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Sun_bear · 2020-09-02T07:27:21+00:00

Stupid question, but how do I send a private message on here?

Sun_bear · 2020-08-16T08:08:46+00:00

Didn't Ted Bundy use a pair of crutches to lure his victims?

Sun_bear · 2020-08-11T18:07:16+00:00

Look, Emma Watson maybe one of the most privileged women, and she may spout some tone-deaf platitudes, but she's still suffered plenty of misogyny herself. I remember reading about how when she was still a child the paparazzi used to sexualise her, how a Peodophile was caught having photoshopped her face into pictures of child porn, how she couldn't leave the house on her 18th birthday because press were lying in her front garden because taking an up-skirt picture of her had suddenly become legal. I'm not saying we shouldn't critique her wishy-washy brand of liberal feminism (and her effective stabbing in the back of JK, the woman who made her) but let's not make fun of her or pretend she hasn't suffered from sexism herself. We're only hurting ourselves at that point.

Sun_bear · 2020-08-11T13:44:29+00:00

How very feminine!

Sun_bear · 2020-08-10T10:49:25+00:00

Writing that it is a letter aimed at banning transgender athletes from competing in sports is obfuscating the issue. The issue is men are attempting to compete in women's sports and men should not, for any reason, not even it they sincerely believe they actually are women, not even if they'll kill themselves if they don't get their way, be allowed to participate in women's sports. Men who do are cheats and nothing more.

Sun_bear · 2020-08-10T06:56:42+00:00

I didn't want to comment on the posts of this racist troll, but I have to say I really enjoyed reading your comment. Have you written anything else about maths being the song of the universe?

Sun_bear · 2020-08-07T21:32:41+00:00

He's wrong though, transgender ideology is misogynistic by design. Removing women's protections is the goal, not a side affect.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-31T20:40:35+00:00

Then you have read wrong. Cervixes cannot be artificially created, especially not in men. Also this article is erasing women because of TIFs who want to opt out of womenhood, not TIMs.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-31T07:07:44+00:00

They've erased women. We're not 'individuals with a cervix', we're women.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-30T08:07:12+00:00

I now know three men who've gone to the doctor, been told there is nothing wrong with them, and then made huge sacrifices to pay for an assortment of private tests to try and prove there is. One of them deferred his university studies to pay for a scan in an MRI machine. Two of them were obviously suffering from fairly severe anxiety and regular panic attacks. As far as I am aware none of the doctors ever suggested to any of them that perhaps that money spent on expensive medical tests could be better spent on therapy.

Also when my grandfather was in the final years of his life he went to the doctor once a week for all sorts of cooked up problems. My grandmother meanwhile ignored all of her symptoms before finally keeling over from stage 4 bowel cancer and appearing to die quite suddenly. None of us knew she was having any symptoms at all.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-29T16:47:39+00:00

It's really a crisis of capitalism as well. It's extremely difficult to afford housing in many countries, add to that potentially expensive education and medical bills... then if you had a child there would be the cost of childcare as well!? Boomers are always saying people shouldn't have children if they can't afford to and now only the very wealthy can afford children.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-29T08:21:21+00:00

That's got to be one of the most blatantly sexist things I've ever read. Female doctors are unprofessional if they have snaps taken of them on a beach holiday? Or are they not allowed to go to the beach at all? I would like some clarity from the study's authors here.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-29T08:09:05+00:00

They have written this about the Combahee River Collective:

The Combahee River Collective, a prominent group of Black lesbian feminists active in Boston from 1974 to 1980, strongly opposed political, moral, and medical discourses about “biological maleness” or “biological femaleness” due to these discourses’ simultaneously racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist implications and histories. In 1978, the collective wrote the famed Combahee River Collective Statement to clarify and define their political views and to offer a broad, inclusive vision for the feminist movement. In the statement, biological sex is clear target of analysis and conceptual un-doing. The Collective states, “We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual.” Combahee further stresses, “we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes [men] what they are. As Black women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.”

I would interpret this quote as being first about intersectionality - there are multiple interlocking oppressions. Women of colour are constrained by both sexism and racism. How does the author of this piece think sexism works if there is no biological sex hmmn?

Then there's the second bit which seems to me to be along the same likes as Simone de Beauvoir's "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." I am unsure if TRAs deliberately misinterpret these critiques of socialisation or if legitimately they just don't understand.

I also found this on the Wikipedia page for the collective:

" We are particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression."

Looks like the Combahee River collective actually did believe in biological sex, in fact it was their mission to dismantle the oppression they faced, partly because of the existence of biological sex...

Sun_bear · 2020-07-28T23:03:42+00:00

Yes, particularly cis-sexist. I suppose I can't imagine someone using cis-sexist in that context and not being on board with at least some TRA talking points.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-28T21:21:29+00:00

I'm so disappointed to realise Cordelia Fine has swallowed the TRA cool aid by the looks of things. Her book delusions of gender was such an important read for me.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-28T21:19:04+00:00

I've read that before, it's very well said.

I would like to add that I find this argument by the TRAs bizarre, in addition to racist. I don't think I've ever seen a black woman who looks 'masculine' to me. They don't look remotely like men. They're sort of like all other women in that respect.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-27T07:04:33+00:00

I haven't seen the film you're talking about (although you've made it seem very interesting) but I agree with you regarding male analysis.

I used to hang around on film message boards years ago and I remember when the first Pirates of the Caribbean film (the one that was actually good) came out reading a man say that it was a film for everyone because boys would watch it and want to be Jack Sparrow and girls would watch it and want to sleep with Jack Sparrow. I thought that was a really odd thing to say at the time, but the more I said I really liked that film the more I kept hearing from men that it was because I wanted to sleep with either Jack Sparrow/Orlando Bloom. It was completely lost on all men that that film is one of the few action films to have a really good, brave, autonomous female character in it and teenage girls liked to empathise with her. It's also a really good story, told really well, with an iconic score and high production values. There's a lot to like there. Yet all men/boys can process is 'women like a thing, women must want to sleep with a thing'.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-26T22:30:38+00:00

Facial hairs, strong jaws and 'masculine' features on women of colour? Erm... No? Do these people read this ridiculous shit that they write? I don't even know where to begin - do I point out women are more than their looks? That 'women of colour' is an incredibly diverse group? That there exist within all races women who look more dainty and women who look more masculine? That this statement is super racist and insulting? That white beauty standards are deeply regressive and anti-feminist? That I have never in my life mistaken a woman for a man, regardless of what race they are? That even if a woman who looked like a man did exist they would still be a fucking woman?

Sun_bear · 2020-07-26T22:16:33+00:00

Interesting how almost all the tweet replies I could see to that - probably 99% of them - were on our side.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-25T13:40:22+00:00

This review claims the book says gender is innate and male brains are fundamentally different to female brains, I was under the impression this had been comprehensively debunked, can any scientists on here weigh in?

Sun_bear · 2020-07-25T13:32:38+00:00

Men are more likely to be raped by other men than be falsely accused of rape by a woman. Bringing up 'false rape threats' is a derailment technique.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-25T13:30:40+00:00

There's a post on there claiming science has been 'weaponised' against trans people...

Sun_bear · 2020-07-25T07:56:18+00:00

I've been to plenty of men's houses where they don't have toilet paper or soap...

I did not return to those houses, needless to say.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-24T05:30:06+00:00

I'm a lot younger than her but I know so many women that I went to school with who were pushed away from maths/physics, despite a very strong academic record in these areas. It's so limiting, these notions that women must do x, while men must do (the inherently higher valued y).

That being said I don't like how the author of the piece keeps talking about the gender binary. I don't see how you can unify the idea of a genderless brain with the current TRA nonsense.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-23T14:43:15+00:00

As you've pointed out it's men who tell women to go back to the kitchen and men who tell other men to man up. Maybe men should just be nice?

Sun_bear · 2020-07-22T21:50:10+00:00

Fucking hell - that poor woman. I'd like to think she'll get some justice, but I bet her abusers paint themselves as the victims and get off scott-free!

Sun_bear · 2020-07-22T21:46:34+00:00

Excellent article. I particularly liked this bit:

But the sociological arguments are equally ridiculous. I’ve read claims that femininity and womanhood are “white supremacist” constructs imposed on Black women, as though White people introduced the world to sex-based gender norms that have appeared in societies across the globe for centuries. This line of reasoning is a dog whistle meant to illicit a Pavlovian response from sensitive, socially progressive Black women. It is meant to silence progressive Black women who are gender critical. It is also meant to “neg” woke Black women who probably know better than to seek validation from “cis” men, but struggle to recognize and repel the “kiss the ring” tone some transwomen carry towards Black women.

This strange idea that non-white cultures can't tell the difference between men and women and don't know where babies come from has always seemed like the most racist thing to me.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-21T15:51:59+00:00

This is a good idea, it would be nice to read non-trans related feminism.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-21T15:48:58+00:00

There was an article on the radio recently that said barbers have been allowed to open and can offer services shaving men's faces, but beauticians are not allowed to offer face-based services...

Women are of course less likely to die from this disease and more likely to comply with measures to mitigate the spread.

But you know, we're women, so we can't have nice things.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-21T07:36:17+00:00

Despite being 30 years old it seems more relevant than ever!

Sun_bear · 2020-07-20T15:06:08+00:00

Grrr there's a comment there saying that the poor lonely punters are being exploited by legalised prostitution.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-20T08:35:45+00:00

I was once part of a vegan group where the members started sharing videos of shocking abuse. I remember there was one with a TIM being beaten to death which the caption claimed was because of transphobia. I think the TIM-as-the-ultimate victim campaign has been very successful. Most people believe TIMs have an average life expectancy of 25, get shot at in the street for their mere existence and are likely to kill themselves from the stress at any moment. Most people can't see that TIMs are mostly privileged men demanding concessions from women.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-20T08:22:56+00:00

I see where you are coming from, but I see where she is coming from too.

The first job I had, I used to walk to work through the park. There was a middle aged women who also used to walk through the park at that time too with her spaniels, who for some reason had a problem with me walking through the park on my way to work, despite the fact that she was also a single woman walking through the same bit of the same park at the same time. Everytime I would see her she would yell 'you're going to get raped!' At me, and chase me and otherwise tell me off. It would be difficult to rape someone in a busy park, in the centre of the town, in broad daylight, but there you go. But she did start getting under my skin, making me feel uncomfortable and anxious for the crime of wanting to walk to work. I don't think that kind of fear is helpful to women.

I had a similar problem with my mother who, when I was a child, graphically described how men would rape and kill me if I was ever home alone. Years ans years later, I still feel fearful being home alone even though the risk of a home invasion is negligible.

I don't think teaching women to feel fear in those situations is good. That being said there are situations in which women should feel fear that we're not taught about - if a man violates a boundary for example he should be cancelled immediately, but I feel as women we're socialised to be afraid of being out in broad daylight alone, but to give men who are obvious predators chances.

I also think the original poster should have used the example she did, it is perfectly legitimate for a woman to not want a man in her home. OP if you see this, it is not only the fear of being raped, there's a fear that men will grope or steal or make inappropriate comments that will leave you feeling unsafe in what needs to be your safe space. Also a delivery driver will then know your address.

So in conclusion, I think women are taught to be afraid of existing as an independent entity in the world, which in my opinion is wrong. That being said women should be taught to be wary of male acquaintances and associates.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-20T07:59:01+00:00

Oooh the backlash is coming!

Sun_bear · 2020-07-18T12:44:07+00:00

When you say anti-masker, do you mean people who are skeptical about the efficiency of home-made cloth masks for preventing viruses from spreading? Because there's hardly an overwhelming body of evidence that proves such masks are beneficial and there's plenty of evidence that says the opposite, see here for example:

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577

Sun_bear · 2020-07-17T22:17:57+00:00

Thank you for posting this - you've given me the sort of examples I was looking for.

Reading between the lines here, I think you are saying GC holds men of colour to a higher standard than it holds white men? Metal, which is predominantly white, gets a pass, while rap, which is predominantly black gets called out?

Edit: what is Soros?

Sun_bear · 2020-07-17T18:37:21+00:00

How can anyone support legalising this horrible thing? I wish I could rescue all of the women and girls who have had this happen to them. I wish I had the money to provide somewhere safe for runaway girls to live.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-17T09:15:10+00:00

I would really like a radical feminist sub that wasn't all about the trans issues. Perhaps where talking about trans people was even banned! I suppose that wouldn't really be fun though...

I did enjoy good news for women. I'd like a place where we could share the achievements of incredible women.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-16T16:53:02+00:00

Could you give me an example?

Sun_bear · 2020-07-15T17:16:23+00:00

I wonder how this man would feel if his wife was asked the same question and replied his boss or other close associate.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-15T17:13:13+00:00

*I wish more women watched porn because the ones that do are so broken they'll agree to any disgusting or depraved act and they don't do that annoying thing where they whine about how they want it to be good for them too.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-15T08:27:59+00:00

I would like to see some example of these white supremacist and anti-semitic posts on r/gendercritical please. There was I thinking your average white supremacist wants to end women's suffrage, end women's participation in the work force and basically go back to the victorian era of women's rights. It's completely incompatible with feminism.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-14T22:31:52+00:00

The weird thing is what they call 'diversity' looks like a group of straight, white men with the same haircut in matching suits.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-14T17:20:13+00:00

What a complete load of bullshit. Women are oppressed because we are women. My understanding of oppression is that the oppressed group must have something the oppressor wants - in the case of women that's reproductive labour. If women were not the sex uniquely able to gestate, birth and nurse children, they'd be no oppression.

Now gender on the other hand, that's a social construct. There's nothing inherently masculine or feminine about skirts, maths or the colour pink and yet we gender away and strictly police each other to ensure we adhere to our categories.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-14T08:05:15+00:00

I don't know if this link is going to work, but hopefully, here's a picture of Caster during his school days: https://images.app.goo.gl/STnmJS6PQa6w8Yxb7

If the link doesn't work try googling his name and 'school'. You should be able to find a few pictures of him at school, in all of them he will be wearing a boys school uniform.

Caster Semenya is a man. He's a man who was raised as a man and identifies as a man. A previous GC poster had found evidence that he openly lives as a man in South Africa. He's making a mockery of women's sports.

I know that when I first heard the case the information given was highly misleading and it made you feel very sorry for Caster. The press made it out like questioning the sex of this athlete was coming from a place of racism, that Caster was being picked on because he was exceptionally talented but also very ugly (for a woman). Even now the press tries to obscure the fact he has XY chromosomes, not female reproductive system whatsoever and testes. But even if an athlete with DSD believed themselves to be female as a child, by the age of 16 they would have visited a doctor to find out why they hadn't started their periods or developed breasts. There is no 'good faith' in the case of DSD athletes, there is only cheating.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-13T21:37:16+00:00

That he is 'genderfluid' aged five is a big sign of abuse too!

Sun_bear · 2020-07-13T15:50:06+00:00

Miriam Margolyes says:

“I can’t make it out. It’s a matter of personal happiness for people and I think that’s what you should concentrate on. If you seriously want to become a woman you should be allowed to.

Someone alert the TRAs to this dangerous transphobia. Look at her implying TIMs 'become' women, implying they weren't always their true gender. 😂😂😂

Sun_bear · 2020-07-13T09:06:25+00:00

I despise the word inclusion. Society in general excludes large groups of people - many disabled people have a 'toilet leash' that stops them from going too far from their homes, many streets and facilities could not cope with a wheelchair user. That is being exclusionary. There's no reason a wheelchair user should not be able to visit my local pizza place and yet it has steps but no ramp/lift so they cannot.

When we talk about inclusivity it should mean making society function better for everyone, but it has become corrupted to essentially mean that no one is allowed to say no to the dominant group.

Let's say I want to start a knitting group, to talk about knitting, share knitting patterns, see other people's knitting and share my own knitting. Clearly in my knitting group I don't want to let in a bunch of fisherman who have never knitted in their life, want to talk about fishing and in fact find knitting quite boring. However these fisherman complain that the knitting group is excluding them and the world sides with them. People as us knitters if we can be sure that we wouldn't be in to fishing when we've never tried it and surely we can't like knitting that much anyway? The fisherman argue that it is triggering to them to hear us talk about knitting needles at the knitting group and instead declare their fishing rods are knitting needles now. It becomes exclusionary to suggest that you need two needles to knit as you only need one to do that kind of knitting where you get fish out of the water. The fishing line is now called wool to include the fisherman, who will kill themselves if not fully centred in the knitting group, but wool is now called sheep-leavings as that's really a much more accurate description of what it is. Any knitter who thinks the term sheep-leavings is actually quite unpleasant is a hateful bigot deserving of death. This would be absurd! And yet that's the exact situation we have with trans people and lesbians.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-13T08:31:15+00:00

No wonder reddit had to shut down r/thisneverhappens. Harder to gaslight an entire sex when there's a nice, concrete collection of evidence.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-13T08:29:14+00:00

I agree with you regarding kink shaming. I have read quite a few rape cases where the victim was covered with terrible injuries and they've been dismissed because they could be part of 'consentual rough sex' which just horrifies me. You cannot consent to abuse! You cannot consent to being murdered! If a woman is covered in injuries but a rape cannot be proven then the man should at least be punished for actual bodily harm. It is not normal to want to be beaten and hurt during sex, it's suggestive of being broken. It is not normal to want to hurt someone during sex either - it seems evidence of a sadistic and cruel person to me.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-13T08:22:50+00:00

I think your interpretation of what I said is correct!

To go into more depth; essentially if you look at a graph of productivity vs earnings, you will see that for around 30 years after the second world war as productivity went up, earnings did too. However around 1980 they became decoupled and now being are becoming more and more productive but their earnings have stagnated. Here's a graph that demonstrates that:

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

What we have is a cohort of people - millenials aren't really that young anymore - who have made HUGE investments into themselves, both in terms of time and money. The average millennial I know has spent years taking professional courses, degrees, developing soft skills and other relevant personal attributes. There's a lot of unpaid overtime that everyone is expected to do and people are expected to keep up with developments in their field on their own time. The benefit of all that extra productivity goes not to the worker though, but to the upper management.

Then not only are millennials working more for less, housing, education and transport are now vastly more expensive in real terms than ever before. (I'm writing this from a UK perspective, hence not including healthcare) I know so many people who are in their mid to late 30s still living in cheap house shares when someone with an equivalent job in their 60s owns a three bedroom semi that they bought in their mid 20s.

This is a very brief summary of why I think capitalism is not a very good system! But I think some young (35 and under) men have a tendency to misdiagnose the problem as being the fault (somehow) of women. I think the argument goes that because women entered the work force there's more competition hence lower pay, and it is very difficult to buy or even rent a house without two salaries, which is a very silly argument of course.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-12T11:09:14+00:00

I do think the world is becoming more sexist, not less, and I've seen some surveys that suggest more sexist attitudes amoung younger people than older ones.

I blame porn. It used to be porn was hard to come by and seen as a bit creepy, but now the internet is awash with increasingly violent and disturbing content. Men who jack off to images of female abuse are conditioning themselves to find pleasure in violence against women.

I also blame capitalism which is failing young people en mass. Men are then wrongly attributing the blame for that to women.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-12T07:34:10+00:00

What a load of sexist/racist/homophobic bullshit that is.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-11T13:33:42+00:00

What about Transwomen are dysphoric males?

Sun_bear · 2020-07-11T11:25:35+00:00

Janice Turner is such a good writer, I'm so glad she is on our side.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-11T11:21:23+00:00

That you for your poems! If you want to share poetry that you love, go ahead and do it! Don't let anyone tell you your interests are boring or whatever - the constant pressure of women to be self-depreciating is a tool of the patriarchy!

Sun_bear · 2020-07-11T11:18:31+00:00

Didn't he have a boyfriend who was a peodophile too?

Grooming, abusing and raping children is not hate speech worthy of being cancelled, but stating facts like men aren't women though is. This is the world we live in now...

Sun_bear · 2020-07-11T08:39:14+00:00

Poor Miranda. He writes so eloquently on the problems with transgender ideology, he really didn't deserve this ordeal.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-11T00:07:08+00:00

Radical feminists believe bodies are sexed but brains are not, while trans rights activists and their liberal feminist handmaidens believe brains are sexed but bodies are not.

Women do not have penises. If someone has a penis, they're not a woman.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-10T23:57:08+00:00

It looks like the bits of his body were photographed separately and then reassembled by a novice photoshopper... it's such a weird photograph.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-10T08:17:04+00:00

That's a terrifying assault. She's one brave woman to handle it in the way she has.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-09T22:29:38+00:00

What is this bigots 'deny our existence' from the TRA brigade? I don't think anyone is claiming there isn't currently a small group of men with a disproportional political influence who what to pretend to be women and gain all of women's sex based rights for themselves. If they didn't exist they'd be no reason to fight them, would there?

The logical extension of TRA thought however is that there is not a type of human that is separate and distinct from men. In fact it is them who are arguing, effectively, that women do not exist. They also are making a concerted effort to erase all language that refers to women.

I mean I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but come on! How does everyone not see this!?

Sun_bear · 2020-07-09T22:15:44+00:00

Men aren't women tho.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-07T22:07:36+00:00

I think the problem is most people simply don't believe sexism exists, they believe instead that women are inherently inferior and deserving of hatred.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-07T17:18:57+00:00

How do any women support this bullshit? I have PCOS because I have ovaries. It's a shitty condition that the medical establishment don't take seriously. I had a man on reddit tell me it was self inflicted, that I'd 'eaten myself into a whole' despite having been underweight for most of my life, overweight women with PCOS are overweight because of the PCOS, not the other way around! People are so nasty to women with this disorder and apparently we can't even have a sub to discuss it. If you have ovaries, you are a woman, no men have ovaries, ffs!

Sun_bear · 2020-07-07T09:14:16+00:00

I just checked out r/pcos and there was a thread where they talk about how they're going to be inclusive now. There seemed to be unanimous support - does the average woman with PCOS support female erasure or were they being brigaded by TRA trolls who want it to seem like women are ok with this?

I have PCOS, it's shit. I've got no idea why TIFs would want to take hormones to artificially create this problem in themselves. It seems like an example of self-harm to me. I also wonder why they can't create their own support forum and leave r/PCOS for the women who need it.

Edit: wrote exclusive when I meant inclusive

Sun_bear · 2020-07-05T15:46:13+00:00

I got banned for saying gender is a social construct used to oppress women.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-05T09:46:33+00:00

Here's a fantastic post from r/GC that explains bio-essentialism:

RESOURCES I'm seeing a lot of posts all over Reddit attempting to explain what gender critical feminists actually believe, and a lot of them are completely wrong. This is a post addressed to newcomers who are visiting this sub to figure out what gender critical feminism is all about.The first thing to get out of the way is this: no, we don't believe that you MUST have periods to be a woman. I've seen so many posts saying "JK Rowling is menopausal and doesn't have periods, so by her definition she wouldn't be a woman!" or "not every woman has a period, some women don't have uteruses!" She isn't saying that at all. Having a period is not a necessary condition for being a woman, but it is a sufficient condition. It's sufficient in the sense that if you experience menstruation then that automatically puts you in the woman category (or at the very least it puts you in the female category). But it's not it's not necessary that you must be capable of menstruation in order to be put into the woman category. In any case, what Rowling was upset about was female erasure. It is, quite frankly, deeply disturbing and insulting for many women to be called 'menstruators' or 'period havers'. This , we feel, reduces us to a biological function. The 'bloody good period' charity once referred to women as 'bleeders', and not only does this not make any sense (men can bleed too!) it is also degrading. 'Bleeders' sounds like a dehumanising slur. Notice there's a pattern here - when have you ever heard males been referred to as 'ejaculators' or 'sperm producers'? I'm going to try to debunk two other claims I've seen floating around that are just bollocks. The first is that gender critical feminists conflate sex with gender. The second is that we are biological essentialists. Both of these claims are false, and both particularly sting because a lot of gender critical feminists of the first and second wave of feminism actually railed against these concepts in the first place. So, back to basics. Sex is biological. Sex refers to the two reproductive roles - male and female. Males produce small mobile gametes, sperm. Females produce the large immobile gametes, eggs. Sex is not a social construct. It is found all across nature. Plants have sexes. Animals have sexes. Gender is a social construct, and is not the same thing as sex. This was recognised by Mary Wollstonecraft in the 18th century, but was really emphasised by the second wave. Gender is social norms of femininity and masculinity. Gender are roles, behaviours, stereotypes, and expectations placed on human beings according to their sex. Male humans are supposed to live up to masculine gender expectations. Female humans are supposed to live up to the feminine gender expectations. Boys are supposed to like violent sports, getting angry, not crying, not eating salad, the colour blue, being dominant and in control, being logical. Women are supposed to like kittens, being sensitive and empathetic, watching their weight, pink, babies, being a homemaker. Women are human females who have the feminine gender imposed on them. And men are human males who have the masculine gender imposed on them. And gender also operates as a hierarchy. Femininity is inferior to masculinity. Feminists pointed out there was nothing natural about gender. Women do not naturally want to be nothing more than baby makers, who cry and like pink glitter, who only care about adornment and home making. This is all a social construct. Gender operates as a constrictive trap, forcing women into one 'natural' lifestyle.A big project of the second wave was to point out the artificiality of gender roles, and to break women out of them. There is no one way to look like a woman. Women can wear makeup, have short hair, wear whatever they like. There should be no such thing as masculine and feminine interests - why shouldn't a man enjoy knitting? Why does that have to mean he's somehow less of a man, or a sissy? And why shouldn't a woman enjoy car racing? Why are we so obsessed with gendering everything, from clothing, to food, to hobbies, to pets, to cars? Second wave feminists established that just because someone is female doesn't mean they are, or should be, girly. Women do not naturally behave, or think, in a particular way. Gender critical feminists have always held fast to this idea that there is no necessary connection between sex and gender roles. If I tell you I have blue eyes, can you infer anything at all about what my tastes are from that information alone? What is my career? My hobbies? My interests? My behaviour? My aspirations? My overall appearance? No -of course not. That is because we don't imbue having blue eyes with any significance. Blue eyes has no connection to your personality or your cognitive capacities. Well, that's what gender critical feminists think about sex. If I tell you a person is female, that doesn't necessarily tell you anything about her hobbies or interests. At most it tells you she's a human who is very likely to experience the incidents of being female - she is likely to be capable of menstruating. She is likely to be capable of getting pregnant. Beyond those basic facts of biology, though, females are people and can have a wide range of behaviours and appearances. There is no 'right' way to be a woman. Literally the only precondition is that you be female. That's it. Female biology is different from male bioloogy, and due to us living in a sexist society is often pathologised and overlooked. For example, menstruation has been coded as 'unclean' and impure - gender stereotypes are interposed on top of natural biological functions. So what Rowling was trying to emphasise was that for women our sex is deeply important to us. It's a core part of our experience going through the world. We are stigmatised for having periods, stigmatised for going on contraception, stigmatised for abortions, stigmatised for giving birth (too many or too few babies). And so there are important political concerns that only apply to those with female bodies. Also, female bodies are often a locus of state control. The state will try to control women by controlling their bodies (see abortion legislation, forced sterilisation,) What that means is even if you accept that trans women are 'women' (whatever women means) there must still be room for a distinctive female rights movement. Some dude on the Reddit front page was given hundreds of awards for blithely saying "no one is saying sex isn't real - we are just saying that sex isn't important." With no respect, dude, it's just not your place to say that. Women are pointing out that sex IS important to them - women are dying because they are taking drugs that have only been tested on male bodies. Men can't handwave that away with claims that 'sex isn't important'. WE are telling YOU that it is. It's important. It's not bigoted for women to campaign for their sex based rights. Biological essentialism is related to all this. Biological essentialism is the view that sex roles are natural. BECAUSE I am female it is therefore natural for me to like babies, be more emotional, and to desire to go shopping. But as I already covered, this view was contested by second wave feminists. On average, women may enjoy makeup more than men. They may be more caring and nurturing, They. may be less into train and plane spotting. But none of this is natural. Women aren't born this way. There is no natural connection between women being female and women liking makeup. There's no biologically essential way for women to be. You may notice that people on Reddit just don't seem to really get what biological essentialism means. Biological essentialism has nothing to do with saying 'women have female bodies.' It's not 'essentialist' to say that women are female. That's just part of the definition of woman. Biological essentialism is the claim that because someone is a woman they have to behave or think in a particular way. In actual fact, many commenters will support trans theory using biological essentialism. One male commenter bravely attempted to define women - " a woman is someone who conforms to our societies expectations of femininity - they dress in a feminine way, think in a feminine way, have feminine interests and so on." This is pure essentialism. Gender critical feminists completely deny that there is any such thing as 'feminine' thoughts. What on earth is a 'feminine' way of thinking? If you say that women are more ditzy, creative, and less logical - isn't that just super sexist? And what's a 'feminine' interest? Are we really back to the bad old days of saying you are less of a woman if you enjoy dirt bike racing? Are you less of a man if you film makeup tutorials? On this definition I would simply fail to be a woman. I wear pants. I don't have typical feminine interests. I work in a male dominated career. I find this definition really sexist - it says that women have to think and act, and look a certain way in order to be women. they have to conform to femininity. But the definition that a woman is an adult human female is not biologically essentialist because all it tells you is that women have female bodies. That's it. Women can look and act in any way they like. To recap and clarify - gender critical feminists are against biological essentialism. And they do not think that sex and gender are the same thing!

Sun_bear · 2020-07-05T09:35:39+00:00

A 'cis' person is someone who identifies as the 'gender' they were born as. I don't believe in gender and I don't identify as anything, so therefore it's not an appropriate description for me. I doubt anyone outside of the Trans-cult really 'identifies' as a gender. The correct term would just be woman, no prefix!

Sun_bear · 2020-07-04T23:19:54+00:00

Once the woke crowd tries my recipe for cat-young pie, there's no going back. Serve with weaponised-tear gravy!

Sun_bear · 2020-07-04T21:15:06+00:00

With us banned from Reddit they can now say whatever they like about us and people can't check!

We're far-right, bio-essentialists who wish violence and death upon trans people, don't you know!

Sun_bear · 2020-07-04T17:38:26+00:00

Some women like PIV sex.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-04T13:53:46+00:00

I just ended down a twitter rabbit hole, looking at the art of some very talented children and reading JK Rowling's lovely comments. So heart warming :)

Sun_bear · 2020-07-02T17:13:09+00:00

It's security theatre. Wearing a medical mask properly if you are infected might reduce the number of people you pass the virus on to, but to force perfectly healthy people to wear highly ineffective cloth masks is a joke.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-02T17:01:21+00:00

You know they could just use the word and - mothers and birthing parents who despite being mothers would prefer to refer to themselves using dehumanising terms like birthing parent and menstruator. Problem solved, women not erased.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-02T12:10:13+00:00

If you cannot debate the other side, if you have to silence them, threaten them and suppress their arguments. If you have to misrepresent their position, spread lies about them, intimidate them with physical violence. If you have to boil your own position down to simple slogans that you must chant endlessly, if questioning any facet of your position no matter how tiny is a 'cancelable' offence, if you have to pretend that any disagreement with your position is literal violence that is killing people...

Then maybe, just maybe, it's because you're not in the right.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-02T10:55:39+00:00

Our society can't allow people to be wrong. It's weird, so many people claim to worship at the teat of science and yet science teaches us that knowledge is based on evidence that is constantly evolving - a theory being disproven is a good thing, because now we understand more. But people become emotionally invested in their theories, their theories become part of their identity. They're not merely a person who thinks right or left wing policies are the best, they ARE a right-winger or a left-winger. At that point an attack on their opinions is an attack on their identity, so they simply cannot countenance that they might be wrong.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-02T10:01:35+00:00

This bit is brilliant:

Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a Pink News leading article as Transphobes, we won’t debate our existence. The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: “We will not allow those who hatefully pretend to believe that there are material differences between men and women, and that men’s access to women’s spaces should not be automatic and backed by the full force of the law, to force us to live in a state where our ideological beliefs are not automatically accepted, without deviation.”

Sun_bear · 2020-07-02T09:12:53+00:00

Really well said. This push for the so called trans rights is really just a backlash against the gay rights movement and feminism. Once you understand that it all makes a lot more sense.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-02T09:00:06+00:00

No someone cannot be a women if they are not biologically female. Sex is binary. Gender is a made up thing opposed upon us which we would like to abolish.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-01T20:58:45+00:00

I followed r/gendercritical for years and I never saw any screenshots like that. I saw a few posts who had anxiety over having male children which I know horrifies those fragile male lurkers, but I have never seen calls to abort male foetuses, or kill male children, or calls to violence of any sort really.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-01T18:16:52+00:00

It's important to remember that threatening to rape and beat women is not hate speech, but calling a man a man is.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-01T09:08:08+00:00

One of those 'crimes' apparently committed by white women occurred almost 100 years ago... Can she seriously not find a more recent example? Also surely most of the people who participated in the actual killing that happened were men, but yeah...of course it was exclusively the fault of the women. I'm so tired of people using racism to justify misogyny.

Sun_bear · 2020-07-01T08:59:12+00:00

Women don't "produce" eggs, they're born with all the ovum they'll ever have.

Sun_bear · 2020-06-30T22:44:14+00:00

So?

Women: the humans who have ovum

Men: the humans who have sperm

There's nothing about being able to have children or wanting to have children in that definition.

Sun_bear · 2020-06-30T21:27:32+00:00

Lesbophobia is a branch of misogyny, hence it is included within feminism. Misogyny ultimately boils down to men wanting control and dominion over the female reproductive capacity, and the hatred of lesbians stems from the same impulse. That's why lesbophobia is so often expressed by vile acts such as 'corrective rape'. Some women just aren't attracted to men, I don't know why you wouldn't believe this.

Sun_bear · 2020-06-30T21:02:44+00:00

Female: of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.

Sun_bear · 2020-06-30T20:50:37+00:00

Woman = adult human female

Sun_bear