This paper offers an analysis of Hipponax’s obscene and abusive vocabulary, with particular attention to the way the issue has been framed and articulated by Jeffrey Henderson in his The Maculate Muse (Oxford and New York, 1991). I argue both that many of Henderson's analyses of individual words and passages in the fragments are wrong and that his attempt to combine iambos and comedy into a single, genetically related phenomenon elides much of what is distinctive about Hipponax, while modelling a problematic style of reading difficult and potentially ‘dirty’ ancient texts.

To gain insight into the political meaning of the Romantic Self, it is essential to consider the relationship between subjectivity and nature on the one hand and the subject and the norms established within a community on the other. These two lines of inquiry converge in the examination of gender, specifically in the question of whether our sexual-biological identity, which constitutes our most nature-bound aspect, affects our subjectivity – that is to say, whether our mode of thinking, feeling, and relating to others is determined by our sexual identity. A consideration of Romantic reflections on gender will complete our investigation about the extent to which Romanticism regards the self as determined by nature or as independent from it. The first part of the chapter explains the meaning of the word Geschlecht (‘gender’ or ‘sex’) in the German philosophical debate at the end of the eighteenth century. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the role played by women within the Romantic ‘symphilosophy’. It closes with a focus on some Romantic women philosophers and their own idea on the role women should play in the cultural and philosophical debate.

American morality standards traditionally dictated restrictions on erotica featuring nudity and sex. Early twentieth century pornography only circulated in marginal spaces — brothels and all-male gatherings. But the new Kodak camera fueled amateur pornography, and, despite Hollywood’s self-censorship, adult “exploitation” films grew. In postwar America, pornography emerged from the shadows. Obscenity laws and their enforcement weakened, and Hollywood relaxed its censorship as acceptance of sex imagery grew. Porn bookstores and foreign or “art” films featuring nudity increased in downtown sex districts. Risqué novels, Playboy, and beefcake magazines addressing gay subculture became popular. Sexually explicit films starting with Deep Throat (1972) achieved notoriety and commercial success. By the 1980s, however, urban renewal gentrified porn districts while videotape and cable TV shifted pornography to homes and privacy, increasing pornography’s audience. The Internet merely proliferated at-home pornography. As pornography expanded, so did public opposition in a feminist anti-pornography movement allied with Christian conservatives

Women opened cultural and political spaces in punk. This chapter looks at connections and tensions between punk and feminism.

The rise of the #MeToo movement has prompted a public reckoning with sexual consent, with public discourse now squarely focused on issues of sexual coercion and culpability. However, the principle of consent has a much longer history and wider significance beyond recent events. Bolstered by a social contract model that prioritises individual personhood and the protection of private property, consent has been central to the development of modern law and liberal societies (Munro, 2008). As feminist legal scholar Vanessa Munro argues, in Western legal settings, it ‘demarcate[s] the terrain between acceptable and unacceptable intrusions upon property / bodies’ (Munro, 2008, pp. 923–4) and accredits the liberal subject with its defining features of individuality, rationality and autonomy. In the specific context of sexual violence, consent is endowed with significant power (Hindes, 2022): it is used to arbitrate legal disputes over sexual assault and violence, and determine whether violation has occurred.

This chapter considers punk’s masculinities, showing how the culture both reaffirmed and challenged gender norms.

The ‘framing’ goods of life, sociality and rationality constitute necessary formal conditions of all the other, namely non-formal, goods. They are also intrinsically good; indeed, without any one of them, one ceases to be a human altogether. Life has absolute priority as a framing good, and is distinct from health (since one can be living and ill). After canvassing Aquinas’s and Finnis’s justification of life as a basic good, I offer my own bipartite justification in terms of life as both a ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ human function. As to sociality, humans are essentially animals who live-in-relation, in the rich sense of developing various intentional relations to the world. If they fail to develop these, they become disabled (disability being a dysfunction and hence natural bad). I then detail various forms of sociality (which Aristotle calls philia, often translated ‘friendship’), along with the perfections or goods they embody. Last, I broach the framing good of rationality. This should be understood not as a virtue (either practical or theoretical), but rather as the ‘immanent character of human being and its form or mode of living-in-relation’. I explore its content in detail in Chapter 7.

One of the most contentious issues relting to sex and gender identity is whether a transgener person has a right to keep informaiton about their biological sex private from others. Related to the right to freedom of expression, discussed in previous chapters, is the countervailing right to private life. Nowhere encapsulates the potential for human rights to conflict more clearly than the tension between the interest of one person to disclose information that another party would rather be kept private. This chapter examines circumstances when it may be lawful to disclose information about the biological sex of another when they would strongly wish that information not be shared at all. Relatedly, it explores circumstances when heightened rights of privacy may obtain as a result of data protection obligations placed on businesses and public bodies. There is no absolute right to keep the fact of one’s sex private, but there may be some circumstances where one has a reasonable expectation of privacy and where disclosure may be unlawful.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the UK Suprme Court’s decision in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, the landmark case which considered the definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010. The Court set out a test for determining when a Gender Recognition Certificate will not modify an individual’s legally recognised sex. In so doing, the Court reiterated the default common law position that sex is binary, biological, and immutable as a matter of fact. The Gender Recognition Act will not modify an individual’s legally recognised sex where the terms, context, and purpose of another enactment show that sex was intended to mean biological sex, because of a clear incompatibility between a certificated reading of sex and another enactment or where an enactment’s provisions are rendered incoherent and unworkable by a certificated sex interpretation. Applying this test to the Equality Act 2010, the Court concluded that a biological meaning of sex prevails. In concluding as such, the Court maintained equality of status for those protected under the characteristic of gender reassignment and reiterated that transgender people remain protected from associative or perception-based sex discrimination. While doctrinally a modest clarification, the judgment has significant social impact, correcting widespread misinterpretations of sex and gender in law.

This chapter describes the law governing transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports. It compares the interpretations of Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination by the Obama and Biden administrations on the one hand and the Trump administration on the other. It explores the state laws regarding transgender girls’ inclusion or exclusion that have arisen against the backdrop of Title IX ambiguity. Finally, the chapter examines what courts have said about what Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause require with regard to transgender girls’ inclusion in or exclusion from girls’ sports.

This chapter explores the scientific connection between sex and sport. It begins by examining the meaning of sex and the criteria used to assign individuals to the male or female category. It ends by exploring the link between sex and sport and identifying the sex-related traits that have the greatest impact on athletic performance.

The question of whether transgender girls should be permitted to participate in girls’ sports has been one of the most politically contested and socially controversial of the last decade. Neither law nor medicine provides definitive answers. This book takes on the absolutist positions staked out by both the left and the right and argues in favor of a more nuanced framework that seeks to ensure all girls and boys –both transgender and cisgender – have access to the benefits of organized sports.

This chapter examines the arguments for transgender girls’ exclusion from girls’ sports that have dominated right-leaning public and political discourse. The chapter articulates the argument for exclusion based on fairness and contends that it cannot justify total exclusion of transgender girls from girls’ sports at every age and level. The chapter next uncovers the claims about human flourishing and personal dignity that also motivate arguments for exclusion and argues that such claims are too empirically dubious and normatively controversial to drive policy decisions.

There are no natural or neutral eligibility rules for girls’ sports. All rules say something about who and what society values. Courts and policymakers will ultimately need to decide how eligibility rules should or must be drawn. In answering these questions, they will need to decide what the social goal of sex-segregated sports is, and which eligibility rules best serve this end. This book started from the premise that transgender and cisgender girls are entitled to equal concern and respect. It then offered a pragmatic and workable framework for optimizing individual and group benefits of sports for both transgender and cisgender girls.