The most viral moment of this summer’s Olympics in Paris—even ahead of Raygun—may have been its most difficult to parse. In the boxing ring stood two fighters, one in red, one in blue. Not many minutes earlier, Algeria’s Imane Khelif, in red, had landed a right-handed punch on the face of Italy’s Angela Carini. After only 46 seconds, Carini abandoned the match. As the Olympians stood on either side of the referee, awaiting his decision, Carini, visibly upset, could be heard repeating non è giusto, Italian for “it’s not fair”. The rest is recent internet history.
Did you happen to be online in that moment? It was astonishing to watch the reaction: a massive social media storm, with all the requisite vitriol. The fury almost immediately took on the darkest contours of the debate over sex-based rights. In her book Sexed: A History of British Feminism, the Guardian journalist Susanna Rustin writes that it has become a “cliché to describe” this argument as “a toxic topic”.
Khelif went on to win gold, but that afternoon the boxer was at the centre of a vicious public fight over gender eligibility. The Russian-run International Boxing Association, stripped last year of its recognition by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), claimed that the 25-year-old, who had competed in women’s boxing for years, had been disqualified from the 2023 boxing world championships over a failed gender eligibility test. The IOC rejected this, saying of the bout with Carini, “Scientifically, this is not a man fighting a woman.”
On X, users speculated whether Khelif—who was born female and has never identified as either trans or intersex—was male or a man or something or other that made her inclusion in the competition unfair, even dangerous. JK Rowling, one of the most prominent gender-critical voices (a term Rustin uses to describe herself), posted a photograph from the fight. She wrote, “The smirk of a male who knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.”
Rowling and X owner Elon Musk, who had also posted that day about keeping “men” out of women’s sports, were named in a cyber-bullying lawsuit brought by Khelif in France. “I’m a woman like any other woman,” Khelif said after winning the gold medal. “I was born a woman, I’ve lived as a woman, I competed as a woman. There’s no doubt about that.”
It might seem absurd that this 46-second boxing match became one of the subjects of the summer, but it is oddly fitting for a year in which the reactionary, populist right has been in the ascendancy—especially given the way in which those dynamics map on to the struggle for gender equality. The US election hinges partly on how voters will react to the rolling back of women’s reproductive rights. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has told women, “You will be protected, and I will be your protector”; meanwhile, his VP pick has managed to make the anti-feminist trope of the childless cat lady go global.
That day, the Algerian boxer found herself hurled straight into an impasse in the discourse over biological sex, the notion of gender and the idea that trans rights compete with those of cisgendered women, a term that refers to someone whose gender identity is the same as their sex at birth. In the US, the backlash against trans rights is part of a right-versus-left culture war. In addition to abortion bans, Republican states are instituting restrictions on trans healthcare. “On the American right, in Russia and in parts of Eastern Europe, attacks on trans rights form part of a wider illiberal attack on the rights of women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and others who reject sexist stereotypes,” Rustin writes.
Britain is an outlier, says Rustin, owing to its strong corps of feminists who advocate for sex-based rights but don’t necessarily consider themselves right-wing
In the UK however, the political lines in this culture war are less clear. Our country is “an outlier”, says Rustin, owing to its strong corps of feminists who oppose trans rights or advocate for sex-based rights (depending on your position on the matter) but don’t necessarily consider themselves right-wing. She notes that the UK has been referred to as “Terf Island” in the American, Australian and Irish media. (Terf, or “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, is a term often used pejoratively to describe feminists with Rustin’s beliefs.)
For Rustin, the virulent opposition in this country to “the philosophy or ideology that every human being has an innate gender” is no less than a “remarkable… renewal of grassroots women’s organising in Britain”. It is this growth of gender-critical feminism to which Rustin dedicates her feminist history, as well as to the task of telling a story that isn’t focussed on the US. Rustin says that she undertook her research because she “wanted to understand why” there is such a strong feminist reaction to “gender advocacy” in the UK. Unwittingly, her book is a first-hand source for the argument itself.
Starting in the 1790s, with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Rustin’s story is divided between decades of women’s activism, such as the suffragists fighting for the vote (the 1860s to the 1920s) or the first female MPs entering the House of Commons (the 1920s and 1930s). The final chapter—“Feminists (2010–2023)”—mostly covers activism over sex-based rights.
Life for women in Britain now is unrecognisable compared with the 1790s. Did you know that mothers had no rights over their children, and that this injustice was not corrected until 1925? Did you know that marital rape only became a crime here in 1991? It is striking, too, that, despite the surface differences, the things which have concerned women have remained fairly constant over the centuries. Feminists have variously fought for change with respect to economic independence, rights in marriage, political representation, the work of house and home, childcare, sexual exploitation, violence, rape, pregnancy, childbirth and the right for autonomy over one’s own body.
Tensions over sex and morality have also been a constant. Wollstonecraft herself had “railed against the miserable condition of women reduced to selling sex through the lack of any other means of providing for themselves”, Rustin writes. In the mid-19th century, sex work, she adds, was known as the “Great Social Evil”. Until its repeal in 1886, following a campaign led by the social reformer Josephine Butler, the Contagious Diseases Act mandated “the compulsory genital inspection of prostitutes” to stop the spread of venereal disease. Male clients were, of course, spared the indignity.
Progress was never easily made, and it was often accompanied by backsliding or insult. Still, after the controversial Nancy Astor (she was known for Nazi appeasement and accused of antisemitism) became the first woman to sit in parliament in 1919, the barriers to policies that helped women weakened. With women MPs working cross-party in the Commons, victories were won against the “monstrous legal fiction” that a father had “sole control of his children”, and for the introduction of women’s pensions. And yet, male parliamentarians still saw their female colleagues as oddities. After the 1935 election, when the number of women MPs dropped from 15 to five, the Conservative MP Thelma Cazalet recalled how male peers “used to point her out ‘as though I were a giant sort of panda’”. Winston Churchill, that great British hero, was “vehemently opposed” to an equal franchise for women.
Throughout the book, Rustin attempts to surface evidence that biological sex has always been essential to the understanding of differences between men and women—and essential to feminist advocacy. In the process of her research, she writes, she has “become convinced that one reason” for the strength of the British feminist anti-gender current “is the depth and range of the political tradition [British feminists] have drawn on—with or without knowing it”. In hindsight, Rustin argues, she has found a historical grounding for her beliefs.
Recent histories, being closer to us, are more difficult to see clearly, and indeed to recount. The final chapter of Rustin’s book seems as incurious and unempathetic towards her opponents as did Judith Butler’s chapter on British “terfs” in their book from this year, Who’s Afraid of Gender? In fact, Butler, an American philosopher, goes so far as to argue that this is a type of feminism “that engages in forms of discrimination that arguably go against the commitment to equality for which feminism has stood. One could thus more reasonably conclude that transphobic feminism isn’t feminism”.
Taken together, we have here two writers, on opposing sides of a debate, looking without curiosity at one another. Neither queries in what ways these divides might be a function of feminists struggling to explain the fact that, even today, misogyny is so pervasive or, some would even argue, resurgent. Surely, this question is worth asking. Rustin doesn’t dwell on why the gender-critical position has so offended those who disagree with it, either. And she doesn’t really say much about the role of the internet in the toxicity of this debate, beyond that “social media is widely observed to fuel polarisation”. But she does take time to highlight the impacts of it on gender-critical feminists; the cases of Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey, who lost jobs over their views and upheld their rights to those views in court, are presented in detail.
As with any furiously contested issue, things get messy. Rustin wants us to see the centrality of biological sex in protecting women’s rights. At the same time, she acknowledges that this focus has limited women’s lives. There are further paradoxes on which neither side can agree—or agree to disagree. One example: females do have a particular biology. That transgender people exist, or that certain people lay claim to a gender which doesn’t correspond with the one assigned to them at birth, does not negate the sex of cisgendered women or their sex-based rights—something that Butler argues, perhaps rather inelegantly, in their book, but which Rustin would refute.
There are various paradoxes on which neither side can agree—or agree to disagree
But these things do not need to be mutually exclusive, as demonstrated by another recent book, which looks very specifically at the body. Sophie Harman’s Sick of It goes beyond British borders to encompass “the global fight for women’s health”. Here, too, are rhymes with the past: violence, sexual exploitation, pregnancy and childbearing, the right to choose what happens to one’s body. But there are newer themes, as well: the importance of data, the bureaucracy of global aid.
Harman is an international politics professor who has worked in global health development for 20 years. Hers is a slightly more personal story of frustration with the neglect, deprioritisation and ugly politics that accompany even matters of life and death. Health development is often more health-washing than a real effort at change, she argues. The phrase “sick of it”, a jarring trope, is used repeatedly. In fact, it opens the book: “The point at which I really became sick of it was in February 2020.”
A key theme is how mothers and motherhood have been co-opted in the global health aid boom to the detriment of women’s health in general. There is a tension here, too, over whether focusing on a certain kind of womanhood privileges mothers and leaves others at risk.
And yet, in her analysis, Harman includes women with female biology and also transgender women and people who identify as non-binary, no matter their biological sex. Lamenting a dearth of data on HIV/Aids, crucial for preventing the spread of the disease, she highlights a dearth-within-the-dearth for “non-binary and gender non-conforming” people. “To have targeted HIV interventions for trans women you need data,” Harman writes—“what risks women face, where they live, how they access health and what they need to live healthy lives.” She quotes a women’s health expert: “The data dudes are misogynists.”
Whereas Rustin excavates the past in order to situate her thinking, Harman seems at great pains to make clear that she is including women who are and aren’t biologically female when she thinks about women’s health. The result is that these two books become, mostly unintentionally, arenas for the enacting of this debate within British feminism. Rustin frames her book as a quest to understand the historical precedents to her opinions. Harman, although not directly taking up the sex-versus-gender war, ends up addressing it anyway. The implication is that, in the context of British feminism, this matter is unavoidable.
If this is the case, then surely feminists who want to make progress on the various issues women still face—violence, sexual exploitation, racism, economic inequality and so on—need to find a way to move past this cul-de-sac in the discourse. Rustin cites the second-wave feminist activist and historian Sally Alexander: the “political lesson from the women’s movement was that you work with many different people… You work with women who do not agree with you.”
Neither Rustin nor, for that matter, Butler suggest a way beyond the argument, a way to work with many different people. Though there have been attempts. Some years ago, as Rustin notes, the Women’s Equality Party ran a consultative exercise to decide its position on gender self-identification. The party was riven with splits, which, despite the attempt at constructive dialogue, remained acrimonious when the party ultimately decided to support the policy. Some members even left the party in protest.
Until such an initiative succeeds, or perhaps a sense of humanity prevails more generally, what we will mostly see is this fight within British feminism, as exemplified by the online storm during this summer’s Olympics. The day after the boxing match, Angela Carini spoke to an Italian newspaper about what had happened. “All this controversy makes me sad,” she said. “I’m sorry for my opponent, too. If the IOC said she can fight, I respect that decision.” Carini regretted her refusal to shake hands with Imane Khelif: “It wasn’t something I intended to do. Actually, I want to apologise to her and everyone else.” In British feminism, there is less contrition.
