Of all the fine pieces on sex and gender we’ve published at Quillette, few matched Kathleen Stock’s fastidiously argued manifesto, Ignoring Differences Between Men and Women Is the Wrong Way to Address Gender Dysphoria. That article appeared back in 2019, at a time when it required real courage to push back against faddish claims that men can become women by announcing as much on Twitter and Tumblr. And during the five intervening years, the former University of Sussex philosophy professor has staked out a prominent role in the fight to (as she puts it on Substack) “claw feminism back from the idiots [who] ruined it.”

Ignoring Differences Between Men and Women Is the Wrong Way to Address Gender Dysphoria

The main problem with sex eliminationism is that, in a nutshell, it leaves us with no adequate language to describe a politically important feature of material reality.

QuilletteKathleen Stock

But the human condition is a house with many rooms, and not even the brightest bulb can illuminate all of them—a principle well-illustrated by Ms Stock’s recent (and very unkindly titled) Unherd essay, Are You a Board Game Loser? Real Life Is Leaving You Behind. With the holiday board-gaming season almost upon us, now is a good time to dispel some of the widely embraced misconceptions that inform her analysis.

Ms Stock tips her bias right from her first line, which asks, “What is your most shameful memory of an argument over a board game?” This is like beginning a meditation on Mexican cuisine by urging readers to reflect on the last time they threw up after eating a taco.