The no-such-thing-as/can't-define-a-woman theorists remind one of Dr Strangelove wrestling with his arm. In every situation, they are able to unerringly identify the thing they repeatedly tell us doesn't exist. Geez, it's almost as if they know exactly what it is. Worse, the non-existence of woman is wholly unlike the non-existence of the toothfairy, unicorns or the planet Vulcan. One can't just prove it and then move on with life. Everyday, in journals, on television, on twitter, in every medium and on every platform, it has to be reformulated and publicly stated. Whole careers---and now industries---need to be built upon it.
"I still can’t get over the idea - anthropological - that women 'don't exist'. ..."
Seems like that depends on how you DEFINE the term. IF you define the category as "adult human females" THEN of course there are members of it, those who "exist" as such. Though not all "vagina-havers" qualify for membership cards in that "exalted" estate. As "biologist extraordinaire" PZ Myers once put it:
PZ Myers: " 'female' is not applicable -- it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female."
However, IF "woman" is no more than an open-ended collection of traits that correlate, to a greater or lesser extent, with "adult human female" THEN one might reasonably say that there is NO person who exhibits ALL of those traits. Ergo, no such "woman". Q.E.D. Logic 101. HTH ... 😉🙂
Not quite sure what you mean by "argue categorically" -- "without exception; unconditionally; absolutely"?
But a whole bunch of fuzzy thinking goin' on, and on virtually all sides of the fence. Kinda think that Kathleen gets to the heart of it or underlines the problem with this earlier comment of hers:
KL: "The stupid gender gotcha about 'you are reducing WOMEN to their UTERUSES' is just obfuscatory piffle ..."
The problem there is, as she put it, "Of course women are fully people". Many if not most people have some difficulty with the difference between categories and members of them, and with the concept that there are generally objective criteria for category membership. Her example is more or less starting from a particular definition for "woman" -- i.e., "adult human uterus-haver" -- and the gender ideologue "thinks" that those defining "woman" that way are insisting that "uterus-haver" is all there is to the person getting their knickers in a twist.
I'd run across a similar example several years ago in a rather brilliant tweet -- almost literally a Road to Damascus revelation -- from one "RadfemBlack (RFB)" in response to one "Miyoko Dunn (MD)":
MD: " 'How is it reductive to define women by their reproductive parts?'
If I have to explain this then you are too idiotic, or dishonest, to bother."
RFB: "You gonna tell people they’re 'reducing beings to their bones' next for saying that a vertebrate is a creature with a spine? (obviously you’re not one 🤡💀)."
An exchange that is front and center in my own kick at that age-old question, "What is a woman?", the one puzzling philosophers, philanderers, and politicians from time immemorial:
I rather doubt that, at least in general. For example, I expect that they would agree that one has to be 13 to 19 to qualify as a teenager. No dude of 35 gets to "identify as" a teenager and claim any rights pertaining thereto.
I expect they simply don't want to define "woman" with any exactitude, with any "necessary and sufficient condition" grounded in "nature" -- as Kathleen put it -- in large part because they don't want to "exclude" any potential claimants to that exalted estate.
Some reason to argue that that is what motivates various so-called biologists and philosophers -- like Colin Wright and Alex Byrne -- to reject or bastardize the standard biological definitions for the sexes by which to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. Lotta that goin' round these days ...
I didn't know about Strathern! I knew Butler nicked a lot from Kessler & McKenna and Rubin. I didn't realise Haraway is actually older than Butler either. Haraway these days (I think from "companion species" on?) has just sunk into senseless sentimental babble conflating humans with jellyfish and bacteria. At least some of her older texts are semi-readable.
I think the simple answer to why people like Strathern and Butler get away with getting their blatant anti-feminism branded as feminist rather than reactionary is: they're women. (Because surely women can't really have real differences between them and surely anything a woman does in a prestigious male-dominated field is automatically somehow "feminist", even and perhaps especially if she shits on other women in the process?) Perfectly disproving their point.
Oh god yes. Being a scholar who called herself feminist while mostly devoting her energies to kicking saddens in the teeth was a fantastic career move for women scholars from about 1980 on.
Yes Haraway has gone full on “being a real environmentalist does not mean combatting habitat destruction it means wittering on about the souls of sea slugs”
v popular in anthro right now as sea slugs don’t ever give you any guff the way humans who read your studies about them sometimes have begun to do!
It’s as though someone believed “Scenes From the Class Struggles in Beverly Hills” was written by a Marxist on acid.
These kinds of “texts” (remember Semiotics?) are remarkably easy to generate with AI because they are words that have a high probability of sounding right together, preferably in conjunction with the most obscure possible concept along with the widest yet most specious inference.
It’s hard to realize that academia didn’t embrace QANON - or did it and we didn’t notice?
There are two main differences between Butler and the anthropologists encountered in this essay. Firstly whatever their shortcomings at least they were actually experts in their field, whereas Butler is an English lit professor (perhaps that explains it all as their interpretations were coming from observing actual human behaviour while Butler's "gender" originates in language). Secondly Malinowski et al were engaging in a descriptive pursuit, whereas contemporary Humanities academia has completely sold out to prescriptive objectives. Since Gramschi, Fanon and co the academy has become a prescriber of political aims rather than a describer of human dynamics.
My assessment of Butler is not charitable, I've been dying to ask someone whether my perception of her is valid. I see her as a self-loathing lesbian who has invented an ideological structure which she can live inside-of and pretend she is something other than precisely that. And to keep the pretense viable she demands everyone else engage in sympathetic role-play. Its not a nice thing to write, but given how much harm her fantasy-worldbuilding has caused sparing her feelings isn't a priority for me.
Gender was an intellectual political project to beat back feminist analysis and feminist gains. Women who took it up have been hugely rewarded for doing so. It is middle management sellout work. Strathern’s work is obscurantist in many of the ways Butler’s is, the subject area notwithstanding. The central contradiction is the hostility to feminism while pretending to be feminists in both cases. Weiner’s work is sophisticated but her prose is clear as a bell because she was not engaged in a managerial bafflegab project.
Nice to finally have someone to blame, some scapegoat to crucify ... 😉🙂
But a rather fascinating essay, a veritable cornucopia of “revelations”, insights, links, and threads to follow. While I’ve barely touched the surface of it, I may repost it, and further elaborations, on my own Substack, particularly if you don’t mind.
However, a couple of your salient points deserve a bit of emphasis and elaboration here.
First of all, while it is certainly commendable, and probably well-justified as you’ve argued, for “anthropology” to step up to the plate and take some blame for the whole transgender clusterfuck – and its many odious consequences – I kinda think the roots of it go back much further than Strathern and company. For instance, while I am certainly no linguist, I kind of get the impression that “gender” – particularly the feminine and masculine halves – has historically been used, probably from about 1300 or so according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to denote those traits which are more or less typical of each sex while not being definitive or not encompassing various reproductive traits or abilities, notably your "capacity for person-production":
No doubt “gender” has, and has had, some grammatical uses, but clearly there are more than a few cases where it is, and has been used to refer to those “accidental properties” of men and women. For example:
“1632: Here's a woman: The soule of Hercules has got into her. She has a spirit, is more masculine, Then the first gender.”
Clearly, a use of “gender” that is an entirely different kettle of fish from “sex”: “masculine” traits – e.g., “Herculean soul” – are more or less typical of males but not unique to them.
Which brings me around to several of your quotes of Strathern, or paraphrases of her, and her encompassing “No such thing as woman”:
Strathern: “Hence, the claim may be made that we have been ignoring a significant universal, the category ‘woman’… it is a persistent premiss… that there is a social category whose dimensions are knowable on a priori grounds such that studies of particular women exemplify attributes of a universal womankind” …. The condescending dismissal of the proposition that there is a “‘significant universal, the category ‘woman’”, which has hitherto been ignored in scholarship. ...what [feminist anthropologists] must not additionally do is claim that “Particular studies can thus yield universals about the condition of womankind as such” ....
Reminds me of a quote of Kathleen Stock in Quillette magazine some five years ago where she argued that “there is no hard and fast ‘essence’ to biological sex, at least in our everyday sense: no set of characteristics a male or female must have, to count as such”:
Though I very much object to this assertion of hers since it is rather unscientific at best, and is flatly contradicted by the Springer definitions I quoted earlier:
Stock: “A plausible and much more minimal alternative says that each sex is defined by the presence of a developmental pathway to produce certain gamete types - either larger, relatively static ones (in which case, the pathway belongs to females) or smaller, more mobile ones (in which case, males).”
But it seems that Strathern and Company are more or less arguing in the same vein (vain?) except for “woman” – though as a gender, and not as a sex – i.e., as “adult human females”. Strathern is basically saying that there is “no set of characteristics a man [gender] or woman [gender] must have to count as such”.
What she and too many “feminists” are doing is making “woman” into a matter of “family resemblances”, into polythetic categories where there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership, just a bunch of amorphous traits that may or may not be sufficient. The upshot of which is to turn “woman” into some ethereal and mythic essence – something that Jane Clare Jones seems guilty of, at least in the article of hers you linked to. And if category membership is based only on that “essence” then it is maybe not surprising that transwomen are trying to claim the cachet that follows therefrom. Talk about cuckoos in the nest.
But you might have some interest in Michael Shermer’s elaboration on that family resemblances idea – elaborated on by Wittgenstein but not really new with him – and in my several of my comments thereon:
“What is a Woman, Anyway?
Fuzzy Sets, Family Resemblances, and Conceptual Truths”
However, there are, as I and others have argued, any number of problems with that family-resemblance/polythetic-categories idea. For one thing, as you’ve suggested, if there’s no there there then there’s no point of comparison, there’s no way of asking, much less answering how, say, women – as sexes, as adult human females, as those with “the capacity for person-production” – express themselves differently, and similarly, in different societies. Profoundly unscientific if not antiscientific from the get-go.
But a further problem is that if one isn’t careful about who one lets into the family one can wind up sitting down to Christmas dinner with the Manson family ... 😉🙂
This is exactly where radical feminism is analytically helpful, in ways I think Kathleen Stock -- whom I otherwise admire -- misses, or at least used to do with her sort of mean spirited dismissals of radfems like Sheila Jeffreys. She may have shifted on this point since. Radical feminism means a feminism that goes to the root, and its analysis was inspired by Marxism. Marxian analysis turned on control of the means of production and the struggles inevitably consequent upon it. Radical feminist analysis turns on control of the means of *reproduction* and the struggles inevitably consequent upon it. This struggle for control is the origin-point of women's oppression cross-culturally (and it is the first building block for generating stratification among all people, men included).
Women's bodies are the control point for the production of new people. Of course any process of stratification is going to begin by trying to control that "production site" and creating symbolic media / elaborations of that control. The stupid gender gotcha about "you are reducing WOMEN to their UTERUSES" is just obfuscatory piffle which we'd recognize if a capitalist said "oh you are just reducing my workers to their wages, I care about them in all their complexity, let's stop TALKING about wages". Of course the worker is a full rounded person. Of course the capitalist who would like to talk about anything but wages is a weasel. Of course women are fully people. Of course the gender ideologues who want to talk about "birthing bodies" as if babies fall from the sky from amorphous bodies are weasels.
Amen to that "fully rounded person". Too many have made attributes -- "female" in particular -- into "immutable 🙄 identities" rather than labels for transitory reproductive abilities and "life-history stages".
As for Stock, she's definitely a "work in progress" 🙂. For example, see her:
She gives a decent defense of "Radfems" in general, notably for being first to the barricades on transgenderism. But she also -- quite reasonably, I think -- argued they're "barking (mad)" for wanting to "abolish gender".
I think, more than a few think, that sex-gender is a useful dichotomy, and why I've tried to put the latter on a more scientific footing. To a first approximation, it is no more than a set of sexually dimorphic personality traits, roles, and behaviors. See my:
The no-such-thing-as/can't-define-a-woman theorists remind one of Dr Strangelove wrestling with his arm. In every situation, they are able to unerringly identify the thing they repeatedly tell us doesn't exist. Geez, it's almost as if they know exactly what it is. Worse, the non-existence of woman is wholly unlike the non-existence of the toothfairy, unicorns or the planet Vulcan. One can't just prove it and then move on with life. Everyday, in journals, on television, on twitter, in every medium and on every platform, it has to be reformulated and publicly stated. Whole careers---and now industries---need to be built upon it.
His arm is conceptually identical to trans Sex BIID - not part of his body, is uncontrolled, and causes distress.
I still can’t get over the idea - anthropological - that women “dont’t exist”.
The old word is charlatan.
"I still can’t get over the idea - anthropological - that women 'don't exist'. ..."
Seems like that depends on how you DEFINE the term. IF you define the category as "adult human females" THEN of course there are members of it, those who "exist" as such. Though not all "vagina-havers" qualify for membership cards in that "exalted" estate. As "biologist extraordinaire" PZ Myers once put it:
PZ Myers: " 'female' is not applicable -- it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female."
https://twitter.com/pzmyers/status/1466458067491598342
However, IF "woman" is no more than an open-ended collection of traits that correlate, to a greater or lesser extent, with "adult human female" THEN one might reasonably say that there is NO person who exhibits ALL of those traits. Ergo, no such "woman". Q.E.D. Logic 101. HTH ... 😉🙂
These texts are not that obvious - they seem to argue categorically. It’s the same as arguing that “adult” or “parent” or “deaf” doesn’t exist.
Not quite sure what you mean by "argue categorically" -- "without exception; unconditionally; absolutely"?
But a whole bunch of fuzzy thinking goin' on, and on virtually all sides of the fence. Kinda think that Kathleen gets to the heart of it or underlines the problem with this earlier comment of hers:
KL: "The stupid gender gotcha about 'you are reducing WOMEN to their UTERUSES' is just obfuscatory piffle ..."
The problem there is, as she put it, "Of course women are fully people". Many if not most people have some difficulty with the difference between categories and members of them, and with the concept that there are generally objective criteria for category membership. Her example is more or less starting from a particular definition for "woman" -- i.e., "adult human uterus-haver" -- and the gender ideologue "thinks" that those defining "woman" that way are insisting that "uterus-haver" is all there is to the person getting their knickers in a twist.
I'd run across a similar example several years ago in a rather brilliant tweet -- almost literally a Road to Damascus revelation -- from one "RadfemBlack (RFB)" in response to one "Miyoko Dunn (MD)":
MD: " 'How is it reductive to define women by their reproductive parts?'
If I have to explain this then you are too idiotic, or dishonest, to bother."
RFB: "You gonna tell people they’re 'reducing beings to their bones' next for saying that a vertebrate is a creature with a spine? (obviously you’re not one 🤡💀)."
https://twitter.com/RadfemBlack/status/1161471915812360193
An exchange that is front and center in my own kick at that age-old question, "What is a woman?", the one puzzling philosophers, philanderers, and politicians from time immemorial:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman
The authors she wrote about seemed to attempt to eliminate the possibility of different kinds of human categories. Not slightly bonkers.
I rather doubt that, at least in general. For example, I expect that they would agree that one has to be 13 to 19 to qualify as a teenager. No dude of 35 gets to "identify as" a teenager and claim any rights pertaining thereto.
I expect they simply don't want to define "woman" with any exactitude, with any "necessary and sufficient condition" grounded in "nature" -- as Kathleen put it -- in large part because they don't want to "exclude" any potential claimants to that exalted estate.
Some reason to argue that that is what motivates various so-called biologists and philosophers -- like Colin Wright and Alex Byrne -- to reject or bastardize the standard biological definitions for the sexes by which to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. Lotta that goin' round these days ...
This is great, but I want more. A book maybe?
I'm working on it!
Excellent!
I didn't know about Strathern! I knew Butler nicked a lot from Kessler & McKenna and Rubin. I didn't realise Haraway is actually older than Butler either. Haraway these days (I think from "companion species" on?) has just sunk into senseless sentimental babble conflating humans with jellyfish and bacteria. At least some of her older texts are semi-readable.
I think the simple answer to why people like Strathern and Butler get away with getting their blatant anti-feminism branded as feminist rather than reactionary is: they're women. (Because surely women can't really have real differences between them and surely anything a woman does in a prestigious male-dominated field is automatically somehow "feminist", even and perhaps especially if she shits on other women in the process?) Perfectly disproving their point.
Oh god yes. Being a scholar who called herself feminist while mostly devoting her energies to kicking saddens in the teeth was a fantastic career move for women scholars from about 1980 on.
Yes Haraway has gone full on “being a real environmentalist does not mean combatting habitat destruction it means wittering on about the souls of sea slugs”
v popular in anthro right now as sea slugs don’t ever give you any guff the way humans who read your studies about them sometimes have begun to do!
Sadden be radfems ! Autocorrect goes wild
Saddens should be….
Gah I give up 🤪
It’s as though someone believed “Scenes From the Class Struggles in Beverly Hills” was written by a Marxist on acid.
These kinds of “texts” (remember Semiotics?) are remarkably easy to generate with AI because they are words that have a high probability of sounding right together, preferably in conjunction with the most obscure possible concept along with the widest yet most specious inference.
It’s hard to realize that academia didn’t embrace QANON - or did it and we didn’t notice?
Nice piece.
There are two main differences between Butler and the anthropologists encountered in this essay. Firstly whatever their shortcomings at least they were actually experts in their field, whereas Butler is an English lit professor (perhaps that explains it all as their interpretations were coming from observing actual human behaviour while Butler's "gender" originates in language). Secondly Malinowski et al were engaging in a descriptive pursuit, whereas contemporary Humanities academia has completely sold out to prescriptive objectives. Since Gramschi, Fanon and co the academy has become a prescriber of political aims rather than a describer of human dynamics.
My assessment of Butler is not charitable, I've been dying to ask someone whether my perception of her is valid. I see her as a self-loathing lesbian who has invented an ideological structure which she can live inside-of and pretend she is something other than precisely that. And to keep the pretense viable she demands everyone else engage in sympathetic role-play. Its not a nice thing to write, but given how much harm her fantasy-worldbuilding has caused sparing her feelings isn't a priority for me.
Gender was an intellectual political project to beat back feminist analysis and feminist gains. Women who took it up have been hugely rewarded for doing so. It is middle management sellout work. Strathern’s work is obscurantist in many of the ways Butler’s is, the subject area notwithstanding. The central contradiction is the hostility to feminism while pretending to be feminists in both cases. Weiner’s work is sophisticated but her prose is clear as a bell because she was not engaged in a managerial bafflegab project.
Nice to finally have someone to blame, some scapegoat to crucify ... 😉🙂
But a rather fascinating essay, a veritable cornucopia of “revelations”, insights, links, and threads to follow. While I’ve barely touched the surface of it, I may repost it, and further elaborations, on my own Substack, particularly if you don’t mind.
However, a couple of your salient points deserve a bit of emphasis and elaboration here.
First of all, while it is certainly commendable, and probably well-justified as you’ve argued, for “anthropology” to step up to the plate and take some blame for the whole transgender clusterfuck – and its many odious consequences – I kinda think the roots of it go back much further than Strathern and company. For instance, while I am certainly no linguist, I kind of get the impression that “gender” – particularly the feminine and masculine halves – has historically been used, probably from about 1300 or so according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to denote those traits which are more or less typical of each sex while not being definitive or not encompassing various reproductive traits or abilities, notably your "capacity for person-production":
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/gender_n?tl=true
No doubt “gender” has, and has had, some grammatical uses, but clearly there are more than a few cases where it is, and has been used to refer to those “accidental properties” of men and women. For example:
“1632: Here's a woman: The soule of Hercules has got into her. She has a spirit, is more masculine, Then the first gender.”
Clearly, a use of “gender” that is an entirely different kettle of fish from “sex”: “masculine” traits – e.g., “Herculean soul” – are more or less typical of males but not unique to them.
Which brings me around to several of your quotes of Strathern, or paraphrases of her, and her encompassing “No such thing as woman”:
Strathern: “Hence, the claim may be made that we have been ignoring a significant universal, the category ‘woman’… it is a persistent premiss… that there is a social category whose dimensions are knowable on a priori grounds such that studies of particular women exemplify attributes of a universal womankind” …. The condescending dismissal of the proposition that there is a “‘significant universal, the category ‘woman’”, which has hitherto been ignored in scholarship. ...what [feminist anthropologists] must not additionally do is claim that “Particular studies can thus yield universals about the condition of womankind as such” ....
Reminds me of a quote of Kathleen Stock in Quillette magazine some five years ago where she argued that “there is no hard and fast ‘essence’ to biological sex, at least in our everyday sense: no set of characteristics a male or female must have, to count as such”:
Archive link: https://archive.ph/UFgFP
https://quillette.com/2019/04/11/ignoring-differences-between-men-and-women-is-the-wrong-way-to-address-gender-dysphoria/
Although I think she has, thankfully, changed her tune since then – for example see her “The Importance of Referring to Human Sex in Language”:
https://lcp.law.duke.edu/article/the-importance-of-referring-to-human-sex-in-language-stock-vol85-iss1/
Though I very much object to this assertion of hers since it is rather unscientific at best, and is flatly contradicted by the Springer definitions I quoted earlier:
Stock: “A plausible and much more minimal alternative says that each sex is defined by the presence of a developmental pathway to produce certain gamete types - either larger, relatively static ones (in which case, the pathway belongs to females) or smaller, more mobile ones (in which case, males).”
But it seems that Strathern and Company are more or less arguing in the same vein (vain?) except for “woman” – though as a gender, and not as a sex – i.e., as “adult human females”. Strathern is basically saying that there is “no set of characteristics a man [gender] or woman [gender] must have to count as such”.
What she and too many “feminists” are doing is making “woman” into a matter of “family resemblances”, into polythetic categories where there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership, just a bunch of amorphous traits that may or may not be sufficient. The upshot of which is to turn “woman” into some ethereal and mythic essence – something that Jane Clare Jones seems guilty of, at least in the article of hers you linked to. And if category membership is based only on that “essence” then it is maybe not surprising that transwomen are trying to claim the cachet that follows therefrom. Talk about cuckoos in the nest.
But you might have some interest in Michael Shermer’s elaboration on that family resemblances idea – elaborated on by Wittgenstein but not really new with him – and in my several of my comments thereon:
“What is a Woman, Anyway?
Fuzzy Sets, Family Resemblances, and Conceptual Truths”
https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman-anyway/comment/7630788
https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman-anyway/comment/7631549
However, there are, as I and others have argued, any number of problems with that family-resemblance/polythetic-categories idea. For one thing, as you’ve suggested, if there’s no there there then there’s no point of comparison, there’s no way of asking, much less answering how, say, women – as sexes, as adult human females, as those with “the capacity for person-production” – express themselves differently, and similarly, in different societies. Profoundly unscientific if not antiscientific from the get-go.
But a further problem is that if one isn’t careful about who one lets into the family one can wind up sitting down to Christmas dinner with the Manson family ... 😉🙂
This is exactly where radical feminism is analytically helpful, in ways I think Kathleen Stock -- whom I otherwise admire -- misses, or at least used to do with her sort of mean spirited dismissals of radfems like Sheila Jeffreys. She may have shifted on this point since. Radical feminism means a feminism that goes to the root, and its analysis was inspired by Marxism. Marxian analysis turned on control of the means of production and the struggles inevitably consequent upon it. Radical feminist analysis turns on control of the means of *reproduction* and the struggles inevitably consequent upon it. This struggle for control is the origin-point of women's oppression cross-culturally (and it is the first building block for generating stratification among all people, men included).
Women's bodies are the control point for the production of new people. Of course any process of stratification is going to begin by trying to control that "production site" and creating symbolic media / elaborations of that control. The stupid gender gotcha about "you are reducing WOMEN to their UTERUSES" is just obfuscatory piffle which we'd recognize if a capitalist said "oh you are just reducing my workers to their wages, I care about them in all their complexity, let's stop TALKING about wages". Of course the worker is a full rounded person. Of course the capitalist who would like to talk about anything but wages is a weasel. Of course women are fully people. Of course the gender ideologues who want to talk about "birthing bodies" as if babies fall from the sky from amorphous bodies are weasels.
Amen to that "fully rounded person". Too many have made attributes -- "female" in particular -- into "immutable 🙄 identities" rather than labels for transitory reproductive abilities and "life-history stages".
As for Stock, she's definitely a "work in progress" 🙂. For example, see her:
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender?utm_medium=web&post_id=52358072
"Abolish the dream of gender abolition
But not for the reasons you think"
She gives a decent defense of "Radfems" in general, notably for being first to the barricades on transgenderism. But she also -- quite reasonably, I think -- argued they're "barking (mad)" for wanting to "abolish gender".
I think, more than a few think, that sex-gender is a useful dichotomy, and why I've tried to put the latter on a more scientific footing. To a first approximation, it is no more than a set of sexually dimorphic personality traits, roles, and behaviors. See my:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum