The criticals

Helen Joyce, Posie Parker and Kathleen Stock are all members of a gender critical movement which wants to emphasize that sex and gender are not ever separable concepts. Their idea is to emphatically deny that trans identities are valid in order to deny them rights in society by saying that the existence of trans women in particular threatens the status of biological women. Joyce and Parker are both on record in their use of language which borders on the genocidal. Such is their almost ecclesiastical belief against the right of trans people to even exist.

I watched a video recently where Kathleen Stock (who is a philosophy professor) debated economics professor Deirdre McKloskey in front of a mostly hostile audience to the latter. Mckloskey, who fully transitioned in 1995, held her own but was clumsy in beating back argumentation which was skewed towards biological reality rather than in the nuances inherent in how one detects personal gender identity so early in childhood development (which is the case in most transsexuals).

Observing that Stock is a biological woman and McKloskey is not, changes nothing in the lives of either person once the debate is over which underscores how lived experience is far more relevant than what chromosomes reveal about us. In other words, the framing of gender criticals is about who can birth and what genitals one is born with than about what makes one identify a certain way.

In addition, the tiny percentage of trans people (made even smaller by those who go through to full medical transition) makes the gender critical movement argumentation all the more needlessly alarmist. They are of course disingenously factoring in the gender variance spectrum which has greatly been made visible in the last decade and using that as additional leverage. The fact that some people feel comfortable identifying as non-binary or gender non-conforming horrifies them and allows them to paint everyone with the same brush.

Once again, nuance and intelligence are jettisoned in favor of dogmatic hyperbole which is a shame.