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Abstract

In the last few years, latent anti-trans sentiment within some corners of UK feminism has coalesced into a highly organised ‘gender critical’ movement that has seen considerable success in influencing policy and public debate. This article addresses ‘gender critical’ feminism as a lobbying movement, examining its orientation towards governance and power. It argues that the ‘gender critical’ movement must be understood as a biopolitical project indebted both to sexological work aimed at ‘normalising’ trans and intersex minds and bodies, and to 1970s feminist responses to this work. This project strives for the power to manage trans populations, both via direct surveillance of trans lives and indirectly, via attempts to counter the supposed threat to a broader cisfeminist population management project posed by trans identification.

Keywords

Gender critical trans-exclusionary radical feminist transphobia biopolitics census

Introduction

This article addresses the ‘gender critical’ movement and its increasing impact on policy and public debates concerning trans lives. While active internationally, the movement has been particularly successful in the United Kingdom (UK), where it has accrued substantial influence over media discourse and policymaking, with high-profile figures in Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Government adopting core ‘gender critical’ platforms. The movement is composed of a constellation of organisations, not all of which are possible to list here. In the UK, however, key groups include Women’s Place UK (WPUK), founded in 2017 to oppose Gender Recognition Act (GRA) reform; Fair Play for Women, which originally campaigned against trans women’s inclusion in women’s sports before expanding its remit to oppose trans inclusion more broadly; and Sex Matters, co-founded by Maya Forstater, the claimant in a high-profile case against her former employer after it declined to renew her consultancy contract following allegations that she had engaged in transphobic behaviour at work and on social media.

‘Gender critical’ figures often claim to stand in opposition to ‘trans ideology’ or ‘gender ideology’, seemingly aligning them with cross-national ‘anti-gender’ movements, which also claim ‘gender ideology’ as their target (Paternotte and Kuhar, 2018). However, while the latter typically accuse feminism itself of ‘gender ideology’, figures in the ‘gender critical’ movement often (although not always) style themselves as feminists primarily concerned to defend women’s rights. While the movement does include family-, school- and child-focused organisations such as Transgender Trend as well as individuals who explicitly disavow feminism, this article focuses on those figures and organisations claiming to be acting in defence of women’s rights and gender equality. Assessing the activities of these groups, the article argues that ‘gender critical feminism’ should be understood as a biopolitical project. For Michel Foucault, biopolitics was concerned with the ‘numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ (Foucault, 1978: 140). This article understands biopolitics as moving between two poles: one concerning discipline or ‘subjugation’ of the body and another concerning population management: ‘demography, the evaluation of the relationship between resources and inhabitants, the constructing of tables analyzing wealth and its circulation’ (Foucault, 1978: 140; see also Foucault, 2013 [1976]). A similar movement between the poles of body and population can be observed in the ‘gender critical’ project, although for reasons of space this article focuses primarily on the population management pole, which has been notably expressed in controversies surrounding the census.

This article begins with an overview of the ‘gender critical’ movement and its claims regarding sex and gender, beginning with but extending beyond the movement’s attempted defence of women-only spaces. It goes on to discuss biopolitical currents in feminist thought, observing that foundations for a feminist biopolitics were laid in the feminist theory of the 1970s. Following this, it demonstrates the biopolitical character of ‘gender critical’ politics, showing that the movement promotes the surveillance of trans people, particularly trans women, and targets the census and other data collection exercises, explicitly presenting trans self-declaration in survey questions on sex as a threat to a (cis)feminist biopolitical project of population management. Following Sara Ahmed, I place ‘gender critical’ in quotation marks throughout, as ‘most of the most critical work on sex and gender within the academy is happening in the very spaces […] many “gender critical” feminists oppose’ (Ahmed, 2021). While I offer critiques throughout, the primary aim of this article is not to debunk but rather to reveal the biopolitical character of the ‘gender critical’ project.

Sex, gender and the ‘gender critical’ movement

Anti-trans feminist sentiment has existed for decades, particularly in pockets of radical feminist activism (Williams, 2020). The moniker ‘TERF’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) was coined around 2008 by trans-inclusive radical feminists in order to differentiate their own position from those radical feminists who did not view trans women as women or include them in their feminist advocacy (Smythe, 2018). Yet trans exclusion can no longer be described as simply a ‘radfem’ issue. The contemporary anti-trans feminist movement in the UK comprises a broad coalition of actors incorporating radical feminist activists, liberal feminists (particularly those who are prominent in UK media circles), and social conservatives and others with no prior connection to feminist activism or thought. The movement now brands itself as ‘gender critical’ or ‘gender critical feminist’. As Claire Thurlow (2022) argues, this shift is meant to signify a softening of previously hard-line positions with the aim of accruing mainstream support, while nonetheless drawing on the same transphobic tropes as earlier iterations of anti-trans feminism.

The movement came into public prominence in the UK in the years following the Conservative Government’s announcement in 2017 that it planned to reform the GRA in order to make it easier for trans people to obtain a gender recognition certificate, and thereby change the sex/gender¹ marker on their birth certificate. Such a reform might have involved dropping the requirement for applicants to have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and to submit a detailed medical report to a formal panel, replacing these with a requirement to make a statutory declaration regarding the applicant’s intention to keep living as their ‘acquired’ gender. This declaration would have been legally binding. Nonetheless, the proposal came to be known as ‘self-identification’ or ‘self-ID’, suggesting a lack of public oversight or regulation. ‘Self-ID’ was met by a sustained backlash, driven by a number of ‘gender critical’ campaign groups that were set up specifically to resist GRA reform (Pearce et al., 2020). After 3 years of increasingly toxic debate, during which time Government personnel changed substantially, the Government eventually announced that it would make only marginal changes to the process, reducing the fee and moving the procedure online (Truss, 2020). But as this article discusses, the ‘gender critical’ movement now extends well beyond opposition to GRA reform.

As Ruth Pearce et al. observe, ‘gender critical’ organisations mobilize around the claim that women’s ‘sex-based rights’ are under threat and need defending (2020: 5). ‘Sex-based rights’ are constituted of a supposed right to provision of cisgender-women-only spaces, including public toilets, changing rooms and services for women survivors of domestic or sexual abuse. ‘Gender critical’ groups argue that it is dangerous to allow trans women to access such spaces, as their presence poses a threat to cis women users. While often presented as self-evident, this claim is poorly supported (Hasenbush et al., 2019). Nonetheless, the fear of trans women’s presence in women-only spaces was key to the backlash. ‘Gender critical’ groups see legal gender recognition as opening the floodgate to trans women wishing to access women-only spaces. In this line of thinking, if a trans woman is ‘legally male’ she can legally be excluded from women-only spaces, whereas a trans woman who has a gender recognition certificate, and is therefore ‘legally female’, cannot be excluded, or at least not as easily. This rests on what is either a misinterpretation or a misrepresentation of UK law, which does not grant ‘sex-based rights’. According to the Statutory Code of Practice on the Equality Act 2010, the law in fact requires providers overseeing single-sex facilities or services to treat trans people according the gender in which they present regardless of whether they hold a gender recognition certificate (EHRC, 2011: 197; see also Sharpe, 2020; Cowan et al., 2021), though limited exceptions can be applied to certificate-holders and non-certificate-holders alike if the provider can demonstrate that this is ‘a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim’. This means that GRA reform is irrelevant to trans women’s access to women-only spaces; trans women had access to such spaces in law before GRA reform had even been mooted (and can be excluded from such spaces in limited circumstances), irrespective of their certified status.

Yet the emphasis on ‘sex-based rights’ extends beyond a misunderstanding of the law. It also points to the central importance of the concept of ‘sex’ to the movement; as Pearce et al. comment, it ‘is used in ways that emphasise the distinction of sex (a ‘biological’ or material reality) from gender (as social role or ideology)’ (2020: 5). ‘Biological sex’ is seen as fixed, and as determining access to the category ‘woman’ such that trans women must always be excluded. This all sits uneasily with the many feminist challenges that have been made to both the sex/gender binary and the cohesiveness of the category of biological sex (Ahmed, 2016: 30; Hines, 2019: 154); however, as the following sections show, there is also an inheritance here from early feminist arguments about sex and gender, and the earlier sexological literature that they drew on in turn. In ‘gender critical’ arguments, ‘biological sex’ constitutes a fixed reality from which there is no escape – one which in fact is taken to determine a person’s social existence as well as their physical embodiment. In this worldview, nonbinary identities are illegitimate and trans men and nonbinary people assigned female at birth may be regarded as ‘wayward sisters’ requiring intervention to restore their female identities. Trans women, crucially, become inextricably linked to maleness and all that goes with it: ‘male socialisation’, ‘male violence’, ‘male criminality’. One might object that socialisation, violence and criminality are sociocultural – gendered – phenomena and not innately connected to male sexual embodiment. But in saying ‘sex not gender’, ‘gender critical’ feminists mean that trans women’s gender identity and gendered experiences (not to mention their actual physiological characteristics, which may be very different from those of cis men) are irrelevant to their social existence; due to their assigned ‘maleness’ they are to be regarded as indistinguishable from men.

Moreover, in the work of some ‘gender critical’ thinkers, ‘trans women are not only misrepresented as men, but are aligned with the very worst of men’ (Hines, 2019: 152): in particular with sexual predators. One way this happens is through the association between sexual violence and the penis which is, as Alison Phipps has observed, then ‘stuck’ to trans women via an obsessive focus on their surgical status, crystallized in campaigns against ‘unexpected penises’ in women’s spaces. Penises are naturalized as the ‘cause’ of violence, and trans women become associated with penises, whether they have one or not (Phipps, 2016, 2020: 102-7). In some ‘gender critical’ rhetoric, trans women are also metaphorically associated with rapists. Infamously, the radical feminist author Janice Raymond asserted that trans women ‘rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, appropriating this body for themselves’ (cited in Williams, 2020: 49). Similarly, Germaine Greer has written that trans women who enter women-only spaces do ‘as rapists have always done’ (cited in Hines, 2019: 152). The minimal conditions of trans women’s existence as trans women – transitioning and living as a woman socially – are portrayed as inherent violations of cis womanhood.

Trans scholars and others working in trans studies have sought to grapple with and critique these views on sex and gender. What is clear, however, is that ‘gender critical’ feminism is a highly organized lobbying movement as well as an ideology. Existing literature has examined the backlash to GRA reform and its putative impact on trans women’s access to women-only spaces (e.g. Cowan et al., 2021; Pearce et al., 2020). But ‘gender critical’ feminism has become broader in its aims than this. Since 2017, ‘gender critical’ groups have continued to proliferate and diversify their aims beyond opposition to GRA reform. The bulk of these groups are heavily engaged in activities such as circulating materials to parents, schools and public bodies, lobbying elected officials, seeking judicial reviews and submitting evidence to any public consultation or inquiry of passing relevance. This article examines the movement’s orientation towards governance and population management, arguing that it should be understood as a biopolitical project.

Gender, feminism and biopolitics

Foucault charted the emergence, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of disciplinary techniques of power centred on the individual human body: the organisation and surveillance of bodies and efforts to make these bodies more productive (‘through exercise, drill, and so on’; 2013 [1976]: 63). By the end of the eighteenth century, however, a new technology of power had emerged, one that took as its object surveillance and control of populations rather than individuals – not ‘man-as-body’ but ‘man-as-species’ (64). This is what Foucault terms biopolitics. Biopolitics is closely related to another of Foucault’s concepts, governmentality; in fact there is much slippage between these concepts and governmentality ultimately came to eclipse biopolitics entirely in his work. For this reason, one might justifiably talk about a ‘gender critical’ governmentality in place of a ‘gender critical’ biopolitics. For the purposes of this article I use ‘biopolitics’ as, whereas for Foucault ‘governmentality’ is primarily directed at the population (Cisney and Morar 2016: 7–14), biopolitics is more commonly understood as moving between the two poles of discipline of individual bodies and regulation of the population (e.g. Rabinow and Rose, 2006: 196). Both poles are highly relevant to the regulation of trans life (Spade, 2015) and ‘gender critical’ discourse similarly moves between each. While this article primarily addresses the population pole, the movement also aims at the discipline of individuals, in particular children (see for example Amery, 2023).

This section describes how foundations for this were laid in the early work of sexologists on ‘gender’ and its subsequent take-up in 1970s feminist theorising. The work of scholars such as Jennifer Germon (2009), Jemima Repo (2016) and Jules Gill-Peterson (2018) maps the emergence of the concept of ‘gender’ in research and experimentation on intersex and trans children and adults beginning in the 1950s, in particular in the work of the sexologist John Money and the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller. Money’s innovation was to present ‘gender’ as something learned postnatally. Stoller both built on and subverted Money’s work, positing gender as a specifically cultural category opposed to the biological category of sex and a harder split between the two, arguing, contra Money, that they could function completely independently in some instances (Germon, 2009: 80; Repo, 2016: 54). For both figures, however, gender was not meant to liberate but to normalize deviant minds and bodies. Gender presented a means, for Money, of inducting intersex children into masculinity or femininity and thereby aligning them with the prevailing social order, justifying the coercive surgical ‘correction’ of intersex bodies (Germon, 2009: 35). For Stoller, it provided a way of theorising the origins of transgender identity in order to prevent it (Gill-Peterson, 2018: 146; Repo, 2016: 62). This work was an expression of the disciplinary pole of biopolitics. For both Money and Stoller, the family was the central site in which gender was produced, and therefore the primary target of disciplinary intervention, with parents recruited as ‘gender coaches’ (Germon, 2009: 44) tasked with ensuring their child adapted to their assigned gender role.

The concept of gender was of high interest to feminist scholarship in the 1970s (Germon, 2009; Repo, 2016). Not all feminist theorists of the era employed gender, many finding that concepts such as ‘sex role’ and ‘sexual identity’ were sufficient for their purposes. But those who did – such as Kate Millett, Ann Oakley, Germaine Greer and Gayle Rubin – relied heavily on the work of Money and Stoller, being indebted in particular to the latter’s portrayal of sex and gender as (potentially) independent. Their readings of Stoller produced a Cartesian dualist account of the sex/gender split (Germon, 2009: 86) in which sex was a feature of the body whereas gender was associated with the mind, therefore cultural and malleable. While these theorists sought to use gender for the purposes of liberating women from hegemonic gender roles, rather than for disciplining them into them, the commitment to gender’s malleability also laid the foundations for future biopolitical interventions in which women’s liberation could be achieved by ‘taking control of relationships and institutions such as kinship, law, or the family’ (Repo, 2016: 103).

While the idea of feminist governmental intervention was largely theoretical for the theorists of the 1970s, in the twenty-first century it is a well-established reality (Halley et al. eds, 2019). Feminist ideas have not emerged unchanged from their entanglement with prevailing policy agendas and governmental logics. Many commentators have observed an alignment between certain feminist projects and discourses and the demands of neoliberal capitalism (e.g. Fraser, 2013; Rottenberg, 2018). These arguments are too vast in scope to address here. But pertinently for the purposes of this paper, one recognised outcome of the dalliance of feminism with neoliberal governance is that gender equality work has come to require masses of quantitative data (Bacchi and Eveline, 2010; Buss, 2015), along with methods for producing and analysing this data that ‘tend to strip away the political content of information on women’s interests and reduce it to a set of needs or gaps, amenable to administrative decisions about the allocation of resources’ (Baden and Goetz, 1997 cited in Bacchi and Eveline, 2010: 50). Gender equality initiatives have, then, inevitably collided with the population pole of biopolitics. The ‘gender critical’ movement is steeped in and shaped by this history. Through attempts to intervene in official monitoring and data-collection exercises such as the census, the movement seeks to defend a population-level feminist biopolitical project, perceived as under threat from trans identity.

‘Gender critical’ population management

As Toby Beauchamp’s work has demonstrated, states target trans people for surveillance, both through the administration of identity documents and through security policies and border regimes that screen for ‘gender anomalies’ (2019). ‘Gender critical’ groups make their desire for surveillance of trans people explicit, often justifying it by asserting that trans women share, or are even exemplars of, a ‘male’ ‘propensity for crime’ (Williams in Women and Equalities Committee, 2021: Q159; see also WEP Sex-Based Rights Caucus, 2021). Even beyond crime, the movement presupposes that trans people – trans women in particular – are dangerous if left unmonitored. This is at the heart of many objections to self-declaration in applications for gender recognition, but materials produced by ‘gender critical’ groups also call for surveillance practices beyond the scope of the GRA. A public letter from Sex Matters to the Committee on Standards in Public Life in 2021 decried, among other things, that

Her Majesty’s Passport Office has admitted that it has no record of how many people it has allowed to change the sex recorded on their passport from “M” to “F” with a simple template letter downloaded from the internet and signed by a GP. (Sex Matters, 2021)

No explanation is offered as to why such a record might be necessary; that trans women must be monitored is presented as common sense. In other documents, Sex Matters calls for yet more invasive surveillance: the ‘Healthcare’ section of its webpage calls not only for trans patients’ assigned sex to be revealed on medical records at all times, disregarding any right to privacy, but also for trans doctors’ and hospital staff’s assigned sex to be a matter of public record (Sex Matters, undated b).

Beyond direct calls for the surveillance of trans people, ‘gender critical’ groups also posit trans inclusion as a threat to a broader biopolitical feminist project requiring the ability to know the differences between men and women in order to govern them. When combined with the beliefs about sex outlined above, this results in a drive towards data purification, demanding the exclusion of trans women from data collection about women due to their supposed polluting influence on this category, and data cis-ification, by forcing the objects of data collection (trans women, trans men and nonbinary people alike) instead into their assigned-at-birth sex categories. Ben Collier and Sharon Cowan describe this as ‘category co-option’: a ‘slow takeover of administrative categories of sex/gender’ (2022: 18).

In July 2018, in a climate of growing ‘gender critical’ opposition to potential GRA reform and ‘self-ID’, WPUK issued a list of five demands. While the first four of these, unsurprisingly, addressed the GRA and single-sex spaces in various ways, the fifth demand read: ‘Government to consult on how self-declaration will impact upon data gathering – such as crime, employment, pay and health statistics – and monitoring of sex-based discrimination such as the gender pay gap’ (WPUK, 2018a). As such, it extended the group’s opposition to trans self-declaration beyond a concern for the sanctity of women’s spaces. This core focus was reiterated in their ‘New Year Resolutions 2019’, which stated ‘Sex matters: Rigorous collection and analysis of sex-based data and high-quality research must be central to the development of any services, policies or actions which address women’s needs or which challenge sex discrimination and inequality’ (WPUK, 2018b). Like many of WPUK’s public documents (and their public-facing persona in general), this resolution appears unobjectionable on the face of it; it is commonplace for surveys to ask about respondents’ sex or gender. But in including the phrase ‘sex-based’, WPUK means that data collection should only ever record trans individuals as members of their birth-registered sex. The group has argued that if this does not happen, ‘[i]t will be impossible to provide for the needs of women and girls or to challenge discrimination and oppression’ (WPUK, 2020).

This view is shared across the spectrum of ‘gender critical’ organisations, which maintain that allowing trans people to self-declare their sex/gender, rather than recording them as their assigned sex, fatally undermines the governance of gender difference. In a section of its website addressing data collection, Sex Matters suggests, reasonably enough, that if data is not collected on women’s needs then those needs tend to go unrecognized – but then proceeds without evidence to suggest that ‘self-ID’ will make it more difficult to tackle the pay gap and other issues of gender inequality (Sex Matters, undated a). The group For Women Scotland makes the same argument with characteristic alarmism:

Do you know that the very word ‘woman’ will change definition, if the trans lobby succeed? If we can’t define what a woman is, how can we accurately capture data? How can we record male violence, the pay gap, our representation in government, business, finance, law, media…anywhere? (For Women Scotland, undated)

‘Gender critical’ groups demand data on women that is purified of trans identification, and in particular keeps trans women out of the ‘women’ category. Their underlying fear appears to be that recording trans women as women will shrink gender gaps and blur the lines between men and women in data, making it more difficult for cis women’s needs and experiences to be recognized – thus jeopardising the ability of biopolitical projects relying on the census and other official data reporting to deliver for women. Often invoked in these arguments is a real or imagined older trans woman, believed to have benefited from male privilege her entire life, who transitions having already achieved a high-flying career (see for example Murray, 2017; Fair Play for Women, 2021). Yet trans women in actuality have on average worse outcomes than cis women across a number of areas including pay (Human Rights Campaign, 2022), employment (Government Equalities Office, 2018: 133), poverty (Crissman et al., 2017), political representation (Victory Institute, 2021), and experiences of domestic abuse (Peitzmeier et al., 2020); their inclusion in the ‘women’ category might, if anything, widen the gender gaps reported in these areas. This illustrates how cisnormative approaches to ‘sex’ struggle to capture or account for the realities of trans lives. But there are also methodological problems with the desire to avoid ‘self-ID’ in data collection, to which I return below.

Sex and the census

The census is a core tool of biopolitical governance operating at the level of population management (Scheel, 2020), formalising identity categories and using these to facilitate provision of resources via, for example, public health or public assistance programmes, ‘enabl[ing] the distributive functions of the administrative state’ (Velte, 2020: 123). National censuses include a ‘sex question’ as a matter of course (although some outside the UK allow answers other than ‘male’ or ‘female’) and have therefore become a primary target of ‘gender critical’ lobbying, exposing the biopolitical aspirations of the movement. From 2020, movement actors began to respond to efforts by census authorities in England, Wales and Scotland to address trans inclusion in their respective census exercises. In England and Wales, the movement opposed guidance by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on the 2021 census’s ‘sex question’, which read: ‘If you are considering how to answer, use the sex recorded on one of your legal documents such as a birth certificate, gender recognition certificate, or passport’ (ONS, 2021a). Fair Play for Women took the ONS to court to demand removal of the words ‘such as’ and ‘or passport’, and the ONS decided not to defend its position, revising the guidance accordingly (Guyan, 2022: 75). This is significant, as in the UK it is much easier to change the sex/gender marker on one’s passport than it is to obtain a gender recognition certificate. Following their success with the ONS, Fair Play for Women served a petition for judicial review of guidance issued by the National Records of Scotland (NRS), which advised respondents to Scotland’s 2022 census that ‘If you are transgender the answer you give can be different from what is on your birth certificate’ (NRS, 2021). In this case, however, Scotland’s Court of Session upheld the census guidance.

One of the clearest accounts of ‘gender critical’ thinking on the census can be found in the report The Political Erasure of Sex (Jones and Mackenzie, 2020). The report, funded from an Oxford University grant held by the historian Selina Todd, was principally authored by the writer Jane Clare Jones with input from policy analyst Lisa Mackenzie; both authors have ties to WPUK. It purports to show how the ONS and NRS were ‘captured’ by ‘transgender ideology’, leading them to change guidance relating to the sex question. The ‘trans policy capture’ theory had previously been put forward by Kath Murray and Lucy Hunter Blackburn with respect to both Scotland’s census and Scottish Prison Service policy on trans prisoners (Murray and Hunter Blackburn, 2019). (Along with Mackenzie, Murray and Hunter Blackburn make up the ‘policy analysis collective’ Murray Blackburn Mackenzie.)

Todd’s foreword makes the case for the census as a feminist biopolitical instrument, arguing that census data on sex have played a vital role in illustrating and explaining social and economic differences between women and men, and ultimately in governing these differences by facilitating policymaking and resource allocation (Todd, 2020). The report proceeds on the assumption that this biopolitical project is endangered by efforts to make the census questions acceptable to trans respondents. Jones and Mackenzie argue that the ‘capture’ of the ONS and NRS by trans groups has persuaded the former into ‘corrupting’ (2020: 17) concepts and variables that work perfectly well for cis respondents, therefore damaging the integrity of the data.

The report describes a genuine challenge for census authorities: trans people may not understand their sex in cisnormative ways and therefore may not answer a ‘sex question’ the way cisgender census administrators expect them to. Additionally, some trans people might refuse to complete the census if questioning around sex and gender identity is regarded as overly intrusive (ONS, 2021b). Jones and Mackenzie are disparaging: trans respondents’ refusal to fit themselves into cis researchers’ categories is repeatedly dismissed as ‘ideological’ and symptomatic of respondents’ need for ‘identity validation’ (2020: 10, 11, 18). Their ideal outcome, it seems, would be for trans respondents to simply submit to the demands of the cisfeminist biopolitical project, but they recognize that this cannot be forced. Their proposed solution is therefore to give up on making census questions and guidance acceptable to trans respondents:

if ONS are unable to devise an instrument to measure a population without offending them in a manner that interferes with measurement, then […] they should judge that the population can’t readily be measured, not start tinkering with and corrupting other variables, let alone variables which are the protected characteristics of other groups of people (2020: 17; emphasis in original).

The report accordingly presents trans inclusion attempts by the ONS and NRS as insufficiently attentive to the quality and integrity of the census data and the need to capture data on cis women. Yet there are problems here. In the passage quoted above, Jones and Mackenzie appear to assume that trans people who are ‘offended’ by census questioning simply disappear from the data or somehow resolve neatly into the cis population. But even if ignored by census authorities, trans respondents will answer the sex question as they see fit. If clear instructions are not given that are acceptable to respondents, it will not be possible for data users to interpret their answers, nor to disaggregate them from cis women and cis men respondents – an own goal given the movement’s stated desire to be able to separate trans women’s data from cis women’s.

The case of the census reveals some of the impossibilities of ‘gender critical’ biopolitical project. Beyond these impossibilities, it also demonstrates an ethos of liberation through control: the control of certain groups (both in terms of enhanced surveillance of those who transition, and in terms of restrictions on self-declaration in data collection) is justified as a necessary condition of cis women’s liberation. Another key takeaway is that ‘gender critical’ actors view themselves as protecting a pre-existing feminist biopolitical project, conceptualized as reliant upon understanding ‘biological sex’ as binary and immutable and therefore endangered by trans self-determination (they’re corrupting our variables!). This can help explain some of the appeal of the movement across the political spectrum, from feminists to liberals to conservatives and even authoritarian figures, all of whom might regard themselves as having a vested interest in defending what they see as the status quo. It also contextualizes the claim that trans rights advocates have ‘captured’ political and social institutions. The ‘gender critical’ movement’s own attempts at institutional capture are not recognized as such; as it represents the status quo, it cannot ‘capture’ institutions, only defend them from the incursions of others.

Discussion and conclusion

Drawing on the work of Repo, Germon, and others, I propose that a feminist project is biopolitical if it contains an ethos of liberation through control. Understanding this ethos as a core element of some manifestations of feminism can help us make sense of apparent paradoxes or hypocrisies, in particular of what might seem to some to be a paradox of contemporary ‘gender critical’ feminism: that it claims to be a movement for liberation from gender at the same time as it advocates for the surveillance and control of gender deviants. This control is in fact justified on the grounds of freedom, namely cis women’s freedom from gender inequality and discrimination. This apparent contradiction between liberation and control has plenty of antecedents in liberal biopolitical governance. As Nikolas Rose has written, programmes of coercion and control form a core element of ‘liberal’ polities, yet must almost always be justified in terms of freedom:

for example, the argument that the constraint of the few is a condition for the freedom of the many, that limited coercion is necessary to shape or reform pathological individuals so that they are willing and able to accept the rights and responsibilities of freedom, or that coercion is required to eliminate dependency and enforce the autonomy of the will that is the necessary counterpart of freedom. (1999: 10)

We see a version of the first of these example arguments at play in the ‘gender critical’ biopolitics discussed in this article: that the constraint of the few (trans people) in the form of surveillance, restriction and management of gender identity is necessary for the liberation of the many (cisgender women). Elsewhere, for example in public discourse on childhood gender transitions, we see versions of the second: that coercion (and disciplinary power) is necessary to reform ‘pathological’ trans youth such that they can be liberated from ‘trans/gender ideology’ and the gender stereotypes purportedly associated with it.

The biopolitical lens exposes the poverty of liberal means of addressing transphobia, particularly those which assume that bigotry will melt away in the face of the targeted group’s ‘visibility’. There seems little prospect of trans visibility staying the ‘gender critical’ movement given that the latter is not primarily driven by personal narrow-mindedness or lack of exposure to trans people but by commitment to a project of management and control – which is conceived as necessary to liberation, not antithetical to it. Some trans writers have linked increasing trans visibility to a rise in transphobic violence and media moral panics (Faye, 2018; Gossett et al., 2017). As Foucault remarked and Beauchamp reminds us, visibility is a ‘trap’ in the face of biopolitics – ‘one’s visibility to surveillance mechanisms can allow those mechanisms to work more effectively’ (Beauchamp, 2019: 16).

It may be tempting to respond to ‘gender critical’ biopolitics by promoting in its place a pro-trans biopolitics that responds to the harms trans people face as a result of state surveillance and population management by proposing that the latter be made kinder or more inclusive. This is what is in play when liberal pro-trans advocacy takes GRA reform or trans-inclusive census questions as its central objects. However, a swathe of trans scholarship warns of the dangers of this approach. As Anna Lauren Hoffman remarks, ‘discourses of inclusion ultimately reproduce, rather than subvert the legitimating power of dominant actors—that is, the power to mark off and bestow recognition upon diverse “others”’ (2021: 3550). Trans critics have argued that the expansion of state surveillance and control can only hurt those, such as trans people of colour, who are unwilling to or cannot neatly be fitted into state-engineered data categories or are subject to state violence along other axes of oppression (Snorton and Haritaworn, 2022; Spade, 2015). Their work suggests that ‘inclusion’ should not be uncritically sought as an end in itself or a counter to anti-trans demands.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Fran Amery

Note

Fran Amery is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bath. Her research addresses contemporary struggles around gender and LGBTQ + equality, with a particular interest in reproductive justice, movements against reproductive rights and organised transphobia. She is the author of Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: The Changing Politics of Abortion in Britain.

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‘Gender critical’ feminism as biopolitical project