OP I had a conversation with someone who really believed that trans people needed rights and didn’t have any in the UK. That transgender people didn’t have access to healthcare. This is what people are being told. It’s complete nonsense if you look into it at all but people are kind, but busy and gullible. People are used to seeing other people as baddies and writing them off- which is a fair reaction in some situations - Trump- but has got people a bit too used to letting others make the assessments for them, and agreeing with those assessments becoming a badge of identity. Think of things like Brexit. Few people I know (me included) could really take the arguments apart but we all know where we stood on the vote). So a third party asking us politely to look again at what we’ve assumed to the true can be quite emotionally challenging. Even though it maybe wouldn’t have been in other less divided political times. I don’t know. Maybe being politically blinkered by the current culture is a very normal state of the human condition.
Anyway IME people (men and women) who believe this don’t ever really think TW literally are W, because they accept biology, but they want to be kind and inclusive and respectful ‘to everyone’ and haven’t thought about what that means for women.
They can’t ever say what ‘rights’ trans people don’t have and then they start talking about school toilets and public toilets and just wanting to pee in peace.
Then you’re on to women’s rights not to feel afraid or uncomfortable in their own spaces and the class aspect of this that many people glibly taking down single-sex provision of every kind are not people who will ever be using these single sex spaces or services. And that protecting minorities abilities to use public services is exactly what ‘being inclusive‘ really actually is. But that isn’t at the expense of others, third spaces can be made if necessary.
Then I mention female powerlessness and how we need to speak up in forums where we aren’t at personal risk for doing so- Female prisons is a classic example. that’s why JKR doing so in public is such a big deal.
It’s made me more certain than ever that it’s women’s rights (and children’s safeguarding) that we cant talk about. Let that sink in. That’s a shock right there at first, in this day and age. We all like to think of social progress going forward so It can be hard to accept that it can go backwards too. And ‘on our watch’.
This all makes me more sure than ever that this is a male sexual entitlement movement we are dealing with. The ubiquity of porn and how viciously women are treated in it is adding to the toxic atmosphere for girls growing up, the stigma that has been attached to lesbianism while T is celebrated in the LGBTQI+. ‘Intersex’ (‘I’) people, meaning people born with disorders of sexual development being unwilling coopted into an identity campaign. While same-sex attracted LGB people are being told they are transphobic for their sexual orientation. But specifically it is lesbians being harassed by men with the disgusting concept of the ‘cotton ceiling‘.
It’s no wonder that increasing numbers of girls and young women want to find a way to escape from all the sexism and the lesbophobia by transition. I see all the time how even for girls seemingly managing to navigate this culture in relatively non-self-destructive ways, and who have grown up always in mixed-sex environments, it’s at the expense of much of a sense of female solidarity and this isn’t an experience they have been able to have.
The ‘not being like other girls’ cool-girl trope really needs careful unpicking because that’s just another way to get by in a misogynistic society. All of these reactions to misogyny are rational and understandable on some level, it reminds me of all the different strategies that people can try to escape bullying though.
We live in a massively sexist, misogynistic culture. That is what has to change.