3 questions for GC women

[ChirpyFinch]

As the title says, three questions for the women in this chat.

1. Do you think the majority of people are gender critical, and why/why not?

2. Globally, the right wing is more vocally gender critical than the left. They are also far more likely to be regressive on a range of women’s issues like abortion and anti-gay. Why do you think they agree with GCs on this one issue but disagree on so much else (if you think they do?)

3. How many trans people do you estimate there are globally?

Those men are social conservatives. I'm not talking about the political parties.

1. Do you think the majority of people are gender critical, and why/why not?
   Yes. Sex is real. Gender is the word for socially constructed roles used to oppress women as a sex class.

2. Globally, the right wing is more vocally gender critical than the left. They are also far more likely to be regressive on a range of women’s issues like abortion and anti-gay. Why do you think they agree with GCs on this one issue but disagree on so much else (if you think they do?)
   Who shouts the loudest is irrelevant.
   Left wing/right wing are social constructions. The far left and far right have more in common with each other than the centrists who have always been the majority.
   There are some right wing conservative religious types in the USA whose whole politics is out of step with any UK/European politics. Bible as the word of God creationists who are anti-gay (they see trans as = gay) anti abortion, anti women.
   Seeing them as aligning with European gender critical people is as bizarre as saying everyone who believes the Earth rotates round the sun is the same. Agreeing on one tiny fact is in no way an indication of parity on wider political agendas.

3. How many trans people do you estimate there are globally?

What do you mean by 'trans'? If it's anyone who defines themselves that way the number is incalculable.
There is online social contagion that can manipulate the minds of any young vulnerable person that's got WiFi access.
No one is born in the wrong body. It's a false concept.

I don't know if this is unique historically or not.

But some of the formulations we have now are new, like the human rights formulation. They aren't totally different but we've extended and codified them to a much greater extent. So those are now they ways people access certain things in society.

I suppose it's inevitable that if power and social privilege is tied to some extent to being seen as oppressed, or as requiring asserting a kind of fundamental rights argument, or as belonging to some kind of connected affinity groups, that you will see people trying to put themselves in such groups, or make claims on the basis of being oppressed, etc.

If everyone is doing it then it's going to end with differernt groups competing for the most deserving place and the most resources in society.

Let's not forget Hitler was a vegetarian.

Appropriately for the discussion, Hitler identified as a vegetarian¹ without really understanding what one was.

¹ He didn't really - he reduced his meat consumption for health reasons, but being an actual 'identifying vegetarian' was one of the things that could get you get you sent to a concentration camp.

People are not divided into saintly Goodies who agree with left-wingers (you?) on every topic and evil Baddies who don’t. Life is not like that. There is nuance. People can make up their minds about each separate topic without having to fit into a mould devised by others, and it’s childish to think otherwise.

Hitler loved dogs and was a vegetarian.

This is not the definition of gender-critical. Being gender-critical means that you are critical about the entire concept of gender. This is what it means to be gender-critical when someone says 'I am man/woman in the body of the opposite "gender" ':

Conservatives: "You have to change you identity to match you body"
Trans-activists: "You have to change you body to match you identity"

Gender-Critical Radical Feminists:
"Both your body and your mind are fine the way they are"

There was the really good image that demonstrated the different points of views, but sadly I can't find it anymore.

Has OP gone?? Was looking forward to more transparent questioning

My Be-Ro book is old- no idea of year but 37th edition. The banana bread is gorgeous, especially with cherries substituted for walnuts.

Some socially conservative men certainly believe that, and if you have never encountered that attitude you have had such a sheltered life that it may limit your understanding of the world around you.

Classic example: man who just interviewed Jan Morris at home, stood up after lunch to to help Elizabeth with the clearing up. Jan barked at him to sit down, because that's women's work (someone will have the link).

See also a lifetime of male colleagues leaving the break room in a mess.

Yes, as far as I can remember every missing post was a cake one. Nothing insulting in them at all unless you have a particular objection to ground almonds. I note that biscuit posts have been allowed to remain. Discrimination!

On an I'm sure entirely unrelated note, the Aston scraping parameters excluded threads that diverged from the original topic.

Wow the prices for Be-Ro books !!!!
Just googled

On an I'm sure entirely unrelated note, the Aston scraping parameters excluded threads that diverged from the original topic.

oh

I must remember to meander a bit more - jink and zig-zag so the genderist scrapy bullets can't hit me.

The effrontery of it, human conversations being disrupted and subjugated to the demands of the artificial intelligence tools used by disrespectful and ingenuous individuals. Mumsnet moderators should not facilitate them.

Was Jan Morris a conservative? Was the interviewer?

Of course some conservative men are like that, as are some men on the left. Selfish pricks.

But would you say those characterize the left or right position as such? They certainly aren't particularly representative of the best elements of either.

1. Do I think the majority of people in the world do not believe that humans can change sex? Unquestionably yes. If by "gender critical" you mean something else, you need to explain exactly what.
2. See my post about the childishness of thinking that because some people agree on one topic, it’s odd that they don’t agree on all topics.
3. I have no idea, and it doesn’t really make any difference. If something is a fact, it is a fact. I suspect you're hoping to be able to say that "gender critical" people grossly overestimate or underestimate the number of trans people in the world. You need to define, though, what you mean by "trans". People who dress and present in a way that doesn’t fit gender stereotypes? People who have had surgery or taken drugs to alter their bodies? Or just people who currently assert that they are the other sex from what their DNA tells us they are?

Surely men on the left, politically, can be just as entitled, if not more so, than men on the right, politically? I can't see anything more entitled than a bloke deciding he's now a women and henceforth will be barging his way into women's changing rooms, to be honest, and that kind of stuff seems to me to be led from the political left.

It all boils down to women being shafted by men. Does it really make a difference which direction the trident is thrown from?

'Conservative' really isn't a useful descriptor.

It covers political conservatives - right wing; social conservatives - Jan Morris; and religious conservatives - who on the whole think homosexuality is wrong, but some think being trans is equally wrong (the current Catholic pope) and others (Iran) think it's a great way to eliminate homosexuality.

The different groups have wildly diverging views on many matters.

Jan clearly was socially conservative if Jan believed there was such a thing as 'women's work'. Jan's enthusiam for sex-role stereotypes seems pretty conservative and very much of Jan's time and world and life experience, as an upper-middle class British army officer in the mid twentieth century.

For me the issue with traditional gender roles and why they are to me a bad thing is not who does the "woman"'s traditional gender role per se, it is who has the power to say no? Who can walk away from the arrangement or unilaterally change it?

So the issue with consigning women to traditional domestic and childrearing roles is not that those roles are somehow demeaning or low value, it is that they carry no economic power and usually very little social or political power, and they are primarily situated behind closed doors in a private space that traditional values believe should not be the concern of public oversight or scrutiny.

A woman in this traditional role is dependent directly on her husband's goodwill to continue to support her and the needs of the doemestic sphere, and indirectly on male-dominated public society to continue to consider the needs of women and the needs of the domestic-sphere as much as they do they needs of men and the needs of the public-sphere - a hard thing to do when the people makig the decisions are by definition not the people they are deciding about. (As the great philosopher Dougal McQuire famously struggled with, things that are close to us seem much larger than things that are far away)

And men have traditionally not dealt fairly with women. They have taken mistresses because they feel entitled to better company than they feel their wives to be, or abandoned mothers and children because they feel their desire for a dfferent life is more important than the obligation to support the people who depend on them. They have arranged the structures of public life - the working day, the school day, the transport routes - with the assumption that the people who need these things are not the people who are caring for children, and in doing so effectively locked those people out of the rles that could give them the power to change things. They have made the minutae of how children are paid for and looked after a private matter between the parents not a public matter for society.

(Oh, and on the washing up...

Traditional: Women are best at washing up so they should always do it
Gender critical: Anyone can do the washing up so everyone should take turns to do it
TRAs: God you are obsessed with washing up! Like that is the most important thing ever for you! Who cares who does the washing up? I guess probably a boring cis woman will do it, they like that sort of thing don't they? Mum, where are the clean plates?)

1. Do you think the majority of people are gender critical, and why/why not?
I think people are confused about what this actually means. I believe the majority of people don't care if a man is a woman internally, if a woman has treatment to become a man. What people care about is their own rights being violated. Their own safety being at risk.

2. Globally, the right wing is more vocally gender critical than the left. They are also far more likely to be regressive on a range of women’s issues like abortion and anti-gay. Why do you think they agree with GCs on this one issue but disagree on so much else (if you think they do?)
I don't think it's a right wing v left wing issue. I think it's a women's rights thing. They either think that trans women should be allowed to be in female safe spaces or they don't.

3. How many trans people do you estimate there are globally?
Why does that matter? It could be one hundred or one million. If a group threatens the rights or safety of another group, people will be upset.

Of course, I don't literally think that all conservatives believe that no men don't should do the washing up - although the most extreme social conservatives believe that it's the role of the man to go out to work and provide for the family and it's the role of the woman to be the homemaker.

It's just a handy little analogy to show that right wingers and GC feminists may both disagree with gender identity ideology but have fundamentally different attitudes towards gender.

And on top of that, "socially conservative" just means wanting to conserve societal values as they were at some given point in time. It could mean wanting to go back to the way things were (or were perceived to have been) in the 1850s, the 1950s, the 1990s, anything really. Some only want to roll back societal change by a decade or two and some want to roll it back more.

Like you say, it's not a useful descriptor.

What would be a more useful descriptor?

I would hazard a guess that almost everyone who has given the question "what is gender?" any real thought is gender critical.

Dishonourable exception: Judith Butler and Sally Hines whose ability to pay the bills literally depends on pretending that gender isn't a load of bollocks.

Gender critical feminists believe that biological sex in humans is binary and immutable, and sometimes this matters. They reject the legitimacy of "gender" as a way to categorise people or organise society on the basis that "gender" is just sexist stereotypes about men and women (the same sexist stereotypes feminism was supposed to liberate women from).

but such people can never, never explain what woman gender and man gender actually look like. That would make me pause, but for some reason it has no effect on those spouting the gender woo.

there was the entertaining and notable exception of Meg John Barker who threw a dart at the board of sexist stereotypes and came up with the following definition of 'woman':

'being nurturing, caring, social, emotional, vulnerable, and concerned with appearance'

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3339137-BACP-Gender-Sexual-and-Relationship-Diversity-by-Dr-Meg-John-Barker

of course then she realised she'd spoken the quiet bit out loud and backed right off.