I'm glad someone asked. Yes. Gender critical people are not motivated by feelings about trans issues specifically. It's about women's perennial need (as they perceive it) to protect ourselves from predatory men, which they feel is undermined by self-identification. https://twitter.com/JesseHa83720945/status/1308656588727648257

Most of Rowling's rad fem views (which I don't really share) are about the many subtle ways in which men undermine women & about the physical danger they pose (& always will pose) to us.

The reason the trans self-identification issue is important to that is because it undermines the possibility of protecting ourselves through segregation (this is where I disagree: I think sex segregation is neither necessary nor helpful, except in a few outlier cases).

Self-identification, they argue, allows people to flit between genders, which means they can exploit a nominal female identity to infiltrate women-only spaces, appropriate funds earmarked for women, etc. I think this is an inevitable trade-off of greater freedoms in most cases.

Safety that is based on segregation from men is a very shaky kind of safety. Also, *complete* safety can never be guaranteed & is therefore not a viable political aim. Having said that, I hope you can see that to describe this as some kind of hatred for trans people is silly.

They focus on trans self-ID because that's where they receive the pushback & because, if there are no sexes, there is no way to be a feminist of that old school kind, which is about fighting for women as an oppressed class.

Imagine someone said: anyone should be able to self-identity as ADOS (American descendants of slaves) & receive reparations or be able to identify as disabled & park in the reserved spaces. This is how they feel about self-ID (which is not legal in the UK).

I feel a bit differently. I think the better analogy is benefits. I used to be a huge fan of means testing, but I've come round to the idea that UBI would be better (cheaper, more efficient), even though it means that some people would receive money who don't need it.

We are butting up against the problems of identity politics everywhere. If you try to compensate for victimhood or oppression by granting special privileges simply on the basis of identity, it always backfires. This is true EVEN in the financial realm (hence I prefer UBI).

The rad fem position is that women's greatest disadvantage is physical (this is mainly about our undoubted lesser upper body strength but also there is the fact that we have the pregnancies). That disadvantage is immutable, hence the neverending struggle against our oppression.

Most woke people understand this type of identity politics with regard to race. Now imagine that black people were also INTRINSICALLY physically weaker than white people. Don't you think this would increase people's ire against those who tried to pass as black?

If you've been up against the brute fact of men's greater bodily strength, it can loom very large. It was trivially easy for a podgy guy in his fifties to immobilise me, even though I've done self-defence classes. I will not forget that ever. But I also will not live in fear.

Segregation is not the answer. We need to make ALL spaces as safe as we can (& accept that risks can't be completely eliminated). We need to raise the level of the societal tide & float all our boats.

Thinking about this a lot at the moment because I'm reading Rowling's latest novel, "Troubled Blood," in which all these topics come up.