"TERF Island" - Pondering why we're so "TERFy"

Nicola Williams deserves a huge amount of credit. ‘Resistance’ seems to have happened earlier in the ‘cycle’ in the U.K., and it is therefore easier to make a difference. Still difficult and takes courage from individuals though.

Mumsnet is a massive bubble for this issue. I very much doubt gender ideaology would be on the list of top 10 concerns for 90% of the population.

This is a genuine question @Aaron95 and I am interested as to what you think: do you genuinely believe that "who is defined as a man or woman" is not going to be of interest for most people? Once it's clear it has nothing to do with being male or female?

1. Conservative party is socially liberal so less polarisation on LGB issues
2. One of the most secular countries in the world so almost no religious conservatives to oppose
3. Keep calm and carry on mentality makes us suspicious of self-centred, me me me arguments.
4. Dislike of strong ideologies and political intransigence

In Britain we're blasé about eccentrics, perhaps?

Quentin Crisp coined the phrase, 'I am one of the stately homos of England'. It was an awesome statement - not just in his book but on the Thames TV film of The Naked Civil Servant - in 1975!

We saw John Hurt again in CLAVDIVS in 1976, and that was quite the rollercoaster from Rome and Robert Graves.

Life of Brian came out in 1979, funded by another iconoclast George Harrison because he 'wanted to watch it'.

I was a teenager throughout all this, loving it, loving the artistic and creative rebellion, the freedom of expression, the boldness and the cleverness. Next stop Greenham ...

I love how GB looks like a little dinosaur on that image (well it does to me).

Mumsnet is a massive bubble for this issue. I very much doubt gender ideaology would be on the list of top 10 concerns for 90% of the population.

Whether or not it is, people mostly still roll their eyes here at the excesses of gender identity ideology. We're not really believers in the absurd.

Sorry you had such a tough time Veronica.
'I think we are mostly fairly urban here with good communication networks.'

I live in a rural part of the UK and none of the farmers I know are going to mistake a wether for a ewe!

Very interesting question!
I have a big raft of American Facebook friends, due to a mutual interest group that is US-based.
I got loads of hate and lost friends by making a GC post [it was a scary time]
I think we are mostly fairly urban here with good communication networks. I felt that a lot of the Americans live in more isolated communities and like to stand out from their rather conservative society by embracing anything vaguely 'unconventional' or 'alternative'.
It's exciting and novel for them to meet someone non-conforming. In Britain we're blasé about eccentrics, perhaps?
They all post those memes along the lines of 'If your family rejects you, I'm your mom now' *sigh

Mn - thanks to those who care, none to those who post no one cares

But also the media is fairly split between captured left and non-captured right

In any country where media challenge has been taken out the whole gender lot gets taken more comprehensively

Apologies - I put ‘U.K.’ regarding the FWS appeal case - but of course this appeal was in Scotland - although doesn’t this make it even messier?

if a FTM person with a GRC has to remain legally a man this case does appear to fit with the mess Britain is in?

Mumsnet is a massive bubble for this issue. I very much doubt gender ideaology would be on the list of top 10 concerns for 90% of the population

In line with previous posters, when you discuss this in real life most people grasp the consequences quickly once you cut through the obfuscating language and explain what’s happening @Aaron95 . It’s not something that’s necessarily on their day to day priorities and concerns, but that’s a different claim from whether they think it is important to get it right.

It was Tara Hudson that really triggered me, along with the realisation that the Women’s Equality Party were campaigning for violent males without GRCs to be allowed into women’s prisons.

That was in 2015. In 2017 Venice Allen set up the first event, We Need to Talk. She invited Stonewall to debate but instead, TRAs bullied the initial venue into cancelling and beat up 60-year-old Maria MacLachlan at Speakers Corner, where we were all waiting to find out where the new venue was. They then followed us there & protested outside with chants of BURN IT DOWN.

Shortly after that Fair Play for Women started, & we were all out in red T-shirts handing out leaflets about self-ID.

Hear hear @Hopelesslydevotedtoshrews. Perhaps the ‘gender bending’ of the 70s and 80s was happening more in the UK than in other places, so that when we reached the point where men in dresses were claiming to be women, we all went ‘Eh? But it’s just clothes!’

Leftie GC women (which I would say describes most UK TERFs) tend to be the most relaxed about gender non-conformity. Most of us don’t bat an eyelid when our 4 year-old son wants to wear a Disney Princess dress and we offer our kids a range of toys to play with from both the ‘pink’ and the ‘blue’ section. Because we can be a bit rebellious and stubborn too. If someone tells us that Lego and trucks aren’t really toys for girls, we get annoyed and buy them anyway for our daughters.

This will be a huge contrast to some of those in the US who, on the surface appear to be GC but who on closer inspection are actually just conservative and often religious, and don’t like anything different from the ‘norm’. They know that men can’t be women but they might also think that a man can’t like make up or ballet etc because they think it ‘goes against nature’ or whatever.

That’s why arguing with American TRAs can be especially frustrating because they assume, based on some of the US TERFs they encounter, that our TERFery comes from the same place and that we want our sons and daughters to conform to gender stereotypes when nothing could be further from the truth.

Mind you, I think gender activists and lobbyists have exploited our national love of institutions such as the BBC and NHS to get as far as they have.

That our publicly funded BBC and NHS have been complicit in all this during a time of financial hardship no less, is heartbreaking.

We are not especially patriotic; largely secular and our religious people are less fundamentalist: culture of piss taking; culture of challenging authority and not revering academics (genderism has been a top down "astro turf" operation as opposed to grass roots); largely politically moderate / centrist, but all to the left of eg USA; a left wing with genuine socialist roots despite some misguided thinking currently; yes to national awkwardness! And, controversially, culture of a tabloid press which dares print what more worthy publications won't.

We are FAR from perfect but, compared to other places I have visited or know people from, most people here are tolerant of difference. Long history of immigration into old, high density cities means many of us live happily in very mixed communities. Wealth disparity is still unacceptable but we're nowhere near as ghettoised as many other countries. Classism is still rife but there is also a lingering respect for plain speaking.

I think it first started being used derisively to refer to women on MN, e.g. this tweet from 2017: https://twitter.com/JulieRei/status/834433962789384192

I love this question.
I often wonder, am I so terfy because I live on Terf Island? Is it in the blood?

The Mumsnet thing, well when I discovered gender bollox I found my way to these boards. My feelings were already there and luckily this forum is full of people who agree.

I also often think, we're a nation with many old punks, despite what the youngsters think, so many terfs seem to be of this non conforming era.

We're also a liberal country with a liberal conservative government. Want to be a butch lesbian? Go right ahead. Want to be an effeminate gay male? Yes, of course, be yourself. And we also love eccentrics. I don't think we require people to 'change sex' to become more palatable to us or to make sense to us.

We also have pretty decent women's rights compared to other countries and I agree a strong sense of fair play.

JKR?

FreddysSquishyBollock · Today 09:15

A cultural tendency towards old fashioned fair play (emphasis on being a good sport rather than being a winner)

That was my first thought, but it occurred to me that it can't be just that, or all the women missing podium places would be smiling and saying, "Jolly good show, Harold! Erm, Helen!"

I think many British people do have good bullshit detectors, even if it can manifest as truculent grumbling. On the whole, we don't like bullies and extremists, which is why Communist / Fascist revolutionaries have never had real popular support.

As a nation, we tried burning Catholics, then burning Protestants, then we cut the king's head off and got something worse and breathed a sigh of relief, when things went back to normal, if still a bit crap.

Hasn't being gender non-conforming been fairly mainstream here for a really long time though? As an 80s kid, it's really hard to understand how clothes inform your gender when we were brought up with Annie Lennox, Boy George etc as examples of living comfortably within your sex but pushing the external representation of gender.

Things just weren't quite so obviously codified pink for girls and blue for boys for earlier generations.

@WitchyWitcherson - yes I did mean the U.K. and I think the law has got us into this mess. Look at the FWS appeal - in the U.K. as I understand it - anyone with a GRC has legally changed their sex forevermore! The U.K. remains a complete mess - the Forstater case is a court of appeal case only and while it has set some precedent, is the U.K. that far ahead? I hope we might be but am not holding my breath! Forstater was one small victory in an ongoing war against women’s rights.

One interesting thing is that there is substantial opposition to gender ideology in the US, but the debate is framed very differently there. There was an international survey recently on the issue (I can't recall where now) and the US had a larger proportion of people opposed to gender ideology than the UK.

But of course in the US, it's become one of those issues like abortion, where if you're for it, you're progressive, and if you're against it, you're an evil right-winger. For that reason, a lot of progressive people in the US are simply too frightened to speak out on gender ideology for fear of aligning themselves with the far right and its package of anti-abortion, anti-gay and lesbian, anti-immigrant attitudes.

I wonder how different we are from the rest of Europe? There's been legislative pushback in the Scandinavian countries, I don't know about elsewhere. I think most European countries have a history of revolution and pushing against authority and we have more democracies than any other continent so things we think of as being peculiarly British actually exist across Europe to a greater or lesser extent than here but much more than in other continents.

We might be thinking about it the wrong way round, and that actually the other English speaking Western countries are the outliers because they are countries of immigrants with the various kinds of baggage that can bring. The US most of all which is culturally very different from the UK and Europe.

Having said that I'd say 1) Mumsnet 2) The same thing that makes us resist ID cards - British exceptionism (we like to think of ourselves as different).

Isla Bryson and her delightful pink leggings woke a lot of the general public up.

Mumsnet is just one place where this is being discussed. However, I think you are not correct about the lack of concern about these issues. Everyone I speak to has concerns about it when you ask questions. Maybe because currently most of my friends are either parents or are women needing intensive health care or are people working in large organisations impacted by issues around single sex provisions or have trans people working with them or for them. The impact is wide and awareness and concerns are growing.

So yes, many people feel they have greater concerns. But that doesn’t mean that this is not also a concern for them.