Right.

So, once more for the people at the back.

When we say that female oppression is sex-based we mean 'female people are oppressed on the basis of sex' NOT 'female oppression arises necessarily and ineluctably because of sex.'

Female people are oppressed by a cultural > https://twitter.com/LaraAone/status/1292080853200379904

mechanism and power hierarchy, that feminists called, once upon a time, 'gender.'

Gender is a social system, it is not necessary, we think it harms female people (and children, and men, and the planet) and we want it dismantled.

Gender, however, is applied to people *on the

basis of their sex.* It also arose historically, because of the way the development of private property, agriculture, and social relations, led to the turning of female people into a valuable reproductive (and sexual) resource.

That is, women's bodies are not accidentally

related to the structure of gender, and the application of gender to them is, fundamentally, derived from the desire of males to control and appropriate their bodies.

You cannot understand the structure of male dominance and its replication through the gendered power structure,

if you do not understand how that structure is about controlling male access to resources, and how this then applies also to the patriarchal relation to land, the bodies of other exploited peoples (both people of colour and working class people), and the mechanisms of colonial

appropriation.

The sexed nature of female bodies is, hence, a necessary condition to explaining the structure of gendered male dominance (aka 'patriarchy'), and the other systems of exploitation which it patterns.

The feminist claim, however, *crucially,* is that that sexed

bodies are not a sufficient condition to explain patriarchy, because patriarchy arises out of the interaction of given material limits and processes, and human culture and social organisation.

The task of feminism is to think about how these cultural aspects of the power

structure might be otherwise, and how we could change our culture so that social organisation between the sexes, and the organisation of the crucial processes of reproduction and reproductive labour are more equitable and don't lead to the exploitation of women, and limit their

development and fulfilment as human beings.

You won't get to that by just pretending that the system is entirely cultural and is not a form of social organisation of reproductive labour.

Because female people are going to carry on having the babies, and pretending they won't

will do nothing to address the social inequality that arises through the lack of recognition/appropriation of women's reproductive labour, or the system of entitlement that generates the appropriation of women's associated sexual, domestic and

emotional labour, and enculturates them to understand their value and function to resides in attending to the needs of males.

To wit: Women are oppressed *by* gender *on the basis of* sex.

If you don't understand the relation of nature and culture, the difference between

necessary and sufficient conditions, or the difference between biology existing and biological determinism, that's *your* problem, not ours.

<Ends>

I'm going to add, this wilful and gleeful dismissal of feminist thought on the basis of some fucking stupid caricature you picked up on the internet is fucking sexist.

As is the readiness of people to lecture women about whatever stupid thing you think they believe that they

don't in fact believe, and the endless pious condescention about how if we believed whatever stupid thing you think we believe that would be anti-feminist.

Listen, feminism is not just some silly piece of frippery you can divine from a day on Tumblr and a bunch of bullshit memes

fed to you by ideologues. It's a deep and complex body of thought with a long history, and a great deal of explanatory power, not only about the oppression of women, but about why domination works they way that it does in general.

I have yet to see one rehearsal of our position,

from anyone pushing this bullshit, including philosophers with senior positions at Ivy League universities, that is even half-faithful to what we believe and what we are arguing.

Women's thought is as powerful and complex and explanatory as anything any man has ever written,

more so I think.

Treat it with respect.