I begin my analysis with the term diyixing (“first sex”), which is one of the cornerstones of CRF ideology and a powerful medium for CRFs to articulate their beliefs on reproduction, sex, beauty standards, and trans issues. The term, which owes its namesake to both Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Elizabeth Gould Davis’ The First Sex, is used by CRFs to celebrate women’s exclusive claim to biological reproduction due to their possession of wombs. According to CRFs, women’s ability to bear children is sufficient for justifying the “naturalness” of matriarchal societies and the perversion of patriarchy. Since men/males do not have wombs and are thus incapable of reproduction, they need to control women and exploit their wombs to ensure the subsistence of patriarchy. This fundamental violence committed by men disrupts the natural order and results in myriad forms of oppression. Therefore, society should return to its natural state and be ruled by women.To fully understand these claims, we need to examine their cultural and societal context. Women’s reproductive abilities have always been under various forms of control in CN, with the one-child policy (1980-2016) being the most notorious example. As Rose and Xue show, “encouraging childbirth dates back to ancient times and was prevalent in the 1950s–1960s,” with laws imposing restrictions on women who are unmarried after a certain age. The one-child policy also left behind an aging population with fewer newborns yearly. Furthermore, sex-selective abortions are still rampant in CN for households with second and third births, not to mention the deserting or killing of female babies in the one-child policy era (Rose and Xue, ch. 3). It is thus quite predictable that CRFs see defending and reclaiming their reproductive autonomy as one of the primary objectives of feminism.For CRFs, the concept of “first sex” accurately captures the biological superiority of females and likely validates the necessity of potential matriarchal societies. For instance, @JaneandLili, a CRF on Twitter, argues that the term “patriarchy” should be replaced by “unnatural society” and “matriarchy” by “natural society”: just as “it is natural for someone who is tall to see further” and “someone who eats a lot to gain weight,” so it is natural “for the sex that can bear life to command the [human] race.” She uses a simple analogy to substantiate this thesis: “There is no relation of oppression between a tall person who naturally sees further and a short person who cannot see as far as the tall person. Oppression emerges when natural laws are disobeyed, that is, when the shorter person rides on top of the tall person” (@JaneandLili). @JiHaoXinKongQue, a prominent CRF on Weibo with over sixty thousand followers before her account was shut down, also asserts that “women’s naturally endowed ability to create life allows them to control life and death…women hold the key to the development of the [human] race due to the longevity, vitality, and resilience of the female body” (@JiHaoXinKongQue, “Women”). All forms of violence, @JiHaoXinKongQue observes, result from men’s jealousy of “human beings”: as she claims elsewhere, “only the female body represents the standard human being, and we should not debase ourselves to the same species as men who can't live without women and are born crippled” (@JiHaoXinKongQue, “Females”). Men assume that women should be jealous of other people because men are always envious of other men, either due to “an unequal distribution of privileges or their inability to attract women.” But men envy women the most as they are always plagued by “fertility anxiety and womb envy due to their inability to produce offspring,” and they start to hate women when they found out women are not as envious as they are (@JiHaoXinKongQue, “Women”). As a result, “they arbitrarily created classes, they use force, they take resources, they oppress women and deprive them of their freedom and rights” (@JiHaoXinKongQue, “Women”).In other words, matriarchy—of which the most cited form is the pre-patriarchal societies described by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State—is the only authentic or natural form of society for CRFs because the female body is infinitely superior to the male one, the most important difference being their ability to give birth to children. All oppressions are, in a sense, derived from the oppression of women by men and will vanish if the natural order is restored—that is, if women or “females” reclaim what is rightfully theirs and rule once more. On the one hand, they make the questionable appeal to natural privilege and ownership that needs to be defended from culturally gendered or monstrous others; on the other hand, they make no attempts to historicize or periodize their claims, as the oppression of women is explained solely in psychological terms: men hate women because they are biologically hardwired to be jealous. These arguments are nothing short of outright proclamations of anatomy as destiny.One can clearly imagine how endearing this must sound for women who have been told that their bodies are inferior to those of men and a source of their oppression their entire lives. Remember that these are not rhetorical statements employed merely for ironic purposes: they are theoretical positions many cyberfeminist activists in the CRF camp seriously advocate. Rose and Xue also extol the term “first sex” in their book, declaring that “as long as a considerable portion of women accomplish self-awareness of their power as the first sex, the feminist agenda might be realized without bloodshed” (Rose and Xue, intro). Such self-awareness can supposedly come into being through reading feminist threads on social media and participating in online feminist communities that endorse and propagate these messages.In a nutshell, the strategy of deriving the legitimacy of matriarchal rule from biological features is sketchy at best, not to mention how similar it is to classical claims used to support patriarchy. After all, anti-feminists have always justified the dominion of cishet men by their superior physical strength, intellect, or other bodily features. The most apparent issue with this tactic is that it commits a naturalistic fallacy that attempts to derive “ought” from “is” and “norms” from “fact.” One of the most forceful critiques of it is delivered by Simone de Beauvoir herself, who famously wrote in The Second Sex that none of these facts “carry their meaning in themselves.” As Beauvoir argues, “when the physiological given takes on meaning, this meaning immediately becomes dependent on a whole context; ‘weakness’ is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal, and the laws he imposes…physiology cannot ground values: rather, biological data take on those values the existent confers on them” (Beauvoir, Introduction). The fact that someone is tall does not necessarily mean they can see further, just as someone having a prenatal disease does not mean they should die. Note that Beauvoir is not merely invalidating claims for male superiority from biology: she is invalidating all claims for superiority on the grounds of physiology. Just as CRFs claim that females should rule the human race because they have wombs, anti-feminists can claim the exact opposite by referring to the same set of statements: since women are too “precious” and “indispensable” to the community, they should be protected from assuming tasks that require constant vigilance and often involve violence. Such duties should be placed in the hands of those unable to conceive children and thus “disposable.” As Slavoj Žižek reminds us, even the idea that males are “just a (falsely emancipated) detour in female self-reproduction” lays the ground for the anti-feminist argument par excellence, for it still associates the male position with “the values of being prepared to take the risk of exile” and the need to “create one’s identity through labor and cultural mediation” (Žižek, Less 756). The classification of males as the “second sex” precisely lays the groundwork for a kind of male supremacism that hails men as the “Spirit” in Hegelian philosophy, which, despite being “a pathological deviation” and a “detour within some larger natural process,” can “elevate itself into an End-in-itself which ‘posits’ its own natural presupposition” (Žižek, Less 756).Even if we gloss over the questionable move of deriving norms from facts, the rest of these arguments are still rife with paradoxes. The main problem is identifying women simultaneously as females, people with wombs, and people who can reproduce. For CRFs, all these terms are interchangeable. The reality, however, is far more complicated. @MuXiYanJiu, another feminist on Weibo, points out that the statement “those who can bear children are the first sex” does not lead to the conclusion that “women are the first sex” or “females are the first sex.” It is common sense that not all females can sexually reproduce since girls and post-menstrual women physically cannot have children, not to mention those with illnesses that prevent them from being pregnant. Intersex, trans, and queer people who have wombs can also bear children and should also qualify as first sex given that /were the criteria is the ability to produce children (@MuXiYanJiu). It thus comes as no surprise that CRFs do not acknowledge the validity of trans people’s existence and use reproductive capacity to demarcate gender boundaries. For them, trans women are just “males” masquerading as women due to some sexual perversion, and trans men, according to @JiHaoXinKongQue, are products of a new incarnation of patriarchy that seeks to undermine women’s exclusive claim to creating life—as they undermine the imagined unity and identity of “woman/females” (Qiao 1324; @JiHaoXinKongQue, “Understand”). Some CRFs realized this issue and proposed that “the power to control populations” should belong to “women as a group, or we will fall into the trap of making women who cannot or will not bear children inferior to others” (paoluren). Unfortunately, if one defines women by their possession of wombs and their ability to reproduce, this modification is unhelpful: a prerogative that originates from an organ cannot be extended to those without it. This argument for women’s collective control of the human population seems as vacuous as the anti-feminist argument that all men should be granted sexual privilege because some men serve in armies. Moreover, the CRFs’ emphasis on the capacity for biological reproduction obscures the significance of healthcare infrastructures, as well as other facets of reproductive and care work which, albeit not being directly related to gestational labor, are crucial for society’s functioning and the kind of work that people with wombs perform (Bhattacharya and Vogel 7). The recognition, if not the abolition, of these forms of work requires much more than mere sex segregation.The second issue results from CRF’s devotion to the claim that women biologically surpass men in every way. As @QingZhouele puts it, men are “originally the second sex and are aggressive, stupid, and short-lived” apart from being “ugly in all kinds of ways,” while “most females in the natural world are physically strong, powerful, [experienced in] leading their groups, and [have] wisdom for survival that pass down from mothers to daughters; men are merely menial knick-knacks and foils [for women]” (@QingZhouele). However, if women are truly superior, and the statements CRFs presented can only be interpreted to justify their superiority, why were they subjugated? Either there is no evidence of physical superiority to justify or account for social hierarchies, or there are aspects in men that are better than women and can be used to justify male rule by the same logic: neither are acceptable for CRFs.Perhaps the best criticism of CRFs comes from their enemies, the red-pill/MGTOW (“men going their own way”)/manosphere anti-feminists who believe that feminism is the cause of society’s downfall (Lamoureux; Anni; @MorpheusHongWanZhuYi, “MGTOW”). Of course, their arguments are not in any way correct; rather, what is truly troublesome is the degree of similarity between the CRF and anti-feminist arguments. For example, both groups agree that humans are “sexually dimorphous” and consist only of males and females; females are defined by their monopoly over reproduction due to their possession of wombs, rendering males “disposable” in comparison; trans and queer people are traitors working for the enemies; gender/sexual separatism is the ideal strategy for their sex; and the other group will automatically collapse without them (@MorpheusHongWanZhuYi, “Why”).This final consensus is particularly ironic because both groups see themselves as outsmarting their rivals by taking this position. Rose and Xue claim that “men fear and rely on women and cannot bear being deprived of access to the first sex. Without accessing women and hijacking their power, patriarchal constructions would collapse immediately” (Rose and Xue, intro). The MGTOW activist @MorpheusHongWanZhuYi, however, argues that the latter is founded on an “insatiable desire to acquire more social resources” and thus will never attempt to “build a utopia for women on some island or planet far away from existing social constructions.” The fundamental mistake of feminism, according to @MorpheusHongWanZhuYi, is that it supposes men and women to be the same and thus neglects the “natural sex roles of males and females prescribed by natural law” (@MorpheusHongWanZhuYi, “Why”). In contrast, MGTOW and red-pill ideology advocates male separatism and proposes that men should stay away from women to protect themselves from the supposed oppression of a “gynocentric” society. For them, “men need women no more than fish need fishhooks” (@MorpheusHongWanZhuYi, “Men”). Both CRFs’ and anti-feminists’ desires for self-sufficiency, e.g., the ability to stay separate from the other group before the other group comes groveling for mercy, expressed in the form of exclusionary politics, are symptomatic of their fear and repudiation of people’s mutual dependence upon each other—the constitutive principle of society itself.What is particularly worth noting here is that anti-feminist MGTOW followers agree with CRFs on most facts or even interpretations of “biology”: they are explicit in their beliefs that men and women have essential differences rooted in their physiology, that males only play a complementary role in biological reproduction, that females are far more valuable than males, and that the role of the “father” is a social construction. Their conclusions, however, are drastically different: MGTOW followers argue that society has and always will be “gynocentric” and will consistently privilege women over men. They are, just like the CRFs, critical of the invention of “fatherhood,” denouncing it as a trap invented by “soft patriarchy”—one form of gynocentric society—to exploit men by forcing them to provide for their families, turning them into a tool to ensure the female’s survival and the continuation of the human race (@TeLiDuXingDeLang). MGTOW followers’ contention is that society will eventually be destroyed by feminism, and males will rule again in the dawn of the new world due to their advantage in physical strength. What I wish to highlight here is their implicit agreement or even hidden complicity with the CRF’s argument that women are the “first sex” and men the “second sex.” Such identification does not necessarily produce any progressive politics. On the contrary, it allows men to claim victimhood as the “disposable” sex, for if the superiority of women is rooted in biology, it cannot be eradicated without women being physically destroyed, but it might be blurred by the complicated societal institutions. If that is the case, society must have always been biased against men; their overrepresentation in high-risk jobs is a prime example of this “fact.” Biological essentialism always backfires.