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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Yeah see this is a great example as I have no clue what anybody’s position is there upon a quick skim, and I’ve never even heard the term Gender Critical

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Being "gender critical" is the view that trans women are not women. Not to be confused with the "anti-gender" movement, which opposes anything other than traditional male/female roles, or with "postgenderism", which argues the complete opposite, namely that traditional gender is irrelevant.

TL;DR is that Maya was (apparently) fired for the first opinion, lost a first court case over it because being gender critical is not protected under UK, and won the appeal because it was after all.

That just seems weird to me. Most people want to have kids later in life. Of course trans women are different wrt that life goal.

Your argument is somewhat tangential - are you arguing women are defined by their ability to give birth? Seems fairly obvious that doesn't hold up even when we aren't talking about trans people

It doesn’t hold up if you talk about cis women either. I know plenty who cannot have children. Menopause also then would make women not-women, right?

There is a bimodal distribution of biological traits related to reproduction. Traditionally, women are defined as members of one of those clusters, the one whose members are generally able to give birth during some period of their lives. This doesn't mean that all members of the cluster can or have or will give birth, but nonetheless the clusters are fairly well-defined for nearly 100% of the population, with trans people being an exception.

Some of the more extreme trans activists seem to want to pretend that these clusters don't exist, which puts them at odds with reality.

Other seem to demand that the clusters shouldn't matter, which I find rather optimistic since they're relevant for reproduction.

Trans rights are a noble goal, but some of the statements made by trans activists are a bit out there.

If by "shouldn't matter" you mean something like "it's ridiculous to define what a woman is as having a capability that literally all women lose around middle age" then I'd have to count myself amongst those people. Your argument is an extremely weak one for defining what it means to be a woman.

Not all trans people undergo or desire surgical intervention. Also, a transgender woman who desires biological children and surgical intervention could freeze her sperm before surgery.

Remember the story a few years ago about the gay couple where one of them was a transgender man and gave birth to their child? I'm sure similar situations do sometimes arise with transgender women.

"Gender critical" is the anti-trans movement. The reason you can't tell their true position is the usual one: they daren't say "we want to eradicate trans people" in public, so they take the "just asking questions" route.

I feel that the trans community has largely been forced into defending "trans women are women" (TWAW), even if it has holes as a philosophical argument, because they need to fight the transphobic "trans women are men" rhetoric and downstream policy decisions. How can someone live as a woman without constant risk of being outed? They need an "F" on their passport and to use the women's toilets, etc. without having a constant risk of being "caught", because that ends badly.

So has Gender critical been defined as a group in such a way that no-one will admit to being in it? Is it similar to TERF?

I think you're correct in your second statement. This whole area seems very polarising. The edge case of women's sports is the obvious situation where a principle of 'Live and let live' doesn't work.

> Gender critical been defined as a group in such a way that no-one will admit to being in it?

No, that's what they call themselves. You can see plenty of people using that label on twitter.

Polarize_d_, in that people have gone out of their way to polarize it. The last major legal advance was in 2004, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Recognition_Act_2004 with broad support, and it's only in very recent years that this backlash has sprung up.

> The reason you can't tell their true position is the usual one: they daren't say "we want to eradicate trans people" in public, so they take the "just asking questions" route.

That's an interesting statement from the POV of falsifiability. Is there an experiment we could theoretically perform to find out if a person who's stating that he's "gender critical" really wants to eradicate all trans people?

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