What Is a Man? A Feminist on Feminism's Moral Compass Between Two Magnets
I. The Vantage Point
Not long ago I spent some time in a hospital bed, and two of the nurses who looked after me were men. They were good at it. They were attentive, competent, unhurried, and kind in the specific, practical way that good nursing requires, and it never once occurred to me to wish they had been women. I have spent most of my working life around steel, and over those years I have watched women weld. Some of them lay a bead as clean and even as anything I could put down myself, and nobody who looked at their work would care about anything except the work. Neither the nurses nor the welders needed anyone's permission to be where they were. They were there because they could do the job, and the job was the only test that mattered. I begin with them because everything I am about to say depends on that test, and because I want it understood from the first page that I have no interest in telling anyone where they belong.
My own position on the questions that now consume so much of our public life is simple enough to fit in a few sentences. Adults may live as they choose. They may dress, present, name themselves, and alter their bodies as they see fit, and it is no business of mine to stop them. In return, nobody is obligated to affirm, recite, or adopt another person's account of who they are, and no institution should compel them to. Children are a separate matter, and this essay leaves them out of it entirely, because decisions made for people who cannot yet make them deserve a different and more careful conversation than this one. None of this strikes me as radical. It was, not long ago, the ordinary liberal default: live and let live, and keep the state and the employer out of what people believe. I have not moved. The ground around me has.
I should say plainly that I am not writing from a vacuum. From 2020 to 2026 I was the target of a sustained public campaign in my own village in western Massachusetts. It came in a petition to remove my public art, in hundreds of comments, in newspaper coverage that was never corrected, in police reports, in an attempt to have me evicted from my studio, and finally in a physical assault on a public sidewalk. Much of it was conducted in the language of identity. I would probably never have thought about any of what follows in such detail if that had not happened to me, and a reader who looks me up will find the story soon enough, so I would rather say so myself. A personal stake is a reason for discipline, not a disqualification. It means this essay has to hold itself to documents, label my own readings as readings, and give the opposing case its full strength. I have tried to do all three. The case itself waits for a later section, where it can be weighed as evidence rather than felt as grievance.
I call myself a feminist, and I want to show what I mean by that before I ask anyone to take the word on trust. I believe a woman doing the same work as a man should be paid the same for it, and that she should stand equal to him before the law, in contracts, in credit, in property, in court, and at the ballot box. I believe the female welder should be judged by her bead and the male nurse by his care. I believe that the single-sex shelters and rape crisis centers built by women in the 1970s were real achievements, won against real resistance, and that they are worth defending now. I believe that the long project of freeing women from roles they did not choose is one of the genuinely good things my lifetime has seen.
So, a feminist, and one who believes in equal rights and equal standing, but who does not deny that men and women differ. The physical differences are obvious and measurable. The psychological ones are subtler and real on average, with enormous overlap between individuals. I do not think that admitting either kind of difference betrays women. I think denying them does, because the protections women fought for were built on the fact that women's bodies and circumstances are their own. I do not claim mine is the only authentic feminism. The movement has never had one uncontested account of itself, and claiming exclusive ownership of it would reproduce the boundary-policing I am criticizing. My claim is narrower: my feminism puts equal standing, freedom from imposed roles, material protections where sex matters, and freedom of conscience at its center, and disagreement about how those principles apply should not disqualify anyone from the conversation.
Because this subject breaks down so often over words, I will fix four of them here and hold them to these meanings for the rest of the essay. By sex I mean the reproductive category, male or female, organized around the production of large or small gametes. By gender I mean the social roles, expectations, and stereotypes that cultures attach to each sex. By gender identity I mean a person's inner sense of being male, female, both, or neither. By self-identification I mean the policy of letting a declared gender identity determine a person's category in law, in official records, or in access to facilities. Most arguments on this subject go wrong because one of these words slides quietly into another's meaning halfway through a sentence. I will try not to let that happen here, and I ask the reader to hold me to it.
The problem this essay addresses can be stated in a paragraph. A strain of feminism now treats the ordinary middle position I have just described as hostile. It does not merely disagree with it; it enforces its own definitions through institutions rather than argument, in universities, human resources offices, professional bodies, public agencies, and local committees, and it treats people who question those definitions as people to be managed rather than answered. I think that strain is wrong on the merits, but my larger concern is what it has done to the movement it claims to speak for.
As I read its history, feminism has carried two broad tendencies from the beginning. One holds that women are a material class, defined by their bodies and by the particular harms that follow from them. The other holds that the goal is freedom from gender altogether, a world in which sex no longer sorts anyone into anything. The present conflict began when those two tendencies were asked to decide the same concrete questions and gave opposite answers. What that has done to the movement's judgment is the subject of the image in my title.
I come at this with more curiosity than anger, and as someone inside the tent rather than outside it throwing stones. The question in my title is meant seriously. It is a question that the current conversation has made surprisingly hard to answer, and I think the difficulty tells us something about where feminism has gone.
II. Two Feminisms from the Start
The first wave of feminism was a fight about rights, not identity. From the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, the women who built the movement wanted the vote, the right to own property in their own names, the right to make contracts, to keep their wages, to be educated, and to stand in court as persons rather than as dependents of their husbands. They did not need to argue about what a woman was. Everyone knew, including the men who opposed them. The fight was over what that fact should be allowed to justify, and the answer the first wave gave was: far less than it had been made to justify. A woman's body might bear children, but it did not unfit her mind for the ballot, her signature for a contract, or her hand for a deed. That position, equal standing without any pretense that the sexes are identical, is the root of my own, and I think it is still the most defensible ground feminism has ever stood on.
In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, and with it the single sentence that both sides of today's argument still claim: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" (in H. M. Parshley's 1953 English translation). Her meaning, in context, was that the social role of woman, with its passivity, its dependency, and its definition as man's Other, is imposed on a female body by a culture that treats men as the norm. Read that way, the sentence is materialist: the body is real, and the role laid on top of it is the injustice. But the sentence can be read another way, and later it was. If one becomes a woman, perhaps womanhood is something one does rather than something one is, a matter of becoming open in principle to anyone. Beauvoir did not settle the ambiguity, and I am not sure she saw it as one. It sat inside the founding text of modern feminism like a seed, and, as I read it, it is the seed of the present quarrel.
The radical feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s took the materialist reading and built a politics on it. For them, women were a sex class, and their oppression was organized around reproduction, sexuality, and male violence. Out of that analysis came women-only consciousness-raising groups, women's health collectives, battered women's shelters, and rape crisis centers, which began opening in American cities in the early 1970s. Single-sex spaces, in other words, were not an afterthought of feminism or an inheritance from Victorian propriety. They were among its signature achievements, built by women on the premise that women facing male violence needed somewhere men were not. Yet even here the other idea was already present. Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), argued that the end goal of feminist revolution was the elimination of the sex distinction itself, not merely male privilege. The movement that organized most fiercely around the female body also contained the boldest wish to make the body's sex irrelevant.
Alongside the radicals ran liberal feminism, less theoretical and more effective at changing law. It worked through legislatures and courts: the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its ban on sex discrimination in employment, Title IX in 1972, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Its central value was access, and beneath access lay choice. A woman should be free to choose her work, her marriage or none, her children or none, her life. That emphasis on individual choice was enormously liberating, and it carried the movement into the mainstream. It would also, decades later, become the vehicle through which self-definition entered feminism, since a politics built on the right to choose one's life could be extended without much strain to the right to choose one's category.
The movement's first open civil war came in the 1980s, and it is worth remembering as a precedent. On one side stood anti-pornography feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, whose model ordinances treating pornography as a civil rights violation were taken up in Minneapolis and Indianapolis in 1983 and 1984. On the other stood sex-positive feminists who saw those campaigns as censorship and as a betrayal of women's sexual freedom; the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality became a flashpoint between them. The sex wars were bitter, and they were fought over the question at the center of this essay: who gets to speak for women, and on what authority. Feminism survived them. It survived them because the two sides, however much they despised each other, argued in public, in print, and at conferences, and because neither had the institutional power to make the other's position unspeakable.
A third thread complicates the picture in a useful way. In 1982 Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice, a response to developmental psychology that had measured moral maturity against a male standard and found women wanting. Gilligan argued that women more often reasoned through an ethic of care and relationship rather than abstract rules and rights, and that this was a different voice rather than a deficient one. Her work has been debated ever since, and the strong version of her claim is contested. But it established something important: the idea that women and men differ, and that the difference deserves respect rather than correction, has a respectable feminist pedigree. It was not invented by feminism's opponents. Christina Hoff Sommers would later give a name, "equity feminism," in Who Stole Feminism? (1994), to the tradition that wanted equal rights and equal treatment without the claim that men and women are interchangeable. That is roughly where I stand.
Feminism also widened, again and again, its sense of who counted. In 1977 the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian feminists in Boston, issued a statement arguing that race, sex, class, and sexuality do not operate separately in women's lives but together, and that a feminism blind to that would serve only some women. In 1989 Kimberlé Crenshaw gave the idea its lasting name, "intersectionality," in a paper showing how Black women fell between the categories of discrimination law, unprotected as women because white women were not discriminated against and unprotected as Black people because Black men were not. Her central example was a 1976 case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, in which a court refused to let Black women combine claims of race and sex discrimination against an employer that had not hired Black women before 1964 and whose seniority-based layoffs then fell on them. These were real corrections, and feminism is better for them. They also matter for the argument ahead, because every one of these expansions brought more women inside the category of woman without changing what the category was. Black women, lesbian women, poor women, and immigrant women were always women. The movement had failed some of them, and it learned to do better.
None of these traditions was uniform, and liberal, radical, socialist, Black, and later queer feminisms overlapped and argued with one another in more ways than any short history can capture. What I offer is an interpretation, not a settled account: that beneath the variety, feminism has carried two broad tendencies that sometimes reinforce each other and sometimes pull apart. The first treats women as a material class, defined by their bodies and the specific harms that follow from them; it built the shelters, the rape crisis centers, and the women's sports leagues. The second seeks freedom from gender, a world in which sex sorts no one into anything; it runs from one reading of Beauvoir through Firestone toward the theorists of the 1990s. These are the two magnets of my title. It matters, though, to separate three claims that the second tendency can contain, because much of the present confusion comes from running them together. One is that gender roles should not be imposed, which nearly every feminist, including me, accepts. Another is that sex classification itself is unnatural or unjust, a far stronger and more contested claim. The third is that gender identity, rather than sex, should decide who is eligible for sex-based categories in law, sport, and facilities, which is a policy, not a theory, and does not follow from either of the first two. A feminist can hold the first without the second, and the second without the third. For most of the movement's history the two tendencies coexisted because they rarely had to decide anything concrete together. That changed when the third claim moved into institutional policy, which is the subject of section V. First, though, it is worth asking where the material tendency is simply right.
III. Where Biology Operates: Standards, Not Barriers
The principle I want to defend in this section is easy to state and harder to live by. Set the standard by what the job or the competition actually requires. Apply it to everyone. Then accept whatever ratio of men and women the standard produces. If ninety-five percent of the people who pass a real firefighting standard are men, that is an outcome, not a conspiracy, and the woman who passes it belongs on the crew as fully as any man beside her. If a standard turns out to measure something the job does not require, it should be fixed, not because it excludes women but because it measures the wrong thing. Sex matters in this section only where bodies matter, and the argument stops at exactly that line.
Some work is physically brutal in ways that ordinary office life makes easy to forget. Wildland and structural firefighting, offshore drilling, steel erection, heavy rescue, and certain kinds of military combat ask the body for strength, endurance, and aerobic capacity at the limit of what people can supply, often in heat, smoke, height, or weight. In this work a physical shortfall is not a private matter between a worker and an employer. It falls on the person being carried down the ladder, on the partner who has to make up the difference, on the crew whose margin for error has shrunk. A lowered standard in these jobs is not generosity. It is a transfer of risk onto people who never agreed to bear it. Because male bodies on average carry more muscle, larger hearts and lungs, denser bones, and greater height, real standards in this work will select more men than women. That is not sexism. Sexism would be refusing to hire the woman who meets the standard, or refusing to check whether the standard is real.
The best-known legal test of this principle comes from Canada, and it cuts in a direction that surprises people on both sides. Tawney Meiorin was a forest firefighter for the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, and she had done the job satisfactorily for several years. When the province introduced a new battery of fitness tests, she passed every part except a 2.5-kilometer run, which had to be completed in eleven minutes. She ran it in eleven minutes and forty-nine seconds, and she was dismissed. Her union challenged the dismissal, arguing that the aerobic standard screened out most women, even fit and capable ones, and that nobody had shown it was necessary to do the work safely. An arbitrator agreed and found no credible evidence that her slower time made her a safety risk. The provincial Court of Appeal reversed him, warning that a different standard for women would amount to reverse discrimination against men. In September 1999 the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously restored her job.
What the court did not do is as important as what it did. It did not say physical standards are illegitimate. It accepted that a firefighter must be fit and that the government's purpose, identifying people who could do the work safely and efficiently, was rationally connected to the job. It did not order a lower standard for women. What it held was that an employer who imposes a standard with that kind of effect must show the standard is reasonably necessary for the work itself, and the province had not done so. It had adopted a benchmark without demonstrating that the job required it, and without considering whether someone who could do the work at a lower aerobic capacity could be accommodated. The three-part test the court set out has governed occupational standards in Canada ever since (British Columbia (Public Service Employee Relations Commission) v. BCGSEU, [1999] 3 S.C.R. 3). I find the case clarifying precisely because it refuses both easy answers. It concedes my principle, that real standards are legitimate even when they produce unequal results, and it shows that the honest fight is over whether a given test measures the job or merely measures maleness. A feminism worth having should want that fight, fought on evidence, rather than either side's slogan.
Meiorin also exposes a question my principle has to answer before it goes any further. In firefighting, bodies matter, and yet the right method is to test each individual against the job. In sport and in shelters, bodies also matter, and there I will defend a line drawn by sex rather than a test of each person. Why the difference? The answer is not that sex matters more in one place than another. It is that the purpose of the rule differs, and so does what can be measured. A categorical line is justified when three conditions hold together. The provision exists to protect a class of people rather than to measure an individual's ability. An individual assessment would be impractical, unreliable, or degrading to carry out. And the harm the provision guards against does not depend on any one person's intentions, so that a sincere person can still defeat the provision's purpose. Where those conditions fail, and performance can be measured directly, the individual test is better, and the category has no business in the decision. Firefighting fails the first condition: the standard exists to find people who can do the work, and the work can be tested. Sport and single-sex spaces meet all three, for different reasons, which the next paragraphs set out. All three conditions have to hold. The second alone, that testing individuals is hard, would justify almost any crude proxy, which is why the first and third must do independent work. Where the conditions point in different directions, the individual assessment or a neutral option should win. A single-occupancy restroom is the obvious example: it protects no class, because it holds one person at a time. This test is mine, and it can be argued with. Its virtue is that it tells a reader exactly where I think sex should decide something and why, and it gives anyone who disagrees a specific claim to dispute.
Sport is the clearest case for a categorical line, because in sport the body is not a means to the work; it is the work, and the female category exists to protect a class of competitors whose advantage cannot be equalized by testing one athlete at a time. Female competitive categories exist for one reason: male puberty produces durable advantages in strength, power, speed, and size, and without a protected category almost no women would reach a final, a podium, or a scholarship in most sports. That is why women's sport was itself a feminist achievement, won through Title IX and decades of organizing. It was never premised on the idea that women are weaker people. It was premised on the fact that women are smaller and lighter bodies on average, and that fairness requires them to compete against each other.
The sporting bodies have now said so in policy. Before the 2024 Paris Games, World Athletics, World Aquatics, and the Union Cycliste Internationale had already barred athletes who had gone through male puberty from their female categories. On March 26, 2026, the International Olympic Committee went further, announcing that from the 2028 Los Angeles Games eligibility for any female event will be limited to biological females, determined by a one-time screening for the SRY gene, which triggers male development, according to the ten-page policy the IOC published that day. The policy also keeps transgender athletes and athletes with certain differences of sex development eligible for male categories, open categories, and events that do not classify by sex. I read that policy as the material idea of feminism winning on its own terms: a category built to protect female athletes doing what it was built to do. It is also worth noticing that the IOC was led into this by its first woman president, a two-time Olympic champion, and that female eligibility was a central issue in the election that brought her to office.
Single-sex spaces are a harder case to argue well, and it is easy to argue them in a circle. Saying that a space meant to exclude male bodies cannot serve its purpose once it admits them only restates the definition; it does not show the definition is the right policy. So the test above has to do the work. Shelters for women fleeing violence, changing rooms, communal showers, and prisons protect a class: women who are physically exposed, undressed, asleep, or confined in the presence of others, many of them there because of harm done to them by men. Assessing each individual who wants to enter would mean questioning, examining, or vetting people at the most private moments of their lives, which is impractical and degrading for everyone, transgender people included. And the harm the provision guards against is not only deliberate misconduct, which I do not believe most people who want to use women's facilities intend. It is also the loss of privacy and the fear that a woman who has been assaulted may feel in the presence of a male body regardless of the intentions of the person in it. That harm cannot be cured by anyone's sincerity. The settings are not all alike, and the case is strongest where exposure and confinement are greatest: a prison cell or a shelter dormitory is not a single-occupancy restroom. Where individual facilities or third spaces can be added, they should be, so that no one is left without a decent option. I am not resting any of this on crime statistics that would need defending line by line, and I recognize that the rule imposes a real hardship on some transgender women. The trade-off is real on both sides. I think it comes out in favor of the category where all three conditions are met, and I say so knowing it is a judgment, not a proof.
In each of these cases sex matters because bodies matter in that setting. The firefighter's crew, the female final, and the shelter are all places where physical facts determine safety or fairness, and pretending otherwise transfers costs onto women and onto the people who depend on them. But the argument has a boundary, and the boundary matters as much as the argument. Outside the settings where bodies matter, sex should matter very little, and the next section is about that much larger territory.
IV. Where It Doesn't: Roles, Temperament, and the Overlap
The physical differences between the sexes are the easy part of this argument, because they can be measured with a stopwatch and a scale. The psychological differences are harder, and this is where honest people need to slow down. On average, men and women differ in some measured traits and interests. One large meta-analysis of vocational interests found one of the biggest psychological sex differences on record, with men on average more drawn to working with things and women on average more drawn to working with people (Su, Rounds and Armstrong, "Men and Things, Women and People," Psychological Bulletin, 2009). Differences in some personality traits are smaller but consistent across many cultures (Costa, Terracciano and McCrae, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001). The word that matters in every one of those sentences is average. The distributions overlap so heavily that knowing someone's sex tells you very little about the particular person in front of you.
The brain is where the debate turns heated, and I want to be careful not to stake this essay on either side of it. In 2015 Daphna Joel and colleagues published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences arguing that most human brains are not consistently "male" or "female" but mosaics, mixing features more common in one sex with features more common in the other. Several research groups replied in the same journal the following year, among them Marco Del Giudice and colleagues and Adam Chekroud and colleagues. They argued that Joel's method could not detect real differences even where they existed, and that when many features are analyzed together, brains can be classified by sex with high accuracy. Both things can be true at once: individual brains mix features, and the mixture still differs systematically between groups. For my purposes the dispute does not need to be settled. Nothing I argue depends on the brain being sharply sexed, and nothing I argue is threatened if it turns out to be a mosaic.
What matters is what averages can and cannot justify. They may be part of the reason some fields lean heavily one way, why nursing and early childhood education remain mostly female and engineering and the skilled trades mostly male, alongside socialization, pay, working conditions, the culture of particular workplaces, and discrimination that has not disappeared. I do not need to settle how much each factor contributes, and I do not claim to know. They cannot justify telling any particular person that they do not belong. An average describes a crowd; it says nothing binding about the individual who walks through the door. The old sexism made exactly that mistake. It took a tendency, real or imagined, and turned it into a rule. Women were said to be too emotional for medicine, too delicate for the law, too unmechanical for the shop. The rule was then enforced against every woman, including the many who were none of those things, and the evidence of their ability was never allowed to count.
The two nurses who looked after me in the hospital and the women I have watched weld are the whole answer to that mistake. Nursing draws on qualities of attention and care that, on average, more women than men are inclined toward, and the men who choose it and do it well are no less nurses for being exceptions. Welding asks for patience, steadiness, and an eye for the puddle that has nothing to do with sex, along with a physical tolerance for heat and awkward positions that varies more from person to person than between the sexes. In both cases the work itself is the test, and the test is indifferent to who takes it.
The strain of feminism I am criticizing makes the opposite mistake, and it is just as costly. Having rightly rejected the old use of averages as barriers, it has too often gone on to deny that the averages exist at all, treating any observed difference in interests or choices as proof of hidden discrimination. That turns every uneven ratio into an accusation against someone, and it leaves no room for the possibility that some of the difference reflects what free people choose. My position avoids both errors. It acknowledges the averages, refuses to let them decide anything about individuals, and saves sex-based rules for the narrow settings in the previous section where bodies themselves are the issue.
One application of that principle deserves to be stated now, because it will matter later. Who sits on a public board, a committee, or any body that makes decisions on behalf of a community is a question of standing, not of bodies. Nothing about governing a park, a library, or a bridge depends on the physical facts that justify a female sports category or a women's shelter. Sex has no business deciding who gets a seat at such a table, in either direction. If that sounds obvious, it is worth noticing how often it is ignored, and section VII describes one place where it is.
If this middle position is as reasonable as I believe it is, a fair question follows: why is it so often treated, in the institutions that now shape public life, as something close to heresy? The answer lies not in any argument that was won but in what happened to the second of feminism's two ideas when it left the seminar room.
V. The Institutional Turn
In 1990 Judith Butler published Gender Trouble, and the second of feminism's two ideas acquired its most influential theory. Butler argued that gender is not an expression of some inner essence but a performance, constituted by the repeated acts that seem to express it, and she went further, suggesting that sex itself is no more natural or pre-social than gender. The book was difficult, brilliant in places, and enormously productive. I want to be fair to it. It began as a critique of rigid roles, of the idea that being female obliges anyone to be soft, domestic, or decorative, and much of that critique I share. Queer theory, which grew alongside it, set out to destabilize categories that had been used to police people, and there were real injustices for that project to expose. As theory, offered in books and argued in seminars, it was one side of an argument feminism had been having with itself since Beauvoir.
What happened next is the part of this story most often told carelessly, by people on my side as much as anyone, so I want to separate four things that tend to be run together. The first is intellectual influence: a theory changes the language and assumptions of people who later work in institutions. The second is policy adoption: an institution writes a particular definition into its rules. The third is enforcement: members or employees face consequences for breaking those rules. The fourth is the suppression of dissent: people are penalized not for conduct a legitimate policy forbids but for saying they disagree. These are four different claims, and evidence for one does not prove the next. Over the following decades many women's studies programs became gender studies programs, and the vocabulary taught there spread into human resources, nonprofits, professional associations, and public agencies. That is influence, and it is easy to see. Policy adoption is documented in particular places, such as the Scottish statute and guidance discussed below. Enforcement and suppression of dissent are documented in particular cases, some of which section VI describes, where courts or regulators later found that institutions had acted against people for protected beliefs. What I cannot show, and will not claim, is that a single theory traveled in a straight line from the seminar to every handbook. My claim is narrower: in specific institutions that can be named, a contested definition was adopted as policy and then defended by penalizing disagreement rather than answering it. Once that happens, disagreement stops being a position in a debate and becomes a disciplinary matter, and the definition no longer needs to win the argument to prevail.
Self-identification is where the third claim from section II meets institutional practice. It is worth saying plainly that it does not follow from Butler. A theory that gender is performed does not by itself say who should run in the women's 1,500 meters or sleep in a women's shelter, and many people persuaded by the theory reject self-identification as policy. But once self-identification is adopted as policy, it collides directly with the material tendency of feminism. A category built on bodies, such as the female sports category or the women's shelter, cannot also be open to anyone who declares membership in it, because the declaration does not change the body the category exists to account for. Questions the two tendencies had never had to decide together, about who could enter a changing room, compete in a race, be housed in a prison, or be counted in a statistic, now had to be decided. On those particular questions they give opposite answers.
The clearest recent example of how this played out comes from Scotland, and it shows institutions overreaching and then being corrected. In 2018 the Scottish Parliament passed an act setting a target for women's representation on public boards, and the act defined "woman" to include trans women. For Women Scotland, a grassroots feminist group, challenged that definition. In February 2022 the Inner House of the Court of Session struck it down, holding that by folding trans women into the definition of women the act had confused two distinct protected characteristics in an area reserved to the UK Parliament ([2022] CSIH 4). The Scottish ministers then issued revised statutory guidance in April 2022 that reached much the same result by another route, counting as women anyone holding a gender recognition certificate. The group went back to court. It lost in the Outer House in December 2022 and in the Inner House in 2023, and on April 16, 2025 it won a unanimous judgment from the UK Supreme Court, which held that "woman" and "sex" in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex ([2025] UKSC 16). The court was also careful to say that trans people remain protected against discrimination under the act's separate provisions on gender reassignment, which is close to my own view: protection from mistreatment, without redefinition of the category. The lesson I draw is about process. After a court struck down its statutory definition, an elected government reached the same result through ministerial guidance, and it took a feminist organization two rounds of litigation, ending in the country's highest court, to restore the plain meaning of the word.
The American picture is different, and an honest essay written in Massachusetts has to say so. In Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the U.S. Supreme Court held by six votes to three that firing someone for being transgender is discrimination "because of sex" under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (590 U.S. 644). What is striking is how the majority got there. Justice Gorsuch's opinion proceeded on the assumption that "sex" refers to biological distinctions between male and female, and reasoned that an employer who fires a person for being transgender must necessarily take that person's sex into account. The court expressly declined to decide questions about bathrooms, locker rooms, or dress codes, saying in so many words that it was not addressing bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything of the kind. So Bostockand For Women Scotland start from the same understanding of the word "sex" and arrive at different results on different questions: one protects transgender people from being fired, the other preserves the biological meaning of the category for single-sex provisions. I find nothing in either ruling that I would reverse. Massachusetts law goes further than federal law. The state's transgender equal rights law, enacted in 2011 and effective in 2012, added gender identity to the protections against discrimination in employment, housing, credit, and education, and a 2016 law extended those protections to public accommodations, which the state's voters upheld at the ballot in 2018. I support those protections. Nothing in them requires anyone to be fired, evicted, or shunned for holding the view that sex is real, and section VII describes what happens when that line is blurred.
The language has changed too, and I will keep this brief, because it is the easiest part of the subject to caricature. Public health agencies, medical journals, and advocacy groups increasingly write of "pregnant people," "people who menstruate," or "people with a cervix." The intention is inclusion, and I take it at face value. The effect, though, is that the female sex class becomes nameless in the very fields of medicine that exist because of its bodies. A woman reading guidance about her own pregnancy is addressed as a set of organs. Language that was meant to add someone has ended up subtracting someone else.
There is a pattern in how a contested idea can come to seem settled, and I have given it a name from my own experience: Distributed Maintenance. An allegation, or a definition, enters public circulation. Institutions repeat it, or simply leave it uncorrected. Later evidence against it gets a fraction of the attention the original claim received. The original account survives, not because anyone defends it, but because no single institution is responsible for retiring it. The pattern requires no conspiracy, no shared motive, and no bad faith; each institution can explain its own silence on its own terms. I developed the idea from a single documented case, and I offer it at the national scale only as a possibility. Something like it may explain how a contested definition of woman came to seem settled across so many institutions without anyone having won the argument. Section VII shows the pattern at work where the documents allow me to show it in full.
Where self-identification prevailed in the institutions I can document, then, it did so less by persuading the materialist tendency of feminism than by being written into procedures that made persuasion unnecessary. The costs of that did not fall on the theorists. They fell on people who had to live inside the institutions, and the next section is about who those people are.
VI. The Cost to Everyone
When an idea wins institutions rather than arguments, the bill comes due for people who never sat in the seminar. I count four groups who have paid it, and the honesty of this essay depends on including the fourth, because it is the one my side of the argument most often forgets.
Before counting costs, it helps to separate questions that public argument usually lumps together, because they do not have to share an answer. One is legal protection against discrimination in work, housing, and services, which I support for transgender people without reservation. Another is access to particular facilities, which section III argued should turn on the purpose of the space. A third is eligibility for sex-separated sport, which turns on fairness in competition. A fourth is workplace rules about names, pronouns, and conduct toward colleagues, which can be matters of ordinary professionalism. A fifth is discipline for holding or expressing a belief about sex, which is where I think institutions have gone furthest wrong. A policy can protect transgender employees from discrimination and still keep a female category in a particular sport. A workplace can require respectful conduct without requiring anyone to affirm a philosophy. Most of what follows concerns the fifth question, because that is where the costs I describe were imposed.
The first group is the dissenting feminists themselves. Maya Forstater, a researcher on tax and development, lost her consultancy with a London think tank in 2019, when her contract was not renewed, after tweeting that people cannot change their biological sex. An employment tribunal at first ruled that her belief was not even protected under UK equality law, describing it as not worthy of respect in a democratic society. In 2021 the Employment Appeal Tribunal overturned that ruling, holding that gender-critical belief is a protected philosophical belief, and in 2022 a tribunal found that she had been discriminated against. Kathleen Stock, a philosopher at the University of Sussex who had written that biological sex matters, resigned in October 2021 after a campaign of protests against her on campus. In March 2025 the Office for Students, England's higher-education regulator, fined the university £585,000 for failing to protect free speech and academic freedom. Its investigation examined the university's policies rather than the circumstances of her departure, and the university said it would challenge the findings. These were not fringe provocateurs. They were women whose views would have been unremarkable to most second-wave feminists, and they were punished by institutions that had absorbed a newer idea of feminism and treated the older one as bigotry.
The second group is ordinary women, and here I want to be careful about what the evidence shows. On the sports question, public opinion is not close: a 2025 Gallup survey found that sixty-nine percent of Americans believe transgender athletes should compete on teams matching their sex at birth. Among elite female athletes, a peer-reviewed survey of 175 national, elite, and world-class competitors, published in the Journal of Sports Sciences in 2024, found that 58 percent favored categories based on biological sex, while 81 percent wanted sporting bodies to do more to include transgender athletes, and 94 percent described themselves as supportive of transgender people in society generally. Views varied by sport, with the least support for open eligibility in contact sports and the most in precision sports. That second finding matters as much as the first. It shows that women can hold both commitments, protecting the female category and wanting trans athletes treated decently, which is roughly the position this essay defends. Polling does not settle what is right; a policy can be unpopular and just, or popular and unjust. I cite these figures only to show a gap between institutions and the public, not as a reason in themselves. The reasons are the ones in section III. What I will not claim is that some silent majority of women privately agrees with me. I do not know what most women think in private, and neither does anyone else. What I can say is narrower and better supported: when an institution's policy runs against what most of the public believes, and dissent carries professional penalties, the gap between what people say in private and what they say at work is predictable. In the documented institutional cases, the professional risk has often been highest for women, because the categories at issue are theirs and because their objections cannot be waved away as coming from outsiders. Men have faced campaigns too, and some gender-critical women have become highly visible public figures, so this is a pattern in particular settings rather than a law of nature.
The third group is men, and this is the first place where the question in my title stops being rhetorical. When a woman raises the material objection, that a female category exists because of female bodies, she is attacked as a traitor to her sex or her movement. When a man raises the same objection, he is not even granted that much standing. He is presumed hostile, an outsider meddling in a question that belongs to others, and the substance of what he said is dismissed along with him. In this conversation, the answer to "what is a man?" is given in advance: a suspect. I do not raise this to complain. I raise it because a conversation that one sex cannot safely have and the other cannot credibly have is a conversation that nobody is having, and the questions it was supposed to settle are being settled instead by whoever controls the procedures.
The asymmetry runs deeper than any single conversation. Feminism became a named movement, with legal reforms, academic departments, and cultural authority built around women's interests and status. Its counterpart for men never settled into anything comparable. The men's liberation writers of the early 1970s, beginning with essays such as Jack Sawyer's "On Male Liberation" (1970) and the early work of Warren Farrell, set out to criticize rigid male roles while supporting women's gains. Within two decades the movement had split. One branch became pro-feminist work, organized in groups such as the National Organization for Men Against Sexism, that tended to treat men's problems as symptoms of male power. The other became a men's rights movement, represented by groups such as the National Coalition for Men and by Farrell's later The Myth of Male Power (1993), which most academic and media settings came to treat as backlash rather than as a counterpart. Meanwhile the patterns that fall hardest on men went largely without an institutional home. Men account for roughly four in five suicides in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than nine in ten deaths on the job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women now earn close to sixty percent of bachelor's degrees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and only men are required to register with the Selective Service. Men's and masculinities studies does exist as an academic field, with its own professional association and journals, and scholars such as Raewyn Connell and Michael Kimmel. But much of that field has studied masculinity as a problem to be examined rather than men as a group with interests to be served. In practice, women's sex-based interests can be asserted as a matter of justice, while men's are more often treated as irrelevant, or as a threat to women's gains. That is beginning to change. Richard Reeves's Of Boys and Men (2022), and the American Institute for Boys and Men he founded in 2023, have brought these questions into mainstream policy argument without treating them as a grievance against women. That is the model I would want. Equal standing has always been meant to run in both directions. For most of my lifetime, in practice, it has run in one.
The fourth group is trans people themselves, and my side of this argument too often forgets them. The institutional overreach of the last decade produced a backlash that is now visible in legislation, in sports policy, in executive orders, and in the tone of public debate. Some of that backlash has gone well beyond correcting overreach, and its costs fall on transgender adults who wanted nothing more than to work, live, and be left alone, the people my own live-and-let-live principle is supposed to protect. Compelled affirmation did not secure their place in public life. It made their acceptance hostage to a set of definitions that most of the public did not share, and when the public pushed back, it pushed back against them. A settlement built on non-compulsion, protection from discrimination without redefinition of sex, would have served them better, and still could.
A movement that makes adversaries of dissenting women, alienates most of the public on the questions it treats as settled, gives men no standing to object, and ends by exposing the very people it set out to protect has lost track of whom it is for. That is not a failure of good intentions. It is what happens to a moral compass when one magnet is moved much closer than the other.
VII. A Case from the Village
Everything I have argued so far concerns national institutions and international sporting bodies, and an honest reader is entitled to ask what any of it looks like on the ground. I can answer from one small place in western Massachusetts, because I lived through it and kept the documents. The full record, told in order with every claim tied to its source, is published separately as "The Charge With No Evidence" at johnsendelbach.com. Here I draw from it only what bears on this essay's argument, and that is two separate matters, which I want to keep visibly apart. The first is a question of governance: who controls a public asset, under what authority, and with what accountability. The second is a set of public allegations against me and how institutions responded to them, and it connects to the subject of this essay chiefly through one document, a letter that used the vocabulary of gender identity to try to end my tenancy. The people involved appear by role rather than by name; anyone who wants the names will find them in that record, beside the documents. This is also where the question in my title becomes personal, because what follows is, among other things, an account of what standing a man has in his own village.
I begin with the case that tests my own principle hardest, because it requires me to apply it against an institution run by women. The Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls is a public crossing, a former trolley bridge owned by the Shelburne Falls Fire District, and it is one of the most visited places in this part of the state. For nearly a century, it has been managed by a committee of the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club, a private organization whose own page on the bridge's website says its membership is open to all women in the region. Seats on the committee are filled by internal nomination. As far as I have been able to determine, there are no elections, no term limits, no open meetings, and no published minutes that a citizen can read, and I have found no public record of any formal delegation of authority from the Fire District to the club. Every member on the committee's 2026 roster is a woman. No man in either of the two towns the bridge connects can serve on the body that decides what stands on that public crossing. I made three works for the bridge, and that is how I came to learn how the committee operates.
I want to be exact about what I am objecting to, because this is precisely where the essay's principle has to cut both ways. Women's clubs are free to exist, to meet privately, to choose their own members, and to do good work, and the gardens on that bridge are beautiful because of decades of women's labor. My objection is not to the club. It is to a private single-sex body holding unaccountable authority over a public asset. In section III I defended sex-based categories where bodies matter, in sport, in shelters, and in changing rooms. In section IV I argued that governance is a question of standing, not of bodies, and that sex has no business deciding who gets a seat at a public table. If a private men's club governed a public bridge on the same terms, I would object in the same words, and I would expect every feminist I know to object louder. I made the case for reform in a signed column in the Greenfield Recorder on February 10, 2026, proposing a part-time professional steward accountable to the Fire District, open meetings, published minutes, term limits, and a real way for every resident to take part. The committee did not respond.
The rest of the story can be told briefly. On June 6, 2020, a protest closed the main road bridge in the village without notice to the businesses along it, and I went out and objected to how it was being conducted. An edited clip of the exchange, which began only after the first minutes of the conversation had already passed, was viewed some twenty thousand times. Within days a petition demanding the removal of my public art from the town drew more than six hundred signatures before the petition site took it down. Roughly two hundred comments called me a racist, a bigot, a Klansman, a child predator, and an antisemite, urged that I be thrown off the bridge, and listed my public works for removal; in six years no one has produced a statement, an incident, or a witness behind any of those labels. The regional newspaper put the already-removed petition on its front page and never corrected its coverage, though I wrote to it many times. The bridge committee met privately about removing my work, did not contact me, and hung an anti-racism sign beside my fountain, beside the inlaid Black Stones of Africa that had been set into its paving nine years earlier to honor a mason's two biracial daughters, without acknowledging what those stones were. Over the next three years one person filed roughly eight police reports about me, and the police advised her to seek protection orders without recording any interview with me. On November 30, 2025, two people assaulted me on a public sidewalk, and one of them threw my phone, still recording, into the Deerfield River.
The record of neutral decisions is short and points one way, though not every ruling went in my favor. In June 2023 a clerk-magistrate found no probable cause on a criminal harassment complaint against me (docket 2341AC000088). A district court judge later vacated one harassment prevention order after hearing the audio of what had happened, and in December 2025 he denied the extension of another after watching the video, saying from the bench, by my account, that he believed me. On July 28, 2026, both people who assaulted me admitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on assault and battery; both cases were continued without a finding for six months, with stay-away orders, and restitution was ordered for the phone (dockets 2641CR0158 and 2641CR0159). A continuance without a finding is not a conviction, and I will not call it one. It is also not an acquittal. Each of these outcomes has a defined legal scope. A finding of no probable cause means the evidence offered was not enough to issue a criminal complaint, not that every allegation behind it was false; a vacated or unextended order means only that the order should not stand. On the other side of the ledger, a court granted a harassment order against me in 2023, the day after the police advised it, and judges denied petitions of my own in 2025 and 2026. Each of those decisions answered the question in front of it, and I do not treat any of them, mine or hers, as a verdict on six years.
The single document that bears most directly on this essay is a letter. On September 6, 2024, the person who had filed those police reports wrote to the new owner of the old mill building where I had rented my workspace for four years, and asked him to evict me. She wrote that I had "verbally accosted and harassed" her adult child, who had been meeting with bandmates in the building. She wrote that I narrated videos "spewing hateful racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric," and that she, "along with many other women in the community," could no longer attend events at the mill. She told him my videos had been removed from YouTube for hate speech.
What the letter did not contain matters more than what it did. It did not quote a single sentence of the rhetoric it described. It did not identify a video, a date, or a statement that anyone could check. The claim about YouTube was false: no platform removed my videos; I had set them to private myself. The case for taking a working artist's studio away from me rested entirely on a list of identity categories, on the writer's own family, and on her claim to speak for the women of the town. I do not dismiss the protections those categories carry. As I said in section V, Massachusetts law protects gender identity in employment, housing, and public accommodations, and I support that law. But the letter did not invoke the law, which would have required evidence and a process. It borrowed the law's vocabulary and dropped its standard of proof. That is the mechanism of Distributed Maintenance meeting a gatekeeper: an accusation by category, addressed to someone with power over a person's livelihood, standing in for evidence, and shifting onto the accused the impossible burden of disproving a label.
The owner's reply is the most sensible thing anyone in authority wrote in six years, and I hold it up as a model. He declined to evict a long-standing tenant over a personal conflict that, as he noted, had produced no criminal or civil judgment against me, because doing so would tell every other tenant that their workspace was not safe from the whims of management or community grievances. He offered to pay toward a professional mediator for all of us. The letter's author replied that she would discuss it with her lawyer, and the mediation never took place. Fourteen months later came the assault outside the brewery. What the owner did, in a few sentences, is what section III asks of a fire department: he measured the claim against a real standard, in this case whether any court had found anything, rather than against the force of the accusation, and he applied the standard to a person instead of a job.
There is one more pattern in this case that I have to address, carefully, because it bears directly on the subject of this essay and because it is the easiest thing in it to misuse. Most of the people who shaped the public account against me were women: the people who confronted and filmed me on the bridge, the author of the petition, the reporter and the editor in charge of the newspaper's coverage, every member of the committee that met about my work and hung its sign (all women, because the parent club admits only women), the commenter who introduced the charge of antisemitism, a state commissioner who wrote that restraining orders against me existed when they did not, the pastor whose column called for hearing untold stories and did not mention mine, and the person who filed the police reports and wrote the eviction letter. In my reading of the comment threads, women also wrote most of the words, though I have not counted them and offer that only as an impression. The counter-record belongs in the same paragraph. Men acted against me too: one of the two people who assaulted me, a professor who repeated the charge of antisemitism to my face on a public street, a commenter who helped catalog my works for removal, and the police officers who advised protection orders without hearing from me. Men and women also stood with me: the judge, the mill's owner, the committee's own assistant gardener who rescued my trolley gate from a scrapyard and returned it, the brewery owner who gave the witness statement supporting probable cause, the petition's author, who later posted that I had been kind and understanding toward her, and a committee member who told me privately that the committee had thrown me under the bus. And the base rates explain part of the pattern before any interpretation begins. Volunteer committees, church leadership, community newspapers, and online community groups in small New England towns often lean heavily female.
So I will claim only what the record supports. The pattern is not that women did this to me; people of both sexes did, and people of both sexes stood up. The pattern is that once the record changed, with the no-probable-cause finding, the vacated order, the judge's words, and the admissions to sufficient facts, no one inside the group that had carried the story broke ranks in public. I do not know what speaking up would have cost any of them, and this essay's own argument holds that such costs can be real and hidden. Whether that reflects ordinary in-group loyalty, the momentum of a story already told, or a cultural script in which a woman's stated fear is treated as settling the question, I do not know, and I offer those as questions rather than conclusions. They are fair questions for anyone thinking seriously about how accusation and belief work in communities like mine, and for a feminism that once taught that women should be believed and must now decide what that means when the evidence runs the other way.
The letter establishes one thing on its face: how a set of identity-based accusations, without supporting evidence, was put to someone with power over my livelihood. Beyond that, I will add one conclusion that is mine alone and labeled as such. Over six years of reading what this one family has written publicly and watching how they have acted, I have come to the conclusion that they treat their advocacy on transgender and LGBTQ+ issues as a weapon as much as a cause: anyone who crosses them is cast as a threat to those communities, and that framing is then used to move institutions against that person. The eviction letter is the one instance where that framing was put in writing and sent to someone with the power to act on it. I rest the conclusion on that document and go no further. It says nothing about anyone's identity, and nothing about the communities whose name was invoked, who had no part in it.
The case also shows Distributed Maintenance in full. An allegation entered public circulation in June 2020. The newspaper reproduced it and never corrected it. The committee acted on it and, after speaking about me freely to the newspaper in June 2020, has addressed me publicly only once in six years. The institutions I wrote to about the charge of antisemitism, a university and several Jewish organizations and publications, did not reply. When the evidence came in, a dismissal, a vacated order, a ruling from the bench, two admissions to sufficient facts, it received a fraction of the attention the allegation had, and the original story went on shaping how the village saw me. I cannot see inside that silence, and I do not claim that anyone who stayed quiet believed the original allegation; silence can mean caution, fatigue, indifference, or a policy of not commenting. Each institution can explain its own silence on its own terms: the letter it did not answer, the correction it did not run, the question it did not ask. None of them has to account for the cumulative result, and that is how the result survives.
I want to be as clear about the limits of this case as about its force. One village and one man's six years show that the mechanism I have described can operate, in ordinary people, in an ordinary place, using the vocabulary of causes I support. They do not show how often it operates, and I make no claim that they do. That is the same standard I applied to my opponents in section VI, where I declined to claim a silent majority I could not document. A case is an illustration, not a census. But it is a documented illustration, and it shows what the institutional turn of the last thirty years looks like when it reaches the level of a landlord's inbox.
VIII. The Magnet Problem
Anyone who has worked with steel knows what a magnet does to a compass. Set a compass on a bench far from any metal and the needle settles toward magnetic north and holds there, steady enough to steer by. Bring a magnet near it and the needle swings to the magnet. Bring a second magnet near it from the other side and the needle stops pointing anywhere useful. It turns toward whichever pull is closest and strongest at the moment, and when you move one of the magnets, it jerks after it. Nothing is wrong with the needle. It is doing exactly what a needle does. The trouble is that it has stopped responding to the earth and started responding to the hardware on the bench.
A movement has a moral compass in the same sense, and feminism's has been sitting between two magnets for most of its history. They are the two tendencies traced in section II. Both have real force, and both have done good. For a long time they sat far enough apart, and far enough from the needle, that the compass could still find north between them: equal standing, freedom from imposed roles, protection where bodies made women vulnerable. When the second idea moved into the institutions, it was as though one magnet had been slid right up against the glass. The needle swung hard toward it and stayed there, and the movement found itself pointing away from the material interests it had been founded to protect.
I want to describe what that looks like in behavior rather than in people, because the image is about a mechanism, not a villain. A contested definition gets treated as though it were settled, so that questioning it becomes an offense rather than a contribution. Dissent gets met with discipline instead of argument, through complaint procedures, dismissals, and campaigns. Good faith is denied in advance to anyone who disagrees, so that every objection is read as a symptom of bigotry rather than as a claim to be weighed. Loyalty to the group comes to stand in for judgment, stubbornness comes to look like principle, and questioning comes to look like betrayal. Institutions reward whoever pulls hardest within them, whatever their numbers outside. None of this requires anyone to be cruel. It requires only that people respond to the nearest pull rather than to the evidence, which is what needles and people both do when the field around them is strong enough.
The image works in the other direction too, and I would be dishonest if I pretended it applied only to my opponents. The backlash of the last few years is a magnet as well, and it is pulling hard. It has moved well past correcting overreach and into territory that would strip transgender adults of ordinary protections and dignity, and it has its own loud voices, its own purity tests, and its own institutions that reward whoever pulls hardest. It pulls on me. Six years of what I described in the previous section would bend anyone's needle, and I have had to keep checking mine. The only defense I know is the one a surveyor uses: go back to fixed points that do not move. In this subject there are two. One is the material fact of sex, where it actually matters. The other is the individual person in front of you, judged by what they do.
The remedy for a compass that has lost its bearing is not the opposite magnet. Shoving a second magnet against the glass only swings the needle the other way, and a feminism that overcorrects into contempt for transgender people, or into nostalgia for the old use of averages as barriers, will be just as lost as the one it replaced. The remedy is to move the magnets back, far enough that the needle can feel the earth again. That means treating the questions in this essay as open, arguable, and answerable on evidence. It means letting women and men both speak to them without being cast out. And it means building rules that rest on bodies where bodies matter, and on individuals everywhere else.
IX. The Other Side's Best Case
An essay that criticizes a position owes that position its strongest form. What follows is my attempt to state the objections a thoughtful opponent would raise, in terms they would recognize, before answering them. If a reader who disagrees with me finishes this section feeling fairly represented, it has done its job, even if they remain unpersuaded.
The first objection is that my side is not the quiet one. Defenders of trans inclusion would point out that gender-critical campaigners in Britain have had sustained, sympathetic coverage in major newspapers for years, that well-funded organizations have pressed the case in courts and legislatures, that the UK Supreme Court and the International Olympic Committee have both ruled the way I prefer, and that in the United States the last two years have brought a wave of restrictive laws, executive orders, and sports policies. On that account, the people being silenced now are not gender-critical women but transgender people, and an essay about institutional capture has the direction of power backwards. I concede much of this. The balance of power has shifted, roughly since 2023, and it is partly because of that shift that this essay can be written and published without much risk. My argument concerns the institutions where self-identification became policy in the decade before, and the costs that policy imposed, many of which are documented in court rulings that went against those institutions. Both things can be true: the earlier capture was real, and the reaction to it now has its own excesses, which I tried to name in section VIII.
The second objection is that "compelled affirmation" is an inflated name for ordinary courtesy. Using the name a person asks to be called, and the pronouns they prefer, costs almost nothing and is what decent people do for one another. Calling that coercion makes a grievance out of good manners. I agree that courtesy is a virtue, and I practice it. If someone tells me what they want to be called, I call them that. The line I draw is elsewhere. It falls at mandated speech enforced by employers and regulators, at the redefinition of sex in law, records, and data, and at the treatment of disagreement about those definitions as misconduct. Manners are offered freely. The things I object to are imposed, and the difference between offering and imposing is the whole of my position.
The objection deserves its harder case, though, because "compel no one" is easy to say and hard to apply. Suppose an employer requires staff to address a transgender colleague by that colleague's chosen name and pronouns. I think that rule is legitimate as a rule about conduct, much like a rule against addressing colleagues by insulting nicknames. Using the name and pronoun someone asks for in direct address costs me nothing I value and affirms nothing about my beliefs on sex. Deliberately and repeatedly refusing to do so, aimed at a particular person, can become harassment, and an employer may treat it that way. The line is crossed elsewhere: when staff are required to declare their own pronouns, to profess in training that sex is a matter of identity, to record self-declared gender as sex in data meant to measure sex, or to keep silent about their disagreement even when they voice it respectfully and away from the colleague concerned. The first is courtesy enforced as conduct. The rest is belief enforced as conduct, and that is what I object to. Reasonable people will draw this line in slightly different places, and the hard cases between conduct and belief deserve argument rather than slogans from either side.
The third objection is that the material harm runs the other way. Transgender people face harassment, violence, discrimination in housing and work, and hostility in public life at rates far beyond anything their critics endure, and an essay focused on the discomfort of gender-critical academics or the standing of men in a village gets the moral proportions wrong. This objection has real weight, and I concede the central fact. Transgender people, as a small and visible minority, bear real and often serious harms, and nothing in this essay should be read as minimizing them. Large surveys of transgender Americans, such as the U.S. Transgender Survey, report high rates of harassment and mistreatment at work, in housing, and in public life. My answer is the one I gave in section VI: the overreach I have criticized did not protect them. It made their acceptance depend on definitions most people did not share, and the backlash that followed has landed on them hardest. A settlement built on protection from discrimination, without the redefinition of sex, would serve them better than either the overreach or the reaction.
The fourth objection is the strongest of these. It holds that feminism has always expanded its sense of who counts, and that trans inclusion is simply the next step. Black women, lesbian women, working-class women, and immigrant women were all, at one time, marginalized within the movement or excluded from its priorities, and each time the movement was right to widen. Those who resisted widening were on the wrong side of feminism's history, and the people resisting now will be judged the same way. I take this seriously, because the history it cites is real and I honor it. My answer rests on the distinction I drew in section II. The Combahee River Collective and Kimberlé Crenshaw asked feminism to see women it had overlooked, women who were always inside the category and whose particular circumstances the movement had failed to account for. Each of those expansions brought more women into feminism's attention without changing what the word woman meant. The present demand is of a different kind. It asks the category itself to change, so that it is defined by identity rather than by sex, and that change has direct consequences for every provision, including sports, shelters, prisons, and statistics, that was built on the body. It is possible to support the earlier expansions wholeheartedly and to see this one as a different kind of claim, which deserves to be argued on its own terms rather than carried along by the moral momentum of the others.
The fifth objection is that sex is not a clean binary at all. Chromosomal, gonadal, and hormonal variations exist; some people are born with differences of sex development that do not fit neat categories; and a definition of sex that cannot handle them, the objection goes, cannot bear the weight I have put on it. I accept the facts and dispute the conclusion. Sex is defined by reproductive function, the production of one of two kinds of gamete, and the developmental pathways organized around it. Rare variations in that development are real and deserve medical care and personal respect, but they are variations within a two-part system, not evidence that the system does not exist. Categories built on sex can handle rare cases case by case, and the sporting bodies are now attempting exactly that; the IOC's 2026 policy addresses athletes with differences of sex development explicitly, and whether its screening method handles them fairly is a fair question for argument. Rare exceptions refine a category. They do not dissolve it.
The sixth objection is that I have framed a false choice. A pluralist institution, the objection goes, does not have to choose between material categories and their dissolution. It can keep sex-based rules where sex is the relevant fact, in a sports category or a medical study, and recognize gender identity for other purposes, in names, records of address, everyday social life, and protection from discrimination. On that view, my two magnets are a dramatization of a conflict that sensible institutions resolve every day by asking which category a given decision needs. I accept this objection almost entirely, because it describes the settlement I want. Where I differ from the people who usually raise it is on where the lines fall, and on how they are drawn. The test in section III is my answer to the first question. My answer to the second is that an institution should say openly which category it is using for a given purpose and why, and should let people dispute that choice without being disciplined for it. Pluralism of that kind is not the opposite of my argument. It is my argument, practiced honestly. What I have criticized is not pluralism but its absence: the replacement of sex by identity across every purpose at once, and the treatment of objections to that replacement as misconduct.
The seventh objection is the one my critics will reach for first, and section VII hands it to them: this is one man's grievance dressed up as theory. A man who was publicly accused, investigated, and assaulted by people who invoked transgender and LGBTQ+ causes has an obvious motive to write an essay like this, and his conclusions should be discounted accordingly. I concede the motive, and I said so in the first section. What I ask the reader to weigh is the method. The village case rests on dockets and dated documents rather than adjectives. It lists the people who stood with me alongside those who did not, names the base rates before anyone else can, labels my own readings as readings, and offers itself as an illustration of a mechanism rather than proof of how common it is. More importantly, the essay's argument does not depend on it. Everything in sections II through VI, from the history of the two ideas to the case for real standards to the costs of institutional capture, would stand if section VII had never been written. The case shows what the argument looks like at ground level. It is not the foundation the argument stands on.
These seven objections do not exhaust the disagreement, and I do not pretend they have all been answered to everyone's satisfaction. Reasonable people will weigh the harms differently, draw the lines in different places, and read the same evidence on sports or shelters differently. What I hope this section shows is that the disagreement can be conducted as an argument, with concessions on both sides, rather than as a contest over who controls the procedures.
X. True North
I began with two male nurses at a hospital bedside and a woman laying a clean bead of weld, and I end with them, because they hold the whole argument in a form no theory can improve on. They belonged where they were because they could do the work, and nobody had to redefine anything for that to be true. The nurses did not need nursing to stop being work that more women than men choose. The welder did not need anyone to pretend that steel is as easy for a smaller body to wrestle as for a larger one. Each was judged by the work, and the work was indifferent to who did it. That is the world feminism set out to build, and in the parts of life where it succeeded, it looks exactly like that.
The principle I have defended can be put in a sentence. Take real differences seriously where they actually operate, judge individuals everywhere else, and compel no one. Where bodies determine safety or fairness, in the fire crew, the female final, the shelter, and the changing room, sex is the honest category and the protections built on it deserve defending. Where they do not, in the boardroom, the classroom, the committee that governs a public bridge, the nurse's station, and the welding shop, sex should decide nothing, in either direction. And across all of it, adults may live as they choose without anyone being forced to recite a belief they do not hold, or being punished for saying what they think. Whatever an institution decides, it should say plainly which category it is using for a given purpose and why that category is the relevant one, and it should let people dispute the choice without being disciplined for it.
Live and let live was never feminism's enemy. Compulsion is. The first wave won its victories by persuading a country that had not wanted to be persuaded, and the second wave built its shelters and its sports leagues against open resistance by making its case in public. The strain of feminism I have criticized in this essay won its victories a different way, by writing its definitions into procedures and treating disagreement as misconduct, and those victories have proved brittle, costly, and in several places already reversed. A movement confident of its case does not need to forbid the questions.
That brings me back to the question in my title, which I promised to answer. What is a man? A man is a male human being, no more and no less entitled than a woman, held to the same real standards, judged by his work, and owed the same hearing before a verdict. He is not a suspect by default when he speaks about the categories he shares a world with, and he is not an authority by default either. He is a person whose arguments should be weighed like anyone else's. The same sentence, with one word changed, answers the question my title turns around, and that symmetry is the point. Equal standing was always the promise. It still is.
Feminism does not have to choose between its two ideas of itself. The material idea and the idea of freedom from gender each describe something true and something worth wanting, and a movement mature enough to hold both can keep both. What it has to stop doing is forcing everyone else to choose for it, through procedures, penalties, and silence. Move the magnets back from the glass. Let the needle settle. It will find what it always found when the field was quiet enough: equal standing, real standards, and the dignity of the individual person. That is true north, and it has not moved.
“A.I. Slopworth” is Artimus Intellego Slopworth, the pen name I use for writing done with AI assistance. Artimus for artificial, Intellego for “I understand,” which the machine can’t, and Slopworth for the empty machine-made text this is meant not to be. The research, documents and judgment are mine. — John F. Sendelbach