AIBU to think anti-trans posts online contribute to real-life harm? Thread no 2

I do believe there are many who suffer with mental illness regarding body dysphoria and have complete empathy, but the men who suddenly turn 50/60 and start wearing fishnet stockings and lipstick, well, it's a fetish.

There is a difference, but how are we meant to know what's a fetish, who's a pervert and who is suffering from a mental illness?

I agree with your entire list but still baffled as to why you think when other people post similar arguments on MN that they are “anti-trans” and “cause harm in real life” but yours don’t.

This is the problem with people ready to cry ‘hate’ and ‘transphobic’ without listening. Most of what people are railing about is protection for children and women.

I feel sorry for those people fighting for good against what I regard as “harm in real life” and daily working life, like hardworking nurses forced to be humiliated at the hands of male fetishism, or academics and journalists cancelled and sacked for saying sex is real, or the safeguarding of girls given no consideration in girl guides, and any number of women going about their business and having to be uncomfortable around males in places they shouldn’t be.

That’s who I feel sorry for. People choose their identity but women didn’t ask for this.

But if you think women’s rights and child safeguarding concerns = anti trans then you already lost the argument.

'Transphobic' has become a meaningless word online. The performative, cry bully meltdowns are the equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum because you won't tell them they're a dragon and can fly. The people validating the delusions are reprehensible. The wave of detransitioners to come will give a lot of medical and psych 'professionals' sweaty nightmares.

We don't validate any other mental delusions (except possibly advanced dementia which is rightly seen as the serious illness it is). The trans 'community' is rooted in autism and people who find community online, especially through gaming and platforms like Discord. It's why it has been able to gain so much reach so quickly. It's also why teens have been sucked into this, especially through gaming and fandom communities. I absolutely agree with you in case that isn't clear. I know a rather lumpen, unattractive, autistic man in his forties who has decided to play his online life as a sort of anime schoolgirl in fishnets. People fawning over him make me sick. If he was just a 'normal' bloke people would think he was a creep for his obsessive interest in this style of dress. Instead he is validated to death online, mostly by Americans and Canadians. I feel sorry for his wife and children to be honest

I mean yeah. It must be hard to have any mental illness. It doesn’t mean we pander to them and affirm their delusions.

Most transwomen are raging AGP fetishists though.

A "woman" sexually assaulted me with their penis in a ladies toilet. That's not normal female behaviour. Women generally don't reveal their vulvas and use them as a tool to attack other women with.

Therefore I would be wary of any male dressed as a woman in a female space in case I get attacked again. That's not transphobic. That's me asserting boundaries to protect myself.

I can't tell which men are safe and which men are dangerous just by looking at them, therefore all men are banned from female spaces. Likewise, I cannot tell which trans are safe and which are dangerous just by looking at them. I think it's unfair to expect me to ignore my inbuilt desire to protect myself and accommodate such men in female spaces.

Rather than cause women to feel uncomfortable and in some cases distressed, it would be better if trans could fight for their own safe space which keeps everyone feeling safe and protected.

Men who pretend to be women are the safest demographic. I'd turn the question back at you and ask if pro-trans posts online contribute to real-life harm - and by that I mean actual harm.

The problem is, while there is nothing wrong about your list, most transactivists would call you a transphobic bigot for daring to suggest any of them, which means it has become imperative to keep pointing the facts out, because if we don’t, we get the situation of child transitioning and Stonewall ‘law’. Women saying they don’t want fetishists in our spaces has had no bearing whatsoever on some men bullying other men, and it’s insane to think it has.

OTOH, personally I don’t like that sort of clear crossdressing in public - it’s not neutral, it’s a fetishistic act which everyone around him was forced to participate in. There’s a fella in my town who parades around Aldi in cliched 80’s hooker gear for hours on end at 10am - that’s not living his life, it’s a sexualised display at the cost of the (mainly female) shoppers who are out living their lives on a Monday morning.

Im sorry that you had to go through that

When this all started over a decade ago many of us offered to help campaign for fourth spaces for trans identifying people and for our trouble we were verbally abused, threatened with rape, torture and death, assaulted and called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists or TERFs. It became clear very quickly that its not about them being unsafe in the mens but about them wanting validation of their professed identity and for some about their sexual gratification, so now I nolonger care where these men go or if they have access to unisex facilities as long as they stay out of the women's facilities.