This is my reaction to Grace Lavery's review of books by Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce and Julie Bindel found here
Grace Lavery begins with a quote from Frances Power Cobbe "we must not fall into the absurdity of supposing that all women can be adapted to one single type, or that we can talk about ‘Woman,’ (always to be written with a capital W) as if the same characteristics were to be found in every individual species,”. Lavery claims this to be arguing "that the category “women” was a legal fiction that empowered men to deprive a class of their fellow human beings of legal and civil rights". If you read the essay you will find that Cobbe is simply saying there are many ways to be female. While Cobbe's feminist views are a thread that runs through the entire text, promoting the legal and civil rights of women is not the purpose of the essay. The "Final Cause of Woman" of the tittle is service to God and in her essay her purpose in considering the many ways to be a woman is reject all beyond that one. It's possible to infer that she envisaged the ways to serve God open to women should be as diverse as those available to men but she was not writing feminist theory.
That Lavery's interpretation of Cobbe's essay has so little relation to that essay is a warning to treat the rest of what she writes with caution.
Lavery follows up with a quote from Simone de Beauvoir. That is a more promising source for Lavery as Simone de Beauvoir was an existentialist and as such influenced by the ideas of Martin Heidegger who also influenced postmodernism and Queer Theory.
"The existence of heterogenetic gametes alone does not necessarily mean there are two distinct sexes; the differentiation of reproductive cells often does not bring about a division of the species into two types: both can belong to the same individual. This is true of hermaphroditic species, so common in plants, and also in many invertebrates, among which are the annulates and mollusks. Reproduction takes place either by self-fertilization or by cross-fertilization. Some biologists use this fact to claim the justification of the established order. They consider gonochorism—that is, the system in which the different gonads belong to distinct individuals—as an improvement on hermaphroditism, realized by evolution; others, by contrast, consider gonochorism primitive: for those biologists, hermaphroditism would thus be its degeneration. In any case, these notions of superiority of one system over another involve highly contestable theories concerning evolution. All that can be affirmed with certainty is that these two means of reproduction coexist in nature, that they both perpetuate species, and that the heterogeneity of both gametes and gonad-producing organisms seems to be accidental. The differentiation of individuals into males and females thus occurs as an irreducible and contingent fact."
Grace Lavery is not entirely wrong in interpreting this as an attempt to downplay biological sex. And it is true that it doesn't follow that a species where the gametes differ in size having small and large gametes will always have two sexes ( gonochorism) - that is individuals who bodies develop to support small gametes and others large. However that is true of all mammals so, sorry Lavery, we can use the fact of sexual dimorphism as a basis for the sexual classification of individuals or groups at least as far as mammals are concerned. That doesn't mean we shouldn't resist some of the conclusions that may be drawn from that reality. de Beauvoir doesn't say who were the biologists claiming from that justification of the established order nor what aspect of that established order might have been their focus. When de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, women had only had the vote for four years and if those biologists were advocating the right to vote should be allotted on the basis of biological sex then the relevance of sex needed to be opposed. If the issue is, as now, whether there should be female only categories of sport or female only prisons the relevance of sex is much much greater.
It is striking how completely Lavery fails to give the reader of her review (at least that is what it self identifies to be) any real impression of the contents of those books. She doesn't provide counter arguments to the arguments put forward in the three books, I suspect because to do so she would have to tell her readers what those arguments were. Lavery states "Strange, given the ubiquity and ferocity of “gender identity theory,” that Stock cannot find a single philosophical source for this “philosophical theory.”" What Lavery seems to be demanding of Stock is to produce a philosophical tome filled with as much jargon as Judith Butler as a contribution to a philosophical debate on reality that has been going on for some three centuries. Instead Stock is dealing with the arguments that are being advanced to justify changing the law so that legal sex is defined solely on the basis of someone's self identification. That involves her taking the whole chapter "What is sex" to refute the arguments that claim that the idea of what a woman/man is not related to biology. That does involve her mentioning such philosophers as Monique Wittig but she covers them in no more detail than needed for current debates.
Lavery is of course entitled to claim that Stock has reduced the arguments to strawman versions and provide instead the steelman versions. But that would entail Lavery revealing her own point of view which she avoids doing. She accuses Stock of misunderstandingg Butler (or misrepresenting?) quoting not from Stocks text but the subtittle: "Judith Butler, gender-critical enemy number one, shows up only to “tel[l] us gender is a performance”—a laughable misreading of Butler’s sense of the “performative” that snags many a first-year undergraduate, but should surely be within the grasp of the first philosopher since J. L. Austin to be entered into the Order of the British Empire." Lavery doesn't tell us what she thinks the correct interpretation is but her suggestion that first-year undergraduates are barely up to the task of understanding these ideas demonstrates the elitism of this movement. If you are confused as to why males should be allowed to compete in women's sport or why teenagers should be given opposite sex hormones without regard for their long term quality of life it is because you are not a professor in Gender Studies, Philosophy or English Literature.
Laws and public policy are made on the basis of ideas that are crafted to be beyond democratic debate and Lavery's review illustrates this.
