Does anyone else resent the gender/ TERF wars?

FWR is a very kind space. But being kind is not the same as giving someone their own way in an argument when you think their argument is unsound. There have been lots of reasons given for why your arguments are unsound. If you have hung out in FWR for any time at all you will know that the posters here are not coming by their views in a knee jerk way.

You appear to be a very selective reader from how you latch into comments. I know I have read comments on previous threads by @PriOn1 not sure about you.

It's clearly me you're talking about because no one else here is defending trans women.

You clearly haven't been here long because I don't recognise your username, the transphobic slurs you say you have never seen here are used here very often, and Mumsnet is not a safe space, it's an open online forum, especially FWR where posters take pride in "not being kind" and blatantly saying the cold hard truth regardless of who they offend or upset as if it's a virtue. If the mere expression of an opposing view is top much for someone to handle, they shouldn't be here.

Good day indeed!

I didn’t name you. Did you recognise yourself in my description?

Have a nice day!

No. Voicing an opinion which is literally answering the question in the OP, then fighting back when someone harassed me for days because they didn't like what I said and accused me of lying about being a SA victim is not abusive.

Are you seriously implying that I should accept being called a liar, a misogynist and a whole host of other things as well as having how fucking dare you shouted at me over and over because calling this behaviour out as unacceptable is abusive? Please.

There are two women - friends of friends - who I overlap with a bit, who have adult sons who identify as trans. My friends go along with this nonsense, out of pity for the women. I bite my lip in front of the two mothers but the whole thing makes me feel nauseated.

My own adult kids are all #bekind. ‘Live and let live’. Can’t see that there’s any sort of an issue. We’ve had heated debates about it as a family.

Yes. I do resent it.

I hear you. Looking back, I must admit to questioning this post.

"I resent that people are still banging on about the TERF ears and won't just let trans people live in peace."

"I have two tran friends, both lovely people who want nothing more than to live their lives in peace but face abuse on an almost daily basis and the fact that people can't just leave them alone and let them live their lives in a way that makes them happy when they aren't harming anyone pisses me off. I resent the fact that most people here would relish in calling them men lapping as women, men in dresses, male bad actors and all sorts of other insults because it is cruel."

There has been an admission that the poster does not even know if these male people are using female single sex provision, yet is then framing their friends as being completely innocent without further investigation as to who is 'abusing' them and why.

I understand that people are protective of their friends. However, there may well be a whole lot more to the situation than is being told.

And the censuring of language and description started straight away, along with the accusation of cruelty to any person who has not complied with this poster's personal expectation of language to be used.

No one has the right to demand that women comply to a male person's philosophical belief about themselves nor use the language that those male people and their friends which to restrict society to use.

You know what is abusive?

Coming on to a specifically designated women’s area of a women’s forum, where women are talking about their traumatic experiences, including loss of friends, loss of family members and other difficult situations, and saying “Well my male friends have it much worse” and implying the traumatized women are somehow at fault.

Abusers then respond to the anger they have created in a woman, who reacted with pain and frustration, by haranguing her over and over and pretending to be a victim.

Fine demonstration of DARVO, with a special touch of gaslighting thrown in for good measure.

Implicit in racism the suggestion that human beings belong to different races, and that one of the races is superior, other(s) inferior, and that some people can be denied their rights because of their race.

Racism is wrong.

Human beings do belong to two different sexes. Sexists think that some people can be denied their rights because of their sex.

Sexism is wrong.

There is no comparison between using racist terms and using blunt language around male people who claim to have a gender identity that makes them in anyway female and making demands that society affirm their identity and allow them to have access to female single sex provisions. If people use language that falls outside the Talk Guidelines, report them. I assume you have been reporting posts, please continue to do so.

Telling female people what language they can and cannot use to describe this situation is indeed censuring.

You are also not using a correct comparator. The comparator should be the censuring of black people who are describing people who are in no way black but who claim that they are black and that society treats them in any way like they are the black people that they say they are. You, personally, have brought race into this and I am reluctantly correcting your assertion. But I find your comparison racist in itself. You have leveraged the oppression of black people to support male people who state that they are women.

Just because you, personally, find the language use uncomfortable and you think it is hateful doesn't mean that it is. You can describe it as 'nasty'. Multiple posters on this thread have described your posts as being similarly nasty and unkind.

Plus, I would expect many of us find any male person who expects to be treated as a female person 'unkind' to put it mildly. I would call any male person who expects to be treated as a female person to be acting misogynistically. Because they have tried to forcibly redefine the words that female people need to describe themselves. What other group of people have done this in society?

But maybe you could answer the questions about how people who take hormones and have surgeries are 'in between' the sexes. Because that all seems to be very flawed logic, but I would like to see just how that all fits together in your way of thinking.

You wouldn't call people telling you not to use racist terms when talking about black people censuring or trying to shut down conversation so why do you call it that when people ask you not to use insulting terms when referring to trans people?

If you can literally make the exact same point without being offensive, why wouldn't you? The women here seem to revel in being nasty and saying "I will not be kind!" as if being nasty to people is something to be proud of and a feminist badge of honour. I have never sent hat behaviour anywhere else it's really strange and off-putting to outsiders. I have seen horror people not care that they are being horrible, but I have never seen horrible revel in their horribleness as if it makes them noble and better than everyone else.

The abusive behaviour from a certain poster I have been calling out throughout this thread which has seen several of her posts deleted due to personal insults, slurs and just general hostility including shouting how fucking dare you at me repeatedly and calling me a liar for being a victim of SA. The abusive behaviour that you literally said 'well that's nothing compared to this' about as if the fact there is worse out there makes it fine.

Amputating body parts doesn't change a person's sex. The presence or absence of a penis on a person with a Y chromosome doesn't change his sex. And there is nothing wrong or faulty about being male.

Or about being female.

Taking oestrogen doesn't make you female - though it might make you ill. A male taking female hormone is still male. If it has a penis, produces small gametes and has XY chromosomes (or DSD associated with being male) it's male. No policing necessary.

The focus on language used by women to demonise the women making legitimate objections is not new at all. After all, if you can present those women as being at fault because of the language they use, and the emotions they express, it makes it easier to discredit their arguments. And to categorise them as being the unreasonable people.

How many times have women heard ‘it is not that I disagree with what you are campaigning for, but the words you use and your tone’ ? How many times have we been told ‘if you just used moderate language people will listen’? When the reality is the ‘moderate language’ being expected by some posters was inaccurate and misleading language.

For instance, how many discussions have we seen about pronoun usage? And yet, after the latest sessions of the NHS Fife tribunal and now the repercussions of using correct sex language to introduce member of Congress McBride, more and more people are understanding why using preferred pronouns is certainly not harmless to female people collectively. And in a growing number of cases, not harmless individually.

How many sessions of congressional meetings get adjourned for lack of respect in an introduction? Particularly because the very same argument can be used to say that any person trying to coerce another to use the claimed pronouns that fit someone else’s philosophical belief is lacking respect in return. The coercer is lacking the respect that the coercee should be able to use the pronouns that fit the established language conventions for that culture not that fit an individual’s philosophical belief.

And yet, important discussions and testimonies that could play a part in shaping peace throughout the world are disrupted and potentially overshadowed because of a male person’s feelings were not centred.

Censuring women about their tone and their language is certainly not new. Particularly when it is being done to support male people.

I don't have to speak for all women, I speak for me. I find womanface offensive - just as I find black face (but not the Morris) offensive. Women find men in frocks offensive. But that is beside the point, men, whether in frocks or not, wearing womenface or not, are to stay out of women's spaces, places, prizes, prisons, refuges, lavatories, changing rooms and wherever else women do not want men. That is the bottom line and I am not moving on it. Nor are many, many women like me.

“And are your friends really that 'harmless' if they are using female spaces.”

No male person is harmless is they choose to enter a female single sex space without announcing a male is about to enter for an acceptable reason. A male person using the provisions because of their philosophical belief is not an acceptable reason.

I guess that some people may choose to not know what decisions their friends make and ignore the potential that their friends may be distressing women with their actions. It may make a friendship uncomfortable to know this.

Is 'blackface' a slur? Or is it a descriptor of very problematic behaviour?

I wasn't trying to justify anything.

What 'abusive' behaviour are you talking about from the GC side?

Well no, because your response to me calling out abusive behaviour was to link to trans women being abusive online and say well they're doing it and worse so what do you think of that!? As if that makes it ok because it's not as bad as what you have seen elsewhere.

It is clearly an attempt at justification. And no, it doesn't justify it.

Womanface is what they are wearing/doing. Straightforward description. If an accurate description of something seems like a slur maybe that's because there's something deeply wrong with the thing.

@Glitterknickerbockers

My post got deleted for some reason, but I was trying to address this point of yours:

They are not biological women, but their bodies are also very different to that of a biological man due to surgery and hormone treatment.

The problem is that no-one knows what surgery and hormone treatment they have had just by looking at them. So it's of no relevance when they enter a women-only space: the women will still be frightened and annoyed.

Much more practical to segregate according to sex, rather than start playing guessing games about people's medical history.

You are completely projecting

I'm wondering why you are so keen to admonish women when men are calling for their decaptiaton if they stand up for what is rightfully theirs. Do these men not deserve your ire more.

And are your friends really that 'harmless' if they are using female spaces. Remember you've never even thought to ask them.

Womanface is a slur and I object to that.

But hey ho, objection doesn't mean anything does it, FWR women love to bang on about not being kind and not caring who they offend. So object away, you don't speak for all women.

So abuse is on a sliding scale is it? Anything less than this is permissable and fine? As long as there are people who are doing worse than you you can continue to do whatever you like? And why the fuck does other people abusive mean that it's fine to be abusive to me?

Where do you draw the line? Or is it only abuse if it's coming from someone who's views you don't agree with?

Yes, some trans people say awful things. That doesn't mean that all of them do, or the ones that don't deserve abuse because someone else from @the same demographic as them did something bad, or that women here can saw awful things to other people and it's totally fine just because some completely unrelated people said awful things on a completely different site. I didn't bother replying the first time because this is obvious. No one would ever say it's fine for me to beat you up because someone else murdered someone would they. You're being ridiculous.

My friends are completely normal, harmless people. They do not deserve abuse for simply existing because some people from the same demographic behave appallingly online. I also don't deserve abuse online for being friends with people, who have done nothing wrong but are in the same demographic as some other completely unrelated people that behave appalling online. If you really can't understand that and think this is any kind of point worth making, I think some self reflection is order.

First of all, thank you for replying directly to my question. I like keeping things simple - none of the 'tying yourself up in knots' you mentioned earlier.

Because this is basically a very simple issue: science says that there are only two sexes, and you can't change sex. If I've got it right, science also says that all the trillions of cells in our bodies have the chromosomes which decide our sex, so it's not like being male or being female is located on any one part of our bodies or our brains.

Keeping things simple again, this is why men presenting as women is so problematic: it is based on the false belief that being a man or a woman depends on outward appearance. That's just not true. Plus or minus bodyparts, your friends are still as male as the day they were born.

As I've said before, I think it would be so much better if gender-questioning young people were told these facts directly and honestly : there's nothing you can do to change sex, so don't cut parts of your perfectly healthy body off, don't have non-functioning extra parts added to your perfectly healthy body, don't submit your perfectly healthy body to a fuck tonne of estrogen or testosterone, and don't condemn your adult self to living in some kind of in-between zone;. now what can we do to help you accept yourself as you actually are and live your best life without fighting against your perfectly healthy body.

If anything should change it's not young bodies, it's the strict stereotypes of what 'a man' or 'a woman' is or looks like which seem to make some people like your friends think there's something wrong about their bodies, and subject their poor bodies to dangerous surgery and a lifetime of medication that will never achieve what they they've been told they can achieve: changing sex.

Note I'm not even going near the social and ethical issues of men claiming to be women - as someone who had a very very difficult time as a gender-non-conforming child, I'm just sticking to the basics, and hoping children like me, and your trans friends, can be helped to love themselves as they are, and are not sold dangerous and false claims that they can transition into something they are not.

Again, thank you for engaging with my question. We both care about our friends and want what's best for them, but where we differ is that I wouldn't want any of my friends to damage their bodies with surgery and pharmaceuticals to try to achieve the unachievable.