Some terms, explained, Part 1
Because it's easier all round to be savvy and helpful
This is a blog post just to explain some terms I’ll be using in a blog post very soon, to save time there. Since I prefer talking with everyone, and since some of these terms will be new for some of you, thus this explainer.
Gender-critical (often abbreviated to GC): Very loosely, a term used to describe a stance based on two important points:
a/ that biology, not delusion, determines what biological sex you are;
b/ and that you don’t need to conform to any social stereotypes just because you’re one biological sex or the other.
So, biological sex exists, but that doesn’t need to mean that you should conform to anyone else’s idea of how you should behave. There are many who use this term more strictly, for example to mean a particular movement. Since that movement started up in reaction to nonsense, then pretty much anyone, who isn’t actually completely hide-bound in how girls or boys, men or women, should behave, and who recognises the reality of biological sex, is gender-critical, whether they know it or not.Gender-ideology: a loose term used to describe the collection of incoherent and sometimes contradictory claims by TRA’s, including claims to the effect you can be any gender you want to be, and that that trumps any biology.
TERF: usually used as a pejorative label, which means it’s been over-used. It comes from “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist”, but what it often means in practice is that someone is condemning someone else. Whether or not the term is accurate now all depends on that particular situation.
TRA: trans-’rights’ advocate, which can mean anyone. A TRA doesn’t need to be trans themselves, and there are quite a few trans people who aren’t TRA’s; instead, many trans people simply try to live their lives. Some trans people are openly, vocally critical of TRA ideology and claims.
trans: believe it or not, this does need explanation. Very loosely, a person living, part-time or full-time, as the other sex. I.e. if they were born male, living as female. That may only mean for some presenting as female, which is rather different than living it (and, of course, you can only ‘live’ to a very limited degree as the sex not your own, owing to a lack of the physical equipment).
Trans people are not a homogenous group. Quite apart from transmen and transwomen, transwomen divide into several, very different groups, and the differences are important. Once upon a time, one group who are now usually included in the transwomen label were called transvestites, which may be more accurate for that particular sub-group. Transmen likely subdivide into different groups as well, though not to the extent that transwomen do.transitioning: some trans people, by no means all, have medications (such as puberty-blockers), or have surgeries too, to approximate the look of the other sex. The general process is called transitioning; there are many different degrees of that.
detransitioner: unsurprisingly, many young people regret having made a hasty choice to transition, and seek a return to a kind of normality, acceptance of their biological sex. This usually means harsh lives for them, since the medications and the surgeries have quite large, often bad effects. The person involved is labelled a detransitioner.
cis: this is a term used by TRA’s and those who agree with them for people who aren’t trans, i.e. the opposite of trans. The label is politically loaded, and I refuse to use it; instead, I use ‘non-trans’.
self-ID: self-identify, one of the most pressing issues in the entire debate; to be allowed with legal recognition to self-identify as a woman, if you’re a man, or as a man, if you’re a woman. For an example of a concrete issue, should a male, who has had zero operations or medications to change gender, in other words is still fully functionally male, be allowed as inmate into a women’s prison or shelter, just because he suddenly self-identifies as a woman? Lots of such cases have already happened; it’s not theoretical.
transphobe: a term that has lost all meaning, owing to having been badly abused and over-used to a huge degree. Originally intended to mean someone who was bigoted about trans people, all it means nowadays is someone who disagreed with some TRA claim, no matter what.
radfem: radical feminist. Basically, they’re gender-critical feminists, but they cover a large range of attitudes and different groupings themselves.
libfem: I don’t know if this is in general usage, I’ve only heard the term from radfems, and I suspect as pejorative, sometimes. Meaning, a liberal feminist. This in practice would be anyone who self-ID’s as both feminist and ‘liberal’ in the American sense, which is different from the British sense. Libfems typically for example regard abortion as a right, but also accept or even advocate the strange claim that “Transwomen are women” (often abbreviated to TWAW), i.e. that a man can simply self-ID as a woman if he wants to.
socfem: I’ve only ever heard this term used once. It means, “socialist feminist”, in the British sense, which is quite different from the American sense of ‘socialist’, and is subtly different from the American sense of ‘feminist’. Loosely, as far as I can work out, socfems are gender-critical, but also in practice heavily against any cooperation with the right-wing; just how ‘right-wing’ gets defined all depends on each person. This is a major hurdle, since in practice definitions of right-wing differ in major ways between the USA and Britain. Germany, much of the time, appears to be somewhere in the middle of that range, but in reality is much closer to the British sense, rather than the American. These differences in reality and perception form a large basis of what my next blog post will be about.
gender: back in the old days, which means only less than 10 years ago, gender and sex were used interchangeably, with gender being the ‘politer’ version of sex. Now, it’s used to mean how you express the idea of what sex you are. I agree with you that this is a pain in the neck; the revolution in the public sphere led by TRA’s has led to the splitting of sex and gender, with the need to stress the physical biology of sex, i.e. male or female.
sex: oh please. There is no such thing as a genuine human hermaphrodite (although the condition of ovotesticular syndrome is sometimes called “true hermaphroditism”, which it isn’t). Nobody but nobody gets born with both full sets of equipment, let alone the two full sets of later functional equipment. Children are born as male or female; all mammals have only two sexes, and do not change sex. Sex is determined by possession of large or small gametes (or at least the beginnings of either), and then the phenotypical outworkings of that. Babies may, if very unlucky, however have…
Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD): such as ovotesticular syndrome referred to above, Swyer syndrome, mosaicism, and so on. These are all incredibly rare, and are all disorders, with often grave health consequences for the person. For example, a person with Swyer syndrome has only streak gonads, which need to be surgically removed as soon as possible, since they’re non-functional, and have a very high probability of becoming dangerously cancerous, including in childhood.
The existence of DSD’s has been used by propagandists to blur the distinction between the sexes; it’s as honest as claiming there are a range of limbs, because thalidomide can severely alter the normal growth of a limb, or, in other words, it’s very dishonest. Sex is very binary in humans, as in all mammals, and the rare existence of disorders of development don’t change that fact in the slightest.
So much for all those terms, which will come up at some point in my next blog post. If you have hard questions about how the biology of sex works out with genotype, karyotype and phenotype, then I suggest you contact Emma Hilton, who is
on here, a.k.a. @FondOfBeetles on Twitter. Mind you, I only now see that she hasn’t done any posts here, so you’re better off contacting her on Twitter. If you have complex questions on how it all works out for sports, then contact @FondOfBeetles or Ross Tucker @Scienceofsport on Twitter. Thanks for listening, and if you have any terms you’d like definitions for, let me know, and I’ll do a Part 2 later.