Transgenderism is a necessary (or inevitable) step

[KLFisgonnarockyou]

Ok, hear me out. This is a thought I’ve been mulling over and it’s not entirely well formed.

In short, I wonder if this phase we’re going through is a necessary step towards gender critical feminism. Young girls (in particular) are realising there’s something wrong with the gender norms forced upon them and they’re questioning it. Society (as a whole) is having to pick which thing to ditch first: biological sex or gender norms, and many are saying they’re more attached to rigid gender norms than biological sex which has got us in the mess.

The good thing is that it leads to the absurd situation where men are on the women’s rugby team and society is waking up and seeing this absurdity.

The bad thing is that a lot of young people are being harmed by genderism and much of this harm is irreversible.

But I’m not sure it was ever easy to go directly to the GC position where we ditch gender norms but keep biological sex.

Does this make sense? That somehow this is a necessary (or maybe an inevitable step) given society’s attachment to gender norms?

Isn’t that like saying that if we wanted to fly to America, we had to either build a plane or grow wings?

I suppose yes, if enough people thought it was possible to grow wings and believed building a flying machine was impossible

I think I would agree with you if there had been a big push towards transgenderism before gender norms started getting broken down.

But this has happened after equal pay, men being nurses, women doctors, female prime ministers, homosexuality being widely accepted etc.

It actually feels like part of the backlash to those improvements. It depends on a regressive set of gender norms to break. So at the same time as announcing you can be whatever you want to be it actively needs to tell most of the population to conform to standard roles.

I think I see what you mean

It is a good thing that people who do not fit into gender norms are given a voice but this had been happening for some time before the campaign to legally replace sex with gender. It is a good thing that people are seeing the difference between the two but the idea that gender trumps sex in legal matters is absurd.

None of us should be limited in life according to societal expectations. Our sex shouldn't dictate our career path, earning potential, clothing choices etc. It's good that males and females are breaking down old fashioned gender stereotypes but the rejection of biological sex, particularly among young girls, is a concern and males bullying and harassing females is crossing a line.

I don't think it's a necessary step but in politics you do see swings back and forth.

When a country (certainly the U.K.) has had a lot of time under conservative rule it will often swing back to liberal/ left after a period of time and vice versa.

That's why successful prime ministers who achieve this are often more centrist.

Not exactly the same, especially as the internet has a lot to do with things in feminism, but I think the same can happen with feminism - just my musings.

So the Lib feminists led to issues with boundaries and penis centring that the second wavers worked really hard on (and second wavers were GC.) which has led to a resurgence of the second wave principles plus I suppose newer scientific reasoning. For a wide ranges of things too - post invisible women boom etc.

Whether it will swing back again I'm unsure but I hope that a deeper connection to scientific evidence will help what ever wave of feminism we are in now (I think 4th wave has been co opted. Can't work it out.)

Invisible women book! But a boom perhaps in women realising they're still not equal in how science and design include us.

Gender norms were being taken down decades ago.

Hence me having my career in doing 'man's work'.

Now, if I'd decided to do engineering at college, they'd be changing my name and putting me on blockers or move me to hairdressing.

It is not inevitable. It is a result of a failed experiment on kids, propped up by industries that are going to make billions out of it, and given an open door by people who did humanities degrees and ended up in HR rather than do proper jobs which keeps them in employment.

The whole lot needs taking down.

That seems to be the argument of the trans side - that by breaking down the gender binary (and the biological sex binary apparently) that gender norms and stereotypes and roles etc will all get so blurred/expanded that it will open everyone's mind and then bingo, we'll have a truly equal society.

I think it's a nice idea and I hope that it does contribute, maybe it could, but I think ultimately it won't, because all of sexism hangs on the concept that men are people and women are for the use of men for sex/procreation/maid duties and don't really matter as people. And you can see that in the way that male and female socialisation come through even after people have transitioned, or people who are non-binary. A violent man doesn't care how you identify, he acts based on physical sex.

I think to end sexism you have to really look closely at and examine sexism, and you can't easily do that without delineating biological sex since that is what it is based on. Pretending that sex doesn't exist won't make sexism magically go away. We need to understand it as a society to address it.

I think the problem is that the kind of feminism the majority of people think of or understand, like pay equality, getting more women into STEM etc, is very surface level whereas what is actually needed for change is deep systemic analysis and most people reject this or think it is some crazy fringe notion.

I understand where you’re coming from. The thing about Transgenderism is that it’s built on the most regressive gender stereotypes out there. Eg boys playing with dolls must really be girls and girls not wanting to wear dresses must really be boys.

It always surprises me when so called progressives( some on Labour left, SNP, Green and Liberals) think that is ok.
What happened to celebrating initiatives like “Women in STEM”? We seemed to have flipped to some backwards way of viewing gender roles, which is being pushed by those with vested interests( AGPs etc) and their (minds so open their brains fall out) allies.
They completely ignore the importance and reality of biological sex.

Hope we are heading for course correction and we can get back to allowing kids, women and men to play with any toys, wear they want and work wherever they want, without the harmful, blatant, lie that they must have been born in the wrong body🙄. Biological sex is the only reality, forget about gender.

A good start would be to repeal the GRA.

I don't think it's that. My thinking isn't very sophisicated on this subject, but it seemed to be going ok there for a while. Now we have gone back several thousand steps and gender stereotypes are entrenched to an insane degree.

In some areas men have definitely lead the way for their own agendas. The girls who are getting caught up in this are often vulnerable in some way. It's naive to think they are leading the charge here and that things will be great on the other side. Very naive.

Also I don't think it's a process anyone should be going through. It should be dropped like the toxic smelly mess that it really is.

A lot of us have been saying for decades that the pinkification of girlhood and then the arrival of the Kardashian version of femininity was harmful.

I look back at photos of me in the late sixties and seventies and I am usually dressed in clearly female but not girly-girl clothes. Practical but not frilly, and usually not pink. That's how most of us dressed, so we could go out on bikes or climb in the playground.

The necessary step I think this will serve long term - and probably decades rather than years - is women waking up to how very thin a veneer their 'rights' and 'equality' was, that misogyny was right there beneath it, that men saw women's rights as something on loan on their terms that they granted to women as nice guys until men needed them back, and that the very serious issues women experience on a sex basis have not anything like been fully addressed.

We all believed that fight for equality was 'done' in the first world. How wrong we were.

This has served to reboot grassroots feminism, wake a lot of women up and make them very angry, and make law makers realise the issues. And this time when equality is properly addressed in law a half hearted pat on the head job won't work. Not what transgenderism set out to do by any means, but that is the impact it will create in the long term.

agree about the pinkification, and that given where we are as a society, genderism follows from that?

I don’t think it’s young girls leading the charge, but they’re being swept up in a patriarchy that is wedded to gender norms

I read an article on the AWFL (Affluent, White, Female Liberal) phenomenon, which might fit into your thoughts. Women have spent so much time proving that we are as able as men and that our different bodies are not hindrances that now, a generation of young women deny / see no bodily differences between men and women. Online or in the office, bodily differences are minimised.

This thinking lends itself to gender ideology by putting "feelings " above biological fact. If you think you're a woman, you are one because we're all the same really.

I can't find the article but I'm sure you can Google it

I actually don’t think all gender norms are bad. The ones that are bad are those that put harmful expectations onto women, which disadvantage them or make them vulnerable, and also those that put expectations onto men that make them feel shame or misery if they aren’t strong/aggressive etc.

However, despite being GC and a feminist who was there in the 80s, when gender norms were very flexible (which was a good thing), I make use of gender norms myself. I wear “feminine” things (sometimes) and sometimes I want to signal that I’m a straight female. Other times I enjoy not bothering with them. I’m also attracted to masculine men, and not feminine ones, though in a fairly complex way (eg he could wear pink and bake cupcakes and wear eyeliner, but I’d be turned off by dainty shoes or lipstick.) I think we use, and “bend” or subvert, gender to signal things about ourselves and most of us wouldn’t actually like it if we couldn’t. Annie Lennox and Grace jones and Prince used gender roles, they didn’t do what they did outside of them. They were clearly one sex playing with/expressing themselves through gender “bending” and adopting some traditional signifiers of the other sex, but not trying to do a “disguise” as the other sex.

what is important IMO is not that there are no gender norms, but that a) they’re not harmful, and b) it’s OK to not bother with them, subvert them, refuse to perform them, pick and choose as you like. And that’s where we were heading and how many people already live. I’m not sure you can get rid of gender norms as such, because there are two sexes and humans naturally adopt cultural expressions for their own group.

i do agree with the inevitability of what’s happened, it’s arisen out of a backlash against women and many men, especially gay men, shaking off restrictive gender norms. There’s been a movement towards more separate, restrictive and harmful gender norms for a couple of decades, pushed by porn and capitalism (to sell more stuff). Then telling people that if they want to opt out of them they’re actually the opposite sex - which has landed hard on young girls who are very subject to social contagion and hating being female, and on young gay men/boys - while fetishist men take advantage.

I also agree it’s engendered a real feminist movement very effectively. But the history of feminism is repeatedly about backlash and rising again as a result. So I don’t know if it will ever “get there”. It now appears the same might be true for gay rights. Genderism appeals to anyone who wants to kick back at women and gay people for getting closer to equality.

This 100%. I am a child of the 70's and 80's and remember a similar childhood. I have brought all my children up the same. No pink frills here unless someone wants them (which they generally don't). I would say 99% of my friends and acquaintances are the same.

The only people I see often dressing their girls in pink frilly stuff are Celebs like Katie Price. Maybe it depends on where you live?