Why conflate 'Gender Critical' and belief in immutable sex?

Yeah, there is a tendency, especially in the media, to lump anyone who thinks sex is immutable, and objects to the current form of gender ideology, under the view gender critical.

Maybe people think of it as meaning critical of gender ideology.

Ultimately though there most people think sex is immutable and always have, but they have all kinds of different views about gender. The way feminists talk about it isn't like the way anthropologists talk about it, for example. And neither of those is the same as the idea that we have some innate gender identity.

To me 'gender' is shorthand for the phrase 'personality traits that correlate broadly (on average) with sex, due to the interaction of sex-differences and social conditioning'. I believe this type of gender is inevitable and pretty much universal among humans - it is a very rare person who really has no gender traits.

Okay, now you're losing me again. I get the sense you're really really hung up on the word "gender" and are trying to base a conversation around the word, rather than material reality.

What would it mean to have "no gender traits" given that definition? Do you mean "no personality traits that tend to correlate to their sex"? "No personality traits that correlate to any sex?" "No personality?"

Height correlates to sex. Is this like looking for a person without a height?

Please, figure out what your question is, and don't use the word gender anywhere in the post.

@Beancounter1
You say "gender is the strict sense of expectations based on stereotypes", which is fine but it is not the meaning of the word gender I am using here. It is a tricky word!
Can you conceive of a world in which gender exists, but is not linked to any expectations or assumptions? I am trying to isolate gender from sexism.

Hmm. So I've read back over your posts and I think you're using gender to mean personality traits that in some way correlate with your sex? (Correct me if I'm wrong!) Now I'm completely open to the possibility that men and women on average display different personality traits or behaviours, and they that might be partly due to nature as opposed to just nurture.

But in that case, why not just talk about personality traits that correlate with sex? What is the term "gender" adding there? After all, there are different physical traits that correlate with sex e.g. women are shorter, men are more likely to die from Covid. We don't have a specific name for those.

My point here is that, when you start using "gender" to talk about personality traits, you're always bundling them up as a pink set of traits and a blue set of traits. But even if men and women on average have different traits, as individuals most of us display different traits from the pink and blue categories. E.g. a person might like wearing flowery dresses and fixing cars, a person might like playing rugby and nurturing animals. When you're talking about having "a gender", it's always restricting people to assumptions that they do or should fit one category or another.

Not sure if I've missed your point there!

Nationality: an artificial grouping determined by geographically proximity. When your family, your profession, you hobby, your clan, your town is enough to make you belong somewhere, why is nationalism carefully promoted? Why does it even exist? It is an easy harness on our minds so we can be endlessly manipulated. It exists as a manifestation of authoritarianism.

Money: another construct, to reify one's labor so that the worker does not retain all the benefit from the value of their own labor. Of course it has its use to facilitate trade, but that is an incidental outcome. You may say we can't do without it in an interconnected world, but there is no safeguard and no limit to the parasitical absorption of our collective work into money, which we do not get to keep.

Gender: one guess who needs gender roles to persist so they can keep their distance from housework and 18 year cycles of raising a child to competent adulthood. How else can the patriarchy maintain its power? Gender is such an easy way to tie up decades of women's lives so the men can live like kings each in their contemptible little mind castles.

Most of the systems we live under are conveniences but certainly not meant to be convenient for women. These systems have been developed to keep a permanent dominant class, which of course requires the existence of a permanent under class. Men DO think women are their support humans.

It is almost impossible to see water when you are a fish. It is like expecting to see air. Our systems are not perfect, they are not even good. They're just what we are dealing with as we go through life. Of course these constructs impact us. But they are still meaningless. That they have meaningful impact on us is a descriptive state, not a prescriptive state. For now we can individually choose to decline these constructs. Until the day comes when we do so collectively.

Babies aren't identical, full stop. Even identical twins have different personalities. I had m/f twins, now adult, and raised them as gender-neutrally as I could, just watching their interests develop and letting them play as they chose with everything. We used a toy library and they could choose. Both grew up to be creative - one is musical, the other artistic. Their interests showed early. Both had dolls, both had bikes etc.

I think an awful lot of what we hear called gender is just personality and interests. Perhaps not all, but probably most.

If society weren't so obsessed with labelling interests and activities as being for girls/women or for boys/men and judging people for breaching imaginary boundaries, a lot of gender dysphoria would subside or be much more manageable.

If we didn't fuss so much about what people are 'supposed' to wear - especially boys and men - happiness could be wider spread. After all, women can get away with wearing practically anything and nobody bats an eyelid. Who wouldn't want that freedom?

Sex, though, that's immutable. You can put yourself through painful surgeries or take cross-sex hormones for life and every single cell in your body will still announce the XX or XY (or XXX or XYY or whatever if things went a bit awry) that was your inheritance when sperm met egg. That's just fact.

Wear what you fancy, live who you love, follow your interests, call yourself whatever you choose, express your individuality, I wouldn't dream of interfering or criticising.

But if you've had a male puberty, it's not fair to colonise women's sport. And if you've had male privilege in your work life, it's not fair to sweep in and snaffle awards intended for women who didn't And if you have a penis and are older than 5 or 6, it's not fair to colonise the girls' or women's changing rooms. And if you are a sex offender or rapist, it's not fair to self-identity into a women's prison and skew government crime statistics so it looks as if women suddenly started raping people.

Live and let live and respect for all - and if you're a man and use the ladies and behave like a lady there, I'm good with that, too. It's all the other bog standard men who will follow you in if you insist on self-ID that really worry me. I realise I'm an outlier here.

No boys in girls' toilets at school though. Girls learning to manage periods do not need boys hanging around outside. After 18 maybe.

I agree with you.

Gender is a thing. A crappy thing, but it's a thing.

But sex is more important.

Yes, you can never know what someone's sex-based personality traits (i.e. what I am calling gender here, the result of nature + nurture

I think you are confusing gender and personality.

This makes for very interesting viewing, explaining the language used by those who believe society based on sex as opposed to those who would advocate for a society based on gender identity.

Right, but in this space such posts would be using "gender" to mean TRAs' "inner gender identity" concept, rather than the feminist structural concept.

I've always thought this. Women are now being labelled with something that I'm not sure should be a label.

@jellyfrizz totally agree, but I do read a lot of posts along the lines of ‘gender doesn’t exist’ ‘gender is nonsense’ etc.

If something is ‘nature not nurture’ that is sex not gender.

Being critical of gender is not dismissing it.

It’s like class - another social construct that harms people that I’d happily get rid of but certainly exists and affects people’s lives.

I would describe myself as GC, but what does slightly wind me is people dismissing gender as a social construct therefore meaningless. Money is a social construct, nationality is socially constructed - both these still have the power to impact lives and experiences.

What we need is genital inspectors at the entrance to every male and female sex segregated venue. Everyone has to flash their genitals to ensure they are right to enter. You can never be too sure when someone who looks CIS is actually not and who looks trans is actually CIS.
The only answer, is genital inspections. Just to be safe

Why on earth are trans activists so obsessed with genital inspections?
GC women aren't asking for this. At All.
The constant claims that this is what women want is weird and creepy af, and quite frankly stinks of some kind of porn-fuelled wishful thinking.

People can change aspects of their physical sex. Cross sex hormone therapy influences the development of secondary sex characteristics (and in trans men, primary to some extent).

‘Pre gay’ children more often exhibit cross sex gendered behaviour traits. There is much discussion here about the fact that ‘trans children’ will most likely turn out to be gay if supported until they desist.

Gender critical thinkers were trying to break down stereotypes in the 'Let toys be toys' times .. which was the catch phrase which underlies the wish that everyone should be free to present how they wish without having people make assumptions about their sex.

Now, we are forced to make declarations about people's sex in order to protect our sex based rights and the reason for that protection is rooted in female oppression.

We do not want to be oppressed on the basis of our sex, we do not opt into this oppression, we reject it.. but are being forced to declare our sex and defend our rights to be called women even though we do not wish to be defined by the stereotypes that go along with that word which are imposed upon us by others.

That is hard... fighting for the right to be defined as women when that definition is harmful to us but not being able to be defined as women is more harmful.

Just catching up on the discussion Beancounter1!

When you put it like that - yes, gender stereotypes are absolutely harmful as they cause/allow/enable/encourage sexism, against males and females.
If there was no sexism, gender would be just dressing up/down and role-play and harmless.
So we are back to sexism is the problem. Which probably falls under point 2 above but this is not clear.

So firstly, the first two points don't deal with sexism on their own. Going back to that picture I posted upthread, the position that sex is immutable and matters is consistent with a very conservative belief that women are inferior to men e.g. women aren't intelligent enough to be allowed the vote. So you do need some other bullets in there to deal with sexism itself.

Secondly, even if men and women were treated completely equally, and there was no power imbalance, I would still say that gender (in the strict sense of expectations based on sex stereotypes) was something worth critically analysing, because it constrains us all. I think of gender as a cage that says "you're a woman, so you have to like nurturing people" and "you're a man, so you have to like fixing cars". If we opened the cage doors, and were free to choose what we liked and what we do, maybe lots of us would still end up clumped together by sex. Maybe a disproportionate number of people with ovaries, really do like wearing eyeshadow - who knows? The point is 1) we should remove the expectations and assumptions, and 2) it's worth analysing the social factors that might contribute to some of this gendered behaviour (the clumping together).

It's only now that it is all becoming oh so difficult...