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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

What does gender critical mean?

116 replies

Yarden · 22/03/2025 23:33

Just that really. I’m not sure what “gender critical “ means anymore. I am not very critical of gender roles- I think they’re useful as a stereotype. does this mean I’m not gender critical? I guess I’m trans critical as I believe trans ideology is harmful as it encourages harmful interventions. What do others think? I’m so lost in this world now.

OP posts:
Gundogday · 23/03/2025 10:54

Datun · 23/03/2025 10:24

It was men who used to wear make up. And a shed load of it too. And high heels. And had long hair.

Fuck all to do with biology !

Especially in the 80s- New Romantics, punks etc.

Brefugee · 23/03/2025 11:17

SnakesAndArrows · 23/03/2025 06:37

I don’t think the term “gender critical” is very useful. It’s ambiguous, and has been taken as an attack on transgender people.

Like Dean, I prefer “gender atheist”, and agree with every word she said above.

Can you explain what you mean by gender stereotypes being useful? I think they are harmful and are at the root of the nonsensical concept of transgender identities.

That sounds like a "them problem" in the way the hard of thinking think "toxic masculinity" applies to all men.

SerenityNowSerenityNow · 23/03/2025 11:19

This doesn't mean that any woman can't be an engineer for example if she chooses, but it does mean that I am not surprised that the sex balance is not anywhere close to 50/50 in university Engineering departments, and accepting that may be in women's best interests rather than aiming for a 50/50.

Well, nobody is expecting all courses to be 50/50 but it is in everyone's interests to understand why a particular group is underrepresented.

I think we have to accept the differences in behaviour and work with them. We may have more women than men involved in childcare and more men that women as CEOs, but then the answer is to ensure that childcare is better paid and well respected rather than trying to force people to do something that they will dislike.

I'm interested, do you think that the reason there are fewer female CEOs is due to biology? That women inherently dislike leadership roles?

XXylophonic · 23/03/2025 11:21

DeanElderberry · 23/03/2025 10:20

why women often wear make-up

Do you think middle-class women in nineteenth century England wore no make-up because they were less female than modern women, or because there was a severe social stigma against doing so? Am I not female because I'm not wearing any make-up right now? Are nuns not women because they don't wear cosmetics?

I think some people need to check whether the advertising industry has sucked their brains, or at least the bits capable of critical thinking, out through their ears.

As for: I do think that some individuals don't behave in the ways that are more typical for their sex and it might be helpful to have the concept of gender and gender non-conformity.

You like sex-role stereotype conformity so much you want to enforce it by othering and labelling people who don't fit your arbitrary culturally-specific expectations. Will that involve sending us to re-education camps as well? Or wearing badges? or carrying permits?

Edited

I completely agree with this. I think the main reason many women wear makeup is absolutely to do with artificial societal expectations. Being told by media, men, other women that they're less attractive without. That they don't care about their appearance, let themselves go and so on.
To suggest that we're biologically wired to wear makeup up or high heels seems absurd. After all, a hundred years ago women weren't routinely wearing makeup up like they do today. It's because society expects it and many women have convinced themselves they need it. Same with removing body hair and so on.

XXylophonic · 23/03/2025 11:35

I think we have to accept the differences in behaviour and work with them. We may have more women than men involved in childcare and more men that women as CEOs, but then the answer is to ensure that childcare is better paid and well respected rather than trying to force people to do something that they will dislike.

I think the reason we have more women in childcare and caring roles in general is because that's where women are encouraged to work. In hindsight I'd have rather become an engineer than a nurse.
Things may have changed but girls were always steered towards stereotypically feminine jobs. Care, hospitality, teaching. Boys towards tech and business
I'd argue pushing girls and women into these roles is 'to force people to do something that they will dislike'

Merrymouse · 23/03/2025 11:42

I do think it's becoming harmful to use 'gender critical' as a general non-specific term, because it renders the words meaningless - just another label that can be written off as a culture war.

For instance the debate over puberty blockers is only partly related to gender - it should also be obvious that children are being harmed because the non-evidence based treatment and inadequate assessment process doesn't meet basic standards, regardless of opinions on feminism.

I understand why Porton Down employment tribunal centred on discrimination against gender critical beliefs, but if scientists at the laboratory that deals with chemical warfare can't understand the concept of classification by sex, we have some other very big problems.

DeanElderberry · 23/03/2025 11:46

I get it XX, you've decided to fully commit to enforcing sex-role stereotypes, and to hell with freaks who want to choose their own path. They mustn't try anything new in case they dislike it.

SamphiretheTervosaur · 23/03/2025 11:46

mordaunt · 22/03/2025 23:46

I’ll never be convinced that framing “gender critical” as an official belief in order to win an employment tribunal has helped humanity at large.

Edited

Very recently 2 maybe 3 employment tribunals have been won in that basis

Using it meant that rather than having to wade through the 'science' that 'proves' some, but not all, men are women, all that was needed was "well, it's a protected belief"

It's a start, it isn't the end

DeanElderberry · 23/03/2025 11:47

Yes, but it didn't help humanity at large, only the women, who aren't really human.

Merrymouse · 23/03/2025 11:48

XXylophonic · 23/03/2025 11:35

I think we have to accept the differences in behaviour and work with them. We may have more women than men involved in childcare and more men that women as CEOs, but then the answer is to ensure that childcare is better paid and well respected rather than trying to force people to do something that they will dislike.

I think the reason we have more women in childcare and caring roles in general is because that's where women are encouraged to work. In hindsight I'd have rather become an engineer than a nurse.
Things may have changed but girls were always steered towards stereotypically feminine jobs. Care, hospitality, teaching. Boys towards tech and business
I'd argue pushing girls and women into these roles is 'to force people to do something that they will dislike'

No CDT at my girls' school in the 1980s - they only had ovens and sewing machines.

My mum's generation could be be sacked on marriage.

My grandmother's generation couldn't vote on equal terms with men.

Maybe girls just hate engineering, but we aren't really in a position to know that yet. It's not as though they are forced to do engineering now - just given the opportunity.

DeanElderberry · 23/03/2025 12:05

Young women can even work out how to use technology to advance medical response and care, if they are encouraged to think science and tech and engineering are something they can excel in.

btyoungscientist.com/sisters-ciara-saoirse-laoise-murphy-announced-as-winners-of-the-61st-bt-young-scientist-technology-exhibition/

XXylophonic · 23/03/2025 12:06

I meant pushing girls into caring roles is perhaps forcing them to do things they don't like

WandaSiri · 23/03/2025 12:09

XXylophonic · 23/03/2025 12:06

I meant pushing girls into caring roles is perhaps forcing them to do things they don't like

Yes, I get it - you were quoting someone else at the top of your post.

BobbyBiscuits · 23/03/2025 12:12

To me it means you don't really recognise gender as being anything more than another word for bio sex. Also that the stereotypes associated with each gender are just that, and people of either sex should be able to act, dress and be interested in whatever they like. It doesn't make them less of a man or woman.

DeanElderberry · 23/03/2025 12:16

XXylophonic · 23/03/2025 12:06

I meant pushing girls into caring roles is perhaps forcing them to do things they don't like

fair enough

FlirtsWithRhinos · 23/03/2025 12:23

As a gender critical feminist, I'd say the key point is not whether gendered preferences and behaviour exist today - clearly they do - it's whether they are an innate expression of sex differences that will always exist so society needs to accept and build them in or something externally constructed that applies unnecessary expectations, limitations and risks to people which society should strive to challenge and aim to move away from.

Taking the OP's "man/mother" example, today the right advice for the child is to find a woman, ideally a mother, because men are a higher risk.

But I believe men can and should be better. So alongside telling children what they need to do to be safe today, we as a society should also be doing much much more to identify and challenge problematic male behaviour as a systemic problem so that someday we won't have to tell children they are safer with women than men.

Like many women on this board I believe strongly that women and girls (original sex based meaning) need single sex spaces to remove the risk of male sexual abuse and mitigate the intellectual and emotional impact of men taking up an unfair proportion of the "air in the room", and that women and girls need women-only opportunities and truly gender neutral oppurtunities like blind auditions to overcome society's default confidence in mens abilities over womens.

Where I differ to some women on this board is that I believe that the bad behaviour of men towards women is socially constructed. So while we may need these things today, we should not fall into the trap of thinking it's the natural state of things.

So the ideal for me as a gender critical feminist is not to maintain single sex provisions indefinitely, it's to get to a place where they are genuinely no longer needed. (Because I believe , while necessary for women and girls today, their very existence is one of the engines for men to fetishise what we do there and want to gain access to that fantasy world.)

Similarly on the makeup. Clearly today women are the main consumers so it makes financial sense to take the into account for marketing. I do not dispute that most women who use makeup enjoy it, and I also accept that wearing makeup and performing feminine grooming is a rational choice for an individual woman if it makes her more acceptable socially or professionally. Nevertheless, l believe the gendering of makeup and grooming is detrimental to women in the long term because it validates to others and to ourselves that it is ok to judge our worth by our appearance, and it diverts our time and energy and money into something that men do not have to do (as much), leaving us less time to achieve other things.

And while it's true to say companies are reacting to the social environment when they market to women, their marketing also creates/produces/reinforces this social environment - social constructions are self-reinforcing. (I actually agree with Judith Butler on a lot of the basics of gender, I just fundamentally disagree with her naivety in believing that a handful of academic individuals pretending not to have a sex is going to disrupt the entrenched gender biases of a society that has been performing and reproducing them since before Biblical times, especially when so many people in society deeply believe those gender constructs on an unconscious level).

So on the makeup companies, I can recognise that they are rationally exploiting the market demographics while considering that their business is exploitative and bad for society in the long term.

(Don't get me started on women being socialised to desire shoes we can't even walk effectively in!)

All this said, there are, obviously, some social differences that are a direct result of our sex differences and will never go away. We will always need separate sporting catgeories for women, for example. We will always need some way to ensure women can bear and give at least early care to children without taking a higher financial or social hit than the father (something we clearly do not have today). To OP's example again, jobs/roles where physical strength matters will usually be better suited to men (although even these when you look closely at them are often less clear cut than we assume - plenty of physical work isn't done by the man's own strength but by the use of tools, tools that today are not engineered to work for women's size and strength but could be).

But I think there are far fewer innate differences than many believe, like the myth "more women than men naturally want to wear long hair, jewellery and makeup" which falls away with the briefest of glances at 18th century France or Ancient Egypt. So while recognising that Gender Critical feminism will ultimately hit a limit where some social, maybe even mental and emotional, differences between women and men are innate, to me the best way to get a fair outcome for women is to assume everything outside the directly physical is socially constructed and continue to challenge it to move to a better future without giving up any of practical single sex supports that are needed today.

The gender critical feminist project is done when all the gendered social constructs have fallen. That does not mean Feminism is done. Feminism's job is ensuring society deals fairly and supports women so we are not limited, disadvanted or abused because of our sex. Even without gender there will be work for Feminism to support women in those constraints and risks that are innate and cannot be taken away. But without gender that job will be much much easier.

So while I know not every woman on this board shares my optimism about how much gendered behaviours and especially MVAWG is socially constructed and therefore solveable, if we take the view that we continue to work towards a non-gendered future but don't give up any individual single sex support until the need for it has clearly passed, it doesn't matter that individual feminists don't agree on where this line is. The path is still the same path. As long as no protection is dropped until there are no longer any women who see a need for it we can still work together towards a world where the socially constructed things that can be fixed get fixed and the innate sex differences that remain are still supported.

So going back to PP's "there will always be fewer female engineers", perhaps. But that doesn't mean we should not be removing all the social barriers and expectations that make it harder for a women to succeed as an engineer, including the ones that artificially reduce the number of women who see engineering as a potential career in the first place. We don't need to assume we will end up with 50% balance to agree this is worth doing, we just need to know that some women say with hindsight they realise they self limited their options, and others say they expereinced more challenges than their male colleagues.

The target of Feminism is not a numeric 50/50 in all things, it's women no longer saying they have been unfairly limited, constrained or abused in their life because of their sex.

XXylophonic · 23/03/2025 12:49

DeanElderberry · 23/03/2025 11:46

I get it XX, you've decided to fully commit to enforcing sex-role stereotypes, and to hell with freaks who want to choose their own path. They mustn't try anything new in case they dislike it.

Is this directed at me? That's the exact opposite of what I believe

WandaSiri · 23/03/2025 13:09

@FlirtsWithRhinos
Privacy and dignity is just as important as safety. Men and women are always going to be physically different and have different physiological experiences. We can tell men about periods and embarrassing flooding, but they won't experience it. We can imagine the embarrassment of inappropriately timed erections, but we can't experience it. It's not wrong of people to want privacy, or have modesty. Too often these days a desire for privacy is rebranded as shame. (Not saying you are doing this.)

I don't see why it is a necessarily a good aspiration to make males and females mix all the time. We should be able to pretty much do any job we like, but we can't be each other and sometimes it's healing and simpler (for both men and women) to just be around our own sex. The nuclear family is a fairly recent development for humans. (Caveat for that statement and this next bit - I have no particular expertise or knowledge of ancient history, I'm just repeating what I have read).
Stone Age peoples and tribes split off into men and women even when they are doing the same activity - eg dancing or hunting. One pregnancy every four years doesn't suggest living together a lot.
The women of ancient Scythian tribes of the Steppes and near Asia sometimes wouldn't see their husbands/partners/sons for years - and these societies were known for sex equality.

Back to safety - even in the unlikely event that men are socialised to be as unaggressive as women, they will still be bigger and stronger and they will still have more innate aggression and a higher sex drive, so they will still have the means and motivation to enact sexual violence on women. We can reduce the number of males who are like this, of course, but we can't eliminate it. That's where the SS spaces come in.

TheCourseOfTheRiverChanged · 23/03/2025 13:12

@I’ve finally found the section from Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman that often comes to mind on these discussion threads:
“Some say that women shall not be free until they are liberated from womanhood itself. Judith Lorber looked forward to an age when we might no longer ask at birth what sex a child is, because it will be of no consequence.

  • “When we no longer ask “boy or girl?” in order to start gendering an infant, when the information is as irrelevant as the color of the child’s eyes (but not yet the color of skin), then and only then will women and men be socially interchangeable and really equal. And when that happens there will no longer be any need for gender at all.”
There is a considerable body of evidence that no matter how gender-free their upbringing, children will invent gender for themselves. One of my god-children amazed me one day by refusing a sweet on the grounds that sweets were for “greedy boys.” All she had ever been told was that in our all-female family we did not eat sweets. She had gendered the activity of sweet-eating all by herself. Though she always wore pants and wore her hair short and had no dolls and didn’t cry when she fell down because she was brave, she knew she was a girl and as unlike a boy as might be. The animal world will remain sexed, if not gendered, and the child would be dead from the neck up who did not wonder whether she was the kind of animal who could have puppies or not. Lorber was delighted with Donna Haraway’s vision of women of the future as cybogs:
  • “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bi-sexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity … the cyborg is resolutely committed to pariality, irony, intimacy and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence … I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
“So would I,” says Lorber. If freedom is an out-of-body experience this feminist wants none of it. This female eunuch wants to be at ease in her body, unembarrassed about her body, proud and protective of her body, the body she has now. She wants to be freed from forever ciricizing it, chastising it and forcing it to submit. It is more wonderful in every way than any production of our technology; … Women may well find that the liberation struggle becomes a struggle to defend the female body, the source of all bodies, against the cyber-sergeons who will inherit the hubris of those present-day surgeons who think they make better breasts than God. … The female body is not our enemy but our strength … .”
AmateurNoun · 23/03/2025 13:21

XXylophonic · 23/03/2025 11:21

I completely agree with this. I think the main reason many women wear makeup is absolutely to do with artificial societal expectations. Being told by media, men, other women that they're less attractive without. That they don't care about their appearance, let themselves go and so on.
To suggest that we're biologically wired to wear makeup up or high heels seems absurd. After all, a hundred years ago women weren't routinely wearing makeup up like they do today. It's because society expects it and many women have convinced themselves they need it. Same with removing body hair and so on.

I think what is biologically driven in women is caring (and worrying) about one's appearance more than men on average.

The way it might manifest might change over time. Trends come and go and obviously make-up wasn't so widely available in the past, but the underlying issue remains constant in my view across time and cultures and is likely biological.

I honestly think that some people who act like it's purely a social thing are divorced from reality 🤷‍♀️

DeanElderberry · 23/03/2025 13:34

I must have met different men. Even the majority of them, who don't suddenly decide to dress as some kind of deluded porno fantasy, are very focussed on looking 'right'. Uniforms, vestments, rules about shaving or not shaving, old school ties, agonising about pefectly normal, non-health-related hair loss, snarking about other men's height, it goes on and on, and they can be very fragile around it.

FlirtsWithRhinos · 23/03/2025 13:39

WandaSiri · 23/03/2025 13:09

@FlirtsWithRhinos
Privacy and dignity is just as important as safety. Men and women are always going to be physically different and have different physiological experiences. We can tell men about periods and embarrassing flooding, but they won't experience it. We can imagine the embarrassment of inappropriately timed erections, but we can't experience it. It's not wrong of people to want privacy, or have modesty. Too often these days a desire for privacy is rebranded as shame. (Not saying you are doing this.)

I don't see why it is a necessarily a good aspiration to make males and females mix all the time. We should be able to pretty much do any job we like, but we can't be each other and sometimes it's healing and simpler (for both men and women) to just be around our own sex. The nuclear family is a fairly recent development for humans. (Caveat for that statement and this next bit - I have no particular expertise or knowledge of ancient history, I'm just repeating what I have read).
Stone Age peoples and tribes split off into men and women even when they are doing the same activity - eg dancing or hunting. One pregnancy every four years doesn't suggest living together a lot.
The women of ancient Scythian tribes of the Steppes and near Asia sometimes wouldn't see their husbands/partners/sons for years - and these societies were known for sex equality.

Back to safety - even in the unlikely event that men are socialised to be as unaggressive as women, they will still be bigger and stronger and they will still have more innate aggression and a higher sex drive, so they will still have the means and motivation to enact sexual violence on women. We can reduce the number of males who are like this, of course, but we can't eliminate it. That's where the SS spaces come in.

Whereas I can't think of anything that is more obviously socially constructed than "privacy and dignity" or "modesty"!

But my whole point is that there's no need to define this stuff upfront. Maybe you are right about where the natural differences line is. Maybe I am. What is undeniable is that right now plenty of women do experience being unfairly limited, characterised or abused because of their sex (including self limitation that is only recognised in hindsight), so the starting point does not have to be "what's the 'right' level of segregation to stop at?", it can just be "what's the right direction of travel to make things better?".

The measure shouldn't be target numbers or a desired known future, it's whether women today are still saying there is a problem.

FlirtsWithRhinos · 23/03/2025 13:44

TheCourseOfTheRiverChanged · 23/03/2025 13:12

@I’ve finally found the section from Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman that often comes to mind on these discussion threads:
“Some say that women shall not be free until they are liberated from womanhood itself. Judith Lorber looked forward to an age when we might no longer ask at birth what sex a child is, because it will be of no consequence.

  • “When we no longer ask “boy or girl?” in order to start gendering an infant, when the information is as irrelevant as the color of the child’s eyes (but not yet the color of skin), then and only then will women and men be socially interchangeable and really equal. And when that happens there will no longer be any need for gender at all.”
There is a considerable body of evidence that no matter how gender-free their upbringing, children will invent gender for themselves. One of my god-children amazed me one day by refusing a sweet on the grounds that sweets were for “greedy boys.” All she had ever been told was that in our all-female family we did not eat sweets. She had gendered the activity of sweet-eating all by herself. Though she always wore pants and wore her hair short and had no dolls and didn’t cry when she fell down because she was brave, she knew she was a girl and as unlike a boy as might be. The animal world will remain sexed, if not gendered, and the child would be dead from the neck up who did not wonder whether she was the kind of animal who could have puppies or not. Lorber was delighted with Donna Haraway’s vision of women of the future as cybogs:
  • “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bi-sexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity … the cyborg is resolutely committed to pariality, irony, intimacy and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence … I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
“So would I,” says Lorber. If freedom is an out-of-body experience this feminist wants none of it. This female eunuch wants to be at ease in her body, unembarrassed about her body, proud and protective of her body, the body she has now. She wants to be freed from forever ciricizing it, chastising it and forcing it to submit. It is more wonderful in every way than any production of our technology; … Women may well find that the liberation struggle becomes a struggle to defend the female body, the source of all bodies, against the cyber-sergeons who will inherit the hubris of those present-day surgeons who think they make better breasts than God. … The female body is not our enemy but our strength … .”

Is this a reply to me? If so you have fundamentally misunderstood what I am saying.

WandaSiri · 23/03/2025 13:54

FlirtsWithRhinos · 23/03/2025 13:39

Whereas I can't think of anything that is more obviously socially constructed than "privacy and dignity" or "modesty"!

But my whole point is that there's no need to define this stuff upfront. Maybe you are right about where the natural differences line is. Maybe I am. What is undeniable is that right now plenty of women do experience being unfairly limited, characterised or abused because of their sex (including self limitation that is only recognised in hindsight), so the starting point does not have to be "what's the 'right' level of segregation to stop at?", it can just be "what's the right direction of travel to make things better?".

The measure shouldn't be target numbers or a desired known future, it's whether women today are still saying there is a problem.

Whereas I can't think of anything that is more obviously socially constructed than "privacy and dignity" or "modesty"!

Maybe, but it's not innately a bad thing, is it? I mean, arguably modesty = having boundaries. It applies to men as well as women.

What is undeniable is that right now plenty of women do experience being unfairly limited, characterised or abused because of their sex (including self limitation that is only recognised in hindsight),
Agreed.

so the starting point does not have to be "what's the 'right' level of segregation to stop at?", it can just be "what's the right direction of travel to make things better?".
We agree on the direction of travel, that the socialisation of men needs to change. As does the socialisation of women. But your utopia of no sex segregation relies on not one single man being dangerous to women and using his superior size and strength. That will never happen. Otherwise you're saying it's fine to sacrifice a few women to the greater good of no segregation and the (IMO) myth of the sexes being identical.
Why does removing all segregation help stop women being unfairly limited, etc. Surely what would help with that is the destruction of gender. The actual un-artificial issues women have to do with their sex, their vulnerability to males, is not going to change.

titchy · 23/03/2025 14:14

Yarden · 23/03/2025 07:19

I didn’t say the child should go to “a gendered male adult presenting in a female stereotype way”. I said the child should go to what looks like as the classic stereotype of safety- a woman with children.
this woman with children might not be a mother and nought not be safe, but it’s a useful stereotype to work with

That’s a sex based description, not a gender based one. A gender based description would be anyone wearing a dress is the safest for a lost child to ask for help.

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