When your friends drank the Kool-Aid

Thanks Datun & Charlie - will look those up. Think my next thing to talk about will be the tension between trans and gay rights. I'll leave it a bit, though - playing the long game here...

Florence have you shown her India Willoughby's piece about only letting people who have 'properly' transitioned into women's loos?

FlorenceLyons

You can tell her that DM has been asked to speak as a representative of the community. I have looked for the link, but I can't find it. But it was kosher - lectern and everything.

I just suggested she google images of DM. I don't think she'd really come across the idea of people identifying as the opposite gender without making any attempt to change their physical appearance. I think she also considered DM unrepresentative of trans people (as I guess they probably are), but it gave me a way in to talking about some of the consequences of identity trumping biology.

I made some progress with my 'drained the entire Kool-Aid bottle' teenage daughter this evening. I talked about women in rape crisis centres being expected to share rooms with people with penises, got her to google Danielle Muscato, talked about people with male bodies being able to compete against women in sport. Her view at the end was that both biological sex and gender identity should be recorded for people, and that in some areas biological sex should be what is used to categorise people. This was a significant shift for her.

Flavor Aid, don't you mean?

It was Flavour Aid.

*men

I completely agree GuardianLions.

Man can sort out amongst themselves how they are going to tackle violence against themselves.

I don't want any men in my spaces for any number of reasons, only one of which is the threat of violence.

And I don't want entitled mean anywhere near me at all.

& thinking about it it would encourage even more victim blaming, the general thought will be that she chose to box, she knew the risk, it was her fault if she got injured. Teeny step to she consented to a beat down, she was asking for it etc

Agreed WobblyLegs5

It's worse than not cool vestal, it's criminal, or atleast it would be if a man beat a woman like that under any other circumstances (not prosecuted enough ofcourse but that's a seperate issue) and making it ok for a woman to be violently assaulted by a man for sport sends a very dangerous and disturbing message.

Datun I agree we should call out male violence, but there is a distinction between male violence against women and girls and male violence towards other males including hate crimes - and conflating the two can make it seem logical that women's spaces should be refuges for males from male violence like hate crimes, when they exist partly to protect females from MVAWG, but also to protect our dignity, privacy, etc from male entitlement and intrusion.
I think dervel was wrong in thinking it is up to women to protect males from hate crimes in our bathrooms and spaces, withough considering that males in dresses, however gentle and in fear of hate crimes, are still intruding on women's privacy and dignity - which their fear of hate crimes does not entitle them to do.

*call out

I still think we should come out male violence whenever we see it, though. It is gendered and the word male needs to be put in that sentence every time.

The argument that if we removed gender stereotyping there wouldn't be any transwomen doesn't stand up, at least at the moment. In theory, it would work, but how many millennia are we away from that?

Transwomen desperately want that gender stereotyping (particularly the autogynephiles). If gender stereotyping didn't exist, they would have to invent it.

And as for male violence, Dervel is right up to a point. Having zero fear of men in your bathroom would, at least, remove that issue.

However, if you could guarantee to me that any man who came into my bathroom was as gentle as a lamb, I still wouldn't want him in there.

Even kind, gentle men change the dynamic of a woman's space.

"One group (the majority) hate all sport anyway, therefore can't see why it matters" - ha, this is me (well, apart from when it comes to transwomen beating the shit out of women, which I do find pretty upsetting).

I loathe gender stereotyping so tend to come at it from that angle - "wouldn't it be great if it was fine for boys to like dresses and pink and girls to like football and playing war games, then children wouldn't feel they were in the wrong body and go through lots of stressful surgery and hormone treatment". It's really hard for liberal types to argue in favour of gender stereotyping, however much they may secretly believe in it.

Ah, thanks anyway.

@CharlieSierra I'm sorry, I saved it to my phone from Facebook so the original isn't any better quality...

Flavia is it possible for you to share a link to that please?

And worse than that. It is a creepy fetishisation of female vulnerability and and the language of our struggles.

"I am so afraid of male violence, I'm such a laydeee!" totter, totter...

Exactly. It is all about a fixation with 'passing'...
And guess what? It is not up to women to provide the solution.

It's dishonest. It's not about protection from male violence for the average UK transwoman. It's about validation.