This is a post from one of our valued Gentle Autistic Community members, who was moved to write it following a gender-critical post on one of our Facebook groups. We removed that post because we have zero tolerance for such judgemental and outdated views. Our community is all about acceptance and kindness. The author of this piece wishes to remain anonymous, for reasons that are obvious but, in a gentler world, wouldn’t be necessary.
The term gender-critical is a label used by people who conflate sex with gender identity, denying the existence of transgender identities. Gender-critical views propose that the immutability of sex translates to one’s gender and that identifying as anything but your sex assigned at birth is invalid.
People who identify themselves as gender-critical often label themselves as ‘gender-critical feminists’, justifying their anti-trans stance with arguments of ‘protecting (cisgender) women’s spaces’, leading to the policing of who ‘looks like a woman’ in spaces like women’s toilets. A significant amount of gender-critical discourse centres around cisgender women as victims and, often hypocritically, reduces women to their reproductive characteristics by insisting that what makes a woman is her biology.
People who call themselves gender-critical are rarely satisfied with just holding their views and often can be found publicly stating their opinions as if they are facts and attempting to rid trans people of the right to exist as themselves.
