On this topic, however, things did not go smoothly. After the book was completed, due to the controversial nature of the material, the press sent it out to 26 readers for peer review. Most accepted the invitation — then backed out once they saw the manuscript. Only one delivered a report, criticizing my work for being “unfair” to gender theorist Judith Butler and “gratuitously unkind to trans people.” My insistence on embodiment — Beauvoir’s insistence — was treated as an embarrassing throwback. In 2025, the contract was terminated. 

I then sent the manuscript to several other presses, who also declined to take it forward. One respected university imprint rejected the book as “too controversial.” Another told me it did not publish books on “individual thinkers” — then six months later issued a book casting Beauvoir as a pro-trans icon. A third prestigious press told me my book “did not fit its list” — and went on to publish a title called Sex Is a Spectrum, inspired by Beauvoir.

The attempt to repurpose Beauvoir to shore up gender-identity orthodoxy represents an all-out attack on her thinking, and erases the actual contents of The Second Sex, a foundational work of feminist theory, first published in 1949. 

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By Kathleen Stock

Beauvoir is controversial today because she was the ultimate sex realist; she refused to separate body from identity, and believed that it was only through understanding women’s embodied reality that we could combat patriarchal cultural norms. Her essential position can be summed up simply: sex is the material ground of women’s lives, gender the cultural elaboration of that ground, and liberation comes not from denying the body, but by transforming the meaning imposed upon it.

She began The Second Sex with research on biology, spending long hours in France’s National Library, sifting through centuries of the science on reproduction. Biology is not everything, she argued. It does not condemn us to lesser lives — but nor is it nothing: nature commandeers a woman’s body, from puberty onward, for the service of the species. These facts don’t make us unequal, but social structures and norms turn reproductive realities into inequality.

In almost every species, Beauvoir emphasized, organisms are defined by the gametes they produce. Large gametes (ova) define the female, small gametes (sperm) the male. In humans, this is “a biological given, not a moment in human history.” We are born male or female, always in relation to each other — what Beauvoir, borrowing from Heidegger, called Mitsein (“Being-with”). Such sex differences themselves are not hierarchical, but patriarchy makes them so.

“One is not born, but becomes, a woman,” she famously wrote in The Second Sex. But this does not mean that gender floats free of sex. For Beauvoir, sex is the foundation; gender its cultural elaboration. A female body is defined by the norms of femininity of its time and place. These norms can change — and Beauvoir’s work aimed to push them toward liberation. Meanwhile, both biology and culture shape the body’s meaning, power, and visibility, qualities that change over a woman’s lifetime as she shifts through the various forms of girl or mother, or menopausal or old woman.

Today, however, Beauvoir is mostly taught through the lens of foundational gender theorist Butler, who claimed to extend her work. But as I argue in my book, Butler actually ignored Bouvoir’s book, collapsing the notion of “becoming a woman” into performance, where repeated gestures conjure the illusion of sex. In Butler’s version, gender is the creator of sex. She makes no mention of puberty, childbirth, or aging.

Butler’s understanding of what a woman is has shaped two generations, and has had noxious consequences for women. If “sex” is only an idea, then puberty itself can be rejected; the category “girl” is something to exit, hormonally or surgically. This is framed as liberation, but in practice, it erases female experience: it turns puberty into a pathology, encourages girls to disidentify from their own bodies, and makes womanhood optional or disposable. What drops out of view is feminism’s starting point — that sex is the basis of women’s oppression. And crucially, the rejection of women’s bodies and of femininity today does not generate demands to transform those constraining norms, but instead points girls toward escape by “becoming boys” — as if freedom lay only on the other side of sex.

Beauvoir’s difference from Butler matters because without sex, feminism loses its compass. If we cannot name sex, how do we name sex-based oppression? 

I have long felt the weight of trans orthodoxies in the classroom and the conference hall. When I teach that, for Beauvoir, the body is not a blank slate, students protest: “using ‘sex’ as a category rationalizes prejudice.” Later, their essays come in as cool hagiographies to Butler, scare quotes around the word “woman.”

In the past, I kept my feelings to myself, wary of complaint. At conferences, I heard how Beauvoir’s emphasis on freedom and authenticity meant that she would definitely support trans identities. When I reminded my fellow academics that Beauvoir explicitly said: “No woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex,” they looked away in embarrassment, and muttered that Beauvoir was being “weaponized by TERFs in the service of transphobia.”

To deny the female body is to dissolve womanhood into the ether. That is why Beauvoir is awkward today. She insisted that women are animals — embodied, vulnerable, enduring — not cartoons, cyborgs, or avatars. 

Nor, in reality, is the female body easily dismissed: it is a body that betrays us, bleeds, and contracts on its own schedule; it intrudes on our consciousness and ruins our plans. Beauvoir writes bluntly, even brutally, about menstruation, childbirth, and abortion. Some critics have called her misogynist. But nothing she said is false — if anything, she was understating the situation.

Erasing women’s biology and erasing Beauvoir go hand in hand. In syllabi, Beauvoir has become a footnote — and when she is taught, “becoming a woman” is misread as affirming gender identity, the opposite of her words.

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By Julie Bindel

I’ve felt this erasure before. As a child, visiting my mother’s Spanish family, I encountered a strident machismo: speaking about politics and having opinions, were for men, not women; I was told to join the women in the kitchen. And it has persisted in subtle ways throughout my career. As an undergraduate at Oxford, my tutor told me, frustratedly, “You are very polite,” unaccustomed to this feminine constraint in what had been, until two years earlier, an all-male college. It was a habit that stuck with me; I found myself overly cautious, and less willing to take the imaginative leaps needed for originality.

The sting of being told to disappear has never left me. That is what today’s distortion of Beauvoir feels like: an instruction to step aside, to be silent, while others rewrite reality.

Beauvoir’s discovery was that sex cannot be evaded. Even though as a young woman she rejected the category “woman” — she “thought like a man,” she said, holding her own in a male world — she eventually realized she had been one all along, defined by her body and by patriarchy’s myths. “If I want to define myself,” she wrote, “I first have to say, ‘I am a woman’; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth.”

That insistence is what makes her urgent now. A feminism that cannot speak of puberty, pregnancy, menopause, or frailty abandons women. Identity without the body is not liberation, but denial.

When publishers canceled my book, they wanted me to cut my critique of Butler. I refused: this lay at the core of my endorsement of a Beauvoirian feminism. That refusal is why I write now — because freedom begins from naming the body we inhabit and at the same time refusing to let it dictate our destiny.

Beauvoir would not have recognized this denial as liberation. Her project was to remake the meaning of womanhood — to expand it, not abandon it. To challenge the myths and constraints that keep women from fulfilling our potential. That is why I call for a Beauvoirian feminism: a vision of woman as both flesh and freedom, subject and agent, irreducibly real.

The exchange became a famous WTF? moment in France. Very few took it seriously. No one realised back then that Gauthier-Fawas was the future.

Last October, I was invited onto a TV show called Quelle Époque to debate Marie Cau, France’s first transgender woman mayor. I say “debate”; I wasn’t listened to. I was described as “hysterical” by one guest for saying that I didn’t believe that Cau was a woman and my rhetoric was described as fascistic. Not one of the eight-strong panel agreed with me, and the studio audience applauded every time someone mocked me.

When I did get the chance to speak, I said: “For me, Marie Cau is a man. A transfeminine man — a person who is biologically a male but who has tastes that match with what people call ‘the woman gender’.” For this, I was branded a transphobe and I am currently being sued by Cau and three LGBT lobby groups for “hate speech”.

After the show was broadcast, the French politicians weighed in. Isabelle Rome, the minister for gender equality, diversity and equal opportunities, shared a clip of my debate on Twitter, saying: “These words are very violent. Every person needs to be respected for their gender identity or for their sexual orientation. It’s not others who have to define the contours. To use the words of Amin Maalouf: ‘It’s our gaze who liberates.’” She then invited Cau to meet her, and posted a photo of the two saying: “We need to build a fraternal society where each person is respected beyond his gender identity or sexual orientation.”

Having raged for years in the UK and US, the transgender debate has finally hit France. And you might say we deserve it; even that we are partly to blame. Back in the Sixties, a group of postmodern French philosophers introduced “French theory” to the world. It was a challenge to the idea that there is a single innate meaning in anything: we should, they assert, deconstruct language, science, even our human nature. We’ve got Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault to thank for the idea that there is no objective truth.

So far, so interesting. In France, we are philosophers. We enjoy ideas for their own sake and have no problem with letting a concept stay as it is – conceptual. But Americans are different. Their activists like to apply theory to the real world. So when Americans, such as Judith Butler, got hold of “French theory”, they applied it to American culture and political activism, which gave birth to post-colonial theory, gender theory and, inevitably, transgender ideology: the idea that language and biological sex can be deconstructed so that women become “menstruating people” and men can be mothers.

Then, the Americans threw it back at us. And that language and ideology is seeping into French culture and taking hold of young imaginations.

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Is France too sexy for the trans wars?

By Kathleen Stock

Only last year, Le Planning Familial (PF), a state-funded network of organisations providing sex education and reproductive services, launched a campaign with an illustration of a “pregnant man”. The poster read: “At Planning, we know that men can get pregnant, too.” The PF also stated that sex is a social construct, a gay man can have a vulva, a penis is not a male organ, and the use of the words “female and male” should be banned. This is an organisation that is providing sex education in schools across France.

French children are no different from those the world over: curious, vulnerable, easily influenced. And the more they absorb, the more they are choosing to reject the traditional gender binary and asserting their right to identify as trans or non-binary. Marry this with the move in medicine to champion a child’s right to self-determine, and we’re in dangerous waters. According to Jean Chambry, a child psychiatrist in charge of the CIAPA (Intersectoral Centre for Adolescents in Paris), a decade or so ago there were about 10 requests for gender reassignment per year; in 2020, it was 10 requests per month, in the Île-de-France region alone.

Chambry has spoken of a worrying acceleration of medical responses to these transition requests; that, as demand surges, barriers to treatment are being significantly weakened. It is currently possible for children and adolescents to be prescribed puberty blockers and hormones if their parents agree — though surgery isn’t supposed to take place before the age of 18. Yet, since last November, those wishing to commence the transitioning process no longer need a psychiatric follow-up. Medical insurance will also now cover the entire cost of a transition (including mastectomy and phalloplasty). And a new law against “conversion therapy for sexual orientation or gender identity” has made it incredibly hard for psychiatrists and psychologists to counsel gender-confused children or adults.

Today, in France, any criticism of this new orthodoxy is quickly shut down. Even our dictionary, Le Robert, has included “iel” — a gender-neutral pronoun, like “they” in English — in its online version. The word has yet to find favour with the general public.

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Elsewhere, activists have also infiltrated anti-discrimination boards, which are now prioritising transphobia over racism. Consider Dilcrah, the Interministerial Delegation for the Fight Against Racism, Antisemitism and Anti-LGBT Hatred, a government body responsible for guiding public policy on discrimination. In January, it was quietly closed down. The party line is that it was dissolved because the team was inefficient. Certainly, it was inefficient when it came to finding common ground on gender ideology. Former president, Smaïn Laacher, is a member of L’Observatoire de la Petite Sirène an association set up by psychiatrists and researchers concerned about the number of children being given hormone treatment, and — despite its name: The Little Mermaid’s Observatory — absolutely not to be confused with the UK’s controversial child transgender group, Mermaids.

This proved problematic for the transactivist sociologist Karine Espineira, who dramatically resigned from Dilcrah last May to protest against Laacher’s membership. There then came a welter of accusations of transphobia against L’Observatoire, after which, in September, Dilcrah decided to file a complaint against the organisation for their recommendation of a cautious approach towards trans children — something deemed to be “conversion therapy”, now forbidden by French law. This complaint was rejected. But in January, Dilcrah was disbanded. Its dissolution arguably exemplifies the French government’s response to the current identity debate — having been captured, they fold.

Amid this growing scandal, in which any attempts at scientific discussion or any urging of caution against accepting the new status quo are shut down, where is the resistance? And where, with our grand tradition of feminist thought, are the feminists? In the UK, you have Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock and J.K. Rowling. In France, it seems, we no longer have feminists in the traditional sense: we have neo-feminists and “queerists”. They aren’t worried about women’s spaces being kept safe, they don’t blink an eye at women’s sports being debauched, and they think it’s perfectly fine for lesbians to date women with penises. These feminists are, as Germaine Greer said, “being persuaded to deny their own existence”.

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By Mary Harrington

Since 2019, “Nous Toutes” — a group with the specific aim of stopping violence against women and girls — have organised feminist marches in towns across France. But their Instagram feed is now alive with anger and posts reading “Terfs out of our fights” and “You don’t need a vagina to be a woman”. It seems even they have lost sight of what our universalist feminism was about — a collective struggle, not an individual one. Such is the vehemence of their feeling against old-school feminist views that when Marguerite Stern, a prominent gender-critical activist and colleague of mine, marched with the sign “Female Sex Matters”, an egg was thrown in her face. This struggle is not a collective one.

How did French feminism become corrupted? Perhaps because of our obsession with Simone de Beauvoir. She believed that female biology was real, but also that it hampered women; she saw it as a constraint. She also believed that women are shaped by society and men into accepting a passive, subjugated position. In Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), she writes: “One is not born but, rather becomes, a woman.” She talked about how we are forced into becoming housewives or mothers. But neofeminists, led by Butler, have deconstructed this and now brandish the slogan as though de Beauvoir were talking about transwomen.

These neofeminists have also co-opted Monique Wittig, the French radical feminist and lesbian who wrote: “There is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed, and sex that oppresses. It is the oppression that creates sex, and not the contrary.” The neofeminists parrot the handy Instagrammable statement “there is no sex” out of context and without understanding.

Resist these misreadings, though, and you will be tarred as a Terf. And it is dangerous to be a Terf in France. In March, on International Women’s Day, the walls of Paris were daubed with “Kill the Terfs” graffiti. A conference in Nantes was cancelled because transactivists threatened speakers with eggs and baseball bats, and cowardly local politicians bowed to that pressure. Last year, a class given at the prestigious Sciences Po school was shelved amid concerns over its topic: Darwinism, evolutive psychology and differences between the sexes. If our scientists have been captured, what hope is there?

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By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

At last, though, there are signs of a French resistance. In January — after three years of harassment, insults and cancellations – Marguerite Stern and I launched Femelliste, an online platform and NGO for “the female of the species”, a place where women can voice their concerns about transgenderism. Here we assert things such as: being a human female is neither a shame nor a weakness; it is not a feeling but a biological and sexual reality. We truly sympathise with those dealing with gender dysphoria, but see transgender activism, and its language, as an attempt to reduce women’s rights.

We are fighting for freedom of expression and pluralism of ideas. And for this, we are currently being sued, accused of “hate speech”. But we Femellistes are not transphobes. On the contrary, in our manifesto, we state explicitly that we recognise the suffering of dysphoric people, as well as the violence that trans people experience. We absolutely understand that.

But we also understand that, in France, feminism is dying. In France, today, if you dare to go on a feminist march and protest for women’s rights, you will be abused. In France, if you write or talk about women’s rights, you will be blacklisted. In France, the birthplace of philosophical feminism, the answer to the question “What is it to be a woman?” is no longer obvious to everyone. But in France, some women are finally daring to fight back.

But the joy, the pleasure of my embodied reality is worth it. I know exactly when my period is due, the sensation of ovulation and the micro-weight gains pre-period that affect my balance, my flexibility and my confidence. I understand the pressures of aesthetics, the desire to be thin, to be ripped, to be long limbed, to be fast and athletic. It’s never ending what you should or could be as a female body in my artform.

I am a dancer and choreographer and have been making work since graduating from London Contemporary Dance School in 1998. I set up my eponymous dance company in 2004, and would regularly tour the UK, Europe and the USA. My work includes 5 Soldiers and MK Ultra which explored conspiracy theory through the lens of pop stars, music video imagery and Britney Spears. I dance, I teach, I speak, and I collaborate.

The body is at the heart of my work and research. To explore the idea of how we inhabit our bodies, I have joined an all-male infantry battalion to train with soldiers, I have been on the beat with West Midlands Police, I have worked with children and teenagers. I have tried to understand the pain women feel about their identity, their changing body in puberty, their sexuality and their confined role in society. I’ve trowelled through the internet and dived into conspiracy theory.

At times, face-masked in mud, helmet and body armour on, clutching an SA 80, I felt more macho than any man I’d ever met. Leaping out of windows, throwing grenades, I felt as cocky and dangerous as any human could ever be. Dressed for a dinner at a private country estate, dangling earrings and floor length gown, I could not feel more feminine. But these are gender stereotypes. These are roles that say soldier = boy, dancer = girl. I stand on the front line of the gender debate, challenging myself and everyone around me, and it’s easier than it looks. You just have to engage your mind, engage your body and be in time in space in the present.

But the frontline of the gender debate is a dangerous place to be. Which is why today I find myself without a dance company, ostracised by my former executive co-director and my board of trustees.

I was shunned following a party at my house during which I disclosed that my new work would be based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando and I revealed my growing unease around the erasure of the word “women” and the biological denialism associated with Gender Ideology.

I did not intend to cause offence or make this about individuals — my ideas were forming and I wanted to have robust debate to find out what the other side thought. But to even float these thoughts in the privacy of my own home was deemed beyond the pale. I was subsequently accused of transphobia and have been investigated for bigotry by my own company. Last week, I decided that I no longer had any trust in my board, and that they had abused the grievance policy of the company to unfairly investigate me. I had no option but to resign, citing constructive dismissal in the hope that I might take back control of my life and my creativity. They tried to silence and shut me down; the next day they took my phone and personal email accounts that were intertwined with the company I founded. I’ve endured dishonest and gross misrepresentations of my views spoken and written about me, and I have quietly tried to maintain my sense of self, my sense of humour and my sanity.

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By Julie Bindel

I believe adult people have the right to be, to feel and to identify any way they want. I do believe, though, that if we erase the word women, if we stop it meaning a biologically based sex class, it becomes a word that can include any male who self-IDs and by doing so we erase women’s rights, the women’s movement and the very basis of attacking and naming sexism and misogyny. The idea that to even state that “a woman is a woman” is extremist or transphobic is deeply chilling and totally false.

The past few years have been dominated by the gender debate online, with the defining moment of the JK Rowling statement, and her eloquent exploration of defending the trans community, defending women, and attempting to explain how domestic violence so affects us as women, and that asking for same sex protections is not in itself transphobic. In fact, in our desperate desire to explain our mistrust of men, so many women have had to re-traumatise themselves, dredging up pain and hurt from the past, as I have done, to help to try to explain just how scared we all really are.

Throughout history it is the artists and the intellectuals who are shut down first — those who dare to question the status quo, or are the first to notice cultural shifts. As artists it is our job to be thinking ahead, following trends, thinking through the eventual outcomes or legacy of new waves of thought. And while my feminism burns bright, I was still feeling uncertain as to what was the right approach to this new way of thinking and talking. I wanted to do the right thing, I wanted to be inclusive, I am a modern progressive artist, I can adapt, change, shift my norms.

So I began looking for a novel or a book that I could hang a lot of my sex and gender questions on, reading, researching, studying Olympe de Gouges who wrote the amazing tenant of Rights for Women, the French Revolution and its betrayal of rights for all (and certainly not for women), sexual politics, and returning to second wave Angela Carter, bell hooks, Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir.

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Then I came to Orlando. I saw the film, and then read the book, and I was utterly blown away. I had found Virginia Woolf pretty impenetrable as a young woman; but when I sat down with it this time, I read it in a heightened state over two fabulous days. I knew I’d fallen in love — with Orlando, with Virginia, and then after reading the letters between Virginia and Vita Sackville West (as recommended by the local LGBT reading group), I fell in love with Vita too. I was so inspired byWoolf’s third way of approaching all of this muddled and difficult stuff.

Orlando absolutely is a man at the start of the novel, a privileged, precocious boy, beautiful, charming, rich, aristocratic. He falls in love, he loses in love, he writes dreadful poetry, he is humiliated, he is confronted with real warfare and can not cope with his “manly role” to fight and he goes to sleep. When Orlando awakes, she is a woman. A total sex change. A different-sexed body, a thing that even with modern medicine, hormone treatment and surgery, can never, ever be achieved. But humans have the power of imagination. There isn’t one woman alive who hasn’t imagined what her life would be like had she been born a man, the freedoms, the right to pleasure, the right to self.

The problem, Woolf seems to suggest, is no man has really, deeply, truly thought about this the other way around. Men have still not truly grasped the radical notion that a woman is a fully created, total, embodied human being, worth exactly the same as any man. The fact that then Orlando does have a wonderfully wicked time in Georgian England (a time where at least 20% of all women and girls in London worked in the sex trade), is both delightful, titillating and fun.

Remember, it would take until the Sixties and the contraceptive pill before any woman could have sex with a man and not be concerned about the consequences of pregnancy, and what that meant for her and her baby’s future. Woolf knows that women and men are not so dissimilar. We have wants, needs, and desires, but we do not have equal treatment, in the eyes of society or in the eyes of the law. Interestingly, even the GRA of 2003 made sure that no woman could change gender to be a man in order to inherit aristocratic wealth. Exactly as in Orlando all those years before. Some things don’t change…

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Unfortunately, because of my attempt to articulate my gender critical beliefs, I now find myself without a company and without an Orlando. I stand accused of transphobia, which is damaging to the trans community, to women and to me and my reputation as an artist. But I must defend myself, defend my views and stand with the other, incredibly brave women and men who are speaking out against this dangerous ideology. The oppression of women is based entirely on our biology and our reproductive rights and vulnerabilities. We embody our oppression and our strength.

I feel this powerfully in my own body. A dancer’s body, but also a woman’s body; a body that has been raped, assaulted, attacked, strangled, knocked out and abused. My body has been in deep pain, physical and mental. My body has been a victim, that has scars running deep — on my scalp and in my soul. But it is also a body that has created, nurtured and given life. A body that coped with pregnancy, that survived an emergency birth, and then breastfed an infant until he was 30 months. A body of beauty, miracle, love and care. A body that sat in local cafes, shamed me with my bursting boobs, leaking nipples and abundant health. A body that was met, even as an infant suckled, with tuts and looks from by passers — the old judging my openness, the young unable to see boobs as anything but sex objects. I sat there, ashamed but not understanding why until I realised that I felt like an an animal. I was an animal. It shocked me. I couldn’t identify out of my life-giving properties. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t female; I was a woman, a mother, a life giver, yet I wasn’t respected or liked or even tolerated because of it.

Something changed in me. Something deep, and I became braver, fiercer, angry even, about how badly women are treated. And it certainly wasn’t just me — it was all my friends, all those forceps births, split and cut vaginas, c-sections, dangerous births, the refusal to give any kind of painkillers, husbands and partners banned from the birthing room. And then there is the aftermath: the refusal to learn your baby’s name. The infantilising of you and your body and your baby, despite being a grown-up professional woman. I felt like I was 10 years old and being told off. The moment of sheer relief when one midwife treated you and your body with respect and compassion. Often the most overworked and exhausted of women who still hung onto a modicum of love and respect for our bodies and babies.

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This body, my body, it’s been through so much. But it is a dancing body, a body with more to give and to learn than ever before.

My body is why I challenge the belief that we are walking meat sacks. How can it be that we are just flesh, blood, fluids, nerves, muscles, bones. That we are nothing alive, we have nothing to feel, nothing to give pleasure. It is this sort of “transhumanistic philosophy”, that we are merely a brain homunculus behind two jiggling eyes, which is the destroyer of women, of our innate power in the universe, of our understanding that we are mammals, we live on a finite planet, we eat and we shit and we make love and we birth babies and we orgasm and we feel pain and we feel hurt and some of it is from outside of us and some it we invent inside ourselves.

We only have this life, this existence and this time on this planet. We cannot invent a new planet, we cannot pretend we do not exist, we cannot pretend our bodies are not ours. We are more than the sum of our parts, we are our bodies, minds and consciousnesses. We are only just now starting to truly understand the connectivity between our minds, bodies, nature and the planet.

So I say no to the new puritans, the sex deniers and the body snatchers. No to erasure of my sex, no to erasure of my boundaries and my safety. You are asking far, far too much and we know it. We must, and always must, state our truth of our own existence.