Can MNHQ set up a new discussion category called Feminism: sex & gender discussion (inclusive, non-GC)

@NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision That is shocking. Every time I think of something which hypothetically might be negative for women in all of this, I find out that it has already happened.

@NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision 👏 great post

One is that I have known many strands of feminism, sometimes in conflict with each other. But all share the one fundamental thing that defines feminism: they are all about women and women’s rights

This is very true, @Ofcourseshecan - we’d all be more accurate if we referred to “feminisms”. Twas always thus.

But any feminism centres women and women’s rights. Some go so far as to fight for women’s liberation.

OP, you feel you are being bullied. Can you connect this with your OP describing posters here with words like derision and hostility … toxic & intimidating …. we have to wade through unpleasant (for us) GC threads … toxicity and hostility?

I would dearly like to hear your viewpoint on two concepts that baffle me.

One is that I have known many strands of feminism, sometimes in conflict with each other. But all share the one fundamental thing that defines feminism: they are all about women and women’s rights.
How can a politics that centres men be called feminist? Allowing men into the category of women isn’t ‘inclusive’, it centres those men who are let in. And of course it abolishes single-sex spaces. By definition, that has to be anti feminist. What am I missing here?

And could you give me a definition of ‘gender identity’, please? I can only see it as a lifestyle choice equivalent to being a goth or a naturalist, but based on 1950s sex stereotypes.

On one thread a couple of years back, a woman disclosed she'd faced that exact quandary after a trans-identifying male raped her.

She'd finally chosen not to report it to the police, for that exact reason.

I think the issue about fertility is that all girls and women assume they can reproduce (until they can't) and that's what their role in life is reduced to from their own perspective and society's perspective. This is relevant in terms of the expectation placed upon them from birth.

In this sense all women are fertile in ideological terms and social terms until they don't come up with the goods and they are declared unwomenly or in unuseful. That's why in these discussions 'menstrator' or 'gestator' are effectively default terms and anything that deviates from this is somehow unfeminine.

Also see women who are older than are 'unuseful' and are now 'barren'

@NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision That is such a powerful post. It has also occurred to me that if a woman is raped and knows that her attacker identifies as a woman or simply might start once he's charged, if she reports him and he's convicted, she knows he's going to a woman's prison where he will be a danger to other women. Instead of feeling that him going to prison will ensure he will be unable to harm anyone for a while, a victim has to decide on which women to condemn.

Good evening. I've been catching up on this thread. I appreciate the following post is going to hark back to posts maybe a dozen pages back, but that's life.

There has been some lofty, idealistic phrasing about dealing with crime committed by males who don't identify as trans first.

So what does that look like, in terms of policy? By how much must male violence against women and girls be reduced before violence by trans-identifying offenders in historically single-sex spaces becomes worthy of preventing? Whatever your figure, what is the gameplan for eliminating that percentage of violence against women and girls?

What is the timescale for this?

Currently, women are being abused by male offenders in prison. How long do they have to wait before they are worth the effort of protecting? When you do your mental arithmetic, take into account that these rapes and sexual assaults are some of the simplest to prevent. All you have to do is separate prisons by sex again!

It can be done with the stroke of a pen.

Would you be willing to listen to the testimony of a woman currently locked in a building with a convicted rapist, and tell her that you don't think her physical and psychological welfare is worth the effort of moving those males into the male estate?

Incidentally, have you ever in your life said that bullying in school shouldn't be addressed until we've eliminated malaria, or anything like that?

At this point in a thread, some person self-identifying as a cleverclogs usually makes a fool of themselves by asking whether I ever cared about prison welfare before this issue came to the fore. Often in a highly patronising tone, with the clear expectation that they're going to trigger some kind of Damascene moment for me in which I'll realise that female prisoners don't matter.

Tonight, for the sake of my own bloody blood pressure, I'm going to pre-empt that. The answer is yes. In fact, I have cared about prison welfare since I was seven years old. Why seven? Because that was the first time my mother ever told me in any detail what her time in prison had been like. In the following years, I discovered that other adults I valued deeply, both female and male, had also served prison sentences. I do hope that's good enough for you.

I don't particularly need flower emojis, but donations to Keep Prisons Single Sex are always nice.

For those who have the emotional perspicacity of a dead sheep, this longheld knowledge means that I have always been aware than incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people are... people! (Although my mother didn't believe that this applied to sex offenders and she brought me up to have no sympathy whatsoever. )

Every single person in there is someone's daughter or son. The adults in my life wanted better for me than the lives they'd had, and they seem to have succeeded (unless I get arrested and imprisoned for calling men, men, at any rate!) but none of us know what the future holds for our own daughters and granddaughters.

Are you happy to turn a blind eye to your granddaughter being sexually assaulted in prison? Mine? The daughter of your sister's best friend?

What lies at the root of this lack of empathy for women? Is it people feeling guilty at saying no to particular subset of male prisoners. Why? The general public doesn't normally have any problem saying no to male prisoners asking for better food, more investment in educational facilities, and so on.

I can say, totally guilt-free, "I don't think you should be housed in the female estate. If you are in danger in the male estate, then separate units should be established for the use of trans-identifying male prisoners, in the male estate."

To be fair, I'd fear for my physical safety if I said it to someone like Karen White (who was placed in a women's prison with a mother and baby unit after being charged for raping a woman on a locked psychiatric ward. He injured her so badly she will never be able.to have children) or Tiffany Scott (Scotland's most violent male prisoner) but I wouldn't feel a drop of guilt. I'd feel a lot of guilt at ushering either of them into a room with another woman and locking the door though. And so I should!

Is it instinctive fear of violent reprisal that means you fear saying no to these prisoners when they demand to be in the women's estate? Do you realise you are using other women as your shield against these scary males? How can you feel comfortable with that?

I could never say to a woman, "I am going to let you get raped, in order to stop this man getting angry with me because he's terrifying".

extract from Keep Prisons Single Sex

“Being in prison with male prisoners, you always feel on edge. You know something could happen at any time. We know they are not women. They are physically threatening and aggressive. I was sexually assaulted and I am not the only woman who has been. They haven’t had surgery and they expose themselves. One of them had been told he couldn’t shower at the same time as us women. He made a formal complaint and said this was a breach of his human rights. So now he is allowed to shower with us. And because he now has that right, the other males have that right too. There’s only a shower curtain between us. He moves the curtain so we can all see his penis when he is washing himself or shaving his legs. This is disgusting and I think it is disgusting that the prison allows this.

We can’t complain about anything. They are very well protected and it feels like our rights as women just don’t count. We have to call them ‘she’ and ‘her’ and have to use their female names. If we don’t, we are punished and lose our enhanced prisoner or D-Category status. It is horrible to do that to women.

I am very upset that I lost my legal case. I can’t understand how anyone can say that imprisoning males alongside women is the right thing to do. The prisoner who attacked me was convicted of the most serious sexual offences against girls and still has his penis. How can the government say that putting him in prison with women is the right thing to do? It’s not. I am out of prison now. But I think about all the other women still in prison who have to live with these males. This is dangerous, disgusting and wrong.”

Offs. You're right it's ridiculous. And deeply unpleasant. We'll bend the rules this way and that and manipulate the truth....

@haXXor for sure - conversation with dd basically I straight up agree that unisex internet 'nickname' and avatar was a sensible form of protective camouflage that made perfect sense to me, also irl that her clothes were for making her as comfortable and confident as possible with no pressure to be decorative or attractive to men.

Taking away female-only space is another way of asserting control over us:

1. We have nowhere to go to talk to other women, be with other women, etc. Even loos are valuable for this. Rape Crisis stickers are put on the walls of the women's loos for a reason.

1. We cannot go outside the home alone for long if loos are no longer single-sex, because we must go home to pee. Would you be able to spend the day viewing flats to move out from an abuser's house if you couldn't pee all day?

Corollary to 2. You cannot have a job if you cannot pee safely at work. The laws protecting single-sex workplace loos are important.

Male entitlement to women across every aspect of life became normalised and accepted because of men's desire to be sure that he has heirs and puts resources into raising his own child, not someone else's. Plus, it's hard to control a woman's uterus if you don't control her entire life...

Tone policing is a means of controlling what women say and is part of how men try to have total control over women. If we talk to each other, we might organise to weaken men's control over us. We might share tips on birth control and abortion, we might advise women of their legal rights when ending a marriage, and we might even try to campaign politically for more freedom. So we must be silenced. If men said outright "shut up women", we'd ignore them because such a demand is obvious enough to be immediately recognised as controlling behaviour. So they try to disguise their silencing as them being reasonable, through tone policing and whataboutery and NAMALT and framing us as unreasonable. It's another thing that comes from controlling our uteruses.

There is a laziness to the continued framing of disagreement as ‘hostility’. On a thread today on AiBU women responding to a clearly misogynistic poster were referred to as being clever and sneery. And that we were ‘off putting’. It really was the same as we always see.

Women, you are too shrill / blunt / hysterical / clever / gentle / unreasonable / hostile / whatever so we are going to shame you and tell you so rather than engage with the intention of understanding what you are trying to say. You are obviously hateful anyway, you really are mean, that while I might agree with some points I don’t want to be seen as being in agreement with you at all so I will try to shame you to distance myself from you because your meanness is that you are pointing out flaws in people’s arguments. How rude and unreasonable you all are!

I mean, we can almost script it by now. First post from the poster on the thread (can be OP, might be just someone joining in) is agreeing with a poster shaming others about how terrible posters have reacted to that poster’s inflammatory words. Then it continues for x posts. The final post is telling women that their tone is ‘off putting’ or whatever and that no one will listen to you all, whereas that poster is positioning themselves as the reasonable poster with the answers, while actually contributing very little but tone policing throughout the thread. Today’s thread that I saw this play out really reminded me of this one.

Sorry for the double reply.

The Scottish govt thinks that a 17 year old can't know right from wrong well enough to be jailed for raping a 13 year old. The same Scottish govt thinks that children aged 16 are mature enough to decide to legally change sex. So that 17 y o who isn't jailed for rape could have been legally-female for a whole year, using women's facilities. Do you think the women and girls in those facilities would be safe with him in them? Men and boys benefit from this Scottish double-think, not women and girls.

Why are so many girls and young women referred to GIDS? I'll bet there would be far fewer if women weren't treated like utter crap.

I set up my first thread as a newbie to MN...the initial response was pretty bracing to say the least, and I felt a bit up against the wall.

But in reality it wasn't hostile, just frank.

Same here.

But we can all see the calibre and toxicity of the replies to me in just the first few minutes of my post being up. It’s a lot of negativity for a MN poster to be subjected to for a straightforward, respectful post
No, we can't. You haven't experienced any toxicity; people simply don't agree with you.

You might want to start getting used to this...

It'll be that we don't want teens to mutilate themselves before their brains are fully matured. You know protecting children and young people from making decisions they are likely to regret later in life.

Goddesses and whoevers bless you, women of MN, for taking such a confused post and turning the thread into a thing of thought-provoking interest.

Sorry, I missed some lines.

Yup. Male entitlement to women across every aspect of life became normalised and accepted because of men's desire to be sure that he has heirs and puts resources into raising his own child, not someone else's. Plus, it's hard to control a woman's uterus if you don't control her entire life, as she could cheat or be raped. For a man, trying to prevent "his" woman from being raped is about protecting his investment. If women are property, a woman outside without her male "owner" and not labelled as owned is up for grabs just like a tenner lying on the ground. This is where wedding rings and the historic practice of married women wearing headcoverings in public comes from as well, marking her as owned so that she can pop to the market without her husband. Don't believe me? How come men only started wearing wedding rings very recently?

Rapists rape because they enjoy it. It gratifies an urge. It’s rarely a thought-out strategy.

How come women experiencing similar urges flick the bean or reach for the rabbit vibrator, but men feel entitled and permitted to help themselves to another person's body? And how come, six times in seven, the person being raped is female. The answer is quoted below from another poster:

What started out as commodifying and controlling women as vessels for men's progeny probably just evolved into the right of men to use women's bodies for whatever they wanted.

Yup. Male entitlement to women across every aspect of life became normalised and accepted because of men's desire to be sure that he has heirs and puts resources into raising his own child, not someone else's. If women are property, a woman outside without her male "owner" and not labelled as owned is up for grabs just like a tenner lying on the ground. This is where wedding rings and the historic practice of married women wearing headcoverings in public comes from as well, marking her as owned so that she can pop to the market without her husband.

pretty sure you’re a her @haXXor sorry not sorry for assuming pronouns

I don't dictate how others refer to me. I do have first-hand experience of taking a pregnancy test, if you were hinting that a male would be unlikely to write such an analysis.

issues like surrogacy

Paid-for surrogacy is to having a Handmaid's Tale type handmaid as prostitution is to rape. The consumer is paying for something that would otherwise not be given freely. It's another "once you see it..." realisation.

as women we just don’t understand the concept of being unsure about your genetic link to your children

Until the advent of hospital births, with baby mixups, that was very true. Equally, men don't understand the concept of being unsure whether you will survive the process of making a child.

In societies like the Mosuo where women own most property and pass it to their daughters, men are strangely much less worried about paternity uncertainty.

oppression is lack of pockets and a 10% gender pay gap

Those originate in uterine exploitation.

Female fashions are designed for appearance at the expense of function in a way that men's clothes are not.

1. Why? To flatter the figure.
2. Why? As a means of establishing pecking order amongst women (who's the fairest of them all?) and to try to attract men.
3. Why? Because women need to outcompete other women to attract a high value man.
4. Why? Because women have been trained to believe that we need a man in our lives (Don't believe me? Look at the pick-mes on the Relationships board.) and she doesn't want to be stuck alone or with the kind of toe rag who beats her. Remember that "old maid", "maiden aunt", and "spinster" are negative words, whereas "bachelor" isn't.
5. Why are we trained to believe that we need men? So that each of us will submit to having our uterus exploited by one man, and in doing so make more citizens for the State.

The pay gap is derived via multiple paths.

• Women not being paid enough for doing reproductive work for the State. Mat pay is not your full salary, is it?
• Women dropping out of work to raise kids, and not paid for caring for the State's new citizens. "The child is her choice" my arse, see again what I said about Decree 770.
• Women dropping out of work to raise kids and the skills needed to do that (time management, dealing skilfully with recaltricant small people who are often only slightly worse-behaved than some of the "rock star" programmers I've seen, prioritising spending with a limited budget) are not deemed appropriate to even mention at interviews and discounted as work-related skills, disadvantaging the woman when she returns to work.

But those paths all come from treating the uterus and the woman surrounding it and her child-caring skills as commodities to be exploited at the cheapest possible price, which inherently means devaluing the skill involved in reproductive work.

"But on this issue I’m expected to creep around the vestry like a secretly atheist chorister, forced to chose between total silence or mouthing the words to a hymn I think is full of bollocks"

This encapsulates it perfectly - the frustration of not being able to speak about reality!

Interesting responses. I think that the difference between Haxxor's emphasis and the one I tried to explore may be quite small in any case, in the sense that, across the broader historical landscape of evolution and the origin of human mores, the essential material divide between men and women (pregnancy-capable and non-pregnancy capable) is at least partly the cause of the psychological vulnerabilites I mentioned. So - on that timescale - pregnancy-capability is analytically fundamental.

Food for thought. I worry about talk of the patriarchy turning men off from supporting feminist goals though.

But the patriarchy is the only reason we even need to have feminist goals in the first place!