning imposed upon it.

But that’s not what Judith Butler says, so it must be wrong.

The problem centres round Beauvoir’s most quoted phrase, “One is not born, but becomes, a woman”. It’s not hard to see why that might be taken as trans avant la lettre. According to Pickard, though, this  this doesn’t mean that gender floats free of sex:

For Beauvoir, sex is the foundation; gender its cultural elaboration. A female body is defined by the norms of femininity of its time and place. These norms can change — and Beauvoir’s work aimed to push them toward liberation. Meanwhile, both biology and culture shape the body’s meaning, power, and visibility, qualities that change over a woman’s lifetime as she shifts through the various forms of girl or mother, or menopausal or old woman.

Today, however, Beauvoir is mostly taught through the lens of foundational gender theorist Butler, who claimed to extend her work. But as I argue in my book, Butler actually ignored Bouvoir’s book, collapsing the notion of “becoming a woman” into performance, where repeated gestures conjure the illusion of sex. In Butler’s version, gender is the creator of sex. She makes no mention of puberty, childbirth, or aging.

Butler’s understanding of what a woman is has shaped two generations, and has had noxious consequences for women. If “sex” is only an idea, then puberty itself can be rejected; the category “girl” is something to exit, hormonally or surgically. This is framed as liberation, but in practice, it erases female experience: it turns puberty into a pathology, encourages girls to disidentify from their own bodies, and makes womanhood optional or disposable. What drops out of view is feminism’s starting point — that sex is the basis of women’s oppression. And crucially, the rejection of women’s bodies and of femininity today does not generate demands to transform those constraining norms, but instead points girls toward escape by “becoming boys” — as if freedom lay only on the other side of sex.

Beauvoir’s difference from Butler matters because without sex, feminism loses its compass. If we cannot name sex, how do we name sex-based oppression? 

What’s so scandalous, though, is that Pickard’s views aren’t even allowed. Clearly there’s strong disagreement about what Beauvoir was really saying, and in a sane world these differing takes should be discussed out in the open, but in the world of institutional gender-capture there can be no debate. Anyone who opposes the official line is not wrong, but evil. They can’t be debated; only silenced. It’s ideological capture – Stalinist-style ideological capture. And the bold “progressives” can’t even see it.