Material Girls

Material Girls is a timely and trenchant critique of the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling about our sex, known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex.

Professor Kathleen Stock surveys the philosophical ideas that led to this point, and closely interrogates each one, from De Beauvoir's statement that, 'One is not born, but rather becomes a woman' (an assertion she contends has been misinterpreted and repurposed), to Judith Butler's claim that language creates biological reality, rather than describing it. She looks at biological sex in a range of important contexts, including women-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection.

Material Girls makes a clear, humane and feminist case for our retaining the ability to discuss reality, and concludes with a positive vision for the future, in which trans rights activists and feminists can collaborate to achieve some of their political aims.

About the Author

Kathleen Stock is an analytic philosopher at the University of Sussex. She has published widely on the philosophy of fiction and imagination. Born in Aberdeen, she studied French and Philosophy at Oxford, completed an MLitt in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews and a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. She taught at the University of Lancaster and the University of East Anglia before her appointment at Sussex in 2003.