Excellent post from twitter:
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When I studied for my PhD our type of feminism argued that we should move past essentialist explanations of gender. We rejected the notion that gender (which for us meant masculinities and femininities) was biological, fixed, innate, unchangeable, etc. or that gender mapped to sex in any unbending way.
We believed gender was socially constructed. Men need not be masculine, nor women feminine. It was what people tended to do but not the only way of doing it. Either could be anything in theory, but in practice, gender was mapped to sex, shaped by the cultural influences of the day, and policed through power, limiting the kinds of gender you could be, praising some types of masculinities, denigrating others, and the same with femininities.
Gender was a linguistic construction. Language, for us, also included other symbols, such as clothing, as these 'say something'. Language shapes our social reality and how we come to know ourselves and describe ourselves.
Queer theory was just coming online. It promised to show that sex was also socially constructed. It was terribly unscientific and never falsified sex as a binary. Disorders of sexual development were rare, and the sex, whether by chromosomes or gametes, is one of the most robust concepts in science, including in DSDs (and few queer people have these anyway, so some gerrymandering was going on there).
Over time, getting nowhere with saying 'sex could have been constructed differently', relativistic queer theory started using gender and sex interchangeably. One minute they'd be talking about masculinities and femininities, saying these could be shown to be different over time and place and therefore socially constructed rather than biological (correct). But you had to keep your wits about you. The next minute, as with conspiracy theorists, after getting your approval, they would move quickly and sneakily into using gender as now meaning 'sex'.
They'd get you buy-in on gender like a sneaky salespeople, and then say you'd agreed to a different product - sex as a social construction. Still getting nowhere, they moved to 'identities'. A male can identify as a woman. Big deal. Still no ontological status. Lots of people believe in untruths and lots of people are poor at self-appraisal. All transgender people know they are not the opposite sex.
Ideologues then tried to break in again (they are free to try every window because it's a linguistic and political, rather than scientific, project). If a man could identify as a woman, why not say he is a woman, be nice ('keep sweet and obey')? These pushy salespeople still push their dodgy wares in academia, using power to frame dissenters of their 'theory' as "transphobic" and other fancy made-up terms, like "cishet normative".
Such terms only mean something inside their own discursive sphere and neo-religion. They construct sin, reify it, and use words as weapons. They police those of us who refuse false premises such as 'males can be females', or that fake identities trump reality, or that personal declarations should always be recognised in law. Normative moral claims.
Like social constructionists, queer theorists had an irreverence for science and how it can be a political project. It certainly can be. But the scientific method already has this bias check built in.
They threw the baby out with the bathwater and ushered in relativism-as-realism, and in so doing, put billions of girls and women at risk, led to unfairness in sports, blokes in showers with girls in sports centres, men in rape shelters next to traumatised women, rapists in women's prisons, etc. Sex survived their attempted deconstruction.
They've had 30 years now. They unleashed all manner of harm in this time. These days, personal attacks are all that is left. This ideology is indefensible and crumbling.
https://twitter.com/NoCisgender/status/1735867366700183891