What are the origins of the modern Gender Critical movement?
Submitted May 16, 2020, 1:52 p.m. by NeverCrumblingI'm aware that radical feminists have been concerned about transgenderism since at least the seventies (when The Transsexual Empire was published), but when and how did people start organizing more recently, over the last ten years or so? Was there much of a movement with regards to this stuff back in the 2000s?
I first became aware of it in 2016 when I discovered Meghan Murphy, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, and the woman who went by Glosswitch, among others. I am a male and experienced severe dysphoria from a very young age, but I have enough self-awareness to understand that this did not make me a female, and that I had no comprehension as to what the actual female experience. I always avoided transgender communities online because even as a kid in the 2000s i could tell that they fostered toxicity, hate, distorted thinking, and severe mental illnesses. I never opened up about my feelings to anyone until I had already mostly moved past them internally. When I got to college I became hyper-aware of what was going on in the tumbrsphere of things, I saw so many instances of ROGD and, again, the extreme, extreme toxicity of queer communities and very quickly removed myself. I became very gender-critical by 2011, but I wasn't aware at all that there were other people talking or thinking about these things at the time. There were no spaces for people like me, but I've been wandering if there was much consciousness about how quickly the trans movement was expanding and becoming progressively more unhinged at the time.
About 5 years ago
IMO it's when TRAs started pushing TWAW. Some of us understood the far reaching ramifications of that slogan in policy and law and started pushing back. Radical feminists by definition accept gender nonconforming people. What we don't accept is that men can actually become women and encroaching on our hard fought for and very recently won rights and spaces is a huge overreach.
do you remember about when that started? i've been kind of wishing for some sort of, like, extensive chronology of all of this stuff in order to keep better track of how the trans community has been escalating things, and how radical feminism has responded. it would be nice if someone would write a book or an oral history or something. maybe eventually.
I don't recall TWAW being said when I was in college, so I'm guessing it may have started reaching more mainstream usage in 2015/2016?
You could be right. I think that is when I became aware of it. Prior to that I had no issue with trans people. I don't think the majority of radical feminists did.
Popping in to say, I became aware of the trans debates through the work of Cathy Brennan, a wonderfully talented lawyer, and the site Gender Identity Watch. She was one of the first to legally challenge the redefinition of "woman" and critique the effects that would have. If you research her activism you'll get a timeline.
I think the fact that peak trans is such a popular thread shows that it's something that we're not very clear on where it started. I think one aspect has been that LGBT NGOs, having accomplished equal marriage rights, needed a cause to sustain their existence. And here was the T, like an answer to a prayer - they could launch multiple campaigns, there was funding from big pharma, and most people were sympathetic to the idea, because they imagined - as many still do - that TIMs are just really super extra-gay dudes not chunky rapists in wigs. And all the corporate bodies had seen the wind change on marriage wanted to get ahead of the next right-on trend (and it's a lot easier and cheaper to pinkwash your shitty corporate enterprise than it is to guarantee worker rights or ethnical trading practices.)
And so there was a campaign for respectability at the same time as Generation Internet was emerging and young, confused, vulnerable people were developing their sexuality in the modern pornucopia, becoming alienated from their own bodies in the process.
I am hoping that Helen Joyce's book will cover all this, when she finishes writing it and then we'll have a proper history. I'm hoping more GC thinkers are writing books too. I think Kathleen Stock is? I wish JCJ would (drools).
okay, right. everything you've just said makes total sense to me. and i guess along side all of that there was a slow rise of all of the well known GC feminists and activists, and most of the rest since ~2016 I've witnessed firsthand. i guess i'm still curious about what was going on re: this stuff prior to around 2010, which is when I became aware of what I think was already a fairly widespread phenomenon of kids getting transed on tumblr, etc. i guess that sort of stuff is difficult to track though.
thank you. i've been looking forward to Stock's book. and i looked up Helen Joyce's and it also sounds like exactly what i'm interested in.
The term TERF was coined in 2008, so that's part of the history too.