Gender Critical or ",GC" as a term, do you like it?

[Mayyouleave]

Do you like the term "Gender Critical" or "GC"? I've seen a lot of people saying that "GC" isn't a movement. I think it is.
Be great to get a discussion going on this.

Yeah, its fine with me. Maybe gender atheist also is good?

I think rational covers it perfectly well. GC makes sense but does feel slightly awkward to me, as though it's unusual to think sex based stereotypes are restrictive.

No I don’t like it. I prefer to say biological realist.

It seems to be the most commonly used term and I'm good with it. Yes, it is a movement. I think of myself as a gender agnostic because I don't have an opinion on whether gender exists. But since I'm critical of fanatical beliefs about gender being pushed on people as fact, it works for me.

I think it means approaching the concept of gender—which I take to mean stereotypes assigned to a sex—critically, that is, thoughtfully. It's interesting watching people try to clutch pearls and make it the most nefarious dogwhistle they can come up with.

Like many terms, I think it means different things to different people.

I think many people have come to think of it as communicating scepticism or denial of gender identity.

I think its origins lay in critiquing gender and rejecting gender norms are viewing them as limiting/repressing both women and men. However, some people who say they are GC do so from a position of accepting gender norms and thinking of them as essential/natural - which I don't think fits with the term's origins.

Or 'not a deluded mentalist' as someone on here once said.

I don't think any gender critical person believes gender stereotypes are essential, if they did they would not be gender critical would they, they'd be something else surely

Brainworm

I think the term is definitely being used by people who do think gender is innate, i.e. women's role is to have children and raise them, and women should be feminine.
I think this is in part the reason why some women don't like the term Gender Critical.

Yes, conservatives who clearly do like gender roles, they just want them to stick to the sexes they feel they should be stuck to, get referred to as GC when they're closer to anti-trans.

Gender Honest whilst being a gender suffragette

I dont know anybody who in the current political climate thinks "gender critical" is about social gender stereo types.

It is the short hand now used instead of the more cumbersome phrase "sex based rights".

Back in the 70s and 80s gender critical may have been about those challenging gender stereotypes but in the current political climate created by TRAs it is far more than that.

It is about opposing the colonising of women as a sex class by the sex class of men.

ie if you erase the real meaning of the word sex, and substitute gender, you can no longer talk about women as a sex class.

I think of it as encompassing both. A crucial part of men claiming to be women is the idea that by embodying stereotypes they become women.

The (appalling) corollary for that is where a man can say he's more womanly than a female woman because he's trying really hard to do woman gender, and women that don't gender up are less woman.

Why do you think it is a movement?

I think it is the opposite of a movement. People who oppose the new regime being forced onto us are attempting to keep a biological definition of sex, not moving a definition of gender and many people involved aren't critical of gender roles in any way.

No, I don't particularly like the term gender critical. It was an awkward shorthand coined in 'the early days' to describe women's campaigning.

I think I prefer 'sex realist' as a better term.

It's more descriptive and accurate as the people opposed to gender ideology come from a very wide range of society. They disagree on many things, but the only principle they have in common is that they understand sex is a real phenomenon in human beings and an important part of our lives and society.

I quite liked it at first, but my thinking is changing. I think terf suits me better now, though I can't really imagine claiming that title in most circles (eg, in front of my son and friends).

Clearly gender exists and is more powerful than it is given credit for. You will see on threads about a partner transitioning that people clearly think something significant has happened if that occurs. According to pure GC thought, nothing has changed when someone transitions, and yet we all also seem to think that something significant has happened which is grounds for divorce and is likely to change feelings and sexual desire immediately. If we were truly GC we shouldn't care two hoots - but I don't think that's realistic. If dp transitioned I would definitely think something had changed. Even if it's 'only' gender and it's not sex, it's not nothing.

I genuinely think that although gender is separate from sex, it can be quite difficult to separate the two. What exactly is it that means that 98% of violent crime is committed by men? Is it purely testosterone and bigger muscles (sex) or is it male vs female conditioning (gender, but a powerful and lifelong element of it) or is it externally applied stereotypes (gender again)?

For me, the term is meaningless now because it has been so misused.

Since the words ‘gender critical’ has been detached from the original term ‘gender critical feminist’ and repurposed by those who seem to want to use it to wedge in groups of people who aren’t critical of gender but who agree that sex is immutable, the words have lost meaning and purpose.

As others have said, ‘what movement?’ The reality is disparate groups hold one common belief. That is the material reality that sex in humans cannot change. The motivations of each separate group is different.

Yet people choose, for their own reasons which are also very different and often harmful to women, to collectivise those groups. Which doesn’t work.

However, ultimately I believe that grouping has been done to discredit the work of feminists. It is the forced teaming of groups with many opposite beliefs by using an established and well proven scientific fact to then use guilt by association to shame feminists.

It is also now used as a dehumanising term too. Such as people saying ‘the GCs’ or ‘the gender crits’, removing even the humanising element of the term. I, personally, avoid it as a label but I do understand others choose to accept it.

Sadly, ‘feminist’ should be the only descriptor we need, but look how many feminists believe that male people can be women and girls.

It isn't a movement. I agree that 'gender atheist' would be so much better, having to criticise the nonsense is annoying but evidently necessary.

Gender atheist - yes, I don't believe in this silly concept invented a few decades ago by ego-driven academics. Gender does not exist except as a function of the grammar of some languages. Gender is not a thing. There is a reason why we always used the word sex to mean sex and did not use the word gender.

That is because there is no such thing as gender. And trying to squeeze humans, who do exist, into the shape of a non-existent thing is cruel and dangerous and deluded.

'not a deluded mentalist' as suggested upthread is good. I would once have been unhappy about it seeming to be slur on people with mental health problems, but perfectly normal, usual and probably inevitable mental delusions during puberty and adolescence are what is leading to so much damage to young people and to women.

Unpopular opinion coming up:

I don't like the term. I've been a feminist since about 1972 (from my early teens) when I read the Female Eunuch and Against Our Will.

I think "GC" is a term which describes a lot of women who haven't been involved in the women's liberation movement until the threat of transactivism hit them in the face (so maybe 6-8 years ago), and who tend to be focused on this one issue.

I hear a lot of women talking about the issue in a way that suggests they weren't really that bothered about feminism before. They assumed that we'd got all the rights we needed, that we're "equal" now. They can't help it, they were brought up in a sort of post-Thatcher liberal feminism.

I agree that transactivism is a huge problem - it is trying to undermine the foundational meaning of what it is to be a woman, but there's a lot more to feminism that being "gender critical" and I doubt a lot of women who say they are GC have thought much about what systems of gender actually mean.

But I've spent over 50 years working in and with feminist theory and activism, so I suppose I do dsort of look at very new "GC" feminists as a bit wet behind the ears, and think they need to do some reading about the long and very awesome history of feminism.

Starting with Mary Wollstonecraft maybe.

Gender not existing except in grammar?

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

If used thoughtfully and with nuance, it's a useful term. That is, if it's used almost as an adjective: "gender roles and stereotypes" for example.

It was useful in the 1970s in my field of work as a way of indicating that there's a separation between biological sex and the socially and culturally constructed roles we expect humans to play, mostly dependent on their sex.

These roles are socially & historically specific.

Feminists needed to show how a person's sex did not necessarily determine or limit what they could do, study, work at, or be like. Until very recently, feminists were trying to achieve simple equality with men: equal pay, maternity leave, no rape in marriage, equal splits on divorce, equal pensions - that sort of thing.

So it was essential to have two words top separate out sex as a matter of biology, and people's social existence. To stop the nonsense such as "Women have babies, therefore their brains are weaker" sort of stuff.

Nowadays we might be better calling gender roles and stereotypes "sex-based stereotypes."

But "gender" has been a useful word in feminist thinking and action.

I read above "biological realist" and I think something like this gets to the gist of it. For me, I'm fine with all gender expressions, go wild, set yourself free. I do think traditional gender stereotypes are limiting for all, but, and it's a big one - sex is immutable and comes with biological realities and sex based rights.

I can't believe that, 'sex is immutable' is actually now considered as a legally protected belief and not just fact, which it is. It blows my mind that we've got to this point.

I have degrees in Women's Studies and Gender Studies. Women have been disadvantaged forever and obtained rights with a hard fight and we're still not there yet. I'm also a pretty good club runner and have observed the significant physical advantages men have over women and the corresponding differences in race times. Letting males compete with females is not fair, it's cheating.

The TRA movement is another chapter in misogyny. It's gaslighting and hugely damaging to women's rights.

No I don’t like the term gender critical, I don’t use it to refer to myself. Sex realist is probably closer because I do believe that sex is a biological reality, immutable and significant. For me gender identity is a concept, a belief and no more or less significant than any other metaphysical belief. You cannot look at someone and know their gender identity as you can with sex, gender identity cannot be discovered by any scientific means in a person living or dead but sex can.

I prefer to explain what I actually believe than use labels which might not convey my beliefs clearly.

I'd guess we're contemporaries - I read my mother's copy of The Female Eunuch ca 1972 as well, and have always, since my early teens, been a feminist. I read Spare Rib, argued on all the issues - which were different in Ireland - no Thatcher, also no contraceptives - except the pill, if you were lucky with your GP. And lots of teachers who were stroppy nuns who had never let their personal lives be shaped by the need to seek male approval.

The 1970s were a scary time in many ways - Jimmy Savile wasn't the only man preying on young girls, PIE was very assertive, it was seen as normal for a daily newspaper to count down the days until a 15 year old girl became legally sexually available. It was legal for men to have sex with men, as long as they were both over 18, but they had to keep it private. Things have changed in many ways, including the language around sexuality, in ways that most people could not have imagined in 1972, and everyone is a bit like that frog getting slowly hotter as the water boils around it.

I am not going to blame women who grew up at a time when they got equal pay, had access to education and jobs, a right to have a sex life without being stigmatised, for thinking things were 'all right' for women now. But battlefields change, and the invention of 'gender' by verbose academics, and the attempts to force theoretical constructs onto humans, has added a new front to the constant fight for women's rights.

Gender theory, pushed into the real physical world, is used to damage girl children understandably appalled at what they are expected to change into, and to enable men who want their sexual whims to be prioritised over everything else, and I will continue to criticise that.

I don't mind it but agree biological realist is far better.

No, it isn't a movement, it is a description of the views of the vast majority of the population, who will disagree on many other issues but who do know basic biology.