A Feminism with Teeth: Lessons from Holly Lawford-Smith’s “Gender Critical Feminism”

Holly Lawford-Smith has written a challenging book at a tumultuous time.

As she explains in her preface, a gulf has opened within feminism. On one hand, we have people who collapse the distinction between sex and gender and believe in “gender as identity.” On the other, we have those who believe that sex is real, and that gender is merely the “social norms and expectations” laid upon individuals on the basis of sex—what she and other feminists worldwide have come to call “gender-critical feminism.”

Lawford-Smith is a feminist philosopher who is firmly in the second camp. She recognizes the salience of biological sex, as well as the burden that gender roles and expectations put on humans of both sexes, but most especially on women.

If Lawford-Smith had written her book at any point between 1970 and 2012, her arguments for gender as social norms and expectations versus gender as identity would have been anodyne, even somewhat pedestrian. She might not have been invited to universities to discuss the book because her argument is too pedestrian, rather than too controversial. Instead, it was published in 2022, a time of “excessive social sanctioning,” “social media dogpiling,” and “unpleasant ad hominem attacks.” As Lawford-Smith points out, gender-critical feminists have been subjected to

open letters (denouncing them), campus protests, campaigns to get women fired (some of which have been successful), malicious accusations made in the media and on social media, campaigns to get women banned from online platforms (often successful), deplatformings, taking women to court, forcing women out of political parties… (and even) the occasional physical assault.”

As a result, academic feminists and feminist campaigners on the gender-criticalside have been “diverted into expending enormous energy in defending themselves, and their views, rather than simply getting on with the work of feminism as they understand it.”

Outsiders to this debate have probably wondered: Why do young people believe that middle-aged lesbians, or mothers, or middle-aged lesbian mothers, are “hateful” because they acknowledge biological sex? Why do so many believe that a beloved children’s author wants them to die? Why can’t we say “pregnant women,” or discuss the importance of single-sex spaces, prisons, and sporting categories for women?

Lawford-Smith’s book is an excellent explainer for those who want to know. Written in a clear, straightforward style, the book is both a history and a polemic. It concludes with a call for a “feminism with teeth,” and a coda outlining “a Gender-Critical Manifesto,” which she summarizes as “a movement for women as women.” Lawford-Smith sees gender-critical feminism as the inheritor of the tradition of radical feminism—a materialist feminism more than fifty years old. She traces this intellectual history and addresses some specific questions about this branch of feminism, namely: Is it anti-transgender? Is it intersectional? And is it liberal?

Universities Can Host Challenging Conversations

Last May, the Heterodox Academy chapter at my university hosted a talk in which I interviewed Dr. Lawford-Smith about Gender-Critical Feminism, the history of feminism, and the conflict between gender identity proponents and gender-critical feminists.

When the talk was announced, the Heterodox Academy coordinator at CSU, Dr. Matthew Hickey, received a few emails from graduate students and from a few faculty members before the event expressing concern that Dr. Lawford-Smith was “likely to indicate that a portion of the student body on this campus does not have the right to identify the way that they do.” One claimed that “The Gender-Critical Feminism Movement openly discriminates against Trans Women, practically denying their existence.” My department chair also received emails complaining about the event. Notably, no one contacted me or questioned me directly—perhaps assuming correctly that my participation signaled a commitment to airing her beliefs in public, or that I might know that her book doesn’t “deny the existence” of anyone. (Probably both.)

My colleagues and I in the CSU Heterodox Academy learned a valuable lesson: deplatforming a speaker is only possible if administrators show weakness and refuse to engage controversial ideas. Universities can host challenging conversations—and if we can’t or don’t, who will? So far, the mass hallucinations of social media don’t inspire confidence.

In the end, the conversation with Holly was polite and respectful. Several people in the room challenged Lawford-Smith on her ideas, but they all allowed her to respond and listened respectfully to her answers. At least four trans-identified students showed up to sit near the front of the room. They listened to every word we said and stayed nearly two hours, through both my interview with Lawford-Smith and the hour-long question-and-answer session that followed. Two of the young people identified themselves as transgender women and asked Lawford-Smith some questions about her opinions. She answered them honestly and transparently.

After the event concluded and the applause died down, she walked directly over to these students to thank them for attending—and for interrogating her. “This is the first time in two years that anyone who disagrees with me has discussed this with me,” she said.

Learning from Feminist History

So, what exactly does Lawford-Smith’s book contain? It begins with a deep dive into the history of feminism, beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft and devoting particular attention to the years from 1967 onwards, focusing on the emergence of second wave in the United States.

Reviewing the split between Betty Friedan’s NOW (National Organization for Women) and the radical feminists of Redstockings, New York Radical Women, and The Feminists, Lawford-Smith highlights the leadership of women—including Ti-Grace Atkinson, Shulamith Firestone, and later Gerda Lerner, Andrea Dworkin, and Catherine MacKinnon—who put women’s bodies at the center of their analysis of women’s oppression. These “feminist women wanted a theory and a movement in which sex took centre stage. Hence . . . a theory by women for women and about women, understood as a sex caste/class,” effectively “push(ing) sex forward as a major axis of oppression just like class and race.”

There were plenty of disagreements among radical feminists of this era, but all of them were united by a focus on the oppression of women based on their sexed bodies and female physiology. “Multiple institutions were identified as helping to achieve the oppression of women, including marriage, the family, sexual intercourse, love, religion, rape, and prostitution.”  According to radical feminist theory, these institutions could only function as oppressive of women because of human sexual dimorphism: women’s bodies are organized around the capacity for sexual reproduction, and women are the sex who bear and nurse the young. Second-wave American feminists in the 1970s advocated reforms that would benefit women as mothers, such as paid maternity leave and wages for housework. Lawford-Smith calls gender-critical feminism “the revival of radical feminism,” because of its focus again on the sexed bodies of women, for example, “prostitution, pornography, surrogacy, sexual and beauty objectification.”

Lawford-Smith rejects the notion that feminism should be or must be “intersectional”—that is, inclusive of other axes of oppression or other movements’ goals. Intersectionality is a concept developed in universities that has become axiomatic of almost all academic feminism. Lawford-Smith does not reject the goals of anti-racism, or environmentalism, or any other movements that feminists might also support. Her point is that “it is hard enough to get a firm grip on the mechanisms by which women are oppressed as a caste, and the things that need to change in order for women’s liberation—as women—to be secured.” Considering that feminism works on behalf of half of the entire human population, “feminism hardly needs the added challenge of figuring out class liberation at the same time.” From her perspective, then, “a feminism that refuses to combine multiple issues, and refuses to be intersectional, is actually less hubristic.”

The Dangers of Sex Denialism

After the initial chapters on feminist history, Lawford-Smith takes on two particularly clear examples of the dangers of sex denialism for women: the sex industry (pornography, prostitution, and surrogacy), and the gender identity movement.

The shocking power and money in commercial sex, pornography, and surrogacy are proof that revolutions can turn in many surprising (and alarming) directions. They certainly don’t liberate all of us equally—or perhaps at all. In the case of commercial sex, the arguments for the harm to women and girls are clear and obvious, and Lawford-Smith makes a persuasive argument for the Nordic model of criminalizing the purchase of sex rather than the selling of sex (a topic she has also tackled in two subsequent books, Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy (2023) and Is It Wrong To Buy Sex? (2024)). Concerning pornography, no matter how obvious its harms to women, this American wonders about the feasibility of criminalizing its purchase or use in the United States, given our First Amendment protections. Surrogacy receives only cursory attention in this chapter—more on this later.

Lawford-Smith argues that the gender identity movement also harms women by denying embodied reality. Instead of challenging cultural and social gender roles, as radical feminism does, gender-as-identity advocates suggest that womanhood is reduceable to a performance of stereotypes or social roles. If any man can self-identify into another sex class and get access to women’s restrooms, locker rooms, sporting competitions, and prisons, as is the case in many Western countries today, that would be dangerous enough. But the precipitous increase in young people—particularly girls and young women—who identify as transgender, should be alarming to feminists everywhere.

Over the decade of the 2010s, the U.K. reported a 4,400 percent increase in the number of girls seeking transgender medical treatment, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries. Without a socialized medical system like the National Health, the United States doesn’t keep track of this data centrally. Still, a 2022 Reuters report based on an analysis of public and private insurance claims showed that diagnoses of gender dysphoria in adolescents tripled in just four years from 2017 to 2021. Of the more than 120,000 adolescents who received a gender dysphoria diagnosis, nearly 14,726 had begun taking cross-sex hormones, and 4,780 American children had had their puberty blocked. A just-published analysis indicates that from 2017-2023, there were between 5,288 and 6,294 elective bilateral mastectomies performed on girls under 18, some of whom (50 to 179) were just twelve years old.

Transgenderism is often portrayed as a new civil rights movement advocating for a vulnerable minority. To gender-critical feminists like Lawford-Smith, it looks more like an epidemic of girls attempting to escape womanhood through medicalized self-harm. They are concerned that “this medicalization doesn’t treat trans people; it creates trans people.”

Lawford-Smith offers an idea to help us understand the vitriolic nature of the conflict between gender identitarians and gender-critical feminists: she says it’s a “fundamental moral disagreement.” These are moral disagreements “about which it isn’t possible to provide any further reasons or justifications.” So, for example, gender identitarians believe “‘it is crucially important to respect people’s self-identifications about sex/gender.’” Gender critical feminists instead “see blind acceptance of identity claims . . as a threat, not a value. . . . We want to know why ‘inclusion’ is given so much weight when there are other values that matter morally.” But, as she notes, “asking these questions is generally met with moral outrage.” This leads to histrionic comparisons of gender-critical feminists—again, mostly middle-aged mothers and lesbians—to genocidaires.

A Gender-Critical Manifesto

The book concludes with “a gender-critical manifesto,” which centers feminism as a movement by and for women, grounded in the material reality of sex. In a list of 72 goals for refocusing feminism around women, she prioritizes those that would end male violence and sexual exploitation; ensure women’s bodily and medical autonomy; and protect women’s liberty of conscience, free speech, and full participation in public life.

These are all worthy goals, but I wonder about Lawford-Smith’s disengagement with motherhood in this book, given her convincing argument about gender-critical feminism’s roots in radical feminism. In her discussion of the problems with the commercial sex industry, prostitution and pornography receive the bulk of the attention. Although surrogacy is noted, it is not equally explored as another means by which women’s bodies are exploited and sold. And it’s not just women’s bodies that are exploited through surrogacy—it’s their unique capacity for motherhood, the one uniquely female experience around which all the other unique experiences of the female body revolve.

Let’s return to basic principles. Why does sex exist? Why is humanity sexually dimorphic?

We are sexually dimorphic because our species reproduces only with genetic contributions from both mothers and fathers, and because babies grow only in their mothers’ bodies and are nourished by the milk of their breasts. It’s this crucial contribution that has permitted our species to grow such enormous brains, in utero and then through infancy. Literally no one else but adult human females can perform this work, and even in the United States, most of us do. As of the end of the previous decade, 86 percent of American women become mothers by age 44.  

If gender-critical feminism wants to do something, “by women for women and about women,” to quote Lawford-Smith again, improving the experience of mothers would be a nearly-universal popular platform—especially in the United States, the only advanced Western country not to offer paid maternity benefits. To be fair, Lawford-Smith does list several motherhood-oriented priorities in her manifesto—but these are not further developed in the first nine chapters of her book. And again, to be fair: American feminists, this is on us—this is not the responsibility of an Antipodean philosopher, however eloquent her arguments.

In the United States, political partisanship is as bad as it’s been since before World War II. The end of the Cold War nearly a third of a century ago and the absence of a common enemy on whom to focus our energies has left Democrats and Republicans at each others’ throats. The secularization of American culture has also created a crisis of meaning especially visible in our young people, who suffer from widespread disconnection from kin and community. Motherhood and family are concerns that bring together people from various walks of life, regardless of faith or political leaning. The capacity for motherhood could be a powerfully uniting force for all women, if only we would recognize it. In whose interests is it to keep us divided?