“You don’t get to decide whether you’re transphobic or not and you don’t get to decide you’re an ally”

@NecessaryScene that sums it up brilliantly.

Argh, just read through this thread. ‘ Natural Woman’ is about someone having great sex and feeling alive again. It’s nothing to do with biology. There is so much ignorance in this whole debate.

Anyway, one of the greatest ironies in this whole movement is the demand that the world needs to respect how people identity themselves and use their words without question or error with the total and utter exception of those of us who emphatically do NOT want to be Cis. Then, self determination flies out of the window, and we are bigots. Fine, fine.

Like many GC feminists I have spent my life arguing for more equality, better rights, a better society. And I regard a lot of the trans narrative as deeply regressive, and harmful. I find that most of the people I talk to ‘offline’ and privately feel exactly the same way, and are terrified at the swift march of law and policy in areas with massive safeguarding flags, huge potential for harms. But we are all publicly silenced by this insistence that to speak out is transphobic, hateful and ignorant. I can only hope the tide turns quickly.

If only trans people were campaigning for recognition 'as trans', and campaigning for services for trans people, I think we'd all support them in that. Like we supported gay people campaigning to be accepted as gay people, and supported services for gay people.

A good piece on that topic from the archives of Jane Clare Jones.

Gay Rights and Trans Rights - A Compare and Contrast

This strategy has been incredibly effective. One of the reasons the trans rights movement has been able to make such an historically unprecedented ascent from obscurity to wall-to-wall dominance is because if you glance at it running from twenty paces, it does look exactly like the gay rights movement. And, right now the whole world is basically going to shit and a lot of people are too up-to-their-eyes in grind, precarity, sugar and anxiety to do anything but look at it running from twenty paces. People just want to be told what the good right-thinking progressive position is and then get on with the business of trying to get on with their business. Fair enough. But there’s a massive problem with all this. And that’s because the parallel between gay rights and trans rights is as superficial and insubstantial as that glossy sound-bite-stuffed Momentum video.

[...]

The key thing to understand about trans rights activism is that, unlike gay rights activism, it is not just a movement seeking to ensure that trans people are not discriminated against. It is, rather, a movement committed to a fundamental reconceptualization of the very idea of what makes someone a man or a woman. In theory, this equally affects both men and women, but in practice, almost all the social pressure is coming from trans women towards the idea of ‘woman’ and the rights of women. And that’s because, when it comes down to it, this whole thing is being driven by male people who want something female people have, and that something, is, in fact, our very existence. Moreover, it turns out – who knew? – that male people have the inclination and social power to exert extreme coercive pressure on female people, and to court the sympathy and support of other males when they do so. (It’s almost as if sex is a thing and that it has something to do with power after all mmmm?).

I find the psychology of it fascinating too, in terms of the fragility of this cohort and how the act of hearing an opinion they don’t like is perceived as threatening to the point of “violence”.

But what I want to know is, where did this come from?

If only trans people were campaigning for recognition 'as trans', and campaigning for services for trans people, I think we'd all support them in that. Like we supported gay people campaigning to be accepted as gay people, and supported services for gay people.

But trans people are campaigning for recognition as what they're 'not' i.e. trans women want recognition as women rather than as transwomen. That's different.

And they're not campaigning for their own services, but to take women's services. That's different too.

"This was said to me by a transman"

Yeah, how about "you don't get to decide whether you're a man or not."

Perhaps they're afraid of men because of the threat some men pose to women. By identifying out of being a woman they perceive that they are no longer at risk from men.

I mean it's all bollocks, but maybe that's the jumbled up thinking behind it.

We should revive "anti woman activists" as some much missed former posters called them.

A transwoman in my local pub tried to have me banned for transphobia because I said I agreed with JKR. He claimed that I wanted him dead. 🙄

I no longer care if people think I'm transphobic. I believe trans people should have no more or less human rights than the rest of us. Demanding society collude in a lie is not a human right

Jumping on the anti racist and anti ableist bandwagon.

Let's just all anti feminism them back. 😎

The other thing that has increased over recent months is the use of ‘anti-trans’.

FFS. The totalitarianism that is carried in the use of that word is stark.

Yet the users declare their ‘lefty’ political purity in the sentences following using that claim.

And I now laugh whenever some tells me that referring to someone’s sex is transphobic.

Great post Hellebore, analysing how some posters on forums, mn, twitter etc, spin the toxic narrative.

I have a slight chest infection and feeling a bit woozy and keep loosing track of which thread I'm on - there's three right now on this board where the dominant themes are coercive control, authoritarianism and extremism.

Exactly, Nancy and Errol. I perceive males, and I perceive misogyny. That's up to me, not anyone else.

I am an alive female gamer who has opinions and says them out loud.

This makes me transphobic.

“You don’t get to decide whether you’re transphobic or not and you don’t get to decide you’re an ally”

And YOU don't get to decide how I see you, regardless of how you see yourself

People can decide for themselves if I’m transphobic or not for not wanting children to be sterilised.

And I can decide I couldn’t give a shit and ignore them.

It was such a big mental lift when I stopped caring about whether people were going to apply a meaningless label to me. It’s like being labelled a heretic, or a Suppressive Person by a Scientologist. I just laugh now, roll my eyes and carry on with life.

I should add it’s been made meaningless by those that fling it about. Because it now means anything and everything, accusers have demeaned the word. People see through it now. Look at the response to LOJ’s baby tantrum.

The thing people really (as in factually, not legal fiction) don't get to decide is simple - it's which sex you are. And you don't get to decide if people of the opposite sex are willing to accept you as an honorary member of theirs.

Sorry, reality is transphobic.

Yes. This is a conversation I have had with the mother of a teen trans person. We often discuss the motivations for this transition and it follows the points you raise here motorina.

This is a struggle OP.

Over the past weeks we have been treated to great demonstrations of this.

One male poster, recently flounced, spent posts distracting and distancing themselves from posts were they gatekept who was trans and who wasn’t. They maintained that transmaxxers were not trans and that a barrister was correct in calling out Hayton.

A couple of days ago on an AIBU thread, a poster declared ‘Mumsnet has a transphobia problem’. Then when pressed admitted that they had no examples that were not deleted, and didn’t understand that some people posted just for screenshots to spread that lie. They still doubled down though. they then used the argument that because it was posted in the first place, there was a problem.

I saw this exact logic on another thread. I did not check to see if it was the same poster as I was busy … they could have name changed. Both posters declared they supported single sex spaces, and other rights, but declared the exact same thing. That MN had a lot of transphobia. Oh.. come to think of it didn’t seem to want to define words either.

One of those posters also declared that cross dressers and sex fetishists were not trans people and they repeatedly asserted this. And that they didn’t believe that anyone who said they were transgender were trans people. And would not accept that this was transphobic.

Yet persisted in declaring others transphobic! It was a clear a case of dissonance as you could see.

More people are understanding there are issues. However, there are more of them now policing tone as they are still in ‘be kind’ mode. The change is in the number.

And so we see again new posters who are supporting the extreme demands now desperately attempting to post something that convinces others. Yet it seems that those who can see some of the issues but want to force ‘kindness’ (something that the flounce yesterday made a huge thing of. Kindness and grace) end up stuck in the conversation.

So, yes. OP. There is so much confusion about what transphobia is and what it might look like in actions. When a word is weaponised as this one has, it loses its meaning and its shock value.

Actually, this makes perfect sense to me. This woman is scared of her vulnerability from men. Maybe that's because of trauma. Maybe it's simply our society is actually a pretty scary one to be a teenage girl in. Part of her self-defence is denying she's a woman - refusing to admit that she is vulnerable to male strength. By saying she's a man she's saying, "I'm strong like them - I can't be hurt". It's all part of the same thing.

It’s absolutely heresy.

I’ve found in RL conversations people audibly gasp or wince when I state bald facts. Because we’re NOT ALLOWED to state them. But then as the conversation progresses it becomes clear that they absolutely agree on all points, but thought they were having transphobic thoughts so kept it to themselves.

Honestly, talking about this in public and not just with my family has been eye opening. I’ve spoken to Uni students, friends, colleagues, randoms in the pub and not once have I found a single person who believes what the Twitter zealots claim. Everybody is ‘transphobic’.

It's a bit like whether you're declared to be a heretic or not, it depends on who has the power.

So if I wore a t-shirt with ‘CIS AND PROUD’ printed on it, would I be displaying my pride that I’m a woman, or, that I’m supposedly a transphobe?

I think they'd see it as transphobic. You're not allowed to be proud you aren't trans, however you express it. It would be jarring, as most women who wanted to express this sentiment would wear an AHF t shirt.

Authoritarianism gets us nowhere.