Peak GC Moment?

I also can’t imagine a man deliberately going through the self id stuff they are proposing, to deliberately go into a toilet etc with the sole intention of attacking someone. It seems crazy. Men who attack women do it regardless.
It will never happen. Except that it does all the time. Look at some of the It Never Happens threads on here.
Men who attack women will do it regardless - so why did we have sex segregated spaces in the first place?
To be honest, I think that this is in pretty poor taste when we have just had news of the Canadian trans abuser.
Also, after a week where we have had people hounded at their workplaces for GC views.
As for India and Posie. India struck me as a whining narcissist and Posie was admirably straightforward.

Pretending that men can be women makes your head hurt

I’ve stopped and I highly recommended it

It allows you to have a coherent position

Sorry, crosspost with SwearyG.

Women don’t have penises - yet surgery can give trans people vaginas.

If your view of a vagina is 'hole between the legs that can be penetrated', I'm struggling to see how you think you can claim to be a feminist.

A vagina is a complex organ that is an inextricable part of the female reproductive system as a whole. To reduce it to 'hole' is deeply misogynistic. A surgically created hole will have none of the functions of a vagina beyond being a place you could potentially put a penis. 'Hole for penis' is indeed how a lot of men see vaginas, but women should know better, especially those claiming to be feminists.

Surgery absolutely cannot give anyone a vagina. You get your vagina in your mother's womb or you don't get it at all.

There is a trans person in my family and she most definitely is a woman

How? Seriously, how? What definition do you have of woman that allows someone who is born male to be a woman?

As for the rest of your post about the lines being drawn and moved as science moves on that's not what should happen. There is a simple definition of woman - adult human female. Muddying that line with post-op TW are women or anything like that is what leads us to the nonsense of the female penis.

As an aside, but an important one, surgery cannot give a man a vagina. A vagina isn't a place to put a penis. It's an organ, one that cannot be manmade. What TW end up with isn't a vagina. Using language this way is very offensive.

But you think Peachy wasn't nice enough to the male who thinks lesbians should get over their aversion to penis?

And was literally responding with the song to being called a misogynistic slur by Dennis? Is this really something to clutch your pearls about?

I saw Posie on This Morning. It exposed the reality sat next to India. Who looked and behaved the most threatening?

I've just rewatched that interview and can't see how either of them were 'threatening' in the slightest during it. No threats were made.

India’s a woman, as is my family member - who is a gorgeous person in so many ways, has been through a lot, and has never bothered anyone. And doesn’t deserve to be seen as inferior in any way.

Do you believe that men are inferior to women? If I see India as a man, how is that seeing India as inferior to me?

The hysteria around this topic...

Ah.
Yes, maybe my womb is wandering off again and that's why I'm having pesky disagreeable opinions instead of just being nice.

Thank you 🌺

I agree with the points you made about tribalism and ideological purity, Woman. Well put.

You see, that's where I differ. An ideology which insists that male-bodied convicted sex-offenders should be placed in women's prisons where - predictably - they go on to sexually assault vulnerable female inmates (Karen White) is dangerous. An ideology which insists that young teens feeling understandably confused and conflicted and even dysphoric about the changes in their bodies which accompany puberty should be placed on a medicalised pathway to sterility and genital mutilation at an age when we wouldn't let them get a tattoo - that is a dangerous ideology. There's no getting round that.

This doesn't make sense to me.

I don't really like the Christmas cards on Posie's website and don't think they're in very good taste. I do have one of her t-shirts, which I love.

I honestly can't imagine the leaps of logic it would take to get from 'I disagree with this one thing Posie did' to 'therefore the GC position is wrong, men can become women after all, womanhood is a feeling and not a biological reality.' Anyone who claims this can't actually have been GC in the first place.

Ditto for a position being automatically wrong because it was stated by Trump or the Daily Mail. It strikes me as incredibly illogical tribalism to believe that because a person you dislike said something, it must be untrue. It reminds me of the ideological-purity types on Twitter who think that if you retweet something it's a statement that you agree with everything the original writer has ever said and will ever say. Bizarre.

Like any other decent person I’m horrified by the Karen White story and other incidents that have taken place. As she is.

Your family member sounds likes some of the transsexual posters here: some of whom are active on Twitter and have been part of the panel at various WPUK meetings. Was it Debbie Hayton or Kristina Harrison or someone else (Google is letting me down)?

Brilliant post @MrsCupCake91 it is heartening to hear there are feminists who think like you do.

arranfan thank you for sharing the article.
I appreciate women want to stand up to trans activism, yet for me, citing the left's willingness to blindly support PIE in the 70s is in no way comparable to the left's willingness to support transgender people and recognise TWAW in the present time.

PIE is a dangerous ideology, being transgender is not.

Spare Rib, the lesbian magazine of the time, did not support PIE.

Diva magazine, the current lesbian magazine, does support transgender women and recognises them as women.

Culturally, PIE and trans activism are worlds apart.

I personally couldn't have said what P9sie said to India's face (although I 100% agree with her) because I'm conditioned as a woman to be nice to people to the detriment of my own self interest.

And I don't want to have to have this ridiculous battle on my hands. I'm astounded it has come to this. Another struggle for women's rights. FFS.

Exactly. TRAs weaponise our female socialisation against us. Posie takes no crap.

I'm being serious, btw. I keep telling my boys 'be nice'.

The root of the problem is that men aren't being nice. They need to stop all the rapes and violence and be nice.

Women, I find, are nice enough.

It would be great if we could sort this all by being nice .

If men who identity as female could be nice enough to not use women’s spaces , legal rights, awards and sports teams then everything would be fine.

Most women would be more than happy for them to campaign for all of these things for themselves , just like women did.

Why can’t they just be nice and kind and obliging, and not do and say these uncomfortable and offensive and discriminatory things ?

What aren’t more men reaching out to other men and telling them to be nice?

Op, why aren’t you reaching out to trans people and begging them to be nice ? Tell them how upset you are about their lack of Kindness please.

I just want to say thank you to the OP for being brave enough to stand up and voice that opinion, in an environment where that view isn’t popular. Gave me a bit if courage!
I’ve been on MN for a while, but had always been scared of mentioning my unease with the rhetoric being used about trans people - and yes, I’m a feminist.
There is a trans person in my family and she most definitely is a woman. She leads a normal life, has a regular job, no-one blinks an eye. When she first transitioned I read as much as I could on the subject, because I knew nothing. MN was one of my first ports of calls. I’d seen a few threads previously, and read them out of curiousity. When the trans news came, I worried how I would feel and react. I was literally panicking.
I needn’t have bothered.
The nastiness and insinuation I read here doesn’t marry up with my family member in any way. She’s not a monster. She’s not deluded, mentally ill or confused. She’s not a threat. She doesn’t need to be separated into some sub group. She has loads of friends, and the thought that on a night out with her pals should would have to use a different toilet is both ridiculous, and heartbreaking. Her friends wouldn’t stand for it.
I think the reality of actually knowing a trans person closely is the best education, and I sense most on here only know the characature.
Like any other decent person I’m horrified by the Karen White story and other incidents that have taken place. As she is. But to me that’s more down to the fact that there are plain and simple bad people. They should have been in isolation. It had nothing to do with them being - or claiming to be - trans. The authorities messed up.Being trans didn’t make them bad.
When I think it through, I also can’t imagine a man deliberately going through the self id stuff they are proposing, to deliberately go into a toilet etc with the sole intention of attacking someone. It seems crazy. Men who attack women do it regardless.
The hysteria around this topic makes me feel very uneasy.
I’ve also seen arbitary lines drawn up on what makes a woman. Women don’t have penises - yet surgery can give trans people vaginas.
So then it changes to women have wombs.
What happens when science reaches a stage where trans people either grow a womb, or can have a transplant?
The line gets drawn again?
How does having or not having a womb even make someone a danger, a threat?
I saw Posie on This Morning. It exposed the reality sat next to India. Who looked and behaved the most threatening?
India’s a woman, as is my family member - who is a gorgeous person in so many ways, has been through a lot, and has never bothered anyone. And doesn’t deserve to be seen as inferior in any way.
I know this is unlikely to change anyone’s view, but I just wanted to support the opening comments.
Anyway, once again, well done OP for giving me the courage to post my view (under a name change to avoid the flak)

Also Hackmum very obviously wasn't equating transgenderism with paedophilia in their most and was making a very obvious different point about aligning with unsavoury people.

For anyone who hasn't seen the article to which hackmum referred:

www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/10653950/We-on-the-Left-lacked-the-courage-to-be-branded-homophobic-so-we-just-ignored-it.-I-wish-I-hadnt.html

And, there's a screen shot here of a letter by Peter Tatchell that demonstrates how easy it is to be seduced by academic argument on the 'right side of civil liberties and exploration' and anecdote into appearing to condone the unacceptable: mobile.twitter.com/SophiaSmith222/status/1055142438724091904

I have no doubts regarding the radical feminist position on transgender ideology and had no problems with Posie Parker's performance in the interview mentioned by OP.

One thing I think it is very important for us all to remember is that there are obviously a lot of people who agree with the radical feminist 'position' that humans can't change sex. I mean, until very recently this would not even have to be described as a 'position' as it was a universally accepted fact with no political dimension. It remains a very widely accepted fact, challenged by a few people whose brains have been addled by too much postmodernism and queer theory.

This does not make someone gender critical. The Daily Mail (as a general rule) is not gender critical. Donald Trump is not gender critical. The argument is also attracting a lot of support from ordinary people who are not gender critical. None of these people are wrong in their knowledge that humans cannot change sex and that certain rights/protections should be based on sex.

To be gender critical is an explicitly feminist position positing that gender roles/norms are socially constructed and can and should be eradicated from our society. A looooot of people who disagree with trans ideology would also disagree with this. They might have no concept of how gender differs from sex in feminist discourse and use the two words as synonyms. Or they might believe that gender roles/norms are as natural and unchangeable as the fact that women don't have penises. They might even believe gender to be a positive thing, that men should be masculine and women should be feminine.

It doesn't matter particularly for the purposes of the political struggle to maintain the female sex class as a legally recognised class. But we should be under no illusions that those people are gender critical and in my opinion we should stop calling them GC just because they know what sex is.

I'm glad you started this thread OP because it is a battle and I feel exhausted thinking about it. I have professional acquaintances who have been writing against TERFS on FB etc. I know some of them have experienced pain because they see this kind of discussion as an attack on them - because that is how it has been framed by certain activists.

But then they post silly things like a rant by an Irish trans person saying they were attacked by men - then ranting against 'fucking TERFS'. It just seemed to sum it up for me - women are blamed for male violence and toxic masculinity. It's not logical. There's no critical thinking. It's all feels and first person thinking and self-congratulation on being so woke, not seeing the complexity of this issue.

I think that if self-ID is kicked into the long grass for a while it might make some of the activists question their bullying tactics and allow new voices to rise up in the movement. People who will actually talk about the issues, instead of screaming 'Transphobes!' and shutting the conversation down.

I fear though that this will be railroaded through. The Government needs a win - they need something that makes it look like they are woke as fuck, that they get us, that they care about little people rather than being the rich, right wing bastards they are. Women get shat on all the time - we're easy targets.