What does it actually mean to be gender critical??

It's the numpties who say things like boys should not wear pink that are the cause of all this nonsense.

And the trouble is there are loads of them. Still. In twenty fucking twenty.

I was agreeing too!

merrymouse I agree. To be clear, it wasn't a criticism and I include myself when I refer to 'feminists'!

Because feminists have been busy arguing that women shouldn't be reduced to their reproductive role

The reason we aren't reduced to our reproductive role isn't girl power, its legislation that ensures the availability of contraception and abortions.

However, maintaining access to contraception and abortion isn't simply a question of enacting one bit of legislation in 1974. You need continuing focus on women's healthcare, funding and other changes to circumstances - e.g. Covid initially impacted on availability of the MAP.

Agree with InvisibleDragon.

I'd even go one further and say I'm prepared to entertain the idea that - independent of socialisation - a majority of women (female sex class, for the avoidance of doubt) might be more nurturing, show a different brain image in reaction to a crying infant, not have the same sense of spatial awareness etc. etc. in comparison to a majority of men.

I seriously doubt many of those things, but I'm prepared to entertain it as a scientific enquiry. Because for the purposes of how society should be allowed to treat you, it doesn't matter whether that is true or not. Because it does not follow either that:

A) one is entitled to assume that because a given person is a woman, those things that are true for the majority of women are true for that person (e.g. we're not hiring you as a driver because the average woman has worse spatial awareness than the average man - you must hire on the merits of the individual); or

B) if you do not conform to the 'norm' for your sex class, you must not belong to that sex class. We have other, separate, empirical criteria for determining sex which does not involve anything as woolly or subjective as behaviour or ability. If I diverge from a behavioural 'usual' of my sex, it should not provoke anything more mild interest.

On a related note to the last, I think it's also worth adding to Invisible Dragon's post that another area people seem to have been squeamish about is acknowledging that sex categories are (or should be) based entirely on reproductive role. Because feminists have been busy arguing that women shouldn't be reduced to their reproductive role in the way they are treated by society, and because we acknowledge that there are female people who cannot or choose not to actually carry out that potential reproductive role, there seems to have been a move away from acknowledging that, once all societal bollocks is removed (no pun intended but I'm leaving it because it's made me laugh) reproductive role is literally the only thing that women necessarily have in common.

That of course includes young female people who are not yet capable of reproducing, older women who are past childbearing age and women who are clearly set up for the large-gamete-gestator role but where something has gone awry with that system.

The fact that we also currently have in common being treated like crap because of it is unfortunate but not determinative of our belonging to our sex class.

It is not reducing women to their reproductive capabilities to point out the common 'axis of oppression' (our ability to gestate and birth) as the root of centuries of mistreatment while saying that women can differ in literally every other way. I would say that is feminism 101!

Finally, while women and girls still are treated badly in our society, it is also not a contradiction to require that extra safeguards are put in place to protect them. While generally speaking point A) above (you must judge each individual in their merits, not by their sex class) absolutely applies to men too, when it comes to safety in an imperfectly operating society, there is a good case for taking a broad-brush approach to separation by sex class in certain circumstances where women and girls are vulnerable and it is not possible to assess each individual man separately. An individual man shouldn't be turned down for a job as a nursery worker, for example, because of sexist assumptions about his skills or because we have tarred him with the same brush as child-offending members of his sex class; it is possible and proper that we address him on his own merits. Where entry to a vulnerable space (communal public changing rooms as one example) is not and cannot based on individual assessment, blunt segregation by sex category is justified where this is shown to reduce actual harm in practice.

I hope this reads vaguely coherently. It's 5am so please cut me some slack if not!

The reason that trans folx are afraid of gender critical people is because the only basis for believing that they are who they say they are is stereotypes of what a man or a woman is, and that's exactly what gender critical people don't believe in.

Great thread. Really liked the posts by invisibledragon and SenselessUbiquity

So much great stuff on this thread.

I think the physical hit on women of childbearing and breastfeeding is not acknowledged enough either.

I always bring this up on threads like this but so much of the media we consume depicts women as having physical parity with men.

There's a ton of films/series that have tiny women beating up some bad guy who looks like he walked straight out of WWE and other unrealistic feats of strength or speed.

I know fiction and entertainment are just that but with the amount of people that seem to struggle with the line between reality and fiction now I think it plays into it.

In addition to that lots of people now have sedentary office jobs and lifestyles and probably never think very hard about the indisputable biological differences.

To believe that women and girls should not have their lives unfairly restricted by the imposition of stereotypes linked to their sex.

And to see men and boys as also impacted, though in different ways, by stereotypes linked to their sex.

To view gender - the accepted term for these sex stereotypes - as largely imposed by culture, rather than innate.

(Where I personally differ from some others is that I think there are some sex-linked behaviours, often around mating and child-bearing, that are innate in that they serve evolutionary purposes. I see these as distinct from gender, or sex-stereotypes).

@InvisibleDragon yes that was a great post.

I was amazed last week that the friend mentioned upthread really didn't understand that saying "men tend to be stronger than women" isn't the same as saying "men like football, women like shopping". He saw them both as "gender stereotyping" and became very uncomfortable when I started talking about testosterone/muscle mass etc. Almost as if I was being horribly sexist by even mentioning it.

Sorry. Typo. the two middle paras should read

So - while I would say that a little girl who knows her sex is driven to want girl-coded things (which could be entirely different things in another society, but she wants to show in our society that she knows she fits in if she plays dress up with princess dresses, etc);

The TRA, or the believer in gender identity, would say that a child who has the gender identity of "girl", regardless of sex, will be driven to want girl-coded things (which could be entirely different things in another society, but she wants to show in our society that she knows she fits in if she plays dress up with princess dresses, etc).

The missing thing is "gender identity". Which is innate, and known to each individual. It is equivalent to sex, in that it is not simply driven by stereotypes, but exists prior to the stereotypes.

So - while I would say that a little girl who knows her sex is driven to want girl-coded things (which could be entirely different things in another society, but she wants to know in our society that she knows she fits in if she plays dress up with princess dresses, etc);

The TRA, or the believer in gender identity, would say that a child who has the gender identity of "girl", regardless of sex, will be driven to want girl-coded things (which could be entirely different things in another society, but she wants to know in our society that she knows she fits in if she plays dress up with princess dresses, etc).

So gender identity stands in directly for sex as an objective fact which relates to the individual. This is something else, something other than "society's gender norms" etc.

My personal position is:

• I believe in sex as an objective reality, which is just the case, and value neutral
• I believe in society's gender norms as objective reality (though changeable) and far from value neutral (very dangerous and oppressive)
• I have no evidence for the existence of gender identity as I don't think I have one myself and I have never "seen" someone else's. BUT I really don't feel qualified to say there is no such thing. I honestly think that some people are so passionately convinced that they are a certain gender that it kind of is a reality, even though there are more of these people than ever before and there is no way that this can really truly be independent of society.

HOWEVER I will get very pissed off if someone insists that I must have a gender identity which is unproblematic to me, so I don't realise it. I just don't. Gender is a HUGE problem to me, in practical terms, and I have never felt "like a girl". I don't feel that I am the wrong sex, at all. But gender is alien to me. It is something external that has definitely been imposed on me.

Very much agree invisibledragon.

Great post @InvisibleDragon

I think OP's understanding of GC feminism sounds pretty good.

One reason why I think GC theory attracts so much criticism is that a lot of liberal feminism up until about 2010 was about how women are not limited by our sex - a woman can be whatever she wants to be. That involved challenging a lot of gender stereotypes and biological determinism: for example the idea that it is 'natural' for a woman to stay home to take care of kids and give up her career; or that women are better suited to (low paid) caring roles, because we are 'naturally' more sensitive and nurturing; whilst men are 'naturally' competitive and good at maths.

Challenging these negative gender stereotypes meant challenging a lot of incorrect ideas about biology: no-one's womb falls out if they do sports; women are not biologically hardwired to enjoy housework or wearing high heels; if women are not equally represented in some careers, this is more likely to be caused by sexism than because we are biologically less capable.

Consequently, there's a lot of resistance within feminism and the left generally to re-centering sex-based, immutable biology: we've spent the last 60 years arguing that women are not defined by biology -- and that there's very little evidence to support biologically essentialist reasons for observed gender differences. We've used terminology that centres "gender" differences rather than "sex" differences, to highlight the importance of gendered socialisation, rather than biology, in explaining them. For example, yes, there are gender differences in (say) adult navigation ability, but most/all of that is accounted for by differences in socialisation. Yes, you can do fMRI brain scans and find sex differences (sometimes, maybe); but the brain changes with social experience. We usually call that 'learning'.

Therefore, when we hear "Yes, but men and women are biologically different", we are primed to hear a reductive argument about women's social roles: that the gender pay gap, lack of women in STEM subjects, or poor uptake of shared parental leave are caused by innate biological differences that cause women to be weaker and less able. And there are a depressingly large number of right-wing columnists and researchers who still make these arguments.

(And, to be fair, there is a fuzzy gray area in the middle. Physically, women are on average smaller, weaker and slower than men. That's why we have sex categories for sport. That means we may never achieve 50% sex-parity in specific professions where speed or strength matter a lot. And teasing out the different strands of influence on gendered behaviour is hugely complex. When you get into the weeds of various scientific studies, everything gets messy and unclear and shaped by the biases of the researchers themselves. Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender is really comprehensive on all this).

That makes it harder to get the point across: Yes, gender roles are socially constructed; no, we don't have to conform to them; yes, we can attract social censure when we don't; yes the way we see ourselves (our gender identity?) is influenced by our socialisation and includes elements of gendered preferences.

But that doesn't mean that biological sex doesn't exist. Or that we can reason it away with deconstructionist obfuscation. Women get pregnant. We menstruate. That matters. Having a woman's body makes some men feel entitled to use us for sex; to abuse us and rape us. Because we are women, we are socialised to put others' needs before our own. That matters too.

We took for granted the assumption that people know that biological sex exists. It didn't need saying, because it was obvious. And most liberal feminists still assume that focusing on biology is repressive and sexist.

Gradually, the "no sex, only gender" arguments have become more prominent. They use lots of the same vocabulary as liberal feminism; so feel like a natural progression of the "not defined by biology" argument. But it's not. And it's quite scary how hard it is to get this across without being silenced by people you thought were your friends.

They need external validation of their choices.

As I pointed out to my teenager today, for non-binary to be 'valid', the people who are 'non-binary' need everyone else to be 'binary'. When I asked her if she was happy that she was put into the 'binary' box and how many people did she really know that fitted neatly into stereotypes. I think she had moment.

*'I don't get how so many people have obviously not asked themselves this question....

What's more likely: That a load of life-long left- leaning LGBT-supporting women have inexplicably and uncharacteristically all suddenly become bigots or that one might be missing something here?*

I think a lot of people just desperately don't want to accept that they are wrong about this issue. I had this conversation with a friend last week about JKR. I was essentially saying "surely you can't really believe that this brilliant author and philanthropist is actually a hateful bigot and for some reason has decided to splurge it all over the internet just to be spiteful to trans people? Really?".

And he eventually had to concede that - no this does not seem plausible. It was hard work though as he'd obviously read a million and one stupid articles about what an awful human being JKR is and was quite enjoying tearing her down.

I'm repeating what other people have said, but this is my understanding of what gender critical means:

1. The idea of 'gender' was invented to distinguish the social role associated with women (and men) from their biological sex. Feminists want to change the way women are treated in society and what is expected of women. In that sense, all feminists are gender critical.

2. 'Gender' has more recently been redefined as a personal identity. So someone might have a gender identity as male, female, both (genderfluid) or neither (non-binary). It's not clear whether this refers to the body or the social role, but one thing that gender critical feminists have in common is that we reject this concept of gender. We don't believe for instance that a man who believes he should be a woman is actually a woman, or that a woman who says she is 'non-binary' stops being a woman and becomes some kind of neutral person.

they see their themselves on a spectrum of gender identities which are fluid and interchangeable.

But they cannot do this in isolation: they NEED others to comply with sex stereotypes/genders in order to place themselves on this special spectrum. They need external validation of their choices.

What also adds to the issue are the feminists who claim TWAW which then gives credence to the argument that GC women aren't feminists and are just transphobes.

I always think of Jack's pinned tweet too (if it is still his pinned tweet) Wines.

being accepted as scientific truth by the general public

My concern is that it is not just by the general public. It is being perpetuated by scientists and experts in medical fields as well. And that studies are being twisted to fit that narrative. Such as the study that was supposedly peer reviewed and published by the American Psych journal and has now been retracted. Or marine biologists who apply the biological processes of clownfish to humans and are lauded for their brilliance. There are many, many examples just in the past month or two.

The problem lies in that dissenting voices find their jobs threatened (and maybe even their own safety on campus). Anyone who speaks up is fair game for abuse and cancellation. I keep coming back to Jack Appleby's tweet (9/7/19).

'I don't get how so many people have obviously not asked themselves this question....

What's more likely: That a load of life-long left- leaning LGBT-supporting women have inexplicably and uncharacteristically all suddenly become bigots or that one might be missing something here?'

To believe that trans people are literally born in the wrong body you must posit a "gender identity" that is innate and exists only in the mind.

It's worse than that - to be literally born in the wrong body would require a mind/gender essence/soul that exists independently of the body.

If other people want to believe they have a feminine soul, that's their lookout. Expecting the rest of us to believe in souls isn't on. Nor is getting us cancelled, doxxed, and fired, or threatening us with rape and death, simply because we don't believe in gendered souls.

The old-skool transsexuals used to say "I feel like I was born in the wrong body." It was never meant to be taken literally.

In terms of why attacking "gender identity" provokes such vitriol:
Most people haven't spent much time thinking about this topic and so think the only reason anyone would attack the concept of "gender identity" is to be nasty to trans people. If they haven't thought much about gender or feminism then it won't be clear to them that the concept of "gender identity" actually flies in the face of most feminist thought. So instead of seeing a bunch of feminists trying to stand up for a progressive analysis of gender, they see mean-spirited women trying to undermine an already oppressed group.