Gina Martin not happy women don’t want trans women in their sex segregated spaces

Cross posted there old crone!

So many people say 'have you actually met a transwoman? Try talking to one.' As if their mate or relative being nice or pleasant means all women's boundaries are wrong.

They get stuck on the idea that their experience is representative. Not just their experience of a transperson, but their reaction to him or her.

It's naive at best and selfish at worst.

When she says "I was also raised not to generalise an entire community of people without reason" she doesn't seem to realise that she is doing just that when she says that all the trans people she knows are lovely therefore they must all be.

People are used to thinking that way, and having a lot of confidence in their "scientific" beliefs. They don't know this stuff, it's all a belief system for them personally, but they've been told it's part of a system of true facts or at least a process that reveals true facts pretty well.

Fuck me, that is spot on.

What hate I wonder? Online twitter or physical. How is this worse than what women endure? And raised bit to generalise - well she missed the mark there by assuming all women who don’t want mixed sex facilities are wrong.

Perhaps this tweet explains her viewpoint.

Oh I just have friends/loved ones who are trans and I've watched them be subjected to unbelievable hate while only ever wanting to just exist as who they are, so I guess you could say experience. I was also raised not to generalise an entire community of people without reason

So there are some trans people she is close to - perhaps an elderly Jan Morris type, or more likely a teenage relative who identifies as trans, and she is assuming all trans people are like that. It really was a master stroke by TRAs to co-opt children into their movement.

What does she think a transwoman is? Does she think they have undergone some sort of magical process that means they are no longer men?

I have seen it on twitter. Activists are saying that Tw or Tm are really born the ‘sex’ they identify. They say they is plenty of new evidence to support this.

I see it as their next foray to claim ‘female’. And to remove the entire Trans label in the future. How can you be trans if you were always this sex. it is just a type of DSD and your mum had a flush of hormones which meant you were born with the wrong genitals. ...... And some of those pushing hardest are HCPs.

‘Sexy’? Mixed sex. (Autocorrect is doing its own thing)

So they don’t have grandmas and great aunts, mums and sisters? Never been in hospital mixed sexy changing area? Never had a mammogram or smear test? Not been in a loo or dressing room or any enclosed area and felt intimidated/scared/vulnerable?

Well bully for her. No empathy whatsoever.

Thing is lots of women don't.

Especially privileged women shiny, who can’t imagine what life is like for women outside their social and belief bubbles. It is an astonishing lack of empathy.

That only works if you are using the absurd assertion that transwomen are literally female. Language and logic show this very clearly isn't true, on every level. If it were true, the prefix 'trans' would be meaningless and redundant.

Thing is lots of women don't.

But it's not that she just doesn't understand the effect of letting men who identify as women into female spaces, she doesn't seem to understand that a transwoman is simply a man who says he's a woman. In fact, she's telling people who point this out to her that they're wrong.

What does she think a transwoman is? Does she think they have undergone some sort of magical process that means they are no longer men? Or is she suffering from linguistic confusion and thinks that a 'transwoman' means a woman who identifies as a man?

Thing is lots of women don't.

Does she have kids? I hadn't seen s communal changing area until my children started swimming lessons/ club which are often in schools which have communal single sex changing, communal showers.

Other sports stuff is often held in schools which in communal changing.

The arguments focus on toilets because it a. Seems trivial and b. There are no laws, it's a social convention. What about sports, prisons, hospitals?

I suspect when Karen white comes up Gina would say 'not true trans'. But it's happened. The single sex things are there for safety, equality, dignity. To prevent issues. The idea that anyone can ID in, and if it goes wrong afterwards report are terrible. It's happened when it didn't have to. Many women and girls don't report. And a lot of iffy male behaviour is not illegal just creepy, scary, disconcerting. We remember this stuff that happens when we're young.

It's a shit idea. How come so many women can't see that? And it is mainly women, most men would say WTF no way.

She doesn’t actually understand? Boy is she in for a shock then if she finds herself in an ‘inclusive’ sex changing area.

I don't think she understands what a transwoman is.

mobile.twitter.com/ginamartinuk/status/1268556751936327680

So men identifying as women are the problem? Got it. So men are the problem. Not trans women.

The definition of a transwoman is a man who identifies as a woman. When someone points this out, she says 'You're still not getting it'. She really has no idea.

Feh. You pick your friends. Until they turn on you - because they generally do.

I'm actually disgusted by Gina Martin's responses. I went back and checked the threads. Various 'I am so sorry' posts in response to transwomen's experiences. Women post about rape, PTSD, sexual abuse, and Gina gives it 'I'm a survivor too', not a word of empathy. That's cold.

I find the strong reaction of so many women, to women talking about/ complaining about sexism, really interesting.

You see it on here all the time.

Woman: this thing has pissed me off. It's sexist

Lots of other women:

It's trivial
Pick your battles
You seem like hard work
You will be seen as a trouble maker
Women like you give all women a bad name
Etc etc

If it didn't matter to them they wouldn't bother posting. For a lot of women, enforcing the status quo seems really important. I can only assume that they are trying to protect themselves/ the woman complaining. Or they go along with stuff and it's worked for them and they are worried that will stop if other women get too noisy. That sort of thing.

But this happens with more serious stuff. Sexual assault. Rape. Rape of a child. Polanski. Not 'rape rape'. Metoo. What did she think was going to happen? Etc

This is where it gets quite worrying. One mechanism is this stuff has happened to them and they have dealt with it by saying, not a problem. Just get on with it. Any other mechanisms?

Stream of consciousness, sorry.

A fish doesn't know it's wet. When your entire existence is a sea of normalized oppression and minimized or unacknowledged abuse, you will likely simply accept the environment. That is why consciousness raising has been such a feminist action - and why one of the ways feminists are derided isby saying we're making a fuss and lots of women don't mind any of these things, or didn't until they were pointed out.

The difference being, of course, that fish were meant to swim in water. Women do not, and should not dwell as second class human beings.

Re the idea about standing up for the underdog.

Women globally and through history have been in an underdog position. But unlike other underdogs:

When we succeed it is rarely celebrated in the mainstream
We are constantly accused of 'playing the victim card' and being weak
A lot of the violence against us is seen by society as normal, a part of life, women's lot etc etc
Successful women or ones who speak out get an awful lot of shit. From social media rape threats here to murder in Afghanistan.

It seems odd.

We are 50% of the population. We have, globally and through history, been enslaved literally and through custom (often seen as normal and fine), denied basic rights, seen as chattel, seen in law as property, not protected by the law, blamed for things that are done to us, not educated, not given any consideration in many medical treatments while also being horribly experimented on, locked up on the say so of men, I mean the list is endless it really is.

Yet this litany of wrongs fails to really land. Because, it's so normal? So entrenched?

Any thoughts?

And Goosefoot's posts too - thoughtful and insightful.

Yes Floral - I was going to bold part of your post but then I realised it was all spot on. It' just what I'd been thrashing around trying to articulate.

This is a battle with different fronts. For legislature, we stick to facts and material reality because that is the essence of we need in law to protect.

For making the case with those taken in by the effective PR from the genderists, we need to counter the emotional fluff with factual reality, yes, but also pierce through all those assumptions and the conditioning of genderist thinking which has been prevalent for way more generations than just the last 50 years. Remember, the trans stuff is just the modern iteration of every sex stereotype in the system that feminists have been pushing back against since the year dot.

Gina Martin thinks she has already struck the patriarchy hard, and sees herself as part of the modern feminists whose mission is to right the wrongs of the entire human race. If you're a victim, anywhere, of anything, feminism is for you. That's a big play in the PopFem crowd, and it's all emotion based.

You don't pop that bubble with stats and logic, sadly. You do it by demonstrating that PopFem betrays the women it thinks it is for. You show the PopFeminist that she's dismissing the very women she is purporting to stand for. You make her notice her hypocrisy and then you give her the space to move away from it.

Now, I'm not saying everyone has to do this, or even do it all the time. Some of us do the first bit well, others do the second. That's ok. But both are necessary, and the Gina Martin's of the world will need to be countered with both approaches.

If she doesn't have the imagination to have empathy for all the women and girls who don't share her views, she's not going to suddenly develop it. I'm happy with arguments peaking some lurkers.

I think this is where I'm at too. People like Gina are problematic because they become the "feminist" representation and example held up of "a feminist". For all the good she's undoubtedly done, she may yet cause far more harm by being part of the process of grooming young people that it is possible to change sex and that girls and women should not have boundaries.

On a personal level, reading her dismissal of other women's trauma hurts. I keep thinking I'd love to actually meet her face to face and see if she could empathise at all with me. But pragmatically she's just one other privileged person. Her obvious indifference to women's experiences might just be the thing to get through to some lurkers. It was a horrendously biased piece in the Guardian a couple of years ago that did it for me.

Its interesting, though depressing, to see the experiences of a transwoman seem to elicit more sympathy than those of a woman. People just presume abuse, violence and rape are such an accepted part of being female, it doesn't even merit a mention? Does a TRA honestly think the transwoman's pain matters more?

It might just be a reflexive preference for the view of the person they see as the underdog. Or even a more explicit view that the lived experience of the person they see as being most oppressed has to be just listened to and affirmed. If TWAW, and they believe that absolutely, they will always see biological women as hierarchically superior.

It's not fundamentally different than people in the MB thread saying, we have to listen to the experience of black people and not question in any way the terms they put that in, or the conclusions they draw. In that system it's almost taboo to put any kind of critical faculties to bear on what someone says about their perceptions. It's pure acceptance only. And the stick to enforce that is the idea that if you do, you are a bigot.

Habits of thought are just that, habits. A lot of these bad habits have been pretty well ingrained before gender ideology ever caught hold.