Unpicking the Seam
How the “Sex-Class” Feminists Hijack Sex-Realism While Smuggling in Misandry
Imagine a conversation that plays out with depressing regularity in certain corners of the gender-critical world:
Male: You just don’t understand men.
Feminist: Why should we centre men in our feminism?
Feminist: Men are to blame for everything.
Male: I thought you just said… Oh, never mind.
It’s funny because it’s true. The circularity is the point. This is the signature move of a dangerous sub-category of feminist: the “sex-class” (radical materialist or socialist gender-critical) feminists. They enjoy real credibility in the sex-realist, child-protection camp because they correctly insist that women are adult human females, that biological sex matters for rights and medicine, and that the surge in girls seeking mastectomies and medical transition is a safeguarding disaster. Yet they retain a core operating system borrowed from older radical and socialist traditions: patriarchy as a system of male class dominance that extracts labour, sexuality, and deference from women. Men, as a class, are positioned as the entitled extractors. Female problems are primarily external—socialisation into service, male entitlement, the male gaze. This school of thought has wide acceptance in gender-critical spaces precisely because it delivers half the goods. But that half-truth makes it more effective at laundering the harmful parts than the openly queer or intersectional versions (which deny the reality of sex) ever could.
In a recent provocative post on X, I observed that campaigns to end The Sun’s Page 3 (topless glamour models) removed a form of cultural “reverence for the female form.” Once that disappeared, I suggested, countless girls later pursued unwarranted mastectomies. Were the two cultural shifts linked? The replies were instructive. Typical responses were quick to resort to accusations of perversion, creepiness, ogling, leering, and so forth, and that it was these behaviours that caused girls to develop “issues with their breasts.” The imagery itself was blamed for female body distress. This is the sex-class lens in action. Male visual interest in the female form is recast as systemic oppression rather than a predictable feature of sexual dimorphism that can be channelled into healthy appreciation or crude objectification depending on culture and character. The “No More Page 3” campaign itself (2012–2015) was a classic feminist project. It framed the feature as sexist objectification that demeaned women and damaged girls’ body image. It succeeded with broad institutional support. Whether Page 3 was net positive, harmless fun, or crude is debatable. What is harder to defend is the assumption that removing public celebration of the female body would automatically improve girls’ relationship with their own. The timing overlaps with the acceleration of female youth gender dysphoria and the rise of social media. Correlation is not causation, but the hypothesis that a culture stripped of positive (if imperfect) embodiment messaging leaves girls more vulnerable to identity-based solutions is at least worth testing against evidence—not dismissed as male apologetics.
Three Camps, One Trojan Horse
To see why the ‘sex-class feminist’ is uniquely problematic, contrast the three “third wave” positions clearly:
Liberal/empirical sex-realists start with observable biology and data. Sex is binary and relevant. Average psychological and physical differences between males and females are real and partly innate (hormonal, genetic, cross-cultural patterns in interests, variability, and behaviour). Child safeguarding prioritises evidence: weak outcomes for puberty blockers and hormones in minors, high desistance rates in earlier cohorts, comorbidities, and social influences. Fathers are potential allies in protecting daughters’ healthy development. Celebration of sexual dimorphism is normal and often protective.
Queer/intersectional types treat gender as fluid performance and centre multiple oppressions. They are openly hostile to sex-based rights and have driven much of the institutional capture around affirmation and self-ID. Their influence on the surge in women identifying out of their sex is direct and irrefutable.
The ‘sex-class’ feminist sits in the middle and is the most effective at colonising the first camp. They are robustly sex-realist on transgender issues because they view women as a material sex class oppressed via gender roles. This gives them sharp tools against self-ID and medicalisation of children. But they keep the patriarchy-as-male-class-dominance framework. Men are socialised into dominance and entitlement; women into service. Problems are explained primarily through external extraction and socialisation rather than a balanced mix of biology, culture, individual agency, and family structure. Their internal model of blaming others, as well as a worldview rooted in cultural Marxism, puts this group reliably on the left politically. It is the oppressor-oppressed narrative of identity politics and the culture wars that has made Western Civilisation uniquely vulnerable to the transgender cult, as well as giving us the social emasculation of adolescent boys with accusations of ‘toxic masculinity’.
This is where the hypocrisy bites. The sex-class feminist routinely says “we don’t centre men” when challenged on misandry or one-sided analysis. Yet their entire analytic engine centres men as the originating class of oppression. Every female difficulty is traceable back to male dominance structures. Fathers become suspect by default. Positive male investment in daughters (protection, guidance, modelling healthy boundaries with the opposite sex) is downplayed or pathologised as patriarchal. Girls are taught, subtly or explicitly, to scan outward for the male gaze or systemic blame rather than building internal resilience, competence, and realistic self-assessment.
The Imaginary Conversation Made Real
The dialogue at the top isn’t parody; it’s diagnostic. When pressed on why male perspectives on protecting girls or celebrating female form are dismissed, the answer is “we don’t centre men.” When asked why almost every cultural or psychological ill lands at the feet of male socialisation or entitlement, the answer is that men are the problem class. The contradiction is never resolved because the framework requires both moves: deny special pleading for men while maintaining men as the universal explanatory variable.
This isn’t harmless rhetoric. It shapes policy instincts and cultural messaging. Campaigns that treat male visual appreciation as inherently dangerous can contribute to the very body alienation they claim to oppose. Rhetoric that frames fathers primarily through lenses of dominance or absence weakens the two-parent structures most protective of children. Education that explains away nature with “socialisation” assumptions can steer distressed girls toward external identity solutions instead of addressing comorbidities, family dynamics, or normal developmental turbulence associated with physical maturation.
The youth data makes the stakes concrete. Referrals to gender services exploded, especially among adolescent girls—a reversal of the historical pattern. Multifactorial explanations (social media, peer influence, porn, mental health trends, social contagion elements) fit better than any single-cause story, whether “it’s all patriarchy” or “it’s all biology.”
Why the Sex-Classist Retains Influence—and Why It Shouldn’t
The sex-class feminist earned its seat at the child-protection table by being right about sex and wrong about transgender ideology’s expansion. That partial correctness buys tolerance for the rest of the package: the class-based analysis that flattens individual men into entitled oppressors and encourages girls to externalise rather than internalise locus of control. It is more dangerous than the fully queer version precisely because it is harder to dismiss. People who correctly oppose medicalising confused children can still absorb the habit of viewing male perspectives or male-female complementarity with reflexive suspicion.
The seam I picked at — reverence versus objectification, celebration of the female form versus its suppression — is exactly where the sex-classist’s influence shows. A healthier coalition would ask: What cultural messages actually help girls develop secure embodiment and realistic expectations? Evidence points toward balanced affirmation of sexual dimorphism, strong families with involved fathers, and resistance to both crude objectification and puritanical erasure of the body. It does not point toward treating male interest in female beauty as the root explanation for female distress. The sex-classist model has no special right to own the sex-realist, child-protection space. It brings valuable clarity on biology and women’s material interests, but it also imports an ideological operating system that systematically undervalues fathers, over-weights external male blame, and risks teaching girls that their problems are someone else’s fault rather than challenges to be met with agency and realism. The entertaining circularity in that imaginary conversation is the tell. Once you notice the move — “Don’t centre men” followed shortly thereafter by “Men are to blame for everything” — the rest of the framework becomes harder to take at face value. A clearer, more durable alliance would keep the sex-realism and the safeguarding focus while dropping the oppressor-oppressed antagonism. Biology is real. Fathers matter. Girls deserve cultures that celebrate their development without shame or ideological capture. The sex-class seam is visible. It can be unpicked.