Jeremy Stangroom

A foundational claim of properly radical feminism is that gender norms - including norms of presentation, behaviour, language, etc, - are in

large part patriarchal constructions. There is nothing essential about these norms, nothing that ties them to a particular biological sex.

In fact, the way they function in patriarchal society is to ensure that one sex remains subordinate to the other. They are a barrier to real

emancipation. The task of feminism, then, is to deconstruct, and ultimately destroy, gender norms, because that is a prerequisite of real

freedom (intra-psychic, interpersonal and political). It follows that what binds women together as a group can be a matter of biology

(though this is actually a contested & tricky issue even for gender critical feminists), or shared experiences that are inextricably linked

to that biology, but it cannot be merely a matter of identifying with a particular gender (because gender is contingent and constructed).

Moreover, in a patriarcal society, to the extent that a person feels comfortable inhabiting a prescribed gender position, the more they are

the more they are complicit in a patriarchal construction. This goes for men *and* women. So if you read about the history of 2nd wave

you'll find there was a lot of painful wrestling with the issue of whether identifying as heterosexual, particuarly in the form that

heterosexuality takes in extant patriarchal socities, is a betrayal of feminist ideals.

In sum, then, gender norms in patriarchal society are both constitutive of what it means to be a "woman" in those societies, and they are

coercive, contingent and a barrier to genuine female emancipation. If you identify with those norms, etc, then you are in some sense

complicit with a patriarchal construction. That's the argument, basically - with apologies for oversimplification & lacunae.