Revisiting the legacy

Although, in the UK, self-described ‘gender-critical feminism’ experienced a surge in popularity from 2016 onwards, after the prime minister announced plans for a consultation on making it easier for trans people to legally change their sex designation, trans-exclusionary discourses have long existed in British feminism. This article presents a close reading of three of the most significant and influential anti-trans feminists from the 1970s to the 1990s: Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and Shelia Jeffreys. I argue that while these theorists have played a pivotal role in shaping and developing contemporary gender-critical thought, their intellectual trajectories and historical contexts are often overlooked in discussions of today’s trans-exclusionary politics. By advocating for the exclusion of trans women from women-only spaces, Daly, Raymond, and Jeffreys have reinforced a gender-critical framework that universalises womanhood, upholds the male/female binary as fixed and immutable, and polices which gendered bodies are considered natural and legitimate while dismissing others as synthetic and threatening. Understanding these earlier foundations is, therefore, essential to grasping how and why gender-critical feminism continues to reproduce exclusionary narratives. Indeed, the discourses deployed by Daly, Raymond, and Jeffreys, and later adopted by gender-critical theorists, fail to acknowledge the intersectional dimensions of women’s oppression and marginalisation

Feminism · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychology