A Feminism That Does Not Know What a Woman Is
Gerrie Strik examines how women’s rights are undermined once the term woman becomes undefined. Published on memoma.nl on 16 May 2025, shortly after the ruling by the UK Supreme Court.
The British ruling that restored the rules of the game
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 self-defined gender identity. A simple sentence with enormous consequences: from now on, the British government once again knows what it means when it refers to women-only spaces. Changing rooms, prison wings, shelters, sports competitions and quotas — wherever sex is legally relevant, the concept once again corresponds to biological reality. vrouwenruimtes.nl explains exactly what the court decided and what this means for single-sex spaces.
For activists who had insisted for years that sex is “a social construct”, the ruling was an earthquake. For women who are discriminated against, protected or given preferential treatment on the basis of their sex, it restored a legal position they had watched disappear with little resistance. Strik uses this ruling as the framework for a broader argument: a feminism that does not know what a woman is cannot defend women.
Gender mainstreaming and the disappearance of women
Strik describes how an academic and bureaucratic movement — gender mainstreaming — has quietly hollowed out the concept of “woman” over the past two decades. The reasoning is that everyone has an inner gender identity, separate from their body, and that this inner identity should guide policy and law.
“A person’s biological sex has no bearing on their identity.”
That sounds like a philosophical position; in practice, it is a political intervention. Once “woman” no longer refers to 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 disappears. What remains is a term without substance, a box that anyone can freely step into and out of.
“Dictatorship of nature”
In the gender-mainstreaming literature cited by Strik, biological sex is dismissed as the “dictatorship of nature” that must be overcome. It is a deceptive frame. For whoever says that sex is oppression is implicitly saying that the struggle against the oppression of women is actually a struggle against womanhood itself. In doing so, the victim of sexism disappears from view.
Strik takes a different starting point. Being a woman is not a disaster that must be abolished; it is a fact of existence. The disaster is that historical and contemporary injustice has been attached to that fact. The solution is rights — not abolishing 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 point is not a play on words. Women’s rights were historically won on the basis of sex: the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to education, the right to abortion and the right to protection from sexual violence. If sex disappears as a category, the people who hold those rights disappear as well.
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 competing 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 thrown overboard for a single man who says he feels different.
Women-only spaces are not a luxury
Strik argues that women-only spaces — physical, legal and political — serve a purpose that cannot be replaced by rhetorical goodwill. A shelter for rape survivors is not a privilege for women; it is a minimum condition for making recovery possible. Anyone who opens such a space on the basis of self-declaration undermines its very raison d’être.
The fact that parents, lesbians, women in prison and feminists who raise these arguments are widely called “transphobic” is precisely the strategy Strik exposes: taking away the language in which the discussion can take place. For if people are no longer allowed to say what a woman is, they can no longer say what happens to her. How dictionaries, the British courts and Dutch law define the word woman is explained on letterbrij.nl.
Sex realism is not an anti-transgender position
An important point that is too often lost in this discussion: sex realists — such as Strik — do not deny the existence of transgender people. Adults may dress, live and describe themselves as they wish. What sex realists oppose is the idea that individual self-declaration should abolish the legal sex categories that protect other people — especially women and children. That is a fundamental distinction. The feminist movements that clash over this issue are described at gender and feminism.
What this means for the Netherlands
- The Dutch Transgender Act still requires an expert’s statement to change sex registration; the bill that was intended to make self-identification possible was withdrawn in 2025. The British ruling raises the question of what legal sex registration means for equal-treatment law.
- Sports federations, shelter organisations and the prison service can no longer hide behind “we follow self-identification”.
- There is legal scope for policies specifically aimed at women on the basis of biological sex, without excluding transgender people from general civil rights.