troons: “vaginas don’t make you a woman. female biology is irrelevant to womanhood”
also troons: “taxpayers not funding trans hormones & surgeries is genocide because being able to crudely imitate female biology is central to my existence”
The Gender-Critical or "TERF" Position is a materialist analysis of sex, gender, and women’s rights. It is not a theory of hatred toward trans-identified people. It is a claim about the importance of sex as a real, human, and materially significant category in law, language, medicine, safeguarding, sport, and feminism.
Trans activists often misrepresent the views of GC feminists, sex realists and TERFs becaue honesty would cause them to lose the argument.
The following is an attempt to represent my position as a gender critical, sex realist and radical feminist precisely so it is easier to see when that view is being intentionally misrepresented and/or understood by bad faith representatives of trans activism.
I know my own position better than anyone. Bad faith is presuming to tell me what my own position is in order to discredit me. That's worse than a strawman, and the main tactic of gender essentialist activism.
Here is my actual position: the only position I need to defend:
1. Sex is real and materially significant
Sex in human beings is not an identity, a feeling, a role, or a personality type. It is a reproductive and developmental category: male and female are the two human sex classes that are the means of human reproduction. Male is the sex class organized around the development of small, mobile gametes and female is the sex class organized around the development of large, immobile gametes.
This does not mean every person is fertile, typical, or currently capable of reproduction. Infertility, menopause, hysterectomy, castration, DSDs, injury, age, or illness do not erase sex. Sex is not a human performance and there is no standard for sex beyond teproductive role. Sex is a human condition and an innate, immutable attribute of the human body.
Gender-critical feminists reject the idea that sex is “assigned at birth” in the sense of being invented, guessed, or arbitrarily imposed by authority. In ordinary cases, sex is observed and recorded. Even in rare, extraordinary cases with ambiguous secondary sex characteristics, with modern instrumentation, the primary atrribute of sex is observable at the definitive level beyond the crude level of external genitalia at the cellular level.
2. Women are female human beings
In this framework, “woman” means an adult human female. “Girl” means a juvenile human female.
This definition does not depend on femininity, beauty, clothing, sexual behaviour, reproductive capacity, compliance, heterosexuality, or conformity to stereotypes. A woman can be masculine, feminine, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, celibate, infertile, disabled, old, young, gender-nonconforming, or medically atypical. She remains a woman because she is female.
The position is therefore not that women must look, act, dress, think, or feel a certain way. It is the opposite: women should be free from the sex-based stereotypes traditionally imposed on female people.
3. Gender is not sex
Radical feminism distinguishes sex from gender.
Sex refers to the embodied, biological male/female distinction.
Gender refers to the social roles, stereotypes, expectations, behaviours, and hierarchies imposed on people because of sex.
Gender-critical feminism does not seek to preserve gender roles. It seeks to abolish their coercive power.
A feminine male does not become female. A masculine female does not become male. No one should have to change sex category, medically alter their body, or adopt a new identity to be allowed to reject sexist expectations.
Continued...