Feeling disheartened

What’s your plan for it, Evarish?

*Only if we have gone insane... prisons exist for a reason, e.g to punish and detain sex offenders and other serious criminals.

If you want to argue that X types of prisoners don't need to be there, that's a different argument; but you can't seriously abolish prisons.

Obviously you need good policy in place to protect prisoners from sexual assault, wherever that comes from. Part of that is keeping males out of female prisons.*

So what's your plan on abolishing sexual assault in prisons, given the majority is carried out by the staff? I don't think anyone should be a sitting duck for sexual assault by being housed in with people in full control of their every day life regardless of what crimes they committed.

Definitely. We should discuss how prisons should be abolished

Only if we have gone insane... prisons exist for a reason, e.g to punish and detain sex offenders and other serious criminals.

If you want to argue that X types of prisoners don't need to be there, that's a different argument; but you can't seriously abolish prisons.

Obviously you need good policy in place to protect prisoners from sexual assault, wherever that comes from. Part of that is keeping males out of female prisons.

Oh sorry this was about wanting to boot trans women from women's prisons again, right, not actually to indicate giving a fuck about women being raped in prisons?

So in your mind, I'm not sincere on the issue, because I'm not mad enough to want to abolish prisons... what you are suggesting is fringe crazy far-left impossible stuff.

op, and thank you to you all.

Oh sorry this was about wanting to boot trans women from women's prisons again, right, not actually to indicate giving a fuck about women being raped in prisons?

Spartacus
👏 👏

If you're exhausted discussing dressing rooms and toilets and being called transphobic, woo, wait until the day you're denied access to a medical facility you need...

Perhaps you need to hang around. Read some of the birth trauma threads, or the threads where women have been sent home in pain and/or have nearly died because their conditions (such as sepsis) were life-threatening, but they were dismissed and told they were overreacting. Yes - and women's cardiac problems are often overlooked because the model and teaching standard is male and symptoms appear differently. Women have been dealing with this shit for fucking centuries in different ways, and we have also been lobotomised and sterilised against our wills and at the request of husbands and fathers. We have been denied adequate reproductive care. Our clitorises have been excised by doctors both because of FGM and because in one era this was thought to cure women of psychiatric disorders... and on that score don't get me started on mental health professionals who have told us we have fantasised abuse and rape.

We have not just been denied medical treatment or given inadequate medical treatment we wrote the fucking manual on how this has happened.

I don't think you have any idea about what it means to (sorry, not finishing this because I don't have the mental energy to contort myself to avoid deletion).

LangClegsInSpace

Agree on all counts. The Twitter noise is just sound and fury. It signifies nothing.

Hi EdinburghFeminist

Yes. I feel like that a lot now and I realise your government is a bit ahead than mine in the old Throw Women Under The Bus campaign so you just be bloody knackered.

As others have said take time away when you need to regroup. I looked at the forwomen.scot website a moment ago - and I'm sorry this is going to sound overdramatic but hey ho - I felt a bit teary but incredibly uplifted. The words on those banners and tags are so true and so eloquent and written in a way I don't think it's possible to disagree with. They come from a place of wanting fairness not pain. But it's clear their authors won't be pushed to the side. I wonder what their writers look like? I wonder if I walk past woman like that in the street (on essential journeys obv!)

Due to my job (Education) I still feel I need to stay under the radar so I'm doing what I can a bit quietly. I liked the idea upthread of a £1 in a pot when the red mist descends ready for the next gardening. I've just got some bags from Stand up for Women and used all of them when food shopping this week. I'm going to buy a suffragette colours face mask later from Radical Tea Towel. As Posie said - Wearing is action.

It's weird .... I don't think I've ever had a time in my life when I've felt so angry but also felt such solidarity with people I've never met, as I do now.

And I absolutely bloody love this place. You lot

sending hot tea, buttered crumpets to OP

If you're exhausted discussing dressing rooms and toilets and being called transphobic, woo, wait until the day you're denied access to a medical facility you need...

Obviously it's a serious matter if someone doesn't get the medical treatment they need, regardless of the reasons for it.

It's also a serious matter if women are being raped in prison by males, to take the extreme example.

Trans women have died from heart attacks because the doctor's didn't take into account that due to their hormonal balance, their symptoms wouldn't be the ones typical to cisgender men.

This makes it sound like their bodies are more like women. Oestrogen is thought to have a protective effect on women's cardiac health. MTF trans people taking cross sex hormones are more at risk. As are FTM trans people.

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/04/05/transgender-men-and-women-may-have-higher-heart-attack-risk

[quote Evarish]@MissLucyEyelesbarrow

Please give an example of anyone trans being denied access to a medical facility that is a matter of life or death.

One trans man I know was being denied access to a hysterectomy he wanted because he had diagnosed uterine cancer, under the excuse that 'he's trying to bypass the GIC process'.

Trans women have died from heart attacks because the doctor's didn't take into account that due to their hormonal balance, their symptoms wouldn't be the ones typical to cisgender men.

A trans man's child had likely died because he entered a hospital saying he was pregnant, is a trans man, female, who stopped using testosterone a year ago, and his water broke and the hospital staff handled him as a fat cis man with a false story until hours and forms later, they decided to give him a pregnancy test.

Regularly, trans people get denied access to facilities they need because their appearance, voice and name doesn't match with the usual clientelle, or that we need 'specialized treatment' for anything (being referred to the GIC for having pneumonia, or for an unrelated surgical procedure that had ruptured are ones I recall from my local community).[/quote]
None of these anecdotes is an example of people being denied treatment because of being trans. At most, they are examples of people not getting the optimal treatment, or their preferred treatment, because of limited understanding of their trans status.

I flat out do not believe your first example. No doctor is going to refuse a TM a hysterectomy for uterine cancer - to do so would be totally contrary to the doctor's own self-interest, because it would create a cast-iron case for negligence against him/her.

So biology and sex absolutely matters then, over whatever people identify as or how the present or appear. Sounds like a good argument against gender ideology.

Seems like biological sex might be kind of important and a useful thing to know within a medical setting.

Do trans women want to be treated as women for medical purposes? Because... you do understand that means being treated badly, right? The heart attack example is particularly galling, and if you're not sure why, please go 'educate yourself' about women's health and female presentation of heart attacks.

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow

Please give an example of anyone trans being denied access to a medical facility that is a matter of life or death.

One trans man I know was being denied access to a hysterectomy he wanted because he had diagnosed uterine cancer, under the excuse that 'he's trying to bypass the GIC process'.

Trans women have died from heart attacks because the doctor's didn't take into account that due to their hormonal balance, their symptoms wouldn't be the ones typical to cisgender men.

A trans man's child had likely died because he entered a hospital saying he was pregnant, is a trans man, female, who stopped using testosterone a year ago, and his water broke and the hospital staff handled him as a fat cis man with a false story until hours and forms later, they decided to give him a pregnancy test.

Regularly, trans people get denied access to facilities they need because their appearance, voice and name doesn't match with the usual clientelle, or that we need 'specialized treatment' for anything (being referred to the GIC for having pneumonia, or for an unrelated surgical procedure that had ruptured are ones I recall from my local community).

The baton is also being carried by some young girls... not every kid is captured yet. There’s hope. The Twitler Youth are already getting old. This next group of young kids will turn on them as swiftly as you can say “Climate Crisis.”

That’s a fabulous post LangClegsInSpace

I'm about ready to jump back in now and I will happily grab your baton.

Glad to hear this LangClegsInSpace

To paraphrase (That Bastard) Ghandi:

First they block and #NoDebate you
Then they laugh at you, discredit you, doxx you and destroy your reputation
Then they fight you and you crowdfund the fuck out of everything
Then you win

We're at the fighty bit now, hence all the court cases and hence everything feeling really quite hairy. But this means we're getting there, all that's needed now is sunlight, which the courts are providing because they are asking all the awkward questions and they can't be cancelled.

The fights in the courts are very civilised but alongside these was always going to come an amount of rage from people who don't want sunlight. People who mostly know in their heart of hearts that what they are doing is wrong but who want it anyway, either for personal advantage or general woman hatred, or because they have invested a huge amount of headspace in gender ideology and can see no easy way back.

It's the fights in the courts that matter now. That's where our rights will be secured and strengthened for a long time into the future. It really doesn't matter how outraged someone is on twitter or whether they come onto MN and express their outrage here. It's all just noise. Engage if you think it's useful and if you have the mental energy, otherwise don't - just leave them to work out their ragey feelings.

Hide unproductive threads and take time off whenever you need it.

This is a relay race, as it has been from the first wave of feminism. If you need time off then take it and be confident that other women will cheerfully take up your baton, whether that's for a few hours, days, weeks or longer. And when you're up for the fight again there will be a baton to grab from another woman who needs rest.

I've been engaged in this since about 2012 and I've just taken a whole year off because on top of coronarivus and a whole heap of personal and family stuff, it was actually driving me insane. I'm about ready to jump back in now and I will happily grab your baton.

Don't worry, it hairpins to all of us.

I'm going to bed happy.

These childish attempts to disrupt political organising and debate are a sign of weakness

I agree. If it didn't matter what we said or did, we would be ignored.