Punching Terfs

I just read that Mya Berne stuff. It is truly frightening how sickening and abusive tactics becime normalised because no one is allowed to criticise trans people. So awful for the majority of trans people who want to just get on with it that they have these seedy misogynistic fellow travellers

Jesus, just read the Helen Lewis comments, it's like falling into a rank sewer of misogyny. How can young women not see this men's rights movement for what it is? It actually makes me feel sick.

I was at a family venue recently and they now have unisex toilets - with a seprate area for males with urinals. Seems it's happening.

Mya Berne's Twitter is active again. Gender Trender posted this in 2015;

gendertrender.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/dear-folk-singer-mya-byrne-masturbating-in-your-sisters-underwear-makes-you-a-predator-not-a-woman/

It's a big building so I imagine they'll argue that women haven't lost their own toilets per se, just that some of the blocks are mixed. I'll make a concerted effort to go to the women's only toilets, although maybe at least hopefully trans people will seek out the mixed gender one and the women's toilets that are there will remain women's spaces.

Without outing myself, it's an educational establishment and I've noticed that they are the most keen to be right on. At my previous place, there were four types of toilets in one of the buildings: accessible, men, women, and then gender neutral.

Ask them to put up this sign. And if they object, ask them why?

They can replace trans* with genders if it's more inclusive.

I'm sure that's against the law on the basis of sex discrimination. Either they all go or they retain one for each sex.

My organisation has mixed gender toilets as of today. We have three types of toilets: accessible, mixed gender and toilets for one particular gender. Can you guess which gender lost their single gender space and which keeps their specific space? Colour me surprised.

It's only in certain areas of the building, but I'll be interested if it gets rolled out.

I think she may have been shadowbanned, I definitely couldn't see her tweets & when I clicked on her profile it came up with two different messages like 'can't load user info' & 'you are not authorised to view this account' but yes she's back now.

Gloss witch is still alive and tweeting! She has just updated her profile to include her real name - Victoria Smith.

They really really hate women, don't they?

A PP noticed Glosswitch Twitter account has gone - I hope she's ok, I followed her but she's gone from mine also.

As bad as it sounds, we need more instances like this one to help the majority reach peak trans. Without seeing the real effects of transgenderism, people naively think its all about toilets.

PoochSmooch

Wow! Thanks for that link. Gendertrender is like some kind of esoteric, giant detective agency when it comes to these issues.

The twitter link brings up all the usual nonsense about suicide statistics and feminists being responsible for male violence. And people asserting that TERF isn't a slur and even if it is, it's deserved.

This man is being defended on Twitter as a victim, despite threatening to punch women and girls, when in fact he is a violent, misogynistic activist. And, it appears, belonging to the group responsible for the ubiquitous 'baseball bat' wielding.

Which is why we desperately need a public debate to expose the dangerous underbelly of the ideology.

I don't follow Helen Lewis, but from what I can gather, she was broadly sympathetic to the trans community. Including transwomen in feminism and saying they are women.

With one or two caveats about no platforming.

Which was obviously her first mistake.

She is now being subjected to all the usual abuse accompanying the word TERF. Because, as we all know, if you don't 110% support absolutely every tiny detail of the ideology, you are responsible for the death of trans people everywhere and an unspeakable piece of shit whose opinion is worthless.

From the accounts I have read, it is this bullying and abusive tactic, almost more than anything else, that is making people reach peak trans.

Really interesting debate to read through this morning. I'm going to digest it and maybe come back to it later.

In the meantime, Gallus Mag is very, very enlightening on our TERF-puncher in this article.

Terrifying. Just terrifying. This fucker has zero interest in any kind of progressive politics, in trans rights or women's rights or any other kind of enlightenment values. Just your garden variety misogynist doing what misogynists do best

IME the hard Left is as misogynist as the hard Right, it just disguises itsekf better.

Trade unionism in the US has a history of misogynist and racism. Usually through the apparently reasonably guise of protecting the position of workers, but eg arguing that all jobs should be full time jobs is problematic because it props up the notion of the man providing for the family whilst ignoring that women are overwhelmingly more likely to want part time work because of caring responsibilities.

Oh, and there are longstanding well documented links between certain trade unions and that most patriarchal of bodies, the mafia

I don't think any sensible theory of human rights can include rights which in some circumstances could not exist without coercing other human beings into doing things to violate their own bodily integrity against their will.

Indeed.

Giving men a right to fathering children is another idiocy along those lines. (I think it was about demanding that the NHS pay for surrogate mothers for unattractive men, or gay men, or something)

What is Australia's attitude to welfare state?

Very strong. Australia was once the best place in the world to be a worker, with the best conditions in the world. If you were a white man, of course. Aboriginal and islanders were exploited with slave wages and the White Australia Policy was the first act passed by the newly federated colonies in 1901.

Historically, Australia has identified its national character as a chauvinist type of egalitarianism and open disrespect of the landed gentry. The Catholic Church has maintained a strong pro-Irish, or rather, anti-Anglo establishment attitude over their congregations, which included political influence. They decided to end support for the Labor Party in the 1950s due to COmmunist sympathisers in the union movement, and threw their support behind a destabilising Democratic Labor Party which saw Labor in the political wilderness until the early 1970s.

Nonetheless, Australia has a much healthier attitude to welfare statism than the UK, despite the interference of neoliberalism. On Mumsnet the prevailing attitude seems to be 'stop putting pressure on the NHS, it can't take it' rather than 'tax the rich, silly, we all need universal health care'. A return to Keynesianism after the financial crisis of 2008, rather than 'austerity', was successful for Australia.

I imagine being kicked out and forced to live there might have given people a somewhat different attitude than the "promised land" attitude of the immigrants to America.

Australia was also a promised land. It had an entitlement that white people were farmers who should get the land, but the ruling class pinched all the best land. America generally has much better soil meaning that your average farmer was able to till the land successfully. 'The Great Australian Dream' is owning your own house (dissipating now!), which is pretty similar to America and inspired by migrants.

Interesting point that radical feminism doesn't necessarily propose solutions, Vestal.

Many radical feminists do, however, talk about the aim being women's liberation (liberation from oppression, male violence, male sexual violence), and tend to eschew talk of equality (whether of opportunity or outcome).

I suppose for me the value of the radical feminist analysis comes in shifting the Overton window - it's not that I want equal right to become a wage slave, for instance, but that I'd like to see the workplace re-structured to make it more woman-friendly, more parent friendly, to make men see that this would work to their advantage too (just to take one example).

I think we also need to rescue liberalism - to point out that liberalism is not the same as neo-liberalism with its rampant individualism. For instance Mill's negative and positive liberties (roughly "your right to swing your fist ends at the start of my nose"), and his utilitarianism (greatest good for the greatest number) could be used to argue against prostitution - that if it is an activity which is overall harmful to women even if a few individuals benefit from it, and if the punter's supposed right (which Amnesty believes in*) to engage in contractual sex is outweighed by the average woman's right not to be sexually harrassed on the street, then there's a case to be made for making the purchase of sex illegal. Liberal needn't and shouldn't be equated with the stupid form of neo-liberal feminism which embraces prostitution and pornography as "empowerfulising" - that's a misunderstanding of liberal theory. Just as most liberals (in Mill's sense) would argue against legalising the sale of kidneys.

*The stupidity of Amnesty's position becomes clear when you pose the thought experiment: what would become of that purported right to sex in a society where no women wanted or chose to become prostitutes? Would it morph into a right to rape? I don't think any sensible theory of human rights can include rights which in some circumstances could not exist without coercing other human beings into doing things to violate their own bodily integrity against their will.

But I'm not sure I think their proposed fixes are actually realistic ones.

Does radical feminism even have a proposed fix?

I always thought the lack of a proposed fix was one of the reasons it is so unpopular - liberal feminism's "Oh, it is all just a terrible misunderstanding, men don't want to oppress us, we just have to tell them we are unhappy, then they'll surely stop immediately" or "it is all women's fault, we just have to empowerfulize ourselves more, through porn and casual sex, then we'll have equal rights" is much more appealing.

Assigned - I've been thinking a bit more about where I sit on the political (and feminist) spectrum (specially since on those online questionnaires I usually come out as a mix of radfem and libfem). I suspect that what it comes down to is this: as tools of analysis, Marxism (re. what's wrong with capitalism) and radical feminism (re. how the patriarchy works, how it becomes self-sustaining, how it renders itself almost invisible, and even co-opts women into perpetuating it) can't be beaten. But I'm not sure I think their proposed fixes are actually realistic ones. (And as you say, in the case of Marxism, history suggests that it is all too likely to get so corrupted and so far from its original intentions in execution that the societies that have tried it in any sort of serious way have all degenerated into totalitarianism. Who was it said "liberal democracy is a terrible political system, apart from all the other systems which we've tried which have turned out to be even worse..."?)