If a tree falls in the forest of decadent feminism...

Holly Lawford-Smith's Gender-Critical Feminism is a great addition to the emergent feminist alternative

Something strange has been happening to feminism, most of all its bureaucratized branches in the NGO and charity sectors, publishing, philanthropy, academy and the government-funded bodies. The messaging that used to centre women now talks of female-identified people or women + other constituencies, and this includes areas with dire female underrepresentation like the programs for women in orchestra conducting and composition. Reproductive or public health messaging, not infrequently from the government, talks of pregnant people and people who menstruate. The National Inquiry’s Final Report on the missing and murdered indigenous women turned itself into a report on missing and murdered “women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people”. Organizations that used to be concerned about the incidence of violence against women are now talking about “gender-based violence”. And last year a great number of nominally feminist social service organizations and NGOs in Canada joined together to condemn a group of women, call them a name, and declare that there is no room for those women in our ranks. It’s a fascinating bin of conceptual debris I mean progressive keyword bingo, the letter, and about 40 different executives in these organizations found no problem with it and signed it. When the Jean Tweed scandal happened a few years ago, when a woman in a nominally women-only shelter complained about a male in their midst, the shelter execs attacked her. The Elizabeth Fry Societies which used to advocate for women in prisons now focus on the “issues that impact criminalized women and gender-diverse people”, and the grassroots advocates for single-sex prisons like Heather Mason are not allowed to place an ad in a community paper. The government-grant-funded advocacy group tasked with “tracking hate speech” is keeping files on the feminist association CAWSBAR which advocates against the Canadian turn towards self-ID in sports, prisons and shelters. What used to be feminism five minutes ago will now get you unpublished, blacklisted, bring hundreds of (left and liberal! so it’s alright) protesters to your event, and get you designated a bigot. Men can, finally, call you a bitch in public and get progressive kudos for it. And the many branches of the well-funded, bureaucratic feminism will cheer them on.

How did we get here? This is an Anglosphere phenomenon, not only a Canadian one, though Canada is manifesting it most acutely of all. It’s easier to argue why we got here –- feminism of the wealthy anglo economies has reached a decadent phase and shares the nature-conquering monied hubris of its societies. It’s harder to show how this thought took over. Why has the concept of “gender” multiply to mean several things? Two of those have opposing meanings: gender is a set of societal norms we attach to the sexed bodies: women pink, self-effacing, weak at STEM, vs. gender is an inner identity: if you’re a lad who’s into pink, ballet and prefer the company of girls, you must be in your innermost self - a girl. Also, why is feminism now supposed to be about everything (decolonization, climate change, disability advocacy, race, LGBT) and for everybody?

There have been several recent books tackling the hows and whys of the self-ID takeover, and mostly out of UK. Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls shows how “gender identity” took over in philosophy and social theory, and how it demoted biological sex, material embodiment, and the concept “woman”. Helen Joyce’s Trans is a history of how trans activism forged its path from the transsexual beginnings to the concept of transgender to its current self-ID iteration, and how it gained influence, allies, funding. Both books, and the forthcoming Karen Ingala Smith’s Defending Women’s Spaces, and Victoria Smith’s Hags, start from the previously uncontroversial premises that 1) sex is real and immutable (while science and philosophy around it can change any which way, there’s no escaping fact that we are mammals, and not clownfish), 2) sex in some contexts matters very much, 3) especially for women. Note to Canadian publishers: there’s a huge reading market for people who hold such beliefs, which the UK is tapping successfully, and we aren’t.

Now with Holly Lawford-Smith’s Gender-Critical Feminism, Australia, via Oxford University Press, is joining the conversation and how. This book of political philosophy could have easily been subtitled Our most significant disagreements, the “us” here being feminists and women’s rights advocates. Lawford-Smith looks at the history of several of the persistent disagreements within the feminist thought, and why one particular kind of feminism is hegemonic today, the pro trans self-ID, sex-work-is-work, intersectionality and choice feminism. While she has a definite preference, Lawford-Smith genuinely steelmans the theories she is skeptical about and sometimes finds herself acknowledging that there may be more than one way to tackle the problem. The big disagreements, she shows, concentrate along the three hotspots: transgender ID; sex trade and pornography; and intersectionality, or how much feminism needs to centre women as women vs. give itself to another pressing cause (anti-racism, income redistribution, the plight of sexual minorities, non-renewable resources).

Mary Wollstonecraft, Lawford-Smith reminds, argued in favour of all opportunities that men have being open to women too, especially in education, and the historical liberal feminism has, in its march, improved the female lot in spectacular ways (the right to vote, the right to own property and not be one’s father’s property, the right to go to university, to work after marriage, to enter all professions, to run for political office). But from Simone de Beauvoir and later the second wave of the 1960s and 70s, we’ve been asking if formal equality is enough if the culture and economy remain men-tailored. De Beauvoir and after her the radical feminists realized that women’s (feminine) socialization goes deeper and shapes our psyche. We don’t choose in a vacuum. And often choose what’s bad for us. How can the question of self-harming choices be raised without veering into paternalism and illiberalism? On this axis, much of the feminism’s philosophical strife takes place.

Lawford-Smith lucidly cuts through the social media noise and group-think, but still, she says, if you believe X, you’re likely to believe Y and Z too, and that is how feminist tribes form. (I, for ex, am multi-tribal as someone who is highly gender critical on the self-ID issue, but pro decriminalization when it comes to prostitution, and swinging both ways on the intersectionality.) A lot of radical feminists have named the personal autonomy and free speech vs. what’s genuinely good for women as a sex class debates as liberal feminism vs. radical feminism battle, but Lawford-Smith does not agree things are that simple. We are all liberals, in politico-philosophical sense, she writes, and all ultimately come from the philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment and liberal democracy, but we fight over which policies are more in line with this ancestry.

While her heart is with the Nordic model (that is, asymmetrical criminalization: demand for sex trade is criminalized, not its sellers – a system that Canada, France and the Scandinavian countries share), Lawford-Smith considers an array of other arguments, and concedes that the one in favour of decriminalization possibly, short term, could be the most useful for the working conditions of women in sex trade. But if we zoom out for the broader picture and look long term, should we as a society ease the trajectory into sex work or actually make it more of a palaver to choose it and stay in it? What are our values around women’s employment and women’s role in a society? We have outlawed the trading in organs, she writes, and commercial surrogacy, but buying access to a stranger’s mouth, genitals and anus is considered perfectly normal. It is not -- Lawford-Smith wants to shake our moral intuitions -- perfectly normal. This debate echoes the debates around the decriminalization of hard drugs. The “harm reduction” approach is now agnostic and nonjudgmental about the use of hard drugs and come in many North American cities with no strings attached. But should we be perfectly indifferent about someone’s choice to use heroin – do we not owe them more, at least some sort of an incentive toward sobriety? I’m persuaded by Michael Shallenberger’s San Fransicko: we should not shrug our shoulders to all of our fellow humans’ choices.

In the final chapter, Lawford-Smith writes about the feasibility of various feminists ideals, conscious that any argument in favour of the gradual self-abolition of sex trade -- a society where there will be extremely few people selling sex and extremely few keen to buy it, and few keen to watch gang-rape porn of women for entertainment -- immediately gets hit with the feasibility question. But why limit our imagination before we even start, she asks. Slavery abolition, and votes for women too were extremely absurd and inconvenient proposals when they emerged.

This is a generous, lucid, optimistic book that will warm the cockles of a cynic’s heart (cynic here) and give you an overview of the most ardent feminists disagreements today. Because free inquiry has dropped down the value ladder across the Anglosphere, it looked like its publication hit a roadblock when the OUP authors and staffers campaigned against their own publisher for intending to publish it. “What further steps is the Press taking to make itself accountable for the consequences of its publication should the book go forward to print”, they asked in an open letter. But who would benefit the most from Lawford-Smiths work is those who disagree with her. As I do, on a number of points, but close the book wishing that our reader-writer conversation continued for much longer.