Gender Critical Feminism, Online Discourse and Women

This is a post I have wanted to write for a long time

As a cisgender woman, who is one of the people whose rights are said to be affected by the inclusion of trans and nonbinary people in women's spaces, I feel I have a valuable voice right now.

And, when so many people are being unheard, I feel it's on me to speak up.

Not to speak up FOR them, but in support of them

To do this, I want to discuss a few of my own recent online experiences, as a trans and non binary supporting cis woman.

This last few months the moral panic around transphobia has seemingly gotten even worse than it has been in the last few years.

During my time online, as an open supporter of trans and nonbinary people, I have faced an inordinate amount of verbal abuse.

I have been called all manner of names, I have been told I am stupid, I  hate women, I've been accused of being middle class and hating poor women, I've been told I must be young, I was even asked what my mum thinks of my speaking up online about this - which I found really amusing, as my first thought was 'who do you think taught me to be this way?'

I was also told I talk too much, which, to be honest, is probably a fair assessment.

But, as women, we have been silenced for so long, speaking up has become a very important part of our lives today, and why it's so important to me.

To be told I am speaking up too much, frankly, just reeks of misogyny, ableism and all other kinds of privilege, because people who speak up often do it because they feel they have to, not because it's just a hobby they enjoy (tho, I do enjoy it)

One of the worst parts of the constant transmisogynistic abuse is that it very often comes from other women. But, I digress, I don't want to focus on the verbal abuse here. 

I want to focus on another part of transmisogyny. The policing of women, our bodies and the removal of autonomy which comes with it.

Last week, I was for the fourth time in recent weeks, told by a gender-critical feminist that I could be a man. I was told, not for the first time, that they couldn't see my face so couldn't tell my sex or gender.

“Your photo is deliberately unclear, as are the photographs of many men who transition. So yes, it’s true. I have no idea of your sex from your profile”

I think most people reading this can see these comments are highly problematic, for many reasons. 

The parts which stand out to me are the insinuation and accusation that my avatar photo is somehow either 'obstructed' or "deliberately unclear".

As women online, we already have to police ourselves. We have to consciously think about who we interact with, how we interact with them and our avatar photo is a large part of that.  We have to carefully consider which photo we use because we can be judged in all manner of ways due to the avatar photo alone. 

We have to think about whether its too sexy, whether it's not sexy enough, shows too much boob, shows too much face, shows not enough face, and whether it shows any part of our face or body which someone else will negatively judge us for, and possibly verbally abuse or harass us for showing. 

In fact this is true of women online and offline. Our lives are constantly being policed by society, our appearance is constantly under scrutiny, by both men and women.

Our bodies have historically been controlled by other people, more often than not men  - because it's men who have positions of power in which to affect our bodily autonomy. 

So, when we see this kind of comment being said to women, by women (and both of those above comments were made by women) it doesn't suggest positive things about contemporary feminism.

The implication I have taken from both of these comments is that women must have explicitly clear phots online so people can determine her sex and gender. I can't say if this is what either of these women meant with these comments, but this is what I see in them.

And that's pretty scary is it not?

Then there is the fact that being told your own very real, very cis name is "ambiguous" (Jo is short for Joanne for anyone who cares). This is a really odd one in my view, considering there are many gender-neutral names which exist already and I never considered that Jo - which is socially understood feminine, Joe being the masculine - would be considered gender-neutral. Nor did I consider that anyone would care to be quite honest. 

So, what do we do now? do we police our own names? do we put an F or M watermark on all our avatar photos to ensure everyone knows what each other is? Do we display our birth certificates and a sample of our DNA on a link? 

Why do we have avatar photos in the first place? What do we use them for? 

I believe we use them to express a part of ourselves. There are thousands of different kinds of avatar pictures; faces, bodies, single features, single body parts, there are cartoons, art, animals, there are even pictures or gifs which are animated.

An avatar picture gives us a way to show people something about ourselves that we want to show.

So, to tell women, if you don't have an explicitly clear photo on your avatar we will judge you as a man, is, in effect, attempting to control women's bodily autonomy.

This is not feminism. In fact it's treating women differently to everyone else, and yet, it's treating them exactly the same as they have always been treated by traditional patriarchal misogyny; demanding we satisfy other peoples need to control our body and how we use it.

During the last few weeks of this discourse, I've taken notice of some of the really strange, and worrying comments made by gender critical feminists. Many of these comments explicitly say there are definitive ways of telling someone is a woman or a man by just looking, and apparently, by listening.

I personally found the 'female gait' comment particularly on point for me, because I describe myself as walking like 'an angry smurf'. I guess this begs the question, is this smurf male or female?

In all seriousness, tho, isn't this worrying?

Women are already under constant scrutiny and being criticised at every turn for our bodies our clothes, our hair, our size, and now we have to add our walk, our behaviour and our pee to the list?

And I don't think I have to get into detail about the last comment and how frighteningly familiar it is with comments about "skull size" and "skin lightness" That is not feminism, There is a name for that, but it's not feminism. 

There are other factors here such as mental health, conditions such as body dysmorphia (BDD) are prevalent. I have BDD myself so I know how the constant scrutiny and criticism from other people can affect you and your relationship with your body. There is, to my mind, no part of this scrutiny, obsessing over every part of someone else's body or existence which says 'feminism' to me. It all screams misogyny. 

In gender critical feminism women are being so narrowly defined by our external appearance and related physical attributes such as walk, voice and how we sound in the toilet, even to the point that our 'demeanour' is being used as a way to define us as women. 

Is there truly a set of behaviours which you can physically see and definitively say 'this tells me someone is a woman'? Do we spin our heads around like Linda Blair in the exorcist? Do our eyes stand out on stalks like in the cartoons when a male mouse sees a pretty lady mouse? Do we howl in a pack when we have our periods?

I truly can't interpret this one myself, all I can come up with is they are adhering rigidly to the traditional misogynistic demands on women to be agreeable, polite, quiet, smile, be friendly and generally pleasing to the men's eyes. Again, that isn't feminism. Is it?

If anyone has any ideas what it means to tell a woman by our demeanour, please let me know. Whatever it is, I have a feeling my demeanour screams angry smurf. 

I'm also struggling with the idea that you can tell someone is a woman or a man by the sound of their peeing. This one struck me as extremely ableist as well as generally being really strange.

Imagine being a woman, say for example with a disability which perhaps means you have to adapt how you go to the toilet. And imagine you are going into a public toilet with this comment rining in your years; knowing that your every sound is being listened to in case you 'pee like a man'. Surely that's nothing short of disability discrimination?

So, go to the toilet everyone, go and pee, and tell us, is your pee masculine or feminine sounding?

It seems this is a question we must ask ourselves now that gender critical feminism exists. 

One other problem with this is the comment below. And this one is not something I can make light of.

This person admits clearly they will 'challenge' women in public toilets if they don't think they are women. 

If *I* as a cis woman cannot be definitively identified as a woman by my photos, by my name, by my walk and 'demeanour', who is to say this person wouldn't feel justified in 'challenging' me? Who is to say they wouldn't feel justified 'challenging' you? How would they "challenge" us? would it be verbal?  physical? would there be a stopping point?

I already have an anxiety disorder, I kinda need to know if I'm going to be accosted in the public toilets and how. 

Again, this isn't all, there was a recent debate on twitter as to the sex and gender of four female Chinese athletes. As we know, this is not the first time this has happened to a non-white female athlete. The controversy around Caster Semenya is yet another example of this. 

As a white woman, I won't pretend to understand the effects this kind of overt racism has on women of colour and non-western women. But what I can and will say is, I personally as white woman, am horrified by it all and by the fact that this is guised as feminism.

This shows the physical demands on women extend not just the control of our body, but the control of what is inside our body, as well as the pushing of white western ideals of femininity onto women of colour.  I strongly feel these women's experiences highlight both the misogyny and the racism underlying gender-critical feminism. Let's bear in mind, this is gender critical feminism, this is what gender critical feminists seem to believe -going by the way they have spoken about women and female athletes - that hormones and biology, that appearance and other superficial things can define us as women. 

One of the issues around this was brought up during a thread I made in response to some tweets about women and fertility and how our body is "designed" to give birth. I was once again told I was a man, I was told I should "love and accept myself" this way. I was also accused of making up having endometriosis - which is a well-known condition women experience which can impact fertility.

As a woman discussing my own body, my own fertility or lack thereof - and how I don't believe this makes me less of a woman - seemed like a fair thing, something I was entitled to talk about without being accosted by self-professed feminists. I guess I was wrong.

This is not a new development, for misogyny.

The idea that women are making up their illnesses is as old as misogyny itself is. The implication here is that women are merely hysterical and don't understand their own body, cant be believed, are simply crazy and that men know better about these things. Women have historically been put into psychiatric hospitals for this very thing.

I don't think I'm going to be alone in saying that for anyone calling themselves feminist to say anything remotely similar to this kind of comment, for them to belive this, is quite worrying for feminism. 

The transphobia which has been taking hold of our society has been and will continue to be extremely harmful to women, to women of colour,  to disabled women, to the LGBTQ+ community, and even to men who don't live up to the stereotype of masculinity.

It seems, based on these comments, that gender critical feminism is fighting to keep the traditional definitions, roles and demands which the patriarchy set out for women. Isn't this everything feminism is supposed to fight against?

If all of this racism, misogyny and abuse is being done in the name of *my* "privacy, dignity and safety" - as has been said many times on twitter by gender critical feminists - Thanks but no thanks, I'd rather you not. 

So, the TL;DR motto of this story is

Demanding women exist a certain way to be able to take part in not only sports but in all facets of society - from going to public toilets in peace without the fear of being "challenged" to simply being online - is extremely harmful to everyone in society: women, men, non-binary, trans and cis alike. 

Feminism should not include women online verbally abusing or harassing other women, it should not include policing other women's bodies, it should not include racist ideologies, it should not include anti LGBTQ+ ideologies.

Feminism should not be about controlling other women's bodies, what they do with them, how they use them, what they put in them or how they express their identity whether 'feminine' or 'masculine' or neither.

Feminism should be supportive, it should be reaching out a hand to each other when one is needed, it should be a healthy debate, it should be listening, learning and it should importantly be full recognition of the need for intersectionality in our feminism. 

Lastly, at no point should we accept anything remotely similar to nazi style ideology as part of our feminist movement.

I will leave you with Shania Twain giving us an idea of what it is to be a woman - if you don't take it literally but read into the message -Shania is, in effect, saying 'I can be whatever I want to be, and that's my right as a woman'

THAT is feminism.