The history of liberalism is, from one perspective, the history of struggles to extend the scope of human and citizenship rights. From the generic demands of the “rights of man and citizen” declared on behalf of the whole world by the French Third Estate, different groups that make up the whole world and have consistently mobilized in their own name to demand that rights be concretized to meet their unmet needs. Women, workers, and enslaved people in the French colonies were the first to argue that the Declaration was too abstract. Since it failed to include their perspectives, its abstract rights could not satisfy their needs. In the twentieth century, African Americans were forced to struggle again for their civil rights; radical feminists deepened the fight against new forms of patriarchy, and gays and lesbians began a struggle for their own liberation. Disabled people have organized in pursuit of their rights; environmentalists have argued in favour of animal rights and the extension of rights-protections to natural spaces. Indigenous people have articulated specific sets of rights and struggled to have them recognized by settler-colonialist societies. All these movements continue in one form or another and still novel avenues open. In the last twenty years trans persons have become more organized and vocal in defence of their rights.

Like the struggles that preceded them, trans activists have highlighted the ways in which existing interpretations of equal rights have failed to address their particular concerns. Like other groups that have stood up for their interests, trans activists too have faced strong opposition, and not always from right wing defenders of a conservative sexual morality. Indeed, some of the most heated arguments have erupted between some groups of feminists and lesbians and trans activists.

Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters to Feminism, attempts to lower the political and rhetorical temperature between the two camps through calm and careful argument. The positions that she adopts on the underlying scientific and philosophical issues will not produce universal assent, but they ought to encourage reasoned argument oriented by the goal of building solidarity between feminism and trans activists. Even though she has been a target of vituperative condemnation by some trans activists, Stock makes it clear throughout her book that she fully supports their general demands demands for legal protection against discrimination. “Trans people are trans people. We should get over it. They deserve to be safe, to be visible throughout society without shame or stigma, and to have exactly the same life opportunities non-trans people do.’ (p. 241) She does not believe that the law can be a vehicle that compels others to believe what she regards as scientific untruths about the non-reality of biological sex, but on the more important issue of building a world in which trans people can live secure, full, and free lives her agreement is unequivocal.

Where Stock differs most sharply from some trans activists is on the complex question of the relationship between biological sex and gender identity. Stock maintains that biological sex is real, defined by the male-female dichotomy, and unchangeable. She recognizes the difficulty of providing a universal definition of biological sex that covers the array of morphologies and chromosomal arrangements that are found in human beings. These complexities not withstanding, she does arrive at a complex definition of sex that adequately covers the actual range of male and female bodies that we find in nature. While she insists that evolutionary dynamics and human social life both prove the reality and importance of biological sex, she does not deny that trans people’s gender identities do not align with their biological sex. She does deny that feelings about gender identity should always override the material reality of biological sex. That is the claim that so angers many trans activists, especially in the UK.

The debate between so-called TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and trans activists in the UK has tended to degenerate into name calling, de-platforming, and threats of violence. Stock herself has been on the receiving end of accusations of transphobia and has been subjected to de-platforming. However, any charitable reading of her book reveals her to be a sober minded, witty, calm, careful thinker. She is sharply critical about some claims that some trans activists make, but when people make claims which other people can reasonably question, the appropriate response is counter-argument, not shouting at them to shut up. Matters that involve the public invite public debate, and trans issues, since they involve changes to laws and traditions, involve the public, making them matters of general concern around which open, non-dogmatic, debate is important.

Stock never claims to have every answer and is honest where she thinks her arguments need further work. All she demands is that argument be met with argument, not vituperative ad hominem.(pp.40-43) She is a philosopher by profession, but also in the best normative sense of the word: she has the courage to expose some absurd implications of incautious claims, but is also open to being proven wrong. Her book is analytic philosophy at its best, marshalling a close attention to the implications of her opponents’ principles for the sake of creating shared understandings and better policy.

The book flows smoothly over some very difficult philosophical, political, and scientific issues. I want to concentrate on the three that I found most important. 1) the complex relationships between the biological and socio-cultural dimensions of human being; 2) the reality of sex and the demands of trans activists; and 3) the problem of solidarity and separatism in the construction of political movements.

The relationship between the biological and socio-cultural dimensions of human being is a long standing and very difficult philosophical and scientific problem. Trans persons’ struggles have– like feminists before them– revealed the sharp political stakes behind what, on first blush, seems a rather simple matter. Human beings are, after all, animals. We are undoubtedly shaped by bio-physical forces. Our lives and health depend upon a few key physical parameters: hydration and nutrition levels, the ability of our immune system to recognize pathogenic threats, the structural integrity of our skin and skeletal structure. At the biological level, human beings are a complex organic system defined by intricately evolved relationships between organs. Organs are functional arrangements of tissues which must operate within fairly narrowly defined parameters. We cannot live if our hearts are removed, or our lungs, or both kidneys. If we flood our bodies with toxins we will die; if pathogens like Covid for which we lack antibodies invade, we can become seriously ill or die.

No matter how committed one might be rhetorically to the position that scientific facts are “socially constructed,” no one is going to eat plutonium for lunch, because they know that whatever word we use to refer to atomic element 94, the element itself is highly radioactive and will kill anyone near it. Even if a language lacks a word for the element, the element itself exists, and will kill everyone exposed to it, whether they know of it or believe in it. Stock rejects the arguments of social constructvists like Judith Butler along analogous lines: “It follows from the logic of Butler’s worldview not only that there are not two pre-given, stable biological sexes, but also that there are no pre-given facts about natural selection. There is no sexual reproduction. There are no pre-given chemical elements or biological species.”(63) In its hard form, social constructivism carries on a lamentable confusion on the left between the mind-and-language-independent elements and dynamics of the physical universe and the changing, fallible, susceptible to ideological and life-destructive use of human science. The hypothetical deductive method has unarguably produced (fallible and corrigible) insights in to physical nature. The computer on which I am typing does not work by magic. A fricassee of plutonium will kill you.

There can be no room for reasonable debate (a debate between two positions each of which is plausibly true) on matters of the basic biological foundations of human life. However, most social constructivists are not concerned with scientific facts about biological life. They are rightly concerned with the way in which claims about purported biological facts have been used to justify oppressive systems. For example, the exclusion of women from public life from ancient Athens to the French Revolution was justified by appeal to spurious claims about women’s nature. But the problem here is not “biological determinism,” but a bad, sexist argument rooted in scientific ignorance on one hand (women are not less intelligent than men) and ideological use of that misinformation facts on the other. Stock urges critics not to throw the baby of objective investigation of natural processes out with the bath water of ideological misuse of scientific findings. (pp.70-71)

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Once we shift focus, from physical dynamics to human interpretations, we arrive at the live centre of the debate that most concerns Stock. If it is obvious that human beings have a biological nature, and no one can coherently deny this nature when it comes to objective facts like “humans will die if they eat plutonium,” why have the facts about our sexual nature become so politicized? After all, a penis or vagina is an organ just like a heart or kidney, and no one says that their functions are socially constructed. The answer is that facts about our circulatory system do not determine our identity but function as frames within which we live our lives. But having a penis or vagina, or XX or XY chromosomes does not always determine how we feel about ourselves, how we express ourselves in private, or present ourselves in public (or how we would do so if it were safe), or how we feel about other people of the same or opposite sex. One fundamental dimension of feminist and later gay and lesbian struggle was to free people’s self-understanding of their life-horizons and sexuality from their biological sex characteristics. Trans activism radicalizes this struggle further.

So why would a feminist and lesbian activist like Stock oppose their argument that what matters to people’s well-being is not sex characteristics but gender identity? If she insists that biological sexes are real, but admits that trans people do not feel aligned with their biological sex, must she argue that being trans is “unnatural,” in the pernicious way that sexists thought that women politicians were “unnatural” or homophobes that that gay and lesbian desires were “unnatural?” One can see why critics would draw this conclusion, but it is not in fact the argument that Stock makes.

Stock provides an excellent overview of the history of the development of different meanings of gender, from its early use to indicate socially constructed dispositions that arose form social pressures imposed on members of the biological sexes to its current use, “gender identity” which links gender with inner feelings unconnected to one’s biological sex. (pp.109-141). She rejects that interpretation of gender identity because she thinks it implies that how one feels can literally change what one (biologically) is (p.148). Some trans activists may disagree, in which case they need to respond to the substance of her argument. The substance of her argument is not that trans people do not exist; she is not– as she is sometimes accused of doing, trying to “erase” trans people. Instead, she is arguing that trans people should be understood to be trans people: trans men, trans women, or non-binary, but not identical to men or women just because they claim to feel “like” a woman or a man. Stock therefore does not believe that a (biologically born) male who identifies as a woman (a trans woman) is a woman. She rejects the slogan “trans women are women,” but she does not reject the (to my mind, more politically important claim) that trans women, trans men, and non-binary people have every right to social and legal protection where and as appropriate.

That last point leads to the second major point of contention between Stock and some trans activists and the second part of the book upon which I want to focus– whether or not trans women should have full, free, and unfettered access to those spaces that have normally been sex-segregated: change rooms, high-level sporting competitions, and, especially, women’s shelters and rape crisis centres. Since Stock argues that one cannot literally change one’s sex, she believes that sex still matters in a number of domains. It matters in medicine, both in terms of treatment and the allocation of research dollars to diseases that typically affect females, and statistics (if biologically male trans women are counted as females, statistical incidence of female-typical diseases will be distorted). It matters for similar reasons in crime statistics: if rapes committed by biological males identifying as women are counted as female crimes, important statistical distortions could be introduced. It matters in sport, where recently transitioned trans women could have an unfair advantage over biological women. It matters for the personal and sexual integrity and autonomy of lesbians, who are sometimes told that they need to “get over’ their lack of attraction to trans women (i.e., biological males). And it matters to women who, for a number of sounds reasons, want some spaces preserved as female only (pp.76-108).

On all of these issues Stock presents cogent arguments. They all follow from her principle that since biological sex is a reality, wherever recognition of biological sex makes a political, economic, or emotional difference to women’s and girl’s lives, the gains they have made by forcing society to recognize and valorize their concerns must be preserved and female exclusivity maintained. Where such differences do not matter, then trans women should be welcomed fully and freely. A spirit of mutual recognition of distinct interests should prevail, and where possible, practical compromises worked out (Men’s, Women’s, and Unisex bathrooms, for example).

The third aspect of her book that I want to discuss is the issue of the continued salience of feminism as a women’s movement. Why, Stock asks, should the emergence of new and legitimate trans demands be accepted at the expense of the historic gains of women to build some spaces free of males?(pp. 252-261) Stock’s arguments here are once again reasonable and recognize the legitimacy of trans struggles. She also insists that political struggles, in order to be coherent, have to have a specific focus determined by the well-defined interests of the people in whose name the movement was built. The women’s movement was built to address patriarchal domination (rooted historically in the sexual division of labour) of girls and adult women. Introducing trans demands into feminism as a women’s movement simply muddies the waters, according to Stock, sidetracks the struggle into abstract debates about whether trans women are women, and thus weakens the political power of feminism and trans activism.

My own work has long argued in favour of the need for unified mass movements that connect human beings across differences. The fundamental problem, in my view, is the way in which the resources that all need are controlled by a minority and exploited for their own enrichment. However, I have also acknowledged the need for distinct groups to voice their distinct demands in separate political organizations. Stock adopts a separatist position when it comes to trans demands. She does not believe that either the women’s or the gay and lesbian movement can do an adequate job defending trans people’s interests, because the interests of women, gays, and lesbians are different from the interests of trans people. The attempt to incorporate trans demands into the heart of feminism and gay and lesbian movements has dulled their ability to fight specifically for women and gays and lesbians. The language of women’s and gay and lesbian liberation has been replaced by a vacuous ideal of inclusivity.(p.244) Again, her argument is not with the legitimacy of trans demands but with the fit between their content and the interests of women, gays and lesbians. If every movement tries to be everything, it must empty itself of coherent demands. The practical result will be infighting on the one hand (as the reality of different interests makes itself felt) and failure to solve the substantive problems on the other.

I agree that different problems sometimes require different movements, but on almost all the problems so cogently discussed in the book I also think that the general way forward requires everyone receiving a healthy dose of an older feminist ideal: androgyny. Stock herself makes this recommendation (p.249) If neither sex nor gender identity mattered as much as they still do, many, many problems of women, gays, lesbians, trans and non-binary people, and heterosexual males too would be on the way to being solved. That is not the world we inhabit, but it is the world I think we should build towards.