Welcome to Mad Libs. This is an irregular debate column where our columnists, contributors, and staff writers (or even you, dear reader) can duke it out over the big ideas we’re discussing in the metaphorical pages of this magazine.
Today’s Mad Libs grew out of the firestorm over the publication of The Argument’s Maibritt Henkel’s “My weekend with the ‘sex-realist’ feminists” late last month.
No issue divides liberal feminists from their sex-realist counterparts quite like — you guessed it — gender. Sex-realists emphatically reject the idea that womanhood has anything to do with identification, arguing instead that it has everything to do with biology.
For sex-realists, feminism begins with the bodily differences between men and women. For liberal feminists, the point of feminism is to make those differences matter less.
So we invited Elizabeth Grace Matthew, a sex-realist feminist who writes the newsletter Restoring American Adulthood, to debate Maibritt directly on how feminists should think about sex and gender.
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- Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument
Elizabeth Grace Matthew:
As a sex-realist feminist, I believe both that women are fundamentally, intrinsically equal to men and that women are definitionally, biologically different from men.
Right-coded anti-feminists reject the first principle in deference to the neopagan misogyny of gender essentialism; they believe that men are superior to women and that the sexes must have distinct roles. Meanwhile, left-coded mainstream feminists reject the second principle in deference to the pseudoscience of gender ideology; they cannot define the word “woman.”
This dominant form of feminism today rejects the reality of sex difference. In so doing, it makes three mistakes:
It abandons protections and accommodations for women on the mistaken belief that sex exists on a spectrum.
It conflates recognizing biological differences between men and women with believing those differences should determine how men and women behave.
It aspires to make men and women more alike rather than allowing each woman to flourish on her own terms.
Sex is not a spectrum
Approximately 0.018% of newborns are intersex (i.e., cannot be classified as male or female or observed classification is inconsistent with chromosomal sex). Until quite recently, the American Psychiatric Association estimated that up to 0.014% of adult males and 0.003% of females manifested gender dysphoria (i.e., experienced distress due to the incongruence between their “gender identity” and biological sex). Among children, presentation of gender dysphoria typically occurred between ages two and four.
The recent spike in gender dysphoria (especially among adolescent females) is a costly, dangerous social contagion. Broad adoption of terminology that attempts to treat these aberrations as norms (e.g., “sex assigned at birth”) is insidious propaganda.
Acknowledging that this emperor is wearing no clothes (and that if his imaginary outfit were a dress, he would still be a man) does not and must not mean failing to treat the small number of people with these conditions humanely. Perhaps no one has been clearer about the totality of that moral reality than the late Pope Francis, whose compassion for people struggling with gender dysphoria did not equate to acceptance of gender ideology.
Sex realism does and must require recognizing, and ordering society to accommodate, the binary reality of sex: In comparison to men, women are on average more sexually vulnerable as well as smaller, weaker, and slower. So, no male, however he identifies himself, should have access to a women’s prison or locker room, or compete on a women’s sports team. As the WNBA recently (unwillingly) demonstrated, to maintain otherwise is to maintain that women’s prisons, teams, and locker rooms have no reason to exist.
Moreover, women alone menstruate, gestate and birth babies, and breastfeed. So, sexual mores, parental accommodation, and infant care should not reflect perfect sameness between the sexes. To maintain otherwise is to embrace a disembodied fantasy.
Sex realism is not gender essentialism
“Gender” is a useless, sophistic concept. It refers to aesthetics and activities that are normed in our culture by sex. “Norms” would suffice.
Anti-feminists weaponize gender to lionize rigid, sexed roles: Men should be breadwinners, and women should be homemakers. Meanwhile, many mainstream “trans-inclusive” feminists weaponize gender to reject the unique physical and sexual vulnerability of women and accept the fallacy of “gender identity” (heedless of the attendant homophobia).
While it’s true that many sex-realist feminists acknowledge the sexes’ overlapping distributions of personality traits and preferences, believing men and women are different doesn’t mean believing women belong in the kitchen. Indeed, sex-realist feminists differ in our own societal and domestic roles.
Sure, many sex-realist feminists believe that if we had a women’s movement that acknowledged and supported both women’s biological distinctness and our holistic equality — and that called both women and men to complementary care work accordingly — there would be more early marriages and big families. Amen.
But sex-realist feminism does not require this belief. It requires only a reality principle and an investment in women’s genuine well-being.
Freedom is not androgyny
Mainstream feminists do not trust women with real freedom; their goal is not to facilitate women’s interests but to perpetuate a norm of androgyny. They know that, blessed with the economic and cultural freedom to do so (as I have been), many smart, educated, ambitious women will prioritize hands-on motherhood (as I do).
Sex-realist feminists, by contrast, trust women with actual agency. Women are not pawns in the left’s crusade against an erstwhile patriarchy, and liberation is not a contest to see how much like men we can become.
Women are also not foot soldiers in the right’s war on feminism, with victory measured by how many of us return to traditional gender roles. Our goal is every individual woman’s full flourishing via equality of opportunity that does not measure success by sameness of outcome.
I can advocate for economic and cultural policies and practices that support working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. I can say “Godspeed” to every girlboss and to every homemaker, irrespective of the national percentages of each.
I believe in each woman’s holistic equality. And, with it, her true liberty to fulfill her own unique vocation.
Maibritt Henkel:
The term “sex-realist feminism” implies that other feminists are unrealistic about sex, so let me clarify where I stand on biology.