Pencil case feminism

Why the feminist distinction between sex and gender isn't the cause of sex denialism.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

My first feminist protest occurred in a junior school sewing class. I wanted to make a pencil case. Girls, I was told, had to make samplers. Pencil cases were for boys.

I’m not sure who thought of this particular rule, but my teachers took it very seriously. If boys had to do sewing these days, at least one could temper the emasculation by letting them make something practical. Only I wanted something practical, too. I wanted something I could use, not just a decorative piece of cloth. My request went as far as the head and eventually it was approved. Following that, it turned out plenty of other girls wanted to make pencil cases, too.

I’m aware that on the grand scale of sex-based injustice, being asked to make a sampler barely ranks at all. Far worse things happen to girls every day (indeed, worse things had happened to me). Nevertheless, I simply didn’t understand why the boys could do that one thing and I couldn’t. Surely there was nothing about being female that ought to put pencil case-making off limits.

As is so often the case, my childhood feminism started with the bleeding obvious. I didn’t grow up around feminists and I didn’t get my initial ideas from books or speeches. I just got it from noticing – as many of us do – that there was a difference between being female and so many of the behaviours, feelings and (in)capabilities that were associated with “being a girl”.

Why was I not supposed to like the things my brother was meant to? Why, when I wanted to do “masculine” things (and he so often didn’t), were both of us told that wasn’t allowed? Why, in the families I knew, were mothers not supposed to work – or at least not in a way that brought in much money? Why were mothers then judged for obeying these rules, while fathers got to use the fact that the money was “theirs” to make every decision? Why was I pushed to like certain things – dolls, beauty rituals, the colour pink – which were simultaneously presented as evidence of some innate triviality? If the things boys did and liked were so much better – so much more serious and valid – why was I told it was wrong for me to do and like those things, too?

I’m not sure I’d have put it in those words at the time. I only remember it in snapshots, as feelings. It’s not as though I ever sat down and separated out what I knew about sex differences that were real and all those differences that I sensed to be exaggerated, if not entirely confected. Nor did I think very clearly about the way in which supposedly random stereotypes – why should girls like this and not that? – were not that random after all. My first impression of gender, as opposed to sex, was of an oddly enduring misunderstanding, with no particular intent behind it. People thought women weren’t equipped to play football or vote or drive cars or refuse to have sex with their partners because … well, maybe women hadn’t said anything about this stuff until five minutes ago?

As time went on, though – and as even the pencil case / sampler binary suggested – I began to feel there was more to gender than an arbitrary doling out of stuff. Even if particular sex-role stereotypes changed over time, things associated with boys tended to be coded one way (practical, active, hard, dominant, rational), those associated with girls another (decorative, passive, soft, compliant, frivolous). It wasn’t that I thought all male-coded things were better, or even that I imagined that without stereotypes, different qualities would be equally dispersed between the sexes. It was that the overall picture sent a message about human beings – how men stood in relation to women, who mattered most, who deserved the most resources, whose work mattered most, who owed what to whom. Men are useful, women are decoration.

“All the fuss about femininity (and to a lesser degree masculinity) is obviously not about inherent differences between the sexes,” wrote Janet Radcliffe Richards in 1980:

“It must, therefore, very differently, be about what it is thought that the sexes ought to be like, and about what measures need to be taken to achieve whatever that is. […] much of what is believed about women stems from what is wanted from women.”

Externally imposed, coerced differences between men and women can feel random and silly but they’re not. This is important, even if samplers and pencil cases are not.

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Radical feminists did not invent the distinction between sex as a material reality and gender as a social hierarchy any more than human beings – or eighteenth-century colonialists, as some trans activists would have it – “invented” biological sex. They were identifying a phenomenon that was already in existence. I didn’t imagine a childhood being told that some things – thoughts, feelings, abilities – were inaccessible to girls, despite the fact that these were things I could think, feel and do. Nor did I imagine this being clearly different to having a female body and not a male one. When I heard my grandma speak of things I could do which she’d been told were only for men, neither of us were under the illusion that this included “grow a penis”. Or were we meant to accept that no woman should ever get a mortgage or a university degree lest it lead to confusion over whether there was such a thing as femaleness at all?

My friend Marina has described a phenomenon she calls “she who smelt it dealt it” feminism, whereby feminists are blamed for somehow bringing into being the very things they describe. This happens, for instance, with violence against women in the sex trade (if only radical feminists would shut up about it, there’d be no stigma, so men would stop raping and beating prostituted women, or something). Right now, we are seeing it happen with trans activism’s assault on women’s rights. Self-styled rational voice-of-reason men are swooping in to tell us that if only “we” (all feminists) hadn’t made such a fuss about separating socially constructed feminine qualities from biological femaleness, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now.

It’s as if, by cutting femininity loose from the female body, we only have ourselves to blame if it took on a life of its own and supplanted adult human females in terms of defining what women are. As if, since we hadn’t been willing to accept being sampler-makers – or being “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes” – as merely part and parcel of being biologically female, it’s our fault if these qualities should become all women are, with the female biology bit tossed out of the window.

An example of the “logic” is here:

The argument – as far as I can work out – seems to be that if you reject the patriarchal version of “woman” in the sense of rejecting socially constructed feminine norms, that’s kind of, if you squint a bit, the same as rejecting womanhood in the sense of saying you’re not a woman because you’re not a representative of socially constructed feminine norms. Certainly, Judith Butler seems incapable of telling the difference between these two things – even though they’re MASSIVE OPPOSITES – so it must be true (who cares about logical coherence when you can blame feminists who objected to sexism for sexism itself?).

The thing that really annoys me is, I knew the difference between these having a vagina and being required to do “feminine” things when I was eight years old, back with my pencil case. I wouldn’t have had the words to describe it, though. Four decades later, I do.

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If only Simone de Beauvoir hadn’t tried to be so fancy with her language. What if, instead of writing the following:

“ONE IS NOT born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychical or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilisation as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine.”

she’d written something more like “human females are subject to intense socialisation and the end product is then used to define what women are, regardless of what the human female is at birth”. Okay, maybe something better than that, but certainly not with that first sentence which gets constantly misread to mean “anyone can become a woman, regardless of their sex”. Fucks sake, Simone. Now look what you’ve done. What feminist has the right to expect people to read more than one sentence of their work before declaring they’ve understood it?

If you do read The Second Sex – and not just that one line – you’ll notice that Beauvoir knows exactly what a female body is. You’ll also notice that unlike the average porn-addled ‘progressive’, she doesn’t regard femininity as some luxury state which should, quite rightly, take the place of femaleness (“for a woman to accomplish her femininity she is required to be object and prey; that is, she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject”).

What second-wave feminists believed about sex and gender can’t be boiled down to a line or a paragraph. As someone who reached adulthood in the nineties, I encountered the backlash – the parodies, the caricatures, the misrepresentations – years before I read any second-wave feminist writing. The story seemed to go as follows:

second-wave feminists – those bitches, not like you nice third-wave ones, with your agentic tits out for the (very progressive) lads – thought every difference between men and women came down to evil patriarchal socialisation and that men and women would be literally the same in every way apart from genital differences. They were total blank slatists, completely anti-scientific and unwilling to engage with the idea of difference. Plus they hated men and babies, the utter cows.

It’s fair to say this was not what feminists actually thought (they thought and continue to think lots of different things). However, the most annoying thing with that argument was that if, like me, you’d grown up with one of your objections to gender being “women can’t do science or rationality”, you found yourself in a double bind. If you didn’t agree with “science tells us women can’t do science and that’s not patriarchy, just facts”, you looked like a woman who couldn’t do science (it’s fair to say I still see a lot of “showing the men I accept women have different brains, thereby proving MY brain is just like the men’s” in certain female commentators today).

The feminist debate on sex, gender and socialisation was far more nuanced than this. For instance, although Richards critiqued the way in which “social arrangements, institutions and customs which defined the relative position of the sexes were designed to ensure that women should be in the power and service of men”, she also considered it “quite compatible with feminism to think it would be pleasant to have, other things being equal, a society where men and women tended to choose what was traditionally associated with their sex, and enjoy the differences traditionally associated with the other”. It’s the “other things being equal” that was the real issue here. ‘Difference’ feminists such as Carol Gilligan were open to the idea that there may be particularly “female” ways of thinking and behaving, while at the same time questioning the construction of femininity to disempower women and serve male ends. Maternal feminists explored the relationship between female reproductive capacity and cultural beliefs about what ‘real’ women could and couldn’t do.

If feminist political writing and philosophy were taken as seriously as it should be these arguments would never been reduced to “silly wimmin thinking everyone’s the same”. What emerges, on the contrary, is curiosity about human possibility. In The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, Anne Koedt described women as “crawling out of femininity into a new sense of personhood”. In Greer’s The Female Eunuch, the enemy is the straitjacket of femininity, not the female body. What so many anti-feminists done is taken the shoulder-padded anti-maternal ballbreaker of eighties films (already taken apart in Faludi’s Backlash) as a suitable shortcut to engaging with the complexity of feminist thought.

Of course, we’re now at a stage where ‘blank slatist’ isn’t the worst insult that’s being thrown at feminists. Indeed, those who caricature feminism in this way will claim they are on our side in the terf wars – how about we show them some gratitude for their willingness to acknowledge that female bodies exist at all? After all, isn’t the current situation a “direct and logical consequence” of what they believe us to believe, and there’d have been nothing for them to believe we believed if we hadn’t had beliefs of our own to start with?

This, seriously, is the kind of “logic” that we are left with. I am truly tired of it.

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In the late nineties and early noughties, the backlash against the feminist distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender often took the form of popular science and psychology books which claimed that many perfectly benign differences between women and men – e.g. women being shit at reading maps and running countries, men being shit at doing the ironing and not killing people – had been rendered unspeakable by those evil blank slatist feminists (who were never actually quoted in said books). One well-known example was Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference, in which a distinction was asserted between “systemising” and “empathising” brains. The former was associated with male brains and the latter with female brains.

Whether more female humans than male humans – other things being equal, as Richards put it – might be better at empathising even without socialisation or power imbalances isn’t quite the point (in any case, Baron-Cohen doesn’t really acknowledge the relationship between “feminine” qualities and disempowerment). Baron-Cohen already knows that some people with vaginas can be “systemisers”, just as feminists had been saying. He still wants to re-conflate biological sex and sex-role stereotypes, though, and he does so by deciding the latter are another way in which we can tell what sex a person is:

When you think about your sex, you have to distinguish five different levels:

- Your genetic sex: you are male if you have one X and one Y chromosome (XY), and you are female if you have two X chromosomes (XX).

- Your gonadal sex: you are male if you have a normal set of testes / (producing male hormones), and you are female if you have a normal set of ovaries (producing female hormones).

- Your genital sex: you are male if you have a normal penis, and you are female if you have a normal vagina.

- Your brain type: you are male if your systemizing is stronger than your empathizing, and you are female if your empathizing is stronger than your systemizing.

- Your sex-typical behaviour: this follows from your brain type. You are male if your interests involve things such as gadgets, CD collections, and sports statistics, and you are female if your interests involve things such as caring for friends, worrying about their feelings, and striving for intimacy.

A question: does those last two points sound like they come from feminist analysis? The very analysis that has been pointing out that women and girls can like gadgets and statistics and men and boys can also care for friends? Or do they sound a bit more like classic sexism, a way of getting around the fact that sex = gender has been disproven (for instance, by women not shrivelling up and dying every time they read a map or open their own bank account) by saying “well, it still equals gender if you rebrand all the gender things sex things. Checkmate, feminists!”?

I did the quiz at the end of Baron-Cohen’s book. Apparently I have a systemising – aka male – brain. The idea that this makes me less female – less of a woman – than a female human with a higher empathiser rating strikes me as nonsense. It also strikes me as the kind of nonsense a trans activist would come out with. Indeed, it is the people who seek to deride the feminist distinction between sex and gender – who seek to re-establish the conflation of the two by saying “liking girly stuff is still female, even if you have a penis” – who have the most in common with modern-day trans activists. The beliefs of the latter are not a distortion of feminism. They’re an extension of traditional patriarchal beliefs about which sex is “supposed” to do what.

See, for instance, Agustin Fuente’s 2023 sex-denialist rant Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary:

We know that humans exhibit a range of biological and behavioral patterns related to sex biology that overlap and diverge. Producing ova or sperm does not tell us everything (or even most things) biologically or socially, about an individual’s childcare capacity, homemaking tendencies, sexual attractions, interest in literature, engineering and math capabilities or tendencies towards gossip, violence, compassion, sense of identity, or love of, and competence for, sports. Gametes and gamete production physiology, by themselves, are only a part of the entirety of human lives. Plentiful data and analyses support the assertions that sex is very complex in humans and that binary and simplistic explanations for human sex biology are either wholly incorrect or substantially incomplete.

This is the same tactic deployed by Baron-Cohen – the merging of “biological and behavioural patterns”, as though liking a gossip and having ovaries are the same sort of thing. Sexists who think sex is binary and immutable engage in this, and sexists who think sex depends on whether you like sports or baking engage in it too. To go back to the charge made by Konstantin Kisin above – “feminists created the concept of gender and pretended it can be separated from sex” – well, yeah, we did. Except we weren’t pretending because “interest in literature” and “math capabilities” can indeed be separated from maleness and femaleness – regardless of how much weight you give to actual reproductive difference.

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What, then, to make of those who call themselves feminists while embracing gender identity ideology? Isn’t that some sort of proof that trans activism is a logical consequence of the feminist distinction between sex and gender (even if we can’t trace the logic)?

I’d say not really. After all, such feminists are pretty clear about how wrong they believe earlier feminists to have been.

For instance, in The Right to Sex ‘trans inclusive’ feminist Amia Srinivasan picks up where the noughties neurosexists left off:

We inspect this supposedly natural thing, ‘sex’, only to find that it is already laden with meaning. At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned. Some of these bodies are for creating new bodies, for washing and clothing and feeding other bodies (out of love, never duty), for making other bodies feel good and whole and in control, for making other bodies feel free. Sex is, then, a cultural thing posing as a natural one. Sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise.

Like Baron-Cohen, like Fuentes, she is smushing together stereotype and biological difference. Noticing that a body is female and can get potentially get pregnant is not the same as deciding it is “for creating new bodies” – reproductive potential is not the same as social purpose, just as defining bodies by sex is not the same as defining bodies by whether they should be “washing and clothing and feeding other bodies”. These ought to be feminists basics, yet they are too politically risky for Srinivasan to acknowledge. Note the last sentence – “sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise” (admittedly I cannot read this without hearing the 80s advert for Transformers – sex difference! Gender in disguise! Which doesn’t make it true).

In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler likens feminists who distinguish sex from gender to conservatives who conflate sex with gender on the grounds that both groups argue women are biologically female and that bodies matter. Both groups she calls “anti-gender”, refusing to acknowledge that one is opposed to gender as a social hierarchy which insists women must be feminine, men, masculine, while the other is very much okay with that as a proposition (as is Butler herself – she just offers any unwilling adult human females, herself included, the supposed get out clause of saying they’re not women after all). In much the same way Baron-Cohen refuses to stop at identifying systemising and empathising brains, but has to call such brains “male” or “female” – regardless of whether they appear in male or female bodies – Butler claims that “the critique of the gender binary” has given rise to “a proliferation of genders beyond the established binary versions”. But why are these “genders” and not just “personality types” or “interests” or “ways of thinking and feeling”? Why does Butler have to situate all “genders” (however many she claims there to be) in relation to maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity? Why can’t she let maleness and femaleness be? She may try to pretend what she offers is a refinement of the feminism that distinguishes between sex and gender. “Self-definition,” she declares, “is an age-old feminist prerogative.” But you would have to be an idiot – or displaying the same bad faith she does – to read her version of “self-definition” as an extension of the argument that an adult human female should not be defined as feminine or that one’s sex should not determine one’s position in a social hierarchy.

I can think of many reasons why Butler argues what she does, and why she gets away with it. Femininity has been used to position female humans as inferior, but it has also been eroticised under patriarchy – the idea that women love degradation and dehumanisation really has made it, to some male people, an enviable state. This is made very plain the writing of trans-identified males such as Paris Lees, Grace Lavery, Julia Serano and Andrea Long Chu. They think they’d love it too (but never actually experience anything other than a play-acting version). Butler knows she wouldn’t love it, so she says she’s not a woman. “For Butler,” wrote Martha Nussbaum in her brilliant take-down of 1999, “the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight.” You could use the word “personalities” instead of the word “gender” but where’s the power imbalance? Who’d be turned on by that?

In this way, I think the ‘feminism’ of Butler – and trans activism in general – could be read as a logical conclusion, not of second wave feminism, but of patriarchy’s eroticisation of female subjugation. It’s been made so appealing that male people don’t want to be excluded from it, in turn making ‘woman’ an intolerable status for any adult human female who doesn’t enjoy being treated like dirt. It’s patriarchy for the porn age. If anyone is to blame, it’s hardly the feminists who put their lives into rejecting gender in the first place.

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It doesn’t surprise me that the very feminists who first sounded the alarm on gender identity ideology have ended up being blamed for it. The traditional patriarch thinks he has us over a barrel. In his film ‘What Is A Woman?’, conservative misogynist Matt Walsh detailed all the ways in which sex denialism is idiotic – as if he was the first to notice – while suggesting that denying boys have penises is the same sort of thing as thinking boys don’t need to play with guns. The message was that if you don’t like men in your changing rooms and rape crisis centres, you’d better accept a return to traditional values. Choose your sexism, ladies! There is no third way.

I find it devastating that so many supposedly ‘progressive’ people have gone along with this. The right-winger threatens the loss of our boundaries if we don’t accept his sex-acknowledging conflation of sex and gender; the ‘progressive’ threatens the loss of our abortion rights if we don’t accept his sex-denialist version. Neither seems to think we deserve anything more. A trans activist version of my pencil case / sampler story would have the narrator claiming that being told to make the “wrong” item was evidence, not that the items were needlessly categorised, but that they themselves had been wrongly categorised. It would endorse rather than reject sex-role stereotypes (it shouldn’t need to be stated that endorsing something is not the “logical conclusion” of rejecting it).

I can’t help feeling much of this comes down to a belief, shared between conservative and ‘progressive’ sexists, that female equality is a lie. A belief that women aren’t really as intelligent, thoughtful, rational, human as men, and that the feminist critique of gender stereotypes was just something everyone else went along with without actually believing women didn’t still have fluffy ladybrains filled nonsense. What I hear when feminists are blamed for sex denialism is “well, what did you expect? You got us all to pretend gender stereotypes are nonsense, so you’ve only yourselves to blame when people start pretending sex isn’t real, either!” Because too many men - whether they’re driven by religion or by ‘traditional’ values or by porn - can’t let go of the conflation of femaleness and femininity. They just don’t believe we’re more diverse than that (and when that message is so powerful across the political spectrum, it’s hardly surprising some women reject femaleness. If you can’t wrest womanhood from femininity, flight can seem the only option).

Yet the feminist rejection of sex-role stereotypes, of femininity, of masculinity, is not naïve or incoherent. It’s essential, I think, that feminists who understand this do not apologise for other people’s mistakes. The sex-role stereotypes we reject can seem trivial (the thing we make in sewing class) or they can be enormous (the role we play at work or in relationships). Either way, we shouldn’t bow down. Our bodies matter, but our minds do, too.