some parallels

Oh that takes me back! My mother used to say things like 'syllogistic fallacy' when she was cross.

Brilliant post @RareGoalsVerge .

@Manfreglory to exactly the same extent, you and old-fashioned sexists have the same amount in common. You both want the word "woman" to be synonymous with a framework of stereotypes of thinking, feeling and acting which we have been fighting against for centuries and no we are not going to stop because you tell us to, because we have the right to our own freedoms.

You want to use the word "woman" to mean "person who accepts and identifies with feminine stereotypes, regardless of sex" and we want to use the word "woman" to mean "person of the female sex, regardless of to what extent they accept and identify with feminine stereotypes" (or hopefully completely reject them as the outmoded bollocks they are).

These two uses for the same word are incompatible. They cannot be reconciled or negotiated between. You have the absolute right to use the word according to your own preferences within your own bubble of believers when it doesn't affect non-believers. You do not have the right to force your beliefs on others.

The law of the land upholds the second definition in circumstances where it actually matters. When it actually matters (which for 99% of 99% of days it will not) and there are rational and valid reasons to divide people according to sex, those reasons do not hold, are not valid, and are not fulfilled by dividing people according to gender identity instead, so if a situation could be reasonably set up with division by gender identity it is by definition not actually legitimate to be dividing people at all and the situation should be fully mixed.

We do not hate or fear trans people. We do not gatekeep womanhood as if it was membership of a group/club/citizenry. Membership is not in anyone's power to give or withold. Your analogy is a basic syllogistic fallacy as it requires the initial assumption that womanhood is something that can be acquired in the same way as citizenship, therefore requiring us to capitulate to your opinion as a premise for the argument, which is never going to get you anywhere.

They are the same user name.

It is true though that these threads do deliver a very wide range of side benefits. Not sure it ever makes any reader feel the shame that I believe is the intention. But the side benefits are vast, surprising and just keep coming - the real MN experience.

The penis thread was the same OP??

Well in that case, I think Manfreglory deserves to be carried shoulder-high through a crowd of cheering MNers.
The penis thread morphed into something that defied description - politics, curry in the 1950s,mangoes, fox mating, gonad-based recipes, it had everything!

Now Manfreglory has given us, inter alia, the opportunity to enjoy the Thing of Beauty which is Boiledbeetle's interpretive dance.

You clearly have a gift, OP😁

xenophobia isn’t justified
Possibly not, in the strict translation of 'irrational fear of strangers', but rational caution of strangers is a survival mechanism. I would also argue that, in a way, it shows respect for those strangers. It acknowledges that they have strength and agency, that they may have allegiances and dreams that differ from yours, that they may intend to act in ways that might not be to your benefit. Unquestioning acceptance of strangers can indicate a lack of respect. It assumes the strangers are weak and pliable, that they will fully accept your way of doing things, that they will put your needs ahead of their own. Consider the shock of the chattering classes when immigrant minorities show agency and vote in an unapproved way.

So I would make a similar argument with transphobia. 'Irrational' fear may be unjustified, but rational caution of men claiming to be women is very much justified. It shows that we think they may be tigers, not kittens to be petted and fawned over, and in that sense it is a type of respect.

Re-posting as it was just glorious - and provides a delightful interlude as we await the return of the main event. 😎

I can't be the only one who thought of this when they saw 'wearing their wardrobe/the wardrobe of their choice'

Great post. The reason (one of many reasons) the OP’s analogy is fails is the power balance is reversed.

I'm not too optimistic we'll get meaningful counter-arguments, but do try to live in hope. I mean, Red's post above shows the quality of engagement you can get here if you've really got the conviction and insight necessary to engage meaningfully. The typical lack of engagement encourages me on several fronts - not only in reinforcing that "our cause is just" 😁, but also in that it sometimes does suggest to me how brittle the conviction, as well as the arguments, of many TRAs must be. If it rests on little more than straw man misrepresentation, with an aversion to deep reflection, I think that shows the beliefs themselves are surface-level, under-sown by unacknowledged kernels of doubt. I think it reinforces that this period of insanity really will be relatively short-lived, in historical terms, at least. You can't live a lie indefinitely.

I've been a feminist since before most of the elder statesmen of the new right were out of nappies.

Farage was still diapered up at 15, right?

That's because @Manfreglory doesn't have any counter arguments. Though I'm sure we'll get some new versions of "evil bigots" soon enough

Citizenship and ethnicity are not the same thing. You can change your citizenship but your ethnicity remains encoded into your DNA. There's a whole industry built on DNA genealogy and finding where your ancestors came from. It's particular common as an interest in the US.

Weirdly there's a whole social trend to this too. Native American DNA is highly coverted (as are all the indigenous DNA ethnicities) on Ancestry DNA Reddit. Getting even 1% is prised. There a whole issue with there being a common family myth that there was a Native American ancestors which is often made up nonsense as it was a more palatable way to explain away darker skin than Jewish ancestry or descent from slaves in some way. The more DNA ethnicities you have the cooler you are somehow. It's all a bit Pokémon - Gotta Catchem All.

What isn't liked is one or two ethnicities only. That's generally considered 'boring' (it far from is - it shows a real culture history and for DNA purposes these individuals are particularly interesting as reference points for everyone else. OR an ethnicity of English, Scottish, Welsh, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Germanic European (which is fairly typical of someone from the UK or UK descent.) It's fascinating seeing how many Americans don't want to be purely White Western European in ethnicity! The only exception is Irish - it's regarded as fairly cool. It really feeds into this idea that victimhood is cool which is cultural the thing right now.

I've seen a few arguments break out over this trend with people (rightly) pointing out how warped (and actively dangerous) this preference is.

If you are white British I'm afraid you are likely fairly screwed as you are unlikely to have 10+ DNA ethnicities. Your family history is too dull for US tastes. Sorry. (This is absolute bloody nonsense btw).

@Manfreglory, come back!

Your opening post did make me think, insofar as I had the same visceral reaction to it as others - I felt it was patently absurd, but really enjoyed the challenge of clearly explaining why. I was also encouraged to see you refer to "teasing out" and "asking yourselves" difficult questions - we need more of this on both sides.

So, now that many of us have done as you asked, in various ways - @Nachoinseachthu's spot-on extension of your metaphor, my step-by-step breakdown, various people explaining why the analogy of colonialism is more apt, the fab one-liners really getting to the heart of the issue - isn't it time for you to do your bit again?

Pick an argument and have at it! Really read and reflect on it, as quite a few of us have on yours, perhaps actually quoting it to ensure you don't slip into misrepresentation, and are instead meaningfully engaging with it, bit by bit by bit.

Can you do that? Are you willing to try? So few of our visitors are, and it does tend to mean that each visit really just offers an intellectual exercise / thought experiment for us to test our views and thoughts. We do, and we find they pass! Again, and again and again! Without any further engagement from the challenger to show us where we're going wrong, this will keep happening.

Surely this isn't what you want, is it? To give us a platform to prove our points? If you genuinely, deeply care about trans rights, "educate us", as the saying goes, where education doesn't mean empty catechisms, but gradually "teasing out" a deep understanding.

Can you come back and give us something more to work with, Manfreglory?

Ah. My bad. I’m still laughing at the TRAs though. How long did they claim we were right wing?

Which goes back to the point about this analysis being rooted in North American cultural imperialism. The UK is a society where there's both gender critical and TWAW beliefs right across the political spectrum. Nobody tell OP what our Communist Party have to say on the issue or his mind will explode!

Just to clarify - she’s not an MP she’s their new prisons spokesperson (I think) - a former prison governor.

Reform have some conflicting views on where male prisoners should be housed if they declare that they are female .

Oh no. One of his mps was saying men totally belong in women’s prisons if they claim to be “ladies” and he backed her up. So technically the TRA are now supported by the right wing. It’s hilarious.

What? I didn’t know that. I don’t know much about Reform, but I thought old Farage went for what he thinks are popular opinions?
Mind, it would make sense for the far right to support transgenderism, as it’s a male supremacist movement. Keep those uppity women in their place.

That's the garderobe/wardrobe thing, with the theory about ammonia keeping valuable clothes free of insects. Always a bit unconvincing, and I'm not going to be inviting drunk men to pee in any of my clothes storage areas..

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garderobe

Like the ‘belief’ that the earth revolves around the sun. And, the ‘trans’ pathway of the sun revolving around the earth, per se, not existing.

Dreadful when people make ridiculous nonsense up, and others don’t ‘believe’ it.

Thanks for saying the only thing that needs to be said.

PS, @Boiledbeetle is a real delight, that is true.

Though I'm sulking because I can't do fancy letters.

Sex is sex, it is real and universal. Males cannot become women. Females cannot become men.

Race and nationality are artificial constructs. Foreigners can integrate into societies by learning and following laws and customs. Colonists, particularly Imperialist colonists, who insist on imposing their own cultures over the indigenous ones are unlikely to integrate.

Most violent criminals are male.

The OP is comedically silly.