Can we be "Sex realist" now? Not "Gender critical"?

[DiamondThrone]

I feel like we've been boxed into a corner. Being defined by "gender", when what we are actuall defined by is "sex", not womany feels.

Bullshit.

Fuck of with the race card.

Sex Is really not hard to define, we are bloody MAMMALS. It’s really very clear. (Yes I know about DSDs before you start.)

Race is absolutely poorly defined in any biological genetic level. It’s a very loose category under and a dodgy classification system.

Sex is very clear. Don’t you know how babies are made???????

Call yourself anti-trans if you like but it’s a phrase without nuance and not many people here would describe themselves that way.

You’re responding to a TRA who likes to come and scold MNers a few times a week.

Bee is a TRA.

Maybe that's what we should call ourselves - WRAs

This. Those wankers need a name for their made up bollocks, but I don’t need a name for not believing the bollocks.

This OP. Honestly you can't react to what the trans extremists are saying on Reddit / Bluesky. I understand your argument but am done reacting defensively to these people

They're currently flailing and wailing as they see it all slipping away. The overreach - upending the social contract, going for woman's spaces, sport, even children has finally been exposed and the public aren't buying it any more. This was an influential movement with numerous men in high places - hence their ability to do so much damage. But they blew it.

As Wallace says, they'll try anything & say anything, no matter how delusional or false.

I agree with @MrsOvertonsWindow and @WallaceinAnderland

I'm a Feminist. I focus on the challenges, risks and inequalities female people face because of our bodies. Some of these are directly down to physical differences between us and men. Many more are down to how millenia of patriarchy has shaped society's expectations, understanding and treatment of us. Between the two are the ways our unavoidable physical and reproductive differences are or are not accomodated in society's structures and norms.

The only reasons I have any issue with Genderism is that (1) in redefining woman as a mixed sex mentality it disconnects female people from our history, our shared experiences and the language and political and social understanding we need to fight this exploitation, abuse and marginalisation, and (2) the incoherent in/out hokey cokey of "my-mind-sets-my-gender-not-my-body-and-it's-not-about-sex-and-sex-is-more-than-binary-but-its-essential-that-I-adjust-my-body-to-fit-my-gender" is causing real people, many far too young to appreciate the impact, to make real, irreversible, damaging changes to their body.

I realised a while back that reacting to Genderists latest flip flop is just letting them set the reference points. Actually their reference points are irrelevant to me. My reference point is the people with female bodies, what that means for us, and how to fight and defeat the unfair burdens we bear because of it.

It doesn't matter if gender is a real thing or not. It doesn't matter if sex is binary or not. I'm not here to argue about the edge cases. I'm here for the pretty much 50% of humanity that is recognised as female the day we are born and live with the consequences of that the rest of our lives.

Understanding that that is what matters to me gives me an unshakeable foundation to base any argument on.

Aka Feminists :)

I know.

I think "critical" is a great thing to be. It suggests discernment, analysis and judgement. Happy to be associated with all of those.

I agree OP. "Gender critical" is a very negative-sounding term, and also it's not immediately clear what it means. "Sex realist" is better, but I think it means something slightly different, and narrower. "Gender critical" includes not just thinking that sex is immutable and more important than "gender", but that "gender" is a social construct imposed either by society or from within (can we always differentiate?) and that it limits and constrains us all.

I am gender critical. Being gender critical is an essential part of feminism and goes much further than any issues with people pretending to change sex.

Personally I find it very helpful to indicate that I am coming at these issues from a feminist perspective.

You can easily be sex realist and anti-feminist.

If I have to choose, I slightly prefer sex/biological realist. I suppose it might depend on who I was talking to.

If I'm talking to a friend or relative who thinks TWAW, then saying I'm sex realist pins down the issue on which we disagree, i.e. that I think sex is real, immutable and important.

If I'm talking to somebody who is very socially conservative and I need to explain that I'm not a fan of traditional gender roles, then I could say I'm gender critical, but I could also convey that more easily just by saying I'm a feminist.

If I'm talking to a TRA who has somehow got the impression that criticising gender identity theory makes me some kind of tradwife, then I'm not sure any label is going to do the job of explaining.

’sex Realist’ and ‘gender critical’ are not the same thing, People on the religious right are likely to know sex is real but be very much in favour of gender roles and stereotypes.

I think 'gender critical' has a life of its own now, whether we agree with it or not.

I like 'biological realist', I think I'm going to borrow it to explain what being 'GC' really means, thank you Hamserfan

Gender roles and stereptypes are not an automatic negative, though. I do things which may be classed as 'gender' based, but I do them mainly because they work for me or fit my preferences, choices, tastes, lifestyle, and also of course because they work for my family.

The problem with gender ,for me, is that once 'sex' has been shorn away, all you are left with is roles and stereotypes, and anyone can mimic or assume those.....including men.

Some of the roles we assume are predicated upon our sex - especially when it comes to having children and being in a heterosexual family unit.Sometimes the roles are what work best or are what is most practical.

I agree 'critical' has a negative connotation (for a lot of people, anyway; as *MyAmpleSheep *says, it really means better/less loaded things, but unfortunately that isn't how most people use or understand it).

And I agree even using the term 'gender' in this context is like somehow accepting the premise.

What is negative is where cultural ideas of gender restrict any person’s free choices, within their own abilities. I’m a scientist, my daughter is an engineer - not so long ago ‘gender’ would have prevented us from following the careers we love.

I don’t agree. Of course ‘critical’ is a negative! That’s the point. ‘Gender’ - the cultural stereotypes and roles - unfortunately exist. They most certainly need to be criticised, and to a large degree dismantled.

At the point we started using the term gender critical on this board, ‘sex realism’ was pretty much a given. Calling oneself a ‘sex realist’ is about as useful as ‘oblate spheroid earth realist’. I think it almost gives credence to the sex unrealists having a legitimate position which requires ‘balance’ in a debate.

The problem, for us, about trans ideology is that it hasnt a core belief. The rationale to allow a man into a changing room with teenage girls changes depending on who is justifying it.

If we say we are against gender, or ignoring sex, there'll be someone, somewhere who'll agree but still want men to be in that changing room.

I hate to be all rik from the young ones, but we are anti establishment as well. The Government, media, institutions have been using GC as a derogatory term. But whatever words we use will be eventually.

I like to focus on safeguarding, but again this is turned against us by people misunderstanding it.

You don't need to get into the minutae of genderist ideologies, you just need to keep laser clear that people born female also exist, being born female has specific risks and consequences, and whatever makes a trans woman a women, it's by definition a different thing to being born female so it makes no sense to say that people born female don't have the right to say what we need as well.

Don't get tricked into answering their questions, ask your own instead. Make them justify why people who are born female don't deserve support as well.

I'm using 'critical' in the sense of 'expressing or involving an analysis of the merits and faults of'

Well yes that too. My critiques of gender stereotypes tend to leave me critical of them!

I was gender critical before transactivism came to the fore. Even if transgenderism didn’t exist, I’d still be gender critical - no girl or boy, man or woman, should be prevented from fulfilling their potential because of restrictive gender roles and stereotypes.

I agree with this. It's incredibly easy for terms to get misused and I think 'critical of gender' is as simple and straightforward as it gets. Everyone argues about differences between sexes and how much they dictate what you're like etc and I think it gets very muddled.

GC is perfect. I think gender is harmful. To say I don't is just a really weird lie, but what else to expect from these dishonest people?!

And saying agender trans people are anti-trans is just bizarre as well. Absolutely shows the state of their 'arguments'.