What fresh hell is this

[Dorothy Parker]

Kirstie Allsopp

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.

Debate on Tran's and a comment about Kathleen Stock

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.

[Dorothy Parker]

Marathon Man

He's knocked every single woman in the list behind him back a place.

Why 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?

[Dorothy Parker]

Transwoman wins women's US cycling race & gets $35k prize

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.

[Dorothy Parker]

@stonewalluk: the descent of a once world-leading lesbian & gay rights charity into the depths of insanity and reckless stupidity. A thread https://twitter.com/berk_hamstead/status/1655890490577895427

From HER To HIM: The Downfall Of A “Lesbian” Dating App – Shay Woulahan
Even some liberal women have been grappling with how to approach using the app if they are genuinely same-sex attracted. On Instagram, one woman left a comment stating that some women only want to have a sexual relationship with someone of the same sex. She clarified that she wasn’t trying to be a “TERF,” lest she be labelled “transphobic.”

HER responded by telling her to “just swipe left” and went on to explain that she needed to reflect on why her sexuality isn’t “inclusive.” Perhaps most disturbingly, they told her she was welcome to use the app only so long as she kept the specifics of her sexual attraction “to herself.”

‘Lesbians being anti-trans is a lesbophobic trope’ – Amy Ashenden
The other day I got a WhatsApp from a lesbian friend. “I’m worried lesbians are seen as anti-trans,” she said. This is someone who, even in her thirties, has struggled to embrace the word ‘lesbian’.

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.

Attraction 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.

[Dorothy Parker]

Victor Madrigal-Borloz's (UN) verdict on the UK: 'Keep calm and respect diversity'

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.

How did people start to believe in this trans stuff?

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.

Homophobia in drag – Ben Appel
I began to fear we had reached a point of no return a couple of years ago, during a conversation I had with a supposedly ‘progressive’ friend. I told her that, if I had been a young boy now, I likely would have been prescribed puberty blockers and gone on to medically transition. ‘And you don’t think you would’ve been happy as a transwoman?’, she asked me. Her question left me speechless. I couldn’t find the words to state the obvious: that I am a gay man, not a transwoman; that statistics tell me my medical transition may not have been successful; and that I would suffer severe medical complications. In any case, if I had transitioned, I wouldn’t be living an authentic life. After all, isn’t that what this is supposed to be about? Living authentically?

[Dorothy Parker]

https://sex-matters.org/take-action/make-the-equality-act-clear/

What's Wrong With The Sex Matters Petition?
Uh oh.

NACF's front page was plastered with this for a short while – a post in every board (like this one, tacked onto this thread).

Baroness Falkner is right to stand up to gender ideology – Joan Smith
Trans people in this country have the same rights as everyone else, which is right and proper. What activists are demanding is additional rights, which in this case compromises women’s rights to privacy and safety. And if the attack on Falkner shows anything, it’s the desperation of people with authoritarian views who fear they’re going to lose.

[Dorothy Parker]

Cancel Culture and The Chilling Effect - a thread to share your experiences

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.

Green periods?

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!

[Dorothy Parker]

Can we have a Daily Mail apprection thread after this article?!

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.

What's this? Some good old-fashioned concern trolling!

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.

[Dorothy Parker]

Pink News Trans Summit & Wickes

“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.'

For TRA lurkers: Don’t be surprised by pushback. EXPECT it.

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.

[Dorothy Parker]

Sung to the tune of Take Me To The River by Talking Heads:

Take me to the trigger
Don't give up your day job
Neither big nor clever
Cringe to the extreme.

That's as far as I've gotten. Thank you and good night.

{Scattered applause}