Materialist Feminism of Martha Nussbaum
- an essay by Katarzyna Szumlewicz with my intro.
Introduction by Joanna Szproch
I translated an article written by Polish PhD Katarzyna Szumlewicz, which analyzes Martha Nussbaum's thoughts, naturally filtered through the author's interpretation. I chose to present it without adding my commentary, intending to share it as an original piece to encourage further thought and discussion. This choice does not imply that I fully endorse the interpretation presented. Instead, I consider this perspective important and hope that quoting it will not lead to any form of pigeonholing me. I advocate for constructive, non-violent debate, using arguments rather than resorting to denigration based on differing views. We should move beyond using derogatory labels simply because someone has a different opinion.
Regarding gender issues, I have not delved deeply into Judith Butler's philosophy. My stance on gender dysphoria is that gender is real but imagined. Gender dysphoria does occur, and those affected should receive the same care as for any other condition. However, with the advent of AI and the ease with which truth can be falsified, and our perceptions influenced by profit-driven algorithm owners, we need to be very cautious and return to reasoned debate about what constitutes material reality, what we can modify, and what should be accepted as fact.
There are also discussions about transhumanism, but when considering Nussbaum's thoughts, one might ask whether, instead of focusing on changing things that consume all our energy and attention, we could redirect that time toward our inherent potential. This brings to mind Adolf Adler's concept, which suggests that we are born with an innate ability to overcome our limitations through adaptation. Adler opposed the idea that trauma defines our existence, emphasizing our capacity to overcome it. Alfred Adler believed that our past traumas don't define our future. Instead, we choose how traumas affect our present or future lives.
The criticism of the now immensely popular Gabor Maté, whom I also highly value and agree with in many respects, is intriguing. I wanted to reference to the words of his critics. Specifically, trauma is not always the cause of addiction/disease and vice versa. This would give hope to those struggling, suggesting they can always seek help and hope for empowerment.
There is a puzzling contradiction in a worldview that critiques individualism as a source of human misery while promoting personal authenticity as the goal of healing. This approach emphasizes each person's "unique and genuine essence" and encourages resisting societal conformity, yet it mirrors a form of individualism found in therapy culture.
Gabor Maté’s focus on trauma as the primary cause of ill health is similarly reductive. It’s as simplistic as attributing health issues solely to genetic or neurobiological factors. Maté's approach often applies a double standard: biogenetic explanations must fully account for illness, while trauma is considered primary if any adversity is linked to it.
There is solid evidence linking adverse childhood experiences to various health problems, which is a crucial insight. However, the associations are often modest, and even the strongest links do not predict illness perfectly. Many who experience significant adversity do not become ill, and some who have relatively smooth early lives do. The influence of trauma and adversity on mental health is important but should be understood within a more nuanced framework that recognizes its complexity rather than relying on overconfident claims.
In any case, back to the subject—gender and sex have always fascinated me. It is said that our brains are practically the same, but recent research indicates that our hormonal reality, and the fact that women function in monthly cycles for most of their lives, have a definite impact on how our brains respond. However, these studies are very new, and the material reality is also significant, as the percentage of studies on female subjects compared to male subjects is minimal, largely due to financial constraints. Studies on females are largely underfunded. That’s a fact.
As an artist promoting fantasies, the question of what is real, what is imagined, and what is entirely fabricated, as well as the nature of meaning—whether AI has consciousness or is merely a calculator—these issues intertwine for me. I hope to dedicate the rest of my life to their further analysis while incorporating my conclusions into future artistic works. I am convinced that it is often these imagined issues that are the source of our conflicts—and these are things whose truth we cannot prove because faith lies beyond reason and rational evidence. Issues of truth, such as whether the words of Jesus or Muhammad are true, unfortunately lead to bloodshed. Often, imagined issues fuel our disputes, and these are things we cannot prove as true, as belief is beyond reason and rational evidence.
Ultimately, amidst this information war and the algorithm benefiting from our division, we should focus on positive narratives. Instead of believing ourselves to be the worst, we should recognize our capacity for the most beautiful things, such as care and solidarity. Protecting the vulnerable should be seen as a duty, not exploitation or fetishization. It’s surprising how little we discuss love, given that it too has been commodified and romanticized by capitalism and patriarchy. Our best nature involves altruism, but we must first learn to love ourselves to give unconditionally. Often, our giving is transactional rather than unconditional.
Before citing the article, I recommend checking out one of the best conversations I recently tuned in to. Catherine Liu, Joshua Citarella’s guest, a professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine, and the author of 'Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class', discusses the origin of trauma studies, self-branding on social media and the ideology of the professional class. Liu has an unwavering commitment to historical materialism and a fierce critique of elitist academies. She explores the intense moralism of our times as it relates to the Freudian super-ego.
Katarzyna Szulewicz’s article “Materialist Feminism of Martha Nussbaum”
Link to the original article in Polish language.
Martha Nussbaum is an American philosopher, born in the late 1940s (1947). Her concept is categorized by herself as part of the liberal tradition, though it is a specific kind of liberalism—very social, and reminiscent of early Enlightenment philosophers like Jean Antoine de Condorcet. Her concept, known as the Capabilities Approach, is an attempt to merge all emancipatory currents that were created or continued in the 20th century. However, she maintains a critical stance toward some of them, which could be considered extreme and deviate from the goal of emancipation towards other values.
She has a negative view of libertarianism, which promotes extreme individualism and, economically, the free market cult. She also rejects communitarianism, a fusion of conservatism and socialism, where the individual dissolves into the community. The third line of thinking she rejects is postmodernist deconstructionism, represented by Judith Butler. This theory, regarded as emancipatory, deconstructs both the subject and society, seeing them merely as fields of competing dominations. On this path, emancipation is impossible; only exposure through parody or absurdity is possible. The forms of domination that affect us can be subversively relocated or challenged, but this does not equate to liberation from them.
Philosophical Inspirations
Regarding the last, often confused with Marxism—sometimes even called "cultural Marxism"—I will write more at the end, as Nussbaum has authored an important critique of it. But first, I will mention her positive inspirations. From modernity, these are three philosophers: Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. Kant is known primarily for his moral imperatives. He is famous for the phrase "the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." This means that nothing, not even the starry sky—whether understood as the cosmos or divinity—holds ethical significance comparable to the individual’s moral will. This is expressed in his practical imperative: "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your person or the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means." Kant even envisioned his utopia of a "kingdom of ends," a social order in which every person is treated as an end in themselves.
Nussbaum universalizes Kantian ethics, which originally assumed the moral subject to be male by default. She uses the term "the end in herself" to apply to women. From this perspective, she examines both contemporary and historical structures in which women operate. She observes that, in most cultures, women are expected to live for the community, which is typically the family, but the family does not exist for the sake of the woman. Similarly, sexual life is not regarded as an activity where a woman's erotic pleasure is considered an end. A woman is expected to be appealing and to arouse specific men while remaining invisible and unavailable to others. She is held responsible for the arousal she evokes, and when this is deemed inappropriate, she is often punished for it. The purpose of a woman's life is seen as sex, but not for herself—for men. A woman who enjoys erotic freedom often incites social hostility, which is by no means limited to religiously conservative environments.
Even in countries where women are guaranteed full civil rights, they are still expected to care for others, even at their own expense, often giving up their own goals in favor of family or a partner. Their presence in the public sphere is also often subject to conditions that are not applied to men. Women are more easily subjected to dislike and resentment, which often leads to attacks. These attacks tend to focus particularly on mature women who have established themselves, women whose appearance and erotic relationships with men did not play a decisive role in building their position. These women are strong players in the public sphere and therefore provoke envy from both men and women. Male envy of female achievements fuels the phenomenon of backlash, which seeks to take away the gains of feminism. This backlash transcends the left-right political divide. The right-wing backlash seeks a return to structures where women had to be obedient (often entirely fabricated), while the left-wing backlash deconstructs gender discourse to the point where feminism is perceived as some outdated dualistic system that is no longer necessary.
These phenomena can be traced back to the public sphere as conceived by Rousseau, which excluded women. Australian philosopher Carole Pateman called this vision a "fraternal social contract." Women were meant to be the silent and invisible foundation upon which men's lives were built. In this vision, men are abstract and disembodied, and women's labor for them is taken for granted, seen as something that appears out of thin air. For this reason, Rousseau envisioned the education of girls to be the reverse of that of boys. Sophie, from his educational treatise Emile (1862), was not to engage in anything abstract, focusing solely on practical matters. In contrast to the titular Emile, a nonconformist and revolutionary guided by enlightened reason, she was to heed the opinions of others and possess none of her own. Jean Antoine de Condorcet, a participant in the French Revolution and a theorist of education, strongly disagreed with Rousseau on this point, as well as on several others. The same applies to the first feminist philosopher and educational theorist, Mary Wollstonecraft, who directly criticized the misogyny of Emile. Unfortunately, by the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, it was Rousseau's vision that gained dominance, not theirs.
John Stuart Mill wrote in The Subjection of Women (1869) that girls were taught "a man must always and in every situation be the guiding star of their conduct," even when he uses violence against them or does not regard them as human. The North Star was a universal point of reference for sailors to know where they were. For Victorian women, navigating the world meant always aligning themselves with what men expected of them, and maneuvering between their often contradictory demands. The paradox of this situation (which, with some exceptions, persists to this day) lies in the fact that it is women themselves who have created and continue to create the space in which women are dependent on men. Women, as mothers and caregivers, and also as wives, provide the invisible foundation upon which the male public sphere is built—a world where men would otherwise eat raw meals and wear unwashed socks, naturally without producing offspring.
Rousseau claimed that everywhere and always, the fate of women depends more on men than the fate of men depends on women. However, all types of data—from biology and demography to sociology and applied sciences—indicate the opposite. Fewer women are born, but they are more valuable to nature, even when they lose fertility. Women outnumber men in every population because fewer of them die from non-age-related causes. This phenomenon is called "excess male mortality" and occurs in every population on Earth, even in those that are extremely patriarchal, where female fetuses are aborted or girls are neglected. Women live longer, taking care of children, husbands, and parents. Men without wives live shorter lives than those cared for by a woman. Women's caregiving work is the material foundation of society, but it is taken for granted, seen as something that happens naturally, and only becomes significant when payment is required, or when the state compensates for it.
Here is where the materialist perspective comes into play. Marx did not invent it, but he was the first to describe it in detail. He pointed out a kind of "standing on its head" in the theories through which capitalism describes itself. In these theories, consciousness is placed before matter. For example, we say "employer" and "employee" in exactly the opposite way to how reality looks. The entrepreneur "takes" labor and profits from it, while the worker "gives" labor, sometimes gaining only as much as to avoid starving. Similarly, ethics based on individual responsibility and entrepreneurship in a world determined by the class one is born into is, for Marx, simply "the thoughts of the ruling class," not something that speaks to the reality of capitalism.
Needs, Potentials, Capabilities
Marx spoke of a process called "alienation," which involves depriving a person of "not only human but also animal needs" for something as immaterial as someone else’s accumulation of profit. The concept of "alienation of the essence of man" is very important for the definition of materialism, even though later Marx avoided it. The essence of man is not yet fully developed; it remains something of a mystery. It is known that this essence is alienated by the unfulfillment of needs. These needs are fundamentally understood and defined—they include food, shelter, health, education, social agency, dignified relationships with other people, the element of art and play in what one does, and self-improvement, in short, the possibility of development. Hence the slogan "To each according to their needs." Marx did not say what an unalienated human being would look like. In his view, it is impossible to predict within capitalism what the world would look like without it. What is important is that what he called human potential should not be blocked by exploitation and the resulting poverty. Therefore, the struggle should aim to transform reality so that these potentials can flourish and develop, even in directions not yet known, enabled by, for instance, the development of science and technology.
The liberal Nussbaum fully incorporated this part of Marx’s legacy into her vision. Marx’s "potentials" become "capabilities" for her. She broke them down into a "decalogue," which, in addition to life and health, includes bodily integrity, reason, imagination, the senses, emotions, belonging to a community, freedom of speech and expression, as well as other factors such as play and recreation and contact with nature. Unlike Marx, Nussbaum recognized only the individual, not any community (class-based or otherwise), as the subject of capabilities. The second difference is that Nussbaum identifies various causes of alienation, not just economic ones. For her, any unjust, hierarchical social order contributes to alienation.
Beyond the most universal (in the negative sense) patriarchy, we have caste systems, racial segregation, and anti-Semitism. However, it is not only social exclusions that block individual development. Nature itself also creates barriers for the disabled, who cannot develop certain abilities. According to Nussbaum, the education and support system should focus on enabling them to develop their remaining capabilities and, where possible, to compensate for those that are inaccessible. As she writes, even fully able individuals cannot do many things—such as move as fast as a cheetah or fly like birds. We have prosthetics for these abilities in the form of cars, trains, and airplanes. Nussbaum extends this comparison further. She notes that we are all born and die in states of incapacity, which means that for part of our lives, we require care. Nussbaum considers care a fundamental ethical value, and being cared for is a condition known to everyone, as everyone was once a child. This condition also awaits nearly everyone at the end of life. Therefore, we should learn to care for others. At one point, she even proposed mandatory community service for young people, where they could choose between military service and caring for people with disabilities.
There is a significant difference between Nussbaum and Kant regarding the approach to dependence on others as a human condition. For Kant, the moral individual is self-sufficient and independent of others. This difference is closely linked to Nussbaum’s feminism, which recognizes the role of care in what is specifically human in contrast to the whole of nature. What differentiates humans from animals is language and culture. These stem from the long helplessness of human infants and children. Both care and the introduction to the world of human imagination are primarily handled by women—mothers, grandmothers, aunts, as well as caregivers, preschool teachers, and educators. All professions related to care, not only for children, are dominated by women and are also low-paid. All unpaid activities involving caring for someone who cannot care for themselves are even more so. Women are raised to be able to care for another person at every stage of their own and the other’s life—young women care for children, older ones for grandchildren and parents, and often for in-laws as well. People with permanent disabilities who need care typically receive it from women. However, as Nussbaum emphasizes, "care is human work, not women’s work." As such, it deserves appreciation, remuneration, and recognition as a duty in the style proposed by Kant, treating both the caregiver and the cared-for as ends in themselves.
Violence and Contempt Toward Women
However, there are more fundamental exclusions than earning low wages in key developmental roles and the fact that unpaid caregiving work is universally considered a female duty. Women, more than any other group, are subjected to violence simply for being who they are, as if femininity deserved punishment or was inherently tied to suffering, mutilation, and rape. History tells us about foot binding, which prevented women from escaping male dominance in the most literal sense. Today, female genital mutilation is widely practiced. Each year, three million girls undergo this procedure, and 200 million women worldwide are affected. The origin of this custom is unknown. Regardless of whether it comes from religion or tradition, it aims to prevent sexual pleasure in women, as every type of this mutilation involves damage or complete removal of the clitoris, the center of female pleasure. As mentioned, patriarchy demands that women's lives center around sex, but not their sexuality—only that of men.
Violence against girls does not end with mutilation. Pedophilia affects girls significantly more than boys, often involving molestation by family members. Child marriage, where girls are forced to have sex with husbands and bear children despite being children themselves, is also a form of pedophilic violence. Husband-to-wife violence, including murder, is the primary form of violence experienced by women in every country. Violence against men in marriages constitutes a minuscule fraction of the number of women affected. Rape and attempted rape, both within marriage and in public spaces, are universal acts of violence against women. Men are victims of this crime hundreds of times less frequently, and perpetrators of rape against men are 100% other men. The scale of these phenomena is not even comparable. Rape and sexual assault are crimes directed at women, and in some countries, women are additionally penalized for being victims of these acts.
Despite significant changes in social customs, women's sexual lives are still judged differently from men's. For a woman, having sex with someone other than her husband can even result in losing her life at the hands of her husband, who may be acquitted or justified. So-called female purity is controlled by the state in many parts of the world. Sometimes, it is not even about sex but rather about appearances that contradict norms, such as a woman revealing aspects of her femininity. This is the case in contemporary Iran, where a woman lost her life for having her hair visible. Additionally, there are economic systems that harm women. In the same Iran, a woman inherits one-quarter of what a man does and is counted as half a male witness in court.
Nussbaum has dedicated much of her research to another country where women have a low status: India. In her publications on the suppression of women's abilities, she described two women in their thirties who had not learned to read and write in childhood. The protagonists, Vasanti and Jayamma, considered having children and a husband, with children being fed and a husband not beating them, as the height of their aspirations. They had no educational ambitions and did not intend to participate in elections. Nussbaum refers to this, as Amartya Sen does, as "adaptive aspirations," which involve adjustment combined with the suppression of one's own needs. For Vasanti, even the dream of having children, her only expectation, was not fulfilled as her husband decided to undergo sterilization as part of a population reduction program. He used the money he received for alcohol and gambling. Jayamma's husband did not earn money; she earned a meager income from hard physical labor, which was half of what men earned, yet she still had to manage all the household chores and eat the leftovers after her sons and husband and also suffered from his violence. In the case of India, as well as China, attention should be paid to the phenomenon of selective abortion, resulting from a reluctance to have daughters. Along with population reduction programs, this has led to a catastrophic effect of a shortage of young women in both countries.
Material and structural harms to women could be listed at length, and yet this is not all. Worse treatment also includes exclusion from positions, public humiliation, blocking and ignoring potential, and the belief that in any dispute between a woman and a man, the woman is the worse and more foolish party. A culture that sexualizes female submissiveness and mocks female intelligence exists in every country, even where the law stipulates equality between women and men. Women are expected to give up their potential wherever it is required by men or family situations. All these types of violence, exploitation, oppression, and discrimination limit the realization of capabilities listed by Nussbaum. They are not inflicted on women by accident, and men cannot simply replace women in these roles. Men usually do not know these kinds of violence and injustices or experience them so rarely that statistics do not account for them. Additionally, there is a phenomenon that is both comic and tragic, where men view women as manifestations of their own emotions and desires. For instance, Gandhi practiced asceticism by denying sex to his wife. He boasted about how effectively he resisted erotic temptations, completely disregarding that his wife might have any own expectations of him as her husband.
Why do these things happen specifically to women? The answer may seem tautological, but I will explain this tautology later. The reason for violence, prejudice, and limitations based on sex is… sex itself. Specifically, the prejudice against the female sex, and the prejudice against femininity. I mentioned selective abortion to show that it is a biological sex, not some other kind. I point out that it is sex understood in terms of matter, as a primary being relative to our interpretations. Whether Marx is right in claiming that being determines consciousness is a complex and unresolved issue even within Marxism. One thing is certain—consciousness is not primary to being. Being shapes it, though this does not exclude reciprocal action.
Judith Butler and Pseudoeemancipation
Meanwhile, from postmodernism and the thought of Michel Foucault emerged queer theory by Judith Butler. According to Butler, sex as a biological or material fact does not exist. There are chromosomes, sexual organs, and pregnancy, but, as Butler says, this is not sex (in the sense of gender). Gender is solely given by culture, and these are expectations directed at individuals recognized as female and male by society. According to Butler, a person can be neither a woman nor a man; their gender can be somewhere in between and can also change depending on the social identities assigned to them. Everyone has encountered the argument that since there are people with characteristics of both sexes, sex is not binary.
Logically, this discourse would be consistent if it admitted that since people are born with an incorrect number of fingers, the number of fingers in Homo sapiens is fluid and culturally variable. There is also the question of how animals, say squirrels, without culture, know which individuals can reproduce with which. But jokes aside.
It is from Butler's inspiration that terms like “people with uteruses,” “menstruating people,” “pregnant people,” “breastfeeding” and other monstrosities arose, although she did not invent them. This happened only after her ideas became widespread. Postmodernists were interested in deconstructing truths (called “metanarratives”), not creating new ones. Consequently, they rejected the category of objectivity. Butler did this as well but did not renounce her followers' or adherents' tendency to treat her thoughts as a “scientific” description of reality. She still proclaims that the concept of “woman” is responsible for the mistreatment of women, so when we start using other terms, such as “person with some organ” or “person undergoing a physiological process,” that treatment will immediately become better. If some facts contradict this... Wait, there are no facts!
Feminism has “femina” in its name, which means woman. It refers to an adult female person, precisely with a female body, decisive in the reproduction process. Feminism, as a movement for women, opposes men's power over women and their ability to create life and the recognition of the universal human as male. Queer theory, represented by Butler, proclaims sexual non-normativity as a kind of revolt against the established order. By habit, it is called “patriarchy,” thus Butler is described as a feminist. Incorrectly, as the subject of emancipation in her theory is not women, but non-normative individuals: gays, lesbians, and trans people. All of them are harmed by the patriarchal construction of relations between women and men, not because it is unequal, but because it limits eroticism to relations between two biologically defined sexes. Other aspects such as sexual desire and self-identification from this image completely disappear, so there is no cleaning, changing children, being forced into marriage, or caring for relatives. There is also, of course, no female old age.
According to Butler, the existing order should be deconstructed through subversive parody. For example, when a man plays a submissive—according to her “feminine”—role toward another man, the anti-patriarchal revolution is taking place. Also, when one “overdoes” the submissive role as a woman, meaning engaging in a satisfying BDSM relationship with a man, this revolution is already happening. Male individuals identifying as women disrupt and parody the gender order, thus objectively “opposing” patriarchy. But what do women, as real people rather than men's fantasies about sexual subjugation associated with femininity, gain from this?
Debate between Nussbaum and Butler
Nussbaum began challenging this vision in the early 1990s with her essay titled “Professor of Parody.” In it, she argues that the redefinitions of terms proposed by Butler have no impact on the situation of women or even worsen it (today, it is clear that the latter is true). Women experience oppression as women, not merely as individuals identifying with a feminine gender. This is well illustrated by Caroline Criado Perez in her book “Invisible Women,” which provides hundreds of examples of the disregard for the physiology and anatomy of women's bodies in medicine, business, architecture, and other fields. It should also be noted that Butler’s theory does not address women outside the United States who experience different kinds of oppression beyond symbolic ones. Should the illiterate Jayamma described by Nussbaum parody the feminine role and derive erotic pleasure from being beaten by her husband? And should Vasanti, who divorced her addicted husband and learned to read and write thanks to a feminist organization believing in the existence of women, be pleased that her husband was sterilized for money and they did not have children because children are part of the heteronormative order?
According to Nussbaum, the language of “people with something” and the view of fighting patriarchy through parodying heterosexuality also obscures the situation of women. Consider data collection, for example, on how daughters are fed in Africa compared to sons, or what percentage of meals worldwide were prepared by women in a given decade. I’ll hint that in the previous decade (2015), it was 90%. If we adopt the new definition of woman as someone identifying as a woman (ignoramus per ignoratum, since we don’t know the definition of the term used), we will have to address entirely different problems than those affecting women.
Trans women are indeed victims of violence, and this violence should be studied, but not within the framework of studying women. Furthermore, this violence is experienced 100% by trans women at the hands of men. However, it is not men who are accused of acting against the interests of trans women, but women defending other women against the entry of male individuals, declared as women, into female spaces: shelters for victims of violence, prisons, hospital rooms, interrogation rooms, toilets, and changing rooms. There is also a significant dispute over women’s sports, where the participation of male individuals, including those after full transition or merely with a genetic anomaly, effectively undermines the sense of competition between women.
Practical Consequences of Post-Gender Philosophy
This is not the end of the problems with the deconstruction of gender. We live in a hypersexualized culture. Since there is now the possibility to declare a gender different from one’s biological sex, teenage girls often express relief at not being women. Some of them likely experience gender dysphoria, which in 80-90% of cases resolves with age. If it ended with just a declaration, there would be no problem. However, under the influence of their environment and especially the internet, these girls begin to demand from their parents permission for breast binding, testosterone administration, and referral to procedures leading to breast and female genital removal.
Performing any of these actions on minors is contrary to the Istanbul Convention and resembles foot binding or female genital mutilation. What if it is requested by a minor? Desires can change, and they generally do, and the described processes are irreversible. One of the consequences of early transition is the permanent loss of fertility, meaning the ability to bear children, forever. The discourse on the gender spectrum and the “right” to transition, including children, is unjustifiably linked to the emancipation of gays and lesbians. Nussbaum is highly deserving of recognition for providing the strongest arguments in history for same-sex marriage, which has indeed been implemented in most states in the USA. One of these arguments is that the prohibition of same-sex marriages is reminiscent of the ban on interracial marriages that was in place in the USA until the 1960s. How does this relate to the demands of trans activism? Not at all. Furthermore, the deconstruction of gender undermines homosexuality itself, which is based on erotic attraction to the same sex. Homosexual rights movements are aware of this and view this discourse as hostile to gays and lesbians.
This essay aims to show that departing from material realities has disastrous practical consequences. These consequences were not anticipated because the post-gender discourse focused on abstractions rather than reality. It does not consider biology or demographics, nor the real living conditions of women and men, as described in “Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado Perez. It also serves as a warning. When a theory concerns only consciousness while ignoring material existence, reflection begins to deviate into very similar pitfalls. At such moments, it is necessary to take a few steps back. To the theories of Kant, Mill, and Marx, and above all—to the feminism of the first and second waves. Otherwise, one will be fighting invented problems using incomprehensible language, without any real, even minimal, benefit to women.