On thin ice
In another part of the forest…
Defamatory?
The Gender Critical Research Network is an explicitly anti-intellectual attack on Gender Studies, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, and inclusive, intersectional feminist politics.
Including the word “explicitly” was…reckless.
Proponents of the “gender critical” perspective, including the Members and Affiliated Members of the Network, are adamantly and openly opposed to recognising trans people’s rightful and valid claims to their gender and their rights.
Again – “and their rights” – reckless.
Their efforts to undermine trans rights are particularly concerning now, at a time when trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people in the UK and elsewhere are already experiencing such immense restrictions on their social, medical, interpersonal, and political livelihoods.
Yes I’d call that defamatory. I’m not a lawyer BUT.
As numerous scholars and activists have documented, those espousing gender critical perspectives routinely make transphobic, discriminatory, inaccurate, and harmful claims about trans people specifically, and gender more broadly, that have profoundly negative effects on social and political life. Their unfounded viewpoints are inimical to intersectional feminisms and scholarly debate, and they contribute to the ongoing “anti-gender” attacks on the field. In refusing the concept of gender, and in framing “sex” as immutable, binary, and essentialist, the gender critical perspective runs counter to decades of scholarship from across the social sciences, humanities, and medical fields, and it relies on and invests in racist, colonial understandings of sex/gender.
Stupid. Maybe defamatory too, but what jumps out at you is the stupid.
Stupid is as stupid does, someone once said.
There are three sexes. Fact. Male. Female. Intersex. This is Biology.
I think we can make a case that there are 2 genders – Man. Woman. This is part biology, part social conditioning. There are men more comfortable appearing feminine and vice versa, and who am I to claim otherwise? Live and let live.
The rest is sexual orientation, who you do or do not find sexually attractive.
IF I change my name to Regina, wear a dress and make-up, and am sexually attracted to women only, that does not make me a Lesbian; it makes me a straight man who likes dresses and makeup. I will not have periods, get pregnant, go through menopause, or get cervical cancer.
I have gay and lesbian friends. Their sexual orientation is their business, not the foundation of our friendship. I may have trans friends, just as in the past I had gay friends without knowing it until later in our relationship. But I could not, under any circumstance, be friends with a TRA. I’d rather die than be a collaborator.
Intersex is not a third sex. It’s a name for a large group of various birth defects. Every single intersex person is either male or female.
Intersex is not a third sex. It’s a name for a large group of various birth defects. Every single intersex person is either male or female.
It is my understanding that “intersex” is not a third sex. It’s a casual term used to refer to disorders of sexual development. All people with DSDs are either male or female, not both, not neither, and certainly not some third sex. They may have ambiguous genitalia, but that again doesn’t make them a different sex. There are only two sexes, male and female.
GW beat me to the punch. I type too slowly.
There is a chart in this post, put together by an individual with a DSD, who was suspended from Twitter for his efforts. It shows all DSD types categorized by which are male and which are female.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10218561771173783&id=1181367351&sfnsn=mo
I don’t understand why thousands of doctors and biologists haven’t slapped this nonsense down, hard.
The biologists are the ones that bother me the most; doctors are not always scientists. I am glad to see that The Endocrine Society has issued a clear statement that there are exactly two sexes, and that the differences between those sexes need to be considered in research. I am sorry that the same organization continues to support medical treatment for young people with gender dysphoria, and I note that endocrinologists have a financial incentive to provide such treatments.
Sackbut, all the biologists I know are very much in the camp of men cannot be women. The problem is, our boss has made it plain we are to be ‘inclusive’. One person has already been fired.
I continue to teach correct biology in my classes; so far it hasn’t been an issue. The students learn it, they answer the questions about x and y chromosomes correctly, and no one has raised an issue, not even the transman I had in that class.
It’s not easy to be the brave leader when you have to eat; I am in a charmed position, because I am old enough to retire (though a little younger than I planned to), so firing me will just sent me to retirement a year early. I don’t put safe space stickers on my door, I don’t post my pronouns on my profile, and I teach Biology-based Biology, not fantasy-based Biology. Too bad I don’t have enough of a name for anyone to give a flying fig what I say or do.
I found this a bit hard to read on account of the poor choice of typeface. However, it doesn’t seem to mention androgen insensitivity syndrome (also known as testicular feminization, but that term seems to be obsolete). People with this condition are XY, but insensitive (in some cases completely) to male hormones, and develop as apparently normal women.
If you met any of the women in the picture in the section Classification here
it wouldn’t occur to you that she was a man, and the only way you would find out would be that she had had infertility tests. If any of them wanted to compete in the Olympics as a woman cyclist only a fanatic would object.
There is a list on that page of People with AIS, but I hadn’t heard of any of them before. One that I had heard of, but is not listed, was Katherine Woolley, archaeologist and friend of Agatha Christie.
‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ are not genders. They are the nouns used to refer to adult males and adult females.
The gender nouns that you were looking for are ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’.
Those are adjectives.
They are grammatical terms: useful (and necessary) if you’re learning French or German or Russian (or, indeed, many other languages), but pretty much useless in English. I never use “gender” in its trendy woke sense.
To an extent, the whole Trans Debate has come down to which set of adjectives the nouns “man” and “woman” should be tied to–GCFs hold that those terms apply to “Male” and “Female”, while TRAs insist that they apply to “Masculine” and “Feminine”.
The TRA position falls apart once you give it a hard look under this light, because it’s trivially easy to point out that the latter adjectives have spongy, shifting definitions, and as categories have often had traits that swapped from one side to the other. Computer programming used to be a feminine occupation, for instance, because it was unglamorous and relatively low-paid. Once it became more rewarding, men invaded and it became a masculine domain.
(Actually, the battle’s a three-way. TRAs want to slave sex to gender (if you want to wear dresses, you’re a woman), Socio-Religious Conservatives want to slave gender to sex (if you’re a woman, you should wear dresses), and GCFs want sex to be a distinct category and ‘gender’ to be burned to the ground (wear a dress if you want to, it doesn’t make you a woman).
This is an excellent distillation of the distinctions, and what I was trying to get at in the other thread.
[…] a comment by Freemage on On thin […]
@GW #12
Yes, of course, stupid me, trying to be too smart for my own good :)
That is actually relevant to the point though as gender isn’t a thing that you can ‘be’ but is rather a description of characteristics that you can ‘have’ or ‘present’. Which goes along with what Freemage said. Masculine women and feminine men have been a thing for millennia and it is only now that we are being bullied into accepting that it is not Ok to simply go with but that we have to re-label those people.
@14, 15–there’s a meme to that effect:
https://media.spinster.xyz/50ca531da8b8e3101078f3e370e5c4b75ff97d34cfeed277f6eafc6cb6b4c57e.jpg
#2 GW #4 Sackbut etc
I would say rather, the intersexed person is not able to be placed unambiguously as male or female, but can be stated as having a male or female phenotype. And given that phenotype drives how people see themselves and how others see (and act towards) them, it is certainly the more useful way of looking at a person.
#10 Athel
CAIS is present on that table: “XY – Mutated X, AIS [Female]. AIS stands for androgen insensitivity syndrome.