Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
The Guardian recently described that in the United Kingdom a number of employers have been taken to task by the courts for disadvantaging employees because of their gender-critical views. This is a good thing, freedom of speech is a great thing.
What stood out was the commentary in The Guardian on this issue:
“Gender-critical feminists believe sex is biological and cannot be changed, and disagree with trans rights activists who say gender identity should be given priority in terms of law-making and policy. Clashes in workplaces – in some cases with those who regard the focus on biological sex as transphobic – have led to a string of employment tribunals.”
This explanation provides an apparent contradiction. Transactivists generally do not believe that gender (in the sense of sex) would not be biological or that sex can be changed. Some 50 years ago people still saw it that way (with now much less used term transsexual as the predecessor of transgender), but that is now a minority view as gender is increasingly defined in terms of (modern, non-morphological) biological characteristics.
That gender-critical feminists believe that gender is biological and cannot be changed may be so, but that does not explain the conflict currently at hand. Nor are they alone in that belief. What the conflict does concern is that gender can have a different meaning than biological sex and that (in accordance with our formal gender theory and in accordance with many earlier authors) not biological sex but gender should determine the social distinction to be made between men and women. In the laws of many countries including the Netherlands, this is now the case.
By 1960, a concept of gender had emerged that took into account transsexing: the transition from male gender to female gender or vice versa based on surgical and pharmaceutical interventions. There we see the first form of divergence between the concepts of sex and gender. Since then, gender has shifted from morphological perspective to “fundamentally biological” perspective and gender has shifted to increasingly count gender identity in the assessment/definition of gender.
In the bills now on the table in the Netherlands and Germany, there is no longer any barrier to gender transition. Many oppose that and we join that opposition. Such resistance can result in one being perceived as gender critical, and then facing exceptionally extreme accusations and imputations from UvA sociology, for example. We discussed this aspect in detail earlier.
Read more about the importance of a gender-critical movement in the Netherlands:
The Netherlands needs a gender-critical movement
We ultimately see two conflicts:
(A) the opponents of any form of transgendering (including TERF feminists, the official line of the Roman Catholic Church, the Russian Orthodox Church and various Evangelical Christian groups) also do not want to accept the conventions and legislation on transgendering established in the last century.
(B) opponents of recent bills do not want to accept the complete decoupling of gender from biological factors. This second conflict brings gender critics into collision with transactivists.
The matter is further complicated by the fact that trans activists often claim to advocate for the rights of transgender people. That claim is nonsensical because it is the definition of “transgender person” that is at issue, not the rights of transgender people. Indeed, it is precisely because transgender people’s rights were and are agreed upon that fierce resistance arises when the definition of transgender people is changed too easily.
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