Brilliant Margaret Atwood memoir review

[hholiday]

By Kathleen Stock https://archive.is/v2z51 and https://unherd.com/2025/11/what-margaret-atwood-got-wrong/

Just wonderful, humane writing that goes closer than anything else I have read to exploring the blind spots in Atwood’s views on gender, as well as expressing delight in her fiction writing. I particularly love these killer closing lines:

But honestly, the idea that, in the near future, Western governments will need to use direct force to make women do market-friendly things against their own interests is now surely, definitively preposterous. The case of genderism — and surrogacy, and “sex work”, for that matter — shows that authorities only need to persuade enough women that certain activities are kind, or glamorous, or nobly self-improving; at which point, tender-hearted armies will rise up to ruthlessly punish dissenters themselves.

Um, it's actually Sodha that didn't provide evidence…

Let's be very clear about your original contention:

Am I correct in thinking that you are saying that if "women exhibit gendered typical behaviours" this means men who exhibit the same behaviours can, on that basis, be classed as women?

Sorry, OP, thanks for posting this. I wouldn't have seen it otherwise and I love both Kathleen Stock's writing and The Handmaid's Tale (however differently I think to the author).

I’m not wanting to feed any troll and don’t want to derail the thread. When I see the likes of Margaret Atwood I again stop to reconfirm my understanding of the trans debate. Can I just clarify- is this your understanding of the pro trans debate? Or am I missing something.

1. Trans people are people, it’s no skin off woman or society’s nose to be kind to their wishes.
2. Let trans woman in the female spaces such as bathrooms or hospital spaces because they are because of - of a new unspecified science/ no science at all/ a new development of societal understanding, a previously unknown type of woman? So therefore trans women are women.
3. Women or others are simply transphobic for wanting to retain single sex spaces and for not wanting trans women in their refuges, for example. Or if not transphobic, it’s a risk that just needs to be accepted because hitherto cross dressers used the bathrooms forever anyway. Collateral damage.
4. That society can’t spot a trans person a mile off so what’s the problem and to say so is transphobic.
5. Trans men can take their chances in the men’s because that’s their choice. Trans men aren’t part of this argument.
6. Third spaces are invalidating and othering so the campaign for them is undesirable.
7. Men are more of a scary / definable risk to trans women than women, therefore it is risking their harm not to allow them in women’s spaces under the protection of women.
8. Dangerous men who are proporting to be transwomen and who go on to hurt women are such a tiny proportion it’s irrelevant to the argument. Collateral damage.
9. That challenging any of the above is hurtful and therefore harmful due to the heavy load and fragile health trans people carry because of being trans in a transphobic society and they’re likely to self harm.
10. That the fear of women is this debate is due to transphobia and doesn’t risk them physical harm and if it does then it’s collateral damage.
11. The trans rights spoke about for example is the right to all of the above? It’s not a specific right or law which is is sought?

Is that it? For clarity- I don’t agree with the above but I do want to understand the full scope of the counter argument.

Haven't rtft yet but wanted to say this is an excellent post.

There is now decades of research (in the wake of second wave feminism) demonstrating the power of socialisation & conditioning. Gramsci & Althusser offer a nuanced Marxist view of this; psychobiologists and those looking at child development also note this. For example, the research about the ways that people treat girl and boy babies differently, from in utero onward.

We are social beings; nature and nurture form us, and our behaviour is always in relation to the social constraints & norms - even if we don't realise this, or try deliberately to resist.

Women and girls are subject to really strong and often coercive socialisation - John Stuart & Harriet Taylor Mill pinned this back in the 1860s in The Subjection of Women. It's worth a read.

I just scroll by certain posts now. IMO, the posts just say the same thing over and over on repeat so once you’ve read a few, you’ve read them all. Plus they never engage or respond to substantive questions.

Edited to add: @totalrocket you won’t get clear answers to those questions.

Also a top post. Very comprehensive!

That is an excellent list @totalrocket
I'm not trying to police the thread but I think it deserves a thread of its own.
There's a lot to unpick here.

Please do start one! 🙏

It's an interesting review. I'm an "old" Atwood fan, she was possibly my favourite fiction author up til "Alias Grace" and then I started to lose interest in her later books. Her older books are still among my favourites and to my mind even a "bad" Atwood is still better than most authors' best.

I loved "The Handmaid's Tale" mainly for the language. "Waste not, want not, the saying goes. I have not been wasted. Why do I want?" still sends shivers up my spine. "The Handmaid's Tale" was not prescient, except in the sense that what you've seen before you will probably see again. What Atwood said at the time was that everything in it as based on reality in some part of the world.

he "prescient" bit that does resonate with me now is how trans ideology crept up on us while I - a feminist who thought the job was mostly done and as a busy mother - was looking the other way and not paying attention. By the time I realised we had a rape by another patient in a supposedly women's hospital ward, trans ideology was throughly embedded in UK society (and elsewhere) and it was very late indeed - nearly too late. But not quite.

One book that writers tend to ignore (and Kathleen Stock has ignored it too) is my favourite "Life Before Man". It's a written in a quasi-scientific objective style but it has profound psychological insight throughout including the damage done in three different childhoods. It's presented through characters who don't have insight themsleves and the psychological theories they do know aren't much use. It also has a fascinating source and precursor to the Aunts, Elizabeth's appalling Auntie Muriel. And in the end it is a redemption story when Elizabeth unwillingly recognises Auntie Muriel's humanity and the story recognises the courage it takes just to keep going. "She has built a dwelling above the abyss but where else was there to build it? So far, it stands".

So I disagree that Atwood is obtuse about humans. She is very sharp about humans. Her way of describing people from the outside and asking hard questions about them and trying to imagine the answers is psychologically insightful. That's not the same as getting everything right in real life. It's not the same as using psychological theories either - in fact one of the things I like best is that she leaves theory behind and asks "what do these people THINK? what would these people DO?"

Anyway, interesting review, and thanks for sharing @hholiday The memoir is going on my Christmas list!

Loving this. The cited study said "women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations."

So polite, sociable men who are conscientious and worry about things ... are women?

It also said the differences emerged in the male profiles, the female ones were consistent. This would mean there was a higher proportion of polite, sociable, conscientious, concerned men in the more economically deprived societies with poor education and healthcare. Somebody should go tell them all they're lady-gendered 😂

Thank you Amarillys, putting Life Before Man on my list.

Exactly, this.

Read the early chapters of Wild Swans for that, and imagine having to crush your own small daughter’s feet for months on end because the alternative could be destitution, or indeed prostitution and an early death.

Excellent post @PermanentTemporary

In my professional life, I am primarily interested in the ways in which women have historically worked within the constraints of their culture, and the ways that they also get under the radar, or resist. Sometimes, in what appear to be very ordinary ways (to us) - simply writing or speaking in public.

Raymond Williams is goof on this - the way that when there's hegemonic power, there's always resistance. I look for women's quiet resistance ...

Horoscopes have been respected by hundreds of millions of people across Asia for millennia, psychology was invented in Europe a century and a half ago.

Both of them have little if anything to do with science.

I can't predict which way "old" feminist or women writers will go on the trans issue. I sometime amuse myself speculating about Andrea Dworkin. I can't guess which way she would have gone. I only know that whichever side she came down on she'd be all in, with both feet and 100% committed!

I found Stock’s review very perceptive. I read a lot of early Atwood, and then Handmaid’s Tale. But I’ve never ever wanted to re-read any of her books. They’re thrilling in one way: the extremity of her imagination, the cut-glass language. But they’re so chilly, as if her fictional worlds are full of thought experiments - beautiful and strange thought experiments - rather than a deep fascination and love for human beings and their stories. I’m glad I’ve read her, but I know I’ll never go back to her. And I think Kathleen Stock has put her finger on why that is.

I guess it's a matter of taset. I'll take her chill over someone else's illusory comfort blanket. For me what she talks about is real, like it or lump it. Maybe I worry about the same things she does.

DH and I we went to an Atwood reading and Q&A many years ago. Someone asked why her books didn't have happy endings and she said, well the characters were still alive at the end weren't they? So now I sometimes say about a really grim story "It didn't have a happy ending. Not even a Margaret Atwood happy ending"

I think the really interesting bit (that I don't think TRAs are at all conscious they are doing) is sliding the meaning of 'women' within the same thought, or even sentence.

To even be able to observe the original group pattern - Group A report higher levels of X than Group B (a simple example being, "women report higher levels of neuroticism than men") you have to have had at least one qualifying criterion for membership of Group A and Group B in the first place, and that criterion cannot be X (because X is the thing you are measuring - it was, at the start of your investigation, your unknown about which you were hoping to get an answer).

In reality, the original criteria for Group A is (and what TRAs know, on one level of their doublethink, that it is), has to mean 'adult+human+female', otherwise they're is no place to start. So what is being said originally is:
Group A [=adult human females] report higher levels of X [=neuroticism] than Group B [=adult human males].

If after getting that result you then try to mentally redefine Group A as, "anyone reporting higher levels of X", and Group B as "anyone reporting lower levels of neuroticism", you are now simply saying:
Group A [=people who report higher levels of neuroticism] report higher levels of X [=neuroticism] than Group B [=people who report lower levels of neuroticism].
Which is technically true, but tautologous and tells us nothing.

OR, a variation: if after getting that result you then try to redefine Group A as, "adult human females PLUS the portion of Group B reporting higher levels of X", and Group B as "adult human males EXCEPT those who report higher levels of X", you are now saying:

Group A [adult human females PLUS the portion of Group B reporting higher levels of X] report higher levels of X [=neuroticism] than Group B [=adult human males EXCEPT those who report higher levels of X].

Which is a partial tautology, artificially inflating the result you were investigating and ends up telling you little to nothing.

However, people rarely slow their thinking down and set it out clearly step by painstaking step in order to spot the fallacy, particularly when they are motivated NOT to try to spot it.

It's fascinating (and depressing).

To bring this back round to Atwood: perhaps unfairly I've always had the impression that she's a bit "I'm not like the other girls" and I think this comes through in interesting ways in her writing (even The Handmaid's Tale). Part if that, I think, is that she considers herself to be far more logical and 'no nonsense' than most. For that reason I'd be really interested to hear her taken through some of the rationale by someone like Helen Joyce, who is similarly data-driven, logical and straightforward but lacks whatever motivated reasoning seems to be operating on Atwood. Unfortunately I expect Atwood would not she to that as it's easier to handwave it all away than risk engaging and being confronted with uncomfortable fact and logic.

Some excellent posts on here making me think about feminism more widely. Re Margaret Atwood, surely she must be on the autistic spectrum - I’ve now come to believe that most brilliant writers are - by way of explanation of her seemingly limited ability to comprehend women’s concerns about gender ideology. And whilst most of her books I’ve found not to my taste, Handmaids Tale was brilliant for its language and accurate portrayal of just how quickly and easily (some) women lose their rights. Jo Stock review was insightful but I don’t discount the possibility of some future where women are forced to do ‘market friendly’ things against their own interests only I wouldn’t use ‘market friendly’, I’d use hegemonic or dominant interests for when we we finally run up against the limits of fundamental resources. Not in my lifetime and hopefully not in the lifetime of my DCs but certainly in a possible future. Also noted that the 7 BTL comments on Stock’s piece all seem to be by men.

Nope. I said:

"Observable patterns, trends or tendencies within exist within particular groups.
These do not equate to either necessary or sufficient conditions for membership of that group."

They do in terms of social categorisations tho. IE we don't use gametal or chromosomal tests to distinguish sex in social situations, rather typical associations.

"We don't distinguish sex, even in social situations, by how suggestible someone is, how 'kind' they feel they have to be, or in fact any personality traits."

Presentation is downstream from personality inclinations so we do in a sense rely on personality traits.

Whilst it's certainly true social pressures exist that influence human behaviour, the extent that they do in terms of personal choices varies. Humans are more complex than 'monkey see monkey do' logic thanks to the abstract reasoning they possess. There's also decades of research on how genes & hormones influence human behaviour not to mention the evolutionary pressures that shaped these.

The idea that humans don't have self awareness of their personal disposition & make decisions independent of social pressure to align with their personality is ludicrous.

The idea that Howse doesn't post incontinent rubbish in a vainglorious attempt to convince us that there is a world where men can actually be women is ludicrous.

So your argument started out as being that in social situations we distinguish sex not via thousands of years of evolution that have enabled us to assess at a glance from countless subtle body cues from gait to tone, but via observed personality traits.

When the silliness of this is pointed out you say, well, no, it's obviously based on physical observation but there may be cases where someone has deliberately modified their physical presentation (looks, gait, voice etc.) that it might fool others (some or all) as to their sex. And someone would have to be motivated by something to do that, and therefore it is their personality that causes them to do it, and therefore it's sort of people's personalities that we use to categorise by sex.

The second argument is so tortured I don't think it can even be called sophistry.

It also applies exclusively to trans people who 'pass' which I doubt is your intention.

It also fails to account for the fact that tricking someone into thinking you are something does not in fact make it so.

If I trick people into believing I am of pensionable age - whether by altering my body, mannerisms or anything else - it does not and should not in fact grant me membership of that group and everything that goes with it.

The criteria for membership of that group is to be human and to have been born a set number of years ago, not conforming to associations with that group and/or convincing enough people that I was born longer so than I actually was.

Exactly the same applies to your reproductive sex class.

Thanks for making these arguments (over and over and over again), though. I think it's good to have the weak reasoning out on display, along with the straightforward logical ripostes. I read posters on here for years who patiently performed this service for me so I like to think I'm paying it forward to other lurkers.

Why does anyone reply to Howse? Surely the best thing to do
is ignore him?