It's language isn't it

I this your post is one of the best summaries of where the other side is coming from that I've read.

I don't think that's what the OP is saying.

It can be good strategy sometimes to "know the enemy". And it's not childish.

I agree, but I think there is a link in the current inability to say 'no'. Setting boundaries and saying no are seen as being unkind, there's this constant push to understand, to listen, to respect, to allow. I don't think it is kind, in fact I think we are doing a disservice to young people. I also think this does link the abusive transactivist and the young kids being sucked into this.

Re: Trans activists; Politicians, the police, schools etc. should be firm in setting boundaries. The authorities should have remained clear about the reality that you can't change sex, the reality that men shouldn't be in women's changing rooms and that ganging up and shouting 'fascist' at a peaceful group of women is unacceptable.

Re; Kids; Schools should be clear that schools are for education, safeguarding is paramount and 'gender expression' is for your free time. Sex education should be factual and biologically based. If children are going to parents, teachers, gps demanding puberty blockers because they 'are trapped in the wrong body' they should be told in no uncertain terms that you cannot be in the wrong body and they should be given professional, proper mental health treatment, autism diagnosis and support, protection from sexual abuse, encouraged to develop a life outside the internet and be allowed to develop normally.

It is not kind to allow people to destroy their bodies, it is not kind to allow people to develop obsessions and escalate bad behaviour. The more I see about this gender ideology movement, the more I think it damages the people involved just as much as everyone else.

It's like trying to be kind to a toddler by understanding their point of view and giving in to every tantrum. It doesn't end well!

Those were the days sighs nostalgically

Control of language is not about words. Its about control of society.

Thats why transactivists want to control the word woman, because in doing so they control women and have power over them.

Orwell will tell you lots about this.

There is no cross purpose for this reason. There is a clear political agenda. This is why there can't be 'common ground', because the purpose of deciding what a woman is, is to remove the power of a women to say no to men in women's spaces.

If you can't see sex, you can't see sexism.

You're absolutely right, this is a fight about language. Postmodernist feminism (think Judith Butler) changed the meaning of 'worman' from a biological sex class to a 'gender'. The original thought behind it was that 'woman' was simply a performance, in much the same way that drag is a performance. Typically we think that drag is a copy of the 'real thing', but Butler's big idea is that there is no 'real' woman - everyone who performs the 'woman' gender just IS a woman. There's nothing deeper, no essence, no criteria to being a woman. All you have to do is play the part of a woman and you are one.

Butler also argued that you can't base womanhood in biological sex becasue even sex is unstable and unreal. It isn't an objective concept. There's no necessary and sufficient conditions for someone to be female, and there are all these exception (like people with DSDs). Sex doesn't exist, so we can't found womanhood on that.

The best solution, says Butler, is to ground womanhood in something which she does acknowledge is real which is people's beliefs and feelings. There's a kind of radical autonomy going on here. Reality doesn't dictate if you are a woman, nor does society. It's a free choice, entirely up to the indivdiual. If you say you are a woman you just ARE one. And going even further, there's no rules about womanhood so anything can constitute it. You can be a woman if you are a 6 foot male with a beard.

The big problem with this is very few people actually believe in postmodern theory. Most people believe in science and reality. They don't think that reality reduces to language. And this is where this curious tension arises. We are supposed to accept transgenderism as this factual thing, when in fact it is based on a very obscure, academic theory about reality which no one really buys into.

The other thing that's weird about this is Butler and her ilk are entirely happy to destroy womanhood and reduce it to a personal whim or choice, but she does NOT advocate the same treatment for any other social category. Race and ethnicity are still very much real things, to Butler. Black people are being oppressed by white people, and white people can't just declare they're black. Palestinians just are being oppressed by Israelis, and you can't just identify as one or the other. But no one ever answers this question why only womanhood gets the postmodern treatment.

It's literally magic op.

They believe (or pretend to believe because it's much the same thing since saying something makes it true) that changing language changes the world around them.

Saying "I am a woman" makes you a woman. If someone says that you're not a woman that is literal violence (they've said it's violence so that makes it true).

Throughout history there have been people who believe in magic, from shamen, wizards, magicians to mainstream religions (cf transubstantiation in the Catholic church).

But it's not true. They are not women, the wine is still wine, the shamen has not literally become a bear.

We have to hold the line.

The word for what they're feeling is feminine.
Our sex is female.
The definition of woman is adult human female not adult feminine person.

Their point of view boils down to "what is mine is mine what is yours is also mine. Give it to me now."

The young kids are confused, lied to about what is actually possible in life and puberty is shit. If you are in anyway not happy they see the rainbow gubbins as a way to instantly find happiness.

It's cruel.

Gender ideology needs what it cannot have: a sense of 'gender' not equivalent to 'sex' but nevertheless such that one's gender may (or not) match one's sex.

Well put @liwoxac . It falls apart at the first instance. Would be happy to discuss with TRAs if they could, at the very least, be clear and honest about what they mean. They cannot.

When trans rights activists call me

A bigot
A Terf
A transphobe
A homophobe
A child abuser
A fascist
A Nazi

Just for saying that men can't ever actually become a woman

I stop trying to understand them and how they feel.

Why the fuck should I?

Trans ideology is easily seen to rely on gross equivocation; look at this through the lens of ‘gender’ ...

... 'Gender' means one of two things:

(1) 'Gender' is synonymous with a particular sense of 'sex'. In the 20th century, as 'sex' came increasingly to mean 'sexual intercourse', 'gender' began to replace it (in early use euphemistically) as the usual word for the biological grouping of males and females. Thus, in this sense 'My sex is female' means the same as 'My gender is female'. Of course in this sense it cannot be that my gender does not match my sex: my gender is my sex.

(2) 'Gender' refers to the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or (putatively) determined as a result of one's sex. These attributes are culturally determined, and vary across time and place. In this sense, it makes no sense to say 'My gender is female' ... Gender in this sense is not something I have; not something I can be, as my sex is. 'I am female' can only refer to my sex, once we take 'gender' in this second sense. In this sense there is no such thing as my gender, so a fortiori my gender cannot match (or mismatch) my sex.

Trans ideology mixes these two senses of gender, resulting in incoherence.

Of course a sticking plaster is often offered involving claims of 'gender identity' ... this has difficulties of its own regarding 'identity', but really it cannot get off the ground at all, because in talking of gender identity and its mismatch with sex, its proponents are forced into the same equivocation as above regarding 'gender'.

... If my gender identity (male/female) uses 'gender' in sense (1), it cannot mismatch my sex. And if it uses 'gender' in sense (2), talk of mismatch cannot make any sense.

So, no matter what tergiversations he may offer regarding ‘gender’ and so on, when a man says, "I am a woman,” what he says is either false or meaningless.

Gender ideology needs what it cannot have: a sense of 'gender' not equivalent to 'sex' but nevertheless such that one's gender may (or not) match one's sex.

So, yes, OP, (tldr:) it is language at the root of the error.

"when did it become less socially acceptable to gender bend"

I would point to two things: Kardashian culture where women have to conform to porn stereotypes to get anyone to notice them. And stupid cheap kids clothes in supermarkets that are blue with trucks on them saying "lock up your daughters" or pink with unicorns that say "be kind".

I'm a woman, I don't feel feminine, female stereotypes are not my thing, and it hurts my feelings if anyone suggest that they should be. Why should I accept people denyine my existence?

Not that I have the remotest notion what 'feeling feminine' would feel like anyway. But they can have all the stereotypes that want.

Nobody cares about women's feelings so why do we need to care about theirs?

It's not even remotely reasonable to try and ban people from stating scientific facts using accurate language just because it hurts your feelings.

Grow up.

When men tried stealing the words I use to describe myself,
When men tried gaining entry into women's toilets
When men tried to chastise me for saying they aren't a woman,
When men took jobs meant for women,
When men started raping women inside women's prisons
When men started assaulting women just wanting to speak
When male politicians starting bullying female politicians in parliament
When men stopped women from having women only single sex groups in rape crisis centres
When men told lesbians they had to accept cock

I stopped trying to understand them or how they feel.

I DON'T CARE.

They can take their point of view and stick it where the sun doesn't shine!

I dont think it's all language, I think a lot is the ubiquity, availability, normalisation and explicit nature of porn.

When I was a kid porn was 'top-shelf', something to be hidden. Possibly privately enjoyed, on your own or with a partner. But not, never, mainstream.

For anything 'hard' - ie, with penises showing, you had to make a special effort. Naked female bodies were available, but not actual sexual acts.

Now you have to make an effort to seek out porn that doesn't involve penises.

That co-incides with the portrayal of female partners as submissive and biddable. Their enjoyment is utterly irrelevant, in most cases.

So we are teaching a young generation that women are here to serve them, sexually.

When the real world hits and that doesn't happen, men are frustrated; leads to incel culture.

But this whole trans movement is very much tied into that. Remember Jordan Gray's vile Channel 4 performance about how, sexually speaking, he is your ideal woman?

Straight men are now being offered "women" in the guise of trans women. Horny men can justify male-with-male encounters, as being with women. Trans prostitutes abound. Trans porn abounds. "Hey guys, you too can have all the great no-strings sex the gays are having, without being gay!"

I was in the "treat transwomen as women for social purposes" camp for a long time. It was the insistence that TW literally are women, coupled with the refusal to say what you mean by "woman" in that claim or any other usage, that has been the basis of my gender criticism.

If people in general had never started conflating "female" and "feminine" (and male/masculine) we could all be clearer when we use language.

Exactly this.

There is only one definition of "woman", and "man".

*Is it because they think they have the same feminine feels as women so that means they literally are women right?"

No one can know what it's like to "feel like a woman", we only know what it means to feel like ourselves. An interest in the stereotypes which have typically been associated with women does not change a persons sex.

I don't think we should indulge hurt feelings which fly in the face of reality.

Great post @MoongazyHare

It's so insidious. I was somewhere with my teenager yesterday and there were all these stupid fucking stripey flags - the crowd were waving flags at each other " in solidarity". Teen said one was a "lesbian pride " flag. It wasn't the double headed axe flag it was the striped one which is apparently for "all lesbians". I assume "all lesbians" means men who want to sleep with lesbians.
And a "non-binary" pride flag. Which is more narcissistic bollocks (if you pardon the expression).
By creating these "communities" under the "queer umbrella" you get to pretend that "only wanting sex with someone when you have romantic feelings " (aka a personality type) is some kind of marginalised group of people - aromantics. And that such people with their flag should support other "marginalised" groups like fucking furries and AGPs with their flags because only as the "queer community", will they get validation.

Unless you are actually same sex attracted or attracted to both sexes, anything to the right of LGB is straight people larping as marginalised.

It's a good idea, trying to understand where another side is coming from - I wonder how many transactivists are thinking about how women feel?!

The problem for me is that this has moved very far away from a transwoman being a man who attempts to adopt female stereotypes. It used to be quite taboo for a man to wear 'women's clothes', now no one cares, so they've changed the definition to anyone who says they're a woman.

I think there are so many different reasons for people to be trans that there isn't one single perspective to understand.

Men who transition because of homophobia or some other mental health issues, I think, are often deeply traumatised and are looking for acceptance. I think their reaction to women saying you're not a woman and you can't come in our spaces comes from deep hurt and rejection and bitterness. And of course it's easier to then turn that pain onto women who are not as threatening than to stand up to those who bullied them in the first place.

I think men who transition because of AGP (can I say that?) are doing it for the thrill of breaking a taboo and enjoy the opportunity to shock and intimidate women. They enjoy the manipulation of those around them and the sympathy they elicit of those who turn on us boring women who won't play along with them.

The TRAs who are not necessarily trans themselves, or who are basically men who pop on a bit of eyeliner but keep their beard (and everything else) are fixated on a moral crusade to destroy the patriarchy and see any opposition as fascists, attempting to hold on to the past as they crusade for a brave new world of rainbows and sparkles where anything goes and it's all free love and happiness and safeguarding is a dirty word.

The last two are not hurt or saddened by being told they cannot be women, they are gleefully stealing the word from us and laughing in our faces when they make us use female pronouns or 'cis'. They ARE the patriarchy, using their power to do what they want.

Part of the problem is that all these are deeply narcissistic and focused only on their own perspective. Women's downfall has been that we are constantly trying to balance our own rights and feelings with the feelings of others. But when the other side shows absolutely NO regard for us and NO willingness to compromise, our feelings are simply getting steam rolled out of the way.