Gender-Critical Feminism – The Wrecking of Lives

Gender-Critical Feminism – The Wrecking of Lives.

Opinion – posted  by Sophie 23/12/24

Talk to anyone in the street and ask them what a feminist is, and most will surely reply as someone who campaigns for womens rights. It’s not rocket science – patriarchy and the oppression of women from healthcare to the pay gap are plain for all to see.

Still, in reality, it is not that simple – feminism, like other political groups, has ‘factions’ none more controversial than the “gender-critical.”

Gender-critical feminism is unique, rarely campaigning for the obvious, occasionally calling out violence against women and girls and the barbaric treatment of women in Afghanistan – gender-critical feminism isn’t about progressing the human rights of women. Gender Critical feminism is about rolling back the human rights of trans people and not recognising society’s acceptance of gender.

To the gender-critical, biology is not just ‘real’ as famously stated in a tweet from J K Rowling in December 2019 – gender critical is a religion bordering on a cult, occasionally leading online participants to paranoia and apparent mental health issues and in one famous case the loss of their home and partner.

As posts on Twitter get more insane, Rowling today posted this:

“They hear themselves and think ‘my God, listen to how sophisticated and knowledgeable and completely in the right I am, why aren’t these women dazzled by my intellectual brilliance and moral superiority? Think I’ll try calling them stupid, evil cunts again, see if that helps.’

No words.

The so-called “gender war” was not started by trans folk. It was started by those opposed to proposed changes to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act, people from the evangelical far-right and those opposed to LGBT+ people in general.

Gender-Critical Feminism – The Goals

Gender-critical feminism has six main goals:

1. Maintaining so-called “sex-based rights”.
2. Advocating sex is immutable (people can’t change sex).
3. Removing gender-affirming healthcare from adolescents.
4. Campaigning against legal gender recognition.
5. Promoting the theory of “gender ideology”.
6. Banning trans women from participating in women’s sports, including at grassroots level.

While the term “sex-based rights” regularly appears in gender-critical social media posts in UK legislation, the term has never been used. It’s a figment of gender-critical speech. What the gender criticals are referring to is the maintenance and improvement of protections in single-sex spaces. All right-minded people understand the need for single-sex spaces – at certain times, we all need privacy and the right to dignity. The Equality Act and Human Rights Act enforce our privacy rights; in society, it’s simply a matter of balancing everyone’s human rights, which are regularly achieved in everyday life, without any issues whatsoever.

While gender-critical feminists argue that trans people deny “sex is real”, as highlighted by Rowling, in truth, the reality of sex has never been in doubt.

Whether cisgender or transgender, very few deny sex, just as very few deny climate change or the world is round. Trans people are very aware sex is real but are also aware that their gender identity doesn’t match their biological sex, often resulting in distress, depression and gender dysphoria.

Whether people can change sex is very much more complicated – legally, people can change sex it’s an established human right which gender-critical feminists call “a legal fiction”. Biologically, surgical interventions can change sex, at least to some degree. Indeed, most would argue that it does not matter if people can or can’t change sex, provided the procedure makes the recipient happy.

Why gender-critical feminists are violently against puberty blockers and gender-affirming healthcare for adolescents is somewhat of a mystery to me. It is well-proven to relieve distress and is sometimes life-saving. In a recent interview with a British gender-affirming surgeon, James Bellringer, he revealed that around one in five trans people take their own lives if they can’t access appropriate gender-affirming healthcare.

Does the gender critical hate trans people that much?

Often citing “an explosion” of gender-questioning kids, while it’s accurate, there was a rise some years ago; looking at the broader picture, just one child in every one thousand six hundred sixty-four kids was (as of summer 2024) gender questioning.

Gender-Critical Feminism – The Journalists

Newspaper headlines tell a very different story, and there is a host of gender-critical journalists, all of whom describe themselves as “feminists” ready to rewrite the article they wrote six months ago about trans kids, gender-affirming surgery and puberty blockers because clicks put meals on their plates and those newspaper owners.

Clicks, that’s what it’s all about. Clicks – at the expense of a tiny, vulnerable minority.

The issue of legal gender recognition is yet another area of gender-critical discourse. Does 99.9% of society understand what legal gender recognition reform is actually about? Needless to say, “no”.

Gender-Critical Feminism – Gender Ideology & Sports

Gender-Ideology? Another minefield; a plethora of alternative definitions, none of which in reality helps to highlight or improve the oppression of women, but it makes for good journalism so to pretend the author knows what she is talking about.

Trans women competing in women’s sports. Who?

No barometer can measure the damage gender-critical feminists have done to trans people.  Hate crimes against the trans community have increased by circa 1466% in the decade ending 2022. The bombardment of negativity in the media has resulted in trans people, particularly young trans people, self-harming and, sadly, sometimes taking their own lives. The discourse, especially in trans healthcare, now so toxic, has meant many shy away, burying trans human rights as they leave the stage.

Gender-Critical Feminism – The Wrecking of Lives.

The “gender war” in the UK has been ongoing for some years now, getting ever more toxic and extreme; look no further than an article from gender-critical stunt-woman journalist Jean Hatchet writing in The Critic:

“When the enemy looks slightly weaker, you don’t just walk away and leave the battlefield. You stand shoulder to shoulder until it retreats. Women must not lay down their arms just yet. Trans activists have, over the past decade, proven themselves deeply manipulative”.

Really Jean?

From what I know about trans people, they want to get on with their lives.

Jean Hatchett, on the other hand, feels that going into a pub with massive signs saying “Transwomen are men” and “A man in a dress is a man in a dress” is acceptable and became “rather upset” when she asked to leave to the point the police were called.

Meanwhile, as Jean is standing “shoulder to shoulder” with her gender-critical friends to deter the advancing hordes of trans women armed with muskets and swords in the latest version of the battle of Culloden, a woman is killed by a man every three days, the pay gap remains at over 11% the delay to NHS gynaecological services has doubled in the last five years. Conviction rates for rape stay at around 2%; one in ten women has to leave work because of menopause, and women are incarcerated in prison, often for trivial reasons. The list goes on and on and on.

Gender-critical feminism isn’t feminism.

In a society plagued with mental health issues, it can be argued it is just a derivative of.

Gender-Critical Feminism – The Wrecking of Lives.