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In 2022, I signed a contract with an academic press for a book on Simone de Beauvoir, titled Beauvoirian Feminism. Two years later, I finished the book, which foregrounded the feminist thinker’s claim that biology is key to women’s experience. I’m a full professor of sociology at the University of Liverpool, and publication of finished academic works at my level is usually a matter of course.
On this topic, however, things did not go smoothly. After the book was completed, due to the controversial nature of the material, the press sent it out to 26 readers for peer review. Most accepted the invitation — then backed out once they saw the manuscript. Only one delivered a report, criticising my work for being “unfair” to gender theorist Judith Butler and “gratuitously unkind to trans people.” My insistence on embodiment — Beauvoir’s insistence — was treated as an embarrassing throwback. In 2025, the contract was terminated.
I then sent the manuscript to several other presses, who also declined to take it forward. One respected university imprint rejected the book as “too controversial.” Another told me it did not publish books on “individual thinkers” — then six months later issued a book casting Beauvoir as a pro-trans icon. A third prestigious press told me my book “did not fit its list” — and went on to publish a title called Sex Is a Spectrum, inspired by Beauvoir.
The attempt to repurpose Beauvoir to shore up gender-identity orthodoxy represents an all-out attack on her thinking, and erases the actual contents of The Second Sex, a foundational work of feminist theory, first published in 1949.
Beauvoir is controversial today because she was the ultimate sex realist; she refused to separate body from identity, and believed that it was only through understanding women’s embodied reality that we could combat patriarchal cultural norms. Her essential position can be summed up simply: sex is the material ground of women’s lives, gender the cultural elaboration of that ground, and liberation comes not from denying the body, but by transforming the meaning imposed upon it.
She began The Second Sex with research on biology, spending long hours in France’s National Library, sifting through centuries of the science on reproduction. Biology is not everything, she argued. It does not condemn us to lesser lives — but nor is it nothing: nature commandeers a woman’s body, from puberty onward, for the service of the species. These facts don’t make us unequal, but social structures and norms turn reproductive realities into inequality.
In almost every species, Beauvoir emphasized, organisms are defined by the gametes they produce. Large gametes (ova) define the female, small gametes (sperm) the male. In humans, this is “a biological given, not a moment in human history.” We are born male or female, always in relation to each other — what Beauvoir, borrowing from Heidegger, called Mitsein (“Being-with”). Such sex differences themselves are not hierarchical, but patriarchy makes them so.
“One is not born, but becomes, a woman,” she famously wrote in The Second Sex. But this does not mean that gender floats free of sex. For Beauvoir, sex is the foundation; gender its cultural elaboration. A female body is defined by the norms of femininity of its time and place. These norms can change — and Beauvoir’s work aimed to push them toward liberation. Meanwhile, both biology and culture shape the body’s meaning, power, and visibility, qualities that change over a woman’s lifetime as she shifts through the various forms of girl or mother, or menopausal or old woman.
“What drops out of view is feminism’s starting point — that sex is the basis of women’s oppression.”
Today, however, Beauvoir is mostly taught through the lens of foundational gender theorist Butler, who claimed to extend her work. But as I argue in my book, Butler actually ignored Bouvoir’s book, collapsing the notion of “becoming a woman” into performance, where repeated gestures conjure the illusion of sex. In Butler’s version, gender is the creator of sex. She makes no mention of puberty, childbirth, or aging.
Butler’s understanding of what a woman is has shaped two generations, and has had noxious consequences for women. If “sex” is only an idea, then puberty itself can be rejected; the category “girl” is something to exit, hormonally or surgically. This is framed as liberation, but in practice, it erases female experience: it turns puberty into a pathology, encourages girls to disidentify from their own bodies, and makes womanhood optional or disposable. What drops out of view is feminism’s starting point — that sex is the basis of women’s oppression. And crucially, the rejection of women’s bodies and of femininity today does not generate demands to transform those constraining norms, but instead points girls toward escape by “becoming boys” — as if freedom lay only on the other side of sex.
Beauvoir’s difference from Butler matters because without sex, feminism loses its compass. If we cannot name sex, how do we name sex-based oppression?
I have long felt the weight of trans orthodoxies in the classroom and the conference hall. When I teach that, for Beauvoir, the body is not a blank slate, students protest: “using ‘sex’ as a category rationalizes prejudice.” Later, their essays come in as cool hagiographies to Butler, scare quotes around the word “woman.”
In the past, I kept my feelings to myself, wary of complaint. At conferences, I heard how Beauvoir’s emphasis on freedom and authenticity meant that she would definitely support trans identities. When I reminded my fellow academics that Beauvoir explicitly said: “No woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex,” they looked away in embarrassment, and muttered that Beauvoir was being “weaponized by TERFs in the service of transphobia.”
To deny the female body is to dissolve womanhood into the ether. That is why Beauvoir is awkward today. She insisted that women are animals — embodied, vulnerable, enduring — not cartoons, cyborgs, or avatars.
Nor, in reality, is the female body easily dismissed: it is a body that betrays us, bleeds, and contracts on its own schedule; it intrudes on our consciousness and ruins our plans. Beauvoir writes bluntly, even brutally, about menstruation, childbirth, and abortion. Some critics have called her misogynist. But nothing she said is false — if anything, she was understating the situation.
Erasing women’s biology and erasing Beauvoir go hand in hand. In syllabi, Beauvoir has become a footnote — and when she is taught, “becoming a woman” is misread as affirming gender identity, the opposite of her words.
I’ve felt this erasure before. As a child, visiting my mother’s Spanish family, I encountered a strident machismo: speaking about politics and having opinions, were for men, not women; I was told to join the women in the kitchen. And it has persisted in subtle ways throughout my career. As an undergraduate at Oxford, my tutor told me, frustratedly, “You are very polite,” unaccustomed to this feminine constraint in what had been, until two years earlier, an all-male college. It was a habit that stuck with me; I found myself overly cautious, and less willing to take the imaginative leaps needed for originality.
The sting of being told to disappear has never left me. That is what today’s distortion of Beauvoir feels like: an instruction to step aside, to be silent, while others rewrite reality.
Beauvoir’s discovery was that sex cannot be evaded. Even though as a young woman she rejected the category “woman” — she “thought like a man,” she said, holding her own in a male world — she eventually realized she had been one all along, defined by her body and by patriarchy’s myths. “If I want to define myself,” she wrote, “I first have to say, ‘I am a woman’; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth.”
That insistence is what makes her urgent now. A feminism that cannot speak of puberty, pregnancy, menopause, or frailty abandons women. Identity without the body is not liberation, but denial.
When publishers cancelled my book, they wanted me to cut my critique of Butler. I refused: this lay at the core of my endorsement of a Beauvoirian feminism. That refusal is why I write now — because freedom begins from naming the body we inhabit and at the same time refusing to let it dictate our destiny.
Beauvoir would not have recognized this denial as liberation. Her project was to remake the meaning of womanhood — to expand it, not abandon it. To challenge the myths and constraints that keep women from fulfilling our potential. That is why I call for a Beauvoirian feminism: a vision of woman as both flesh and freedom, subject and agent, irreducibly real.
