Gender Critical or ",GC" as a term, do you like it?

I asked how you would prevent our embodied experience being enculturated.

No, you didn't, you asked how do you propose to remove the real experience of sexual dimorphism from human culture?

I said I don't.

The reproduction-related experiences of sexual beings are what they are, entirely and necessarily connected to the natural functions of sexual dimorphic species. They are not gender.

Gender systems - plural, because they vary wildly across space and time - are social trappings associated with each sex. The very fact that they differ so much between cultures proves they aren't innate, like sex is. They're socially imposed.

I could take you on a fun romp through fashion history to illustrate this within western European culture alone, but it should be flaming obvious to anyone using a brain cell. Here's a sweet little article about the days when men wore high heels to show off their silk-stockinged legs (they also wore makeup, perfume and a ton of jewellery, not to mention elaborately styled long hair). Clearly, none of these trappings made them think they were women. They just carried right on being masculine males!

The point, if I have to keep making it: Sex is innate, natural, genetic, unavoidable, indispensable. Gender is made-up rules, fashions and stereotypes.

Andrea Long Chu wrote a whole book about being female, which is actually about being feminine - being a female stereotype (as he sees it). He also explicitly stated in his opening paragraph that "femaleness" is not anatomical or genetic. Femininity isn't, but he has swept sex aside and replaced it with gender.

Most of this post has zero to do with what I wrote. Largely the first half with the stuff from Chu, I don't know what you think the point of bring that up is in this context.

I also did not suggest you could remove sexual dimorphism, I asked how you would prevent our embodied experience being enculturated.

You've not actually answered that or addressed the examples I gave - how would you stop motherhood, for example, from having cultural significance, from shaping people's experiences, from being captured in art, and especially, how would you stop it from being associated with femaleness? How would you stop young people from being interested in, and emphasizing, their sexually dimorphic characteristics through culture?

Showing a negative example doesn't somehow prove either that all cultural reflections of our being a sexed species are negative, nor that it is possible to eradicate them all.

But how do you propose to remove the real experience of sexual dimorphism from human culture?

I'd be really stupid to propose that, @TempestTost, now, wouldn't I.

It is, however, what the genderists propose. When a person with a penis and testes, who produces sperm, can be a woman who identifies as female, your sexual dimorphism's out the window, isn't it?

The sexual dimorphism still exists, as it must. The only difference is that now we're instructed to ignore it, and the words previously used to denote the two sexes are redundant. The words man, woman, boy, girl, male and female now refer ONLY to gender identity. And what is that? It's a nebulous feeling inside the individual's head, which can only be described in terms of sex-role stereotypes.

"I am sensitive, gentle", says the testicular individual, "I love to giggle, wear makeup and to play with my long hair. I adore wearing silky clothes. I am a woman."

Pulitzer prize winner, Andrea Long Chu, informs us that a woman is "an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes". For clarity: "Femaleness is not an anatomical or genetic characteristic of an organism".

There. In genderism, femaleness has nothing to do with the reproductive categories of humans; indeed, we have no unifying words for these categories. (We may refer to their members as breeders, uterus-havers, ejaculators, as necessary.) Man and woman have been redefined as sets of stereotypical qualities that have been culturally associated with ... well, with the two reproductive categories.

The sex-role stereotypes culturally associated with each sex are the system known as gender: masculine and feminine. This is nothing to do with sexual dimorphism, it's all about social expectations. In Afghanistan today, the Taliban's busy codifying gender in a different way: the Afghan woman is silent, unseen, subdued.

Both the Taliban and the genderists are wrong. Biological sex doesn't determine behaviour, personality or preferences; it doesn't dictate certain styles of dress. What I want to abolish is the belief that it must.

https://www.sexualdiversity.org/edu/1111.php

My apologies, there are fewer listed on Wikipedia I think. Although most could be accommodated under the 'genderfuck' identity for simplicity.

What could you possibly find to be critical of here?

Yes, @museumum - but even on here, as this thread shows, the term GC isn't always correctly interpreted.

I use it on here and in spaces where I know I'll be understood as I intend it. But in the wider world I would say 'I don't believe in gender stereotyping'. For me that's clearer - usually I follow it by saying I think people can wear whatever they want but it doesn't change their sex. Or that I have no problem with anybody presenting any way they choose but that I do not like how many transgender discussions buy into and reinforce gender stereotypes.

Like any label 'gender critical' is a shorthand or jargon that is only really meaningful to people already engaged with the topic of discussion.

Will we have to provide litter trays for the furries? Maybe some of them could have a fire hydrant to share their pee-mail.

Clearly all the genders except BlokeyBlokeGender will self identify into the naice clean female loos. It's not even a close race. The male loos are frequently disgusting

I 'identify'🙄as a biological realist. Sex is determined by the biological reality of our genes evolved over millennia. Human sex is binary. DSD exist in a tiny percentage of the world population but there are several billion of us so the chances are you know someone who has one, you may even know how they feel about it.

Once, the words sex and gender were interchangeable. Then, it seems (if I understand correctly) gender became the term used for societal roles/stereotypes. This seems to have developed into a performative idea in peoples' heads (which is a gift to bad actors). There are now (that 'authoritative source Wikipedia tells me..) 107 gender identities for 2024. Will they all demand their own bathrooms?

I wish people would just say what they mean in ordinary English. I still don't really know what it means, something about women being women? It seems a bizarre phrase that has no obvious meaning. Am I critical of gender, makes absolutely no sense.

Did someone say 'biological realist'? Still makes no sense, how can I be or not be a realist about biology. It's a big subject.

But how do you propose to remove the real experience of sexual dimorphism from human culture?

It can't happen, it's rooted in that experience. All those associations with motherhood, for example, in art, literature, reflected in our language, how we see the world?

If we did somehow decouple them, do you imagine some kind of vacuum would remain?

People say you fail to realize it because if you did understand it, it's very difficult to see how you would talk about "abolishing" it. You can't abolish human culture or the experience of embodiment we bring to it.

What happens when you try is you still have bodies, and you still have that cultural product, but people come to think they aren't actually inherently attached to each other. What that looks like, or one thing it can be interpreted as, is a sort of internal, individual experience of "gender" which is a kind of free-floating essence.

And no, no one says that because they aren't educated enough in feminist texts, ffs.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/employment-tribunal-rulings-on-gender-critical-beliefs-in-the-workplace/

It's a familiar issue - things relating to gender ideology being confused and confusing.

A while back, lots of 'GCs' thought/hoped that if/once people acknowledged that sex and gender are different phenomenon, sex based rights would be easier to uphold. But, if sex and gender are completely decoupled, gender ceases to exist. The construct of gender is inextricably linked to sex based differences, so gender cannot be fully decoupled. What we have now is 'disprovable' claims they are different (no shit, Sherlock), but connected in metaphysical ways at the level of the individual. Everyone has a sex and a gender and these either align or don't align. This model would suggest that males who identify as 'women' would maintain a butch appearance if this were the norm for women.

So, in this view of the world, gender itself is an innate feeling (not gender identity), yet, the claim is that gender is a social construct.

By far the most rational explanation for gender identity issues is that of sex stereotyping and/or body dysmorphia.

Yes, yes, @Garlicfest - I think I see a clear generational divide on MN about this. I was educated in all the classic feminist texts, from Wollstonecraft on (I read History at an ancient university - we were radical, I tell you!) and I teach these texts to my students now.

But there's a large swathe of the female population, who would call themselves feminists but because that's sort of what most women are nowadays, in very general & vague ways. Because it can feel that all the real battles for equality were fought and won (by 2nd wave feminists). So women felt we could relax a bit - the cause was passed on to excellent people such as Caroline Criado-Perez - or the organisation Pregnant Then Screwed (which I always think of them as the 21st century version of the "wages for housework" movement that Anne Oakley wrote about).

Then transactivist /extremist gender ideology snuck in. Quite a lot of 2nd wavers saw it, and wrote about it (across a broad spectrum of feminist writers: Suzanne Moore, Julie Bindel, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond). But the angry vicious misogynist force of TRAs took us all by surprise - the absolutely open and violent hatred of women by those masked antifas was a shock after 30 years of relative calm and progress.

What I hope is that those radicalised by resistance to transactivism go on to look at the broader feminist issues and follow the examples of valiant 2nd wave feminist - many of whom who are still around and still fighting.

Apologies for the long quote, but that's so much what I wanted to say!

Ideologically, I'm a Gender Abolitionist and have been since before feminism gave me the language to explain it (1971, if you're interested). If we have to acronym everything, it's quite handy that Gender Atheist and Gender Agnostic also match.

The fact that I want to abolish gender means I recognise it exists as a significant social force. A few PPs imply that we old-style feminists fail to realise this, or pretend we don't. They couldn't be further from the truth. Gender is, as set out in multiple feminist texts, the means by which women are oppressed. Of course we see it, and of course we want to get rid of it.

That feeds into what I find most repulsive about genderism. We were doing quite a good job of weakening the bonds of gender - they bind men as well as women - and now, suddenly, gender (also known as sex-role stereotyping) is what's supposed to DEFINE us, even to the extent of overriding biology? Fuck that!

Broadly speaking, social movements are composed of multiple collective actions to achieve a shared purpose. Feminism is a movement. Transgenderism is a movement. 'GC' is not, unless you want to call it a resistance movement. Since the only resistance needed is to defend factual reality, it's neither anti-gender nor pro-feminist.

If you mean gender, as in some kind of feeling of femininity or masculinity, or just a set of arbitrary rules, maybe.

I think that ends up not really understanding what human culture is or how it works, or most importantly, how much it is a part of us, and inescapable.

So much of what and who we are is shaped by symbols, traditions, ways of doing things defined over time, stories, common experiences.

Look at something like motherhood. It's one of the earliest and most fundamental human relations, and experience of it is near universal. All societies have basic myths built around it, stories and sophisticated literature. It is a bar, in many ways, for what we see as a kind of perfect love and care. And it is inextricably tied up with concepts of femaleness, self-giving, and love.

That is not constructed gender roles, even if some mothers have little relation to all of that, and even if some women are not mothers.

Even arbitrary changeable things, like pink = girl are part of how we conventionally communicate and define ourselves as sexed beings within a cultural context. Human beings find our sex important and interesting enough to care about understanding - and other people understanding - our sex role in society.

The biggest weakness of the traditional feminist GC view, IMO, is not giving the power and importance of culture in human life enough credit. We will never wipe out cultural the significance of sex roles, and so they will manifest within human society in cultural ways.

The attempt to stop this or claim it's a phantasm has enabled the situation we are in now.

I think it's fine, though maybe not the clearest. It's come to be a little more widely targeted than it was, but it's not necessarily a problem, it's happened naturally enough.

I do think it describes people with some fairly differernt viewpoints, though the idea that conservatives think "gender" is innate and people should follow these kinds of gender stereotypes is pretty inaccurate, IMO. It really doesn't describe the more mainstream conservative position even in the US.

Really? I wouldn't use it.

If someone asked if I was gender critical I wouldn't like the label.

It's like if a religious person asks if I'm an atheist. Really they just want a label they can attack and then claim all kinds of things about it and pretend that that's what I think.

Maybe I'm just used to horrible people.

No. The word "critical" has negative connotations and immediately casts anyone with that label in a subconsciously negative light.

It's used as an insult. People who believe in the standard biological truths that did not get pushback in say 2000 are now being labelled as a way to attack them.

Yeah, me too. I believe in biology. Gender is a thing, but it doesn't trump biological reality.

And just to join the dots ... Maya Forstater was one of the co-founders of Let Toys be Toys, the idea for which arose from a thread on MN FWR.

I'd describe myself as a feminist, who wants to fight against sex-based oppression and believes that gender is a made-up fiction. However, because that's quite a mouthful, and because of Forstater, I'd probably describe myself as GC as that affords me some legal protection.

The experiment in the video in this thread is why it's still (increasingly!) very necessary to be gender critical in its original meaning.

BBC on gender stereotypes through toys and clothing 😲 www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/5150755-bbc-on-gender-stereotypes-through-toys-and-clothing