Biology is not our destiny

Issue: 185

Sheila McGregor

One of the campaign ads used in the 2024 presidential elections was: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you”.1 The slogan both taps into the transphobia promoted by the political right in the “culture wars” and appeals to ideas about the family and an “unchanging nature”.2 As Jeffrey Weeks points out:

Appeals to nature, to the claims of the natural, are amongst the most potent we can make. They place us in a world of fixity and truth. They appear to tell us what and who we are, and where we are going. They seem to tell us the truth.3

This can be a powerful appeal in a world in turmoil. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Judith Butler’s recent publication, Who’s Afraid of Gender, has further intensified the debates about gender.4 The book has elicited a range of responses, including one from the socialist author Lindsey German, entitled “What the Butler didn’t see”.5 This is a continuation of a longstanding debate, with German one of those trying to offer a Marxist justification for opposing trans people’s right to “gender self-identification” or “gender self-determination”. Although it is true that Butler does not analyse oppression through the framework of materialism, let alone Marxism, they (Butler’s chosen pronoun) are at least on the right side of history on this question. What follows is not a review of Who’s Afraid of Gender but rather a framework rooted in the tradition of this journal. It should allow us to think through these debates without adopting Butler’s idealistic, post-structuralist approach.

Butler makes three important points. First, they link the attacks on abortion, the rights of gay, lesbian and bisexual people and the rights of trans people. Second, they identify the main protagonists in such attacks as those who would imprison everyone in a heterosexual, white male-dominated straitjacket: the catholic and evangelical churches, right-wing populists and fascists. Third, they argue that the central question is the right of everyone to decide how to live their life. Butler poses sharply the issue that goes to the heart of the debate over trans people when they discuss the issue of their effacement:

Who are these people who think they have the right to tell you who you are and what you are not, and dismiss your own definition of who you are, who tell you that self-determination is not a right that you are allowed to exercise, who would subject you to medical and psychiatric review, or mandatory surgical intervention, before they are willing to recognise you in the name and sex you have given yourself, the ones to which you have arrived? Their definition is a form of effacement.6

Unfortunately, “trans-critical” figures, including some Marxists, practice precisely this kind of effacement. They seek to justify this by starkly counterposing sex, which is treated as biology, naturally given and fixed, with (social) gender roles that are treated primarily as an ideological construct. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, such issues were debated by the Women’s Liberation Movement, during what is now known as Second Wave Feminism, and by the gay and lesbian liberation movements. Women’s Liberation focussed primarily on expanding the gender roles available to women. Therefore, it is fair to say that debates generated by the gay and lesbian liberation movements provided a more robust challenge to ideas about the nature of the human body, initiating debates about heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality.7 Radical Feminism, the current that became prominent in the late 1970s and early 1980s, went in the opposite direction, with some deriving the origins of women’s oppression from the male body. The tradition of International Socialism has, by contrast, always been to start from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s approach: that humans are a distinct part of nature, capable of consciously working on nature, and that we both evolved and live in a dialectical relation to nature. We interact with the natural world to live and, in turn, shape both ourselves and the world in which we live.

Engels on evolution

In 1871, Charles Darwin wrote the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Although he rightly surmised that human beings evolved in Africa, a view that did not chime with colonial supremacists’ views about white and black people, the book also proposes that the key driver of evolution is the brain.8 To counter the idealist aspects of this view, Engels wrote a response in 1876, entitled The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, first published in 1895-6 in Neue Zeit.9 Engels views the sequence of evolution as: labour and tool use, bipedalism, the development of the hand, which stimulated a socialisation process that resulted in greater mutual dependence, and ultimately language. This, in turn, provided the stimulus for the development of the brain.10

Engels argues that the human species is “the most social of all animals” and that labour led to increased cooperation so that we evolved as a social, cooperative species.11 Both Marx and Engels took sexual reproduction as the basis for the evolution of the human species as well as for perpetuating human society.12 However, we now know a number of other things: human sexuality is not tied to reproduction in the way it is in many other species. The human penis has shed the bristles to be found on the penises of other apes and is also boneless. This occurred after the split from chimps and bonobos between seven and nine million years ago.13 Anthropologists Loretta Cormer and Sharyn Jones argue that these changes were a consequence of females selecting for more pleasurable sex.14 A bony penis is a hindrance with the evolution to upright gait.15

We have no way of knowing what the sexual practices were of our ancestors beyond concluding that sexual reproduction was essential for our evolution, as it still is for the reproduction of humans. However, we evolved with bodies capable of sexual pleasure in a variety of ways separate from the needs of reproduction.

Sex and Reproduction

The reproduction process is not exact, and this can give rise to what is known as Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD), formerly known as “intersex”.16 This is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not seem to fit the typical conceptions of the female or male sexes. DSD can occur for a variety of reasons and may or may not be visible at birth, giving rise to a range of anatomies that could be categorised as such.17 Only a minority may be directly affected. Yet, the insistence on a simple sexual binary has led to medical interventions on babies that have caused enormous suffering, as individuals had a sex imposed on them that did not fit how they experienced themselves as they grew up.18

The separation of sexuality from reproduction and the possibilities of same-sex relationships, bisexuality and DSD are not the only challenges to the idea of the gender binary and to biological reductionism. The birth process, breast feeding and child rearing have themselves changed during the history of early humans. Sexual dimorphism, the difference in size between males and females, may well have only occurred 2.4 million years ago, with the evolution of homo erectus.19 A whole series of other evolutionary changes reflect what is termed “alloparenting”, the possibility of safely supplementing breast feeding of infants from the age of three months, facilitating collective childrearing practices, longer childhoods and longer dependence on adults. The human baby can be fed by other lactating females and then fed appropriately prepared food—small bites of prechewed food by others.20

It is impossible to know exactly how the earliest members of homo sapiens lived and organised their lives, but we can compare practices from recent hunter gatherer societies with those of today, giving some insight into the way the birthing process, lactation and childcare have changed. In most hunter gatherer societies that we know, women either gave birth on their own or with a few other women, often wherever they happened to be. As I wrote in 2018:

George J Engelmann, an obstetrician and professor of gynaecology at the St Louis Postgraduate School of Medicine, wrote a fascinating study, published in 1883, of different practices relating to childbirth, drawn from a wide variety of hunter gatherer and tribal societies. He concluded they reflected a way of life that favoured healthy physical development and therefore short and relatively easy births with little impact on the mother’s mobility and physical wellbeing.21

The difference with today’s experience in Britain and other highly developed capitalist economies could not be starker: pregnancies are often difficult, and women and men have fought for proper maternity agreements to give mothers, and today fathers, time off work before and after birth. Births usually occur in hospitals, are often excruciatingly painful, sometimes require painkillers, can be highly traumatic and are frequently accompanied by physical injury. At times, births are followed by postnatal depression.22 It is still overwhelmingly biological females who become pregnant and give birth, although a trans man or someone who has ovaries and a womb can give birth.23 Nevertheless, the birthing process has changed qualitatively. As Marx writes in The German Ideology:

The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other, as a social relationship.24

The Family and the rise of women’s oppression

Marx and Engels believed that the first human societies, prior to the rise of class society and the state, were egalitarian. In 1884, Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, drawing both on his own research and notes Marx had made.25 He argues that there were several stages to production before the definitive rise of classes, accompanied by state structures and the family. Engels’s views were once accepted as a classic text in the Marxist tradition. Today, they are overwhelmingly rejected, including by many Marxists.26

Nonetheless, many of his central arguments have been confirmed by others and remain valid. These include the point that men and women had once lived in egalitarian societies; that exploitation and oppression are a product of history, not genetics; that the roots of women’s oppression lay in the transformation in social relationships, brought about by changes in the way humans secured their living; and, finally, that the subordination of women to men emerged in parallel with the rise of class exploitation of the majority by a minority and with the development of the state to defend minority rule.

In his work, Engels adopts the stages of the evolution of human society based on changes in the methods of production set out by the pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan.27 The initial and longest stage includes small groups of egalitarian hunters and gatherers. A further stage is horticulture and kinship societies. A final stage allows the production of a stable surplus product for the first time due to the development of agriculture. Only then do we see the rise of class societies, the family and the state. Morgan made a decisive contribution to understanding the relationship between “the arts of subsistence” and social relationships. He demonstrates how changes in one underpin changes in the other, partly derived from the nature of social systems based on collective land ownership, which he observed among the Iroquois in North America.28

If egalitarian relationships within societies and between men and women depended on shared contributions to the production and reproduction of society, the control by specific men over producing a developing surplus could undermine the position of women in relation to men.

The development of agriculture did not immediately transform societies, leading to the subordination of women and the rise of the state. This took place over thousands of years, from about 10,000 years ago, and did not occur everywhere in the same way or at the same time. The relationship between changes in the environment, ways of producing and what is produced, and wider social relations is complex.29 Furthermore, many hunter gatherer societies, horticulturalists and pastoralists continued to exist after class societies had emerged. It took the rise of modern capitalism to transform almost all societies across the world.30

Space does not permit a detailed discussion of these historical processes, which will form the subject of a later article in International Socialism. Here, it is sufficient to acknowledge that where women were displaced from an equal place in creating the products on which society relied, this tended to coincide with two major development: the emergence of class divisions, between a minority of rulers and a majority of direct labourers, and the state, what Lenin called “armed bodies of men to defend class interest”, to prevent any challenge to their control over the social surplus.31 Institutions such as the family would also become central to passing wealth between generations of the ruling class—and, in different ways over time, became a site in which labourers could be reproduced and reared, even if the earliest class societies often also relied on unfree labour to generate a surplus. Finally, with these changes to society, oppressive ideologies linked to the supposed roles of men and women developed, playing a material role in buttressing the new class societies.

Transgender

Laura Miles argues:

Biological sex (however defined) has materiality, though it is nowhere near as binary or as purely biological as some people believe. Yet, in a (broadly) sexually bi-morphic self-aware social species like human beings sex is (usually, still) both a biological pre-requisite and a socially/historically influenced indicator of who bears children and who plays what role in the reproduction of the next generation of labour power. But how we are currently sex-assigned says little or nothing about who could nurture and socialise the next generation, how that might be accomplished, and for what purpose. These vary from one culture to another.32

The phenomenon of women taking the role of men and men taking the role of women, including dressing in the chosen gender, marrying and raising children, has been observed in a range of societies.33 Darmangeat notes of North America that “some Inuit girls were brought up as boys” where there was a lack of boys to become hunters. He cites the known example of the “berdaches”, who “were people whose bodies and minds were thought to belong, at least in part, to different sexes.” This includes wearing “the characteristic clothes of their ‘other’ sex, and engaged in the activities appropriate to it”.34 Among tribes accepting “berdaches”, 100 allowed male to female gender switching and 30 female to male.35 He also describes societies in Sub-Saharan Africa that adopt the “other” gender.36 Butler refers to the Nigerian sociologist Ifi Amadiume’s pathbreaking work Male Daughters, Female Husbands, which shows “how gender relations and assignments change depending on the distribution of wealth, the power to participate economically, and the role assumed in relations of care within extended kinship networks”.37 Women could access masculine social status and operate economically, politically, and socially, as privileged men. Daughters could inherit land as social sons and found lineages as social husbands.

The examples cited above are taken from particular societies, reflecting the ways of producing and social relations of those societies. In other words, they are culturally specific, not a reflection of some free-floating trans identity. Similarly, the fixity of gender roles and biological sex that are at issue in modern capitalist society are a consequence of the system of privatised reproduction of the working class through the family. The “traditional” nuclear family is largely a product of a crisis of reproduction of the working class in the 19th century. The response was the construction of a particular type of hierarchical model: a male dominated division of labour between male earners and female homemakers, a concept of the family as a mini-welfare system, with mother as carer, educator and lover, and father as provisioner.

This model would be challenged by struggles such as those associated with the women’s liberation movement and the gay and lesbian liberation movements. As a result of all of these movements and the changing needs of capitalism, which increasingly expects women to provide wage labour alongside childbearing and childrearing, a whole variety of living arrangements have become possible. However, all are framed by the concept of the nuclear family, with reproduction of the current and next generation of the working class at its heart.

The emergence of different ways of living provides a challenge to traditional assumptions about gender roles and opens a space for individuals to break out of the binary altogether. This conflict between the tying together of gender roles with biological sex in the nuclear family and the battle for the recognition of transgender people lies beneath the reactionary view that “a man is a man, and a woman is a woman” and the right of people to define their own gender.

Miles, in her groundbreaking book Transgender Resistance, devotes a chapter to analysing the complex dialectical relationship between the body and a person’s sense of self. According to her, key is:

Gender can be understood as having two elements. It is both socially applied (ie as something which exists externally to the person—gender roles) and it is also an internal sense of self—gender identity.38

Expanding on the concept of gender identity, Miles writes:

Gender identity or our gender-self, like sexuality, is much more than “a feeling” as it is sometimes rather dismissively described in trans-critical and transphobic narratives. It is an outcome of interactions between the person’s self-perceived body, their biological sex (including in some cases their deep unease about this), the social perception of their body in the eyes of others, social factors like gender values and expectations, and finally the person’s development as a sexual being with sexual attractions and sexual needs (their sexuality). Our gender identity or gender-self has a certain mutability or plasticity as a result of these dialectical interactions mutually influencing each other, but it also has a level of persistence in the face of social pressures which serve to constrain us within binary and sex-ascribed expectations on pain of hostility, disapproval, and even ostracism and violence.39

The movements of the 1960s and 1970s for the liberation of women, gays and lesbians presented a partial challenge (and an important one) to the imposition on people of ways of being because of their biological sex. The demands for recognition of transgender identities push that challenge to its logical conclusion. In so doing, they come up against the ideas promoted by the ruling class that the nuclear family is natural and eternal, and human nature unchanging. Hence, it is not surprising that those on the political right attack the very possibility of trans identity as a way of creating divisions inside the working class and cementing their hold ideologically. JK Rowling purports to support trans people but simultaneously argues, “When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman…then you throw open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside”.40 The implicit argument in such claims is usually that transitioning is a means to assault women. This has been instrumental in opening the door to ruling class ideas and right-wing forces, who not only deny the oppression trans people face, but want to roll back the gains made by women, gays and lesbians, challenge abortion rights and the like. These are the same forces that cut back funding for Rape Crisis Centres, housing, and other social support that do make a difference to violence against women. The consequences have allowed the ruling class to halt the change to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to allow self-ID or self-recognition, the closure of the Tavistock Gender Identity clinic, the only clinic to deal with trans and non-binary people under the age of 18, and the worsening of facilities for transgender people. It also fed through to the Cass report and the decision of the previous Tory government to ban the prescription of puberty blockers for young people on the NHS, a ban that has been continued by Labour health secretary Wes Streeting.

German also raises arguments about violence against women, in terms that make concessions to radical feminist arguments about male violence. She suggests that other socialists do not take the issue seriously, implying that if we had fought hard enough, we could have rolled back violence against women. Meanwhile, she herself fails to show solidarity with transgender people and the oppression they face. Moreover, she seems to see being transgender as primarily a political choice adopted to challenge gender stereotypes, rather than about fellow human beings asserting their democratic right to define themselves.41 German could have used the tools of historical materialism and Engels’s analysis of the family to explore the ways in which changes in the mode of production impact on family forms, how different gender roles emerge in different societies, as well as how the ideology surrounding sex and gender changes. Instead, she has resorted to a crude form of materialism, evoking the idea that “biology is your destiny”. This, ironically, summarised the opposition of much of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s to traditional views about sex and gender.

Marx argues that “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations”.42 He provides here a highly condensed summation of the way material and social forces shape people and their ideologies, acting on individuals, who in turn, react to that wider social reality. I do not have the space here to unpack all the implications. However, for the purposes of this discussion, in addition to the kind of society, class, family and wider environment an individual is born into, this includes: the impact of social values, expecations about behaviour and what is permissible, and political ideas. All these factors influence the way the individual develops and articulates their own sense of self, in relation to others and their own bodies, as they experience the world. As German should know very well, this is the material reality that shapes us all, whether heterosexual, cis, non-binary, transgender, gay or lesbian. Yet, instead of starting from this rich tradition, she has used Marxism as a justification for what is a form of effacement. This reveals not just a failure to understand transgender oppression and its roots in the nuclear family, but also a lack of empathy about what it might be like to be a trans person in our society.

German insults a tradition rooted in fighting exploitation and oppression, one that links the potential of the self-emancipation of the working class to systematic struggle against all forms of oppression.43 One of the central arguments made by the revolutionary socialist tradition is that, while we should fight every instance of women’s oppression in the here and now, eradicating it altogether will come with the socialisation of the tasks currently undertaken by the nuclear family. This would release everyone from the straitjacket of the gender binary, perpetuated through the nuclear family, and begin the process of everyone being able to define themselves. Just as the oppression of gays and lesbians, non-binary and trans people, flows from the existence of the nuclear family and the oppression of women, the withering away of the family is the key to the withering away of all the related forms of oppression. A coherent strategy for women’s liberation necessarily includes fighting for material gains, such as equal pay, an end to job discrimination, free 24-hour nurseries and the right of women to control their own bodies, as well as resistance to all forms of sexism and violence. It means a consistent challenge to the idea that biology is our destiny and supporting people’s right to define themselves.

Violence against women

Because the question of violence against women is often raised in debates around self-definition, it is important to restate: trans people do not pose a threat to women. Argentina has had a gender identity law allowing “any person to change their gender if they so desire” since 2012.44 Since 2015, in Ireland, people could apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate after the age of 18, if they had lived in their chosen gender for two years.

Violence against women is on the rise in Britain, according to a report from the National Police Chiefs Council, published in July 2024.45 It states:

We estimate that at least one in every 12 women will be a victim of VAWG [Violence against Women and Girls] every year (two million victims) and one in 20 adults in England and will be a perpetrator of VAWG every year (2.3 million perpetrators). Crimes including stalking, harassment, sexual assault and domestic violence affect one in 12 women in England and Wales, with the number of recorded offences growing by 37 percent in the past five years and the perpetrators getting younger.46

The figures understate the real trauma and the danger of death experienced by women resulting from this level of abuse. This violence is perpetrated, overwhelmingly, by men, although there are male victims of domestic abuse, and violence occurs in same sex relationships. A question is whether the fact of being biologically male is the key to understanding male violence against women. Is it simply because men have a penis, are usually physically stronger and usually have higher testosterone levels than women that make them prone to physically bullying behaviour?

There is a long tradition associated with radical feminism of locating women’s oppression in male biology. In 1975, Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will, a book that would be profoundly influential among feminists. It reflected the strength of radical feminism in the US women’s movement, a current that theorised women’s oppression in terms of personal relations between men and women, strongly emphasising male violence against women. Such ideas were often based on claims about human biology. Brownmiller argues that the sexual act itself is the key to understanding male domination: “Man’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself”.47 She believes:

Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear is one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.48

However, the tradition of this journal has been to locate violence against women and girls firmly in the economic and social framework of specific societies and push back against the idea that all men are violent and potential rapists.49 Currently, among the greatest violence perpetrated against women and girls are imperialist wars that are prosecuted as vigorously by female members of the ruling class as male members, sometimes in the name of liberating women. The participation of female soldiers in the sexual torture of male prisoners in Abu Ghraib and of women soldiers in the IDF pursuing Israel’s genocidal wars in Gaza and Lebanon are proof that women can be every bit as violent against women, children and men.

The explanation for the violence against women and girls lies in an analysis of the way in which the nuclear family shapes the roles of what it is to be a man and a woman, both inside the family and in wider society. This context in which some men respond with violence towards women includes: the hierarchy within the family and the ideology of separate roles for men and women; the subordination of women’s sexuality to pleasuring men; the naturalisation of male sexual violence towards women through the likes of social influencers such as Andrew Tate; the profound alienation and sense of powerlessness that stems from a world where no one seems to listen, that offers no hope of a better future, only more grinding economic misery.

The same context leads to violence against trans people. It is fanned by the “culture wars” and the transphobia of politicians such as former prime minister Rishi Sunak, who argued at the Tory party conference in 2023, “a man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense” (now echoed by current prime minister Keir Starmer, who opposes the right of trans women to use women only spaces).50 In the year ending March 2023, 4,732 hate crimes against trans people were recorded—a rise of 11 percent on the previous year.51 An estimated 62-73 percent of transgender people have experienced harassment and violence because they were identified as transgender. This includes verbal abuse, threatening behaviour and physical and sexual assault.52 As with domestic abuse, rape and sexual harassment, this type of abuse is underreported. Again, the roots of transphobia and violence against women are the same: the imposition of a hierarchical binary through the nuclear family and the powerful, naturalising ideology that accompanies it.

Resistance by working-class people, women and men, transgender people, binary and non-binary people, is a way of creating alternatives that undermine the brutal dynamic of society today. Collective struggle, whether on the streets over Palestine or against racism, for abortion rights and Black Lives Matter, against homophobia and transphobia, for higher wages or defence of jobs and services, gives people the experience that those they struggle alongside—regardless of race, sex, gender, religion or nationality—are what makes them strong. It creates space for discovering who your real allies are and who you want to be. The siren voices that try to divide us on the basis that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman” are just that: voices that are amplifying the ideas of the ruling class that certain things are just about “nature”, which we cannot and should not try to change.


Sheila McGregor is a long-standing member of the SWP and member of the International Socialism editorial board.


Notes

1 Cited in Brown, 2024.

2 On culture wars, see Cox, 2024. This article benefited from comments and encouragement from Joseph Choonara, Laura Miles and Rosemarie Nünning.

3 Weeks, 1991, p87.

4 Butler, 2024. See the excellent review by Ringrose, 2024.

5 German, 2024. I was sorely tempted to title this piece: “Why won’t the Mistress listen?”

6 Butler, 2024, p151. Butler poses the issue of effacement alongside other forms of oppression, such as that of Palestinians, that have quite different historical and social roots.

7 Weeks goes through these debates in the first three chapters of Against Nature, Weeks 1991.

8 Darwin, 1871.

9 Engels, 1876.

10 Engels, 1876, p357.

11 Engels, 1876, p356.

12 They also assumed that the first division of labour was the sexual division of labour. Marx and Engels, 1976, p51.

13 Cormer and Jones, 2015, p21. All male species of nonhuman apes and Old World monkeys have what is called the baculum. Some New World species do not.

14 Cormer and Jones, 2015. This is speculation on their part.

15 I hope the reasoning is obvious. If not, take a look at how chimpanzees mate from behind.

16 There are other factors that break with the idea of gender binary, such as the existence of women who have naturally higher levels of testosterone.

17 Intersex Society of North America, 2024. Incidentally, German, 2024, is quite wrong to claim that there is no range in DSD. Human biology, including our reproductive systems, are more complex and varied than she seems to realise.

18 It is difficult to get exact statistics, partly because there is not complete agreement on what counts as DSD. See the Intersex Society of North America for further discussion and calculations made based on some research by Anne Fausto-Sterling.

19 Skinner and Wood, 2006, p348.

20 Alloparenting is also found in other species in the animal kingdom.

21 McGregor, 2018.

22 See Jones, 2023.

23 See Eske, 2023.

24 Marx and Engels, 1976.

25 Engels, 1884.

26 See Vogel, 1983. For a refutation of Vogel’s arguments, see McGregor, 2018, and of Dunayevskaya and Vogel, see McGregor, 2021. Why Men (C Hurst & Co) by Lindisfarne and Neale was published in 2023. See my review, McGregor, 2023. This year saw the publication of English translation of Christophe Darmangeat’s Primitive Communism Is Not What It Used to Be (Brill; 2024), which will add to these debates.

27 We would no longer use the terminology on which Morgan and Engels relied. See Harman, 1994, p107.

28 See Leacock, 1981. This essay first appeared as the introduction to the 1963 edition of Morgan’s Ancient Society. Lise Vogel provides a clear summary of Morgan’s contribution to understanding pre-class societies, although she disagrees with his focus on the “arts of subsistence”—Vogel, 2013, chapter 6. See McGregor, 2023, pp308-310.

29 See Harman, 1994, pp118-129, for an overview of such processes.

30 The Communist Manifest presents the way in which the bourgeoisie sweeps all before it. Engels and Marx, 1948.

31 Lenin, 1917.

32 Miles, 2020, p. 50.

33 The whole concept of changing gender roles is based on societies having a sexual division of labour in the first instance. This seems to have been fairly universal without any predetermination over what labour would be allocated to what sex/gender, nor for how long. See Costin, 1996, chapter 4.

34 Darmangeat, 2024, p159. There is a debate about the use of the term “Berdache” and whether it has insulting connotations. I have retained its use here because it occurs in Darmangeat’s text. See Miles, 2024, p23.

35 Darmangeat, 2024, p161.

36 Dermangeat makes the point that this had no impact on the sexual division of labour that existed in such societies.

37 Butler, 2024, p224. The entire chapter, “Racial and Colonial Legacies of Gender Dimorphism”, makes fascinating reading. For further discussion, see also Miles, 2020, and Feinberg, 1996.

38 Miles, 2020, p51.

39 Miles, 2024, p53.

40 Rowling, 2024.

41 German, 2024.

42 Marx, 1976, p616.

43 Marx, 1871. This was a crucial point made by Lenin when he argued that the socialists had to be the “tribune of the oppressed”.

44 Butler, 2024, p83.

45 National Police Chiefs Council, 2024.

46 National Police Chiefs Council, 2024.

47 Brownmiller, 1975, pp 13-14.

48 Brownmiller, 1975, pp 14-15.

49 See for example McGregor, 1989.

50 Hunter, 2024.

51 Goodier, 2023.

52 CPS, 2024.


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