The phrase ‘gender critical’ has become commonplace in discussions around gender identity. In many ways, however, it mimics gender ideology’s propensity for confusing language and contradiction.
A quick primer if you haven’t read my blog or radical feminist work: humans are a sexually dimorphic species consisting of females and males, the two sex classes. ‘Intersex’ is a misnomer as people referred to as such are technically female or male but have sex organs that haven’t developed properly; they’re not a third sex. Sex is about reproduction, which requires a female and a male. Like other species, we’re wired to instantly recognize sex because our continued survival as a species depends on it. There are physiological differences between the sexes which are designed to facilitate reproduction, but they don’t extend to cognition, personality, aptitudes, hobbies, etc. There’s no female or male brain. There are many boys who take after their mothers and girls who take after their fathers. It’s not as though those genetic traits that females inherit from their male ancestors are rendered inactive. The truth is personality is highly individualized, shaped by genetics, environment, and one’s choices.
Gender, on the other hand, is the social hierarchy that shunts females and males into two separate, opposing, and unequal social classes. Females are trained into femininity and males are trained into masculinity. It starts before birth with ridiculous “gender reveal” parties and continues from there nonstop. The first thing people ask when they see an infant is, “Is it a boy or girl? Adults speak differently to babies once they know their sex. Masculinity encourages males to engage in the sort of behaviour that affords them power and dominance, while femininity encourages females to be self-sacrificing, self-limiting, and obsessed with being attractive and available to males.
Yet how many women who refer to themselves as feminists still perform femininity? Feminists used to recognize that beauty practices rob women of our hard-earned money, time, and focus, and are physically damaging. How many years of the average woman’s life are aggregately spent on hair removal, makeup application, hair styling, fashion and clothing, and other rituals? How many self-described feminists or supposedly gender-critical women take their husband’s last name as though they’re still a man’s property? Germaine Greer is correct that “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” but perhaps even less of an idea of how much women have learned to hate themselves.
There’s a glaring contradiction in being a woman who says girls should be able to be and do whatever they want while performing femininity.
I argue that women have a responsibility to live this message. To show girls that not being feminine isn’t just an option, but a necessary step to liberating themselves from patriarchy. This isn’t a choice men will support, including men who claim to be gender critical. It’s not even a choice many women will encourage other women to make. Because women who perform femininity do so knowing they’ll be judged, mocked, and far less able to attract or keep men as romantic partners if they don’t. This is where liberal feminism creeps in: women feel they’re being attacked personally and claim they just happen to like femininity, that these considerations are superficial and simply a matter of individual choice. But if you’re straight or bi and have hairy legs, don’t wear makeup, and dress solely for comfort as most men do, your dating options pretty shrink drastically.
Radical feminists don’t play these games. They’re not merely critical of gender. They want to abolish it. This means that as much as masculinity is inherently toxic, so is femininity. One can’t exist without the other. There’s no reforming gender roles. Femininity isn’t just harmful when men dress up in lingerie, become submissive or masochistic “sissies,” or perform their fetish in public and in female spaces. Sure, it’s atrocious that gender identity is enabling more and more men to deny their privilege and openly eroticize women’s oppression. But they’ll continue to do this as long as there’s a gender role attached to women to perform, because it’s the act of occupying this inferior sex role that excites them.
Canadian pop music artist Shania Twain has spoken about how sexual abuse by her stepfather made her hide and hate her female body. Every girl experiences female objectification and misogynist discrimination and abuse, and now with the gender identity cult offering them a way to dissociate from girlhood and womanhood and/or alter their body to make it unrecognizable as female, they’re doing exactly what you’d expect girls to do in a world that hates them.
Female celebrities are the most obvious example. Their brand follows the liberal feminist you-go-girl template of self-objectification and overt sexualization. They’re steered in that direction by everyone around them and thought we’re told they’re happy and powerful, they, like all women, know exactly what’s expected of them from years of being groomed by society at large. The path of least resistance is to create a narrative “owning” one’s oppression. The resulting contradictions are exemplified by Twain’s rationalization of how following a personal tragedy at the age of 22 she “began to embrace her identity as a woman”:
“All of a sudden it was like, ‘Well, what’s your problem? You know, you’re a woman and you have this beautiful body.’ What was so natural for other people was so scary for me. I felt exploited, but I didn’t have a choice now. I had to play the glamorous singer, had to wear my femininity more openly or more freely. And work out how I’m not gonna get groped, or raped by someone’s eyes, you know, and feel so degraded.”
Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Twain understands womanhood as an identity because defining womanhood as embodiment means that women are nothing more or less than an adult human female, and that’s just not good enough. It’s not just liberal feminists who perpetuate this message. Though not so overtly, many women who consider themselves gender critical may criticize gender rhetorically, but they don’t quite follow through on that conviction. It’s no coincidence that the women who are most visible in this space are quite feminine-presenting. As the brilliant radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys clearly and concisely explains in the video below, we can’t effectively challenge gender identity or transgenderism while holding onto femininity.
Lavender Blume 