Except it's owned by one of the larger media companies out there and has ties to most of them through their connections to the associated press.
They're closer to actual publishers than twitter or Facebook are to be honest.
The gender critical movement is based on antisemitic conspiracy theories (eg Bilek) and unhinged hatred of trans people (eg Glinner).
I’m “Gender Critical”, because like many people born in the 1960s I see women as being a group of individuals primarily discriminated against by virtue of their sex - particularly in regards to contraception and the economic and social consequences of reproduction.
Sex is biological and objectively real. Gender is a social construct relating to imposed standards of masculinity or femininity.
How have we ended up reinventing the idea that sexed identity is the performance of innate gender roles or preferences? Just because we’ve allowed people to opt out by changing gender doesn’t make the idea of linking gender to sex any more acceptable. This is an entirely regressive state of affairs, and pointing that out is in no way hateful.
It is really not as hard and fast as "there's men" and "there's women" and "you can tell them apart by a quick genetic test".
There's basically a sliding scale from "definitely male" to "definitely female" (in unmodified body) and a mostly-but-not-always correspondence between said body and the genetic markers (XX and XY).
If the testosterone receptor codons are damaged, the extra testosterone that the XY chromosome normally produce will not get a chance to influence the fetus, so any make characteristics will be under-developed (or not developed at all). Heck, there have even been genetically XY people who have sustained pregnancy and given birth.
I mean, somewhere between 0.02% and 0.05% are born with effectively both make and female sexual characteristics.
So, yes, as long as you insist that "there are two sexes, and it is objectively easy to say which one is which", I would say that it is, if not hateful, at least ignorant and disrespectful.
Trans people, more than any other group, are acutely aware of the reality of biological sex characteristics.
Of course parts of gay culture can be critized. Older man preying on barely legal teens, drug use, and open relationships are all controversial things that the gay community grapples with. Sure I can get behind not giving a platform to people who think gays should be stoned or trans people don't exist, but the moderates shouldn't be lumped in with them.
This is a contradiction in terms. Supporting trans people means believing that transition is not some sort of "regrettable outcome".
> are forced to forums/subs filled with people who are unapologetically transphobic. The discussion there will often lead the moderate opinions to radicalization.
You are the company you keep.
No one is saying transition is a "regrettable outcome".
What people are saying is that some people may think they are trans and then change their minds later. In these cases a watchful-waiting approach is better because it may allow the person to avoid life-altering decisions like surgery or hormone replacement. This is not a hypothetical, there are recorded examples of young adults who, having undergone these therapies, came to regret it later.
> You are the company you keep.
If we extend this logic (which we should under no circumstances do) we could say that Aimee Challenor is guilty of the rape and torture of a 10 year old child.
Actually a lot of people say that, cf rhetoric about "a lifetime of hormones and surgery". As someone who has had surgeries and expects to be on hormones for the rest of their life, I think what I did to my body was good, not bad.
Ironically, misapplication of moral universalizing is what leads people to be bigoted against trans people in the first place.
> No one is saying transition is a "regrettable outcome".
It's safe to assume it's meant in the context of the ongoing thread. Not as in "No on in the world is ever saying that", but "No one here has said such thing". It's better to direct your arguments to an individual in the thread, not an official representative of the collective internet.
We're never going to have experiences of our own that can inform our judgement on this, so shouldn't we just listen to and trust trans people to work out how to best to make their way in the world?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Please for the love of christ just spend 10 minutes reading some of the gender critical arguments before trying to represent them here, because you're saying stuff that is 1) untrue and 2) very obviously untrue to anyone who's given even cursory attention to what these people are saying.
Transition currently has very low rates of regret; lower than many other forms of surgery. Hip replacement has higher rates of regret and there's not a mainstream movement trying to prevent access to that.
Either way, your post is nit-picking. My point was that being against affirmation in all cases is simple not the same thing as viewing all transitions as a "regrettable outcome".
> Transition currently has very low rates of regret; lower than many other forms of surgery. Hip replacement has higher rates of regret and there's not a mainstream movement trying to prevent access to that.
Wonderful. But hip replacement is not elective surgery based on the subjective feelings of the patient. As long as one person regrets it, it is my opinion that we should prefer a watchful-waiting approach and I can say that without "failing to support trans people".
Whether you’re aware of it or not, your argument is disingenuous, unscientific, gaslighting propaganda pushed by bigots, and it has the direct result of harming trans people.
Sure, but most of the contention by far is around kids and teenagers who are kinda sorta thinking that this "trans" thing they keep hearing about in their social milieu might perhaps apply to them, and statistics align with the (eminently reasonable) expectation of higher regret rates in that restricted subgroup. It's not a simple problem, there are very real issues involved.
Could you ping me to where you see those numbers? I know data is tough to come by but the sorts of numbers I see, as someone who doesn’t follow this topic closely, are much higher:
> Such “desistance” appears to be common. At least half a dozen medical studies show that between 61% and 98% of children presenting with gender-related distress were reconciled to their natal sex before adulthood. However, all these studies looked at children with early-onset dysphoria.
https://www.economist.com/international/2020/12/12/an-englis...
I'm also happy to explain transness in detail to the cis people I know and trust in real life. Perhaps get to know a trans person among your friends, family or coworkers, and build enough of a relationship with them that they trust you. I generally don't do it on internet forums because of the range of responses I've gotten in places like this thread.
> You are the company you keep
Sure, but if someone who is trying to be critical in good faith finds themselves kicked out of every other community, what can you expect? Their unanswered questions will need somewhere to find an answer. Sure the individual has some responsibility, but you just made the path to radicalization much easier for them to stumble upon.
However, GCs tend to believe in an oppositionally sexist view of the world, where your assigned sex at birth puts you in one of two firm categories, and any sort of crossing over or breach between categories is impossible. That's how GCs construct their categories.
Sexism is “prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls. It has been linked to stereotypes and gender roles, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is intrinsically superior to another”.
GCs reject sexism. Rejecting sexism doesn’t mean rejecting the reality of men and women being genetically distinct and having different body plans for the purposes of reproduction. Rejecting sexism doesn’t mean refusing to discriminate when discrimination is necessary for the socially just goal of sexual and gender equality.
Sex is recognised at birth, not assigned at birth - it’s determined at fertilisation: XX or XY.
Assuming you’re a transwoman. Your sex is male, and your gender is feminine. Women and transwomen substantially share a gender, given most women choose to be feminine and most transwomen feel compelled to present and be seen as feminine.
This is fine, every GC person I know accepts the right of individuals to choose their expressed gender and be free from unreasonable discrimination. What we don’t accept is the refusal to acknowledge that women also have a sex-based component of identity that transwomen don’t share.
I appreciate that this causes psychological stress to people with a dysphoria that is only calmed by affirmation of successfully changed sex - but - the physical reality of the situation can not be changed or rationally denied.
There is no fundamental law of the universe which says that sex must be defined through gametes or chromosomes.
In any case, all this definition stuff is secondary to how our actual lives are affected by this nonsense. As a transfeminine person I've been using women's bathrooms for many years without incident, but most GCs would want to make that illegal. Many GCs think I shouldn't have access to healthcare for my breasts. All my friends and coworkers use my pronouns, but many GCs would refuse to. The list goes on.
GCs say they want me to live a life free of discrimination but also want to put me in situations where I'm going to face discrimination, like making it harder for me to update my documents. It's all lies fueled by distrust and hatred.
I'm just a normal person who wants to live my life in a self-respecting manner. I don't ever want to interact with a GC but I'm forced to because their policy recommendations keep getting in my way. I really want to do better things with my life than deal with a bunch of boundary cops.
Doesn't CA have a mandate for single-occupancy, non-gendered bathrooms, which are anyway more inclusive of genderfluid folks and those who do not identify with the gender binary?
> Many GCs think I shouldn't have access to healthcare for my breasts.
Well, that's quite bad. Those GC folks should be made aware that male breast cancer is a thing too.
CA has a mandate that all single-stall rooms be all-gender, but there's no mandate to build them.
"Trans people want to reinforce gender stereotypes" is yet another GC lie based on selection pressure from the medical gatekeeping we've endured for decades. Even today, in parts of Europe and in much of the world you'll be expected to wear a dress and makeup to your doctor's appointments, otherwise you won't get access to the hormones your body needs. (The SF Bay Area where I live doesn't have that as much.)
I want to repeat: Cis people are the ones who reinforce gender stereotypes, not us.
There are many trans women for whom femininity is not an important aspect of their individuality as well. There are trans butch dykes. Of course there are. Once you start looking at us as human you'll see that we have as much variation within our group as anyone else.
The stated purpose of feminizing/masculinizing hormone therapy is specifically to alter secondary sexual characteristics in a feminizing or masculinizing direction, respectively - so yours seems to be a comparatively uncommon use of such HT. Given that "medical gatekeeping" is merely a fact of life that applies to all sorts of substances and that there are also many arguments for gatekeeping access to steroids specifically, the proactive step forward for people like you would be to get your specific medical need described in the medical research literature so that, in the longer run, policies around access to steroids can be changed to more naturally encompass cases like yours. Blaming GC positions for such issues is just not very sensible.
I'm aware of what hormones do, I did plenty of research before getting on them. I take hormones so that my body is feminized, which I like. But I don't present as a stereotypically feminine woman in terms of long hair, dress or makeup. I'm not sure why that is so hard to understand.
I'm usually perceived as a gender-nonconforming woman, which is how I'd like to be perceived as. The only reason people like me are uncommon is selection pressure due to medical gatekeeping. There are a lot of trans people who have no interest in conforming to gendered expectations, but are coerced to by the threat of losing access to medically necessary healthcare.
Medical gatekeeping is not "a fact of life" that can't be changed. There's less of it where I live and it works out just fine. Informed consent is the modern protocol and the rest of the world should adopt it, but GCs in places like the UK oppose that and want to reinforce silly stereotypes like "if you don't wear a dress you're not a real trans woman".
---
edit to respond: sigh, no, transness does not hinge on gender expression. It hinges on gender identity and subconscious sex, neither of which are the same thing as gender expression. Gender identity is only somewhat related to social conceptions of gender expression.
What a lot of GCs do is deny the existence of gender identity. But that's just empirically false based on the evidence from millions of trans people worldwide, which includes literally me as a human being, writing this comment right now.
It is important to note that this is a contingent fact about Homo sapiens—it is possible that a different species with our level of intelligence doesn't have anything called a gender identity. But humans do.
Please read Whipping Girl. It goes into all this in quite some detail.
Well, historically, the broad shift from a focus on "transsexual" status and "sex change/reassignment" (focusing on primary and secondary sex characteristics) to one on "transgender" and "gender reassignment" (focusing on some canonical gender expression) was driven by consensus within the trans community.
If anything, the more traditional or "gender critical" POV is that the earlier 'transsexual' focus was in fact appropriate, in which a transfemale person can be transfemale no matter what they express as, whilst "cis", "trans" or "fluid" gender expression is a bit of a red herring.
What do you think is the psychological cause of not wishing to be recognised as a gender-nonconforming transwoman?
What is the identity difference between woman and transwoman?
I find this debate interesting so I try to read a lot of different perspectives. I think the /r/gendercritical position was more nuanced than you make it out. They think that while humans can’t change their sex, rigid ideas of what it is to be a man or woman are one of the things that causes some people to feel like they need to. They would say that society should accept a and encourage a broader range of expressions of femaleness and maleness than it does now.
The GC position, as I understand it, decries the idea that a butch dyke should feel the need to live under a male identity just because she is far outside of the “firm category” of feminine or has many traditional masculine traits. It’s why they use terms like “butch erasure” [1]. It’s something interesting that I learned reading a now-banned subreddit which helped me to have more compassion and understanding for people who haven’t always had the easiest time in life.
I can’t speak for all GC people, but for me it’s more a rejection of seeing certain behaviours as gendered at all - rather than things individuals may do.
Current trans ideology makes what sex people identify as vitally important, and something that requires gate keeping by femininity. “Womanhood is for feminine people, being feminine is the most important aspect of who I am”.
The GC position, ironically, sees sex as primarily important for the purposes of reproduction - though, in the context of ongoing sexual inequality also important for social justice. “Womanhood is for female people, being female is a relatively minor aspect of who I am as a unique individual”.
To repeat: I do not believe what you claim I believe. I do not believe that womanhood is only for feminine people or any such nonsense. I know and love masc cis women and masc trans women.
People won't let you hold that kind of opinion, though. You'll just get flamed from both sides.
Guess who was responsible for that injury. Not Fallon Fox, but a cis woman.
MMA is an incredibly dangerous sport. If you want to talk about banning UFC I'm all ears.
My problem with GCs (in their strongest firm) is the policy prescriptions. Making medical transition harder. Making it harder to get updated documents. Opposing anti-harassment laws in our workplaces and schools. Not letting us use the bathroom in peace. GCs do a really slimy shift from policy to philosophy and back that indicates a deep disrespect for our experiences.
I know trans women who present quite masculine while being on estrogen and having changed their name and pronouns. They're butch dykes living as women, not men. They're literally exactly what GCs claim to want. But would GCs think so? No, because their brain is warped by oppositional sexism.
The GC position is absurd, untenable, and simply does not fit with the available evidence about humanity.
https://www.autostraddle.com/6-amazing-women-speedrunners-to...
"Six amazing women speedrunners" and only one of them actually had to build their rep as a woman.
Meh. That's completely unobjectionable to me -- fact is that a lot of trans people used video games to escape from society's bullshit when they were younger, which is why we're overrepresented in video game communities. To the extent that a cis woman has trouble being inspired by a trans woman speedrunner, she should probably work on her own internalized transphobia.
Thankfully, this view is vanishing among younger people: they generally take it for granted that the category of womanhood includes cis and trans women.
Edit: maybe I'm just not being charitable enough to jargon. I guess I can see how "affirmation-only" might be understood to mean "affirmation-only of felt gender identity" in the context of certain communities.
I want to provide concrete examples of what an affirming approach is. Here is an approach that is not affirming:
https://mobile.twitter.com/caitlinmoriah/status/137415749883...
If a young boy wants to play with dolls, an affirming approach would let them. If they later decide they'd like to be perceived in the world as a girl and change their pronouns, you support them through that. If they later decide they want to keep playing with dolls, be perceived in the world as a boy and not change their pronouns, you support that as well. If they want to play with trucks and be perceived as a girl, you support them through that as well.
The point is that how you are perceived, how you look at yourself and what you do are all different but correlated. You just support them through their journey of growing up and discovering themselves.
Personally I've been uncomfortable at my endogenous sex characteristics from the moment puberty hit. That is why I've changed them (many years afterwards), and I couldn't be happier about that.
For example quite a few of the "gender critical" people being referred to here are actually lesbians, and they've been accused of hate or transphobia because they loudly refuse to adjust their sexual preferences to include males who identify as women. It's impossible to satisfy both gay and trans people on this specific topic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism#Radical_lesbi...
You don't know anything about me, or that situation, but you are happy to accuse me of:
- Claiming to speak for lesbians - Spreading propaganda from bigots - Using "abuser tactics" - Having unexamined prejudices - Making prejudicial assumptions - Having no respect for trans people - Not engaging in good faith
I'd actually be really happy to discuss this topic in good faith, as it's important to someone I care about, and you clearly have a very different opinion. But I'd want you to read the HN guidelines first and make an effort to follow them.
Does that also apply when the group is men/women (as opposed to AMAB/AFAB folks which would be the 'gender critical' view)? Should we all be pansexual?
> I just don't see the points of these arguments.
Directly contradicts with
> Thought people on this site "loved discussion".
And this
> They love hearing their own opinions
Contradicts with
> downvoting anything that is not conservative.
Considering the heavy presence of Bay Area commenters and the fact that the Bay Area skews more liberal than most places in the US.
But you are failing to consider the heavy presence of Bay Area wantrepreneurs, who skew more heavily right-libertarian than the Bay Area, or even the US as a whole.
BTW, this is just as true of the modern concept of gay. Egalitarian/romantic relationships among men were not typical or well-regarded prior to well into the 19th c., even within the relevant communities.
I'm not some sexual bigot. I'm a man and I've experimented with homosexual activity myself. But I don't try to censor or bully people who politely disagree with how I see myself.
Fuck the meta level. I'm only interested in engaging with specifics.
There's plenty of actual transphobia occurring, out there in the real world - as in, real hateful violence and oppression being done to people who identify as trans or even just behave in non-gender-typical ways. So you're quite factually wrong about this.
Gender-critical feminists do not even register on the radar.
These people are abusers and bigots. They’re no different than any other hate group, except that they often use the language of victimhood to cloak their primary mode of social aggression. (This is the mode of aggression that it is most acceptable for AFAB people to express, so they get really, really good at it. It has a lot in common with the dynamics of emotional abuse, and, for lack of a better term, mean girling (which is, especially after adolescence, a particularly effective form of abuse)).
So you have no idea what you’re talking about, but based on your other comments in this thread — you genuinely seem to think homosexuality is a modern invention? And that it came out of some sort of predatory behavior? — it seems this is a willful ignorance that accommodates the hate and disgust you already feel for certain minorities.
A rose by any other name smells just as sweet, etc.
Your ignorance on this is truly stunning.
It's quite true that homosexuality used to be viewed like that. And yet, strange as it might seem, even that was a significant step forward from earlier perceptions of MSM which essentially were reminiscent of the Graeco-Roman model. Obviously these perceptions were also colored by bigotry, but we can see parallel changes in the discourse among male gays themselves.
Society should progress, but not "at any cost" or "by any means."
Those are the exact same things. One is just the perspective of the oppressor and one is the perspective of the oppressed.
> it’s a not well-thought idea
Why? You give no evidence to support your argument as to how restricted speech makes makes things “more fair and democratic”.
No, they are not. "Moral authoritarianism" is a judgmental label, putting equality sign between a democratic mechanism of protecting human rights and authoritarian rule, which is by definition undemocratic. A logical fallacy hidden behind a There's no place in a constructive discussion for such language, because it is not just untrue, but also offensive.
>Why?
There's plenty of historical evidence on how hate speech supports transition of society to a tyranny. Germany 1930s is the most obvious one (and the reason, why freedom of speech is restricted in modern Germany), but there are many many others. On the other side, there is not much evidence that ultimate freedom of speech results in more prosperous and democratic society.
And there’s plenty of tyrannical countries that have no free speech. What’s your point?
Also, democracies can absolutely be authoritarian. Look up the phrase “tyranny of the majority” if you want to see why following a democratic process is not sufficient to avoid authoritarian behavior.
Any big government that regulates all of the minutiae of its citizens’ lives at the expense of minority lifestyles is authoritarian, even if the he majority decided it.
> When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the German constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Through decrees and laws, the Nazis abolished these civil rights and destroyed German democracy. Starting in 1934, it was illegal to criticize the Nazi government. Even telling a joke about Hitler was considered treachery.
Sounds like you are on the side of the nazi's, given that you support abolishing civil rights.