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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This highly engaging analysis of the contemporary global social and political landscape of trans antagonisms draws specific attention to gender-critical mobilizations of Simone de Beauvoir's account of becoming a woman in The Second Sex to advance and justify trans-exclusionary positions. Through a careful examination and application of Beauvoir's philosophical and political commitments, Becoming a Woman compellingly explores the significance of her notion of becoming not only as affirmative of trans women, but also as an ethical demand to affirm trans possibilities.
More than a reply to gender-critical readings of Beauvoir, this book develops an original, Beauvoirian ethics of gender affirmation that shows why we ought to challenge trans exclusion and anti-trans movements.
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Seitenzahl: 195
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Trans Antagonisms and Beauvoir
The Turn to Beauvoir
Trans-Exclusionary Feminism
The Reality of Trans Antagonisms
The Harm of Trans Antagonisms
For the Sake of Girls and Women
1 Becoming a Woman
The Sex–Gender Distinction
On Being and Becoming
The Injustice of Becoming a Woman
2 On Females and Women
The Fact of Being Female
Let’s Talk about “Sex”
On (and Away from) Sexed and Gendered Categorization
3 An Ethics of Trans Affirmation
Gender-Affirming Care Saves Lives
On Self-Determination
Detransition and the Need for Ambiguity
Pronoun-Go-Rounds
Conclusion: Bad Faith and Feminism
Being in Bad Faith
Feminism in Bad Faith
Glossary
References
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Trans Antagonisms and Beauvoir
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Bad Faith and Feminism
Glossary
References
End User License Agreement
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Becoming a Woman
Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Trans Existence
Megan Burke
polity
Copyright © Megan Burke, 2025The Author hereby asserts their moral right to be identified as author of the Work.
First published by Polity Press in 2025
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6200-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024936775
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
To all the trans and queer accomplices, past, present, and future, creating space for expansive possibilities – thank you. To all those in the places with whom I’ve found myself and didn’t expect to find myself, thank you for showing me that it’s possible to build worlds and make new meaning together. I would never have understood with such richness that being-with is what it takes. For those whose ideas have inspired me, especially to the trans philosophers who I’ve had the privilege to think alongside and learn from; to Gonzalo and Maia, for reading this early on, and carefully and with enthusiasm; to a few loves, who took interest in my ideas and cared for me in various ways while I was writing this book; to my mom, always. To Elise for being supportive of the project, full stop; for trans people everywhere living and doing the best they can in this world, thank you.
Preface
While writing this book, it has often felt like anti-trans forces are becoming mundane. They are not, of course. Their persistence is concerning. The social and material power wielded by those who espouse anti-trans views and those who create and advocate for anti-trans legislation is alarming. They are creating, and maintaining, a world where trans and gender-nonconforming people are targets of violence and have diminished life chances. Because today’s anti-trans sentiments frame trans people, and trans women in particular, as well as gender-nonconformity, as predatory and pedophilic and as a risk to the freedom of girls and women, they are sentiments being adopted by those who don’t know very much about trans existence in the first place.
This is a book about this contemporary social and political climate, and about what’s wrong with it. It is also about how some self-proclaimed feminists weaponize a classic feminist text to justify transphobia. That text is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex ([1949a, 1949b] 2010). Often dubbed the feminist bible, The Second Sex offers an indictment of patriarchal ideology as it shapes and violates women’s lives. It has, for years now, been drawn on by gender-critical feminists as a means of trans exclusion. Although a niche in the world of trans antagonisms, this manifestation of anti-trans politics is disturbing. This anti-trans mobilization of Beauvoir aims to offer a reasoned justification for denying trans experience. If the views of one of the most famous feminist philosophers of all time show that trans experience is dubious, that real women are never trans, then anti-trans sentiments are not political after all; they are just the truth, even if the truth hurts trans people. As a Beauvoir scholar, I’ve been disturbed by the anti-trans turn to Beauvoir. I continue to be disturbed the more it persists. If it’s not yet disturbing to you, my hope is that this book will show you how it is and why you ought to be concerned.
In this book, I offer an alternative reading of Beauvoir that challenges gender-critical turns to her work. Given that Beauvoir herself was not focused on trans experience – which does not, I think, mean her work is not relevant to it – my reading also shows how Beauvoir’s commitments and her analysis in The Second Sex speak to and support trans existence. Through this reading, I hope readers learn about The Second Sex and what Beauvoir is really up to in the book. I also hope to offer a window into the general social and political landscape of trans antagonisms in Western contexts, especially – but not only – for people who don’t know much about what’s going on.
In this book, I use transgender, or trans for short, in a descriptive way, not as an identity category. I follow, though loosely, Susan Stryker’s notion of the term in Transgender History, in which she uses transgender/ trans “to refer to people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth … the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place – rather than any particular destination or mode of transition” (2008, p. 1). This is not the only way to define transgender/trans, and it is not necessarily an agreed-upon definition amongst trans scholars or trans people more generally. I use it here because I take it to be a helpful heuristic for describing the broad range of experience targeted by anti-trans politics and sentiments. At the same time, how an individual is targeted and the extent to which they are impacted has everything to do with the entirety of their social positioning, including their race, class, sexuality, and national origin. It is certainly the case that trans people of color, and trans women of color, have long been the most vulnerable of trans people, the most deeply impacted by hostilities toward trans people.
I write this book as a white, middle-class, queer, non-binary American academic. As many people do, I have a complex relationship to gender. As I will talk about at several places in the book, some of my experience feels like a trans experience, though of a very privileged kind. Some of my experience does not. I don’t care to reconcile this ambiguity here, for myself or for you, the reader. I may never care to reconcile this ambiguity; it is one way I have come to assume my existence. As I hope this book makes clear, despite what some people may claim, there are many ways to live out who we are as sexed and gendered people. There should be many. In writing this book, my intention is not to speak for all trans people or all variations of trans experience. My intention isn’t even to speak about the many, many creative ways trans people inhabit the world and seek to change it. Rather, I’ve tried to draw attention to what and who is getting in the way of trans existence. More importantly, I’ve tried to make clear that trans possibilities are valid and why everyone ought to create conditions for their flourishing.
Introduction:Trans Antagonisms and Beauvoir
On March 11, 2024, right around the time I was completing the final edits on this book, an article by trans scholar Andrea Long Chu was published in New York Magazine. The article, “Freedom of Sex: The Moral Case for Letting Trans Kids Change Their Bodies,” offers an important trans account of freedom. The account is, on the one hand, an intervention in the hostile landscape of anti-trans politics and, on the other, an intervention in leftist politics that argue for trans affirmation on the basis of gender alone. Chu not only argues that trans kids should not be denied transition-related medical care, but also, and most importantly, she argues that securing the freedom to choose one’s gender and one’s sex is the morally right thing to do. Chu puts it this way: “What does this freedom look like in practice? Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again” (2024). Chu insists on defending the desire of trans kids who wish to change their biological sex, regardless of where the desire comes from. For Chu, as the freedom to pursue gender in different ways has changed, “the number of people wishing to change their sex” has increased. “Sex itself,” she writes, “is becoming a site of freedom” (2024, p. i).
In a world rife with anti-trans politics, Chu’s position is as powerful as it is provocative. It challenges us to conceive of what is possible – to at least confront, if not entirely reimagine, how we could pursue our embodied lives and how we could allow others to pursue theirs. Her conception of freedom relies on challenging commonly held assumptions and beliefs about the meaning of sex and gender. Or, as she puts it, “In general, we must rid ourselves of the idea that any necessary relationship exists between sex and gender; this prepares us to claim that the freedom to bring sex and gender into whatever relation one chooses is a basic human right” (2024). This book is written in this spirit.
Put most succinctly, the positive ethical position at the heart of this book is that trans people’s self-determined existence should be affirmed, which is to say, honored and supported. Such affirmation is a condition necessary to securing trans life chances. To disavow trans people’s self-determination and eliminate the material conditions in which trans people can realize who they are is to create genocidal social and political conditions for trans people. This may sound like an extreme claim, but granting authorial social and political power to efforts and views that disavow trans people is a way to produce trans non-existence. This book highlights legislative actions and gender-critical perspectives as two extreme and powerful forms of such disavowal, but it is also baked into many social conventions and traditions in more nuanced ways, in ways that often don’t register as hostile or transphobic. At the same time, the ethical position of this book is not just about securing trans life chances; it is about working for and securing a world of care and justice, a world that resists austerity and domination.
Securing this ethical position and pursuing freedom that affirms trans lives does require intervening in beliefs and perspectives that erode and erase trans possibilities. What is also required is a reconsideration of how we should understand sex and gender. Often, mainstream discourse around trans affirmation or trans exclusion is captivated by the discourse of gender identity and is thus captured by a concern with the nature of sex and gender. This concern with metaphysics is not the only way to consider the meaning of sex and gender. This book insists we need to shift our attention. By turning to the philosophical work of Simone de Beauvoir, this book prioritizes an ethical not metaphysical ground for trans affirmation. Rather than get trapped in the issue of what trans people are, or what sex and gender are, Beauvoir’s work demands a prioritization of how we all choose to live together.
The Turn to Beauvoir
It’s a curious turn. Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, published in 1949 and often dubbed the feminist bible, is certainly not at the forefront of contemporary politics over trans existence. If non-academics have heard of Beauvoir, they likely haven’t studied The Second Sex. Beauvoir also didn’t write about trans people. Beauvoir was concerned with the situation of non-trans women in a world dominated by men. Today, Beauvoir’s work is, at times, mobilized to denounce trans existence by predominantly white, non-trans women from Western countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States who call themselves gender-critical feminists. Gender-critical turns to Beauvoir can be found within academia, as well as without. As will be discussed in more detail soon, what these turns to Beauvoir share in common is a claim that Beauvoir emphasizes that to be a woman is a matter of sex, not gender. One of the more notable references to Beauvoir can be found in the well-known and controversial blog post made by the author of the Harry Potter series on June 10, 2020. It is often the case that gender-critical discourse turns to Beauvoir to insist that real women are born women, which delegitimizes trans existence. In Gender-Critical Feminism, philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith sums up who such feminists are: “These rebels call themselves gender-critical feminists, referring to the idea that gender is something we should be critical of” (2022, p. xii).
For some time, being critical of rigid gender norms and their imposition in individuals’ lives has been a central feminist practice. Gender-critical feminists, however, make their target the reality of gender identity. Rather than seeing the imposition of rigid gender norms as a key site of patriarchal oppression, gender-critical feminists take the insistence on gender identity to obfuscate the oppression of women as females. Their concern is to not only fight for the liberation of non-trans women, but also to situate the site of their oppression in the reality of sex. They take a focus on gender, which they claim to be the focus of trans activists, to be the political erasure of sex. Gender-critical feminists rebel and fight in the name of sex, against the new tyranny of gender. In doing so, they inspire suspicion of trans people and, as a result, of affirming trans existence. Instead of affirming trans people, full stop, the gender-critical view insists we should be asking: Is it really, as trans activists claim, trans people who are oppressed? What if trans activists are deceiving all of us, especially the youth, into thinking that being trans is not only real, but also a reality that should be supported? In all the contemporary fervor about trans rights and trans affirmation, what is happening to “real” women?
Philosopher Kathleen Stock’s book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (2021) exemplifies a gender-critical turn to Beauvoir. According to Stock, Beauvoir’s account of what it means to be a woman is incorrectly leveraged by trans affirmative politics, or what Stock refers to more pejoratively as “gender ideology,” which she takes to be a tyrannical set of misguided beliefs about the reality of gender as an identity that one chooses for oneself. For Stock, the most famous sentence in The Second Sex – “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” – is one of the key moments in the formation of gender ideology, but not because Beauvoir herself meant it to be (Beauvoir, 1949b, p. 13). For Stock, this sentence has been interpreted to mean that a woman is not born, but is socially constructed, which means that a woman is not a woman by birth but is something one becomes. From this interpretation, it follows that a transgender woman is a woman without qualification because she has, as Beauvoir claims, become a woman. But for Stock, as she says in an interview, “I don’t think she [Beauvoir] had any conception of how that phrase would be used, but it set in motion a chain of thought and processes. That sentence is used all the time to justify the idea that trans women are literally women, or even that gender identity makes one a woman” (Gluck, 2021).
In her own effort to denounce gender identity and challenge the view that trans women are women – that is, real women in the metaphysical sense – Stock claims that Beauvoir’s interest was not in gender, but in sex. The name of the book was The Second Sex, after all. What gender-critical discourse does is claim that it is sex not gender that is the marker of reality, that makes one a real woman. Whatever this thing called gender is, they claim, whatever gender identity one might claim to have is, in effect, not real. This move toward sex is at once political and philosophical. The claim is not only that contemporary trans activism obscures the reality of sexbased oppression, or the oppression of women, but that affirming trans existence also mystifies what is real: sex is real, gender identity is not. Although gender-critical feminists, such as Stock, who do turn to Beauvoir are not scholars of her work, the author of the feminist bible nonetheless occupies an interesting place in the gender-critical push to shift our focus to sex – and not merely away from gender, but against it.
There is so much to say. But let’s stay with Beauvoir for now; doing so will clarify her relevance to thinking about and affirming trans existence. Beauvoir’s famous sentence does inaugurate an important distinction for feminism, but it’s not the one Stock claims. Stock’s misreading is not entirely her fault. Decades of academic feminists, particularly those in the Anglo-American context, have misread Beauvoir’s famous sentence. In the sentence – “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” – there is a classic philosophical distinction between being and becoming. This distinction is a metaphysical one about the nature or essence of reality.
Being refers to an internal, predetermined, and unchanging essence of a thing, whereas becoming refers to the reality of a thing as indeterminate, historically bound, and therefore contingent. Because Beauvoir was an existentialist through and through, across all her work, she rejects the idea that there is any such thing as a predetermined human nature. Who and what we are, Beauvoir believes, is a result of human agency in the past and present. This belief is central to The Second Sex. When she claims that one is not born, but becomes, a woman, her point is that women are not by nature women, which means that, on her account, there is no such thing, naturally, as a natal woman. In fact, her most famous sentence targets the view that takes women to be women by virtue of biological facts, by virtue of what Stock and Lawford-Smith refer to as biological sex. Beauvoir believes it faulty to accept the commonsense idea that to be born with certain genitalia or reproductive capacities makes one a woman. In Beauvoir’s language, becoming a woman is a social destiny imposed on, and taken up or lived out by, a certain group of human beings. As will be further discussed in chapter 1, far from a biological fact, Beauvoir’s account of becoming a woman as a social destiny shows how the conferral of ‘woman’ onto an individual by others is an enforced structure of lived experience. Furthermore, even if her account focuses on the imposition of this social destiny onto specific sexed bodies, such a social destiny is a product of human actions and choices. Ultimately, her account shows how non-trans existence is naturalized and normalized, which makes being a woman an immutable, natural fact. This is not the view Beauvoir endorses but one she exposes and argues against. In contrast, the gender-critical thrust insists on the realness, and thus truth, of biological sex.
In Beauvoir’s view, biological essentialism, or the belief that physiology or biology is the essence of a woman, is erroneous. “[H]umanity … is a historical becoming,” she asserts in the conclusion of The Second Sex (2010, p. 753). We are not what and who we are because of our biology. ‘Woman’ is not found in any essence called ‘sex.’ And yet that still leaves us with the question of how to understand and articulate the relation between physiological differences and the reality of ‘woman’ – or, that is, as Beauvoir makes clear, that women clearly do exist in the world in a certain way, in relation to being female. But, as this book shows, Beauvoir doesn’t understand this relation between being female and a woman to be a necessary or essential relation. That is, it’s not a law of nature. It is not an inevitable reality. This does not rule out the significance of physiology; indeed, it shows how sexed embodiment is an experiential dimension of our existence, not a determinative and fixed one.
For Beauvoir, we become who we are, and this includes the very existence of women as female, a point that urges us to reconsider not only the relation between ‘woman’ and ‘female’ but also what ‘sex’ and ‘female’ even are. This reconsideration is a needed response to the gender-critical reliance on the naturalness of sex. Whether and how ‘female’ and ‘woman’ are lived and experienced is a collective endeavor; we have the power to limit or open our possibilities. Working from Beauvoir’s most famous sentence, then, this book highlights how Beauvoir’s feminist philosophical and political commitments are trans inclusive and why we should heed her insights today.
