In his 1995 essay 'Queers, Sissies, Dykes, and Tomboys: Deconstructing the Conflation of "Sex," "Gender," and "Sexual Orientation" in Euro-American Law and Society', law professor Francisco Valdes argued that 'queer legal theory must transcend the limits of current privacy notions and push for sex/gender dignity and equality in all spheres of life'. 'The ultimate goal, dignity and equality, requires the right of sexual minorities to be open,' he wrote, 'to be active in our occupations and secure in our homes without having to choose continually between a life of closet and a life of enduring homophobic bigotries.'

This sounds reasonable. Nonetheless, one might ask whether or not this thinking applies to Kayla Lemieux, a male teacher at a Canadian high school who hit the headlines in 2022 due to being photographed wearing prosthetic Z-cup breasts to work. Lemieux was claiming to be a woman – was this, then, merely a push for 'sex/gender dignity and equality' without being 'limited to conventional (mis)conceptions of privacy'? Or was it, as many felt (including the students who took the photos), overstepping the mark, and quite possibly taking the piss? Was this a creepy man exploiting the flimsiest plausible deniability in order to make students feel uncomfortable, or would even suggesting this constitute a potential denial of Lemieux's true selfhood? For those who could not countenance doing the latter yet still had the capacity to spot the bleeding obvious, it was hard to formulate an acceptable response.

'It feels like the progressive thing to do is to support this teacher's right to self-present in the classroom as she does, or at least to honour her side in the matter,' writes Phoebe Maltz Bovy of the case. At the same time, Bovy notes, very politely, that there was something about this particular choice of self-presentation which 'makes a mockery of countless young girls who've been told at school that their bodies – developing bodies they themselves are still getting used to – are a distraction'. There's that, and there's also the fact that this mockery may have been the entire idea. It is impossible to know the precise motivation. Does one need to, though? If some forms of self-expression impose so much on the selfhood of others, should we not find somewhere to draw a line? 'Bringing your whole self to work' might seem easy, but not if you take it to its logical conclusion.

Like many beliefs that are now defended without qualification in the name of kindness and inclusivity, 'bringing your whole self to work' starts from an important place. We know that some people have had to engage in far more self-denial and self-suppression than others in order to be accepted in many workplaces. This has been particularly true for those whose sexualities and relationships have been stigmatised, denied formal recognition and even treated as grounds for dismissal. The freedom to talk about one's partners, share stories, have one's losses recognised, should be accorded to everyone, not least because we are all defined by others. This only becomes a problem when one group's self-definition as 'the norm' is permitted to override and deny the social and emotional realities of others.

When individuals share some things that might once have had to remain hidden – relationships status, mental health history, caring responsibilities – this can be characterised as 'bringing one's whole self to work', but this is a shorthand as opposed to the literal truth. It is a way of relating to others, not the revealing of some unchanging inner essence or the exposure of all personal details. In the workplace, just the same as anywhere else, we adapt and make room for others. We alter who we are according to shifting relational contexts. Equality and inclusion ought to mean not that everyone must be viewed and described by their colleagues in exactly the way they would most desire, but that shifting and adapting is fairly distributed. It should not mean that there are two classes of people: those who claim all the selfhood, and those who absorb and accommodate. Nor should it mean there is no separation between the work and the non-work self. An inclusive workplace recognises that people have different needs and dependencies outside of work. A kind one makes room for alternative viewpoints within it.

'Bringing your whole self to work' has undergone one of those toxic mutations – akin to those experienced by 'rights aren't pie' and 'biology isn't destiny' – which means the idea of the 'whole self' is taken literally. Since we are social beings, existing interdependently, this cannot really hold. If everyone is being their true self, you will constantly encounter people whose self-perception challenges yours. The only way to protect yourself from this is to ensure that some people get to be a 'whole self' while others have to be supporting actors. To the latter, one might justify their latest status by calling them allies (the flattering tactic), privileged (the neutral one) or bigoted (the shaming one). Some employees are, to adapt Beauvoir, 'the Subject [. . .] the Absolute'; others are 'the Other'. Many a woman has experienced discrimination for expressing views on sex ad gender in the workplace (or even outside it) which are consistent with her sense of self. In such cases, however, 'bringing your whole self to work' only functions in reverse. The woman is, she will be told, preventing others from being their whole selves by refusing to validate their identities. She cannot point out that to do so imposes an unreasonable cost on her, by forcing her to deny her own perceptions. This concept of the 'whole self' does not allow for reciprocity or compromise. In a 2015 essay denouncing 'terfs' in academia, Sara Ahmed hyperbolically declared that we should be 'aiming to eliminate the positions that aim to eliminate people'. 'For if she begins to tell the truth [or at least, her truth], the figure in the looking-glass shrinks.'

This veneration of the antipluralistic 'whole self' is presented as the epitome of kindness – if we all just accepted each other, think how free we would be! – yet true kindness involves a willingness to revise our understanding of the self, again and again, as we interact with others. Historically, the problem for women has been that men have expected us to adapt so that they do not have to. Flexibility and openness are viewed as feminine qualities; rigidity and directness are male ones. Script after script – religious, scientific, pornographic, political – 'discovers' that women and girls simply find it easier to adapt their behaviour than poor old men. Female sexuality is posited as 'malleable'; girls, according to Simon Baron-Cohen, are 'better at self-control'. In 2012's The End of Men, Hanna Rosin compares 'Plastic Woman', who performs 'superhuman feats of flexibility', with poor 'Cardboard Man', who 'hardly changes at all'. That this 'flexibility' might be more accurately described as the resourcefulness of the subordinate has done little to alter the perception that in situations of conflict or change, it is female selfhood that can take the hit. This stereotype, coupled with male-default understandings of bodies and lifecycles, means that formerly male-dominated workplaces still expect women to adapt to structures and patterns created with men in mind.

'The job market,' Katrine Marçal writes, 'is still largely defined by the idea that humans are bodiless, sexless, profit-seeking individuals without family or context. The woman can choose between one of these, or being their opposite: the invisible and self-sacrificing one who is needed to balance the equation.' It is important to understand that this mindset was already in place long before HR departments got on board with promoting twenty-first-century 'whole selfhood'. Women's opportunity to play the game had already been granted on the assumption that they would do their best to 'fit in' by not being too female. If companies then start to promote a model of 'whole selfhood' that is rooted in an ideology which denies the salience of biological sex – and with it, the physical, social and lifecycle differences women are already downplaying in order not to be viewed as liabilities – then who gets to bring 'more' of themselves to work remains as strictly circumscribed as before. The superficial justification for the female employee's self-suppression might have changed, but the expectation and the experience remain the same.

The sociologist Kathleen Lynch points out that individualism is implicated in neoliberal capitalism regardless of whether it is 'constructed positively as individuality, promoting uniqueness originality and capacity for self-realization, or negatively as indicative of self-preoccupation and self-interest'. There are obvious advantages to a modern-day employer in viewing equality and inclusion through the lens of the 'whole self' rather than that of its relational counterpart. It offers a progressive-sounding way of celebrating those differences which are less likely to cost money or involve serious structural change. The relational self gets pregnant; the relational self has dependents and dependencies; the relational self is not a box you can tick. The relational self does not ask for validation or approval, but for a shared redistribution of time and resources, one that necessitates putting other people's self-perception in question. If by 'being kind' we truly mean striving to centre care and compassion in our policies, then it is necessary, as Lynch argues, 'to develop a political and cultural appreciation of how the self is co-created, through struggles and negotiations to relationships, for better or worse, both collectively and individually'. This is the opposite of the politics of 'I am whatever I say I am.'

In A Little Give, her autobiographical exploration of 'women's work' against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, Marina Benjamin describes coming to the realisation that for socially progressive movements such as feminism, chasing after authenticity can be a self-defeating objective: 'It may well be more honest, and I suspect we'd be happier for it too, if feminism [. . .] gave up on its quest and instead accepted the inevitable mess and chaos of our lives.' To abandon our attachments to an illusory authenticity – one that so quickly collapses in the need to position oneself as the hero surrounded by non-player characters, lest one start to doubt one's own existence – offers a route to real change. Relational selfhood is holding back sometimes, taking up more space at others. It involves a much more meaningful recognition of the fact that 'what constitutes through division the "inner" and "outer" worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained' than the author of those words, [Judith] Butler, could manage. This tenuous maintenance, far from an expression of conservative paranoia, can be revolutionary work.

For girls today, social justice kindness culture can operate as an extension of this. It demands the same obsessive self-judgement, the same strictures, the condition of being tracked by the male gaze. As with external beauty practices, the point is not really the thing itself – particular acts or choices of words. It is that you are kept in a constant state of hypervigilance, which feeds the self-objectification spiral.

Qualities such as entitlement and unkindness become additional flaws that must be worked on. Female privilege has acquired a similar status to female fat – a supposed indicator of excess for which young women should constantly check themselves. (Is my privilege showing?) The 'greedy' girl on the scales in Take a Look at Yourself has a woke equivalent in the 'cis girl' jealously hoarding her privileges and policing her boundaries. (If you have been inclusive from an early age, boundary reframing shouldn't be necessary). The privilege framework, notes Phoebe Maltz Bovy in The Perils of 'Privilege', 'asks all the many privilege-loosely-defined women to apologize for taking up space, for speaking their mind, which women already do, copiously'. I cannot count how many hungry hours I spent thinking of 'scales girl', resolving not to be like her; if 'cis girl' had been around, I'd have done the same with her.

It may not seem that you are being bullied into any of this. Everything can fall under the rubric of 'work on the self'. Just as the beauty industry has successfully market dull, repetitive, sometimes painful rituals as 'pampering', female emotional suppression and unforgiving self-scrutiny can be packaged as 'gratitude', 'inclusion' and 'kindness therapy'. These are projects aimed at making you acceptable to others and yourself – only they are never-ending projects, so you will never be fully acceptable.

It is worth noting that female inclusion in sport has long been controversial because it places patriarchal definitions of what women are – passive, non-competitive, their emotions directed solely towards meeting the needs of men and children – in question. The version of femaleness it presents to the world is completely unlike that found in traditional conduct guides or porn-inspired modern-day treatises on womanhood as femininity. When England's Lionesses won Euro 2022, Lucy Ward wrote in the Guardian about the joy of seeing goal scorer Chloe Kelly's shirtless celebration because it struck with images of women designed for the male gaze. 'Here instead is a woman thinking about herself, her sporting skill and her team; looking out, even as she is being looked at.' Kelly is not playing the object; far from being a hollowed-out fantasy figure, she occupies herself. This version of womanhood is far more controversial and fear-inspiring than the hackneyed, hyper-feminine version of gender non-conformity that [Jonathan] Liew and [Freddie] deBoer have convinced themselves the less enlightened masses are worried about.

Today's sportswomen are not underrepresented in coverage and prize money because earlier generations of women showed no interest in football or athletics, or because earlier spectators were not interested in watching women compete. As Rachel Hewitt documents in 2023's In Her Nature, men in positions of power chose to drive them out, introducing restrictions following periods during which sportswomen had been making significant gains. Hewitt associates the pushback at the turn of the twentieth century with a raft of measures imposed 'in reaction to the burgeoning success and authority of women in the public domain'. She quotes Pierre de Couberrin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, declaring that women's role should be 'above all to crown the victors, as was the case in the ancient tournaments'. This desire to drive women out of sports is very explicit, and clearly linked to marking territory in order to reinforce gender norms. 'Key to sport's capacity to boost male strength,' writes Hewitt, 'was the exclusion of femininity and effeminacy from its spaces'. One way of reinforcing sport's relationship to masculinity is to deny women any sports at all; another is to recast the female sporting category not as a space for female physical excellence, but as one for lower-achieving 'feminine' people, who will never achieve the speeds of male athletes, not because they are biologically different, but because they lack the magical masculine touch. The recategorisation of female sports as feminine sports thus excludes women and girls on two levels: first, by male people taking the literal places and prizes of female competitors, but second, and perhaps more significantly, by redefining them not as true sports, but an inferior, feminine imitation (which is, I suspect, how some male sports writers and commentators have always thought of them anyway).

Although women have managed to claw back status in areas such as football, they are still, as the football journalist Carrie Dunn points out, treated as interlopers, 'expected to demonstrate gratitude for everything they receive, no matter how little, particularly as they [. . .] begin to take up spaces and resources - spaces and resources that [. . .] are still given to men and boys without question'. Their male counterparts, meanwhile, 'are hailed and praised as "allies" for doing the bare minimum, for recognising the existence of women's football [. . .] when true allyship would be using that platform to genuinely promote and support the game and its participants'. The double standard of kindness – the lowest of bars for men, the highest for women – is already in place in the sporting world. If female players are assumed to have a debt of gratitude to pay, it is short step to recasting this as privilege and entitlement. By intruding on the 'male' sphere of football, the interlopers are seen to have something which doesn't belong to them (despite being robbed of it in the early twentieth century, when FA introduced what would become a fifty-year ban on women's football). Rather than say any of this out loud, the 'progressive' male sports writer can call these women exclusionary and fantasise about 'the inspiring' day when a better type of woman has claimed it all back.

Should one require proof that male inclusion in female categories is about prioritising one sex over another (as opposed to prioritising gender over sex in an area where one sex just so happens to lose out more), one might look at US Rowing's 2023 trans inclusion policy. This decrees that it is fine for any number of male-bodied people to compete as women in women's events, but not fine for more than 50 per cent of a mixed rowing crew to be male bodied. That is, trans inclusion is the priority and sex is irrelevant when female rowers might lose out as a consequence, but not when it might lead to male rowers being disadvantaged by a mixed team having a greater proportion of male competitors than their team does. As Olympic rower Mary O'Connor commented, 'this policy destroys fair competition for girls and women, but it protects it for boys and men'. For some reason, everyone agrees that a trans woman's 'personhood' and 'dignity' isn't quite as important when a man might lose out on a trophy too. After all, one must think of the man's personhood and dignity too. There's only one group for whom personhood and dignity are apparently of no consequence at all.

The power of style to override substance makes it difficult for feminists to critique this dynamic without being dismissed as miserable opponents of other people just 'being themselves'. The fact that one person's expanding 'selfhood' requires the constriction of another person's – that it means women cannot, to quote [Andrea] Dworkin, 'feel a whole range of feelings, express a whole range of ideas, address our own experience with an honesty that is not pleasing to men' – is simply not noticed. The underlying hierarchy is the air we breathe; we only notice difference, and the 'difference' of a superficial rejection of one form of masculinity is enough to distract us from that which remains the same. Any feminist failure to get on board with the 'fun' of a boy in a dress destroying his sister's possessions, or a man in lipstick leading a woman's march, falls into the category of old-style feminists once again being bitter and humourless, if not actively hateful.

The truly gender non-conforming women – gender non-conforming in her resistance to male entitlement – comes off poorly in comparison to the 'fabulous' male who embraces every feminine norm bar that of being situated lower down the social hierarchy. She is sour-faced; he is joyous. She is limitation; he is freedom. It is not surprising that many 'progressive' men (and women) not only decide to throw their lot with him but convince themselves that this is the way to create a brighter, shinier, kinder world for everyone. If only some women (and little girls) would stop making so much of a fuss about keeping their paints, their castles, and indeed anything of their own.

The experience of pregnancy is completely closed off to half of the human race. The feeling that it ought to be shared out more equally – at least in terms of cultural status, if not physical pain or risk – is a cornerstone of patriarchy. It underpins narratives which make the process of reproduction a male creative act, and legal and social norms which inscribe male ownership of women and children (naming conventions, custody biases, abortion restrictions, the intense regulation of female sex lives). It is fundamentally patriarchal to seek to 'reassign' reproductive authority to male people. This is a problem for those who claim feminism takes nothing away from men. Many men would like to retain a central role in a biological process which excludes them, only in ways that are less scientifically untenable and socially inconvenient than before.

As Mary O'Brien pointed out in 1981's The Politics of Reproduction, however much wanting babies is cast as a 'woman thing', men are obsessed with paternity. To deny it, she writes, 'is to make nonsense of centuries of strenuous masculine activity to negate the uncertainty of fatherhood'. In a reversal of the myth of penis envy, second-wave texts such as O'Brien's or Gena Corea's The Mother Machine (1985) emphasised men's natural position as one of alienation from the reproductive process and any assurance of biological lineage. A pregnant woman is never in doubt as to whether the foetus is really inside her body and not someone else's; without a number of measures which limit women's sexual freedom and other men's access to her, a man can never be absolutely certain that the same foetus is connected to him and not another man.

'Man's nullity as a parent appears unbearable to him,' wrote Corea. '[. . .] His assertion of a right to the child must be supported by ideologies of male supremacy and by a host of social structures.' In any culture that still encourages women to view their reproductive potential as a liability, such assertions may seem strange or even hysterical. They envy us? But the structures, myths and rituals exist. Look at forced marriage. Look at the right's obsession with female sexual purity. Look at the paternity tests that were a staple of nineties talk shows. Look, if you dare, at the left's new-found obsession with claiming men can get pregnant, too, or even that humans can change sex as easily as clownfish. Female bodies are not meant to do something that male bodies can't. If you cannot stop them doing it – and especially if you still require them to do it – you must take it upon yourself to define and control what pregnancy is and, by extension, what women are.

There is a degree to which modern reproductive technologies have sought to get around the mean, exclusionary nature of pregnancy. As yet, however, no human being has been gestated to term outside a female body. Even if this were to become a possibility, there remains only one type of body that can do this without any form of external intervention (beyond impregnation itself). To many, this doesn't seem fair. It didn't seem fair to men in the past, and it does not seem fair to those now insisting on kindness, empathy and the complete denial of competing rights are the solution to all injustices. There must, it is felt, be some way of rearranging things so that anyone who wants a baby all of their own can have one. There must be some way of solving the problem of female people not sharing their femaleness. Why can't pregnancy – like woman, like man – be whatever we want it to be?

The answer to this is simple and frustrating: because pregnancy just isn't like anything else. As the sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman has argued, this very uniqueness has been a problem for patriarchy, but it has also been a problem for liberal feminism, which has rebelled against the things men have done to counter reproductive alienation without necessarily grasping that female reproduction is not itself to blame. In her 1989 book Recreating Motherhood, Rothman noted that both patriarchy ideology and liberal feminist thinking had 'come to the same conclusion about what to do with the problem of the uniqueness of pregnancy: devalue it. Discount it so deeply that its uniqueness doesn't matter'. The liberal feminist devaluation of pregnancy Rothman identifies – rooted in a tendency to blame any recognition of reproductive difference for women's oppression rather than men's chosen response to said difference – has played a role in distorting social justice-based approaches to pregnancy, especially in light of the two trends which have become far more dominant since the time at which she was writing. The first is that of denying the social and political salience not just of pregnancy, but of biological sex in its entirety. The second is that of validating individualism (the so-called 'true' self) at the expense of accepting the contingent, relational nature of our identities. The very beginnings of human life show that relationality is not an add-on to personhood. 'Just be kind' politics cannot tolerate the singularity of pregnancy, its sex-specificity, its mixture of fuzzy edges and firm boundaries. And if your politics cannot tolerate pregnancy – and you will not change your politics – you will reach a point at which your politics cannot tolerate the class of humans who get pregnant.

In Full Surrogacy Now, self-described cyborg feminist Sophie Lewis dismisses O'Brien's Politics of Reproduction by describing it as 'trans-exclusionary' and 'romantically gynocentric'. Wasn't that the Ancient Greeks' issue with pregnancy too? Hasn't that always been everyone's issue with pregnancy, with womanhood itself? It's all far too womb owner-focused! Women need to stop being so gynocentric and trans-exclusionary and give someone else a turn at being them. There is a connection between the ancient devaluation of female reproduction and the current moral panic over female people existing as women at all. Somewhere between the two lies feminism's own misplaced anxiety over biological essentialism. In seeking to free ourselves, there are ways in which have ended up tightening our own restraints.

'Selfless' is one way of putting it (although any selflessness involved in the three previous pregnancies which ended in miscarriage is not mentioned). McKeown emphasises that 'the surrogate is not genetically related to the baby. She basically babysat our daughter inside her womb for nine months.' In a similar fashion, the UK surrogacy agency Brilliant Beginnings promotes its services as 'extreme babysitting' ('Brilliant Surrogate Tracey [is] talking about her "extreme babysitting" journey . . . Could you be an extreme babysitter?'). If only Aristotle had thought of it: man provides the life principle, woman does the extreme babysitting.

The story illustrates many of the problems with 'just' being kind. In the eyes of some, the boy's autism elevated him above the other boys who pressure girls to do things they do not want. His shyness and social awkwardness were problems the original girl could have solved simply by saying yes. Maybe she judged boys like him just because they were different. Her rejection became, not a simple expression of her desires – just as his choice to ask her, rather than another girl, had been – but a judgment on his worth as a human being, one which the rest of the world set about correcting. To some, the boy had a right to kindness and validation which the girl was withholding. But what of her right to have her needs respected? There's a suggestion that while all girls have the right to say no, it would make life a lot easier if they could train themselves not to, coupled with the old message that girls are better than boys at manipulating their desires – see how many of them were willing to approach the boy the next day! There's so much prejudice in the world, but if girls agreed to offer themselves to the boys who felt most left out, we'd have begun the work of removing it. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is incel thinking.

This marries up with the 'progressive' disregard for a feminism that is just for women and focused on domestic as well as public life. Old-style feminism is low status because woman are everywhere. Half of us are women. There's nothing heroic or glorious about empathising with your mum. Much of what is associated with social conservatism – that oppressive mindset which prevents everyone being their unique selves – is related to family, social rituals and the dependent, sexed body. Dismissing all of this as unthinkingly traditionalist and unprogressive is convenient if you want to focus on the needs of the gender marginalised in some vague sense but not, say, on all the ways in which you benefit from the unpaid labour of 'privileged' woman around you. In a 2018 interview with his daughter, Labour's Alastair Campbell claimed to 'absolutely believe in equality of opportunity'. 'I don't have an inbuilt objection to doing things 50-50,' he admitted, 'but it's true, on the housework front, I've never, ever done it.' Such admissions might irritate plenty of women, but they are rarely viewed as hateful or having a serious impact on the creation of a more just world. Yet as [Kathleen] Lynch writes, recognising unequal distribution of household labour is an essential part of recognising 'the interests of men, qua men, in upholding a capitalist system from which they are net beneficiaries relative to women of their class.' It's very handy to be too busy criticising women for stigmatising strippers or upholding the gender binary to notice the dirt and dust, and very easy to think this makes you someone who is generously choosing to empathise with the world at large instead of remaining small-minded enough to be conscious of your immediate environment.

The fact that so many left-wing men have not, in fact, dealt with the day-to-day basics of domestic labour redistribution before moving on to the big ideas may be one reason why a feminism that recognises sex differences is opportunistically conflated with a feminism that is right wing. This feminism's recognition of limitation and restriction, alongside its willingness to admit we cannot have everything we want – that some rights are indeed pie – is wilfully conflating with telling people to know their place. Of course, these are not the same things, but it doesn't matter. If you have found a new way of positioning a woman saying 'no' as selfish, cruel and politically suspect, what is to stop you running with it? Especially if you have been virtuous enough to commit yourself to being on the kind, feminine side of the political spectrum. Aren't some of the bullying rights – of the bad, unkind women, that is – the very least you are owed?