Dealing with inflammatory posts re Trans on MN

As a person who was sexually and physically abused as a child and sexually assaulted as an adult I think I can speak about my own experience to live in a place of hope and love. I refuse to be a victim. I refuse to live in a place of oppression were I am the jail keeper. Life is wonderful, people are wonderful. If you give hate you see hate. I give love I see love.

Why are some people so afraid of others being authentic to themselves and to the world in which they live?

The real issue is more than 75% of sexual abuse is committed by someone known to the victim. That percentage rises to 90% for children.

www.feministcurrent.com/2017/09/21/terf-isnt-slur-hate-speech/

discoversociety.org/2018/04/03/viewpoint-understanding-anti-transgender-feminism/

I have very little history with this subject, established positions, anger or hate.

I'm a heterosexual woman, a CEO, and a feminist. But I'm not politically aligned to any party or a radical on anything. But through my job I'm engaged in political discourse and lobbying on my area of concern which relates to disability, health and social care.

I will always be a liberal in terms of accepting anyone to have any orientation or identity - let anyone be who they want to be, change, express themselves and champion their place in society. I am always angry about discrimination or hate - we all have a right to be who we want to be.

But as a liberal I am very concerned that no one's rights can traduce anyone else'is. I will never accept that women's natural rights can be overridden by anyone else's and no one else can speak for them and know their experience. Not for me - no thank you.

But i know as a professional lobbyist for a charity that I cannot engage openly in this debate. Because the trans lobby will vilify and bully me and threaten my job. So, out of fear, I can only engage with this issue on Mumsnet.

I thank you for allowing me to express my views - I do not accept any labelling or vilification. I just want the experience of women to be championed, and accepted, separately from others - whether trans or whomever else. In return, I will champion forever your right to be you.

Second that. Thank you Bewilderness.

Well that's really interesting. So often I have heard that terf is not a slur because it was a term coined by some radical feminists to describe themselves. Thank you for confirming it originated as a term to exclude and discredit gender critical feminists.

I've sat and read this thread all evening, including the links.
(Sue, I see that your last link, includes in the Acknowledgements, funding from Mermaids. Interesting).

I appreciate the contributions of the lurkers. I'm encouraged by the answers from those who have spent considerable time here already.

I think that this is a significant thread, and it's been a light bulb moment for me.
Thank you all.

Not much to tell, Pencils.
Hoyden about town was one of many self styled feminist blogs. There were lots of blog wars over things like the appropriation of Black women's writings by commercial feminists. There were some serious conflicts over predatory male feminists like Hugo Schwyzer using commercial feminists books in his classes in exchange for promoting him. Feminists were trying to find a way to talk about the divisions between women without exacerbating them without much success. Transgender males had been turning up on Feminist blogs more an more often insisting that women had an obligation to include them in Feminist advocacy for women's rights.
During a heated discussion among feminists on her blog tigtog announced that Radical Feminists were too doctrinaire and inflexible and the last straw was excluding transgender males from feminism. Further that Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists were not welcome there. So we all left as requested.
The sex pozzie blogs and the transgender community quickly adopted TERF to dismiss and silence women who disagreed with them. As you know it is now directed at transgender persons who deviate from today's 2 minute hate script.

Oh yeah thebewilderness id be really interested in the tigtog story.

Useful tool - Basic questions about sex and gender for progressives by Rebecca Reilly Cooper.

We can start asking these when we're stuck in the loop.They are non-aggressive yet cut straight through the bullshit.

I will not post, I will not post, I will not post......

thebewilderness - As a qualifier to my earlier remarks, I loved it when so many women on MN instantly changed their user names to Telling E Real Facts. It felt great. Partly because I was one of the women ordered off the blog by tigtog when she created the acronym TERF to "other" the Feminists who were not sex positive male inclusive.

Please share this story if you can!

Thanks for the link Sue

I would just like to observe that a single case-study from 50 years ago is pretty ropy evidence for immutable gender identity, and further, that even if immutable gender identity dissociable from sex and from socialisation can be demonstrated, nobody has even begun to explain what this has got to do with defining women, who are defined by their sex.

Sue -“the vast majority of people are inherently good “ .
I don’t know one woman who hasn’t experienced some level of sexual assault. Not one single woman. I know six or seven women who have been raped, one as a child. That is just the ones who have shared that information with me, the actual figure is almost certainly more.
I don’t think it is one man doing all the assaulting and raping. Given the constant child abuse scandals appearing, and the #metoo, I think that statement above is at best naive, at worst gaslighting.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans

www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/389_XXIV_1/3373_sexual/

And since it's a made up word, you might as well shout 'blop' or 'floop' at people

IRL the only people I know who believe what the TRAs believe are under 25. There are a lot of people who'll use the requested pronouns etc to be polite, but they don't believe the person has actually changed sex, because that's impossible.

I know nobody who thinks that "biological sex is a social construct", which is the extreme end of the TRA position.

The thing that makes me ‘laugh’ about TERF is that it makes it sound like the only people objecting to this are a load of Greeresque Millie Tant women.
They aren’t going for the men who wouldn’t consider a transwoman for a relationship; who won’t want transmen in their toilets; who wouldn’t allow transmen join men only clubs.

As a qualifier to my earlier remarks, I loved it when so many women on MN instantly changed their user names to Telling E Real Facts. It felt great. Partly because I was one of the women ordered off the blog by tigtog when she created the acronym TERF to "other" the Feminists who were not sex positive male inclusive.

Point taken about TERF usernames. I've been called a TERF when actually trying to do what's right by my trans mtf sibling, so took the name as a sort of response to that.

But I shall change it forthwith. As soon as I remember my password anyway!

he thinks TERFs are a quite scary highly radical very organised underground movement.

That's come from social media, where I can never work out if it's a difficulty believing (as seen this weekend) that ordinary people have concerns and questions and an attempt to keep it mentally comfortable by making it a demonised, shadowy group who can justifiably be dehumanised and don't have to be listened to, or if it started from intentional misleading. As that's how 'terfs' are talked about, that's also how the newspapers interpreted it when they first were trying to make sense of the online jargon. It's one of the most successful myths created since the Loch Ness Monster.

That does mean that when people look on MN for the fictional monster created to justify a lot of the 'we're fighting for our lives!' high drama, as MN is constantly accused of having fed and nurtured, what is here to be found is just women talking. The reality gap is obvious. That people are taking the accusation and name of 'monster' being thrown at them and making it a joke of 'yes, it's me' it takes a huge amount of power out of the word. People are getting increasingly less bothered about being called a bigot or a terf. And since it's a made up word, you might as well shout 'blop' or 'floop' at people, it has about the same meaning and impact.

Why can't there be room for both?

Absolutely hence the reference to a dialectic, although in some kind of oppositional reaction to having to be reasonable I just spent the whole thread disagreeing with whichever position seemed to be uppermost

I am old, as you have probably gathered.
When I was little men called it "The Battle of the Sexes".
Today we call it "The War on Women" because we recognize it was not just a battle because it never stopped.
There is not one single right that women fought for and won that is not constantly being undermined, up to and including the right to vote and be recognized as a citizen.
As far as I have been able to learn there is not a culture on the planet that is not a hostile environment for women. They abort female fetus in India and China and are sterilizing female children in the US and UK who are diagnosed as transgender or non binary.
Please tell me what I should call these instead of hostile actions in the war on women?

Sue, did you read about the doctor who worked with the US gymnastics team who'd been abusing the members of that team and the team at the university he spent most of his time working at for 20+ years? That's the length predators will go to to gain access to prey. They'll become priests, they'll coach sports teams - they'll build their whole lives around gaining access to prey if that's what it takes. Compared to that, signing a declaration is a pretty minor thing.

Even that isn't really the problem, though. The problem (and you can already see this in places that are farther along the self-ID route, like many parts of the US West Coast, or Canada) is that once the expectation becomes that there will be male people in women's spaces and it's not kind or polite to challenge their presence there because they're probably a trans woman then it doesn't matter whether any given male person has that documentation or not, because the expectation is that when women see a male person in a women's space they're not supposed to challenge his presence there. So any man can walk right in and, in the unlikely event that he is challenged, all he has to do is say he's trans and the person challenging him is expected to back down. Washington state issued official guidelines on this that state that if a woman complains about what she thinks may be a man in the toilets then security should instruct her to go find a different toilet to use if she has a problem with it. That's where this is headed.

What most women here are worried about is that once that expectation is in place, that male people in women's spaces are not to even be questioned on their presence there because they may identify as women, men with no feelings about their gender identity whatsoever will be able to go into women's spaces to, and there will be nothing the women in those spaces can do about it. Surely you can see how inevitable it is that predators will abuse that situation.