KJK

It is indeed at the heart of it.

And one can't have lovely reasonable chats with raging bad faith narcissists.

This is the heart of the matter. Enabling and indulging these people isn't helpful.

"Women need to practise getting better at saying 'no' and allowing themselves to stand in that space, boundaries defined, without apology".

Spend an hour on the Relationships board to see how hard so many women find this - even in the face of the most abusive, toxic male behaviour.

It's not just that.

It's that one realises how society has generally been hoodwinked.

And one can't have lovely reasonable chats with raging bad faith narcissists. I mean, you can. But ...

It's a matter of personal integrity, honesty, and morality. It's modelling assertiveness.

And contrary to Bonfire's repeated assertions, I actually see nothing 'hardline' in statements that men cannot be women, and that women need women's rights.

Dispensing with frills and froth and pretty pleases and thankses doesn't actually make much difference, in the end. It makes no odds if you ask Alpha to stop objectifying women or mocking women or ignoring women.

What needs to be said is 'no', and it needs to be clear.

Women need to practise getting better at saying 'no' and allowing themselves to stand in that space, boundaries defined, without apology.

I'm afraid society is reaching a point where they're going to realise that there are those who do not blossom when lavished with kindness and compassion and all their needs met, but instead regard you as a mug to be taken for as far as the ride can be made to go.

I can understand why an incel might feel that he should be allocated a woman (who must be attractive and must not be allowed to want unreasonable stupid things like that he should wash occasionally and not hit her, or that sex happens when she wants and consents to it) as a maid and sexual partner because he's entitled/unattractive/wants to 'queer' society's expectations of reciprocal and appropriate social relationships being conditional to other people wanting to have them with you.

I don't however expect my understanding to really go beyond sadness at seeing someone stuck in this grotty mindset and probably not possible to rescue from it, and from it hardening my conviction and resolve that they require very firm boundaries, clear messaging, and that enabling is neither kind nor harmless.

When my Mum was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and I talked to her on the phone, she’d ask me a question like “So how’s work?” and I’d talk/moan for a couple of minutes about it, then she’d ask the same question again and I’d give her the same answer but shorter, and by the fourth or fifth time she asked, I’d be down to “Fine!”

I think that’s why people like KJK and Helen Joyce upset some people, it’s just they’ve had to give the same answer so many times before that they’ve whittled it down to the barest of bones.

Yes, women on here may be abrupt, rude, bad tempered, tired, and sometimes intemperate. I love them all the more for it.

Just like KJK. Whose voice is also incredibly important in holding the line of no, and cutting through directly to this. But equally, like I said in my first (I think) post on this thread, there are those for whom this style of delivery sounds harsh. There are those who hear (or read) strong words, delivered with an abrupt tone and naturally start siding with the underdog.

There's definitely no meeting in the middle to be had when it comes to accessing women's spaces or children and vulnerable people being pulled towards a belief that may lead them to change their bodies irreversibly.

The "middle conversation" isn't about moving that line at all. It's about approaching "no" in a different way, when a belief can lead to harm, which perhaps also involves actively listening to and engaging with the opposing viewpoint to understand why someone believes what they do.

There was a comment up above about KJK challenging the misogyny in Islam. I'm going to take a guess that this related to bhurka/hijab wearing or other restrictions that are placed on women as part of this faith - and that some people took exception to this. If I've understood that correctly, it's a good example of how challenging someone's belief head-on doesn't always get received well by everyone.
Obviously religious beliefs don't impact anyone else's boundaries, outside that religion, unless people choose to accommodate them, such as women covering up to visit a mosque (or indeed a Catholic church in Europe) when visiting. By contrast, gender identity belief is being pushed on to all of us as a truth.

If the intention is to talk about the impact on women owing to a particular belief, there are several different ways to approach this. All are equally valid.

There will be plenty of people on these threads who are unsure about gender identity. Who have come here to seek a better understanding WRT what it's all about. Some will absolutely respond to the KJK approach, and be thankful that she cut to through lots of waffle etc. Some won't.

On the nail post Arthurbella.

I know it all inside out because I've been there and wroten the book.

"Women are comprehensively trained to behave well. To acquiesce, smooth, tidy the rough edges, keep everyone happy. This works reasonably well until we diminish ourselves in order to maintain this facade of peacableness."

This is particularly relevant.

Fab post Arthurbella!

yep.

It's a Zeno's paradox of reasonableness.

"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man. You take a step towards him, he takes a step back. "Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.

Women are comprehensively trained to behave well. To acquiesce, smooth, tidy the rough edges, keep everyone happy. This works reasonably well until we diminish ourselves in order to maintain this facade of peacableness.

We diminish our needs and desires, our ability to be honest, speak out, name the problem of male abuse, in order that some men are encouraged to be honest and open. Women are always halving our needs/desires/rights, in order to 'meet them in the middle'. The idea of 'reasonableness' always seems to involve us being nice to men who are categorically not nice to us. In any way. They are not interested, at best we are invisible - more often, we are a resource.

This took me a long while to learn, and I'm still learning. But this is about boundaries.

When we are 'reasonable' and attribute value to honesty, integrity, consideration, critical thinking, etc, we like to imagine that others are the same.

I'm afraid that often they are not. Yes, sure, we can give the benefit of the doubt. But at a certain point, when it becomes clear that someone is deliberately taking advantage of that, it becomes either naivety or some kind of masochism, or even masochism by proxy. What is it to try and seek 'middle ground' with someone who is categorically refusing to respect women's boundaries? Someone who insults us, demeans us, and refuses to even pretend he will listen to us? Someone who actually gets a kick from all of that?

Some men seek to push at and overcome boundaries. Subconsciously or consciously. It's a need, echoing that of 'queer theory', to subvert, provoke, disturb and transgress.

This inevitably involves transgressing the boundaries of other people. This is also an intrinsic part of most paraphilias - they are predicated on non-consensuality. (Paraphilias are almost entirely confined to males. Most women seem to find them really baffling).

Lastly, a situation that is set up where a certain class of person is entitled - in fact encouraged -in the transgression of social boundaries, is always, always, always going to attract disordered people. They may be personality disordered and/or sexually disordered and frequently both - there's a lot of overlap. Narcissists feed off other people's attention, discomfort, input, flattery, rage etc.

Yes, women on here may be abrupt, rude, bad tempered, tired, and sometimes intemperate. I love them all the more for it.

Sadly despite all those saying no, we've made minimal progress with these organisations completely embedded in countless schools,

Strongly agree.

Just look at the # of times since 2016 that someone has posted FWR thread titles with some variation of "The tide is turning," "A new dawn?," "People are waking up." Lots of relatively new posters say, "Oh, my friends and family are more aware" or tell some personal anecdote about a sotto voce conversation in a pub and generalise from that.

But, here we are, many years on, political parties, policy makers, our major services and organisations are captured in plain sight. They are staffed by self-interested careerists, cowed or true believers, and the class of people least likely to be harmed by luxury beliefs espoused. Women are being erased as a sex class with associated rights and to loud applause. In a legal and social sense, women are deracinated.

It also needs to be faced that not all arrive with the honest intent of enlightening women, spreading the blessed word and seeing them all turn into good little service humans, and are not here with any intention of actual conversation. It's just a puddle of female attention. You trot out the lines and off they go, nurture, sympathy, scolding, believing, pandering, simpering, stroking....

I really do suggest reading Cakelady's blog end to end. And Lundy Bancroft's Why Does He Do That. The entire psychology works on Issenadai's blog. And then spending a few days reading the relationship board. This is rather like doing the pick me dance when your husband who left you for another woman tells you he's trying to decide (and enjoying both of you while you both wait for him to come to the wonder of his own inner decision and deign to tell you). It's all scripted. All of it. It's just the same old same old.

Sadly despite all those saying no, we've made minimal progress with these organisations completely embedded in countless schools, encouraging adults to socially transition children, teaching gender nonsense as fact, and undermining safeguarding & the emotional health and wellbeing of children.

My tolerance of men who arrive on here to lecture, admonish, wheedle or spout regressive nonsense is at an end. They are part of the problem and if they choose to descend on a feminist board where women congregate, then they won't be pandered to by most of us. It's long overdue that they are confronted with the grim reality of what they're promoting.

Yes, absolutely.

Now we've got lots of different voices saying no in lots of different ways. There is a huge strength in this.

Biological sex is observable both before and at birth, no matter whether someone believes we have a gender identity or not. DSDs have been proven to be attributable to either males or females.

So from that point on it's a case of stopping gender identity belief being compelled as truth in law, education and healthcare. And there are lots of different ways to achieve this.

I find it appalling that any transwoman would be or would feel that they had been encouraged to join in on the transwidows support thread. I would also find it awful to hear that women had been accusing transwidows of bringing their problems on themselves, if that has also been happening on that thread.

The "middle ground" and "Helen Joyce debate" threads lent themselves well to a transwoman joining in the conversation. I would still say that both threads help any lurkers to get a pretty rounded understanding of the subject - and that Alpha being there was a part of this.

When I saw Alpha on this thread, talking about debating KJK, with bravado, I called it out as game play.

There is however a very, very fine line indeed between having a reasonable debate, and feeding and encouraging a male who is enjoying the opportunity to use women.

I agree entirely. That's why I set out clear lines when engaging. And why I remain grateful to all the amazing women who have been on this board for years, from whom I've learned tons. Likewise to KJK for everything she does. Yes, she has a different style to me in the way that she interacts but I'm totally OK with that. The thing I'm not OK with is being told that I'm a part of the problem, simply because I interact differently from the more direct way of talking. No still means no when it comes to crossing others' boundaries or pulling vulnerable children and adults in to a compelled belief that we all have a gender identity, but that doesn't mean I can't listen to why someone feels that they have a gender identity themselves. I value the opportunity to do so, in the right threads of course (never a transwidows support thread, for example). There is nowhere else where I can have these kind of conversations, with the level of debate and challenge that we can have on this board.

Taking the opportunity to repost a link to Barracker's brilliant and somewhat controversial essay about pronouns, first posted here on MN:

https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/

I want to be alert. I want others to be alert. I want people to see the real picture, and I want those instinctive reactions that we feel when something is wrong, to be un-blunted, un-dulled by this cheap but effective psychological trick. I feel like I owe this to myself, and I absolutely owe it to other women.

And more than anything, I owe this to girls. I don’t want to play even the tiniest part in grooming them to disregard their natural protective instincts. Those instincts are there for a reason. To keep them safe. They need those instincts intact, and sharp.

And that’s why I won’t use preferred pronouns.

That is interesting Bonfire about what KJK said to you.

Because I have the opinion that using preferred pronouns has as deep knock on ramifications as I do allowing a male poster to continue their posts which amount to abuse of women, directly through boundary violation such as posting on the transwidow threads or indirectly through their using women as a resource and amusement or because we needed to be 'educated'.

It is directly via leveraging pronoun use that Ivy / McKinnon got whichever sporting bodies would listen to allow male people into female sports categories. The logic they used, as a Philosophy lecturerer, was that people use female pronouns for them and many other males who request them, therefore everyone thinks they are female. And how cruel it is to then deny them access to female sports categories.

There is a reason that no should be considered a complete sentence and not an invitation to continue to use women as a resource and to continue abusive behaviour.

The sad truth @BonfireLady is that the majority of children are in this mess because we (collective we) failed to say "No, go away, you're not qualified" to countless men like this when they started to weigh in on education, the NHS, child healthcare, counselling & therapy for children etc. Because we collectively simpered and pandered, the "stunning and brave" rampaged unchallenged through organisations where children and women gathered, overturning decades of safeguarding / child psychology & professional expertise.
Women on here have learnt to say no to these men when they manipulate and dominate on here with their regressive stereotypes.

"No is a complete sentence" is after all the Mumsnet mantra.

If you've been accused for tone policing on multiple occasionsacross threads don't you think there might be some truth in you doing that?

This was probably a poor choice of language on my part. There have been a number of occasions, where I have been interacting in what I felt was a balanced way, where I was then told I was being "too reasonable". When I then explained that I valued all voices, including respectful debate, I was told to stop policing people's language. To pull it back to the theme of this thread - effectively being told, like I was by KJK, that I'm a part of the problem by the way that I am choosing to interact (from higher up the thread KJK told me that by sometimes using preferred pronouns, I am a part of the problem).

Also @BonfireLady I am not sure whether it is a conscious act or decision on your part but you do react and interact very differently to the Alpha's of this world than you do to the women on this Board.

I can't speak for everyone, obviously, but as someone who has been accused of tone policing on multiple occasions by certain posters on different threads, despite me saying on multiple occasions that I value all voices and all styles (including that of KJK and Glinner), I'm afraid this feels somewhat ironic.

If you've been accused for tone policing on multiple occasions across threads don't you think there might be some truth in you doing that?

There have been several posters recently (who appear to be recent arrivals to the debate) who have taken it upon themselves to tell the women of this board that they are just not doing it right and if only they would adopt a different tone or use different words, be nicer, kinder and do as instructed by these posters everything would suddenly be perfect. And, indeed, some of them have gone as far as to blame us for the current debacle.

I understand that you personally have to tread a fine line in your interactions with people outside of this board due to the circumstances you find yourself in, however, why tone and word police this Board?

Do you not see your lauding of Alpha who was using this Board and the posters on it enables them to continue with that behaviour?