Another unrequested lecture
Dude laboriously does us an explain in Psychology Today that gender norms are cultural. Gosh, who knew?
Never mind that we don’t need some guy telling us that, because it’s there only as a runway for a flight into the usual Women Must Do What They’re Told.
More recently, the advent of so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) came to be a significant feminist ideology. In recent years, TERF has been “rebranded” as gender critical (GC) feminism, a “linguistic pivot from ‘anti-trans’ to ‘pro-woman’ … an attempted claim to legitimacy with an aim of accruing mainstream support,” according to a peer-reviewed research article by Claire Thurlow.
No, chump, “terf” hasn’t been rebranded. Terf has always been a snide pejorative for women who don’t submit to trans ideology.
Thurlow argues that despite the rebranding, GC feminism continues to deploy anti-trans tropes and alarmist rhetoric aimed at inciting moral panic. According to another commentator, Katelyn Burns (writing in Vox), GC feminism is now the de facto dominant ideology in the UK and a significant force in the United States, where, ironically, GC feminists ally with (male) “family-values” conservatives whose goals are often antithetical to those of GC feminism.
Wut? Gender critical feminism is now the de facto dominant ideology in the UK?? You must be joking. No kind of feminism is the dominant ideology anywhere on the planet, let alone the gender critical kind in the UK. And we don’t “ally with” family values conservatives. We do overlap with them on the question of whether people can change sex, but guess what, we all sometimes overlap with people we disagree with on most things, because there’s so much that everyone agrees on.
His final summing up:
Whatever one’s views on the immutability or otherwise of biological sex, gender is itself a sociolinguistic construct. While it certainly has a basis in biology, it is confected in a cultural context. And non-Western cultures take different views as to whether gender identity must align with biological sex as assigned at birth (see my previous post). The takeaway from this is that while freedom of speech is important, so is tolerance of opposing views, without resorting to perceived transphobic tropes.
That’s the takeway? You could have fooled me. He hasn’t mentioned “transphobic tropes” before this abrupt conclusion, so we don’t even know what he considers a “transphobic trope.” It’s funny that he takes the precaution of calling them perceived transphobic tropes, but since he hasn’t specified any, his meaning remains conjectural. Dude tries to tell women what women are, fails.
Well, remember: they aren’t allowed to know what a woman is, either. Woman must be forever undefined so that no man can be denied access.
First off, biological sex is not assigned, it is a biological reality. Whether your sexual identity aligns (stereotypically) with your biological sex is the question. There are only the two. Both sexes and genders. Two and the same, male and female. How else could a person be “transgender” if they weren’t trying to pass themselves off (or believe themselves to be) the opposite of their biological sex? Sex and gender are not two different things, they mean the same exact thing. I haven’t seen any coherent argument to the contrary, and after seeing this guy’s writing, I still haven’t. If someone is gender critical, then they are critical of the idea (ideology in fact) that people can change their biological sex. Because they can not. Transsexual is an outdated word for transgender — it’s virtually, and for all intents and purposes, defined as the same thing. Gender is sometimes described as social norms, but those social norms are based on the sex binary. I don’t buy it.
I suppose a lot of PhD’s are awarded to people who unnecessarily complexify things. In so doing they can get things wrong. I find them intellectually dishonest.
twilighter
Both TRAs and feminists sometimes use “gender” to refer to the social norms that are attached to, or expected of, each sex. The norms are “based on” the biological sexes but are not at all the same thing. If sex and gender (in this sense) were the exact same things, women would never have gotten the vote (just for starters).
Yes, but we’re also critical of the ideas that gender norms are intrinsic to manhood and womanhood, and that women and men must or should conform to those norms. These are among the points that distinguish us from gender conservatives.
Some behavioral (and possibly some cognitive) gender norms are indeed biologically based, and we see statistical differences in behavior. These are not unimportant. But there are outliers. Just as some men are shorter than the statistical male norm, there are women and men who are sex atypical in behavior. But just as a short man aren’t less of a man than a man of average height, so masculine women and feminine men are still, respectively, women and men.
(“Masculine” and “feminine” are useful words for describing gender-typical behavior.)
The problem isn’t with people defying gender norms. It’s with people defining what it is to be a woman or a man by “gender” rather than sex. That, and the whole denial of sex. And the prioritization of “gender identity” over sex in law and social policy. And the chemical castration of children. There are lots of problems, actually. But distinguishing “gender” from sex in this way isn’t one of them.
Damn. I really tried hard to proofread.
Just “less of a man” should be italicized.
I apologize, O. I know I do this a lot. I have only a smart phone, so I can’t see my entire comment as I’m typing and have to scroll.
No worries! It’s very easy to fix stuff via the dashboard.