Holly Lawford-Smith

Gender-Critical Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2022) argues a position rather than surveying one: that sex is biological, that gender is something done to people on the basis of sex, and that women's politics should organise around the first. Lawford-Smith has been an taught political philosophy at Melbourne as an associate professor since 2017, following a lectureship at Sheffield and a doctorate from the Australian National University on feasibility constraints in political theory. A New Zealander, born in Taupō in 1982, she read philosophy at Otago first. The work is contested on its own terms. Academics signed open letters objecting to her 2021 website gathering anonymous accounts of transgender women in single-sex spaces, and later to the book's publication; Oxford defended its review process and published it. Not in Their Name (2019) asks what citizens owe for what their states do; before it she co-edited Global Justice (2012) with Christian Barry, a collection on justice across borders. She writes regularly for Quillette.