Material Girls
Material Girls is a timely and trenchant critique of the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling about our sex, known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex. Professor Kathleen Stock surveys the philosophical ideas that led to this point, and closely interrogates each one, from De Beauvoir's statement that, 'One is not born, but rather becomes a woman' (an assertion she contends has been misinterpreted and repurposed), to Judith Butler's claim that language creates biological reality, rather than describing it. She looks at biological sex in a range of important contexts, including women-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection. Material Girls makes a clear, humane and feminist case for our retaining the ability to discuss reality, and concludes with a positive vision for the future, in which trans rights activists and feminists can collaborate to achieve some of their political aims.
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- I think you may find this article of interest, it's a decent backgrounder to this point of view, and hopefully gives insight into why many left-leaning feminist women have adopted this view or are moving towards it:
https://hollylawford-smith.org/what-is-gender-critical-femin...
Holly Lawford-Smith's book Gender-Critical Feminism expands on this in much detail. Kara Dansky's book, that you cited, is an enlightening read too, with more of a focus on US law and politics, as her linked blog post is. If you would prefer a more philosophical treatment of this topic, may I also recommend Kathleen Stock's work Material Girls.
- It's a very good read. Helen Joyce's Trans and Kathleen Stock's Material Girls are also excellent critiques of this movement.
- That is just one definition of gender. There's confusion over its usage because it has a number of different and conflicting meanings.
In her book Material Girls, which thoroughly and thoughtfully explores this topic, Kathleen Stock describes four senses of the word:
> GENDER1: A polite-sounding word for the division between men and women, understood as a traditional alternative word for biological sex / the division between biological males and females.
> GENDER2: A word for social stereotypes, expectations and norms of 'masculinity' and 'femininity', originally directed towards biological males and females respectively. These can and do differ from culture to culture, though there are many overlaps too.
> GENDER3: A word for the division between men and women, understood, by definition, as a division between two sets of people: those who have the social role of masculinity projected onto them, and those who have the social role of femininity projected onto them.
> GENDER4: A shortened version of the term 'gender identity'. [A] common idea is that it is the 'private experience of gender role' - roughly, whether you relate to yourself psychologically as a boy or man, girl or women, or neither, in a way that has nothing directly to do with your sex.
Up until recently, the colloquial sense was GENDER1. Now this is shifting partly towards GENDER4, amongst some but certainly not all English speakers.
When you refer to people "confounding sex and gender", I expect you're simply observing the conflict between different people understanding the term as GENDER1 or GENDER4.
