Instead, gender critical thought derives from the very marginal work of trans-exclusionary feminists such as Janice Raymond, whose manifesto The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male was published in 1979.
While gender critical feminists demand more and more intense legal regulation of women’s personhoods and identities, radical feminists have historically seen the liberation of women from “legal categories” themselves as a vital component of feminist liberation. Gender critical feminism is a broad church, but at its core is the belief that women are unified by what the Woman’s Place UK manifesto calls “sex-based needs,” so they are therefore in particular need of what they call “sex-based rights.” These might be characterized as the ever greater and more specific biological specification not merely of “women” as a legal entity but of various classes of women whose commonality might otherwise be understood not as biological, but cultural.įor example, a recent gender critical manifesto argues that the inclusion of trans women “within the legal categories of woman, of lesbian, and of mother threatens to remove all meaning from these categories.” This position is profoundly at odds with both mainstream liberal feminism and with the left-wing radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone whom the gender critical advocates sometimes cite as influences. That’s true, although perhaps multimillionaires like Rowling have less reason to be afraid than the children and trans people targeted for abuse, harassment, and violence amid rapidly intensifying moral panic around the world. Rowling, whose anti-trans activism galvanized the movement earlier this year, took another opportunity to claim that there is a “ climate of fear” around trans issues. The court’s decision was lauded not just by the British right-wing press like the Spectator but, more strikingly, by center-left media like the Observer, which applauded the decision, suggesting that it will “ensure that children will now receive the protection to which they are legally entitled.” (The law does not yet apply in Scotland, but campaigners are attempting the same change there.) A formerly highly marginal ideology, the so-called gender critical position, has captured British institutions.
It also reflects a disturbing escalation of anti-transgender policy across the United Kingdom. In effect, the courts intervened in the transition-related care of children experiencing gender dysphoria, putting those children and their families in the position of having to seek care abroad. The decision is an unprecedented juridical attack on the LGBT community in the U.K., in which the British state has asserted a right to enforce unwanted puberty-and to arrest transitions that are already in progress-on the slimmest of pretexts.Įarlier this month, the British High Court judged that children under the age of 16 have “enormous difficulties” in meeting the standard for informed consent-a long-established norm known as “Gillick competency”-that would allow them to take puberty blockers, drugs that delay hormone-induced development. That’s why the British Medical Association recently affirmed its position that transition-related care for minors should focus on delaying puberty. To some children experiencing gender dysphoria, puberty-a difficult experience at the best of times-can be especially painful because it enacts changes to the body that may be irreversible without painful and costly surgeries.
Earlier this month, the British High Court judged that children under the age of 16 have "enormous difficulties" in meeting the standard for informed consent-a long-established norm known as “Gillick competency”-that would allow them to take puberty blockers, drugs that delay hormone-induced development.
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