Why is Mumsnet so GC?

[ireallycantthinkofaname]

Maybe an odd question but I've never come across another space, online or otherwise, where being GC is the norm. IRL I only ever discuss GC views openly with one family member, whose stance on it is similar to my own, though, so I'm not saying it's unwelcome.... Just curious how/why it's come about. Any thoughts or theories?

The core 'gender critical' position is about gender and how it is deleterious to both sexes. Gender critical feminism is specifically about how it impacts the female sex. It originally had nothing much to do with issues around transgender people. We were able to focus on advancing true equality for women, and on raising children as free of the bounds of gender as possible, whether they were girls or boys, developing their own unique characters and potential.

People who identify as transgender are arguably the ones who have been most damaged by the concept of gender (though as rtb and many others have found, some of them love to splash the damage around).

As I said some pages back, gender stinks.

As a society we shouldn’t be enabling this

The fact that the law was changed so we do is astounding

LOL. Butters keeps making our point for us. Feminism didn't undergo some kind of seismic shift in 1979 because of a book about transsexuals.

Stand back, cos this might blow your mind:

feminism isn't about men

BH is also determined to take a reductivist approach to everything. and an atomistic one at that.

Focus on singular biological processes or proteins rather than the complex interplay of systems. Identify a single book or point within that, rather than the acknowledge the complexity and multiplicity of arguments and positions.

All while claiming to be focusing on flexibility and openness and such like.

Thats how you get to ‘I like pink and hate sport so I must be a woman; ooh aren’t I good at challenging stereotypes!’ as your position in life.

It's really interesting to see the analyses on here. There's no denying the logic.

I don't actually think that butterfly believes they have an inner gendered soul. You'd have to be so very deluded that I'm not sure normal discourse would be possible with that level of delusion.

So then, yes, it becomes about control and dominance in order to reinforce that preferred self perception.

And if butterfly truly thought they were female, red's post about the disadvantage women have would have resonated as profoundly with butterfly, as it did with us.

You can tell the men who are really interested in women's rights, we do have a few posting on here. They join the dots with ease and alacrity. Because they are genuinely aware and interested, despite not having the experience themselves.

An abiding characteristic of transgenderism seems to be a never-ending need for navel gazing. With that level of introspection, there's no way they can genuinely think they are replicating the female experience.

No women dilates a neo vagina. No woman has her penis cut off, or lives with one prior to that, or notices its absence, post that! It's an unequivocally male experience.

Women don't get nervous about walking into women's spaces, or excited, or think they're cheating because they compete against women.

And no man walks around wondering whether or not he'll get pregnant, or start a period on the first day of that job, or deals with the body change that only women have through every stage of their biological evolution.

And no man will ever experience the instant bonding, that women who have never met each other can have, over that biology.

From the superficial things like the brief looks between older women and first time pregnant women in somewhere as mundane the supermarket. To the protectiveness of the nightclub ladies loos, or a profound been-there-done-that empathy between a woman and her female gynaecologist.

Not all women, not all the time, but only women.

And yes, there are some men who have only seen women as superficial cardboard cutouts to support them, so of course, they've told other men that that's what our job is. And those men have no reason to even question it.

So it must come as something of a shock to encounter so many real woman who say no, fuck off mate - the need for dominance and control kicks straight in.

And when those women proliferate across a parenting website, and especially on the feminist board, well fuck me, there's no greater target.

When "telling off women" becomes your whole personality

I'm not sure normal discourse would be possible with that level of delusion.

Um.

Why? Listen to Ciara at 16.32.40.

Listen to her share her truth about the trauma women experience. Both at the time and because of language and her experiences.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5012863-the-reality-of-losing-sex-based-language

Haha! What I mean is, it would be like talking to someone who thought they were Napoleon. Who couldn't get past the fact that you're not addressing them as your majesty (or your imperial highness, or whatever it was!).

😶

Datun, there another curious factor.

The rise of the Incel has happened as there has been the explosion of social media.
The rise of Trans Activism has also happened in complete and utter parallel to this.

There is much written about why there has been the rise of the incel and the role and promotion of regressive male stereotypes and negative attitudes to women and feminism.
Trans Activism often looks a lot like males taking on the opposite regressive female stereotypes but retaining those same negative attitudes to women and feminism.

Both take this idea that feminism has gone too far. And the comments about 1979 really really reasonate with me in this context.

Transactivism repeatedly blames women for transphobia, but rarely challenges or takes on men who are very openly and explicitly transphobic. Why?

Here's an article from Vox on incels. This is literally the first article that came up and I clicked on when I did a search on 'the rise of the incels'. I had no idea of what it said. Its defintely worth a read for some thought provoking contextialising:
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/4/16/18287446/incel-definition-reddit

What it says really has this ring of echoes of transactivism. Even to the point of this nostaglia for the internet of the late 90s and early 2000s and the describing of a high level of self reporting of autism and/or trauma.

I think we have to be very aware that given the parallel rise, it is impossible for us to say that trans activism hasn't been heavily influenced by views that have been driving incels. In fact, it'd almost be surprising if there was no cross pollenation of ideas and views on women and feminism.

We ALREADY know that the internet is heavily skewed to male attitudes to the point that its recognised that AI is basically sexist.

I'll go further with the Trans/Incel comparison: Whats fascinating about trans activism, isn't purely that they want to be treated 'like women' - its more that -they want ACCESS to women. Thats why third spaces aren't acceptable. Its why males can suddenly be lesbians....

There's a hell of a lot here and that article which when you start to process it, is really chilling.

In the context of the rise of the manosphere - something that DIDN'T exist in the late ninties and polling which actively suggests a huge amount of sympathy for the like of Andrew Tate amongst teenagers and men in their early twenties and this centring of sex and pornified ideas of women - the question about sex based rights for women becomes MORE not LESS pernitant.

Why are Sex Based Rights suddenly not important and not needed according to a whole bunch of men?

Butterfly is right. Its not 1979. Its is 2024 and this is the background and context of the world that women have to deal with: upskirting, revenge porn, cyber stalking, cyber harassment and incel terrorism are things the women of 1979 didn't have to deal with but women and girls in 2024 DO have to deal with to name but a few issues.

Remember Bewilderness's Rules of Misogny:

1. Women are responsible for what men do.
2. Women saying no to men is a hate crime.
3. Women speaking for themselves are exclusionary and selfish.
4. Women’s opinions are violence against men, thus male violence against women is justified.
5. Women and Feminism must be useful to men or they are worthless.
6. Women who go around being female AT men by menstruating and breastfeeding babies deserve punishment.
7. Women should always be grateful to men for everything.
8. Men are whatever men say they are and women are whatever men say they are.
9. Men always know the “real reasons” for everything women do and say.

10. The worst thing about male violence is that it makes men look bad. 11. Whatever women suffer from, it is worse when it happens to men. 12. Women’s ability to recognize male behavior patterns is misandry. 13. Angry women are crazy. Angry men have trouble expressing themselves. 14. Women have all the rights they need: The right to remain silent. 15. Men are the default human. Women are strange subhuman others.

I think on this thread I have spotted at least 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14 and 15.

Thats pretty damn good going.

Sexism in 2024 is VERY MUCH alive and well. Even if it looks different to how it presented in 1979.

That 1979 comment still has me chuckling away at JUST how ill judged and JUST how much it revealed and how its really so much about how women have to protect themselves in the face of males and why sex still very much matters.

The tone deafness of it, is absoluetely STAGGERING. Not just a little bit blind to the experience of women, but totally and utterly IGNORANT of general current affairs and news curves which anyone who spends a lot of time socialising via the internet REALLY should have on their radar in some form.

Male doctors like Bernadette Wren and Caroline Brain?

No, more like Magnus Hirschfield and Elmer Belt. Do you have problems with history that doesn't centre yourself or your own history? Have you sought help for that?

Since when was Bernadette Wren a doctor? She's a clinical psyschologist and (assuming she was trained in the UK) not a doctor at all.

Marci Bowers on the other hand is male, and a gender surgeon, and likes to be considered as female.

@ButterflyHatched
You have stated before that you transitioned young and 100% 'pass' so much so that almost no-one knows you are trans and everyone you have met for the last X years thinks you are a woman.
Now you have stated that you have faced nearly 4 decades of people trying to force you to adhere gender stereotypes.
Could you confirm if it is male stereotypes or females stereotypes that people have tried to force you into conforming to.

If you are saying that the awkward and frankly bizarre initial attempts to describe gender dysphoria within modern western medicine can't help but have been heavily influenced by all the key actors being privileged white men existing within the godawful context of the 20th century then I completely agree.

Since you are online, are you going to address the point about the need for Sex Based Rights in 2024?

Or are you going to conveniently ignore the subject, AGAIN?

Excellent.

Then you at least have some indication that women were never considered when these male doctors told other men that they should just use women's words and use women's spaces. And play in women's sports.

And here you are continuing that gross misogyny telling us that you will continue that disrespect to women. You use our words and our spaces and try to shame us when we disagree and reject your usage.

At least you are not deny that you have some basic understanding of the origins of this.

Agree - but bearing in mind that drug addicts need more and more of the "substance" to achieve the same high, it's terrifying to think where they would go next if they manage to succeed re: the validation.

Both. Firstly brutalised throughout my childhood for daring not to conform to male stereotypes, then when it was clear that this wasn't just 'an odd boy' and there was something more going on it became both, often from ostensibly sympathetic people ("It's a beautiful story but girls don't really write science fiction" oh fuck off) and then from my mid-teens onward once it started becoming hard to pass as male we crossed over fully into the female ones which continued through university (I'll never forget looking along the row at the three other women in my first year undergrad course lectures as we all huddled together for protection from the horde of men) and through into the workplace where it's the same bullshit everyone on this forum is painfully aware of.

You don't become exempted from stereotypical gendered expectations either side of the perceptive divide. You already know we're deemed worthy of extra censure for being a gender non-conforming woman on top of the baseline contempt from the patriarchy for being a gender conforming woman; if you're a trans woman and people perceive you as female then that doesn't magically not happen.

Nobody is saying your aren't at the mercy of gender stereotypes regardless of whether you are male or female.

What we are saying is that still doesn't stop us being a certain sex. And rearranging the deckchairs so that a male person can say they are female to avoid the bullying of not conforming to the gender stereotype of a male, obitating sex based rights and protections in the process ISN'T a solution.

All it does it force anyone who is non conforming into a position where they have to either decide to conform by under going invasive surgery and hormones.

Or we could get rid of the stereotypes.

Misogyny, is something that can come from male or females though - and its about denegrating females to a lower status in society regardless of gender stereotypes.

You act with the entitlement of a male who still can't grasp the need for sex based rights.

And you are STILL reducing use all to gender stereotypes which you claim to despise.

Fuck that.

More with the forced teaming.

No, thank you.

Also the law already protects people who suffer adverse treatment (E.g anti semitism) just because they are perceived to have a protected characteristic.

It doesn’t mean that they could claim to have that protected characteristic for all other purposes, or that people who actually have the characteristic don’t need specific rights.

I'm sure I said this before at length on a thread about three years ago, but to save searching for it.

I think there are situations where our historical legal definition-space chafes against a steadily improving understanding of the wider range of ways there are to be a human.

Existing laws were drafted, debated and enacted within the cultural context of the time. It's clear that wider cultural changes have highlighted the fragile house of cards that much of historical equality legislation is built upon; we built laws that used a definition of 'sex' to mean something that was rarely publicly contested and nowadays is a great deal more so.

When we exist in public, we don't actually in practice categorise by (the massive oversimplification that comes under the heading of 'genetic') sex. We categorise by gender expression, which is a chaotic and vague mess of different factors and stereotypes. If a person looks 'male or female enough' to assign them a category one way or the other then, because we have been trained from birth to see humans as only one pole or another on a range of expressions, we do so.

This approach of hammering every person into a 'male' or 'female' hole is increasingly revealing itself to be woefully inadequate - not just ideologically, but practically. It feels like stumbling across a vast quarry in a previously flat landscape - even if you fill the quarry back in, it will take a long time for the ecosystem to stabilise and it will never be quite the same again. We can't just return to a 'binary' world - because it was always a strained fiction to begin with.

The law does not dictate material reality but it can be a useful tool for guiding behaviours and creating a general sense of the kind of society we wish to have. The GRA is shit concessionary legislation, but it's a hell of a lot better than no legislation because it clearly says that we take at least some trans people seriously enough to protect them. The Equality Act, meanwhile, is pretty good - binary sex-based provisions are increasingly conceptually strained but they are in some cases necessary, and the inclusion of the phrase 'proportional means of achieving a legitimate aim' was very carefully and wisely chosen.

Can we do better? Absolutely. Is there a desperate need for frank honesty in culture-wide discussions around safeguarding and single-sex facilities and how we transition from one shit solution to a slightly less shit one? Absolutely. Am I confident that it will be possible to have these discussions in any meaningful way while they are a charged electorial issue? Not really.