Oxford University Press — Gender-Critical Feminism

Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford and one of the largest academic publishers in the world. Academic titles are peer-reviewed before publication and approved by the Delegates of the Press.

The book

In 2022, OUP published Gender-Critical Feminism by Holly Lawford-Smith, a political philosopher at the University of Melbourne. She presents and defends gender-critical feminism: a movement that maintains the distinction between sex and gender, emphasizes the importance of sex, and sees gender as something imposed on men and women.

Why it is on this list

The book is an academic elaboration of a position otherwise found mainly in popular books and opinion pieces. Its publication was controversial; there was opposition to OUP's decision to publish the book. The link provided leads to the publisher's general website, not to a separate book page. See critical perspectives and terminology.

The author

Holly Lawford-Smith studied at the University of Otago in New Zealand and received her PhD from the Australian National University in 2010. After serving as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sheffield, she has worked as an associate professor of political philosophy at the University of Melbourne since 2017. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Controversial Ideas and writes for Quillette. OUP has also published Not in Their Name (2019) and Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy (2023) by her.

The protest against its publication

The book was published in the United Kingdom on May 12, 2022. A month earlier, on April 14, 2022, the publisher received an open letter bearing more than eight hundred signatures. The letter was coordinated by Eugenia Zuroski of McMaster University and came from scholars affiliated with OUP: authors, reviewers, series and journal editors, translators, and lecturers who use the publisher's books. They expressed their deep disappointment with the decision, but did not call for it to be reversed and wrote that they did not want to censor ideas. David Clark, who was responsible for academic publishing at OUP, replied that every academic title is assessed by the Delegates. According to him, this book had undergone a thorough review, with an additional round of assessments by experts in specific fields.

How to weigh this source

Lawford-Smith is herself a participant in the debate. In February 2021, she launched the website No Conflict, They Said, featuring anonymous and unverified accounts about the presence of trans women in women's spaces. Colleagues at the University of Melbourne condemned the site as transphobic in an open letter. The book is therefore an argument by an involved author, but one that has undergone the standard academic review process. It is suitable for reading the reasoning of gender-critical feminism as a coherent whole. More about the relationship between feminism and the gender debate can be found under gender and feminism. The counterarguments are not included; you will find them under science and debate.