Part two. It is very long
Part Two - Gender Critical [sombre music] “Gender Critical” is the term used to describe an ideology, and the people who hold it, who are against gender ideology. And what is that?
So we usually talk about sex and gender, and gender is commonly understood to be about socially constructed characteristics, such as norms, roles, appearances and relations between different groups of people of different gender. How gender is understood varies from society to society and it can and does change over time.
Historically different cultures and societies have had vastly different outlooks towards gender identity and expression, as well as how many genders there are,
and even on the importance of quantifying one's gender over time. Gender is sometimes thought of, especially in gender critical circles, as being opposed to biological sex.
I mean, I would say that we just have different ways of talking about different parts of human identity, but for some people out there, like Boba apparently? That simply will not do.
Oh! For those people, “gender ideology” is the phrase they use to describe anyone or thing which, in their minds, seeks to remove biological sex from its rightful position as The Most Important Thing™. Anti-gender movements have unfortunately, been a thing for a few decades now.
What was originally a Catholic-led anti-abortion movement has morphed into way, way more than JUST that. These days, the anti-gender movement is closely focused on trans rights and has moved far beyond the realms of religious organizations. Although, as we will later see, ties to its roots remain strong. Modern self-declared gender-critical people include most of the Far, Alt, Religious and Conservative Right, as well as public figures such as JK Rowling,
TV writer Graham Linehan, MP Rosie Duffield, Olympian Sharon Davies, and I think on last count, about 89% of Guardian columnists. That was a joke! I don't know the accurate figure, it could be as low as 87%. These are people who are quite outspoken in their gender-critical views, but there are way, way more public figures, politicians, journalists, who hold what I would call “gender critical sympathetic” views.
Just as a side note, I think I’m going to start saying “GC” instead of “gender critical” or “gender criticalism” because I stumble over my words in enough filming these… SEE? I’m stumbling over my words now! I stumble over my words a lot, I need to make it easy on myself. So what do Sharon Davies, anti-abortion Catholics, outright fascists and the Suffragettes have in common? Well, the reason that GC has its roots firmly in Catholic anti-abortion movements is fairly simple. [singing] It's biological essentialism! And it's bad! Biological essentialism is understood as, “The belief that human nature an individual's personality or some specific quality such as intelligence, creativity, homosexuality, masculinity, femininity, or male propensity to
aggression, is an innate and a natural essence, rather than a product of circumstances, upbringing and culture. The concept is typically invoked where there is a focus on difference, as where females are seen as essentially different from males.”
Now as I’ve already said, I’ve read a bit of that Bible thing the Christians are fond of, and right, sort of in the first part, you might remember a LOT of emphasis being placed on the differing roles and rules of men and women. The main vibe being, women are property of their fathers, then husbands, and they're expected to make babies and nothing else. Rules placed on women were designed to restrict her sexuality and baby-making capabilities to the man who was responsible for her, and to confine her within this realm. Now, I’m not here to get into a “which religion is the most misogynistic?” thing, or even to attack The Bible, but till this day, religious fundamentalist organizations have sought to restrict women to that which they believe is the purpose of women; to bear and raise children, and offer support and sex to her husband.
And as we have recently seen in the USA, this is an ongoing and successful mission, and biological essentialism is used to achieve this. It holds that it's simply in our nature to have kids and do mom stuff. When applied to sex, biological essentialism holds that men and women, due to their biology, have essential intrinsic and changeable differences and characteristics. For example,
that male propensity for violence, “boys will be boys” attitudes when it comes to sexual assault, as well as a view of women as non-violent, non-abusive and naturally caring and maternal.
As you can see, biological essentialism harms men and women alike, never mind those who don't identify as either! And it has been used for centuries to enforce segregation of the sexes in both public and private spaces. In fact, the idea of human nature as something intrinsic to all humans and from which we should not deviate, this is something that has supported all kinds of oppression on the grounds of “degeneracy”.
So to religious fundamentalists, the idea that gender might be more important than biological sex attacks their fundamental belief that society should be concerned with restricting the reproductive rights of women, based on our God-given nature. If gender has nothing to do with reproduction, and can be fluid to any degree, then that invalidates the God-given role of men! So you can see why religious organizations might be incentivized to spend ridiculous amounts of money and time dismissing the idea of gender ideology as “nonsense” or stronger, “dangerous”. But what about these “gender criticals”? If they're going around calling themselves feminists, why do they agree with such a thing? Despite the fact that gender-critical has its roots placed firmly in biological essentialism, which has its roots placed firmly in the idea of intelligent design, you wouldn't expect your average gender-critical person to know that or understand what it is.
If you went up to a gender-critical activist and asked what it is they're standing for, they won't say “biological essentialism!” they will say “women's rights”.
Quick little disclaimer before we move on, this video is, it's kind of for the uninitiated, right? It's not one for the choir. If you're already well-versed in all of this, it might seem a bit basic, and I want to re-clarify that this video is specifically concerned with how gender criticalism interacts with feminism and women's liberation in general. I am not trying to speak for trans people. This video doesn't even really speak to trans rights at all, although you will find plenty of resources linked in the description from trans people about these basic concepts, so if you're curious and you want to learn more, really do consider checking out that document, because
there's just loads of links, loads of things to learn, all from really cool and entertaining creators. So in this video, I’m speaking from my perspective as a woman.
The type of woman, as it happens, that gender critical people seem to be very concerned with. They have a lot to say about women like me - domestic abuse and sexual assault survivors, autistic women, even, and they claim to be speaking on my behalf. So that's what this video is; me speaking on my own behalf.
And if you haven't noticed, I also happen to be a bit British, and if you're also a bit British, then chances are you're being fed a gender-critical narrative…all day every day!
And some of those gender criticals, at least to the unaware, can sometimes seem pretty reasonable… “All we're saying is biology matters!” “If trans people were under attack I would march with them, but they're not!” “Nothing about us without us!” “We just don't want to see children irreversibly damaged!” “Lesbians are going extinct!” “Women's voices are being erased!”
“We don't want feminist progress to be undone…” “We just want to protect women's rights!” “You can't identify out of misogyny!” “Women deserve security and safe spaces.” “But women's rights are under attack!” “Children need protecting from harmful ideologies…” “Being a woman isn't just about wearing a dress!” “A woman is not an idea in a man's head.” “We're only saying sex is real!”
Now, GCs make a lot of what they call “arguments” and I couldn't possibly address them all in one video. I will be addressing them in other videos though! In this video, I want to focus on the claim that gender-critical people are standing for women's liberation. As I said before, I’m going to be doing a whole video on spaces, female-only spaces, safe spaces, spacey things…so I’ll be talking about what they say about that, in that. So spaces aside, what these gender criticals actually saying?
Language seems to be one of the biggest bees in their bonnet. Now I won't get into the whole “chest feeding”, “birthing parent”, “cervix-possessor” thing here because honestly, I find that particular side of the moral panic particularly silly. Especially when those most angry about it are using terms like “penised individual”!
But mainly because language always changes, we're always looking for ways to be more inclusive and sometimes, that looks a bit clumsy. But all those new and inclusive phrases being tried out are for use in such specific circumstances, like it's literally just mainly for the medical profession, a profession where clarity, specificity and inclusivity are of the utmost importance.
Not all mothers give birth, not all women who have given birth want to be called mothers, and yes, there are trans men and non-binary people who might give birth. So “birthing parent” or “child-bearer” or whatever, is just a more accurate way of describing the SERIOUS MEDICAL CONDITION of being pregnant and giving birth. Far more accurate than “mother” or “woman” - neither of which are medical conditions. But honestly, this is my brain every single time I see a GC pearl-clutcher claim that “we can't say woman anymore”.
It literally is just that, ironically. But language is important! Having words with which we can express ourselves is inherently liberating. As part of their amazing series, Inside A Cult, Caelen Conrad powerfully and beautifully describes one of their darker moments. After suffering a violent assault at the hands of bigoted strangers, and living with the anxiety they were left with, they temporarily sought comfort in anger, and I’ll just let them tell you what happened next…
The other main tactic to recruit LGB people, is to manipulate them into believing there is an epidemic of straight people co-opting the slur “queer” and that gender-critical activists are fighting against this. These posts would be screenshots of people saying things like, “as a polysexual, I have the right to call myself queer”. “What's a polysexual?” I’d ask in the comments. They'd all have mostly different answers, things like “straight people who aren't even gay enough to be bi” or “straight people who want to seem cool” of course, had I calmly thought to myself for a moment, I’d probably have come to a different conclusion, but I wasn't calm. I felt like my heart had been racing for months, my skin was on fire.
How dare they? How dare you take that word from me? I was a queer, I knew what being queer was! It was discrimination, it was pain, it was living in a world where just walking alone at night meant that I was fair game. I had no idea what this “polysexual” person had been through, but I was still absolutely certain, it wasn't enough on its own, in my books, to reclaim the slur.
And like, listen, I didn't care for nearly anyone in these groups, as I realized most of them were simply there to have a place to vent their hatred towards marginalized people. I downvoted those posts, and occasionally got in arguments, but I wasn't there to engage. I was there because that burning rage, that terrible pain needed a focus, and it gave me a sense of validation, because every screenshot of a tweet saying “cis gays aren't oppressed” was another tweet that affirmed what I was hearing in these subreddits, that they were trying to make the word “queer” meaningless, and if I believed this conspiracy theory to be true, then my anger suddenly becomes righteous!
I’m on the side of protecting the LGBs! The cognitive dissonance I developed to allow me this outlet for my anger was unsustainable for someone as like in their head as I am. I don't pal-around with homophobes and misogynists, and the fact that I had even been sharing my anger with them was sign enough that I was on the wrong path. And while this entire period probably didn't last more than 90 days, it has allowed me a degree of insight into how trauma, pain and a marginalized identity can be used to distract from obvious indoctrination tactics. How easy it is to be manipulated, when the ideology being pushed aligns with your gut feelings on the world, confirming your fears and your biases, telling you that you were right all along, and who doesn't like being right? And so because of this experience, I can kind of understand and empathize with gender-critical women, especially the recruits whose only education about trans women comes from gender critical misinformation and propaganda.
I get the feeling behind, “…how dare you? how dare you take that word from me? I am a woman! I know what being a woman was, it was discrimination, it was pain, it was living in a world where just walking alone at night meant that I was fair game. I have no idea what this “transgender woman” had been through, but I was absolutely certain it wasn't enough in my books to claim the term “woman”. Of course, had either of us cared enough to ask, we might have found a lot more in common than we had expected. We might have found quite a lot of shared pain and maybe, we would have thought about the fact that as long as we define who we are through our oppression, then we can only exist as long as we're oppressed.
When you base your sense of identity, your sense of what it is to be a woman on the very specific confines of your own womanhood, then it might be hard for you to see other people who haven't shared that experience using the words and language that you need to talk about yourself.
But when we try to decide upon which and how many aspects of womanhood are enough to maketh the woman, in order to show why we shouldn't let trans women use the word “woman”, we inevitably and always fall into excluding whole groups of cis women from our definition. Just as white feminism has always done. My experience of being a woman - of periods, of sex, of femininity, of boobs and beauty, of healthcare, of objectification, of misogyny, violence and pain; this will be nothing like the experience of the unhoused woman living under the bridge downtown, or the woman in modern day slavery building fast construction projects for huge corporations, or the woman who was born with different reproductive organs or genitalia, or the disabled woman living in full-time care, or the rich celebrity woman in her Beverly Hills mansion, or the elderly house-bound woman who has become invisible to society, or the trans woman holding her pee until she gets home, risking infection because she's afraid to use public bathrooms.
There is no universal experience of womanhood and there never has been. This is one of the points that the theory of Intersectionality is trying to get across. A million and one things shape, impact and inform individuals over the course of a lifetime. And this might be a good place to counter another popular GC claim. You see, even when a trans woman does pass as cis, when she does all the things that the gender gatekeepers put in front of her, she will still never be accepted by gender criticals, because of her “male upbringing”. Everyone's formative years shapes them fundamentally, there's no escaping that.
But to suggest that trans kids of any gender have the same experience as cis kids
is…utter madness! Most, or…all trans and queer people I know have been bullied and ostracized for their WHOLE lives on the basis of their queerness or transness. It is absolutely wild to me that anyone can suggest that people who have very obviously been the target of toxic masculinity have somehow benefited from patriarchy. How is that not victim-blaming? Most feminist.
There is no universal experience of womanhood, or girlhood, or manhood, or boyhood, or transness, or queerness and that's okay. Because to say that there is no universal experience of womanhood, doesn't negate the need for women's rights, it doesn't negate the need for sex to be held as a protected characteristic for the means of preventing discrimination, and to suggest it did would be silly, silly sauce. you don't need universal experiences to have solidarity and to suggest as much would render all solidarity between differing groups impossible it doesn't matter that trans women are different to me I’m different to millions of women the variety of human beings is what makes us so beautiful so creative so impactful.
But you know, this trying to identify what makes a “real woman”…it's done things to the gender-critical brain. “We can always tell” is a bit of a meme online now, what started with like some GC types like, bragging about how you can always tell a trans woman, has led to just like, multitudes of photos of beautiful cis women being called “men” by gender critical people. One even said a photo of JK Rowling her very self was a man so, LOLs all round.
All you have to do is plant a seed of doubt that a woman might be trans, and gender criticals will fall over themselves to pinpoint every single tiny detail that they think is too masculine or an obvious tell. And this is funny enough when people do it to supermodels or famous actresses or JK Rowling. It's amusing to watch the cognitive dissonance on display in real-time, but let's not pretend they're not also doing this to just every person they meet in real life.
A movement of mainly women, getting it into their heads that there is a global agenda which is trying to erase cis women and replace them with trans women, that there are simply hundreds, if not thousands of men out there, pretending to be women in order to sneak into our spaces…and gender criticals DO think this, by the way, this is a breeding ground for a pervasive paranoia which has them judging mainly women on their appearance, solely based on how feminine and soft they look.
I'll talk more about this in my video on spaces, but “The Bathroom Problem” is an issue that cis butch women have been talking about for a long time. Butch cis women have long found it difficult to access public bathrooms, due to being misgendered, essentially called men and accused of trespassing in the women's loos.
That’s cis women, being targeted and harassed for not looking feminine enough.
So much feminism, I can't even cope with it! In Part Three of Caelan's series, they talk about the various kinds of bigotry on display in gender-critical groups. Including, but certainly not limited to misogyny. Caelan spent months undercover in gender-critical Facebook groups, collecting data, screenshots and evidence of this. I do urge you to watch their series if you can, but what was on display regarding misogyny, I honestly found to be rather sad.
When it's necessary to insult trans women, they immediately go to gendered stereotypes. In this instance, someone took a screenshot of a company Instagram photo and a woman in the photo was trans. They immediately began commenting on her outfit and appearance. Comments like, “A real woman would have coordinated her outfit with the others…”
“They're dressed casually but in a normal way, the TiM is dressed like a straight-up child! Grown women just don't wear things like that, especially if they're getting their picture taken! Just one of the many ways that these dudes have no clue what it actually is like to be a woman.”
Regardless of the fact that other people in the group said that that wasn't true for them, they were like, “I’d wear that & I’m 36…” The fact is, that any movement that tries to exclude trans people through policing visible gender non-conformity will always, by NECESSITY, also limit the freedom of expression of all women. Even tall women are not women enough at first glance for some of these people anymore… “HELP! Whenever I see a tall woman now,
I question whether she/he is a man or not! Anyone else!?” Restrictive gender norms, that feminists fought so long to abolish, are even celebrated among gender-critical parents, forcing their “daughters” to shave their legs or their armpits, or cover them up. “Shave pits or cover pits - she can pick!” even going as far as to pay their children to adhere to patriarchal ideas of womanhood… “I bribe my female-to-male kid $20 a month to shave her legs! I’m happy to pay it!”
I mean, if your ideology has you afraid of tall women, I’d be giving it a rest with the old Facebook groups if I were you. Tall women rock. What we see when we look into gender-critical spaces, is women being forced to conform to gender norms or risk being judged, mocked, bullied, or having their achievements undermined. Take that Chinese athletics team, who did really well, won some medals at the sporting fields… I don't know, I don't sport!
But anyway, instead of getting to celebrate and just be happy in their accomplishment, they and the athletics organization that they were associated with were forced to spend their days defending their womanhood to a bunch of angry gender criticals who had gotten a hold of a photo of them, and made it go viral as being a “woman's team full of men”. All the women on that team are cis, but they did have strong jaw lines, though so, I guess it's fair game. And as the prominent theme of Caelan's series makes clear, the harm done to trans kids by parents in these gender-critical groups is incalculable.
Like the series is a bit of a hard watch, just due to the heart-breaking stories of child abuse at the hands of these supposedly “concerned” parents. Bribing them to remove body hair is the least of it. And gender-critical activists have some choice words for cis women who do not agree with them. “Handmaid” or “handmaiden” being the overwhelming favourite. When accused of bigotry, when it's pointed out to them that human rights are good, actually and usually only bigots want to remove minority groups of their rights, GCs will respond by saying that, you know, while that is normally the case, it doesn't apply to them, you see, because, they say, trans rights conflict with women's rights.
Now, a lot of their reasoning for this is concerned with female-only spaces, so you will have to wait for my other video for my thoughts on that, it's also in that video that I’ll address the “fake trans” argument…so, watch out for that! But the idea that the liberation of trans people poses a threat to women and children…this idea is giving me déjà vu. Mainly because “protecting women and children” has always been the main rallying cry for all bigotry ever!
White suffragettes thought that civil rights for Black people were a threat to women's rights! Because if Black people got the vote, then Black men would have power over white women. Not to mention the long history of racist propaganda solely focused on painting Black men as a threat to white women. For a long time, bisexual men were painted as a threat to women. Gay marriage was a threat to the family, it “erased the meaning of marriage” and of course, gay men have long been propagandized as threats to children. Modern anti-immigration and anti-refugee bigots use “women and children's rights” to excuse their bigotry. I’ve lost count of the number of times some anti-immigration, flag shagging Islamophobe told me that I “must be fine with women and children being r__ed”.
These days however, I mainly hear that from gender criticals. Lots! Of course, I can't simply point to other forms of bigotry and go “you sound like them!” that never convince anyone. Also, me pointing to the history of White Feminism, and the tendency of excluding women who didn't fall within the confines of what was considered to be a “real woman”, that won't convince a gender-critical either, who will simply pronounce that trans women aren't women. I might say, “yes they are!
Of course they are!” I might look to definitions and thought experiments that prove that they are, but they'll just call that a difference of opinion. I might retort by saying that white suffragettes didn't consider Black women, or disabled women to be fully human, let alone real women, but again, historical comparisons don't usually do much to convince people.
So let's see what GCs are actually saying, today. The Sexist Dichotomy of the Gender Criticals!
When GCs talk about the dangers of allowing transwomen in the loos, or talk about the irreversible damage done to confused and misled girls… I say “when they talk about that” but when aren’t they talking about that? But when they do, they display the very sexist, very biological essentialist, dichotomous worldview that they entertain. When GCs talk about trans men being the confused victims of brainwashing, who only need some acceptance, or to learn to feel beautiful in their own skin, or to have their breasts caressed…seriously. That this is all they need, to see the error of their ways, it's because they think that trans men are women, and women are feeble-minded and easily led. Or maybe they just need to remember that being butch is an option! Maybe they just forgot about it with the little lady brains!
When GCs say that trans women pose a threat to women, it's because they believe that they are men, and that men pose a threat to women. OOF, you can just feel the statistics being angrily typed into the comment section, can’t you? So all right, let's talk about men! It is true that violence against women…ALL women…is usually perpetrated by men. The same goes for most violence against men.
Most violence, in general it seems, tends to be done by the mens. The cis mens. And so, what should we make of such facts, such undeniable statistical certainty?
Might we look to see how patriarchal ideas and structures, and toxic masculinity has nurtured young men into acting a certain way, how material conditions again, due to capitalism and patriarchal ideas, have historically affected men in different ways to women? Should we analyse how the systemic objectification of women's bodies, the dehumanization of women and girls can lead to men feeling certain ways about us? How the cycle of generational abuse is almost always present in instances of violence, how socioeconomics, culture, media, and upbringing, has led to a situation in which men feel under pressure yet disempowered, and women are seen as objects, receptacles, receivers?
There is a long, long history behind how we as humanity went from largely matriarchal, communal, caring cultures, to the atomized and pressurized systems of today, in which the nuclear family is seen as common sense, and gender roles are defined along this highly illogical basis.
Might the answer to the statistical likelihood of men acting violently lie somewhere in there?
Or should we assume that there's just something inside all people who are born with a penis that drives them towards violence? An…essence of some kind? That's what makes this all so much worse! They're not even creative with their biological essentialism! Like, it is bog standard. Men are strong, predatory, prone to violence, sex-obsessed and always looking to subjugate women. And women are eternal victims, powerless, weak, maternal and non-violent. It's the “boys will be boys” excuse for sexual violence, but with extra steps! Those are kind of abstract, ideological ways in which gender criticalism is antithetical to feminism.
And honestly, if their sh__ stayed in the abstract, I probably wouldn't be making this way too long video about it! But the STINK of gender-critical ideology can be smelled in ever-increasing areas of public life and policy. Remember I said that the roots in the anti-abortion Christian Conservative Right remain strong? Well the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, the EPF, produced a report on the financial funding of extremist groups and politics, from outside of the EU. And one thing that stands out to me, besides all the hundreds of millions of dollars pouring in from Christian Conservative groups, is that the EU doesn't distinguish between anti-trans rights groups and anti-abortion groups, rather it calls them all “anti-gender”. For reasons I outlined earlier. GCs will obfuscate about the financing issue, with like, some of them just announcing that they're happy to work with, and be supported by the far-right, actually! It's fine! While others usually plead ignorance. In fact, just this week, prominent gender-critical activists have been promoting like, a new film documentary thing, called “What Is A Woman?” which is made by a self-declared anti-feminist. I think he said that feminism is a cancer? Like full-on anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, bog-standard bigot dude. It's fine for the gender criticals, it's all good.
I think Katy Montgomerie described it best. As she wrote on Twitter, “One of the many reasons I don't believe GCs when they say that it's just a coincidence they're allying with anti-abortionists against trans rights, is that they won't ally with trans feminists over abortion.” Speaking of Katy, in this interview, Katy and Jo Maugham of The Good Law Project discuss that far-right funding I was telling you about…
They're very media savvy, they seem to have enormous amounts of money. We know that vast amounts of money are coming into the UK from the Christian Right, we don't know where that money is going, but it must be going somewhere, and if it isn't going in part to many of these crowd funders, and many of these organizations that seem to spring up out of nowhere with very professional offers, I’d be pretty amazed! I had this discussion actually with the LGBA founder and she said, “well no, all of our money comes from members of the public!” and I said, “Well how do you know?
Because you don't know who is giving you money, even if money comes into your crowd-funder, people have the option of telling you who they are!” It’s self-ID, isn’t it? It’s self-ID, that's right! And so you just have no way of knowing in truth whether the money is being fed in in dribs and drabs from some huge Christian Right organization in the States, or from somebody who's genuinely concerned in the in the UK. There was one ages ago, it's because some as well as these big attacks on laws, there's been like, lots of different defamation and stuff cases going on around this as well and there's also been cases about police misconduct…there's been lots of different things, and I can't remember exactly what it was, and I’m not going to say who it was, but a gender critical person had some law trouble, and they needed money for some case but in that thing, people are accusing them of taking money from the Religious Right and stuff,
because that's the accusation that gender criticals always get, and she was like kind of like, accidentally mask-off said, “You know what? I DID have a religious right organization come and say that they pay all of my fees and we wouldn't have to, and I turned them down! So if anyone says we're being funded by the Right, they're lying!” and I was like, “Yeah, but they wouldn't have come to me and offered me the money, would they? And they did offer it to you!”
And all the other people who you know…there'll be lots of people around who have had that same offer & who have accepted it! Yeah, I mean undoubtedly there's a huge avalanche of money from the Christian Right coming into the UK and Europe, there's report, after report, after report that identified that the number is in the billions of pounds, and you know the trans community in the UK does not have much support in the establishment, as you rightly point out, it's very very difficult to get any newspaper to give trans people any sort of a hearing, let alone a reasonable and sustained one! The full interview is linked below and I do urge you to go and watch it.
Later on, they talk about how gender criticals are placing themselves in the centre of power, including the British Equality and Human Rights Commission - that's the public body overseeing all human rights in the UK. And the harm to feminist progress just does not stop!
You know how feminism is often painted as “man hatred” and then feminists have to spend great amounts of time explaining basic concepts like “equal”? The framing of feminism as being anti-men is one of the most effective ways that patriarchal power has put people off feminism.
A 2018 YouGov poll found that 34% of women in the UK said “yes” when asked whether they were a feminist, up from 27% in 2013. However, people do not appear to reject the term feminism because they're against gender equality or believe it has been achieved.
This same study found that 8 out of 10 people said men and women should be treated equally in every way ,with many agreeing sexism is still an issue. This apparent contradiction between only 34% of women in the UK calling themselves feminists and yet, 8/10 British people saying that they basically agree with feminism, I think that can certainly be explained by the viewing of feminism as being “anti-men”. And men, anything masculine, anything at all penis-related, is viewed with utter derision in GC circles. Unless of course the men folk are being called in to protect us!
If they're performing their traditional role as Protectors of Women & Children™ then that's permissible, in fact vehemently encouraged by gender criticals! Including by inviting armed men into women's toilets…
I’m talking about you dads, who maybe carry, I think that's what you say, I’m so down with the American lingo! Maybe you carry, maybe you don't, maybe you consider yourself a protector of women, maybe you're that sort of man, if you have a daughter or a mother or a wife, maybe you have a sister, maybe you just have some friends, maybe you just think women are human and you don't need any absolute connection with them to PROTECT US, I think you should start using women's toilets, men!
Literally armed men on the toilet doors, making sure you've got the right genitals for entry, or of course, you know, they could just hang around in there…with their guns…keeping an eye on things… You know, in case anything creepy happened! This is the future GCs want.
Aligning with and accepting funding from far-right and Christian Conservative groups and media institutions, who are ABSOLUTELY about policing women's bodies, claiming to speak for all women, while dismissing any woman who doesn't agree by using overtly misogynistic tropes, judging the appearance of other women for being too tall, too hairy, too strong, not soft enough, not feminine enough, inviting cis men into female spaces for our protection, declaring that the universal experience of womanhood is about pain, victimhood and oppression, without any consideration as to how intersectionality interacts with oppression, holding the feelings of white, wealthy, able-bodied, neurotypical women as more important than the material harm being done to marginalized women by the politics they support. They support right-wing parties, both with their votes and advocacy. Infiltrating the upper levels of power to ensure that biological essentialism continues to influence policy, wrongly arguing that women could never match men in sport, encouraging men to be men, abusing their children who wish to explore their gender identity and sexuality, actively undermining public opinion of feminism by holding anything masculine in contempt…this is not an exhaustive list.
But I do hope it shows why gender-critical feminism is actually just a continuation of the same Conservative, Christian right-wing nonsense that has always held women back.
But then, how do so many gender-critical women believe that they are still protecting women's rights?
Part One of Caelan’s series explains in detail how gender-critical activists recruit people, often parents, who are either concerned or confused. How they use tactics usually reserved for cults to twist women's concerns into fear, paranoia and eventually, hatred. And there's other reasons why women might turn to the supposed support that they think they're finding in these groups - jealousy for example, it's very common for straight people to feel jealousy over what they perceive to be a celebration of LGBTQ people. They see rainbow logos and Pride displays in supermarkets, and take from that LGBTQ people can't be oppressed.
But this is just White Lives Matter levels of thinking! This is a man standing at a Suffragette rally holding a sign saying “VOTES FOR MEN”! Maybe they feel overlooked.
Maybe they feel repressed. Maybe, as some of them openly admit, they might have liked the freedom to explore their gender and sexuality when they were younger. It's kind of like that whole, “I had to pay tuition fees, so it would be unfair to scrap them now!” kind of thing. But as Caelan points out, many simply concerned women come and go from these groups all the time. But the ones who stay, the ones on whom the constant cultish barrage of propaganda is effective, the ones who become vocal activists, who begin making content and lobbying politicians, they cannot be explained away by ignorance. And when what they are saying is so completely in-line with what the Far Right is saying, so much so that the EU doesn't even bother to distinguish between them, we should take them out their word.
When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. And I believe that the gender-critical movement is nothing more than a furthering of the same Far-Right, fascistic oppression of women that we have always seen. But as I hope to have shown, the very limited feminism of white middle-class cis women not only has a long and sordid history, but it will continue to restrict women's liberation so long as white, middle-class, able-bodied, neurotypical, cis women are seen as the default. So long as they're the only women with any meaningful power in what is still very much a man's world.
Outdated concepts of social hierarchy which shape our current societies are embedded in our minds, and people have a tendency to apply hierarchical thinking to all manner of things. You can't have equality and hierarchy. You can't have equality and capitalism, which is in itself a kind of hierarchy. Sylvia Pankhurst knew this. Feminists of colour always knew this. In fact, the only ones who don't know this, or at least, who resist accepting this, are the ones who find themselves, or at least perceive themselves to be, close to the top of this hierarchy, and who do not wish to risk this position.
This tendency for white feminists to believe that they should be the ones taking the charge, that they will fight for the rights that they believe we all need, this exposes
the “we know best” mentality which has always been a feature of white polite society. It's seen in the way that straight people judge gay people for the way they express themselves, it's seen in all respectability politics, it's seen in the way that able-bodied and neurotypical people talk down to disabled and neurodivergent folk. Having a default type of person by which all other people should be compared is in itself a hierarchy. And it can be uncomfortable for those who are the default, those who believe themselves to be near the top of this hierarchy, to learn how to view themselves as just one of many, one voice, among millions of equal voices.
If you have an idea of women's liberation which is centred on women like you ,with the needs you have, then attempts to include different kinds of women, with different kinds of needs, might well feel like being pushed aside. You might then feel like pushing back. That's understandable, but it's not forgivable. Centring arguably the most privileged women in the world will inevitably push out the most marginalized, and i am not only talking about trans women.
The needs of marginalized women, I mean ALL marginalized women, have never been at the centre of mainstream feminist movements. And the gender-critical movement, far from being radical, is just a continuation of this trend. Putting your own feelings of discomfort before the rights and freedoms of marginalized women, and in so doing, promoting politics, ideologies and mindsets, laws and policies which inevitably harm all women. These are not the acts of a feminist. These are the acts of a bigot who uses feminism as their smoke screen. You do not get to claim to speak for women. You do not speak for me. And i will not let your claims of feminism go unchallenged.