Indeed, gender is a core second wave feminist concept. As a core second wave feminist concept it refers to the social mechanisms through which people are socialised into their respective sex roles, the hierarchical valuation of those sex roles, the mechanisms of othering and devaluation of women, and beyond that, the entire hierarchical set of social values and oppositions which upholds this system.

It *does not refer* to people’s inner or innate identity. And it does not displace or overwrite sex in any way. Gender in second wave feminist operates with a distinction between sex and gender, and the understanding is that gender role socialisation is applied to particular individuals *on the basis of sex* in order to maintain and propagate sex based oppression.

That is not the same concept as is being used either by third wave Butlerian feminism, or by the dominant gender studies paradigm that was created by the fusion of third wave academic feminism and trans ideology.

And the reason we are fighting a battle that has come to be called ‘the gender war’ is because we fundamentally don’t agree here about what gender is. Although, as Jo is doing an exemplary job of demonstrating, we have spent the last ten something years trying to get a coherent definition of what the dominant gender studies paradigm actually thinks gender is, and we’re still not much the wiser. I was teaching this last night in my class on third wave feminism.

One of the issues here is that feminism appropriated the word ‘gender’ from sexology in the early seventies to apply to a concept/set of thoughts that has existed in feminism at least since Wollstonecraft’s ‘Vindication.’ That is, that our society has a hierarchical sex based role system and that the ‘inferiority’ of women is socially produced.

It turns out that taking the word from sexology might not have been so felicitous. Because in sexology it comes along with a load of individualising, psychologising, and patriarchal assumptions. And that is the meaning of gender that ended up resurfacing in the concept of ‘gender identity.’ Which, to underline, *did not emerge through feminism.* That concept goes from sexology into trans ideology, and then is absorbed into the dominant gender studies paradigm when it is formed from the fusion of third wave feminism and trans ideology.

Okay. So I’m only going to do this once here.

This is in response to the below tweet requesting evidence, in response to my previous tweet about whether people really do want us to provide receipts, which was a response to the anonymous GC Letter, which is an exercise in handwaving and deflection produced in response to the GC Anti Far Right letter.

This account is claiming she has no idea what we are referring to and asking to be directed to some evidence. So I checked her TL. We have many of these such encounters these days. People saying ‘we can’t make legitimate criticisms of Islam’ or ‘it’s just about two tier policing’ and then checking their TL and then going ‘Oh fuck, okay, right you are 🤯’

Turns out this tweet is a pretty good example. The practice being depicted in the video is indeed barbaric. And it’s okay to say that. However, the text places that observation in a much wider frame. The use of ‘most of these apes’ (FFS), the reference to ‘live like we are in the 1AD,’ combined with ‘who follow the Quran,’ ‘third world,’ ‘immigration’ and ‘barbaric’ produces this:

‘We should not let Muslims immigrate to this country because they are backwards uncivilised primitive animal-like barbarians.’

And that isn’t just ‘expressing reasonable concerns about Islam.’ That is anti-Muslim racism. So, I have an essay I wrote yesterday and I’m just faffing around with it and getting it ready.

In response to all this handwaving I started getting the receipts together and sorting them into piles.

‘Historic GC anti-Muslim rhetoric’

‘Recent GC Anti-Muslim rhetoric 1 and 2.’

‘Attendance at Tommy Robinson marches and handwaving and defending it.’

‘Personal abuse and lies aimed at anyone who calls it out.’

‘Rhetoric handwaving the racist nature of the riots, claiming it is just legitimate class war, claiming anyone who objects is some mad totalitarian wokeist, more nonsense about two-tier policing, more nonsense about how the far right doesn’t exist, re-posting videos repeating the far right framing of the grooming gang scandal at the precise moment people are trying to set fire to buildings with asylum seekers in them in Rotherham while making cracks about ‘inflammatory’ rhetoric. Yes the rhetoric is at this very moment literally inflammatory. Okay.’

It all tells a pretty compelling story.

I’m not going to post them. I am not going to post them for strategic reasons I consider more important than answering to a great deal of wilful deflection and handwaving.

Anyone who honestly wants to see what people are concerned about merely needs to open their eyes and look.

Extract from ‘Feminism Is Not Identity Politics: Transactivism, Gender Critical Populism, and the Culture War.’

The Radical Notion Issue 8/Gender Critical Disputes, February 2023.

“What is happening now in the gender-critical community is the steady replacement of arguments based on material sex-class analysis with a politics of ‘woman-identity.’ Materialist feminists used to laugh when TRAs accused us of ‘gatekeeping womanhood,’ as if we gave a shit about such a nebulous gendery thing, or as if being female was somehow the same as being a country with borders under human control. I hear a lot more talk of ‘defending womanhood’ these days, or even, in one alarming (and alarmist) formulation that turned up in my mentions, the urgency of ensuring the “survival of the biological female race.” People seem to have forgotten that the original gender-critical point was that men who wear women’s clothes, or use women’s names, or even take she/her pronouns, are not, thereby, made female, because being female is a material fact distinct from all the social trappings of ‘woman-identity.’ Women, we said repeatedly, are not an idea one can simply identify with. Women are no more or less than adult female people. And being female is not a thing that can be attacked, and not a thing that needs to be defended. It simply is. What needs to be defended is the recognition of female people, or women, as a class in law, the organization of public services and public policy on the basis of sex, and the right of women to organize and speak politically as a sex class. That is defending women’s material class interests, not defending womanhood.” “Right now, however, gender-critical discourse is increasingly focused on the protection of ‘woman-identity’ from the onslaught of an invading other. And it is no accident that with this shift comes tribalism, ‘us vs. them’ thinking, mistrust of nuance and complexity, increasing dehumanization of ‘the enemy,’ and just in the last few days, a direct—haha joking!— incitement to violence.(24) In this new ‘either you’re with us or against us’ landscape, internal critique can no longer be tolerated and anyone who raises questions about the direction of travel will be increasingly positioned as a traitor, in league with ‘the enemy,’ or, as materialist and radical feminist women have recently been called, ‘TRA-lites.’ And you know what, many of us do share some beliefs with the TRAs—or at least, with what TRAs claim to believe about othering people, provid- ing they’re not non-compliant middle-aged women who re- mind you of your mum. We believe that dehumanizing other groups of people is wrong and goes bad places, that it’s not consistent with a feminist politics of anti-domination,(25) and that mechanisms of tribal othering have a lot to do with right- wing nationalisms, with white and male supremacy,(26) and indeed, with fascistic violence. As I argued in ‘Why Feminists Are Not Nazis,’ the reason for the spuriousness of transactivist claims about the inherent connection between gender-critical feminism and the kind of ‘us vs. them’ tribalism that tends to shade towards fascism, was that gender-critical feminism was materialist class politics, not sovereign identitarianism. At the point at which it starts to become primarily a matter of tribal identity, some of the TRAs’ anxieties become substantially less batshit-sounding (although going from nought to genocide in two tweets will never sound not-batshit). And lo, right on cue, up turn the men with big guns and big hats, Tommy Robinson’s crew, Patriotic Alternative, theocratic fascists, assorted MAGA-cum-QAnon loons, and some Proud Boys. Like seriously, I’m sorry, I am trying my hardest to be calm and moderate here, but WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.(27)”

So, it appears it is time to get this old favourite out.

Dear men on the left,

Women wanting to protect their rights are not 'spiteful,' this is not evil nasty 'weaponisation,' and if the clarification of the meaning of our protected charactersitic in law is an attack on other people, then that might tell you something about what those other people's political project means for us, don't you think? jeniharveymindthegap.substack.com/p/dear-men-on-…

So apparently me, @lnmackenzie1, @LucyHunterB, @kathmurray1, @wpuk and @selina_todd are involved in some nefarious Bond villain style biopolitical plot of purification and population control by wanting to… *checks notes*… make sure there is accurate sex data recorded in order to ensure good resource allocation for women and to monitor and challenge our oppression.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117… Rainbow Pens of Doom incoming… when it is a bit less of a binfire all up in here…

There is a realy important part of the ERCC judgement that is worth underlining.

Trans activists have routinely tried to claim that it is somehow illegal to have the biological sex of trans people disclosed under any circumstances.

As GC women have repeatedly pointed out, that would make the funtioning of some single sex spaces impossible. And the case of a service user wanting to know whether a support worker is male or female is a perfect illustration of where the rubber meets the road here. ERCC tried to invoke the Article 8 legal right to privacy in order to suggest it would be unlawful in some way to have revealed AB's birth sex to a service user.

Trans activists have also appealed to the GRA to try and make a similar claim, and have sometimes even suggested that this right follows from the protected charactersitic of gender reassignment.

Because we’re not liberal feminists.

That has a great deal to do with explaining our positions on pretty much everything.

It’s kind of incredible that this is still opaque.

https://twitter.com/dmquillenr/status/1788928185985368322

It’s also pretty incredible that we’re in a situation where the liberal feminists are generally taken for the ‘far left’ and the radical, socialist and materialist feminists are taken for the ‘far right.’

I think I might need to get the pens out and scribble on Andrea Chu Long.... Okay dokes...

'ANDREA CHU LONG ON THE MORAL CASE FOR THE UNIVERSAL BIRTHRIGHT TO FREEDOM OF SEX BECAUSE WE WANT AND WE SAY WE WANT'

This is in a lot of ways a recapitulation of the famous Edinburgh Action for Trans Health Manifesto (which always gave me the vibes of being ranted up by large angry toddlers on speed waving plastic water pistols' )tumblr.com/edinburghath/1…

Our arguments aren't grounded simply in a liberal notion of autonomy.

They're grounded in an an analysis of harm, control, power and exploitation.

https://twitter.com/benappel/status/1731544945243075042

Liberal notions of autonomy don't give us a substantive enough analysis of harm, they don't take account of power structures and their investment in controlling and exploiting women's reproductive or sexual capacities.

So, the great sword wielding king of concepts has dropped his blistering analysis of my critique:

1. You is a crazy bitch. 2. You got Marxist cooties.

So, about James Lindsay - and also Pluckrose and Lindsay - and why its not a great surprise that he's turned out to be a misogynist anti-feminist asswipe.

Lindsay's analysis consists, basically, in nothing more than the claim that what is wrong with 'wokeism' is that it is an analysis of oppression. That's why he's running around all the time shouting about 'Marxism' and 'cultural Marxism' and 'race Marxism' and wotnot.

As far as he is concerned, the witch-hunting cancel culture phenomenon we have been dealing with over the last decade is a direct result of the idea that some groups of people oppress other groups of people.

That is, James Lindsay is against all analysis of structural oppression.

The resentment that men feel about desiring women is the key to misogyny and a great deal of male violence.

Desiring women makes men vulnerable. Because women are people. And women get to say yes or no. Depending on their own desires.

And men are not supposed to be vulnerable. Stop showing pictures of the roses.

Roses are not sweet or romantic when they are delivered as a sign of murderous entitlement.

Am listening to Naomi Klein's Doppelganger. It's a truly excellent analysis of the growth of the populist conspiratorial right and the rocket fuel given to it by the pandemic and covid conspiracy theories. One thing she's very good on is the way Steve Bannon has strategised the platform of issues on the basis of balls that have been dropped by liberals/progressives. There are kernels of truth in everything that turns up in what she calls 'the mirror world.'

JFC I am so furious right now about how TRA and related bullshit has completely fucked up the basic norms of political discourse. 1. You are allowed to say whatever you want - bar incitement to violence - even if it upsets or offends people.

2. If people are upset or offended, they are allowed to say they are upset or offended.

3. It would be even better if they explained why they are upset or offended.

So, I'm going to give it my best shot to exit this conversation now. As usual, when this topic comes up, the conversation devolves through analogies to locked cars and whether one should look twice when crossing the road, through claims about swamps of alligators, and into a conversation about why feminists are ridiculous and stupid for not accepting that the staggering rates of male sexual violence in this society are just some immovable rock like datum put there by evolution.

These are the comments made by Meloni’s partner and the responses by critics. amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug… I’d like to point out:

a) Gambruno compared male rapists to wolves, and said that ‘the bad guys are always out there.’ You don’t have to be straight out saying ‘men are entitled to rape women’ to be perpetuating narratives that feed into rape culture.

This. This is one of my principal concerns.

- I do not think that is a representative portrait of feminist women's concerns about shifting the discourse about rape onto women's behaviour, to claim that we are denying the fact that women who get very drunk in public are >

https://twitter.com/redandgreenish/status/1698302005939163506

vulnerable, to all kinds of unpleasant things happening to them. Every decent woman I know responds with concern when they find a very drunk woman out alone at night. Usually we stop and talk to them, try and get them a taxi, wait with them until we know they are on their way

Very pleased to have this reply to *that* (nonsensical and enraging) Catharine MacKinnon speech published in @philosophersmag.

philosophersmag.com/essays/318-wom… @sleeepysandy @philosophersmag It staggers me they can’t hear the internalised misogyny in it…

It impacts (not determines) social relations *in a patriarchy.

And the mechanism by which sex impacts social relations in a patriarchy is called…. Gender.

https://twitter.com/elanabrell/status/1689785528621600768

Because in a patriarchy women are oppressed along the axis of sex.

And erasing the recognition of axes of discrimination isn’t a good way of doing law.

https://twitter.com/elanabrell/status/1689788075117817856

The thing is, ‘gender critical’ was coined to mean exactly what it says. ‘Critical of gender.’

The term comes out of feminist critique. It didn’t just mean ‘against gender identity.’ There are a whole load of people who are against the trans rights project who are not remotely critical of gender.

They dislike gender identity ideology because they think it is against god and/or nature for men to be feminine and women to be masculine.

We live in a structurally sexist society.

It was always going to be the case that the women who built the resistance to trans ideology would have to push 100 times as hard to be heard, and that when we were finally heard, powerful men would turn up and either ignore or even blame the women who worked so hard to push this into the mainstream.

In one sense it doesn’t matter, because what matters is that it is stopped.

In another way it really matters, because if people has been able to hear, it could have been stopped so much sooner.