I don’t know if anyone really needs my two penneth on this, but I’m going to offer it. Recently, the Radical Notion magazine put out a pamphlet called “Gender Critical Disputes” which outlined the position of some feminists in ongoing disagreements.
I think a great many of us need your "two penneth" very much. I have long felt that every heretical woman's (and man's, but that's for another day) voice does matter in this life and death moment in history, and that *no one* is in perfect agreement with *anyone* else 100% of the time. We are all fully aware of just how warped one's worldview can become when an ideology (or fundamentalist religion) rules one's life. It behooves us to at least try to recognise the possibility that our own ideological commitments might obscure our own vision from time to time. At the very least, we really don't need to pour any more energy into creating yet another (as you noted) Us vs. Them division/distraction. Kids are getting sterilised, lives are being shattered. Can we focus on the urgent matters at hand? Thank you for your compassionate, reasonable words.
Indeed. And a great deal of ideological claptrap in much of feminism; see, for example, this article on "Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender":
"A wise woman once told me, though, that we’ve got to have a bit of Game Theory in life. You will not value every player on the board, but each player is in turn valued by someone else and may be needed for the winning move."
The biggest (and most successful) feminist fight ever was for the vote. And it was only won because women from across the political spectrum pulled together. It's disappointing to see a lot of feminists of the left forget that lesson.
Agreed. I’ve no interest in the individual politics - for me it’s all about the collective of women raising concerns, and I think it’s working well. It’s much more in the public consciousness now, whether because of Kellie-Jay, Julie B or JCJ. I don’t know if I fit the definition of feminist according to any of them but I don’t care. Labels schmabels!
This whole article is so generous of spirit, and so true. This may be, for me, the most important observation of all: “Our online space feels increasingly polarised which gives the illusion that our views are neatly divided into clear sets, but for a lot of women much of this is messy. They value reading other women’s analysis but they also value the space Posie has created for women to speak.”
I am in the US, and I only wish we had a phalanx of women dissenters from the prevailing orthodoxy as robust, diverse, and courageous as you in the UK. You are ALL our guiding lights. The Glasgow Let Women Speak event gave everyone I know who cares about this an enormous lift. I come from a background of union organizing, and I can say with confidence that KJK is a genius at grass roots organizing, clear communications, an extra dose of charisma, and all in combination with an empathic, welcoming spirit that encourages woman from all walks of life and beliefs to speak. I am equally grateful to those like Julie Bindel, Helen Joyce, Maya Forsteter, Kathleen Stock, Jane Claire Jones, and so many others who have kept at it and helped so much to elucidate what the h**l is going on here. Please, please stay together. We need every one of you to lead the way, give us hope, and give us courage to speak.
Really nice essay. Something I remind myself of a lot is a wise phrase I read somewhere: if you had to like *everything* about your friends, you would have no friends. Obviously that doesn't mean tolerating every disagreement, but .. for those of us who are not marquee names, the sheer experience of solidarity in this movement has been so incredibly wonderful. I'll never forget the night two Alberta women essentially comforted me over zoom as I faced what I thought was about to be the loss of my job over being a TERF. I was so scared and they were so nice and I will NEVER forget it. We don't talk enough about all the little kindnesses that keep our movement rolling at the bottom, and too much about the trading of barbs at the top.
I love the idea of us all talking about the little kindnesses. That would be a magnificent thing. And I’m sure we’ve all experienced them from women in this. The solidarity really is wonderful. Women together can be so much joy and love! I really hope things worked out all alright without your job ❤️
I don't think the differences in the RN Gender Critical Disputes issue are about those individual relationships, though. Most of us have friends and relatives with whom we have political disagreements - but who are true friends when we need them. The significant differences are about political outcomes - and those outcomes are shaped by how we frame the issues and whether or not they are achieved with the aid of rw organizations.
Thanks for this scrupulously polite and evenhanded piece.
My take is that the problem with it, and the wider issue it refers to, is the assumption of a shared understanding of "womens rights/interests".
From where I'm standing, the "GC" movement appears increasingly to be characterised by biological determinist, pro natalist, pro nuclear family, gender conformist ideas and values that I reject a. because they are antithetical to my idea of how society should progress, and b. because I understand them to be key components in the conditions from which the current "trans" phenomena has arisen. "Gender" is at the root of transgenderism - it's the compost it grows in. Radical feminism, by definition, addresses the root of women's oppression, and as such is uniquely equipped to dismantle the entire process of trans construction (what Janice Raymond keeps getting misquoted about).
Conversely, a "GC" movement that noisily snips away at the leaves, whilst simultaneously composting and watering the roots, is counterproductive to that kind of progress.
Clearly, within the GC movement there is a wide spectrum of views, from far right ethno nationalists, religious ultra conservatives , antisemitic "new world order/transhumanist" conspiracy theorists, through to academically credentialled evo psyche sexists, average small c conservatives, and feminist women who genuinely believe any means are justified by the ends of cutting off leaves like the GRA, inclusion policies etc. but the overall effect is to pull the focus and aim away from what I would understand as womens rights.
So the issue for me at least, is not one of differing approaches to the same goal, but an increasing sense that the "GC" movement is working toward goals, whether by design, ignorance or expedience, that are fundamentally different to my own.
Thank you for this. I think your perspective is important and if we could have healthier discussions, with much more assumption of good faith amongst women, we could talk more easily about where we are going, and what it will look like when we get there.
"Not to mention what it might be like for women new to the fight to turn up to all this."
I only became aware of what was going on with the attack on women's rights in Dec 2018. When I went looking for information and found women's voices on Mumsnet and Social Media I almost immediately encountered various factions and individual women, who I had never heard of, engaging in internecine verbal punch-ups and smear campaigns. I had no idea what was going on. It was an irritating distraction but I ignored it and ploughed on.
I would advise anyone new to this to do the same.
After a while, I noticed that some of these women had either made their peace with each other or had moved on. Meanwhile, their supporters continued to battle it out with each other.
I understand better now that sometimes this is out of loyalty to an individual woman or women, sometimes out of ideological tribalism, sometimes out of political allegiances, sometimes a mixture of these, sometimes because some women just like a scrap, sometimes because they are deliberately sowing or prolonging division because they are not actually on our side at all.
What I hate most are the lies and deliberate misrepresentations. Whether we decide to "pick a side" or not, I think the way out of this relies on honesty, sticking to facts and countering misinformation on both sides.
What we are fighting depends on a huge lie and suppression of the truth, from which a few profit and the majority are damaged.
My introduction to this was hearing this, to me horrifying, exchange on Woman's Hour about "transwomen in women's sport":
Jane Garvey, Presenter:
At professional level, that would mean in team games, for example, no woman would ever play hockey for Great Britain or England again.
Beth Jones:
They may, they may not. It's all in the future to be determined.
My first reaction was complete shock, max "peak trans" from a standing start. It told me everything about what this meant for women in every sphere of life.
I soon stumbled across Alice Dreger's , "The Controversy Surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen: A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex in the Internet Age".
That led to my second complete shock, which was "This is Lysenkoism all over again!"
Not the details of the biology but the brutal political suppression of truth and scientific research in the cause of upholding an ideology. Actual Stalinism, resulting in dissenting scientists being discredited, imprisoned and killed, the death of up to 10 million people in the Holodomor and then over 40 million in Communist China's Great Famine.
I am not suggesting that the ideology of transgenderism will necessarily lead to the early deaths of millions of people. However, "trans-medicalism" certainly leads to the early-onset of medical conditions associated with ageing, to premature deaths and to eugenics via the sterilisation of children and adults.
It was the parallel between the state-imposed impositions of pseudoscience, of "transgenderism" and Lysenkoism, that struck me. If we look for historical precedents, I would be inclined to think that what we are seeing has more in common with the cock-up of Stalin rather than the conspiracy of Hitler in terms of a "Big Lie". As with Lysenkoism, it is elements on the Left rather than the Right who are the most dedicated enforcers of compliance and purgers of dissent.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that, within the ranks of today's dissenters, it is hard-line "Socialist Feminists" who we see deploying smear campaigns, ie. in a similar way to the "transgender activists" described by Dreger?
It is a bit old-fashioned now for people to describe themselves as "Stalinists" or "Maoists". "Socialist" is a broad term and encompasses everyone from those who espouse a vague belief that "everyone deserves a fair chance in life" to unreconstructed "Trots" and "Tankies". The sort of people who are now condemning the majority of people "on our side" when they say that anyone who claims to be "apolitical" is disingenuously using that label as a cover for being right-wing, probably "far-right" or actually a fascist.
Lyndon B Johnson's famous misquote re J Edgar Hoover comes to mind, “Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”
The problem that pluralist feminists have is that some socialist feminists, who should be our allies, are inside the tent pissing in. If they could focus their energies on playing the same trick inside the Socialist tent it would help enormously!
Genderwang: "... internecine verbal punch-ups and smear campaigns ..."
Indeed. Not sure how "feminism" thinks to tell society how to order itself when feminism is riven with its own internecine warfare. Not sure that many there are willing to consider that -- maybe, just maybe -- each sect is more a part of the problem than of the solution. My previous comment here refers to a post by Kathleen Stock who seems one of the few willing to consider that possibility:
Genderwang: "... stumbled across Alice Dreger's , 'The Controversy ..."
I'd read bits and pieces of that controversy, but I see there's a public domain article published by the NLM on the topic that seems likely to be worth a read:
"So let it be written, so let it be done." 🙄 And her recent debate with Colin Wright suggests that she hasn't changed her tune; in fact, some reason to think that she's now overdosed on the transgender Kool-Aid.
Genderwang: "This is Lysenkoism all over again!"
Amen to that; largely the crux of the matter, the rotten heart of the whole transgender clusterfuck for which feminism in general has to take a great deal of responsibility. An illuminating passage from Wikipedia's article on the topic:
"In time, the term [Lysenkoism] has come to be identified as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable."
Some reason to argue that a great deal of feminism is engaged in the "deliberation distortion of scientific theories" for a rather questionable political project. No doubt some merit in it, but if the price is the corruption of biology then I expect that will be something that society in general will wisely and soundly reject. Underlining that is a rather brilliant essay by Substacker Helen Dale, particularly where she cuts "philosopher" Cordelia Fine off at the knees:
"[Louise] Perry wants to persuade leftie readers (along with fellow feminists), so she piles up a mountain of scientific evidence to buttress her case. She is also a clear, orderly writer. This has the effect of demolishing not only Brownmiller’s reputation but that of Cordelia Fine, a philosopher now notorious for trying to edit science to fit in with feminism."
That "editing" seems rather characteristic of far too much of feminism, including by the three "tribes" described in the "Feminism and Femalism" article by Rose Rickford in the recent issue of JCJ's "The Radical Notion":
One of those tribes -- Sex-Realist Feminism -- feature Helen Joyce and Louise Perry on its masthead so I have a bit more sympathy for that particular sect. However, I'm not terribly impressed with their "vision of female and male as embodied expressions of human personhood"; a more woo-ish bit of anti-scientific blathering is scarcely imaginable:
Seems that what vitiates the efforts of all three of those sects is a rather pigheaded reluctance to accept the biological definitions for both the sexes and a consequential one for "woman". They may well have a definition for the latter outside the standard -- i.e., "adult human female" -- but they all seem desperate to make that term "woman" into a woo-ish, feel-good, participation-trophy type identity rather than any sort hard-edged category capable of some use in adjudicating competing claims to further social policies.
In any case, I quite agree with your point about Lysenkoism providing some useful insights into the problem. Couple of essays I've run across or written on the topic that you might have some interest in:
Quite a good essay. And I generally have to commend all the women stepping up to the plate to defend women's rights -- quite impressive. Although it's a bit depressing that it's turned out to be a campaign of decades if not centuries. "Rome" wasn't built in a day, and I guess it won't be torn down in one either.
But I generally wish you well, and am happy to put in my own two cents, and my shoulder to the wheel where needed or useful. Not least because transgenderism in particular seems to have some seriously toxic consequences far outside just the issue of women's rights, even if that is often where the rubber meets the road.
However, I kind of get the impression that much of feminism is riven with sectarianism largely as a result of some very questionable philosophical principles and premises, not least surrounding the rather murky concept of gender. But for instance, I seem to recollect seeing on Twitter recently some "GC feminists" throwing stones at Jane Clare Jones, who's apparently front and center in Radical Notion, for some of her recent statements and positions.
Moot exactly what is the bone of contention there, and I certainly don't know enough about feminism to give any sort of detailed analysis. However, Kathleen Stock at least alludes to the problem, even if she has yet to offer much in the way of solutions:
"One big question for this newsletter will be: how did mainstream feminism come to embrace what I’m calling the stupid story [transgenderism?], so that many feminists ended up cancelling themselves out of politically effective existence? Effectively, the stupid story functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
I think a great many of us need your "two penneth" very much. I have long felt that every heretical woman's (and man's, but that's for another day) voice does matter in this life and death moment in history, and that *no one* is in perfect agreement with *anyone* else 100% of the time. We are all fully aware of just how warped one's worldview can become when an ideology (or fundamentalist religion) rules one's life. It behooves us to at least try to recognise the possibility that our own ideological commitments might obscure our own vision from time to time. At the very least, we really don't need to pour any more energy into creating yet another (as you noted) Us vs. Them division/distraction. Kids are getting sterilised, lives are being shattered. Can we focus on the urgent matters at hand? Thank you for your compassionate, reasonable words.
❤️
Indeed. And a great deal of ideological claptrap in much of feminism; see, for example, this article on "Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender":
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346447193_Ideological_Bias_in_the_Psychology_of_Sex_and_Gender
Bit depressing to see that in full flower in The Radical Notion article:
https://theradicalnotion.org/gender-critical-disputes/
"A wise woman once told me, though, that we’ve got to have a bit of Game Theory in life. You will not value every player on the board, but each player is in turn valued by someone else and may be needed for the winning move."
<3
❤️
The biggest (and most successful) feminist fight ever was for the vote. And it was only won because women from across the political spectrum pulled together. It's disappointing to see a lot of feminists of the left forget that lesson.
Agreed. I’ve no interest in the individual politics - for me it’s all about the collective of women raising concerns, and I think it’s working well. It’s much more in the public consciousness now, whether because of Kellie-Jay, Julie B or JCJ. I don’t know if I fit the definition of feminist according to any of them but I don’t care. Labels schmabels!
This whole article is so generous of spirit, and so true. This may be, for me, the most important observation of all: “Our online space feels increasingly polarised which gives the illusion that our views are neatly divided into clear sets, but for a lot of women much of this is messy. They value reading other women’s analysis but they also value the space Posie has created for women to speak.”
I am in the US, and I only wish we had a phalanx of women dissenters from the prevailing orthodoxy as robust, diverse, and courageous as you in the UK. You are ALL our guiding lights. The Glasgow Let Women Speak event gave everyone I know who cares about this an enormous lift. I come from a background of union organizing, and I can say with confidence that KJK is a genius at grass roots organizing, clear communications, an extra dose of charisma, and all in combination with an empathic, welcoming spirit that encourages woman from all walks of life and beliefs to speak. I am equally grateful to those like Julie Bindel, Helen Joyce, Maya Forsteter, Kathleen Stock, Jane Claire Jones, and so many others who have kept at it and helped so much to elucidate what the h**l is going on here. Please, please stay together. We need every one of you to lead the way, give us hope, and give us courage to speak.
Amen.
Really nice essay. Something I remind myself of a lot is a wise phrase I read somewhere: if you had to like *everything* about your friends, you would have no friends. Obviously that doesn't mean tolerating every disagreement, but .. for those of us who are not marquee names, the sheer experience of solidarity in this movement has been so incredibly wonderful. I'll never forget the night two Alberta women essentially comforted me over zoom as I faced what I thought was about to be the loss of my job over being a TERF. I was so scared and they were so nice and I will NEVER forget it. We don't talk enough about all the little kindnesses that keep our movement rolling at the bottom, and too much about the trading of barbs at the top.
I love the idea of us all talking about the little kindnesses. That would be a magnificent thing. And I’m sure we’ve all experienced them from women in this. The solidarity really is wonderful. Women together can be so much joy and love! I really hope things worked out all alright without your job ❤️
I don't think the differences in the RN Gender Critical Disputes issue are about those individual relationships, though. Most of us have friends and relatives with whom we have political disagreements - but who are true friends when we need them. The significant differences are about political outcomes - and those outcomes are shaped by how we frame the issues and whether or not they are achieved with the aid of rw organizations.
Thank you
Thank you, I needed this!
❤️
Thanks for this scrupulously polite and evenhanded piece.
My take is that the problem with it, and the wider issue it refers to, is the assumption of a shared understanding of "womens rights/interests".
From where I'm standing, the "GC" movement appears increasingly to be characterised by biological determinist, pro natalist, pro nuclear family, gender conformist ideas and values that I reject a. because they are antithetical to my idea of how society should progress, and b. because I understand them to be key components in the conditions from which the current "trans" phenomena has arisen. "Gender" is at the root of transgenderism - it's the compost it grows in. Radical feminism, by definition, addresses the root of women's oppression, and as such is uniquely equipped to dismantle the entire process of trans construction (what Janice Raymond keeps getting misquoted about).
Conversely, a "GC" movement that noisily snips away at the leaves, whilst simultaneously composting and watering the roots, is counterproductive to that kind of progress.
Clearly, within the GC movement there is a wide spectrum of views, from far right ethno nationalists, religious ultra conservatives , antisemitic "new world order/transhumanist" conspiracy theorists, through to academically credentialled evo psyche sexists, average small c conservatives, and feminist women who genuinely believe any means are justified by the ends of cutting off leaves like the GRA, inclusion policies etc. but the overall effect is to pull the focus and aim away from what I would understand as womens rights.
So the issue for me at least, is not one of differing approaches to the same goal, but an increasing sense that the "GC" movement is working toward goals, whether by design, ignorance or expedience, that are fundamentally different to my own.
Thank you for this. I think your perspective is important and if we could have healthier discussions, with much more assumption of good faith amongst women, we could talk more easily about where we are going, and what it will look like when we get there.
Beautifully stated, thank you.
❤️
Excellent article!
"Not to mention what it might be like for women new to the fight to turn up to all this."
I only became aware of what was going on with the attack on women's rights in Dec 2018. When I went looking for information and found women's voices on Mumsnet and Social Media I almost immediately encountered various factions and individual women, who I had never heard of, engaging in internecine verbal punch-ups and smear campaigns. I had no idea what was going on. It was an irritating distraction but I ignored it and ploughed on.
I would advise anyone new to this to do the same.
After a while, I noticed that some of these women had either made their peace with each other or had moved on. Meanwhile, their supporters continued to battle it out with each other.
I understand better now that sometimes this is out of loyalty to an individual woman or women, sometimes out of ideological tribalism, sometimes out of political allegiances, sometimes a mixture of these, sometimes because some women just like a scrap, sometimes because they are deliberately sowing or prolonging division because they are not actually on our side at all.
What I hate most are the lies and deliberate misrepresentations. Whether we decide to "pick a side" or not, I think the way out of this relies on honesty, sticking to facts and countering misinformation on both sides.
What we are fighting depends on a huge lie and suppression of the truth, from which a few profit and the majority are damaged.
My introduction to this was hearing this, to me horrifying, exchange on Woman's Hour about "transwomen in women's sport":
Jane Garvey, Presenter:
At professional level, that would mean in team games, for example, no woman would ever play hockey for Great Britain or England again.
Beth Jones:
They may, they may not. It's all in the future to be determined.
My first reaction was complete shock, max "peak trans" from a standing start. It told me everything about what this meant for women in every sphere of life.
I soon stumbled across Alice Dreger's , "The Controversy Surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen: A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex in the Internet Age".
That led to my second complete shock, which was "This is Lysenkoism all over again!"
Not the details of the biology but the brutal political suppression of truth and scientific research in the cause of upholding an ideology. Actual Stalinism, resulting in dissenting scientists being discredited, imprisoned and killed, the death of up to 10 million people in the Holodomor and then over 40 million in Communist China's Great Famine.
I am not suggesting that the ideology of transgenderism will necessarily lead to the early deaths of millions of people. However, "trans-medicalism" certainly leads to the early-onset of medical conditions associated with ageing, to premature deaths and to eugenics via the sterilisation of children and adults.
It was the parallel between the state-imposed impositions of pseudoscience, of "transgenderism" and Lysenkoism, that struck me. If we look for historical precedents, I would be inclined to think that what we are seeing has more in common with the cock-up of Stalin rather than the conspiracy of Hitler in terms of a "Big Lie". As with Lysenkoism, it is elements on the Left rather than the Right who are the most dedicated enforcers of compliance and purgers of dissent.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that, within the ranks of today's dissenters, it is hard-line "Socialist Feminists" who we see deploying smear campaigns, ie. in a similar way to the "transgender activists" described by Dreger?
It is a bit old-fashioned now for people to describe themselves as "Stalinists" or "Maoists". "Socialist" is a broad term and encompasses everyone from those who espouse a vague belief that "everyone deserves a fair chance in life" to unreconstructed "Trots" and "Tankies". The sort of people who are now condemning the majority of people "on our side" when they say that anyone who claims to be "apolitical" is disingenuously using that label as a cover for being right-wing, probably "far-right" or actually a fascist.
Lyndon B Johnson's famous misquote re J Edgar Hoover comes to mind, “Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”
The problem that pluralist feminists have is that some socialist feminists, who should be our allies, are inside the tent pissing in. If they could focus their energies on playing the same trick inside the Socialist tent it would help enormously!
Very good comment; lots of meat on the bones.
Genderwang: "... internecine verbal punch-ups and smear campaigns ..."
Indeed. Not sure how "feminism" thinks to tell society how to order itself when feminism is riven with its own internecine warfare. Not sure that many there are willing to consider that -- maybe, just maybe -- each sect is more a part of the problem than of the solution. My previous comment here refers to a post by Kathleen Stock who seems one of the few willing to consider that possibility:
https://loreleihatpin.substack.com/p/disputes-and-kumbaya/comment/12601066
Genderwang: "... stumbled across Alice Dreger's , 'The Controversy ..."
I'd read bits and pieces of that controversy, but I see there's a public domain article published by the NLM on the topic that seems likely to be worth a read:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170124/
Though I'm not too impressed with Dreger as she had once tweeted that:
"People. There are more than two sexes. There are more than two genders. This is not a political statement. It's just reality."
https://twitter.com/AliceDreger/status/1064259049246601216
"So let it be written, so let it be done." 🙄 And her recent debate with Colin Wright suggests that she hasn't changed her tune; in fact, some reason to think that she's now overdosed on the transgender Kool-Aid.
Genderwang: "This is Lysenkoism all over again!"
Amen to that; largely the crux of the matter, the rotten heart of the whole transgender clusterfuck for which feminism in general has to take a great deal of responsibility. An illuminating passage from Wikipedia's article on the topic:
"In time, the term [Lysenkoism] has come to be identified as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Some reason to argue that a great deal of feminism is engaged in the "deliberation distortion of scientific theories" for a rather questionable political project. No doubt some merit in it, but if the price is the corruption of biology then I expect that will be something that society in general will wisely and soundly reject. Underlining that is a rather brilliant essay by Substacker Helen Dale, particularly where she cuts "philosopher" Cordelia Fine off at the knees:
"[Louise] Perry wants to persuade leftie readers (along with fellow feminists), so she piles up a mountain of scientific evidence to buttress her case. She is also a clear, orderly writer. This has the effect of demolishing not only Brownmiller’s reputation but that of Cordelia Fine, a philosopher now notorious for trying to edit science to fit in with feminism."
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/feminising-feminism/
That "editing" seems rather characteristic of far too much of feminism, including by the three "tribes" described in the "Feminism and Femalism" article by Rose Rickford in the recent issue of JCJ's "The Radical Notion":
https://theradicalnotion.org/gender-critical-disputes/
One of those tribes -- Sex-Realist Feminism -- feature Helen Joyce and Louise Perry on its masthead so I have a bit more sympathy for that particular sect. However, I'm not terribly impressed with their "vision of female and male as embodied expressions of human personhood"; a more woo-ish bit of anti-scientific blathering is scarcely imaginable:
https://fairerdisputations.org/
Seems that what vitiates the efforts of all three of those sects is a rather pigheaded reluctance to accept the biological definitions for both the sexes and a consequential one for "woman". They may well have a definition for the latter outside the standard -- i.e., "adult human female" -- but they all seem desperate to make that term "woman" into a woo-ish, feel-good, participation-trophy type identity rather than any sort hard-edged category capable of some use in adjudicating competing claims to further social policies.
In any case, I quite agree with your point about Lysenkoism providing some useful insights into the problem. Couple of essays I've run across or written on the topic that you might have some interest in:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-triumph-of-trans-lysenkoism/
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/wikipedias-lysenkoism
https://artymorty.substack.com/p/lysenkoism-all-over-again
Quite a good essay. And I generally have to commend all the women stepping up to the plate to defend women's rights -- quite impressive. Although it's a bit depressing that it's turned out to be a campaign of decades if not centuries. "Rome" wasn't built in a day, and I guess it won't be torn down in one either.
But I generally wish you well, and am happy to put in my own two cents, and my shoulder to the wheel where needed or useful. Not least because transgenderism in particular seems to have some seriously toxic consequences far outside just the issue of women's rights, even if that is often where the rubber meets the road.
However, I kind of get the impression that much of feminism is riven with sectarianism largely as a result of some very questionable philosophical principles and premises, not least surrounding the rather murky concept of gender. But for instance, I seem to recollect seeing on Twitter recently some "GC feminists" throwing stones at Jane Clare Jones, who's apparently front and center in Radical Notion, for some of her recent statements and positions.
Moot exactly what is the bone of contention there, and I certainly don't know enough about feminism to give any sort of detailed analysis. However, Kathleen Stock at least alludes to the problem, even if she has yet to offer much in the way of solutions:
"One big question for this newsletter will be: how did mainstream feminism come to embrace what I’m calling the stupid story [transgenderism?], so that many feminists ended up cancelling themselves out of politically effective existence? Effectively, the stupid story functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp?s=r