Julie Bindel on twitter

Amalfimamma Sorry if that came across as an answer to you. It was just me dumping my thoughts.

Cuntysnark

I'm not dictating anything. I am merely pointing out that if you are GC you can't say "well my forend Nigel is a woman cos she says so and she's nice" it's an oxymoron and I am incredulous it has to be pointed out numerous times by numerous people on the feminist forum at MN.

What has happened to this place? Had Spartacus been long forgotten? I do despair.

You might love mumsnet MForstater but I bloody love you!

I ricochet between horror & incredulity with a fistful of frustration. I do ‘do’ things but anonymously and those who know me know why,so I am beyond grateful for those who can & will speak out in their own names but also know that people like you and many others (including Dr JL who hugged me and reassured me in a mini moment of panic-a complete stranger to her but her kindness to me still soothes me) know we are an army who will not let this go.

We've now got someone on the thread dictating the "GC ethos"!!

I don't mind if some women think "not my Nigel" provided they are still fighting for woman to mean woman.

You may not but any GC feminist will disagree with you. Men cannot be women and if you think some men can be women then you go against the whole ethos of gc.

For me I think it is most helpful to come at this from the angle of consent: Is there anything a man can feel, say, wear, do to his body, do by legal or administrative process that should allow him access to womens bodies against their consent?

No, not one single thing.

For me I think it is most helpful to come at this from the angle of consent: Is there anything a man can feel, say, wear, do to his body, do by legal or administrative process that should allow him access to womens bodies against their consent?

Nail, meet hammer.
The answer is so obviously no that one wonders how anyone could argue against this.

Thanks R0wantrees for all the links and memory (and have I mentioned how much I fucking love Mumsnet)

I think it is right that this is the fundamental tension:

*Some GCs want to be able to freely misgender TW in public.

Other GCs know they won’t get anywhere near the mainstream media or keep their jobs if they openly misgender people.*

(Or correctly sex....)

And the reason for it is not to be gratuitously mean but to be able to name men and spot male patterns.

I don't think it quite splits into two tribes, people work together and value each other. But I do think it is what underlies the outbursts of personal animosity between people who are all brilliant and brave and basically on the same side. (And we've all been under incredible pressure)

If you think about this carefully and honestly enough I think it's impossible to avoid landing up at TWAM. And you can either say it, and then decide how far your personal politeness and sense of self preservation will allow you to fudge it in personal or professional situations..... Or your cognitive dissonance kicks in "I'm not the kind of person who fudges the truth, so there must be a deaper and more nuanced truth,"

I don't think TWATW holds as a sustainable position. It's a social niceity. We've spent two years and more painfully learning how to spell out that there are two sexes and you can't change from one to the other.

Mechanisms for avoiding cognitive dissonance are how a meme (in the Dawkins sense) protects itself inside your head against your own intellectual probing. TWATW/it's more complex than W=AHF/Not my Nigel etc... are a different meme than TWAW but they still kick up the dust clouds of cognitive dissonance avoidance.

For me I think it is most helpful to come at this from the angle of consent: Is there anything a man can feel, say, wear, do to his body, do by legal or administrative process that should allow him access to womens bodies against their consent?

No... Good ok then we need words and laws and rules and expectations for that.

Once we've got that clear then we can talk about how to protect the rights of the broad umbrella of males who don't fit with male gender stereotypes or dont feel comfortable identifying as men (practically - offer privacy: unisex options wherever possible, "prefer not to say" on forms etc...)

I think we can have some compassion for those who've built their life based on a promise that should never have been made (do "X" and you can have the right to access womens bodies without their consent). Just as it's worth understanding and having compassion for overly strict fathers trying to protect their daughters from harm in a patriarchal society by constraining their freedoms etc...(or if you watched Unorthodox have compassion and empathy for Yanky....)

But the promise should never have been made, by doctors and then fudged and overlooked by officials and lawmakers.

It's not a question of being more nuanced or strict about what "X" is.

I will read the philosophers books & artcles. I think it's really important what they've done to get us this far, in creating intellectual space. But ultimately this stuff has to be able to be understood and used by people without reading any books (and whether they are left, right, feminists or not ...). It needs to be simple and unambiguous.

I don't recognise half of the stuff that people are talking about.

May Day weekend meltdowns, CursedE, not my Nigel....

But I would say that Julie Bindel and Julia Long were pushing back against gender ideology for YEARS before 'GC feminism' was even coined as a phrase and before it was discussed on MN.

I have tremendous admiration for them and feminists like Linda Bellos and Germaine Greer who were often lone voices out there in the wilderness before the proposed GRA reforms and before most of us (including me) had really engaged with these issues.

I don't recognise the 'two tribes' - is that just a twitter thing?

Why are some people so keen to force people into being on someone's 'side'? Surely I can just not give a fuck at all and go 'meh' to the whole thing.

Any woman who thinks "not my nigel" trans friend

I don't mind if some women think "not my Nigel" provided they are still fighting for woman to mean woman.

I think it's obvious from this thread that all women who speak up have flaws, just like every male politician.

I have seen fantastic speeches and read amazing articles from all the women who have been mentioned on this thread.

The important thing is that we all keep focused on arguing for our rights, not getting involved in minor spats.

I couldn't believe it when Freedman gave support to CursedE. Lost all respect for her that day.

I suggest you stop telling us what to do, thank you, it is not helpful.
I can fully understand how friendships can complicate things.

As someone said about, bindel calls her mtf friends "she". Stock does the same. I've had, fortunately, very little interaction with jcj, and freedman just loves to push cursedE on us and call some men "she" that her colours shine bright.

Any woman who thinks "not my nigel" trans friend is a threat to women an s insists on mis-sexing them and insist they take their seat at the table of feminism , displacing women along the way, are not gender critical feminists. They are your common garden variety of international women .

To those who support JCJ you all do realise she outted a victim without having the decency to advise her, in her, now infamous, "May day weekend meltdown"? Not so long ago a respectable and well loved feminist was outted as a csa survivor and most people supported the faux feminist putting people in personal vendettas..........

Stop sitting on the fence ladies.

It's either black or white, shades of grey are not acceptable in the war on women (by women)

No it doesn't make you female/male/woman/man/neither. No, not everyone has one. But equally no, its not just "personality"; nor is it sign you're stuck in regressive tropes about womanhood or manhood (or no more than most of the planet).

It would be more helpful if she could explain what 'gender identity' is, rather than just what it is not.

I love that pretty much everyone on MN is anonymous. When I started here it was an unusual experience to engage with people who don’t know your experience or real life reputation. Your views stand or fall only on your contributions here. On Twitter OTOH some are anon and others aren’t. There is a much stronger tendency for the known people to listen more to other known people (not just on feminism). Maybe that’s natural but it’s pretty undeniable that the push back against the TRA agenda has been instigated by anons and MNers in particular before most of the known feminists fully engaged or re-engaged with this issue.

I don’t have much time for tone policing other women or distancing from other women. Everyone has a perspective on feminist issues and I care less about whether other feminists are pure enough than on whether they are working to the same goal, even if that is only on a single issue.

This is spoiler for work to come but something I'm increasingly aware of in writing my book is how unhelpful it is to for feminists/others to be scathing about gender identities non-aligned with sex. The fact some are scathing is no doubt reaction to overreaches made in name

of gender identity by trans activists. No it doesn't make you female/male/woman/man/neither. No, not everyone has one. But equally no, its not just "personality"; nor is it sign you're stuck in regressive tropes about womanhood or manhood (or no more than most of the planet).

It's not a choice, though it can be indirectly affected by self-interpretation, and it can change over time. And it's not inevitably maladaptive, though minors shouldn't act on it irrevocably. I"m going to try to explain and justify all this in book. In meantime though

I'm steering clear of narratives that make people with non-sex-aligned gender identities out to be dupes, or fools, or self-indulgent narcissists. I think that's all deeply unfair and alienating and I don't blame trans people or detrans people for being revolted by it.
My formal education stopped at 16.
Human beings cannot change sex. That's it for me. No amount of wordy intellectual pontification will change that.

how unhelpful it is to for feminists/others to be scathing about gender identities non-aligned with sex

There you go. That's the first I've heard of feminists/others being scathing about gender identities non-aligned with sex.

I've never considered I had a gender identity, but if I do have one it is definitely non-aligned with my sex.

I disagree that there are two tribes /two approaches /two sides

There are a large number of women who have been working hard to try to protect Safeguarding &/or women's sex based rights in a wide range of ways.

Yes that’s one analysis. But the division is there otherwise what we’ve seen happen wouldn’t be happening.

Oh, and all of the GC philosophers totally reject the idea of "gender identity"

Kathleen Stock recently tweeted,

"This is spoiler for work to come but something I'm increasingly aware of in writing my book is how unhelpful it is to for feminists/others to be scathing about gender identities non-aligned with sex. The fact some are scathing is no doubt reaction to overreaches made in name/

of gender identity by trans activists. No it doesn't make you female/male/woman/man/neither. No, not everyone has one. But equally no, its not just "personality"; nor is it sign you're stuck in regressive tropes about womanhood or manhood (or no more than most of the planet).

It's not a choice, though it can be indirectly affected by self-interpretation, and it can change over time. And it's not inevitably maladaptive, though minors shouldn't act on it irrevocably. I"m going to try to explain and justify all this in book. In meantime though/

I'm steering clear of narratives that make people with non-sex-aligned gender identities out to be dupes, or fools, or self-indulgent narcissists. I think that's all deeply unfair and alienating and I don't blame trans people or detrans people for being revolted by it."
twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1256146500205363201

Oh, and all of the GC philosophers totally reject the idea of "gender identity" (which is blatantly circular, so how anyone with philosophical training could possibly believe in it is beyond me) so by definition they are completely different from GIRES and any other TRA org.

You should read Becca's stuff for yourself rather than react to my (possibly poor) summary of it

I have read, listened & share a lot of her work.

I think Rebecca Reilly-Cooper's speech at an early WPUK meeting might to help explain her position:

A Woman’s Place is a Sanctuary
Birmingham
Thursday, 15 March 2018

You should read Becca's stuff for yourself rather than react to my (possibly poor) summary of it sexandgenderintro.com/

Becca is a long way from GIRES, trust me.

JCJ's position has always been "transwomen are transwomen", that they are male, but they are neither men nor women, and need their own category. This entails that she rejects that woman means just "adult human female", and thinks there is a social element in "woman" that isn't in "female" (although she hasn't said this to my knowledge, but it follows from what she has said).

Rebecca Reilly Cooper said that a fully medically transitioned transwoman is a woman, but was still male. So she also rejects "woman = adult human female".

GIRES 'research'
'Gender Variance (Dysphoria)'
2014-09-01
GIRES supports the right of individuals to live according to their true gender identity, rather than one imposed upon them at birth. (continues)

Gender variance is an atypical development in the relationship between the gender identity and the visible sex of an individual. In order to understand this atypical development, it is necessary, firstly, to understand something of the typical development of these elements of our make-up. Many in the scientific and medical professions recognise the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ as having distinct meanings. ‘Gender identity’ describes the psychological recognition of oneself, as well as the wish to be regarded by others, as fitting into the social categories: boy/man or girl/woman. These social categories generate expectations of gender roles, that is, how we are expected to behave in society. ‘Sex’, on the other hand, is usually understood to represent the physical differentiation as male or female, indicated by the external appearance of the genitalia and the presence of gonads (testes in a boy/ovaries in a girl) which will determine reproductive function, and differences in brain structure and function. (continues)
www.gires.org.uk/gender-variance-dysphoria/

Kathleen Stock never gives an opinion on whether diagnosed and treated ‘genuine’ transwomen should be treated as women or not. She only seems to discuss self identified ones, which she clearly states should not.

the academic side seem to want transsexual males to be referred to as women, whereas Posie et al. including Jenn Smith, say that they are male.

That isn't right.

JCJ's position has always been "transwomen are transwomen", that they are male, but they are neither men nor women, and need their own category. This entails that she rejects that woman means just "adult human female", and thinks there is a social element in "woman" that isn't in "female" (although she hasn't said this to my knowledge, but it follows from what she has said).

Rebecca Reilly Cooper said that a fully medically transitioned transwoman is a woman, but was still male. So she also rejects "woman = adult human female".

Kathleen Stock has explicitly published an academic paper in defence of "woman = adult human female", so she doesn't agree with JCJ or Becca Reilly Cooper. Stock says that it transwomen being treated as women is a fiction.

So "the academics" are not in agreement on this. But none of these three say that any transwomen, no matter how transitioned, are female.