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…'

Hmm...I'm not sure if bans on selling sex, pornography or changing gender are the way to go.

I may think plastic surgery & especially gender surgery are harmful, and the second definitely extremely harmful, but that doesn't mean I think adults should be banned from having those procedures. Neither should be NHS funded though.

Prostitution: I think UK should implement Nordic model. Pornography is hopefully being curtailed but I'm not sure how far we should go on that. So much of the industry involves trafficking that harsher crackdown on that should hopefully help.

I appreciate that point of hers. If she wants to push that to 'women now would be better off without the Pill', then I don't agree. Moreover, using that logic, condoms, IUDs etc also change the rules & 'stop the body doing what it's designed to do' - does she also think we'd be better off without those?

Moreover, I was asking for your view, not for Harrington's. Do you think women now would be better off if the Pill hadn't been invented? If yes, would you extend this to condoms & IUDs too? Why or why not?

I suppose the question is, which ones have the power to inspire people or motivate them or give them meaning? Or maybe, who has the ability to communicate a vision like that?

That's something I think we can only know when it happens.

I'm not making an argument to ban or not. I'm saying transgender medicalization falls into this broad group of ultra liberal outcomes.

Yes. There is a significant change of perspective from, let's fix this part of your body that isn't working properly, and restore health, vs, let's take this part of your body that is working as it ought to and stop it from working the way it is supposed to.

If you look at the way people talked about the pill and contraception generally early in the 20th entury, doctors, the Church, etc, you can see they are still really in the first mindset. Insofar as they are willing to accept it, they are thinking of it as essentially a remedy to concupiscence, which is from that perspective a kind of disorder itself. One which they were aware could in fact allow the disorder to increase and so should be used within limits.

That's really differernt to the way most people think of it now, which is as a kind of thing we are entitled to by right, in order to be able to live free lives and be fulfilled.

That change is a significant one.

It's the beginning of all transhuman technologies which have changed the relationship between our bodies and technology.

Surely there is a longer history of technology changing this relationship? Why single out reproduction?

I agree on this : dangers of surrogacy, artificial wombs etc.

Otoh re 'genetically related' children, this is really important but I think some critiques of this go too far & into territory that unfairly criticises lesbian parenting. Eg. Thus article of Bilek's :

'The Castberg Laws of 1915 were a landmark in Europe. They established that children had the right to paternal inheritance, to bear their father’s surname and to receive support, regardless of whether their parents were married (2). These laws recognized children as rights-holders, not as extensions of adult desire.
That principle has been overturned. In 2009 the legal fiction of the “co-mother” was introduced into the Children Act. A female partner of the mother gained father-like parental status in cases of assisted reproduction (3). Biological fathers were reduced to anonymous “sperm providers”. In practice, the child lost not only a father but also grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. What had once been secured as a birthright was cut away by statute.'

I definitely think that any couple who uses sperm donation, lesbian or straight, needs to keep the child in contact with the biological father. But going from that to calling a 'co-mother' a 'legal fiction' is too much. I think there should be birth certificates with biological parents on, but also parenting certificates to show who is actually raising the child & being the parent in daily life.

It's notable Bilek and the Norweigan woman writing that article with him ignore that presumably straight couples using sperm donation in Norway before that were also creating legal fictions, (ones far less easy to discover), when they were listing the mother's husband as 'father' on the birth certificate when that should actually have been the sperm donor. Yet Bilek & his cowriter seem happier to only criticise lesbian couples.

https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/norway-s-persistent-war-on-heterosexuality-and-biological-family-bonds-to-whose-benefit

Ah right, I agree

Exactly...

There is a significant change of perspective from, let's fix this part of your body that isn't working properly, and restore health, vs, let's take this part of your body that is working as it ought to and stop it from working the way it is supposed to.

Having seen the impact of unplanned pregnancy on women in my family before the availability of contraception, I would argue that 'the body working the way it is supposed to' might not be all it's cracked up to be.

I reject the suggest in the original article that the GC Movement is a transformative movement. I see it as course correcter, dragging logic and biology back to where is stood originally, before the TRAs got going.

Yes. There's serious issues with the impact the Pill has hormonally etc but we need to balance that with the positive impact of being able to control fertility more reliably. And obviously condoms & IUDs are other options (as well as NFP although as I've said this will not be possible for quite a few, eg. People with PCOS).

I'm very uncomfortable with designating the Pill, and contraception more generally, as overall negative & transhumanist etc. We need to have open conversations about the cons of contraception & specifically the Pill & how to mitigate them, that's definitely crucial.

Yes, I agree

Can't begin to imagine what it was like for women back in the days when 8 or 10 kids was commonplace. And almost certainly, even more pregnancies. The Good Old Days weren't indeed all they are cracked up to be, whatever the drawbacks of the Pill.

Personally, I pine for the days of lead paint, asbestos houses, no seat belts, and getting a clock after working 45 years for the same company.

True, but they weren't thought of as terrible at the time, just with 20/20 hindsight. Whereas spending half your life pregnant...

code words

Ahem...

• Dinosaurs.
• Suffragette colours.
• Rabbits. (I cannae get over that particular outbreak of trantrumming)
• Tunnocks.
• Support wrens.

Is the Pill the first time we have used medication to fix something that isn't broken, so to speak? I guess cosmetic surgeries would come under this heading too.

sex is a matter of identity rather than reality.

Other way around.

sex is a matter of reality rather than identity.

@Carla786 I think there should be birth certificates with biological parents on, but also parenting certificates to show who is actually raising the child & being the parent in daily life.

Interesting thought. Thanks

Some of the (more speculative) science is looking at using cells from each person in same-sex relationships so that the child genetically belongs to both of them.

(Bilek is a woman btw)

The Vorkosigan Saga idea of uterine replicators disintegrates on contact with medical ethics and the realisation that we aren't even close to understanding gestation yet.

You'd have to have a means of testing them ethically on embryoes, foetuses, and babies. There is no means to ethically test them on that class of very young humans.

As for us losing that reproductive role: we'd still have to choose between contraception with a risk of failure, or sexual abstinence, to avoid pregnancy. Men would still not face that choice. I've spent my whole life using the most reliable contraceptives possible, some of which turned out to endanger my life, to avoid becoming a mother. The reproductive role might be latent, it might be one that we reject, but we, never men, are still the ones who have to alter our bodies because of it.

You mean as unethical as Streeting's PB trial?

Yes.

I mean the gender critical movement grew out of rejecting the hypothesis put forward by gender ideology that sex is a matter of identity not reality.

Women have done everything they can think of for millenia to try to stop men from leaving us pregnant. Inserting foreign objects in the uterus, drinking concoctions of herbs, taking sylphium until it was overharvested to extinction, putting vinegar-soaked sponges into our vaginas, using strips of bamboo as curettes for abortions, you name it, we have done it.

What's broken is the male sexual appetite and entitlement, and yet it's us who is left trying to fix it.