Gender Critical = fundamentally right wing (according to Vox)

[TheRealMcKenna]

I know it’s Vox, I know it’s not a ‘reputable’ news source, but this is hilariously bad.

Main points:

• TERFs calling themselves ‘gender critical’ are akin to white supremacists calling themselves ‘race realists’.
• Women are oppressed based on gender identity and not biological sex.
• Most ‘decent’ feminists include trans women in their movement, but a horrid bunch of conservative-allying pro-life supporting homophobic white supremacists don’t.
• GC feminists Who rely on ‘science’ have abandoned the idea that chromosomes determine sex (this is news to me)
• GC feminism is mainly a UK phenomenon and is ‘whipped up’ by the horrid Mumsnet site. Everyone else in the world is lovely (apart from those far right pro-life conservatives).
• GC feminists cite a tiny number of high profile cases to whip up fear and hatred of trans women.
• GC advocates bully people online, especially on Twitter.
• GC academics have a terribly large amount of power and influence.

www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/5/20840101/terfs-radical-feminists-gender-critical

@CloudyVanilla

Obviously nobody actually posted here in good faith to discuss what the article is actually about so there's not point in me engaging further. I hope in future though to be able to discuss the actual topic. The thread was on topic until someone who isn't trans exclusionary posts and then it's all about me and my views. Why? The discussion was still fully possible to be about the actual content of the article.

Because you joined the discussion to point out that posters on FWR are like your friend who turned out to be an MRA. You failed to explain why or to offer any further details. It perfectly reasonable to ask questions about the incident, about how the views align and for you to explain how this marries up with the article.

@EdgeOfACoin I will answer your question before I go as your'e interested, but if it's okay as I'm in a rush to finally eat dinner now DC are asleep I'll just give you a quick overview if you don't mind:

I did move further to GC or trans exclusionary feminism. I hate writing TERF because it's often use an an insult and I don't know if it's fair to use the R label either but I may refer to it from now on for brevity.

I got all my info on the trans debate from MN and when I looked into it further, particularly after my big debate with MRA friend, and also because I realised my intolerance of trans women I particular was not morally sitting well with me and my other values. So naturally I started looking into it more and I really strongly disagree with TERF now for two main points:

• I believe that gender at least is a social construct. I feel this is proven through history and looking at different and changing cultures. I believe gender identity matters much more than GC feminists assert, whether rightly or wrongly it is an integral part of human nature, at least in modern culture and it is probably accurate for most of history too.

Therefore, I do not feel it is my right nor do I feel it is accurate or fair to discount someone who says they fundamentally identify as what they personally understand to mean female. I do not believe arguments or counter points of "oh but what is a state of mind, what is it to feel like a woman?" Because I trust other humans when they say they have a strong identify of themselves and I do not feel that feeling trans is any more dismissable than sexual orientation. It is absolutely wrong to me to tell someone that when they say they identify as a woman, that that identity is not valid because somebody else either thinks they can't truly feel like that, or especially that it doesn't matter what they feel because biologically they are not the gender they feel they are or wish to be.

I disagree with TERF on a fundamental basically because I feel that the argument of "biological male can never be female" is completely missing the point of what transgenderism is.

I Also on a less direct point feel that the idea that transgender rights, the right to be accepted under the umbrella of feminism and womanhood, or otherwise to be seen as the gender they identify as will erase women or women's rights to be hyperbolic. I do agree that laws need to tread carefully and be able to consider certain things (sports, prisons) on a case by case basis. But the lack of proportionality on the part of TERFeminism around these issues is nothing short of hateful and phobic to me. I believe the vast majority or trans men and women just want to be respected for who they are and live with dignity. I do not believe there is evidence enough to support the active exclusion of trans women from most walks of life, and believe that trans women and women, as they really mostly do now, can live peacefully along side eachother without issue and without the need to put trans women in their place and remind them they aren't "actual women".

I hope this sort of explains what I have come to see. I will say that you would not get this perspective from exclusively using the MN feminism board. Witches vs the Patriarchy is a fine example of how feminism does not become invalid by being trans inclusive.

Vanilla: Telling somebody they are not who they fundamentally identify as on a deep personal level is naturally asserting that their state of mind is not valid.

No, that's not how it works.

Telling someone I don't believe in the existence of God doesn't make their own internal belief, as a Christian, in their own internal, deeply felt sense of the immanent presence of the divine disappear. It just means I don't believe their belief to be grounded in external reality.

Similarly, someone's completely at liberty to believe whatever they like about their own internal gender identity. I'm not questioning the sincerity of their beliefs (well, barring some obvious piss takers like Canada's serial harrasser of underprivileged indigenous women quietly trying to run their own business). I simply don't believe that their internal belief in gender identity corresponds to an external reality grounded in the possibilty of them actually changing sex - because that isn't actually possible.

There's lots of areas where one set of people disagree really quite profoundly over what another set of people take to be ideological or religious or "psychological" truth.

If your belief system is so tenuous that me saying "actually, I don't share your belief system" causes your whole world view to crumble, then either your belief system was a bit shit in the first place, or your mental health is extremely fragile, neither of which is my problem, frankly.

Christians don't wander round saying "your atheism invalidates me as a person." Marxists don't wander round saying "your committment to holding private property invalidates me as a person."

Vanilla what do you plan to do then with the females who cannot use spaces where male people are, regardless of how that male identifies?

Where do they go? What services do they use? How are you planning for society to be kind and humane to them?

Vanishing them by calling them hyperbole is convenient if you don't want to have to unpack and engage with the issues, but it's not realistic. Those women exist too. And it sounds as if you see male people as intrinsically more important and deserving of your sympathy, support and care than female people.

Also, can we stop using "valid" - I don't think it means what TRAs think it means.

Arguments are valid - it means the conclusion follows logically from the premises. (Incidentally, this does not mean that the conclusion is true - if the premises are false, the conclusion of a valid argument may be false, for e.g. "If a horse has a horn in the centre of its forehead, it is a unicorn, Percy has a horn in the centre of its forehead, therefore Percy is a unicorn" - valid, but nonsense because there's no such thing as a unicorn. )

Assertions about facts ("The earth is flat", "The current rate of global temperature rise is man made", "The moon takes 27 days to orbit the earth", "MMR vaccine does not cause autism") can be either true or false (depending on whether they correspond to the real world or not - other philosophical theories of truth are available, but I think most of us, naively, are realists and pretty keen on some sort of correspondence theory of truth... unless of course you're a post-modernist, and truth is all about how loudly you make your assertions - cf our favourite Cyclepath's PhD dissertation).

But people, and their "identities" are not valid, or invalid, true, or false. People are simply part of the material, biological, tangible world (as are their biologically sexed bodies). Their identities are in their heads, nebulous things about which they can make claims, based on their subjective, lived experience, but to which the rest of us have no access (because we're not fricking mind-readers), so they're a very bad basis on which to found legal or political debates. Because we're not mind-readers.

I actually find the lack of proportionality and reciprocation, or even ability to listen to women's concerns, issues and needs from a political lobby I won't be quite as rude about as you're choosing to be, disturbing too, to put it mildly. Don't you? Why do you expect from GC women what you don't expect at all from male people?

Incidentally, not listening to women, and not caring about vulnerable women's inclusion in society, is not a left wingish position.

A lot of people think right wing and left wing are a list of check boxes on issue based questions. The way you decide if an position is right wing is whether or not it is evil.

There is no sense of the underlying thought processes or goals or history of the left or the right.

One can only evaluate the validity of assertions based on measurable reality, which will allow assertions to be falsified If untrue (invalid).

This is where Queer Theory comes in which is based on PoMo ideas which assert that there is no objective reality. What we ‘consider’ to be reality is based on biased interpretation of the world seen through a white supremacist cis heteronormative patriarchal lens.

Essentially, what is valid is ‘lived experience’ and the more oppressed the person is, the more valid that lived experience is in its inversion of the power/oppression structure. Thus a trans women (being trans and thus very oppressed) has a much more valid ‘lived experience’ and reality of being a woman than a ‘cis’ (hate that term) woman.

It sounds batshit crazy and ridiculous (because it is), but you only have to spend a little time reading these ridiculous articles and looking on Twitter to see that people actually believe it, and are happy to scream ‘bigot’ at anyone who doesn’t.

I would say your views then are similar to sex essentialism shared by the right.

It is this fundamental argument that I disagree with.

You say to trans women - someone saying something about themselves doesn't make it a fact. That only hard reality and proveable facts matter and that if you feel like a woman, good for you and that's fine with me but I do not agree you are a woman because the clear evidence of you being biologically male says otherwise. I understand.

I say - gender is a social construct and although your biological sex is at odds with your gender identity, your fundamental feeling that you feel uncomfortable living your life being identified as a man and feel in every other way apart from your biology you are a woman is something I accept. I understand you are biologically male and I accept the dissonance between the factual evidence and your identity and sense of self. Particularly as gender is a social construct, I support and encourage your right to live as the gender you feel comfortable identifying as, and that pointing out that your biological sex does not match your identity as a woman is unnecessary, hurtful to you and stops you from living in dignity and peace. I cannot walk in your shoes and I will never know what it truly feels to be trans, but I understand that it is important enough to you to change your whole life and subject yourself to abuse and intolerance. I welcome you under the umbrella of womanhood because you are a trans woman. I do not need to point out that you are not a biological woman because you know this. I do not need society to discriminate against you on my behalf because I do not believe the relatively small number of trans women in the world will erase the rights and needs of roughly 50% of the population. To me, trans women are women not because biologically I believe it so, but because I see no need exclude them from the identity they so fundamentally hold.

Those are my views, like it or lump it I guess.

Lumped it after the first half.

That's all very well. We're no further forward though. What are you going to do with the female people who are excluded from female services and spaces because they cannot share a mixed sex space?

CloudyVanilla in that longest paragraph of your last post I counted four occasions when you pointed out that trans women were either biologically male or biologically not female. In the eyes of TRAs and those who buy into Queer Theory, that makes you transphobic. They believe trans women are biologically women.

Welcome to the far right.

I would say your views then are similar to sex essentialism shared by the right.

Which views, shared by which part of the right? The right is a disparate collective of different interest groups, with wildly differing views, especially in America.

"All the people?"

How many people? Please show me all the evidence and numbers of all the disjointed women unable to access spaces because of trans women.

I know how important a bit of hard science is to you here. And not just abstract what if's.

TRAs = most trans people?

Or TRAs = the trans people whose opinions you choose to voice in order to justify your own opinions?

Well you could go and have a chat to Detroit who posts here, who has been living rough because of not being able to access a single sex shelter. And the posters who went to the meeting to explain their needs for single sex refuges and ended up in tears because they were not listened to and afterwards it was denied that the meeting ever happened or any women had said anything. And the poster who is supporting the Muslim lady who now has no access to park toilets because they've all been turned gender neutral?

Those three might be a good start. I am sorry, but these are real women, not theoretical ones. What do you plan to do with them and their needs?

I understand that it is important enough to you to change your whole life and subject yourself to abuse and intolerance.

It is highly transphobic to suggest that a trans woman needs to live as the opposite sex let alone change her body or behavior to be considered a woman.

Studies though? Research and data? Any reason other that personal belief that they didn't want to be around a trans woman? Empirical evidence that trans women can be accurately viewed as more harmful to women?

I'm sorry but I don't see why a religious based claim to single sex toilets is any more or less important than a gender identity based claim to gender neutral toilets. And if that's the extent of the harm including trans women as does then I would argue that is a price worth paying considering the increased risk of violence trans women are at.

But again if you have any evidence at all that trans women are objectively a clear risk to women (and you would of course have to disregard all well documented evidence and data that it is heterosexual men, known to and close to the victim, that inflict the vast majority of harm to women) I would be interested to hear it.

@Goosefoot

A lot of people think right wing and left wing are a list of check boxes on issue based questions. The way you decide if an position is right wing is whether or not it is evil.

There is no sense of the underlying thought processes or goals or history of the left or the right.

Very true, but genderism is based on sex stereotypes which IMO puts it ideologically on the (religious) right. It has emboldened people who would rather "trans away the gay".

CloudyVanilla Thanks for coming back and making your argument. Appreciate it.

I know you said that you weren't going to change your mind, so I've got no expectations in responding here, but to borrow your words, this is a feminist forum and I'm allowed my views, so... to me it comes across loud and clear that you dismiss women's concerns, en masse, as hyperbolic, and you prioritise the feelings of men in your feminism. Doesn't sound like feminism to me. Sounds conservative and regressive.

@CloudyVanilla

Studies though? Research and data? Any reason other that personal belief that they didn't want to be around a trans woman? Empirical evidence that trans women can be accurately viewed as more harmful to women?

I'm sorry but I don't see why a religious based claim to single sex toilets is any more or less important than a gender identity based claim to gender neutral toilets. And if that's the extent of the harm including trans women as does then I would argue that is a price worth paying considering the increased risk of violence trans women are at.

But again if you have any evidence at all that trans women are objectively a clear risk to women (and you would of course have to disregard all well documented evidence and data that it is heterosexual men, known to and close to the victim, that inflict the vast majority of harm to women) I would be interested to hear it.

Why don't you take a little time to work your way through this thread:

It will never happen - resource thread. www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3348290-It-will-never-happen-resource-thread

@PigeonToe I can totally see how it comes across that way on a thread centred around transgenderism, honestly.

But the reality is for me outside of the MN board, "the trans debate" is only a small section of feminism. I spend a lot of my time surrounding myself with positive forms of feminism, including the subreddits I mentioned earlier, the A Mighty Girl Facebook page and the literature they recommend. I'm also interested in become a girl guide unit leader one day when I am a little less busy among some other ventures :)

I see.

1. Women have to provide to you evidence, that you approve of, in sufficient amounts, explaining the issues for female people, before you're prepared to extend any kind of listening to or acceptance that some of them may have an issue with this. Until this happens (and you will decide if the evidence suits your criteria) there is no problem. However you're very clear on the huge problems for male people and expecting others to take those seriously, without providing such evidence yourself.

2. Even if that evidence is produced - and you clearly know what it is, since you've mentioned one of the big issues for female people and intersectionality, you've already invalidated this as something they need to get over or accept losing services as a penalty because you don't agree with or accept their personal views/needs/culture/beliefs. (But you do unconditionally extend this respect for the male people we're talking about.)

3. The only thing that would justify female people having needs/feelings about this in your view would be if there was absolutely incontrovertible proof of those female people being in actual, physical danger, but you've added provisos of how unwilling you are to consider that evidence anyway.

Thanks, that's a very helpful lay out of your beliefs, and the massive double standards involved.