(London: Oneworld, 2021) pp 311 RP: £16.99; and Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (London: Fleet, 2021) pp 312 RP: £16.99.
CLT write..
Material Girls and Trans set themselves against trans rights activism and, in the process, advance broader toxic politics that embolden the Christian right, free-speech absolutism, and government attacks on higher education. In short, they amplify our culture wars. Indeed, it is precisely because right-wing political interests coincide with the interests of trans-exclusionary activists (recently laundered as ‘gender critical’) that ‘gender critical’ ideas and speech have received such uplift from The Times, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Spectator,[1] as well as from other right-wing media platforms. In this respect, the ‘gender critical’ moment is one of happenstance, if not serendipity. I make these observations in order to contextualise reception of the two books, to explain the buzz, the superlatives that have accompanied their arrival.
Stock’s book, we are informed, evinces commitment to ‘good faith debate,’[2] exhibits a ‘generous spirit’[3] and demonstrates fidelity to ‘the tradition of the Enlightenment’[4] no less, while Joyce’s book has had ‘rigorous,’[5] ‘compelling,’[6] ‘thoroughly researched,’[7] and ‘rooted in good science’[8] tossed its way. Only Gaby Hinsliff, writing for the Guardian, has brought even a degree of scrutiny to the exercise, and then only in relation to Joyce’s book.[9] One thing that seems to unite these reviewers, apart from the fact most are sympathetic to ‘gender critical’ thinking, if not card-members of the party, is the dubious notion two brave women have spoken truth to power. That is, while their styles differ – Stock, forensic, Jesuit-like; Joyce, zealous, born again – they are as one in their mission to slay ‘sacred cows.’
And the mother of divine bovines, one central to the ‘gender critical’ movement’s sense of cohesion, proves to be the ‘fiction’ of gender identity which on their accounts has led to ‘sex denialism’ and poses a serious threat to the interests of cis women and girls. It is not possible, short of writing a book length response, to address the multiplicity of misleading or otherwise problematic claims each book contains – the fictions in which each author has immersed herself. Nevertheless, I will tease out what I consider to be some of the more troubling claims. As the two books overlap considerably, I will, in order to avoid repetition, examine a different set of issues in relation to each. I will begin with Joyce’s Trans which is clearly the weaker book.
