What is a woman, anyway?

A serious answer to unserious people’s favorite question

"One is not born, but rather becomes, woman."

— Simone de Beauvoir[i]

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A favorite question of right-wing pundits in recent years has become: what is a woman? Those who ask it, nearly always acting in bad faith, presume that the question has an obvious answer. It is presumed that there are only two options: (a) define women on biological terms, thus proving that trans women are not women or (b) say that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman, thus rendering the category meaningless. It is presumed that if "woman" becomes meaningless, then so too will gender, sex, heterosexuality, the church, the family, and probably Western civilization. Exciting stuff.

It is useless to engage directly with the reactionaries who ask this question. They are not interested in an answer. However, the question is both interesting and important. Many trans women have already addressed this question in one form or not: Julia Serano has spilled ink; Susan Stryker has "queered the woman question"; Laverne Cox has asked "ain't I a woman?"; Talia Bhatt has argued that "the question has an answer."[ii]

There is no single answer to the question. The social category of "woman" is complex, carrying thousands of years of male-supremacist baggage. Gender is culturally and historically specific; gender categories exist in different ways throughout different cultures. Thus, I present a specifically feminist approach to understanding the category of "woman". The goal of feminism is to liberate women; in order to do so, women's oppression must be understood. In order to understand women's oppression, it must be understood what "woman" means and how the category came to be.

From female to woman

There is no inherent reason why the physiological difference between male and female bodies should carry so much social meaning. There is no inherent reason why one body or another should correspond with an expected style of dress, expected social role, average income, relationship to sexual violence, access to political power, access to effective and compassionate medical care, and so on. There is no inherent reason why these differences should exist, and why they should be sex-differentiated — and yet, they do, and they are.

The physiological differences between male and female bodies become socially meaningful via the imposition of a sex/gender system. A sex/gender system is, as Gayle Rubin explains, "the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which the transformed sexual needs are satisfied."[iii]

A sex/gender system imposes an organizational system onto human society. The sex division is the original class division,[iv] allowing labor to be differentiated. In a species in which one sex must undergo lengthy and painful pregnancy, there is some logic in the sexual division of labor. However, this does not mean that such a division of labor is inevitable: different societies throughout history have seen different divisions of labor, often but not always corresponding with sex.

The sex/gender system currently dominating the globe is patriarchy; the underlying ideology of patriarchy is male supremacy. Patriarchy has long existed in numerous countries, and the gluttonous vampirism of Western imperialism has ensured that it now exists in every country.

Patriarchy takes for granted two things: that men and women are different from each other, and that men are superior to women. In a male supremacist world, only men are granted full access to humanity. To be a man is to be human; women are forgotten. Such a world imposes a public/private divide: the public is the domain of man, the private the domain of woman. It is in the public domain where the real business of living happens: wage labor, politics, academic study, love, war, brotherhood. The private sphere consists of only of childrearing, homemaking, and getting fucked. It is for this reason that a male supremacist world is intensely homoerotic. Although men are expected to fuck (possess) women, they can only truly love other men, because only men possess the full breadth of humanity.

This subordination, in which women are restricted to such a narrow portion of human experience, does not arise naturally. In order to be successfully maintained, it must however appear natural — thus, the degradation of women saturates every part of culture. Women are ideologically constructed as lesser via a self-perpetuating system of male power that selfishly guards access to all dialogue and knowledge. The male control of the episteme ensures that all people, male and female, are taught that women are lesser. This allows men to exploit, dominate, and possess women.

Sexuality is a significant — although not the sole — aspect of the organization of the oppressed sex class of woman. Sexuality define the unequal relationship between men and women. There is a sort of expected violence in heterosexual intercourse: in marriage, a man purchases — and thereafter owns — a woman's sexuality. Implicit in the ownership of sexuality is the ownership of childbearing capacity. Catharine MacKinnon, comparing feminism to Marxism, writes,

Implicit in feminist theory is a parallel argument: the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes — women and men — which division underlies the totality of social relations. Sexuality is that social process which creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire, creating the social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. As work is to marxism [sic], sexuality to feminism is socially constructed yet constructing, universal as activity yet historically specific, jointly comprised of matter and mind. As the organized expropriation of the work of some for the benefit of others defines a class — workers — the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. Heterosexuality is its structure, gender and family its congealed forms, sex roles its qualities generalized to social persona, reproduction a consequence, and control its issue.[v]

As women are expropriated of their sexuality, they are rendered not sexual subjects, but sexual objects. Sexuality is done to them, regardless of their desires. The sexualization of women must permeate culture for this expropriation to be successful, hence, makeup, the sexualization of women's fashion, pornography, the social structure of marriage, the proliferation and the gendered nature of sex work, and the ceaseless and self-perpetuating onslaught of sexual violence against women. Thus, to be a woman is, in the words of Emma Heaney, "to wear a social identity that is haunted by rape."vi Many women are lucky enough to escape tangible sexual violence (and many men are unlucky enough to experience it) — but the threat of sexual violence hangs over all women.

This total sexual dominance allows men to socially dominate women. There is a marked power differential between men and women, and men can leverage misogyny to elevate themselves over women. Women can also leverage misogyny to elevate themselves over other women. Everyone, men and women alike, is taught misogyny; everyone (but particularly men) is materially incentivized to uphold it.

The system of male dominance is complicated by the existence of other systems of dominance. Not all men are necessarily able to dominate all women. Although men are, collectively speaking, privileged over women, collectively speaking, an individual man might be subordinate to an individual woman on racial or class hierarchies. Frank B. Wilderson, for example, makes a compelling case that in sexual relationships between Black men and white women, it is white women who hold social power — and thus it is white women who are capable of raping Black men, rather than vice versa.[vii]

Concomitant with the expropriation of women's sexuality is the expropriation of women's labor — as argued by feminists who, unlike MacKinnon, wed Marxism and feminism. Women are forced to perform unpaid and thankless labor, to tend the household and raise children. This forced labor is tightly linked with forced sexuality — women are required both to be fucked and to birth and raise the children that are conceived thereby. By identifying this work as a form of labor, Marxist feminists aim to liberate women. "To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money or capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking," writes Silvia Federici, a famous Marxist feminist. "To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it..."[viii]

The exploitation of women's reproductive capacity is a significant aspect of the misogynistic control of women — but because women are valued for their reproductive capacity, those women who are barren are excluded from normative heterosexual society and consigned to the margins, subject to additional violence. This point will become particularly significant later.

Furthermore, although middle-class white women have been historically consigned to the home – and therefore exploited – many working-class women, including many women of color, have long been engaged in wage labor. This dull and repetitive labor has not been liberating, a point made by many Black feminists.[ix] Thus, it is not merely access to employment that will liberate women. The entire economy must be restructured, in the form of socialist revolution.

By identifying the means by which women are made into a subordinate class, radical (and/or socialist) feminism accomplishes a significant feat: it denaturalizes women's oppression. By identifying how this oppression comes to be, this oppression can be challenged and ultimately ended.

Thus, so far, our definition of woman is this: a woman is a member of the sex class oppressed in a male supremacist world. Women are, on account of their sex, expropriated of sexuality and labor.

Women below women

All women are oppressed, exploited, but not all women are oppressed equally. Hierarchies of domination such as class and race cause some women to be more oppressed than others.

A racist-sexist world has a specific ideal of how women should be: white, heterosexual, young, beautiful, fertile. A woman who lives up to all of these expectations does not escape oppression – she will still be pressured into heterosexual marriage, an unequal and unfree arrangement – but a woman who cannot live up to these expectations will be treated even worse. Women of color, lesbians, disabled women, transsexual women, and those women who are all of the above, will be particularly oppressed.

White supremacy is just as responsible for the construction of gender categories as is male supremacy. In a white supremacist society, gender categories are constructed according to white ideals. That does not mean that all white people are able to live up to gender standards, but it does mean that all people of color are seen to violate the standards merely by being racialized. In the United States, for example, Native American gender roles were aggressively attacked and destroyed by colonists, while Black people have been punished in distinctly gendered ways.

One particularly harsh tool used to oppress women is that of degendering. Women who are accused of being "male", of "not really being women", are degendered. These women are consigned to a third sex category, subject to increased misogynistic violence, and denied legibility as women. Women of color, lesbians, intersex women, transsexual women, and women who sit at the intersections of multiple of these categories, are particularly subject to degendering.

I have discussed degendering at greater length in Feminism Needs Trans Women; I discuss the relationship between white supremacy and gender at further length in my upcoming book, Trans/Women, chapters 5 and 9.

Assuming too much

The first section of this essay began with an assumption, an assumption which must in fact be interrogated. The assumption is this: that there naturally exist male and female bodies that can then be classified as men and women. The classification as "male" and "female" is deceptive, because it seizes on tangible physiological traits, but constructs myths surrounding them. Thus, the myths take on the appearance of inevitable nature.

The human species engages in sexual reproduction. In order for a human fetus to form, an egg must be fertilized with sperm. Some humans produce sperm; others produce eggs. Those who produce sperm have sexual intercourse with those who produce eggs in order to fertilize the eggs and conceive offspring. Not all humans produce sperm or eggs; many produce neither. No one, so far as I am aware, can produce both.

In order to organize society around this process of biological reproduction, humans are sorted into one of two sex classes at birth based on visible genitalia. Those with a penis are expected to be sperm producers; those without are expected to be egg producers. However, individual human beings may have internal biology inconsistent with external genitalia. Those born with a penis may not actually be able to produce sperm. Those born without a penis may not actually be able to produce eggs. Furthermore, some infants are born with ambiguous genitalia. In the modern era, these infants are typically "corrected" to one sex or the other, a procedure which is both unnecessary and harmful.

Genitalia are the most readily visible sex traits at birth, and are thus seized upon in order to gender an infant. But genitalia are not the only sex trait. The majority of visible and meaningful physiological differences between males and females arise during puberty — including but not limited to breasts, fat distribution, voice, muscle mass. The precise nature of puberty is controlled by hormone levels — those with high estrogen levels undergo "female" puberty, while those with high testosterone levels undergo "male" puberty. However, puberty does not necessarily correspond with birth genitalia. Intersex children may undergo puberty that seems to contradict their birth sex assignment, while transsexual children who are given hormone replacement therapy may undergo puberty that differs from their birth assignment. Transsexuals who receive hormone replacement therapy at a later age undergo two puberties, one naturally induced and allying with birth sex, the other medically induced and aligning with embodied sex.

Thus, the category of sex is neither inevitable nor immutable. Sex — a categorization — exists only when there is someone to do the categorizing. The physical traits that are associated with and classified into sex categories are tangible, observable, "natural" — but the categories are a product of society. The categories are oversimplistic, and do not accurately represent the complexity of the human body. Thus, a patriarchal world forces those who do not fit either category back into the binary. As mentioned previously, a patriarchal world takes two things for granted: that men and women are different from each other, and that men are superior. Neither of these dicta are inevitable; both are and must be enforced with physical, sexual, social, medical, and state violence.

Transsexual Women

For cissexual women, the path from human to female to woman is fairly straightforward. From birth, women's genitalia mark them as female, and in a male supremacist world, to be female is to be a member of the subordinate sex class. In day-to-day interactions — in which genitalia are not visible — women's bodies, clothing, and other aspects of presentation mark them as female. Gendered clothing is essential to the maintenance of the sex class system; if everyone wore gender-neutral clothes it would be difficult in some instances to differentiate between men and women.

Transsexual men, assigned female at birth, occupy the social class of woman prior to their transition. When transsexual men transition, when a combination of hormones, surgery, and social transition allow them to live as men, they exit the social class of woman. Transsexual men continue to be vulnerable to violence and exploitation on account of their transsexual status, but those transsexual men who pass as male do not occupy the social class of woman.

Transsexual women are assigned male at birth. Theoretically, as they grow up, they are perceived as male and exempt from misogyny. In practice, this may or may not be true: some trans women spontaneously present feminine from a young age, which marks them as a target for sexual and social violence. Transsexual women experience particularly high rates of childhood sex abuse. Whether or not trans women occupy the social class of woman during the pre-transition years is a complex question, the answer to which surely varies from woman to woman.

However, it is when transsexual women come out — when they, according to my three-phase model, enter phase 2[x] — that they firmly cement themselves as members of the social class of woman.

Transsexual women are expropriated of their sexuality, as are all women. The expropriation transsexual women's sexuality is totalizing. It is brutal, harsher and more intense than the expropriation of cissexual women's sexuality. Trans women are relentlessly sexualized against their will, a process of cultural rape, as I argue in Chapter 7 of Trans/Women. Transsexual women are relentlessly sexually harassed in pornography; mainstream media; feminist, scientific, and academic discourses; the fear mongering of right-wing politicians — an entire cultural engine.

Transsexual women are made subject to rape and sexual exploitation as all women are. Transsexual women are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence in institutionalized contexts, such as sexual violence in male prisons, or sexual exploitation in sex work (both of these our particular risks for racialized trans women). Transsexual women face distinct and degrading forms of sexual harassment that are incredibly normalized, as I have examined and argued in previous essays.

In addition to being victimized, transsexual women are relentlessly slandered as predatory. Transsexual women are ceaselessly accused of being rapists by feminists, scientists, and politicians alike. Of course, transsexual women's primary relationship to rape is as victims of rape — transsexual women are far more likely to be subject to sexual violence than to perpetrate sexual violence. Thus, trans women are in double jeopardy — they are incredibly likely to be raped, and incredibly likely to be falsely accused of rape.

Beyond sexuality, transsexual women are expropriated of labor. Transsexual women are not necessarily exploited in the precise ways that cissexual women are — transsexual women, unable to bear children, cannot participate in the traditional heterosexual contract. However, it is for this precise reason that transsexual women are consigned to the margins of society. Trans women have access to neither the traditional public sphere of wage labor, nor the traditional private sphere of housework. The quintessential trans woman job (especially for trans women of color), survival sex work, is a job that exists on society's margins. Trans women are economically exploited — they earn less, on average, than even cissexual women. Transsexual women are the least-paid gender group.xi

Thus, from a feminist perspective, the dual expropriation that defines the class of woman — that of sexuality and of labor — applies in full force to transsexual women. Transsexual women constitute a sort of subaltern class of women, subject to particularly severe and intense violence, denied relief and legibility.

Does trans women's oppression happen on the basis of gender alone, or also on the basis of sex? There is a common — and mistaken — notion that trans women have a gender of "woman" but a sex of "male". This is inaccurate, misunderstands trans women's experiences, and generally misunderstands the nature of women's oppression.

Women's oppression is social. This oppression often seizes upon and exploits certain biological characteristics, but it does not arise as an inevitable result of those biological characteristics. Rather, women's oppression is enforced via a self-perpetuating structure of male power. Catharine MacKinnon writes,

...women’s oppression is enforced through gender, specifically gender hierarchy, a social and political, not biological, arrangement. On the technical meaning of sex as physical and gender as its social meaning, sex is equal. Gender is unequal. Women are not men’s biological inferiors; we are constrained to be men’s social inferiors. This power division, not our bodies, is what makes women a political group and the women’s movement a political movement. ...

The key question here is not (the endlessly obsessed-over) what is a woman, but what accounts for the inequality of women to men. Women are not oppressed by our bodies — our hormones, chromosomes, vaginas, breasts, ovaries. We are placed on the bottom of the gender hierarchy by the misogynistic meanings male dominant societies create and project onto us, attribute to us, which on my analysis center on women’s sexuality. When feminists define women from the dictionary as “adult human female,” in biologically essentialist terms — adult is biological age, human is biological species, female is biological sex — sliding sloppily from “female” (sex) through “feminine” (gender) to “woman,” as if no move has been made, they not only give the wrong answer, they are answering the wrong question. And they are ensuring that they can at most address excesses of male power, never that power itself. ...

... not only are trans women living women’s lives — often much the worst of that life — but the transgender women I know, anyway, embrace womanhood consciously, are far more woman-identified than a vast swath of those assigned female at birth (so-called “natal women”) that I also know, many of whom have been trying to escape womanhood their whole lives for real reasons, who often defend rape of other women as just a bad night and disidentify with women in every possible way short of their own transition, which is a lot of trouble and takes real courage. Trans women are, politically, women. They are our people too.[xii]

MacKinnon here makes several key points. I have quoted quite a lengthy passage because MacKinnon argues with greater eloquence than I could ever hope to achieve.

First, the gender hierarchy is artificially constructed. It is this hierarchy that is the basis for women's oppression. As I have argued previously, it can be in a sense more accurate to understand trans women as a distinct "third sex", subordinate to the second sex class (woman) in the gender hierarchy. As I wrote,

That most trans women occupy a "third sex" category does not mean that they are not women. Rather, from a feminist perspective, all members of the third sex (including trans women) are a sort of uber-women. This subaltern class experiences the most extreme forms of misogynistic abuse and violence. To be consigned to the third sex is to be rendered illegitimate, hideous, and disposable.[xiii]

From a feminist perspective, these members of the third sex, expropriated of sexuality and labor, are women — are the women of women.

MacKinnon, of course, also keenly identifies two more factors. First, sex, gender, and gender presentation are — while related — separate things. Second, transsexual women's material interests align with those of cissexual women. Those feminists who assume that transsexual women are in some way appropriating feminism are simply mistaken — transsexual women have a valid and vested interest in women's liberation, because transsexual women are oppressed as women. Those transsexual women who have participated in feminist movement — including but not limited to Beth Elliott, Sandy Stone, Julia Serano, Emi Koyama, and Talia Bhatt — demonstrate that this is true.

Finally, it must be said that transsexual women do not have male bodies. The process of medical transition physically alters a transsexual woman's body, stripping her of male sex characteristics and giving her female sex characteristics. Thus, transsexual women who have undergone medical transition — as most transsexual women have — experience the bodily oppression of women, including medical misogyny.

Transsexual women's physical transition from male to female would seem to make them more oppressed — female bodies are more oppressed than male bodies. However, perhaps contrary to intuition, the reverse is usually true. Transsexual women who are visibly transsexual — who do not "pass" — are treated much worse than either cissexual women or transsexual women perceived to be cissexual. Those trans women who can live "stealth" tend to have much more comfortable and safer lives than those trans women who are constantly openly and visibly transsexual. Visibly transsexual women occupy firmly the subaltern "third sex" class, while transsexual women who "pass" have the privilege of occupying the (still significantly oppressed) second sex class.

"Trans women are women" is not a slogan: it is an accurate analysis of gender oppression. Those who refuse to believe this — to really believe it, not just pay lip service — refuse to accurately analyze the reality of misogyny and the gender hierarchy. Trans women are not "male-bodied people who identify as women". They are materially women — they have women's bodies, lead women's lives, and suffer women's oppression.

Transsexual women should not be understood as aberrations, as exceptions to the typical standards of womanhood. Transsexual women, hyper-exploited, subalternized, made uber-women, may perhaps be the standard against which all women should be understood.

How do you identify?

"im a cis man who’s transfeminized within a patriarchal system and subjected to transmisogyny. doesn’t mean im a woman. read theory, stemcel."

— tpwrtrmnky, Ranked Competitive Breast Growth[xiv]

Within most modern LGBT-friendly spaces, a particular gender paradigm predominates: anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman.

On an interpersonal level, this is probably the best possible approach to gender. It comes as near as we can to Jacob Hale's pronouncement that "gender should be consensual, or at least more consensual than it is now inffull gender consensuality is impossible…"[xv] It avoids the hostile gender policing that has hurt so many non-conforming women (whether butch, intersex, of color, transsexual) and has destroyed certain women's spaces (MichFest, among others).

The theoretical basis for this notion of gender-as-identity-alone is Judith Butler's oft-misunderstood theory of performativity. I analyze this theory in moderate detail in chapter 5 of Trans/Women, but Susan Stryker provides an adequate and brief explanation: "A woman, performatively speaking, is one who says she is — and who then does what woman means."[xvi] Those who have misunderstood Butler's theory as arguing that "gender is a performance" are encouraged to read either Gender Trouble or the numerous essays that have been written about it.

If a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, then women are not necessarily united by a common expropriation. Some people may identify as women who do not experience this oppression; others may experience this oppression but not identify as women. It is here that we experience a rupture between two gender paradigms, gender-as-class and gender-as-identity.

Gender-as-identity is the most useful and respectful in interpersonal interactions. No one should have to prove that they are or are not oppressed in a certain way — or that they do or do not have a certain history — in order to be accepted as a member of the sex in which they currently live. However, gender-as-identity is not especially helpful for feminist analysis; personal identity may not align with membership in a sex class.

There is no prescription for, definition of, or limit to gender identity. An ambitious and broad-thinking transgender movement has developed countless gender identities, including numerous variations on non-binary, agender, genderqueer, not to mention Two-Spirit (an indigenous American gender identity).

However, sex classes are defined by a patriarchal society. There are three, as I have previously argued — men, the first sex; women, the second sex; other, the third sex. This three-sex analysis is counterintuitive, and runs contrary to much conventional feminist wisdom, but I believe it is accurate. I did not invent this analytical framework. My analysis of it, including appropriate citations, can be found in Feminism Needs Trans Women.[xvii] It is the second and third classes that, within a male supremacist world, are feminized, made women. The third sex class are feminized in a particularly harsh fashion, made women but denied even the small privilege of paternalistic benevolence that is sometimes granted women in a patriarchal society.

Gender-as-identity and gender-as-class are not identical paradigms. The vast majority of people (perhaps all people) who identify as women occupy either the second or third sex classes. However, there are also people who occupy these classes, but do not identify as women. The two paradigms should be understood as coterminous and coexisting. The gender-class paradigm is more useful for analysis of gendered oppression, but personal identity should be respected — gender should, as much as possible, be consensual.

Women's future

If women are defined and grouped by the oppression that they experience, what will "woman" mean once women are liberated? Will the class of "woman" cease to exist? Some feminists have thought so. In The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone writes,

... just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality — Freud’s “polymorphous perversity” — would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labor would be ended by the elimination of labor altogether (cybernation). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.[xviii]

Although this position is typically known as gender abolition, it is more accurate to refer to it as sex abolition. "Gender abolition" has frequently been co-opted by anti-trans feminists like Sheila Jeffreys, who wish to abolish gender but keep sex. Because sex is ultimately an artificial divide just as is gender, TERFs' faux gender abolition cannot liberate women and is not radical, does not "grasp at the root".

Not all feminists believe in sex abolition. Those who are liberal do not advocate for such broad structural changes. Others believe that sex abolition is hopelessly utopian and cannot be meaningfully achieved (certainly, Firestone's vision of artificial reproduction seems unlikely or impossible). Others still believe that sex abolition will be particularly harmful to trans people. This is a well-warranted concern, given that gender abolition has been pushed by radical feminists like Jeffreys or Janice Raymond in an attempt to totally eradicate transsexual people.

Many feminists simply think that gender abolition is unnecessary. Mari Mikkola (as quoted by Andrew Cull), writes of students who say "time and again that the abolitionist strategy aims to eradicate something that seemingly need not be eradicated. As they see it, ‘the feminist revolution’ need not do away with gender, and being a woman or a man is not primarily the problem — the real problem is how people are viewed and treated."[xix]

Here, it again becomes useful to draw a distinction between the multiple paradigms of gender. Surely, gender-as-class must be abolished. A class distinction is created by a power differential; when that imbalance in power is eliminated, the class will no longer be grouped as a class. (Socialist analysis, as referenced by Firestone, is particularly relevant here.)

However, a world without gender-as-class need not necessarily be a world without gender-as-identity. Given the importance to so many people of personal gender identity — and the lengths to which some people go to accomplish such an identity — the abolition of gender-as-identity seems unnecessary at best, cruel at worst.

Certainly, gender prescriptions must be abolished. People with specific gender identities — or with specific sexed bodies — must not be expected to dress, live, or present in specific ways. People with specific sexed bodies must not be expected to have specific gender identities. Intersex people must not be forcibly "corrected" into a particular sex category. All people must have access to gender-affirming care, including but not limited to hormone replacement therapy, genital reconstruction surgery, and other gender-affirming surgeries.

Many people misunderstand the platform of sex-class abolition. Many people mistakenly assume that to abolish sex is to simply stop using male/female language. Such a surface-level change would totally fail to abolish sex. Sex exists as a class system; thus, the conditions that create the class must be dismantled. The physiological differences — non-binary and malleable — between male and female bodies will continue to exist. But perhaps, in a world without sex class, there will be no need to classify bodies at all.

Without the classification of bodies, will there still be women? After so much analysis, we only find ourselves back where Simone de Beauvoir arrived so many years ago, when she wrote: "It is hard to know any longer if women still exist, if they will always exist, if there should be women at all…"[xx]

Want more reading? Buy a copy of Feminism Needs Trans Women.

‍ ‍

‍ ‍i Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (France, 1949; repr., Vintage Books, 2011), 283.

‍ ‍ii Julia Serano, “What Is a Woman? (A Response),” Switch Hitter, November 27, 2023, https://juliaserano.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman-a-response; Susan Stryker, “Transgender Feminism: Queering the Woman Question,” in When Monsters Speak (2007; Duke University Press, 2024); Laverne Cox, Laverne Cox: “Ain’t I a Woman,” 2015, Digital, online, https://youtu.be/PQkXnDkLW5Q?si=VqqWOC-woHnKoN-S; Talia Bhatt, “Conclusion: The Question Has an Answer,” in Trans/Rad/Fem (2025).

‍ ‍iii Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex, 1975, 159, https://glc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/rubin_the_traffic_in_women.pdf.

‍ ‍iv Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (Morrow, 1970; Bantam revised edition, Bantam Books, 1972), 12.

‍ ‍v Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” 7 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3, 1982, 848–849, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv39x51k.23.

‍ ‍vi Emma Heaney, ed., Feminism against Cisness, Asterisk : Gender, Trans-, and All That Comes After (Duke University Press, 2024), 7.

‍ ‍vii Frank B. Wilderson, Afropessimism, First edition (Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton and Company, 2020), 169.

‍ ‍viii Silvia Federici, Wages against Housework (Falling Wall Pr, 1975), 5.

‍ ‍ix Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class, 1st Vintage Books ed (Vintage Books, 1983), 232.

‍ x This model is articulated in a lengthy and yet-unpublished essay, cut from Trans/Women for reasons of length.

‍ ‍xiThe Wage Gap Among LGBTQ+ Workers in the United States (HRC Foundation, n.d.), accessed March 19, 2026, https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-wage-gap-among-lgbtq-workers-in-the-united-states.

‍ ‍xii Catharine A. MacKinnon, “A Feminist Defense of Transgender Sex Equality Rights,” pt. 88, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 24, no. 2 (2023): 190–192.

‍ ‍xiii Sara Moiseff, Feminism Needs Trans Women (Self-published, 2026), 13–14, https://www.saramoiseff.com/fntw.

xiv Beth Leigh-Ann and Talia Bhatt, “03 – Optimal Prog Gamer Strats,” in Ranked Competitive Breast Growth (n.d.), https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1584138-ranked-competitive-breast-growth/chapter/1585854/. Spelling original.

‍ ‍xv Jacob Hale, “Are Lesbians Women?,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006), 282.

‍ ‍xvi Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006), 10.

‍ ‍xvii Moiseff, Feminism Needs Trans Women, 7–13.

‍ ‍xviii Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 11.

‍ ‍xix Quoted in Matthew J. Cull, “Against Abolition,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 5, no. 3 (2019): 4.

‍ ‍xx Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 3.