Transgender and intersex rights advocates often regard feminists as allies in their struggle against alleged inequality and oppression, and vice versa, but some leading feminists have declared that transgenderism is fundamentally incompatible with feminism (New Yorker, Guardian, SMH) . Here I argue that if transgenderism is an equally valid mode of sexual identity to the male/female binary then the feminist project is invalidated by the Sorites paradox.

The conflict between transgender and feminist interests has recently resurfaced when a MMA fighter Fallon Fox, born a man but identifying as a woman, has seriously injured a female-born fighter in 2015. More recently, an Australian Rules football player Hannah Mouncey (born male, Cullen Mouncey, identifying as woman since transitioning in 2015-16) applied to compete in AFL’s women’s competition and was rejected, to the cheers of some women’s rights activists who consider inclusion of any former-man athletes in women-only competitions as discriminatory against women. Several years ago a Melbourne University radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys went as fast as to accuse transgenderism of violating human rights of all women (1997, “Transgender Activism”, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 1:3-4, 55-74).

The debate so far has focused exclusively on the meaning of womanhood, definition of the female sex, and the scope of choices available to female-born versus transgender women. In this article I suggest that the conflict between feminism and transgenderism runs much deeper and is of a different kind than the commonly raised doubts about physiology, vulnerability, choice and privilege: feminism is logically irreconcilable with the possibility of a ‘third’ sex between male and female, with the premise of ‘transitioning’ from one sex to the other, and with the possibility of a ‘gender spectrum’ between man and woman.

The difference between male/female (biological sex) and man/woman (gender identity) is not lost on me, and I will address sex and gender separately as much as practicable.

The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) defines Intersex as a spectrum of biological characteristics akin to the colour spectrum, and asserts that ‘nature doesn’t decide where the category of “male” ends and the category of “intersex” begins, or where the category of “intersex” ends and the category of “female” begins.’ According to ISNA, the male or female identification of sex is a socially constructed classification.

The premise that intersex is a third, normal mode of the sexual function rather than its abnormality has curious logical consequences for sexual identity in general. If there is a real sex somewhere between male and female, located on the sliding scale of biological development of sexual characteristics (chromosomes, gonads, hormones, sexual organs), then male and female are just ideal limits of that scale that no human can perfectly embody; limits that can only be ascribed to real bodies by imposing an arbitrary ‘sufficiency condition’ rather than on the basis of biological, empirically demonstrable facts. On the above definition, slight daily variations in male and female hormone levels, for example, can render every functional male (capable of producing sperm) always slightly female, and every functional female (capable of producing eggs) always slightly male. In other words, the intersex theory is based not on the functional understanding of sex but exclusively on the degree of possession of sexual characteristics. It is unclear to me how one could rationally talk of sexual characteristics without implicitly affirming the sexual function – what those sexual characteristics are for – but it is not my purpose here to debate logical consistency of claims associated with the intersex theory. What interests me is how the theoretic claims of intersex theory, transgender theory and feminism collide.

Feminism can be characterised as aiming to reclaim autonomy and self-determination for the female and/or woman in the man’s world. If the primary ‘other’ that feminism considers real is the dominant, self-determining, authoritarian, archetypal male, then the ‘validity’ of intersex presents feminists with the impossible task of proving female’s existence as a definite sex with respect to the a priori real male. On the spectrum of sexual characteristics dominated by and defined with respect to the archetypal male, the female is limited to being only an imperfect male. How then can one justify complaining about being oppressed as a partial female when one is also inevitably identifiable as a partial male?

What the feminist project is confronted with here is a version of the Sorites paradox: if a minimal (or barely distinguishable) shift in sexual determination does not change a real male into a female but into a vague category of the intersex, than no amount of cumulative minimal changes can account for a complete female. The limit of the spectrum is practically unachievable, and so the primary platform of the feminist struggle (insofar as is attached to a concrete sex) does not exist. The complete female is effectively effaced from the sexual reality while the male is raised to be a kind of monistic deity, capable of self-reproduction by ‘allowing’ the female to exist within himself, as an imperfect male.

The paradox can off course be ignored, just as we do in cases of the Soritean ‘heap’, but it leaves a hole in female identity. In the context of feminism this hole manifests as the dilemma of whether to accept transgender females as females, even despite their obvious male characteristics (greater muscle mass and the skeletal structure developed under the influence of male chromosomes and hormones) that can be intimidating, reminiscent of a past sexual assault, or just symbolic of the patriarchy.

The question of sexual characteristics is closely related to the question of gender, which is another key referent for feminism. Irrespective of whether gender is linked to the degrees of biological maleness and femaleness, the spectrum of gender identity reproduces the same logical structure as the concept of intersex. If between man and woman there are other genders or a gender spectrum then no one can ever be a complete man or a complete woman, just more or less transgender on a scale defined by ideal limits. The feminist project is then also frustrated by inconsistency: trying to match or overcome the archetypal masculinity it implicitly affirms the reality of man as a discursive a priori, but by doing so it also renders reclaiming womanhood practically impossible. Conversely, if womanhood were established as an absolute ontological property, either in opposition or in a state of functional complementarity to manhood, then feminism would be obliged to reject transgenderism as a possibility. There is simply no logical space remaining in this binary juxtaposition of genders for something in-between, something that could cast doubt on the existence of womanhood. Without a sharp distinction between man and woman the rhetoric of gendered conflict or oppression loses its normative force.

All Sorites-type problems are formally solvable by defining the ostensibly opposite properties in terms of a single property that comes in degrees, but this is of no help to feminists as it deflates the binary opposition and makes a mystery of what feminism could be about without its primary anchor of identity. If, on the other hand, the feminist rhetoric were radically modified, launched not from the position of womanhood but from human position that would embrace the entire spectrum of femininity-to-masculinity, it would be unclear in what sense this project could still count as feminist rather than humanist. The label of feminism would be a misnomer if its gendered identity were replaced just with human relations.

According to Slavoj Žižek, both feminism and transgenderism may be just epiphenomena of capitalism, working to “replace the standard normative heterosexuality with a proliferation of unstable shifting identities and/or orientations”, but despite their instrumental equivalence for the capitalist gameplay it seems that feminism and transgenderism cannot both be right, even if intersex could be dismissed as a genderless abnormality. Is this irreconcilable conflict perhaps also intended as just another capitalistic exploit?

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