DEBATE NOT HATE: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT GENDER

Clare
I’ve just spent some time reading some of the posts on your blog.* I feel that you are genuinely a good person who is working hard to understand and document what you and other trans people are going though.*

Like in every situation, though, there are good eggs and there are bad eggs.* The trouble is that the bad eggs in the TA camp seem to be some of the most violent, misogynistic, self-entitled people I’ve ever come across.* This group have a disproportionate amount of influence - this is what we women are most worried about.

Look at this image (from Lily Maynard’s twitter feed) of what young girls are doing to their bodies under the influence of this ideology and try to convince us that what is already happening to young girls and boys is right and good.**

@Datun

We have a common interest, in ending the link of sex to gender.

In any conflict, there are extremists and moderates. I want moderates to cautiously reach out to each other and build trust. Can we reduce fear? Can we lower the temperature?

On facebook trans support groups, I challenged those justifying the assault on Maria MacLaughlin. I barely tweet at all but I have tweeted to challenge violent threats against a female detransitioner.

As society is, people transition. We will continue to do so while the gender norms exist. We are traumatised by the experience of trying to fit them. Transition is liberation.

I can totally see why transition is liberation for you, and for many trans people as individuals. But people stepping out of one gender prison into a different one that fits them better only reinforces those prisons. It's not the way towards the gender free society that both you and gender critical feminists want.
There is another way, the way of living authentically as you are without the pretence that you are the opposite sex.

I’m still confused about what you think our aims are?

Clare you're preaching to the converted re. gender.

But Datun is right. What should women do?

So there is an answer: work not against transition, but for cross-gender behaviour.

That is a sensible response, which I agree with and until recently had always advocated. But the recent explosion in trans-identifying children deeply worries me - not because they are trans, but because they might not be - because the TRA side of things seems to be pushing social and medical transition more and more, and pushing for it to be easier for kids to get hormones than it is at present. The idea is to stop them going through the "wrong" puberty because, if a child says they are trans, then they definitely are. I can't go along with that. I only wish that my concerns about transing children could be addressed by simply working in favour of cross-gender behaviour. That would be wonderful.

I'm struck by the things you say about trans becoming a rebellion, about the child not wearing a binder due to discomfort. Those things suggest that you, also, believe that a child stating they are trans might desist in the future? If so, that is exactly what I think. My fear is that children may transition before they are old enough to fully think it through. But that is what TRAs are advocating.

ClareFlourish

That's very interesting and it's good that you question gender. Nonetheless, it's an intellectual exercise, that although useful, is not getting to the heart of the disagreement.

Gender is indeed harmful, but people cannot change sex and basing law on gender rather than sex is dangerous.

We can all discuss how unhelpful gender is, but in the meantime, violent men are threatening women with rape and death and are attacking them in public.

People who support the upcoming law are allowing these very men unfettered access to their victims.

What do you think women should do?

@MaximumVolume I am in the Labour Party too. Should I go to the women's forum meeting this evening, before the constituency party meeting? Decisions, decisions...

It is an extremely long road before children get puberty blockers. Children need to identify as trans before a lot of what is culturally seen as cross-gender behaviour can be tolerated. So there is an answer: work not against transition, but for cross-gender behaviour. A friend of a friend was deeply distressed at her child identifying as trans, but if the mother objects, trans becomes a teenage rebellion thing. If the mother gives boundaries- you must see NHS doctors and not get hormones elsewhere, yes I will buy you a binder- the child has responsibility for the decision, and might talk to the mother about it. A binder is really uncomfortable, and the child might just decide not to wear it.

Challenge gender-enforcing behaviour in schools. Did you see "No more boys and girls"? The teacher called boys "mate" and girls "love". He decided to stop. He saw the value of stopping.

If radical feminists are right that gender dysphoria is cultural, and not linked to my being "really" in some way "a woman", it will melt away as people subvert gender. So, don't treat us as the problem. The problem of trans will take care of itself. IF we can transition more easily, we won't be so desperate about it. It won't be such a big deal. We transition because we are desperate. I agonised about it for years before doing it.

I find "non-binary" a far more liberating concept than trans. Someone non-binary claims the right not to conform to gender norms, but find their own way. People will see what the culture offers and harmful choices will become rarer.

Biological women are not going to accept this after centuries of fighting their way out of this, out of sympathy for a very small percentage of the population born male who feel they are entitled.

Just to be clear, I was specifically referencing the TRA factions who put forward this violent narrative, and not transwomen in general. I do appreciate Clare that you condemned the violence at Speaker's Corner, it was very concerning that only Stonewall was prepared as an LGBT group to do the same. Even more worrying, I've seen screen shots of tweets that trans groups rang around telling LGBT groups NOT to condemn that violence.

clare

Are you able to come back and address these different concerns?

You say you want to create a better way. What way is that?

Until there is some kind of test devised where women can tell a harmless man, from a violent thug, from a fetishist, what would a 'better way' look like?

In my experience nice, decent men do not want to make women feel uncomfortable. They go out of their way not to. So we are left with those who do. Or don't care.

What is the better way?

We experience events like that one at Brighton as repressive, trying to shut us out of the only way of being ourselves which society tolerates

Cross post - but don't you see that biological women experience the resistance to permitting debate or concerns about the impact on them to be even discussed, as equally repressive, shutting them out of their experience of themselves, appropriating their experiences, their language, their way of being themselves?

And incidentally, the biological women involved in both the first meeting at speakers corner and Brighton experienced massive social media threats specifically stating they should be punched, 'fucked up', bloodied, raped and murdered, and one experienced actual violence, assault and theft. I have never seen any mention or suggestion of threat or violence against TRAs from those women.

This is massive misogeny. This is flinging women's rights back into the dark ages. This is threat, intimidation, violence, the bringing of male violence openly and publically into women's spaces to shut them up and make battering them socially acceptable if they don't do as they're told, shut up and get out of the way. Biological women are not going to accept this after centuries of fighting their way out of this, out of sympathy for a very small percentage of the population born male who feel they are entitled.

ClareFlourish
You lost me when you used cis. Do you realise how offensive it is
I will respect any person but it some situations I want to only be with biological females. Do you accept that?

if they do anything which gets that noticed by others, public order offences should apply.

Absolutely. However that should then mean that transwomen are absolutely safe and able to use the mens toilets.

I have never had the slightest concern about transwomen sharing public bathrooms but with this bill, now I do. I don't want to be used as part of someone with autogynephilia's fetish. I absolutely don't consent to the intimacy and vulnerability of undressing and toileting around the kind of TRA maniacs who battered the woman at Speaker's Corner and shout about killing and raping terfs and cis women. The bill makes it all or nothing, and the people who will lose by this are the very trans women who have peacefully shared bathrooms for years.

don't take away my lifeline

By doing what? I don't understand. I don't agree with gender boxes - I will passionately defend anyone's right to name themselves, dress and present however best fits them in terms of gender, without stereotyping, without this being grounds for any form of discrimination or harassment. I absolutely stand behind the rights of people to be safe from male violence in all forms, and the provision of safe prison facilities, toilet facilities and medical care so that no one has to enter a space in fear of violence, as well as a strong national approach to addressing male violence.

I just won't lie and say that biological sex doesn't exist and a man can be a biological woman with a penis, I won't agree to the erasure of women, their language and their lived experience as biological woman, and I won't agree to the end of the right of biological women to equal respect and safety by having the same facilities for biological women only.

Can you explain how that is harmful to your needs?

@ClaireFlourish I must admit I hadn't read to the bottom of the thread. I apologise if my request appears insensitive straight after your posts.

My feeling in your situation is that it would surely be better if you had been brought up in a society where you could express as feminine with nobody batting an eyelid.

This is a situation that radfems would love to see. We worry that children wearing dresses well be forced down a route of medical issues if they happen to be born boys. That they will start on puberty blockers & progress to cross-sex hormones & have a lifetime of health worries because of the effects of these drugs.

Several transwomen & parents of trans kids have told their stories here & medicalisation is currently the overwhelming path kids expressing against gender norms are steered onto.

Anything else is labelled gatekeeping or conversion therapy by the trans lobby, ahs stories of detransition are treated as heresy.

And those are just my concerns for trans people, I haven't even touched on the -unintended- consequences to women's rights that the proposed changes to the legislation will have.

So you can see why we do need to discuss this, but please do not thing that I don't value you as a person, that I wish you harm or that I wish to deny your self-expression.

I don't think anyone here wants to take away your lifeline, clare. We want to keep the law as it is, and I hope from what you say that you've been able to find the best way to live with yourself within the law as it stands. What we're saying is that the proposed changes to the law need to be discussed, not steamrollered through, because unlike the existing law it poses a threat to women, girls and children. It is also IMO a threat to many gay men, lesbians and trans people.

I completely agree with you that gender is the poisonous root of all our issues. I also agree that we don't live in the world I (and you?) would like to see - a world where gender roles are not entrenched and enforced. Instead, we live in this toxic, gendered environment, and I fully understand and support anybody's wish to express themselves in any way they wish - within, outside or against the gender binary. I respect the pronouns and names of everyone I encounter. So we have so many things in common.

So much of what you've posted makes me so sad and angry at the steamrollering and polarising that's going on with this issue. We aren't trying to roll back your rights or take away your lifeline. That's what the extremist end of the trans movement is telling you, but we honestly don't. Many of us are the parents of teenagers who have abruptly declared themselves to be transgender, and are appalled at the lack of support available to them, and to us, to try to find out why this is so suddenly the case. We think there must be a wide variety of reasons for this - issues of toxic gendering such as the ones you have mentioned. But increasingly, the only explanation that we are allowed to accept is that our children have simply ALWAYS BEEN the opposite sex (not gender) from the one that they biologically are. And increasingly, the only treatment we are allowed to accept is immediate affirmation and hormonal treatment. But those decisions should be taken only by adults, not by young children who are still developing. We want children to have the space to explore and be critical of toxic gender roles, not simply to be bundled into the opposite role. But we are being told that, if we don't go along with current dogma that the child must be medicalised ASAP, our child will commit suicide, and we will have caused it. We are 'literally erasing them'.

So when we talk of lifelines: either you believe us - that we mean the best in this, that we want our children to free to explore gender without being forced into one box or another before they're ready to decide, that we want them to have the same lifeline that you have... or you think as the extreme transactivists do, and would say that we would 'rather have a dead child than a trans child'. This is a group of parents. Which do you honestly think is more likely?

This stood out to me:
We experience events like that one at Brighton as repressive, trying to shut us out of the only way of being ourselves which society tolerates

If you mean the 'Debate not Hate' meeting, can you explain why you find any discussion of a way forward to be repressive?

ClareFlourish

You just said yourself that a woman objected to you using the bathroom, but you used it anyway!

How is that you not disregarding her saying no?

And again, I would love to hear the compromise that you have in mind. What is it?

sleighbellend

The theory goes that when a woman looks at herself in the mirror before going out on a hot date she turns herself on. Completely confusing appreciation (or not!) with arousal.

Or when a woman imagines having sex with a hot lover, and gets a tingle, that's autogynephilia.

Complete protection and a desperate attempt to equalise a male fetish.

"A woman saying no means nothing to you". It really does. You may make me a monster if you wish. You don't think compromise is possible, and you blame others for that.

‘Cis women have this fantasy too’?!

Clare - how exactly does Julia Serrano know what women feel? Women don't get aroused thinking of themselves as women because, duh, they are women.

clare

At a conference, I spoke with a woman who objected to trans women in the women's loos. After, I used the women's,

Again. Women saying no isn't enough.

If anyone goes into a toilet as a fetish, if they do anything which gets that noticed by others, public order offences should apply

Not only are the women on here very well informed, there are many women on here whose ex husbands are AGP.

It's very disingenuous of you to suggest that in order for a man to exercise his fetish in a women's space, he would have to commit a crime.

A man, any man can intimidate a woman by doing virtually nothing. Certainly not committing a crime.

A man claiming to be a woman, in a woman's space, and being aroused by his own presentation, is involving the other women in his fetish.

And he may only be washing his hands.

But since you've already acknowledged that a woman saying no it means nothing to you, it's no surprise that you see nothing wrong in that.

I'm in the Labour party & just tentatively suggested this as a topic for our CLP Women's Group discussions one person (not the organiser) who was sympathetic once I explained & had no knowledge of these issues really. Any idea how to approach with the group as a whole?

Can anyone recommend some calm & clear writing on the subject that I can circulate for beginners who probably take a default sympathetic position on trans rights because they're nice people who haven't thought through the hidden consequences?

I am welcomed. I go into a toilet for the usual purpose. If anyone goes into a toilet as a fetish, if they do anything which gets that noticed by others, public order offences should apply. In Australia there was an outbreak of theft of handbags from cubicles while women were on public loos. If there is actual offence, deal with that then. I would support you.

At a conference, I spoke with a woman who objected to trans women in the women's loos. After, I used the women's, but felt self-conscious about it, especially as I was drying my hands and a woman I knew came in, and greeted me. I was completely keeping myself to myself as I generally do, and she felt snubbed.

Conservatives: see the bathroom bills in Texas and North Carolina.

”Please do not take away my lifeline before we can create a better way.”

Huh??

Have you bought into the activists idea that radical feminists wish to literally cease the existence of transpeople? How are we taking away your lifeline?

The talk was about changes to the existing law. The existing law that did allow you to transition.