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.

I 'identify'🙄as a biological realist. Sex is determined by the biological reality of our genes evolved over millennia. Human sex is binary. DSD exist in a tiny percentage of the world population but there are several billion of us so the chances are you know someone who has one, you may even know how they feel about it.

Once, the words sex and gender were interchangeable. Then, it seems (if I understand correctly) gender became the term used for societal roles/stereotypes. This seems to have developed into a performative idea in peoples' heads (which is a gift to bad actors). There are now (that 'authoritative source Wikipedia tells me..) 107 gender identities for 2024. Will they all demand their own bathrooms?

Clearly all the genders except BlokeyBlokeGender will self identify into the naice clean female loos. It's not even a close race. The male loos are frequently disgusting

Will we have to provide litter trays for the furries? Maybe some of them could have a fire hydrant to share their pee-mail.

I use it on here and in spaces where I know I'll be understood as I intend it. But in the wider world I would say 'I don't believe in gender stereotyping'. For me that's clearer - usually I follow it by saying I think people can wear whatever they want but it doesn't change their sex. Or that I have no problem with anybody presenting any way they choose but that I do not like how many transgender discussions buy into and reinforce gender stereotypes.

Like any label 'gender critical' is a shorthand or jargon that is only really meaningful to people already engaged with the topic of discussion.

Yes, @museumum - but even on here, as this thread shows, the term GC isn't always correctly interpreted.

https://www.sexualdiversity.org/edu/1111.php

My apologies, there are fewer listed on Wikipedia I think. Although most could be accommodated under the 'genderfuck' identity for simplicity.

What could you possibly find to be critical of here?

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

I'd be really stupid to propose that, @TempestTost, now, wouldn't I.

It is, however, what the genderists propose. When a person with a penis and testes, who produces sperm, can be a woman who identifies as female, your sexual dimorphism's out the window, isn't it?

The sexual dimorphism still exists, as it must. The only difference is that now we're instructed to ignore it, and the words previously used to denote the two sexes are redundant. The words man, woman, boy, girl, male and female now refer ONLY to gender identity. And what is that? It's a nebulous feeling inside the individual's head, which can only be described in terms of sex-role stereotypes.

"I am sensitive, gentle", says the testicular individual, "I love to giggle, wear makeup and to play with my long hair. I adore wearing silky clothes. I am a woman."

Pulitzer prize winner, Andrea Long Chu, informs us that a woman is "an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes". For clarity: "Femaleness is not an anatomical or genetic characteristic of an organism".

There. In genderism, femaleness has nothing to do with the reproductive categories of humans; indeed, we have no unifying words for these categories. (We may refer to their members as breeders, uterus-havers, ejaculators, as necessary.) Man and woman have been redefined as sets of stereotypical qualities that have been culturally associated with ... well, with the two reproductive categories.

The sex-role stereotypes culturally associated with each sex are the system known as gender: masculine and feminine. This is nothing to do with sexual dimorphism, it's all about social expectations. In Afghanistan today, the Taliban's busy codifying gender in a different way: the Afghan woman is silent, unseen, subdued.

Both the Taliban and the genderists are wrong. Biological sex doesn't determine behaviour, personality or preferences; it doesn't dictate certain styles of dress. What I want to abolish is the belief that it must.

Most of this post has zero to do with what I wrote. Largely the first half with the stuff from Chu, I don't know what you think the point of bring that up is in this context.

I also did not suggest you could remove sexual dimorphism, I asked how you would prevent our embodied experience being enculturated.

You've not actually answered that or addressed the examples I gave - how would you stop motherhood, for example, from having cultural significance, from shaping people's experiences, from being captured in art, and especially, how would you stop it from being associated with femaleness? How would you stop young people from being interested in, and emphasizing, their sexually dimorphic characteristics through culture?

Showing a negative example doesn't somehow prove either that all cultural reflections of our being a sexed species are negative, nor that it is possible to eradicate them all.

I asked how you would prevent our embodied experience being enculturated.

No, you didn't, you asked how do you propose to remove the real experience of sexual dimorphism from human culture?

I said I don't.

The reproduction-related experiences of sexual beings are what they are, entirely and necessarily connected to the natural functions of sexual dimorphic species. They are not gender.

Gender systems - plural, because they vary wildly across space and time - are social trappings associated with each sex. The very fact that they differ so much between cultures proves they aren't innate, like sex is. They're socially imposed.

I could take you on a fun romp through fashion history to illustrate this within western European culture alone, but it should be flaming obvious to anyone using a brain cell. Here's a sweet little article about the days when men wore high heels to show off their silk-stockinged legs (they also wore makeup, perfume and a ton of jewellery, not to mention elaborately styled long hair). Clearly, none of these trappings made them think they were women. They just carried right on being masculine males!

The point, if I have to keep making it: Sex is innate, natural, genetic, unavoidable, indispensable. Gender is made-up rules, fashions and stereotypes.

Andrea Long Chu wrote a whole book about being female, which is actually about being feminine - being a female stereotype (as he sees it). He also explicitly stated in his opening paragraph that "femaleness" is not anatomical or genetic. Femininity isn't, but he has swept sex aside and replaced it with gender.