Material Girls Quotes

“Any philosophical critiques that do sometimes (rarely) emerge – especially by non-trans academics – are regularly treated as equivalent to actual attacks on trans people rather than as critiques of views about trans people, or of trans activist commitments”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“And perhaps most awkwardly, they have been left unable properly to explain why, internationally, half the population in a given culture might be disproportionately subject to specific experiences like rape, sexual slavery, female genital mutilation, honour killing, female infanticide, banishment to menstrual huts, surrogacy tourism or death by stoning for the act of adultery. Clue: it’s not possession of a female gender identity.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“It is standard for academics to subject their work to rigorous critique by peers: papers get torn to shreds in seminars and referee reports, and experiments pored over to look for potentially confounding variables. And for good reason: history is littered with bad theories and empty theoretical concepts, from inner demons to bodily humours to phlogiston. There’s no reason to think there isn’t room for similar error here – in fact, there is extra reason to think there is, inasmuch as some (though not all) trans people so clearly desperately want gender identity theory to work, which might be affecting their neutrality. Many trans people assume – wrongly, as I will eventually argue – that the existence and recognition of their political and legal rights depends upon gender identity theory’s correctness.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“From the 2000s on, it started to be a relatively commonly held belief in progressive circles that it is not your biological sex nor even your ‘social role’ that makes you a woman or man – it is having a female or male gender identity that does it.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“Butler makes the general assumption that anything at all humans can meaningfully think about is socially constructed, ‘all the way down’ as it were. This means she thinks there are no material facts before language – that is, prior to culturally specific linguistic and social constructions of them. Linguistic categories, including scientific and biological ones, aren’t a means of reflecting existing divisions in the world, but a means of creating things that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“Trans people are trans people. We should get over it. They deserve to be safe, to be visible throughout society without shame or stigma, and to have exactly the life opportunities non-trans people do. Their transness makes no difference to any of this. What trans people don’t deserve, however, is to be publicly misrepresented in philosophical terms that make no sense; nor to have their everyday struggles instrumentalised in the name of political initiatives most didn’t ask for, and which alienate other groups by rigidly encroaching on their hard-won rights. Nor do trans people deserve to be terrified by activist propaganda into thinking themselves more vulnerable to violence than they actually are.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“Stable biological facts have contingent social effects in a given society in conjunction with other social aspects. A society can always choose to mitigate those effects by instigating different social arrangements and structures.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“some 70s feminists then seemed to reason in a couple of defective ways about biological determinism and sex. On the one hand, some assumed all binary theories of sex must imply determinism: that is, that these theories must be saying something about the fundamental individual ‘natures’ of males and females in terms of dominance for males, and passivity and submission for females. Working backwards, they therefore concluded that, since biological determinism isn’t true, binary sex must be a myth. Meanwhile, an alternative feminist response from some seemed to go roughly: ‘If there were no natural differences at all between males and females, biological determinism would obviously be false. We all want biological determinism to be false. Hence there are no natural differences between males and females.’ Compare: Jed really wants it to be false that he’s got cancer. If there were no such thing as cancer, it would be false that he’s got it. Hence, Jed concludes, there’s no such thing as cancer.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“At the very least, it’s clear the decision to use sex-incongruent language of any sort should normally be a free choice. It’s not acceptable on the part of any organisation to coercively require this on pain of sanction. Trying to encourage social norms of politeness in a company or institution, including encouraging people to use preferred pronouns where sex isn’t relevant, is one thing; having HR departments threaten people with accusations of ‘transphobia’ and ‘hate speech’ if they don’t is quite another. As a trans person, having your preferred pronouns or other sex-incongruent terms used by others is a courtesy on their part and not a right on yours.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“Gender identity theory doesn’t just say that gender identity exists, is fundamental to human beings, and should be legally and politically protected. It also says that biological sex is irrelevant and needs no such legal protection.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“Sexual orientations are ‘identities’ now. They follow from, and depend upon, a prior and more fundamental one: gender identity.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“A first thing to note, in case it’s unclear, is that I am not arguing against legal protections for trans people against violence, discrimination or coercive surgeries. I enthusiastically support these protections.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“I am critical of gender identity theory – but not of trans people, for whom I have friendly sympathy and respect.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“What is objectification? From Simone de Beauvoir to Martha Nussbaum to Catharine MacKinnon, feminist philosophers have long been interested in analysing the concept. Broadly speaking, to objectify a woman is to treat or represent her as a partly or wholly dehumanised, de-mentalised object. There are various ways to do that. Fashion and advertising offer several possibilities for doing so visually. You can represent her as a dazed, passive thing to be fucked, with a vacant expression and glazed eyes, as in many high-end fashion advertising campaigns. Extending this, you can represent her as sexually dominated, with her personal autonomy diminished or removed: bound or gagged, for instance. You can dress her up in animal skins or leopard print and represent her as a kind of wild, highly sexualised animal, something the fashion industry has been particularly fond of doing to black women over the years. You can dress and pose her as a stereotype: the Capable Housewife (in domestic setting, comfortable clothes, tolerant rueful smile), the Brainy Scientist (white coat, stern expression, glasses on end of nose), the Little Girl (kneesocks, pigtails, blowing bubblegum), the Sexy Vamp (cleavage, tongue on front teeth, wink). You can place her in a row with other similarly shaped, similarly adorned women, visually emphasising what they all have in common in looks and dress, so that individuality is rhetorically diminished, and one woman looks replaceable with any other. You can make her just a pair of legs, or breasts, or an arse, focusing the camera on body parts and even omitting the head and face. In all such cases, the thinking mind, personality, autonomy or particular individuality of the woman in the image is downplayed, diminished and ignored, to a greater or lesser extent. She’s ‘objectified’ in the sense she’s made more like an object and less like a fully individuated human being: less rational, less individual, less present, less important for who she actually is. In extreme cases, she can even be used as if or pictured as an inanimate object: a ‘table’ for men’s feet, or as a ‘plate’ for food– as in the Japanese practice of Nyotaimori, using a woman’s naked body as a receptacle for sushi in restaurants.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“To academic philosophers like me, keen to connect philosophy with working science in fruitful ways and to make appropriately nuanced distinctions between what is discovered by humans in the world as opposed to what is put there by them, Butler’s worldview looks adolescently, simplistically monotonic. In short: she thinks it’s all put there. Yet”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“So, hard cases are not a special fact about the categories male and female. Many categories are bound, eventually, to run into hard cases that can’t be automatically settled one way or the other on present understandings of the category. We mostly form our categories as conceptual tools to help us negotiate the everyday world and the sort of cases we encounter most. So it’s not surprising that, when an unusual case turns up, we don’t always know how to classify it.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“In any case, trans people reasonably disagree among themselves about gender identity. Trans people aren’t an intellectual monolith, and misaligned gender identity, understood as a general concept, is not something lived experience delivers straight to trans brains in a transparent and uninterpreted way.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“demiflux’ – that is, people ‘whose gender identity is partially fluid, with the other part(s) being static’.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“demifluid’ – that is, the policy states, people ‘whose gender identity is partially fluid whilst the other part(s) are static’.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“pan-gender’, understood as people who identify ‘with a multitude, and perhaps infinite (going beyond the current knowledge of genders) number of genders either simultaneously, to varying degrees, or over the course of time’.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“Facebook offers the user a choice of seventy-one ‘gender options’.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“standpoint epistemology’. This is the idea that some forms of knowledge are socially situated, so that only if you are in a particular social situation are you able to easily acquire that kind of knowledge. The term originally comes from Marxism and the idea that oppressed people can have insight into two perspectives or ‘standpoints’ at once – their own and their oppressors’ – whereas oppressors can have only one perspective (their own). Since the workers are subject to bourgeois rules and a bourgeois worldview, they get insight into the bourgeoisie’s standpoint. Additionally, though, workers have intimate knowledge of their own socially situated standpoint, which the bourgeoisie lacks. This idea has been adopted by several social justice movements, including feminism, critical race theory and trans activism.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“The New Zealand psychologist and paediatrician John Money is perhaps most well known for his involvement in an ethically dubious clinical case: the involuntary medical ‘sex reassignment’ of male child David Reimer after a severely botched circumcision, whose tragic story ended in his suicide as an adult.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“Here are four axioms of modern trans activism, which I’ll be examining from different angles in this book. 1. You and I, and everyone else, have an important inner state called a gender identity. 2. For some people, inner gender identity fails to match the biological sex – male or female – originally assigned to them at birth by medics. These are trans people. 3. Gender identity, not biological sex, is what makes you a man or a woman (or neither). 4. The existence of trans people generates a moral obligation upon all of us to recognise and legally to protect gender identity and not biological sex.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“In a 2018 Populous survey in the UK involving 2,074 respondents (49% male, 51%female, weighted across a range of age groups), participants were asked 'to think about a person who was born male and has male genitalia but who identifies as a woman'. They were then asked: 'In your own personal view would you consider this person to be a woman or a man?' 19% answered 'woman'; 52% of respondents answered 'man', 7% said 'not a man or a woman', 20% said 'don't know', and 3% preferred not to say.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“LGBT activism also fails on intersectionality for trans people themselves. It has no interest in acknowledging the somewhat different political and social situations of trans men and trans women respectively, but insists on treating both as identical for the purposes of lobbying. As far as trans activism is apparently concerned, there is no relevant difference in the situations of a fourteen-year-old transidentifying teenage female, attracted to other females, who is crowdfunding ‘top surgery’ and self-harming in the meantime, and a forty-one-year-old late-transitioning autogynephilic heterosexual male with no intention of divorcing the wife.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“So straight away I want to be absolutely clear about what I’m not saying, before I go on to explain and justify these points in more detail in the next chapter. (I can anticipate a lot of these misunderstandings because they’re frequently fired at me by critics, as assumptions about what I must really be saying.)

I’m not saying that to physically alter oneself to look like the opposite sex, or unlike one’s own sex, or both, isn’t ever a reasonable thing for adults to do in response to developing a misaligned gender identity. I think it can be, and have explained why in Chapter 4.

More generally, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with looking or being radically sex nonconforming, either naturally or artificially. Quite the opposite. Personally speaking, I value and celebrate sex nonconformity: masculine women, feminine men and androgyny. Indeed, it’s partly in the service of this evaluation that I’ve made the arguments I have.

I’m not underplaying the psychological relief it gives many trans people to think of themselves as members of the opposite sex. Nor, perhaps surprisingly, am I saying that trans women and trans men, respectively, shouldn’t ever call themselves ‘women’ and ‘men’ or be referred to that way by those around them. I’ll explain why in the next chapter.

I’m not saying trans people are ‘deceivers’, nor that they are ‘delusional’ or ‘duped’ – far from it. I’ll explain why in the next chapter, so there can be no doubt.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“The background assumption seems to be that, paradoxically, by identifying and discussing socially produced inequalities, we further entrench them; whereas if we ignore them, perhaps they will go away.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“As developed by trans activists, standpoint epistemology says there are special forms of standpoint-related knowledge about trans experience available only to trans people, not cis people. For instance, only trans people can properly understand the pernicious effects of ‘cis privilege’, and how it intersects with other forms of oppression to produce certain kinds of lived experience. As with some versions of feminism and critical race theory, when transmuted through popular culture this has quickly become the idea that only trans people can legitimately say anything about their own nature and interests including on philosophical matters of gender identity. Cis people, including feminists and lesbians, have nothing useful to contribute here. Their assumption that they do have something useful to contribute is a further manifestation of their unmerited privilege.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism