to be shocked that TERFs should be raging against kids clothing?

[Preggopreggo]

You cannot be anti-trans whilst also perpetuating a binary with your own children? AIBU?

Surely if the craziness around ‘boy clothes/toys’ and ‘girl clothes/toys’ ended and gender differences became less distinct, then far fewer children would grow up with gender dysphoria and want to transition?

I know very little about all this, so I may be wrong and just can’t find the threads. Please point me in the right direction if this has been discussed already 🙏

but I can’t see a mention of the implications for gender identity.

I think that's because most GC feminists don't believe in gender identity as a thing. I certainly don't.

I think you think you've found some kind of gotcha OP, but it rests on a misunderstanding.

I’m a terf probably. DD wore mainly gendered clothing as a child as that’s what she liked, now she wears a mixture of things. She also had dolls and unicorns as that’s what she liked to play with (I tried the gender neutral toy thing briefly but it didn’t work).
If she had wanted to play with trucks and guns at no point would I have thought she was anything but female.
Thats the difference. I don’t think my child would need a lifetime of drugs and aggressive surgeries for playing with the ‘wrong stuff’.

You can try the gender neutral toy thing but it’s not going to change anything. I grew up with 4 brothers and boys toys everywhere, I still wanted dolls. Children should play with whatever sparks their imagination.

I think you’ll find non-terfs are the ones obsessed with gendered toys/clothes meaning something.

Huh. Do you even have a grasp of the basics? It appears not.

1/10 - do not recommend

If society stops telling little boys that they can’t be pink glittery unicorns then surely fewer little boys will ask to be girls??

Boys can dress however they like. If they want to wear pink glittery unicorn clothes that's ok. That doesn't mean they have to 'become' girls.

I know plenty of little boys who are now gay that wore pink and played with dolls in nursery.

Please don't let this melt your brain, but Terf-in-Chief Maya Forstater was one of the founders of the Let Toys Be Toys Campaign.

If your brain is still there, you might want to think about what gender-critical and gender-abolitionist mean.

The 80s were better in some ways, less pink girls clothing, short hair on women was just a common meaningless hair style, I could climb trees and play football whilst being labelled a Tom boy rather then a boy.

Isn't 'TERF' just a misogynistic acronym designed to shame women into accepting those born male as 'women'?

Hi Preggo,

There have been several 'waves' of feminism beginning in the late 18th century. The modern wave is usually defined as beginning with Betty Friedan in 1966. As part of this modern wave, the contradictions and oppressions inherent in hypercapitalism's aggressive gendering of clothing, and how this maps/doesn't map onto biological sex, has been widely analysed and explored by writers such as Friedan herself, Dworkin, Wolf, Greer, Steinem, hooks, Lorde and many more.

You can find some useful summaries and reading lists on Wikipedia.

So because one poster said that her children mostly had clothes specific to their sex you extrapolate that 'terfs' in general don't care about gendered clothing?

TRAs really here scraping the bottom of the barrel for arguments here!

Not sure how to corral my thoughts on this one. And not sure I will. Agree this is TRA shit-stirring

There’s no such thing as “clothes for boys” or “clothes for girls”

This flow chart applies.

I’m not sure I follow your thinking op. I suppose I’d call myself GC and I do actively try to raise my children without gender stereo types. However I am raising them within society. My son who wore dresses, tutus etc when he was little, no won’t wear “girls clothes” as he knows that is uncommon for males and that it might make others comments on what he wears. Even with personal beliefs we are still raising out children within an environment with quite strong gender stereotypes.

I think GC do align with challenging Gender stereotypes. I mean the whole point is that the other stuff (clothes, voice, hair) don’t make your a woman or man. That fits perfectly doesn’t it?

I am TERF. My boy wears a sparkly unicorn costume and pirate costume with similar regularity. I mostly put him and his sister in trousers because they're practical.

Usually yes

Although some women do choose to reclaim it I find it a slur still

Sex based reality for me and dd wears a range and does a range of things, no stereotyping here

I do 'rage' against this and 'gendered' toys. So much so I've actually delivered lectures on this.
HTH

Love that flow chart. 😁
Not loving the OP’s insinuation that she or he has stumbled across some sort of cognitive dissonance amongst feminists.
I would be called a TERF. I have BG twins and they just wore the nearest thing to hand until they expressed a preference. I’m not on mission to force my children into any issues around clothing so they often wore gendered stuff.

The point OP is that the force of TRA influence have steamrollered past simple solutions like 'if clothing wasn't gendered the number of children identifying as opposite sex would be reduced".
Their narrative of "identity" embraces clothing and toys and relies on them being "gendered". And this has lead to a total breakdown of safeguarding.
The arguments against this need to be focused on fighting back against the abuse of children and young people via medical interventions, and the destruction of safeguarding for girls and women.
The subject of 'gendered' clothes, toys, societal expectations etc.etc. occur throughout the discussion. Gender critical individuals don't accept the notion of gender as anything other than a social construct based on stereotyping.

There is nothing for you to be shocked about with regards to this.

misses point of thread

Anyone want to start a band with me called "rage against the peen".

Sorry, I'll see myself out.

If you ever listened to the feminists that you call TERFs, you would realise they are not anti-trans.

So YABU for waging into a debate without 'educating yourself' first.

Wtf you on about?! You think it's TERFs buying "Boys will be boys" t-shirts?

This isn't academic for me. I'm sure I'm not alone in bringing up my children with as few gender bullshit stereotypes as is possible in our sexist society. As a consequence my kids are the ones the whole class will stare at when receiving their (misogynist, homophobic) training in gender ID.

If you're the boy who wanted to keep his hair long half the kids tell you to get a haircut and the other half tell you to go and use the girls loos.

If you're after more threads in the feminism board on this a) start one and b) tell your mates with dicks to stop inserting themselves unwanted into spaces where women are vulnerable so as to free up a bit of headspace for talking about clothes.

This is not a new idea. Toys are no longer gendered in most major toy stores following campaigns such as Let Toys Be Toys. Categories are now usually "outdoor," "role play," "dolls and action figures," "arts and crafts," etc etc.

Clothes are more tricky since the stereotypes are more ingrained, but in my experience baby clothes at least are seeing a bit of a culture shift - there are now far more retailers that just sell clothes for babies, not baby girls/baby boys, than there used to be.

It's a pretty well established idea among the gender critical that what is often referred to as 'gender' is in fact personality, and that there are no good reasons why we need to split society in half based on personality, whereas there are very good reasons why we sometimes need to split society in half based on sex.

You got it totally ass backwards OP. Trans ideology reinforces stereotypes. Gender criticism tries to do away with pink and blue clothing. HTH

In the hope of gaining enlightenment. I couldn’t find any article or thread that explained why there is such a disconnect between the Mumsnet-heavy movement which I shall not name for fear of getting it wrong and the desperate need to deconstruct the gender binary. What am I inflaming?

You couldn't find a thread so you decided that "TERFS" are all about the pink and the blue? Feminists have talked about the ridiculousness of gendered clothing for children for decades, they've talked about the sexualised clothing for pre-teens since that became a rather unsavoury thing. What you're doing, which seems to be at the heart of this "debate" all to often, is blaming women. If women just said and did the right thing then this wouldn't be happening, therefore women are to blame. If it were as simple as every child wears unisex clothing then no one would believe they were somehow the opposite sex and the TERFS would be happy, what a simple and wonderful world that would be. Alas, the current cultural situation is such that there are many factors at play, including capture of so many aspects of society that there are people who truly believe you can change sex, that some women have penises, that some men give birth and that the moment a little boy wants to play with a Barbie doll he is clearly dysphoric and needs to go on a medical path so he can finally be the little girl he should have been born as.

I get the need to learn more, but your opening question, which you changed, fair enough, was basically throwing out blame. It's the TERFS fault! No.

You’re a good 20 years too late to this, OP. If it doesn’t seem visible enough to you that’s likely because it has long been common sense to just let kids carry on with what they like, and as such people haven’t really felt the need to pontificate about it in recent years.

Isn't there fairly good research that societies that traditionally were more accepting of GNC people and gay people didn't commonly have a 'third sex'? I thought someone did a study of First Nations People that showed it. Essentially if you don't shove people into little, tiny, restrictive boxes, you don't need another box for all the people that can't make themselves fit. Also see late-transitioning men from the army.

DOWN WITH BOXES.