Ivan Waters

Gazing at the moon, getting lost, reading Gramsci and Kafka by candlelight.

[Cervixen of the Clitorians @cervixen]

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...

[Akua Reindorf KC @akuareindorf]

Yes sure, that's why he was quoted by the Supreme Court in one of their most significant judgments of the century and then got a job at Oxford as an Associate Professor at the age of 31.

[Jon Pike @runthinkwrite]

This is a matter for the Vice chancellor of @UniofOxford Prof Irene Tracey, but also for the Chancellor @WilliamJHague. You were elected on an academic freedom platform: let's see some action, Lord Hague.

[Akua Reindorf KC @akuareindorf]

@Rhammified @DavidWootton69 <If you thought the Equality Act said trans people were entitled to be treated as though they'd changed sex, that's because for years Stonewall etc disseminated the lie that they did. It was never true.
If you want more detail here's a piece I wrote today
https://t.co/0GEXPgOiYM

[Sarah Ludford 🇬🇧 🇮🇪🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @SarahLudford]

If you trans activists want to march in support of destruction of rights based on sex & sexual orientation, or organise debates on sex v gender ID, it’s your right.
But if you disrupt a lecture by a renowned academic legal expert, you are surely unfit to be students @UniofOxford

[teresa smith @treesey]

This is the first lecture in @michaelpforan’s series

Apparently some students at @UniofOxford think it shouldn’t be heard

https://t.co/GRxuaGP24R

[Mara Yamauchi @mara_yamauchi]

X tells me they have received a complaint about this tweet 👇and are permanently withholding its content in the EU on the grounds of “illegal or harmful speech”.

It has been confirmed that Khelif is male. Stating the truth is now illegal or harmful. 🤷‍♀️

[Maeve Halligan @MaeveHalligan]

When I talk about fear culture at our universities, this is what I mean. A few young minds that have closed themselves off to anything they disagree with are ruining it for the majority of us students who know that such exposure is the most important of all.

[Professor Alice Sullivan @ProfAliceS]

@UniofOxford Questions must be asked of the Oxford University Proctors.
Why did they allow protests inside a lecture theatre?
Why do they think it is acceptable to create a hostile and degrading environment for Michael Foran and his students?
What do they think education is for?

[Dennis Noel Kavanagh @Jebadoo2]

2/ Associate Professor Foran is one of our foremost legal minds on the subject of sex and gender as it relates to equality law. He has a nationally significant mind and his work has been referenced in the UK Supreme Court by the Law Lords.

https://t.co/e9bL41dAwf

[Dennis Noel Kavanagh @Jebadoo2]

4/ Gay men and lesbians have a particular concern in this debate. Trans activists tried to render the gay/lesbian protected characteristic "meaningless" in For Women Scotland. Many of us such as me feel rather angry about that, but Dr Foran always speaks calmly and academically.

[Bev Jackson @BevJacksonAuth]

The “gender transition” industry is driven by two main factors: financial greed and ideological zeal. The financial motives are clear from graphs projecting soaring profits in this billion-dollar industry.

Zeal: middle-aged men justify their craving for hyper-stereotypical “feminine” attire by asserting they were “born that way”. To prove it, they encourage distressed teenage girls and young women - whose distress has multiple different causes, unrelated to the cravings of middle-aged men - to “identify” as “trans”. This is then used to back up their false origin story.

And the results are a large cohort of young women - mostly lesbians - who have seriously damaged their physical and mental health.

[Jennifer Bilek @bjportraits]

This could do without the left/right framing. They are two wings of the same bird. Otherwise, this piece points in the right direction as to why sex is being legally unwound and usurped by gender identity.

“In the name of constitutional rights, the law had to accomplish what biology prohibits: making two same-sex adults the legal parents of a child. Thus, through the use of language and state force, activists began to meticulously eradicate a child’s mother and father.”

And let’s not forget technology, which is creating children from the gametes of strangers, using the gestational relationship between a woman and her baby as a means to parentage for someone else, and deconstructing what mother and father is.

Stay human.

[Róisín Michaux @RoisinMichaux]

I had an intake meeting today at a paediatric gender clinic. I've been on the waiting since February 2025.

FtM daughter, 14, autistic, socially anxious, depressed, cutting herself, takes showers in the dark due to self-loathing, lesbian. Trauma from her youth. Quit school, won't leave her bedroom even to come to the gender clinic. Can't even cope with meeting over Zoom. All day online in queer communities. She just wants T and that will make everything better.

Puberty blockers will help with the dysphoria, I was told, until she gets T at 16. Appointment booked for July to meet with a psychologist to build her trans "story", then psychiatrist for the meds for the comorbidities, then puberty blockers. It's not a test to see if she's really trans, it's just formalities. She won't come if she thinks she won't get the hormones, I told him. Don't worry about that. Dad doesn't agree with transition, so don't bring him to the meeting.

It's the clinic that Irish kids are being sent to since the Tavistock stopped seeing children. They follow WPATH SOC8.

[Malcolm Clark @TwisterFilm]

1./ My latest article dissects the career of a woman who may be one of the most dishonest people in public life: Ruth Hunt. She turned Stonewall into a wing of the toxic trans lobby despite saying she wouldn't. That was only the start of her disregard for ethics.

[Malcolm Clark @TwisterFilm]

It’s a scandal that Ruth Hunt earns £370 every time she rocks up at the House of Lords. She advocated for child sterilisation, sabotages women’s rights and at Stonewall funnelled vast sums of cash to her own partner. She’s dangerous and dodgy yet gets to slurp on public funds. 🤮

[Women's Rights Network - WRN @WomensRightsNet]

An astonishing omission by @BBCNews to leave out the motivation of this man. He specifically targeted girls and he was motivated by ‘trans’ grievances.
Why sanitise the truth in this case?

In his own words 👇

[♀️Jennifer Gingrich ✡️ @fem_mb]

I just got a desperate phone call from an inmate at the Maine Women's prison. She is being pressured by the administration to recant her claims of abuse by trans-identifying double murderer Andrew/Andrea Balcer.

These women need help. @SenatorCollins @Repksmith @DAGToddBlanche

[SEEN in Journalism @JournalismSEEN]

All this from the trial has been left out of the police upsum and sentencing coverage

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Polite notice to schools still breaking the law by failing to provide single sex bathrooms: you will be sued and you will lose 👇