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

I very much liked the term for what it originally meant - being critical of gender stereotypes and all their ramifications.
It wasn't about being critical of transgender people, it was about rejecting gendered boxes. Girls can't play football, boys don't cry, pink is for girls, short hair is for boys .... and all that crap leads on to.

Out of this, in conjunction with a grasp of basic reality that there are 2 sexes and humans can't swap between them, comes the GC view in relation to trans issues. Live your life, present as you want, but don't force the belief that a man can become a woman on other people.

I think it's a silly expression.

It's not accurate either. Sex can't be changed. That isn't a belief, it's fact. I am not "gender critical". For me, gender is something you grapple with when learning German ;)

Also "gender" isn't a thing. The protected characteristic in UK law is "gender reassignment".

I don't think a blame game is productive. The world changed and the goalposts moved.
We can't change the past, we move forward from where we are.
Womens' sex based rights are under threat and I am incredibly grateful to those who were 'awake' enough to see it coming and shout about it.

Ditto.

Surely in that case one is identifying those things that fall under the umbrella of "gender" in order to criticise them? In the sense of assessing their positive/ negative traits and utility?

I think that sums up where I’m at.

Half the problem, though, is that the usage of the term , gender, has developed in the same way that ‘gay’ doesn’t mean merry/ /happy, and ‘queer’ doesn’t mean strange. However, many people ( of all ages) still think it can be used interchangeability with sex , meaning male/female, rather than the stereotyping pink/blue meanings.

Its a long running made up dilemma - that people agree on somethings but not for the same reasons and dont agree on other issues.

Its only used when people want to add doubt onto an idea - it cant be a good one because he agrees and he also thinks x.

What matters is the solution. I dont want matt walsh to be tasked with it, but i dont want a liberal solution either. Im in favour of safeguarding being the solution over somethining like free speech simply because i dont want the outcome to be 'he can call himeself a woman and we can call him 'he'.

But before a solution is found, we need as many people as possible to acknowledge the problem.

I prefer the term, sex realist.
I have learned lots from radical feminism but I'm not a gender abolitionist. I think I agree with Germaine Greer, that gendering (i.e. attaching signifiers or meanings to our sexed being that are cultural rather than biological) is just something that human societies do. I'm wary of the idealism of radical movements which want to reform human nature into something better.
On the other hand, I think today's trans rights movement is just a men's rights movement with flags.
(One day I'll have a child who sleeps through the night and I'll have the time and brain space to read The Whole Woman once again and get my head around what exactly it is that Greer says about gender which I tantilisingly just remember as Very Interesting).

I prefer it to Terf, and to me it covers a much broader rejection of stereotypical fluff. Being critical of gender says nothing specifically about my beliefs regarding queer-theory gender or trans issues, except that gender shouldn't matter at all.

Gender is a word with lots of meanings, but is confused, i believe, with sex in the GRA.

When we talk a gender roles and expectations, we mean sex roles and expectations, dont we? A girl who would have been considered a tom boy years ago would be seen as gender non conforming now. Same with boys, rather than calling them 'effeminate', we say gender non conforming. Its just acting differently to what is expected from their sex.

But, they were girls and boys whatever they do because of their sex. Gender isnt a person, its behaviour and roles assigned to one sex.

But within queer theory and the GRA, gender is what a person is, and thats what makes them female and male, not sex.

Well put. But an awful lot of people don't realise that the two terms aren't interchangeable. They think that gender is just a more polite term than sex. I had to explain the difference to my DH, who is both intelligent and well educated. The faster that the difference, as you describe it, becomes more widely known, the faster we will have well-informed discussions in the general public.

Whats happened is academic feminism became untethered from real life, and morphed into gender. Feminists in the political class are too removed from ordinary women to understand how their decisions can impact on lives. They saw everyone as identities and stopped seeing women as a class.

Men rights, under the cover of trans ideology used this to convince the elites that their sexual wants are a human right. And because marginal identies trump the majority, politicans and academic feminists didnt think to analyse the impact of the demands of an identity on society.

Women didnt even know this was going on until they were told that they had to accept a boy in their daughters changing room, or a man in their hospital ward.

Men who think women have a particular role in life have always existed, but can never put that idea into law. Are we really close to it being illegal for mothers to work? There may be barriers, but no party in the UK is making it illegal. There is, however, laws that give adult men female birth certificates and the right to be treated as if they are women, and no political party is willing to change that.

You are free to think that matt walsh is a threat to all women and spend your time concentrating on him but i think you are distracted from the real issue - politicians redefining what a woman is.

Sex is material and a physical reality.

Gender is a construct and a metaphysical reality.

Some people try and claim gender is a material reality (which is ridiculous) others claim that sex is a metaphysical not physical reality (also ridiculous).

To deny sex or gender exists altogether is ridiculous. There is clear evidence that both exist whether people like it or not.

Agreed, it's the 'old' feminists that let us get in this mess.

Quite. This all went through on their watch. Whilst the rest of us were busy living lives and getting on with it.

Conservatives? What like the UK party who have had 3 female Prime Ministers? Unlike the Labour Party who have never had one woman allowed to be a leader? Those 'Conservatives'?

This is the problem with labelling things 'Right' or 'Left' or 'Conservative' or 'Labour'...you just end up making me have to point out your illogical fallacies. Please start thinking things through to the end of your sentences. It's really fucking simple when you start to do it.

And a lot of feminists who were active years ago either didnt notice trans ideology creeping in, didnt understand the implications for women and children, or actively encouraged it.

It could equally be argued that women new to feminism are trying to sort out the mess made by those involved for years.

Such a flat, one dimensional view of what is actually multi-layered reality.

Sex is real. It is biology. Only women can become pregnant and give birth...and in spite of some types feminist argument, pregnancy and motherhood are not automatic negatives; they can be great joys, and motherhood is not a dirty word. It does not have to be synonymous with oppression.

Is this what you mean by " sticking to the sexes"?

I assume you don't have children? Many of us women do. I do, and now a granddaughter as well......I'm not oppressed, I've done 'my thing', I continue to do my thing, I do what I enjoy and what works for me, not what I'm expected to do by others.

That is a bastardisation of what GC implies.

And that is because you are confusing sex with gender.

Sex is biological reality; the nature of your body - and that includes for women female puberty and all that flows from that. Of course it is only women who can become pregnant and give birth ( and there can be great value and worth in that - it is not an automatic negative) - but that doesn't mean that women can only wear certain types of clothing, do certain types of occupation, have limited stereotypical interests and so on......all of those things are GENDER.

Gender is just personal preference or taste or personality, or whatever you want to call it.

There are some traits which tend to be sex specific, though, or certainly over-represented by one sex or the other........and that includes a propensity for violence.....most violent offenders, for example, are males......and this a consequence of the combination of testosterone and male drive and its socialisation. Women tend not to be sexual fetishists or predators, either, in the way that males can be.

I don't know of anyone who might be described as GC as being accepting of gender norms and stereotypes. The people who seem to cling most to these norms and stereotypes are the people adopting gender identities.