Should we dispense with the word gender critical and just call ourselves biological realists?

[Stopsnowing]

Just that really. If sex matters and gender is mainly irrelevant shall we just stop referring to being gender critical?

@falalalalalalalallama

It sounds to me like we're looking for two labels here. Let's be clear about this

1. A name for those women who are fighting gender ideology as part of our feminism. So, we're looking for something like "women's rights activist" here.

1. A name that sums up a belief in evidence-based biology and the lack of belief in gender woo. So, something like "biological realist" but without negative connotations. This isn't to do with feminism at all, but a wider term that anyone in society could use to show they don't believe in gender nonsense. We need a word here that the general public feel comfortable using.

Finding a word for the second one would be immensely useful IMO.

Pro-life / pro-choice is a good example. We are pro-choice as part of our feminism, but people can use the word pro-choice to express their stance on abortion without having to subscribe to any wider belief system or framework. (Although I agree in PR terms it could be a better term).

We need a term that gets across that the TRAs are essentially flat-earthers and we're reality / evidence based.

Well summarised. This is exactly right, IMO.

I actually quite like Pro-Reality for the 2nd name (the one for the general public to use). It does the trick of being something positive about us, while implying something negative about the opposition, and it is inoffensive to all potential supporters, as almost no one consciously defines themselves as being anti-reality.

@Blibbyblobby

Female-centered feminism.

Should be a tautology. The fact it isn't highlights the absurdity we are in.

I like this, too.

Should we dispense with the word gender critical and just call ourselves biological realists?

For me, I just call myself a feminist.

The version of feminism I espouse, teach & try to live, is one which recognises the distinction between sex and gender, seeing gender as an historically & culturally constructed system which coercively requires certain characteristics, roles, behaviours of individuals, based on their sex. And these gender roles are hierarchically valued, and oppressive of women and girls.

Feminist analysis gets into that gap between sex and gender, to argue that just because women are biologically programmed (large gametes) to conceive, gestate, and feed infant humans, doesn't mean we can't do anything else, or that we are incapacitated or lesser in all other aspects of being fully human.

So that position recognises sexual difference but avoids the biological essentialism that the women's movement of the 1970s (second wave, if you like) found so troubling.

Didn't realise we were a brand, tbh. I have great sympathy with those who are sick and tired of the compartmentalisation and labelling.

What am I?

I'm a woman, I'm a child protector, I prioritise the rights of women and children.

That's it, really.

I like 'anti-sexist'

Pro equality

I think people do still know what sexism is.

I like 'pro-choice' because it doesn't imply any favoured outcome except for female autonomy as an end in itself.
And 'anti-choice' is a fair, realistic description for the other camp.
Same as 'sexist' is a fair, realistic description for the other camp here.

Same, Tanith.

Resist the (very natural) human inclination to form tribes, classify and categorise!

Labelling someone as 'gc' implies that it's only a small, involved group that believes things like - 'sex is immutable' and 'there are only two sexes'. In reality, this is the position of almost everyone, were you to ask them clearly.

We aren't necessarily 'gc'. Just people who are doing our best to make sensible decisions based on rational thought and available evidence. I suppose you could class many of us as 'bloody stubborn', but that's about as far as I'd go.

@ArabellaScott

Same, Tanith.

Resist the (very natural) human inclination to form tribes, classify and categorise!

Labelling someone as 'gc' implies that it's only a small, involved group that believes things like - 'sex is immutable' and 'there are only two sexes'. In reality, this is the position of almost everyone, were you to ask them clearly.

We aren't necessarily 'gc'. Just people who are doing our best to make sensible decisions based on rational thought and available evidence. I suppose you could class many of us as 'bloody stubborn', but that's about as far as I'd go.

Well that's lovely and very high-minded, I'm sure. Unfortunately, it's also a gift to the TRAs. If we are too naice to create our own brand, it will be created for us - by our enemies. There are already millions more people world-wide who have heard the term T*RF, than have heard of being GC.

I agree with you that most people are GC. The problem is that most of them don't realise it, so they do not rally to support us, or the women and girls we are campaigning to protect. We have to wake the public up to the fact that they agree with us - just as other successful campaigns, such as the gay rights movement, have done in recent decades.

Branding, or tribes, or whatever you want to call it, is a fundamental aspect of human society. Give me one example of any movement for justice or rights that has succeeded without engaging in some form of branding (in its broadest sense).

You might want to be terribly pure of mind and stay above the fray. I would rather protect vulnerable women by any (legal and ethical) means necessary.

Pure of mind? I don't think so. But I'm not joining in something just because other people tell me to. Wouldn't be here if I did.

I think this is a good idea and have been sitting here trying to come up with something.

Wondered about something like Pro-FairPlay.

(And am posting it because I don’t want the thread to die.)

Pro choice sounds like an abortion slogan

I've said before that I see it as a misnomer and an unfortunate term and have wondered how it came to be adopted.

When the topic is women's rights and protections under threat from activists for men's rights, I don't see why the terms women or women's rights campaigners or defenders of women don't suffice.. They are more transparent and straightforward - and they're not negative either. And you don't have to be a particular kind of feminist to want rights and dignity for women.

I'm not keen on using something with biological in it, given that it has recently come to be used in an unfortunate way, as a qualifier of what is a woman or of the term sex. But it would be good to find some alternative.

The issue as I see it isn't gender but gender identity, a compound which takes the word gender (as used in the Act) but hitches it to the engine idea that it is something one can 'identify into', which is a way of altering the original and opening it up to an infinite number of assumed gender identities, which are then often referred to and passed off as 'gender' (with its associated authority from the Act), as proponents slide about between the two terms, using them as if they are interchangeable. There's a two-stage sleight of hand going on there.

I've said before that I see it as a misnomer and an unfortunate term and have wondered how it came to be adopted.

I wrote something about that upthread. It wasn't about 'gender identity' or trans people - it was about rejecting gender stereotypes for our kids, and women not being constrained by gender roles. Wholly supportive of people being gender nonconforming.
If you go back 10 years that's what many discussions on FWR were about. And when transactivism started up, with self ID officially on the table and unofficially in place through the back door, the rise of stonewall, mermaids etc - fairly obviously many women already thinking about issues pertaining to gender from this feminist perspective could see the problems before they were more widely apparent.

Pro equality

There was a saying in the 1970s: "A woman who aspires to be equal to a man lacks ambition."

I think the problem with equality on paper is that women still pay the reproduction penalty. Equality doesn't acknowledge sexual difference.

@ScrollingLeaves

Because of TWAW any ‘woman’ word is out, sadly.

It really isn't. Woman as woman requires no qualification. That would be capitulation of the worst kind in my view.

@ErrolTheDragon

I've said before that I see it as a misnomer and an unfortunate term and have wondered how it came to be adopted.

I wrote something about that upthread. It wasn't about 'gender identity' or trans people - it was about rejecting gender stereotypes for our kids, and women not being constrained by gender roles. Wholly supportive of people being gender nonconforming.
If you go back 10 years that's what many discussions on FWR were about. And when transactivism started up, with self ID officially on the table and unofficially in place through the back door, the rise of stonewall, mermaids etc - fairly obviously many women already thinking about issues pertaining to gender from this feminist perspective could see the problems before they were more widely apparent.

Yes, sorry I hadn't read the whole thread when I posted. I haven't been about in feminist groups in recent years so I would have missed the background. Though I've always thought of myself as a feminist, when someone references Gender Theory, for example, my reaction is bafflement. I don't know what they mean by it. Or say, gender critical, well, I've never heard of it and it means nothing to me. I'm not critical of gender any more than I am of sex. Why should I be? It just is. And when they describe it, I think ah, they mean gender roles, which is something else.

For many years we've read about and seen a small number of individual transsexuals and read their posting online for the past fifteen years or so since we've had online discussion message boards and forums but what they wrote about wasn't about gender roles or self declaring a gender identity. It started with individuals' private awareness they said they felt acutely from a very early age, which led them eventually to a pioneering specialist medical facility, perhaps as adults, and a long involved psychological assessment and monitoring process and surgical and other treatment until they transitioned and lived as if they were the other sex, quietly getting on with their lives, working, getting married and so on.

What's been happening in the last several years is very different from that. We've had a very muddled Act in 2004 which probably passed without much public awareness, then Maria Millar's zeal for going further (self ID?) and what has developed subsequently is an ever encroaching militant rights movement that led people like Professor Stock to start saying as she did in, I think 2018, Wait a minute...what's going on here, in regard to women's and children's rights?

Get your point @KaycePollard

Reclaim kindness to include kindness to all

Pro kindness

Femaleist. Believes feminism centres women and girls.

@Swashbuckled

I think this is a good idea and have been sitting here trying to come up with something.

Wondered about something like Pro-FairPlay.

(And am posting it because I don’t want the thread to die.)

I like that - the idea of fair play or fairness for women. Actually isn't there a women's campaigning group already called something like Fair Play for Women? If we could work some variant around that idea.

Fairness for Women. Women for Fair Play. Fairness Campaign. Fairness. Campaign for Fairness. Fair Play campaign.

Fair Play or Fairness would have the advantage of not being confined to women or women and girls, but carries the idea of fairness for the people, embracing women, men, children.

@KaycePollard

Pro equality

There was a saying in the 1970s: "A woman who aspires to be equal to a man lacks ambition."

I think the problem with equality on paper is that women still pay the reproduction penalty. Equality doesn't acknowledge sexual difference.

I agree. You can end up being trapped in a kind of paradigm of emulating men, or a male ideal, a mental straitjacket in which the male is the model of humanity, the pinnacle of aspiration and the measure of value. The notion of fair treatment almost mandates that thinking, though.

@ArabellaScott

Pure of mind? I don't think so. But I'm not joining in something just because other people tell me to. Wouldn't be here if I did.

I'm sure that all the women prisoners currently banged up with rapists applaud your rugged individualism.

No one is forcing anyone to join anything. It's a question of giving those who want them the tools to bring about positive change

If all we are going to do is wring out hands on MN, it doesn't matter what we call ourselves. If we want to push back against the erosion of women's rights, it does. No group that is relatively disempowered has ever won power/rights without support from within the Establishment, and from the general public. We need to make it easy and relatively risk-free for the people with influence to support us. We need either a name or slogan that they can get behind: something that sounds uncontentious and that is easy to understand.

I like suggestions from PPs about fairness. It's hard to complain about anyone advocating fairness.

Fairness is good as a concept. How would we make it both general as in fairness for all, and at the same time tie it to the specific topic of women's rights and trans? The word Fairness on its own is too vague to convey the actual context and topic without some additional specific reference pointing to sex and trans. That's the hardest bit.

Godsake, MissLucy, why the constant barbed comments at me? Not sure you're quite getting the hang of winning hearts and minds, tbh.

@ArabellaScott

Godsake, MissLucy, why the constant barbed comments at me? Not sure you're quite getting the hang of winning hearts and minds, tbh.

Im not getting it either

Ive gone back and reread some posts and im struggling to see the problem

(I like the fairness thing as well, as has already been said it hard to argue with)