I have been a bit confused by Helen Lewis' stance on gender, She seems to fence sit quite a bit esp recently re Jenni Murray
Yes, she tweeted that 'The idea of a 'real woman' is a dead end. I'm sure some don't think I'm a real woman because I'm childless.' This is a dreadfully obtuse interpretation of Murray's article. Murray was making the connection (like de Beauvoir before her) between the fact of having female biology and the cultural oppression that women experience because of that, which includes enforced socialisation into femininity. She wasn't saying that socially stereotyped feminine sex roles are what women are. And it also seems to support the bizarre view of gender identitarians that because women have different experiences, 'woman' means nothing and everything and men can claim to be women if they like.
I think Helen Lewis's position is 'gender critical but scared to lose her job'.
Ha! That's probably the position of a lot of women in the media, who are just keeping silent about the whole thing. But Lewis's fence-sitting does irritate me, partly because she has a rather cowardly habit of caricaturing the views of gender-critical feminists in order to position her own as 'reasonable' and protect herself against trans backlash. Take the supercilious way she frames the concerns that many have about the rapidly expanding paediatric transition industry in this article about trans kids:
the most dogmatic parents argue that the trans activists are peddling a lie that you can transform, swanlike, from one sex to another – and fear that any child who so much as likes pink (if they’re a boy) or pirates (if they’re a girl) could be frogmarched down a path that ends in having their breasts or testicles removed.
It's really quite a distorted and demeaning way of representing people who are raising reasonable concerns about the multiple health risks (including sterilisation) of an unprecedented social and medical experiment on minors.