Is the Gender Critical Movement Bound to Remain Rudderless?

[UtopiaPlanitia]

I came across a recommendation on TwiX for this interesting article and thought I'd post a link here (with a few excerpts to give an idea) for anyone who might be interested.

https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/is-the-gender-critical-movement-bound-to-remain-rudderless

'For all its apparent moral clarity and empirical grounding, the gender critical movement suffers from a deep structural weakness. It lacks a horizon, a vision to move toward. Though move it does, it is rudderless, hitting targets on its way to nowhere definite or well-defined.

And without any clear vision, it’s destined to remain merely reactive, the reluctance or inability to say what it’s for or what kind of world it’s attempting to bring into being likely to ensure its eventual failure to win institutional power or systemic reform.

Every transformative movement needs the vision of a future worth defending beyond merely resisting the course of events and the GC project is no different…

…As such then, the movement resists but doesn’t envision what its own success looks like, thereby confining itself to the conceptual and institutional boundaries set by the very ‘gender industrial complex’ it opposes.

…The ‘trans-activist’ (or ‘sex denialism’) side, in contrast - along with the wider techno-capital system in which we, and it, find ourselves situated does have a vision – a horizon toward which it’s heading. It imagines a future where everything about us is flexible, modifiable, and optimizable. A world where identity, bodies, and even ordinary life can be upgraded, medicalized, data-tracked, and endlessly redesigned, all framed as liberation or ‘becoming your truest self.’

But underneath the uplifting language a simpler logic is at work: turn everything into something that can be engineered, monetized, connected, or (ideally) all three.

…[gender identity] is the ideal entry point for a form of capitalism that now treats the human body and personal identity as further sites to extract value from.

This is why “gender” has become a privileged site of transformation. It isn’t uniquely ‘fragile’ (as some would so vocally claim) but it is viewed by the system as uniquely modifiable making it a space perfectly suited for ‘optimization’, where the ‘optimal’ is simply the continued expansion of the system itself…'

Yeah, those objectives sound fine to me.

It doesnt need ro bw a bloody crusade. We dont need a flag or a holy vision.

We just need everyone to be clear there are 2 sexes and those sexes are immutable. Policy and law accepting simple material fact.bThen we can all go home.

It's not rocket science.

If everyone could keep their rudders to themselves, that would be a great start.

I have pointed out before that I think transgender activism is fundamentally right wing - it wants free market capitalist-type access to treatments without government oversight created and led by its own organisations - and this article supports that.

And who “leads” the transgender movement? Billionaires like the Pritzkers? Grifters like the Foxkiller cashing in on it? Lawyers like Strangio who have taken organisations like the ACLU to somewhere far and away from its initial cause?

You can keep ‘em, mate.

Boats need rudders. Being GC is not a 'being in a boat' experience. It's being solid rocks that keep getting draped with assorted rubbish, including discarded rainbow flags.

Women don't need a rudder because we aren't going anywhere. We co-operate on some of the clean-up work as and when.

Grass roots movements and reality don't need rudders.

Their strength is their spontaneity and the fact their point doesn't need PR because everyone ultimately gets it.

Our “movement” needs to be reactive though. Even if we stated and achieved a goal of say repealing the GRA, there will always be a movement of men pushing for ways for them to access female spaces.

It’s always going to be a case of holding the line and pushing back against whatever attack they come up with next.

Editing to say: the role of women saying no to men wishing to violate women and children is going to be a lifelong constant battle and sadly there will never be a final victory.

I like the analogy of rocks. That makes sense to me.

I agree, as we've seen in the months since the Supreme Court ruling, the Genderist side will not go lightly and will continue to try to subvert the meaning of 'female' to suit their own objectives.

They've been working for decades to supplant their definition of woman into legislation and do not enjoy this project being thwarted by 'boring old' actual women.

Edited: missing word

I wrote my comment before reading his article then sighed and went a read it.

He has a point about the commodification of bodies but the title is odd and very annoying. Perhaps chosen for pure clickbait rage power. ‘Bound to remain rudderless’ is a strong statement and highly critical framing. Nicely wrapping together criticism of women being hopeless for not being sufficiently visionary.

Its clickbait nature worked as it pisses me off that once again a man is berating women for not resolving all the world’s ills including the capitalist system of reproduction and men’s recent turn towards wholesale fetishisation of women. If I were being mean, I’d think that this is the kind of man looking for a strong mummy to look after him.

However, if women don’t win ‘institutional power or systemic reform’, well colour me surprised that a several thousand years battle hasn’t been won yet and trying to retain some of our already hard fought for rights.

Lots of ‘visionary’ questions pissed in the blog but suggesting that capitalism turned inwards to the body as a new frontier of commodification is several decades old. My bah humbug view is that as soon as we find ourselves with less to eat (either climate instability or war or supply chain disruptions) we will suddenly rediscover the importance of the material body.

It absolutely is not rudderless or without structure. It is one of the single most effective political movements in recent decades.

You don't require 'a vision' other than pushing back on and undoing the damage caused by trans ideology. And we all know what that looks like. We've always known it is a generational thing and would take 20 plus years to unravel.

Aye. An overarching aim of the women's rights movements, to end VAWG and misogyny, is something I think most women are pragmatic about

I do think, though, there is a far deeper trend afoot which revolves around a rejection of the limitations of the body and of the earth and its cycles. And to my mind such movements are inherently masculine and anti feminine movements. Whenever man tries to conquer nature, nature is seen as a restrictive burden to be escaped or over-come. And female bodies are seen as inherently more linked to nature: to the earth and its cycles.

Movements towards not only transgenderism, but also towarsd transhumanism mre generally. Those billionnaites who want to live forever and cheat death and spend their millions on trying to reverese the ageing process. Augmenting the human body with robotic elements. Brain implants etc

Moving towards babies being born outside of the womb. Think Mary Harrington's vision of factories full of brain dead female incubators, gestating babies for people too busy or 'above' doing it for themselves.

To my mind a thoroughly dystopian Aquarian age,

And none of it very Green or Eco.

I think he's riffing off Mary Harrington. But her vision is a lot more female centred.

Excellent point. Medical science has been trying to replicate or supplant women for decades by investing in things such as artificial wombs, transplanting wombs into men, IVF, various forms of surrogacy that prevent a genetic relationship between the woman and the baby. It's all a bit too Shulamith Firestone (or like the Tleilaxu from Dune) for my taste.

I'd rather that pharma and bioscience invested time and money in research that actually helps women with their reproductive and pregnancy issues now rather than trying to replace women entirely but that's probably too boring and unsexy to garner grant money 🙄

Edited: missing word

But moving towards ( the ultimate progressive utopia) can sometimes mean revising and re-visiting the past and previous conditions, but doing do with a fresh persepctive and necessary modifications. The idea that human society always moves in a straight line towards a distant horizon is questionable. History and society tends to be cyclical......re-hashing and reformulating the same old themes and elements, but in slightly different configurations, for each new age.

It's true, but irrelevant, like saying the problem with horses is that they don't have wheels. True, they don't. But it's not a problem.

From what I've seen over the past six years, the "gender critical movement" is a loose alliance of a range of very different people from conservatives to communists, from the deeply religious to atheists, and from the polite to the downright rude. There are "standout" individuals and organisations and many examples of individual bravery and integrity. There is little infighting, primarily because there is no canonical "in" to fight about. The only thing we have in common is a belief that sex is real and it matters socially and politically.

Taking a doctrinally coherent position on tech capitalism and the movement towards meat lego is a different, though at times related, fight.

As @ArabellaSaurus said above, "If everyone could keep their rudders to themselves, that would be a great start."

It lacks a horizon, a vision to move toward.

That's odd because I thought the goals were quite clear. Recognition that sex is important and has an impact that means that in some situations women require specific rights; refusal to be defined by sexist stereotypes. Basic feminism really.

I don't think feminism has an end point because there are key differences between men and women so societal/political changes will always impact differently.

'Protections' and 'Rights' are different from each other - to my mind. A 'Right' tends to be an emancipatory licence to do or to act, whereas 'a protection' is a vehicle to provide shelter against a known problem or issue.

The Equalities act provides protections and adapatations, not rights, to various groups on the basis of understood suppressions/oppressions.

By understanding that a group requires certain protections one is working with, and understanding, the nature of human society - with all of its imperfections and inevitable restrictions. It is not utopian. 'Rghts' are more about moving towards an imagined utopia. that's certainly how I see it.

So being 'GC' is more about protections than rights - whereas trans activist tend to view the GC position through a lens of oppression and restrictive stereotypes about sex. they want to believe that we are already free of biology and the body and that the body is just an oppressive 'meat suit'....not the real self.

It's not and never has been a 'movement'. It's a belief system worth of respect in a democratic society that sex is important and matters.

Though there certainly has been a movement of people that have come to together to resist the dogma and authoritarianism of trans ideology.

I think 'rights' in the mundane legal sense are also relevant: right to maternity leave or the recent change in policy that means that women can request a c-section simply because that is their preference.

I would describe these as sex specific rights.

I am no expert or scholar but I see his point.

Gender has colonised society, institutions, offered a vision, and the structural tools to propagate it, creating academia, scholars, jobs, careers, awards, bs dreams, lifestyles to its believers, and we don’t even think or dream of doing the same. And I m going to be very reductive here, but in contrast, it seems we would be happy to stop at the door of our toilets and changing rooms.

We decry woo woo gender studies departments by example, but we just would like to see them disappear or at least stop their drivel, we aren’t fighting to make them ours or create their equivalent to promote our own vision.

Women’s experience is central in our fight, we claim for its right to exist, but we are still not thinking too much of taking over institutions one by one to make our vision matter like they did. Why not?

(important note: not saying there are not women doing fighting for these things, but that the collective psyche of the GC movement has not naturally and broadly embraced these causes as the natural evolution and widening of their fight)

And when I see so many comments saying “it’s so male”, and pinching their nose every time the word “power” is mentioned anywhere or saying that you just want x or y, don’t you realise you are staying in your lane the men want you to? Of course, they have gaslit you telling you it’s too heavy for your pretty little heads, of course, they are showing an awful and unappealing example of it, but rather than avoiding power and ambition, we should realise we would actually be much better at it than they are and that they are doing all they can to turn us off from it because they wouldn’t stand the competition. And even without wanting all the power, deserve at the very least a much bigger seat at the table of things.

if we want men to become more attuned and empathetic to female reality, we need to be a bit more attuned to the male reality, power and ambition are not anti feminine, they are not a bad word, they exist, they matter. We are more than a bunch of testosterone, we could handle it without losing ourselves if we wanted to, if we dreamt of it, if we believed in us.

I m no historian of feminism but if someone knows if something similar didn’t happen to the floundering of second wave feminism, its importance within mainstream society tapered off to oblivion because it was go big or go home and they went home

And if we don’t develop that vision and meekly accept to return to the historical status quo of just being women in a men s world, they ll find something else to shaft us with and we will have to spend another generation in defensive mode again at best

woman, be ambitchious for yourself, for your sisters and for your sex, you make the world go round already, take your power back

(Writing this a bit rushed on a phone because it s dear to my heart, sorry for ramblings)

I agree @inkognitha On reflection I think that being gender critical has to be a movement. It is one that was created out of the hypothesis that sex is a matter of identity rather than reality. To that we can respond defensively using law and argument to clarify why sex matters. However, power is also important. The situation would be less perilous if those in power both shared our views and also saw them as important.

Really interesting take, @inkognitha . 💪

What a load of navel-gazing twaddle. I can’t think of anything more likely to kill the gender critical premise than becoming a “movement”. It’s reality.

The moment we start mixing activism and ideology and leaders and movements into plain reality, we introduce the same perverse incentives that made Stonewall pivot from working to legalise gay marriage to shilling transgender ideology.

Sex is real and important, and unpicking the nonsense that’s obscuring that is essential. It’s not a belief or an ideology, it’s a fact. There’s no confusion about what the end goal is here.

Other issues that concern feminists aren’t going to be the same issues that concern all sex realists, and forced teaming them is a recipe for disaster and in fighting.