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

Agree with this. 'critical' implies that you're unconvinced (and therefore could potentially be convinced) and that there's something concrete to be critical about/against. It's like saying 'God critical' instead of 'atheist'.

It began as being critical of something that's all too real, gender stereotypes. That used to be a pretty well-understood term, think of books like 'Delusions of Gender' (nothing, iirc, to do with trans issues).

I think there's a scale of strength here, isn't there?

• sex realist < gender critical < "gender atheist"

Sex realism / biological realism means you acknowledge the physiological and social importance of sex but aren't necessarily too bothered about the separate social category of gender. You could be a sex realist and still be fine with little girls being expected to do girly things, or with males identifying as "women" in a social sense, whilst not wanting males in female toilets, acknowledging males' greater propensity toward violence etc. Most conservatives are probably in this boat.

Gender critical and gender "atheist" positions seem to me to align more with traditional feminism by saying explicitly that the social expectations of "gender" should be questioned (GC) or rejected entirely (GA). On the trans issue, a gender atheist is going to state outright that to believe yourself to belong to another gender than that you were brought up in is a false belief; while a gender critical person is at least strongly open to the possibility that such a belief might be false. (A complication being that GC is also used in the sense of GA, no doubt at least in part because the latter is such a clunky term.)

We are going to have people from all three groups on a forum like this one and that's fine, but that doesn't mean we need to pretend the different labels are interchangeable.

I guess it really depends on how you are defining "GC"

Part of the problem with GC (as a standalone term) is that since Forstater, it has simply come to mean (in a legal sense) somebody who believes that sex is real, immutable and important. This can probably be applied to most people regardless of whether or not they understand and are critical of the concept of gender, and regardless of their political position.

I think the only time that I would call myself GC now is where doing so would offer me some protection in law but I also understand that this protection is open to any person who recognises the reality and immutability of sex and so it applies to people across the political spectrum from the ultra left to the far right.

For this reason I think it has become a useful concept in law but less helpful in terms of describing a political or feminist movement because it simply ends up applying to everybody.

Agree with this. 'critical' implies that you're unconvinced (and therefore could potentially be convinced) and that there's something concrete to be critical about/against. It's like saying 'God critical' instead of 'atheist'.

I did not study feminism and have never read feminist theory, I did study industrial relations though so I looked at it all from the discrimination side. I was practicing feminism without any interest in the theory. I could have told your undergrads that they had no fucking idea to support their idea that women had equality. They were living in a fantasy land.

I also remember being told off by women a decade younger on a work trip about 5 years ago, where the women were saying that female singers who sexualised themselves were empowering girls. I told them it was the opposite. That this was not empowerment just because they did it to themselves. It was still women using the ‘sex sells’ concept of marketing and teaching girls that to be successful you have to objectify themselves.

I was not popular for saying so. But that to me seems to encapsulate ‘liberal’ feminism.

Never heard of it, no idea what it means, sounds like more made up bollocks to me to be honest

And - a woman standing up for herself should not be diminished with the term 'aggressive'. Self defense is not aggression, women don't have to be meek. My resolution this week is to be more Nell.

YellowAsteroid was deliberately snide and I am not going to ignore that. If she wanted to disagree with me, fine, let her attempt to convince me that her postition has some validity. Sniggering assumption of superiority is not fine.

It was disgraceful.

Do you need to be quite so aggressive, Dean? YellowAsteroid made relevant points. And as a second-wave feminist, I’m old enough not to blame my lecturers or anyone else for the mistakes I’ve made.

I’m a gender realist.

I don’t mind ‘gender critical’, and sometimes use GC for convenience when talking to other women, eg on Mumsnet, because it’s well known.

But I prefer ‘gender realist’, which is a more exact definition. I don’t care what other people call themselves, I’ll stick with reality.

some of the twisting of my words upthread

Maybe your words were the problem. If you left your undergraduates thinking that women didn't need feminism any more, that speaks volumes about your inability to show them what the live issues were. Your failure as a lecturer, not their failure to see what was happening in the world because they were being given an inadequate grounding.

I'm not surprised by that - your use of that quite disgracefully snide 'Up to a point Lord Copper' quote to say that you (quite mistakenly) thought I was wrong (and that you were too gutless to say so outright, and think yourself clever because you can quote Waugh) told me that you are self important and self regarding and intellectually dishonest. Not qualities that ever go down well with the sceptical and intelligent young. Or with the middle aged, or with other 2nd wave feminists.

Rather than flouncing around telling us how wonderful you are, maybe do some honest reflection on how your own poor communication skills, and more broadly, the sloppy acceptance of the word 'gender' by academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, grew into the tragedies we see around us today.

Standing alongside the likes of Matt Walsh resisting the mutilation and sterilisation of children and the mangling of basic language to describe reality is completely different to a 'feminist' movement that will be co-opted by men, as always, to further their interests. As demonstrated by the so called 'professional feminists' who failed to keep feminism about women and girls.

It is a subtle difference. There is more than one war going on here.

I'm really pleased to see the revival of grass roots feminism, in this resistance to the attack on the fundamental definition of what it is to be a woman.

But it's not the only tenet of feminism, which is a much broader movement. And I think some of the newly radicalised "gender criticals'" need to remember this. We need a movement which will keep going on other important matters once we've diverted transactivism.

Activism on femicide worldwide - the million or so foetuses aborted each year because they are female; surrogacy - the use of women as merely vehicles for rich couples; prostitution & sex trafficking - some big international fights!

Since the words ‘gender critical’ has been detached from the original term ‘gender critical feminist’ and repurposed by those who seem to want to use it to wedge in groups of people who aren’t critical of gender but who agree that sex is immutable, the words have lost meaning and purpose.

That's really astute @Helleofabore and catches what I've been feeling for a while.

As a dyed-in-the-wool 2nd wave feminist. I've always been "gender critical". For me (and millions like me from the women's lib movement/2nd wave) it's fundamental to feminism - a critique of sex-based stereotypes.

And contrary to some of the twisting of my words upthread, the main attack on extremist gender ideology and transactivism has come from 2nd wave feminists - women around my age and older. Journalists such as Julie Bindel & Suzanne Moore were noting the emerging TWAW discourse in the late 90s/early 2000s. And of course, there's Janice Raymond's Transsexual Empire back in the 1970s, and staunch feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys speaking & writing about this for the last 30-40 years. Germaine Greer was public about this in the fight to try to stop a transsexual man from joining her all women college in the late 1990s/early 200s.

For me, the gap - when women didn't notice what was happening - was in the period of "liberal feminism" - when the undergrads I was teaching at the time tried to tell me that they "didn't need feminism" or "were not feminists" because "women are equal now."

I told them to come back in 20 years after a few maternity leaves, and the young men they'd studied with & started work with had zoomed ahead in promotions & salary ...

We took our eye off the ball, but it wasn't the 2nd wavers. And it's the 2nd wavers now who are leading the move to fix things.

Gah - word salad! Should read '...that biological realism is...'. Not sure where the 'to be a' came from.

I have to agree that I prefer biological realist. I mean, yes, I am also gender critical, but that's in the sense of thinking gender stereotyping is damaging patriarchal bullshit, rather than specifically anything to do with the conflict between trans activism and women's rights.

No feminism is about protecting the rights of all women, including the vast majority who do not conform to any stereotype. The suffragettes wanted all women to have the vote, not just women who were 'feminine'. Women are female, and discriminated against because of that. Feminism existed long before anyone (John Money, late 1970s self-described 'feminists') started theorising about the existence of something they chose to call 'gender'.

No, its stupid
And I hate labels, they are afterall what powers TRA.
I accept biological reality.
Thats it

At its broadest 'gender critical' just means someone who doesn't buy into gender ideology. And it's weird to have a term to express this rejection. It is like treating not-being-a-Scientologist as a particular ideology of its own.

Just as with not-being-a-Scientologist, the rejection of gender ideology is going to be a feature of the belief systems of many people who are in other respects extremely diverse in their outlooks. Hence the questions about 'what gender critical means'

I do think, though, that despite the fact that many right wing and/or anti-feminist people might call themselves 'gender critical' in the very broad sense that I have mentioned above, it does have a core longer-term meaning which excludes the anti-feminist right. It's core meaning is simply the feminist rejection of the gender stereotypes that have confined women (and to some extent men) since forever, and that are now being used in a brand-new supercharged way to prevent women from even naming the sex class that has been victimised by these stereotypes.

At its core, feminism just is gender criticism, and gender criticism is feminism. Because gender stereotypes are the ideology through which the oppression of women is enacted and endorsed, and they are demolished when we critique them and point to their unreality.

So I am happy enough with 'gender critical'. I think 'sex realist' might be a slightly better term though. It carries a clearer sense of the absurdity of gender ideology.

It's a sex stereotype. Gender doesn't exist. And I also criticise any stereotyping of poor people, or people from other nationalities or religions, or Travellers, or people from other races. Admittedly sex does actually exist, as does money, as do countries. A lot of the rest is extremely tenuous.

But I'm agin encouraging anyone to let stereotypes limit their potential.

Good idea, or at least say in full 'gender stereotype critical' if clarification is needed.

I think I'm just going to change 'gender' into 'stereotype' whenever I see it from now on. I'm stereotype critical. If people want to change their stereotype, fine. Why would anyone need surgery or hormones to change their stereotype. And wtf do we need legislation to replace 'sex' with 'stereotype' when it comes to equal rights?

It is a resistance. Not a movement.

But surely 'gender critical' doesn't mean critical of the term 'gender'? It means critical of gender, i.e. critical of gender stereotypes.

I have no problem with the term 'gender critical'. I am critical of gender stereotypes and gender identity theory.

I do have a problem with the term 'terf'. Not because I find it offensive as such, but because it implies that to be a biological realism is an extreme view held only by radical feminists (whereas in fact the vast majority of men, women and children, whatever their political or social views, know full well what 'man' and 'woman' mean).