Two questions about the phrase "gender critical"

[senua]

1. who invented the phrase?

2. do you think that it has served us well? To the untrained ear it has negative shades of "fault-finding" rather than positive "analysis".
   I have heard several references recently (enough to make me think it might be an Upcoming Thing) to the concept of "Rationality". I think that I would like to be known as a "gender rationalist".

Interesting discussion. It does feel as though there isn't a great word to describe our beliefs.

I am interested to know what the difference is between being a gender abolitionist and a person who wants to abolish gender stereotypes?

To my mind gender is the set of stereotypical expectations put upon people on the basis of their sex. So if you abolish the stereotypes the whole idea of gender goes as well.

I think my issue is with trying to make people fit the stereotypes. People should be accepted for who they are regardless of how feminine or masculine they are.

What is gender if not stereotyping?

Biological realist?

Gender is what people tend to do, left to their own devices.
Stereotyping is telling people what to do, not allowing variation.

That's not really a common definition, to be fair. If anything, I suppose it's closer to the libfem definition of gender as a self-conception, or the conservative definition of gender as a sex binary of the mind, rather than the GC definition of gender as a sexist imposition. I wouldn't count the first two as being genuinely progressive.

Senua they tend towards these 'genders' because of our highly gendered world/society/culture no? I fail to see how you can be truly 'left to your own devices' in such a toxic context.

But what people tend to do can't be separated from society's expectations of gender. Ie what feminists mean by the patriarchy. Gender is the mechanism by which women are oppressed, even in Liberal societies.

Senua they tend towards these 'genders' because of our highly gendered world/society/culture no?
Yes and no. I am not happy with, eg, the concept of "girls don't so maths" but I am content with "men/women tend to wear this" because they are taller/shorter, have/have-not an adam's apple, have-not/have a bosom. I wouldn't fancy both sexes wearing chinese-communist-style identikit clothing.

Woah I think that's a little extreme. More like there are just t-shirts, jeans, jumpers etc in various sizes and styles. Surely you can't ignore how aggressively gendered fashion is? Utility for boys and men, aesthetics for women and girls.

And shouldn't it be up to individuals how they want to dress themselves, free of that societal pressure and limited commercial choices.

I'm fine with gender critical. Maybe it's because I remember when the usual word was 'terf', which was an insult and a threat. At that time, people wanted to be called gender critical. TRAs used to say 'gender critical is a euphemism for terf'.

Gender critical is appropriate because it means a) critical of gender stereotypes and b) critical of genderism. All feminists should be against gender stereotypes, and obviously in my opinion, they should reject genderism as well! Since it's based on gender stereotypes.

The problem we have now is that 'gender critical' is being used for anyone who opposes genderism, including social conservatives who're fine with gender stereotypes, so long as they attach to the conventional sex. But I'm not sure what we can do about that.

I'm not a 'gender abolitionist' because gender is about social roles associated with sex, and sometimes you need to differentiate between women and men, like in sport, or crime statistics, or changing rooms.