What feminism is

Feminism is the name for the political movements and bodies of thought that hold that women are treated unjustly because they are women, and that this should change. The American writer bell hooks gave one of the shortest definitions in Feminism Is for Everybody (2000): "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression" (bell hooks Books). Nearly every feminist would accept that sentence. They disagree about almost everything that follows from it: what sexism is, where it comes from, who counts as its target, and what a world without it would look like.

For that reason, scholars often speak of feminisms in the plural. The philosopher Alison Jaggar's Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1983) became a standard textbook by sorting feminist theories according to their picture of human nature and the root of women's subordination: liberal, Marxist, radical and socialist (Bloomsbury). Later writers added more strands, and the strands have often been in open conflict with each other.

This page is the entry point to the site's feminism series. It sketches the history, compares the main strands, and sets out the question that divides them most sharply today and matters most to this site: is "woman" a sex or a gender identity? It then looks at why feminist ideas come up so often in detransitioners' accounts, and suggests a reading path through the section.

The "waves" metaphor

Feminist history is usually told as a series of waves. The framing was coined by the journalist Martha Weinman Lear in a 1968 New York Times Magazine article, "The Second Feminist Wave", which linked the new women's liberation movement back to the suffragists (Lear 1968). The suffragists had never called themselves a "first wave"; the name was given to them afterwards.

The metaphor is useful because it captures something real. Each generation reorganised feminism around a new central question: legal personhood (first wave), the social meaning of being female (second), difference and identity (third), and online organising and the trans-inclusion dispute (fourth). Each also reacted against the one before it.

It is also limited, in at least three ways (see first-wave feminism for more):

• It implies quiet troughs. Women campaigned for equal pay, birth control and labour rights between 1920 and the 1960s, when the metaphor says the tide was out.
• It centres one story. The standard dates follow white, middle-class British and American organisations. The historian Nancy Hewitt's collection No Permanent Waves (Rutgers University Press, 2010) argues that Black, Chicana, labour and non-Western women's movements follow different timelines, and suggests thinking of radio waves on different frequencies instead of ocean tides (DOI).
• It flattens disagreement. Each "wave" contained strands that fought one another. The biggest conflicts in feminism, including the current one over sex and gender identity, run across waves more than between them.

The waves are best used as a rough chronology, and the strands (below) as the better guide to ideas.

Timeline of the waves

Two threads run through all four waves. The first is the argument that a woman's body should not decide her rights or her role. First-wave feminists answered doctors who claimed that education would damage women's wombs; second-wave feminists answered the post-war belief, which Betty Friedan called "the feminine mystique", that a woman's fulfilment lay in housework and motherhood. The second thread is the question of whether women should be freed as women, or freed from the category altogether. That second question is the one that splits feminism today.

The main strands compared

The strands below cut across the waves. Many people hold views from more than one, and the labels are often applied by others. Links point to the page in this series that covers each strand in most depth.

A few points the table cannot show:

• Radical and gender-critical are not the same. Gender-critical campaigning grew out of radical feminism, but many people who share its legal claims do not share radical feminism's wider politics, and some radical feminists are trans-inclusive (see gender-critical feminism).
• Queer theory and innate gender identity disagree with each other. Queer theory says gender has no inner core. The definition of gender identity used in law and medicine describes exactly such a core. The two are often blended in practice, and the queer theory page explains how.
• Intersectionality changed as it spread. Crenshaw built it to describe how courts failed Black women, using categories people do not choose (Crenshaw 1989). Its popular online form often became a ranking of individuals that added self-declared identities alongside sex and race (see third-wave feminism).
• Trans-inclusive feminism is itself varied. The trans writer and biologist Julia Serano's Whipping Girl (2007) argues that trans women face a specific combination of misogyny and anti-trans prejudice, which she named "transmisogyny", and proposes a partly innate "subconscious sex" (Seal Press). The philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher, also trans, argues that both the "trapped in the wrong body" model and the "beyond the binary" model are flawed, and defends a "multiple meanings" account in which words like "woman" can carry different meanings in trans communities than in the dominant culture (Bettcher 2014; see also her Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry).

The central fault line: sex or gender identity?

Two definitions of "woman"

The second wave gave feminism a distinction that both sides of today's argument still use. Sex meant the biological fact of being female or male; gender meant the social package of roles and expectations laid on top of it. The sociologist Ann Oakley put it plainly in 1972: "sex" refers to the biological division into male and female, "gender" to the "parallel and socially unequal division into femininity and masculinity" (Oxford Reference). The point was that the second could be changed without denying the first.

From the 1990s a different meaning of "gender" spread through law, medicine and activism: gender identity, which the Yogyakarta Principles (2006), an influential human-rights document drafted by legal experts, define as "each person's deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender" (Yogyakarta Principles). On this definition a person's gender is something inner and self-known, and it can differ from their sex.

The two meanings produce two answers to the question "what is a woman?":

1. A sex-based definition. A woman is an adult human female. Womanhood is a material, bodily category that no one chooses and no one can leave, and sexism is the treatment of that class.
2. An identity-based definition. A woman is anyone whose gender identity is female. Sex may matter for some medical purposes, but it does not settle who belongs to the category.

Much of the time the difference has no practical effect. It becomes concrete in law and policy: who may use women's refuges, prisons, changing rooms and sports categories, how sex is recorded in data, and who is counted when sex discrimination is measured. In the United Kingdom the question reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers (April 2025) that "sex" in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex (EHRC 2025). The sex vs gender identity in law page covers how different countries have answered it.

How each strand answers

• Gender-critical feminists make the sex-based definition their defining position. Trans-inclusive feminists hold the identity-based one, or a social one in which trans women are women by living as women.
• Radical feminists mostly start from women as a sex class, so the best-known radical feminist writers, such as Janice Raymond (The Transsexual Empire, 1979) and Sheila Jeffreys (Gender Hurts, 2014), took the sex-based side; some radical feminists argue for trans inclusion (see radical feminism).
• Liberal and socialist feminists have no single position. Individual choice pulls some liberals towards self-identification; the material reality of reproduction and unpaid care pulls some socialists towards sex.
• Cultural and lesbian feminists built many of the women-only spaces whose boundaries are now disputed (see lesbian feminism).
• Intersectional feminism in its popular online form often treats "cis" and "trans" as an axis of privilege like race, which goes well beyond Crenshaw's legal argument.
• Queer theorists reject both definitions as fixed categories, but queer theory's claim that sex is constructed has in practice been used to weaken the sex-based one.

The strongest case on each side

The sex-based case rests on history and function. Every law the first wave fought (coverture, exclusion from the vote and the universities) applied to women because they were female, and the defenders of those laws argued from the female body (see first-wave feminism). Pregnancy, abortion law, menstruation, female genital mutilation, sex-selective abortion and much sexual violence are organised around sex, not identity. On this view, a movement that cannot name the female sex cannot describe the oppression it exists to fight. Gender-critical writers such as the philosopher Kathleen Stock, in Material Girls (2021), add a further argument: defining womanhood by an inner feeling quietly turns sex stereotypes back into a personal essence, so that a girl who dislikes femininity may conclude she is not really a girl (Stock 2021).

The identity-based case rests on a different reading of the same history. Biology was used as a cage: doctors and legislators claimed that anatomy fixed women's minds and proper sphere, and feminists won by rejecting that claim. Defining women by reproduction, on this view, repeats the logic feminism defeated and excludes women who are infertile, intersex or trans. Trans-inclusive writers also argue that trans women face misogyny as well as anti-trans hostility, and that a feminism which polices who counts as a woman ends up enforcing the same gender norms it opposes. Some trans commenters put it directly:

Feminism is specifically in argument that women are not defined by ability to have children even. —SaltyPrompt5252, mtf

Bioessentialism is patriarchy, and patriarchy is misogyny. —Emily__Lyn, mtf

Critics of the identity-based case reply that this argument runs together two different things: sex (a bodily category) and biological determinism (the claim that sex fixes behaviour, intellect and role). A sex-based definition need not say that a woman is defined by her fertility, only that she is female, and differences of sex development are variations within the two sexes, not a spectrum between them. The identity-based case is strongest as a demand that trans people be treated with dignity and protected from discrimination, which many on the sex-based side say they support.

Where the strands agree, and an assessment

Beneath the conflict there is wide agreement on one point: sex stereotypes are harmful, and no one should be forced to fit them. Second-wave feminists, gender-critical feminists, queer theorists and many trans-inclusive feminists all say this. What they disagree on is what follows for a person who does not fit.

Here the two definitions give very different advice. On the identity-based reading, a girl who hates being feminine may have a male or non-binary gender identity that should be affirmed. On the sex-based reading, she is a gender non-conforming girl reacting, reasonably, to a narrow role, and the role should change, not her body. The second answer is the one feminism gave for most of its history, and it is the one many detransitioned women say they wish they had heard earlier (see gender stereotypes and gender non-conformity without labels).

On the evidence, sex is observed, binary and politically significant, and the sex-based definition describes the class that feminism was built to free. The trans-inclusive tradition's real insight, that biology must never be used to restrict what a person may be or do, does not require giving up that definition; it is the core of the sex-based tradition too. Holding both, sex as real and stereotypes as optional, is a coherent position, and it is the one this series argues for. It is compatible with treating trans adults with respect, and it does not depend on any claim about every person who identifies as trans.

Why feminism matters to detransitioners

A route in and a route out

Feminist ideas appear on both sides of many detransitioners' stories. For some, a particular kind of feminism, the online, identity-focused kind, was part of what made womanhood feel unbearable or made leaving it feel virtuous. For others, an older feminism was what let them come back. Often it is the same person, at different times.

Some women describe feminist content as part of how they came to want out of womanhood:

How it framed her worldview of what being a woman is in society - a vulnerable victim oppressed by men and their bodies. And that consequently this further alienated her and she wanted nothing to do with womanhood. I 100% relate to this. —Weird-Experience-123, detrans

Others describe feminism as what helped them return, and the irony of the change:

Feminists (most visible feminists are women too) get blamed for everything. I blamed them for not letting me transition in the first place. Now I’m being blamed as a feminist for realising they were right about me. —Luck_Unlucky2, desisted female

Some describe a move from one strand to another, not out of feminism altogether:

no, i’m still the same, i just used to be a liberal feminist and now i’m a radical one. —enbym00n, desisted female

What the numbers show

Several surveys are consistent with these accounts, though none can say how common they are among everyone who transitions. In a survey of 100 detransitioners (69% female), 60% said they detransitioned after becoming more comfortable identifying as their natal sex, and 23% cited homophobia or difficulty accepting themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual (Littman 2021). In an online survey of 237 detransitioners (92% female), many described needs around internalised homophobia and sexism and reported rejection from the LGBT community (Vandenbussche 2022). In interviews with six UK women who had detransitioned, changes in their sense of belonging were sometimes linked to feminist values (Lomax & Butler 2025).

This site's own analysis of about 3,100 r/detrans stories gives a similar picture. Internalised misogyny or misandry (contempt for one's own sex, absorbed from the culture) was identified in about 30% of female stories (712 of 2,344) and 20% of male stories (149 of 750). When the AI extraction picked a single primary reason for transitioning, internalised misogyny or misandry came out at an estimated 14% of female stories (about 320 of 2,344) and 7% of male stories (about 50 of 750). As a primary reason for detransitioning, realising that internalised misogyny or misandry had driven the transition came out at about 8% of female stories (about 180) and 2% of male stories (about 16) (detrans.ai stats). These are estimates from AI extraction over a self-selected sample of people who post on r/detrans, where feminist explanations are widely discussed. They show that the pattern is common in that community, not how often it happens among all people who transition. The internalised prejudice page covers this evidence in depth.

Detransitioned women

For women who use feminist ideas in detransition, the central move is usually to separate being female from being feminine. That is the second-wave sex/gender distinction, rediscovered decades later:

I learned I resented the so called “femininity” pushed upon me from a young age—I lumped in my female body with this resentment… —Soggy_Agency_7062, detrans female

I really don’t understand how “Women are people who have these personality traits and this aesthetic, etc” is more correct than “women are female human beings”. —Admirable_Treacle_97, detrans female

Some look back to a specific period of feminism as the one they wish had lasted:

I really wish the feminist movement of the early 80s stuck. You know the one where nobody cared if you as a female wore men's clothes and were masculine? —lezbianlinda, desisted

Psychologically, this resembles what therapists call externalisation: the distress is moved from "something is wrong with my body" to "something is wrong with how women are treated". That can relieve shame and open options other than changing the body. The series pages trace this in detail: second-wave feminism, radical feminism, and, for masculine and same-sex attracted women, lesbian feminism.

Detransitioned men

Most research on detransition has focused on women; in a 2024 survey of 78 young adults who had stopped identifying as trans, 91% were female (Littman et al. 2024). Men's experience of feminism is documented mainly in first-person accounts, and it often runs in the opposite direction. Some describe absorbing the idea that men as a class are oppressors, and finding in transition a way out of that category:

as shameful as it is to admit, a part of it for me was that i wanted very badly not to be an oppressor and wanted to share in the sisterhood of feminism, without realizing the shallowness and consequences of my idealization. —peacock_00, desisted male

Others found feminist ideas helpful in detransition; one man said exploring radical feminist spaces "in part allowed me to reevaluate my transition" (verytiredcatto, detrans male). Some detransitioned women point out that men have no equivalent support:

Women get it easier due to Feminism, while men get nothing. Although it's hard in society to be either sex, at least women have Feminist groups to folic to. —wispo-wills, detrans female

The men and masculinity page covers men's liberation, masculinity studies, "toxic masculinity" and what a non-stereotyped masculinity can look like, and internalised misandry covers the male side of internalised prejudice.

Cautions from inside

Detransitioners do not speak with one voice about feminism. Some describe hostility from some radical feminists, being used as evidence in a political fight, or swapping one all-explaining ideology for another (see radical feminism and gender-critical feminism). Others warn against judging a whole movement by its worst members:

If by "TERFs" you mean "some TERFs" then, sure, it's totally possible. If, instead, you mean "all TERFs" or "most TERFs" then I think you just haven't heard many radical feminists. —PM-me-darksecrets, desisted female

TERF stands for "trans-exclusionary radical feminist". It began as a description of one group of radical feminists and is now applied widely, often to people who are not radical feminists, and many of those it is applied to regard it as a slur (see fourth-wave feminism). Detransitioners are often given the label simply for describing their own lives, which is part of the wider backlash against detransitioners. Disagreement over how much gender-critical feminism belongs in detransition spaces is one reason two detransition subreddits exist (r/detrans vs r/actual_detrans).

Feminist theory is a political framework, not therapy. It cannot by itself resolve trauma, body dysmorphia or other mental health problems that some detransitioners describe (see healing and recovery). At its best it offers a simpler message: no one has to fit a stereotype to belong to their sex.

Where to start

The series can be read in any order, but this path builds the ideas in sequence:

1. Second-wave feminism: the origin of the sex/gender distinction, and the page most directly relevant to detransition.
2. Radical feminism: gender as a hierarchy rather than an identity, and how detransitioned women use and criticise it.
3. Queer theory and third-wave feminism: performativity, intersectionality and how they fed into today's gender identity beliefs.
4. Fourth-wave feminism and gender-critical feminism: the present-day split, the law, and the "TERF" dispute.
5. Lesbian feminism: butch identity, "butch flight" and detransitioned lesbians.
6. Men and masculinity: men's movements and male detransitioners.
7. First-wave feminism: the suffrage history both sides now claim.

Outside the series, read gender stereotypes, internalised prejudice (with its pages on internalised misogyny and internalised homophobia), sex vs gender identity in law and non-binary identities.

References

• hooks, b. (2000). Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. South End Press. bell hooks Books.
• Jaggar, A. M. (1983). Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Rowman & Allanheld. publisher.
• Lear, M. W. (1968). The Second Feminist Wave. The New York Times Magazine, 10 March 1968. NYT archive.
• Hewitt, N. A. (ed.) (2010). No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism. Rutgers University Press. DOI.
• Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, Gender and Society. Temple Smith. Oxford Reference.
• Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum. source.
• Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. archive record.
• Yogyakarta Principles (2006). Introduction. source.
• Serano, J. (2007; 2nd ed. 2016). Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Seal Press. publisher.
• Bettcher, T. M. (2009; rev. 2024). Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. source.
• Bettcher, T. M. (2014). Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance. Signs 39(2). source.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender. source.
• Stock, K. (2021). Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. Fleet (Little, Brown). Google Books.
• Equality and Human Rights Commission (2025). UK Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act: our work. source.
• Littman, L. (2021). Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page.
• Littman, L., O'Malley, S., Kerschner, H. & Bailey, J. M. (2024). Detransition and Desistance Among Previously Trans-Identified Young Adults. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page.
• Vandenbussche, E. (2022). Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey. Journal of Homosexuality. study page.
• Lomax, J. & Butler, C. (2025). Narratives of Adults Registered Female at Birth Who Started a Medical Transition and Later Detransitioned. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page.
• detrans.ai. Detransition statistics (r/detrans story analysis, n = 3,094). stats page.