Thread by @janeclarejones

1. It is false to claim that materialist/radical feminist critiques of trans ideology are 'the same view' as is held by Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or the far right.

The feminist critique and the gender conservative critque are *not the same view.*

2. 'Gender critical' originally named the feminist critique, and 'gender' in the name refers to gender in the feminist sense. The name expresses the idea that one central thing wrong with trans ideology is that it is based on the essentialisation of gendered norms.

3. People who are worried about the essentialisation of gendered norms do not share a view with gender conservatives, whose objection to trans ideology is about what they perceive as the disruption of gendered norms.

4. In this sense, as feminists have often argued, gender conservatives and trans ideologues actually agree with each other about the essentialisation of gender norms. They just differ because TRAs think gender essence can get put in the wrong body, and gender conservatives don't.

5. Over time however, as the GC movement grew, 'GC' has come to mean 'sex realist' not 'critical of the essentialisation of gendered norms.' Many people now involved in the fight against trans ideology no longer know the feminist roots of the term.

Indeed, many people think the 'gender' in the term just means 'gender identity' or 'trans.' It is now common for me to hear people criticising the term for 'using the language of the enemy.'

For feminists, 'gender' is not 'the language of the enemy.'

It is OUR language too.

6. In the course of the flattening of the term into simply 'sex realist' and the expansion of the movement into one united only by sex realism, the feminist critique of the TRAs position has progressively dropped out of the discourse.

This has been not only accidental but structural. And this is a common feature of feminist history. When feminist based movements reach wider platforms the discourse gets defanged. The figures that end up rising to prominence are the ones happy to go along with the defanging.

7. When the feminist critique of gender essentialism is lost, and all is left is sex realism, *then nothing is left that does distinguish the position from that of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.*

8. The alignment on sex realism does not, by itself, demonstrate any wider political alignment.

Because in a world that had not gone bonkers about this, asserting the facts of mammalian biology shouldn't constitute a political position at all.

Many people across the political spectrum, from the Communist Party of Great Britian, to Tommy Robinson, have the same view about that.

9. *However,* the question of political alignment is not simply a matter of 'sharing the same views about whether humans come in two sexes.'

It is, more significantly a matter of:

a) Sharing political platforms and/or engaging in political organising with.

&

b) Whether your views end up coinciding in other respects in accordance with a wider political agenda.

10. This is where things get sticky.

I have never agreed that those criticising GC figures for appearing on populist right platforms because they are also sex realists are simply practicing 'guilt by association.'

When you appear on the plaforms associated with political movements that have a wider agenda, you are lending credibility, political energy, and momentum to those agendas.

You are also contributing to the merging of political audiences, and bringing people into contact with

political discourses which have objectives that are antithetical to the political principles that grounded that GC project when it started.

This *is* what has happened over recent years, to the extent that the gender critical space is now pretty hostile to many of the women who

helped build the original movement.

Many of the activists from that original project have left.

Those of us cursed with an obsessive need to read political tealeaves can't quite tear our eyes away, or give up on the importance of the original project.

But it is dishonest to pretend that, in signficiant ways, that hasn't happened by hiding behind 'guilt-by-association,' or 'we just happen to agree that the sky is blue.'

No one should read political alignment from the fact that you happen to agree the sky is blue, but they

might quite rightly read it from sharing platforms, from the ways the discourses are merging around several issues, and from the failure to mark clear differences between one project and another.

And while you might decry it, if you want to convince the people you need to convince - the progressive people who are ideologically primed to disagree with you - that set of political alignments is a serious barrier to winning them over and finally finishing this thing.

Which is all basically to say that both Allison Morris and he GC respondants are right about some things and wrong about others.