Holly Lawford-Smith

An unquestioned assumption of contemporary politics is that the left owns minority groups, in the sense that the left, exclusively, champions the interests of minorities and is for that reason owed the allegiance of minorities. This, in turn, gives rise to the sense of dissonance created by right-wing dissenters—the black social conservative, the gay ultra-nationalist, the female libertarian, the poor...

The expectation used to be that men would be masculine and women would be feminine, and this was assumed to come naturally to them in virtue of their biology. That orthodoxy persists today in many parts of society. On this view, sex is gender and gender is sex. A new view of gender has emerged in recent years, a view...