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.

Do you need to be quite so aggressive, Dean? YellowAsteroid made relevant points. And as a second-wave feminist, I’m old enough not to blame my lecturers or anyone else for the mistakes I’ve made.

YellowAsteroid was deliberately snide and I am not going to ignore that. If she wanted to disagree with me, fine, let her attempt to convince me that her postition has some validity. Sniggering assumption of superiority is not fine.

It was disgraceful.

And - a woman standing up for herself should not be diminished with the term 'aggressive'. Self defense is not aggression, women don't have to be meek. My resolution this week is to be more Nell.

Never heard of it, no idea what it means, sounds like more made up bollocks to me to be honest

I did not study feminism and have never read feminist theory, I did study industrial relations though so I looked at it all from the discrimination side. I was practicing feminism without any interest in the theory. I could have told your undergrads that they had no fucking idea to support their idea that women had equality. They were living in a fantasy land.

I also remember being told off by women a decade younger on a work trip about 5 years ago, where the women were saying that female singers who sexualised themselves were empowering girls. I told them it was the opposite. That this was not empowerment just because they did it to themselves. It was still women using the ‘sex sells’ concept of marketing and teaching girls that to be successful you have to objectify themselves.

I was not popular for saying so. But that to me seems to encapsulate ‘liberal’ feminism.

Agree with this. 'critical' implies that you're unconvinced (and therefore could potentially be convinced) and that there's something concrete to be critical about/against. It's like saying 'God critical' instead of 'atheist'.

I guess it really depends on how you are defining "GC"

Part of the problem with GC (as a standalone term) is that since Forstater, it has simply come to mean (in a legal sense) somebody who believes that sex is real, immutable and important. This can probably be applied to most people regardless of whether or not they understand and are critical of the concept of gender, and regardless of their political position.

I think the only time that I would call myself GC now is where doing so would offer me some protection in law but I also understand that this protection is open to any person who recognises the reality and immutability of sex and so it applies to people across the political spectrum from the ultra left to the far right.

For this reason I think it has become a useful concept in law but less helpful in terms of describing a political or feminist movement because it simply ends up applying to everybody.

I think there's a scale of strength here, isn't there?

• sex realist < gender critical < "gender atheist"

Sex realism / biological realism means you acknowledge the physiological and social importance of sex but aren't necessarily too bothered about the separate social category of gender. You could be a sex realist and still be fine with little girls being expected to do girly things, or with males identifying as "women" in a social sense, whilst not wanting males in female toilets, acknowledging males' greater propensity toward violence etc. Most conservatives are probably in this boat.

Gender critical and gender "atheist" positions seem to me to align more with traditional feminism by saying explicitly that the social expectations of "gender" should be questioned (GC) or rejected entirely (GA). On the trans issue, a gender atheist is going to state outright that to believe yourself to belong to another gender than that you were brought up in is a false belief; while a gender critical person is at least strongly open to the possibility that such a belief might be false. (A complication being that GC is also used in the sense of GA, no doubt at least in part because the latter is such a clunky term.)

We are going to have people from all three groups on a forum like this one and that's fine, but that doesn't mean we need to pretend the different labels are interchangeable.

Agree with this. 'critical' implies that you're unconvinced (and therefore could potentially be convinced) and that there's something concrete to be critical about/against. It's like saying 'God critical' instead of 'atheist'.

It began as being critical of something that's all too real, gender stereotypes. That used to be a pretty well-understood term, think of books like 'Delusions of Gender' (nothing, iirc, to do with trans issues).

The experiment in the video in this thread is why it's still (increasingly!) very necessary to be gender critical in its original meaning.

BBC on gender stereotypes through toys and clothing 😲 www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/5150755-bbc-on-gender-stereotypes-through-toys-and-clothing

I'd describe myself as a feminist, who wants to fight against sex-based oppression and believes that gender is a made-up fiction. However, because that's quite a mouthful, and because of Forstater, I'd probably describe myself as GC as that affords me some legal protection.

That is really stark, thanks for sharing.
Faceplantagain
I hadn't even thought of the Forstater case when I posted the OP, but yes gender critical is the term used in it, is that right?

And just to join the dots ... Maya Forstater was one of the co-founders of Let Toys be Toys, the idea for which arose from a thread on MN FWR.

Yeah, me too. I believe in biology. Gender is a thing, but it doesn't trump biological reality.

No. The word "critical" has negative connotations and immediately casts anyone with that label in a subconsciously negative light.

It's used as an insult. People who believe in the standard biological truths that did not get pushback in say 2000 are now being labelled as a way to attack them.

itsmabeline

Gender Critical as a term was popularised on this board...

Really? I wouldn't use it.

If someone asked if I was gender critical I wouldn't like the label.

It's like if a religious person asks if I'm an atheist. Really they just want a label they can attack and then claim all kinds of things about it and pretend that that's what I think.

Maybe I'm just used to horrible people.

I think it's fine, though maybe not the clearest. It's come to be a little more widely targeted than it was, but it's not necessarily a problem, it's happened naturally enough.

I do think it describes people with some fairly differernt viewpoints, though the idea that conservatives think "gender" is innate and people should follow these kinds of gender stereotypes is pretty inaccurate, IMO. It really doesn't describe the more mainstream conservative position even in the US.

If you mean gender, as in some kind of feeling of femininity or masculinity, or just a set of arbitrary rules, maybe.

I think that ends up not really understanding what human culture is or how it works, or most importantly, how much it is a part of us, and inescapable.

So much of what and who we are is shaped by symbols, traditions, ways of doing things defined over time, stories, common experiences.

Look at something like motherhood. It's one of the earliest and most fundamental human relations, and experience of it is near universal. All societies have basic myths built around it, stories and sophisticated literature. It is a bar, in many ways, for what we see as a kind of perfect love and care. And it is inextricably tied up with concepts of femaleness, self-giving, and love.

That is not constructed gender roles, even if some mothers have little relation to all of that, and even if some women are not mothers.

Even arbitrary changeable things, like pink = girl are part of how we conventionally communicate and define ourselves as sexed beings within a cultural context. Human beings find our sex important and interesting enough to care about understanding - and other people understanding - our sex role in society.

The biggest weakness of the traditional feminist GC view, IMO, is not giving the power and importance of culture in human life enough credit. We will never wipe out cultural the significance of sex roles, and so they will manifest within human society in cultural ways.

The attempt to stop this or claim it's a phantasm has enabled the situation we are in now.

Apologies for the long quote, but that's so much what I wanted to say!

Ideologically, I'm a Gender Abolitionist and have been since before feminism gave me the language to explain it (1971, if you're interested). If we have to acronym everything, it's quite handy that Gender Atheist and Gender Agnostic also match.

The fact that I want to abolish gender means I recognise it exists as a significant social force. A few PPs imply that we old-style feminists fail to realise this, or pretend we don't. They couldn't be further from the truth. Gender is, as set out in multiple feminist texts, the means by which women are oppressed. Of course we see it, and of course we want to get rid of it.

That feeds into what I find most repulsive about genderism. We were doing quite a good job of weakening the bonds of gender - they bind men as well as women - and now, suddenly, gender (also known as sex-role stereotyping) is what's supposed to DEFINE us, even to the extent of overriding biology? Fuck that!

Broadly speaking, social movements are composed of multiple collective actions to achieve a shared purpose. Feminism is a movement. Transgenderism is a movement. 'GC' is not, unless you want to call it a resistance movement. Since the only resistance needed is to defend factual reality, it's neither anti-gender nor pro-feminist.

Yes, yes, @Garlicfest - I think I see a clear generational divide on MN about this. I was educated in all the classic feminist texts, from Wollstonecraft on (I read History at an ancient university - we were radical, I tell you!) and I teach these texts to my students now.

But there's a large swathe of the female population, who would call themselves feminists but because that's sort of what most women are nowadays, in very general & vague ways. Because it can feel that all the real battles for equality were fought and won (by 2nd wave feminists). So women felt we could relax a bit - the cause was passed on to excellent people such as Caroline Criado-Perez - or the organisation Pregnant Then Screwed (which I always think of them as the 21st century version of the "wages for housework" movement that Anne Oakley wrote about).

Then transactivist /extremist gender ideology snuck in. Quite a lot of 2nd wavers saw it, and wrote about it (across a broad spectrum of feminist writers: Suzanne Moore, Julie Bindel, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond). But the angry vicious misogynist force of TRAs took us all by surprise - the absolutely open and violent hatred of women by those masked antifas was a shock after 30 years of relative calm and progress.

What I hope is that those radicalised by resistance to transactivism go on to look at the broader feminist issues and follow the examples of valiant 2nd wave feminist - many of whom who are still around and still fighting.

It's a familiar issue - things relating to gender ideology being confused and confusing.

A while back, lots of 'GCs' thought/hoped that if/once people acknowledged that sex and gender are different phenomenon, sex based rights would be easier to uphold. But, if sex and gender are completely decoupled, gender ceases to exist. The construct of gender is inextricably linked to sex based differences, so gender cannot be fully decoupled. What we have now is 'disprovable' claims they are different (no shit, Sherlock), but connected in metaphysical ways at the level of the individual. Everyone has a sex and a gender and these either align or don't align. This model would suggest that males who identify as 'women' would maintain a butch appearance if this were the norm for women.

So, in this view of the world, gender itself is an innate feeling (not gender identity), yet, the claim is that gender is a social construct.

By far the most rational explanation for gender identity issues is that of sex stereotyping and/or body dysmorphia.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/employment-tribunal-rulings-on-gender-critical-beliefs-in-the-workplace/

But how do you propose to remove the real experience of sexual dimorphism from human culture?

It can't happen, it's rooted in that experience. All those associations with motherhood, for example, in art, literature, reflected in our language, how we see the world?

If we did somehow decouple them, do you imagine some kind of vacuum would remain?

People say you fail to realize it because if you did understand it, it's very difficult to see how you would talk about "abolishing" it. You can't abolish human culture or the experience of embodiment we bring to it.

What happens when you try is you still have bodies, and you still have that cultural product, but people come to think they aren't actually inherently attached to each other. What that looks like, or one thing it can be interpreted as, is a sort of internal, individual experience of "gender" which is a kind of free-floating essence.

And no, no one says that because they aren't educated enough in feminist texts, ffs.

I wish people would just say what they mean in ordinary English. I still don't really know what it means, something about women being women? It seems a bizarre phrase that has no obvious meaning. Am I critical of gender, makes absolutely no sense.

Did someone say 'biological realist'? Still makes no sense, how can I be or not be a realist about biology. It's a big subject.