Gender critical ideology is a belief system
One of the quirks of the Maya Forstater employment tribunal case is that under English law gender critical beliefs are now treated on the same level as other protected beliefs, including religious belief, anti-abortion beliefs, and any other belief that a person may hold. It also affirmed that gender reassignment is a protected characteristic, meaning that while one is a belief system, the other is an innate characteristic worthy of wholesale public protection. In their rush to declare gender an ideology, gender critical feminists have in fact proven the opposite, namely that their own views are beliefs required court enforced protection not gender inclusive views.
The semantic dancing around gender critical beliefs often gives exclusionary feminists a free pass, as they bark out that gender is an ideology, all the while failing to see that their own belief structures require essentialist and quasi-religious views to be upheld. For all their cries of science and rationality, they seemingly root all personhood in rote genetics, forgetting that humans have higher level functions that transcend biology. No human is simply a sum of their DNA, we are all thinking and feeling persons, and the rejection of feelings as woo ignores the fact that without feelings we would be mere automata.
I doubt Maya Forstater intended her case to be both a reinforcement of gender reassignment as a protected characteristic and for her personal views to be shunted into the realm of the anti-abortionists. Indeed, the celebratory light which has been shed on her case showed that gender critical believers were happy for their views to be seen as such, rather than the case being seen as a repudiation of believe over protected characteristics. Yes, a person can hold gender critical beliefs, but doing so must not come at the erasure of trans identities in the public sphere. If you hold a belief system that is both dogmatic and exclusionary you cannot expect to be held up as a paragon and those views held as sacrosanct no matter how loud you yell “persecution”. No belief system survives contact with reason or the human condition intact.
It matter that we treat gender critical beliefs like any belief system because in doing so we show how hollow it actually is. Like most beliefs that resist scrutiny, gender critical thinkers attempt to do away with the majority of the human condition to solely focus on one small aspect of what makes us who we are. The see sexed bodies as the core part of what makes us human, that bodies are destiny, and as such it is impossible for a trans woman to actually be a woman. They see trans women as invaders, and trans men as foolish girls duped by gender ideology. To the point that no matter what logic or reasoning anyone brings to bear, they resist the rest of the human condition because it highlights the fallacies in their belief structures.
Like all converts they are zealous, seeing gender as the great scourge made out of fresh cloth in the last ten years. They fail to see that gender incongruence has existed throughout human history, and that trans identities in the modern sense have existed for at least 110+ years. Gender critics are blinded by their need to impose order over bodies, blind to the realities of womanhood in all its complexities and blinded by their own beliefs that a woman is a woman only if the gametes in the womb combined in a certain way to make her such. If women are women simply by a quirk of genetics, then it removes all agency from women to shape their own destiny, they are simply lumped into this lesser category because that is their fate.
Yet, much of this belief system rests in the hands of a few ideologues who have been granted the power to spread the word. Book deals, television interviews, newspaper columns, and subscriptions all flow to a narrow group of gender critical women who parrot the same beliefs, all of which are uncritically lapped up by those who choose to buy into their message. This uncritical nature of their movement is what makes it so dangerous, and as with all beliefs the more outsiders push against it the more they resist that critical engagement. Yes, there is a smidge of conspiracy theory amidst this, because much of the funding for these views has come from right wing sources that so not like having a light shone on their efforts.
It then begs how do you counteract such an entrenched belief system. This is the complicated part. Gender critics such as Forster, Helen Joyce, and Graham Linehan are litigious and are happy to slap their critics with threats of legal action and then take it to court if needs be. Calling out the Empress and her new clothes takes courage in such an environment, yet every inclusionary feminist should be calling them out often and loudly. No belief system survives scrutiny intact, it is forced to adapt and change to survive. Already we are seeing gender critical feminists moving towards the right wing as leftist supporters abandon them due to the hate they are stirring. In the embracing of the right, exclusionary values are becoming more radical, a danger to all women not just trans women.
Sex in not the basis of the human condition, it is the starting gun. How we live our gendered lives is not dictated by the biology we were born with but by the choices we make and feelings we innately understand. No DNA can ever tell you how to live your life, and gender critical believers dogmatically want to strip the right to be your gendered self away from you. Forstater should be seen for the misfire it was, namely that in ring fencing gender criticism as belief those who are trans inclusive have the moral high ground because dogmatic belief always blinds and never enlightens.
