Men who parade how "feminist" they are but who can fuck right off...

Ehric has it

How do feminists transplain Kim? Do you mean by questioning the assertion that trans people are biologically the sex they gender-identify with, despite being male with a vagina or female with a penis?
Or the assertion that people have gendered essential brains that are as determined as their physical sex is?
Because it's not trabsplaining to question that. If I told you 'you don't feel like a woman, you just feel like an unhappy man' I might be transplaining. But to say to you 'I question your assertion that you are female in your brain because I do not accept the concept of essentialist gendered brains' that's just me expressing my perfectly valid opinion.

There is no equivalence between women / transwomen and those other groups (black / white, gay / straight etc.). If trans activist goals were the recognition of trans rights as trans rights, this in all likelihood wouldn't be happening. In that case it might be more like black people "splaining" to gay people. However since trans activist goals are currently the erasure of womanhood as an axis of oppression, and the assumption of women's rights (such as they are) for trans people, feminists have every right to express themselves on these issues.

presumably anyone who isn't trans though is liable to do that rather than feminists in particular? or is it feminists in particular?

kim - do you think cis women are more privileged than trans women? Do you think this is analogous to black and white people?

Exactly Stephanie

Absolutely StephanieDA

There are misogynistic anti-feminist trans women activists and there are feminist trans women activists. I support the feminist ones. Owen Jones supports the misogynistic ones. Only those who support the feminist ones get called transphobes or TERFS. Go figure.

I don't believe I have ever been anything other than a trans ally.

But when loon trans activists believe they get to define what "woman" is, and impose a nonsensical "cis" label on me, and attempt to shut down legitimate discussion about the experience of biological women then I will regard them as hostile, and not anyone I am allied to.

Glad you're sure about that Kim.

However, you are failing to recognise that feminists and lesbians (and lesbian feminists) are dismissed and mocked and accused of transphobia for describing their experience of being women and/ or lesbians.

Not for telling trans-people how to feel. For saying how they feel.

Any attempt to explain is shut down with cries of bigot and transphobe.

See for example, the latest nonsense where a rape victim wrote a blog post about how for her personally, women-only space was essential in her recovery from being raped and was accused of thinking like a rapist by a trans-ally because of her experience of needing that woman-only space.

Owen Jones presumably isn't entirely on top of understanding that that is the sort of silencing women and feminists face and as long as he feels comfortable with ignoring the women who would tell him about that, he never will be on top of understanding it.

Because that's what this thread is about remember - men who think they're feminist allies but don't feel it necessary to listen to feminists.

Of course. maybe he's totally aware of such nonsense and is comfortable with it. In which case, there's no hope for him.

Kim: "They have every right to discuss trans issues and how they affect them. But not to explain to me what trans people should do"

I have to part company with you on the second one. Suppose I am at a women's college (as I was 30 years ago). Suppose I am aware of the proud history of such institutions in making higher education available to women (remember, Cambridge didn't start awarding women full degrees until the 1940s). Moving from history to the current day, suppose I'm aware of the low numbers of women studying STEM subjects, and the little oasis my college provides in giving women a chance to do that free from stereotypes and surrounded by positive female role models. Now suppose I'm also aware of the way women's sexuality and bodies have traditionally been demeaned and demonised, and the way the "worst obscenity in the English language" is a slang word for vagina. And I am interested in challenging that and reclaiming the word. So I want to put on a performance of the Vagina Monologues. And a trans person who also happens to be a trans activist campaigns (successfully) to prevent me doing it on the grounds that to do so would be cis-sexist (sic.). Why am I not allowed to say "you should not do that?"

Ditto campaigns to erase women's experience by removing the word "female" from female genital mutilation, trivialising the ongoing erosion of women's reproductive rights in the US by insisting that the single most important thing we must do is insist that abortion clinics' leaflets talk about pregnant persons (newsflash: republican misogynists are not being transphobic when they try to restrict access to abortion to the extent that they have all but banned it in several states).

I do have ever right to stand up and say to the trans activist "you should not be doing that" - because what they are doing (not feeling) is directly impinging on my rights.

What Stephanie said

Well said Stephanie, that sums the issue up perfectly.

"It's called irony.

Feminists complain about mansplaining.
Feminists are just as capable of "splaining" as other people."

You are ignoring the power issue there.

Men who mansplain are listened to and taken seriously and respected.
Feminists who "splain" as you refer to it (or attempt to assert boundaries/ describe our lived experience which is routinely erased from societal recognition) are mocked and dismissed.

Imagining that there is some sort of parity, implies an unawareness of the power differentials between female voices and male voices, between women and men.

My post was to Kim and the comment about 'irony'.