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The topic of this article is the ideology or movement known variously in reliable sources as gender-critical feminism (including abbreviated forms such as "GC", "GC feminism) or trans-exclusionary radical feminism (including abbreviated forms such as "TERF ideology", "TERFism" and similar expressions). The two main titles are equivalent. The article was split off from the article Feminist views on transgender topics where the corresponding section is titled " Gender-critical feminism and trans-exclusionary radical feminism." |
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On 31 January 2024, it was proposed that this article be moved to trans-exclusionary radical feminism. The result of the discussion was no consensus. |
Reference ideas for Gender-critical feminism The following references may be useful when improving this article in the future:
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I can see multiple comments above arguing for the pre-eminence of academic sources on this subject. We need to take a closer look at this. WP:SOURCETYPES tells us:
When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources.
Usually. Not always. It particularly doesn't mean that academic sources have a monopoly on significant viewpoints.
GCF is not the physical sciences, where scientific consensus is widely discussed and results are widely believed to converge on an objective truth. It is a type of social science or philosophy, where ideas diverge and proliferate and different schools of thought emerge. Part of the reason why Wikipedia favours academic sources is because of their objectivity. Scientists, for the most part, take a neutral stance in their publications, and they are kept in check by empirical reality. Not so for ideas where there is no recourse to experiment to settle disputes. There is no apparatus that can objectively answer whether GCF is transphobic, because that is a question about society and its values, not about nature and the universe at large. Without objectivity, academic statements are rigorous opinions. They should not be waved on through to wikivoice just because they are academic.
I also note WP:SCHOLARSHIP's advice on POV and peer review in journals:
Care should be taken with journals that exist mainly to promote a particular point of view.
We have at least one of those being used, where academics wear their POV proudly on their sleeve. That's OK, that comes with the territory. POV sources can be mined for facts and relevant attributed opinions. What it means for us as Wikipedia editors is that we cannot venerate this type of academia as authoritative in the same way as an academic paper on gravity or geology or genetics. Barnards.tar.gz ( talk) 21:36, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
"There is no apparatus that can objectively answer whether GCF is transphobic"is as inaccurate as saying we should treat antisemitism in a "both sides" way, giving equal validity to antisemitic viewpoints, because scholarship on antisemitism is not physical science but social and historical science. -- Amanda A. Brant ( talk) 17:34, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
in this field it's not really a Western democracy, its policies are more similar to authoritarian countries
the only accepted view in polite society
A tiny minority in our countries clarification needed cycle to work or have installed heat pumps or would take a long distance bus or train.
Pick a GC view? 60% who? say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth
but Wikipedia couldn't possibly suggest this is actually what people [!] in 2024 think. [Sources:] Where Americans [!] stand on 20 transgender policy issues [/] Americans’ [!] Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues
The majority of US population share some GC views. Many US states have laws that are more aligned with GC views than trans activist views. Your [whose?] next president... [...] That half the population [again, the world is not America] are happy to vote Trump, who wants to lock up physicians offering youth gender affirming care, does not in any way suggest to me that this is a FRINGE view in society.
The majority of US population share some GC views
gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth(but it is a conservative belief). Barnards.tar.gz ( talk) 08:59, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
One of the second wave's most important achievements was to develop an important distinction between sex - in the words of British sociologist Ann Oakley (1972) the biological differences between male and female' - and gender, which she described as the social classification into "masculine" and "feminine"' (16). [...] Decoupling sex from gender enabled feminists to successfully argue that women required certain rights and services by virtue of their sex and challenge the sexist assumptions that justified women's inequality with men. They explained that women's biology, particularly their ability to bear children, means they required specific rights and resources. But they used gender to argue that women's biology does not make them inferior to men. They recognised that women's specific needs were neglected by policymakers and medical practitioners not because women's needs were inevitably less important than men's but because the world was male-dominated. They also showed that women's inequality is often justified by the claim that women are best suited to perform 'feminine' roles. Feminists demonstrated that there was no evidence to substantiate this notion that gender is innate. They also showed that masculinity and femininity are not simply different from one another but also inherently unequal (which explained why, for example, 'women's' work was paid less than men's). As Angela Philips (1974) wrote in the feminist magazine Spare Rib, ending women's oppression relied on creating a new relationship between the sexes 'which is not built out of domination [commonly perceived as masculine] and submission [widely defined as feminine]' (31). Feminists therefore critiqued and sought to eradicate gender.
Void if removed ( talk) 09:32, 22 May 2024 (UTC)new groups emerged, such as Woman's Place UK (WPUK), founded by socialists and trade unionists in 2017 to campaign for women's sex-based rights. WPUK's conscious debt to the second wave is evidenced by their 'Five Demands' (WPUK 2018), and their distinction between sex as biological - which underpins their emphasis on women's bodily autonomy - and gender as a restrictive construction that feminists must challenge.
This is pointless. Without considering specific sources, this discussion is bound to go off-topic, as is already happening with discussions of polls, arguing about the prevalence of various sentiments towards trans people in the Anglosphere. I invite editors who take issue with the sourcing in this article to consider relevant policies of Wikipedia:
Where Americans stand on 20 transgender policy issuesare irrelevant for determining these aspects. These are also irrelevant for determining whether a viewpoint is WP:FRINGE. An academic field and the wider population can disagree about the relevance of different aspects of a field, even in the much-heralded "physical sciences": string theory was still widely believed to be a useful candidate for a Theory of Everything by many people long after mainstream physicists had abandoned it as a path to TOE. So, even if, for example, Gender-critical beliefs were prevalent, e.g. in Britain, that would still only mean that a huge part of the British population subscribes to beliefs on the fringes of the academic mainstream.
fringes of the academic mainstream
Once you decide that the subject of this article is not actually "gender critical feminism" or what "gender critical feminists" say and believe and write and publish and campaign for, but actually what academics who hate them say about them, you can't begin to approach a neutral POV. If that is your view of this subject, or the sources used in this article, and your solution is to explicitly advocate for a content fork, I must remind you of Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. If you can't gain consensus for your point of view, or it seriously differs from other points of view, content forks are not the solution. TucanHolmes ( talk) 16:20, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
First a word on terminology. I use ‘TERF’ as a representation of what might be called the original trans-exclusionary feminist view, which I outline in the following section, and ‘gender critical’ to represent more contemporary presentations of feminist trans- exclusion. I use ‘trans-exclusionary feminism’ as an umbrella term encompassing both. As will be discussed, the application of these terms is complex and political. They represent positions that are interconnected and often interchangeable, indistinguishable and/or contradictory. Acknowledging these enmeshments as I advance, there is enough of a separable figurative TERF position from that of a figurative gender critical one, at least in how they are presented, to be usefully employed.
Raymond’s conclusions can be distilled as (a) trans is a manifestation of patriarchy and is caused, at least in part, by sex-role rigidity, (b) trans people are either delusional or deceiving and to think otherwise is to ‘collude with the falsification of reality’ (1994: xxiii) (c) trans women are violators and penetrators, of space, of bodies, of true womanhood.
It was individuals with the type of trans-exclusionary opinions outlined in this section that would retrospectively be termed TERFs (short for trans-exclusionary radical feminist), and it is these types of sentiments I intend to capture in my use of ‘TERF’.
the late 1980s onwards saw increased focus on differences within womanhood, including the work of power dynamics in privileging and marginalising voices and experiences. There was an increasing focus on a critique of categories such as woman, man, straight, gay and the policing they accrue. This came not least from poststructural scholarship and, particularly in this context, queer theory. This combination of events led to growing understanding and inclusion of trans people within feminism
While it remained accurate to a subsect of trans-exclusionary feminists (some radical feminists), TERF came to signify trans-exclusionary views more generally. [...] Moreover, once the term was popularized, being trans-exclusionary and therefore liable to being labelled a TERF did not necessitate being a feminist at all, with the term also being used to describe trans- exclusionary positions from right-wing or religious perspectives. This diffusion of the application of ‘TERF’ coupled with the overt transphobia of earlier feminist writings on trans-exclusion, promoted the terms pejorative use by some. It has been argued that TERF now meets the definition of a slur
Amidst the melee of controversy and connotations attached to ‘TERF’, the term ‘gender critical feminism/ feminist’ began to be used by proponents of trans-exclusionary feminism. While this constitutes a late 2010s renaming of TERF, it would be more accurately described as a rebranding.
Leaving aside that the term ‘gender critical feminism’ is tautology
its adoption represented the beginnings of a pivot by trans-exclusionary feminists towards language which obscures their trans- exclusionary focus. Alongside a shift from TERF to gender critical, ‘anti-trans’ became ‘pro-women’ and ‘trans-exclusion’ became the protection of ‘sex-based rights’ (‘We defend sex-based rights’ (Fair Play for Women, 2021: para.6)). These rather innocuous- sounding terms have been transformed into the language of division; exemplifying dog- whistle politics whereby the phrases act as a coded message of anti-transness to those initiated, while appearing ‘reasonable’
The UK’s lower rating comes amid a delay on banning of so-called ‘conversion practices’, the government’s trans guidance for schools having the potential for forcibly out trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming student to their parents and the NHS announcing that trans women will be banned from female wards in England.
While the British gender critical movement shares some characteristics with the international anti-gender movement, it also differs significantly.
It emerged in direct response to proposals by the UK Government to reform the Gender Recognition Act to remove barriers to acquiring a legal change of gender
Third, unlike the global anti-gender movement, which is deeply invested in patriarchal norms, the British gender-critical movement initially emerged as a feminist project
Anti-gender conservatives and gender-critical feminists both oppose what they describe as ‘gender ideology’, but from very different positions. Conservatives uphold ‘traditional’ gender norms, advocating for sex ‘complementarity’ (i.e., distinct roles and identities for men and women) and blame changing gender roles for a range of social ills. Whereas gender critical feminists view ‘gender identity’ as reinforcing stereotypes of what men and women should be (i.e., women as ‘feminine’ and men as ‘masculine’). They worry that ‘gender ideology’ encourages ‘masculine’ women and girls, particularly lesbians, to become men, and ‘feminine’ men and boys to become women instead of accepting a range of expressions and sexualities. Gender critical feminists also argue that shifts to replace ‘sex’ categories with ‘gender’ will hamper efforts to collect ‘accurate’ data on equality measures, such as unequal pay, crime rates and health—despite the fact that both ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ categories can be fraught with challenges in data collection (Collier & Cowan 2022). Fundamentally, gender critical feminists see trans rights as a threat to women’s equality and gay rights, whereas conservatives generally oppose gender and sexual equality altogether.
A fourth key difference is anti-trans politics in Britain defy conventional left-right divisions. Gender critical perspectives in Britain cross multiple constituencies as well as political and partisan lines (GATE, 2022). For example, there are gender critical sub-groups within every major political party across Britain
These distinctions between the British gender critical and the global anti-gender movements are not insignificant. Such differences pose challenges for developing effective counter strategies—not least of all because gender critical feminists appeal to left-wing and liberal audiences as much as right-wing ones. Strategies designed to push back against right-wing politics can backfire when applied to left-wing campaigners. “No platforming” tactics, for example, first used against fascist speakers, have not been especially successful when applied to gender critical feminists. In some cases, these tactics have brought gender critical voices far greater platforms, media attention and public sympathy than they would have had otherwise.
In addition to acknowledging differences between anti-gender and gender critical politics, it is important to recognise divergences within the British gender-critical movement. Despite a tendency among commentators to treat gender-critical advocates as broadly similar (oscillating between branding them all ‘TERFS’ on the one hand, or right-wing, neo-fascists on the other), these campaigners occupy a range of political positions. For example, while there are right-wing women organising under the banner of gender-critical politics, for the most part they are not feminists (and therefore not ‘TERFS’).
Conversely, many of the leading gender-critical women’s groups in Britain—including those who are undertaking significant lobbying and policy work—come from left feminist positions. A Woman’s Place UK, for example, a key gender-critical group established in 2017, was set up by trade unionists and other left feminists. It explicitly describes itself as left-wing and has supporters from a range of left-groups
There are also a range of ‘non-partisan’ gender-critical women’s groups, such as Fair Play for Women, For Women Scotland, and Sex Matters, comprised of members across the political spectrum. Gender-critical campaigners also include groups of lesbians, gays and bisexuals who seek separate organising from trans communities (e.g., LGB Alliance) including those who publicly eschew both left and right politics (e.g., Get the L Out).
reinforcing stereotypes". Void if removed ( talk) 18:40, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
if it was left wing, do you think the Torygraph and the Daily Mail would put out articles almost every single day covering it favorably?
The original point is very much whether what is being called the "academic mainstream" actually is, or is in reality an incredibly niche and opinionated part of academia, and whether that should actually dominate this page (as it presently does), and how we establish what terms even mean or what is balanced and neutral.Well, then get reliable sources to back up that assertion.
And that's very hard when people glibly compare the UK to an authoritarian state like Russia. Hence everything goes in circles.It's not Wikipedians' fault that the European Human Rights Council named the UK in one breath with Russia et al.; this all goes to underscore that the views prevalent in some parts of the Anglosphere are minority views. The fact that people have to resort to random polls and surveys to argue their case of what is fringe and not fringe is at least one indicator that the academic consensus – not just in social studies – seems to go against gender-critical feminism. TucanHolmes ( talk) 16:24, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
hateGCF) and can't get consensus for that (or provide citations for your opinion that we should discard those sources because they
hate GCFs), then that is not a problem with this article. Wikipedia doesn't automatically give exposé space to ideologies; all ideologies are evaluated (critically), especially if they are deemed to be WP:FRINGE. You can't have it both ways: Either gender-critical feminism is a feminist / feminist-adjacent movement (in which case it gets a Wikipedia article but is evaluated accordingly), or it is part of a broader gender-critical movement, as your comments here seem to suggest. But in that case, this article will need to be folded into the bigger topic.
countries populations who?think when evaluating sources. This is only relevant when the actual point of contention is what those populations think (nevermind that I highly doubt that you could provide enough reliable sources to back up your assertions). TucanHolmes ( talk) 09:24, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
departs significantly from the prevailing views or mainstream views in its particular field.
However, there are at least two caveats: not every identified subject matter has its own academic specialization, and the opinion of a scholar whose expertise is in a different field should not be given undue weight.
Fringe theories in a nutshell: To maintain a neutral point of view, an idea that is not broadly supported by scholarship in its field must not be given undue weight in an article about a mainstream idea. More extensive treatment should be reserved for an article about the idea, which must meet the test of notability. Additionally, in an article about the minority viewpoint itself, the proper contextual relationship between minority and majority viewpoints must be made clear.
more extensive treatment' i.e. we need to explain in detail what g-c feminist views actually are, and the other viewpoints should only be mentioned to add context. Sweet6970 ( talk) 11:35, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
Additionally, in an article about the minority viewpoint itself, the proper contextual relationship between minority and majority viewpoints must be made clear.TucanHolmes ( talk) 15:00, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
Just think of this like a minority religious denomination and you'll have a far better idea of how Wikipedia should deal with it.(?) That's not how that works. That's not how any of this works. TucanHolmes ( talk) 15:11, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
Arianism (Koine Greek: Ἀρειανισμός, Areianismós) is a Christological doctrine considered heretical by all mainstream branches of Christianity.
A belief that the concept of marriage should apply to same-sex partnerships is very very much a minority belief worldwide.Again, I don't like that you constantly pull these factoids out of nowhere. You cannot know what the world believes, I cannot know what the world believes; the actual fact which your statement is adjacent to is that same-sex partnerships are treated as criminal activity in many countries. However, this doesn't have anything to do with fringeness, because these countries are no authority in the field, nor have their legal systems anything to do with how Wikipedia should write about same-sex partnerships (in the same way that UK court rulings have nothing to do with how Wikipedia should write about gender-critical feminism, I should point out). An actual useful comparison would have been how psychologists view/treat same-sex partnerships. Seventy years ago, Wikipedia would have treated same-sex partnerships as a form of mental illness (and actual physical encyclopedias did so). That was wrong, but only because psychologists at large were wrong. That homosexuality was benign and nothing to worry about was a minority view at the time (see Magnus Hirschfeld), and would have been considered fringe by most psychologists.
the lead would be reminding readers of its illegality in 83% of the world and that it is an abomination in the eyes of God.Incidentally, the second sentence in the article about same-sex marriage reads
As of 2024, marriage between same-sex couples is legally performed and recognized in 37 countries, with a total population of 1.4 billion people (17% of the world's population).
Opposition is based on claims such as that homosexuality is unnatural and abnormal, that the recognition of same-sex unions will promote homosexuality in society, and that children are better off when raised by opposite-sex couples. These claims are refuted by scientific studies, which show that homosexuality is a natural and normal variation in human sexuality, that sexual orientation is not a choice, and that children of same-sex couples fare just as well as the children of opposite-sex couples.
The problem is that beliefs are not theories.What? TucanHolmes ( talk) 09:31, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
Gender critical feminists advocate what they call "sex-based rights," arguing that "women's human rights are based upon sex" and that "these rights are being eroded by the promotion of 'gender identity.'" Human rights scholar Sandra Duffy described the concept of "sex-based rights" as "a fiction with the pretense of legality," noting that the word "sex" in international human rights law does not share the implications of the word "sex" in gender-critical discourse and is widely agreed to also refer to gender. Catharine A. MacKinnon noted that "the recognition [that discrimination against trans people is discrimination on the basis of sex, that is gender, the social meaning of sex] does not, contrary to allegations of anti-trans self-identified feminists, endanger women or feminism", they expand by saying "women do not have 'sex-based rights' in the affirmative sense some in this group seem to think."".
When writing any Wikipedia article, you should not use sources that promote positions that are rejected in the academic community by experts on the subject" is the basis of frequent argument by Reprarina and Amanda and others. But what are they expecting these "experts" to tell us? They are expecting our experts to tell us what are RightTM beliefs to hold. And what is the "position" that has been "rejected"? This isn't a position like "I think vaccines save many more lives than the small risk of harm" or "Driving too fast is a common cause of death and injury on our roads" or "Humankind is responsible for global warming" or "Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election". It is as fundamentally wrongthinking to consider GCF a "position" that "experts" can declare "accepted" or "rejected" as it is to consider if Anglicans or Baptists are right or if the UK should be a member of the European Union or if university education should be free or charge tuition fees. These are all things people can have an opinion on, and pollsters can measure the extent of those opinions, but no serious thinker would make the mistake that because there are more Anglicans than Methodists, the latter must be a wrong kind of Christianity. That because there are more theology academic papers written by Anglicans, their theology is correct, and Wikipedia must make sure any articles on Methodists are never sourced to Methodists. That because there are more countries that drive on the right, that this is the "correct" side and lefties are "rejected" and we must never cite any sources to the UK and Japan on road safety.
The analogy breaks down when one considers that GCF is not about the supposed beliefs or psychological analysis of some political/ideological messiah, which is then at the mercy of all the disconnects there may be between what many followers believe and what the messiah may have once said but also contradictorily said another time and all the possibly incorrect things others have ever said about the messiah.
Instead GCF writers who are expressing and writing about their own GC beliefs and concerns are arguing their own case, and it is important we figure out what their shared (and perhaps disagreed) beliefs actually are.
"Once you decide that the subject of this article is not actually "gender critical feminism" or what "gender critical feminists" say and believe and write and publish and campaign for, but actually what academics who hate them say about them, you can't begin to approach a neutral POV": The article on antisemitism is not an article that presents what antisemites "say and believe and write and publish and campaign for." Instead, it's based on scholarship on antisemitism. Hence, the article defines antisemitism as "hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews [and] a form of racism." TERF ideology similarly is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against transgender people and a form of transphobia; this reflects the consensus in scholarship on the phenomenon. -- Amanda A. Brant ( talk) 07:49, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
I don't think that is so at all.And here we have the problem with this discussion: Assertions, mere opinions without citations to back them.
The point of having this article is to educate our readers about what GCF is.And the whole problem is that there is disagreement about what that education entails. You have your version/vision, but you can't get consensus for it.
Part of the problem with this culture war is those on the extremes of either side are utterly misunderstanding the other side. They so hate each other (I blame Twitter for a lot) that they have no wish to understand the other side. citation neededWikipedia isn't for writing great wrongs; if reliable sources are, in your opinion, biased, the solution isn't to discard or disregard those sources.
Whatever writers you are reading on that are confusing things to make their activist/political point or are just plain confused.
which results in everyone outside of the war rolling their eyes.
We have the same behaviour here, were some people are insisting an article be written from a activist-hater POV.
The "in some countries" seems very out of place, looking at the article at the moment the by country section contains 3, the United Kingdom (seems to be about 90% of the section), the United states and south Korea. The only organisation mentioned in either of the latter 2 is Wolf (which looking at their page has been criticised for allying itself with the right wing). Looking at the UK ones there are definitely organisations that are criticised for allying with far right organisations.
I suggest removing the "In some countries" part but want to feel out what consensus would be on the swap. I personally think "some major Gender critical feminist groups" but I'm very happy to compromise with "some gender critical" or other suggestions.
LunaHasArrived (
talk) 21:42, 25 May 2024 (UTC)
In some countries, gender-critical feminist groups have formed alliances with right-wing, far-right, and anti-feminist organisations’ based on? Sweet6970 ( talk) 16:20, 26 May 2024 (UTC)
To this end, a key issue in the current political and scholarly landscape is the growing convergence, and sometimes conscious alliances, between “gender-critical” feminists (sometimes known as TERFs - Trans- Exclusionary Radical Feminists), religious and social conservatives, as well as right-wing politics and even neo-Nazi and fascist movements. Their target are transgender people, queer activism and theorising that support an expansive approach to gender identity. An example from the USA is the colloquium, “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns from the Left,” sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation (2019), a think tank that is promoting tough immigration politics, traditional marriage laws (keeping it heterosexual), and stricter abortion legislation.
The problem here is that alliances with the Christian right are being continually used as a stick to beat all gender-critical feminists with, including women who’ve taken a consistent and principled stand against them. The mud has been raked very successfully. A radical feminist critique of the political erasure of sex has been linked, perhaps terminally in the US context, with religious homophobes and racists.
But the problem is the conflation of "TERF" with "gender-critical feminist
Gender-critical feminism, also known as trans-exclusionary radical feminism or TERFism
In the United kingdom section the first bullet point (starting existing exceptions) whilst not saying anything wrong (I think it has to be proportional means of achieving a legitimate aim in certain circumstances or and some other stuff, but I am no legal scholar and haven't read the exact document for a while), seems badly sourced. The ehrc link fails verification for me and the wpuk page about suella braverman I was surprised to see linked at all. I tried doing a search but a quick look at gov UK and the ehrc but didn't find anything that would support the current text and it seems a shame to get rid of it.
Any help finding better sources for this bullet point would be appreciated.
LunaHasArrived (
talk) 11:48, 26 May 2024 (UTC)
This chapter has surveyed the history and current state of English and international laws on sex and gender. It has shown that, where laws relating to sex have been enacted, they have been intended to remedy the disadvantages suffered directly and indirectly by women. These disadvantages have always been based on women’s biology as females and on the social constructs built upon their biology. In consequence, the law has defined women as females and has provided rights and protections to counter the historical and continuing restrictions imposed by these.
Our conclusion is that there are just too many situations – those envisaged in the Equality Act exemptions being prime examples – where removal of the protected category of sex will reduce, and possibly remove, the very protections that were enacted to help natal women and redress their historical disadvantage. It is for this reason we argue that we need to retain the protected characteristic of sex in the EA, since its replacement by ‘gender identity’ would obliterate its historical and continuing basis in biology, cut women off from our heritage (women’s lives matter, just as black lives do) and blur the distinction between people who have been discriminated against because of their bodies and those discriminated against because of their identities.
Void if removed ( talk) 12:39, 26 May 2024 (UTC)Woman’s Place UK (WPUK), founded by socialists and trade unionists in 2017 to campaign for women’s sex-based rights. WPUK’s conscious debt to the second wave is evidenced by their ‘Five Demands’ (WPUK 2018), and their distinction between sex as biological – which underpins their emphasis on women’s bodily autonomy – and gender as a restrictive construction that feminists must challenge.
Void if removed ( talk) 21:38, 26 May 2024 (UTC)The reasons why British and some international law safeguards sex-based rights are explained by Rosemary Auchmuty and Rosa Freedman in Chapter 8. In Chapter 9, Callie Burt examines the basis of challenges to sex-based legal rights in the US and the consequences of these. Together, these chapters argue that legal recognition of sex, and sex-based rights, is essential.
Rather than arguing about the motives of the right-wing press, how about talking about our article?
Void, do you have any suggestions for specific wordings for adding to this article, based on this source? Sweet6970 ( talk) 22:20, 10 June 2024 (UTC) The source: [4] Sweet6970 ( talk) 22:22, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Sarah Lamble described several key differences between gender-critical feminism and the anti-gender movement, noting a defiance of typical left/right divisions and concluding that "gender critical feminists see trans rights as a threat to women’s equality and gay rights, whereas conservatives generally oppose gender and sexual equality altogether".
the issue of overreliance on critical academic sources that insist they're all hateful white supremacist TERFs,etc. ?
The UN Women article is, per the first sentence, about people (and movements) "opposed to equal human rights for LGBTIQ+ people" that "have acted in social movements and governments to exploit social, economic, and political instability by attempting to bring reactionary beliefs into the mainstream and reverse gains for members of marginalized groups". It then mentions that "these movements use hateful propaganda and disinformation to target and attempt to delegitimize people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and sex characteristics." It then cites "movements encompassing “anti-gender”, “gender-critical”, and “men’s rights”" as examples of the movements it discusses, indeed movements taking attempts to "frame equality for women and LGBTIQ+ people as a threat to so-called “traditional” family values" to "new extremes." The claim that the article is not discussing the anti-gender or gender-critical movements in the introduction is clearly without any merit whatsoever. Some further sources:
(I also noticed that TERF group Sex Matters specifically said the quote about hateful propaganda was about their movement) -- Amanda A. Brant ( talk) 19:19, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
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The topic of this article is the ideology or movement known variously in reliable sources as gender-critical feminism (including abbreviated forms such as "GC", "GC feminism) or trans-exclusionary radical feminism (including abbreviated forms such as "TERF ideology", "TERFism" and similar expressions). The two main titles are equivalent. The article was split off from the article Feminist views on transgender topics where the corresponding section is titled " Gender-critical feminism and trans-exclusionary radical feminism." |
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On 31 January 2024, it was proposed that this article be moved to trans-exclusionary radical feminism. The result of the discussion was no consensus. |
Reference ideas for Gender-critical feminism The following references may be useful when improving this article in the future:
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I can see multiple comments above arguing for the pre-eminence of academic sources on this subject. We need to take a closer look at this. WP:SOURCETYPES tells us:
When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources.
Usually. Not always. It particularly doesn't mean that academic sources have a monopoly on significant viewpoints.
GCF is not the physical sciences, where scientific consensus is widely discussed and results are widely believed to converge on an objective truth. It is a type of social science or philosophy, where ideas diverge and proliferate and different schools of thought emerge. Part of the reason why Wikipedia favours academic sources is because of their objectivity. Scientists, for the most part, take a neutral stance in their publications, and they are kept in check by empirical reality. Not so for ideas where there is no recourse to experiment to settle disputes. There is no apparatus that can objectively answer whether GCF is transphobic, because that is a question about society and its values, not about nature and the universe at large. Without objectivity, academic statements are rigorous opinions. They should not be waved on through to wikivoice just because they are academic.
I also note WP:SCHOLARSHIP's advice on POV and peer review in journals:
Care should be taken with journals that exist mainly to promote a particular point of view.
We have at least one of those being used, where academics wear their POV proudly on their sleeve. That's OK, that comes with the territory. POV sources can be mined for facts and relevant attributed opinions. What it means for us as Wikipedia editors is that we cannot venerate this type of academia as authoritative in the same way as an academic paper on gravity or geology or genetics. Barnards.tar.gz ( talk) 21:36, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
"There is no apparatus that can objectively answer whether GCF is transphobic"is as inaccurate as saying we should treat antisemitism in a "both sides" way, giving equal validity to antisemitic viewpoints, because scholarship on antisemitism is not physical science but social and historical science. -- Amanda A. Brant ( talk) 17:34, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
in this field it's not really a Western democracy, its policies are more similar to authoritarian countries
the only accepted view in polite society
A tiny minority in our countries clarification needed cycle to work or have installed heat pumps or would take a long distance bus or train.
Pick a GC view? 60% who? say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth
but Wikipedia couldn't possibly suggest this is actually what people [!] in 2024 think. [Sources:] Where Americans [!] stand on 20 transgender policy issues [/] Americans’ [!] Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues
The majority of US population share some GC views. Many US states have laws that are more aligned with GC views than trans activist views. Your [whose?] next president... [...] That half the population [again, the world is not America] are happy to vote Trump, who wants to lock up physicians offering youth gender affirming care, does not in any way suggest to me that this is a FRINGE view in society.
The majority of US population share some GC views
gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth(but it is a conservative belief). Barnards.tar.gz ( talk) 08:59, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
One of the second wave's most important achievements was to develop an important distinction between sex - in the words of British sociologist Ann Oakley (1972) the biological differences between male and female' - and gender, which she described as the social classification into "masculine" and "feminine"' (16). [...] Decoupling sex from gender enabled feminists to successfully argue that women required certain rights and services by virtue of their sex and challenge the sexist assumptions that justified women's inequality with men. They explained that women's biology, particularly their ability to bear children, means they required specific rights and resources. But they used gender to argue that women's biology does not make them inferior to men. They recognised that women's specific needs were neglected by policymakers and medical practitioners not because women's needs were inevitably less important than men's but because the world was male-dominated. They also showed that women's inequality is often justified by the claim that women are best suited to perform 'feminine' roles. Feminists demonstrated that there was no evidence to substantiate this notion that gender is innate. They also showed that masculinity and femininity are not simply different from one another but also inherently unequal (which explained why, for example, 'women's' work was paid less than men's). As Angela Philips (1974) wrote in the feminist magazine Spare Rib, ending women's oppression relied on creating a new relationship between the sexes 'which is not built out of domination [commonly perceived as masculine] and submission [widely defined as feminine]' (31). Feminists therefore critiqued and sought to eradicate gender.
Void if removed ( talk) 09:32, 22 May 2024 (UTC)new groups emerged, such as Woman's Place UK (WPUK), founded by socialists and trade unionists in 2017 to campaign for women's sex-based rights. WPUK's conscious debt to the second wave is evidenced by their 'Five Demands' (WPUK 2018), and their distinction between sex as biological - which underpins their emphasis on women's bodily autonomy - and gender as a restrictive construction that feminists must challenge.
This is pointless. Without considering specific sources, this discussion is bound to go off-topic, as is already happening with discussions of polls, arguing about the prevalence of various sentiments towards trans people in the Anglosphere. I invite editors who take issue with the sourcing in this article to consider relevant policies of Wikipedia:
Where Americans stand on 20 transgender policy issuesare irrelevant for determining these aspects. These are also irrelevant for determining whether a viewpoint is WP:FRINGE. An academic field and the wider population can disagree about the relevance of different aspects of a field, even in the much-heralded "physical sciences": string theory was still widely believed to be a useful candidate for a Theory of Everything by many people long after mainstream physicists had abandoned it as a path to TOE. So, even if, for example, Gender-critical beliefs were prevalent, e.g. in Britain, that would still only mean that a huge part of the British population subscribes to beliefs on the fringes of the academic mainstream.
fringes of the academic mainstream
Once you decide that the subject of this article is not actually "gender critical feminism" or what "gender critical feminists" say and believe and write and publish and campaign for, but actually what academics who hate them say about them, you can't begin to approach a neutral POV. If that is your view of this subject, or the sources used in this article, and your solution is to explicitly advocate for a content fork, I must remind you of Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. If you can't gain consensus for your point of view, or it seriously differs from other points of view, content forks are not the solution. TucanHolmes ( talk) 16:20, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
First a word on terminology. I use ‘TERF’ as a representation of what might be called the original trans-exclusionary feminist view, which I outline in the following section, and ‘gender critical’ to represent more contemporary presentations of feminist trans- exclusion. I use ‘trans-exclusionary feminism’ as an umbrella term encompassing both. As will be discussed, the application of these terms is complex and political. They represent positions that are interconnected and often interchangeable, indistinguishable and/or contradictory. Acknowledging these enmeshments as I advance, there is enough of a separable figurative TERF position from that of a figurative gender critical one, at least in how they are presented, to be usefully employed.
Raymond’s conclusions can be distilled as (a) trans is a manifestation of patriarchy and is caused, at least in part, by sex-role rigidity, (b) trans people are either delusional or deceiving and to think otherwise is to ‘collude with the falsification of reality’ (1994: xxiii) (c) trans women are violators and penetrators, of space, of bodies, of true womanhood.
It was individuals with the type of trans-exclusionary opinions outlined in this section that would retrospectively be termed TERFs (short for trans-exclusionary radical feminist), and it is these types of sentiments I intend to capture in my use of ‘TERF’.
the late 1980s onwards saw increased focus on differences within womanhood, including the work of power dynamics in privileging and marginalising voices and experiences. There was an increasing focus on a critique of categories such as woman, man, straight, gay and the policing they accrue. This came not least from poststructural scholarship and, particularly in this context, queer theory. This combination of events led to growing understanding and inclusion of trans people within feminism
While it remained accurate to a subsect of trans-exclusionary feminists (some radical feminists), TERF came to signify trans-exclusionary views more generally. [...] Moreover, once the term was popularized, being trans-exclusionary and therefore liable to being labelled a TERF did not necessitate being a feminist at all, with the term also being used to describe trans- exclusionary positions from right-wing or religious perspectives. This diffusion of the application of ‘TERF’ coupled with the overt transphobia of earlier feminist writings on trans-exclusion, promoted the terms pejorative use by some. It has been argued that TERF now meets the definition of a slur
Amidst the melee of controversy and connotations attached to ‘TERF’, the term ‘gender critical feminism/ feminist’ began to be used by proponents of trans-exclusionary feminism. While this constitutes a late 2010s renaming of TERF, it would be more accurately described as a rebranding.
Leaving aside that the term ‘gender critical feminism’ is tautology
its adoption represented the beginnings of a pivot by trans-exclusionary feminists towards language which obscures their trans- exclusionary focus. Alongside a shift from TERF to gender critical, ‘anti-trans’ became ‘pro-women’ and ‘trans-exclusion’ became the protection of ‘sex-based rights’ (‘We defend sex-based rights’ (Fair Play for Women, 2021: para.6)). These rather innocuous- sounding terms have been transformed into the language of division; exemplifying dog- whistle politics whereby the phrases act as a coded message of anti-transness to those initiated, while appearing ‘reasonable’
The UK’s lower rating comes amid a delay on banning of so-called ‘conversion practices’, the government’s trans guidance for schools having the potential for forcibly out trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming student to their parents and the NHS announcing that trans women will be banned from female wards in England.
While the British gender critical movement shares some characteristics with the international anti-gender movement, it also differs significantly.
It emerged in direct response to proposals by the UK Government to reform the Gender Recognition Act to remove barriers to acquiring a legal change of gender
Third, unlike the global anti-gender movement, which is deeply invested in patriarchal norms, the British gender-critical movement initially emerged as a feminist project
Anti-gender conservatives and gender-critical feminists both oppose what they describe as ‘gender ideology’, but from very different positions. Conservatives uphold ‘traditional’ gender norms, advocating for sex ‘complementarity’ (i.e., distinct roles and identities for men and women) and blame changing gender roles for a range of social ills. Whereas gender critical feminists view ‘gender identity’ as reinforcing stereotypes of what men and women should be (i.e., women as ‘feminine’ and men as ‘masculine’). They worry that ‘gender ideology’ encourages ‘masculine’ women and girls, particularly lesbians, to become men, and ‘feminine’ men and boys to become women instead of accepting a range of expressions and sexualities. Gender critical feminists also argue that shifts to replace ‘sex’ categories with ‘gender’ will hamper efforts to collect ‘accurate’ data on equality measures, such as unequal pay, crime rates and health—despite the fact that both ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ categories can be fraught with challenges in data collection (Collier & Cowan 2022). Fundamentally, gender critical feminists see trans rights as a threat to women’s equality and gay rights, whereas conservatives generally oppose gender and sexual equality altogether.
A fourth key difference is anti-trans politics in Britain defy conventional left-right divisions. Gender critical perspectives in Britain cross multiple constituencies as well as political and partisan lines (GATE, 2022). For example, there are gender critical sub-groups within every major political party across Britain
These distinctions between the British gender critical and the global anti-gender movements are not insignificant. Such differences pose challenges for developing effective counter strategies—not least of all because gender critical feminists appeal to left-wing and liberal audiences as much as right-wing ones. Strategies designed to push back against right-wing politics can backfire when applied to left-wing campaigners. “No platforming” tactics, for example, first used against fascist speakers, have not been especially successful when applied to gender critical feminists. In some cases, these tactics have brought gender critical voices far greater platforms, media attention and public sympathy than they would have had otherwise.
In addition to acknowledging differences between anti-gender and gender critical politics, it is important to recognise divergences within the British gender-critical movement. Despite a tendency among commentators to treat gender-critical advocates as broadly similar (oscillating between branding them all ‘TERFS’ on the one hand, or right-wing, neo-fascists on the other), these campaigners occupy a range of political positions. For example, while there are right-wing women organising under the banner of gender-critical politics, for the most part they are not feminists (and therefore not ‘TERFS’).
Conversely, many of the leading gender-critical women’s groups in Britain—including those who are undertaking significant lobbying and policy work—come from left feminist positions. A Woman’s Place UK, for example, a key gender-critical group established in 2017, was set up by trade unionists and other left feminists. It explicitly describes itself as left-wing and has supporters from a range of left-groups
There are also a range of ‘non-partisan’ gender-critical women’s groups, such as Fair Play for Women, For Women Scotland, and Sex Matters, comprised of members across the political spectrum. Gender-critical campaigners also include groups of lesbians, gays and bisexuals who seek separate organising from trans communities (e.g., LGB Alliance) including those who publicly eschew both left and right politics (e.g., Get the L Out).
reinforcing stereotypes". Void if removed ( talk) 18:40, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
if it was left wing, do you think the Torygraph and the Daily Mail would put out articles almost every single day covering it favorably?
The original point is very much whether what is being called the "academic mainstream" actually is, or is in reality an incredibly niche and opinionated part of academia, and whether that should actually dominate this page (as it presently does), and how we establish what terms even mean or what is balanced and neutral.Well, then get reliable sources to back up that assertion.
And that's very hard when people glibly compare the UK to an authoritarian state like Russia. Hence everything goes in circles.It's not Wikipedians' fault that the European Human Rights Council named the UK in one breath with Russia et al.; this all goes to underscore that the views prevalent in some parts of the Anglosphere are minority views. The fact that people have to resort to random polls and surveys to argue their case of what is fringe and not fringe is at least one indicator that the academic consensus – not just in social studies – seems to go against gender-critical feminism. TucanHolmes ( talk) 16:24, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
hateGCF) and can't get consensus for that (or provide citations for your opinion that we should discard those sources because they
hate GCFs), then that is not a problem with this article. Wikipedia doesn't automatically give exposé space to ideologies; all ideologies are evaluated (critically), especially if they are deemed to be WP:FRINGE. You can't have it both ways: Either gender-critical feminism is a feminist / feminist-adjacent movement (in which case it gets a Wikipedia article but is evaluated accordingly), or it is part of a broader gender-critical movement, as your comments here seem to suggest. But in that case, this article will need to be folded into the bigger topic.
countries populations who?think when evaluating sources. This is only relevant when the actual point of contention is what those populations think (nevermind that I highly doubt that you could provide enough reliable sources to back up your assertions). TucanHolmes ( talk) 09:24, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
departs significantly from the prevailing views or mainstream views in its particular field.
However, there are at least two caveats: not every identified subject matter has its own academic specialization, and the opinion of a scholar whose expertise is in a different field should not be given undue weight.
Fringe theories in a nutshell: To maintain a neutral point of view, an idea that is not broadly supported by scholarship in its field must not be given undue weight in an article about a mainstream idea. More extensive treatment should be reserved for an article about the idea, which must meet the test of notability. Additionally, in an article about the minority viewpoint itself, the proper contextual relationship between minority and majority viewpoints must be made clear.
more extensive treatment' i.e. we need to explain in detail what g-c feminist views actually are, and the other viewpoints should only be mentioned to add context. Sweet6970 ( talk) 11:35, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
Additionally, in an article about the minority viewpoint itself, the proper contextual relationship between minority and majority viewpoints must be made clear.TucanHolmes ( talk) 15:00, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
Just think of this like a minority religious denomination and you'll have a far better idea of how Wikipedia should deal with it.(?) That's not how that works. That's not how any of this works. TucanHolmes ( talk) 15:11, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
Arianism (Koine Greek: Ἀρειανισμός, Areianismós) is a Christological doctrine considered heretical by all mainstream branches of Christianity.
A belief that the concept of marriage should apply to same-sex partnerships is very very much a minority belief worldwide.Again, I don't like that you constantly pull these factoids out of nowhere. You cannot know what the world believes, I cannot know what the world believes; the actual fact which your statement is adjacent to is that same-sex partnerships are treated as criminal activity in many countries. However, this doesn't have anything to do with fringeness, because these countries are no authority in the field, nor have their legal systems anything to do with how Wikipedia should write about same-sex partnerships (in the same way that UK court rulings have nothing to do with how Wikipedia should write about gender-critical feminism, I should point out). An actual useful comparison would have been how psychologists view/treat same-sex partnerships. Seventy years ago, Wikipedia would have treated same-sex partnerships as a form of mental illness (and actual physical encyclopedias did so). That was wrong, but only because psychologists at large were wrong. That homosexuality was benign and nothing to worry about was a minority view at the time (see Magnus Hirschfeld), and would have been considered fringe by most psychologists.
the lead would be reminding readers of its illegality in 83% of the world and that it is an abomination in the eyes of God.Incidentally, the second sentence in the article about same-sex marriage reads
As of 2024, marriage between same-sex couples is legally performed and recognized in 37 countries, with a total population of 1.4 billion people (17% of the world's population).
Opposition is based on claims such as that homosexuality is unnatural and abnormal, that the recognition of same-sex unions will promote homosexuality in society, and that children are better off when raised by opposite-sex couples. These claims are refuted by scientific studies, which show that homosexuality is a natural and normal variation in human sexuality, that sexual orientation is not a choice, and that children of same-sex couples fare just as well as the children of opposite-sex couples.
The problem is that beliefs are not theories.What? TucanHolmes ( talk) 09:31, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
Gender critical feminists advocate what they call "sex-based rights," arguing that "women's human rights are based upon sex" and that "these rights are being eroded by the promotion of 'gender identity.'" Human rights scholar Sandra Duffy described the concept of "sex-based rights" as "a fiction with the pretense of legality," noting that the word "sex" in international human rights law does not share the implications of the word "sex" in gender-critical discourse and is widely agreed to also refer to gender. Catharine A. MacKinnon noted that "the recognition [that discrimination against trans people is discrimination on the basis of sex, that is gender, the social meaning of sex] does not, contrary to allegations of anti-trans self-identified feminists, endanger women or feminism", they expand by saying "women do not have 'sex-based rights' in the affirmative sense some in this group seem to think."".
When writing any Wikipedia article, you should not use sources that promote positions that are rejected in the academic community by experts on the subject" is the basis of frequent argument by Reprarina and Amanda and others. But what are they expecting these "experts" to tell us? They are expecting our experts to tell us what are RightTM beliefs to hold. And what is the "position" that has been "rejected"? This isn't a position like "I think vaccines save many more lives than the small risk of harm" or "Driving too fast is a common cause of death and injury on our roads" or "Humankind is responsible for global warming" or "Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election". It is as fundamentally wrongthinking to consider GCF a "position" that "experts" can declare "accepted" or "rejected" as it is to consider if Anglicans or Baptists are right or if the UK should be a member of the European Union or if university education should be free or charge tuition fees. These are all things people can have an opinion on, and pollsters can measure the extent of those opinions, but no serious thinker would make the mistake that because there are more Anglicans than Methodists, the latter must be a wrong kind of Christianity. That because there are more theology academic papers written by Anglicans, their theology is correct, and Wikipedia must make sure any articles on Methodists are never sourced to Methodists. That because there are more countries that drive on the right, that this is the "correct" side and lefties are "rejected" and we must never cite any sources to the UK and Japan on road safety.
The analogy breaks down when one considers that GCF is not about the supposed beliefs or psychological analysis of some political/ideological messiah, which is then at the mercy of all the disconnects there may be between what many followers believe and what the messiah may have once said but also contradictorily said another time and all the possibly incorrect things others have ever said about the messiah.
Instead GCF writers who are expressing and writing about their own GC beliefs and concerns are arguing their own case, and it is important we figure out what their shared (and perhaps disagreed) beliefs actually are.
"Once you decide that the subject of this article is not actually "gender critical feminism" or what "gender critical feminists" say and believe and write and publish and campaign for, but actually what academics who hate them say about them, you can't begin to approach a neutral POV": The article on antisemitism is not an article that presents what antisemites "say and believe and write and publish and campaign for." Instead, it's based on scholarship on antisemitism. Hence, the article defines antisemitism as "hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews [and] a form of racism." TERF ideology similarly is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against transgender people and a form of transphobia; this reflects the consensus in scholarship on the phenomenon. -- Amanda A. Brant ( talk) 07:49, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
I don't think that is so at all.And here we have the problem with this discussion: Assertions, mere opinions without citations to back them.
The point of having this article is to educate our readers about what GCF is.And the whole problem is that there is disagreement about what that education entails. You have your version/vision, but you can't get consensus for it.
Part of the problem with this culture war is those on the extremes of either side are utterly misunderstanding the other side. They so hate each other (I blame Twitter for a lot) that they have no wish to understand the other side. citation neededWikipedia isn't for writing great wrongs; if reliable sources are, in your opinion, biased, the solution isn't to discard or disregard those sources.
Whatever writers you are reading on that are confusing things to make their activist/political point or are just plain confused.
which results in everyone outside of the war rolling their eyes.
We have the same behaviour here, were some people are insisting an article be written from a activist-hater POV.
The "in some countries" seems very out of place, looking at the article at the moment the by country section contains 3, the United Kingdom (seems to be about 90% of the section), the United states and south Korea. The only organisation mentioned in either of the latter 2 is Wolf (which looking at their page has been criticised for allying itself with the right wing). Looking at the UK ones there are definitely organisations that are criticised for allying with far right organisations.
I suggest removing the "In some countries" part but want to feel out what consensus would be on the swap. I personally think "some major Gender critical feminist groups" but I'm very happy to compromise with "some gender critical" or other suggestions.
LunaHasArrived (
talk) 21:42, 25 May 2024 (UTC)
In some countries, gender-critical feminist groups have formed alliances with right-wing, far-right, and anti-feminist organisations’ based on? Sweet6970 ( talk) 16:20, 26 May 2024 (UTC)
To this end, a key issue in the current political and scholarly landscape is the growing convergence, and sometimes conscious alliances, between “gender-critical” feminists (sometimes known as TERFs - Trans- Exclusionary Radical Feminists), religious and social conservatives, as well as right-wing politics and even neo-Nazi and fascist movements. Their target are transgender people, queer activism and theorising that support an expansive approach to gender identity. An example from the USA is the colloquium, “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns from the Left,” sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation (2019), a think tank that is promoting tough immigration politics, traditional marriage laws (keeping it heterosexual), and stricter abortion legislation.
The problem here is that alliances with the Christian right are being continually used as a stick to beat all gender-critical feminists with, including women who’ve taken a consistent and principled stand against them. The mud has been raked very successfully. A radical feminist critique of the political erasure of sex has been linked, perhaps terminally in the US context, with religious homophobes and racists.
But the problem is the conflation of "TERF" with "gender-critical feminist
Gender-critical feminism, also known as trans-exclusionary radical feminism or TERFism
In the United kingdom section the first bullet point (starting existing exceptions) whilst not saying anything wrong (I think it has to be proportional means of achieving a legitimate aim in certain circumstances or and some other stuff, but I am no legal scholar and haven't read the exact document for a while), seems badly sourced. The ehrc link fails verification for me and the wpuk page about suella braverman I was surprised to see linked at all. I tried doing a search but a quick look at gov UK and the ehrc but didn't find anything that would support the current text and it seems a shame to get rid of it.
Any help finding better sources for this bullet point would be appreciated.
LunaHasArrived (
talk) 11:48, 26 May 2024 (UTC)
This chapter has surveyed the history and current state of English and international laws on sex and gender. It has shown that, where laws relating to sex have been enacted, they have been intended to remedy the disadvantages suffered directly and indirectly by women. These disadvantages have always been based on women’s biology as females and on the social constructs built upon their biology. In consequence, the law has defined women as females and has provided rights and protections to counter the historical and continuing restrictions imposed by these.
Our conclusion is that there are just too many situations – those envisaged in the Equality Act exemptions being prime examples – where removal of the protected category of sex will reduce, and possibly remove, the very protections that were enacted to help natal women and redress their historical disadvantage. It is for this reason we argue that we need to retain the protected characteristic of sex in the EA, since its replacement by ‘gender identity’ would obliterate its historical and continuing basis in biology, cut women off from our heritage (women’s lives matter, just as black lives do) and blur the distinction between people who have been discriminated against because of their bodies and those discriminated against because of their identities.
Void if removed ( talk) 12:39, 26 May 2024 (UTC)Woman’s Place UK (WPUK), founded by socialists and trade unionists in 2017 to campaign for women’s sex-based rights. WPUK’s conscious debt to the second wave is evidenced by their ‘Five Demands’ (WPUK 2018), and their distinction between sex as biological – which underpins their emphasis on women’s bodily autonomy – and gender as a restrictive construction that feminists must challenge.
Void if removed ( talk) 21:38, 26 May 2024 (UTC)The reasons why British and some international law safeguards sex-based rights are explained by Rosemary Auchmuty and Rosa Freedman in Chapter 8. In Chapter 9, Callie Burt examines the basis of challenges to sex-based legal rights in the US and the consequences of these. Together, these chapters argue that legal recognition of sex, and sex-based rights, is essential.
Rather than arguing about the motives of the right-wing press, how about talking about our article?
Void, do you have any suggestions for specific wordings for adding to this article, based on this source? Sweet6970 ( talk) 22:20, 10 June 2024 (UTC) The source: [4] Sweet6970 ( talk) 22:22, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Sarah Lamble described several key differences between gender-critical feminism and the anti-gender movement, noting a defiance of typical left/right divisions and concluding that "gender critical feminists see trans rights as a threat to women’s equality and gay rights, whereas conservatives generally oppose gender and sexual equality altogether".
the issue of overreliance on critical academic sources that insist they're all hateful white supremacist TERFs,etc. ?
The UN Women article is, per the first sentence, about people (and movements) "opposed to equal human rights for LGBTIQ+ people" that "have acted in social movements and governments to exploit social, economic, and political instability by attempting to bring reactionary beliefs into the mainstream and reverse gains for members of marginalized groups". It then mentions that "these movements use hateful propaganda and disinformation to target and attempt to delegitimize people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and sex characteristics." It then cites "movements encompassing “anti-gender”, “gender-critical”, and “men’s rights”" as examples of the movements it discusses, indeed movements taking attempts to "frame equality for women and LGBTIQ+ people as a threat to so-called “traditional” family values" to "new extremes." The claim that the article is not discussing the anti-gender or gender-critical movements in the introduction is clearly without any merit whatsoever. Some further sources:
(I also noticed that TERF group Sex Matters specifically said the quote about hateful propaganda was about their movement) -- Amanda A. Brant ( talk) 19:19, 16 June 2024 (UTC)