Why do you care so much about gender issues?

[GCScot]

Longtime lurker, first time poster.

I'm fully GC, mainly due to this board. So first of all, thank you for all the excellent thoughtful discussion!

DH and most of my family are also GC. But they don't care about it anywhere near as much as me. This got me wondering - why do some of us care so much about gender ideology?

My reasons are:

1. I'm a lifelong feminist. Gender ideology causes so many issues for women. But the attempted redefinition of the very word woman feels like an actual existential threat

1. I'm a lifelong lefty. Finding myself on 'the other side' to left-wing political parties, friends, and institutions I have trusted all my life (The Guardian, BBC, NHS, universities) has completely thrown me. Am I wrong? If I'm not wrong, how have they gone so spectacularly wrong?

1. I have a science background. The (wilful?) ignorance of the basic science of biological sex and the prioritisation of feelings over facts enrages me

1. I have personally had a double mastectomy and hormone therapy for breast cancer. These were extreme medical treatments to save my life and have long-term health repercussions - I am at high risk of heart disease and osteoporosis. The fact that physically healthy children and vulnerable young people are being encouraged to undergo these treatments makes me sad and angry

1. The 'No debate' aspect of this issue is totally against my values. I work for a fully captured institution (Scottish university) and being unable to freely speak about this issue means that it is frequently running through my mind

Do any of the above resonate with others? Do you have any additional reasons why you care so much about this issue?

One of the first things that peaked me was Émilia Decaudin getting the rules in the New York State election codes which had been bound by “one man, one woman”, changed to different genders and ended up being two men elected, IIRC, and I just knew this was bad news for the gains made for women.

I’m a biochemist and the whole changing sex concept is just complete garbage; gender identity is just regressive stereotyping (lipstick, long hair and playing with dolls) that I’d thought we’d got rid of years ago. I grew up reading Germaine Greer (I dont care).

What peaked me was listening to nurses talking about men in women’s wards, when I was in hospital - I hadn’t really realised what was going on until then. I’ve been a victim of SA more than once so I would freak out if there was a bloke in a wig in the next hospital bed.
I even broke the habit of a lifetime and voted Tory at the last GE, because women’s rights and safety are an absolute priority for me.

Also, why do supporters of the gender identity movement get away with being so nebulous about their central tenet?

They change gender, and expect the rest of us to pretend they've changed sex.

Sex is inescapably a biological reality. All women will live and die female, all men will live and die male.
There are differences between the sexes.
Some of the most relevant differences biologically are that men are on average bigger, stronger, faster and more aggressive than women. They are more prone to develop sex fetishes and other paraphilias, and to commit violent crimes and sex offences.
Culturally, women are disadvantaged throughout most of the world, and are openly denied human rights in many countries.

Men may like wearing clothes traditionally worn by women, or performing other stereotypes of femininity, but it doesn't affect their sex. People may use hormones and surgery to look more like someone of the other sex, but again it doesn't change which sex they are.

Gender is an element of some people's personalities. It's as (ir)relevant to anyone else as your star sign or your favourite band. Currently, 'gender' is used to mean performing the sex stereotypes of one or the other sex.

A lot of transactivists say they don't deny biological reality, that they change gender, not sex. That would be fine if it was true, if the men just tried to look like women and act in what they see as a feminine way.

But they never stop at that. They demand the right to use our facilities and services, take our jobs and prizes, and have access to our private spaces. Basically, they're demanding the right to have everything that's ours. When men make these demands, and expect to have them agreed to, that's male supremacism. It's not in any way about equality. It's about obliterating women's rights.

What they're demanding is to be treated as the other sex, not the other gender. Which shows how meaningless their talk of 'gender' identity really is.

More than anything I simply find it fascinating, and I think it touches on so many modern issues.

Meghan Daum was asked this in a recent interview and she gave the same answer but put it much better than I could, from 1:32:40

I think this is a misrepresentation.

Very few Genderists claim biology is fully mutable.

Common claims are:

Sex isn't biology, it's mental. So people can have the wrong sex for their body. They don't change sex, they just correct their body.

Sex isn't biology, it's cultural constructs wrongly applied to bodies. So you can be either sex, or no sex, regardless of what body features you have.

Sex is biology but because there is overlap between secondary characteristics like height and strength, and because DSDs and gender medical interventions mean biological features of one sex can appear in the other, means no one can ever really assess someone else's sex so you just need to take their word for it

Saying women are a certain sex is reducing women to baby makers and we don't think that is ok any more so why can't male people be women?

These ideas get treated like a pic n mix, so you quite often find the same person using contradictory arguments at different times, or even at different times in the same conversation.

Yet for all the handwaving, none of them ever explain why, if biological sex isn't important to who is a man or a woman, is it so important that the pre-existing language and provisions that were set up because of biological sex and the impact has on us, that only exist because of biological sex, are nevertheless exactly the right ones that need to be used for the thing that is definitely not biological sex, and that any language or activity or support or social analysis that is based on biological sex can't exist alongside it but has to stop being done altogether.

Because honestly, some of those ideas I would actually be entirely comfortable with if they were just following their own logic and treating Gender as something totally separate to body sex.

Just give this thing that is not sex a different name to the names of the sexes, and let us carry on also having names, rights and recogition of the impact of our bodies and the history of sex and sexism on especially women.

This is exactly what happened in the old days of "political correctness".

Back then I was young and naive, and it took me a long time to realise that what on the face of it seemed very progressive and inclusive actually boiled down to "this is what we think the people who are excluded would be saying if they were not excluded" and thinking that was the same as actually including them.

I count myself lucky that the way my life has gone means I have at different times been on equal terms with very different demographics.

1. Because it's bollocks;
2. Because it's bollocks that is actively insulting to women;
3. Because it's bollocks that is actively harmful to women and children;
4. Because it's bollocks that is messing up legal frameworks;
5. Because it's bollocks that is messing up basic safeguarding;
6. Because it's bollocks that is exposing a deep-seated misogyny that I thought we had left behind some time ago;
7. Because it's bollocks that is exposing a deep inability of a significant portion of the population (including sections that we should absolutely be able to rely on to know better) to exercise the most basic critical reasoning skills, which has disturbing wider implications;
8. Because it's bollocks that was designated as the modern heresy and attempted to gag anyone speaking against it by every possible method.

Because in order to have any hope of living in a reasonably orderly, free society we need to deal in fact and be allowed to speak freely to establish it.

Learning about the Inquisition horrified me. Learning about the witch trials horrified me. Learning about McCarthyism horrified me.

Same bollocks, different day.

So much this! I mean of course we would be including the excluded ppl except they have tedious opinions like believing in biological reality which is just so unkind amirite?? Therefore it's just best to exclude them so we can congratulate ourselves on how kind we are

they don't know what's best for them anyway

I think it's the gaslighting and that we're being told that this is now the only version of the truth that can now exist that really irks me, as for all we keep hearing that this is a social construct, not in my world it isn't.

About 7/8 yrs back, I asked my DEI lead at work about trans issues. And I said I'm pretty centre left with most things, but I couldn't get on board with this as being something I could agree with. She actually agreed with me and we had a great discussion about sex, and the regressive nature of stereotypes. Fast forward to now and such a conversation with our new DEI lead would not be possible such is the control speak that has developed in the intervening period.

Much of my discomfort from this comes from my own life experience growing up. I really did challenge teachers an conventions at school and can recall one when I was 8 or 9 telling me that I, "Should've been a boy" given my interests and passions, but I was always supported by a really open Mum and grandparents. They were very open and supportive of just following my interests wherever those take me, and never bound by the belief that there were 'girl's toys' or 'boy's toys'. There were times I would have desperately wanted to have been like my friends who were all boys and whose bodies became muscular while mine became curvy, and who gradually left me behind in sports. I had to hide away my bleeding every month (and that started just before my 9th birthday), and I desperately hated being an early developer. I would have taken a way out if anyone had offered it to me back then. Now as I reflect back, I realise it was just growing up and a discomfort with my body not being able to be like my friends and, tbh, it wasn't an option back then to be anything other than a (and I bloody hate the word) 'tomboy'. I used to get the, "You're not really a girly girl" which I now see as shorthand for, "You're not what I think a girl should be" and it's so offensive to assume that there's a right way for a girl to be. I am no less of a girl than those who wore pink and wanted to be a princess than me being obsessed with drawing World War 2 aircraft with my grandfather, playing drums and wanting to be a footballer! How regressive is that for our young women to wish anything other for them than the heights of their own ambition?

I've sat in meetings where I've heard senior NHS staff talk about their 'gender affirming' haircuts and the like and I wonder if this is what we've become? Short hair = something other than woman, and it all just feels depressive, regressive and deeply unambitious for our boys and girls that the rigidities of gender stereotypes have come to play such a defining part of who they are, right down to suggesting their sex matches these gender stereotypes for no reason other than they can't possible believe of a life beyond adherence to these gender stereotypes.

Foremost is just the fact that it's based on a lie - the idea that a man can in any way become a woman, either biologically through surgery or socially by embodying or attempting to embody female sex-based stereotypes. The law and institutions should simply never have been allowed to perpetuate this lie (whether or not those doing so were true believers or just toeing the 'be kind' line).

Interesting that she suggests much of the support for gender ideology may be due to the perception that it is gay rights version 2.0. I definitely think that is one of the main factors in its success

I think this is also where I started. I've always really been interested in epistemology and the philosophy of science and how that interacts with medicine, so it seemed such a bizarre thing.

And as identity politics have taken over whole sections of the left I've found that kind of fascinating in a train wreck kind of way. The complete inability of the antiracist crowd to understand correlation vs causation, for example. The weird appeals to emotion.

I also have been involved in education a fair bit over the years and have been really horrified at what I've seen there.

But mainly because it's bollocks, right? 😂

I think universities are vulnerable to ideological trends because making an academic reputation depends on rocking the previous boat, but it's safest if you do it in a fashionable way. So there has to be a continual succession of "new takes", but there's also a tendency for particular forms of iconoclasm to become a bandwagon for a while.

First it was Freud, and digging the sexual dirt on eminent Victorians etc ( the more apparently respectable, the bigger the academic scoop). There was Marxist analysis. Feminism (old style). Racism and slavery is another. And of course, all things "queer".

Obviously, reviewing the world, or bits of it, in the light of a new kind of theory is a perfectly proper thing for academics to do. But if intellectual life is in a healthy state, there will be room for the unfashionable voices too - both the ones who point out where the old ideas are still valid, and the ones putting forward new ideas that don't fit the current trends. But if finances are precarious, the tendency will be to produce and support work that is most likely to get published and widely cited (and funded), and likely to appeal to students.

💯 spot on

The number of Autistic young people swept up in all of this should ring enough alarm bells to drown out the most pernicious TRAs. Also gay, other trauma.

I'm a philosophy graduate too, and despite all the real world harms being caused by this ideology, I think the thing that incenses me the most is that it MAKES NO BLOODY SENSE!

I like things to make sense. I like people to define their terms, and not use circular definitions or scream 'no debate'. I hate the butchering of language, at the behest of a tiny fraction of the population.

I've questioned whether I'm missing something, read stuff by trans authors, but no. There are only two sexes, you can't change sex, and sex is an important category in law.

I care for lots of the same reasons as you OP. Lifelong leftie, and it was a big part of my identity. I when the penny dropped on gender for me I went through a grieving process as my political affiliation had been very important to me. I felt embarrassed that I had been fooled into going along with it or at least trying for as long as I did to ‘educate myself’ and ‘be kind’. I thought I was smart till then but it took me far too long to realise the truth about queer theory.

When my own child briefly got caught up, it sharpened my focus. But it’s not just that. I detest that it took this to really make me realise that I had been intellectually screwed with by my ‘tribe’. A type of intellectual grooming. The TRA propaganda that I consumed with an open heart and mind, only to realise with hindsight, when I saw the bigger picture, that it was all part of that ideological drive to fool women into obedience. I resent it so much. I will never trust or support another political or intellectual institution again in my life. I feel cast out into the wilderness in that sense and that’s why I know this matters a lot.

Powerful post @Wetoldyousaurus

Fair question OP. So many reasons. Off the top of my head...

1. Yaniv. WTAF?
2. Brought up in a female family, men were always 'other' to me, learned to be wary of them very young. Men can hurt me in ways women can't.
3. Primary school teacher. When I first started I was surprised at how differently bright boys and bright girls approach tasks, I don't believe it's learned, it's innate. The system is loaded towards how bright boys do it. Since then have been staggered by the ways in which boys are given precedence at the expense of the girls. Boys' poor behaviour is permitted in class, they can assault and insult girls without consequences (I've seen this start in Y3, so 7 year olds). Well behaved girls used as sponges to sit either side of boys with significant behaviour issues, who quite frankly physically intimidate me, a grown woman. Girls just learn to get their heads down and stay out of the firing line. Mixed sports day events, so give out 32 stickers to the winners (8 events, place 1-4), only 4 of those stickers being for girls. Its non stop.
4. Reflecting on my & my friends' experiences of sexual assault and harassment when we were younger. It seemed so normal then. Again showing me that men are not always safe, and women are expected to make allowances for them. I want to be absolutely sure that if I make a complaint about a male in an area for females, it will be taken seriously, and that is won't be me who ends up being reported or blamed.
5. I know too many young people caught up in this. Their adhesion to the theory that they are unhappy because they were born in the wrong body (which is supported by the institutions around them, NHS, universities etc) is preventing them from dealing with their real problems, and they resort to black market hormones in the hope that this will make them better. When that fails they land the responsibility for their unhappiness on others, stalling them in an adolescent state.

Reasons 2, 3, & 5 for me. As said upthread, once you see it, you can't unsee it.

If it helps, there's a fuck of a lot of us in the same wilderness.

@ArabellaSaurus yeah I know :) But I was at a party a while ago and a woman approached me and she said her name and knew straight away she was someone who I had been in a private GC chat with but never met IRL. She did too and we just instinctively hugged each other and it was noisy so we managed a brief GC outpouring together before others joined us and we had to shut up again. This knowing that we could only say these ‘things’ under the cover of loud music because the other people in this ‘scene’ were a danger to us, professionally and socially if the knew the truth behind our association, it made me realise how strange this whole thing still is.

It's an interesting question. I sometimes feel like screaming at people in frustration that they can't see the same insanity I'm seeing.

Firstly, it's part of my job to understand human behaviour. And this is the most out of my depth I've ever been in my life. I feel like I'm getting closer to understanding how this has taken such a hold, but I'm still not fully there yet.

Secondly, the sheer speed with which women's rights, opportunities, safeguarding got overturned. That blows my mind completely.

The same people who would have fought for women's representation in sports, turning round and letting men take that from them. It's gobsmacking.

The same people who were advocates of 'me too', who argued for women choosing 'the bear' over men, who would have been stringent champions of safeguarding of young girls in sports/overnights, who would have been the biggest advocates for sensitive rape counselling. To see them throw that all away to accommodate delusion men - I can barely process that.

So I think it's the barefaced hypocrisy of it all. The blatant, widespread misogyny that I was naive to. I've found that out in the most brutal
way.

I’m also in that same political wilderness @Wetoldyousaurus