Women as a sex class in a world of ‘identity’ — The Unmoved Feminist

Uncategorized 7 Minutes

Today, we launch ‘The Unmoved Feminist’, a new podcast from the Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances. Hosted by Liv and Martine, the series applies second-wave, materialist feminist analysis to the issues and debates women are navigating right now — because our analysis hasn’t shifted, even as the political and cultural landscape around us has.

Each episode is accompanied by a blog post, and both are designed to be short and focused, each taking ideas from the second-wave tradition and showing why they still matter today. Listen on Spotify, Apple, or via our podcast page.

Welcome to The Unmoved Feminist, and Happy Easter.

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One of the most consequential intellectual shifts of the past two decades has been the gradual displacement of ‘sex’ by ‘gender identity’ in law, policy, and public discourse. What was once a stable feminist distinction — sex as biological reality, gender as the social hierarchy built upon it — has been inverted: gender identity is now treated as primary and self-defined, while sex is increasingly described as ‘assigned at birth’, as though it were a bureaucratic act rather than a biological fact. For women’s organisations rooted in second-wave, materialist feminist analysis, this is not a minor semantic adjustment. It strikes at the foundation of how we understand women’s oppression and what we need to end it.

What the second wave understood about sex and class

The concept of women as a sex class did not arrive fully formed. It was developed, with considerable intellectual force, by the women who built the theoretical infrastructure of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) established that patriarchy is not a biological given but a political institution, one that maintains male dominance through ideological control and, when that fails, through force — from legal penalties to rape. For Millett, sex was “a status category with political implications”; power, not nature, explained women’s subordination. Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex (also 1970), took this further, identifying women as a “sexual class”, whose oppression was rooted in the biological facts of reproduction and then elaborated through every structure of society from the family to the economy. And Christine Delphy, writing from France in the 1970s, offered a materialist account in which women constituted a class by virtue of our position within the domestic mode of production: women’s unpaid labour in the household was not incidental to capitalism but ran alongside it as a distinct system of exploitation, one from which men as a group materially benefited.

What these women shared, despite differences in approach, was a refusal to explain women’s subordination by nature, biology, or individual psychology. Oppression was structural. It operated at the level of class. And because it operated at that level, it required a collective response — not the adjustment of individual attitudes, not the quiet reform of institutions, but the dismantling of the system as a whole.

Ti-Grace Atkinson perhaps put it the most plainly in 1974: “The analysis begins with the feminist raison d’être that women are a class, that this class is political in nature, and that this political class is oppressed.”

This is the tradition we stand in.

Sex class and the question of priority

When we say that women exist firstly as a sex class before we exist as individuals, or as members of any other class that includes the category of males, we are making a specific analytical claim.

The claim is not that sex is the only thing that matters about a woman’s life, or that women’s experiences are all the same; rather, it is that the material circumstances shared by females — vulnerability to male violence, responsibility for reproductive labour, risk of sexual exploitation, economic dependence flowing from all of these — are generated by the fact of being female in a society organised around male dominance. These circumstances cannot be adequately understood by dissolving women into mixed-sex categories of ‘people’, ‘workers’, ‘parents’, or ‘LGBTIQA+ individuals’. Doing so renders the specifically female dimension of subordination invisible, and with it, the feminist analysis capable of addressing it.

This is why the category of ‘woman’ matters politically and analytically: not as an identity to be performed or an inner feeling to be affirmed, but as a description of a structural position in a hierarchy whose material effects are real and whose elimination requires the category to be legible.

Gender as hierarchy, not identity

Second-wave feminism was clear that ‘gender’ was not liberation but oppression’s mechanism. ‘Gender’ is the set of norms, expectations, and roles — femininity and masculinity — through which patriarchy reproduces itself. Femininity trains girls toward deference, self-effacement, sexual availability, and the subordination of our own needs to others’. Masculinity trains boys toward entitlement, privilege, dominance, and the presumption of authority. These are not innate orientations: they are the ideological residue of a political system.

To treat gender as an identity as something internal to the individual, to be celebrated rather than critiqued is, on this analysis, to rehabilitate the mechanism of oppression as its own remedy. Millett argued that women internalise the ideology of femininity as a condition of survival under patriarchy, understanding our compliance as a form of protection rather than freely chosen self-expression. Catharine MacKinnon, developing this strand in the 1980s, showed that women’s apparent desire is not formed independently of male power but within it: the eroticisation of dominance and submission is not a neutral fact about human sexuality but a feature of a particular system of domination.

When gender identity is presented as the site of liberation — when the task of feminism is reframed as affirming identities rather than dismantling structures — this analysis is abandoned. The hierarchy is left intact. What changes is only the language used to describe it.

What is lost when sex disappears from the frame

The consequences of this displacement are not abstract. They show up in law, in policy, and in the texture of women’s daily lives.

In legal and policy definitions, the substitution of gender identity for sex makes it structurally impossible to identify and remedy sex-based harms. If a ‘woman’ is whoever self-declares as one, then the category of ‘woman’ can no longer track the material patterns of female oppression: patterns of violence, poverty, reproductive exploitation, and exclusion from power. The feminist insight that patriarchy organises harm along the lines of sex is lost precisely when the law ceases to be able to see sex.

In data collection, the consequences are practical and cumulative. When sex is replaced by or conflated with gender identity in official records, in health data, in crime statistics, and in social research, we lose the evidentiary basis for feminist argument. We can no longer clearly demonstrate who commits violence against women, which women are most at risk, or how far sex-based disadvantage has been narrowed or widened by policy. This is not a technocratic problem; it is the erasure of the evidential ground on which women’s advocacy — and reality — stands.

In female-only spaces, the feminist rationale becomes harder to articulate and defend. Refuges, rape crisis services, prisons, and sport categories for females exist because women, as a sex class, are at significantly greater risk of male violence and at structural disadvantage relative to male physical capacity. The justification for these spaces is entirely coherent on a sex-class analysis. Remove that analysis — treat the spaces as expressions of ‘identity’ rather than as responses to material risk — and the justification becomes merely one preference competing against another.

In reproductive and sexual politics, the commodification of women’s bodies becomes harder to name. When prostitution is reframed as ‘sex work’ — a matter of individual choice, stripped of its structural context — the second-wave insight that male demand for sexual access to women is itself politically organised is lost. When surrogacy is framed as ‘gift-giving’ or contractual labour between consenting parties, the analysis of reproductive exploitation disappears. Christine Delphy’s point remains as sharp as it was fifty years ago: the exploitation of women within the domestic and reproductive sphere is not incidental to the wider structure of patriarchy but one of its central mechanisms.

The current stakes

The shift from sex to identity in mainstream feminist and progressive discourse has created a strange inversion. Positions that were, for decades, recognisably left-wing, anti-exploitation, and grounded in materialist analysis — opposition to prostitution and pornography, insistence on female-only spaces, critique of the commercial use of women’s bodies — are now treated in many quarters as reactionary or suspect. The analysis has not changed. The positions have not changed. What has changed is the interpretive framework through which they are being read by those who have adopted identity-based approaches as their default.

This is the context in which the sex-class concept carries renewed importance. It is not sufficient, in this environment, simply to assert that women exist: the category is contested at precisely the moments when its practical significance is highest. What is required is a renewal of the argument: a patient, clear, and rigorous account of why sex matters structurally, why the class framework is the right tool for understanding female subordination, and why abandoning it does not advance equality for women but obscures the conditions that make it necessary to struggle for.

The women who built the second wave did not have the benefit of fifty years of hindsight. They were building their analysis in real time, from consciousness-raising groups, from organising against rape and domestic violence, from their experience of being paid less, owned less, and believed less. That work was not finished. In many respects — as data on male violence, female poverty, and reproductive exploitation continues to show — the conditions it addressed have not been resolved.

The sex-class analysis remains not only defensible but essential. It is the analytical thread running through everything we do: through our work on surrogacy and prostitution, on female-only spaces, on gender medicine and its effects on girls, on institutional data integrity, and on the legal definition of sex. In each case, the question is the same: what is happening to women as a class, and what needs to change for our class to be free?

Further reading

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