What is a woman? An adult human female. What is a female? This site aims to examine those two questions and the snap response.
Radical feminism’s associated separatist movements are reliant on categories that can be separated. On this site I will focus on trans exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) thought that enforces and justifies a separation by synthesizing womanhood and claiming that the oppression of women is contingent on their female sex, aka is “sex-based”. This theory has dramatic implications for ontologies of identity, which clash with various non-binary gender identities and the idea of gender identities themselves. At its core this theory relies on a literal and metaphorical “policing” of identity along often scientifically and medically biological lines, a rejection of sex as considered in queer thought, and claims that the rights of “sex-based” women are being encroached upon. This site aims to outline, explore and critique various ways these thinkers synthesize womanhood.
I will examine the work of authors like, for example, Shon Faye, Kathleen Stock, Julia Serano, Holly Lawford-Smith, Catharine MacKinnon, Judith Butler, and Julie Bindel. I am also interested in cataloging and providing a taxonomy of popular apocryphal accounts of womanhood encountered in the Wild and demonstrating inconsistencies, confusions, and contradictions between allied trans exclusionary theorists and internally within their own work. While this will primarily be a contemporary exploration, I will be keeping in mind the potential that some “new” thought about these theories is an echo of thinkers such as Greer, Beauvoir, and Wittig.
Additionally, I will be interested in exploring the idea that these modernist accounts of womanhood are also colonialist and “western” accounts, highlighting how third-gender concepts such as “x-gender” from Japan clash with “sex-based” theories.
I am also curious about the effort to link the current fight for “sex-based” rights with the suffragette movement, and would like to more critically examine how the rhetoric and theory (and sometimes fascist tendencies) of that movement are linked to current “sex-based” womanhood. Another fascinating facet to me is the idea that concepts like chromosomes, gametes and lesbianism are claimed as objective realities while being relatively contemporary concepts - and what the implications of these claims are for the correctness of historical accounts of womanhood.
I am a unionist, feminist, ex-postgraduate philosopher, programmer, and agender anti-fascist person.