Very good piece, thank you for your clarity. I want to work toward a world where a guy can walk into the men's room and refresh his lipstick in the mirror, and not be harassed there. Fetish or personal style, who cares? It's his lips, he can do what he wants with them – and what goes on in his pants/skirt is no one's business but his own. But it is NOT the responsibility of women to welcome men into our safe spaces. If anything, it is the task of women to raise sons who can expand their definition of masculinity, and who will make room at the mirror for men who can claim their individual expression as men.
Men can retouch their lippy in the gents. Well they can in the UK. David Bowie did it. The glam rockers of the 70s and 80s did it. The Emos of the 90s put their eye liner on in the gents. Transsexual women have used mens spaces with no problem for decades. Our experience of gender crtical thinking in the UK is different to that in America, just as our feminism is and was different. Kellie Jay Keen is a smart woman who has done a huge amount for women and should be thanked by every woman, just as JK Rowling has. You may not agree with how we do things in the UK, but they are just as valid as how you do things in the USA. Different horses for different courses.
Thank you for this. This has got me thinking of the furor over Phil Illy's appearance at a Genspect conference dressed as a woman. While I concede his choice of garb was unwise, I haven't heard that he conducted himself inappropriately, but some self-defined gender critical people went bananas and demanded that he be removed from the event. Stella O'Malley very reasonably pointed out that a) Genspect had established no dress code; and b) even if they had, it would likely have been illegal for organizers to have ejected Illy based only on his gender-non-conforming clothing.
It's weird that people who insist that hair and clothing or mannersims do not make a man a woman ALSO insist that men not adopt the hair, clothing and/or mannerisms stereotypically associated with women. Wouldn't that mean that women should not adopt the hair, clothing and/or mannerisms stereotypically associated with men? Good grief...that's the path to a world in which women may not wear trousers or change the oil in their own cars, and men better stick with navy blue and black because, you know, pink is for girls. Yikes.
Yeah, I was there at Genspect, and you're correct. The complainers weren't present. The people present didn't care. Phil conducted himself fine and didn't use the women's facilities.
I wrote about it at the time because I kept getting trotted out by these neo GCs as someone likely traumatized by his presence. And then they were mad when I was like nah, you don't get to speak for me. Own your own views.
I agree with you, I also think the thornier issue is that men like Phil Illy clearly get a kick out of forcing others to see their fetish in action. The exhibitionism is the point. So you can’t kick people out of the meeting. But you can say: Don’t be a creep.
In the photo I saw, he was wearing a very understated dress. I don't recall a stuffed bra or even make-up. Simply a man in a dress. How is that putting on a fetishistic exhibit? I don't think we should enforce dress codes, no matter the motive of the dresser, as long as females have rights to single sex spaces.
Did he have an apparent erection that day? The women who were present at that conference were not uncomfortable with him. It became a big controversy online when a photo was posted showing him present at the event in a dress. We really waste our time with this, imo. If Illy was using the men's room that day and supports female-only spaces, then him wearing a simple dress is no big deal, imo. Plenty of people have fetishes. I know a young woman who wears a fur tail. As long as they do not violate others, live and let live, imo.
They do, but some people get a kick out of making others uncomfortable, whether that’s by shouting things at women as they walk down the street or dressing outrageously. If everyone just ignores them it will cease to be interesting for them.
"men like Phil Illy clearly get a kick out of forcing others to see their fetish in action. The exhibitionism is the point"
I don't think that's true. It is true that (some) autogynephilic men get a kick out of dressing as women, but that doesn't mean that they are aroused *all the time* when they do it. (It's like how people used to say that same-sex lovers holding hands were displaying their kink: well, no, just because they are attracted to each other doesn't. mean that there can't be other motives, signs of affection and love. Similarly, some straight, monogamous couples may get a kick out of thinking "he/she is only mine", but that doesn't mean that wearing a wedding ring turns them on.) The sexual urge which originates the desire doesn't remain purely sexual, or even (in all times) sexual at all: it transforms to be other. A lot of AGP men talk about simply being more *comfortable* in women's clothes.
I am not denying that there are *some* men who are exhibitionistic, and that for *some* men having others see them in women's clothes may be a sexual experience. But I do very much deny that it is necessarily or even most often the case.
I think this misunderstanding has a lot to do with why (some) gender critical women (honestly, in either definition) are uncomfortable with avowedly AGP-men: they falsely see them as engaged in what is always a kink. But if you listen to what they (we) say, you'll see it's just not so. That's not how they experience what they are doing. Again, the comparison between how people used to think of same-sex couples is important here: before people could see past the then-unusual nature of it, they saw things that straight couples do routinely as sexual in the case of same-sex couples. But it was wrong then, and it is wrong here.
AGPs are also lying about their motives, even to themselves, sometimes, it is part of the pathology. We don't need to have blanket acceptance of men in dresses, that's not part of the social contract.
Depends on the local situation, I'm not saying men can't wear dresses or we should discriminate against them, just that we don't need to give them carte blanche acceptance. There's a tendency for some social liberals to elevate them as some kind of icon of progressivism.
Yes, this is exactly why I have never defined myself and my feminism as GC. There are women I know and respect who do use the label, but even right at the beginning I thought it only made sense if you equated gender with gender identity, which I don't. It soon became an umbrella term for a number of different political tendencies, some of which I found pretty reactionary. As you say, it's now the reactionaries who have the highest public profile. Which is a pity, but not entirely a surprise. Their position is easier for most people to grasp than the radical feminist one. As for me, if I'm pressed to give myself a label I say I'm just an old school women's libber
In the final edition of The Radical Notion, many of the British women who spoke about their involvement with feminism over the past decade rejected GC (and other labels). Most simply said they're on the left.
I think it's helpful to define "gender" as feminist sociologists have long done - as a the social norms that stratify men and women (and the things associated with them) such that men and masculinity are consistently more highly valued. Gender identity is then a psychological phenomenon that some people experience. Most of us don't "identify" as women, though, we simply *are* women by dint of our bodies and the socialization attached to being female.
My goal is to relegate the word "gender" to grammar and second wave feminist books as much as possible and still be understood. Just as there is no "cis," people don't have genders - just grammar does.
Thank you for linking the interview with Lisa Vogel, the 40 year producer of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. I worked on long crew for 10 summers. This was where the budding men's movement to colonize women's spaces first impacted me personally - 22 years ago. I was called a trans-exclusionary radical feminist before it was shortened to "terf."
I was also at Genspect in Denver and Phil Illy was fine. We had a nice chat and used different bathrooms. When people lost their minds about it later, it showed me where to prune the people I follow on social media. (Discussion is one thing, hysteria is another.)
I wonder what the next term is for the position that is pro sex-based reality.
"poorly defined" is an understatement. A step in the right direction would be to consider it as a label for sexually dimorphic personality, behavioural, and physiological traits. You might consider Paula -- "Sexy isn't sexist" -- Wright's post as a neat illustration:
I don’t call myself a radical feminist or even a feminist, but I’m not a religious conservative either. I’m a lesbian. My wife is gender non conforming.
Yet I don’t think men should wear women’s clothes, especially not “sexy” women’s clothes designed to emphasize a female figure they don’t have. (A modest outfit with a pink print or something is different.) It’s a fetish for most of them, and it makes me uncomfortable.
I don’t want it to be illegal. But privately, I would judge someone and avoid him socially. And I think it’s fine for our culture to send the message that this clothing isn’t appropriate for men. A lot of clothes are inappropriate and inviting judgment, but not illegal.
Good, bad, or ugly (all are reasonable POVs about this history imho), the Geneva Conventions are littered with international responses to how Canadian soldiers conducted themselves on the battlefield.
And frankly, if F47 was to make good on his threats to our sovereignty, I would not necessarily respect those Conventions* in defence of my country.
*I would 100% respect all the ones around the proper treatment of & conditions for civilians and *female* prisoners of war — the latter being an appropriately higher expectation than most developed countries afford both prisoners and “free” women.
I have a similar struggle with the label “Left.” Doesn’t mean what it used to mean. I Used to use it, now I can’t stand it. Shifting political sands leave us unmoored, but all that rethinking is a constructive process.
We need to reclaim it. The Left grew out of the political movement of working people for better wages, working and living conditions. Now the average Leftie probably never heard of the Wobblies, Sacco and Vanzetti or Walter Reuther. I think Bernie has always been on the right track. He's never really knuckled under to all this gender woo woo. The Left means those of us who support universal health care, fair housing, free or cheap education, due process, fair, transparent elections and a huge reduction of corporate and billionaire power and wealth. Race and sex got pulled into all this because our ruling elites always used them to divide us. LGB came later and finally trans activists and slick lawyers tacked T onto LGB and off we go, to rainbow whackdoodle land. We don't have to put up with that. We can and should dump postmodernism, extreme identity politics and the young Left's morbid fascination with making everything "safe". There's no such world. Idk. Maybe there's no hope for a resurgent, common sense, realist, materialist, empiricist Left, but I'm going down swinging.
I avoid the word 'gender', preferring to distinguish only sex. Other than my long hair (more from lack of desire to spend lots of money at a hairdresser than anything else), I give only basic thought to what I wear - comfortable and practical. I'm female, I don't have to dress to signal that. I don't much care what anyone else wears. But - males wearing clothes intending to make them appear female, do stick out. And they make me wary of them, the way obviously drunk or intoxicated behaviour would make me avoid someone. It's not that I want men to 'conform to gender roles', its by obviously intending to break the norms, they flag themselves as a possible risk. And as potentially mentally unstable. And before 'trans' was everywhere, I don't think I thought that way. I suspect it's part of the backlash, which will likely wash over the LGB along with the TQI+. It's a tragedy.
I love the way you said woman is not a costume. Sums it up perfectly. I’ve been wondering if it makes sense to look at “dressing up as a woman” in the same way that we might loot at someone choosing to “dress Chinese” or “Native American” or any other race/ethnicity/culture of people. That makes us uncomfortable and rightly so - it is fetishizing a commonly understood “look” of a category of people (often oppressed) and using it for play and attention. So why would that not apply to the sexes as well? Though clothing is technically/conceptually “just clothing”, in real life one still ascribes certain styles mainly to one sex or the other, especially when we are talking about the more garish/sexual ways of dressing. So a man putting on the most stereotypically female clothes he can think of and adorning himself in other ways society by and large sees as feminine is a way of claiming “woman” as a costume — which is perhaps inappropriate in the same way as a white person claiming “black” as a costume. We want everything to be neutral, but it isn’t. Of course, the line is gray - where do we cross from choosing the clothes we like regardless of stereotype into putting on a costume of a different sex? I’m not sure. I also want to live in a world where men can reapply their lipstick in the men’s bathroom and that would be totally fine. Perhaps there is a heightened sensitivity right now precisely because of all the intentional costuming and demanding to be referred to as the sex that one is not. So that has whiplashed into people being wary of even small acts of non-conforming dress/makeup/etc.
just some thoughts, would love to know if others think I’m barking up a tree that makes any sense…
I agree with you on everything--radical is not a great qualifier, no one outside of it gets it--but I'm at a loss as to what to do about it. Definitions are slippery things. I know what I think feminism is, but I'm not sure it's what others think it is.
A few months ago, I had an exchange with someone who took issue with my use of the expression “gender critical/conservative.” “‘Gender critical’ analysis comes from radical feminism, which is not conservative,” she corrected me. And I was just like, “Well, yes, but things have drifted.”
Like you, bewildered by it all. Being far removed hasn't helped. But here's a tip. Obscuring effects brought about by excess verbiage and flabby thinking are undoubtedly with us to stay. That conclusion is based on some funny and pungent observations by Orwell in "Politics and the English Language" re such reliable cultural sand traps as art criticism. Worth checking out. Not much of a feminist of course but he did ID some perennial soft spots among the chattering classes. They morph but never go away.
I see the trans-gender movement solidifying gender stereotypes; if a boy likes dresses, he should've been a girl; if a girl likes tools, she should've been a boy.
The obsession over gender is moving us backwards in societal progress and has real life harms to children and teens being told they should take irreversible medical steps to change their bodies before they're old enough to drive a car. Going through puberty is hard enough without being told you can be "'born in the wrong body." I think this culture trend is very damaging to kids.
It is also having serious consequences to women's same-sex spaces; locker rooms, spas, bathrooms, prisons, and sports. It is dangerous for women to so quickly forget that they are a protected sex class for a reason.
I say, wear whatever you like, but stop trying to change sex, because that can't be done. I wish people would be encouraged to be more in-touch with their body. When I was young, the fad was for women to be anorexic, now that's changed to transgender. All in all, I think it's just hard to grow up in this world.
There was a midpoint in the change here where many probably well-meaning pro-trans people failed to imbibe the original meaning of gender critical and popularized the notion that e.g. a boy who likes dresses must actually be a girl. The original feminist, gender critical idea was that such a boy is indeed merely a boy who likes dresses, but since that itself does not obviously support trans gender ideology it had to go. It was the left's erasure of the term's core ideas that left it open for reclamation by conservatives.
Great piece, and glad to see more people writing on this. I coined two terms of GC- Gender Critical and Gender Conservatism, when I spoke to Stella O' Malley- the two GCs are not only incompatible but Gender Conservatism is in danger of fuelling gender ideology 2.0, as where do the nonconforming kids go if you tell them to conform? Where they're told they will be accepted as their nonconforming, authentic selves. And so the cycle begins again.
I always rejected this term popping up and never adopted it , the term “gender critical” sounds cringe inducing - the lack of any grounding or exposure to feminist theory one would have had to come up with this is was instantly off putting.
The term is GENDER ABOLITIONIST for a start
But the other word ww could use is simply FEMINIST because the entire feminist movement hinges on the distinction made between gender (masculinity-femininity) arguing it tk be a socially constructed socialisation mechanism for enslavement of thr female sex by the male sex - and Sex Which was argued for first time by the women’s libbers to be limited to differences in reproductive biology with no connection to any of the other things (femininity) conflated with female biology .
Any argument that gender is an essential innate identity rather than a socio political construct is anti feminist . Any argument that slight differences between male and female sexual reproductive organs and slight anatomical differences in any way mark a human beings identity or have any significant meaning besides being aware jf which equipment yoy have should you be seeking to reproduce- and that female sexual organs define and mark the identity and nature of who and what a person is, that is wnt feminist
An Australian feminist polemic writer put it this way “I never thought of myself as a girl or woman growing up , I thought of myself as an Emily”
I noticed on Facebook all the pages, groups and statuses on my newsfeed feed that had all been radical feminists beginning with the Australian ones I know or was networking with over shared activism goals as exiled TERFS SWERFs despite most of us being sex trade survivors wjth lived experience who were campaigning for the Nordic Model and I was called ‘whore phobic (I guess I was phobic of misogynist hate speech terms like that one used by the sex slave traders) and for handing out pro choice action collective flyers about an abortion rights protest action - transphobic then was banned from what had once been the room on campus wonen had skeins decades fighting for as one room on campus for only female sexed people. It was no longer a safe space for me once people twice my size wjth scrotums bulging out of their yoga tights outnumbered the women who were there to ensure no words or thoughts had been allowed to be spoken ir publish by the women’s collective unless they were censored or dictated by the new cszars of the feminists on campus who were behaving the way abusive violent boyfriends of the most severe end of the scale .
But increasingly it was getting taken over wjth trump supporting republican types of women from the US from largely the red states with that kind of background influence and none of them academics, intellecuaor remotely familiar with or political engaged in any feminist theory or political consciousness-
And generally just seemed to be anti trans in the same way the religious right wing fundamentalists feel the need to defend the patriarchy from transgenderism for completey opposite political reasons than the feminists and they certainly don’t actually care about women’s safety but sadly some right wing women likely believe these men actually care about protecting their safety.
I have certainly seen a lot of women who were not remotely feminist and just were building up all these mutual friends making them seem linked with the radical feminists but they clearly had just latched onto whatever rad fem based trans specific content caught their eye and just followed all those groups and friended those women until eventually nobody knew who all these random white USA based MAGA types with no connection to the feminist movement and it all got a bit much..
I mean I’m not saying conservative women can’t protest on the issue but they absolutely need to be at their own separate demonstrations and not attach themselves to gender abolitionist feminist women who did’t come into their feminist conciousness on the internet for the 1256th wave and are the ones who either were around in the libber days or grew up with all bookshelves full of Germaine and all the others -or attach themselves to us
Very good piece, thank you for your clarity. I want to work toward a world where a guy can walk into the men's room and refresh his lipstick in the mirror, and not be harassed there. Fetish or personal style, who cares? It's his lips, he can do what he wants with them – and what goes on in his pants/skirt is no one's business but his own. But it is NOT the responsibility of women to welcome men into our safe spaces. If anything, it is the task of women to raise sons who can expand their definition of masculinity, and who will make room at the mirror for men who can claim their individual expression as men.
Men can retouch their lippy in the gents. Well they can in the UK. David Bowie did it. The glam rockers of the 70s and 80s did it. The Emos of the 90s put their eye liner on in the gents. Transsexual women have used mens spaces with no problem for decades. Our experience of gender crtical thinking in the UK is different to that in America, just as our feminism is and was different. Kellie Jay Keen is a smart woman who has done a huge amount for women and should be thanked by every woman, just as JK Rowling has. You may not agree with how we do things in the UK, but they are just as valid as how you do things in the USA. Different horses for different courses.
I'm not in the USA, I'm in Canada, where we are on the far trailing end of this necessary turnaround. Bring back the glam rockers, I'm all for it :)
👍 Elbows up Canada! 😉🙂
Thank you for this. This has got me thinking of the furor over Phil Illy's appearance at a Genspect conference dressed as a woman. While I concede his choice of garb was unwise, I haven't heard that he conducted himself inappropriately, but some self-defined gender critical people went bananas and demanded that he be removed from the event. Stella O'Malley very reasonably pointed out that a) Genspect had established no dress code; and b) even if they had, it would likely have been illegal for organizers to have ejected Illy based only on his gender-non-conforming clothing.
It's weird that people who insist that hair and clothing or mannersims do not make a man a woman ALSO insist that men not adopt the hair, clothing and/or mannerisms stereotypically associated with women. Wouldn't that mean that women should not adopt the hair, clothing and/or mannerisms stereotypically associated with men? Good grief...that's the path to a world in which women may not wear trousers or change the oil in their own cars, and men better stick with navy blue and black because, you know, pink is for girls. Yikes.
Yeah, I was there at Genspect, and you're correct. The complainers weren't present. The people present didn't care. Phil conducted himself fine and didn't use the women's facilities.
I wrote about it at the time because I kept getting trotted out by these neo GCs as someone likely traumatized by his presence. And then they were mad when I was like nah, you don't get to speak for me. Own your own views.
I agree with you, I also think the thornier issue is that men like Phil Illy clearly get a kick out of forcing others to see their fetish in action. The exhibitionism is the point. So you can’t kick people out of the meeting. But you can say: Don’t be a creep.
In the photo I saw, he was wearing a very understated dress. I don't recall a stuffed bra or even make-up. Simply a man in a dress. How is that putting on a fetishistic exhibit? I don't think we should enforce dress codes, no matter the motive of the dresser, as long as females have rights to single sex spaces.
Correct, no stuffing, no makeup, and he wore the dress with sneakers.
It's fetishistic. Illy says it is. He's an AGP. It's a fetish or a paraphilia based on a fetish.
Did he have an apparent erection that day? The women who were present at that conference were not uncomfortable with him. It became a big controversy online when a photo was posted showing him present at the event in a dress. We really waste our time with this, imo. If Illy was using the men's room that day and supports female-only spaces, then him wearing a simple dress is no big deal, imo. Plenty of people have fetishes. I know a young woman who wears a fur tail. As long as they do not violate others, live and let live, imo.
They do, but some people get a kick out of making others uncomfortable, whether that’s by shouting things at women as they walk down the street or dressing outrageously. If everyone just ignores them it will cease to be interesting for them.
"men like Phil Illy clearly get a kick out of forcing others to see their fetish in action. The exhibitionism is the point"
I don't think that's true. It is true that (some) autogynephilic men get a kick out of dressing as women, but that doesn't mean that they are aroused *all the time* when they do it. (It's like how people used to say that same-sex lovers holding hands were displaying their kink: well, no, just because they are attracted to each other doesn't. mean that there can't be other motives, signs of affection and love. Similarly, some straight, monogamous couples may get a kick out of thinking "he/she is only mine", but that doesn't mean that wearing a wedding ring turns them on.) The sexual urge which originates the desire doesn't remain purely sexual, or even (in all times) sexual at all: it transforms to be other. A lot of AGP men talk about simply being more *comfortable* in women's clothes.
I am not denying that there are *some* men who are exhibitionistic, and that for *some* men having others see them in women's clothes may be a sexual experience. But I do very much deny that it is necessarily or even most often the case.
I think this misunderstanding has a lot to do with why (some) gender critical women (honestly, in either definition) are uncomfortable with avowedly AGP-men: they falsely see them as engaged in what is always a kink. But if you listen to what they (we) say, you'll see it's just not so. That's not how they experience what they are doing. Again, the comparison between how people used to think of same-sex couples is important here: before people could see past the then-unusual nature of it, they saw things that straight couples do routinely as sexual in the case of same-sex couples. But it was wrong then, and it is wrong here.
AGPs are also lying about their motives, even to themselves, sometimes, it is part of the pathology. We don't need to have blanket acceptance of men in dresses, that's not part of the social contract.
How would you enforce that????
Depends on the local situation, I'm not saying men can't wear dresses or we should discriminate against them, just that we don't need to give them carte blanche acceptance. There's a tendency for some social liberals to elevate them as some kind of icon of progressivism.
Yes, this is exactly why I have never defined myself and my feminism as GC. There are women I know and respect who do use the label, but even right at the beginning I thought it only made sense if you equated gender with gender identity, which I don't. It soon became an umbrella term for a number of different political tendencies, some of which I found pretty reactionary. As you say, it's now the reactionaries who have the highest public profile. Which is a pity, but not entirely a surprise. Their position is easier for most people to grasp than the radical feminist one. As for me, if I'm pressed to give myself a label I say I'm just an old school women's libber
Is that you, *the* Deb Cameron? I feel starstruck. Love your work and I quote it all the time.
Well, there must be others, but I think I'm probably the one you mean!
In the final edition of The Radical Notion, many of the British women who spoke about their involvement with feminism over the past decade rejected GC (and other labels). Most simply said they're on the left.
I think it's helpful to define "gender" as feminist sociologists have long done - as a the social norms that stratify men and women (and the things associated with them) such that men and masculinity are consistently more highly valued. Gender identity is then a psychological phenomenon that some people experience. Most of us don't "identify" as women, though, we simply *are* women by dint of our bodies and the socialization attached to being female.
Excellent analysis.
My goal is to relegate the word "gender" to grammar and second wave feminist books as much as possible and still be understood. Just as there is no "cis," people don't have genders - just grammar does.
Thank you for linking the interview with Lisa Vogel, the 40 year producer of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. I worked on long crew for 10 summers. This was where the budding men's movement to colonize women's spaces first impacted me personally - 22 years ago. I was called a trans-exclusionary radical feminist before it was shortened to "terf."
I was also at Genspect in Denver and Phil Illy was fine. We had a nice chat and used different bathrooms. When people lost their minds about it later, it showed me where to prune the people I follow on social media. (Discussion is one thing, hysteria is another.)
I wonder what the next term is for the position that is pro sex-based reality.
Yes, the fact that “gender” is a poorly defined word these days is a good reason in and of itself to reject the label “gender critical.”
"poorly defined" is an understatement. A step in the right direction would be to consider it as a label for sexually dimorphic personality, behavioural, and physiological traits. You might consider Paula -- "Sexy isn't sexist" -- Wright's post as a neat illustration:
https://www.paulawrightdysmemics.com/p/ruff-sex-and-sneaky-fukers?triedRedirect=true
I don’t call myself a radical feminist or even a feminist, but I’m not a religious conservative either. I’m a lesbian. My wife is gender non conforming.
Yet I don’t think men should wear women’s clothes, especially not “sexy” women’s clothes designed to emphasize a female figure they don’t have. (A modest outfit with a pink print or something is different.) It’s a fetish for most of them, and it makes me uncomfortable.
I don’t want it to be illegal. But privately, I would judge someone and avoid him socially. And I think it’s fine for our culture to send the message that this clothing isn’t appropriate for men. A lot of clothes are inappropriate and inviting judgment, but not illegal.
Bring back ostracism!
Shame has a useful function that has been defanged by the very same gender ideologues.
"Put them in stocks!" 😉🙂
Though I'm also reminded of the motto of a fairly famous Canadian regiment -- my ex's uncle was serving therein as they landed on Juno Beach on D-Day:
Motto(s); French: Honi soit qui mal y pense;
"Shamed be whoever thinks ill of it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Grenadier_Guards
We grow a lot of tomatoes, and also squashes for the most recalcitrant… 😬
We Canadians have a chequered (but I honestly think *pragmatically* ruthless) approach to wars that we’ve been forced to fight:
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-forgotten-ferocity-of-canadas-soldiers-in-the-great-war
Good, bad, or ugly (all are reasonable POVs about this history imho), the Geneva Conventions are littered with international responses to how Canadian soldiers conducted themselves on the battlefield.
And frankly, if F47 was to make good on his threats to our sovereignty, I would not necessarily respect those Conventions* in defence of my country.
*I would 100% respect all the ones around the proper treatment of & conditions for civilians and *female* prisoners of war — the latter being an appropriately higher expectation than most developed countries afford both prisoners and “free” women.
I have a similar struggle with the label “Left.” Doesn’t mean what it used to mean. I Used to use it, now I can’t stand it. Shifting political sands leave us unmoored, but all that rethinking is a constructive process.
We need to reclaim it. The Left grew out of the political movement of working people for better wages, working and living conditions. Now the average Leftie probably never heard of the Wobblies, Sacco and Vanzetti or Walter Reuther. I think Bernie has always been on the right track. He's never really knuckled under to all this gender woo woo. The Left means those of us who support universal health care, fair housing, free or cheap education, due process, fair, transparent elections and a huge reduction of corporate and billionaire power and wealth. Race and sex got pulled into all this because our ruling elites always used them to divide us. LGB came later and finally trans activists and slick lawyers tacked T onto LGB and off we go, to rainbow whackdoodle land. We don't have to put up with that. We can and should dump postmodernism, extreme identity politics and the young Left's morbid fascination with making everything "safe". There's no such world. Idk. Maybe there's no hope for a resurgent, common sense, realist, materialist, empiricist Left, but I'm going down swinging.
Agreed. I maintain those values while distancing myself from today’s ‘left.’
That's my idea of Left as well
I avoid the word 'gender', preferring to distinguish only sex. Other than my long hair (more from lack of desire to spend lots of money at a hairdresser than anything else), I give only basic thought to what I wear - comfortable and practical. I'm female, I don't have to dress to signal that. I don't much care what anyone else wears. But - males wearing clothes intending to make them appear female, do stick out. And they make me wary of them, the way obviously drunk or intoxicated behaviour would make me avoid someone. It's not that I want men to 'conform to gender roles', its by obviously intending to break the norms, they flag themselves as a possible risk. And as potentially mentally unstable. And before 'trans' was everywhere, I don't think I thought that way. I suspect it's part of the backlash, which will likely wash over the LGB along with the TQI+. It's a tragedy.
Very sadly for TRAs one cannot change sex. "Woman" is not a costume and women's spaces are not for men, however they identify.
I love the way you said woman is not a costume. Sums it up perfectly. I’ve been wondering if it makes sense to look at “dressing up as a woman” in the same way that we might loot at someone choosing to “dress Chinese” or “Native American” or any other race/ethnicity/culture of people. That makes us uncomfortable and rightly so - it is fetishizing a commonly understood “look” of a category of people (often oppressed) and using it for play and attention. So why would that not apply to the sexes as well? Though clothing is technically/conceptually “just clothing”, in real life one still ascribes certain styles mainly to one sex or the other, especially when we are talking about the more garish/sexual ways of dressing. So a man putting on the most stereotypically female clothes he can think of and adorning himself in other ways society by and large sees as feminine is a way of claiming “woman” as a costume — which is perhaps inappropriate in the same way as a white person claiming “black” as a costume. We want everything to be neutral, but it isn’t. Of course, the line is gray - where do we cross from choosing the clothes we like regardless of stereotype into putting on a costume of a different sex? I’m not sure. I also want to live in a world where men can reapply their lipstick in the men’s bathroom and that would be totally fine. Perhaps there is a heightened sensitivity right now precisely because of all the intentional costuming and demanding to be referred to as the sex that one is not. So that has whiplashed into people being wary of even small acts of non-conforming dress/makeup/etc.
just some thoughts, would love to know if others think I’m barking up a tree that makes any sense…
I agree with you on everything--radical is not a great qualifier, no one outside of it gets it--but I'm at a loss as to what to do about it. Definitions are slippery things. I know what I think feminism is, but I'm not sure it's what others think it is.
So well explained. Thank you for the clarity, Shannon.
A few months ago, I had an exchange with someone who took issue with my use of the expression “gender critical/conservative.” “‘Gender critical’ analysis comes from radical feminism, which is not conservative,” she corrected me. And I was just like, “Well, yes, but things have drifted.”
Like you, bewildered by it all. Being far removed hasn't helped. But here's a tip. Obscuring effects brought about by excess verbiage and flabby thinking are undoubtedly with us to stay. That conclusion is based on some funny and pungent observations by Orwell in "Politics and the English Language" re such reliable cultural sand traps as art criticism. Worth checking out. Not much of a feminist of course but he did ID some perennial soft spots among the chattering classes. They morph but never go away.
We should be working towards gender abolitionism.
I see the trans-gender movement solidifying gender stereotypes; if a boy likes dresses, he should've been a girl; if a girl likes tools, she should've been a boy.
The obsession over gender is moving us backwards in societal progress and has real life harms to children and teens being told they should take irreversible medical steps to change their bodies before they're old enough to drive a car. Going through puberty is hard enough without being told you can be "'born in the wrong body." I think this culture trend is very damaging to kids.
It is also having serious consequences to women's same-sex spaces; locker rooms, spas, bathrooms, prisons, and sports. It is dangerous for women to so quickly forget that they are a protected sex class for a reason.
I say, wear whatever you like, but stop trying to change sex, because that can't be done. I wish people would be encouraged to be more in-touch with their body. When I was young, the fad was for women to be anorexic, now that's changed to transgender. All in all, I think it's just hard to grow up in this world.
> "We should be working towards gender abolitionism ..."
You may wish to read Kathleen Stock's views on that objective:
"Abolish the dream of gender abolition; But not for the reasons you think"
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender
"Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" -- that is largely or to a first approximation what "gender" encompasses.
There was a midpoint in the change here where many probably well-meaning pro-trans people failed to imbibe the original meaning of gender critical and popularized the notion that e.g. a boy who likes dresses must actually be a girl. The original feminist, gender critical idea was that such a boy is indeed merely a boy who likes dresses, but since that itself does not obviously support trans gender ideology it had to go. It was the left's erasure of the term's core ideas that left it open for reclamation by conservatives.
This is a great point.
Yes, I think a lot of people missed the CRITICAL part in gender critical.
That and I don't think TRAs took any time to actually listen to or understand the arguments that gender critical feminists were making.
Great piece, and glad to see more people writing on this. I coined two terms of GC- Gender Critical and Gender Conservatism, when I spoke to Stella O' Malley- the two GCs are not only incompatible but Gender Conservatism is in danger of fuelling gender ideology 2.0, as where do the nonconforming kids go if you tell them to conform? Where they're told they will be accepted as their nonconforming, authentic selves. And so the cycle begins again.
I always rejected this term popping up and never adopted it , the term “gender critical” sounds cringe inducing - the lack of any grounding or exposure to feminist theory one would have had to come up with this is was instantly off putting.
The term is GENDER ABOLITIONIST for a start
But the other word ww could use is simply FEMINIST because the entire feminist movement hinges on the distinction made between gender (masculinity-femininity) arguing it tk be a socially constructed socialisation mechanism for enslavement of thr female sex by the male sex - and Sex Which was argued for first time by the women’s libbers to be limited to differences in reproductive biology with no connection to any of the other things (femininity) conflated with female biology .
Any argument that gender is an essential innate identity rather than a socio political construct is anti feminist . Any argument that slight differences between male and female sexual reproductive organs and slight anatomical differences in any way mark a human beings identity or have any significant meaning besides being aware jf which equipment yoy have should you be seeking to reproduce- and that female sexual organs define and mark the identity and nature of who and what a person is, that is wnt feminist
An Australian feminist polemic writer put it this way “I never thought of myself as a girl or woman growing up , I thought of myself as an Emily”
I noticed on Facebook all the pages, groups and statuses on my newsfeed feed that had all been radical feminists beginning with the Australian ones I know or was networking with over shared activism goals as exiled TERFS SWERFs despite most of us being sex trade survivors wjth lived experience who were campaigning for the Nordic Model and I was called ‘whore phobic (I guess I was phobic of misogynist hate speech terms like that one used by the sex slave traders) and for handing out pro choice action collective flyers about an abortion rights protest action - transphobic then was banned from what had once been the room on campus wonen had skeins decades fighting for as one room on campus for only female sexed people. It was no longer a safe space for me once people twice my size wjth scrotums bulging out of their yoga tights outnumbered the women who were there to ensure no words or thoughts had been allowed to be spoken ir publish by the women’s collective unless they were censored or dictated by the new cszars of the feminists on campus who were behaving the way abusive violent boyfriends of the most severe end of the scale .
But increasingly it was getting taken over wjth trump supporting republican types of women from the US from largely the red states with that kind of background influence and none of them academics, intellecuaor remotely familiar with or political engaged in any feminist theory or political consciousness-
And generally just seemed to be anti trans in the same way the religious right wing fundamentalists feel the need to defend the patriarchy from transgenderism for completey opposite political reasons than the feminists and they certainly don’t actually care about women’s safety but sadly some right wing women likely believe these men actually care about protecting their safety.
I have certainly seen a lot of women who were not remotely feminist and just were building up all these mutual friends making them seem linked with the radical feminists but they clearly had just latched onto whatever rad fem based trans specific content caught their eye and just followed all those groups and friended those women until eventually nobody knew who all these random white USA based MAGA types with no connection to the feminist movement and it all got a bit much..
I mean I’m not saying conservative women can’t protest on the issue but they absolutely need to be at their own separate demonstrations and not attach themselves to gender abolitionist feminist women who did’t come into their feminist conciousness on the internet for the 1256th wave and are the ones who either were around in the libber days or grew up with all bookshelves full of Germaine and all the others -or attach themselves to us