The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

For the most part, trans activists and gender-critical feminists share a belief in bodily autonomy and the right to identify however one pleases. The contention has arisen because many trans activists take the view that self-identification renders biology irrelevant, whereas for feminists the preservation of single-sex spaces – such as prisons, changing facilities and domestic violence refuge centres – means that biology cannot be so easily dismissed. In spite of what some activists believe, feminists do not wish to preserve single-sex spaces in order to exclude certain people, or to bolster a certain kind of ‘privilege’, but rather to protect women from the reality of a world in which violence against them is overwhelmingly caused by male perpetrators. This is the key argument of philosopher Kathleen Stock’s book Material Girls (2021), which offers a robust overview of the ways in which women’s rights depend upon a recognition of biological truth.