Lesbian's and the Trans debate

Thanks slug and Juzza for the online examples - what I've not seen is the extreme views and comments being made in real life, and I'm not 100% convinced they will be. The answer to the online nutcases is obviously just to ignore them (or to ridicule them like Magdalene B does).

I don't think the notion that penises can be female or that lesbians are by their very nature transphobic is going to take off in the real world, because most people who haven't been exposed to TRAs/the nitty gritty of the trans debate will see it through the lens of a lifetime of logic.

But I'm open to being proved wrong if this stuff is not just a few tweets and YouTube videos but is actually is happening to real women in gay bars up and down the country - anyone?

Juzza, do you have a link to the 'corrective' rapist you mentioned please?

I don't understand what you're trying to say Terfsup, do you really think those women and girls would give a damn about naming their very own bodies as the reason for their hideous mistreatment at the hands of the patriarchy? Do you think they'd prefer one explanation to the other? I genuinely don't understand what you're getting at.

The patricharcy doesn't oppresses us for being women, it oppresses us for not being a certain type of white man

Tell that to girls around the world who are forced into marriage at a young age or who have their genital mutilated because they're not white men. Or the 14 year-old rape victim in Uruguay who died a few days whle giving birth.

Or the 10 year-old in Paraguay who was raped and gave birth.

They weren't oppressed because they weren't white men; they were victims because they were female.

LonginesPrime, just go and have a look at Riley J Denis (or Rapey J Penis as he's known by many) for the general tenor of the conversation. This is a you tuber with a huge following whose entire output seems to be cloaking rape culture in a veneer of lesbians being phobic of lady dick. Magdalene Burns is very good at rebutting him. How she manages it without rolling her eyes into the back of her skull I'll never know

The patricharcy doesn't oppresses us for being women, it oppresses us for not being a certain type of white man.

Thank you, intellectual titan Stillscreaming, for letting me know that when I lived in Saudi Arabia I was oppressed for not being a white man rather than for being a woman. I would suggest that someone tell the Saudi princess who was executed for having a relationship with a man she wasn't married to, but we can't, because she's dead. I'm sure it's just because she wasn't a white man though, nothing to do with her being a woman.

On the subject of lesbians, can any lesbians pitch in with their experience of real life examples of being subjected to claims that lesbians are transphobic or arguments about the cotton ceiling please?

As a PP mentioned, the 'proof' that these things are occurring and that lesbians are under direct threat specifically from transwomen that I've seen on here so far seems to be based on a few extremist TRAs on Twitter. I'm not saying those TRAs don't identify as trans, but people often say things online to get attention or rile people and if it's only occurring on Twitter and Reddit, that's a very different threat from one that's prevalent IRL too.

The other thing I've seen mentioned on here as evidence is 'general lesbians at uni' are being pressured - if that's what people have read/heard, can anyone please point me to a source?

Im not being facetious, I'm just trying to understand the real threat here. I keep getting accused of being a selfish, insufficient lesbian because I don't pay attention to the TRAs on Twitter. I'm open to hearing the evidence and will obviously want to help other people if they are actually being threatened, I just haven't come across this in my own experience.

I think you're all ignoring the role of internalised hierarchies and memetic evolution.

I don’t think the Muoso are considered a true matriarchy, though they are certainly very interesting.

Bonobos are fascinating. Again, they are not matriarchal - males are still dominant over the group - but the females form a sort of Lysistrata-style union amongst themselves and control access to sex. They’ve also been seen to diffuse the violence displayed by the males. This gives them power in a way that is not seen in other ape species.

There’s a great (if somewhat depressing) book by the primatologist Richard Wrangham that goes into this stuff in some detail. It’s called Demonic Males, if anyone wants to give it a go.

RealityHasALiberalBias, a couple of counter-examples for you. Among apes, the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo

And among humans, the Mosuo people of China:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo

Not that either is an absolutely perfect example of feminism as a way of life(!!) but anything that's different from the norm could be a starting point for a discussion.

... Although I guess that rather depends on your definition of oppression (do violent male apes "oppress" female apes? genuine musing...), and as we've seen that's rather up for debate.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there have been societies and communities within which women were not oppressed, so there was simply no discernable sex-based oppression. That women have never been dominant over or oppressed men (i.e. a true matriarchy) isn't really the point.

And there has never been a matriarchal human society, anywhere or at any time in history. You’d think with all the diversity of complex civilisation, that at least one would have given it a go. Does anyone who doesn’t believe in a biological root to female oppression have an explanation for that?

I agree with that Reality, competitive aggression is typically masculine in many species.

All great ape species, our closest relatives with who we share a common ancestor, have dominant males who exhibit violence, sometimes gratuitously. Agriculture may have led to patriarchal structures, but the dominance and violence was always there.

And a MALE phenomenon, not a MAKE one. FFS bloody phone and fat fingers.

Heritage OF patriarchy, not or! Bloody typo completely changes the meaning.

Lang, look, it's not that I don't understand what you're saying, it's that you and I are looking at the same set of circumstances and seeing a different causal relationships. And that's okay, because societies are complex with many competing factors, and they're also different - across the globe and through time - people do not agree on one defined heritage or patriarchy. Or rather we agree on the root, but disagree on the path it's taken and what that means for modern femism. You and I disagree.

I've posted my historical analysis previously on MN, but safe to say it doesn't differ hugely from yours. Except in my analysis I find that the feature by which groups were oppressed is by their deviation from the dominant group, and that aggressive dominance became a make phenomenon at the time of tribal branch-out (so communities meeting one another), and grew exponentially through the age of empire followed by colonialism. I'm not much of one for this property idea, as I think people were farming communaly in one way or another well before women were oppressively subjugated. And that the idea of personal property as opposed to community property came much later than the start of female oppression.

It could be animal husbandry to blame, I suppose.

LOL! But seriously - there's a reason pre-modern societies were usually matrilineal and turned patriarchal after the advent of agriculture and, with it, private property.

It could be animal husbandry to blame, I suppose.
What it really comes down to is what it has always come down to.
Male dominance by any means necessary.

For thousands of years men justified their treatment of women by arguing that women were nothing more than the dirt men planted their human seeds in.
We can thank the very agriculture that we invented for that, I suppose.

Oh right, so not because of biology then? I'm assuming had the same sort of bodily set-up before farming came along?

Oh, FFS. How can you read that and say not to do with biology then? What do you think biology is? The emergence of private property via agriculture meant the subjugation of women so that men could control inheritance through women's biology. How can you read a shortish post in perfectly plain English and not understand it?

I say again - social constructionism is a fucking cancer. It rots brains. Lawmakers and institutions steeped in this ideology are making public policy for millions of people. Yet they couldn't recognise material reality if it got up and slapped them in the face with a wet fish.

It wasn't so important to control their reproductive capability before the advent of property because there was nothing to pass on.