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First they came for trans women
And we all stood shoulder to should with them to prevent a backsliding of any other rights. This is how it should go down, though in reality trans people, immigrants, and perceived enemies of the State are being targeted and people are standing by as those targeted do not impact them. As with all political purges and abuse divide and conquer tactics are the first play that wannabe tyrants use. Gender critics have been astroturfed into believing that trans women are a threat, all the while women’s actual rights are being stripped away without a peep from them. Indeed, it would be tragic if it were not for the Trump mania that swept gender critical social media.
You only need look back at the 1930s to see the pernicious gender critical approaches taken by fascist and conservative countries to see how a removal of minority rights invariably leads to a restriction of women’s rights. The same happened in the 1950s as a backlash against more liberal wartime policies, and again in the 1980s as conservatives sought to restrict women based on Christian ideology. Trans women were canaries each time, at each point mocked, ridiculed, and their rights restricted. Post-2016 globally trans people have been attacked in much the same way as ages past, yet this time they are the public face of much larger repressive actions which harm all societies.
Gender critical discourse raises fundamental questions about womanhood which need to be addressed. What is a woman, who has the right to be a woman, and who has the right to police that definition. Biological constructions of womanhood rooted in XX chromosomes, wombs, and assigned at birth F on birth certificates conceive womanhood as a lifelong status which is inviolable and one which cannot be willingly taken by those assigned M. And vice versa. Who gets to police this is anyone who feels that the person opposite them is not woman enough or is the wrong type of woman to exist in the same space as other women.
Data and understanding are never objective or agnostic, they are always positional based on the needs of those collating, collecting, and analysing the data. Policing sex, especially when using a gender critical lens to keep women safe, results in a conception of womanhood based on the positionality of the observer which they will use to enforce womanhood. Never mind that every form…
