Some questions for the socialist/left feminists here

[BlackWaveComing]

It's a free world, apparently, but this isn't a thread seeking input from conservative or right wing GC's. So

Otoh, if you are a feminist whose feminism encompasses but is not confined to GC in the context of transgender issues, and you have a socialist or left political alignment, I'd like your input. I suppose it's an AIBU for you. ( For context, I appreciate the role of social conservatism as a balancing force, and have defended FWR from accusations of transphobia on many occasions. Posting here for years, other names. You can PM me if you want my other names for veracity.)

I feel like FWR is losing a connection to feminism, and becoming a free speech board with an upsetting number of anti-feminist and anti- w/c tropes appearing here, largely unchallenged, daily.

Today I note the patriarchal notion that mothers are to blame for their children's mentally illness being trotted out. ROGD children, subject to an individualist corporation mediated social pressure being called attention seekers. This veers towards t-phobia, imo. And a complete lack of recognition that feminism is for poor women too, a cohort to whom the economic right is no friend.

Am I unreasonable in my assessment that yes, FWR is sliding into anti-genderism, anti-feminist conservatism?

And regardless of whether I'm wrong or right, is there a place for international w/c socialist feminists to discuss gender, among the many other issues facing women and children?

TIA.

[quote raspberryfields]@DonkeySkin

When I use gender critical, I mean it to say exactly what you have just said really. I believe in sex based difference and don't really think that gender is that helpful. I would love to be talking about sex rather than gender!

But maybe I am missing something! [/quote]
I think the difficulty is that there are sex roles, as Donkeyskin said, and that is not the same as sex. But it's also not in line with what people seem to think of when they talk about gender or the idea of abolishing gender.

One think I find interesting and sometimes confuses discussions is that for many, only gendered things they think are negative are called gender. A cultural construct that exists attached to sex - say maternity leave legislation - is not called "gender". But it falls within the definition, it's a cultural construct that relates to sex and has all kinds of social significance and structure built around it. Some constructs like this are useful, some aren't, and sometimes it changes based on other social or technological developments. Some are pretty neutral.

@Goosefoot

See I don't really think of maternity leave as "gender" now. It probably used to be, but I think that the current movement around gender as understood by TRAs/Stonewall is trying to detach gender from sex, so that your gender is woman, but that gender doesn't necessarily include things that actually would exclude those who say their gender is woman but who don't actually have those sex-based experiences.

So, you can talk about "people with a cervix" or "people who are pregnant" as the inclusive term for people with particular sex features, but then that is then actually detached from the idea of whether you identify as a woman.

This is then problematic, because some of the rights that women have fought for as "women's" issues are then not really permitted to be associated with "women" and there doesn't seem to be a term now for those sex based issues.

I guess that is what I mean when I say I am critical of "gender" - if you strip away the link to sex based issues, then really you are just talking about a collection of stereotypes around masculinity and femininity.

I have only read your posts OP and I agree with you. The dominance of GC feminists seems to have also dragged FWR to the right and it’s affected a lot of the whole tone of MN. I’ve been here a long time now and used to find FWR interesting. I’m convinced some regular posters have been led into conservatism via GC feminism. In fact I have seen screenshots from here on left wing forums with people pointing that out.

I can't pretend to have been able to follow everything said on this thread perfectly, and honestly I often find a lot of the "discourse" that exists within certain -ism related spaces to use a lot of intellectual jargon that feels elitist and exclusionary.

I'd define myself as broadly vaguely left/liberal, strongly anti-racist, anti-classicist, hardcore feminist/pro-women's rights.

To answer the OP's question: I haven't personally seen that. Something I have seen which worries me is a minority of posters who seem to be exploiting a GC/feminist position to attack or debunk other "social justice" issues like anti-racism. The argument broadly goes: "Wokesters/liberals believe that men can become women, and that women's spaces and physical safety should be compromised to serve men. Ergo wokesters are bad and wrong. Ergo anything that wokesters believe in is bad and wrong. Wokesters also believe that racism is wrong. Ergo being anti-racist is "woke". Ergo anti-racism is wrong."

I'm not making generalisations, I'm aware it's only a small number of posters, and maybe they have an agenda. Either an agenda to encourage posters to say things so they can smear GC feminists as racists, or possibly an agenda to actually be racist. But I've seen a number of very troubling posts saying that women and especially feminists should support men and causes that are explicitly racist on the grounds that those people are also anti-trans. Even when some of the men in question are openly misogynistic or have been accused of abusing women!

Not everyone who is anti-trans is pro-women, and surely it should be possible to separate out different beliefs? If someone holds GC views but is also racist, surely it's possible to say "I agree with their views on X, but strongly disagree with their views on Y"?

So yes, I'm happy that FWR encompasses a range of views, because this partisan woke/anti-woke nonsense is dangerously divisive.

"ROGD children, subject to an individualist corporation mediated social pressure ..."

So what does this mean, @BlackWaveComing?

My experience is that FWR was very left wing when Dittany was around, swung to the right after she was purged and has now come back to the left.

There were few years where there were loads of threads on here which were very much of the build an amazing career and get yourself wealthy and to the top type feminism.

The fact that this has nothing to do with most women’s experience of work or working rights was stomped all over.

@CarrotInATree

I have only read your posts OP and I agree with you. The dominance of GC feminists seems to have also dragged FWR to the right and it’s affected a lot of the whole tone of MN. I’ve been here a long time now and used to find FWR interesting. I’m convinced some regular posters have been led into conservatism via GC feminism. In fact I have seen screenshots from here on left wing forums with people pointing that out.

Why this assumption that being GC means you are right wing

Woke is just shorthand for American style authoritarian identity politics.

The vast majority of feminists and activists working on ending racism aren’t woke at all.

How interesting. After posting I thought a bit. I thought I had shifed a little closer centre in recent years, however, it seems I am more left wing than ever (and more of a liberatrion).

Me too. I'm quite surprised. However, I have a feeling the test and questions may be more geared to an American audience, and that there's probably some difference in scaling of responses.

[quote NRatched]How interesting. After posting I thought a bit. I thought I had shifed a little closer centre in recent years, however, it seems I am more left wing than ever (and more of a liberatrion).

I know this is not accurate as such, but have been doing this for a few years just to check, curiousity really. I have generally been in the middle corner area, between liberatrian and left.

www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2?ec=-4.75&soc=-3.08[/quote]
Me too, I posted that I’m centrist, but I did the same test as you and it shows I’m firmly out on the left wing

Please don't use the term TERF

I feel like FWR is losing a connection to feminism, and becoming a free speech board with an upsetting number of anti-feminist and anti- w/c tropes appearing here, largely unchallenged, daily

YANBU - there's a lot of anti women (as in women who aren't middle class, white, the "right" kind of woman ) homophobic stuff and it does go by largely unchallenged, and when it is challenged you're likely to be "shouted down".
I've been on MN years and I find the seeming shift to the far right alarming.

I'm pretty sure generalising is against the rules

How is it generalising?
It's not generalising against people or posters as such.
Just the board (s)
The views on them.
It's an interesting question and I feel the same as the OP

To an earlier poster, I am actually deeply “gender critical”. I was using a polite term for how the mumsnet feminists align regarding trans rights.

I don’t tend to start threads, I’m more of a contributor. I certainly contributed a lot more in the era when every single thread didn’t seem to get somehow skewed into yet another discussion about this one single issue.

It’s fine, I’m not whining about being left out, it would be nice to feel the board welcomes all feminists but it has become self-limiting, so I largely stay away on the whole.

I also find there's a lot of homophobic tinges to comments eg a thread defending someone who is against kids learning about gay relationships

I don't recognise this, maybe I have missed some threads

There's one running right now (if it's still there, it was this morning) the No Comment one.

@Butterer

I apologise for using that term - in future I'll try rephrase that as 'gender critical exclusionary', if that's more appropriate?

What do you mean by exclusionary?

[quote raspberryfields]@Goosefoot

See I don't really think of maternity leave as "gender" now. It probably used to be, but I think that the current movement around gender as understood by TRAs/Stonewall is trying to detach gender from sex, so that your gender is woman, but that gender doesn't necessarily include things that actually would exclude those who say their gender is woman but who don't actually have those sex-based experiences.

So, you can talk about "people with a cervix" or "people who are pregnant" as the inclusive term for people with particular sex features, but then that is then actually detached from the idea of whether you identify as a woman.

This is then problematic, because some of the rights that women have fought for as "women's" issues are then not really permitted to be associated with "women" and there doesn't seem to be a term now for those sex based issues.

I guess that is what I mean when I say I am critical of "gender" - if you strip away the link to sex based issues, then really you are just talking about a collection of stereotypes around masculinity and femininity. [/quote]
A stereotype is an interesting thing, because at a group level they can be perfectly true observations. It's essentially pattern recognition. Where they become stereotypes is when we believe or behave as if the pattern that dominates in the group will always apply to each individual member of the group, which is a fallicious way of thinking.

We often talk as if noting the pattern itself is wrong and that when people do this, they are being sexist or racist or whatever. I think this tends to lead to problems in that it doesn't stop the pattern from being real, it just stops us acknowledging it, and it stops people from being able to talk about it. Trevor Phillips talked about that a bit in the little film he made, and it's well worth watching.

Masculinity and femininity are concepts that are about group behaviour, by their very nature. They have to be stereotypes, whether they are wholly learned or when they are not.

But something like associating blue with boys - I don't think that's best understood as a stereotype. It's a cultural custom that is attached to sex, just like you might have cultural clothing customs attached to age - older women wearing a hat, or longer hair on infant boys. And actually it's a pretty benign one, unlike something like foot binding of girls.

But so long as we have culture, and society, if sex is real our social structures and our culture will reflect and interact our experience as being sexed. To label all of this gender and try and eradicate it is probably impossible, and to accomplish it even a little would mean preventing people thinking about sex as relevant. Which might have been a goal when gender was coined as a term but has had some unexpected effects.

I’m a socialist, working class and very gender critical (which I always thought was an essential criteria for feminism, but there you go...) and keen on free speech. I think there are a fair few right wingers on FWR, but feminism has always been a broad church (and that’s as it should be- we are united as women, we don’t have to agree on everything)

‘There's one running right now (if it's still there, it was this morning) the No Comment one.’

Okay, I am confused. You are criticising the existence of that thread, but you are one of the few people posting on it?

It’s a thread started by a random person and the posters on there are disagreeing with the homophobic element. I don’t see the problem.

Thought some people on this thread might be interested in this.

Yes it’s a thread with hardly any posts & most of them disagree with the OP

If it’s offending why not report it?

I too thought I had moved to the right in recent years-apparently not