The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
The UK Labour Party is becoming sharply divided over the impact of the government's proposed Gender Recognition Act, as some 500 feminists and allies recently met in secret to discuss the policy effects while prominent men associated with the party organized harassment campaigns against them. The proposed Gender Recognition Act would allow people to legally identify themselves as a different gender without needing to undergo medical checks, which in turn would make it easier for men to pose as women for access to private, female-only spaces. Additionally, Labour recently announced that self-identification as female is enough to get on all-women shortlists for parliamentary selections; a change that reduces female representation in the party. The feminists meeting in secret describe it as but the first in a series of such gatherings leading to the establishment of what they call "a new women's liberation movement" later this year.
If the late 1970s and early '80s featured what were known as the feminist sex wars -- a polarized conflict between radical and liberal feminists over whether sexual relationships should be examined for misogynistic content -- then this development appears to mark the formal beginning of what might be called the feminist gender wars between the same camps: a conflict emerging as fundamental over whether one's gender (as contrasted with one's biological sex) is innate or instead a social construct that mostly benefits men at the expense of women. The liberals insist that one's gender is innate and biological sex a construct, while the radicals contend the opposite: that one's sex is innate and gender a construct.
I suppose one might conversely argue that such a war against "cis" (i.e. real) women has been going on for a number of years already, complete with extensive censorship of all who question the notion of innate gender, but I'm generously characterizing this as the formal beginning of the culture war in this area in the sense that this development marks the first campaign of organized pushback to exist offline that I'm aware of, and thus it is now starting to become a slightly less one-sided conflict than it has been up to now. It will probably spread to many other countries. This could be an important, even defining, development in the history of the women's movement. I've already explained which side of this dispute I'm on, personally.
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Originally Posted by IMPress Polly
