Book Review: The Abolition of Sex, by Kara Dansky

Kara Dansky is a feminist lawyer who, since 2015, has played a leading role in opposing ‘gender ideology’ in the United States. She chairs the law committee of the Women’s Human Rights Campaign, and from 2016 to 2020 she was also prominent within the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF).

Her 128 page book is a very good introduction to the concerns and actions of ‘gender critical’ campaigners in the United States. Some of the contents are covered in Helen Joyce’s 331 page Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.

Dansky’s subtitle, How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, indicates the author’s refusal to accept the validity of ‘gender identity’ (and therefore ‘transgender’ identity), as well as the book’s focus on the erosion of female-only spaces. In the introductory chapter, she writes: ‘This book is primarily about the…agenda that involves men claiming to be women’.

She does briefly give other reasons for rejecting ‘transgender’. She compares it to her own experience of anorexia nervosa: ‘going to college was a difficult transition for me…My eighteen-year-old brain decided to get matters under control by studying as hard as possible and by starving myself. I convinced myself I was overweight…Helpfully, my parents refused to validate my delusion…They persuaded me to get the help that I needed. They did not encourage me to take drugs or get surgery to validate my deluded ideas about my body. That would have been unkind.’

Helping people with bodily delusions, she goes on, ‘…is what our society needs to do for the people who are sincerely confused about their biological sex and/or ‘gender identity’, whatever that may mean for them.’

Having made that point, together with similar language such as ‘fiction’ and ‘fantasy’, Dansky moves on. Only at the end of the book, in the penultimate chapter on ‘The Gender Identity Industry’, does she outline possible causes of these delusions or fantasies: commercial interests, Queer Theory, sexual objectification, pornography, and autogynephilia.

In her account of the ‘relentless pressure’ to assert that ‘trans women are women’, and to use ‘so-called preferred pronouns’, Dansky highlights an incident in the UK: the 2018 conversation on Sky News, between Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull and Dr Adrian Harrop, about the billboard poster of ‘Woman noun adult human female’ that Keen-Minshull had put up in Liverpool, where Harrop was working as a primary care doctor. Harrop (who has since admitted that some of his campaigning activities, but not this particular one, were ‘foul and abrasive’ professional misconduct) complained that Keen-Minshull’s dictionary-quoting poster ‘excluded trans women’. Asked to ‘explain what a woman is’, he responded: ‘A woman is a person who identifies as a woman.’ Harrop continued his campaign to have the poster removed. It was.

Dansky states it is a ‘logical fallacy’ that a man can be a woman when he ‘identifies’ as one. I agree that such men do not become women, but I disagree that this is a logical fallacy, with the implication that the meaning of ‘woman’ is fixed. It is quite possible that Harrop and others will succeed in getting common usage of the word ‘woman’, and therefore its dictionary definition(s), changed.

Just before I published this review, I took issue with Dansky’s ‘logical fallacy’ argument on Twitter, pointing out that her book contains no examples of judges, in legal proceedings, accepting it. It seems to me that, as well as being a distraction, such an argument can sound as though the concerns of people with ‘gender identity issues’ are to be dismissed in advance.

As a lawyer, Dansky gives an account of the legal framework in the US, and the legal cases that she and others have been involved with. She starts with the ‘so-called Equality Act‘, which has passed through Congress and is waiting to be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Act would redefine ‘sex’, in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to include ‘gender identity’. Although it does not explicitly set out that ‘sex’ would be ‘abolished’, Dansky convincingly shows that would be the result.

She does not reveal to the reader her estimate of the Equality Act’s chance of being made federal law. One current estimate is: only 3%. That appears to be based on the near-unanimous opposition from Republicans, who have focused on the women’s sports issue in particular. Although Democrats have a slim effective majority in the Senate, in practice 10 of the current 50 Republicans would need to support it, as well.

As Dansky outlines, much state law already ‘prohibits discrimination on the basis of ‘gender identity”, and therefore abolishes sex. The July 2021 California Wi Spa case came to worldwide attention after a woman complained about ‘a fully naked man with an erect penis in a section of the spa that was supposed to be exclusively for women and girls’. Los Angeles police have charged the man (reported as ‘a woman’, of course, by the Los Angeles Times) with indecent exposure, and made his previous ‘sex crime convictions’ public, but unless it transpires that his not entering such spaces was specifically prohibited as a result of his previous convictions, he may have a defence for his behaviour under California law, or even grounds to sue the police (Dansky does not explicitly go that far).

She provides a summary of the Supreme Court’s June 2020 Bostock ruling. This was actually three cases, only one of which concerned a ‘transgender’ person, Aimee Stephens. Dansky argues that the court wrongly created a precedent to ‘erase sex…in employment’ (although the possible consequences of that precedent are unclear), and ‘the Biden administration is grossly misrepresenting the ruling…to justify the abolition of sex throughout federal administrative law’.

As a Democrat, Dansky defends working with conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, and appearing on Fox News, on the basis that centrist or liberal groups, and the mainstream media, have been captured by gender ideology. WoLF has also defended this approach, hitting back at the criticisms from some influential campaigners in the UK:

Dansky does not hit back in her book. If and when she decides to, she could start with the mental health smear of ‘nut jobs’ (I found no evidence that Dansky, or WoLF, have ever used similar language). Secondly, it seems doubtful that the conservative groups WoLF have worked with are any more racist, ‘hard right’, or anti-abortion, than large elements of the UK Conservative party, the governing party that UK groups such as the LGB Alliance have worked with. In 2019, 83 Conservative MPs voted against extending abortion rights to Northern Ireland, and 66 voted against extending same-sex marriage. Thirdly, Julie Bindel has published in newspapers that are widely seen in the UK as promoting racist and right wing views, and she has used exactly the same defence as Dansky and Wolf.

The United States is a major centre of the ‘Gender Identity Industry’ in the world today, and The Abolition of Sex is essential for anyone wanting to understand the legal and political context of how it works. It may not be too long before a second edition is required, especially if current lobbying of Republican politicians by the industry expands further.

(Thanks to @STILLTish, Jennifer Bilek, and many others, for background on ‘trans issues’)