Abstract

There is something of a war going on between, broadly, two groups of people who have very different views about gender. These groups call each other by various names, many of them quite loaded, but let’s just call them Group A and Group B. Group A, on the whole, has a view of gender centred on the connection between physical traits and social positioning. Group B, by contrast, leans more toward a view focused on mental traits and self-understandings. Maybe surprisingly, it turns out that people from these two groups tend to hold very similar beliefs about many, if not most other topics within feminist philosophy and politics: things like abortion rights, say, or the need to address sexual harassment in the workplace. What could be going on?