the folks on mumsnet absolutely ascribe the absolute worst kind of anti-trans bigotry & attack people with name-calling & bullying tactics until they either give in or leave
The entire idea that woman is an 'identity' comes from postmodern/queer theory. As Kathleen Stock points out, if we believe in science and reality then there is no need for us to follow the dictates of postmodernism!
The argument appears to be this. Every woman is different and no woman has the same experiences. There are rich women, black women, disabled women etc each with their own struggles. So we can't find a single thing that women have in common that unites them as women.
What about the female body? Well, postmodern feminists fret that defining women by their bodies (a woman is an adult human female) is reductive and reduces them to their biological functions, which is what the patriarchy does. Since the early 90s, postmodern feminism has been terrified of 'reducing' womanhood to some property or other, but hasn't really been able to articulate why this is even reduction and why reduction is so terrible in the first place.
So being a woman must be an 'identity', something that a person opts into and chooses because there is nothing externally that fixes what a woman is. It must be something internal and personal. And then along came Judith Butler with 'gender trouble' and her views that gender is a performance, and suddenly being a woman is an identity that can be adopted by anyone.
No other social justice movement is expected to cover all possible causes, by the way. Only feminism is, and this has been the case for quite a while. It's interesting, and ultimately has to do with the way women are not allowed to have boundaries or the right to say no.
Intersectionality is an important component for feminist analysis as women's oppression also depends on their position with respect to the other axes of oppression. But once we drop sex from those axes of oppression altogether, we have dropped the reason for feminism. And I see intersectionality now almost always used in a way it was never intended to be used: To expand the bailiwick of feminism to every cause in the whole world and to expect feminism to fix all of those. Women are the universal mothers and cleaning ladies of the world.
QuoteSo in old money, OP is a gay man?
It's not possible to say because although they've declared themself to be a "straight trans woman", we have no idea what they mean by ""straight" or "trans" or "woman".
Remember exactly how vulnerable you were having just given birth. Possibly torn and stiched, definitely bleeding, suffering after pains as the uterus contracted. 'Baby blues' as the hormones swung about turn. Engorged breasts as the milk came in. Waddling to the loo with a mattress between your legs and in fear of the impact of urine on your tears and grazes or the pressure of a poo and possible piles. Self consciously getting your breasts out to try and feed with all the struggle that involved. No sleep and possibly none for days due to labour. And then there are those who've had c-sections - major surgery - possibly still on catheters and pain pumps unable to get out of bed. And others frantic with worry with their baby in nicu. Others with abusive partners or difgicult living situations wondering how they will keep their baby safe. All incredibly vulnerable.
And a man says he is 'frightened' of them! If he is frightened of anything it is the reality of being a woman and the recognition that it is something a man could never be.
You can make a sarcastic privilege list (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4635034-at-last-all-the-reasons-cs-women-are-privileged?page=2&reply=120040575) about any group, actually, once we separate 'privilege' from its old historical meaning. For instance, as I am not terribly rich I never need to worry about hiring housekeepers for my multiple residences or about yacht insurance or about employing bodyguards for my children (to ward off kidnappers).
If I was someone in prison I would have the privilege of never worrying where my meals come from and I wouldn't have to fear dying in traffic etc.
The initial idea with the privilege concept was good, i..e., using introspection to understand that we, personally, may not have experiences about certain kinds of discrimination and that this does not mean it's not happening. But the way it is used now is simply to divide people into separate groups for whether they can speak about something or not and also to divide people so that they won't unite behind a cause they would all share.
And as Caroline Criado Perez keeps showing us, women are certainly not treated equally with men in medical research or medical care because so many treatment guidelines are still based on measures derived form men's bodies.
The idea of 'cis' privilege (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4635034-at-last-all-the-reasons-cs-women-are-privileged?page=2&reply=120042018) does begin to look a little ridiculous if you are a woman in places such as Afghanistan. But that's partly the genius of the gender identity ideology: To erase sex-based oppression and to hide that erasure by changing language and by treating all 'cis' people as if they were equally privileged with each other. In other words, all traditional forms of exploitation and oppression are erased in that treatment, except when they are used for forced teaming to enhance trans objectives.
I'm glad this - a grain of sand on a huge beach tbh - was included:
"This view, together with the belief that “cis women have more power than trans people”, led genderist academics to refrain from forthrightly denouncing some transgender activists’ aggressive tactics towards feminists. These include threats and ideations of extreme violence, which, as well as being pervasive on social media, appear to be increasingly condoned at universities. For example, last year, a London School of Economics postgraduate student conference paper described a scene in which feminists critical of genderism “scream for mercy”. The paper then described the potential threat: “I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear”, concluding: “Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.”
When discussing this horrific anti-feminism, some interviewees, including those working on violence against women, would nonetheless still equivocate. As one sociologist put it: “My priority are the people who are being harmed by this debate, who I perceive to be trans people.” “These gender-critical feminists – they are intellectualising [sex and gender], and I think it’s harmful,” she added."
Plus the admission that they don't really know or care what the GC position is.
"When asked to describe their arguments, however, she responded: “I don’t know if what I understand or what I think are the issues, are the issues, I’ll be honest with you – I stay out of their way.” This remarkable coupling of condemnation and ignorance regarding gender-critical feminism was fairly common among genderist academics. Many readily admitted that they limit their academic engagements, including their reading, to their “echo chambers and bubbles” where, as one journal editor noted, “we all share basically the same perspectives”."
[Times Higher Education] has touched on the 'trans debate' issues in the past, but never with something as refreshing (and horrifying) as this.
Get it out in the open, discuss it - unless your beliefs cannot withstand scrutiny.
One of the things I find problematic with the oft repeated phrase "trans rights are human rights" is that it undermines the concept of human rights.
As far as I can tell, nobody sensible is saying that trans people should not have human rights. But the point of human rights is that everybody has them, and they have the same ones. Trans people have exactly the same rights everyone else has; no fewer, and no more.
Human rights that we all have, such as the qualified right to freedom of expression and freedom of thought, conscience and religion, apply to all of us. You are free to believe in gender identity theory. We are free not to. You are free to manifest your beliefs in public. So are we. We all have the right to express our disagreement with belief systems we do not share. We do not have the right to harass or persecute people we disagree with. Trans activists do not appear to respect this.
We have the right not to be discriminated against, including for our sex. In order to protect this right, we must have the language to accurately define and discuss sex.
At the end of the day, (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4633653-mermaids-vs-lgb-alliance-and-charity-commissioner-first-tier-tribunal-general-regulatory-chamber-thread-3?page=8&reply=119996013) they aren't objecting to the words we use, but to our right to express certain concepts. Such as the concept of humans coming in two biological sexes, and there being important differences between the two sexes which are not impacted by your personal identity. And the concept of same sex attraction, meaning being sexually attracted to people of the same biological sex as yourself, i.e. people with the same kind of genitalia you have, not people who believe they identify as the same thing you are.
This is why it is naive to assume that if you ignore the nonsense and just get on with your life quietly, it won't affect you.
Sooner or later you are going to find yourself given a verbal warning at work for using the wrong pronoun, or see your teenage daughter lose her spot on the sports team to a trans identifying male teenager, or be told by a rape crisis organisation that if you don't feel comfortable attending a women only therapy group where "male bodied people" are present, they won't help you (and neither will any other rape crisis organisation).
It's just getting worse and worse, and unfortunately it's not going to stop until a majority of people stand up and say, "No. I support trans people's rights to live in a way that makes the most sense to them, but not at the expense of everyone else's rights. This has gone too far."
Clearly there was a 'shock and awe' motivation behind this experiment. How would this 'teacher' feel if he arrived at his doctor's office for a checkup and the physician was dressed in that get-up? Or better yet - would he fly on an airplane if the pilot were in this costume? Surely the students deserve some respect.
The author of that article (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-ontario-students-and-educators-receive-a-lesson-in-body-shaming/) does seem to have recognised that this is a male imposing his fetish on children.
Gender identity is not a choice. However, showing up to teach in cartoonish fake breasts is one. It’s a choice to wear what is effectively a fetish outfit while teaching, in a way that is visible to all. Whether done as a stunt or a sincere expression of sexuality, if anything qualifies as inappropriate, that would be it.
But she's so caught up in the idea that anything to do with 'trans' is progressive that the article as a whole ends up as a confused mess.
I'd like people like her to explain exactly what they mean by 'progressive'. It seems to be the idea of 'anything goes', but they fail to see that this leads to things like men parading their fetishes around children and non-consenting adults, and when it does, their heads explode.
"I wonder if the man in question knows it's a fetish or instead thinks that he is really transgender because that is what all these groups tell him it is? Is he another "victim" (I deliberately put that in quotes) of the affirmation culture?"
There are victims in this - but it's not him. It's the children forced into accepting him as a "role model". It's every unconsenting adult having to remain "professional" and not call out the disgraceful behaviour that this is. Add to this the erosion of boundaries and safeguarding children from adult fetishes that this represents. Not to mention the professional reputation of a school that is unable to say the word "no" in the face of such behaviour.
This is what an "oppressed & marginalized"
minority looks like. How it behaves.
Happy to join?
Eager to become "an ally"?
Keen on shredding the "cotton ceiling"?
Well, then crack on and take your part in
the social justice struggle.
Victory is yours and it looks precisely like that.
Very tasty, indeed.
Both aesthetically and ethically pleasing;
which is what we all want:
beauty and goodness personified.
Hallelujah.
The Fingal Library Twitter account was found to be following various clearly suspect accounts like Maya Forstater’s, Allison Bailey’s etc. We can’t have that, can we? (https://archive.ph/WaUnA)
It's the glee that gets me. They're so delighted with themselves every time they get someone disappeared.
I mean, cancelled.
Antipodean fruit growers - Canary in the internet coal mine (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4632616-antipodean-fruit-growers-2-canary-in-the-internet-coal-mine?page=2&reply=119984850)
Free speech absolutism is a challenging concept. Language has power to oppress and coerce and silencing is disempowering. It is natural to wish to use language to our advantage and silence those who threaten us.
However, in practice, restrictions on speech are wielded by, and most benefit, those who dominate society and culture.
Women, females, the majority of the population but the largest minoritized class, have the most to gain from free speech absolutism. The impact is magnified because speech is both the weapon and shield of choice for women against the overpowering physicality and fiscal advantage of men.
The rebellion of #womenwontwheesht is a non-violent protest against both compelled speech and censorship, shifting the focus away from policing speech for our protection and towards pushing away barriers to liberation.
Movements for civil rights and civil liberties - including freedom of speech - arise from the downtrodden, at the grass-roots. By contrast, "Social Justice" is an astro-turfed movement of the managerial class serving corporate interests.
A whopping great clue is in the fact that social justice initiatives are driven, implemented and enforced by the university-educated, the privileged.
"Creatives" who tick the right "progressive" boxes are favoured by grant-giving bodies. Human Resources staff, people whose main qualifications are making rules for the conduct of others and disciplining those who break them, to the point of removing their means of making a living.
Politicians, police, teachers, health and social care professionals, union officials, all university-entry and indoctrinated to eradicate species-survival instincts of fairness and empathy. Police prioritising "hateful" social media posts over call-outs to active crimes of violence and burglaries. Women in prison punished for "misgendering" male inmates.
The horror is that this has cascaded down to primary school, with little children being punished by teachers for saying what they see, and mobbed by gangs of self-righteous bullies. Encouraged to inform on their parents too - anyone who cannot see shades of Hitler Youth and the Stasi in this is wilfully blind or woefully ignorant.
may well be entitled to free speech, but he is not entitled to freedom from its consequences
This phrase sets off my ‘fascist claiming to be antifascist’ klaxon like no other.
I find it REALLY weird that Brexit is lumped in with this. And attitudes towards race/racial equality.
'The first of these debates is about what should be done to recognise the culture, identity and economic position of some minority groups. It is argued that they face disadvantage because of their personal characteristics, such as being Black or transgender, and that to address these disadvantages it is important to acknowledge and challenge ‘white male’ or ‘heterosexual’ privilege. Critics of this position, in contrast, feel that society has already done enough to recognise and enhance the position of ‘equalities groups’ and that to go further could have a detrimental impact on social cohesion and fairness.'
Why smoosh blackness and 'transgender' together like that? What on earth do they have in common?!
Reading this, I'm quite astonished at how clumsily it's trying to create a narrative, with broad-brush concepts ('culture wars' ffs) and loaded language. Not sure how much I can be bothered to read, because this just stinks of dishonest propaganda, to me.
The author of that article does not understand what critics of woke mean by it.
they also don’t understand what liberal means. Liberal means tolerance of ideas. A liberal society is not one with conformity to one view.
Reading this, I'm quite astonished at how clumsily it's trying to create a narrative
The “liberal-authoritarian divide” they keep referring to and the accompanying “liberal-authoritarian scale” they’ve apparently developed! Where “authoritarian” apparently means “disagrees with the authors.”
Can we stop using "woke" and "liberal" to describe views that are more accurately described as puritan?
It would at least hamper their efforts of trying to create a false "liberal-authoritarian" dichotomy when what it actually is is dogmatic Puritans v those who believe in balance of rights.
except (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4583516-amy-hamm-canadian-nurse-being-disciplined-for-being-gc?page=2&reply=120193202) in her pronouns apparently - beautifully capitalised.
It is all so delightfully 16th century. The century's version of Do you or do you not accept the Real Presence in the Eucharist?" The human race - nothing new under the sun.
Things change, and the internet changes faster than most things. (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3288348-Cycles-of-feminist-internet-herstory)
Is it neo-religious fervour that inspired CMK to act so badly and to see her 'sin' (https://www.stonewall.org.uk/) solely in terms of its effect on her fellow activists? To my mind, there is something like a call and response about the way that the argument has flowed over the years.
Take your pick of any call...
(Our) Call:
Sex matters and is immutable/there are 6500 differences between male and female people/sex is not a spectrum as people with DSDs are still male or female/male bodies which have been through male puberty retain male advantage/show me the third gamete/ a woman who has a double mastectomy or a hysterectomy is still female whether the removal is due to cancer or dysphoria etc etc
(Transactivist) Response:
'Look at this one Nature opinion piece article - GCs are ignorant bigots who need to educate themselves beyond high school science'
Call:
'Should an adult male-born person with a penis be able to undress in a communal changing room where teenage girls are undressing?
Is it still accurate that 95% of TW retain their male genitals or has that percentage actually gone up due to the explosion in numbers?
If 98% of sex crime perpetrators are male (and we are starting to have doubts about the actual sex of some of the remaining 2%) why on earth are any male prisoners being placed in women’s prisons?
What about 4th spaces to ensure the safety, privacy and dignity of women and girls?
Response:
'OMG, GCs are obsessed with genitals - you're disgusting'
Call:
'Can't you see that gender ideology is illogical/incoherent/misogynistic/ homophobic/particularly harmful to lesbians who shouldn't have to accept males in their dating pool?'
Response:
'TWAW. GCs are not pro women but all anti-trans transphobic bigots who are trying to take away our rights. And your views - < misstate GC views here> make no sense.
Call:
'There is no such thing as a 'trans' child - just children with dysphoria/ it's impossible to be born in the 'wrong' body/ puberty is a tough but vital maturational stage and dysphoric children need talking therapy not drugs/this looks like eugenics for gay and autistic kids/we want to protect kids from making harmful decisions with powerful lifelong consequences for their future health, fertility and sexual pleasure which they may later regret
Response:
'GCs want trans people to not exist/genocide/kill themselves'
Call:
We are concerned about how potent (particularly for vulnerable people) the love bombing/TWAW mantras/no debate/encouragement of detachment from family/shunning of apostates/grooming of teenagers on the internet prior to a sudden declaration of gender dysphoria/magical thinking/group think etc might be.
Response:
'GC is a cult'.
Call:
We have had to raise many hundreds of thousands of pounds for court cases to protect the existing sex based rights of UK women and girls.
Response:
'GCs are funded by the American Christian Right . And btw 'sex-based rights' is a transphobic dog whistle.'
Call:
Many of us find ourselves 'politically homeless', we have cut up our Labour party (https://unherd.com/2022/09/why-has-keir-starmer-banned-feminists/) memberships, we are apparently 'wrong' to say that only women have a cervix, we are dinosaurs hoarding our rights. After decades we have stopped buying The Guardian, we are told by the Lib Dems not to vote for them, the Greens use terf-blocker. We see that groups with similar views to ours are not even allowed a stand at conference. Although the GRA was a Labour Act, most of our current woes have been embedded in our institutions under a Tory government. We are Maria Miller's 'so-called feminists'. Right wing women are women. Things have got so bad that a politician who simply "knows what a woman is" (and in the UK in 2022 it seems that only Tory politicians are currently free to express this) has become a measure of positive judgment.
Response:
"Serves you right, you right wing bigot."
And now (because someone apparently filmed a public event in a public place) 'GCs are alt-right/ literal Nazis'
Call:
We can see the authoritarianism of 'TWAW:no debate', the threatening black-bloc masked individuals at Manchester, Bristol and Brighton, the closing down of free speech, the questioning of Stickerwoman, the police visits for thought crimes and hateful haberdashery, the smoke bombs, the banging on windows to disrupt a wpuk meeting, the vilification of a left wing philanthropist like JKR, the secret recording of non crime hate incidents, the threats of sexual violence at Filia, the sacred caste, the capture of institutions, (https://unherd.com/thepost/sorry-sussex-police-but-sex-is-relevant-to-sex-crimes/) the expensive recourse to the law to uphold our legal rights, the women losing their jobs over tweets, the pile ons, the shaming, the substitution of gender in place of sex, the census debacle, the policing of language, the pronoun rounds, the 'die in a grease fire', the 'we've been using it for years so we're coming in anyway', the suspect training in schools, the safeguarding frameworks under threat...
Response:
"GCs are Nazis and fascists."
Call:
'Look at all these creepy blokes using a trans identity as cover for their crimes' and 'look at the criminal record of these men who tried to remove single sex spaces'
Response:
< crickets >
Long twitter thread here. She's had her electronic devices seized too, and has been accused of being certain posters on Kiwi Farms and Mumsnet.
https://twitter.com/CF_Farrow/status/1577092705154666496
[some background (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4647654-carolyn-farrow-taken-to-police-station?page=3&reply=120481271)]
As seen across multiple current issues being discussed on this board, there are boundaries and limits and checks and gatekeeping everywhere for some. And others who can do whatever they choose without the faintest boundary anywhere in sight.
This political lobby have successfully created a two tier society. The servers and the served.
It still isn't really safe to be outspoken about this. (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4648346-return-of-women-who-were-right-about-safeguarding?page=2&reply=120501806) Basically there is a very murky side to a certain very popular ideology. There are many very knowledgeable women, experts in the field of safeguarding and child protection, psychologists, social workers and HCPs who have been raising the alarm (https://twitter.com/SoniaPoulton/status/1577920223570706433) about the systematic and institutional undermining of safeguarding for the last few years. They have been deleted and banned.
Everything they warned about has come to pass and many children and vulnerable women have been harmed. Finally the information is coming out and being reported in MSM.
I have tried to choose words carefully, which I know is annoying for people who are not up to speed, but it is necessary in order to not get deleted/banned.
Quote from: KCandtheSunlightBandThe banned people are the tip of the iceberg really. MN have made it so difficult to actually say what one means on the FWR board and stay within the ‘guidelines’ that threads can be difficult to follow, difficult and (particularly for novices to the board) intimidating to write.
It hasn’t been the same board since MN chose to split it. clever tactics really to cut traffic to that area of the site.
I am aware the MN has had to cope with a lot of pressure due to the interest FWR gets, but I know many in real life that only stay here for FWR, and pick up other topics of interest at random. So this may not be such a clever move on their part.
This is essentially (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4648346-return-of-women-who-were-right-about-safeguarding?page=5&reply=120504497) what LangCleg was banned. She directly communicated with MN that the policing of women's language in this way was a form of coercive control. When she wouldn't back down, they banned her.
This was before the Forstater case that confirmed in law that being gender critical beliefs are worthy of respect in a democratic society, and protected as a belief under the Equality Act. And before the cases brought by a number of brave women against the Tavistock Gender Clinic - which of course is now to be shut down because it is not fit for purpose.
LangCleg was always ahead of the game. Sadly, MN, whilst providing one of the few spaces in the early days of gender criticism to discuss the matter, have not always been brave enough to be seen as in any way as en par with the likes of Maya Forstater or organisations like Safe Schools Alliance. MN has always bowed to pressure. The breaking of the FWR board being the nadir of cowardice.
Against all evidence to the contrary, a group of posters claimed they were put off from posting on FWR because there was too much talk about gender politics. Despite there being a number of threads about all topics concerning women/feminism, not just gender politics. No amount of logic would appease them. Nobody can stop anybody starting a thread on any topic or discussing what they want to discuss. Oh no, they said, then you won't post on my thread, and that's not fair, you'd rather post about gender. But, don't you think that's a sign that you cannot separate feminism from the gender politics trampling all over women's hard won rights and boundaries. Oh no, they said, we can't possibly be exposed to you banging on about genitals all the time, it puts us off from starting threads about all the good feminist stuff that is not effected whatsoever by sex and gender. Blah, blah, blah. So they got their way and the board was severed in 2. They got "Feminist Chat", we got "Feminism Sex and Gender" or the naughty corner, where any thread started anywhere else on MN about the incursions of TRAs on women and children's safety and dignity is shoved in the hope it will disappear into obscurity.
And Feminist Chat? Well, the biggest gobs who got FWR separated didn't come back to start all their lovely gender free threads. Half of what is on there are threads about sex and gender. The place is virtual tumbleweeds. The schism was a complete waste of a once flourishing community of women sharing knowledge, strength and support in the face of the biggest threat to women's rights in 100 years. The people who clamoured for it - who will be reading this thread - should feel thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
QuoteI was still in a fog of wouldn't it be nice if everyone were nice and everyone just lived and let live tra la la land!
Well that's the blasted irony of it all, isn't it. (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4648346-return-of-women-who-were-right-about-safeguarding?page=7&reply=120506693) Most of us were from the left and held just such a view. We were aware of the odd cross dressing male in our spaces every now and then, but took a live and let live attitude to their presence. An actual transperson was vanishingly rare. Then Stonewall lost its raison d'être post gay marriage being legalised, the left realised it was completely clueless as to how to fix real issues of poverty, lack of opportunity, housing crises etc, and the police realised just how fucking widespread crimes based in misogyny are and how they were failing to deal even with the tip of that iceberg; so between them they cooked up a new category of "most marginalised", then focussed all their attention on providing relief to this made up group, whilst vilifying all the people they had failed in a form of mass, institutional DARVO.
Quote from: entropynowTransphobes wanna transphobe. Simple
Please, please, I beg you, keep saying this. (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4648346-return-of-women-who-were-right-about-safeguarding?page=7&reply=120506693)
It's all you've got, and it's witless nonsense, and that's why I want you to keep saying it. Up against the statistics, the facts, the lived experiences, the hard science, the victims, the bleeding fucking obvious, this is all you've got and all you've ever had.
As people become less afraid to say that the empire-ruler-assigned-male-at-birth has no clothes (and he's clearly assigned male at birth), it becomes clearer and clearer that you have nothing but this worthless, empty, hate-filled, anti-woman nonsense.
You are doing us the most enormous favour. Please go up against the women cheated out of their sporting medals by males who think a woman is a slightly hobbled man, the women assaulted in prison by someone who was not a woman legally or biologically, the young girls who were traumatised on shopping trips, the Muslim and Jewish women who cannot use public facilities, the women losing professional awards to recognise women to intact male people who don't know whether they'll be female tomorrow, and give them this gut-churning bollock followed by a mic drop.
I beg you. Please.
My heart is so sad. (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4648847-the-globe-theatre-share-and-praises-poem-about-terfs?page=2&reply=120526259)
That these young women look across the years and see us older women as bitches.
Not seeing the young women we were, and the invisible women we are now, who defied gender stereotypes.
Who were lucky enough to live in a small sliver of the corner of the world where we existed, where we got to break out of small corners of those boxes.
"It makes them so blind that they can't see the path down which they're being lead
is another fucking path being paved by fucking men"
The writers of this letter (https://www.transgendertrend.com/2017-letter-gids-clinicians-ignored-guardian/) are just two of a growing number of whistleblowers. The bleak truth is that if and when the scandal does erupt, nobody currently cheering this movement on will be able to credibly claim ‘we couldn’t have known’.
I don’t really understand what Billy Bragg is saying. It seems to me that this whole thing boils down to “do you accept that trans ideology means collateral damage occurs and who are you more bothered about it affecting?” The mealy mouthed refusal to accept the collateral damage seems so disingenuous and we should welcome those who highlight and try to tackle the nitty gritty issues of this ideology rather than those who wax lyrical about being kind and don’t raise the problems because otherwise your words kill. I’m not interested in what a celebrity or politician has to say unless they talk to the blunt realities of what’s going on here. Nicola sturgeon I’m looking at you – just say what collateral damage is more acceptable to you, stop pretending it doesn’t exist.
Collateral damage to young people who might calm their dysphoria by long term therapy (that doesn’t exist) instead of harming their bodies in the short and long term, that kids/ people will die by their own hands if they can’t trans as quickly as possible, that women will die / be harmed by predatory men (of whatever persuasion) who use trans as a perverse entry pass to “safe” single sex spaces, that the end point of trans ideology will ensure data collection and allocation of scant sex based resources won’t occur and women be harmed as a result of that, that denying the reality of sex based experience will harm women versus that rejecting sex based experience will make trans people feel better and therefore less likely to self harm and that a society that labels people instead of accepting their dysphoria as fact means trans people will be victimised and harmed.
JK is an expert communicator. She is clear as day in all she says. Her refusal to STFU and accept, hide or minimise the inevitable collateral damage to this ideology for women but also trans people is brilliant.
Quote from: Strangeways19Have read the correspondence fully. She wanted all female care that she makes very clear. She says only with prior agreement will she want a male in her room. This is going to be pretty much impossible in such a busy environment.
The point is, (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4658806-hospital-refuses-to-operate-after-woman-requests-all-female-care?page=14&reply=120892411) that she could have asked for the moon on a stick, and they could have replied with well the moon is a little far away, and we're all out of sticks. But that's not what happened and it's irrelevant what she actually asked for, at this point.
Because the reason they didn't address her request was not because they were all out of sticks and the moon's a tad out of reach, it's because they didn't share her values. And cancelled the operation on that basis. And then compounded the whole thing, by actually writing that down in an email to her.
It's not about compromise, it's not about trying to accede a request with limited resources. It's about the reason why they said they would not countenance her request. It was because, and, again, they actually wrote this down, they didn't share her values.
But, as an aside, a sexual assault survivor asking for females to look after her intimate care subsequent to her surgery, is a perfectly normal request. Of course, people understand that it's not always possible to comply with it. But as a request, it's totally normal.
What's not normal is saying no on the basis that she wouldn't validate a man's feelings.
Quote from: RoomOfRequirementI know the defence of Tories here often is 'at least they know what a woman is' - and they do.
But they use that knowledge of what a woman is to make our lives worse. Over 100 Tory MPs voted against a buffer zone on abortion clinics. They know we're adult human females, who can get pregnant, and they vote to allow us to be harassed because of that.
I'm also GC, and do not believe you can change sex. Gender - sure, I don't care how anyone wants to present or what they want to be called and am happy to oblige - but some things are separated on the basis of sex and should remain that way regardless of presentation.
That said, Tories are not on the side of women, and you need to he aware of that before voting for them based on this 1 issue.
There’s a massive difference between having policies that are not aimed specifically at women but because of the structure of society disproportionately affects them, and actively supporting ideologies which deny what a woman is, take away fundamental rights of dignity and safety for women, and create a situation where women are frightened to voice concerns.
It’s a witch hunt environment. It’s a way to control women and make them compromise themselves for the needs of others. They are not even allowed their own identity. I really don’t get how people can’t see how important this is, not just for today but for generations to come.
It’s not some frivolous 1st world problem. It’s about protecting over half the population from being told who they are allowed to be and what they must put up with. Don’t complain about stripping next to this biologically male individual: humiliated if you do, humiliated if you don’t. It’s not about the rights of trans people and keeping them safe. If it was, they would be fighting for third spaces. It’s about the subjugation of women. That single point is very decisive where I put my vote. Who are you to decide why I should vote one way or the other.
With the Tories it’s collateral damage. With Labour it’s a laser guided missile.
Pah. Just vote Lib Dem,* as they now inhabit the middle ground without being infiltrated by extremists. Both Conservative and Labour parties are being pulled apart by factions to the left, right and middle of their old ground - they have no consistent, logical ideology any more, so rapidly descend into infighting even when given a chance of power. Also, campaign against 2-party, first past the post politics, because that system is imploding in both the UK and US.* See @RoyalCorgi's helpful link (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4654372-lib-dems-transphobia-definition-deemed-illegal?reply=120709037)
Regardless, western capitalism is collapsing under the weight of its own short-sighted greed. Power and wealth is held in private hands, not in the hands of democratic countries, yet people still bizarrely wonder why the low tax, small state regimes they hanker after appear to be falling apart (because they expect to keep their profits to themselves, but simultaneously expect the state to provide the infrastructure they need, and healthy, educated workforces to exploit).
QuoteAre you arguing that trans people shouldn't be allowed to exist at all?
Nobody is debating whether or not someone exists. You can disagree with people and they still exist. Flat earthers exist. Creationists exist. I do not believe that trans women are literally women, but they still exist.
We are debating whether your internal sense of self and belief in a particular ideology that prioritises feelings over material bodily reality is enough to reorient society.
Drives me nuts seeing the level of thoughtful, passionate engagement of women on these threads and the total lack of engagement from the politicians who will only come here if HQ protect them and handpick the least scary questions for aides to write answers to in advance.
Trans ideology (https://prettygoodbritain.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/everything-is-transphobic.gif) cannot flourish in an environment of open, honest, tolerant debate, (https://archive.ph/udnjD) and so in constituencies across the country, such debate is simply not allowed.
It is going to have to be acknowledged by society and particularly by government that an ideology that has a fundamental belief that reality is created by choice, preference and emotion, and by pretending unwanted facts and bits of reality don't exist, and then trying to force everyone else to pretend this is the truth too (while screaming at, threatening and trying to silence anyone who will not indulge this) ..... pretty much renders anyone speaking from that ideology as not someone you can engage with or expect to make any sense on anything.
By all means people should have the personal freedom to enact whatever beliefs they like - but it is incompatible with decision making, policy making, safeguarding and any other matters affecting others. It is incapable of impartiality or coping with other people's perspectives, experience or with reality.
QuoteWe should have a proper, open, decent, respectful discussion about this'
then
'I think that the labour party has had that discussion and that’s a very very good thing'…
So here we haveShroedinger'sStarmer's Cat. Where a topic should be discussed and in the same breath, has BEEN discussed. Amazing doublespeak.
I think it’s more jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today.
it should be discussed, it’s been discussed. But it’s never currently being discussed.
Rowling’s greatest sin was to expose the lie of “no conflict” between trans “rights” and women’s rights. What little she said about trans identified males was actually very tolerant and compassionate (more so than I would be inclined to be). Most of her statements have been about protecting the rights, safety and dignity of girls and women. Her need to voice her concern showed that she believed that trans demands were a danger to girls and women. She was right to so believe. It is instructive that this was reflexively understood by trans activists as being “anti-trans.” The careful failure to quote exactly what was transphobic about what she actually said is also telling. It would have exposed the fact that what Rowling was saying was reasonable and correct. Better to hide her actual words under your own preferred spin than to give wider exposure to her completely logical, pro-woman position. To rephrase Lewis’s Law, the response to any statement in support of protecting women’s rights against trans demands demonstrates the very need for those rights.
When I was younger I was aware of the trope of Left Wing people becoming Conservative when they were older and I was determined that I myself wouldn't lose my values that way. What caught me off-guard was not that my values changed but that my perception of what actually worked did. I still believe most of what I used to in terms of morality and I'm still politically active. But I've had some strong shifts in how I apply that morality and become a lot more open to other people's viewpoints on how to achieve those things. I call myself Right Wing these days, without shame. Because whilst there's ignorance and bigotry in all large groups I find no more in the Right than the Left. And frankly the Right are easier to have a conversation with typically. They don't try to control language so much.....
There's a scene in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" (and if the name Ayn Rand suddenly causes an instinctive shut down / rejection of what I'm saying but you've never read her work, ask yourself where that instinct came from), where a character says we've moved from an "aristocracy of money" to an "aristocracy of pull". I didn't understand that when I first read it. What did she mean? What was more powerful than money? But I get it now. It's about having the right people in the right place and the right favours. When you're rich enough money is no longer something you require and becomes a tool to manage others. Look at the recent kerfuffle with KiwiFarms. It's broken no laws. It's very hands off by policy the people it discusses. No legal authorities were ever approached about the supposed "threat to life". It was used purely for reputational purposes and the site was brought down by one trans person in one company reaching out to a trans person at another company who was their friend. Similarly it was subject to Denial of Service attacks for weeks openly condoned and celebrated by the trans streamer Keffels. Denial of Service attacks are a crime, and they used hacked PCs via spread malware. Someone(s) was paying for that. But there was never any investigation of it that I was aware of despite very public starting points presenting themselves (those openly advocating and celebrating them). The legal authorities were at no point in the loop with companies bringing down the farms nor did the sites enemies need them to be. It's no longer money (at least as a first cause) but "pull", that is to say networking and influence. This is demonstrable.
Which really, when you come down to it, is what a conspiracy is. You could say that a conspiracy would also be required to be secret by definition and you'd be right... except that so few people actually look outside their favoured sources or question them that you have a de facto secrecy even when something is in the open. And people only normally shake themselves out of that mindset when, like the OP, they run into something first hand which contradicts the prevailing narrative.
Even then, most people will just think "oh, they're ignorant / have lied about this one issue", turn the newspaper page to another story and assume that the next story is accurately reported.
That was a long post. [A lot longer than what I reprinted.] What I really mean to say is there's a tonne of lies and manipulation when you start actually questioning things; that doesn't mean every whacky conspiracy theory is true; also some people get REALLY aggressive when you question something in front of them. Almost as if they're afraid of you being right.
Although I have been savvy to this ideology for a long time, I now feel embarrassed to think how I would do the Buttergasp either inaudibly or out loud when people would say or do something morally ‘incorrect’ , for example if someone said they were thinking of voting Tory or for Brexit, or this time an old guy who had worked with disabled people all his life said “mentally handicapped” ~ gasp - didn’t he know we say ‘someone with learning disabilities’ now?
I think I am actually genuinely more tolerant. I am unlikely to dismiss the underlying point of what someone is trying to say because they don’t word it in a politically correct way now.
The thing you said about the left-wing media really resonates with me OP. Although I still have fundamentally left-wing beliefs, I am vehemently opposed to the wronging thoughts and ideas, the ‘correcting’ that the left are so fond of. It narrows the mind and disconnects us from what we truly think or believe, and gives our personal power away as we look for permission.
The reason people swallow all this crap when they consume only left-wing media, is because they have bypassed their own thinking. It’s a huge sacrifice in the name ofmisplacedconfidence that you are one of the ‘right’ people on the ‘right side of history’.
The NY Road Runners website says that the second, third, fourth and fifth place prize winners in the non-binary category are Zackary Harris, Alexander Edgemon, Kosta Kleyman and Christopher Di Nisio. AFAICT, these are all young white males. (They all seem to be American from very privileged backgrounds who've gone to elite universities too. Which is weird in an international event where competitors come from 91 different countries, and black Africans excel.)
Significantly, in its previous stories and its coverage today about the new non-binary category, the NY Times didn't feature any non-binary female runners. In fact, it didn't even mention any female non-binary runners. As if they are invisible or simply don't exist...
So it seems like the non-binary category is mainly being regarded and used as category to separate out white gay men from "regular" men and give them additional chances to win podium places and take home prize money - chances these guys wouldn't have in the bog standard men's category because their running times aren't anywhere near fast enough.
Attempting to cancel Mrs Doubtfire (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4679177-attempting-to-cancel-mrs-doubtfire?page=2&reply=121595215)
Interesting comment
"I remember an interview with Robin about the makeup for this movie, and how after seeing himself being characterized as a woman for the first time he told the makeup artist "gosh, I really look like a lady. Now make me pretty"
The artist told him " I already did, this is the best I can do", and Robin tells he was emotionally devastated because he suddenly felt ugly and unimportant. He realized that is what most aging women go through every day, and how acting in this movie challenged his views on women a lot. Powerful stuff, one of the best interviews he ever gave if you can find it."
It's a socially constructed vagina. (https://twitter.com/Willard_Austria/status/1592967713496104960)
Your crotch isn't a North Carolina lunch counter. (https://twitter.com/gcraven10/status/1593017811835981825)
It must be true because of all the books in the background. (https://mobile.twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1555302093065400320)
Quote from: OnnabugeishaAh, a lovely morning pile of more proof of my claims.
We’ve got misquoting, misrepresentation, we’ve got the cognitive gymnastics of simultaneously claiming cis-women do not exist while being offended on behalf of cis-women, we’ve got rampant intolerance as shown through the usual insults towards a different belief system & anyone who doesn’t join in with your intolerance.
Yep, this thread is a perfect example of exactly the kind of human beings you are.
I thought your work here was done? Ffs, flounce or don't flounce, but don't claim a coup de grâce and then keep coming back to complain that everyone's still alive. That's not how it works.
By the way, how did the Japanese know who was an Onna Bugeisha? They did need to know because they were given a different style of weapon to account for their different build to male warriors. How did they work it out?
This is rich. Logically he knows that it’s all convoluted and that trans ideology can’t withstand even the barest application of logic, but his emotions (and let’s be real… his fetish) are telling him that it has to work, and so he continues to try and squeeze the square peg in the circular hole, over and over again.
individual TW may be all sorts of things - clever, virtuous, funny, brave, noble, kind, you name it, all are eminently possible. but woman, never. 'woman' isn't an adjective, it's a noun - and wanting to be a woman, or trying really hard to be a woman, or making sacrifices to be a woman, none of these is really a thing. calling someone a 'woman' isn't a compliment - it's either just a statement of fact or a statement of error/untruth.
And you realise (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/trans-women-are-women-but-1?reply=121445804) that as a biological female, these males see you merely as props. Tools. For their use. And the rage at you not mummying their needs and daring to have a life of your own that does not revolve around their inner selves blows their capacity apart.
I'm afraid the answer to that is not to be kind or sympathetic or compassionate - because God knows those males have none of that to offer to anyone else.
OK so 'Gamechanger' Munroe Bergdorf is about to talk at The United Nations HQ in New York as a spokesperson for UN Women. They've chosen MB to talk at their conference, 'Un-Stereotype Alliance' on #RaisingtheBar to 'forge an unstereotyped world and create equality for all'.
How exactly does Munroe challenge all the stereotypes of what a woman should be (beyond the obvious)?! Regular Lipfillers, cosmetically enhanced breasts, facial fillers, bottom and hip implants, Botox - glossy magazine/social media photographs in designer frocks, diamonds, lingerie, latex, nipple pasties, high heels, posing on yachts in bikinis while sipping champagne etc ...
Really, really challenging stereotypes there. How, exactly?
Can't wait to hear what MB has to say. I bet we will hear the words 'intersectionality', "nuance', 'empowerment', body 'positivity', 'autonomy', and, if they get a chance, 'protect trans kids'.
UN-women indeed.
I don't think the idea is that you can't tell. It's that you're meant to think that the idea that "man" and "woman" relate to sex is outdated and wrong, because they now mean "Which set of societally determined gender stereotypes do you feel suit you best".
Which obviously is far more important to determine in sports, relationships and places where people are vulnerable, (https://archive.ph/11klN#selection-693.0-695.1) than silly old biological sex. (https://archive.ph/mDFbH)
never. stop. fluffing. (https://ovarit.com/o/TransLogic/208636/insane-post-on-how-to-have-sex-with-a-tim-directed-at-lesbians-telling-them-a-pe)
Well, the strategy has worked, because I'm currently speechless. (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4687561-sturgeon-to-give-speech-at-event-banning-talk-of-single-sex-spaces?reply=121894714)
Quote from: RoyalCorgiI am baffled (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4686851-chimamanda-ngozie-adichie-interview-with-zoe-williams?page=5&reply=121894254) as to why Zoe seems so ignorant about stuff that she must, surely, be aware of, if she's paying attention.
It's interesting that she explicitly uses the phrase "reducing it to the absurd", (https://twitter.com/glosswitch/status/1597217825784881157) which Helen Joyce as a mathematician uses in Latin as "reductio ad absurdem".
It's a means of proof of a theorem - you assume something is true, then demonstrate that if that is true, then you inevitably reach an absurd deduction (more accurately paradoxical or axiomatically impossible). Which shows that it cannot be true.
So some people look at the "absurd" cases and think they demonstrate why a rule doesn't work.
Whereas Zoe and others think pointing out actual absurd cases, or even suggesting that they're possible, is somehow offensive.
The very concept of "reductio ad absurdem" is kind of rude. Why would you do that to a perfectly innocent theorem? Just leave it alone, let it "live its truth”.
So we attended the exhibition and we were sent a survey via email. It started off well but we were then alerted to a section containing questions of a more 'personal nature'.
I found one question utterly bizarre. It was along the lines of ' Has attending the exhibition made you consider changing your gender?'
FFS, this is basically an exhibition of the Rosetta Stone and how it was used to decipher hieroglyphics. How on earth could it ever have that effect?
In the days when the Guardian used to allow comments on articles about the trans issue, a lot of us had the experience of having our entirely polite comments deleted.
Then they stopped allowing comments on trans stuff - except when they mention trans stuff in their live politics blog, which is always open to comments.
Someone on Twitter took screenshots of comments earlier this week on the Scottish bill that were subsequently deleted by Guardian mods. They are all perfectly polite, reasonable, gender-critical comments. But comments offensively accusing gc people of being funded by the Christian right etc were allowed to stand.
They really are beyond hope.
While being subjected to constant rituals of pronoun exchanges may seem silly or annoying at best and exhausting at worst, in reality participating in this ostensibly benign practice helps to normalize a regressive ideology that is inflicting enormous harm on society. To understand why, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with its core tenets.
I was asked to include pronouns as part of my company bio. I didn't. Gave them the rest of the information asked, the stuff that is actually relevant for my role but didn't include the non-essential bit of information. I don't know if it was anything to do with my refusal to comply but when our bios did appear on the website, pronouns were not included for anyone.
If I were asked in a meeting or face to face, I think I would just ignore the question. It's bizarre to think you can control how others refer to you when you're not there (or even if you are there). If I had the power to put words in other people's mouths, I wouldn't settle for something as trivial as pronouns, I'd insist that people only describe me using specific adjectives, namely 'intelligent', 'witty', and 'wise'.
Justine is doing exactly what we bloody well need the government and all local authorities and civil institutions to do.
She is making it impossible to know what her own personal views are on the subject as not relevant while maintaining spaces for both beliefs and not allowing one to silence the other outside of the law. She makes it clear that it does not matter what she thinks personally, and does not involve her own feelings.
That used to be called things like 'integrity' and 'professionalism' back in the day, when those in positions of power and influence actually had some class. Before total emotional incontinence and infantile behaviour became the norm. I respect the hell out of her for it.
Quote from: Robin Moira WhiteIf you want a discussion, it needs to be respectful or I won’t be there.
But it an be argued (and I would indeed argue) that none of what you’re doing, what anyone involved in GRA reform etc is doing, is respectful to women.
You disrespect us by the very act of - as a biologically male person - appropriating the material reality of biologically female people and claiming it as an identity for you to use as you please. In the context of age old male oppression of female people, where males have traditionally extracted whatever resources they want from female people without concerning themselves with the issue of consent, this is just another assault on our human rights. As always, we are objects to be used by male people; not subjects with full agency.
When you make use of facilities designated for female people, and campaign for ever wider access to those facilities for more and more male people - which is the net result of GRR in tandem with self ID in general - you are again disrespecting us.
Biologically male people who respect biologically female people, and acknowledge the ways female people have been systematically hurt and disadvantaged by male rule across the generations, respect our boundaries.
I for one see no reason at all why I should respect biologically male people who don’t respect me, or biologically female people in general.
I think the point for me is that any man who claims to be a woman is demonstrating loud and clear that he has incredibly disordered views about women.
That’s not against the law or anything. I’ve worked with plenty of men with pretty weird views on women and, of necessity, muddled along OK.
but if those men get a say in women’s lives, it will not go well for women. As we’ve seen demonstrated in that interview by Robin clearly believing that women have no right to single sex spaces and are in fact ‘mad’ for even wanting such things...
I think we’ve all been reluctant to say that by definition trans people have disordered views about sex because it feels like a sweeping generalisation and we get told they are bad
but insisting that you are a member of the opposite sex, something that is literally impossible, does of course reveal disordered thinking.
how could it not?
There are many different types of trans activists. There are the ones who hold signs saying “decapitate terfs”. There are the ones who wear black masks and hoods and physically and verbally attack women speaking. There are the ones online who post abuse. There are the ones that scream at babies (that one is unique I grant you). Then there’s the ones like Robin.
Robin is the walking embodiment of the Dentons document. (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-document-that-reveals-the-remarkable-tactics-of-trans-lobbyists/) Robin shares all the same views as the black masked violent activists - that women don’t deserve single sex spaces, that women are witches, that children should be sterilised in order to validate Robin’s beliefs - but does it through a veneer of respectability. Robin ties those beliefs to the legitimacy of being a barrister, uses the gravitas of age and experience to perpetuate the very same ideas that mask-wearing teenagers do. This is what the Dentons document advises to do.
And Robin has had years to consider all this. This is not an impulsive jumping on the activist bandwagon. Robin has knowledge, experience and intelligence and isn’t doing to be part of a group, to be seen as inclusive, as part of peer pressure, or social contagion, or the misplaced anger of youth like so many of the mask-wearing, abusive sign-carrying activists. Robin is doing it as part of a calculated campaign.
I find people like this a great deal more dangerous to the rights of women and children that those impressionable young people who stand at the front of it all.
Robin spoke at the end about the awfulness of puberty for trans people and how stopping puberty would have enabled Robin to have a feminised voice. This is a classic example of why trans activists should never be allowed to influence health care and treatment of children. Like so many activists, Robin sees this from a personal perspective. They have no insight / knowledge of children and adolescence and think that some children avoiding puberty is a good thing.
This is why the NHS / the DfE are so dangerous having allowed trans activists to influence practice. It's why safeguarding children is being systematically eroded - the special trans treatment in the DBS, drag queens for children, the focus on porn in SRE etc. Not saying RMW has advocated for the latter - just pointing out how adults with an agenda have been given an influence that works against the needs of children.
Right off the bat (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4725535-trans-self-id-since-2015-and-no-horror-stories-the-times?reply=123284864) I would consider all the women terrified by rapists in their prisons to be horror stories, all the women who have lost their jobs and endured death and rape threats for not believing in self-ID and having the temerity to say so to be horror stories, the sexually assaulted woman harassed and then refused a female-only life-saving operation of which she’d been assured — endangering her life — to be a horror story.
The rape victim in Brighton forced to share a therapy group with a seemingly prurient male is a horror story. The police door stepping women for putting up mild factual stickers is a horror story. A guillotine on a placard (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4725108-snp-demo-decapitate-trfs) is a horror story. Spitting at women is a horror story. Punching women at Speaker’s Corner is a horror story. Shutting down feminist talks at multiple universities is a horror story. Males taking medals from sportswomen and women writers alike is a horror story. Adolescent males being roomed with females on Girl Guide sleep-aways is a horror story. Calling all powerful female icons “non-females” in our theatres is even a horror story.
We are living in a horror story.
There's very little point replying to this obviously goady thread but I will anyway, for the lurkers. And I will explain this as a woman, living in Scotland.
There's a reason that the GRR Bill is being referred to as the 'Rapist's Charter' here in Scotland.
www.nationalreview.com/news/transgender-sex-offenders-placed-in-womens-jails-in-scotland/
archive.ph/2022.10.04-232359/www.thetimes.co.uk/article/half-of-scottish-trans-prisoners-changed-gender-after-convictions-pftqbbhg6 (http://archive.ph/2022.10.04-232359/www.thetimes.co.uk/article/half-of-scottish-trans-prisoners-changed-gender-after-convictions-pftqbbhg6)
www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/anger-trans-inmates-revert-males-25840252
The reforms to the GRC will make it even easier for predators to take advantage of self id. The SNP, Scottish Greens, Lib Dems and Scottish Labour voted against suggested amendments being put in place to restrict sex offenders from changing their gender, including -
an amendment to pause an application for a GRC for those charged with rape or sexual assault which was defeated by the casting vote of the Presiding Officer.
An amendment which sought to prevent convicted sex offenders being allowed to change their gender.
There were over 150 amendments, discussed over a ridiculously short 2 days, with the majority voted down, including a suggestion to yearly monitor the effects of the GRR Bill on women and girls rights.
The Scottish Government's hand was forced at the 11th hour to hold an additional evidence session because they had refused to hear from experts on VAWG. The 'feminist' groups in support of the bill are all majority funded by the Scottish Government (as reported in various news sources yesterday). Funding from the Scottish Government is contingent on being 'inclusive' which is why there are currently no single sex rape crisis services in the Lothians. The one which is in the process of being set up and has used the single sex exemptions allowed in the EQA2010 is being threatened with challenges for 'discrimination' - this is far from the only example - organisations are being informed (falsely) by lobby groups and others are facing the silencing effect.
The Scottish Government was warned repeatedly that the legislation was poor and conflicted with reserved legislation. They ignored it in their zeal to push it through and now section 35 has had to be invoked.
The SNP had to whip its members into voting for the Bill and even then, faced the biggest revolt by SNP MSP's since they came to power.
The Scottish electorate do not support this bill. There's been a hell of a lot of sunlight on this issue. There's real anger and dismay at the Scottish Government now.
QuoteWhat is this madness costing the country?
Mad (https://twitter.com/SVPhillimore/status/1433707045652418562)ness is le mot juste. I find it so profoundly unsettling to see what is so clearly a belief system (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4729272-is-peter-tatchell-doing-a-reverse-ferret?page=7&reply=123451272) like any other religion be forced upon everyone as if it had any evidence behind it or basis in fact or reason. It has none. And yet it's in schools, the judiciary, sports, the NHS, the press, everywhere. When it is a faith that makes no sense at all, whose tenets show obvious dangers to women and children, and to which the most dubious and awful people flock - not even hiding, but openly.
You grow up thinking that truth and scientific method are unassailable, and then this happens. I've just watched the ITV news, which described a "transgender woman rapist" who committed "her" crimes "when she was a man, before she became a woman." And all I could think was, STOP LYING. He is a man who has done what dangerous men have been doing since the dawn of humanity. He has not become a woman. No man can become a woman. He has changed his haircut. Why are news outlets required to lie in this way, simply because a rapist demands it? Why?
She/they means the actor wants the grammatical patterns she/her/hers and they/them/theirs to be used. Often in alternation.
See image modelling usage. If you are using a screenreader, this image says
If someone tells you that they take more than one pronouns, which should you do?
Make your best effort to use the different sets they've shared. For example, if someone uses she/they pronouns…
Then there is an image of a man with a speech bubble. The words in the bubble say, I was talking to her the other day. They told me…
(https://i.imgur.com/lXljAch.jpg)Quote from: SidewaysOtterNo-one refers to themselves in the third person so this is all about demanding how other people refer to you. Apparently for some it’s not enough to be she/hers, they/them etc, they add an extra layer of demand…
It serves the same social function as honorifics like His Eminence, Her Royal Highness, His Grace and many more; to keep you on edge and remind you of the titled people's exalted status when you speak of them, even when they are not present to hear. These customs of demonstrating public deference effectively reinforce hierarchies. That's why we have such traditions. It is essentially neurolinguistic programming.
So we come to they/them. In my experience, it is possible, although difficult, for some people to learn to always use a plural pronoun for one particular known person. It is possible to master it to the point you can simply speak as normal without having to consciously monitor what you say, until it poses no additional cognitive burden. That's when people suddenly began specifying that they took mixed sets and that they wanted each set used an equal amount of time.
When you want people to feel as if they are walking on eggshells around you, and they have mastered using they/them, what new challenge can you pose? The answer is She/they and He/they.
Quote from: JesusMaryAndJosephAndTheWeeDonHe's saying it for votes though not because he cares about women's rights.
He cares about his legacy and not getting the biggest kicking at the polls in history
Yes you're right, it's a serious moral failing (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4734411-sunak-i-know-what-a-woman-is-an-adult-human-female?page=13&reply=123622614) for a politician to listen to the electorate and try to win an election. Presumably Labour aren't pursuing a similar strategy because they value ideological purity over votes. (https://archive.ph/GaUfK#selection-6261.1-6261.37)
IW's frustration speaks volumes about IW's view of women.
To IW, a woman is a shell, a surface appearance, a skin to inhabit. IW thinks that IW can climb inside that shell because to IW it is unoccupied, empty space. Hence the "better woman than you" comments - IW thinks IW is making better use of a "woman" shell by occupying it with IW's personhood.
The frustration is all "But I've put on the "woman" surface, I look like you, surely that is all it takes, why isn't that enough?" Absolutely no concept that beyond the surface appearance of an adult human female there is an actual human being.
This business of uterine "transplants" into men appears to be about science but it is not. It's about getting the idea out there that men can give birth too, but not just yet, there are a few technical details to be sorted out first. So while we're waiting for the inevitable, let's get on with the social sciences side of things and accept that since men can give birth too (not yet, but soon, soon, it's bound to happen), then there are no real differences between men and women in terms of things that are material and significant, they're just bodies with an interchangeable set of parts. The actual significant differences are surface ones like the chosen forms of appearance.
It is about trying to change how people think by assuming a medical horror is a run-of-the-mill thing just round the corner. It's Overton Window stuff, not science.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Quote from: NotHavingItI think what you are calling " forced teaming" is actually building a consensus around your goals, which tends to be the only way you can actually achieve any meaningful implementation. There is nothing compromising, cynical or suspicious about that.
Two completely different things going on:
1. Groups like Stonewall insisting that all gay people or all feminists are (must be) in favour of self-ID and those that aren't are bigots. That's forced teaming.
2. Different groups that oppose self-ID working together despite different views, whether it's feminists and trans people of Posie Parker and American conservatives. This one is utterly normal and (as many have said) the way you change society.
These conversations with polite, reasonable, male [transsexuals (https://archive.ph/JYetT#selection-4261.29-4261.48)] who explain their difficulties and do it all without the shouting, the ranting, the threats and sexual violence and yada yada that we're all so familiar with, have been happening on [the Mumsnet feminism board] for years.
And yes, anyone compassionate is going to be aware that for these male people, to reclaim women's spaces and services is going to end the privilege set up years ago for men by men without consulting women. Those men's plight is real, they have been harmed by the rather insane activist years.
But if you've been around the block long enough you start to notice two things.
One is that all of these nice male people always, invariably, have the purpose of asking women to draw a line that excludes other males but includes them in women's groups, spaces, facilities, lives.
Now this has been tried. It was the GRA in fact. A very small number of men who had or were in the process of wholly and entirely transitioning, were given the right by other men (no one bothered to look at whether this worked for women or they agreed, because merely women) to use women's spaces, facilities etc. In fact I believe using those spaces (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4745819-trans-and-losing-my-mind?page=8&reply=124028185) was required as part of proving seriousness of transition.
It has been pushed, and exploited and abused beyond belief, because this only would ever have worked if men were able to respect women. And they can't. And it's now broken beyond repair. The time when this was a usable solution to return to is long, long since gone. It is unworkable. Because you will always have a male like the OP who is realistic about biology, fully transitioned, telling you that no one could ever know they were male. And behind the OP will be other male people, all of whom will claim that they pass whether they do or not, some of them will have beards like Alex, and others be shouting 'call me ma'am' at you. And behind them are males who will tell you that a requirement to 'pass' is false and cruelty, and who are you to gatekeep their womanhood, that it isn't about appearance, that women appear as a whole spectrum, the word salad will be enough to drown in. And behind them will be the one with the sword, or the one wanting to raid the sanpro bin to put the tampons up their bums, and the one who wants to help little girls fit their tampons, and the ones who will photograph themselves wanking on the toilet next to you, and the ones who will tell you they're coming in, you can't stop them, and they'll rape/kill you if you look at them wrong.
They will all use the OP's words, claims and access to leverage their own. The very sad truth is, no gatekeeping of some males and not others is possible. There are no cards issued, no gatekeeping on the doors, if it is any single one male then it is all of them.
Females can only have female only, accessible spaces if no male at all is ever permitted to use them and males are capable of respecting female need, inclusion and access equally to their own.
And that brings me to the second thing that every nice TS MNetter has shown us here.
They all of them - all - listen to women explaining, the exclusion of females that is inevitable in order to meet unmet male need, why this does not work for women, why women cannot be the cloth to mop up for male human problems. And they all end as the OP has. In gently, even apologetically, informing that they have listened, and their decision is that they will just use women's spaces because they need to and wish to. Daddy has spoken.
And it's always that women will just have to be excluded and subordinated, because a male person is in need and sad and has problems. And good women would put them first anyway.
Now oddly enough, I'm not ok with that.
Quote from: Fausto Sterling via Alice Robertssex and gender are best conceptualized as points in a multidimensional space
I can work with this.
Sex is a fixed point, or rather, one of two fixed points. Immutable.
Gender is usually, but not always, located around its matching fixed sex point. The distance can vary, and indeed, can change over time.
In some cases gender can ping out of our known, definable, measurable universe and enter a new-niverse of [bluehaired] dimensions.
I'd draw a graph but it might look a bit like boobs.
Women have been vilified for wanting their basic rights since the dawn of time and the OP is just the latest in a very long tradition.
Women wanting the vote were depicted as home wreckers, unfeminine, bad mothers, ball breakers, Old Maids. Women campaigning for access to contraception faced huge opposition with all churches opposing it until the beginning of the 20th century and the Catholic Church still banning it.
Now women wanting to safeguard their existing rights to safe and fair sport, single sex prisons, rape crisis centres, domestic violence shelters and changing rooms where they can undress without a male present find themselves branded fascists.
It is of course same old same old - men opposing women’s rights. Except in this case these are rights that women have already won which men are trying to take. Rights that are important for women and their participation in public life. Men are demanding access to women’s spaces and sports and women are saying NO.
Does the OP really think we are remotely bothered by these hyperbolic, ridiculous insults? We have seen it all before and see it for what it is. Woman hating.
I just came on this thread interested to read the ”experiences of a trans person”, but OMG, the narcissism, the hyperbole, the tedious whinging, the poor logic, the calculated and curated victimhood, the lack of perspective, the bad faith non-“arguments”, the babyish overstatement — if that’s the experience of a trans person I’d rather not “pay it some mind”, thanks.
“I was being brazenly looked up and down”! This must be the “existential violence” deserving of “retaliation” that you talk of, OP — and your post is all of a piece with the logic of any man who justifies thumping women because he doesn’t like how they look at him and they should know their place. It’s misogyny pure and simple. Gender ideology is nothing more than ideologically sanctioned cultural appropriation for juvenile and shallow people who are terminally self-obsessed and more interested in clothes, hairstyles and “whatever camp pretty things they felt like” rather than any really important issues.
And that’s mirrored in the hyperbolic claims about being such an oppressed minority and suffering such “existential violence”. Just how narcissistic and inappropriate do you have to be to look at people with really awful lives - children in poverty, hunger, abuse, people who are disabled, who are sick, who have had really awful things happen to them, those fleeing war and persecution, those who are bereaved and dispossessed, and think that women disagreeing with you and “brazenly looking you up and down” is genuine oppression?Quote from: nilsmousehammerFemales just aren't real people in this ideology. (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4752330-experiences-of-a-trans-person?page=17&reply=124253219) They're kind of a mix of the view a kid has of their sock washing, unconditional nose and arse wiping bit of your mum who has no inner life or thoughts that doesn't revolve around you, a kind of walking public sex aid, a free therapist, and a punchbag.
^^This. It’s tedious and childish, and despite all the scolding, it rests in a mulish inability to see life from any other perspective than that of a collective of self-obsessed individualists who are more interested in getting to do whatever they want whenever they want, than any real sense of social duty or community, or the real lives of other people. I’m not a straight woman, OP, but is a straight kid who wears “pretty camp things” and likes to cross-dress “queer”, but I’m not? What kind of “community” is that?
It’s the ideology of terminally vapid, shallow, consumerist, appearance-obsessed, feelings-obsessed youth and middle aged men who have never emotionally matured and think women are a slave class there to decorate his personal validation fantasies. And it’s never made sense to me why confused teenagers look at these middle aged men and think they have anything in common with them — but actually, it all revolves around a shared anger-fantasy about “mum”, doesn’t it?
Goodness me...it's like the online version of man-spreading on public transport.
Happy to invade a woman's space (though they can magically keep their mass in their own seat when next to another male) whilst telling us we are mean by not centring their comfort when we object to being squished out of what we deserve and have paid for.
The simple truth is that the OP came here, not in the expectation of having a conversation, but to validate their own sense of entitlement by invading a female space and blaming the women here for not making room for them.
So here's the thing....we see you.
We are done. NO FUCKING ROOM AT THE FWR INN.
Just as we pay for our public transport tickets, it's women who make MN, and FWR especially, commercially viable. It's our content (not yours) that gets the clicks and drives advertisers, and as much as you hate that, it's women who make the decisions on where to spend the family money on food, clothes and pretty much anything - that's why advertisers still use this site (despite your best efforts).
This is our space and if you don't like being asked to squish up for a change then here is a revelation for you - don't post here, spread your legs somewhere else.
Quote from: JusteanBiscuitsSo I presume you call ALL men sexual deviants and perverts, right?I didn't say I did, I asked how you tell as you seem to know how we can work this out before they harass, assault, rape or murder us. So if you could share that it would be great.
Yes, what's this reasonable solution we're all too busy screaming to see?
And while we're finding this 'middle ground' and 'not dismissing entire groups of people', how are we going to provide access and facilities for the entire group of female people who cannot use mixed sex spaces? At all?
The 'middle ground' invariably means 'making women accept men in their spaces'.
No. The GRA was the middle ground. Men broke it.
Women: we don't want males in our spaces
TRAs: you bitches, we will fuck you up, I'm a gon beat your ass, kill the TERFs, behead TERFS
Women: yeah, that's why.
Taken from today's excellent article by Sex Matters: https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/searching-for-a-simple-answer/
the right to “live in a chosen gender” (with or without a certificate) is not a right to distort reality, subject other people to humiliating treatment or compel others to act as if they believe the person has actually changed sex,
As the article concludes, trans rights are human rights and other people's rights are human rights too.
To state that is not hateful or justifying of violence to a typically balanced mind. But this is what women are saying that is leading to a political group calling to behead them. In public. As if this is a normal thing to think about anyone who has displeased you, as opposed to indicative of fairly major issues.
It seems the OP and their supporters need to work harder to reframe their trauma.
Quote from: NixieRoseFeel privileged that he's trusted you with his secret.
It's not a secret, it's a lie.
Lady peen are sparkly and pretty and shoot out glittery stuff... male penises (peni?) are just sexual organs that ejaculate semen I think?
Some men crave women’s attention so much they’ll actually pay women to scold them.
At some point I resent witnessing them getting this service for free.
It is only once a year that you can change sex. (https://twitter.com/salltweets/status/1617852841569447936) But to a maximum of three times. Just make sure you don't get stuck as some unfortunate sex on the third attempt.
Refreshing like a pigeon at a bird feeder. (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4752156-equality-act-what-next?page=23&reply=124499405)100,000 (https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/623243)
It is going to take us a LOT of work and prodding to make the debate a serious one involving more than six MPs, only five of them awake, and all agreeing that it's all fiiiiine.
Quote from: DurableBookQuote from: someone on RedditThey rely on asserting a cissexist view that something about you that’s systemic makes you your assigned sex at birth.
Feminist. The feminist view.
You're just sexist, son. You think femaleness is irrelevant and there's nothing about a woman that a man can't buy. You think the experiences of the four billion female persons on this planet are less important than your feelings. You think your opinion is a new gospel. Your penis is showing.
When they handwave about how meaningless biology is, they push the idea that women aren't human, but an indeterminable collection of ideas and practices that can be laid down and taken up at will by anyone on earth. The only definitions of womanhood they'll allow require availability for colonisation, appropriation, and mimicry by men. If men can't possess or claim it, does it even exist?
The positive is that the term “her penis” is in scare quotes throughout the article. I don’t think I’ve seen that before. It’s a step forward, and the writer is definitely thumbing their nose at the atrocious Ipso guidelines, while still feeling obliged to stay technically within them.
It’s also interesting how very clear it’s made that he’s a man/male, and a reference to how recent the “transition” is, in a way that allows for the suggestion that he might have been less than sincere.
Along with the term “trans predator” and the reference to Adam Graham/Isla Bryson, I think this actually represents a step in the right direction. It’s not that long since we were seeing pieces that made no reference whatsoever to the fact of these sex offenders actually being male, just calling them “women” throughout.
I hope very much we won’t see any more of those now we’re in the post-Graham era.
The logical conclusion of trans-ideology is intellectual dictatorship: one person (or a tiny group) telling everyone else what is real and what to think.
I felt a bit sorry for him because he might have been too exhausted to think sensitively after asking everyone in the entire building their pronouns, to establish just who is a man and who is a woman, but then I remembered we gender criticals have to carry out genital inspections, and that's far more involving, especially when you've forgotten your Marigolds and your torch.
Thing is, I suspect that this particular school is easy to ostracise because it’s already viewed by liberals as part of the problem. It’s a Christian school that probably is overtly conservative.
That makes it really easy to dismiss the stance it’s taken as ‘right wing’ and ‘bigoted’.
These categories function so that the groups don’t listen to each other at all, and never recognise where there might be common ground or where the reviled group might actually have a point.
The Guardian’s reporting of this is an almost perfect demonstration of this rhetoric.
It has the added advantage of silencing anyone within the ‘liberal’ camp, even getting them to police their own thoughts, because they don’t want to see themselves as conservative. That would be awful. Best not to pursue those thoughts and to seek to cleanse oneself of any questions about whether trans people are actually the most marginalised group that’s ever existed and at risk of violence and genocide if anyone sets biological categories for school sport. That way bigotry lies.
I realise I am actually quite shaken by it all. Seeing that photo of them. All these women with short grey or white hair, attentive and ready to listen - you can see it is needed - there to meet and do something so humble, to focus on themselves and their own community.
And these bastards are protesting it.
And the poor women in NZ, ready to give their speeches, to have a voice. And the fuckers drown them out.
Its really got to me.
You think you're in a grey area and that's actually part of the problem. You've been told people on "our side" want to prevent trans people from existing...
Most people on "our side" don't give a damn about what adults want to wear or call themselves or have done to themselves.
We just don't want to be forced to accept men as women and to give them access to single sex spaces and sports. And we don't want important sex specific language neutralised to "people with [whatever body part]".
I think we all start from a grey area and hope to have some nuance, but like everyone says it really does just become more black and white the more you look into it. If stonewall had campaigned for third spaces a lot of this unpleasantness wouldn't have got so far... but like everyone has said, it's never good enough.
Pronouns, I wouldn't hurt anyone but I won't use them, I use their name. I think that using them, adding them to sign offs perpetuates this whole movement and I've got to the point where I think less of people that do use them.
Non binary is a nonsense, it's just called a personality.
The fact that our young people are constantly wondering who they are, I mean I guess we did when we were teenagers, wearing different clothes, acting out, but none of it caused irreversible harm like it can do now.
The aggression from the TRAs what happened at SFW event the other day worries me greatly, we really are in a difficult place as a society.
I think for most of us, we start from a place of grey and then realise the full implications, sport, prisons, religious women, safety, the larping side of it, is that another word we is for the 3 letter one? The danger to children...
As an aside, thanks to all the people on here, I seldom post but am here every day.
I went to a ‘women’s liberation in education’ day at a university not long ago. It was a really thoughtful, interesting day of talks and workshops about women’s rights and safeguarding in education. Attended by women from all walks of life. (I was sitting between some young Muslim students and an older Lesbian couple. Really diverse and really, really interesting hearing lots of different women talk).
Outside, all day, was a group of trans rights protestors. They were banging on the windows and screeching through a megaphone ‘Die terf scum’ and ‘scratch a terf a Nazi bleeds’.
This, for me, just sums it up. A group of women having quite sensible discussions about the grey areas versus the same old male entitlement and threats of violence. They don’t even want is to think or speak. Just roll over.
NO!
This is fascinating. Not watched it all yet (just scrubbed through) but is this a fair summary of events?
Bloke who knows pretty much nothing about the Transgender encroachment on women’s sex based rights stumbles across the trans protest happening outside The Lesbian Project meeting.
Bloke has a small YouTube channel that focuses on documenting British Police at work and challenging their professional transgressions.
Bloke obviously takes an interest in the police who are there to supervise the protest and starts filming, the intended subjects of his footage are the police, but the TRAs don’t know this and decide Bloke must be some sort of enemy force to trans rights.
Chaos ensues. All on camera.
Trans activists do normal transactivist type things.
Police do not behave well.
Bloke is surprised, but not in a good way.
Bloke challenged police using his specialist police-watching knowledge.
Bloke uploads footage to aforementioned small YouTube channel, where his dedicated police-watching audience are similarly surprised-in-not-good-way.
Video gets shared around a bit. New comments are made sharing the back story.
Bloke reaches the tipping top of trans mountain in a single day, perhaps the fastest ever assent from neutral base camp to the absolute ‘these people are scary’ summit. Takes his entire YouTube audience up with him.
It seems strange that they hold a Protest/Party in street, go to the trouble of making banners with their messages then go all precious and offended when someone peacefully takes notice of their Protest. A Protest outside a building where women are meeting peacefully and out of sight to discuss their rights as women. A talk probably disrupted by the music and loudspeakers outside and the Police look on.
Look up Maria Maclachlan (website Peak Trans) who was assaulted by 3 men in Hyde Park, Speaker's Corner just for doing what you did - filming them on her phone in a public place, they also smashed her camera and she was punched in the face. The main assailant was convicted. He was in his twenties and she was sixty. The judge made her refer to the bloke as a woman in court. So she had to say "she punched me" - not "he punched me". This is how female victims of male violence are treated.
That man who verbally abused you through the megaphone in the red beret, is Trans "woman" Sarah Jane Baker, convicted of kidnap, torture and attempted murder, and who still issues death threats to JK Rowling. These are the types of men women are expected to accept into our single-sex spaces
I will not be conforming to compelled speech to enact something I do not believe, to enable a male person to mock female people. Whether they are doing this intentionally or not.
Equally with the tampon issue: whether it is fully consciously done or not, the penetrative aspect is obvious. And likely why pattern recognition (which is not a hate crime incidentally) demonstrates that many male people fetishize this particular piece of equipment from women's lives.
Tampons to female people are boring, mundane, functional things that are a nuisance to have to buy and keep to hand. There is nothing exciting or socially interactive about them.
We don’t want men in any of our spaces and we don’t want to be compelled to alter the language we use to describe other people or to describe our female bodies or female bodily processes. We also don’t want our children to be brainwashed by schools or other institutions into thinking that a regressive ideology based on narrow stereotypes is fact.
How is this “anti trans”?
Quote from: hotdiggetydogwhen the shoes on the other foot and men "pretend to be women" (as the bigots put it) there's absolute outrage.
Why are genderists so binary/black and white?
It's really not that hard.
It's not "pretending" per se that's the problem, although in a sexist society the different power dynamics of male and female means some pretending is a problem.
It's the insistence that these men are women, because that imposes the sexist and reductive belief that womanhood is a mental rather than physical difference on all women whether that reflects how they experience their own lives and identities or not, and the subsequent leveraging of this imposed definition to appropriate resources that were set up to mitigate the consequences of being female within a structurally sexist society and hand them over to male people.
But you know, that's just my coherent and self consistent analysis that fits the observed facts.
So hey, here's an idea! Instead of little snipey asides about what others believe, which might sound clever but can be easily dismissed with a moment's actual thought, why don't you present a coherent alternative view of sex/gender that better fits the observed facts than ours? You do have one, right? I mean, surely no one would be shallow enough to make snippy little comments criticising others without a strong, clear understanding of why they are wrong behind it?
We ALL know (https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4782092-would-you-ever-consider-a-transwoman-a-woman?page=19&reply=125339379) that a ‘balanced’ opinion is one that is weighted heavily towards giving male people what they want.
You know that research finding that people feel that women are dominating meetings and taking over if (collectively) their contributions reach something like the dizzying heights of 1/3 of the contributions collectively made by men. This is the opinion version of that. If there’s more than a tokenistic acknowledgement of women, then it is ‘unbalanced’ and unfair.
It’s one of those ‘balanced’ systems where the fulcrum has to be hugely offset from the midpoint.
(https://i.imgur.com/oiiKgJf.jpg)
They’re not “safe spaces”, they’re single sex spaces. I really hate the way slippery language like this is inserted into discussion. The next move in the TRA’s game is so transparent: they’re safe spaces and transwomen need to be safe too so…. No. They’re single sex spaces and services so women can undress, receive intimate care, sleep and discuss their trauma without males present. End of.
This ‘enforcement’ issue is really just distraction.
Were we ever able to ‘enforce’ access to publicly open spaces? No.
But we could call security/police etc. We could make so much noise to alert others. This was how it was in the past
Now we have no recourse. At all.
Any male who respected women and girl’s and their need for their own spaces will not enter. Males who have no respect for female single sex spaces and those female people’s needs will be the ones we should be very wary of however they present themselves.
It isn't a question of 'enforcing' anything. The clarification will just give employers, service providers, public bodies the right to exclude men from women's spaces, retaining the status quo that has been well-established forever but is now under threat.
That means that these spaces can be properly flagged as women's and providers of them can ask people to leave or take other kinds of appropriate action. No one will be pre-emptively scanning for sex, in relation to most services
As for people 'passing' this will happen to the same extent as it ever did. I imagine that there have always been a few transwomen slpping into toilets etc, sometimes because of a genuine fear of harrassment in the men's spaces and sometimes for malign reasons.
Where it is a problem, women will have the confidence to make a complaint. Where it isn't a problem most women would probably do what must have happen for ages until TRAs fucked everything up: turn a blind eye out of kindness.
Threads like these do my head in. it’s basically ‘oooh but you can’t actually stop TW coming in can you, I mean not really so why bother even trying, you might as well just give up’
until 5 minutes ago men stayed out of women’s spaces because we, the collective we, had a social contract where we knew full well what spaces were reserved for women and which were ok to be mixed. However thanks to a minority of very very loud narcissistic TW & their allies we’re now expected to believe that it’s all sooooo hard to have single sex spaces backed up by stonewall lying to ppl about what the law says. Decent men whether they were wearing a dress or not would stay the fuck out of women’s spaces.
and for the record, back in the days when we were told it was only 5000 old ppl, men who wanted to transition were told to use womens spaces to demonstrate that they were serious about transitioning. No one ever actually bothered to ask women if they were ok with that
It's weird though, isn't it, how all these usually sharp and articulate people - usually women, but not always - only ever misspeak/are taken out of context - on this one particular topic? This one particular topic where anyone who disagrees with genderism is likely to be told to die in a fire/get raped/be submerged in acid? I'm sure it's nothing to do with that though.
Rowling is on record for saying that she has no problem calling trans men he/trans women she
Well turns out we are not a hive mind then.
I don't agree with my language being coerced
I don't use the wrong pronouns because it implies I believe in regressive stereotypes
I don't use wrong pronouns because the confusion they cause can have real world effects
I don't use wrong pronouns because it makes it harder for individuals to change their mind if they are socially transitioned
I don't use wrong pronouns because pronouns are sex based
I don't use wrong pronouns because they are for the ease of the speaker not the subject and they create too much cognitive dissonance for me to maintain long-term without mental exhaustion
Even if I try I forget and pronouns are meant to make speech easier not more difficult.
I know it's difficult for you to hear that we all have our own distinct thoughts, views and practices on the subject. We tend to put that down to choice and personality though rather than our special GC identity.
GC basically describes any human who believes sex is real and stereotypes are bad. That's a lot of people.
A larger group agrees sex is real but have differing views on sexism, stereotypes and gender roles.
I'm not going to agree with everyone in group one, let alone group two who are very different from me.
Shocking I know.
The problem with her position - let's have a women lite option for some men, is that while it sounds both inclusive and pragmatic it is anything but.
She's imagining laws where she can giggle with Dylan Mulvaney while they both do their make up in a lovely public toilet, but exclude Isla Bryson from following 15 year old girls in a more secluded space.
She's also imagining that we have the same line, and that the men who don't meet the standard are going to be happy stay out of the spaces. Also that we are allowed to even talk about where the line is, because to acknowledge the line is to acknowledged that these men aren't women at all.
On the start of the quoted debate, it's not true that transgender activism would be "just about people wanting to live their lives", because all of it requires extreme changes in how everybody else lives:
Language must be rewritten so that all women who are women because they are female are now stripped of their own identities as embodied identities are invalid.
Female single-sex spaces must be destroyed so that any male person can enter any such space by simply arguing that they are transgender.
Female sports will become mixed sex sports and few female people will reach the podium.
Female short-lists, scholarships and awards will now be open for anyone who identifies as a woman which means less likelihood that any particular person of the female sex will get a place on that short list or get the scholarship or award. When all these were created because of an under-representation of female-bodied people, the outcome is unfair.
It's really common to try to set the boundaries for a debate from the start in a way which makes it harder to argue opposing points.
Here that is done by simply stating that transgender people "just want to live their lives", so anyone who points out the clashing rights would then be seen as stopping transgender people from doing that and then being seen as a bigot.
He's knocked every single woman in the list behind him back a place.
Quote from: clpsmumWhy does it matter ffs how does it affect you, are you competing?
You haven’t grasped that feminism is a collective movement fighting for all women, have you?
If the UK becomes an outlier in international circles with only females on the team, we'll drop in the rankings over time. There will be pressure to fit in with the norm. Coaching culture is more competitive than the sport itself - look how many sports had exploitative and abusive coaches for years - as long as they were winning, everyone looked the other way.
The USA is proving itself profoundly sexist in this way and it has big influence to make sure that men come first.
There is a delightful interview somewhere online with Austin Killips where she [sic] talks about her hormonal struggles and how difficult it is to manage her hormonal moods. Two blokes simpering at each other about the challenges of femininity. I may have thrown my phone across the room.
Amy properly skirts around everything in that article. It says nothing really, just that 18 to 24 year olds support trans people.
That's so vague it's meaningless, and Amy says absolutely nothing about her own personal life which is a wonderful and sensible approach, because it's private.
The Amy's of this world have little wiggle room for honesty in the 2020s which is an interesting thing in itself.
Fortunately older people who do know what words mean are able to push back whether Amy wants us to or not.
It's a funny old pastime, showing up on Mumsnet to moan at mums for not agreeing men are women!
Ah I think I understand the position we are supposed to adopt in order to be compliant, non-hateful and non-transphobic.
We are not allowed to talk about, or have words to describe, genital preferences for the type of body for the persons we have sex with. Having such words, or wanting such words is wrong. Quite literally the love that dares not speak its name.
Which is not to say we have to actually have sex with the people who don't fit our preferences, we just can't say we have such preferences, or do anything to pre-filter the people we date to rule out the ones we know we won't be interested in. Or have social events at which we will be more likely to be able to readily meet the people we might want to go further with, by excluding those who have no chance.
Complaining about this is transphobic.
The original article is reporting the good news that a lot of people have given up fighting the inexorable victory of this new mindset.
The purpose of the article is to make each woman who isn't happy about it feel more isolated, more afraid to object, more shamed and uncertain of her right to have a word to describe her sexual orientation.
Well, pro-women = anti-trans. Lesbians are unarguably pro-women.
So, yes, by one of the many definitions of anti-trans - all of which are set by transactivists - they are. Enjoy your resentment.
Consider this:
You love bacon sandwiches and don't like cake, or any sweet food.
It becomes fashionable to say a bacon sandwich is a cake.
You're not anti-cake, you just don't like them for yourself.
People keep pressing cake on you: "You love cake!"
You try to explain you don't like that sort of cake.
You are derided - "Victoria sandwich, bacon sandwich, what's the difference?!"
Trying a different tack, you request a bacon cake.
The unfortunate result is a vanilla sponge layered with jam, cream & bacon.
"You can't tell the difference," they jeer, "It's a sandwich. With bacon."
Patiently, you explain you like your bacon between slices of bread, not cake ...
And that's it, you're done for. "BIGOT!" they scream; "Anti-cake monster!"
So what do you do?
Mount a campaign for the return of the old, "normal" and "accurate" (bigot!) definitions of cake and sandwich?
Or do you eagerly embrace the Victoria Bacon Cake as your newly preferred food, consigning the cake previously known as a bacon sandwich to a murky history you'd rather not revisit?
I hardly need to tell you that even admitting you once enjoyed bacon sandwiches is social death. You'll just about get away with it if you refer to them as cakes and emphasise that you didn't know any better back then.
I realise this doesn't work perfectly, but I typed it so I'll post it.
QuoteAttraction isn't as simple as you're making out.
Indeed - if you think attraction isn't simple, why do you want to use the same word for clearly different types of attraction?
Do you think female-attracted females don't deserve a name?
Here we have in real time the problem that arises when people think men can turn into actual women.
Transwomen are male. That's why they are called trans in the first place.
Some women would date a transwoman, but that makes them bisexual, because in the real world there are two sexes.
The mental gymnastics these people need is exhausting to think about.
the 'respect diversity' people never want to talk about anything real do they?
they never want to talk about women locked up in prison with rapists, about sterilised children, about women and children assaulted by men in women's toilets, about women subjected to voyeurism by men in women's changing rooms, about women feeling unable to participate in their own sports, about prizes intended to boost visibility and recognition of women being given to men.
As for 'trans people have always existed.' No. Sexism, misogyny and homophobia have always existed, therefore people who haven't fitted into sexist, misogynistic and homophobic societies have always existed.
(https://i.imgur.com/GlykhZZ.gif) (https://sex-matters.org/take-action/make-the-equality-act-clear/)
https://sex-matters.org/take-action/make-the-equality-act-clear/
I have learned the hard way not to discuss these matters in a group. You only need one person to disagree with you and suddenly everyone else takes fright and turns against you to signal their virtue. The backlash can be horrendous and very upsetting - I had to endure people making comments about me in front of me and suddenly it was assumed I was a GC monster with no feelings, or that I deserved everything I got. And this was from people who've known me for decades and whom I counted as friends.
I will discuss it with individual people quietly but some don't want to have those discussions, which is fine and I'm not going to push it because it will damage the friendship. Others do want to talk and are sometimes glad to have found someone of a similar mindset and then we are free to discuss less quietly!
My social media are separated; I have GC accounts and 'me' accounts and there is nothing on my GC accounts to link to me in real life. Only a handful of people whom I trust know my identity.
I’m getting braver with other parents - just this week I’ve been very outspoken with parent friends of 10+years about my views - both very “be kind” lovely types, but exactly those who perhaps haven’t looked beyond the rainbow flags to see the red ones.
I think it's interesting when the word "menstruator" is justified by the claim that women past menopause do not menstruate. I think this illustrates one of the creepy purposes of using dehumanising terms such as "menstruator", which is to separate women into different groups and pretend like those groups have nothing in common with each other. It's basically a "divide and conquer" strategy, splitting women up into different groups and placing them in different silos, socially, politically, linguistically. And yet, women past menopause are the same group as women who menstruate, just older!!! You can't be in menopause unless you are female.
The dehumanisation is not only in the redefining of the words 'girl' and 'woman' and 'female' and their replacement with "menstruator" "cervix-haver" and "pregnant person." It's also in the pretense that the only thing that's important about you is today's biological function, and the pretense that you can be categorized solely on the basis of this particular function, as if all the other aspects of being female are something totally unconnected, as if we are all little lego toys, with parts that can be disconnected in space and time.
But in the real world, the baby born with a uterus is the same person as the adolescent girl a few years later who gets her first period, who is the same person as the young woman a few years later who gives birth, who is the same person as the woman 20 years later who undergoes menopause, who is the same person as the woman 10 years after that who gets uterine cancer, who is the same person as the woman who gets a hysterectomy for that uterine cancer. We're not just female in the one moment where a man looks at us and says, "menstruator." We're female for the entirety of our lives!
It's been shown that the media is actually quite poor at changing what people think. What it's very good at is controlling what people think about. And for that, it's pretty vital that organs like the Daily Mail are not allowing this discussion to be so one-sided or memory holed entirely.
You can't have it all ways. You can't say that transwomen are making a mockery/presenting a danger towards 'real' women by wanting to share their space/be acknowledged as women, while shrugging your shoulders at a publication that has primarily made its money from fetisishing the female body and mocking anything that falls outside of its narrowly defined gender roles. Dig into pretty much any long running thread on this board and you'll find comments linking male to female transgenderism with fetishistic motive but apparently that's not relevant when it's a zoomed in paparazzi camera on an eighteen year old's cleavage? Give me a break.
The DM doesn't give a shit about 'fighting women's corners' - if it did it would stop feeding the sidebar of shame and instruct its reporters to cover issues like why more mums than ever before are having to turn to food banks under the Conservative government and the effect that's having on their mental health and our future generations. They'd be talking about rape culture, the lack of cultural and leisure opportunities for young working class girls, the way the NHS is still failing women of colour... the list goes on.
The sexualisation of barely legal female bodies in the media is an issue you should be far more concerned about than the miniscule percentage of the population who identify as transgender. Your daughters are FAR more likely to be influenced by the unrealistic beauty and gender standards they see in these tabloids than they are the tiny and minute possibility that they may encounter a transwoman (much less a predatory one) in a woman's public toilet. But once again, with the creation and endorsement of this thread, gender critical feminists have proved they're a single issue movement who don't care about women, only eliminating a subset of women they see as unaccepable.
What subset of women exactly? Women aren't sets or subsets. We are one set.
Stickybackplasticbear: Eeeee do you ever think you're on the wrong side of history when you're celebrating a rag like this?
Hepwo: How do you get on a side of history? Back side, front side? It's so confusing.
Redebs: Missing your moral compass?
Hepwo: I have a gyroscope.
Did you know human ears act like gyroscopes and stop us falling over if we hear an opinion that differs to another opinion.
I remember as a kid laughing along with things like the "Daily Mail Headline Generator" where you'd click a button on the website and it would show you a mockup with something like "Illegal Immigrants Gave Princess Diana Aids to Steal Benefits". [DM headline generator when you were "a kid"? How old are you? - Ed.] And I never batted an eye at Student Unions getting the Daily Mail banned from on-campus shops. I'd just received the opinion that Daily Mail was an evil propaganda paper for bigots and accepted that. What is very sinister is that I can't remember from where I ever got that belief or when. It was just something I "knew".
In any case, it's kind of funny how The Guardian is 'our' paper but we disagree with most of the stuff printed in it or at least see major flaws (like the one about Black girls being disproportionately targeted for strip searches which fell apart completely under the most superficial examination); whilst the Daily Mail keeps on coming out with stuff that we do agree with but is 'their' paper.
This whole thread reminds me of that conversation between Stella Creasy, MP and a young woman who worked in some business analysis field, which culminated in an angry Stella Creasy declaring "Feminism isn't about women, it's about power."
That's your division right there. Those who care about feminism for its own sake and those for whom it's part of a general Left Wing identity and a tool to advance their Leftist cause.
Face facts, the Left is no longer getting the political capital from Feminism it once got. Trans minorities are the new hotness. It's traded you all in for a younger model. (Offensive analogy, yes... but to who?)
I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that working class (gulps) men are reading. I mean actually reading, a newspaper. And the thought that ANYONE is reading ANYTHING when it hasn't been produced entirely by saintly virgins rapt in prayer and meditation HORRIFIES me. Please please MN promise that you will not encourage this evil (clutches pearls).
Or at least encourages it only for long enough for whoever it was to get their rocks off. We're not monsters after all.
Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
Sir Humphrey: Oh and Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?
Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country as long as she's got big tits.
“You know you’re being an ally when you’re doing things that make you feel uncomfortable”.
It really is in plain sight isn't it. They say the quiet parts out loud.
No. If you feel uncomfortable about doing something that is supposed to make you an ally, you are ignoring your compass that guides your decisions about which ones are right for you. If your intuition is telling you something isn't right in your eyes, then fucking go and find out more, and work out if there is something about what you are doing that you know is poor safeguarding, or leads people to harm.
You should never just tamp it down because some consultant tells you that this is way to be being a 'good' person.
Society may expect things of people of that sex but we should be trying to alter those expectations not alter birth certificates. In a nutshell, there is the difference between the traditional Gay rights movement and the new corporate sponsored LGBTPLC movement.
The point I would make, is that the purpose of debate isn't necessarily to change your opponent's mind. That mostly doesn't happen.
The real point of debate is to test the strength of arguments, and potentially change the minds of a more neutral audience that may be witnessing the debate.
To say "I'm not going to change the minds of the 10%"... who cares if you are going to change their minds? Just destroy their position anyway, if you have the arguments to do it.
Exactly.
'Think of the lurkers.'
This is for the lurkers on here who may be reading this:
When you make a concerted effort to alter our language and our long-held understanding of human nature in order to eliminate sex-based rights and safeguarding for females… expect pushback.
When you begin involving people’s children in an ideology that not only exposes little girls to naked males in traditionally female spaces, but which is psychologically unhealthy, teaches hatred of the body, and has an end goal of medicalization and radical body modification… expect SEVERE pushback.
When your activism hinges on violence, demonization, and an unwillingness to debate, and which demands 100% capitulation, without question, to an ideology that introduces brand new and illogical concepts that affect the more vulnerable sex… EXPECT PUSHBACK.