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Jaicee on 22 June 2020
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sundin13 said:
Jaicee said:

Since we're hearing these criticisms of gender critical feminists, I thought it might be useful to also include a short speech by a noted gender critical feminist (a more principled and weathered one than J.K. Rowling I mean) as well so that we might actually get a perspective from a veteran of this movement on their own terms. To that end, below you will find a speech by Meghan Murphy, who owns the Feminist Current web site you may have noticed I link to sometimes. It was given at the Toronto Public Library late last year amidst large demonstrations outside, mostly by trans activists disingenuously associating her with, of all things, the Trump border wall and "fascism" and "genocide" and other assorted hysterical claims. The trans activists had called upon the library to cancel the event because of who the speaker was. (It's a movement that I think you'll find struggles to tolerate concepts like free speech, dissenting views, and dialogue.) Every ticket sold. The video includes only the speech itself (not the Q&A that followed and such), which keeps it just under half an hour. I picked this one because I've found it to be Murphy's best and most succinct talk on the subject of gender identity. Without further adieu

"According to the trans movement, we are not women, we are cis-women, which apparently means we identify as the gender assigned to us at birth. This is insulting. I am not a 'woman' because I identity with femininity." *hold for applause*

This seems to be a pretty core part of the thesis of "gender critical" feminism, and it feels to me like a huge misunderstanding of what that statement actually means. I understand the perspective of this from an "abolish gender" perspective, however, I think we come to an issue when we talk about identifying and what that means. To "identify" as a woman, is not to embrace femininity but simply to speak about how you think about and name yourself. If you see yourself as a male and you prefer male pronouns, that generally means you identify as male. It does not say anything about your relationship with masculinity.

That is because gender identity and gender expression are not interlocked. We can identify as a female while expressing as masculine, and that is entirely valid.

....

(I left it at that because I think your core case was made here and this is what I aim to reply to tonight.)

That, to my mind, only shows gender identity to be even more arbitrary and disingenuous concept than I'd previously believed. If a guy can just claim for all legal and social purposes that he's a woman without even being expected to change anything about himself to indicate as much -- if he can just continue comporting himself in a socially masculine way and everything -- and I'm seriously expected to just buy that he, with his full Taliban beard and all, is really a woman on nothing more than his personal say so, then that only shows how capricious and intellectually dishonest this whole phenom is.

The essence of what gender critical feminists believe about womanhood is that it's something that exists objectively, materially, and has real-world consequence. Womanhood is not just a feeling that anyone can claim. You cannot just identify your way out of patriarchal repression. Phenom like the polls showing the vast majority of people prefer male babies and societies where fetuses are commonly aborted if it's discovered that they're female go to show that social misogyny begins to affect one before they're even born, let alone able to conceive of a gender identity for themselves. Patriarchal oppression doesn't care about your gender identity, it cares about your physical chemistry and defines your worth accordingly. That, in fact, is why trans-men face discrimination and under-representation even within the transgender movement: because they are biologically female! It's no coincidence that they have the higher rates of depression and anxiety are more likely to try taking their lives.

Sexism is called that for a reason: because it based on your sex! To the extent that that simple fact is ignored, it becomes impossible to recognize sexism when one sees it, and thus to resist and defeat it.