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In Material Girls, philosopher Kathleen Stock braves accusations of hate to publish a fearless, rigorous study of gender identity
Nakedness has always, literally or metaphorically, epitomised stark, outrageous truth. Diogenes in the Athenian marketplace, King Lear on the stormy heath, 20th-century hippies: all were tearing off their clothes to reveal the “poor, bare, forked animal” that underlies pretension and pretence. But now nudity is not enough. We discern something yet more fundamental beneath the skin – gender identity.
This, or your inner sense of it, is what makes you male or female (or, perhaps, one of a range of other genders), irrespective of whether it tallies with the sex you were “assigned at birth”, and whether or not (if it doesn’t) you undergo surgical or hormonal adjustments. To do so is irrelevant to being transgender (“transsexual” is an outmoded, quasi-offensive term). The essential thing is how you self-identify. Any distinction between “natural” and “artificial” sex is arbitrary.
For contesting such views, Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, is accused of hating trans people. But, undeterred, she sets out in Material Girls to disentangle the confusions that have bemused so many politicians, institutions and young people into acquiescing – with what? They’re unsure, except that it seems to be the tide of progress.
“How did we get here?” asks Stock, and locates various stages along the way. In the 1960s, feminists,...