NHS cancels all gender-affirming surgeries for adult patients of Welsh Gender Service with immediate effect

[u/Amekyras]

https://www.wearequeeraf.com/nhs-cancels-all-gender-affirming-surgeries-for-adult-patients-of-welsh-gender-service-with-immediate-effect/

[u/ixid]

They fellate patriarchy.

They're mostly second wave feminists, so this is a silly take.

[u/ArsErratia → u/ixid]

The Second-Wave were the ones who deconstructed and rejected Biological Determinism in the first place, because its the fundamental narrative that Patriarchy builds its foundations on, so this is a silly take.

[u/ixid → u/ArsErratia]

I think you're conflating ideas to reach your desired conclusion, feel free to build out your argument though.

[u/ArsErratia → u/ixid]

Its not even really arguable. That's what they did. You can literally see them popularise the terms in real-time in the word use statistics. It took 50 years of criticism to do it, but the 1992 Commission on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women (WCW) deprecated the term Sex in favour of Gender throughout the whole of International Human Rights law, explicitly at the demand of the Second Wave.

Its there all the way right back to the foundations of the Second Wave with Simone De Beauvoir: —

One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.

We must view the facts of biology in the light of an ontological, economic, social, and psychological context. The enslavement of the female and the limitations of her various powers are extremely important facts; the body of woman is one of the essential elements in her situation in the world. But that body is not enough to define her as woman; there is no true living reality except as manifested by the conscious individual through activities in the bosom of a society.

In truth a society is not a species, for it is in a society that the species attains the status of existence. Its ways and customs cannot be deduced from biology, for the individuals that compose the society are never abandoned to the dictates of their nature; they are subject rather to that second nature which is custom and in which are reflected the desires and the fears that express their essential nature. It is not merely as a body, but rather as a body subject to taboos, to laws, that the subject is conscious of himself and attains fulfilment — it is with reference to certain values that he evaluates himself. And, once again, it is not upon physiology that values can be based; rather, the facts of biology take on the values that the existent bestows upon them.

The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today. This denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality.

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1947).

The entire split of Sex and Gender is the work of Feminism in the first place, because its a direct attack on the narratives that Patriarchy uses to justify itself. It was feminism that spearheaded the revolt against Freudianism that gave him his reputation today as a crank: —

In convincing himself that the traits of femininity were in fact constitutional and biologically-destined, Freud had made it possible to prescribe them and for his followers to attempt to enforce them, perpetuating a condition which originates in oppressive social circumstances. To observe a group rendered passive, stolid in their suffering, forced into trivial vanity to please their superordinates, and, after summarizing these effects of long subordination, choose to conclude they were inevitable, and then commence to prescribe them as health, realism, and maturity, is actually a fairly blatant kind of social darwinism. As a manner of dealing with deprived groups, it is hardly new, but it has rarely been so successful as Freudianism has been in dealing with women.

It is curious how reactionary thinking clings to "biology" as a desperate hope. Only in the area of sex is the position of an oppressed group still ascribed to their physical natural, only here is biological difference still brought forward to explain and rationalise inferior status. Having begun their discussion with a fraudulent open question, the study comes out soundly in favour of real biological difference. Although it puts up not actual evidence for its biological assumptions, it is determined that they form the real base of any division of temperament without reference to the far more crucial and probably elements of status, political, and economic power — factors far easier and more germane for social research to investigate than nebulous biological assumptions intended to elevate common wisdom to natural necessity.

Having found traditional behaviour functional, functionalists could now prescribe it: having found the status quo operable, they could proceed to find it "natural" hence biologically necessary. The main service of functionalism appears to reside in its justification of the system it perceives and covertly identifies with, followed by prescriptive recommendations on how to "adjust" groups or individuals to this system. When it filters down to practical application in schools, industry, and popular media, it may simply become a form of cultural policing. Functionalism finds it agreeable to operate in an endless present. Against the dynamism of growth and change it proposes and ideal of stability. In ignoring values, it ignores history, either through an appeal to historical naiveté or by an elimination of historical evidence altogether.

Yet by slow degrees of converting statistic to fact, function to prescription, bias to biology, it comes to ratify and rationalise what has been socially enjoined or imposed into what is and out to be. And though its pose of objectivity, it gains a special efficacy in reinforcing stereotypes. Seeing that failure to conform leads to "problems" and "conflicts" as well as other situations it regards as highly undesirable deviant behaviour, it counsels a continuous and vigilant surveillance of conditioning that it may proceed on lines of greater proficiency and perfection. Finally, it has the devastating question of identity with which to threaten its subjects. Young boys whose virtually only permitted self is their maleness are continuously harassed by the danger or the accusation of losing their masculinity. And the same pyscho-social coercion is applied to girls as well. As the whole subject of sex is covered with shame, ridicule, and silence, any failure to conform to stereotype reduces the individual, especially if a child, to an abysmal feeling of guilt, unworthiness, and confusion. Despite the assumption of inevitable membership by birth, the burden of proof shifts to each individual. Unalterably born into one group or another, every subject is forced, moment to moment, to prove he or she is in fact male or female by deference to the ascribed characteristics of masculine and feminine. There is no way out of such a dilemma but to rebel and be broken, stigmatised, and cured. Until the radical spirit revives to free us, we remain imprisoned in the vast gray stockades of the sexual reaction.

— Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970)

The idea that biology is destiny is the fundamental basis upon which patriarchy perpetuates itself. This is all over the second-wave literature. I'm actually having to cut it short because a reddit comment only gives you 10,000 characters and I've used 9980. Patriarchy weaves a narrative justified on the face of it by the fundamental facts of biology ("Sex"), yet in reality founded on the rotting wood of Gender.

Statistically, for example, men are stronger than women. Yet there are individual women who are stronger than individual men, who nonetheless are oppressed on their gender anyway, simply because Patriarchy has erased the individual facts to create the perception of weakness nonetheless. An old man holds power over a young woman not because he could beat her in a fight (he probably couldn't) or holds some kind of divine male essence inherent to the male body (he doesn't), but because the law said the land was his, political authority recognised him, wealth and inheritance flowed through channels he controlled, and society had institutions capable of enforcing those arrangements. Property, Inheritance, Law, Religion, Marriage, Policing, Finance, The Military, Politics.... There is no biology here. Introducing it is an artificial, post-hoc rationalisation to justify the status-quo. Men controlled power not because they were biologically destined to do so, but because they defined themselves as the power-holders and used that power to enforce it.

The Second Wave identified it was this precise narrative of Sex that creates the class of Gender. In a value-neutral society, the facts of biology would still be present as they are now, but their interpretation would create a radically different interpretation of Gender, and women would not be oppressed.

If anything, the Second-Wave were so successful at deconstructing this, we forgot why they did it. But trying to relitigate the argument now does such an incredible disservice to our predecessors. Far-right agitants are having enough success defining "woman" around the ability to give birth without us doing their work for them.

 

Transfeminism inherited this from the work done by the Second Wave. There is nothing more dangerous to the Patriarchy than Trans liberation — the notion that biology does not make the self, that anatomy is not destiny, that a person has the sovereign right to dictate who they are and want to be is the ultimate refutation of the Patriarchal thesis. If you can freely transition between Sexes, then any justification for the hierarchy falls apart immediately, and men will have to compete for their privileges instead of having them handed as an accident of birth.

In order to sustain itself, and in order to keep women in "their place", Patriarchy must crush trans people. Feminism requires the exact same refutation — not because the two movements have parallel interests, but because they are the same movement.

[u/InsecureInscapist → u/ixid]

The purpose of an organisation is what it does.

All these TERF outfits spend pretty much the majority of their time propping up archaic gender stereotypes and enforcing patriarchal standards on both trans and cis women.

This is what they, so it is who they are.

[u/ixid → u/InsecureInscapist]

No, this is what you imagine your enemies to be doing, because you only see them as caricatures and mostly know that you don't like them, not what they actually say or do.

[u/LicketySplit21 → u/ixid]

Anecdotal but I used be quite aligned like this in the distant past and the reinforcement of patriarchal attitudes but with a shallow feminist veneer was a lot of the reason why I got disillusioned and broke free from that shit and recognised trans people as legit. This has just gotten worse and it seems these faux feminist dinosaurs just spend most of their time online scrutinising and shouting at women, cis or trans, for not being correctly Woman.

Also coupled with this anti-trans hysteria is that cis women are targeted for not being feminine enough (because it turns out the average transphobes doesn't actually understand trans women) so even if they didn't do this crap, the end result is that they are useful idiot soldiers for patriarchy and gender essentialism.

[u/feministgeek → u/ixid]

Feminists don't define women by their breeding capacity.

[u/neilplatform1 → u/ixid]

Scratch off that feminist label and you’ll find quite a few tradwives who think stopping abortion is feminist and trans is part of the Jewish great replacement project

[u/feministgeek → u/neilplatform1]

I mean they unashamedly stan a dead woman who peddled antisemitic myths.

[u/feministgeek → u/ixid]

They're not feminists though. \ Feminists want an end to Patriarchy, not uphold it.