Canadian Politics Today

I'm not proposing that Tessa, themself, is hurting anybody. Just that they've bought into an idea that feminists fought against for many decades. There are lots of ideas that aren't hurting anyone, but that doesn't mean that they're actually sensible ideas.

And, while Tessa might consider themself to be not a woman, that's how the world will perceive them.  Wherever they goes, they will be perceived as a white woman-- a rather attractive one-- with all the privileges and headaches that come with that. When Tessa goes to the pub for a pint, the lads won't ask their pronouns before they decide they want to chat them up. If they goes for a job interview, their prospective employer will view them as a white woman (which might be fortunate or unfortunate depending what the job is) even if Tessa tells them she's non-binary.  So overall I view this stuff as pointless and inane.

People like Tessa aren't the ones impacted by this pronouns stuff, even though they might think they is.  It's not a female person that looks and dresses like Tessa that is going to be impacted.  It's a female person that looks and dresses like Rachel Maddow who is going to be pestered for her pronouns, because unlike Tessa, Rachel Maddow is "doing femininity wrong" and pestering her for her pronouns is how people will remind her of it. Little girls who like unicorns won't be asked their pronouns; little girls that like trucks will... and the message that's going to be drummed into their heads is: "you're being a girl wrong. There is something wrong with what you are doing."  Gender-people would have you believe that this stuff is liberating for children, but it will be the opposite. It will terrify them into gender conformity lest they stand out or be thought different or defective.

They don't just acknowledge the existence of gender stereotypes, they've built their whole ideology around gender stereotypes.  If you propose that sex is irrelevant and everything needs to be redefined around gender, then you can't very well do away with gender. 

Next time you see a news story or a documentary clip of a mother who has decided her male child is trans, look at the kid and I bet you'll find that the most ridiculously over-the-top stereotypes of girly girlhood have been visited upon the child.

Non-binary people define themselves in contrast to a gender binary that doesn't even exist in western societies. Nobody is binary, so everybody is non-binary.  And if everybody is non-binary, then nobody is.

I will grant you the white t-shirt, but the rest, I disagree.  The green coat might be something a man would wear except that it's made of green fun-fur and has shiny brass buttons on the front.  I can't recall the last time I saw a man wearing a coat made of fun-fur, and I can't remember the last time I saw a man wearing a coat with big shiny buttons on the front.  I can't remember the last time I saw a man wearing pleather pants with a sash at the waist. Khal Drogo, maybe? I dunno.  I see "Karen" types wearing similar pants whenever I go out. The long blue coat is such a classic women's style that you can see women wearing it in old black and white Christmas movies that air this week. I've never seen a man in a similar coat. Long coats for men do exist, but that isn't one of them.

I think you misunderstand me.  I'm not saying that Tessa should change their wardrobe.  I'm also not suggesting that there aren't genuinely gender-neutral clothing items.

I'm just pointing out the absurdity of taking a bunch of women's clothing and dubbing it "non-binary!" because it isn't overtly girly.

I've never been to Ireland, I'm not sure what day to day life is like there. I'm skeptical of the notion that there are gender police going around performing pronoun checks and scolding women for wearing clothes that aren't feminine enough. "You there! Miss! Why are you wearing those pants?" "It's alright, constable, I'm non-binary!" "My apologies, xir! Carry on with your pants-wearing activities." I doubt that this happens in Ireland. There are places where gender conformity is strictly enforced.  Parts of the Muslim world, for example.  I don't believe Ireland is one of those places.  I have a hunch that Tessa is more at risk of being yelled at for stealing a black-people hairstyle than they is for wearing Tu Clothing^tm from Sainsbury's^tm.

Congratulations on your daughter!

The TERFs will be the ones telling your daughter that she can like unicorns or trucks or both, and the gender-people will be the ones telling your daughter that if she likes trucks more than unicorns it might be because the magic gender machine put her blue brain in a pink body by mistake.

Gender people: "oh, bioessentialism is so degrading to women because it reduces women to just a collection of body parts and bodily functions."

Also gender people: "oh, we need to refer to female people by their body parts and bodily functions because inclusivity."

No, gender critical people do not claim that a woman is just a collection of anatomical parts.
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You've already talked about the trucks/unicorns thing in regard to your daughter. As she grows, she's going to have a lot more exclusively female experiences, some as a result of biology, and others as a result of our society perceiving her and treating her as a female.  I don't think it's demeaning to propose that the biological reality of being female will shape your daughter's experience in our world in a way that some adult male deciding to do performative femininity will never comprehend.

What idea is that, exactly?

That's the world in which we live now and it's not the "gender people" who are perpetuating that ****.

I've got a lot of mixed feelings about the gender question, but the alarmist, apocalyptic tone from the radfems on so much of this reminds me so much of the Christian right's arguments against homosexuality that it's hard for me to not see the parallels between two forces bent on maintaining a rigid social order around sex and gender roles.

So what i think you're saying here is that since gender activists have dispensed with biology as a way to distinguish between men and women, they have resorted to socially constructed gender stereotypes instead and that's bad too. While I think that's an extremely broad brush you're using, doesn't that simply show how pervasive gender stereotypes are? Now in my admittedly limited dabbling on this, I've never ever ever seen a "gender person" (ugh) say there's a specific way to dress and behave in order to be a woman. for better or worse, they seem to value self-expression above all else, which seems closer to third wave feminism's insistence that all women's choices are valid.

So let me get this straight: a transwoman dressing in an over the top feminine way is reinforcing gender stereotypes, while an NB person dressing in a not over the top feminine way is to be ridiculed, a transman dressing like a dude is...I'm not sure because those people don't seem to exist in TERFland. So can you just let me know how it is people are supposed to dress?

wut

So how do you define "gender neutral" clothing?

Is there a point to this or are you just trying to hit a quota of "lol wokes" for the day?

I mean you couldn't possibly be saying there's no pressure on women to look, dress and act a certain way.

Yes external forces play a role in shaping one's identity. But that's not the entire story. To hear the gendercrits tell it, being a women is entirely about having female reproductive parts and a lived experience that is one of victimhood and degradation. They present a version of womanhood tin which the individual is completely at the mercy of forces beyond their control, whether biology or society. That sounds extremely grim to me.

What gender identity is a plain white T shirt?

The idea that if you like basketball and don't like prom dresses or think about boys all the time, you aren't really a girl.

Gender-critical people are 100% supportive of gender non-conformity,[b/] and simply reject the notion that your gender expression constitutes an "identity" in and of itself.  [/b]

Before this gender identity stuff came along, feminists fought for decades for women to live outside of gender conformity. Now that gender identity ideology has taken over feminism, gender non-conforming people are being fed the notion that they need to change their gender identity because they don't fit in society's boxes.

Of course, in theory they're all for women's freedom to express themselves as they wish and identify as they wish. In practice, if your gender identity is expressed through gender performativity... then the conclusion that gender non-conforming women are doing it wrong is kind of unavoidable, isn't it? 

We went from "trucks are for boys and unicorns are for girls" to "it's okay for girls to like trucks too!" to "if you like trucks more than unicorns you might not be a girl", and I think we should go back to the second one.

Again, I'm not ridiculing the non-binary model for dressing the way they wants to.  I'm ridiculing the notion that their non-binary style is anything unique or different from stuff that ordinary cisgender women wear every day.  I mean, ****, dude, I wear a men's button up shirt most days, a men's necktie some days, men's watches and men's cologne all the time.  I'm the most gender non-conforming person I know. I'd never ridicule somebody for wearing gender non-conforming clothing because I do that every day. And maybe that's why I find it so **** hilarious that Tessa here acts like she has broken the code.

What would an actual gender binary woman be like in our culture? June Cleaver?  If gender expression is a spectrum, then who is a 0% or 100% on the spectrum?

Of course there is. And do you think deciding that they is non-binary changes anything for Tessa?  Has attempting to identify your way out of prejudice ever worked? I think that if identifying your way out of prejudice worked, black people would have discovered that centuries ago.

It isn't.  Tessa describes her identity by comparing herself to "other girls" (as has every non-binary female person I have ever read describing themselves).  Implicit in this is the notion that there's a theoretical ideal of girlhood and that those who differ are doing it wrong.

Old fashioned people would tell girls what is or isn't appropriate for girls, newfangled people would tell girls that if they're different from some stereotypical girl then they might not really be girls, and to me this doesn't seem like progress.  To me it seems like we've stopped beating gender non-conforming girls with one stick, and started beating them with a different stick.

Well that's an excellent question.  What actually is an identity, then? People tend to think of things like your nationality or your religion or your sexual orientation or your sex. "I'm a Canadian Muslim man!" for example. Things that have some degree of significance, and some degree of permanence and some degree of observability.

Is "butch lesbian" an identity, or is butch just a description? Am I butch because I like men's shirts and accessories? Am I femme because I have long and luxurious hair? Am I butch on days that I don't wear makeup and femme on days that I do? Aren't butch and femme both kind of subjective, dated, and pointless descriptions anyway?  I don't know. Lesbian is an identity, I think. Or it used to be. It used to mean something, but maybe it's just slowly becoming just a genre of ****. I don't know.

Remember those Gamergate goons from a few years back? To those guys, Gamer (with a capital G) was their identity. Is it really an identity, or just a hobby, or maybe a lifestyle?  Are lifestyles identities?  If someone says "I'm retired" or "I'm an office worker" or "I'm a homemaker" are those identities?   What about "I'm a parent!" as an identity?  I am guessing that being a parent is probably a more significant factor in your life than almost anything anybody would describe as their identity. Probably more than what brand of church you go to or what country your grandparents came from.

What about the Goth kids? Remember them? Was Goth an identity, or just a phase?

There are all kinds of other alleged identities out there, most of which aren't taken seriously. People who say they identify based on their kinship with various kinds of critters. Or some sexual fetish.  The tired joke about "I identify as an attack helicopter" was really not that far off from some of the things people have claimed to identify as.  I don't know if anybody has claimed their favorite sports team as an identity, but I wouldn't be surprised. "I'm RaidersGendered so I should be allowed to wear my helmet and war-paint to work."  Last month I read somebody on Twitter declaring a new gender identity called AmongUsGendered, based on their enthusiasm for the computer game Among Us.  They even designed some Pride flags. 

Of course nobody takes that stuff seriously, except (maybe) the people who claim to identify as these things. (I have an icky feeling that many of the people who identify as "otherkin" are completely serious.)  Sooooo... what's different about nonbinary?  What's the element that makes people treat nonbinary as a legitimate thing, the element that "otherkin" or "AmongUsGender" are lacking? I'd like to pinpoint what the difference is.