Is the Gender Critical Movement Bound to Remain Rudderless?

I agree @inkognitha On reflection I think that being gender critical has to be a movement. It is one that was created out of the hypothesis that sex is a matter of identity rather than reality. To that we can respond defensively using law and argument to clarify why sex matters. However, power is also important. The situation would be less perilous if those in power both shared our views and also saw them as important.

It's the beginning of all transhuman technologies which have changed the relationship between our bodies and technology.

Surely there is a longer history of technology changing this relationship? Why single out reproduction?

There is no gender critical 'movement'. Just loads of individuals, not all of us women, getting on with life and refusing to take nonsensical shit.

Some of these men seem to expect something like the freemasons, with dressy-up clothes and code words and meetings and officers and leaders. No thanks.

Can't begin to imagine what it was like for women back in the days when 8 or 10 kids was commonplace. And almost certainly, even more pregnancies. The Good Old Days weren't indeed all they are cracked up to be, whatever the drawbacks of the Pill.

I reject the suggest in the original article that the GC Movement is a transformative movement. I see it as course correcter, dragging logic and biology back to where is stood originally, before the TRAs got going.

There is a significant change of perspective from, let's fix this part of your body that isn't working properly, and restore health, vs, let's take this part of your body that is working as it ought to and stop it from working the way it is supposed to.

Having seen the impact of unplanned pregnancy on women in my family before the availability of contraception, I would argue that 'the body working the way it is supposed to' might not be all it's cracked up to be.

It's the beginning of all transhuman technologies which have changed the relationship between our bodies and technology.

Surely there is a longer history of technology changing this relationship? Why single out reproduction?

I'm not making an argument to ban or not. I'm saying transgender medicalization falls into this broad group of ultra liberal outcomes.

I don't know whether the GC 'movement' itself needs a vision but I do think women as a whole need to look further ahead at what may be coming down the line. Do we want to give up the messy, dangerous, heartbreaking, awesome process of gestation and childbirth? Do we want it to be outsourced to test-tubes and artificial wombs? Do we care if our children are genetically related to us or not? We define 'female' by our reproductive role. What if we, voluntarily or otherwise, lose that role?

edit: clarity

I think Harrington's point is that the Pill is a technology that changes the body to stop it doing what it is designed to do. I don't think she is saying it hasn't had good effects -- but that it has negative ones as well. It has certainly changed the rules of sexual encounters for women, and taking the long view, those changes have had profoundly negative effects.

But in any case, what she is arguing is that the Pill is an inflexion point. It's the beginning of all transhuman technologies which have changed the relationship between our bodies and technology. There's a direct line between the Pill and cross-sex hormones.

I think Harrington's point is that the Pill is a technology that changes the body to stop it doing what it is designed to do. I don't think she is saying it hasn't had good effects -- but that it has negative ones as well. It has certainly changed the rules of sexual encounters for women, and taking the long view, those changes have had profoundly negative effects.

But in any case, what she is arguing is that the Pill is an inflexion point. It's the beginning of all transhuman technologies which have changed the relationship between our bodies and technology. There's a direct line between the Pill and cross-sex hormones.

Hmm...I'm not sure if bans on selling sex, pornography or changing gender are the way to go.

I may think plastic surgery & especially gender surgery are harmful, and the second definitely extremely harmful, but that doesn't mean I think adults should be banned from having those procedures. Neither should be NHS funded though.

Prostitution: I think UK should implement Nordic model. Pornography is hopefully being curtailed but I'm not sure how far we should go on that. So much of the industry involves trafficking that harsher crackdown on that should hopefully help.

There are other visions of the future out there, in contrast to the techno-capitalist-utopia. They are on the fringes, but they are there.

They are often not popular, sometimes because they require giving up faith in the religion of "progress".

I think Harrington's point is that the Pill is a technology that changes the body to stop it doing what it is designed to do. I don't think she is saying it hasn't had good effects -- but that it has negative ones as well. It has certainly changed the rules of sexual encounters for women, and taking the long view, those changes have had profoundly negative effects.

But in any case, what she is arguing is that the Pill is an inflexion point. It's the beginning of all transhuman technologies which have changed the relationship between our bodies and technology. There's a direct line between the Pill and cross-sex hormones.

I mean, I don't see pornography being reined in.
Other adult services. Prostitution, old and new (Your Fans, anyone?). No momentum to curtail surrogacy. Now we hear that kids are finding their PBs online. Plastic surgery is off the scale.
If transgenderism is going to be part of this spectrum, and so many elites and politicos still cannot say "no" to it, after the report on The Tavistock, Cass, the WPATH Files, now the SC ruling, then we know a capitalist behemoth underpinned by 21st century left wing platitudes of Be Your Best Self and suicidal empathy, will carry on driving a coach and horses thru what we used to see as a healthy progressive status quo.

You think women's lives would be better without the invention of the Pill?

I agree there are negatives to it that have been downplayed too much, but I think dismissing any form of contraception as 'transhumanist' is too much. I'm not sure I'd agree Harrington is doing that, she's always very critical of the Pill & apparently contraception more widely, but it's unclear if she disapproves of IUDs, condoms etc. I know she promotes NFP but she must know that isn't an option for everyone (irregular cycles, PCOS etc)

It's very easy to dismiss contraception as 'transhumanist' and rhaphsodise about 'rewilding sex' when, like Harrington, you're comfortably middle-class, have only one child, a husband and childcare (despite her apparently harsh views on childcare, she herself has said she uses it).

I think this is true - but it's much bigger than gender Ideology and I wouldn't really have put it in those terms.

But maybe it's fair to do so. I've often felt that GI won't really go away until id pol is dismantled, but that too means people have to see some alternative.

Transhumanism and the weird tech-utopia some seem to think is the future does seem to have been taken up by the uber-capitalists. And many normal people have vaguely fallen in line with that, they seem to see it as inevitable, almost like there is no other road. I've thought for a long time that the main reason the dominant feminism in the west is all about women in the workforce is similarly a folding in of feminism to capitalism.

Who will offer another vision? To be honest I don't see that coming out of gender critical thinking, I believe it would need to come from some wider vision of reality.

There are other visions of the future out there, in contrast to the techno-capitalist-utopia. They are on the fringes, but they are there.

They are often not popular, sometimes because they require giving up faith in the religion of "progress".

The technology may not be around the corner, but science is nibbling away at the edges. That is a sensible point at which to consider competing visions. If women's reproductive role becomes redundant in society, if even our ova aren't needed, then that is going to affect how our rights are viewed. No evolutionary leaps needed.

A few thoughts about the piece and the response here:

I think the key to the piece (and it's hidden towards the end) is this:

To be clear, I’m not defending ‘tradition’ here but proposing the first civilization in history that’s fully technologically potent yet fully committed to remaining biologically human, technologies that serve life instead of replacing it; a legislative order that protects the reality of sexual dimorphism the way environmental law now protects wetlands and an understanding that the female body isn’t a planetary resource to be financialized, data-mined, or rented out as a gestational service.

There's much in here that is similar to Mary Harrington's thought, in particular that genderism is only one form of transhumanism, the transformation of human bodies and capabilities into cyborg equivalents. In Harrington's account (with which I largely agree) this started with the invention of the Pill. Harrington argues that women have actually been complicit in the transhumanist takeover of human life. This piece traces the interpenetration of academia and the economy by transhumanist technologies and ideas, and the creation of a coherent world view and vision of a transhumanist/genderist future.

Every single wave of feminism has found ultimately that merely seeking rights is not enough to enable women's flourishing. It's necessary but not sufficient. In my view the writer is correct that simply demanding a return to 'the way things used to be' isn't enough, because it implies that the way things used to be was ok. It wasn't. And it is essentially a reactive and defensive move. I don't see anything (apart from Harrington) attempting to sketch out what a future in which we inhabit our human bodies in the way that we were meant to, but in a world which is increasingly technologised, and where our infrastructure, life choices and economic system are fully subordinated to technology. What do we want for men and women in this world? That is what is meant by 'offering visions of victory rather than prohibitions'.

I've been thinking a lot recently about Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, which imagines two futures, one a transhumanist nightmare and the other a fully human ideal. There's lots not to like about her ideal, but it's a really interesting attempt to imagine it.

I think a lot of the responses on here are saying, what's wrong with simply getting our rights back. And there's nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes -- but it doesn't answer the question: why? what will women's rights achieve, what is their purpose? If it is simply to restore the status quo ante, that won't suffice to counter the totalising force of genderism.

We are a long way from understanding infertility and miscarriages. This technology is not just around the corner.

And even if it existed, women and men would need different rights because women would still need access to contraception. Also, just look at what women have to go through during IVF now. Women's and men's bodies are different, so they rely on different rights. You would need a leap in evolution, not technology, to change that.