At the heart of de Beauvoir’s feminism—indeed, at the heart of any system that makes a hard distinction between biology and gender—is a metaphysical (or, perhaps better, antimetaphysical) commitment to denying the authority of the physical body and its significance for personal identity. That is a dramatic move, and as de Beauvoir well knew (and Hanby points out), it can be sustained only on the basis of technological power.
