# smashing-the-binary-september-pdf **Opening (not a real abstract):** ‘Smashing the Binary’: Notes on the Historicization of Sex Jane Clare Jones, Draft, September 2021 The core axiom of transgender ideology,1 as pithily expressed by Stephen Whittle, legal scholar and co-founder of Press for Change,2 is that “To be a man or a woman is contained in a person’s gender identity.” (Whittle 2002, 6) This thought is commonly expressed in the central slogan of contemporary transactivism – ‘trans women are women/trans men are men’ – which serves to disseminate the idea that being a man or a woman is a matter of gender identification, rather than sex, and which hence constitutes a radical redefinition of the natural language, and common legal, usage of the terms.3 Trans ideology can thus be understood as an assertion that gender identity should trump sex with respect to the recognition of a person