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…'

Streeting is one of the biggest disappointments in modern politics. So instrumental in getting GC voters to placate their fears over Sir Keir "99% of women don't have a penis" Starmer, straddling the divide of seemingly being skeptical on Stonewall Law, while maintaining the modern left's Live Your Best Life acceptance of the concept of the trans child. Coming out to uphold Cass and even the SC ruling in the faint praise way that is the best anyone could hope for.
Yet in championing the PB trial, he ties his colours to the mast, and comes full circle back to everything he always thought about GC women, and was never slow to tell them on Twitter, 7-8 years ago.
The Q is, do Labour survive this storm, Streeting unconscionably putting this cohort test group in danger, Phillipson looking to kick roll out of advice from the SC ruling, Starmer permitting both of these on his watch (and I'd add his lack of urgency on the grooming gangs inquiry, using a Labour peer as head)?
Or will women en masse vote Labour again because they truly believe the party has been open and honest with them, and has women and children's best interests at heart?

There really is no disgust like the disgust when you realise how blatantly and shamelessly you were lied to.

I think Labour have spent the 'believe in who we were in our imaginations thirty years ago' coin though, even with women who against their own interests, again and again, are willing to try and understand and think the best of people. Not realising that often those people are laughing at them for being such gullible idiots.

Yes, not to mention the higher rates of maternal mortality then... Maternity care in UK is terrible but it's also one area where we CAN measurably say there has been tremendous progress.

Hmm...possibly. I want to think further about this.

Otoh it's fair to point out the Pill can be used to regulate periods, though this isn't the most common use, and the use of it by GPs etc to manage PCOS is questionable.

Thank you, yes there are definitely serious ethical questions about that.

Sorry for calling Bilek 'he'! I thought there was a transwoman who had investigated some of this & I seem to have mixed them up with Bilek.

Great post. Otoh, women also want sex...I mean, I know you're not saying they don't, but rather putting the focus on men who push for sex/lie & then abandon, but I think it's also fair to point out that even if men weren't (sadly) often lying/abandoning/pressuring women into sex, women would still want sex without having to have a baby & unwanted pregnancies would still be an issue.

That's not really the point, is it.

It is a huge shift to see tech as a way to heal a body that is not working properly, to one that is changing the nature of the body itself.

It is a huge shift to say,, not, we should live in a way that is in harmony with the real needs of our body, in terms of eating, reproduction, and so on, to, let's change what it is to be human into some conceptualisation of what we would like it to mean.

That is the mindset that we are in now in terms of things like cosmetic procedures or gender reassignment - it makes total sense within that paradigm.

There is nothing wrong with the gender critical movement being about protecting existing women's rights.

It does not need a horizon or any other future to move towards than refusing to give up existing women's rights.

It is not rudderless, the authors don't seem to have heard of Sex Matters, who are doing great work.

All you would have to do is reclassify infants up to a certain point as not people.

Or possibly certain ones, maybe ones without parents, or the products of unsuccessful abortions, or human-ape hybrids, or ones that will be euthanized under medically assisted death programs, or ones produced by surrogates for the purpose, maybe with some genetic modification.

I know people will think that sounds like a sci-fi novel but I think that given the arguments people make with some of the active controversies now, we are actually not that far away from a possibility like that.

Well I like a bit of SciFi, so I shall investigate the Saga. Thanks!

Ethics <hollow laughter>. PB trial.

Most of the advancements so far have been done in the name of helping infertile couples and preventing miscarriages. Very worthy aims which can then be subverted. That womb transfer, from one sister to another, made me feel very uneasy. Plus I imagine some countries are less on board with the ethical concerns than others.

In my (unhappy) vision of the future the option of permanent sterilisation will be offered to all women (and men) at 18. If it becomes the norm in a society that reproduction is removed from the sexual act and subsequent pregnancy, then perhaps fertile women will become an aberration and considered less worthy of rights relating to their (voluntary) fertility.

There is that too. However, I think almost every married woman has had sex with her husband that she didn't actually want, at least once, and him forcing her to submit to him sexually wasn't illegal until the early 1990s.

It has absolutely been a matter of utter desperation driving women to dangerous concoctions of pennyroyal and black cohosh, paying unqualified people to insert knitting needles and umbrella spokes through their cervixes to try to "get rid", the lethally dangerous early IUDs like the Dalkon Shield, and everything else they could think of, because "no" wasn't a legal option for us.

I am the first to criticise the Pill as it nearly killed my sister and put my life at risk, but it was better, at least for women who don't get aura-type migraines and don't have clotting disorders, than the options available before it. We now have even safer options, like the slim-line copper IUDs, so I always recommend that women reconsider the Pill because it quadruples your risk of having a stroke. I don't tell women to rid their bodies of all contraceptives and just abstain or use NFP, because I recognise that many women like sex and don't want to be stuck to a calendar.

Ironically, some early Greek civilisations thought of babies like that, hence the exposure overnight on the mountain top to weed out the weak ones.

It would be astonishingly barbaric to go back to a Spartan ideal of how to treat children.

Why is it not the point?

Pregnancy might be natural, but It doesn't mean that it always has a positive outcome.

For some women the ability to avoid another pregnancy is life saving.

Of course they started messing around with birth certificates for adoption in the 1920s and this set the precedent for same sex couples and surrogacy (and becoming trans).

I say this as an adopter btw. My younger daughter tells no one she is adopted (she is an adult now) and she has completely rejected her (abusive) birth family and she welcomes having a certificate that doesn't flag her adoption up.

But it is messing with the facts.

My dad lived next door to a lesbian couple who had a son. They split up and both have remarried other women. So this boy now has four mothers!

We have moved away from biological reality in so many ways for what were considered good reasons at the time.

This was my situation. There wasn't enough of me to sustain DD growing inside me. Either I would die, she would die or we would both die. The CS at 32 weeks worked for both of us but I actively avoided another pregnancy.

Thank you. This is brilliant.

Yes....'natural' obviously doesn't equal 'good'. There was far too little emphasis in the past on the potential negative side effects of the Pill, but swinging too far the other way is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

And sperm donation for straight couples, which began around the 1940s... (Google children's author Eva Ibbotson's father Berthold Wiesner, who secretly fathered around 600 children via substituting his own sperm for the purported donors 😢).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertold_Wiesner

I can definitely see the value of having certificates that don't show adoption for cases like your daughter's, it would be really hard to have to show both....but otoh I think at least the general rule should be to have 2...

The case you mention with the boy having 4 mothers due to divorces....new stepparents taking care when older are never good, lesbian or not.. I support same sex parenting but I think the parents should always keep the child in as much contact with other biological parent as possible. This should also apply to straight couples using a sperm donor or egg donor, which is for some reason talked of far less.

Do you support same sex parenting? Or do you think it is too much of a move from biological reality?

I think the article makes some sense for me because, in the face of reality, a lot of humans have a deep need to believe in something that explains existence and their special place in the universe. I've lost count of the number of people who have told me that atheism depresses them because, to them, atheism is so bald and final and doesn't see a special place for humanity in the universe.

Genderism makes everyone the king of their own wee world where they feel they can decide who and what they are and force other people to go along with it. It allows people who hate themselves and their life circumstance to try and hide from them.

Gender Critical thought on the whole is, at times, like herding cats but it also tends towards conceiving of humanity as a whole and examining what we owe to each other as citizens and fellow members of society - even if there are many answers within the GC movement to those two questions.

I think, ultimately, that whether it's GC thinkers, feminists, political theorists, eco-activists etc, someone needs to make the argument that humanity has to work together to survive challenging economic, social and environmental circumstances and that fleeing from your humanity into transhumanism is not a rational response.