“No debate” no longer an option

By Ellen Pasternack, The Critic:

Persuasion works: three new books by gender critical feminists have captured public attention in spite of publishers.

Gender identity ideology began as a way to conceptualise transgender people. According to this belief system, they have a gender identity that doesn’t match the sex they were “assigned at birth”. This ideology currently has the endorsement of governments, educational institutions and NGOs worldwide — a state of affairs that has come about with remarkably little comment. Contradicting this dogma has become suddenly taboo, even via statements nobody would have considered controversial ten years ago, such as arguing that the national census should continue to collect data on people’s biological sex, or that sex itself is a fixed and binary characteristic.

In spite of the pressure, this summer has seen the publication of three new non-fiction books by “gender critical” feminist writers who oppose gender ideology.

In May, philosopher Kathleen Stock turned a critical eye to the fundamentals of what she terms “gender identity theory” in her book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. Stock’s book is a study in meticulous, evenhanded analysis — but even so, this amounts to a pretty comprehensive vivisection of an ideology riddled with serious flaws: to circularly define a woman as “anyone who identifies as a woman”, for instance, makes as much sense as explaining that a teapot is “any object that is a teapot”. Reading her book, one almost feels sorry for the ideologues having to defend flimsy ideas from such straightforward criticisms.

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