It might be argued, indeed, that within contemporary identity politics, “inclusivity” and “intersectionality” are names given to the good, more moral ideals than analytical tools they had once been. More inclusivity and more intersectionality hence become the quintessential demands of today’s identity politics, which in its course has largely succeeded in elevating the idea that “every marginalized identity’s claim to recognition must be recognized and respected” into an inviolable principle within American progressive politics.

Yet, Haider, a socialist activist whose experience with antiracist struggles runs deep, places under question the cogency, justifiability and effectiveness of politics around racial identity that is motivated by such a normative outlook, favoring instead the idea put forth by the British cultural theorist Paul Gilroy: “Action against racial hierarchies can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of ‘race.’”

If references to race in Gilroy’s proposition were replaced with “gender”, the result would be something close to the stance on gender identity underlying the recent book by the British philosopher Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.

Material Girls is an intervention in a debate that has gained a great deal of public attention in the United Kingdom since 2016, when reforms were proposed to the Gender Recognition Act to allow people to “self-identify” as a gender of their choice by signing a statutory declaration without needing to provide a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

While the British government announced in 2020 that requirements for the acquisition of a Gender Recognition Certificate would not be changed, the debate over whether the category of “woman” should be made more inclusive so as to encompass trans women remains understandably intense.

The debate has created a deep chasm—which was in full visibility when the lesbian group Get the L Out marched with banners reading “lesbian=female homosexual” and “trans activism erases lesbians” at the 2018 London Pride parade—between the trans-inclusive mainstream feminist and LGBT organizations on one side and a vocal minority of “gender-critical” feminists and radical feminists described as “trans-exclusionary” on the other.

An advocate of the gender-critical position in the debate, Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, advances arguments challenging the theory of gender identity that is used to support the view that “woman” ought to be made trans-inclusive—a view that is supported by mainstream feminists and trans activists while also exerting increasing influence on public policy, sometimes to the detriment, Stock argues, of the very demographic that feminism must stand for: women qua biological females.

According to the modern gender identity theory ensconced in the Yogyakarta Principles and almost universally embraced within trans activism, the achievement of a certain gender identity has little to do with either medically transitioning or “passing” as a gender that does not align with biological sex.

In fact, it allows for an infinite proliferation of genders, as noted, for instance, in the University of Essex policy that recognizes “pan-gender”, defined as people who identify with “a multitude, and perhaps infinite (going beyond the current knowledge of genders) number of genders either simultaneously, to varying degrees, or over the course of time.” As such, there can be in principle no specific set of auditory, visual or behavioral cues by which the third person would be able to identify the gender of another person with reasonable confidence in the absence of an explicit statement from the latter.

Such an understanding of gender might be unintuitive for some, but it is one that is reflected in the policies of many British institutions. It is the policy of HM Prison Service, for example, to “house some male prisoners professing female gender identities in the female prison estate, whether or not they have received medical intervention or Gender Recognition Certificates.”

Neither popularity among activists nor implementation within public policy counts as evidence of theoretical cogency, however, and Stock shows that there are substantive questions to be asked about the fundamental assumptions and theses of gender identity theory, such as what it means to possess an “inner” identity, what it is to “identify as” or “be recognized as” a certain gender, what the relation between sex and gender is, and whether it could rightly be said of either that it is a “spectrum” and not a binary.

Stock, who had experienced a great deal of ostracization—including from her colleagues and students—for voicing gender-critical views, remarks that the “question of whether trans women count as women, literally speaking, has become enormously toxic.”

Explaining why it has become so to readers unfamiliar with the details and stakes of the debate is a task Stock accomplishes admirably, through reconstructions of various positions in the debate, clear expositions of concepts and theories that might at first appear arcane to those without relevant background knowledge, and discussions of the practical implications of the debate in the UK. Stock offers a generally balanced introduction to contemporary issues around gender identity, although one may find her gender-critical position difficult to accept in whole.

While Material Girls is primarily an intervention made in the British context, it is also the case that the hegemonic status of the English language in gender studies has often implied a swift influx of theories and debates from Anglophone activism around gender into non-Anglophone worlds.

Indeed, the contours of a schism around the very same questions discussed by Stock are discernible among scholars and activists in East and Southeast Asia, serving as a sobering reminder that solidarity, even between underrepresented or oppressed identities, is never simply a given but a painstaking and often fragile achievement.

 ***

The writer is a lecturer in Cultural Studies, Sanata Dharma University.

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