Gappy Tales: Laurie Penny's T*RF Wars: Aguide to cognitive dissonance

I'm once again struck by why the fuck I'm supposed to care about any male's made up identity

You and me both. I must have a malfunctioning chip. However my bullshit detector is in pretty good nick.

It's disappointing reading that thread from two years ago to see that Laurie Penny left the thread when it became clear that we were wiping the floor with her.

Yes, I doubt she'll turn up on this one.

I know men who still paint their nails black in their 40s! They probably shouldn't do so around Laurie in case the poor dear gets confused.

I suspect we may have hung out in some of the same clubs Kittens!

Penny is such an incoherent wazzock. It's sort of...the individual words make sense but then at sentence level, it's just one long 'eh? Wtf?'

Men who're goth also paint their nails sometimes. Does it not count if you paint them black? As hard as she works to deny it Laurie is actually old enough to realize that those men exist.

I’m curious as to whether LP would concede that fetishes are a real thing and that, for some men, their fetish is ‘being’ a woman. And that being the case, would she see that as a legitimate ‘trans identity’?

So good. I wish I could write like that.

The dog/cat analogy is brilliant. Those who have made up their minds to spout the mantras will never listen to it, though. Glad to see the Penny idiocy is being taken apart by those well-qualified to do so.

One of the key repeated themes in the TWAW nonsense is that you 'have to believe people are what they say they are', isn't it? So, when accused of being a transphobe, I could say, 'No, I'm not.' And I would have to be believed.

Altenatively I could say that I do not identify as transphobic, and so to refer to me as such is 'literal violence and a hate crime'.

Fairenuff - it's that linguistic sleight of hand again. If you redefine men as women, then you can pretend they're a subset of the class women. Suppose you decided that dogs could identify as cats. You could call them "trans cats". At that point trans cats are just another type of cat, like tabby cats, Siamese cats, Persian cats, Bengal cats etc. The trick of using the word "cat" disguises the reality, which is that we're talking about dogs.

'It is not transphobic to acknowledge that trans women have a different political experience of womanhood than cis women, just as white women have a different political experience of womanhood than black women, just as rich women have a different political experience of womanhood than poor women.'

What is this nonsense? Yet again trying to say that black women are a different kind of woman. I hate this racism. Women are women because of their biology, not because of their political experiences.

I was upset to see Rebecca Solnit share the Laurie Penny article on Facebook today. I can't seem to go near social media any more without feeling thoroughly depressed....

because when a trans woman paints her nails she is betraying the uniform of her assigned sex and gender,

How can they be betraying anything, when they have always been female? From birth in fact.

Make your mind up, love. Are they are men fighting for the acceptance of nonconformity, or they are really women, because only women paint their nails?

Thanks royal, I'm only halfway through that thread but it's great. I hope this doesn't come across as negative towards the brilliant posters we still have here but the arguments in that thread have so much clarity, succinctness and cut to the heart of the whole debate, it's really refreshing and also why I find it frustrating when every other thread now seems to descend into talking about toilets or personal attacks so the clear arguments get a bit drowned out (I am of course guilty of this too).
Obviously the same arguments are being had year in, year out. I get the feeling that a handful of posts in the LP thread could serve as responses to most questions we get here!

They are small, intimate acts of identity formation

I think that's actually the wanking with the nail varnish on, Penny.

I agree, merrymouse, we're all fine with a man painting his nails if that's what he wants. Just don't imagine it makes him a woman.

As it happens, I haven't painted my nails for at least 30 years. Don't know if I'm betraying the uniform of my sex, my gender, or both, or neither.

It's disappointing reading that thread from two years ago to see that Laurie Penny left the thread when it became clear that we were wiping the floor with her.

As somebody who can't usually be bothered with things like painted nails, I think a man who wants to paint his nails everyday is expressing his identity more authentically than I would be.

I just don't understand why anybody would insist that a man can only paint his nails if he identifies as feminine.

Hasn't at least one refuge in Canada lost funding because of campaigning by TRAs?

Yes, Vancouver Rape Relief. The campaign was headed by the delightful Morgane Oger.

because when a trans woman paints her nails she is betraying the uniform of her assigned sex and gender, and there is courage in that. These things are not frivolous. They matter. They are small, intimate acts of identity formation

See, I just read that and I'm once again struck by why the fuck I'm supposed to care about any male's made up identity that is based on their own ideas about femininity and that is not grounded in material reality. Why?

Laurie Penny says:

"They are committed to an essentialist understanding of womanhood, grounded in a radical reclaiming of the female body- a reading of gender and power that identifies binary reproductive difference and male violence as the root of women’s oppression."

What else is there?

I think LP's focus on identity affirmation (self actualisation - at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs) displays a complete inability to imagine what it would be like to be deprived of basic needs - food, shelter and safety because of something over which you have no control - sex.

It's not even as though men have to consciously oppress women. My ability to access education and earn money is impacted by my ability to access services like birth control that men don't need.

"They’re not sending in trans women to invade domestic violence shelters. They’re just closing the shelters and taking away legal aid protections for women fleeing abusive relationships."

Hasn't at least one refuge in Canada lost funding because of campaigning by TRAs?

There's a bit on that thread where she writes:

"What I’m hearing is that women here have been utterly shat on by this government, by cuts, by rising sexism in society and the stripping of vital welfare and institutional support. And that in this context, as you see trans women as men, it seems like men are barging in and demanding access to what little there is left for women."

It's funny, because she's entirely missed the point. That's not what we were saying at all.

Here you go, bishopgiggles. Somebody started a thread on her, and then she joined us on page 3. (I was using a different name back then.)

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3244928-Laurie-Pennys-Mirror-World?pg=3

does anyone else remember the time Laurie Penny came on here to lecture us about how silly we all were?

Don't think i was here then! Are the threads still there?