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.

@YellowAsteroid · Today 06:44
Gender not existing except in grammar?

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

No Lord Copper about it, Your own post concedes that I am right about this. Gender was a grammatical term that feminist critics and academics, clearly including you, co-opted in the 1970s (latish, post Female Eunuch) for your discussions. You claim:

it was essential to have two words to 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.

Maybe it was, maybe all you achieved was to centralise and prioritise that nonsense. You say:

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 say you should have called stereotypes stereotypes from the beginning and that using the weasel word gender, probably because some of you were too 'naice' to say sex has been disastrous.

Up to that point, Lord fucking Copper.

I don’t think it’s a movement.

I think there’s a collection of ideas that varied people believe. not all those people will have the same ideals across the board or even anything in common other than refusing to accept how you present defines your sex (and for all this “no, it’s gender, it’s different!” It’s sex that matters otherwise third spaces or acceptances of men who ID as trans or nb in male single sex facilities would be seen as more acceptable).

To compare, you can look at animal rights and say there’s hunt sabs, those who release animals from labs and target stores that sell fur with graffiti attacks, there’s also little old ladies who feed all the squirrels, stray cats, birds, hedgehogs and donate to every animal charity going, whilst also sitting down to a roast dinner on a Sunday and ham sandwiches for lunch. Plus vegans who bore on about their new plastic shoes all over insta and little kids who love animals and tell everyone they meet how great animals are and can we have a pet lion etc. they’re not a movement, they’re people who care about animals in varying degrees who probably have nothing else in common. We wouldn’t call them a movement.

GC feminists reject the stereotypes of “gender” and see it as harmful, which I guess has grown out of basic feminist principles. As things have got more public (and extreme) more people have got involved. As mentioned up thread there’s younger women who haven’t had the battles feminists of the past have had and this is there entrance to feminism. Then there’s people who have very set views of what a man or woman should be-no more the natural bedfellows of feminists than the right wing evangelists who see porn as immoral were allies of feminists who see porn as violence against women.

I still can’t see how the absolute sexism of the recent trans movement can be compatible with feminism. It isn’t liberating anyone from stereotypes, it’s cleaving to them and once you look into it it is wholly negative for women. You only have to read the words of the transwomen who post about themselves here to see that “woman” or “girl” is a set of stereotypes to them and ones that we’ve been kicking against for a very long time!

Personally, I wouldn’t say I was a GC feminist anymore than I’d say I was an Equal pay feminist or an Anti Sexual Harassment feminist or any other single issue, because those are such basic elements of feminism it’s all part and parcel of the whole thing.

I had always assumed that the word “gender” was used by feminists to be our equivalent of “race” or “class”. All social constructions that are systemic.

As a second wave feminist in the seventies that made sense to me. It put us on a par with those arguing about those other oppressions.

I think that the word “gender” has many meanings now.

Wasn’t it Nancy Kelly who said she wanted Stonewall’s definition of gender to be accepted?

Not as applied to a person. It's a nonsense to say a person is 'gc'.

Views can be 'gc'.

As often happens, it's been lots misused and misapplied.

Many feminists are critical of gender stereotyping, doesn't mean they are necessarily critical of 'gender' itself, although some are.

I don’t like the term gender critical. I have no problem with gender, for me it’s a handy term to describe stereotypes commonly associated with either sex. I’m not critical of gender. I’m critical of people and policies that deny reality

‘not a dickhead’ will do for me.

I don't love it but will accept the use as many know what it seems to represent

I can't stand the way some TRAs use it but that's deliberate

I also prefer Plain English and gender ideology has mangled language enough, purposely for their agenda

So something in plain English? Maybe rational from pp

It's more of a mouthful but I prefer to describe myself as critical of gender ideology rather than gender itself.

What I dislike is the presumption/belief that the internally felt or outwardly presented changeable elements of gender ("women are ... girly, feminine, interested in fashion" etc) can ever be more important when writing laws than the immutable facts ("women are ... vulnerable in certain circumstances due to their biology")

If my husband were to transition, our marriage would be over. Not because I'm so wedded to gender that I could no longer see us as husband and wife, but because his acceptance of transition making him a woman would mean we are so at odds from a belief perspective I would need to leave.

I don't like it at all......it has been used to reduce a full blooded, whole thing, to a one dimesional facsimile of itself - and it positions anyone who understands the true nature of biology and human life on Planet Earth in such a way to suggest it is just some kind of fringe grouping.

I don't know of anyone who might be described as GC as being accepting of gender norms and stereotypes. The people who seem to cling most to these norms and stereotypes are the people adopting gender identities.

That is a bastardisation of what GC implies.

And that is because you are confusing sex with gender.

Sex is biological reality; the nature of your body - and that includes for women female puberty and all that flows from that. Of course it is only women who can become pregnant and give birth ( and there can be great value and worth in that - it is not an automatic negative) - but that doesn't mean that women can only wear certain types of clothing, do certain types of occupation, have limited stereotypical interests and so on......all of those things are GENDER.

Gender is just personal preference or taste or personality, or whatever you want to call it.

There are some traits which tend to be sex specific, though, or certainly over-represented by one sex or the other........and that includes a propensity for violence.....most violent offenders, for example, are males......and this a consequence of the combination of testosterone and male drive and its socialisation. Women tend not to be sexual fetishists or predators, either, in the way that males can be.

Such a flat, one dimensional view of what is actually multi-layered reality.

Sex is real. It is biology. Only women can become pregnant and give birth...and in spite of some types feminist argument, pregnancy and motherhood are not automatic negatives; they can be great joys, and motherhood is not a dirty word. It does not have to be synonymous with oppression.

Is this what you mean by " sticking to the sexes"?

I assume you don't have children? Many of us women do. I do, and now a granddaughter as well......I'm not oppressed, I've done 'my thing', I continue to do my thing, I do what I enjoy and what works for me, not what I'm expected to do by others.

And a lot of feminists who were active years ago either didnt notice trans ideology creeping in, didnt understand the implications for women and children, or actively encouraged it.

It could equally be argued that women new to feminism are trying to sort out the mess made by those involved for years.

Conservatives? What like the UK party who have had 3 female Prime Ministers? Unlike the Labour Party who have never had one woman allowed to be a leader? Those 'Conservatives'?

This is the problem with labelling things 'Right' or 'Left' or 'Conservative' or 'Labour'...you just end up making me have to point out your illogical fallacies. Please start thinking things through to the end of your sentences. It's really fucking simple when you start to do it.

Quite. This all went through on their watch. Whilst the rest of us were busy living lives and getting on with it.

Agreed, it's the 'old' feminists that let us get in this mess.

Shortshriftandlethal

I'm not confusing sex and gender. I was speaking about people who know that people can't change sex but also think women have a role in life. Matt Walsh is a prime example.

Personally I don't mind the term Gender Critical, although sex realist makes more sense.
YellowAsteroid
Your post is really interesting from the perspective of a long time feminist. Does GC mean feminist? I'm not so sure.

Sex is material and a physical reality.

Gender is a construct and a metaphysical reality.

Some people try and claim gender is a material reality (which is ridiculous) others claim that sex is a metaphysical not physical reality (also ridiculous).

To deny sex or gender exists altogether is ridiculous. There is clear evidence that both exist whether people like it or not.

Whats happened is academic feminism became untethered from real life, and morphed into gender. Feminists in the political class are too removed from ordinary women to understand how their decisions can impact on lives. They saw everyone as identities and stopped seeing women as a class.

Men rights, under the cover of trans ideology used this to convince the elites that their sexual wants are a human right. And because marginal identies trump the majority, politicans and academic feminists didnt think to analyse the impact of the demands of an identity on society.

Women didnt even know this was going on until they were told that they had to accept a boy in their daughters changing room, or a man in their hospital ward.

Men who think women have a particular role in life have always existed, but can never put that idea into law. Are we really close to it being illegal for mothers to work? There may be barriers, but no party in the UK is making it illegal. There is, however, laws that give adult men female birth certificates and the right to be treated as if they are women, and no political party is willing to change that.

You are free to think that matt walsh is a threat to all women and spend your time concentrating on him but i think you are distracted from the real issue - politicians redefining what a woman is.

Well put. But an awful lot of people don't realise that the two terms aren't interchangeable. They think that gender is just a more polite term than sex. I had to explain the difference to my DH, who is both intelligent and well educated. The faster that the difference, as you describe it, becomes more widely known, the faster we will have well-informed discussions in the general public.

illinivich

That's a huge leap. I certainly don't spend any time thinking about Matt Walsh. I started the thread to ask about people's options on the term GC. I used him as an example of men who know sex is real but also think women are subservient to men, and want to uphold sex stereotypes.

Gender is a word with lots of meanings, but is confused, i believe, with sex in the GRA.

When we talk a gender roles and expectations, we mean sex roles and expectations, dont we? A girl who would have been considered a tom boy years ago would be seen as gender non conforming now. Same with boys, rather than calling them 'effeminate', we say gender non conforming. Its just acting differently to what is expected from their sex.

But, they were girls and boys whatever they do because of their sex. Gender isnt a person, its behaviour and roles assigned to one sex.

But within queer theory and the GRA, gender is what a person is, and thats what makes them female and male, not sex.

I prefer it to Terf, and to me it covers a much broader rejection of stereotypical fluff. Being critical of gender says nothing specifically about my beliefs regarding queer-theory gender or trans issues, except that gender shouldn't matter at all.

I prefer the term, sex realist.
I have learned lots from radical feminism but I'm not a gender abolitionist. I think I agree with Germaine Greer, that gendering (i.e. attaching signifiers or meanings to our sexed being that are cultural rather than biological) is just something that human societies do. I'm wary of the idealism of radical movements which want to reform human nature into something better.
On the other hand, I think today's trans rights movement is just a men's rights movement with flags.
(One day I'll have a child who sleeps through the night and I'll have the time and brain space to read The Whole Woman once again and get my head around what exactly it is that Greer says about gender which I tantilisingly just remember as Very Interesting).