Gender critical viewpoint as explained by a bloke

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Morning all,

Was browsing reddit last night whilst sitting around on the evening shift. Ended up going down a bit of a rabbithole and reading some discussions on AskTransgender as was curious to see what the response to the recent supreme court ruling was.

Ended up reading a thread asking why so many cis women are 'not accepting of trans women' and one of the first responses I read was the below, which appeared to be written by a man. I'm still getting my head around the various arguments as tbh I've not really given much thought to the whole discussion the past few years - I don't think I've ever actually seen a trans person in real life aside from a few non binary looking schoolgirls who could also have been lesbians, and I work in the construction sector where all this woke stuff is pretty non existent.

Curious to see if people agree with the below. Sounds pretty logical to me and quite surprised it hasn't caused an epic shitstorm on there tbf lol.

Some people are just bigoted no doubt, but I think it's reductive to suggest it's all down to transphobia. I think more often it's a fundamental disagreement on a few key aspects.

Typically, the discussion focuses on trans identity and the refusal of gender critical women to accept said identity. However, I think in some cases the resistance might actually stem from the GC women feeling that their own identity is being challenged.

For example, if you've been accepted as 'a woman' all your life and somebody you perceive as male suddenly tells you that they're a women now and you're a cis woman some people aren't going to like that. Perhaps even less if that person is younger than them or of a demographic that would've been considered male in traditional societies.

That would perhaps explain why a lot of GC women tend to be middle aged - they've had years of being a woman and then suddenly a 20 year old 'male' (in their eyes) tells them he's a woman and biological women are now just a sub category of womanhood. Whether or not the GC woman is justified in feeling this way, some will no doubt argue that it's like telling a pre-op trans woman that she's now going to be called a 'pre-trans' rather than just a 'trans woman'.

Another common theme seems to be women's safety. I'm not going to try and define biological sex as there is much disagreement on what constitutes it. However, we know for a fact that 98% of recorded sex crimes are committed by individuals with a penis. This seems to be a big part of GC women's resistance to being alone in a state of undress with individuals that have penises, or facilitating a situation where said individuals could be around their daughters unsupervised whilst both are unclothed. Same for women who are rape survivors and experience trauma responses when alone with unfamiliar males, especially when naked and feeling vulnerable, or women that can't be naked with 'male bodied' people for religious reasons.

This isn't strictly about trans women from what I've read. The argument seems to be that we don't want to normalise the situation where a male paedophile can just claim to be a woman and follow the girls swimming team into the changing rooms. Many would say this is the entire reason we have sex segregated facilties in the first place and the reason behind the recent Supreme Court judgement.

Unfortunately, there have been a few high profile cases where some pretty vile sex offenders (e.g. Barbie Kardashian) have transitioned and been sent to women's prisons, which has fuelled the flames. Many people would argue that a male sex offender shouldn't be able to get sent to an institution full of vulnerable women just by claiming to be a woman shortly before the sentencing date, which appears to be what happened.

These aren't necessarily my own views. I'm just explaining what I understand to be the common GC arguments as somebody who has tried to understand both sides of the debate.

I suspect the middle classes are more likely to be political activists across the board.

Possibly. Although there also seems to be a huge rise in protests against things like immigration. Reform, Tommy Robinson, etc. I think online debate is very much the reserve of the educated but possibly not marches/protests etc.

Well the other day we had Tandora prattling on about how it WAS a condition and to check medical journals. Notably Tandora did respond to my picking apart of this (mainly cos there isn't a response)

So even the TRAs are super divided on this point and this only strengthens the point that there is multiple groups within the monolith that transactivism has created which doesn't reflect the reality that it's a multi cohort movement.

I remember wondering what an 'enby' was before the penny dropped when I first read the phrase.

I think sex feels a lot more real when you've had babies or know lots of people who have.

I also suspect younger women are more likely to just "be kind" (or pretend to be) as a PP said, and obviously have less life experience in general.

There was a thread on here where it was being discusssed whether a trans woman assumes a female identity whilst a gay man assumes a female sexuality. That if one person claimed to be a dog but the other just walked around on all fours and barked we wouldn't assume the latter wasn't also mentally ill.

The post seems to focus on identity, missing the point that GC women argue that women need specific rights regardless of their identity.

The poster could start by trying to understand what 'gender critical' means.

I'm not very tolerant of the thinking process that's leads people to think the moon landings were fake, the pyramids were built by aliens or the earth is flat. GI is on the same batshittery level as the typical crank view's. I'm not a support animal, I'm not going to indulge people's denial of reality, or their need to be made to feel 'special'. Cobblers is cobblers, at least the usual cranks don't want to give my right's to the alien overlords, or demand I don't go near the edge.

I'm not familiar with the post or the thread, but the difference between a man and a woman is not who they have sex with.

The fundamental difference is reproductive role.

Yes, but we also have had an expert in the field clarify for us gender identity is about someone’s understanding of their experiences and how it doesn’t mean that the person’s experience as a male person who says they are female is not having in any way a materially real female experience, only that the male person categorises the experience of it being female. Therefore it is a ‘female’ experience and that male person is living as a ‘female’.

This miscategorisation is part of post modernist theory. It doesn’t exist outside those philosophical theories. Hence it is all based on a philosophical belief about themselves that is not materially real. There have been many words for this used in the past that I won’t use here.

But the basic premise really comes down to ‘why should someone’s philosophical belief about themselves that is not based in material reality being treated as if it is materially real in situations where it causes direct negative impacts to others’?

I'm just explaining what I understand to be the common GC arguments as somebody who has tried to understand both sides of the debate.

How hard-of- thinking does someone have to be to fail to grasp "sex is real, immutable, and sometimes it matters"?

I don’t think so, I think this is someone firmly GC, who has gone into do the good work, in a low key, not disagreeing with anyone sort of way.
He knows that going away from the Orthodoxy will get everything he says rubbished and probably a lifetime ban. So he walking a fine line.
It’s probably actually a woman.

I agree it’s someone who really knows their stuff.

Class analysis is based on what the individual is, not how the individual identifies.

Trans ideology is individual identity and not limited by what the individual actually is.

This could be compatible if we were looking at two different things, but trans ideology wants to remove sex class and replace with identity.

But the needs of the female sex class haven't disappeared because some men have a female identity and some women don't. And thats the issue that TRA dont want to acknowledge.

And i think this is what the post is saying, but in trans language.

The reason GC is percieved to be middle age women is partly because middle age women have the confidence, money and fuck off attitude that younger women dont have. And partly because the trans movement dont see how they are full of middle aged people too.

All of this for sure, except perhaps your final sentence. Identifying as has acquired weighty new significance in the past 15 years or so. It isn't really a normal and natural part of the human condition. It's related to some of things humans naturally do, having exaggerated and extrapolated those things to a freshly invented level.

My identity is comprised of facts: my name, first and foremost. I'd add, as needed, other basic facts that are on my passport: nationality, ethnicity, age, sex and height. In some circumstances I might add my educational background, work history, family background, relationship status and suchlike. None of it is about feelings or beliefs.

Re beliefs: People whose religion features strongly in their lives would probably add it to their mental self-description, as very politically active people would include their affiliation and avid sports fans their team. It wouldn't be at all normal for them to believe their beliefs overrode or altered their 'passport identity', though, as genderists seem to.

The closest I've come to identifying as was in my teens and twenties, while experimenting with different lifestyles that felt incredibly significant at the time, and which allied me with certain groups of (temporarily) like-minded young people. This gradually morphed into status-based group bonding as careers and property prices came to the fore, then we all abandoned the self-labelling because we'd realised there's more to life. You can have interests, a personality, talents & flaws, and they make you uniquely your self - no need for a clearly-marked package, it's just who you are.

The youthful labelling process is part of an individuation phase that's considered a normal part of growing up. I'd assume that young people's identifying as is the same thing, but it worries me greatly that many of them are making permanent alterations to their bodies and interfering with their physical maturation. It's concerning, too, that grown adults propagate the belief in self-imagined identity as something necessary, normal and permanent. It has become the equivalent of a cult.

... that was much longer than I intended! Sorry if it's a derail.

As Merrymouse says, it’s not in any way about “my identity being challenged”. I admit being called a “cis woman” is enraging but that is because what transactivists are trying to do is to change the meanings of words to distort reality.

It’s not about “my identity”. I don’t think I really have one of those. It’s about the meaning of the word woman and how changing that meaning removes all of women’s rights, as those rights mostly exist to offer protection from men, and if we pretend some men are women, that protection is removed.

So the piece is presented from a position where we may still be wrong and I know we are not. I think most women objecting to transactivism eventually land here. It’s as if an absolute madness has invaded the world and any suggestion that the madness may have any basis whatsoever in fact, is also enraging as I can see with absolute clarity that it’s all nonsense.

In short, it’s not about me and my personal feelings. It’s very straightforwardly about correcting nonsense and not being gaslighted. The author of that piece is still missing the point of just how damaging transactivism is to society and women in particular.

That is very well put. The identities that I went through as a adolescent and teen were a narrowing; only wearing particular clothes that identified me in a certain group, liking a narrow collection of music. I then opened myself up to more possibilities as I got further into adulthood.

Girlhood/womanhood didn't enter into it, as my PP, that was only ever imposed upon me from the outside.

What the post didn't acknowledge, and i dont think they could and remain up, is that trans identifying men have and used the advantage of being the dominant sex, while still removing womens ability to organise as a sex class.

For example so many of men involve hold positions of authority so can influence how policy is made. So are paid to remove women being a sex class, and women have to fund their own legal cases to get their rights back.

Yes - and it's not just about protection from men - it's the fact that women depend on rights that men just don't need.

My great grand mothers had between 4 and 9 children. I don't know how much say they had in that, but my life is different because I have access to maternity care, contraception, abortion and work place maternity rights. I also have a greater ability to take a rapist to court, and protect myself from domestic violence.

Women got the right to vote in my grandmother's lifetime. I think many people argued that women shouldn't have the vote because they were not independent of their husbands (similar to arguments over 16 year olds voting now), and whether or not that is morally wrong, it is objectively true that without rights that we now take for granted, women were not independent of their husbands.

I think that sometimes it takes a few decades to understand that women depend on a scaffold of rights that can be taken away.

All this waffling about identity really is a luxury.

I agree. I’m surprised and pleased that he’s got most of the main points, especially that it’s about women’s and children’s genuine safety as opposed to sex fetishists’ pretend fear.

If it’s AI-generated, I’m impressed that it got it right. I’m so much more used to finding AI full of mistakes.

For me the AI Reddit response misses, as pp say, that young generations have had less exposure to decades of male fuckery and always rebel against what they perceive as outdated ideas.

Older women generally have had the exposure and are more likely to be aware of the threat men - however they present - pose to them and their offspring.

2 huge elements of womanhood are always omitted from the discussions and definitions of womanhood in the gender identity realm, which are motherhood and sexual oppression. We don't seem to be allowed to talk about either, sexual oppression particularly.

Some powerful voices in the trans lobby are adult males living out autogynephilia. I see EI/SI as an example. The biggest victims of the movement are autistic teenage and pre teenage girls who are often on a pathway to permanent disfigurement/medicalisation and who have become vocal advocates for the adult males.

These girls often see their parents/mothers as bigoted enemies when they try to safeguard them. It is a nightmare situation for those parents when schools and the NHS can cast them in this light too.

There is nothing remotely new in the first part. I was a victim of sexual grooming by 2 older males as an adolescent girl and I was their biggest cheerleader and supporter at the time. See also the grooming gangs cases. It is only later (and possibly permanently) that the sexual trauma can no longer stubbornly be ignored or brushed aside. Abusers always try to turn their victims away from their sources of protection and support.

The difference now is the authorities; who have some legislated control over children, above that of parents are now in collusion with physical and emotional abuse. When historically they had been apt to turn a blind eye and dismiss concerns.

Even post Cass Report, we are still not really allowed to raise concerns about what is happening to children. I am very careful about what I say to my own children as I want them to come to me. My younger 2 are 12 and 14, both with an autism diagnosis. The elder is gay and (thankfully, please let it continue 🙏) still a girl, or a subsection of girl. I am still so worried for them, we are not out of the woods yet.

This is far more important to me than any risk to myself. I feel I am through the worst for myself, in the sense that I am very clear about who I am, whatever assails me from the outside world.

That’s an extremely good point @cosimarama

That’s an extremely good point @cosimarama

That’s an extremely good point @cosimarama

That’s an extremely good point @cosimarama