This one's free, like everything here. Paid subscriptions are the reason I get to write instead of trying to cite theory for meals. I’d appreciate a paid subscription extra for this one as it took me forever to do the research to show these charlatans how fucking stupid they are.
Bluesky: bundleofstyx.org / Twitter: @bundleofstyx_ / Tumblr: @bundleofstx / Instagram: @bundleof.styx
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INVARIANCE
Sex, Class, and the Last Materialists
By Tara Knight
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A month or so ago I published an essay called "The Last Materialist." It argued that the feminist tradition most invested in calling itself materialist had stopped doing materialism at the exact point where materialism would have required it to think. The essay was long, rude, and, I thought, reasonably clear about what it was criticizing: a strain of feminist theory that historicizes every social relation in sight, then reaches sex and suddenly discovers that one category was natural all along.
Addison Turner at Implacable Books an ally of total loser I mean women’s victory responded. The response is titled "Sex, Class, and the Material Relations of Patriarchy: Prolegomena to a Materialist Theory of the Sex Contradiction." It runs several thousand words. It cites Althusser, Fanon, Mao, Cabral, Brownmiller, Sanyika Shakur, and Safiya Bukhari. It opens with a meditation on intellectual rigor and the revolutionary necessity of learning how to study.
I have now read the whole fucking thing, and I want to say before anything else that I am grateful for it. That sounds like a setup for a devastating follow-up clause, and it partly is, but the gratitude is also real. Most people who disagree with me on these questions do not write arguments. They write tweets. They write callout posts. They write one-paragraph summaries of what they imagine I believe followed by three screenshots and a pronoun flag. Turner wrote an argument. The argument is serious, careful, theoretically ambitious, and wrong in ways that are much more interesting than the usual wrongness I get to respond to. I have spent the better part of the last year being told that I hate women by people who cannot identify the feminist tradition they claim I am betraying. Someone finally showed up with citations. I owe the citations a response.
I also want to acknowledge the comedy of what is happening to both of us. I wrote a long essay, Turner wrote a longer response, and I am now writing a response to the response that will probably be longer than both of them combined. At some point one of us will have to stop or Substack will have to start issuing academic press imprints. We are two feminists trapped in a dialectical arms race where every exchange adds another ten thousand words, and somewhere Friedrich Engels is watching from the grave, pleased that his theory of the family has finally produced a custody dispute over materialism itself. The laughter stops here, because I should say something about why I am responding to this particular essay rather than the dozens of other responses "The Last Materialist" generated. Most responses to my work on these questions fall into one of three categories: people who agree with me and want me to say it again, people who disagree with me and cannot articulate why beyond gesturing at vibes and screenshots, and people who disagree with me on grounds they refuse to make explicit because making them explicit would require engaging with arguments they have not read. Turner's response belongs to none of these categories. It (fails to) engage with the problem. It attempts to construct a theoretical framework capable of answering the questions I raised.
I am not interested in spending the remainder of my intellectual life standing before successive panels of feminist theorists, proving that transsexual women qualify for admission. I have done that work. I published "It's Not the Hormones, Idiot" in “The Collected Works of Tara Knight.” I made the argument that I was talking about social position, not identity. I made the argument that transition alters a person's relationship to patriarchal social power in ways that cannot be dismissed as merely cosmetic, merely psychological, or merely ideological. I stand behind every word of that argument, and I will cite it where the present essay requires it. But the question that interests me now is larger than whether any particular school of feminism has room for transsexual women in its ontology.
The question is what happens to materialist feminism when transsexuality is treated as evidence about how sex operates rather than an exception that an existing theory must somehow accommodate.
I have been called a lot of things in the course of writing about these questions. I have been called a misogynist by people who have never read a feminist text written before 2015. I have been called a rape apologist by people who cannot define the word "materialism." I have been called a man by people whose commitment to women's liberation begins and ends with tweeting about it. None of that is interesting. What is interesting is that I have also been called wrong by someone who has actually read the relevant theory and attempted to construct a counterargument. I care about being called wrong. I care about it enough to spend twenty-five thousand words responding.
Turner's response is unusually useful because the argument does not retreat into crude biological determinism. Turner historicizes gender, discusses reproduction as a social relation rather than a brute anatomical fact, invokes Althusserian overdetermination, and acknowledges that gender classification has material effects on how people are perceived, punished, rewarded, and permitted to move through institutions. Turner even leaves the central hypothesis partially open, conceding that it remains to be demonstrated rather than treating it as already settled. That makes the disagreement worth having. Turner has constructed a better version of the argument I criticized. Good. Now I can show where the better version breaks.
We are going to follow Turner's materialism further than Turner does. We will begin with the claim that sex determines patriarchal class position "in the last instance." We will examine what "material" actually means inside the tradition Turner claims, and ask whether sex can coherently function as the pre-social material substrate of a theory that otherwise insists on understanding social categories historically. We will move through reproduction, racialized womanhood, the John Brown analogy, class formation within sex classes, and the relationship between gender classification and structural position. We will ask whether a social relation that is acknowledged to be historically constituted, socially reproduced, ideologically mediated, and institutionally administered can still be said to rest, in the last instance, on a bodily fact that the same theory has declined to historicize. Eventually, the essay will arrive somewhere larger than adjudicating who is correct about trans women.
I have spent the last year writing around a theory I had not properly named. Every time I wrote about transition, womanhood, heterosexuality, race, sexual politics, or the state, I kept returning to the same problem: how do you identify a social position when the people occupying it, the bodies attached to it, and the institutions reproducing it can all change? I had been calling the answer materialism, because that was the nearest available word. It was becoming increasingly obvious that I meant something more specific. In "It's Not the Hormones, Idiot" I wrote: "I am not arguing about identity. I am arguing about social position" (Knight) (meee), The Collected Works of Tara knight. That distinction has followed my work for a long time. I had the pieces before I had the name for the method. I called the object social position. Now I need to describe how we find it. I call that method Invariance, though I will not define it fully here because the definition has to be earned through the argument that follows. For now, Invariance asks what remains structurally operative when the individual occupants, bodily characteristics, institutional mechanisms, and ideological representations attached to a social position all change. It asks what the relation is doing while everything around it moves.
This essay answers Turner's response on Turner's own theoretical terrain while using that confrontation to construct a materialist feminist method capable of surviving the questions Turner's framework cannot answer.
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I. THE LAST MATERIALISTS
Turner's argument opens from a frustration with the concept of "cis privilege." The frustration is understandable and, within a certain analytic framework, defensible. If woman names the subordinated position within patriarchy, then describing women's recognition as women in terms of "privilege" risks inverting the actual structure of domination. Women who are legible to patriarchy as women are legible precisely because they have been successfully incorporated into a subordinated social class. The legibility is a condition of subordination, not an escape from it. Calling that legibility privilege is like calling the visibility of an enslaved person on a plantation a form of social advantage relative to a fugitive hiding in the swamp. The analogy is Turner's, and it is a clever one.
Under historically constituted patriarchal social relations, sex determines class position "in the last instance." Gender, while materially efficacious, functions principally to represent, organize, police, and reproduce a class relation constituted elsewhere. Gender classification can determine how a concrete person is perceived and treated across institutions, even across an entire social life, without that determination settling the question of their structural class position. Sex remains the anchor. Reproduction remains the ground. Gender is the set of mechanisms through which the sex-class relation is socially mediated and lived.
Their Althusserian vocabulary is doing real work here. Turner borrows the concept of determination in the last instance from For Marx to distinguish between what is immediately determinant in a given encounter and what constitutes the structured whole within which that encounter acquires meaning (Althusser, 1969, pp. 111-113). A person can be classified, rewarded, or punished through gender without gender being what constitutes the patriarchal classes. Gender can be decisive at one level while sex organizes the relation at another. The immediate and the structural need not coincide.
Turner's strongest argument also rests on several things I agree with. Patriarchy does not follow naturally from reproductive anatomy. Sexual dimorphism does not contain within itself a necessary social hierarchy. Historically constituted social relations organize real material differences in ways that make those differences socially consequential. The social relation is not contained within the material difference itself. Skin color does not produce slavery, and ancestry does not inevitably produce racial antagonism. Social relations organize differences; the differences do not spontaneously generate the relations.
These are exactly the right principles. They are also exactly the principles that Turner's own argument stops applying at the precise moment they become most dangerous.
Turner historicizes patriarchy, gender, reproduction as a social relation, and the political meaning attached to bodily differences. Turner explicitly argues that the social position produced through a relation should not be read backward into the material difference itself, so that what is historically produced appears biologically inevitable. Turner condemns bio-essentialism in both its racial and sexual forms. Turner understands that domination transforms historically constituted relations into apparent properties belonging to subordinated bodies. Then Turner reaches sex and preserves for it a degree of ontological stability that Turner's method has denied everything surrounding it.
Sex becomes the thing that is organized rather than the thing historically produced as a coherent category. It becomes the material difference that social relations seize upon rather than a classification whose contours, coherence, and political salience are produced and maintained through those same relations. Sex becomes the rock underneath the historical water while everything else moves around it.
The entire essay depends on a distinction between, on one side, historically constituted social relations that organize bodily differences into structural positions, and on the other side, the bodily differences themselves, which are treated as pre-social material given a social meaning by the relations that seize upon them. That distinction is carrying half the fucking building, and Turner's own anti-essentialism should make it impossible to sustain. Turner's framework wants to analyze patriarchy as a historically constituted social relation while simultaneously exempting the bodily substrate of that relation from the same historical analysis. Everything on top of sex is historical while sex itself is simply there. Gender is constructed while sex is given; the social organization of reproduction is historical while the bodily differences it organizes remain pre-historical raw material. The hierarchy is contingent, yet the classification upon which it rests is natural. This is a dualism, exactly the kind Marx's method was designed to dissolve. In the Grundrisse, Marx argued that even the most apparently natural economic categories, including production, consumption, and exchange, are always already historically specific rather than transhistorical. The political economists of his time treated the categories of bourgeois political economy as natural categories applying to all human societies. Marx showed that the apparently natural category of "production in general" already presupposes historically specific social relations: a particular organization of labor, a particular relationship between producers and the means of production, a particular form of property. The abstraction "production" appears to be a neutral description of what all human societies do. In fact it is a historically specific abstraction that smuggles the social relations of capitalism into the definition of a supposedly universal category (Marx, Grundrisse, 1857-58/1973, Introduction) The same operation is at work in the category of sex. "Sex" appears to be a neutral description of what all human bodies are. In fact it is a historically specific classification that smuggles the social relations of patriarchy into the definition of a supposedly natural category. The category selects certain bodily differences, organizes them into a binary, treats the binary as exhaustive, treats it as permanent, and treats it as foundational to social organization. The selection, organization, and political deployment of these differences is a social process. The category that results from the process appears to precede the process, the way the commodity form appears to be a natural property of objects rather than a social relation between producers. Consider what Turner explicitly argues about race. Ancestry, phenotype, and skin color are material differences that can, under particular historical conditions, become socially determinant. The social relation is not contained within the material difference. Skin color does not produce slavery. The historically specific organization of social relations makes those differences consequential. The bio-essentialist error consists in reading the historically produced relation backward into the body, so that the social position appears to follow from biology. the same method to sex and reproductive anatomy becomes a material difference that can, under particular historical conditions, become socially determinant. The social relation is not contained within the material difference. Reproductive anatomy does not produce patriarchy. The historically specific organization of social relations makes those differences consequential. The bio-essentialist error consists in reading the historically produced relation backward into the body, so that the social position appears to follow from biology.
Turner accepts all of it in the paragraph above. And then Turner's hypothesis requires something that the paragraph above cannot provide: a reason to treat sex as the substrate that social relations organize rather than as itself a product of the same historical process that produces gender, womanhood, and the patriarchal class relation. Precision matters here because the stupidest possible reading of this argument will otherwise reproduce itself by lunchtime. Bodies are real. Reproductive anatomy exists. Human beings differ in their relationship to gestation, birth, lactation, and reproductive capacity, and those differences are material and politically consequential in ways any serious feminism must be able to analyze.
What I am saying is that "sex" is the name for a classification. The classification gathers together particular bodily characteristics, assigns them to two categories, treats those categories as exhaustive, treats them as stable, treats them as politically foundational, and treats the boundary between them as naturally given rather than socially administered. The classification has a history. The characteristics it gathers have changed. The lines it draws have shifted. The institutions that administer it, from medicine to law to the family to the state, have reorganized which bodies count as which sex under different historical conditions. The relationship between the classification and the bodies it classifies is mediated by exactly the kind of social relations that Turner correctly identifies as historically constituted in every other domain of the argument.
A materialist analysis of sex cannot simply identify materialism with anatomy. This may be the most important methodological point in the essay, so it is worth getting it right rather than waving the word "material" around like anatomy settles the argument. Historical materialism does not define "material" as "physical." Social relations are material. A wage relation is material even though the value of a dollar bill is not a chemical property of the paper. Property is material even though ownership cannot be located by dissecting an object. Class is material even though nobody can find "proletarian" inside a worker's chromosomes. Marx spent three volumes of Capital demonstrating that value, which organizes the entirety of capitalist social life, is a social relation rather than a physical property of commodities (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 1867/1990). The whole point of the critique of political economy is that the material character of social relations cannot be reduced to the physical properties of the objects through which those relations are mediated.
The essay already makes this general point correctly: ancestry, phenotype, and skin color are material differences that become socially determinant through historically specific social relations, and the social relation is not contained within the material difference. The anti-essentialist method is sitting right there. Turner applies it to race and then fails to apply it to sex, because applying it to sex would dissolve the distinction between sex and gender that the entire framework requires.
The distinction between a theoretical choice and a failure matters here. Turner could argue that there is a principled reason to historicize race while declining to historicize sex. Turner could argue that sex possesses a degree of biological determinacy that race does not. Turner could argue that the relationship between female reproductive anatomy and women's oppression is tighter, more direct, and less historically variable than the relationship between phenotype and racial oppression. Turner does not make any of these arguments. Turner applies the anti-essentialist method to race, arrives at sex, and suddenly stops. Conveniently, the method expires exactly where applying it would become dangerous to the hypothesis it is supposed to test.
If Turner's materialism is Marxist, then "material" cannot simply mean "anatomical." A social relation can be fully material without being reducible to the physical bodies of the people who occupy its positions; property, wage labor, and patriarchy are all material. The question is what kind of materiality we are investigating when we investigate sex, and whether the answer is "the physical body" or "the social relation through which bodies are classified, administered, and made politically consequential."
Turner's framework wants both sides of the contradiction. It historicizes the relation while treating its bodily substrate as pre-historical, says social relations organize sexual difference while refusing to say sexual difference is itself socially organized, and makes patriarchy render sex determinant without allowing patriarchy to participate in producing sex as a coherent, binary, politically foundational category.
The French materialist feminists Turner does not cite had already identified this problem. Colette Guillaumin argued in Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology (1995) that the naturalization of social groups is itself a product of domination. The idea that subordinated groups possess inherent natural characteristics distinguishing them from dominant groups is not a pre-political observation that domination subsequently exploits. The idea is produced by domination. The "natural" properties attributed to women, to colonized peoples, to enslaved populations, are themselves ideological effects of the social relations that subordinate those groups. Nature, in Guillaumin's analysis, is something that power attributes to the people it dominates. The dominated are the ones who have a nature. The dominant simply are (Guillaumin, 1995, pp. 155-171)
Guillaumin's concept of sexage, the appropriation of the labor, time, bodily products, and sexual availability of the class of women by the class of men, locates the material foundation of women's oppression in a relation of direct physical appropriation rather than in anatomy itself (Guillaumin, 1995). The body matters in this account, but it matters because it is appropriated, not because it contains within itself the social meaning of that appropriation. The body is what domination seizes, and sex is the classification through which domination organizes what it has seized.
Christine Delphy, in Close to Home (1984) and in her essay "Rethinking Sex and Gender" (1993), argued that sex is a social product rather than a natural foundation. Gender, in Delphy's account, does not elaborate a pre-existing sexual division. Gender constitutes sex as a socially relevant category. The division of labor between men and women is not a cultural superstructure erected upon a biological base. The biological differences between male and female become socially salient, become organized into a binary, become treated as a foundational social division, because the social relations of patriarchy require them to. Without the patriarchal organization of reproduction, kinship, labor, and sexuality, the particular bodily differences currently gathered under the heading "sex" would have no more political significance than any other set of bodily variations (Delphy, "Rethinking Sex and Gender," 1993)
Wittig goes further. In "The Category of Sex" (1982) and "One Is Not Born a Woman" (1981), both collected in The Straight Mind (1992), Wittig argued that sex is the political category through which the heterosexual regime naturalizes the oppression of women. "The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual" (Wittig, The Straight Mind, 1992, p. 5). Sex is not a neutral description of bodily difference. Sex is the mechanism through which bodily difference is made to appear as the natural foundation of a social relation that is in fact historically produced. The category creates the appearance that the social division it organizes was always already there in nature, waiting to be recognized.
None of these theorists need bodies to disappear for the argument to work. Guillaumin studied the physical appropriation of women's bodies. Delphy studied the material extraction of domestic labor. Wittig wrote about the concrete social mechanisms, from marriage to reproduction to compulsory heterosexuality, through which women are constituted as a class. Their materialism is more rigorous than Turner's precisely because they refuse to exempt the category of sex from the same historical analysis they apply to every other social category.
Wittig matters here because she anticipates the exact problem Turner's framework produces. In "One Is Not Born a Woman" (1981), Wittig argues that the category "woman" exists only in relation to the category "man," and that both categories are produced through the heterosexual regime that organizes reproduction, kinship, and sexuality. A lesbian, in Wittig's analysis, is not a woman, because a lesbian has stepped outside the heterosexual relation that constitutes women as a class. The claim sounds paradoxical until you understand its terms: Wittig is saying that womanhood is a relational position within a system, and that someone who exits the system exits the position. The claim can be contested. Lesbians continue to face misogynistic violence, employment discrimination, and the institutional administration of their bodies by the same patriarchal state that administers heterosexual women. But the theoretical move is important: Wittig refuses to treat womanhood as a natural category that people carry around inside their bodies. Womanhood is a position within a relation. If the relation changes, the position changes. If someone's location within the relation changes, their womanhood changes (Wittig, The Straight Mind, 1992, pp. 9-20)
This lands remarkably close to what Invariance formalizes. The key difference is that Wittig anchored the constitutive relation too narrowly in heterosexuality. The social production of womanhood operates through more relations than heterosexual complementarity alone. It operates through labor, through violence, through institutional classification, through legal administration, through medical practice, through the racial organization of reproduction, and through the sexual organization of bodies that is broader than the heterosexual contract. Invariance takes Wittig's relational method and extends it to the full range of social relations through which womanhood is produced and reproduced.
Taken together, Guillaumin, Delphy, and Wittig leave Turner's framework with a problem it cannot answer without sacrificing its central hypothesis. If the naturalness attributed to subordinated groups is itself a product of domination (Guillaumin), if the biological differences classified as "sex" acquire their social salience through the social organization of gender rather than preceding it (Delphy), and if sex as a political category is the mechanism through which a heterosexual regime naturalizes the oppression of women (Wittig), then the category of sex cannot coherently serve as the pre-social substrate upon which a materialist analysis of patriarchy is built. The supposed substrate is already inside the building and the supposed ground is already part of the structure, so the distinction between a "material" base and a "social" superstructure dissolves at exactly the point where Turner needs it to hold.
To be fair, Turner never cites Guillaumin, Delphy, or Wittig. It is possible that Turner is unfamiliar with their work. But these are among the most important materialist feminist theorists of the twentieth century. Their arguments bear directly on the theoretical problem Turner is attempting to solve. A materialist feminist essay that proposes a theory of sex class without engaging the French materialist tradition that produced the most rigorous existing analyses of sex, class, and the relationship between them is missing its interlocutors. Turner engages Althusser, Fanon, Mao, Cabral, Brownmiller, and the New Afrikan revolutionary tradition. All of these engagements are productive. But the specific theoretical problem Turner is attempting to solve, the problem of what constitutes the patriarchal classes and how sex relates to that constitution, was most rigorously developed by the thinkers Turner does not engage.
Turner's essay ends up in a strange position relative to this tradition because the analytical tools, historicization, anti-essentialism, and explicit denial that the social relation is contained within the material difference are all already present. Everything necessary to reach the conclusion that sex is historically produced as a politically foundational classification is sitting inside the argument.
The essay does not reach that conclusion. Turner's hypothesis instead requires preserving sex as the material given that social relations organize, the thing that is there before the relation arrives, the ground beneath the historical feet. And as long as sex occupies that position in the theory, no amount of historicization will prevent the argument from recapitulating the structure it claims to have escaped: the structure in which a social relation reads itself backward into the bodies it dominates and discovers that those bodies were always already divided in the way the relation requires.
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II. SEX HAS A HISTORY
The claim that sex is historically produced as a socially coherent category needs care because people are spectacularly capable of replacing it with a much stupider claim and then arguing with that instead. The stupid version says that bodies are linguistic constructions, that reproductive anatomy does not exist, that words create chromosomes, and that anyone who mentions biology is a positivist. The stupid version has real adherents, and I am not among them.
Human bodies exist and differ. Some can gestate and give birth while others cannot; some produce ova and others produce sperm. These are material facts about physiology, and a feminism that cannot talk about them cannot talk coherently about reproduction, pregnancy, obstetric violence, menstruation, contraception, abortion, or the specific exploitation of gestational capacity. I have no interest in that feminism because it is useless.
The actual question is why these particular bodily differences, rather than any of the thousands of other ways human bodies differ, are gathered into a binary classification, treated as exhaustive, permanent, and foundational to social organization, administered through law, medicine, bureaucracy, kinship, religion, and the state, and made the basis of an entire system of domination. Human beings vary in height, weight, limb proportion, blood type, visual acuity, metabolic rate, allergic sensitivity, bone density, hormonal profile, neurological organization, and an effectively infinite number of other physiological characteristics. Patriarchy did not select these differences as the basis of its class system. Patriarchy selected reproductive characteristics, combined them with secondary sex characteristics, drew a line through the resulting distribution, called everything on one side male and everything on the other side female, and built a civilization on the assumption that this division was nature speaking.
The selection is political rather than natural. The fact that the selected characteristics are physical does not make the act of selecting and organizing them a neutral scientific description rather than a social practice embedded in relations of power.
We can see this most clearly when we examine what happens when the classification encounters bodies that do not conform to its expectations. The classification says there are two sexes, male and female, defined by reproductive characteristics, and expects chromosomes, gonads, hormones, genitals, and secondary sex characteristics to line up obediently in the same direction. When they do not, the classification has historically revised the body rather than itself. Intersex infants are surgically altered to conform to one of the two categories the classification demands. Adults whose hormonal profiles deviate from the expected range are medically treated to bring them into conformity. The classification does not describe what it finds. The classification produces what it needs.
This is a point about power rather than linguistic magic. The word "sex" does not create bodies; institutions administering sex classification exercise material power over bodies, and the classification they administer is shaped through that power rather than floating above it as a neutral observation. The distinction is important because it means that when we analyze sex, we are analyzing a social institution, a system of classification backed by medical, legal, and state power, rather than reading a transparent biological text.
Consider what the classification requires. Sex as a binary category requires treating a set of characteristics that actually distribute across a continuum as though they cluster into two discrete types. It requires treating those types as exhaustive, so that every human body belongs to one or the other. It requires treating them as stable, so that classification at birth determines classification for life. It requires treating them as concordant, so that chromosomal sex, gonadal sex, hormonal sex, genital morphology, and secondary sex characteristics are assumed to align in every case. It requires treating reproductive capacity as the definitional core of the category, despite the fact that large numbers of people classified as one sex or the other do not possess the reproductive capacity assumed to define their classification. And it requires treating the boundary between the categories as sharp, natural, and unproblematic, despite the existence of intersex people whose bodies do not conform to the binary, and despite the existence of transsexual people whose bodies have been materially altered through medical intervention in ways that disrupt the assumed concordance.
Every one of these requirements is maintained through institutional practice rather than through the spontaneous testimony of nature. Medicine administers sex through diagnosis, surgical intervention on intersex infants, hormone regulation, reproductive technology, and the legal administration of sex classification. Law administers sex through birth certificates, identity documents, marriage law, criminal law, family law, and anti-discrimination law. The state administers sex through census categories, military policy, immigration policy, prison classification, and the regulation of public facilities. Kinship administers sex through patrilineal and matrilineal inheritance, gendered naming conventions, expectations of domestic labor, and the organization of care. Religion administers sex through marriage rites, sexual morality, reproductive prohibition, and the gendered organization of religious authority. Sexuality administers sex through compulsory heterosexuality, the organization of desire around the assumed complementarity of male and female bodies, and the punishment of sexual relations and identities that do not conform to the binary.
None of this administration is necessary in the sense that it follows inevitably from the existence of reproductive differences. The administration is necessary in the sense that without it the classification would not hold together as a binary, would not hold together as exhaustive, would not hold together as stable, and would not function as the foundation of a system of domination.
This reverses the usual direction of explanation. The usual explanation says: sex exists as a natural binary, and patriarchy builds a system of domination on top of it. The reversed explanation says: patriarchy requires a binary classification of bodies in order to organize its system of domination, and sex is the name for the classification that patriarchy has produced to serve that requirement. Patriarchy does more than organize sexual difference; it participates in producing sexual difference as a socially coherent difference. Bodies precede their classification, while sex as a political classification does not.
This only sounds extreme if "classification" is mistaken for a label. Here it means an institutional practice backed by material power. The classification of bodies into two sexes is not a passive description written on a clipboard. It is an active process involving doctors, hospitals, government offices, legal systems, school systems, military systems, prison systems, insurance systems, athletic regulatory bodies, and the entirety of the administrative system through which modern states govern their populations. The classification produces material consequences: it determines which bathroom a person uses, which prison a person is sent to, which medical treatments a person can access, which legal protections apply to a person, which employment opportunities are available to a person, and which expectations govern a person's behavior in every social interaction from birth to death.
A materialist analysis of sex must account for this institutional reality. The institutions are not neutral observers of a pre-existing biological fact. The institutions are active participants in the production and maintenance of the classification. The institutions enforce the binary by pathologizing, medicalizing, and sometimes surgically altering bodies that do not conform to it. The institutions maintain the exhaustiveness of the classification by refusing to acknowledge the existence of bodies that cannot be classified within it. The institutions reproduce the stability of the classification by making it extremely difficult, legally and socially, to change one's sex classification once it has been assigned. And the institutions produce the political salience of the classification by attaching to it an enormous system of differential treatment, differential vulnerability, differential access, and differential obligation.
Sex requires historical maintenance by institutions that have changed over time, operated differently across social formations, classified bodies differently under different conditions, and produced different relationships between the classification and the bodies classified.
Thomas Laqueur argued in Making Sex (1990) that European medical understandings of sex shifted from a one-sex model, in which male and female bodies were understood as hierarchically ordered variations of a single type, to a two-sex model, in which male and female bodies were understood as fundamentally different natural kinds, during the eighteenth century. In Laqueur's account, the shift was not driven simply by new anatomical discoveries because much of the relevant anatomy had been available for centuries. He instead connected the change to political transformations, including the reorganization of civic life around the concept of natural equality, which produced a need for a new account of sexual difference capable of justifying women's exclusion from the public sphere on natural rather than merely customary grounds (Laqueur, 1990, pp. 149-192) The category of sex did not change because bodies changed. The category changed because the social relations within which bodies were classified changed.
Laqueur's argument has been criticized, and some of the criticisms have merit. He may overstate the degree to which premodern European thought operated with a single-sex model, and the transition to a two-sex model was probably less abrupt and less uniform than his narrative suggests. But the core insight survives the criticisms. The way a society classifies sex is connected to the social relations that organize sex, gender, reproduction, and political life within that society. When those relations change, the classification can change. The classification is historical. It has not always been what it currently is. It will not necessarily remain what it currently is. A materialist analysis of sex must be able to account for this historicity, and a framework that treats the current binary classification as a transparent reflection of pre-social biological fact cannot account for it.
The history of intersex medical treatment provides an even more direct demonstration. Since the mid-twentieth century, medical institutions in the United States and Europe have performed surgical interventions on intersex infants to assign them to one of two sex categories, including interventions undertaken without an independent medical necessity and primarily to make bodies conform to social expectations of male or female anatomy. In those cases, the institutional system cannot comfortably accommodate a body that refuses the binary, so medicine materially reshapes the body until the classification can digest it. The surgery does not simply discover an infant's true sex; it can produce a body made legible within the existing system (Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 2000) . This brings me back to a formulation I developed before I had the language I am constructing here. In "It's Not the Hormones, Idiot," I argued that the relevant political question is social position rather than identity. What determines whether someone occupies a particular social position is the set of social relations that produce, maintain, and enforce that position, not the interior experience or self-identification of the person occupying it. A worker is a worker because of a relationship to capital, not because of a feeling of proletarian identity. A colonized subject is colonized because of a relationship to a colonial power, not because of a psychological attachment to the experience of colonization.
I applied this same analysis to womanhood. I argued that what makes someone a woman, politically, is a set of social relations: institutional classification, employment discrimination, sexual subordination, exposure to gendered violence, medical administration, legal status, the organization of domestic labor, and the way other people treat the person in ordinary social interactions. Transition alters these relations: medical transition alters the body, social transition alters classification, and legal transition alters administrative position. The person's relationship to heterosexuality, to misogynistic violence, to employment discrimination, to sexual objectification, and to the gendered organization of everyday life changes. The change is not absolute, not instantaneous, not identical across all transsexual women, and not independent of race, class, geography, and historical period. But the change is real, material, and consequential in ways that cannot be dismissed as merely ideological.
I called the object social position, and Invariance is my attempt to describe how we find it.
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III. INVARIANCE
Every materialist feminist theory of sex confronts the same foundational problem. Womanhood as a social position is occupied by people who differ from one another in nearly every imaginable way. Women differ in reproductive capacity, in bodily configuration, in racial classification, in economic class, in sexual orientation, in national origin, in historical period, in relationship to colonialism, in relationship to slavery, in relationship to the carceral state, in relationship to labor, and in whether they were classified as female at birth or arrived at that classification through a process of transition. Any theory that proposes to analyze womanhood as a class relation must explain what holds the class together despite these differences. The traditional answer is sex: what all women share, what makes them women, what grounds the class, is a set of bodily characteristics, typically organized around reproductive capacity. I have spent the first two sections of this essay arguing that this answer is inadequate. If sex is itself a historically produced classification rather than a natural given, then it cannot serve as the pre-social ground of the class it is supposed to explain. You cannot use the output of a historical process as the foundation for a theory of that process. If patriarchy participates in producing sex as a socially coherent binary, then sex cannot simultaneously be the thing that exists before patriarchy arrives and explains why patriarchy takes the form it does. But the alternative cannot be that womanhood is nothing, that the class has no coherence, that feminism has no object. If the critique of sex-essentialism simply dissolves the category of woman, it has destroyed the possibility of feminist analysis along with the essentialism. A feminism that cannot say what it is analyzing is a feminism that cannot analyze anything. We need a method capable of identifying the social relation that produces women as a class without requiring the class to be grounded in an essential bodily property shared by every member, and we need a way to identify what persists when the individual occupants, bodily configurations, institutional mechanisms, ideological representations, and historical conditions change. That means investigating the relation rather than hunting for a substance inside the people who occupy it. I call this method Invariance.
Invariance is a materialist method for identifying a social relation by following what remains structurally operative across transformations in its ideological form, individual occupants, and historical mechanisms of reproduction. The term requires immediate clarification. I am borrowing from a mathematical and physical concept, but I am not using it in its technical scientific sense. In mathematics, an invariant is a property that remains unchanged under a specified set of transformations. A circle retains its ratio of circumference to diameter regardless of its size. The property persists while the particular instance changes. I am using the concept analogously. A social relation has an invariant structure when certain of its features persist across transformations in the particular people occupying its positions, the particular bodies attached to those people, the particular institutions reproducing the relation, and the particular ideological representations through which the relation is lived and understood.
The invariant is neither an eternal property nor a mystical essence every woman must possess. It is the relation itself insofar as that relation continues to reproduce a social position despite variation among the people occupying it and historical changes in the processes through which the position is produced. Consider the Marxist analysis of class, which provides the clearest existing model for this kind of investigation. A proletarian is not a proletarian because of an essential bodily property. No chromosome, no anatomical feature, no inherited characteristic makes someone a worker. A proletarian is a proletarian because of a relationship to capital: specifically, a relationship in which the worker, lacking ownership of the means of production, must sell labor power in order to survive. The class position is relational. It is defined by the relation, not by the body of the person occupying it. Individual workers can enter and leave the proletariat. A worker who inherits a factory ceases to be a proletarian. The change is in social relations, not in the body. A small proprietor who is bankrupted and forced into wage labor becomes a proletarian, again through a change in social relations rather than a change in physiology (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 1867/1990, Chapters 6-7, 25).
The class persists despite turnover in its individual members. The relation persists despite changes in the particular industries, technologies, and institutions through which it is reproduced. The ideological representations of the proletariat change historically, from artisan to factory hand to service worker to gig-economy contractor, without the relation ceasing to operate. Capital does not need the same workers, the same industries, or the same cultural forms. Capital needs the relation: a class of people separated from the means of production and compelled to sell their labor.
Notice what Marx does not do. He never searches for a bodily characteristic shared by all proletarians or invents a proletarian essence, biological substrate, or physical property that grounds their class position. He does not argue that class position is determined "in the last instance" by a bodily fact that social relations subsequently organize. Class position is constituted through a material social relation that operates on bodies and produces a class; the ground of the class is the relation. Nobody finds this controversial when we are talking about economic class. Nobody argues that Marxist class analysis is threatened by the fact that individuals can move between class positions, that a proletarian can become a small proprietor, that a small proprietor can be bankrupted into the proletariat. Nobody argues that mobility between class positions proves that class is merely an "identity" or a "social construction" in the trivializing liberal sense. Nobody argues that because individuals can change class positions, class analysis has been refuted. The class is a product of the relation. The relation persists through the movement of individuals. The mobility of individuals is evidence about the relation, not evidence against it. The same logic should apply to sex. If womanhood is a class position produced through a social relation, then the movement of individuals into and out of that position is evidence about the relation, not evidence against it. A transsexual woman's movement into women's class position tells us something about what produces the class: it tells us that the class is produced through social relations that can incorporate a person whose initial bodily classification was male. It tells us that the relation does not require a specific set of bodily characteristics as a prerequisite. It tells us that the relation operates through classification, through institutional administration, through social perception, through the organization of labor and sexuality, and through the material consequences that follow from being positioned within these relations. It tells us, in short, exactly what Invariance predicts: the relation produces the class, the relation can operate on different bodies, and the invariant is the relation. What persists through these transformations is the invariant, the thing Marxist analysis is already investigating when it investigates class. I am proposing the same kind of investigation for sex.
Feminism has spent an astonishing amount of time trying to locate womanhood inside the human body, as though surgeons misplaced it during an operation and we just need a sufficiently motivated search party. The essentialist version searches for a bodily characteristic, typically a reproductive organ or a chromosome, that all women share and all non-women lack. The identity version searches for a psychological experience, a felt sense of gender, that all women share. Both searches fail for the same structural reason: they are looking for womanhood inside individual persons rather than inside the social relations that produce those persons as women. Invariance redirects the search. Instead of asking what property all women share, ask what relation continues to produce women as a subordinated social class despite variation among women and historical changes in the mechanisms of production. Here is how the method works: take the social position "woman" and change the variables.
Change the individual occupying the position. Replace one woman with another. Do the same social relations operate? Does the new occupant encounter the same institutional classification, the same sexual dynamics, the same relationship to domestic labor, the same exposure to gendered violence, the same administration by medicine and law? If so, the relation is operating independently of the particular individual.
Change the anatomy. Consider women who lack reproductive capacity: postmenopausal women, infertile women, women who have had hysterectomies. Are they still women? If so, then reproductive capacity is not the invariant. The relation that makes them women persists despite the absence of the characteristic that essentialist theory identifies as foundational. Consider a person whose legal sex is changed from male to female. Do the social relations attached to womanhood begin to operate? Does the person begin to encounter employment discrimination, sexual dynamics organized around femininity, institutional treatment appropriate to women, exposure to misogynistic violence? If so, the relation is responding to classification rather than to some bodily fact beneath classification.
Change the social classification. Consider a person who is perceived and treated as a woman in ordinary social interactions regardless of their legal classification. Do the social relations of womanhood operate through that perception? If they do, then social classification is materially efficacious in a way that cannot be dismissed as merely ideological.
Change the race. Consider Black women, white women, Indigenous women, Asian women. Do they all occupy womanhood in the same way? They do not. Womanhood as a social position is differentiated by race in ways that affect the specific relations through which women are subordinated, the specific forms of violence they encounter, the specific relationship they have to reproduction, the specific relationship they have to labor, and the specific ideological representations through which their womanhood is understood. The relation persists, but the relation operates differently across racial positions.
Change the economic class. Consider bourgeois women and proletarian women. Do they occupy womanhood identically? They do not. Class position differentiates the specific processes of subordination, the specific forms of domestic labor, and the specific relationship to reproductive exploitation. But both groups remain women. The class relation persists across economic class positions while operating differently within them.
Change the historical period. Consider women in feudal Europe, antebellum America, and contemporary capitalist democracies. The ideological representations, institutions, and specific mechanisms of subordination have changed, but something has persisted: a social relation that produces a subordinated class of people through the organization of sexuality, reproduction, labor, kinship, violence, classification, and institutional administration.
What persists is what Invariance investigates, and the invariant is not a list of essential properties. It is a relation that keeps reproducing a recognizable social position despite changes in the properties attached to the people occupying that position. The method does not require every woman to share a common bodily characteristic. It requires the social relation to keep operating. And the relation can keep operating through different bodies, different mechanisms, different institutions, and different historical conditions precisely because the relation is social rather than anatomical.
Someone will ask: if the invariant is the social relation rather than a shared bodily characteristic, then what prevents the class of women from expanding indefinitely? If womanhood is defined by a relation rather than a body, then can anyone who encounters gendered social relations claim to be a woman? Does the method dissolve the limits of the class entirely? It does not, because the method is disciplined by the actual operation of social relations that are institutionally administered, materially consequential, and empirically investigable. The question is whether the social relations that produce women as a subordinated class are actually operative on a given person, not whether the person feels they ought to be. A man who experiences a single instance of gendered condescension has encountered one of the mechanisms through which patriarchy operates. He has not been incorporated into women's subordinated class position. The relation operates on him momentarily and situationally; it does not produce his social position. A transsexual woman who has undergone social and medical transition and whose daily life is organized around the social relations of womanhood, whose employment, sexuality, institutional classification, exposure to violence, and ordinary social interactions are all structured by her position as a woman, is in a fundamentally different situation. The relation is not operating on her momentarily. The relation is producing her social position.
The distinction between encountering a single patriarchal relation and occupying a position matters here, and it is precisely the distinction that Invariance is designed to identify. A mechanism can operate in a particular encounter while a position is produced through the sustained operation of multiple mechanisms over time. You can encounter a mechanism of patriarchal gender enforcement without occupying the subordinated class position that those mechanisms reproduce. The class position is produced when a constellation of relations converges on a person and constitutes their social location within the hierarchy. The constellation, mechanisms, and bodies can vary, but the convergence has to be real, material, and sustained, and whether it is real is an empirical question answerable through investigation, not a metaphysical question answerable through introspection.
This has a consequence that will make some feminists uncomfortable. If the invariant is the relation rather than the body, then the limits of the class produced by that relation cannot be determined in advance by inspecting bodies. They can only be determined by investigating which people the relation actually incorporates. If the social relations that produce women as a subordinated class incorporate transsexual women, then transsexual women are part of the class. The theoretical question is not whether they possess the correct bodily characteristics. The theoretical question is whether the relation operates on them. for those transsexual women whose social transition has placed them within the set of relations through which womanhood is reproduced, is that it does.
This does not mean every transsexual woman occupies womanhood identically to every cis woman. It does not mean every cis woman occupies womanhood identically to every other cis woman. Black women do not occupy womanhood identically to white women. Poor women do not occupy womanhood identically to rich women. Lesbians do not occupy womanhood identically to heterosexual women. The class contains internal differentiation. It has always contained internal differentiation. The presence of transsexual women within the class adds another axis of differentiation. It does not destroy the class any more than the presence of Black women within the class destroyed it, despite the best efforts of white feminist theory to pretend otherwise for most of its history. Catharine MacKinnon's theory of sexuality provides additional support for the invariant method, though MacKinnon herself might resist the use I am making of it. In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), MacKinnon argues that sexuality is the primary mechanism through which women are subordinated. Sexuality, for MacKinnon, is to feminism what labor is to Marxism: the process through which the subordinated class is produced and through which its subordination is reproduced. Women are constituted as women through the sexual objectification that makes their bodies available to men, and the availability of women's bodies to men is the material foundation of patriarchal power (MacKinnon, 1989, pp. 3-4, 127-154) MacKinnon's theory is powerful because it locates the production of womanhood in a social relation, sexuality, rather than in a biological fact. Women are women because of what sexuality does to them, not because of what their chromosomes contain. The theory has limitations. It tends to treat sexuality as the single constitutive mechanism of women's oppression, which produces the same kind of analytical bottleneck that reproduction-centered theories produce: a single mechanism cannot account for the full range of social relations through which womanhood is produced and differentiated. But the relational move is correct. MacKinnon understood that womanhood is produced through a relation. The invariant method generalizes that insight: womanhood is produced through a constellation of relations, of which sexuality is one, and the method investigates the constellation rather than any single component.
If the invariant is the relation rather than a shared essence, then disrupting the relation should weaken or transform the class position even when bodily characteristics remain unchanged. That is precisely what we observe. Consider women in historical periods of revolutionary upheaval. During the Russian Revolution, during the early years of the Chinese Revolution, during national liberation movements across Africa and Asia, the social relations that produce womanhood were partially disrupted. Women entered production and gained access to education, political participation, and legal recognition while the sexual division of labor and the institution of the family were partially reorganized. Women's relationship to reproduction was partially altered through access to abortion, contraception, and socialized childcare. In each case, the bodily characteristics of the women involved did not change. What changed was the set of social relations through which those bodies were classified, administered, and positioned within a social hierarchy. The class position of women weakened, shifted, or was partially reconstructed because the relations producing that position were disrupted. The bodies stayed the same while the relation changed. The invariant method predicts exactly this: change the relation and you can change the position without changing the body. Conversely, when revolutionary disruptions were reversed, when the Soviet Union retreated from its early commitments to women's liberation, and when the Chinese state reconsolidated patriarchal family structures, women's class position was reconstituted without any change in their bodily characteristics. The relation was re-established, the position reproduced, and the bodies remained unchanged. What moved was the social relation, and the social position moved with it. That is evidence an invariant analysis can generate and an essentialist analysis cannot, because essentialist analysis predicts that the class position should remain stable as long as the bodily characteristics remain stable, and the historical record shows that it does not.
Invariance also has to survive cases that have nothing to do with transsexuality or it is just a sophisticated trans-inclusion argument wearing a theoretical hat. Take lesbianism. A lesbian's bodily characteristics are indistinguishable from those of a heterosexual woman. Her reproductive anatomy and chromosomes can be the same as a heterosexual woman's. By every essentialist criterion, she is female in exactly the way a heterosexual woman is female. Yet her relationship to the social relations that produce womanhood is different. She is not positioned within heterosexuality as a woman available to men. Her domestic life is not organized around the sexual division of labor between a male breadwinner and a female domestic worker. Her relationship to reproduction may be organized through medical technology, adoption, or the decision not to reproduce at all rather than through heterosexual intercourse. Her exposure to certain forms of male sexual violence may differ in its patterns, its contexts, and its institutional visibility. She is subjected to specific forms of punishment for deviating from the heterosexual organization of womanhood. She is punished for refusing the specific mechanism, heterosexual availability, through which patriarchy most directly administers women's subordination. She remains a woman even as her relationship to the relations of womanhood changes and the relation operates differently on her.
An essentialist analysis can say that the lesbian is female, which is true and tells us almost nothing about her specific social position. An invariant analysis can say that the lesbian occupies womanhood through a specific mode of incorporation that alters her relationship to heterosexuality, to domestic labor, to reproduction, and to the forms of violence that enforce compulsory heterosexuality, while leaving intact her relationship to other mechanisms through which womanhood is produced: employment discrimination, institutional classification, social perception, medical administration, and the gendered organization of public life. The invariant analysis explains what changes and what persists; the essentialist analysis explains neither. In the nineteenth-century bourgeois household, the "woman question" was organized around the confinement of women to the domestic sphere and their exclusion from wage labor. Women's subordination was reproduced through economic dependence on husbands, the legal doctrine of coverture, and the ideology of separate spheres. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, women entered wage labor in massive numbers. The specific mechanism of economic dependence through exclusion from paid work was disrupted. Women now constitute nearly half the labor force in most advanced capitalist economies. Yet women remain a subordinated class because the relation has persisted by adapting, operating through the gender wage gap, occupational segregation, the double burden of paid employment and unpaid domestic labor, sexual harassment in the workplace, the glass ceiling, and the specific forms of exploitation directed at women in feminized industries like care work, garment manufacturing, and sex work. The mechanism changed while the relation persisted. The invariant method predicts this: it predicts that the relation will continue to operate through whatever mechanisms are available to it within a given historical configuration, and it predicts that changes in specific mechanisms will produce changes in the form of women's subordination without automatically producing changes in the existence of women's subordination. an essentialist analysis cannot explain why the entry of women into wage labor did not end women's oppression, because essentialist analysis locates the ground of oppression in the body rather than in the relation. If women are oppressed because they are female, and if they are still female after entering the labor market, then the oppression should continue regardless of changes in the labor market. The essentialist analysis has nothing interesting to say about why the form of oppression changed. The invariant analysis has a great deal to say about it: the form changed because the specific mechanisms through which the relation operated changed, while the relation itself persisted and found new means. The analytical task is to trace the persistence through the transformation.
Then take changes in the institutions that reproduce sex. In the United States, the legal and medical institutions that administer sex classification have changed significantly over the past century. A person's legal sex was once determined exclusively at birth and was virtually impossible to change. It is now possible, in many jurisdictions, to change one's legal sex through administrative and medical procedures. Medical technology has made it possible to alter secondary sex characteristics, hormonal profiles, and even certain aspects of reproductive anatomy. The institutions that administer sex are themselves historically variable: they change, adapt, and produce different classifications under different conditions. An essentialist analysis treats the institutions as reflecting a natural fact. An invariant analysis treats the institutions as participating in the production of the classification. When the institutions change, the classification can change, and when the classification changes, the social position it produces can change. The method investigates this process rather than assuming that the classification is fixed and that the institutions are mere mirrors of a biological reality.
Any theoretical framework that has to call material consequences "merely ideological" until they become polite enough to disappear has already told on itself.
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IV. JOHN BROWN WASN'T A TRANS WOMAN
Turner's strongest “argument” is the John Brown analogy. John Brown and other white abolitionists were punished, imprisoned, and killed for violating the racial hierarchy of slavery. Their treatment bore empirical similarities to the treatment of enslaved Africans. But the similarity of their treatment did not make their structural position identical. Brown was punished for opposing a class relation. He did not thereby become a member of the class subordinated by that relation. His persecution and the oppression of enslaved Africans acquired different structural meanings because Brown and the enslaved occupied different positions within the same system. the analogy is deployed to argue that transsexual women who are punished for violating patriarchy's gendered expectations are in a position analogous to Brown's: punished through the mechanisms of a hierarchy without necessarily occupying the subordinated class position that hierarchy reproduces. Being punished for defying the rules of a system is not the same as being constituted as a member of the subordinated class within that system.
I will concede the abstract methodological point because it is correct. Being punished for violating a hierarchy does not automatically make you a member of the class subordinated by that hierarchy. A white person who is physically attacked for participating in civil rights activism has been harmed through the mechanisms of racial domination without becoming Black. A man who is beaten for being perceived as effeminate has been harmed through the mechanisms of patriarchal gender enforcement without becoming a woman. The punishment responds to a real violation and produces real harm, but the structural position of the person being punished is not automatically identical to the structural position of the people whose subordination the system is organized to reproduce. That much is conceded; the analogy still fails when applied to transsexual women.
John Brown opposed a class relation. He acted in political solidarity with enslaved Africans. He organized militarily against the slave system. He was executed by the state for his actions. At no point during any of this did society begin to classify John Brown as Black. His legal race did not change. His embodied characteristics were not medically altered toward characteristics that racial society interpreted as Black. Employers did not begin treating him as a Black man because they perceived him as Black. Sexual and romantic partners did not approach him through a social classification of him as a Black person. The state did not issue documentation recording his race as Black. His access to public accommodations, employment, housing, and civic participation was not reorganized because society had incorporated him into Blackness. His ordinary daily interactions were not restructured around a social perception of him as a Black man.
Brown's relationship to the racial hierarchy was one of political opposition, and his relationship to Blackness was one of solidarity rather than incorporation. He fought against a system without being absorbed into the social position that system produced.
Now consider a transsexual woman who has undergone medical transition, whose legal sex has been changed, whose social presentation has been altered, and who is perceived and treated in ordinary social interactions as a woman.
Her legal classification has changed. Her embodied characteristics have been medically altered in ways that lead society to classify her as female. Employers treat her as a woman, with all the consequences for wages, promotion, sexual harassment, and occupational segregation that follow from that treatment. Men approach her sexually through a classification of her as a woman. The state has issued documentation recording her sex as female. Her access to gendered institutions has been reorganized. Her ordinary daily interactions are structured around a social perception of her as a woman. She is subject to misogynistic harassment on the street. She is subject to sexual objectification. She is subject to the specific forms of condescension, dismissal, and paternalism that patriarchy directs at women. She is subject to the specific forms of violence that patriarchy directs at women, compounded by the specific forms of violence that patriarchy directs at transsexual women in particular. this is not a description of someone who has merely violated the rules of a hierarchy. This is a description of someone who has undergone a material process that has altered her location within the social relations that constitute the hierarchy. Brown opposed a class relation from outside. A transsexual woman has undergone a transformation that places her within the social relations through which the subordinated class position is produced and reproduced. John Brown walked into Harpers Ferry with a plan to arm enslaved people and start a revolution. He did not walk into Harpers Ferry with a plan to become Black. Brown's entire political project was organized around solidarity across a racial boundary that he understood himself to be standing on the dominant side of. His radicalism consisted precisely in his willingness to use the social power available to him as a white man, his access to weapons, his freedom of movement, his capacity to organize without being immediately surveilled and destroyed, in the service of the enslaved class. His position within the racial hierarchy was a resource for his political project, and he deployed it as such until the state killed him. A transsexual woman is doing something categorically different. She is not deploying the social power of maleness in the service of women's liberation from a position of solidarity across a boundary she understands herself to stand on the dominant side of. She is undergoing a material process through which her position within gendered social relations is altered. The process is not an act of solidarity. The process is a transformation. The distinction matters because solidarity presupposes two distinct positions with a political relationship between them, while transformation presupposes movement from one position toward another.
Transsexual transition is a material process through which a person's social position changes by altering bodies, legal classification, social perception, employment relations, sexual relations, exposure to violence, and the institutional administration of the person's life. These alterations are not absolute or simultaneous, do not occur identically across all transsexual women, and are shaped by race, class, geography, and whether the person "passes" in gendered social interactions. But they are real, material, and consequential in ways that the John Brown analogy cannot accommodate, because the analogy was designed to describe political opposition to a system, not material incorporation into a social position produced by that system.
There is a further dimension to this that the John Brown analogy cannot capture. Brown's relationship to the racial hierarchy did not change over time through a cumulative process of institutional reclassification. His race was never contested by the institutions that administered racial classification; he was never racially ambiguous or positioned between white and Black. He was white, and he was killed as a white man who opposed the racial order with his whiteness never in question. A transsexual woman's position within the gendered hierarchy often does change over time through a cumulative process of institutional reclassification It involves multiple institutions, multiple encounters, multiple adjustments in how she is treated, what is expected of her, what violence she is exposed to, and how she is positioned within sexual, economic, and social relations. The process can be incomplete. It can be contested. It can be reversed. It can differ in its extent and its consequences depending on the specific circumstances of the individual woman, her race, her economic class, her access to medical care, her geography, and the specific institutional environment in which she lives.
But the process is real, a positional change within a hierarchy rather than political opposition to a hierarchy from a fixed position outside it. The John Brown analogy can describe solidarity, opposition, and punishment for deviation, but it cannot account for a person whose actual position within the hierarchy is materially altered through the body, law, medicine, social perception, and the reorganization of ordinary daily life.
Turner's own concessions make the failure clearer. The essay acknowledges that gender classification has material effects. It acknowledges that gender classification can determine how a person is perceived, treated, punished, rewarded, and permitted to move through institutions. Turner acknowledges that these effects possess their own "material efficacy and relative autonomy." Turner acknowledges that "in particular circumstances any one of these may become immediately decisive in determining how a concrete person is treated."
If gender classification materially determines institutional treatment, social perception, employment relations, sexual dynamics, exposure to violence, and the organization of a person's daily life, then Turner has described a set of social relations.
The social relations include institutional classification, the gendered organization of labor, the sexual administration of bodies, exposure to gendered violence, legal status, medical administration, and the way other people treat the person in ordinary interactions. These relations determine material outcomes by distributing advantages and disadvantages and organizing exploitation and vulnerability. They are reproduced through institutions with their own histories, material existence, and capacity to act upon bodies.
The essay acknowledges all of it as materially efficacious. Then Turner insists that none of it constitutes class position, because class position is determined, in the last instance, by sex.
I want to press on this distinction, because it is doing all the load-bearing work in Turner's argument and it is exactly where the argument breaks.
If something determines how a concrete person is treated across institutions, across their daily life, across their employment, across their sexual relations, across their exposure to violence, and across their relationship to the gendered organization of labor and reproduction, what exactly is left for "class position" to name that this set of determinations has not already described? What is the remainder? What is the thing that exists beneath all of these materially efficacious determinations, the thing that Turner calls "sex," that constitutes the "real" class position while all of the listed material effects are classified as mere ideology with material consequences?
Turner's framework requires that class position be something other than the totality of social relations through which a person's location within a system of domination is produced. It requires that class position be a fact about the body that exists beneath the social relations, a fact that the social relations express, mediate, reproduce, and sometimes obscure, but a fact that remains there, unchanged, regardless of how the social relations actually operate on the concrete person. That requirement smuggles back exactly the kind of essentialism Turner's anti-essentialism was supposed to prevent.
Marxists who historicize every form of social consciousness while treating "economic interest" as a transhistorical natural fact are performing the same operation. Racial theorists who historicize every form of racial ideology while treating phenotypical difference as a pre-social given that history merely interprets are performing the same operation. The structure is always the same: the theory claims to be anti-essentialist while exempting its own foundational category from the anti-essentialism it applies to everything else.
Turner's framework is anti-essentialist about gender, about ideology, about the social organization of reproduction, about the political meaning attached to bodily differences, and about the relationship between structural position and immediately observable experience. It is essentialist about sex. The essentialism is residual because it is not announced. It is embedded in the theory's architecture, in the assumption that sex names a pre-social material fact that history seizes upon rather than a classification that history produces. The assumption is never argued for. It is presupposed. And it is presupposed because arguing for it would require the theory to explain what holds the classification "sex" together as a natural binary, and the explanation would have to proceed through the same kind of institutional, medical, legal, and social analysis that the theory has already conceded applies to gender, which would dissolve the distinction between sex and gender that the entire framework depends upon.
The analytical move is familiar from other domains. A framework acknowledges that social relations produce material effects. Then it insists that those effects are merely the way a deeper determination manifests itself. Then it locates the deeper determination in a bodily characteristic. Then it refuses to historicize the bodily characteristic on the grounds that the characteristic is "material" in a sense that the social relations are not. The result is a theory that appears to be materialist because it talks about bodies, while the actually existing social relations through which bodies are classified, administered, and made politically consequential are demoted to the status of ideological mediation.
If gender classification materially determines what happens to people, and if that determination operates across the full range of social relations through which patriarchy is reproduced, then at some point you have to ask whether continuing to classify that determination as "merely ideological" is a theoretical conclusion following from the evidence or a prior commitment that the evidence has been organized to protect.
The evidence, including the evidence Turner presents, supports a different conclusion. The social relations through which people are incorporated into sexed class positions include anatomy, but they also include legal classification, social perception, institutional administration, the gendered organization of labor, exposure to violence, sexual dynamics, medical administration, and the way other people treat the person in ordinary interactions. All of these relations are material. None of them is more material than the others. The question is which of them are operative in a given case, not which of them possesses the metaphysical privilege of constituting "real" class position while the others are reduced to ideological representation.
Invariance does not need to choose one determination as foundational. Invariance asks which relations remain operative when the others change. It investigates the social production of class position through whatever combination of material relations is actually doing the work. And it refuses to exempt any particular determination from investigation on the grounds that it is "physical" while the others are "social," because the distinction between physical and social materiality is exactly the distinction that Turner's own anti-essentialism should have dissolved.
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V. THE REPRODUCTIVE TRAP
If there is one argument that has historically been difficult for trans-inclusive feminism to answer convincingly, it is the argument from reproduction. The argument is straightforward: patriarchy is organized around the control and exploitation of female reproductive capacity. Pregnancy, gestation, birth, lactation, and the unpaid labor of social reproduction are performed by female bodies. The control of these processes constitutes the material foundation of women's oppression. Transsexual women cannot become pregnant. Therefore transsexual women are not oppressed as women through the specific material relation that constitutes womanhood as a class.
I want to take this argument at full strength before I dismantle it because reproduction is real. The exploitation of reproductive capacity is real. The history of patriarchy cannot be understood without understanding how male-dominated societies have organized, controlled, and extracted value from women's capacity to gestate and give birth. Engels was wrong about nearly everything specific in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), but the general insight that the organization of reproduction is connected to the organization of property, kinship, and social power is correct and has been developed far more rigorously by subsequent feminist theorists. Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch (2004) demonstrated the historical connections between the enclosure of common lands, the criminalization of reproductive autonomy, the witch trials, and the production of the proletarian housewife as a form of unpaid reproductive laborer serving capital's need for a self-reproducing workforce. The control of reproduction is political. It has material consequences. It is one of the mechanisms through which the class of women is produced and maintained.
None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute is whether reproduction can serve as the essential defining characteristic of womanhood, the thing that makes the class a class, the invariant property that all women share and that grounds the social relation producing their subordination.
Start with the obvious difficulty: not all women reproduce. Infertile and postmenopausal women are women; so are women who have had hysterectomies, chosen not to reproduce, live in lesbian relationships without reproductive technology, or have been involuntarily sterilized. Nobody, including Turner, would argue that any of these people cease to be women because they lack reproductive capacity or do not exercise it. But if women who cannot reproduce remain women, then reproductive capacity is not the defining characteristic of womanhood. It is one of the characteristics associated with womanhood, one of the means through which womanhood is produced and maintained, but it is not the invariant.
The response would be that these women remain women because they belong to the sex class that is organized around reproduction even if individual members of the class do not reproduce. The class is defined by its relationship to reproduction even if not every member of the class instantiates that relationship. That is a reasonable response and an enormous concession. The moment you concede that individual women need not possess reproductive capacity to count as members of the class organized around reproduction, you have conceded that class membership is determined by something other than individual reproductive capacity. You have conceded that class membership is determined by the social relation rather than individual reproductive capacity, which hands over the central methodological point of Invariance while trying to keep a conclusion the concession no longer supports. The argument from reproduction becomes even harder to sustain when confronted with the history of racialized womanhood.
Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (1987) remains one of the most devastating interventions in the history of feminist theory precisely because it demonstrates that the categories "woman" and "mother" have never operated uniformly across racial lines in the United States. Under slavery, the enslaved Black woman occupied a position in which her reproductive capacity was appropriated by the slaveholding class. She was, in Spillers's terms, "ungendered" by the violence of the Middle Passage and the regime of forced labor. The enslaved woman's body was property, her reproductive capacity produced more property, and the children she bore were denied ordinary legal claims of maternal kinship. Her relationship to motherhood was structurally different from the relationship of the white bourgeois woman to motherhood, because the institutions of kinship, law, and property that organized reproduction operated on her differently. She reproduced, but she did not reproduce herself. She reproduced the slaveholder's capital
Spillers's analysis makes it impossible to treat reproduction as a uniform experience that grounds a uniform class position. The enslaved Black woman and the white slaveholding woman both reproduced. They occupied radically different social positions in relation to reproduction. The difference was structural rather than merely a difference of degree within a single class. It was produced by the intersection of racial capitalism and patriarchy, and it made the meaning of reproduction, the meaning of motherhood, and the meaning of womanhood itself different for Black and white women.
Angela Davis developed complementary arguments in Women, Race and Class (1981). The ideology of femininity, domesticity, and maternal virtue that defined womanhood in nineteenth-century America was never extended to Black women. Black women labored in the fields alongside Black men under slavery. They were not excluded from "productive" labor and confined to "reproductive" labor in the way that the bourgeois ideology of separate spheres imagined white women to be. Their exclusion from the protections of femininity, their availability to sexual exploitation by slaveholders, and their forced reproductive labor were not deviations from womanhood. They were the specific form womanhood took for Black women under racial capitalism (Davis, 1981, pp. 3-29)
Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought (2000) extended this analysis by examining the controlling images through which Black womanhood has been represented and administered: the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare mother, the jezebel. These images are not merely cultural stereotypes. They are ideological channels through which Black women are positioned within interlocking systems of race, gender, and class domination. The mammy image justifies the extraction of Black women's domestic labor in white households. The welfare mother image justifies the surveillance and discipline of Black women's reproduction by the state. The jezebel image justifies the sexual exploitation of Black women by representing their sexuality as inherently excessive and uncontrolled (Collins, 2000, pp. 69-96)
Black feminist theory is not an optional supplement to an otherwise complete theory of sex class. Black feminist theory demonstrates that no historically adequate theory of sex class can begin from an abstract universal female relationship to reproduction. The relationship between women and reproduction is mediated by race, by class, by colonialism, by enslavement, by the specific historical organization of kinship, law, property, and labor in particular social formations. A theory that treats reproduction as the ground of womanhood and then discovers that different women have different relationships to reproduction has not encountered an anomaly. It has encountered evidence that its starting point was wrong.
Spillers's analysis has implications that extend far beyond the history of American slavery. If the social meaning of womanhood, motherhood, and reproductive capacity was produced differently for Black and white women under the specific historical conditions of the slave system, then the social meaning of these categories is always produced through historically specific social relations rather than derived from a universal female biology. The question for any historical period, any social formation, is not "what is the universal relationship between women and reproduction?" The question is "how do the specific social relations of this formation organize reproduction, and how does that organization produce, differentiate, and administer the class of women?"
The implications for Turner's framework are severe. If sex determines patriarchal class position "in the last instance," then the sex of enslaved Black women and white slaveholding women was presumably the same. Both were female and both belonged to the subordinated sex class. But the social relations through which they were incorporated into that class, the specific processes of their subordination, and the specific relationship they had to reproduction, labor, kinship, sexuality, and violence were so fundamentally different that any theory of womanhood beginning from a shared bodily characteristic and working outward to social experience cannot explain the difference. The difference is constitutive rather than a deviation from a norm. Different social relations produced different forms of womanhood even where sex was supposedly "the same." A theory anchored in sex strains to explain that; a theory anchored in the social relation does not.
The argument needs a name for what is happening here: differential incorporation. Differential incorporation names the process by which different people can be incorporated into the same class position through different pathways and can experience different relations within that position. A class can be a class, can be produced and reproduced through a continuous set of social relations, while containing significant internal differentiation in the specific processes through which its members are subordinated.
Consider the proletariat. A factory worker in Detroit in 1950, a domestic servant in São Paulo in 2020, a gig economy driver in Lagos in 2025, and an agricultural laborer in Mississippi in 1890 are all proletarians. They are all separated from the means of production and sell their labor to survive, while the mechanisms incorporating them into the proletariat, the forms of exploitation they experience, and the institutions administering their labor differ enormously. The specific relationships they have to the state, to racial domination, to colonial extraction, and to the gendered division of labor differ. The class is real, the relation is operative, and the variation within the class is real too. Marxist class analysis does not require every proletarian to have an identical experience of exploitation. It requires the relation to be operative.
The same principle applies to womanhood. A white bourgeois woman in antebellum Virginia, a Black enslaved woman on the same plantation, a lesbian feminist in 1970s New York, a postmenopausal widow in contemporary Japan, and a transsexual woman in Atlanta in 2026 are all incorporated into womanhood. They are all positioned within the set of social relations through which womanhood is produced as a subordinated class. But the pathways of incorporation, forms of subordination, and relationships to reproduction, sexuality, labor, violence, law, and institutional classification differ.
Differential incorporation solves a problem that has haunted feminist theory since its inception: the problem of false universalism. Every feminist theory that begins from a universal account of womanhood discovers that the account is actually a description of a particular group of women, typically white, bourgeois, heterosexual, non-disabled, and cis, whose experience has been generalized as the experience of all women. The discovery produces a crisis. Either the theory retreats to a narrower scope, analyzing "women like us" rather than women as a class, or the theory tries to patch itself with additive intersectionality, treating race, class, disability, and sexuality as modifications applied to a base-level womanhood that remains fundamentally the same across all women.
Both responses fail. The first destroys the possibility of feminist class analysis, while the second preserves the universalism and pretends it has corrected it, because the "base-level womanhood" that the modifications are applied to is still the womanhood of the particular group that was universalized in the first place.
Differential incorporation offers a different solution. There is no base-level womanhood that exists prior to its differentiation by race, class, sexuality, disability, and cisness or transness. The class of women is produced through differentiated mechanisms of incorporation from the start. Black womanhood is not white womanhood plus race. Black womanhood is a specific form of incorporation into the class of women, produced through specific social relations, involving specific mechanisms of subordination, generating specific relationships to reproduction, labor, sexuality, violence, and institutional administration. White womanhood is another specific form of incorporation. Neither is the base or the modification; both are specific productions of the same class relation operating through different social relations of race, class, and historical formation.
Differential incorporation explains how a class can be internally differentiated without ceasing to be a class. It explains how women whose relationship to reproduction differs radically, including women who have no relationship to reproduction at all, can nonetheless occupy the same class position. It explains how the variation among women, which essentialist theories treat as a problem to be explained away, is itself a feature of the class relation.
It also explains how transsexual women can be incorporated into womanhood through mechanisms that differ from those incorporating cis women without destroying the coherence of the class.
Differential incorporation needs sharper limits or it collapses into a pompous synonym for "diversity." It is not merely the observation that women are different from one another. It is a claim about the structure of class production. Specifically, it claims that a class can be produced through multiple distinct pathways of incorporation, that these pathways can involve different processes operating on different bodies under different conditions, and that the class remains a class because the pathways converge on a common relational position despite their divergent origins.
The concept has limits, and differential incorporation does not mean that anyone can be incorporated into any class through any mechanism. The pathways of incorporation are constrained by the social relations that constitute the class. A person is incorporated into the proletariat through specific economic relations: dispossession from the means of production, compulsion to sell labor power. A person cannot be "differentially incorporated" into the proletariat through a mechanism that has no relationship to these economic relations. The concept is not infinitely elastic. It describes variation within the operation of a specific set of social relations, not unlimited variation across unrelated relations.
Analogously, a person is incorporated into the class of women through specific patriarchal relations: the social organization of sexuality, reproduction, labor, kinship, violence, classification, and institutional administration. A person whose relationship to these relations is negligible or nonexistent is not incorporated into the class, regardless of their self-identification. Differential incorporation describes variation in the specific mechanisms through which these relations operate on different people. It does not describe a situation in which the relations are absent.
The concept also generates explanatory consequences that go beyond its defensive use against the reproduction argument. If a class is produced through differentiated pathways of incorporation, then political organization within that class must account for the differentiation. A feminist politics organized exclusively around the reproductive mechanism of women's subordination will fail to represent women whose incorporation into the class operates through other mechanisms. A feminist politics organized exclusively around the experience of white bourgeois heterosexual women will fail to represent women whose incorporation operates through different racial, economic, and sexual relations. The concept of differential incorporation does not simply pluralize womanhood. It requires feminism to investigate the specific processes through which different women are subordinated, the specific contradictions produced by those differences, and the specific conditions under which solidarity across differentially incorporated positions becomes politically possible.
Solidarity across differential incorporation has to be built through material work: the identification of shared interests, the negotiation of divergent interests, the construction of organizational forms capable of representing internally differentiated class positions, and the development of political demands capable of addressing the specific processes of subordination operating on differently incorporated women. The history of feminism is largely a history of failed solidarity across differential incorporation, and the failures are instructive. The nineteenth-century women's suffrage movement failed to build solidarity across racial lines because it organized around the interests of white women and treated Black women's specific mechanisms of incorporation as irrelevant to the central struggle. Second-wave feminism reproduced similar failures around race, class, and sexuality. Each failure followed from the same structural error: the assumption that one pathway of incorporation represents the universal experience of the class, and that women incorporated through other pathways should subordinate their specific demands to the demands generated by the universalized pathway.
Differential incorporation predicts these failures and provides a framework for avoiding them. If the class is produced through multiple pathways, then no single pathway represents the class. Feminist politics must begin from the differentiation rather than treating it as an inconvenient complication of an otherwise unified class experience. The class is unified by the relation. The politics must address the differentiated mechanisms through which the relation operates.
The concept of differential incorporation also illuminates why the history of reproductive politics in the United States cannot be understood through a single narrative of patriarchal control over female bodies. The reproductive politics directed at white middle-class women in the twentieth century centered on restricting access to abortion and contraception: patriarchy wanted these women to reproduce and organized legal and medical institutions to ensure that they did. The reproductive politics directed at Black women, Indigenous women, Puerto Rican women, and disabled women centered on forced sterilization, coercive contraception, and the punitive regulation of reproduction: patriarchy wanted these women not to reproduce, or to reproduce only under conditions that served the needs of racial capitalism, and organized legal and medical institutions to ensure compliance. The mechanisms ran in opposite directions while the relation remained the same: patriarchal control over women's reproductive capacity. The direction of that control, toward compulsory reproduction or toward compulsory non-reproduction, was determined by race, class, disability status, and the specific needs of the social formation. The body was the site of the relation, while the social relations of racial capitalism determined its form and administered the body accordingly (Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 1997) [VERIFY CITATION].
A feminist theory grounded in reproductive anatomy cannot explain why the same anatomy produces opposite forms of patriarchal control depending on the race and class of the woman. A theory grounded in the social relation can, because the relation is the control of women's reproductive capacity while the specific form of that control varies historically and socially. The invariant is the relation of control rather than the anatomy being controlled.
The history of surrogacy provides another demonstration. Gestational surrogacy separates the genetic contribution to reproduction from the physical labor of gestation. A wealthy woman who contracts a surrogate to carry her genetically related child has displaced the physical labor of reproduction onto another woman, typically a poorer woman, often a woman of color, sometimes a woman in a different country. Both women are involved in reproduction, but one bears the physical burden while the other assumes the legal and social role of mother. The surrogate's reproductive labor is appropriated, compensated at rates that reflect her position in the global economy, and rendered legally invisible by contracts that assign all parental rights to the commissioning parents. The relation between the two women is a class relation within the class of women, a relation of labor extraction organized around reproduction and mediated by economic class, race, nationality, and the legal system governing reproductive labor.
A theory that treats reproduction as the uniform ground of womanhood cannot explain this relation. If all women are oppressed through the same relationship to reproduction, then the surrogate and the commissioning mother occupy the same class position, which they obviously do not. Their relationship to reproduction is structured by economic class in ways that produce fundamentally different positions within the class of women. A theory that treats the social relation as the ground of womanhood can explain the relation. The class of women is produced through the social organization of reproduction, and that organization differentiates women's positions within the class according to economic class, race, nationality, and the specific form their reproductive labor takes.
The reproductive trap catches theories that try to ground a class in a single process rather than in the relation that operates through multiple pathways. Reproduction is one historically powerful means through which womanhood is produced, a mechanism that has organized enormous amounts of exploitation, violence, and social control and remains politically urgent in every society on earth. It is still one of several operative relations, and the relation can and does operate through other pathways. And a theory that identifies the class with a single process rather than with the relation that persists through changes in its means has confused a feature of the relation for the relation itself.
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VI. CIS PRIVILEGE AND THE MISTAKE ON BOTH SIDES
Turner's critique of "cis privilege" contains a real insight, which deserves full credit before I explain why the other half is wrong.
The insight is this: describing women's recognition as women in terms of "privilege" risks inverting the actual structure of patriarchal domination. A cis woman who is recognized as a woman by patriarchal institutions is recognized as a member of the subordinated class. Her legibility to patriarchy is a condition of her subordination. Being treated as the kind of woman patriarchy expects, being subjected to the gendered expectations, the sexual objectification, the domestic labor extraction, the condescension, the paternalistic protection, and the threat of male violence that constitute women's ordinary experience under patriarchy, is not a privilege. It is what subordination looks like for the class that is being subordinated. Calling it privilege is like calling the stability of the plantation a benefit enjoyed by enslaved people relative to fugitives.
That analogy is Turner's, and within its terms it works. There is a version of "cis privilege" politics that does exactly what Turner fears. It takes the fact that cis women are legible to patriarchy and redescribes that legibility as a structural advantage analogous to male privilege, as though being successfully incorporated into the subordinated class were a form of social power comparable to membership in the dominant class. The most vulgar versions of this politics treat cis women's pain under patriarchy as a form of complicity, as though their subordination were a price they pay for a position of dominance over trans women. This is incoherent. Cis women do not stand above trans women in the same structural relation that men stand above women. Cis women do not constitute patriarchy's dominant sex class. Their legibility to patriarchy as women is the medium of their oppression, not an exemption from it.
I concede that much, and Turner's error comes immediately after it: the fact that cis women are subordinated as women does not establish that no structured asymmetry exists between cis and trans women within the class of women. Black feminist theory demonstrated this principle decades ago and Turner's framework should be able to accommodate it, because Turner explicitly invokes the analytical tools necessary to think it.
White women are subordinated as women. Their subordination as women is real, material, and constitutive of their class position. Their subordination as women does not prevent whiteness from structuring their relationship to Black women in ways that produce real advantages for white women and real disadvantages for Black women within the class of women. White women have historically been able to exchange their subordination under patriarchy for specific racial advantages: access to property through white men, protection from certain forms of violence that Black women receive no protection from, the displacement of domestic and reproductive labor onto Black women and other women of color, the representation of their experience as the universal experience of womanhood, and the capacity to mobilize the state against Black women through the racial organization of sexual accusation. These advantages are real and material. They do not make white women the dominant sex class, but they do make whiteness a structured advantage within the subordinated class (Davis, 1981; Collins, 2000; Spillers, 1987).
Bourgeois women are subordinated as women. Their subordination does not prevent class position from structuring their relationship to proletarian women in ways that produce real advantages within the class. A bourgeois woman can displace the domestic labor that patriarchy assigns to women onto a poorer woman, a woman of color, a migrant woman. She is still subordinated as a woman. Her class position within capitalism modifies the specific form her subordination takes and gives her access to resources and protections that proletarian women do not have.
If a class can contain structured internal asymmetries organized by race and economic class without those asymmetries being identical to the primary contradiction constituting the class, then a class can also contain structured internal asymmetries organized by the relative security of one's incorporation into the class itself.
The cleaner formulation is this: what is often described, badly, as "cis privilege" is better understood as differential security of incorporation into womanhood.
A cis woman's recognition as female can secure her incorporation into women's subordinate position under patriarchy while protecting that incorporation from forms of contestation, instability, and additional violence faced by transsexual women. The same mechanism can subordinate along one relation while producing relative security along another.
A cis woman who is recognized as a woman does not have to prove her membership in the class. Her access to gendered institutions, from healthcare to employment to public facilities to domestic partnership, is not conditional upon passing administrative tests of sex verification. Her womanhood is not treated as a political claim requiring justification. She is not subject to the specific forms of violence directed at people whose sex classification is perceived as fraudulent, illegitimate, or contested. She is not required to carry documentation proving her sex. She is not subject to the specific medical gatekeeping through which transsexual women must negotiate access to healthcare that affirms their classification. She is not vulnerable to being outed, to having her history used against her, or to the specific social and economic consequences that follow from the revelation that someone's sex classification has changed.
None of this makes her a member of the dominant class, makes her subordination as a woman fake, or places her above transsexual women in the same relation that men stand above women. It means that within the subordinated class, the stability of her incorporation protects her from a set of specific vulnerabilities that transsexual women face. The protection is not an exemption from patriarchy. The protection is a specific modality of patriarchal subordination that happens to be relatively stable compared to another modality.
Turner, who invokes Althusser's concept of overdetermination, should be able to think this. Overdetermination means that a concrete person is constituted through multiple determinations simultaneously. A cis woman is determined by sex, by gender, by race, by economic class, by sexuality, by nationality, and by the relative stability of her sex classification. These determinations do not all operate in the same direction; some subordinate while others confer relative advantage. The concrete person is overdetermined by all of them at once. The fact that one determination subordinates her does not prevent another determination from producing a relative advantage within the context of that subordination.
Turner's error is to conclude from the fact that cis women are subordinated as women that no structured asymmetry can exist between cis and trans women within the class. The conclusion does not follow from the premise. The conclusion would require that a class never contains internal relations of differential advantage, which Turner's own analytical framework, which includes race and nation as axes of overdetermination, cannot consistently maintain.
The mistake on the other side, the side of trans-inclusive liberalism, is to describe the asymmetry in terms that imply cis women are structurally dominant over trans women in the way that men are structurally dominant over women. They are not, because the relation between cis and trans women within the class of women is not the same kind of relation as the relation between men and women. Men exploit women's labor, sexuality, and reproductive capacity. Men hold disproportionate economic, political, and social power relative to women. Men constitute the dominant class within patriarchy. Cis women do not exploit trans women's labor, sexuality, or reproductive capacity in any systematic way. Cis women do not hold structural power over trans women through a relation of domination analogous to patriarchy. The asymmetry between cis and trans women is an asymmetry of security within a shared subordination, not an asymmetry of domination between a dominant and subordinated class.
Getting this distinction wrong has consequences in both directions. If cis feminists deny any asymmetry, they make it impossible to analyze the specific vulnerabilities that transsexual women face within the class of women, and they lose the ability to build feminist solidarity that accounts for those specific vulnerabilities. If trans-inclusive liberals redescribe the asymmetry as a relation of domination, they alienate cis women who correctly perceive that their subordination under patriarchy is being redescribed as a form of power, and they produce a political framework in which the primary antagonism within feminism becomes the relation between cis and trans women rather than the relation between women and the patriarchal system that subordinates all of them.
Both errors are analytically available within Turner's framework. Turner's framework simply does not have the tools to prevent them, because it has declined to theorize the possibility of structured asymmetry within a subordinated class except through the axes of race and nation that Turner already recognizes.
The deeper irony is that Turner invokes Althusser to argue that sex determines class position "in the last instance" while gender is materially efficacious at other levels. Althusser's actual use of "determination in the last instance" is more radical and more cautious than Turner's application of it. Althusser famously wrote that "the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes" (Althusser, For Marx, 1969, p. 113). By this Althusser meant that the economic "last instance" never operates in pure form, detached from the political, ideological, and other levels of the social formation. The social formation is always already overdetermined, with no level operating in isolation. The "last instance" is a structural determination, not a causal mechanism that could be empirically observed operating independently of everything else.
If Turner takes Althusser seriously, then the "last instance" of sex can never be empirically isolated from the gender, race, class, and institutional relations through which it is always already mediated. Sex in Turner's framework is always encountered through gender, through institutional classification, through social perception, through the administration of bodies by law and medicine. The "last instance" is always mediated and never arrives alone. And if it never arrives alone, then the claim that sex determines class position "in the last instance" becomes effectively untestable. Any evidence that gender classification produces material effects can be redescribed as an effect of the sex relation operating through its gender mediation. Any evidence that a transsexual woman occupies women's class position can be redescribed as evidence that the gender mediation is unusually powerful in this case while the sex determination continues to operate beneath it. The hypothesis is protected from disconfirmation by the same theoretical framework that is supposed to be testing it.
A hypothesis that cannot be disconfirmed by evidence is not doing materialist analysis; it is protecting a commitment. I want to be explicit about what I am and am not accusing Turner of here. I am not accusing Turner of bad faith. I am not accusing Turner of secretly believing that transsexual women are women and refusing to say so. I think Turner is working through a genuine theoretical problem with genuine intellectual seriousness. I think Turner's theoretical framework, which has real strengths, produces a conclusion that the evidence Turner assembles does not support. I think the gap between the evidence and the conclusion is sustained by a philosophical commitment, the commitment to sex as the "last instance," that functions within Turner's argument as an article of faith rather than as a conclusion of analysis. And I think that commitment, precisely because it is held sincerely and defended with real intellectual effort, deserves the most rigorous challenge I can construct.
So here is the problem Turner has to answer: if every piece of evidence that gender classification produces material effects can be reabsorbed into the framework as evidence of the sex relation operating through its gender mediation, then what evidence would count against the hypothesis? If there is no possible evidence against it, then the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, and an unfalsifiable hypothesis is not doing the work Turner wants it to do. And if there is possible evidence against it, then Turner needs to tell us what that evidence would look like, so that the hypothesis can be tested rather than assumed.
Invariance gives us better tools. If womanhood is a social position produced through a set of relations, and if different women are incorporated into that position through different pathways, then the relative stability of a particular mode of incorporation can be analyzed without that analysis either erasing the subordination that the incorporation produces or redescribing the incorporation as a form of structural dominance. Differential incorporation within a class is precisely what the method is designed to identify and analyze.
Politically, the payoff is simple enough: a feminism that can analyze differential security of incorporation within the class of women can build solidarity across that differential without either denying it or treating it as the primary antagonism. A feminism that can say "cis women and trans women are both subordinated as women, and the specific forms of that subordination differ, and one of the differences involves the relative stability of classification itself, and that differential stability produces specific vulnerabilities for transsexual women that feminist organizing must account for" is a feminism that can build coalitions. A feminism that can only say "cis women are privileged over trans women" or "trans women are men pretending to be women" cannot build coalitions, because the first formulation insults cis women by redescribing their subordination as privilege, and the second formulation excludes transsexual women by refusing to analyze the social relations that actually produce their position.
Turner wants to protect women's autonomous organizing from the claim that it is inherently oppressive, and I share that goal. Autonomous organizing by a subordinated class is a revolutionary practice, not an act of exclusion. But the defense of autonomous organizing cannot depend on denying that the class being organized contains internal relations of differential vulnerability. White women's autonomous organizing in the suffrage movement was a revolutionary practice that was also structured by racism. Acknowledging the racism did not destroy the legitimacy of women's autonomous organizing. It identified a contradiction within the organizing that had to be addressed in order for the organizing to serve the interests of all women rather than the interests of white women alone. Acknowledging the specific vulnerabilities of transsexual women within the class of women does not destroy the legitimacy of women's autonomous organizing. It identifies a contradiction that has to be addressed. The contradiction is real, and pretending it does not exist only makes it worse.
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VII. THE WOMAN AFTER WOMAN
The last movement of this argument can leave Turner behind. The dispute has served its purpose by giving me a surface against which to sharpen the argument and exposing contradictions worth exposing. But the argument I am making does not depend on Turner being wrong. The argument depends on Invariance being right, and that claim cannot live or die on the weaknesses of a single interlocutor. It lies in whether the method can do what I claim it can do: identify and analyze the social relation that produces women as a class without requiring that the class be grounded in a shared bodily essence. The question comes back around to what a woman is, and feminism has three existing answers, none of which works.
The essentialist answer says: a woman is an adult human female, where "female" refers to a set of bodily characteristics organized around reproductive capacity. This answer fails because it cannot explain why women who lack reproductive capacity, from postmenopausal women to infertile women to women who have had hysterectomies, remain women. It cannot explain why the specific social meaning of womanhood has changed historically while the bodies classified as female have not changed in any corresponding way. It cannot explain why the relationship between different women and the mechanisms of their subordination varies by race, class, sexuality, and geography in ways that a shared anatomy cannot account for. And it cannot explain why a transsexual woman whose social relations have been reorganized around a classification of her as female encounters the same patriarchal mechanisms that the essentialist theory attributes exclusively to natal reproductive anatomy. The essentialist answer locates womanhood inside the body and then cannot explain why the body is insufficient to predict the social relations that the theory claims follow from it.
The identity answer says: a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. This answer fails because it evacuates the category of any analytical content. If womanhood is a felt sense, a psychological orientation, an interior experience, then feminism cannot analyze the social relations that produce women as a subordinated class, because the class has been redefined in terms that have no necessary connection to any social relation. A person can identify as a woman without encountering any of the material conditions, the employment discrimination, the sexual objectification, the exposure to violence, the extraction of domestic labor, the institutional administration, that constitute womanhood as a political position. The identity answer makes feminism a project of recognizing individual self-descriptions rather than a project of analyzing and transforming social relations. I wrote in "It's Not the Hormones, Idiot" that I was arguing about social position. Identity is evidence rather than a conclusion. The constructionist answer, in its most common liberal form, says a woman is whoever society constructs as a woman. This gets closer, but its usual formulation is too passive and too empty to explain why the construction takes the particular form it does. If womanhood is "constructed," then what does the constructing? If society, then which social relations? Through what mechanisms? To what ends? What material interests are served by the construction? What resistance does the construction encounter? How does the construction change historically? Without answering these questions, the constructionist answer is an observation masquerading as an explanation. It tells you that womanhood is made without telling you what makes it or why.
Invariance gives a different answer: a woman is a person who occupies a historically reproduced social position generated through patriarchal relations whose concrete mechanisms include sexuality, reproduction, labor, kinship, violence, classification, and institutional administration.
Occupying this position does not require instantiating every mechanism. A woman who does not reproduce still occupies the position. A woman who is not heterosexual still occupies the position. A woman whose relationship to reproductive labor is structured differently by race or class still occupies the position. The position is produced by the relation, and the relation operates through multiple pathways. No single pathway is individually necessary because the relation is what persists. The specific institutions that administer womanhood differ between feudal, capitalist, colonial, and postcolonial social formations. The ideological representations, legal frameworks, relationships to labor and sexuality, and specific forms of violence directed at women all change. Through all of these changes, the relation continues to operate: a set of social relations continues to produce a subordinated class of people organized around, though not exhaustively defined by, the social administration of reproductive capacity, sexual availability, domestic labor, and the classification of bodies into a binary system of sex. Individual women are born, live, and die, while the class persists. Women enter and leave the class through birth, through death, and, in the case of transsexual women, through a process of transition that alters their position within the social relations that produce the class. In the case of transsexual men, a process of transition can alter their position in the opposite direction. The movement of individuals into and out of the class does not destroy the class any more than the movement of individuals into and out of the proletariat destroys the proletariat. The class is a product of the relation, which persists through the turnover of its occupants.
The ideological representation of womanhood can change. The meaning of womanhood, the expectations placed on women's behavior, appearance, sexuality, and social role, have all changed historically and vary across cultures, classes, and racial formations. The ideology that represents womanhood is not the same thing as the social relation that produces it. The ideology can change while the relation persists, and the relation can itself change, pulling the ideology with it, though not simultaneously and not in a relationship of simple correspondence.
The limits of the class can be contested. Whether a particular person counts as a woman, whether a particular group of people is included within or excluded from womanhood, is a political question that has been answered differently under different historical conditions. The edges of womanhood have always been contested. Black women have been excluded from the protections and representations of womanhood while being subjected to its exploitations. Lesbians have been represented as failed women, as not-quite-women, as women who refuse the defining characteristic of womanhood, namely sexual availability to men. Working-class women have been represented as insufficiently feminine, as too coarse, too physical, too masculine to occupy womanhood properly. Disabled women have been represented as incapable of fulfilling the reproductive and sexual functions that patriarchal ideology defines as the purpose of womanhood. These lines are not fixed by nature. They are produced, maintained, policed, and contested through social relations.
Transsexual women are the most recent population whose inclusion within or exclusion from womanhood has become a site of real political contestation with real stakes. The fact of contestation does not distinguish transsexual women from every other group whose relationship to womanhood has been historically contested. The contestation itself demonstrates that the limits of the class are political, not natural, and that the question of who counts as a woman has never been answerable by examining bodies alone.
The most consequential turn in this essay comes here: feminism has spent decades asking whether transsexual women can be squeezed into theories of womanhood built before our lives became theoretically unavoidable. I think we have exhausted that exercise. The more interesting discovery is that transsexual women reveal what those theories could never adequately explain about cis women either. The essentialist theory that locates womanhood in reproductive anatomy was already failing to explain infertile women, postmenopausal women, women without uteruses, and women who never reproduce. It was already failing to explain why the social meaning of womanhood varies by race and class in ways that reproductive anatomy cannot account for. It was already failing to explain why a woman's social position under patriarchy changes when she is racialized differently, classified differently, economically positioned differently, or sexually oriented differently, despite her reproductive anatomy remaining the same. It was already failing to explain why the historical mechanisms of women's subordination have changed while the bodies classified as female have not changed in any corresponding way. Transsexual women did not create these problems; we made them impossible to ignore. A population whose existence forces a theoretical tradition to confront contradictions it has managed, deferred, or simply failed to notice for decades is intellectually useful. The relationships between womanhood and reproductive capacity, race, and class were always more complicated than the essentialist tradition admitted. Those complications were known, analyzed, and substantial enough to generate entire sub-traditions of feminist theory. But the essentialist foundation survived, partly through inertia, partly because the complications could be managed as "intersections" added onto an otherwise stable base, and partly because nobody had yet produced a systematic alternative account of what holds the class together if the body does not. Transsexual women's existence makes the complications unmanageable. A person whose initial bodily classification was male and whose social position has been materially reorganized around a classification as female cannot be accommodated by a theory that grounds the class in reproductive anatomy. The theory has to either exclude her from the class, which requires ignoring the social relations actually operative on her, or include her in the class, which requires abandoning the essentialist foundation. Both options are available: the first preserves theoretical consistency at the cost of empirical adequacy, while the second preserves empirical adequacy at the cost of theoretical consistency. Neither is costless. Invariance proposes a third path: abandon the essentialist foundation and replace it with a relational one. Ground the class in the social relation that produces it rather than in a shared bodily characteristic that the class has never actually shared.
A transsexual woman's existence makes visible something that was always true about the social production of womanhood: that the relation operates through classification, through institutional administration, through social perception, through the gendered organization of labor and sexuality, and through the material consequences that follow from being positioned within these relations, and that the relation can operate on bodies that do not possess the characteristics that essentialist theory treats as foundational. The relation can operate on bodies that have been altered through medical intervention. The relation can operate on bodies whose legal classification has been changed. The relation can operate on bodies whose social perception has shifted. The relation can do these things because the relation is social, because it operates through institutions and practices and classifications and interactions that are themselves historically constituted and materially efficacious, and because the relation has never been a simple readout of anatomy.
A cis woman's womanhood is also produced through these relations. A cis woman is a woman because she is classified as female at birth, raised within gendered social expectations, subjected to the ideological and material system of femininity, incorporated into the gendered division of labor, positioned within sexual relations organized around heterosexual complementarity, exposed to gendered violence, and administered by institutions that track, regulate, and exploit her relationship to reproduction. Her anatomy is part of the basis on which she is initially classified. It is part of the material that the social relation seizes upon. It is not the relation itself. The relation is what produces her as a woman. The body is what the relation works on. When we see a transsexual woman being produced as a woman through the same set of social relations, through classification, institutional administration, social perception, the gendered organization of sexuality and labor, and exposure to violence, we are seeing the relation operating on a different body rather than an anomaly. The relation persists while the body, mechanism of initial classification, and specific experience of incorporation differ. It is still doing what it always does: producing a subordinated social position and incorporating a concrete person into it.
We should be careful here about how we describe what transsexual existence reveals. It would be easy, and it has been common in certain academic traditions, to treat transsexual people as a "natural experiment" that reveals something about the construction of gender. I want to resist that framing. Transsexual people are not laboratory objects. We did not transition in order to provide evidence for a social theory. The use of transsexual existence as theoretical evidence must be accountable to the people whose existence is being theorized. The point is not to instrumentalize transsexual life for academic gain. The point is that any adequate theory of womanhood must be able to explain what happens when someone undergoes a process that alters their position within the social relations the theory claims to analyze, and that the explanation reveals something about the relations themselves, something that was always true and always operative and always there to be investigated, but that was harder to see when the population under study consisted entirely of people whose classification had remained relatively stable from birth.
The transsexual woman does not fit the essentialist theory because the essentialist theory was never an adequate account of how the relation operates. It kept staring at the body while the relation was doing the work in front of it. That relation was always operating on bodies in ways the bodies themselves could not fully explain; the transsexual woman makes the old gap impossible to ignore.
Invariance investigates the relation rather than mistaking the body for an answer. It asks what remains structurally operative when bodies, classifications, institutions, ideological representations, and historical conditions change. The answer is the social relation that produces women as a subordinated class, persists through change, adapts, incorporates new bodies and classifications, and uses whatever institutional and material means are available in a given historical period. The relation is invariant; the occupants, bodies, mechanisms, and ideological representations are variables.
The specific body matters because it affects the specific form that incorporation takes, the specific mechanisms through which the person is positioned within the relation, and the specific experience of subordination that follows. A Black woman's body matters because it affects how she is incorporated into womanhood, which mechanisms of subordination operate on her, and what specific relationship she has to the racial organization of reproductive exploitation. A transsexual woman's body matters because it affects how she is incorporated into womanhood, which mechanisms of subordination operate on her, and what specific relationship she has to the medical, legal, and social administration of sex classification. Bodies are not irrelevant. Bodies are what the relation works on. The error is to treat the body as the ground of the relation rather than the material the relation works with. One more application matters before I turn to the political implications: disability.
Disabled women remain women even though their relationship to the mechanisms through which womanhood is produced and maintained differs from that of non-disabled women. Disabled women's relationship to reproductive exploitation is mediated by the history of eugenic sterilization, by the assumption that disabled people should not reproduce, by the institutional control of disabled women's sexuality and reproductive autonomy. Disabled women's relationship to the labor market is mediated by employment discrimination, by inaccessibility, by the organization of care labor around the assumption that disabled people are objects rather than providers of care. Disabled women's relationship to sexuality is mediated by desexualization, by the assumption that disabled bodies are not sexual bodies, and simultaneously by the specific sexual exploitation that follows from the vulnerability produced by physical dependence and institutional confinement. Disabled women's relationship to violence is mediated by the specific vulnerability produced by dependence on caregivers, by the invisibility of violence against disabled people, and by the assumption that disabled women's testimony is unreliable.
A theory that locates womanhood in reproductive anatomy has difficulty explaining why disabled women who have been involuntarily sterilized, whose reproductive capacity has been destroyed by the state, remain women. Their reproductive anatomy has been altered and their relationship to reproduction severed. If reproductive capacity grounds the class, then the class has expelled them, yet they remain women because the social relations that produce womanhood continue to operate on them through classification, the gendered organization of care, sexual exploitation, institutional administration, and the control of their bodies by medical and legal authority. The body has been altered while class membership persists because the relation, rather than the body, holds the class together. Invariance is a feminist method, not a theory of transsexuality. It investigates the social production of a class position by following the relation rather than searching its members for a shared essence. I have developed it through the question of transsexual womanhood because transsexual existence exposes the gaps in essentialist theory with particular clarity, but the method applies wherever a class position is produced through social relations that operate on variable bodies through variable mechanisms under variable historical conditions. It applies to race, economic class, and colonialism. It applies wherever the question is: what keeps producing this social position despite changes in the people occupying it, the mechanisms reproducing it, and the ideological representations justifying it?
In every case, the answer is the relation. Consider how the method would apply to the analysis of race. What produces Black people as a subordinated racial class? An essentialist analysis locates the ground in phenotype, in ancestry, in the physical body. An invariant analysis locates the ground in the social relation: the historically constituted set of relations through which particular bodily differences are made racially significant, through which people are classified into racial categories, through which those categories are administered by institutions, through which differential access to wealth, employment, housing, education, healthcare, political power, and safety is organized along racial lines. The relation has changed historically. The specific forms of racial subordination under slavery were different from the specific mechanisms under Jim Crow, which were different from the specific mechanisms under contemporary mass incarceration and neoliberal disinvestment. The ideological representations of Blackness have changed. The bodies classified as Black have not changed in any corresponding way. The relation has persisted through changes in its mechanisms, its ideological representations, and even, at the margins, its classification of particular individuals. What persists is the social relation. The invariant is the relation.
The parallel is not an equation. The social relations that produce racial subordination differ from those producing gendered subordination in mechanism, history, and institution. The point is methodological: in both cases, the class is produced by a relation that operates on variable bodies through variable mechanisms under variable historical conditions, and in both cases, the invariant is the relation rather than the body. Bodies change, mechanisms change, ideology changes, and the relation keeps producing anyway. That persistence, that capacity to continue operating through transformation, is what I am calling invariance. And analyzing that persistence, tracing its mechanisms, identifying its points of vulnerability, asking where it breaks and where it adapts, is what I am calling the invariant method. The invariant method does not dissolve the class of women. It reconstitutes the class on a foundation that can actually support it. The essentialist foundation was always cracking. It was cracking under the weight of Black women's history, under the weight of colonial history, under the weight of the diversity of women's relationships to reproduction, labor, sexuality, and institutional classification. The cracks were visible long before transsexual women entered the theoretical debate. Transsexual women made the cracks structural. We made it impossible to keep standing on the old foundation and pretending the ground was solid.
The new foundation is the social relation that produces women as a subordinated class, operates through sexuality, reproduction, labor, kinship, violence, classification, and institutional administration, incorporates different women through different pathways, and acts differently on different bodies. It produces the class, maintains it, polices its limits, and exploits the people positioned within it. That social relation is what feminism has to analyze and, if it means what it says, destroy.
if it is a revolutionary project and not a reform project, aims at the abolition of the class system that produces women as a subordinated class. Wittig was right about this, whatever her other limitations. If "woman" names a class position produced through a relation of domination, then the liberation of women does not consist in improving the conditions of their subordination. It consists in destroying the relation that produces them as a subordinated class. After the relation is destroyed, the bodies that were classified as female will still exist. The reproductive capacities that were organized into a system of exploitation will still exist. What will not exist is the social meaning of those bodies and capacities as the basis of a hierarchical classification. What will not exist is the class "woman" as a subordinated social position. What will not exist is the set of relations through which patriarchy produces, maintains, and exploits that position.
Invariance does not tell feminists what to do; it tells us what the fuck we are looking at. It identifies the relation, traces the mechanisms through which it operates, investigates how it incorporates different people differently, and identifies where it is strong or vulnerable. It provides a method for analyzing the production of sexed class positions without requiring the analysis to rest on an essentialist foundation that feminist history has already shown to be inadequate.
What feminists do with the analysis is a political question that no method can answer in advance. But a political practice that lacks an adequate analysis of its object will fail. It will fail because it will aim at the wrong targets, organize around the wrong demands, build alliances with the wrong forces, and misidentify the friends and enemies of the revolution. A feminism that thinks it is fighting for the protection of female biology is fighting a different war than a feminism that knows it is fighting to destroy a social relation. The strategies, alliances, goals, and analysis of who belongs to the class that the feminist movement is organized to liberate are different.
Invariance is the method for keeping that relation in view when everything else, the bodies, the classifications, the mechanisms, the ideological representations, the historical conditions, is moving. Someone will attack the name the moment this essay is published, so I would rather kill the objection here than spend tomorrow reading a forty-seven-post thread written by someone who made it to the title and got excited. Invariant does not mean immutable. The name "Invariance" will be misread as a claim that patriarchy possesses one eternal structure, that the social relations producing womanhood have always been the same, and that the method searches for an unchanging core beneath historical transformations. The method does the opposite.
An invariant relation persists through transformation; an immutable relation does not transform. These are different concepts, however badly somebody will pretend otherwise five minutes after publication. A river that changes its course across centuries while continuing to flow is invariant in the sense I am using: the flow persists while the specific channel changes. An immutable river would be one that never changes course, never floods, never shifts. Nobody would confuse these. The claim that the Mississippi River has persisted since before European colonization is not a claim that it has always occupied its current channel. The claim that patriarchy has persisted across multiple historical social formations is not a claim that it has always operated through the same mechanisms. Historical relations transform. Patriarchy in feudal Europe operated through different institutions, different ideological representations, different legal frameworks, and different relationships to labor and reproduction than patriarchy in contemporary capitalist democracies. The mechanisms of women's subordination in a slaveholding society are different from the mechanisms in a society organized around wage labor. The relationship between womanhood and reproduction in a society without reliable contraception is different from the relationship in a society where contraceptive technology has partially separated sexuality from reproduction. In each case, the relation has transformed. In each case, the relation has persisted through the transformation. The method investigates both: the persistence and the transformation. It asks what remains operative when the mechanisms change, and it asks how the mechanisms change in response to transformations in the broader social formation.
Invariance is a method for determining continuity through transformation. It does not claim that the continuity is absolute, that the relation has always been identical to itself, or that the transformation is superficial. It claims that something has persisted, that the persistence is real, that it can be investigated, and that identifying what persists is necessary for understanding what has transformed and why. A method that could not distinguish continuity from change would be analytically useless. A method that denied either continuity or change would be historically false. Invariance claims that both are real and that the relationship between them is the proper object of materialist feminist analysis.
You'll ask “ erm but Tara if there is no invariant anatomical property shared by every member of the class of women, what prevents the category from becoming analytically unlimited? If the limits of the class are not determined by the body, what determines them? If anyone who encounters the social relations of womanhood can be counted as a woman, does the category retain any analytical discipline, or has it become an infinitely expandable identity label with no determinate content?”
That is a serious objection and it deserves a material answer. Self-identification cannot settle it. I have argued throughout this essay that identity is evidence, not a conclusion. The question of whether someone occupies a class position is not settled by whether they feel that they occupy it. It is settled by whether the social relations that produce the position are actually operative on them.
The class is bounded by the operation of patriarchal social relations. The class of women consists of the people on whom the constellation of social relations that produce women's subordinated class position is actually operative. This is an empirical, investigable claim rather than a subjective one. You can examine whether a given person's institutional classification, employment relations, sexual dynamics, exposure to violence, relationship to domestic labor, medical administration, and ordinary social interactions are organized by the same set of relations that produce other women as women. The investigation is imperfect, involves judgment, and produces contested cases at the margins. But the margins are where every social classification produces contested cases, and the existence of contested cases at the margins does not destroy the analytical utility of the classification any more than the existence of contested cases at the margin between the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat destroys the analytical utility of Marxist class analysis.
The class is bounded by the relation: where the relation operates, the class extends, and where it does not, the class does not. A man who has never been classified as a woman, who has never been perceived as a woman, who has never been subjected to the social relations of womanhood, and whose ordinary social interactions are organized by his membership in the dominant sex class is not a member of the class of women regardless of how he identifies. The relation does not operate on him. The class does not include him. This is not a judgment about his identity. It is a judgment about his social position, and social position is determined by social relations, not by self-declaration.
Conversely, a transsexual woman whose social transition has placed her within the social relations of womanhood, whose institutional classification has changed, whose employment relations are organized by her classification as a woman, whose sexual dynamics are organized around her position as a woman, whose exposure to violence includes the specific forms of violence directed at women, and whose ordinary daily interactions are structured by her social position as a woman is incorporated into the class. The relation operates on her, so the class includes her. That is a judgment about the social relations producing her position rather than a certification of her identity.
The category is not infinitely elastic because it is bounded by historically specific social relations that operate on some people and not on others. Its limits are historical rather than natural, which means they can change, have changed, and will change. But at any given moment, in any given social formation, the question of who the relation operates on has a determinate answer, even if the answer is sometimes difficult to establish at the margins.
Invariance should generate future work rather than pretend to foreclose it. The method identifies the relation; tracing its specific mechanisms across social formations, historical periods, and populations is the work that remains. How does the relation operate in a society organized primarily around subsistence agriculture? How does it operate in a financialized service economy? How does it interact with racial capitalism? How does it interact with settler colonialism? How is it modified by the specific institutions of a particular state? How has the relationship between womanhood and reproduction changed with the development of reproductive technology? How has the relationship between womanhood and labor changed with the entry of women into wage work? How has the relationship between womanhood and sexuality changed with the partial de-institutionalization of compulsory heterosexuality? Each of these questions requires concrete investigation. The method does not answer them in advance. The method provides a framework within which they can be productively investigated.
It also raises questions about its own limits. Can Invariance be applied to social positions that are not class positions? Can it be applied to racial positions, to national positions, to positions within colonial relations? If so, how does the method handle the interaction between multiple invariant relations operating simultaneously on the same person? How does overdetermination work within the invariant framework? These are open questions. They are the kind of questions that a founding text is supposed to open rather than close.
A materialist feminism adequate to sex cannot search beneath social relations for the body that supposedly explains them. It must investigate the relations through which bodies acquire sexed political meaning, determine how concrete people enter and move within those relations, and identify what remains structurally operative as bodies, classifications, institutions, and historical conditions change. I call that method Invariance
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