Essay - age and gender criticism

[NoWireHangersEver]

Just wrote this piece about the futurity of the gender critical movement and the demographics of those involved, posting as thought some of the women here might be interested - touches on ageism and intergenerational solidarity. I'm a younger not-quite-radfem who drops in here occasionally for the quality of GC discourse and would love to hear thoughts if you have them! 😀

Most of us here would be rightly weary of clicking a random link on a post wanting opinions from GC women.

Hi Ella. I'm sorry I'm not smart enough to make much of a comment except to say well done for that articulate and excellent piece of writing.

As for the future, it was gender ideology that bought me to feminism and gave me an awareness of the disadvantage that comes with being born into the female sex. Now that I'm enlightened I'll continue to call out that disadvantage wherever I see it and hopefully enlighten some of the younger generation in the process.

I clicked and I'm still here 😀Thank you for posting.

I probably need to read it more than once to get everything out of it but, in some ways I think I'm more optimistic than you seem to be about the future. That's because I said and did some totally stupid and arsey things when I was young and... well I changed my mind, and I'm guessing today's young people will do the same. Also the generation that comes after you tends to define themselves by rejecting many of the things you stood for and again, I see no reason why this generation won't suffer the same fate.

What makes me less optimistic is firstly that social media might make it harder for people to change their minds - I'm lucky in that none of the things I said 40-years ago are in the public domain. Secondly I think young people are being totally let down by so-called adults failing to step up and be the grown ups. That's the thing that makes me most fearful.

Love it. You're as sharp as a tack, you write well, and I hope you will document what happens next. If our history is written I'd rather it was by one of us.

Thank you Fairypage. I enjoyed that. I know from my adult daughter that there's a growing cohort of younger women speaking out. She first picked up the issue from listening to young lesbians talking about the cotton ceiling and the pressure they experience from some trans women.

It's a great article, thank you for posting.

I agree it's easier for people like me, in middle age, to be open about having gender critical views. I've sometimes thought how much harder it must be for younger people, perhaps at university or at the start of a career. One ray of light is the Maya Forster ruling that gender-critical is a protected belief. In the UK at least (is that where you are)?

The GC movement does have a demographics problem - most of us are older. The young, currently captured, generation are the future. It's very worrying. I hope the generation that comes after yours rebels against gender ideaology. And I'm very gratified that young women like you exist!

Hi, great article.

I think the end of the ideology is coming - how long it will take I couldn't say - but to me genderism seems to be a relic of a postmodern era where there is a general distrust of material facts. It's hard to identify the era shifting but some people have posited that what comes after postmodernism is metamodernism - a renewed interest in what is "real" alongside a healthy recognition that human knowledge can be flawed, a kind of reconciliation of modernism and postmodernism. If this is how it did play out I think we would see a restatement of sex being real but also a growing focus on accepting gender nonconformity (rather than a postmodern/genderist view which attempts to deny that sex is real).

"I said a while ago that I would no longer be engaging with transgender discourse - that the debate had blown up into something increasingly ridiculous" - not a terrible idea! The debate is painfully polarised and exaggerated on both sides. The fuss over the swimmer Lea Thomas was a case in point - with 'anti trans' social media users swearing that Thomas was 6'4" tall, whilst the consensus amongst 'the trans lobby' seemed to be that she was 5'8" tall. The best guess at an accurate measurement seems to be that her true height was roughly exactly halfway between those two estimates, at about 6 foot nothing.

I don't think you should assume that it'll forever be the young who adopt the more 'liberal' stance on this issue. These things often go in cycles, e.g. the current age split you have in support for the main political parties [i.e. little to no support for the tories amongst the young, little to no support for labout amongst the old] is by no means one that's always been set in stone, e.g. in the 80s Margaret Thatcher had a very significant following amongst younger voters.

In terms of the 'endgame', it's really hard to predict. I'm fairly sure that 'the trans lobby' will 'lose' on sport, and I guess on prisons, but will probably to some extent 'win' [as far as such a thing is possible] on say public toilets and will also quite likely get further concessions in terms of funding for medical treatments. The debate around surgery and meds for the very young is the one where I can't really predict what'll happen.

Great read, OP, thanks!

I see this is an old thread...the original link doesn't work for me.

Ah - the zombifier is a spam post. Will report