Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters to Feminism has its virtues. The book is well written, and compared to the levels of vicious vitriol normally accompanying work on transgender issues, it is generally even handed and fair minded, if a bit sharp and sarcastic at times. As one of the most visible and beleaguered defenders of the ‘gender critical’ take on transgenderism, Stock is known for wading into the most contentious online debates imaginable and she had been the occasion for some appalling attacks on academic freedom as result. In Material Girls Stock laudably tries to defuse things as she plays the analytic philosopher of her training, arguing with rigor and restraint, considering her opponents’ arguments with care, and searching for as much common ground as possible.
Stock covers a lot of ground in a fairly brief work, with mixed results. She begins with a ‘Brief History of Gender Identity’ which attaches significant moments in the relevant intellectual history with specific figures in a plausible enough way. She then spends two chapters rehearsing arguments for what she takes to be obvious truths—first, there are two biological sexes and second, that the differences between males and females is often important. Stock finds having to argue these things exasperating, and this is one place where her moderate and dispassionate tone sometimes slips. She is right to be exasperated though, and while unavoidably perfunctory, her rehearsal of what should be obvious is nicely done.
We then get three chapters that dive into the heart of the overheated and rancor filled debates about transgenderism and gender critical feminism: what is a gender identity? what is a woman? and is there a literal sense in which trans women as women? With each question, Stock does her best to do justice to the views of those with whom she profoundly disagrees, and it is here that she offers some of her most original ideas. On each count, she is less than totally successful, but these are some of the most interesting parts of the book.
Stock seems to me to needlessly complicate the question of gender identity. She also relies too much on popular sources in reconstructing the views she opposes as she works to reject the view that we all have an innate or deeply rooted sense of gender. Instead she tries to assimilate gender identity with psychological identification—I have a masculine gender identity, according to Stock, to the extent I identify with masculinity as understood in my cultural setting.
There are some rather obvious ideas here that Stock ignores. Any developmental psychology textbook will tell you that as they grow children quickly learn and begin to apply gender categories. They also effortlessly begin to apply such categories to themselves in the primitive sense of knowing which sex they are, but also in a matrix of behavioral and attitudinal dispositions ranging from pronoun usage to recognizing clothes and toys as properly for boys or girls to judging one of the genders (their own) to be the better. All this is well established in most children before age 5.
It’s not clear what more than this ‘gender identity’ needs to be to be a useful idea, or why Stock would reject it in favor of an account of gender identity that allows that many people, perhaps most, don’t have one.
Does a feminine gender identity make a trans woman a woman sans phrase? Not on Stock’s account. In Chapter 6, she argues that the concept WOMAN picks out adult female humans, and a trans woman will never be that. Moreover, she argues, the concept WOMAN is both useful and irreplaceable given our many interests in tracking the different sexes. What Stock does allow is that it can be a ‘useful fiction’ to think of trans women as women is all but a handful of contexts such as healthcare, sports, and women only spaces. Trans men and women can, as they please, ‘immerse’ themselves in such a fiction, and it reasonable for them to expect others to go along with this in all but those handful of contexts by using post-transition names, appropriate pronouns, and so on.
All of this will, I suspect, do nothing to appease Stock’s critic, and telling trans people they are immersed in a fiction has not gone over well when Stock has suggested it in other places. Here too there is a possible alternative Stock ignores.
While ‘adult female human’ is a core meaning of WOMAN, it’s plain that women are more than adult females. There’s a lot to being a woman, to say the least. This suggests the possibility of ways of being a woman that are divorced from the biological part. An analogy (first used, I believe, by Alex Byrne) is parenthood. While rooted in the facts of biological reproduction—a core meaning of PARENT is has biological offspring—this is not the only meaning. Nor, by now, is having biological offspring always necessary for someone’s being considered a parent. Because childrearing goes way beyond procreation, the concept of PARENT has become inextricably tied to the doing the work of parenting. As a result, we unproblematically consider those raising adopted children to be parents san phrase in a great many contexts. It’s not clear that such usage involves being ‘immersed in a fiction’ or why trans women can be women in something like the very real sense in which adoptive parents are parents.
Material Girls ends with two chapters devoted to activism, with Chapter 7 focusing on the problems, as Stock sees it, with contemporary transgender active while Chapter 8 offers some heartfelt suggestions about how a better activism for sexual minorities and women might be crafted in the future. Chapter 7 feels cobbled together—Stock ranges from criticisms of very specific elements of recent transgender activism in the UK to an insightful analysis of the concept of ‘objectification’ to a more speculative treatment of the role autogynophelia in trans identity. In this chapter Stock the activist begins to overshadow Stock the philosopher.
Chapter 8 is more successful. Stock urges all sides in the debates over transgenderism to take a step back from the polemics and vitriol and to look for common ground in a shared struggle “to reduce the the cultural stigma of sex noncomformity” and to “loosen the grip fo the many stereotypes to do with masculinity and femininity.” Given the self-destructive ugliness of so much of the discourse surrounding these issues, this seems like good advice.