Future of legal gender and mumsnet

[Strangerthantruth]

Davina Cooper responds to Mumsnet critics.

futureoflegalgender.kcl.ac.uk/2020/04/30/responding-to-gender-critical-feminism-on-gender-sex-and-a-generous-feminist-politics-in-anxious-times/#more-1141

I haven't read it all as it's long and mostly unoriginal. I will try to go back to it but if anyone else wants to read cutting edge thoughts on why men can claim to be women, here you go.

can we find a more generous place for thinking about and responding to the feminist politics of others?

Be nice.

YY, Academicexposer

you misunderstand me I think. Sex is reproductive capacity yes, but whether or not it is exercised (given that humans have a large degree of choice over whether to do so) is not relevant to whether a person is of a particular sex.

I don't think, what you are saying is what I said is the case.

My initial point was that many people, I suspect, really do not understand that. They believe that is we say sex is an element of reproduction, that sex exists for reproduction, then we must believe that all individual men and women have to reproduce or at least be able to. An infertile women would not really be a woman.

So, they argue, because some individual women can't (or don't choose to) reproduce, being a woman can't be about reproductive category.

They are making an error about biological classes, but it seems to be a common error and I think for many it is completely genuine.

“I want to suggest we might focus on how diverse gendered subjectivities and experiences form (and reform”

No I’m out. There’s a limit to the amount of meaningless guff one can read in a day.

“the more pressing question is: how do our bodies matter in shaping our lives? ”

In a world where little girls have their clitorises sliced off and their genitalia mutilated giving them lifelong pain and removing any sexual pleasure in order to please a future husband, I find this comment utterly offensive.

Okay sorry I misunderstood Goosefoot. But people who think that way are obviously a little bit dim. You could equally say that being human is about reproduction and that people who can’t or don’t want to reproduce are not human.
Being a woman is a material fact, nothing more, nothing less. Once we start looking for an inner essence that has nothing to do with embodied reality, we run into big problems and end up with nonsense like Prof Cooper’s blog and assertions that being a woman is about vulnerability and appearance.

What I'm getting from this piece is that people don't agree on what gender is. Why then would we want to validate it in law?

That's genderwang.

Okay, that made me LOL. Probably the best description I've run into of the whole ideology yet.

I'm re-reading the thread about Meg-John Barker's BACP foolishness that I linked earlier. I thoroughly recommend it, it's much more fun than Cooper's ponderous waffling nonsense.

"Action for Northern Health"

Well I had a bash at reading. It

Jeez I was thinking. Just get to the end of the waffle

And say something of substance.

It was waffly waffly

Sex = what you are... Gonads, gametes, genitals

Gender = How you feel in relation to your sex; specifically in relation to society's stereotypical beliefs about how men and women should behave (leading to behaviors that are typically 'masculine' or 'feminine' at an individual level).

Things I do because I'm female: deal with periods, give birth, lactate

Things I do that may or may not be feminine: wear lipstick. Or not. Be a hairdresser. Or not. Play football. Or not.

I can never support the conflation of sex and gender which is rife in this article.

I'd hate for anyone to feel bad about their typically 'masculine' or 'feminine' behaviours.

But I'd defend to the last that men and women are different at a population level and that women in particular have specific sex-based needs in relation to health, safeguarding, protection from abuse, criminal justice and sport etc.

Also we should not get confused between society-level approaches ('women need to have safe spaces') and responses to very individual issues ("that man feels more in tune with himself when he wears a skirt").

That writing is a load of muddled, dangerous pseudo- something or other.

My initial point was that many people, I suspect, really do not understand that. They believe that is we say sex is an element of reproduction, that sex exists for reproduction, then we must believe that all individual men and women have to reproduce or at least be able to. An infertile women would not really be a woman.

Agreed; it's a very widely-held idea. A friend of mine was born without a womb, and that level of common understanding among the general populace gave her a fair bit of mental anguish, which makes it an attitude I'm always keen to tackle in the wild (as it were).

Re childlessness - I expect a great many number of people who remain childless do so by choice.

Therefore reproduction (if they are active sexually - pre menopause for women and throughout life for men) will still impact their lives because they have to actively work towards staying childless.

So a big part of being human is reproduction even if you decide not to use it. Similar could be said for infertility as a disorder of reproduction - it's not without consequence.

Then of course there is menopause which for women ceases reproduction but without reproduction menopause wouldn't be a thing. So it's still a consequence of having reproductive abilities.

OvaHere that’s true for those where there is a choice. But these idiots often like to use infertile women as a punchbag and say that ‘if you say Trevor who feels feminine isn’t a real woman then you can’t logically say that a woman with severe endometriosis that prevents conceptions is a woman either’.

Oh I know they do. It's so ridiculous though - if a woman with endometriosis wasn't a woman then she wouldn't have endometriosis in the first place.

I mean yes, not all women have endometriosis and not all women have wombs but for those that do it couldn't occur without being a woman.

From their academic bubble it seems they thought this project was a slam dunk post self ID and could easily change the law. What we are seeing now is bottom of the barrel scraping to try and find something, anything to say for the money spent.

Yes, there are parts of blogs she's written where she clearly thinks self ID is a given.

I’d be keen read straightforward responses from researchers to the points raised in their questionnaire responses and on the various MN threads they’ve quoted from in that blog, though. They've clearly read them That doesn’t feel like what they’ve offered here though.

I am still appalled by the research culture that could have enabled that survey and it’s deliberate conflation of sex and gender. Their results will be uninterpretable yet they plan to use them in all kinds of advocacy. It was a shocking waste of public money and depriving someone else of doing some good and useful funded academic work. It’s so unethical to ask the public to respond to politicised rubbish and call it research.

Well, I felt she painted a very utopian view of the future. Where male violence does not exist and females are never discriminated against for being the only the sex that be pregnant.

And that maybe she is missing the point that so many people don’t fit into gender stereotypes unless they do it to ‘choose a gender’. In which case, if that is where we are headed, so far back to stereotypes it just becomes another way to discriminate.

I admit to skimming sections as it simply seemed to be repeating itself.

Okay sorry I misunderstood Goosefoot. But people who think that way are obviously a little bit dim. You could equally say that being human is about reproduction and that people who can’t or don’t want to reproduce are not human.

I don't know, I think it quite a lot of people. A lot more people than I used to realise. And it's not necessarily people wedded to this ideology, you see the same logical mistake in other areas as well.

I had been thinking it must be a problem in science education. People don't understand how a species is defined, or a grouping. But I wonder if it doesn't reflect a deeper lack of understanding of named categories generally. Which is one of the most basic topics in philosophy. Most regular people used to understand this fairly naturally I think, but somehow now there is so much emphasis on individual differences, it seems like something has gone awry.

Hmm well I think if you asked the vast majority of people whether a woman without children was a woman, of course they would agree that she is. Whether they think she should have children is a different matter. But of course she’s a woman because if she is human and isn’t a woman, she’d be a man.

I think people are talking about vastly different things. All most sensible people are saying is that a woman is a biological female and that that’s the only thing that all women have in common. Disingenuous idiots like Prof Cooper and her minions choose to interpret that as people saying that being a woman is all about having children (which is illogical because being a woman is about having female biology but not necessarily using it).

I’d be keen read straightforward responses from researchers to the points raised in their questionnaire responses and on the various MN threads they’ve quoted from in that blog, though.

Yes. It’s a pity they saw valid points as ‘attacks’. Wasn’t the point of the survey to find out what the public thought?

I haven’t read all of the “genderwang” as another poster so eloquently describes it as, but I was struck by her attempts to discuss sexuality without reference to biological sex. She referenced radical feminist writers of the 80s and 90s as asserting that (hetero)sexuality, not sex, is the root of female oppression.
Im not a radical feminist and not well-read in the literature at all, but a quick Google search shows me that Atkinson commented on the biological dichotomy of sex and its basis in female oppression, as early as the late 60s. So, some cherry-picking there, I think. Because the point she overlooks is that those feminists were clear that domination of women was achieved by men, through heterosexuality. There is a sex-based distinction there: we weren’t subjugated by other women.

You know, I'm usually willing to wade through this kind of thing to attempt some kind of analysis, but I've been stuck in my house or a supermarket for weeks now, and my patience for indulgent cobblers has dwindled spectacularly, so I think I will pass on this one.

IME writers of this ilk have about as much chance of understanding radical feminism as they do of understanding nuclear physics if their last physics lesson was when they were 14. It's often funny to watch them try though!

Or would be in the right frame of mind, but right now I also am in a "take your genderwang and flush it down the toilet where it belongs" frame of mind.