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By Tara Knight.
Before we begin, I should probably address something that has become almost comically routine in my political life. I am accused of being a TERF constantly, usually by people who have decided that any feminist criticism harsher than “everyone is valid” must secretly be one bathroom bill away from joining the Heritage Foundation. So I thought I would finally do everybody a favor and show you what an actual TERF politics looks like when it is written coherently enough to expose its own premises. No innuendo, no screenshots of me saying something rude about kink, no elaborate forensic reconstruction of a joke I made six months ago. We have the real thing in front of us now: a feminism that naturalizes sex class, treats reproductive origin as politically decisive, and then attempts to dress the whole arrangement in revolutionary language.
Since people are so fond of invoking my supposed proximity to this politics, I intend to make the distinction painfully clear. I am going to take Sathi Patel’s argument seriously enough to do what I have always thought feminism owed its own ideas: subject them to ruthless criticism. Marx used that phrase to describe criticism unwilling to fear either its own conclusions or conflict with existing powers, and I have always preferred that tradition to the modern custom of treating ideological disagreement like a customer-service complaint. Patel has built an argument around Mao, materialism, sex class, colonialism, and revolution, so those are the terms on which I am going to meet her. Then I am going to show exactly where the argument fails, where the biology starts doing work the history was supposed to do, and where the supposedly revolutionary theory quietly reconstructs the same reproductive caste politics TERFs have been trying to sell women for years.
Consider this the demonstration everyone apparently needed. You have spent long enough calling me a TERF because I am a radical feminist with sharp elbows. Now you get to watch me give an actual TERF argument a good old-fashioned ruthless criticism.
Total Woman Victory is a radical feminist publication and organizing project built around anti-prostitution politics, anti-pornography politics, sex-class analysis, and a revival of older women’s liberation theory. They also organize beyond the page, including through their upcoming TORCH gathering in Worcester, Massachusetts, where they are explicitly trying to build a more durable radical feminist political tendency. That makes them more than a Substack with a strong editorial line; they are attempting to turn a body of theory into an organized political project.
Introduction
Sathi Patel is a member of Total Woman’s Victory (even biting my catchphrases huh.) we will be addressing her article that directly pertains to me a transsexual woman who identifies herself as a radical feminist.
Patel’s “The Sex Contradiction” opens by telling you that the relation between men and women has a history, then spends the next several pages explaining that the antagonism between them was already there before that history began. I read it twice in one afternoon because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t flattening her argument into something easier to attack. The second reading made the problem worse. Patel wants a historical account of patriarchy while preserving a male-female opposition that sits underneath history, fully formed enough to wait around for social institutions to give it a more complicated costume.
I probably would have left Total Woman Victory alone if it were merely another corner of the internet where women with bad politics publish essays for one another and congratulate themselves for rediscovering biological destiny. I recently learned, however, that they are recruiting in Worcester. I live close enough to Worcester that this stopped being an abstract dispute with a publication operating somewhere comfortably far away from me. These women are trying to organize in my backyard while carrying a politics that treats my transsexual sisters as disposable, suspect, or fundamentally outside the class whose liberation they claim to represent. There is a level of disrespect involved in bringing that politics this close to me and apparently expecting women like me to politely regard it as somebody else’s problem. I don’t respect Total Woman Victory, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise for the sake of appearing gracious. Recruiting near me while holding my sisters in contempt got my attention very quickly.
That anger doesn’t make the theoretical disagreement less serious. It makes taking their theory seriously more necessary. If you are going to recruit women into an organization, then the ideas you teach them matter. If those ideas construct trans women as an intrusion into feminism, then the consequences don’t remain inside a Substack archive. They become part of how women understand one another, whom they organize alongside, whom they exclude, and whose suffering they decide counts as collateral damage. TWV wants the authority of radical feminism without confronting what happens when its categories are actually subjected to the materialist analysis it claims to practice. The disrespect is political before it is personal, although I would be lying if I said the personal part didn’t ignite me.
I agree with much of the terrain Patel wants radical feminism to recover. Male power exists beyond the intentions of individual men. Sexuality develops inside social relations and stays open to feminist criticism after consent has been established. Marriage, domestic dependency, prostitution, pornography, reproductive labor, and the sexual expectations imposed on women all deserve political analysis. No woman has ever escaped a social structure by getting better at describing everything she does inside it as an autonomous preference. Patel understands that problem, which is part of what makes the essay so irritating. She repeatedly walks right up to a historical theory of sex and then backs away the second history threatens the permanence of the categories she started with.
Her central error appears early. Patel separates dialectical feminism from metaphysical feminism by arguing that relations between men and women have to be understood historically rather than treated as permanent expressions of nature. She then calls the sex contradiction primordial, traces it to reproductive differences among early humans, and argues that patriarchy later institutionalized an antagonism already operating between males and females. The essay warns against naturalizing sexual relations and then places the foundational political conflict of humanity inside sexual difference before patriarchy has even entered the picture. Biology goes from being a material condition to carrying political content in advance, while society arrives afterward to formalize the arrangement. Mao’s presence doesn’t rescue any of this. Leaving On Contradiction open on the table doesn’t turn metaphysics into historical materialism.
The problem runs deeper than the familiar fight over who counts as a woman. A materialist feminism should explain how bodily differences get organized through institutions until they acquire political meaning. Pregnancy has never written a marriage law, and no chromosome has drafted an inheritance statute or decided which group is entitled to another group’s labor, time, or body. Social relations do that work, and social relations happen in history. Colette Guillaumin called the material appropriation of women sexage. Monique Wittig argued that sex becomes a political category through a heterosexual social order that later presents its own categories as nature. Catharine MacKinnon located sex inequality in hierarchy and in the social construction of sexuality. These writers disagree with one another in serious ways, yet each gives us better tools for understanding how embodied difference becomes politically organized than a theory that declares a primordial male-female contradiction and trusts the word “dialectical” to wipe the fingerprints off afterward.
My disagreement with Patel comes from radical feminism itself. I share her refusal to reduce liberation to identity. I share her insistence that women make choices inside conditions they didn’t personally create. I share her interest in revolutionary change because a feminism satisfied with administering male supremacy more fairly has already surrendered most of what made it worth having. The disagreement begins with sex itself. Patel wants patriarchy to have a history while the categories through which patriarchy operates retain something close to geological permanence. A trans-inclusive radical feminism has to push further because treating sex class as a social relation gives us a better account of women’s oppression, colonialism, racial slavery, sexuality, agency, and transsexuality than the reproductive caste model Patel keeps rebuilding underneath Marxist language.
Patel naturalizes the contradiction she promises to historicize
Human beings have reproductive differences, and any serious feminist materialism has to account for what those differences have meant for labor, vulnerability, kinship, and social reproduction. Pregnancy, birth, and nursing created forms of dependency that men were historically positioned to exploit and frequently did. Control over whose children a woman bore became central to inheritance and to the authority of men within households. None of this requires us to imagine that male and female reproductive positions already formed opposing political classes before institutions organized them that way. A body becomes politically meaningful through relations, and relations happen in time. When Patel turns sexual difference into a primordial contradiction and assigns patriarchy the later task of institutionalizing it, she moves the explanation of domination backward until reproductive difference starts doing political work by itself.
Guillaumin got to this problem earlier and handled it better because she begins with appropriation rather than a naturalized antagonism. In “Pratique du pouvoir et idée de Nature” and its English version, “The Practice of Power and Belief in Nature,” she works through what the marriage relation actually appropriates. The wife doesn’t simply owe a finite collection of tasks whose value can be measured against a wage. Her time, labor, sexuality, reproductive capacity, and bodily availability are treated as resources belonging to another class. A servant’s labor has a limit because the servant is paid for specified work. The wife’s labor historically has no comparable ceiling because the appropriation reaches the person herself. The ideology of natural difference then holds the arrangement steady by presenting the inequality as the obvious consequence of what women supposedly are.
The order matters because Guillaumin’s argument moves from appropriation to naturalization. A social relation is built, bodies are classified through it, and the classification later gets cited as proof that the relation was inevitable. Patel keeps drifting in the opposite direction. She makes reproductive classification the starting point of the contradiction and gives patriarchy the comparatively modest job of formalizing what biology has already prepared. The result leaves a social antagonism lodged inside the body before anyone has explained how it got there. The theory starts resembling the thing radical feminism was supposed to expose: a political arrangement presented as the unfolding of nature.
Wittig attacks the same naturalization from another direction. “The Category of Sex” and “One Is Not Born a Woman” treat sex as political because heterosexual society organizes bodies through domination and later describes the resulting categories as natural facts. Her notorious claim that lesbians aren’t women only makes sense inside this argument, since “woman” for Wittig names a class position produced through heterosexual social relations rather than a zoological designation. You can think Wittig takes the argument too far and still recognize the problem she creates for Patel. If the political category of sex is produced through social domination, a politically loaded male-female contradiction can’t simply be placed before the social order that gives it that meaning.
Patel wants sex to emerge from prehistory already carrying enough political structure to generate antagonism while somehow remaining innocent of the metaphysics she criticizes. The argument becomes a shell game where biology keeps moving underneath whichever cup currently says “history.” Patel moves the cups quickly. We can still see her hands.
The problem gets more serious once we ask what women actually are as a class. A class exists through a relation, and its political meaning comes from the position its members occupy within that relation. Capitalists and workers don’t become classes because their bodies contain capitalist or proletarian essence. Their relation to property and production creates the class division. Radical feminism borrowed the language of sex class because women’s oppression also involves systematic relations of appropriation and domination. Treating “female” as though it automatically names that class collapses the relation back into anatomy.
That collapse also makes historical difference harder to explain. Womanhood has meant different things across centuries and social formations. The same reproductive capacities have acquired different political meanings under slavery, colonial administration, industrial capitalism, and different systems of kinship. Women with similar anatomy have occupied radically different relationships to property, labor, marriage, and state power. Patel uses class language throughout the essay while treating class membership as something reproductive origin has already settled. Once she makes that move, history gets reduced to changing the circumstances under which a permanent class relation expresses itself.
This is especially strange because Patel clearly wants a theory capable of transformation. She argues that patriarchy changes shape, that feminist struggle forces male supremacy to respond, and that different institutions become central at different historical moments. Those claims require a category of sex capable of being changed by the same history changing everything else. Instead, male and female stay put while the social architecture above them moves. History can renovate the house, but Patel has declared the basement load-bearing without asking who poured the concrete. A stronger radical feminism begins with the embodied conditions of human reproduction and explains how particular societies organized those conditions into political classes through law, inheritance, kinship, sexuality, and labor. Biology remains material without being promoted to legislator.
Mao does not license a permanent principal contradiction
Mao creates another problem for Patel because her argument about the principal contradiction runs against the method she’s citing. On Contradiction insists that contradictions exist within every process while taking particular forms according to concrete conditions. Mao distinguishes principal from secondary contradictions because revolutionary strategy depends on identifying which conflict most decisively structures a particular situation. That designation can’t be settled in advance through theoretical loyalty because the relative position of contradictions changes when historical conditions change.
His own political examples make the point clearly. The Japanese invasion altered the structure of the Chinese struggle and pushed the contradiction between China and Japanese imperialism into the principal position. Internal conflicts that had previously dominated revolutionary strategy became secondary for a period, which made the united front intelligible under conditions where the same alliance would have been disastrous earlier. Mao’s method exists because revolutionaries can’t drag one formula into every situation and expect reality to reorganize itself around their favorite contradiction.
Patel nevertheless declares women’s oppression principal to any analysis of class, imperialism, and colonization. She has given herself the conclusion before the investigation has begun. A feminist can demonstrate that male supremacy structures a particular colonial formation, shapes a specific labor regime, or becomes the decisive contradiction within a certain political struggle. Those claims require evidence from the formation being studied. Declaring sex universally principal turns a historical category into a permanent ranking of oppression. Radical feminism has spent decades being accused of doing exactly this, often unfairly. Patel manages the unusual achievement of supplying the accusation with supporting documentation.
The irony is hard to improve on. Mao spent considerable effort criticizing dogmatists who recited general formulas without examining concrete conditions, and Patel answers him by turning the sex contradiction into a laminated answer sheet handed out before history has taken the exam. She has chosen as authority for the move the theorist whose method was designed to prevent it.
Her use of the principal aspect of a contradiction is similarly loose. In Mao, the principal aspect is the side within a contradiction whose position determines the character of the process at a particular moment. The relation between the two aspects can change as struggle develops. Patel sometimes uses “principal aspect” to describe the social arena where women’s oppression is most decisive or visible, such as kinship under one formation or wage labor under another. Those arenas matter, but they’re terrains through which a contradiction operates rather than the opposing sides of the contradiction itself.
If the contradiction is male supremacy against women’s struggle, then asking about its principal aspect means asking which side currently determines the character of the relation. Marriage, reproductive labor, sexual violence, and wage labor are institutions and practices through which the conflict unfolds. Mixing those levels makes the essay sound Maoist while loosening Mao’s concepts from the distinctions that made them useful in the first place.
That slippage carries political consequences because it lets every historical development confirm the same primordial structure. Colonialism strengthens the authority of male household heads, so the sex contradiction has intensified. Capitalist development draws women into wage labor, so the sex contradiction has changed form. Feminist struggle wins legal reforms, so patriarchy has adapted and the contradiction continues. Every possible outcome becomes evidence for the doctrine. An analysis should be capable of being revised by history. A doctrine that converts every imaginable result into confirmation has wandered into theology, where evidence mainly arrives to demonstrate that revelation was correct before anybody bothered looking.
Dialectical materialism should leave theory exposed to history. Concrete developments should be capable of damaging our categories badly enough that we have to repair or abandon them. Patel protects the primordial sex contradiction from that possibility and lets everything surrounding it change instead. Her framework claims historical flexibility while placing its central proposition somewhere history can’t reach.
A trans-inclusive radical feminism has particular reason to take Mao’s method seriously because sex itself demands concrete analysis. Reproductive capacity, legal classification, sexual objectification, domestic labor, racial hierarchy, and social recognition don’t carry the same political weight in every setting. The mechanisms through which male supremacy organizes women change across time, and those changes can alter who becomes socially situated within womanhood. A theory beginning from a fixed reproductive class will repeatedly dismiss these transformations as secondary complications because its central category has already been immunized against them.
Mao’s method should push radical feminism toward greater historical specificity. Patel uses Mao to grant a universal answer theoretical immunity. It’s irritating in exactly the same way as somebody reading the assembly instructions out loud while putting every piece of furniture on backwards.
Colonialism and slavery break the primordial model
Colonialism is where Patel’s primordial sex contradiction becomes a template stamped onto societies before their histories have been properly examined. She argues that colonized men draw on existing patriarchal arrangements while attempting to recover national authority and cultural power, especially through controlling women who become symbolic carriers of tradition. This can be true, and feminist analysis has documented it repeatedly. Nationalist movements have regulated women’s dress, sexuality, family roles, and childbearing in the name of authenticity, and women have paid for those projects through forced marriages, reproductive control, and political exclusion.
The trouble begins when colonialism is treated as a force acting upon a patriarchy presumed to have already existed in recognizable form. That leaves too little room for colonialism to reorganize gender itself. It assumes the male-female contradiction was already sitting there in a form we’d recognize before colonial administrators arrived with censuses, mission schools, property codes, and the astonishing confidence that every society on earth had simply been waiting for Europeans to explain it to itself.
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argues in The Invention of Women that Yoruba social relations were historically organized more decisively through seniority than through anything equivalent to Western gender and that the anatomical body didn’t operate as the organizing principle colonial scholarship later assumed. Her account has been contested, and scholars of Yoruba history have challenged parts of it. The problem she raises survives those disputes. The existence of sexual difference doesn’t prove that every society turned sexual difference into its primary social classification. People everywhere could recognize who became pregnant without building their political institutions around the same male-female division developed in Europe.
The question is whether Western scholarship projected its habit of making anatomy the primary sorting principle of social life onto societies where other hierarchies carried greater institutional weight. Colonial administration, missionary Christianity, mission schooling, and imported property law could then intensify body-centered gender categories while claiming merely to describe the societies being governed. Patel’s theory makes this harder to see because she enters the analysis carrying a primordial sex contradiction already declared universal. Once every society is presumed to contain the same foundational antagonism, colonial history becomes a collection of regional variations on a story whose ending was written before anyone opened the archive.
Racial slavery pushes the problem past the point of repair. Hortense Spillers, in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” examines the captive body and describes a process of ungendering in which slavery ruptures the kinship and gender categories that organized the world of slaveholders. The enslaved Black woman didn’t experience a generic female oppression onto which racism was later added. Slavery reorganized her relation to labor, reproduction, sexuality, property, and her children. Virginia’s adoption of partus sequitur ventrem in 1662 legally made the child follow the condition of the mother and turned Black women’s reproductive capacity directly into a mechanism through which the slaveholder’s property reproduced itself.
An enslaved Black woman’s body could be exploited as productive labor, valued as reproductive capital, and treated as sexually available property inside the same social order. The law could deny her the protections of recognized kinship while exploiting her fertility through hereditary slavery. Nobody in the big house found the contradiction difficult to manage. A universal female class defined primarily through reproductive origin can’t adequately explain this because racial domination helps produce what womanhood means inside the formation itself.
Angela Davis develops a related argument in “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” and later in Women, Race & Class, where she emphasizes the distance between bourgeois femininity and the labor demanded from enslaved Black women. White womanhood could be associated with domestic dependency and supposed physical fragility while enslaved Black women worked under coercion in fields, homes, and workshops. Those forms of womanhood were produced inside the same economy and in relation to one another. Their difference can’t be treated as an additional racial detail pasted onto an otherwise complete universal female condition.
Race reorganized sex-class relations, and sex helped organize racial domination. Black feminists have explained this for decades because universal feminist theories have a recurring habit of inventing Woman somewhere outside history and inviting Black women in after the furniture has been arranged. Patel’s claim that women’s oppression should be treated as principal to analyses of colonialism or imperialism recreates exactly the hierarchy of explanation a materialist approach should resist.
A concrete historical study might show that control over women’s reproduction was central to a settler project. Another might show that colonial administrators strengthened the authority of male household heads because indirect rule depended on them. A study of racial capitalism might reveal a gendered labor regime built through women’s unpaid or underpaid work. Those are conclusions reached through studying the social formation. They can’t be installed as premises before the investigation starts.
Black women have particular reason to distrust a theory that announces the universal structure of womanhood before examining the racial order. We’ve already seen how quickly “universal woman” develops a white accent and starts explaining why everybody else’s history should be treated as a special case.
Trans-inclusive radical feminism and Black feminist materialism share a methodological concern here even though the histories involved are different and should remain distinct. Both require feminism to separate embodied materiality from the political meanings imposed upon bodies. Racial slavery could transform the gendered meaning of Black embodiment. Colonial government could change the relation between sexual classification and social authority. Transsexuality shows that sex characteristics, social classification, and political position can also separate and be reorganized within a lifetime rather than remaining permanently synchronized from birth. These histories meet at the point where naturalized categories stop being adequate substitutes for examining what actually happened.
Patriarchal symbolism is not anatomical truth
Patel’s discussion of penetration contains the same failure in miniature. She correctly identifies sexuality as politically organized and then allows patriarchal symbolism to harden into sexual ontology. Patriarchal cultures have coded penetration through domination for a very long time. Men take, conquer, possess, score, smash, and use. Women give themselves, yield, get used, or get run through. Pornographic genres intensify that grammar and sell it back at industrial scale, while rape turns bodily invasion into an explicit exercise of power.
MacKinnon matters here because her argument in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State treats sexuality under male supremacy as constructed through inequality. The feminist question is how social relations teach people to experience particular acts as dominant, submissive, desirable, shameful, masculine, or feminine. Patel sometimes slides toward a different claim where the receptive sexual position itself begins to stand in for subordination. Once that happens, she’s taken patriarchal ideology and mistaken its description of sex for anatomy.
Feminists should get suspicious whenever patriarchy’s account of an act reappears inside feminist theory as the permanent political meaning of the act. If patriarchal heterosexuality codes the penetrator as dominant, concluding that penetration itself naturally contains dominance leaves the old symbolic order exactly where it was. The judgment changes while the sexual grammar survives intact.
Lesbian sex breaks this framework almost immediately. Women penetrate women. Women change roles, sometimes during the same encounter. The political meaning of an act depends on the relationship, the people involved, and the social conditions surrounding it. Trans women make the framework harder to sustain because anatomy and social position don’t line up according to the map Patel’s argument requires. A trans woman can penetrate her partner while living socially as a woman and encountering the misogynistic treatment attached to that position outside the bedroom. She can be penetrated without becoming more politically female as a result. Sexual acts take their meaning from the relations in which they occur rather than from genitals issuing political instructions like tiny patriarchal oracles.
Feminism doesn’t have to retreat into the liberal claim that consensual sex becomes politically meaningless in order to reject Patel’s conclusion. Desire grows inside social relations and can reproduce the hierarchies that helped shape it. A woman can enjoy domination fantasies produced in a culture that despises women. She can participate in pornography that reproduces degrading representations of women. She can choose beauty practices developed around male expectations and genuinely feel good in them. Consent establishes that she agreed. It doesn’t explain why the practice became desirable, who profits from it, or what social meaning it carries.
Liberal choice feminism fails because it treats preference as sufficient political justification. Patel fails from the opposite direction because she pushes so hard against liberalism that certain political meanings wind up welded to bodily acts. Both approaches remove something feminism needs to analyze. One evacuates social determination, and the other strips women of enough agency that they begin disappearing as political subjects.
Patel is right (surprisingly!) that women’s choices develop under patriarchal conditions and can’t be understood as expressions of pure autonomy. Nobody develops outside society, and feminism should have buried the fantasy of an untouched inner self years ago. The problem begins when constrained choice starts sounding indistinguishable from the absence of meaningful agency. A theory that leaves women wholly constituted by male supremacy has trouble explaining how women become feminist subjects capable of organizing against it.
Feminist consciousness has to emerge inside the same social world that shaped the desires being criticized. Women can recognize how their preferences were formed, discard some of them, keep others, and act politically while remaining socially constituted people. Agency under constraint gives feminism somebody to organize. Total determination leaves women sitting around like furniture until the revolutionary chapter arrives and suddenly hands them rifles.
There’s a strong version of Patel’s critique available here. A materialist account can understand autonomy as something exercised within social conditions. Choices remain real while their formation stays open to criticism. Desire belongs to the woman who experiences it even though society helped produce its content. A practice can be pleasurable and still reproduce something harmful. People can understand that contradiction and keep doing the thing anyway. I certainly have. Feminism becomes more useful when it can hold those tensions without reducing women to dupes or granting every desire immunity from criticism. Patel repeatedly reaches toward that complexity and drops it because her categories demand more consistency than human sexuality has ever had the courtesy to provide.
Her preference for clean historical sequencing weakens the discussion of virginity and pornification too. Patel argues that patriarchy adapts as older forms of sexual regulation lose power, moving from an order centered on virginity toward one where women become commodified through pornification. She’s onto something because sexual liberalization can weaken older restrictions while creating new markets in women’s sexual availability. The mistake comes from arranging these mechanisms as though one replaced the other.
Contemporary patriarchy handles virginity and constant sexual availability perfectly well at the same time, often through expectations imposed on the same woman. Men consume pornography and condemn the women who produce it. Purity culture and sexual commodification coexist without much friction. A woman can be expected to appear sexually knowledgeable enough to satisfy men while remaining respectable enough to avoid the contempt directed toward sexually experienced women. Patriarchy has never had much trouble maintaining contradictory demands because the contradiction itself is useful. An impossible standard gives the system permanent grounds for disciplining the people expected to satisfy it.
Patriarchy has survived for a very long time without behaving like a coherent graduate seminar. Feminist theory should stop expecting it to develop the courtesy now.
Trans-inclusive radical feminism is the materialism Patel wants but struggles to grasp.
The most frustrating thing about “The Sex Contradiction” is that a trans-inclusive radical feminism can preserve nearly everything valuable in Patel’s project while dropping the essentialism that keeps breaking it. Women can remain a social class produced through male supremacy. Reproductive exploitation stays central to feminist analysis without becoming an entrance exam. Marriage, prostitution, pornography, compulsory heterosexuality, domestic labor, and beauty practices remain available for criticism. Liberal choice politics can still be rejected because socially produced desires don’t become politically innocent simply because the woman experiencing them is sincere.
The assumption that has to go is the idea that reproductive classification at birth permanently determines political sex class across every historical process. Patel treats that assumption as though losing it would dismantle radical feminism along with it. It doesn’t.
MacKinnon supplies part of the alternative because she treats women as a political group constituted through sex inequality rather than as a biological population standing outside domination and waiting to be described. When Cristan Williams asked her directly about trans women in the 2015 TransAdvocate interview, MacKinnon described women as a political group and connected womanhood to living women’s status. Her broader theory consistently centers hierarchy. Male-dominant society has spent centuries explaining women through biology, which makes it strange to watch feminists inherit that definition and announce that they’ve finally escaped patriarchal ideology. Patriarchy is receiving an enormous compliment here, and I’m not sure the people paying it understand how generous they’re being.
The useful question is who gets subjected to the social organization of womanhood, how that position is produced, and what enforces it. Bodies matter enormously because hierarchy works on and through them. Reproductive capacity matters, sexual vulnerability matters, violence matters, and medical institutions matter because all of them participate in the material organization of women’s lives. Bodily classifications still acquire their political meaning through relations of power.
Transsexual women make this distinction concrete because transition changes the material conditions through which a person is sexed in everyday life. Hormones alter secondary sex characteristics. Surgery can alter anatomy. Social recognition changes. Sexual relationships change. The kinds of violence and objectification a person encounters can change, along with who feels entitled to touch her or threaten her. Legal classification can change or remain hostile depending on the jurisdiction. None of this erases a trans woman’s earlier history, and none of it makes her life identical to the life of every cis woman.
What it shows is that embodied sex unfolds through time. It isn’t a completed political fact permanently sealed at birth. A historical materialism capable of analyzing transition should find this useful because transition puts the relationship between body, classification, social perception, and power directly in view. Cisnormative life allows most people to ignore that relationship because their classification remains stable enough to look natural.
This account doesn’t require a liberal theory where self-declaration settles political position by itself. A trans woman’s class situation can’t be reduced to an internal identity, and neither can a cis woman’s. Embodiment matters, as do social treatment, economic position, legal recognition, sexual vulnerability, medical regulation, and participation in institutions organized around sex. Different trans women occupy these relations differently. Cis women also occupy womanhood differently according to race, class, sexuality, age, nationality, and geography. Classes contain internal variation because class membership describes a relationship to power rather than a promise that everybody inside the class shares the same biography.
Guillaumin and Wittig help explain why none of this abandons materialism. If sex categories operate through appropriation and heterosexual organization, those categories can change when the relations maintaining them change. Transsexuality is one place where the relationship between body and social category becomes unusually visible, which helps explain why it produces such extraordinary theoretical panic among people committed to reproductive caste politics. Their model requires sex classification to remain politically immutable. Once transition can change how a person is embodied, perceived, regulated, sexualized, paid, and subordinated, classification at birth stops being able to explain the whole political situation. The theorist then has to investigate social relations, which is considerably more work than checking a birth certificate and announcing the discovery of materialism.
Patel’s account of revolution is thin in a way that connects to the larger problem. She closes by invoking collective struggle, revolutionary discipline, slave rebellion, and people’s war while saying very little about the institutions through which women’s liberation would actually be organized. A radical feminist revolution has to deal with reproductive labor, housing, childcare, money, sexual violence, and the family because these are among the places where male supremacy reproduces itself every day. Somebody has to take the children while their mother is at the meeting. Somebody’s name is on the lease when she wants to leave. A shelter has to take her at two in the morning, and whether it takes her when she’s trans is political whether the theoreticians find the question aesthetically inconvenient or not. Somebody still has to wash the dishes after the general assembly.
A revolutionary feminist movement also has to confront racial hierarchy among women and explain the position of lesbians and trans women because a movement unable to explain its own class boundaries will reproduce exclusions while speaking more militantly about them. “Protracted people’s war” doesn’t answer these questions by itself. Revolutionary language becomes useful when it clarifies organization and strategy. Otherwise it’s eyeliner applied to a theoretical bruise.
The more coherent version of Patel’s project is already sitting nearby. The central feminist contradiction can be understood as the struggle between male supremacy and women whose liberation requires the destruction of male power over women. That contradiction has material roots in reproductive exploitation, sexual domination, and the appropriation of women’s labor and time. Its concrete forms change across history. Race and colonialism can reorganize the conditions through which womanhood is lived. Capitalism can absorb feminist victories and turn them into markets. Transition can alter the embodied route through which a person becomes socially situated within womanhood.
Radical feminism loses none of its capacity to attack patriarchy by adopting this framework. It gains the historical flexibility Patel’s supposedly dialectical theory keeps refusing to permit itself.
What survives the blast
“The Sex Contradiction” contains the outline of a serious feminist intervention. Patel recognizes the poverty of a feminism reduced to choice and representation. She understands that male supremacy adapts, that sexuality requires political analysis, and that women’s oppression can’t be explained through attitudes alone. Her mistake is giving sexual difference a political meaning before the history she claims to analyze has produced that meaning. Once the male-female opposition becomes primordial, patriarchy starts looking like the institutional expression of an earlier biological antagonism, and the argument begins drifting toward the reproductive caste theory TERF politics depends upon. The metaphysics comes back through the rear door wearing work boots and carrying Mao, which is a very funny outfit for metaphysics to have chosen.
A stronger radical feminism begins from embodied life and keeps going. Human reproductive differences create material conditions that societies organize through kinship, property, labor, sexuality, law, and violence. Those institutions produce political classes and attach meanings to bodies. Those meanings can change because the relations producing them can change. Guillaumin shows how appropriation gets naturalized after the fact. Wittig shows how the category of sex becomes political through heterosexual organization. MacKinnon shows how sexuality and inequality are produced through relations of dominance. Spillers shows slavery reorganizing gendered embodiment through property and the destruction of kinship. Davis shows different forms of womanhood being manufactured within the same racial economy. Oyěwùmí forces feminism to confront what happens when European body-centered categories are treated as though somebody in Europe discovered humanity’s operating system.
That tradition gives us far more to work with than a primordial war between reproductive classes. It also gives radical feminism an escape from the miserable false choice between liberal identity politics and reproductive caste theory, both of which leave too much unexplained for movements that claim to care about material conditions.
Trans women require radical feminism to finish the materialist argument it started. Our existence forces feminist theory to explain how bodies become socially sexed, how classifications change, how sexual hierarchy operates across different embodied histories, and how womanhood can remain a material political category without hardening into a caste assigned permanently at birth. A theory capable of answering those questions can describe a world where sex itself has a history. A theory that can’t ends up treating biology as destiny while taking extraordinary care never to type the word destiny.
At every point where Patel’s essay most wants to look revolutionary, it runs into the same wall. It puts feminist analysis on historical terrain and exempts its foundational categories from historical change. It invokes Mao while assigning one contradiction permanent priority. It criticizes metaphysics while granting the male-female opposition a political existence before the social institutions that are supposed to explain it. It attacks liberalism’s shallow account of choice and leaves women’s agency underdeveloped. It imagines abolishing patriarchy while preserving the naturalized categories patriarchy has spent centuries using to justify itself. The result is a radicalism with a strangely conservative horizon, where the social order gets blown apart and reproductive ontology somehow walks out of the rubble without a scratch.
This would already be worth criticizing as theory. TWV deciding to recruit women in Worcester gives me considerably less reason to treat it as an academic curiosity. If you’re organizing near me around a feminism that regards my transsexual sisters as women feminism can afford to throw away, then I am going to pay attention to what you’re teaching people. I am going to read the theory underneath the organizing, and when the theory is this weak I am going to say so plainly. Nobody gets to wander into my backyard preaching female solidarity while quietly writing some of my sisters out of the class.
I have no interest in handing radical feminism to liberals because some radical feminists became frightened of transsexual women. I have even less interest in letting TERFs claim materialism because they can point at a body and pronounce destiny in a lower voice. Radical feminism is concerned with abolishing the social relations that make sex hierarchy possible, and doing that requires understanding how those relations produced the political meanings attached to sex in the first place. If sex turns out to be less eternal than Patel would prefer, history will manage the disappointment. It has disappointed considerably more imposing theorists than this.
Patriarchy has spent several thousand years explaining that anatomy determines our political fate. And these charlatans believe we should do it for them. It’s quite rude to try and take their jobs.
Works cited
Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Black Scholar, 1971, and Women, Race & Class, Random House, 1981. I draw on Davis for the relationship between white bourgeois femininity and the labor imposed on enslaved Black women within the same racial property system.
Colette Guillaumin, “Pratique du pouvoir et idée de Nature (1): L’appropriation des femmes,” Questions Féministes, 1978, published in English as “The Practice of Power and Belief in Nature,” Feminist Issues, 1981, and collected in Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, Routledge, 1995. Guillaumin provides the concept of sexage and the account of women’s appropriation that informs my argument about the naturalization of sex class.
Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” Signs, 1982, and Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Harvard University Press, 1989. I use MacKinnon’s account of sex inequality, hierarchy, and the political construction of sexuality throughout.
Mao Zedong, On Contradiction, 1937. I draw on Mao’s distinction between principal and secondary contradictions, his concept of the principal aspect, and his insistence that these relations change according to concrete historical conditions.
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. I use Oyěwùmí’s argument concerning seniority in Yoruba social relations and colonial body-centered gender classifications as a challenge to universalized theories of sex. Her account remains contested within scholarship on Yoruba history.
Sathi Patel, “The Sex Contradiction,” Total Woman Victory, 2025, totalwomanvictory.substack.com/p/the-sex-contradiction. This is the essay under discussion throughout. (Read at your own risk.)
Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, 1987. I use Spillers’s account of ungendering and the captive body in discussing slavery, kinship, and Black womanhood. The 1662 Virginia statute establishing partus sequitur ventrem appears alongside this discussion because it legally tied the status of children to the condition of their mothers.
Cristan Williams, “Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: The TransAdvocate Interviews Catharine A. MacKinnon,” TransAdvocate, April 7, 2015, based on an email interview conducted between November 2014 and March 2015. I use the interview for MacKinnon’s comments on women as a political group and the relationship between trans women and women’s social status.
Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” 1981, and “The Category of Sex,” 1982, collected in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Beacon Press, 1992. I use Wittig for the argument that sex functions as a political category produced through heterosexual social relations and subsequently naturalized.