How did we get here?

[StormyPotatoes]

I like to hope with the Supreme Court ruling and public opinion changing rapidly we are finally moving into a new period where women’s rights and concerns matter, and biology prevails. But I don’t really understand how we got here to begin with and I really hope some knowledgeable posters can provide some background on this.

I am mid-to-late 30s. Femboi-emo kids were cute when I was a teen. I had a very huge crush on Brian Molko. Most of my male friends (and my now husband) wore eyeliner. Nobody in my year came out as gay whilst at school as the taboo still existed, but interestingly 3 girls in my mixed sex class of 30 came out as lesbians away from school (yes, they are all actual women - not men).

My exposure whilst a teenage to transsexuals was Hayley Cropper, the sympathetic and kind transwoman-played by an actual woman in Coronation Street; and Nadia, the winner of season 5 big brother, who I had forgotten all about in all honesty and was only reminded about due to current BB. It’s now occurred to me that the gender recognition act passed in the same year Nadia won BB.

At that time trans was unusual - I remember cross dressing being a thing and named, as we know, as transvestism. And I also remember, back then, so many of the historic and well documented serial killers had proclivities in cross dressing, which seems to now be downplayed.

So what happened between then and now? Why did very, very few men manage to influence the change in the Equality Act? Where did this sharp increase of trans people suddenly come from (we know it can’t be the GRA because most didn’t apply for it)?

And I think more importantly - why did both governments and media suddenly become so afraid to call a man a man? And worse, seek to punish a woman who dares to call a man a man. The GRA is one thing, but so many of the men who have been actively labelled as women by both politicians and journalists don’t hold a GRA. Where is the political and journalistic integrity they are supposed to uphold?

What happened? Not so much the boom in trans people but why they became a law of their own?

How did we get to where the EHRC got equality law wrong, even when there were plain examples within the guidance, saying for instance women only rape crisis facilities? Could it have been anything to do with their Chair from 2016 to 2020, David Issac.

David Issac was chair of Stonewall from 2003. He left to another charity before Stonewall kicked off in earnest over the T but that means nought.

people whose self identity is wrapped up in being kind and caring.

Indeed. It was telling that Kate Searle's last line of defence as she crumbled under interrogation was wailing 'But I'm a kind person!'. Her indentity mattered more than her actions.

There's some interesting research showing that people who classify themselves as 'a good person' tend to have worse moral behaviour than those who don't.¹

Because they're 'a good person' it doesn't matter to their self image if they do bad things - as a good person they must obviously be doing them for the right reason, and the end justifies the means if your soul is pure. Whereas if you're simply 'a person who mostly tries to do the right thing', you do actually have to do it.

¹ (From memory I think it may have been good vs neutral; not sure they tested good vs actively evil. That may have had different results.)

I would be very interested in reading more about that research if you can recall the details.

I believe it was due to Isaacs.

He either was already influenced or allowed those pushing the Stonewall approach to law to be used in the EHRC. It is perhaps a very good reminder about how these connections work.

Group trends vs individual meaning is one of the areas genderism tends to go wrong (accidentally or to suit their argument).

There are group-level behaviour differences between men and women. Some are entirely socially defined ('girls like pink' is specific to modern western culture), some are at least partly biological (men are more violent than women because they have more testosterone, because they have greater strength that means they're more likely to have a 'successful' result from acting violently, and because society allows and even encourages them to be more violent).

But most of these trends tell us nothing about the individual, and the link with sex is an indirect one. A man who likes pink is still a man; a violent woman is still a woman; it's no use asking my (male) DP about the rules of rugby but he can tell you the lift rules for a competition Vienese waltz.

Whereas physiological and anatomical difference is much more directly linked. A person who produces eggs is always a woman (even though not all women produce eggs). And a person with testosterone levels over 5 is a man (or a woman in need of immediate medical treatment).

I'm afraid I'm.terrible at saving links, @eatfigs , but I may have something lurking in my bookmarks. I'll have a rummage.

Thank you @NoBinturongsHereMate for articulating my point of view so well!

There's often a confusion between traits at class level (eg a sex class) vs at individual level. We could describe the average woman using various measures across all women and choosing the mean score. However the vast majority of women will not match that description at all. It has no effect on whether or not they are female.

Look at it this way.... if we used measures at class level, we could say that the average human has one breast and one bollock. However, trying to use that information to help or describe etc any individual is utterly useless.

Actually that reminds me of that website where they provided the average calorie requirements for men, women... and non-binary people by calculating the midpoint between the two

Most people, when confronted with an ‘expert’ in a subject they don’t personally know much about, are happy to take that expertise as read unless there are some really obvious mistakes made. Most people also don’t like causing upset and offence, especially in a group that they’ve been reliably informed is very vulnerable.

I would go further and say that most people (maybe 'kind' people) accept other people's expertise even when it doesn't match with what they actually see around them.

For example a man looking around their workplace and thinking "The women here all seem to be making progress, and I covered all that work for Emma when she went on maternity leave", or a white person looking around their neighbourhood and thinking "There's a great multicultural mix here, and there's loads of interesting new food available".

Other people's lives do mostly look pretty good from the outside, and their daily problems generally seem somewhat less urgent than your own.

So how do you deal with it if things look ok to you but the experts tell you, actually, they aren't ok? That you should be behaving differently, doing more to help, or that what you thought was normal behaviour is actually unhelpful, or a "microagression"?

If you are a decent person, you are going to believe those other people, and try to change. Maybe throw in a bit of guilt for not noticing that other people were suffering. The instinct is good - but your background doubt of "Is this really a problem? Really?" might never go away, especially if it's something which is always going to be outside your own experience.

And that's how I think trans rights have taken hold. People are inured to the dissonance. "I don't fully understand, but I want to be supportive" easily shades into "I won't ever understand and I must be supportive regardless."

@NoBinturongsHereMate @potpourree
Agree with all you say.

The relevance to this discussion, to answer the question 'how did we get here?', is that when some feminists claimed that 'biological sex was completely irrelevant' back in the 80s, they were thinking mainly about success in their careers and equal distribution of housework. They were not thinking about letting men in the female toilets.
Unfortunately, the very widespread adoption in society of the basic attitude that biology was irrelevant was adopted wholesale by the genderists and taken extremely literally.

As another strand, some academics went too far, and in fact went completely off the rails, and ended up trying to demolish sex (in favour of gender-woo), instead of demolishing sex-based discrimination, maybe because the latter actually seemed harder than the former.

Unfortunately, the very widespread adoption in society of the basic attitude that biology was irrelevant

Do you think anyone did actually believe this?
I struggle to believe that even, say, 20% of society believe this or did believe it. Sexism never went away and it was and is always based on people's sex - their biology.

It was meant in mainly in terms of work. There were very strong messages to girls that 'you can do anything you want' for a job. We were told that the only difference that was women got pregnant, but with maternity pay we could still have a great career. We were told you only had to have a few weeks off work, and even if you wanted to breast feed for four months (the norm, weaning used to start at four months), you could just pump, or the childcare could use bottles while you were at work.
Plus there was the whole 'ladette' culture in the 90s, that women could drink and enjoy casual sex just like men.
It was not literally that 'biology' per se was irrelevant, just that as a woman you could do anything, and that modern men should be perfectly happy to change nappies and push prams.

Of course the patriarchy and sexism never went away. Women being told 'you can do anything you want' is not quite the same as actually getting equal promotions and having no sexism at work.
Perhaps it was only the women that believed their biology was irrelevant, and the men were just pretending to go along with it.

As I said, the backlash in terms of gendering children's stuff was huge. Whether this was driven by parents or by corporations is hard to say.

We were told that the only difference that was women got pregnant

Do you disagree with this, in terms of being able to do a normal sort of job (eg not requiring male strength etc)?

Perhaps it was only the women that believed their biology was irrelevant, and the men were just pretending to go along with it.

Absolutely. This is why I think it wasn't ever "widely accepted" or believed that women and men were on equal footing except for genitals!

Before childbirth, women absolutely can do non-physical jobs just like men. Some unfortunate women suffer dreadfully with PMT, but generally most women cope fine and perform as well as at any other time of month, and as well as their male colleagues.

However, after childbirth, not many women can go back to work after six weeks, or even less time, and pick up where they left off as if nothing had happened, or as if they had just been off for a minor operation like having an appendix out.
Such women are outliers.
Most women who go back so early are forced to by financial circumstances and they suffer for it.
Many women (not all) go back to work sooner than they would like, even after a year off, and many have to fight their hormones every step of the way. I have read here on MN of women crying in the toilets at work because they miss their baby so much.

This is why I think it wasn't ever "widely accepted" or believed that women and men were on equal footing except for genitals!
No, not that women were on an equal footing. The sexism in society was always apparent, even after the legislation of the 1970s.
What we were told was that our biology, our body, was irrelevant, and that we should fight the sexism in society, and furthermore we would soon win.

I'm not talking about time off for childbirth.

I'm asking whether you think that there is any difference between women and men in being able to do a "normal" sort of job under normal circumstances (i.e. not having given become a parent in the past couple of years).

You seem to disagree that - in terms of doing a job - that pregnancy and maternity is the only difference between men and women so I'm trying to tease out what you think that is. (Maybe you don't disagree - I'm not clear).

My second question was not about "being told" - we are told billions of things that we don't accept without question - but when you said it was "the very widespread adoption in society of the basic attitude that biology was irrelevant" - I am not sure if that is what you meant to say, so im trying to figure it out.

Hope you don't read my tone as snarky, it's not meant to be!

Six weeks?! Are you in the US?

Six weeks is all many people can afford. A lot of nice employers who want to attract and retain talented women to work there may offer a good occupational maternity pay package but lots don't. If you are only entitled to SMP you get 6 weeks at 90% of full pay then it drops to the weekly rate of £187.18 which is £811 per month. Average non-london rent is £1,141 per month. If you have no other way to meet obligations for rent and bills there may be no other option.

True, the higher level of SMP is short - but your statement 'We were told you only had to have a few weeks off work' suggests a significant number of people thought that this is a good thing. I don't remember that ever being the case. Even back in the 90s at the height of ladette culture and the libfem 3rd wave, the predominant UK conversation I was aware of was not '6 weeks is plenty', but 'why don't we have 3 years like Scandinavia?'.

Hell yeah!

I think the answer is because that's not how ideas work. They often aren't thought out and discrete over time.

This is why it's so bloody foolish to think we can tear down taboos and pass laws thinking that safeguards of some kind or another will stop them from being misused. New ideas change the way people view the world, often without them really knowing it.

As you have young women growing up in the 70s and 80s and 90s, with this idea that men and women are basically interchangable and the same, comfortably taking for granted the technology that makes it possible for them to believe that, what develops along side it is a new kind of sense of what it is to be a man or woman.

And the new sense isn't a person who becomes pregnant, or impregnates, or who could be a mother or a father, because those aren't seen as integral to the definition, in fact they are regressive ideas. The new sense is that it's about some abstract idea of being womanly or manly. The socially accepted trappings of masculinity or femininity.

Of course if it were really true there were no differernce masculinity and femininity wouldn't survive, but we aren't talking about a systematic rational system. It's just people's sense of things, fairly unexamined, which develops when they accept certain socially popular beliefs.

Are you very young?

Because I can tell you, as a woman who has had four children and am in the throes of menopause, that plenty of behaviour is hormone driven. Fuck - my thoughts are hormone driven a lot of the time.

The same is true of other mammals so no surprise really.

I also think people just have more experience around sports.

People think the idea of men in women's prisons is bad - expect when they are being told, by people in the prison service, that this is right for transwomen and there is no risk because they are actually more vulnerable than women.

So they assume the experts know what they are talking about and also would not do something crazy like put eal men in with women. (They also tend to assume more transwomen are gay men, as in, interested sexually in other men.)

Sports are differernt. Many people have lots of personal experience playing sports, and as soon as they see examples of males in women's sports, they can see, with their own eyes, that it is not on.

How did we get here? IE the point where females & males freely express their shared personality traits?

Biological evolution.

Whilst males & females have distinctive biological functions that result in on average distinctive behaviours, behaviours also overlap because as it turns out adaptability is necessary for survival. IE different environmental pressures call for different approaches that our shared capabilities can adapt to.

Cue feminism. Given certain environmental pressures were 'relieved' meant people were more at liberty to express whatever their individual organic personal inclinations were that didn't always align with previous social expectations of gendered roles because of shared personality traits.

All this is to say that the idea that gender expression is purely a learned phenomena is false. Rather its a an organic phenomena to express masculinity or femininity.

'But that doesn't mean you can change biological sex' people say. True, but given society has associated typical behaviours to specific sexes its accurate to say on the level of societal categorisations, behaviour is a sex distinction.

Gender critical feminists whilst correct to be concerned by how patriarchal expectations continue to pressure behaviour, don't account for how the overwhelming majority of that behaviour is a free choice powered by natural inclinations that was millions of years in the making which is now reflected in societal acceptance.

“given society has associated typical behaviours to specific sexes its accurate to say on the level of societal categorisations, behaviour is a sex distinction.”

How is that definitive list of male and female behaviours that allows accurate categorisation of humans coming along? The list of behaviours that never change from birth to death so that categorisation for access to single sex provisions can be done?

And can we please please please have the BIMODAL SEX model you talked about? With the axes marked clearly.