The gender critical movement grew out of feminist discourse surrounding transgendered people, and tends to be fairly centrist or center-left on other issues.
I would say it ranges across the political spectrum, but in the UK most who describe themselves this way range from centre to far left, yes. However, the term is used more broadly than its origins – not everyone who describes themselves this way would say themselves as allied to a specific branch of feminism.
The anti-gender movement is older, grew out of Catholic opposition to abortion, gay marriage (and homosexuality more generally) and transgenderism, and is more conservative.
I’m aware that a Pope apparently criticised ‘gender ideology’, and I have no idea what exactly is meant by this (I know what conservative traditionalists generally believe, I just don't know why they use the term 'gender ideology' to describe it). However, the term ‘gender ideology’ is now also used by gender critical people who are not conservative or traditionalists. Moreover, the term ‘anti-gender’ is too broad because many who would describe themselves as gender critical are also adopting such terms due to constant misrepresentation of what ‘gender critical’ means.
I can't say that I know of anyone who fits that description. I've never met a living soul who thinks laws that protect people from sex-discrimination should be abolished and replaced with laws that protect people from discrimination on the basis of gender identity. If such people exist, I expect they are a tiny minority, even among the most obnoxious activists. In any case, people in both these movements take no care whatsoever to ensure that their interlocutors actually hold this position before voicing this criticism, so it's obviously not about attacking the ideology.
That is too narrow a definition of what I said, but as it happens, I believe Stonewall in the UK did attempt to do this, although they later denied it. It is also commonplace in the UK to see people not include sex in a list of protected characteristics, but instead include gender or gender identity (which are not protected characteristics), and no, one cannot assume now that this is intended as a synonym for sex.
But I was referring more generally to the movement to treat sex as completely irrelevant and replaced entirely by self-declared identity (and the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ are now being cast as identities). And if this happens in statistical data collection, sex discrimination will be impossible to detect.
Can you give an account of the epistomology that underpins gender identity ideology? Or tell me what gender identity ideology is, for that matter? Or how it differs from gender ideology?
Personally, I tend to use the term gender identity ideology precisely because I understood there is another meaning to ‘gender ideology’ after hearing an activist pretending that gender-critical people are conservative traditionalists because they heard somebody on the right using the term.
What it is: imagine two people (say males) who do not have clinical dysphoria but are both gender non-conforming, that is, they do not identify with or relate to the stereotypes and expectations typically associated with their sex, and do not believe people should be pressured to conform to sex stereotypes that don’t suit them. These hypothetical people are clones of each other, except for the following statements:
Male person 1 says ‘I reject the assumption that men must have masculine traits / expression and should prefer typically male social roles / occupations’.
Male person 2 says ‘I reject the gender assigned to me on the basis of my sex therefore I am a woman (or some other gender).
The difference between the two is that the second believes in gender identity ideology and the first doesn’t. As to the epistemology, I will have to go into that in another post.
Postmodernism is a broad umbrella of critiques of the modernist project with very little in common, so it's more or less impossible to say that it's incompatible with anything. But even those who regard science as a grand narrative beholden to naive realism are capable of doing science. They just need to provisionally accept the grand narrative.
No, there is more to it than this, but I won’t elaborate here. I will make a separate post when I have time.
In any case, this is a genetic fallacy, and gender, as a concept distinct from grammatical gender, did not originate in postmodernism but in behavioral psychology/sexology (although certainly it has been contributed to by post-modernists over the years).
I did not just say it originated in postmodernism, I said it has its roots in it (roots support something right now). You are the one using genetic fallacy in going on about the origins of gender critical ideas and terms used by gender critical people, which have little or nothing to do with the way there are used now.
And the concept of gender as used now in gender identity activism has nothing to do with behavioural psychology – it comes from and is underpinned (right now) by queer theory, which originated in humanities and has infiltrated parts of psychology.
"Trans-identified male" is not a more accurate term than "transwoman", and exists only to antagonize those who would like to be thought of as women.
If somebody says ‘trans-identified males should not be allowed to play in female sports’, they are emphasizing that the reason for this is that they are male and that identity is irrelevant. Because believe it or not, if you say ‘trans women should not compete in female sports’ somebody will come along and say ‘you are bigoted against women who happen to be trans’.
"Gender ideology" , on the other hand, is largely a floating signifier used to attack people. You can tell by the way you deploy it against people who don't hold the ideology you (haven't) described.
Actually, I’ve described it plenty of times. The problem is that a large number of people seem to have swallowed it wholesale under the belief that it represents some type of scientific advance or progress. When pushed, however, they can never explain what this scientific advance actually is, or how re-defining the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in terms of identification with gender stereotypes is progressive rather than regressive.
I'm unclear on what you think the relevance of this is. If I think "gender identity theory" (whatever it turns out to be...is it different from "gender identity ideology"?) holds, I will think they are wrong to reject it, and if I don't, I will think they are right to do so.
You can think they are wrong to reject it, but if you can give any coherent, logical, evidence-based reason why, you will be the first to do so. It might help to read some critiques first.
