Sally Hines

🤣

JKR replied to my comment on the X thread and she added a "x" - she sent me a kiss 😁

That thread is the gift that keeps on giving 😁💜

Oh how excellent!!!
😂😂
Jeez JKR is wiping the floor with this non-Gendered person, and the pet doesn’t even realise!!

You really can’t go around just making things up

Oh, the fucking irony 🙄

I think it can be potentially a useful theory but the limitations need to be really clear. And what it can be used for.

It's a bit mad that law is trying to suggest that 'feelings/thoughts/ideas about sex stereotypes' are an exact equivalent to the state of biological sex.

That a man who has feelings/thoughts/ideas/belief about sex stereotypes and feels that he prefers the stereotyes generally loosely applied to 'female' could actually think that makes him female is mad in the first place; that the law suggests it can actually afford him the rights/protections afforded to women based on his feelings/thoughts/ideas/beliefs is ... I don't know. Meta-mad?

Sorry, Arabella, I made assumptions!
I was so excited to see what I thought was a better explanation of what GI is than we normally get on these boards.

Yes, that all makes good sense to me.

In legal terms it would possibly work if it made very clear that sex and gender have different meanings - even if only in legal terms - and what each one meant.

Keep a GRC totally unrelated to biological sex. Then hand them out to whoever wants one.

IANAA (I am not an Academic) and I haven't read Hines' book, I am just trying to parse out what she has said from her tweets. It could be that I'm missing something crucial, I don't have a big knowledge of feminist theory.

FlirtsWithRhinos · Today 13:55

...they need to make that case explictly, explaining from first principles...

I think that ought to be first question in any debate on this. They'd fall at the first hurdle.

I don't think I could facepalm harder if I tried.

Its the circular:

Its not about gender stereotypes, but if you don't conform to stereotypes then you are trans rather than gender non-conforming.

And everyone else should be a sexist pig from theh 1950s but with new added glitter to make it fashionable and progressive.

And JKR firmly has her number on that.

Honestly I'm 100% fine if people want to be able to label themselves based on how they relate to the ideas of gender. I don't feel any need to dispute the ever-more-freewheeling explanations of gender feelings and gender identifies, the manifolds and shifting constellations and so on (in fact I quite like them), because at the end of the day everything they describe is obviously a different thing to physical sex, and my concern as a femiinst is ending the disproportionate social and economic marginalisation suffered by female people because of their physical sex.

My red lines are simple:

1. Feelings of gender are manifestly not the same as phyiscal sex so they should not use the same names as physical sex.

1. Feelings of gender are manifestly not the same as phyiscal sex so there is no justiifcation to have a legal status of the opposite sex based on feelings of gender.

1. A person's gender identity does not give them any particular insights into or commonality with the opposite sex and so we should not give their input into political, legal or social discussions about the opposite sex any more weight than those of any other person of their sex

1. A person's gender, being not the same thing as sex, does not confer them access to any rights, support or resources where the intention is to segregated by sex. The accident of the same name currently labelling two separate things (see point one) is not justification to treat the two things as interchangeable.

1. If someone believes feelings of gender are a more appropriate basis on which to segregate something than physical sex, they need to make that case explictly, explaining from first principles and without relying on the existence of a support based on sex, why it makes sense to replace that specifc sex-based support with a gender-feeling support, explainaing both why the gender feelings give rise to the need and why the sex-based need no long exists.

So laws are built on egos.

Fantastic.

@lifeturnsonadime & @Needmoresleep

It's all about you, and how you feel about what you are wearing/doing, what your job is. If your intention is.
Apparently.

Actually, maybe the arbitrariness and mutability of gender (she means, but doesn't want to say, stereotypes) is not a weakness.
If the gender identity is your relationship with gender (stereotypes), then she might argue that it's about how you feel about whatever "gendered" behaviour and dress etc happens to mean at the time you are alive.

But this still relies on there being such a thing as sex, because otherwise how do we know whether something is masculine or feminine coded? That's the constant - that we keep dividing people up into two groups with (mostly) different dress and behaviour expectations, so we must have a way of telling which group is under which set of stereotypes.

I wonder what she says sex is. Not enough to buy the book, obviously.

Ah so gender identity is putting people into stereotypical boxes?

Great, so why are we basing laws on stereotypes?

So if I am a woman, it is not acceptable to be assertive, without endangering my identity as a woman? .

I am in the middle of a large construction project and am having to be very assertive with the surveyor. Structural engineer and contractor are on my side so it is both correct and necessary that I am. However would the surveyor have the right to claim I was not feminine enough?

(He is a plonker - so if he could he would.)

I think she's saying (I'm cribbing from Arabella's summary, I haven't read the book) that if you like and feel comfortable wearing trousers and having short hair, have a traditionally masculine job and hate housework, then your GI is masculine. How masculine and how much of a man you are, depends on how much you embrace masculine-coded behaviour and presentation. Ditto feminine-coded behaviour and presentation. Hence the spectrum.

So it's not quite as silly as claiming that the mere act of wearing trousers etc turns you into a man, but it's a fundamentally flawed analysis nonetheless.

So is Sally simply saying that if you have more masculine traits then your gender identity is man and if you have more feminine traits then your gender identity is woman? So it's no longer possible to be a woman who wears trousers and is an engineer, or a man with long hair who likes cooking?

What happened to breaking down gender stereotypes, Sally?

I think what Hines is saying is that 'gender identity' is how we relate to the ideas of 'gender'. Whether we wish to conform or not to the bundle of characteristics described as 'masculine' or 'feminine'. And we can measure our own antipathy or enjoyment against the cultural standards and stereotypes and expectations.

The trouble is that those bundles are arbitary, they change depending on history, culture, context. There is no fixed set or definition, and 'gender' or the things we desribe as 'gender' don't map directly, clearly, or uncomplicatedly onto sex.

It's trying to hammer a nebulous, shifting, vague and contested academic theory onto a very simple, material and immutable physical reality. The two things are immiscible.

It's not possible to say that anything is inherently 'masculine' or 'feminine', because it is subjective and subject to change, constantly in flux. We can step back and say how we feel overall about any arbitrary set of stereotypes, for sure. But all that means is 'gender non conformity'.

I'd say that 'non binary' and 'gnc' are the only logical outcomes of 'genderism', really. Because you just cannot relate an infinite, changeable, and arbitrary set of characteristics onto two immutable sexes.

The disconnect is in trying to suggest that 'gender' is a fixed material reality, and that 'sex' is a mutable theoretical quality. It's the wrong way round.

The back and forth between JKR and Sally has been joyous though. JK is on fire!

Pfft. How should I know?

I'm not your bloody therapist.

(Oh how I howled at that response).

JKR is pwning her.

Thanks, now I have a nursery rhyme earworm to try to extemporise. I hate you all.

Is Sally Hines a bargain-bin Judith Butler?

😂😆

😂that's hilarious, Snowypeaks😂
I'll never look at a muffin again without thinking of Sally Hines... oh wait..

😨that's awful,Snowypeaks😨
I'll never look at a muffin again without thinking of Sally Hines