Yes, this is an extra thing today. I normally try to publish three days a week and I don’t want to get so talky that I turn people off, but sometimes you just want to say something and not have to wait to see it a day or three later. I’m sure someone will let me know when I get overwhelming. They do that. By disappearing, if by no other method.
What brought this on was actually a collection of several events and observations which just sort of all gelled together. It gets sort of built up in your mind and then you think, Hey, I see a pattern. I really ought to say something. Or you do if you’re me.
Okay. So. The new people in my life may be convinced I want to be a hermit when I grow up (nah; I keep my bedroom door closed so I don’t have to monitor doggos and protect my trash can), but I actually like people and find them fascinating. I’m just not sure where I belong anymore. It may be a while before I figure that out. But as often as I comment in various online conversations, just as often I notice people doing things and sort of quietly store it away for later analysis. Everything does not require an immediate response. That’s been a hard lesson for me to learn, but I got there.
It’s gotten to the point, though, that I really should speak up.
Look. I know. A lot of us facing this gender-identity thing are relatively isolated with little in-person social support. It gets lonely out here. I actually got very, very lucky in my current housing situation because if I told you who I was living with and also who my near neighbor is, you’d be like, “Oh, yeah — that’s terf central!” I never had this before. I had to be constantly on guard before now lest I say the wrong thing around the wrong person and wind up with my whole life ruined, and then that went and happened anyway. To be able to stand in the middle of my (my roomie’s) living room and say, “Women are real and gender identity is bullshit,” and know that I’m not going to be attacked or kicked out for it is huge. I don’t actually do that — she and I both know and understand this, no need to beat a dead horse — but I fucking could. Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two is four. I haven’t had that freedom in years.
And, hell, I was just tired of not having friends I could actually look at and talk to face-to-face. I won’t say I suddenly have a gang of besties, it’s too early for that, but I could see it going in that direction.
So I get why people online glom onto anyone who might agree with them on the gender question. I’ve been there. I’m still sort of there; two local people agreeing with me is nice, but we’re in hostile territory and not really safe, so it feels better to network with gender-criticals online as well. I’m not gonna condemn other people for having a human need. Right there with ya.
But, y’all? Try to be a little more discerning about it. You’re taking things just a little bit too far in the wrong direction.
I have noticed there are two camps of the “gender-critical.”
Gender fundamentalists: Are completely okay with the existence of sexist stereotypes, but are offended that the gender-identity movement assigns them to the “wrong” sex classes.
You know you’ve encountered one of these when their daughter has desisted from a trans identity and has now gone completely in the other direction to look “hyperfeminine,” and the parent is celebrating the daughter “looking like a real woman.”
Like… That bullshit helped cause this problem. Miss the point much?
Gender atheists: Often known as gender abolitionists, they are against sexist stereotyping or never bought into it in the first place or are actively trying to unlearn it now or some combination of some or all of those things. Probably more likely to be blindsided by their kids getting into gender identity because they already didn’t enforce patriarchal gender in their home life and so just assumed the kid was being gender-nonconforming. This was me.
And an interesting thing I notice with these two camps is that the gender fundamentalists tend toward the more right-wing side of the political spectrum (unlike sex, politics is a spectrum) and gender atheists tend toward the more left-wing side. This is not an absolute, there are exceptions, but it is the dominant pattern.
It wouldn’t be a problem if the fundies and the atheists were just engaged in a temporary alliance to get gender identity out of politics and enforce some kind of science-based rules for medical practice. But what I’m seeing are far too many gender atheists beginning to parrot gender fundamentalists’ right-wing talking points.
We don’t do this with any other political issue. We don’t look at right-wingers and say, “Well, they agree with me that we need to breathe oxygen to live, so I guess they’re right that rape never causes pregnancy and that immigrants are parasites.” But the second a right-winger says women are real, too many of us want to platform every single other thing they say, even when it’s clearly bullshit.
Imagine how strong the left would be now if we put all that energy into reviving leftist politics which, by the way, we don’t really have in the USA and Canada anymore and is on its last legs in the UK as well. But we’re too busy echoing the fundies when they say this mess is all leftism’s fault. Excuse you. Not only do leftists know what a woman is, Marx himself said that every social change requires women’s participation to succeed. The current “leftist” thing going on is excluding women’s participation, especially feminist women’s participation, or pretending it isn’t happening. Because it’s not leftist. This is just two different factions of right-wingers playing Good Cop, Bad Cop against women. And we are falling for it.
So many of the people we uphold as “gender critical” heroes are anti-planet, anti-nature, anti-human, anti-life (even when calling themselves “pro-life”… once again, excuse you, because women are alive too and we fucking matter), and anti-female but they’re right on this ONE thing, that women are real, so we give them a pass. What do you suppose is going to happen if they gain real political power? Why on earth would we let that happen?
They’re not going to help you. They want to help themselves and they know being contrary gets them attention. If you pay attention to their arguments that are not about gender identity (and sometimes when they are; the parents celebrating their desisted daughters “now looking like real women” because they now wear makeup and miniskirts come to mind), you can see that this is so. One of my favorite bits is James Esses being offended that oppressed people get to judge whether we are actually being oppressed — who on earth does he think gets to make that determination? The oppressor class? A disinterested third party? And where on earth would you even find one of the latter, anyway? And then, according to some of these people, we’re not supposed to support even the idea that black lives matter, even though black women are being particularly harmed by gender identity (who the hell do you think makes up so much of the population of women’s prisons in the USA, often for crimes that get white women probation?), and we’re supposed to jump on all these other bandwagons like being against immigration and being for Israel’s extreme violence in Gaza. This is clownery. Just not gender clownery. There are lots of different schools of clownery, and we probably ought to be on guard against all of them.
I don’t want the same fucking fucked-up world but with no gender identity. I want a different world entirely. One in which women and kids regardless of background get a fair shot at living up to our full potential in peace and reasonable safety. I think we all need to slow our roll, stop operating from fear, and start really thinking about what outcome we want in the long run. And then start making choices that support that outcome. If the rightists don’t like it, they have three options: shut it, complain about it, or change. Not actually our problem.
This is great thank you