A feminism that doesn't know what a woman is
Gerrie Strik analyses how women's rights are undermined as soon as the term woman becomes undefined. Published on memoma.nl on 16 May 2025, shortly after the ruling of the UK Supreme Court.
The British ruling that restored the rules
On 16 April 2025 the UK Supreme Court ruled that in the Equality Act 2010 the terms "woman" and "sex" refer to biological sex, not to self-chosen gender identity. A simple sentence with enormous consequences: from now on the British government again knows what it means when it talks about women's spaces. Changing rooms, prison wings, shelters, sports competitions and quotas — wherever sex is legally relevant, the concept again coincides with actual biology.
For activists who had insisted for years that sex was "a social construct", the ruling was an earthquake. For women who are discriminated against, protected or favoured on the basis of their sex, it was the restoration of a legal position they had seen disappear with little resistance. Strik uses this ruling as a hook for a broader argument: a feminism that does not know what a woman is cannot defend women.
Gender mainstreaming and the disappearance of woman
Strik describes how an academic and bureaucratic movement — gender mainstreaming — has quietly hollowed out the concept "woman" over the past two decades. The reasoning: everyone has an inner gender identity, separate from their body, and that inner identity must be decisive in policy and law.
"The biological sex of a human being has no meaning for their identity."
That sounds like a philosophical position; in practice it is a political intervention. Because as soon as "woman" no longer stands for the half of humanity that can become pregnant, menstruates and statistically faces a higher risk of sexual violence, the legal protection of that group also falls away. What then remains is a term without content, a box that everyone can freely step in and out of.
"Dictatorship of nature"
In the gender mainstreaming literature Strik cites, biological sex is dismissed as a "dictatorship of nature" that must be overcome. It is a treacherous frame. Because whoever says sex is oppression implicitly says that the fight against women's oppression is really a fight against being female itself. With that, the victim of sexism disappears from view.
Strik chooses a different starting point. Being female is not a disaster to be abolished; it is a fact of existence. The disaster is that historically and today injustice has been attached to that fact. The solution is rights — not the abolition of the fact itself.
Why this is decisive for women's rights
"A feminism that does not know what a woman is cannot effectively stand up for women's rights."
Strik's central sentence is not a play on words. Women's rights have historically been won on the basis of sex: the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to education, the right to abortion, the right to protection against sexual violence. If sex disappears as a category, so does the bearer of those rights.
In the Dutch context this plays out on many fronts: a man who calls himself a woman and wants to use a women's shelter. An athlete with male physiology who competes in women's categories. A prisoner with a history of violence against women who is placed in a women's prison. In each of these cases the legal protection built up for women is broken to pieces for one man who says he feels different.
Women's spaces are not a luxury
Strik argues that women's spaces — physical, legal and political — have a function that cannot be replaced by rhetorical goodwill. A shelter for rape victims is not a privilege for women; it is a minimal condition to make recovery possible. Whoever opens such a space on the basis of self-declaration undermines its reason for existing.
That parents, lesbians, female prisoners and feminists who bring these arguments forward are called "transphobic" on a wide scale is exactly the strategy Strik exposes: taking away the language in which the discussion can be conducted. Because whoever may no longer say what a woman is can also no longer say what is happening to her.
Sex-realism is not an anti-transgender position
An important point too often lost in this discussion: sex-realists — such as Strik — do not contest the existence of transgender people. Adults can dress, live and refer to themselves as they wish. What sex-realists do contest is that individual self-declaration overrides the legal sex categories that protect other people — especially women, especially children. That is an essential distinction.
What this means for the Netherlands
- The Dutch Transgender Act allows sex change on self-declaration. The British ruling opens the question of whether the same applies to the Equality question.
- Sports federations, shelter organisations and the prison system can no longer hide behind "we follow self-declaration".
- There is legal room for specific women's policy on the basis of biological sex, without this excluding transgender people from general civil rights.