OK, let's talk about gender.

[GarlicRound]

Warning: I've just realised I've been up all night and really need to get some sleep - so this is a post-and-run (until the evening). Second warning added: I tend to ramble a bit when tired. Apologies for the length!

Gender. Not the linked concepts of gender identity or grammatical gender, but the cultural expectations and impositions placed by societies on their members according to sex.

Like everyone else, I live in a society so am not free of externally applied or socially internalised gender. I have tried to resist it, personally and politically, since childhood. Since discovering feminism at 17, I've recognised it as a tool of patriarchal oppression.

I really hope people will run with it. Please raise questions, issues and share perspectives. We do this topic from time to time, so I'll kick off with a less-discussed angle: men 😄

A young male may grow up in a warlike society, which expects and requires men to be warriors. He may not feel himself to be warrior material, despite all his training. He may be distressed by violence, reluctant to hurt people, and far better suited to tending the wounded due to his irrepressibly kind disposition.

In a warrior society, violence defines a man. Our chap isn't violent, therefore he is not a man. He's kind and nurturing: qualities expected of a woman. By the logic of his culture, then, he is a woman - a woman with a penis (unless they cut it off to make sure). To make sense of him, they dress him in women's clothes and send him to do women's work, living with the women.

There is an obvious intersection here with gender identity and genderism. He might, if he were aware of the concept, 'identify as a woman' because this is the only explanation his society provides for a peace-loving male. We have evidence of this happening in Native American cultures with 'two-spirits' and archaeological finds of male skeletons with feminine trappings, among others.

It only means the guy 'is a woman' in terms of his people's highly prescriptive sex roles. The warrior stereotype for men still pertains in more flexible societies like ours: men are bigger, stronger than women, and more likely to be violent; in many ways the more physically dominant of men still overrule the gentler types.

It's one of the routes by which gender disadvantages males. There are others. By and large, though, sex stereotypes disadvantage women more widely and profoundly.

No, I'm saying that sex would be the only difference between men and women. Both sexes could present however they like but remain male and female from conception.

A bit like if you think of the whole world, throughout all time and through all cultures, the only thing men have in common is their sex. That's it.

It's not how they dress, whether they wear wigs or makeup or jewellery (all of this has been done by men) in the past.

The same goes for women. The only thing that unites them is their sex.

I agree with all that. Not sure what I'm disagreeing with you on, then :P Ah well!

yes

My apologies for the long post - I wanted to include the lengthy excerpts because most will probably not have run across Sontag's feminist writings or bought the book - and I found they weren't easy to summarise to demonstrate my point.

What makes Sontag interesting is that she doesn't fit neatly into 2nd wave feminism. In fact her feminist works are fairly peripheral and she was more of a gadfly. But she motivated a lot of 3rd wave feminism, especially Butler. There's a disjunction between 2nd and 3rd wave feminism - they're somewhat orthogonal to each other - Sontag, to some extent, explains that disjoint, and also helps answer the question: why use gender as a construct.

In a warrior society a man with the gift of healing is valued and no less a man. So too a man who can put into song the deeds of the warriors. And in that society however gentle you might be, you will still fight in the line of battle - because that's survival for the group.
Hypothetical tales about pre-history don't tell us much about our current society, anyway.

Surely Sontag is hugely better known and more widely read than Butler? And, obviously, readable, even if you disagree with things she said.

Butler just splatters out words.

So in this mythical society, are unfeminine fighty women expected to be warriors? Or are they declared mad and bad and locked up?

As an intellectual and essayist: yes, but for her feminist writing I would say less so. Several of the essays were out of print, and most of them considered minor. Sontag herself strongly resisted being labelled a feminist writer and I think only one of the essays was part of her author‑supervised collections. I personally would rate her more highly, and like I said her influence on Butler is remarkable - I would even go so far as to say that Gender Trouble can be read as a response to Sontag's writing, feminist and otherwise.

But I was shocked by the overwhelmingly hostile response the book got from feminists - especially the seeming unfamiliarity and incomprehension. Cooke's review is an example. So, it would seem that her feminist currency these days is very low. And it's certainly true that she was out-of-step with second wave feminists generally and adversarial to some of them, e.g. Adrienne Rich (their exchange is in the book).

It's hard to read the above excerpts and agree with everything she wrote, so I wasn't trying to put it forward as thesis. But I've been highly stimulated by it, for a number of reasons, the influence on Butler - but also because of the fact that she lays out the terrain that Butler covers, but without using the the word (or concept of) gender - and it feels somewhat odd for someone to talk bout sex roles and stereotypes without it - it's become so ingrained. In fact it's occurred to me: if only we could rewind and take off were Sontag left off in the late 70s. But that's idle musing.

For me, gender is still a pointless neologism. None of the foundation feminists needed it. Neither do we.

Sontag, for good or ill, was a thinker and commenter. Butler is a strategic careerist.

Just checked my notes. The number of labour corps in the army wasn't as high as I thought.

It was ofiicially about 10% so I correct that - but many of the front line units were carrying out these logistics jobs which took up the majority of the work needed for the war when in reserve - not the front line defence (hence why I've got my numbers mixed up). The labour corps still totalled 700,000 men though.

They weren't organised into groups to do these tasks until 1916. The Military Service Act 1916 created Non-Combatant Corps of conscientious objectors to work on non-combatant tasks and the Labour Corps themselves were formally created in 1917 in addition to these due to the need. They were otherwise manned by men who were medically rated below "A1" condition.

The minimum criteria for men changed a lot during the course of the war - at the start you had to be a minimum of 5'4" for example, but by 1918 they'd dropped this an a number of other requirements. You see a lot of men who were 5' dead in 1918 records - its quite startling to see the heights and weights of many of the men - 5'6" was tall. And there were a huge number who were regarded as underweight even by the standards of the time due to malnutrion. (This is one reason why it wasn't hard for 14 year olds to pass themselves off as 18). Army rations were better than the diet a lot of men had prior to the war and were a motivating factor to enlistment for some. Men who were initially rejected for service did enlist again later or were conscripted as the war when on as a result.

Many of the Labour Corps were the returned wounded (so had served on the front, were injured but were still enlisted and needed so given other roles). Later on in, particularly after March and April 1918 there was a real shortage of men, so you see men from the Labour Corps drafted into the front lines and increasing numbers of previously wounded returned to front lines.

This is in addition to the Royal Engineers too - who did things like build bridges, railways, repair guns and artillery, were in charge of communications and looked after horses etc. Basically a shitload of jobs.

There's also other weird specialist roles - such as the mining battalions - who were miners by trade tasked with things like digging under the enemy front lines, who didn't see front line action. Theres one example near Ypres where the British dug for two years and put 500,000kg of explosives under the German line. Which went successfully went kaboom with the effects you might imagine (10,000 casualties).

And the army cyclist corps - most of whom didn't leave the UK as they were considered too important. They were essentially the home defensive line along the coast.

You also get a lot of men who initially signed up for other battalions but then were transferred to the Corps (due to injury), recorded as having died under their original unit which further makes it hard to know much about the labour corps. As the man power crisis got worse in 1918, you start to see man transferred out of the Labour Corps into the front line too.

My other g grandfather who was in the labour corps was particular old - he actually lies about his age to get into the army; he said he was younger than he was. He also had had two kids and men with children were deprioritised for service until mid 1917 when they start to get short of men. More significantly he was Irish and Irish men were also more likely to be put into the Labour Corps (the British Government actively didn't want them walking around with guns).

Even then, from what I can tell, even if you were in a front line battalion you could still volunteer for roles like stretcher bearer rather than general solider. Reading through accounts, it sounds a lot like the stretcher bearers were some of the more respected men - precisely because their work was amongst some of the most dangerous at times. General soliders didn't want to do the job because of how it left them so exposed.

So yeah a SHIT load of jobs men could do in WW1 which weren't necessarily involving blood thirsty killing of the enemy.

There's an assumption there about transwomen invading female-only spaces. Are there any studies about this? Is it 100% or some other figure? I personally expect it's quite a high figure, but does anyone actually know?

If transwomen weren’t invading female only spaces, then the Supreme Court ruling might never have been necessary. And there would be no issue over Hampstead Ponds, and Sandie Peggie & the Darlington nurses would never have had to go to court.

The realisation that much of the population was malnourished was one reason why domestic science - cookery - was introduced into government schools, initially after the Boer War and then again after WWI.
There was a lot of protest by feminists that cookery was not a fit subject for academic girls, or that girls should not be pushed into knowing how to cook rather than being prepared for other work. This was the middle-class protest; working class women considered that schools teaching their daughters to cook was unwarranted government interference.
After WWII, with the passing of the 1944 Education Act, secondary moderns continued to teach domestic science (which was heavy on nutrition, healthy diets and cooking methods - I learned to make short, rough puff, flaky and choux pastry, various sorts of sponge cake and how to deep fry - along with how to run a house efficiently) but secondary grammars did not usually (and if so it was for the C stream, along with art etc).
The advent of food science was actually a step backwards, seeing cookery not as a domestic art but as preparation for work in the food preparation industries. There was also an undertow of desiring to increase demand for ready made foods, which entailed making sure most women/men (boys were doing domestic science fromt the 70s) could not cook properly.
One could see the introduction of domestic science in schools as part of the welfare state and of moves by government to regulate the people's lives towards what governments thought were good outcomes. That lots of girls (and later boys) learned to enjoy cooking was an unintended bi-product (not one Mrs Thatcher wanted to continue if it stopped people buying ready-meals!).

Yes. There were people awarded the VC who never carried a gun, for example a Canadian chaplain who helped wounded soldiers under fire.

Obviously. But is it all transwomen, most transwomen, half of transwomen, a minority of transwomen? I suspect most, but does anyone actually know?

Are you talking about the percentage of TW who use women's spaces?

Or the percentage who do knowing and understanding that it feels invasive for women ?

It sounds like you're saying that the intention matters. I don't care what a TWs motivation / intention is for being there - the result is the same for me (and other women).

The rhetoric of today’s transactivism is more like colonial aggression. It’s not at all gentle and nurturing towards women.

Yes, this ^ is the visible face of transactivism, but in my experience there are also many younger men who are adopting a TW identity precisely because - along with being autistic- they are more soft spoken and are not aligned with sports mad physically robust type of young male seen on the football pitch. Maybe it’s too much to suggest that Andrew Tate et al has shifted the Overton window, but there might be some merit in @GarlicRound thesis.

I'm talking about the percentage of men claiming to be women who enter women's spaces. I'm not aware of any researched figure for this. My guess is that it is over, probably well over, 50% and under 100%. I have little evidence about even the trans people I know personally; I know one has used an accessible toilet when men's and women's were also available; I haven't personally seen him enter or exit any women's spaces since he declared his trans identity.

We don't have reliable figures on practice, let alone intention (about which I agree with you).