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…'

It's like the space race in the 60s - a clear vision for the future which transcends the limits of current existence.

The proponents of trans genderism think we can't see the vision.

but we are still not thinking too much of taking over institutions one by one to make our vision matter like they did.

I think that until about 10 years ago, most of us would have thought 'sexist stereotypes bad, women's rights good' was a truism

We would have thought, for instance that Jill Tweedie
https://x.com/VerityKalcev/status/1991916958783299635?

and Norah Ephron's reviews of Jan Morris's book Conundrum represented main stream feminism.

https://x.com/treesey/status/1601958265784508416/photo/1

It's been a bit of a shock both to realise that we still have have to fight this battle.

and forced teaming them is a recipe for disaster and in fighting.

Agree. To take the highly controversial issue of abortion, women have vastly different opinions on who the law should be, and you are never going to get everyone to agree. But to make any kind of coherent argument you have to acknowledge that ONLY women get abortions. That isn't an ideological position.

I think JKR has a vision, but she’s very sensibly playing her cards close to her chest. There are others, such as FWS and Sex Matters. All will have some kind of vision.

It is going to be reactive and scrappy though. I suspect, though it’s been carefully hidden, that there has been a massive, semi-organised push towards genderism, funded by high level men in the US so we are fighting a rearguard action against something that has infiltrated our institutions so thoroughly that it’s going to be incredibly hard to reverse. I think the progress we’ve made in the UK is astonishing, given what we’re up against.

I can't get past "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." in the OP.

Errors -

(1) Why the hell does he think it is a "movement" as opposed to lots of individuals, some of whom are in specific GC sub-groups with their own special interests?

(2) Surely "sex based rights and evidence based healthcare" is a pretty clear vision, albeit 100% reactionary to an insane incoherent belief system which opposes those commons sense goods.

I think the umbrella aim of the GC movement is perfectly clear. To halt the march of an ideology that is causing harm. I'm not entirely sure that a movement is required to bring forward an alternative 'new' idea to replace a new harmful one. A movement can exist simply to resist a harmful change.
That said some GC people do have a progressive aim, to dismantle sex based stereotypes in order that we can all live freely in accordance with our personalities rather than being placed into boxes based on our sex.

The attempts and arguments to discredit gender critical women are getting desperate.

You make some really interesting points there.

For me, I think the main difference between the Genderist movement and GC activists is that Genderism is more authoritarian in nature while claiming to be Libertarian (or, inexplicably, even Marxist) in political ideology.

And I think the GC movement has, on the whole apart from the very Left elements, tended towards anti-authoritarian thinking and is more a loose collection of individuals & individualists who want to fight for recognition of material reality. After that common goal, their future goals, political theories, and methods for achieving same are probably going to vary quite a bit.

The other main difference is that Genderism is very male in all its facets: ideology, behaviour, goals. Whereas GC activism is still majority female with some male supporter input. Women establish hierarchies but not always in the same way that men do, so you could also describe GC activism as a loose confederation of warring tribes 😬 with some compatible goals in mind.

Yes, but people have to move in a co-ordinated way to counter that. When I discovered what was happening in the name of 'trans rights' I thought I must be alone, but then reached out and found others. We then started to meet up in each others homes, organise events, share information, and then join forces with other groups and individuals around the country.This 'movement' was literally a self generated one...not a top down one with established leaders.

Sometimes it can takes certain voices or personalities, though, to become the channel for voicing a deeper collective mood, or for raising consciousness; especially when that you counter has slid in under the rader of public agreement or even consciousness.

I can recall my Nana slightly misquoting Rousseau's "The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing."
We live in a time of widespread Presentism & many longstanding problems have been given fresh names & wrappings but remain very much the same.

What a lovely piece of batshit to end the year with! Very 2025.

A whole lot of wang that really boils down to an inability to handle real people and real life - if there's no flag and branding and corporate wank it doesn't compute. It's sad really.

I think it's an advantage that we are by way of being a hydra, it makes us a harder enemy to defeat. Many well-funded strategists have found themselves unable to win against insurgencies.

Whenever man tries to conquer nature… nature eventually relegates man back to cockroach status. Or less than that? Just a matter of time.

One day we’ll outgrow these stifling boxes…

Not yet it seems! Back into smaller and more gilded boxes now. Kylie Jenner ones for girls. Andrew Tate ones for boys.

Can't believe the people is/was buggering about with they's pronouns even in Rousseau's time.

*(I googled and 'is' is apparently actually a 'copular verb' or 'copula'. Which will be my word for the day.)

You could also describe the GC 'movement' as 'herding cats'. I'm told.

I don't know whether the GC 'movement' itself needs a vision but I do think women as a whole need to look further ahead at what may be coming down the line. Do we want to give up the messy, dangerous, heartbreaking, awesome process of gestation and childbirth? Do we want it to be outsourced to test-tubes and artificial wombs? Do we care if our children are genetically related to us or not? We define 'female' by our reproductive role. What if we, voluntarily or otherwise, lose that role?

edit: clarity

"A people" innit?

A few thoughts about the piece and the response here:

I think the key to the piece (and it's hidden towards the end) is this:

To be clear, I’m not defending ‘tradition’ here but proposing the first civilization in history that’s fully technologically potent yet fully committed to remaining biologically human, technologies that serve life instead of replacing it; a legislative order that protects the reality of sexual dimorphism the way environmental law now protects wetlands and an understanding that the female body isn’t a planetary resource to be financialized, data-mined, or rented out as a gestational service.

There's much in here that is similar to Mary Harrington's thought, in particular that genderism is only one form of transhumanism, the transformation of human bodies and capabilities into cyborg equivalents. In Harrington's account (with which I largely agree) this started with the invention of the Pill. Harrington argues that women have actually been complicit in the transhumanist takeover of human life. This piece traces the interpenetration of academia and the economy by transhumanist technologies and ideas, and the creation of a coherent world view and vision of a transhumanist/genderist future.

Every single wave of feminism has found ultimately that merely seeking rights is not enough to enable women's flourishing. It's necessary but not sufficient. In my view the writer is correct that simply demanding a return to 'the way things used to be' isn't enough, because it implies that the way things used to be was ok. It wasn't. And it is essentially a reactive and defensive move. I don't see anything (apart from Harrington) attempting to sketch out what a future in which we inhabit our human bodies in the way that we were meant to, but in a world which is increasingly technologised, and where our infrastructure, life choices and economic system are fully subordinated to technology. What do we want for men and women in this world? That is what is meant by 'offering visions of victory rather than prohibitions'.

I've been thinking a lot recently about Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, which imagines two futures, one a transhumanist nightmare and the other a fully human ideal. There's lots not to like about her ideal, but it's a really interesting attempt to imagine it.

I think a lot of the responses on here are saying, what's wrong with simply getting our rights back. And there's nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes -- but it doesn't answer the question: why? what will women's rights achieve, what is their purpose? If it is simply to restore the status quo ante, that won't suffice to counter the totalising force of genderism.

Looks more and more like gender ideology is a long term capitalist project. Split people into more and more categories. Re-define categories. Expand current markets. Make new markets.
Slicing up the pie creates a bigger pie.
In parallel, transgenderism is part of the spectrum of services new and old that monetises people, most of all women and children.
Prostitution, pornography, plastic surgery, surrogacy, now puberty blockers/trans surgery, next stop womb factories and trans-humanism.
The crazy thing is that at the height of the class war, so many on the left including pretty much every woman would have died on a hill rather than support the capitalist male domination of women at the time, and would have been absolutely horrified if they'd seen transgender medicalization and profit driven surrogacy looking in a crystal ball, but now a good majority of the left see these all as boons and rights and empowering of women.
Neo liberalism didn't just kill the class analysis of society, it killed so much else.
Capitalism co-opted the left.

Harrington argues that women have actually been complicit in the transhumanist takeover of human life.

I would agree with this. Sounds like I need to read some Mary Harrington.

Well, okay, but can it wait til after Christmas? I'm done in.

Yeah, fair enough. Me too.

I mean, I don't see pornography being reined in.
Other adult services. Prostitution, old and new (Your Fans, anyone?). No momentum to curtail surrogacy. Now we hear that kids are finding their PBs online. Plastic surgery is off the scale.
If transgenderism is going to be part of this spectrum, and so many elites and politicos still cannot say "no" to it, after the report on The Tavistock, Cass, the WPATH Files, now the SC ruling, then we know a capitalist behemoth underpinned by 21st century left wing platitudes of Be Your Best Self and suicidal empathy, will carry on driving a coach and horses thru what we used to see as a healthy progressive status quo.

How did I know that was written by a male, just from the extracts you posted 🙄