What does gender critical mean?

As a gender critical feminist, I'd say the key point is not whether gendered preferences and behaviour exist today - clearly they do - it's whether they are an innate expression of sex differences that will always exist so society needs to accept and build them in or something externally constructed that applies unnecessary expectations, limitations and risks to people which society should strive to challenge and aim to move away from.

Taking the OP's "man/mother" example, today the right advice for the child is to find a woman, ideally a mother, because men are a higher risk.

But I believe men can and should be better. So alongside telling children what they need to do to be safe today, we as a society should also be doing much much more to identify and challenge problematic male behaviour as a systemic problem so that someday we won't have to tell children they are safer with women than men.

Like many women on this board I believe strongly that women and girls (original sex based meaning) need single sex spaces to remove the risk of male sexual abuse and mitigate the intellectual and emotional impact of men taking up an unfair proportion of the "air in the room", and that women and girls need women-only opportunities and truly gender neutral oppurtunities like blind auditions to overcome society's default confidence in mens abilities over womens.

Where I differ to some women on this board is that I believe that the bad behaviour of men towards women is socially constructed. So while we may need these things today, we should not fall into the trap of thinking it's the natural state of things.

So the ideal for me as a gender critical feminist is not to maintain single sex provisions indefinitely, it's to get to a place where they are genuinely no longer needed. (Because I believe , while necessary for women and girls today, their very existence is one of the engines for men to fetishise what we do there and want to gain access to that fantasy world.)

Similarly on the makeup. Clearly today women are the main consumers so it makes financial sense to take the into account for marketing. I do not dispute that most women who use makeup enjoy it, and I also accept that wearing makeup and performing feminine grooming is a rational choice for an individual woman if it makes her more acceptable socially or professionally. Nevertheless, l believe the gendering of makeup and grooming is detrimental to women in the long term because it validates to others and to ourselves that it is ok to judge our worth by our appearance, and it diverts our time and energy and money into something that men do not have to do (as much), leaving us less time to achieve other things.

And while it's true to say companies are reacting to the social environment when they market to women, their marketing also creates/produces/reinforces this social environment - social constructions are self-reinforcing. (I actually agree with Judith Butler on a lot of the basics of gender, I just fundamentally disagree with her naivety in believing that a handful of academic individuals pretending not to have a sex is going to disrupt the entrenched gender biases of a society that has been performing and reproducing them since before Biblical times, especially when so many people in society deeply believe those gender constructs on an unconscious level).

So on the makeup companies, I can recognise that they are rationally exploiting the market demographics while considering that their business is exploitative and bad for society in the long term.

(Don't get me started on women being socialised to desire shoes we can't even walk effectively in!)

All this said, there are, obviously, some social differences that are a direct result of our sex differences and will never go away. We will always need separate sporting catgeories for women, for example. We will always need some way to ensure women can bear and give at least early care to children without taking a higher financial or social hit than the father (something we clearly do not have today). To OP's example again, jobs/roles where physical strength matters will usually be better suited to men (although even these when you look closely at them are often less clear cut than we assume - plenty of physical work isn't done by the man's own strength but by the use of tools, tools that today are not engineered to work for women's size and strength but could be).

But I think there are far fewer innate differences than many believe, like the myth "more women than men naturally want to wear long hair, jewellery and makeup" which falls away with the briefest of glances at 18th century France or Ancient Egypt. So while recognising that Gender Critical feminism will ultimately hit a limit where some social, maybe even mental and emotional, differences between women and men are innate, to me the best way to get a fair outcome for women is to assume everything outside the directly physical is socially constructed and continue to challenge it to move to a better future without giving up any of practical single sex supports that are needed today.

The gender critical feminist project is done when all the gendered social constructs have fallen. That does not mean Feminism is done. Feminism's job is ensuring society deals fairly and supports women so we are not limited, disadvanted or abused because of our sex. Even without gender there will be work for Feminism to support women in those constraints and risks that are innate and cannot be taken away. But without gender that job will be much much easier.

So while I know not every woman on this board shares my optimism about how much gendered behaviours and especially MVAWG is socially constructed and therefore solveable, if we take the view that we continue to work towards a non-gendered future but don't give up any individual single sex support until the need for it has clearly passed, it doesn't matter that individual feminists don't agree on where this line is. The path is still the same path. As long as no protection is dropped until there are no longer any women who see a need for it we can still work together towards a world where the socially constructed things that can be fixed get fixed and the innate sex differences that remain are still supported.

So going back to PP's "there will always be fewer female engineers", perhaps. But that doesn't mean we should not be removing all the social barriers and expectations that make it harder for a women to succeed as an engineer, including the ones that artificially reduce the number of women who see engineering as a potential career in the first place. We don't need to assume we will end up with 50% balance to agree this is worth doing, we just need to know that some women say with hindsight they realise they self limited their options, and others say they expereinced more challenges than their male colleagues.

The target of Feminism is not a numeric 50/50 in all things, it's women no longer saying they have been unfairly limited, constrained or abused in their life because of their sex.

fair enough

To me it means you don't really recognise gender as being anything more than another word for bio sex. Also that the stereotypes associated with each gender are just that, and people of either sex should be able to act, dress and be interested in whatever they like. It doesn't make them less of a man or woman.

Yes, I get it - you were quoting someone else at the top of your post.

I meant pushing girls into caring roles is perhaps forcing them to do things they don't like

Young women can even work out how to use technology to advance medical response and care, if they are encouraged to think science and tech and engineering are something they can excel in.

btyoungscientist.com/sisters-ciara-saoirse-laoise-murphy-announced-as-winners-of-the-61st-bt-young-scientist-technology-exhibition/

No CDT at my girls' school in the 1980s - they only had ovens and sewing machines.

My mum's generation could be be sacked on marriage.

My grandmother's generation couldn't vote on equal terms with men.

Maybe girls just hate engineering, but we aren't really in a position to know that yet. It's not as though they are forced to do engineering now - just given the opportunity.

Yes, but it didn't help humanity at large, only the women, who aren't really human.

Very recently 2 maybe 3 employment tribunals have been won in that basis

Using it meant that rather than having to wade through the 'science' that 'proves' some, but not all, men are women, all that was needed was "well, it's a protected belief"

It's a start, it isn't the end

I get it XX, you've decided to fully commit to enforcing sex-role stereotypes, and to hell with freaks who want to choose their own path. They mustn't try anything new in case they dislike it.

I do think it's becoming harmful to use 'gender critical' as a general non-specific term, because it renders the words meaningless - just another label that can be written off as a culture war.

For instance the debate over puberty blockers is only partly related to gender - it should also be obvious that children are being harmed because the non-evidence based treatment and inadequate assessment process doesn't meet basic standards, regardless of opinions on feminism.

I understand why Porton Down employment tribunal centred on discrimination against gender critical beliefs, but if scientists at the laboratory that deals with chemical warfare can't understand the concept of classification by sex, we have some other very big problems.

I think we have to accept the differences in behaviour and work with them. We may have more women than men involved in childcare and more men that women as CEOs, but then the answer is to ensure that childcare is better paid and well respected rather than trying to force people to do something that they will dislike.

I think the reason we have more women in childcare and caring roles in general is because that's where women are encouraged to work. In hindsight I'd have rather become an engineer than a nurse.
Things may have changed but girls were always steered towards stereotypically feminine jobs. Care, hospitality, teaching. Boys towards tech and business
I'd argue pushing girls and women into these roles is 'to force people to do something that they will dislike'

I completely agree with this. I think the main reason many women wear makeup is absolutely to do with artificial societal expectations. Being told by media, men, other women that they're less attractive without. That they don't care about their appearance, let themselves go and so on.
To suggest that we're biologically wired to wear makeup up or high heels seems absurd. After all, a hundred years ago women weren't routinely wearing makeup up like they do today. It's because society expects it and many women have convinced themselves they need it. Same with removing body hair and so on.

This doesn't mean that any woman can't be an engineer for example if she chooses, but it does mean that I am not surprised that the sex balance is not anywhere close to 50/50 in university Engineering departments, and accepting that may be in women's best interests rather than aiming for a 50/50.

Well, nobody is expecting all courses to be 50/50 but it is in everyone's interests to understand why a particular group is underrepresented.

I think we have to accept the differences in behaviour and work with them. We may have more women than men involved in childcare and more men that women as CEOs, but then the answer is to ensure that childcare is better paid and well respected rather than trying to force people to do something that they will dislike.

I'm interested, do you think that the reason there are fewer female CEOs is due to biology? That women inherently dislike leadership roles?

That sounds like a "them problem" in the way the hard of thinking think "toxic masculinity" applies to all men.

Especially in the 80s- New Romantics, punks etc.

To me it means to be critical of gender ideology - the idea that someone’s subjective and changeable feelings about themselves are a better basis for policy and law than the material reality of their sex. That you can be “born in the wrong body” and it’s kind to tell children their healthy bodies and wrong and can okay be fixed by medical interventions that leave them sterile, with increased risk of cancers, heart disease, brittle bones, reduced cognitive functioning and no sexual function as adults.

It's odd that women are stereotypically viewed as delicate and flowery, when so much of being female literally involves cleaning up bodily fluids.

Yes, some people.

And another reason why I think this issue has actually created more feminists.

Some people who might uphold some stereotypes, will still baulk at the thought of rapists in women's prisons, mixed toilets in schools and not being able to ask for a female doctor.

So they go off in search of an explanation.

And find feminism

You can almost think of transgenderism as a recruitment drive

GC is misunderstood and mislabelled "anti trans" - both "sides" want to reject the idea that people should be constrained by sexist stereotypes. The difference is that the trans narrative requires the stereotypes to have a power and concrete existence in order that those who step outside them can define themselves in terms of how they live in relation to those categories, whereas the GC narrative wants to deconstruct and disempower the stereotypes and reduce their existence for everyone.

some people believe the most terrible stuff about race. That isn't a reason to encourage them by legislating on the basis of their ill-thought-out narrow-minded prejudices.

some people

some people believe a lot of shit

They weren't allowed to become doctors, one of the reasons for which was that they couldn't handle the sight of blood on a regular basis.

Hello periods!

The thing is, I'm absolutely certain that most people knew women could handle the sight of blood. Nurses, for instance. Abortionists.

Hence the necessity to impose the stereotype.

I do genuinely think this is one of the reasons why transgenderism has been allowed to thrive. Because people really do believe in sex stereotypes.

"This doesn't mean that any woman can't be an engineer for example if she chooses"

Until the latter part of the twentieth century, women's educational choices were very limited because the societal expectation was that a woman's role was domesticity.

Women in Afghanistan certainly don't have a choice.