This will be long, so I apologise in advance. I find myself in a grey area between radfems and woke-maidens. I don’t hate trans people, I don’t hate anyone, although as a woman in my 50s I’ve had enough male fuckwittery in my life to have a very low opinion of men in general. I do believe that there are some people with such intense dysphoria that counselling and support are not enough and surgical transition is their best solution, but I don’t believe anyone can change sex, or is born in the wrong body.
That said, I detest gender stereotypes and the confusion of sex & gender, I’m the generation of women that fought really hard on a day to day level to reject these stupid made up rules about what girls can and can’t do/wear/think, and seeing the ‘men in a dress’ become accepted as that meaning they are women is a huge step backwards, and it makes me furious.
I honestly don’t care who wears what, if a man wants to wear dresses and make up, that’s fine. I’ve spent the last 15-20 years in t-shirts and jeans, no make up etc, so I don’t see why men can’t wear skirts if they want to. As Eddie Izzard used to say, they aren’t women’s clothes, they are my clothes. (So disappointed that Eddie has now claimed to be Suzie)
I am not a dress.
I genuinely don’t care about sharing spaces like toilets, it’s possible to create safe unisex toilets, the focus on this is a distraction and needs to stop. But when men claim to identify as women and skew crime statistics, that bothers me. Men who claim to identify as women and try to insist that lesbians should date them, that’s controlling and gross. Hospital wards and bays are segregated for a reason, and demanding we use she/her pronouns doesn’t mean a man should be put in a bed in a women’s bay. Same with any communal changing area, be it the gym or a shop fitting room. Women don’t have a penis, it’s really that simple.
This morning the SC ruling was mentioned briefly and my adult daughter is furious with it. She claims it’s a step backwards, that it will cause hate crimes and violence towards trans people, that anyone who supports it is a hateful bigot and wishes harm on a vulnerable minority. I tried to calmly explain to her that no laws have been changed, only clarified, and that trans people haven’t lost any rights, nor will any MtF prisoners be immediately transferred to male prisons to be raped and murdered by the other prisoners. Women aren’t going to be randomly strip-searched by male police officers who will claim they thought it was a man, etc. She just refuses to believe that women’s safe spaces need to be just for actual biological women, because she believes trans women don’t pose a threat, and even when I explained that most trans identifying MtF don’t have surgery etc and are still fully functioning males, and showed her examples of MtF assaulting women, she won’t accept that the actions of these men mean that we should be able to hold safe spaces based on biology. I tried to explain that I understand that trans people are vulnerable to hate crimes etc, and that we need to take steps to keep them safe, but not at the expense of women. We’ve had a long and very heated argument where she has accused me of being a bigot and a bunch of other incredibly hurtful things, mostly by refusing to accept that there is a toxic sub-set of (mostly MtF) TRAs that are actually autogynephiles/INCELs with misogyny at their core, and that these people threaten actual physical harm to anyone (like JKR) who dares to question their claims of womanhood.
Help me. Help me find a way to reach her. She’s an intelligent educated young woman who has been raised with feminist values, I have modelled non-stereotypical behaviours and given her complete freedom to choose her direction in life, with no expectations or limitations based on her sex. I’m genuinely appalled to hear this garbage coming from her.