Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: The TransAdvocate interviews Catharine A. MacKinnon

The following interview occurred over a series of emails between November 2014 and March 2015 and is part of an ongoing TransAdvocate series on feminism.

I always thought I don’t care how someone becomes a woman or a man; it does not matter to me. It is just part of their specificity, their uniqueness, like everyone else’s. Anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.
— Catharine MacKinnon


Cristan Williams: In a world that largely appeals to an asserted natural binary sex essence, trans people and feminists alike have made some observations. The following three quotes touch on this experience. Would you please comment on the experience these three are discussing?

Andrea Dworkin, Radical Feminist: “Hormone and chromosome research, attempts to develop new means of human reproduction (life created in, or considerably supported by, the scientist’s laboratory), work with transsexuals, and studies of formation of gender identity in children provide basic information which challenges the notion that there are two discrete biological sexes. That information threatens to transform the traditional biology of sex difference into the radical biology of sex similarity. That is not to say there is one sex, but that there are many. The evidence which is germane here is simple. The words ‘male’ and ‘female,’ ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ are used only because as yet there are no others.”[1]

Catharine MacKinnon: Andrea’s critique of the bipolar sex/gender binary as rooted in the lie of natural determination is an analysis we have always shared.

Sandy Stone, Trans Feminist: “What I am saying is that one of the ways that people justify oppressing people of any alternative gender or sexuality is by saying that the social norm is natural. That is, it originates in the authority of Nature itself. In other words, it comes from god, an authority to which to appeal. All of this is, in fact, a complete fabrication, a construction. There is no ‘natural‘ sex, because ‘sex’ itself as a medical or cultural category is nothing more the momentary outcome of battles over who owns the meanings of the category. There is a great deal wider variation in genetics than most people except geneticists realize, but we make that invisible through language. The way we make it invisible through language is by having no words for anything except male and female. One of the ways our culture erases people is by not having words for them. That does it absolutely. When there’s nothing to describe you, you are effectively invisible.”[2]