My aim as a working class woman has always been to overthrow capitalism (not on my own, obviously), not adapt myself to fit more easily into it. Therefore the concept of a universal sisterhood where I joined with other women on the basis we were all women appeared to me idealistic in the extreme. I considered it nothing more than an abstraction that ignored the very real differences of income, educational achievement, occupational status and life choices of working class women like me.
In fact I have always found I have more in common with working class men than I could ever have with middle class women. We share experiences of hardship, exploitation and struggle. As far as I was concerned the only thing I had in common with middle class women was my biology — the experiences we share are biological ones — menstruation, child birth, miscarriages, lactation, abortions, the menopause etc. (even though not all women experience all of these).
But it is precisely on these biological grounds I now find my self aligning with all women who are gender-critical.
It is important to realise how gender relations have always played a role in the reproduction of capitalist society and capitalist reproduction has always depended on the oppression and exploitation of women. But for working class women that oppression and exploitation has manifested itself differently from the privileged lives of middle and upper class women. Understanding how patriarchy manifests in class specific ways has always informed my feminism. The essentialism I witnessed in the middle class version of feminism was simply a strategy that worked to denigrate or ignore the experiences and knowledge of working class women and exclude them from the public sphere.
Although not a class in the way that Marx proposed it, women are, as a biological category, different from men for all the reasons I have just stated but also because of the way in which gendered expectations construct a (classed) version of women –call it femininity — that fits well into the needs of a capitalist society for unpaid labour.
But biological sex allows us to make distinctions based on biological needs as well as recognizing biologically-determined capacities. Recognising this in a positive rather than discriminatory way allows society to give women’s rights over their bodies and needs — a struggle which as the recent Irish referendum on the Eighth Amendment shows, is ongoing.
Sex is the scaffolding upon which gender roles are constructed. It depends upon both the conscious and unconscious wielding of power reinforced by cultural norms that are both personal and institutional. The idea that one can individually and on the basis of feelings opt out of these realities is an extraordinary basis for left politics as far as I am concerned.
Its a very long article, so these are just a few paragraphs that I have picked out https://rdln.wordpress.com/2019/11/17/left-censorship-and-exclusion-against-gender-critical-women-a-marxist-critique
(Sorry have just seen from the link it is quite an old article - but as the situation on the "left" hasn't changed still interesting to read. )