“What gender critical feminism really amounts to is a baroque palace of rationalizations built on a foundation of pure disgust”

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The term “gender critical” is really a euphemism recently created to replace TERF with a phrase that doesn’t have such negative connotations. It’s perfectly analogous to the phrase “race realist”, which was invented by racists wanting a more flattering and respectable description of their beliefs. I’ve used the term “gender critical” in this video to be inviting to fence-sitters, but I refuse to cooperate with racists who want me to use their euphemisms, and I generally do the same with TERFs.

Now, I’m a very agreeable, non-confrontational person. I usually like to call people by whatever they want to be called, but when it comes to “race realists” or “gender critical”, every time I use these phrases, I’m essentially becoming an accomplice in their scheme to legitimize bigotry. And I have especially little patience for TERF requests for linguistic decorum, since most of the language used by TERFs is specifically designed to be maximally hurtful, harmful, and insulting to transpeople.
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See, what TERFs do in public is advance what, on the surface, are a series of feminist critiques of trans-people. For example, the critique that hyper-feminine trans-women are reinforcing misogynistic stereotypes designed to oppress women. At a glance, this appears to be a critique of the way some trans-women behave and present themselves. But, in the next breath, these same TERFs will argue that trans-women are mannish, unfeminine perverts who are forcing masculinity into female spaces. So, trans-women being feminine is bad and trans-women being masculine is bad, then there really is no way that trans-women could behave that TERFs would accept.

So, in fact, what TERFs really oppose is not trans-women being feminine or trans-women being masculine, but trans-women being trans-women. In other words, the fundamental issue underlying these phony concerns is trans-phobia, simple animosity towards trans-people’s very existence.
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What gender critical feminism really amounts to is a baroque palace of rationalizations built on a foundation of pure disgust. In this respect, it’s just like homophobia.

Natalie Wynn, “Gender Critical”, Contrapoints (30 March 2019) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pTPuoGjQsI]

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