We need to examine why so many women (including some prominent feminists) pushed the trans movement

Oh absolutely. And I do think the WC feminists who do go along with the T are often doing it because they need to keep their place in the movement (I am thinking of several women who were feisty feminists who became involved with Women's Equality Party and had to toe the line to keep their position).

Yeah, definitely a good point about women in industrial heartlands. I'm wary of seeing too many parallels between trans politics and remainer politics but it does remind me of the conversations about Brexit - where the righteous and correct pro-Europeans could not get their head around how their opponents had come to an opposite position. Lack of empathy and the need to be right.

I also think many working class women who came to loudly oppose trans madness would never in a million years call themselves feminists or political. It just made sense that this was an obvious wrong being inflicted on them by the middle and political class that have a history of imposing 'correct behaviour' on the lower orders.

In my experience, it depends which WC circles you move in.

I used to be well involved in communist and socialist circles and activist groups and there it was very much as you say. "Make me a cup of tea little woman and we'll worry about your little rights once we've achieved the glorious revolution." I call them Brocialists. Dworkin wrote very well about them too as it happens.

However, women from the traditional WC (you know, the former industrial heartlands, the people which Labour was founded to represent) tend to be much more clued into the reality of trans madness because, unlike MC trans activists and trendy intersectional feminists who've never done a day's hard graft in their lives, WC women are far more likely to see the terrible implications of trans madness in their jobs, in shelters and in prisons.

This was said to me in discussion: if you say transwomen can't compete in women's sports because they're bigger and stronger, aren't you saying that women are too small and weak, forc example, to do certain jobs?

Damned if we do, damned if we don't.

If I feed the crocodile he will eat me last

It's idealism versus pragmatism.

It's about having an idea and whether you like the sound of it versus looking at an idea and thinking whether the proposed solution will work it in practice.

You may like the sound of an idea but when you start to drill down into technicalities it falls apart.

I don't think that's about big picture thinking. I think that's about attention to detail and understanding how the world works on a practical rather than theoretical level.

The idea that men can be women falls apart in one area and it's actually the most crucial. How do you define women from an objective point of view? The law MUST be objective so it can be judged by a third party impartially if there is ever a problem. By the same token if you want protected status for trans people how do you define them?

Assisted dying falls apart with the same intangible issue. How do you define someone vulnerable and how do you define coercion and stop it? You cant. It's simply not possible. And we already have massive issues properly identifying it. And therein lies the problem at the heart of the issue that no one who supports assisted dying really wants to address. The question then changes from can we have assisted dying to how many people being murdered through coercion is an acceptable number to allow more privileged people to have the death they want? That question enrages assisted dying supporters but it's the one we should ask just as we should ask how many women and girls are we prepared to accept as collateral damage in order for men to access women only spaces?

It's these questions of definition and implementation that screwed Brexit too. The Good Friday Agreement was the stumbling block and some of us realised this before the referendum occurred. Then there was an issue with how Article 50 worked and how Theresa May handled that exceptionally badly putting us in a terrible place to negotiate. Then there was a whole debate about how supply chains worked and the minor fact that we are prisoners of geography that supporters of Brexit didn't want to have.

It's all about the practical details and the wording of law. It's not about a big picture for me. It's understanding that nice simple ideas rarely work - because if they did we'd have done them all a long long time ago.

It's idealism versus realism. It's nice to be an idealist, but idealists don't implement shit. They just come up with ideas and dump and run and then scream when they don't get quite what they wanted because it's impossible.

Yes. I think there's a good slice of people who have no real idea what it is they are purporting to be in favour of, they just get their right on right opinions as a job lot. It saves thinking about things. A lot of people seem not to like thinking about things.

The people shouting 'trans rights are human rights' having no clue what rights they are asking for or don't already have, are the same ones chanting 'from the river to the sea' completely unable to tell you which river or which sea. They just have a vague idea that they're fighting for the oppressed and are on TRSOH.

I think that's a dangerous way to think, there's an acceptable "correct view" and the intersectionality. It's like seeing gay or trans flags at a pro Palestine demo. You think....is there a failure of understanding here?

I agree with @GiveMeSpanakopita but as an ex-working class woman, I have seem WC feminists board the trans train because they are immersed in intersectionality and that their feminism is part of a general pick and mix of various oppressions so there is a belief putting women at the top would be wrong. "No-one is free until we are all free."

@GiveMeSpanakopita - word for word (almost!) that is what I was about to post.
👏

Because a lot of these so-called feminists aren't true feminists. Emma Watson, Caitlin Moran, Laurie Penny, Lauren Laverne, all adopt a shallow patina of 'feminism' in order to make ££££ and be 'cool'. But in reality they're very male oriented and wouldn't recognise an Andrea Dworkin thesis if it came up and tweaked their nose.

Also these women tend to be highly privileged, and to move in highly privileged circles. It suits them therefore to adopt some aspects of 'right on' views (feminism, socialism, etc) whilst all the while basing their material status on the exact opposite. They won't speak out for true feminism because they're scared of losing their standing invitation to the North London meeja dinner party circuit.

For the record, they disgust me, and always have, since long before the trans issue. We working class women and domestic abuse survivors have always seen these posh fake feminists for what they really are.

Yes 👍

@TempestTost you are spot on about a lot of people (the majority?) not using systems thinking. It does my head in on a regular basis. Just join the dots!!!
(I don’t mean conspiracy type stuff, I mean complex issues like how we can revive the high street whilst people automatically use Amazon etc - not black and white, but lots to think about the reasons for that; or, back when I was working, how shocking it was to me that most couples counted the women’s salary only towards child care and priced themselves out of it, instead of jointly financing it and jointly taking a day out of full time work, for example - people just tend to do what they see their friends doing and don’t sit down and think about it from scratch).

I have wondered a bit if I am on the sociopathic spectrum, (is there such a thing?) because this sort of guilt never bothers me at all. I find the whole idea completely alien.

I often feel that way too.

In my better moments I think it's basically accurate, but an over-statement. One thing I have realised more and more as I've aged is how many people are not big picture thinkers.

They may be reasonably normal intelligence, bright, well educated, and able to express themselves, but they aren't particularly inclined to question the basics of their worldview, and they don't apply the most complex/higher order kinds of thinking and questioning.

One of the things I've noticed about FWR is that there are a relatively large proportion of people who seem to be big picture thinkers. What really brought that home to me was reading the thread on assisted death here and the one in AIBU. The latter was almost entirely pro, with arguments like, it's my right, and we shouldn't let people suffer, and there are safeguards. The one on FWR was asking questions like, will the safeguards be able to stand up to legal challenge, will it be a cover for bad actors, how will this change people's ideas about the value of life, what kinds of unintended pressures or consequences could there be, how will it affect other kinds of legislation and parts of society.

I worry that this is actually quite a large group of people.

It's "education" in a bubble though. Not genuinely delving or debating, just going with what's fashionable, the current thing for leftists to support. Sometimes mindlessly.

I think the vast majority of men, whatever their ages, find the trans agenda nonsensical too.

Gender ideology is a hyper-capitalist invention.
It makes a fortune for the financial (pharma/medical/psych) markets.

It's hard to put up a fight against institutional capture especially when your livelihood depends on supporting the institution. If you know you'll get sacked for daring to think differently, why would you bother thinking differently?

I think it’s a mix of misogynistic tropes all existing at the same time and cumulatively saturating the culture (along with all the very deliberate work TRAs did to produce training through Stonewall for organisations, politicians etc).

So if you grew up in the 70/80s, you were comfortable with David Bowie and Adam Ant and Boy George and Annie Lennox and Suzi Quattro, so probably rejected traditional gender roles and dress etc. Combined with 80s feminism that women could do men’s jobs (and men were sometimes being nurses, single dads etc), it was right on to think gender was « fluid. » A pp said that of course you never thought you could actually change sex, but be bending roles was accepted.

Then medical advances come along and more people have surgery. This is where Hayley Cropper comes in. You start thinking, maybe they do end up a woman, I don’t know what the surgery does… you can have IVF and heart transplants, so…. ?

At the same time in the 2000s a lot of action and super hero movies came along, and a lot of female characters fight and take blows like men can. (I know, it’s the movies…). It’s totally unrealistic but a lot of girls grow up on this stuff. There’s a lot of emphasis on biology not being deterministic. That happens at the same time as porn and lad’s mags and girls are encouraged to be as sexually permissive as men. All empowerment, right?

Then you grow up a bit more, you get pregnant, you have a baby, you birth that baby and feed that baby and you think, holy shit, look what my female body can do! You bring up a small male or a small female human and you notice how different they are. And then peri comes along and meno comes along and you realise what a massive effect hormones have on every aspect of your physical and mental being. And you understand, finally, that human sex is binary, and biology IS fucking deterministic, and there’s NOTHING WRONG with that. What’s wrong is the patriarchy using women’s biology against them for power.

Trans defending women are stuck at the earlier stages. And either havent had enough life experience (good and bad) or haven’t thought it through.

I know the daughter of a friend who is really into Judith Butler and the trendy side of fluid gender politics. Yeah, whatever. All very liberating. But what about men’s physical advantages and unfortunately distributed proclivities for assault? What about women’s opportunities in sport? What about vulnerable children in care or in hospital? What about the obvious mental health crisis of isolated autistic girls or disturbed young gay men? This ain’t doing them any favours either. You keep your trendy gender fluidity. Grow up. Pick a side.

This is precisely my mother. Feminist, left wing - but cannot understand that today’s TiM is not the TiM of the 70s, 80s and 90s.

It’s not gay men identifying overtly with feminine stereotypes, it’s straight men wanting to BE the feminine stereotypes.

So, thinking on a bit about female socialisation and how it leads us to think about femininity = kind, nurturing, inclusive, all the things.

Transsexualism comes into public consciousness (mostly but not exclusively) with individual HSTS. 20, 30, 40 years ago the homosexual transsexual basically is "trans identity" and so is at least adjacent to the gay scene if not a subset of it.

So I'm thinking of the affinity women often have for gay men, and it seems to me that's often an identification with the feminine man who's being excluded by the masculine men.

(Possibly a tangent - with the straight women I know who are massively into gay male culture, it's always the camp side of gay male culture. I've never known a woman who was massively into, say, Tom of Finland.)

So I think that historic sympathy naturally transfers over to the gay man who wants to present in a female persona.

It really doesn't work for AGPs, so I think the increasing prominence of AGPs means a huge amount of cognitive dissonance, plus that bit of female socialisation that leads a certain type of woman to look at a fucked up man and say "I can fix him."

Men aren't like that. There are many wonderfully supportive and empathetic men out there, but I defy you to find a man who encounters a woman whose life is a mess and says "I can fix her." He will run very fast in the opposite direction, and I can't blame him.

I have not read the whole thread so apologies if this has been put forward.

I have encountered many women of my generation (80s child) who simply do not want to be called a feminist. I’ve heard the phrase “I’m not some hairy legged feminist but…” So I think it’s natural from that viewpoint to centre men.

if you don’t understand what feminism is about then, if brought up with fairly regressive sex stereotypes, you will naturally support what is essentially a men’s rights movement.

Tbh can't help but be glad that they're in a female environment even if it doesn't fit their professed beliefs. Obviously we all think they have every right to be in a women's team.

I feel just like this about a girl at school who has been enthusiastically supported with a male name/pronouns. It's a girls' school: why has no one said to her "why are you still here?" ?