Common courtesy, a non-malicious question from a transgender person

I think when your world relies on people being forced, through expectation, work rules, or any other type of force, to maintain your emotional safety zone, you tend to forget that other people have needs. A small number of people will not have any conscience at all about that. It might pay to question that small group’s motivation.

But either way, if you choose to participate in creating a world of safety for that person, that is your business. Stop telling anyone else that they need to perpetuate that version of reality for others.

Most of the population never get to live anywhere but the real world with its brutal honesty. And I could not live in a world where I had to wonder whether that person was being honest with me just in using my fucking pronouns. Let alone what else they are being dishonest in any way over.

Yes, it is exhausting OP. But you are intent on making others guilty for that exhaustion when the reality is, it is an internal matter.

I'm happy to respect anyone's pronouns though in conversation with a trans person it would rarely come up I think. I wouldn't refer to someone as she or they when talking direct to them. I don't declare my pronouns as It's obvious I'm a woman.

I understand discrimination and abhor it. As a woman I have faced it since a small child, at school, socially and in my career. I would like my experience respected and recognised too and that I'm a feminist and proud if it. Just as I respect your right to live the life you want to lead and have the relationships you choose.

I've got nothing against transgender poeple at all and do treat them like I treat anyone else. But it's just my rights and safety as a woman being totally undermined and eroded that I'm furious about.
I don't want to share a changing room or locker room where I'm naked with a massive 6 foot person with a penis.
I don't feel safe in a changing room where there are big people with penises also changing.
I've been raped and abused and I just don't feel safe anymore anywhere and I've stopped going out shopping and using swimming pools. Its making my world smaller.

Not RTFT but isn't this another man coming on to lecture women to be kind? It is not common courtesy to demand women lie about who they see. To tell girls they must not refer to men entering their spaces as men but must lie and refer to them as women, to hide the fact their boundaries are ignored and their safeguarding risked. It is not common courtesy to expect rape victims to refer to their male rapist as 'she'. It is not common courtesy to deny us our identity, to prevent accurate data to be collected on women's experiences. It is not not common courtesy to demand the rules of gramme are changed to fit a small group of individuals. To demand that women are blamed for men's crimes.

By allowing men to claim the language we use to refer to ourselves we are allowing ourselves to be written out of existence as a group.

If I was speaking to a transwomen then I would use their name or 'you' as I would speaking to anyone.

Oh, the OP won't be back. The post was for screenshots.

The OP's sole post was a game of two halves: in paragraphs 1 - 4, the OP drew a portrait of shy, gentle transwoman who wants nothing more than to be loved and accepted by society. Paragraphs 5 - 8 go on the attack and insinuate previous posts refused to acknowledge the OP's preferred pronouns and who were rude and inconsiderate to the OP.

tl;dr: screenshots.

OP takes the time to write a long post on Christmas Eve then doesn't come back? Hmm.
I was just about to post the same thing: 236 replies, none of them acknowledged. What happened to OP's "common courtesy"?

So OP takes the time to write a long post on Christmas Eve then doesn't come back? Hmm.

If OP comes back: are pronouns the worst thing happening to you by GC women? I'm wondering if any men hurt your feelings like this and if you ask them why too?

I object to compelled pronouns because it ends up in women like me - a rape survivor - being told they'd need to be "re-educated" when seeking rape support services. I also don't usually know what pronouns people use to refer to me behind me back, and I try to focus on other things. There are some things I can't control and I try to accept that.

By the way, did you also ask Lesbians (other than your partner) is they minded you acquiring their words?

Just further on this. You will understand completely then that there will be those who will lie to you and say they are ok if you claim the word ‘lesbian’ for you as a male. When the reality is they do not.

Because you are insisting that women politely go along with pronouns and whatever language you seem to feel can just apply to you because you want it to.

So… scratch my question. Because I just realised it would not matter. You would ask the question. People would answer you politely so as not to offend you or hurt your feelings.

You would then feel you had enough permission to claim the word as your own. Based on the polite replies (ie coerced via societal understanding of politeness, and by kindness).

See how this works?

Perhaps some of your frustration is because you are actually aware of this? And you so want it to be true but you realise that you will now never be sure of the authenticity of people’s reaction or intention.

That really would be hard to deal with and I would need extensive therapy to deal with the dissonance. That of wanting that particular politeness, but not being able to trust it. Because it is not based on widely known truth, just your personal definition of that particular truth that you have forced people to support.

A truth that until recently was based on immutable facts.

Until some people decided they needed those facts to be malleable and shifting to cope with their lives.

I will use sex-appropriate pronouns. My belief is that pronouns are sex-based and therefore fixed and unchanging.

So that’s a “you” if I am speaking directly to you, “They/them” if I am speaking to someone else about a group that you are in. And “he/him” if I am speaking about you and not addressing you directly.

There is no conceivable reason for me to refer to any male as “she/her”, and I will not be compelled or bullied into doing so.
In the case that I am specifically asked not to refer to someone by the correct sex-based pronouns, I shall endeavour to use their name in place of any pronoun instead.

I will trust that you are in good faith, OP, if we are clear that the courtesy you ask for goes both ways. I am happy to acknowledge your identity as transgender--that is authentic and true. And I can avoid using the term man as long as it is clear that we both understand that gender identity does not change sex. But I would absolutely expect you to respect my physical boundaries as a woman and to not claim that you are an actual woman. I do believe that transgender people are real, valid members of society who should not be erased. They should be respected AS transgender men and women.

I don't care who anyone identifies as- I just don't think male born people should compete in women's sport

I identify as a woman and ask that others respect me in that identity.

I have no recourse in situations where someone just decides to remind me in every sentence of how I was born.

Why does anyone’s identity as something they are not (and you acknowledge you are male) demand respect?

Benign, and inconsequential to you maybe but to me it isn't.

I can assure you, that your expectation is only superficially benign and inconsequential. It is obviously, important to you.

It is also rather important to many women. Because to respect your seemingly small demand leads to a world full of demands.

While you don’t want to admit it, your expectation that we change our language to suit your personal needs, is repeated on a much larger scale.

There is a transitioned male academic who has neatly stated that since others call transwomen ‘women’, why should anyone ever deny them access to everything for women only.

That is the reality.

Like that weird law in some places that if you allow the neighbour to use your veggie patch for long enough, they can claim ownership to that land.

So, to reiterate, why is it okay to just outright not afford me common courtesy?

Common courtesy? That people refer to you as the sex you are not? People can speak to you without referring to sex at all. If you do not like being spoken about without having she/her pronouns used, that is your issue to deal with. It is not respectful to expect others to use female pronouns for someone they understand is not female.

I havent done anything to gender critical people. Im not even involved in any kind of activism or social media.

You need to accept that you are complicit in pushing women to effectively erode their own rights through adapting their language to suit your needs.

I've been dragged into this unwillingly.

You are dragging people into your personal treatment plan. What right do you have to do that?

You are claiming victimhood here. Yet you have never once in your post acknowledged the needs of women to be able to have language that specifically refers to them and the freedom to use it.

I just want to live my life and feel free to frequent LGBT spaces where I won't be harassed by virtue of my very existence and nothing at all to do with the content of my character.

By the way, did you also ask Lesbians (other than your partner) is they minded you acquiring their words?

But this is a another statement about your claim to victim status. No one denies you, personally, exist. However, it is you who is expecting that people accommodate your need to ‘not be male’.

You really come across as not actually ever understanding that other people should not have to be part of some kind of treatment plan for your need to not be the thing that you acknowledge you immutably are. People can treat you with the same human right of dignity without referring to your sex, unless it is necessary. But you cannot expect them to actively support your treatment plan.

Particularly since it seems you also cannot acknowledge that the previous ‘kindness’ is now being positioned as a claim to rights. To access to sports, to roles and opportunities that were designed to progress and encourage females due to both the needs of their bodies and to sexist discrimination because of their bodies. Something that females will not escape by ‘identifying’ as men no matter how they try.

In fact, you have come onto a feminist board to complain that women are not being kind. Do you fall into the classic, ‘I identify as you, but only my version of you. And only because I don’t want to be me and there is no other options.’? Because you display little understanding of what being female means to many women.

You certainly should not be harassed though. In saying that, not using pronouns or using the word woman to describe you is not harassment unless someone is deliberately taunting you. And of course, no one should be taunting you.

You talk about character, but your post comes across as ‘me, me, me’. Could it be that people ARE responding to the content of your character? Do you believe that people owe you the extra active accommodations that you demand? Or is just being neutral is ok too?

I’ve treated the TW who attends yoga classes with courtesy throughout. They haven’t reciprocated - decided to use the women’s’ changing rooms, open space, no cubicles - after the last session, this despite there being another unisex changing area with cubicles available. I’m not willing to strip off and shower in front of any male-bodied person that I don’t choose to, so I waited in the reception area until they came out. I’ll be ignoring them completely in future.

Please don’t continue with that gaslighting myth. What is the difference? In the past, the occurrence really was a rarity. Now? The numbers are much higher.

And now, the sense of entitlement has led to aggressive hostility from some people, if there is anything but ‘acceptance without exception’.

I am quite certain that I wasn’t ever asked if it was acceptable to me for a male to use single sex spaces meant for my use. Yet, here we are. Some males with extreme views have claimed outrage that they might be denied something that they should not have been allowed to claim in the first place.

And yet, some other women have decided for me that their friend’s or their loved one’s desire to access that single sex space has priority over my right and need.

Who has given you the right to decide that other women’s needs come second to your friends?

Have you ever thought about the women who are now excluded due to religion or past trauma? Or did the fact that they are most likely the group that are, in reality, the most vulnerable and marginalised people in the country not occur to you? Because you have been sold the other myth, that the subset of males you seek to allow access for are the most marginalised and vulnerable.

The thing about the most marginalised and vulnerable group is that they have rarely changed demographic through out life eternal. By their nature they were also most likely hidden too, making them very easy to forget and very easy to speak over.

After all, that is the nature of being the hidden ‘most vulnerable and marginalised’ isn’t it?

But they are obviously not your friends, those who you have prioritised.

I haven't read all the responses, so this is just seconding the many who have no doubt said the same thing:

Courtesy is a social function. Within social situations, no polite person will object to harmless requests. Using your preferred pronouns is similar to using your preferred name. If you decide "Jane" isn't you and you'd rather be called "Jocelyn," no reason why anyone wouldn't go along.

The law is a different matter. If everyone could change their names, willy nilly, the loopholes for criminals are giant, just to begin with. The law isn't about politeness and courtesy. It's about rights.

The question at that level isn't how to "be kind" (Ardern to the contrary notwithstanding). It's how to make sure people's rights don't get trampled.

Forcing a rape survivor to call her attacker "she" is a violation. One carried out by the supposed law in that case, which is even worse. Being polite and "kind" about self-ID means sexual assault statistics approach uselessness. Something like 2% of those crimes are committed by women, the other 98% by men. It doesn't take many opportunists under color of transness to make it look like, oh my god!, 5% of those crimes are now committed by "women." 10%!

That obviously affects women's fundamental right to being free from harm. It's so obvious that I'm sure you must know that. Mixing up social courtesy with disrespect for women's rights is the problem. You can ask for social courtesy. You can't demand it.

All women can ask of you is respect for their rights. The same right to define their own group that all other groups have. The right to safety. The right to assemble (and therefore to exclude). In a rights situation, not a social one, courtesy may have to give way to reality.

I identify as a woman and ask that others respect me in that identity.

But Women are adult human females, which you have confirmed you are not.

Woman is really not a 'gender identity' word but the collective noun to describe the reality of adult human females of my sex class - 3 or so billion of them, including women like your mother and mine. Woman, female and lesbian are words which are already taken. Outside of genderism, there is no reason for a male person to appropriate the word 'woman' to describe themself, however feminine they feel. And it is not a belief system I subscribe to.

So, thank you for asking but, as you might imagine, on reflection, no thank you, I would rather not. Hope that is courteous enough for you, OP.

A couple of quick questions if I may about the etiquette on fora which cater primarily for transwomen: Do GC people come on there and reproach TW say for their lack of respect for single sex spaces? Or demand respect from people who frankly don't know them from Adam?

In case it is different on there, a friendly heads up that it's really not de rigeur on Mumsnet to write a long first post and then ignore pages of responses... People - well, women mainly - have invested time and energy replying to you, OP so it seems somewhat churlish to fail to engage with their ideas.

If it is for the screenshots, mumsnet will probably just delete the thread in the end (which is a depressing waste of Women's labour replying) but an occupational hazard in these parts...

You describe what you see - I can't dictate how you perceive the world around you. I describe what I see - and you cannot dictate how I perceive the world around me. If I perceive a male nobody has the right to demand that I lie and pretend that they are female.

If I could bottle “Essence of Woman” I’d either make a fortune or be hounded out of town for selling snake oil.

What is it that you get from being a woman that you don't get from being a man?

That’s one of those million dollar questions, Stroopwaffle.

Impossible to answer (in genderist terms) without recourse to stereotypes.

Also what does identifying like a women feel like? I have no idea and I am one! Is it the urge to wear makeup and women's clothes? What is it that you get from being a woman that you don't get from being a man?

I would quite happily use your preferred pronouns, however, unless you were extremely convincing such as Blair White, I would still think of you as a man dressing as a woman. It may be because I'm not neurotypical, but my brain just cannot allow me to. I have a transwoman friend, but I cannot see her as a biological woman because she has an Adams apple, a masculine face and hands and a deeper voice. She also holds herself differently to women.

Well it doesn’t look like OP is coming back but here goes anyway.

I identify as a woman and ask that others respect me in that identity.

Male people “identifying as” women in a patriarchal, male supremacist society where women are still fighting for our human rights, and indeed seeing them rolled back more and more, is necessarily a misogynistic act that harms all women and girls.

Oppressors “identifying into” the oppressed class necessarily removes the ability of the oppressed to name and resist their oppression. We have seen it over and over again that falsely including any biologically male people in the category of “women” has nothing but negative consequences for women. The only people it benefits are the male ones, the oppressor group. What’s in it for women, the oppressed group? Nothing.

I’ll be fucked if I’m going to “respect” that. No. You are the one who should be respecting the right of female people to have a name that is ours and ours alone, not yours to appropriate. The right to be recognised as a discrete group, separate from male people, for legal and social purposes where sex matters. Full stop.

I am very aware of how I was born. I am very aware that I am different. I hate everything about how I was born. To be reminded of that constantly, sometimes even aggressively is mentally and emotionally exhausting.

Yes. You are different. You are male. Not female. Different. Not better, not worse, just different. It’s not our fault. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just life. You know you’re male and it’s the cognitive dissonance between that knowledge and the fantasy you wish were reality that is mentally and emotionally exhausting you: your inability to accept reality as it is - and that’s what you need to focus on.

Hating everything about how you were born is a serious psychological condition/MH issue for which you need and deserve support, but it doesn’t mean you’re entitled to demand that everyone else collude with you in a lie. It’s your responsibility to get the therapy/whatever form of treatment you need, to put the work in, to find a way to live with and ultimately heal whatever trauma caused this very sad self loathing.

Doing that kind of work is hard and painful, I know, but it’s your responsibility to do it if you want to be at peace with yourself, with who you are.

All I hear you saying is that you want to dodge that responsibility and make it the job of women to sacrifice ourselves, our needs, our rights, our safety, our integrity and our self respect in order to make you feel better about yourself, and save you the effort. Save you an onerous task no matter what the cost to us.

The job of women to be your service humans, in fact.

And I say again, no. Fuck that.

I am actually fucking furious that you have the nerve to come here and ask women to do your dirty work for you and try to make out we’re being mean to you if we won’t. No. You’re being mean. You’re being mean to all women and girls and to the women of this board in particular.

You’re trying to bully us from a position of male privilege, privilege that goes so deep you probably aren’t even aware you have it - because you’ve never known what it’s like not to have it. You didn’t suffer the psychological mutilation that goes hand in hand with being socialised female in a sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal world.

Yes, you have your trauma, and I have compassion for all individuals who’ve suffered trauma. But guess what? We have trauma too. We have more fucking trauma, collectively as a sex, than you can shake a stick at, than you could possibly imagine. And we have trauma individually, as individual female people who have grown up in a world where we were told from birth we were the lesser sex and were treated accordingly, and who have suffered the consequences of that, in myriad different forms.

We have trauma that you frankly don’t seem to give a damn about, while demanding that we put all our feelings aside in order to make it all alright for you.

No. No, no, no, no, no.

I will not use your pronouns. I will not call you a woman. I will not pretend that you are not male, not different from me, that reality doesn’t exist, that I am the bully and you are the vulnerable victim. You need to stop trying to bully and control women. If we don’t want to collude in your fantasy, it’s your job to deal with how that makes you feel, not to try and manipulate us into saying the words you want us to say, repeating the lies you want to hear, behaving the way you want us to behave.

We are not your puppets. We are autonomous human beings.

Do try to respect that.

Reading with intrigue