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I often think about this panel I attended once. One of the speakers was a young, black gay man with a quite femme gender presentation. He did a talk on "Desire". He told stories of the time he'd been in danger when other men, seeing parts of his body, assumed him to be female.
He'd receive wolf whistles, or the sort of sexually aggressive sexual comments often alleged to be compliments, but rarely feel like them. He'd be the recipient of a sexist masculine desire, based on the *assumption* that he was female, perhaps only because of some tight jeans.
The moment at which these men, having made these misogynistic expressions of desire, realised that the object of this desire was not in fact female was a moment of genuine danger. Misogyny easily transitions into homophobia; they're cut from the same cloth.
I think of this when I see 'gender critical' takes floating around that misogyny is only experienced by women because they have wombs, or certain chromosomes, or boobs. That people with penises are always perpetrators of it, never victims.
As if these sexually entitled men, witnessing a nice pair of legs enter their vision, stop to go "excuse me, what chromosomes do you have" before they go on to say "phwooarrghh put those legs around my face darling".
Misogyny is a social experience - it happens due to a complex interplay of socio-cultural dynamics in which we normalise sexual aggression from men & normalise homophobia (see the 'gay panic' defence).
I find it utterly bizarre that out there there are women, ostensibly intelligent women, actually arguing that the sole reason women face misogyny is because when they were babies, they had a vulva.
It also reminds me of the Twitcourse last year about bisexual women not being able to call themselves 'dykes' because only lesbians were allowed to reclaim the slur; as if homophobes will go "oh, sorry, I thought you were a lesbian! i take back my homophbic slur, carry on"
The 'Gender Critical' position argues that there's no such thing as an 'internal feeling' of gender, and that only material reality matters; but also that people are abused and harassed based on internal attributes that are not visible on the surface.
It ignores the visible reality that people are abused, assaulted, marginalised, discriminated (and yes, desired) by what is *visible and observed* and how as a society we frame that which is visible and observed.
No street harasser has ever stopped to ask me my karyotype, or whether I am able to have babies, before shouting at me in a sexually agressive manner; and no homophobe has stopped to ask me if I am bi before shouting homophobic slurs.
The gender critical perspective, just like the biphobic and homophobic one, is maddeningly inconsistent, and incoherent and yet somehow it clings on.
To add - I think the phrase the speaker used was something like "thwarted desire" - how the moment the onlooker realises they've desired something they consider "wrong", and how that desire turns to disgust, which turns outwards as anger.
He was talking about the sort of misogynistic men who shout sexually aggressive things at women, but I think there's a lot about this dynamic that also plays out for "gender criticals".
A further thought: that danger that the invididual, having been initially desired, but now a figure of disgust, is significantly hightened for queer and trans people. Both "gay panic" and "trans panic" have been used as a defense for murder.
All the person has done is exist as themselves, but a toxic combination of misogyny, desire, disgust and entitlement turns a moment of verbal sexual aggression into a very real physical - potentially fatal - threat.
The gender critical position would have us believe that this cannot happen, because such acts of sexual violence happen only to women, and women are only those who are known to have two xx chromosomes and a womb.
This is such obvious nonsense, it's not only baffling that anything those who are gender critical say is taken even half seriously, it's worrying. It's a wholesale denial of the violence meted out on queer, trans or gender non confirming people *by cis men*.
The gender critical position would have us believe that these Queer Bodies are more of a threat to cis women than cis men are to either. It's a denial, at core, of the effects and imacts of patriarchy and rape culture itself: bedrocks of feminism
"gender-critical feminism" is an oxymoron. One cannot hold a gender critical perspective and also be a feminist, as it involves denying the most fundamental aspect of the feminist position: the dismantling of patriachy for the emancipation of all.
