Setting boundaries

A giant in the philosophy of gender seems unwilling to engage with alternative points of view or the reality of biological sex.

- EMMA MARTIN

Over the past decade, the way women and men are referred to in public discourse has shifted. It has become common to hear sex described as having been "assigned at birth". Pregnancy can happen to "any gender". A woman is anyone who feels themselves to be a woman, a man is anyone who feels themselves to be a man (the circularity of these definitions is a clue that something unusual is going on here). "Misgendering" - any unwanted reference to a person's presumed sex - is increasingly considered to be, at best, impolite, and at worst, a form of hate speech.

This shift is not merely linguistic. It also manifests in fraught public debate about who should have access to women-only sports, spaces and services, and what types of psychological or medical interventions should be made available to children and teens whose sense of self is at odds with their biological sex.

No public intellectual is more closely associated with this shift than US philosopher Judith Butler. Her early work in the 1990s introduced the idea of gender as performance: a continuous reproduction and morphing of what it is to be a woman or a man through the ways we behave and express ourselves. For Butler, it was not just that social norms and expectations about women and men change over time, it was that no stable referents for the terms "woman" and "man" survive these changes.

Escaping academia and finding its way into popular culture via early 2010s social media sites such as Tumblr, this idea has itself morphed into the belief that we create ourselves as women or men - or, more expansively, as any of a plethora of bespoke gender identities, each with its own brightly coloured flag - through a process of internal self-discovery. The resulting self-concept is understood to be potent yet fragile, to the extent that any failure by onlookers to affirm a person's gender identity may be interpreted as an existential attack.