KJK

Actually @BonfireLady i thought you were a trans activist under a false flag when I read your posts.

I'm avidly following along with all of this, and can actually feel my brain struggling and learning!

It's fascinating, and wonderful. And why I'm so glad I found this.

Several posts here have 'landed' with me, but I this one from Gail was a major lander.

I relate very strongly with Bonfirelady's way of thinking and approaching contention (and I recognise your personal difficulties- and achievements- with this too, Bonfire- which are far more than mine), so have felt deeply, almost personally, involved in this discussion here.

The lightbulb that's just gone on for me though, is that I suddeny realise that I have a blindspot!

I think that, because I like to think deeply and critically about an issue (especially conflict)- to try to understand it, from all angles, and to work out where others are coming from/how it can be resolved, and because two of my core values are truth and integrity- I think, on some level, I assume that the same is true of others.
I think they too, just need to (and will want to) understand, and will choose to act on truth and integrity when they do.

Being a mediator type- and how we get to be one- is a complex thing- and in some situations its a gift. In others it's a curse, and I certainly have encountered lots of roads paved to hell with good intentions over the years.

Even though I have been gradually learning on a personal level, that in some situations, with some people, a simple, firm boundary is the only things that works- I think I haven't yet been able to fully translate this to society (the decision makers) as a whole. I realise I'm still holding the hope that the values I hold, and the power of understanding can win through in the end.

I read this board compulsively (and threads like these in particular), as it plays out my own internal tensions: to mediate, or to boundary.
As I'm reading, I go through the gamut of YES! NO-TOO MUCH! I AGREE! NOT SURE! AAAARGH!
It's pretty visceral!

Late in life, I'm in the process of trying to stand in my power as a woman- and the one good thing to come out of all this gender mess, is that this has been an unexpected learning point.

And what GailBlanche says here, about the decisions makers, struck like a sword of truth.

I am clearly seeing that this is a boundary point, not a mediation point.

(Recently re-watched the film Erin Brokovitch- and that came strongly to mind when writing this!)

I found one of the scales upon scales post that I mentioned upthread. Scales are first mentioned on pg 3 (for those with the 100 posts per page view).

This thread has been astonishing. I thought the scales had fallen from my eyes several months ago and realise now the scales had only fallen from the scales. The process of burrowing down beneath the layers of gas lighting, compromising, desire to be kind and inclusive that have clouded the arguments and caused people to find these issues confusing is really a journey in understanding how massively the world is run by men, for men. I thought I knew that, but I didn’t really have a clue. I rarely post but I read avidly and am spreading the word in real life.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3364094-Debbie-Hayton-in-the-Times?reply=81111220&utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share&utm_source=copylink

So many excellent posts in that thread but I'm highlighting another on the same page from Barracker (it's 2018 and it's interesting as a benchmark of where we are now).

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3364094-Debbie-Hayton-in-the-Times?reply=81111062&utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share&utm_source=copylink

Why am I going in for this archaeology? It's a relic and demonstration of just how very many threads have been dedicated to similar discussions and how familiar the many arguments are although they continue to be new to some people: it's about Debbie Hayton and the thread includes mention of KJK. It's also a Whos Who of how many posters have since been felled by the then moderation around these issues.

That thread is worth reading.

And this is the nub of it.

You can be nice and reasonable with nice and reasonable people who have the capacity and interest in reciprocation.

With someone with a problem and no such capacity, who is behaving abusively? You need to know what you're dealing with and have firm boundaries, or you risk being harmed or hoovered up/used.

Sadly with this lobby, you really need to know the difference. Hence all the talk about recognising abusive behaviour. Gender identity choices have no impact on behaviour. If someone is a boundary violator with no respect for others, then it does not matter what their gender identity or star sign is.

It’s proper give an inch and they’ll take a mile stuff, innit?

The first time I heard a feminist blatantly say that a transwoman was a man I was genuinely shocked at her forthright, give no fucks attitude.

I was sweet and wishy washy when I turned up here - thought it all might be a bit of a misunderstanding and that the terves and the tras just needed a nice, polite, moderate go-between and we’d be able to iron it all out.

That turned out to be utter bollocks and I have toughened up considerably, largely due to feminists and trans widows pointing out the vista from Malaga Airport.

I have learned, I over time, that bluntness is the only way to get my message across. Where I come from, the expression "I shouldn't think so" is a hard "No". When I started working in London, I found that people thought that I was inviting a debate when I said it. So I started to say "No". Some people still interpreted that as being willing to debate the issue. I now tend to say "Don't be fucking stupid".

Yes. how many misogynists have we had visit this board and tell women that they won't read a thing because women were swearing and not using nice language.

And we still have women telling us off for swearing, too. Life must be fucking limiting if your critical thinking ability switches off if you read something with a fucking swear word in it.

No. I am not quite sure why it was positioned the way it was initially, but it is good to have that clarity now.

So you agree with Kellie Jay here then?

Why do you keep telling us about it then when you agree? You can see her point clearly and you agree with it.

Sure, you can keep saying you choose to do things differently. But it seems to me that you have trouble accepting that your choices have negative implications. However, we all have to accept that our decisions may have those negative ramifications and live with that very fact which ever way you seek to justify it.

Decision makers understand the issues all too well, don't be fooled that they don't they merely picked which side they thought was easier to shit on without them fighting back which is why they are like rabbits in the headlights now that women are fighting back and being direct about it.

Coach Blade had someone say exactly this to her outright.

I actually took the president of Athletics Canada to to dinner and I basically said, 'Bill, please tell me- why is this happening? You know men have an advantage. And he kind of hummed and hawwed and kind of gave me a smirk.

I said, 'Oh, I see, okay. So I get what's happening here - you're afraid, our whole association is afraid, that these few men, male, self-appointed females or whatever, are going to sue you. You're worried about them, about another male suing the association'.

I said, 'but don't you understand that there are way more girls and women who are going to be disaffected that might also be suing you? So like the chances of a lawsuit are much higher by allowing this inclusion than other way around.'

And he looked straight at me, and said 'girls wouldn't do that'.

(Sasha gasps) Are you joking?

Coach Blade: I'm not joking. That's exactly what he said. I'm quoting exactly. He said girls wouldn't do that. So the assumption is that that we would just sit, we're supposed to sit and take it. We won't ever... Girls are nice, they don't sue.

People may not be so explicit about it, but that's the dynamic. Women are expected to be support humans, and not stand up for their own rights.

We're currently at the point lots of women are fighting back and suing, but people still seem to be surprised at this. It would not be unreasonable to conclude that more noise is required. We've kind of reached a tipping point at least in UK venue bookings where people are still defaulting to screwing women, but immediately realising their legal error, but still, what will it take for them to actually have second thoughts about screwing women in the first place?

Or well informed.

And they are awfully ready to outsource their thinking without bothering to check their facts before they chant nonsense like obedient little parrots.

You're left thinking this is someone who isn't really demonstrating capacity for a job of such responsibility. Frankly the entire political class of the moment seems a dead loss with major reviews needed about the kind of person getting into power and their route of access, because it urgently needs sorting out.

Thank you for Victoria Smith's article linked above. I particularly agree with her point that using pronouns is another 'yes dear' head pat that women are required to offer to the male ego as part of the price of being a woman and functioning in society. And it's so ingrained I know I do some of it without even noticing.

Thanks for clarifying. I thought it didn't sound like something she'd say.

Muddled thinking by decision makers is surely an issue here?

David Lammy, one the the MPs at the centre of the GRA believes that men can grow a cervix.

These decision makers aren't bright.

This is what you say to children. "My ears only hear nice voices".

This is what misogynists say to women. "You'd be listened to if you weren't shrill or hysterical".

IT's SEXISM

If you want to ask nicely for little girls not to be subjected to blokes with their tackle out living their 'best lives' (and fuck the little girl's best life, she's a tool in this, not a person) and for women to not be excluded from women's spaces so that any male who wishes in the moment can LARP about in there, then you crack on. You see if you get heard where all other women tried and failed.

And meanwhile I'm going to be blunt and plain and I don't care now if male feelings get hurt, because women have been actually raped while we try and explain that women are human too, and can they have a few rights please if no one minds, in our nice voices. *

Not sure about this. I think the TRAs have been very devious (or indirect) in their mangling of language definitions and their assertions that everything is transphobic. Many people (myself included) didn’t realise what they were (are) doing. If you spotted this ten years ago, it must all seem very obvious, but many people still think that ‘gender identity’ is more important than sex, that it’s rude and unkind and therefore wrong to point out biological reality, that transgender people are the most vulnerable, that a hierarchy of oppression is the arbiter of morality etc. And of course, that women’s rights are not an issue, that they don’t matter. Muddled thinking by decision makers is surely an issue here?

When everyone stood up and said isla the rapist was a man, politicians had to admit it too, and put that man into the male estate.

YY.

Agreed. But having decision makers understand the issues is the key bit. If they don't like what they are hearing (too direct or not direct enough) they will switch off.

They cant. Politicians and other decision makers cannot switch off to their responsibility around safeguarding, even though plenty of them try. What they to do is pretend safeguarding isnt being compromised.

If society continued to call men women, politicians will as well and use that to pretend safeguarding standards are being met.

When everyone stood up and said isla the rapist was a man, politicians had to admit it too, and put that man into the male estate.

While people are lying and saying Willoughby is a she,they are allowing politicians to ignore the safeguarding fails that they have legislated for.

Everyone who calls a man she takes a step to allowing that man into the changing room with little girls. Because we know thats their aim, they tell us time and time again. Should we just sit back, wait for bad things to happen, and then call the man 'he' then? Or do you think we should do it earlier?

Agreed. But having decision makers understand the issues is the key bit. If they don't like what they are hearing (too direct or not direct enough) they will switch off.

Do you seriously think the TRA side went to the decision makers and asked nicely or indirectly? Do you really think they caved because TRAs said pretty please?

Seriously.

Decision makers understand the issues all too well, don't be fooled that they don't they merely picked which side they thought was easier to shit on without them fighting back which is why they are like rabbits in the headlights now that women are fighting back and being direct about it.

Buy me! Buy me! Buy me!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CMJZ43VZ

The problem is that when you allow the AGPs to gallop around FWR in their size 10's and women engage with them in polite and ladylike discussion, you are confining Trans Widows to the Trans Widow thread like it's a ghetto.

We don't want to engage on threads that our exes are on. Given this is a feminist forum I always hope (often in vain) that women will feel they can learn more from us than from our exes.

Anybody here who thinks they can learn more from our exes than us is entitled to that opinion, but it is not a feminist one.

Put simply, you can have us or them. Which do you value more? Alpha's incursion onto the TW thread was a perfect illustration of this.

Giving decision makers the false idea that they can straddle some kind of fence is where we get Keir Starmer's sex fudge from.

Agreed. But having decision makers understand the issues is the key bit. If they don't like what they are hearing (too direct or not direct enough) they will switch off.

Ground has definitely been lost because of the compelled language around preferred pronouns, I totally agree. But each of us is still free to make our own choices, for our own reasons.

Yes, and if KJK makes the choice to call prominent people out on something she thinks needs highlighting, that's a choice she's free to make too. And you can't really wonder at her response to you, as you freely made the choice to challenge her.

TL:DR freedom of speech is great and people are allowed to challenge things they disagree with. Both you and Kellie.

Not verbatim. But telling me that my assertion (which I still stand by) that we should each be free to choose what pronouns we use for someone was why ground had been lost.

I posted a comment because she wasn't just saying "he" in the thread, like many other posters were, she was telling Rachel Johnson what she should/shouldn't be saying.

Ground has definitely been lost because of the compelled language around preferred pronouns, I totally agree. But each of us is still free to make our own choices, for our own reasons.

It comes right back to there being different ways of doing things and on this particular thread, Rachel Johnson was commenting on something in a GC capacity. I can't see the original post any more but it was in relation to something that Janice Turner had written. From what I understood from Rachel Johnson's comment, it looked like Rachel was supportive of a GC view but also wanted to draw a clear line in the sand because of her own previous involvement with India with specific reference to pronouns. Personally, I would completely understand why she chose to use India's preferred pronouns if she didn't want to muddy the waters and/or risk undermining the Channel 5 legal warning that she referred to.

Excellent timely piece by Victoria Smith

https://thecritic.co.uk/she-her-or-else/

"It reminds me of the way in which a woman will try to be nice to a man who is harassing her. She will smile; she will be polite; she will ask herself “what’s the point in offending him?”

Eventually, however, there will come a point where she needs to assert her boundaries, whereupon her harasser will accuse her of leading him on. Even if he knows her “niceness” was coerced, he will deem it hypocritical. She should have been honest with him! Even if five minutes earlier, he would have claimed that a smile or a pronoun costs her nothing at all.

When women endorse other people’s realities as an act of kindness, all the latter perceive is that this is now “the reality” — the only one that matters. Hence any future deviation from it is proof either that women are dishonest or that we are cruel. We might have been having our own personal experiences of the world the whole time, but that is simply not taken into account.

GailBlancheViola

If people cannot cope with someone expressing themselves in a direct manner, using only the number of words necessary to make their point...

Yes, she's very good at sticking to her point and refusing to go down interviewers' rabbit holes and they hate it. Good old plain speech and sticking to the facts is exactly what she needs to do.

Some people will think she's a bolshy sod, but she's had to be, because of her experiences. She speaks about what she knows about and is firm in refusing to compromise, because there IS no middle ground.