  Being-two is counterposed to the metaphysical alteration between the one and the many, with its incessant oscillation between the essentialism of a rigid identity and the laissez-faire contingency, independent of any determining essence, of unlimited multiplicity and atomistic individualism. It is on the basis of this being-two that Irigaray attempts to build an ethics of sexual difference, a political relation between-two, with civil rights appropriate to sexuate identity, so that one's identity as a citizen is not cut off from the body, and law is not severed from nature. If sexual difference is not simply an effect of oppression, then freedom does not mean freedom from sexed embodiment. While political neutrality can only recognize disembodied subjects deprived of their bodily life, for Irigaray, citizens are not abstractions. The doubled, non-neutral, universal allows for distinctively feminine (and distinctively masculine) subjects to be recognized politically.