How did we get here?

Hell yeah!

True, the higher level of SMP is short - but your statement 'We were told you only had to have a few weeks off work' suggests a significant number of people thought that this is a good thing. I don't remember that ever being the case. Even back in the 90s at the height of ladette culture and the libfem 3rd wave, the predominant UK conversation I was aware of was not '6 weeks is plenty', but 'why don't we have 3 years like Scandinavia?'.

Six weeks is all many people can afford. A lot of nice employers who want to attract and retain talented women to work there may offer a good occupational maternity pay package but lots don't. If you are only entitled to SMP you get 6 weeks at 90% of full pay then it drops to the weekly rate of £187.18 which is £811 per month. Average non-london rent is £1,141 per month. If you have no other way to meet obligations for rent and bills there may be no other option.

Six weeks?! Are you in the US?

I'm not talking about time off for childbirth.

I'm asking whether you think that there is any difference between women and men in being able to do a "normal" sort of job under normal circumstances (i.e. not having given become a parent in the past couple of years).

You seem to disagree that - in terms of doing a job - that pregnancy and maternity is the only difference between men and women so I'm trying to tease out what you think that is. (Maybe you don't disagree - I'm not clear).

My second question was not about "being told" - we are told billions of things that we don't accept without question - but when you said it was "the very widespread adoption in society of the basic attitude that biology was irrelevant" - I am not sure if that is what you meant to say, so im trying to figure it out.

Hope you don't read my tone as snarky, it's not meant to be!

Before childbirth, women absolutely can do non-physical jobs just like men. Some unfortunate women suffer dreadfully with PMT, but generally most women cope fine and perform as well as at any other time of month, and as well as their male colleagues.

However, after childbirth, not many women can go back to work after six weeks, or even less time, and pick up where they left off as if nothing had happened, or as if they had just been off for a minor operation like having an appendix out.
Such women are outliers.
Most women who go back so early are forced to by financial circumstances and they suffer for it.
Many women (not all) go back to work sooner than they would like, even after a year off, and many have to fight their hormones every step of the way. I have read here on MN of women crying in the toilets at work because they miss their baby so much.

This is why I think it wasn't ever "widely accepted" or believed that women and men were on equal footing except for genitals!
No, not that women were on an equal footing. The sexism in society was always apparent, even after the legislation of the 1970s.
What we were told was that our biology, our body, was irrelevant, and that we should fight the sexism in society, and furthermore we would soon win.

We were told that the only difference that was women got pregnant

Do you disagree with this, in terms of being able to do a normal sort of job (eg not requiring male strength etc)?

Perhaps it was only the women that believed their biology was irrelevant, and the men were just pretending to go along with it.

Absolutely. This is why I think it wasn't ever "widely accepted" or believed that women and men were on equal footing except for genitals!

It was meant in mainly in terms of work. There were very strong messages to girls that 'you can do anything you want' for a job. We were told that the only difference that was women got pregnant, but with maternity pay we could still have a great career. We were told you only had to have a few weeks off work, and even if you wanted to breast feed for four months (the norm, weaning used to start at four months), you could just pump, or the childcare could use bottles while you were at work.
Plus there was the whole 'ladette' culture in the 90s, that women could drink and enjoy casual sex just like men.
It was not literally that 'biology' per se was irrelevant, just that as a woman you could do anything, and that modern men should be perfectly happy to change nappies and push prams.

Of course the patriarchy and sexism never went away. Women being told 'you can do anything you want' is not quite the same as actually getting equal promotions and having no sexism at work.
Perhaps it was only the women that believed their biology was irrelevant, and the men were just pretending to go along with it.

As I said, the backlash in terms of gendering children's stuff was huge. Whether this was driven by parents or by corporations is hard to say.

Unfortunately, the very widespread adoption in society of the basic attitude that biology was irrelevant

Do you think anyone did actually believe this?
I struggle to believe that even, say, 20% of society believe this or did believe it. Sexism never went away and it was and is always based on people's sex - their biology.

As another strand, some academics went too far, and in fact went completely off the rails, and ended up trying to demolish sex (in favour of gender-woo), instead of demolishing sex-based discrimination, maybe because the latter actually seemed harder than the former.

@NoBinturongsHereMate @potpourree
Agree with all you say.

The relevance to this discussion, to answer the question 'how did we get here?', is that when some feminists claimed that 'biological sex was completely irrelevant' back in the 80s, they were thinking mainly about success in their careers and equal distribution of housework. They were not thinking about letting men in the female toilets.
Unfortunately, the very widespread adoption in society of the basic attitude that biology was irrelevant was adopted wholesale by the genderists and taken extremely literally.

Most people, when confronted with an ‘expert’ in a subject they don’t personally know much about, are happy to take that expertise as read unless there are some really obvious mistakes made. Most people also don’t like causing upset and offence, especially in a group that they’ve been reliably informed is very vulnerable.

I would go further and say that most people (maybe 'kind' people) accept other people's expertise even when it doesn't match with what they actually see around them.

For example a man looking around their workplace and thinking "The women here all seem to be making progress, and I covered all that work for Emma when she went on maternity leave", or a white person looking around their neighbourhood and thinking "There's a great multicultural mix here, and there's loads of interesting new food available".

Other people's lives do mostly look pretty good from the outside, and their daily problems generally seem somewhat less urgent than your own.

So how do you deal with it if things look ok to you but the experts tell you, actually, they aren't ok? That you should be behaving differently, doing more to help, or that what you thought was normal behaviour is actually unhelpful, or a "microagression"?

If you are a decent person, you are going to believe those other people, and try to change. Maybe throw in a bit of guilt for not noticing that other people were suffering. The instinct is good - but your background doubt of "Is this really a problem? Really?" might never go away, especially if it's something which is always going to be outside your own experience.

And that's how I think trans rights have taken hold. People are inured to the dissonance. "I don't fully understand, but I want to be supportive" easily shades into "I won't ever understand and I must be supportive regardless."

Actually that reminds me of that website where they provided the average calorie requirements for men, women... and non-binary people by calculating the midpoint between the two

Thank you @NoBinturongsHereMate for articulating my point of view so well!

There's often a confusion between traits at class level (eg a sex class) vs at individual level. We could describe the average woman using various measures across all women and choosing the mean score. However the vast majority of women will not match that description at all. It has no effect on whether or not they are female.

Look at it this way.... if we used measures at class level, we could say that the average human has one breast and one bollock. However, trying to use that information to help or describe etc any individual is utterly useless.

I'm afraid I'm.terrible at saving links, @eatfigs , but I may have something lurking in my bookmarks. I'll have a rummage.

Group trends vs individual meaning is one of the areas genderism tends to go wrong (accidentally or to suit their argument).

There are group-level behaviour differences between men and women. Some are entirely socially defined ('girls like pink' is specific to modern western culture), some are at least partly biological (men are more violent than women because they have more testosterone, because they have greater strength that means they're more likely to have a 'successful' result from acting violently, and because society allows and even encourages them to be more violent).

But most of these trends tell us nothing about the individual, and the link with sex is an indirect one. A man who likes pink is still a man; a violent woman is still a woman; it's no use asking my (male) DP about the rules of rugby but he can tell you the lift rules for a competition Vienese waltz.

Whereas physiological and anatomical difference is much more directly linked. A person who produces eggs is always a woman (even though not all women produce eggs). And a person with testosterone levels over 5 is a man (or a woman in need of immediate medical treatment).

I believe it was due to Isaacs.

He either was already influenced or allowed those pushing the Stonewall approach to law to be used in the EHRC. It is perhaps a very good reminder about how these connections work.

I would be very interested in reading more about that research if you can recall the details.

people whose self identity is wrapped up in being kind and caring.

Indeed. It was telling that Kate Searle's last line of defence as she crumbled under interrogation was wailing 'But I'm a kind person!'. Her indentity mattered more than her actions.

There's some interesting research showing that people who classify themselves as 'a good person' tend to have worse moral behaviour than those who don't.¹

Because they're 'a good person' it doesn't matter to their self image if they do bad things - as a good person they must obviously be doing them for the right reason, and the end justifies the means if your soul is pure. Whereas if you're simply 'a person who mostly tries to do the right thing', you do actually have to do it.

¹ (From memory I think it may have been good vs neutral; not sure they tested good vs actively evil. That may have had different results.)

How did we get to where the EHRC got equality law wrong, even when there were plain examples within the guidance, saying for instance women only rape crisis facilities? Could it have been anything to do with their Chair from 2016 to 2020, David Issac.

David Issac was chair of Stonewall from 2003. He left to another charity before Stonewall kicked off in earnest over the T but that means nought.

That’s a really good point about the money. I’ve never thought about how hospital boards would see it during austerity but it makes total sense.

I think the lanyard class is an important dimension too. If follow the money is the why, the capture of public and third sector organisations is the how. It led to whole organisations of flying monkeys.

These are people who mostly mean well. Who are basically caring, helpful and value driven. But also people whose self identity is wrapped up in being kind and caring. It was easy to weaponise “Be kind” as in instruction to follow the dogma without challenge because of how people saw themselves. Disagreeing would have meant being unkind. You only have to see the shit shown at Sandie and others who dared to disagree, to understand why most people kept their heads down.

This also took place against the background of austerity. Rainbow lanyards and glitter aren’t just more colourful than disability rights they are cheaper. A nice sounding (but meaningless) phrase in a policy document is easier to implement than accessible toilets, and who cares if women are affected because they don’t matter.

I don't know about you. Science and statistics are done with large populations. You might be an outlier.

I was thinking more of the effects of testosterone on men, rather than female hormones on women, so I don't know about the research on female behaviour, although PMT and the menopause are obvious examples, as well as the hormones encouraging bonding immediately after birth.

Tumblr.

I wonder though whether it was sports that provided the evidence about fhe retenfion of power in male bodies. That power differentiation proof was not ‘unknown’ but we had do go to the effort of proving it.

that then worked with other aspects which was based on moral ground which some people deny or twist to suit themselves.