Cerys Vaughan is biologically female, identifies as a woman, uses she/her pronouns and has long hair. To many a wannabe gender rebel, this would make her the epitome of cisnormative femininity. Yes, Vaughan likes sport, which might ordinarily shift her a little further along the Barbie-to-GI Joe “gender spectrum”. However, she also thinks female sports should be for female people only. This would most definitely place her out of the running for any “gender binary smashers” annual award.
Last year Vaughan, then aged 17, was disciplined by the FA for questioning the fairness and safety of her own women’s football team competing against a team fielding a biological male. At the time she was handed a six-match ban (four of these were suspended). In February this year, an appeal board found that she had been treated unfairly. A new process was ordered, but the complaint has since been dropped.
Vaughan has now broken her silence on the case. Watching her in a BBC interview, I am struck by how perfectly she illustrates the difference between fake, performative gender norm defiance, and an actual, meaningful rejection of gendered beliefs and expectations. Repeatedly pressured to prioritise to downplay and deprioritise the needs of female people in relation to those of males, she refuses.
“Do you have any sympathy for transgender women who want to play with women and may feel this decision has excluded them from a sport that they love and they get a lot out of?” asks the male interviewer. “No,” says Vaughan. Just plain “no”. The interviewer pushes further: “why is that?” “Because,” says Vaughan, “I also have a love for the game”:
I compete with other women. I love football. I think that if biological males get involved then that just makes the game experience worse for everyone else because then it’s not an even game when you turn up.
What I love about this answer is that it is so focussed on female experience, as something just as valid and important as male experience. It is neither apologetic nor an attempt to deny the feelings of male players. Male players want what they want, but female players matter too. This is what real gender non-conformity looks like: a clear, direct rejection of the idea that, as the Times Kenny Farquharson so memorably put it, “womanhood in all its glory is capacious enough, generous enough, diverse enough, to accommodate and perhaps even to welcome a small number of people who did not start life’s journey as women”. Or, as Simone de Beauvoir expressed it more succinctly, the idea that woman “must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject”.
I find Vaughan’s poise particularly impressive given her age. Centring women as a class is a risky thing to do when so many around you have adopted a version of “rejecting gender norms” that is anything but. Gender non-conformity in young women, we are encouraged to think, is having short hair, or crushing your breasts, or rejecting femaleness entirely. When Vaughan is challenged on her assertion of boundaries — “there should be a priority on inclusion rather than exclusion”, the interviewer proposes — the implication is that she is the one rejecting the dismantling of restrictive roles. On the contrary — she is the gender rebel here.
To some this might seem counter-intuitive. One reason why gender ideology has gained quick acceptance amongst self-styled progressives — despite being both regressive and completely irrational — is that if you don’t think very hard (or at all), the movement does seem to promote liberation from gendered expectations. This is what Judith Butler likes to imply when she writes of enabling “a proliferation of genders beyond the established binary versions”. It all sounds very exciting, providing you don’t start to question what “gender” means or wonder what’s stopping Butler from embracing the radical feminist proposition of rejecting gender entirely.
Once you do that, you notice that what gender ideology actually does is maintain the depressingly limiting conflation of femininity with femaleness and masculinity with maleness. It just does so while pretending to offer you a choice. Don’t feel feminine? Maybe that means you’re not a woman after all!
This makes it impossible for anyone to reject gender norms from within the framework of gender ideology itself. The issue is not just that someone who claims they are so gender non-conforming they’re actually the opposite sex is reaffirming, rather than rejecting, the idea that to be a woman is to be feminine, to be a man, masculine. It’s that in failing to address what gender does — the purpose it serves, as opposed to the arbitrary, variable dress codes it sets — gender ideologues make it easier for gender to perform its function of claiming more space and resources for men and boys, and fewer for women and girls (on the football field as much as anywhere else).
This is the heart of gender, after all. As Beauvoir noted in The Second Sex, “precisely because the idea of femininity is artificially defined by customs and fashion, it is imposed on every woman from the outside”:
… it may evolve so that its fashion standards come closer to those of men […] That does not change the core of the problem: the individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will.
“Rejecting feminine attributes,” she added, “does not mean acquiring virile ones; even a transvestite cannot turn herself into a man: she is a transvestite”. If the underlying power structure remains intact – and as far as Butlerians are concerned, it has to (“no bondage, no delight”, as Martha Nussbaum put it in her 1999 critique of Butler) — “queering gender” and ‘smashing the gender binary’ cannot mean the same things for both sexes.
Men who claim to be women fetishise femininity while demanding even greater access to women’s time and resources
Indeed, those who shout loudest about smashing the binary can be among the most gender conforming people on the planet. Men who claim to be women fetishise femininity while demanding even greater access to women’s time and resources. As Jenny Lindsay points out in Hounded, a male person who wears “a tight-fitting Sugababes t-shirt and pink skirt” but “turns up to a woman’s conference, shouts misogynist obscenities at the crowd and punches a gender critical feminist” is offering “a naked display of ‘masculine’ and very male aggression and power”.
Meanwhile, women such as the actor Bella Ramsay, who disidentify from femaleness on the basis that they do not feel “feminine”, do not and indeed cannot make a land grab for male status and authority. On the contrary, they are ceding more ground, leaving “womanhood” to the males who define it — the “dolls” — rather than messing things up with their unfeminine ways. Patriarchy 1.0 told female people they were innately feminine and had no choice in the matter; Patriarchy 2.0, aware that there’s nothing more unfeminine than a flesh-and-blood female human with an inner life, encourages such creatures to exit the “woman” category rather than spoil the fantasy for everyone else.
For this reason, we should celebrate every woman who refuses to budge up. Cerys Vaughan presents far more of a challenge to gender norms — those of both left and right — than any girl meekly binding her breasts and handing her “woman” card to a doll-identified man who insists he needs it more. Challenging the status quo takes more than changing pronouns or getting a haircut. It means understanding how power is distributed, and who benefits. There’s nothing revolutionary in women giving what little we already have away.
