One of the many contradictions at the heart of the “progressive” position on sex and gender lies in its embrace of the most rampant individualism alongside its claim that it promotes the values of community.
The essence of gender self-identification is that “I am whoever I say I am.” That is, I do not conceive of myself as male or female in terms of where I stand in relation to others. Their bodies, their experiences, the demands placed upon them because of their sex (whether materially determined or socially constructed), the way in which these inform the power relations between us—all of that means nothing to me.
For those who take this position, membership of the group “men” or “women” does not depend on one’s relation to others within it. It depends only on demanding membership. Should any previous members complain, that is not a sign of one’s failure to acknowledge relationality, but of their failure to commit to the values of the community—values that require the abandonment of any idea that identities are co-created and have value within the life of the community itself.
Predictably, this contradiction causes more problems for women than it does for men. Ignoring sex difference in favour of self-described identity enables male-bodied people to leverage social privilege and physical dominance and to take resources from female-bodied people, while preventing the latter from raising any objections (or, at least, from having said objections taken seriously). Despite this, many women have supported this development, considering it a route—perhaps their only route—to freedom.
Although widespread transgender identification is still relatively new, the core problem is not. Women have been grappling with the question of how to hold competing values in tension— individualism and interdependence, sexual equality and sexual difference—for centuries now. In recent decades, the most popular forms of feminism have doubled down on individualism and equality as the keys to women’s progress. Unfortunately, these values all too often morph into idealized, ideologically driven dreams of radical autonomy and androgyny, which do not truly serve women.
The female body—and, in particular, the bodily reality of pregnancy—pierces the illusion of radical autonomy. It demonstrates the insufficiency of an implicitly male understanding of personhood. Rather than confronting the tension between women’s personhood and their interconnectedness with their children, progressives try to apply the language of choice and even free trade to the experience of childbearing. We see the results most clearly in the burgeoning practice of commercial surrogacy, which denies the full personhood of the woman who carries the child, reducing her to a mere container and denying her relationship with the baby in her womb.
The Link Between Individualism and Sex Denialism
In her 1991 book Feminism Without Illusions, the late founder of the Emory women’s studies department Elizabeth Fox-Genovese argued that denying sexual difference “perpetuates the illusions of individualism, especially the illusion of autonomy.”
In our time, the ideal of androgyny captures the fantasy that we are free of all restrictions on the self, including material and biological restrictions … Androgyny simultaneously perpetuates the extreme objective and subjective implications of individualism: that people are no more than irreducible units of sovereignty; that people are no more than their personal stories.
This androgynous ideal embodies, Fox-Genovese argues, “precisely what feminists have reproached the concept of the individual for—the denial of female being and experience.”
Nonetheless, if one feels faced with the admittedly “unpalatable and unrealistic choice between becoming ‘male’ or not becoming individuals,” many women would rather deny their sex. I think I would too, if I accepted the male-centric model of the individual as the only one possible. Perhaps I too would live with incoherence and moral inconsistency—even risk to others—if I thought the only alternative to denying my sex was to accept the patriarchal worldview described by Andrea Dworkin in Right-Wing Women. On such a view, women are “not distinguishable from the animals,” meant only for providing sexual pleasure and offspring to men. In such a world, who wouldn’t rather, as Adrienne Rich wrote, “travel as a disembodied spirit”?
Sex denialism is a far more dominant position on the left today, with far more obvious practical consequences, than it was in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, when Fox-Genovese, Dworkin, and Rich wrote. Because of the connection between rejection of the body and women’s desire for full personhood—even if it is one that many feminists have themselves critiqued—many on the right have been quick to blame feminism for the current state of affairs. We should have been careful what we wished for. We should have been less ambitious, less selfish, more respectful of the compromises with personhood anyone with a female body just has to make.
This is unfair, not least because one ought to think of sex denialisms in the plural. The “biological sex doesn’t exist” of the man who wishes the world to play along with his fantasies of feminine subordination—while never actually losing sight of his “right” to dominate—is not the same as the rejection of the sexed body of those feminists who wish to reject gender as a social hierarchy, but cannot see a way to do so without making the body socially and politically meaningless.
It is unjust, and an abnegation of moral responsibility on the part of men, for women to find themselves caught between the traditional misogynist’s requirement that women accept our true subhuman “nature” (Dworkin’s “life of animal functions”) and the trans activist’s gleeful insistence that only by not having a word—or a politics—for the class of humans who gets pregnant can the members of that class avoid being reduced to animal status. It is not unrealistic or absurd to want more than this, as sex-realist feminists do.
Yet, as Fox-Genovese identified over thirty years ago, this wanting more has to constitute more than an oscillation between denial of difference and over-investment in it. This position—a back-and-forth between “progressive feminist” and “traditional misogynist” positions—is incoherence masquerading as compromise. As the current backlash teaches us, feminists can ill afford incoherence, even if it seems the only way to square the being-human-but-also-female circle. It surely cannot be, for we know our bodies and our humanity at one and the same time.
The Problem of Surrogacy
“Many feminists,” wrote Fox-Genovese, “continue to found some of their most important claims—above all the right to ‘reproductive freedom’ and abortion—firmly in individual right, even as they ground others—above all, comparable worth—in a repudiation of individualism.” Though her trenchant critique of pornography and other topics remain insightful in our day, she does not explore the topic of surrogacy. Nonetheless, I found myself thinking of surrogacy again and again as I read. It is, I think, the area where the dubious “balance” between “individualism for some issues, interdependence for others” is most clearly exposed as untenable.
Pregnancy raises a series of difficult yet essential questions. Does pregnancy mean something about who you are in relation to others, or does it not? Does it say something about the inherent flaws in the male-normative concept of the individual? Or does investing too much meaning in it reduce women to that lowly animal status once more? Surrogacy—especially commercial surrogacy—complicates these questions further. The practice has risen exponentially in line with new reproductive technologies and the conflation of capitalist individualism with social progress. If, as Mary O’Brien wrote in The Politics of Reproduction, “patriarchy is the power to transcend natural realities with historical, man-made realities,” the wealthy woman who rents out the womb of a poor woman takes on the role of the patriarch, even if she identifies as a feminist. For her, too, the female body is but potting soil, a mere container for her property.
Whenever charges of exploitation are raised, surrogacy is defended on the basis that it is about community, kindness, and inclusion—surrogates are the most generous people in the world!—but also that it is about individual choice—who are you to question a woman’s decision to create a baby for others? The two strands come together in the claim that surrogacy is the “new reproductive rights battle,” justified simultaneously on the grounds that it is about love and connection, but also that being the person who gets pregnant and gives birth has nothing whatsoever to do with love and connection. (Warm feelings towards the commissioning parents might be acceptable, but not towards the baby.)
As Katha Pollitt wrote of the Baby M case in 1998, the surrogate must promise “something it is not in anyone’s power to promise: not to fall in love with her baby.” This leads, Pollitt argued, to an “emotional paradox”:
We accept a notion that a man can have intense fatherly emotion for a child he’s never seen, whose mother he’s never slept with, let alone rubbed her back, or put his hand on her belly to feel the baby kick, or even taken her to the hospital. But a woman who violates her promise and loves the child she’s had inside her for nine months, risked her health for, given birth to… She must be some kind of nut.
This is a highly problematic area for feminists who have staked their claim to female personhood on a fully individualistic, depersonalised understanding of pregnancy, focusing on relationality only when it cannot be too closely associated with specifically female bodies. In surrogacy, we see how this ends up denying full personhood—embodied and emotional—to the particular women who serve as surrogates, in the name of extending it to women in general.
In The Outsourced Self, Arlie Hochschild witnesses surrogates being instructed “to think of their wombs as carriers, bags, suitcases, something external to themselves.” The emotional desires and attachments of wealthy “intended parents,” by contrast, are not deemed to make them less human. Baby hunger only puts you on a level with the beasts of the field if you are the person carrying the child. In that case, you must switch your feelings off. We are rightly expected to become incensed about atrocities committed towards mothers on slave plantations or in the Magdalene laundries—or even in the fictional world of The Handmaid’s Tale. Yet there comes a point at which you are supposed to deny the unique, relational nature of pregnancy, lest it close off access to your own self-realisation.
Pregnancy Pierces the Illusion of Radical Autonomy
In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson claims that pregnancy “queers the body.” This is one rather insufficient way of recognising that pregnancy highlights the flaw in a male-centric vision not just of bodies, but of self-contained personhood. Nelson baulks at extending this analysis to look at how and why female people—the class of humans who get pregnant—are taught to deny their aberrant bodies in order to conform to this vision. Instead, she attempts to shoe-horn sex denialism into the experience of pregnancy itself (“as my body made the male body, I felt the difference between male and female body melt even further away”). On this view, one might as well go back to denying femaleness any specificity at all.
A more fruitful approach has been to take pregnancy’s uniqueness and use it to question the very tension between individual and community in ways extending far beyond the pregnant body/individual. “We have in every pregnant woman,” wrote Barbara Katz Rothman in 1989’s Recreating Motherhood, “the living proof that individuals do not enter the world as autonomous, atomistic, isolated beings, but begin socially, begin connected.” The essential relationality of pregnancy lays bare the interdependency of all human beings and the fact that no one is merely “whatever I say I am.” This is true regardless of how effectively it is masked, whether by conservatives assigning dependency exclusively to women in order to preserve the illusion of male self-sufficiency, or by progressives recasting dependency as an unnecessary limit on freedom.
“Strangely enough,” noted Rothman, “albeit for different reasons, both patriarchal ideology and liberal feminist thinking have come to the same conclusion about what to do with the problem of the uniqueness of pregnancy—devalue it; discount it so deeply that its uniqueness just doesn’t matter.” For “liberal feminist thinking” one might now substitute a more diffuse leftist positioning, one which claims to liberate women from pregnancy’s challenge to unfettered individualism by denying that there is even a particular class of people who get pregnant. At the extreme, texts such as Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now seek to empty pregnancy of meaning entirely (“to an extent, bodies are always leaky, parasited, and nonunitary … In the accounts of earthly life given by biologists such as Lynn Margulis, we are all revealed to be disconcertingly pregnant”).
I think it is important to name what is happening here. It is a form of emotional blackmail—a protection racket—to tell women that the full recognition of what is unique about pregnancy only serves to devalue female humans. On the contrary, such a recognition demands a revised understanding of the relationship between identity and community, an understanding that applies to everyone, men included. We must reject claims to moral superiority on the part of those who cannot stand the way in which the dependency compromises their vision of freedom. It makes little difference in practical terms whether such claims come from left or right.
Even so, one must take care. In The Mask of Motherhood, Susan Maushart argues that women’s capacity to reproduce has been treated as “an infirmity” and “an outright liability” precisely because it is so powerful:
In the creation stakes, motherhood is the big league, and everything else—art, science, technology—is a farm team. Is it really any wonder that (as evidence suggests) at some subconscious level all men are terrified, awestruck, and deeply envious of the gender-specific miracle of creation?
The low status of mothers and care work mean that many of us do not come to value female reproduction until we have children ourselves. At that point, when the blackmail no longer works, it can be tempting to reverse male claims to physical (and even moral) superiority. We make and feed entire human beings. What can you do that measures up to that? The symbolism of pregnancy itself—God-like, but also nurturing—can function to mask egotism, the delusion that to be “living proof” of human interconnectedness is to be a better person. Rather than choose between sex denialist individualism and the subordinate status of the “mere” breeder, one gets what feels like a non-individualist individualism, self-assertion and self-abnegation rolled into one.
Once more, by a sleight of hand one can pretend the circle is squared, as though individualism and community will not always be in tension. As though this is not the stuff of life.
It’s Time to Be Honest About Interdependence
“We live in a world,” writes Fox-Genovese, “in which women must be able to support themselves and in which the survival of our species depends upon their bearing children. It is, accordingly, of the most pressing social concern that our laws and institutions permit them to do both.” If this was pressing in 1991, one could argue that it has become even more pressing now. She warns of “the twin evils of complacent acceptance of things-as-they-are and an imaginative turning of our world into a mess of broken crockery.”
Right now, I see young women who genuinely believe they must choose between any degree of independence and having children of their own. Not only that, I see it implied that to choose the latter really is to reject full personhood, leaving it to men and child-free women, as though that is just the way things are.
Sex denialism has not granted women the same access to individualism granted to men. It has not freed women from biological essentialism. But it has preserved male delusions of self-sufficiency. There is nothing wrong or shameful about women wanting what men have claimed for themselves, but the truth is that we cannot have it. Men do not really have it, either.
“As a critique of individualism,” wrote Fox-Genovese, “feminism potentially contributes to a new conception of community—of the relation between the freedom of individuals and the needs of society.” That it still struggles to make such a contribution is down to a lack of honesty about bodies, relationships, and human interdependency. Regardless of claims to the contrary, it is the opposite of dehumanising to assert that we are all so much more than whoever we say we are.
