This article is a critical feminist analysis of the UK Gender Recognition Act of 2004. This Act is radical in enabling transgenders to gain certificates recognising their new ‘acquired gender’ without undergoing hormonal or surgical treatment. The Act has considerable implications for marriage, for motherhood and fatherhood, for women who are the partners of men […]

This article argues that women in the military are in double jeopardy. They face the danger of rape from their male colleagues as well as the ordinary dangers of being killed or wounded by the enemy. They are used to send messages from one masculine military to another in their very bodies. This is particularly […]

In April 2004, the Family Court of Australia made the decision that a 13-year-old girl, said to be suffering from gender identity disorder (GID), should be treated as a boy and embark upon a course of female hormone treatment to suppress menstruation. The treatment is expected to change to the administration of male hormones at […]

I have a radical lesbian feminist position on marriage which is well expressed by the US lesbian legal theorist Ruthann Robson (1992) who argues for the general abolition of marriage saying that ‘lesbian survival is not furthered by embracing the law’s rule of marriage. Our legal energy is better directed at abolishing marriage as a […]

This article examines a recent tendency amongst researchers of sex tourism to include women within the ranks of sex tourists in destinations such as the Caribbean and Indonesia. It argues that a careful attention to the power relations, context, meanings and effects of the behaviours of male and female tourists who engage in sexual relations […]

This article argues that contemporary concern about ending child prostitution is misdirected in its strategy. Some theorists and activists, even the ILO, are seeking to create a distinction between adult and child prostitution as if child prostitution could be ended whilst adult prostitution remains intact. The motivation for the distinction relies upon trends in the […]

Today there are many forces at work in the normalization of the international sex industry (Jeffreys, 1997). The sex industry has become immensely profitable, providing considerable resources, not just to individuals and networks involved in trafficking women but to governments who have come to depend on sex industry revenue. One aspect of the industry in […]

In this article, I shall examine the ideas and practices of the bisexual movement that has developed in the Western world in the last decade. I shall offer a lesbian feminist critique. Bisexual theorists and activists have formulated critiques of lesbian feminism at their conferences and in anthologies of their writings. Lesbian feminists have been […]

Feminist analysis of transsexualism such as that of Janice Raymond has seen it as a deeply conservative phenomenon in which surgical mutilation is employed to maintain the genders of male dominance and female subordination. Transsexualism has a new face in the nineties in “transgenderism” which employs queer and postmodern theory to render transsexualism progressive. This […]

Can feminists theorize prostitution if they have never worked as prostitutes? Feminist analysis would be very partial if we could only speak of that which we had personally experienced. In the absence of personal experience feminist theorists can rely upon other women’s accounts and upon the exercise of their own critical political intelligence. In the […]