What the gender critical movement is trying to achieve

[NotTerfNorCis]

Someone on Twitter has asked what the 'end goal' of the gender critical movement is.

Mumsnet is a better forum for discussing it (you can write as much as you want, and abuse isn't allowed) so I'm setting up this thread.

Personally I'd say the goals were broadly:

1. Transsexuals who are cognitively mature and persistent in their belief deserve to be treated with tolerance and kindness. They shouldn't suffer discrimination in jobs or housing. They shouldn't suffer abuse because of their transsexual status. The NHS should support them. People should respect their chosen name and pronouns, unless there's a very good reason not to.

2. It should always be possible to acknowledge a person's biological sex. That is what makes someone a woman or a man. For example, in media reporting of a sexual crime, or referring to a sex offender, the person's biological sex must be acknowledged. No rape victims should be forced to call a male attacker 'she'.

3. Where necessary, biological sex will be taken into account, and women's rights will be based on sex rather than gender identity. For example, sports should be separated into male (or open) and female, not 'male-identified' and 'female-identified'. Same-sex attraction should be respected. If need be, males should be kept out of female spaces.

4. Biological sex should also be taken into account in larger studies and surveys, like the census. Otherwise the data is misleading.

5. The spread of gender ideology needs to stop. Kids shouldn't be taught that 'woman' is defined by stereotypes, and if they don't feel comfortable with the social stereotypes associated with their sex, they must be the opposite sex (or 'non-binary', 'gender fluid' etc). In other words, as a society we need to stop elevating 'gender'.

6. Transitioners shouldn't be accepted without question, especially young people. Otherwise we end up with tragic cases like Milo: The prescription of puberty blockers should be reviewed. Clinics should carry out careful checks to make sure that the person's trans status isn't a manifestation of something else, like a repressed sexual orientation, or reaction to abuse.

7. Families affected by a member transitioning should be given any support they need, rather than being dismissed. That includes if they have a negative reaction to the transition.

8. The sense of being in the wrong body is an agonising mental health condition, as transsexuals like Buck Angel acknowledge: https://twitter.com/BuckAngel/status/1676398204412387328 There should be research to find out if the condition can be alleviated from a mental health perspective, without needing surgery.

9. (Ideally) any awards given to males competing in female categories should be retrospectively reviewed.

10. It should be valid to say that transwomen are not a subset of women and transmen are not a subset of men, without being discriminated against or abused. Gender critical beliefs (which are actually pretty mainstream) should be respected.

In short: genuine transsexuals should be respected, but sex is the ultimate marker of whether someone is a man or a woman and must be taken into account. Elevating gender stereotypes is anti-feminist. Genderism is a fad that kids need protecting from.

India Willoughby has posted about this thread without linking.

There's a bizarre world of lies and assumed victimhood out there.

https://twitter.com/IndiaWilloughby/status/1679117329324449793?t=JFysLQ47PDUGgBEqW0uHBQ&s=19

Maybe in that respect genderism is comparable to atheism

Sorry, slip of the keyboard! I meant gender criticism. Meaning an absence of belief in a magical system. You can get politically active atheists and passive atheists.

OK. I hear you on the slip of the keyboard but I still disagree with you. I think because we are coming at this from very different perspectives.

Genderism and by consequence transgenderism aren't beliefs in a magical system. The system totally exists - it is the current universal social system that we all live in under which males are privileged and females are subjugated. The system is very real. It is institutionalised, all pervading and we are all socialised by it. Generally this system is referred to as patriarchy. Criticism of this system / gender criticism AKA feminism is not an absence of belief in the system - it is disagreement and resistance to this very real system.

The magical belief is that it is possible to change one's biological sex. Although I don't think that many people (even transgenderists[ really believe that. What they do believe is that male dominated society is entitled to demand that we all pretend to believe that it is possible for men to change their sex. Remember that in male dominated society, men define what women are to that society so it's not entirely surprising that they believe their own hype and now think that because they define what a woman is politically and socially that means that they define what female is biologically. Or at the very least we should all pretend that they do - back to that tedious god complex again.

Yes, exactly.

For decades before gender identity ideology came along, feminists were pointing out gender oppression and were striving to get misogynists to acknowledge that gender is a social construct and an oppressive tool of the patriarchy. Most people (in my experience, anyway) dismissed this view as extreme and thought we were fanatical feminazis who were reading sexism into everything even when it wasn't there.

And then gender identity ideology saunters in and the men start saying "oh, guess what? We've just made this exciting new discovery that gender is a social construct, but don't worry, here's the solution..." and because it's men saying it this time, everyone listens and suddenly everyone agrees with the men's amazing new idea (which was what feminists were saying all along, but obviously no-one credits feminists as they're just horrible jealous bigots).

In my opinion, it's precisely because no-one listened to feminists about gender oppression in the preceding decades (which was a result of misogyny and, well, gender oppression) that society was so vulnerable to gender identity ideology, as people failed to spot what it really was.

It seems so obvious that the people who couldn't spot the misogyny and gender oppression that was blatantly staring women in the face for centuries before gender identity ideology came along weren't going to suddenly be able to recognise it in this newly repackaged, male-driven vehicle with sequins all over it.

It's the exact same misogyny, and yet again, women's voices are dismissed through that same misogyny.

At the highest level, being GC means you want to abolish gender - a world in which no-one assumes any desires, behaviours, skills, abilities, personality traits etc about anyone purely based on their sex.

This does not preclude risk assessment at group level where sex is a risk factor.

I think in a world where we have disentangled female/feminine and male/masculine, everyone would be a lot more free to be themselves.

The idea that your sex has anything innate to do with your personality was wrong to me for many many years before I even thought about trans people. The idea that how you are socialised as a male/female can shape a lot about you is definitely interesting, and I'd like to see how this could change without gender.

From a medical ethics point of view you can't have a situation when one gender dysphoric individual is 'genuine' and another is not because one has surgery and/or takes hormones and the other doesn't.

What if the gender dysphoric person is a high anesthesic risk, or has a clotting disorder (the genitals are extremely vascular) or has a history of cancer/genes increasing risk of cancer that is hormone dependent? No legislation can be put in place that pressures people into dangerous medical decisions by declaring them as 'not genuine' (obviously ignoring the fact that in all likelihood every transition is medically dangerous to some extent).

Gender dysphoria is a mental health condition and should be managed accordingly, IE, individualised care to make them functioning and comfortable members of society, but without expecting anyone else to play along with their delusions/ be adversely affected by them.

Apologies for the mega quoting but am on my phone.

What you say here is so true @Seamsthesame

No-one with a conscience and sense of ethics wants to encourage or god forbid force others to have surgery or take hormones.

And this is where society (yet again) should be listening to feminists. People's bodies are not wrong. It is not the people or their bodies that need fixing. It's the stupid system that tells us that body / sex = gender stereotype. And if you don't fit the stereotype it's not the stereotype which is the problem, it's your body / sex.

But of course we can't have honest and thought provoking conversations about that because if we did the whole system has to be questioned and that opens up a Pandora's box on which all of society is founded and functions.

Which is that male privilege is totally unjustified and indefinsible.

And we've never had much luck with that conversation. So now we are in a big old mess with no obvious way out.

And really when you think about it, feminists and gender non conforming people have a lot in common and should be natural allies.

And indeed they were back in the days of transexualism.

But unfortunately transsexuelism was hijacked and transgenderism took over. And then lesbianism and homosexuality was hijacked.

And it's all very invested in the myth / social construction of gender and therefore an absolute gift to patriarchal society.

Such a waste. But also utterly inevitable.

I don't think anyone who has been thinking about and analyzing gender for some time is surprised that this is where we have ended up.

I guess I would add a part that states: There are no male behaviors or female behaviors. Human behavior is on a continuum...

Males and females can have behaviors on every part of that continuum. There is no such thing as being born in the wrong body. If we as a society don't give a specific behavior a gender then maybe gender dysphoria will cease to be an issue.

☝
Brilliantly summed up.