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sometimes being a woman comes with an expectation of being all things at one time, all the time. sometimes being a woman reminds me of the desert, where everything is beautiful but also sharp; everything’s learned to grow defenses. while I was being raised up as a young girl I was taught to brush my hair & make sure I was presentable before I left the house, but also to watch my back & walk tall & strong against those who’d try to fuck with me. I still carry that today - I’ll have a dress & lipstick on but also a knife strapped in my boot. I like the way the steel feels against my ankle.

CHELSEA WOLFE ON WHAT BEING A WOMAN MEANS TO HER

I’m seeing a lot of posts all over Reddit attempting to explain what gender critical feminists actually believe, and a lot of them are completely wrong. This is a post addressed to newcomers who are visiting this sub to figure out what gender critical feminism is all about.The first thing to get out of the way is this: no, we don’t believe that you MUST have periods to be a woman. I’ve seen so many posts saying “JK Rowling is menopausal and doesn’t have periods, so by her definition she wouldn’t be a woman!” or “not every woman has a period, some women don’t have uteruses!” She isn’t saying that at all. Having a period is not a necessary condition for being a woman, but it is a sufficient condition. It’s sufficient in the sense that if you experience menstruation then that automatically puts you in the woman category (or at the very least it puts you in the female category). But it’s not it’s not necessary that you must be capable of menstruation in order to be put into the woman category. In any case, what Rowling was upset about was female erasure. It is, quite frankly, deeply disturbing and insulting for many women to be called ‘menstruators’ or ‘period havers’. This , we feel, reduces us to a biological function. The ‘bloody good period’ charity once referred to women as 'bleeders’, and not only does this not make any sense (men can bleed too!) it is also degrading. 'Bleeders’ sounds like a dehumanising slur. Notice there’s a pattern here - when have you ever heard males been referred to as 'ejaculators’ or 'sperm producers’?

I’m going to try to debunk two other claims I’ve seen floating around that are just bollocks. The first is that gender critical feminists conflate sex with gender. The second is that we are biological essentialists. Both of these claims are false, and both particularly sting because a lot of gender critical feminists of the first and second wave of feminism actually railed against these concepts in the first place.

So, back to basics. Sex is biological. Sex refers to the two reproductive roles - male and female. Males produce small mobile gametes, sperm. Females produce the large immobile gametes, eggs. Sex is not a social construct. It is found all across nature. Plants have sexes. Animals have sexes.

Gender is a social construct, and is not the same thing as sex. This was recognised by Mary Wollstonecraft in the 18th century, but was really emphasised by the second wave. Gender is social norms of femininity and masculinity. Gender are roles, behaviours, stereotypes, and expectations placed on human beings according to their sex. Male humans are supposed to live up to masculine gender expectations. Female humans are supposed to live up to the feminine gender expectations. Boys are supposed to like violent sports, getting angry, not crying, not eating salad, the colour blue, being dominant and in control, being logical. Women are supposed to like kittens, being sensitive and empathetic, watching their weight, pink, babies, being a homemaker.

Women are human females who have the feminine gender imposed on them. And men are human males who have the masculine gender imposed on them. And gender also operates as a hierarchy. Femininity is inferior to masculinity.

Feminists pointed out there was nothing natural about gender. Women do not naturally want to be nothing more than baby makers, who cry and like pink glitter, who only care about adornment and home making. This is all a social construct. Gender operates as a constrictive trap, forcing women into one 'natural’ lifestyle.A big project of the second wave was to point out the artificiality of gender roles, and to break women out of them. There is no one way to look like a woman. Women can wear makeup, have short hair, wear whatever they like. There should be no such thing as masculine and feminine interests - why shouldn’t a man enjoy knitting? Why does that have to mean he’s somehow less of a man, or a sissy? And why shouldn’t a woman enjoy car racing? Why are we so obsessed with gendering everything, from clothing, to food, to hobbies, to pets, to cars? Second wave feminists established that just because someone is female doesn’t mean they are, or should be, girly. Women do not naturally behave, or think, in a particular way.

Gender critical feminists have always held fast to this idea that there is no necessary connection between sex and gender roles. If I tell you I have blue eyes, can you infer anything at all about what my tastes are from that information alone? What is my career? My hobbies? My interests? My behaviour? My aspirations? My overall appearance? No -of course not. That is because we don’t imbue having blue eyes with any significance. Blue eyes has no connection to your personality or your cognitive capacities. Well, that’s what gender critical feminists think about sex. If I tell you a person is female, that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about her hobbies or interests. At most it tells you she’s a human who is very likely to experience the incidents of being female - she is likely to be capable of menstruating. She is likely to be capable of getting pregnant. Beyond those basic facts of biology, though, females are people and can have a wide range of behaviours and appearances. There is no 'right’ way to be a woman. Literally the only precondition is that you be female. That’s it.

Female biology is different from male bioloogy, and due to us living in a sexist society is often pathologised and overlooked. For example, menstruation has been coded as 'unclean’ and impure - gender stereotypes are interposed on top of natural biological functions. So what Rowling was trying to emphasise was that for women our sex is deeply important to us. It’s a core part of our experience going through the world. We are stigmatised for having periods, stigmatised for going on contraception, stigmatised for abortions, stigmatised for giving birth (too many or too few babies). And so there are important political concerns that only apply to those with female bodies. Also, female bodies are often a locus of state control. The state will try to control women by controlling their bodies (see abortion legislation, forced sterilisation,) What that means is even if you accept that trans women are 'women’ (whatever women means) there must still be room for a distinctive female rights movement. Some dude on the Reddit front page was given hundreds of awards for blithely saying “no one is saying sex isn’t real - we are just saying that sex isn’t important.” With no respect, dude, it’s just not your place to say that. Women are pointing out that sex IS important to them - women are dying because they are taking drugs that have only been tested on male bodies. Men can’t handwave that away with claims that 'sex isn’t important’. WE are telling YOU that it is. It’s important. It’s not bigoted for women to campaign for their sex based rights.

Biological essentialism is related to all this. Biological essentialism is the view that sex roles are natural. BECAUSE I am female it is therefore natural for me to like babies, be more emotional, and to desire to go shopping. But as I already covered, this view was contested by second wave feminists. On average, women may enjoy makeup more than men. They may be more caring and nurturing, They. may be less into train and plane spotting. But none of this is natural. Women aren’t born this way. There is no natural connection between women being female and women liking makeup. There’s no biologically essential way for women to be.

You may notice that people on Reddit just don’t seem to really get what biological essentialism means. Biological essentialism has nothing to do with saying 'women have female bodies.’ It’s not 'essentialist’ to say that women are female. That’s just part of the definition of woman. Biological essentialism is the claim that because someone is a woman they have to behave or think in a particular way. In actual fact, many commenters will support trans theory using biological essentialism. One male commenter bravely attempted to define women - “ a woman is someone who conforms to our societies expectations of femininity - they dress in a feminine way, think in a feminine way, have feminine interests and so on.” This is pure essentialism. Gender critical feminists completely deny that there is any such thing as 'feminine’ thoughts. What on earth is a 'feminine’ way of thinking? If you say that women are more ditzy, creative, and less logical - isn’t that just super sexist? And what’s a 'feminine’ interest? Are we really back to the bad old days of saying you are less of a woman if you enjoy dirt bike racing? Are you less of a man if you film makeup tutorials? On this definition I would simply fail to be a woman. I wear pants. I don’t have typical feminine interests. I work in a male dominated career. I find this definition really sexist - it says that women have to think and act, and look a certain way in order to be women. they have to conform to femininity.

But the definition that a woman is an adult human female is not biologically essentialist because all it tells you is that women have female bodies. That’s it. Women can look and act in any way they like.

To recap and clarify - gender critical feminists are against biological essentialism. And they do not think that sex and gender are the same thing!

“When men talk to me, they look at my chest. It doesn’t matter if I wear a turtleneck. I am being undressed in their minds. If I wore a trash bag, they’d probably be all the more grateful. Plastic is easier to rip through, anyhow. My teacher told us to make sure not to wear low cut tops during examinations. She’d seen with her own eyes, she said, male invigilators peering down shirts under the guise of looking at exam scripts. Thank you. I will remember. I went to buy soup at the hawker centre and the man asked if I wanted milk in my soup. I shook my head no. His colleague said something in dialect. I understand dialect. He doesn’t know I do, thinks I’m a silly teen who’s forgotten her roots, the sam sui women, the orang asli. He says, she doesn’t need the milk, and nods towards my breasts. Both of them turn to stare. I stare back. They meet my gaze and look away, ashamed. I know he knows I understand. He asks me if I do. I say yes, and he hands me my food in silence. I walk away and wonder if they’re looking at my ass. I walk faster. They weren’t embarrassed because of their thoughts or the way their eyes strayed. They were embarrassed because they were caught. I wear mostly black now, to draw attention away from my chest, and also in mourning for my girlhood. I was 15.”

— Venetta Octavia, “no one will be spared”, for The Mira Project (via venettaoctavia)

Thank you for correcting me! I must need to do more research. I have been doing research on her, but I've misinterpreted the information, I guess. A lot of people referred to her as a she and have said she was a trans woman a lot of the time, so I misinterpreted it.

I shouldn't have brought someone I still need to do more research on into the conversation. I'm really sorry for that!

Instead of citing Marsha, I will cite myself. I am a trans male, so while I cannot speak for trans women, I can speak for the trans cause.

My argument with you & people with your stance is that you seem to try to assert some expertise over people with our lives, and it's. . . well, really rather arrogant. You can list everything you've got to back your opinions up but it won't change the fact that it's an opinion.

The facts you get are from people who know just as much about us as you do and people who do not make up the whole of us. An experience, however different it may be from mine, is still valid and the person with it is allowed to open up about it. It's beyond horrible that some of the trans community demonstrates the same prejudice that they claim to hate.

But again, they do not describe all of us.

There are those of us who don't advocate for hate or disgusting behavior. Many, actually. There are also those of us who are the way we are for a reason.

Whatever it is in your mind does not matter because you are not trans—even if you supported the trans community, you would not fully understand it.

Is that an excuse for people to say whatever nonsense they feel like?

No; but you can become blinded to any positivity we promote if you become accustomed to seeking the negativity. You don't just call out negativity in the trans community. You only call out the negativity and make negative judgements based off of your negative opinions. Based off of what you believe, what you have seen.

I was dumb to argue when I mentioned Marsha P. Johnson. I need to do more research next time I cite someone, even if I think I know what I'm talking about. Mind you, I'm sure, to you, it must sound completely ironic.

But my stance is—stop acting like you understand exactly what is going on in our minds, nor anything of what we may think because you have no firsthand experience to talk about who we are nor the open–mindedness to talk of us impartially.

You can make a list of the bad trans people, but there will always be good trans people, there will always be more to our community than you would be willing to see.

Now, I'm not acting as though I'm keeping some sort of secret from you because I don't have anything to back it up. I can speak, as a good ( I do try my best to be good to people, I'm sorry I was so rude to you to begin with ), decently–knowledgeable trans person, who knows good, knowledgeable trans people.

You are judging lives you would not understand enough to arrive at enough logic to label, debunk, or explain them.

You're talking about an experience I could never understand, but for years I've identified myself as trans (or at least gender fluid), when I was 14/16, and used he/him pronouns. I wanted to be a man, I covered my breasted and wore masculine clothes. I tried even to walk like a man. It felt right to me to use different pronouns but then I changed, because that's what happens during adolescence. If you look up (I studied psychology and pedagogy at school) adolescence is a period of changes, and a 17 years old teenager is different than his/her 16 years old self. Just by one year everything changes. And that's what happened to me, I grew up and I changed.

I know a lot of trans people, one is even a close friend of mine, and in my city there was a big friends group with all trans people. After a year or two (they were like 13-16 years old) a few of them call themselves "trans".

And I want to be clear, I respect people because it's not in my character to hate, but when I say "a trans woman is not a woman" and other people say "no, it's a real woman", it makes me angry. Because we're talking of common biology that is taught in schools.

For example: Blair White is a person I respect. She (wow I'm respecting her pronouns) is a transwoman and knows she will never be a real woman, just because of biology. In fact, Blair stated that doesn't want any bottom surgery because it has many risks. And from what I've learned, that's true. But I respect Blair, a transwoman, that says what is true. Because not a lot of people (like politicians) have the guts to say that a transwoman is just a man. And I know not all trans people are bad people, but why the majority of them hate detransitioners? Why the majority of them doesn't care about women voices, about women being not comfortable sharing a locker room or a bathroom with a biological male?

So, why transwomen talk about being women even if they're men?? They shouldn't talk about it, even calling themselves woman, because they don't know what it's like to be a woman. They never grew up being one.

Us radfems rely a lot on biology when we talk about transpeople, because we can't ignore it, especially when men play sports against women and they win, or when men are being put in prisons with woman and rape them, or when in other occasions society tries to be inclusive and put men in women category and gives all the recognition to men. But that doesn't happen with men, because I never saw a transman win against a biological man in a race or in a box fight. Transpeople should have, at this point, their own categories because it's unfair for woman to compete against man that are biologically stronger than us.

(It's good to have those interactions, sorry for eventual mistakes but English is my second language and sometimes I might sound angry but that's how I normally talk)

As a radfem of Rwandan descent, I find the “trans genocide” discourse especially heinous. I don’t understand why they’re so quick to use such language to describe not being able to access artificial hormones as children…like honeyyyy my paternal grandparents were murdered by their neighbors. During the Rwandan genocide, ~800,000-1,000,000 people died in the span of around one hundred days. That’s a genocide. In the United States, ~38 trans people were murdered last year…..be fucking for real.

It’s so insensitive to call that a genocide when there are real people who have actually experienced atrocities. It shows how sheltered and terminally online tra people are. It’s simply a high pressure sales tactic to get unwitting people to join their bandwagon because if you don’t, then…you support a “genocide” and that makes you a big fat meanie!!

ppl really r like “how dare you place misogyny on the same level as *ACTUAL BIGOTRY* like idk where people get the idea that it’s like totally unreasonable to compare misogyny to racism or homophobia or to think misogyny is a serious issue

I'm trying to understand why feminism is hated by other women. Most of them say "I'm not feminist because I want equality and not women above men". They care more about men than us.

They care more about the same people who harass, rape and kill women just because they (we) exist.

you’re not evil girl you’re just lonely and no one has cared for you in a while and its making you crazy can you go get a fucking chai latte or something