Towards the end of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, the newly “tamed” Katherine likens the reformation of her character—its return to a suitably feminine softness—to an alignment of female body and inner self:
Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
A soft, weak, smooth body, paired with a soft, weak, smooth nature: this is an example of what, in second-wave feminist terms, might be called biological essentialism, whereby female biology is used to define female emotions and the female social role. It’s a theme found elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work, perhaps most notably in Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here,” associating the de-feminisation of the body with the ability to reject feminine “softness” (“Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall”). If women are kinder, gentler, and more nurturing than men, it is because of their bodies. If they are not, then they are aberrant: not real women, un-tamed, and un-sexed.
Many feminists have had a problem with this, and it hardly needs saying why. The assumed alignment of female biology with feminine softness, kindness, and nurturance has been used to justify women’s subordinate position in relation to men, and to excuse men’s failure to take on nurturing roles themselves. It has been used to devalue reproductive and caring work, positioning these tasks as a natural extension of female selfhood, requiring no conscious effort and hence undeserving of recognition and reward.
“Woman,” writes Katrine Marçal in her 2015 book, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, “has been assigned the task of caring for others, not of maximising her own gain.” Her “self-sacrificing nature was said to tie her to the private sphere, and thus she was not economically relevant,” Marçal continues. “What she did was just a logical extension of her fair, loving nature.” Like many feminists before her, Marçal notes that in the eyes of many “the fact that there are biological differences between men and women is seen to justify a certain kind of politics, and it is thought that the only way to reject this politics is to deny that there are biological differences.”
Such a denial is not sustainable. Yet many still attempt it, either on an individual level, à la Lady Macbeth, or as part of a wider political project. The most obvious example we see today comes in the form of Butlerian pseudo-feminism’s conflation of sex and gender, treating both as socially constructed and effectively indistinguishable. “Of course, many people refer to ‘sex’ as if it is an obvious fact, based on observation, and worry that academics have needlessly obfuscated plain matters,” complains Butler in her 2024 book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?. “Consider, however,” Butler continues, “that sex assignment is not simply an announcement of the sex that an infant is perceived to be; it also communicates a set of adult desires and expectations.” Quite how this contradicts the original feminist distinction between sex (biological fact) and gender (the imposed expectations and desires) is not entirely clear, even if Butler seems to think it does.
Rejection of the female social role—and with it, the assumed “feminine” emotional life—need not entail rejection of the sexed body. Indeed, it cannot, given that the body persists. Lady Macbeth is still a woman; Katherine is no more or less of one, shrewish or not.
Yet there is something about the female body, as distinct from the male one, that feeds these particular desires and expectations. If femaleness has been tied to a value system that is erroneously coded as “feminine,” this system is one which, just like the body itself, should not necessarily be rejected wholesale. One of the problems feminists face today, when challenging the “progressive” attack on recognising femaleness at all, is that we need to understand why it has been so easy to make so many people—including many intelligent, well-meaning, forward-thinking people—make such an obvious logical error when understanding biological essentialism.
I think it is because they are frightened of the softness, the gentleness, the dependency. They are frightened of what female bodies tell us about all human bodies, and of what this knowledge might ask of them.
Dependency Denialism
In one sense, “progressive” sex denialism—that is, denial that sex is binary and immutable, and that female bodies perform distinct functions that male bodies cannot—can be read as an evolution of “traditional” patriarchy’s positioning of male people as the default humans. Instead of defining females as inferior “misbegotten males,” their bodies unworthy of any recognition in their own right, this new approach collapses femaleness into maleness entirely, suggesting difference exists only in terms of random, self-contained variations: the shape of genitals, whether or not you are a penis owner, whether or not you menstruate. None of it is connected, and there is no continuity. Biological traits are casually listed alongside gender stereotypes as though all things are equally contingent.
“The originary division of sex,” writes Amia Srinivasan in 2022’s The Right to Sex, “determines what social purpose a body will be assigned”:
Some of these bodies are for creating new bodies, for washing and clothing and feeding other bodies (out of love, never duty), for making other bodies feel good and whole and in control, for making other bodies feel free. Sex is, then, a cultural thing posing as a natural one.
Only it isn’t. The fact that only some bodies are capable of getting pregnant—regardless of whether they do so or not—is not the same as the claim that only some bodies ought to be assigned all the dirty dishes. To pretend otherwise will hardly redistribute the already undervalued work of “creating new bodies” so that male people share in it too.
Why does such flawed thinking get to pass as “progressive”? And why are so many of those engaging in it female themselves? Partly, there is that fear—particularly on the part of women who wish to be valued for their minds—that if you accord any significance to your femaleness, you will indeed be assigned the “washing and clothing and feeding”: all the drudgework that puts a real dampener on any liberatory aspirations. Believing female bodies are definable and matter in their own right is coded as limiting and regressive. It’s cast as reducing women to brood mares, walking wombs, nothing more than their reproductive function.
One feminist response to this has been to point out that there is a difference between “defining as” and “reducing to.” If you view all people with female biology as passive reproductive vessels, this will not change if you start calling them “gestators” as opposed to “women.” Yet as many of us have learned, repeatedly, pointing this out is not enough.
It is not enough to differentiate between “biology is destiny” and “biology is.” Not all women gestate and give birth to new humans, but most do. All humans who ever existed emerged from a body that is female. Feminists have tended, not incorrectly, to see this as the reason why women have been expected to undertake a disproportionate amount of caring work, and assigned ‘feminine’ characteristics which men are not expected to embody. It is not enough, though, to say that belonging to the sex class that gives birth does not make every female person a natural born nurturer. While this might be true (there are always going to be a few Lady Macbeths), it does not address what pregnancy tells us about the necessity—the total and absolute unavoidability—of nurturance. This is a problem when the “progressive” left is as much in thrall to dependency denialism as the libertarian right.
The specific capacities of the female body—the things it can do that are essential to life, such as gestating, birthing, and nursing—are politically disconcerting not just to the conservative who prizes self-sufficiency above all else, but also to the “progressive” who understands identity in terms of self-definition, as opposed to ever-shifting relationships of dependency. “We have in every pregnant woman the living proof that individuals do not enter the world as autonomous, atomistic, isolated beings, but begin socially, begin connected,” wrote Barbara Katz Rothman in 1989’s Recreating Motherhood. As Marçal points out, “we are born from each other,” and “we live from each other, in each other and through each other. We don’t start our lives in a state of independence and then face the challenge of creating some sort of relationship or bond with others.”
This reality—the reality of human dependency, which applies to each and every one of us—is at odds with an individualism that the conservative right might be happy to acknowledge, but which the left is too embarrassed to own. The left prefers to call those who see and value dependency—who want it to be central to a genuine politics of care—essentialist.
Why liberate flesh-and-blood humans when you can retreat into liberating words?
Recovering the Relational Self
I believe sex matters, and for that I have often been called mean, unkind, exclusionary. Most women in my position have. Sex denialism positions itself as inclusive, generous, and kind—a new version of kindness, though, not like the old, tired, body-bound version.
This is an easy, low-cost kindness. It doesn’t get its hands dirty. It doesn’t ask anyone else to clean up the mess, though it assumes that someone will (presumably on the basis that there will always be someone who identifies with doing so). It tells you that a world in which your understanding of yourself can only be formed in relation to other people is a cruel one, simply because it stops you from being whoever you want to be, whatever you say you are—as if that is an option for anyone who lives among other humans, and who cares for them as well as themselves.
In her 2021 book Care and Capitalism, the sociologist Kathleen Lynch argues that in order to create a world in which care is truly valued, it is necessary
to put the relational self at the centre of meaning-making, to move beyond the idea of the separated, bounded and self-contained self. The goal is to develop a political and cultural appreciation of how the self is co-created, through struggles and negotiations in relationships, for better or worse, both collectively and individually.
The “progressive” politics of sex denialism and self-identification is directly opposed to such a conception of selfhood. It tries to get around any accusations of selfishness and exploitation by pointing the finger at the very idea of limitations imposed by other bodies and other needs. It makes of genuine kindness a taboo, capitalising on the fact that many of us fear being placed in a subordinate role by our own “soft” bodies.
The point, for sex-realist feminists, is not that “our soft condition and our hearts / should well agree with our external parts.” It is that softness and kindness have been offloaded onto one sex, with the body used as a justification. Yet bodies are not irrelevant.
Some people are so frightened of this aspect of human nature—so scared that we are all, regardless of sex, vulnerable, dependent, duty-bound to care and to receive care—that they would rather deny the sexed body entirely. It might look like an escape, but it isn’t. Our “natures” may not be defined by our bodies, but all of our obligations to one another are shaped by our embodied selves, which always exist in relationship with one another.
True kindness starts with recognising this.
