Overview

Second-wave feminism is the name usually given to the women's movement that rose in Western countries from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. The first wave had fought for the vote and for women's legal personhood. The second wave asked why women were still unequal once those rights had been won, and its answer reached into every area of life: work, marriage, housework, sex, medicine, violence, language and the inner sense of who a woman is "supposed" to be.

Two ideas from this period matter most for this wiki. The first is that the roles and personalities expected of women and men are largely made by society, not dictated by the body. The second is the distinction between sex and gender that feminists built on that idea: sex for the biological fact of being female or male, gender for the social package laid on top of it. Many detransitioned women say that rediscovering these ideas, decades after they were first written down, is what allowed them to reject femininity without rejecting their female bodies.

Origins: de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

The French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) in 1949, more than a decade before the movement took shape. It became one of its founding texts (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Simone de Beauvoir).

Her central claim is that, in every culture she surveyed, man is treated as the default human being and woman as "the Other": defined in relation to him, as his complement or deviation, never as a full subject in her own right. Women had not chosen this position; it had been built around them through law, religion, myth, economics and upbringing.

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"

The book's most famous sentence opens its second volume. In French it reads "On ne naît pas femme : on le devient." The first English translation (H. M. Parshley, 1953) rendered it "One is not born but becomes a woman"; the 2010 translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier has "One is not born but becomes woman" (SEP: Beauvoir). The Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on feminist views of sex and gender pairs it with de Beauvoir's explanation that social discrimination produces in women effects "so profound that they appear to be caused by nature" (SEP: Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender).

What did she mean? De Beauvoir was an existentialist: she held that human beings have no fixed inner essence that decides their fate. She was not claiming that women are not female, or that sex can be chosen. Large parts of The Second Sex deal in detail with the female body: menstruation, pregnancy, menopause. Her point was that the meaning given to that body ("the eternal feminine", passivity, dependence, a destiny of marriage and motherhood) is taught, enforced and absorbed from childhood. A girl is born female; she is then made into the kind of "woman" her society demands.

This reading is contested at the edges. Later scholars, including those behind the 2010 translation, criticised Parshley's version for flattening de Beauvoir's philosophical vocabulary. Some readers argue her sentence already contains the later sex/gender distinction; others say she would have rejected so clean a split. The SEP notes that whether de Beauvoir meant to start the distinction, and how far it should be taken, "are matters of feminist debate" (SEP: Beauvoir). Readers on /r/detrans still come to the book directly:

If u like reading genuinely read the second sex, it's a massive and also tough read but it's made me realise so much about gender. —paperpigeons, detrans female

The movement takes shape

The Feminine Mystique and NOW

In the United States the movement's popular starting point was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). Friedan, a journalist, described "the problem that has no name": the depression and emptiness of educated suburban housewives who had been told that home and family should fulfil them completely (W. W. Norton). The "mystique" was the cultural ideal, spread by magazines, advertisers and popular psychology, that a woman's true nature was domestic.

In 1966 Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), which pressed for women's full participation in public life. Its Statement of Purpose rejected "the assumption that these problems are the unique responsibility of each individual woman, rather than a basic social dilemma which society must solve" (NOW 1966). That sentence states in small form a theme the whole wave would develop: what looks like private unhappiness can have social causes.

Consciousness-raising and "the personal is political"

Younger radical women, many from the civil rights and anti-war movements, formed small groups such as New York Radical Women (1967) and Redstockings (1969). Their key method was consciousness-raising (CR): meetings where women took a topic (their childhoods, their bodies, sex, housework, their mothers) and each spoke from her own experience. Activist Kathie Sarachild is usually credited with developing it as a political practice (Sarachild 1973). What one woman had taken to be her own failing often turned out to be shared by everyone in the room.

Critics on the left dismissed this as group therapy. Carol Hanisch replied in a 1969 memo, published in 1970 as "The Personal Is Political." She later explained that the title was given by the editors, and that "political" meant power relationships, not elections (Hanisch 1969/2006). Her argument was that women's personal problems were not signs of individual neurosis to be fixed by adjusting oneself, but the effects of a shared social position that could only be changed together.

This idea bears directly on detransition. Some detransitioned women describe having taken a social problem (being treated as lesser, sexualised, or "wrong" for not being feminine) and reading it as a personal, medical one located in their own bodies:

Little did I know I wasn't uncomfortable by my sex rather by the way society treats biological women. —dorkydawgduke, questioning own gender transition

Strands of second-wave feminism

The second wave was never one organisation or one theory. Historians commonly separate several strands, though many women moved between them and the labels were often applied after the fact. The historian Alice Echols, for example, distinguished the early radical feminists from a later cultural feminism that she saw as a retreat from their programme (Echols 1989).

Radical feminism is the strand most often cited by detransitioners, and it has its own page: radical feminism. Millett described gender differences as having "essentially cultural, rather than biological bases" (SEP: Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender; Columbia University Press). Firestone went furthest, arguing that the goal of feminist revolution was "not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself", so that genital difference "would no longer matter culturally" (Firestone 1970). By this she meant that the body should stop deciding a person's social role, not that bodies could be changed.

Achievements in law and services

Reproductive rights

Control over pregnancy was central to every strand. In Britain the Abortion Act 1967 allowed doctors to terminate pregnancies on specified grounds in England, Scotland and Wales (legislation.gov.uk). In the United States, Roe v. Wade (1973) recognised a constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability; it was overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022 (Brennan Center). Other countries reformed their laws over the same period, and the women's health movement also pushed for access to contraception and for women's right to understand and make decisions about their own bodies.

Work and equal pay

In the US, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 required equal pay for substantially equal work, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned sex discrimination in hiring, firing and promotion, though Title VII was little enforced for sex until the 1970s (EEOC; PMC study of the 1963 and 1964 Acts). In Britain a 1968 strike by women sewing machinists at Ford's Dagenham plant helped bring about the Equal Pay Act 1970, which came into force in 1975 alongside the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 (House of Commons Library).

Violence against women

Consciousness-raising groups found that rape, sexual abuse and domestic violence came up again and again, and that police, courts and doctors often blamed the women involved. Activists responded by building services:

• Rape crisis centres: the first in the US opened in Washington, D.C. in 1972 (Encyclopedia.com, Dictionary of American History); London's opened in 1976 (Women's Legal Landmarks).
• Women's refuges: the first refuge for women escaping domestic violence opened in Chiswick, west London, in 1971 (Big Issue North; BBC Witness).
• Theory: journalist Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975) argued that rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" (Yale Review). Even sympathetic readers argued over that sweeping wording, but the book helped move public opinion away from blaming victims (NPR).

Women-only refuges and rape crisis services were built on the premise that female survivors of male violence need spaces defined by sex. That premise is at the centre of later disputes; see gender-critical feminism and sex vs gender in law.

The sex/gender distinction

Where "gender" came from

Before the 1950s, "gender" was mostly a grammatical term. The New Zealand-born psychologist John Money, working at Johns Hopkins Hospital on children with differences of sex development (DSDs), borrowed it in a 1955 paper on "hermaphroditism" to describe a person's gender role: everything they say and do to show themselves as a boy or girl, man or woman ("Money and the Production of Gender"). DSDs are developmental variations within the two sexes, not a third sex or a spectrum; see intersex and DSDs. Money's framework was mainly a clinical rationale for raising such children firmly as boys or girls, and he believed rearing could largely set a child's gender in early life.

The psychiatrist Robert Stoller developed the term gender identity in the 1960s and, in Sex and Gender (1968), used "sex" for biology and "gender" for a person's degree of masculinity or femininity. This let him describe transsexualism as a mismatch between the two (SEP: Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender; Robert Stoller's Sex and Gender: 40 Years On, Archives of Sexual Behavior 2010).

How feminists took it up

Feminists saw a political use for the clinicians' vocabulary. If femininity was learned, it could be unlearned, and claims that women were "naturally" suited to the home lost their footing.

• Ann Oakley, a British sociologist, made the distinction central to sociology in Sex, Gender and Society (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; Oakley, author's site).
• Gayle Rubin, an anthropologist, introduced the sex/gender system in "The Traffic in Women" (1975): "a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention." She called gender "a socially imposed division of the sexes" (SEP: Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender; Rubin, in Deviations, Duke University Press).

The irony of the borrowing

The concept moved in two directions from the same root. For Money and Stoller, gender was something clinicians managed: a child's gender role could be set by rearing, and an adult's felt gender identity could justify hormones and surgery to bring the body in line. For second-wave feminists, gender was something to expose and dismantle: a social hierarchy pressed onto two sexes, which nobody should be required to match.

Both meanings live on today, and they lead to very different advice for a girl who hates being feminine. On the clinical reading, her discomfort may be a sign that her gender identity differs from her sex. On the second-wave reading, her discomfort is an understandable reaction to a restrictive role, and the role, not her body, is what should change. Some trans commenters separate the two by keeping roles social while treating identity as innate:

Gender ROLES: Social construct Internal gender: Innate —Creativered4, ftm

Many detransitioners reject that second line, and do so in language close to Oakley's and Rubin's:

I do agree that gender, meaning the roles/behaviours assigned to people based on their sex, is socially constructed, and that's precisely why it can't be an innate part of a person's soul and why fitting more with the roles of the opposite sex absolutely does not mean one was "meant to be" the opposite sex… —Sorry-not-Sorry-666, desisted female

The gender stereotypes page looks at the evidence on how far sex differences in behaviour are innate or learned. Second-wave writers did not need every difference to be learned; their claim was that no average difference justifies forcing an individual into a role.

Lesbian feminism

Lesbians were active throughout the movement but often felt pushed aside, including within NOW. In 1970 a group later called the Radicalesbians disrupted the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York and handed out "The Woman-Identified Woman," a manifesto that presented lesbianism as a political commitment to women as well as a sexual orientation (glbtq Archive). Lesbian feminism went on to build its own presses, record labels and festivals, and developed ideas such as "political lesbianism" that remain controversial.

Its relevance here is that many detransitioned women are lesbians who earlier read their attraction to women, and their gender non-conformity, as signs of being male. See lesbian feminism and internalised homophobia.

Early disputes over transsexualism

Second-wave feminism's critique of gender roles led some feminists to sharp criticism of sex-change medicine. The best-known case is Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Beacon Press, 1979; reissued by Teachers College Press, 1994), developed from a dissertation supervised by the radical feminist theologian Mary Daly (Online Books Page / Teachers College Press reissue).

Raymond's argument

Raymond's case had several parts:

• A medical critique. She described the gender clinics of the 1960s and 1970s as an "empire" run largely by male doctors and psychiatrists. They treated distress about sex roles as an individual illness to be cured by hormones and surgery, instead of questioning the roles themselves.
• A stereotype critique. Clinics of the time often required patients to prove themselves by living out conventional femininity or masculinity. The publisher's description of the 1994 reissue says the book "exposed the antifeminist stereotyping that requires candidates for transsexual surgery to prove themselves by conforming to subjective, outdated and questionable feminine roles" (Google Books listing of the 1994 reissue).
• A claim about women's space. She argued that males who transitioned and then entered lesbian-feminist communities were appropriating womanhood, and singled out by name Sandy Stone, a trans woman then working as a sound engineer for the women's music collective Olivia Records. That hiring had already provoked an open letter of protest in 1977 (Sister letter, 1977; KQED).

The book also contained language that many feminists, not only trans people, found indefensible. The most cited line reads: "All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves" (Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2014). Raymond later said that rape was not a proper metaphor (The Guardian, 2021). In 1980 she also wrote a paper on the social and ethical aspects of transsexual surgery for a US federal health technology agency. Trans advocates argue it shaped later federal reluctance to fund surgery. Raymond, in the 1994 reissue, credits other factors for changes such as Johns Hopkins closing its gender clinic. How much influence she actually had remains disputed.

Stone's response

Stone answered in "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," written in 1987 and published in 1991–92 (Stone, Camera Obscura 1992; full text). She summarised Raymond's thesis as the claim that transsexuals are "constructs of an evil phallocratic empire." Her own critique of the clinics in fact overlapped with Raymond's on one point: the gender programmes had judged patients on how well they performed their new gender, enforcing "a fully acculturated, consensual definition of gender." Stone's conclusion was different. Instead of abandoning transition, trans people should stop trying to "pass" and speak openly as transsexual, which she put this way: "to begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written." The essay became a founding text of transgender studies and fed into the third wave's queer theory.

Assessing the dispute

Both sides were reacting to the same problem: a medical system that tied womanhood to conventional femininity. Raymond's diagnosis of how clinics reinforced stereotypes has found echoes in some detransitioners' accounts of being assessed, and in later critiques of informed consent. Her personal attacks and inflammatory metaphors did lasting damage to that argument and are still used to dismiss any feminist criticism of gender medicine. Stone's answer was humane and influential, but it moved the debate from "should sex roles define us?" towards "how should gender identity be expressed?", which is a different question. The split between these responses runs through the fourth wave and gender-critical feminism.

The "sex wars" and the end of the wave

By the late 1970s, sexuality itself was dividing the movement. Anti-pornography feminists, including Andrea Dworkin and the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, argued that pornography sexualised women's subordination. In 1983 they drafted a Minneapolis ordinance defining it as a civil rights violation (MNopedia). "Pro-sex" or sex-radical feminists, including Gayle Rubin, saw this as a dangerous alliance with moral conservatives and defended sexual minorities and sex workers. The 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality, picketed by anti-pornography groups, is often treated as the opening battle of these "sex wars" (Diary of a Conference on Sexuality; Michigan Feminist Studies).

The sex-radical side, together with Black feminist and lesbian-of-colour critiques that the second wave had centred white, middle-class women, prepared the ground for the third wave: Judith Butler's theory of gender as performance, intersectionality and queer theory. In that later framework the sex/gender distinction was itself questioned, and some theorists argued that "sex" was as socially constructed as gender. Many detransitioned women see that move as a turning point that removed the ground they now want to stand on.

Relevance to detransitioners

Rediscovering second-wave ideas

On /r/detrans, second-wave and especially radical feminist ideas come up often in accounts of detransition, mostly from women. The core insight is usually some version of the claim that the problem lies in the role, not the body:

Transgender ideology tells you that your body is wrong, radical feminism tells you that society is wrong. —AbolishGender, r/detrans user (a woman with dysphoria)

For some, one phrase was enough to change how they understood their own history:

Specifically- they were talking about the "gender binary" and stated, "It's not a binary. It's a hierarchy."

And just like that, I saw with absolute clarity- how logically it would follow that FTMs internalized the messages elevating men and denigrating women. Obviously. —L82Desist, detrans female

Others describe the second wave's distinction between being female and performing femininity as freeing:

It helped me redefine being a woman, because from day 1 we are conditioned to behave certain ways and sort ourselves into boxes and rely on the approval of others. I can be a woman and anything else. My body doesn't adhere me to others' expectations. —gold-exp, desisted

You don't have to present femininely. Femininity is not a requirement of being female. Nothing is "required" to be female besides being born female. —AbsentFuck, desisted female

Some commenters point specifically to the older wave, or to how much of it they feel has been forgotten. One desisted woman listed what she thinks would help others, including "at least a basic understanding of 2nd wave feminism" (merpderpderp1, desisted female). Another commenter wrote:

I swear all the progress we made as women from the 70's to the 90's has just been forgotten. —HOT__BOT, r/detrans commenter

"Can't beat them? Join them"

Second-wave analysis also gives some women a way to understand why they transitioned without calling themselves foolish. One woman who lived as a man for nearly 18 years wrote:

By 'becoming a man' (at least to the rest of society) I thought it would make me safer and thus happier and more free to pursue my interests and dreams. I also thought I was doing something radical at the time … But the reality is, when I look back at it now I can't help but feel it was a 'can't beat them? join them' kind of situation. —nwtae, r/detrans commenter

This is close to de Beauvoir's observation that a woman who wants to be treated as a full human being can feel she has to leave womanhood to get there. The internalised misogyny page covers this pattern in depth.

What the research shows

Survey evidence is consistent with these accounts but cannot show how common they are. 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 being lesbian, gay or bisexual (Littman 2021). In a survey of 237 detransitioners recruited from online communities (92% female), the author identified psychological needs around "internalized homophobic and sexist prejudices" (Vandenbussche 2022). In a UK interview study of six detransitioned women, shifts in participants' sense of social belonging were "sometimes linked to feminist values" (Lomax & Butler 2025).

These are small, self-selected samples, drawn partly from online detrans communities where feminist explanations are common. Respondents may have adopted that framing from the community, and the studies cannot say how many people who remain trans-identified would recognise themselves in it.

Ambivalence and criticism

Not every detransitioner finds feminist spaces helpful, and the same theory can be applied harshly. Some women warn against swapping one all-explaining ideology for another:

Many female detransitioners will adopt radical and feminist ideology when detransitioning that helps shift their anger to a source, which a lot of the time will be 'men' or 'misogyny'. … But yes, some of that feminist ideology is sensational and excessive. —vibincatto, detrans female

Others describe hostility from some radical feminists towards people who have transitioned. One commenter objected to "the radfems who say shit like 'you've mutilated your body'" to people considering detransition (detransdyke). Male detransitioners in particular can find these spaces unwelcoming:

Because gender critical radfems have a tendency to be very mean to men, and the ones who come here are usually in a bad mental state already. —super-porp-cola, detrans male

Some men still find the ideas useful. One detransitioned man said exploring radical feminist spaces "in part allowed me to reevaluate my transition" (verytiredcatto, detrans male). The second wave's men's liberation offshoot and later debates are covered in men and masculinity.

Why the second wave resonates

Second-wave ideas seem to help some detransitioners for three reasons:

1. They relocate the problem. Hanisch's "the personal is political" turns "something is wrong with me" into "something is wrong with how women are treated". That makes the distress understandable and opens options other than changing the body.
2. They separate womanhood from femininity. De Beauvoir, Oakley and Rubin give a vocabulary in which a woman can reject makeup, passivity or the expectation of being desired by men and still be fully female. This is the stance of gender non-conformity without labels.
3. They offer community and grief. Consciousness-raising was about women recognising themselves in each other. Many detransitioned women describe a similar relief in finding other women, often older, who disliked femininity too, and they describe grief at recognising how much misogyny they had absorbed. See healing and recovery.

The limits matter as well. Second-wave theory is a political framework, not therapy, and it cannot by itself resolve trauma, body dysmorphia or other conditions that some detransitioners describe (mental health). Used rigidly, it can turn into a new set of rules about how a "real" feminist woman should feel. At their best, the second wave's founding texts ask for the opposite: that no woman should have to fit any template in order to count as a woman.

See also

• Feminism (series overview)
• First-wave feminism · Third-wave feminism · Fourth-wave feminism
• Radical feminism · Lesbian feminism · Gender-critical feminism
• Gender stereotypes
• Internalised misogyny

References

• How the 1963 Equal Pay Act and 1964 Civil Rights Act Shaped the Gender Gap in Pay. PMC.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir. source.
• Brennan Center for Justice. Roe v. Wade and Supreme Court Abortion Cases. source.
• Big Issue North (2022). Women's refuges, fifty years on. source; BBC Witness, Britain's first women's refuge, source.
• Money and the Production of Gender (book chapter on John Money's work). source.
• Echols, A. (1989). Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975. University of Minnesota Press. source.
• EEOC. Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. source.
• Encyclopedia.com (Dictionary of American History). Rape Crisis Centers. source; Women's Legal Landmarks, The opening of the first Rape Crisis Centre (1976), source.
• Firestone, S. (1970). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. William Morrow. Overview: Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
• Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. W. W. Norton. publisher.
• glbtq Archive. The Woman-Identified Woman. source.
• Goldberg, M. (2014). What Is a Woman? The New Yorker. source.
• (2010). Robert Stoller's Sex and Gender: 40 Years On. Archives of Sexual Behavior. source.
• Hanisch, C. (1969; intro 2006). The Personal Is Political. author's site.
• House of Commons Library (2020). 50 years of the Equal Pay Act. source.
• KQED (2025). Sandy Stone survived transphobic backlash and made history. source; Sister (1977), open letter to Olivia Records, scan.
• Legislation.gov.uk. Abortion Act 1967, section 1. 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.
• 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.
• Alderfer, H., Jaker, B. & Nelson, M. (1982). Diary of a Conference on Sexuality. source; Political is Personal: Scholarly Manifestations of the Feminist Sex Wars, Michigan Feminist Studies, source.
• Millett, K. (1970). Sexual Politics. Columbia University Press reissue. publisher.
• MNopedia (Minnesota Historical Society). Minneapolis Anti-pornography Ordinance. source.
• National Organization for Women (1966). Statement of Purpose. source (advocacy organisation).
• NPR (2025). Susan Brownmiller, whose landmark book changed attitudes on rape, dies at 90. source; Potter, C. B., The Book That Changed How We Think About Rape, Yale Review, source.
• Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, Gender and Society. Temple Smith. Oxford Reference, author's site.
• Raymond, J. G. (1979; reissued 1994). The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Beacon Press; Teachers College Press. Online Books Page, Google Books.
• Rubin, G. (1975). The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex, in R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women; reprinted in Deviations (Duke University Press, 2011). source.
• Sarachild, K. (1973). Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon. source.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender. source.
• Stone, S. (1987; published 1991–92). The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto. Camera Obscura 10(2). DOI, full text.
• The Guardian (2021). 'Being trans is not something you put on and take off'. source.
• Vandenbussche, E. (2022). Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey. Journal of Homosexuality. study page.