STOP MIS GENDERING ME JUST SAY SHE

I have a son after 3 daughters and it’s been a good lesson for me that actually, male puberty is also A LOT all at once and that boys and men need their own spaces.

I watch him play rugby and I see boys dealing with increased strength, managed aggression and male camaraderie. They stand with their arms around each other during the pre game coach talk and they encourage each other when the game is going well, but also when it’s not. He’s too old now to play contact sport with girls, no matter how they identify, for safety reasons but a girl in his team would change the dynamic.

We focus a lot on women and girls and their need for single sex spaces (and rightly so) but men and boys also need their own spaces.

Yes, the Men's Shed here has been turned into a 'community shed'. I think of the careful and important work it was doing with isolated older men, and wonder who has lost out.

I agree, and I know of cases where women (just bog standard women with a male partner, not “trans men”) have shoehorned their way into “men’s sheds” in the same way TIMs do into women’s spaces, ie enabled by one man in the group and emotional blackmail that his wife/friend feels left out. It’s really sad, because it changes the dynamic.

Totally agree. It's as if the realisation and belief that women aren't all identical, homogenous creatures in one set of respects and men aren't all identical, homogenous creatures in a completely different set of respects somehow needs its own 'identity' to make that opinion valid. And that that identity is something so shocking and unacceptable to the less enlightened that it warrants its own 'coming out'. It's a very bizarre attitude.

We can't talk about trans rights and why they have been so successful at this moment in history without being self critical and without looking at a wider context.

The language here matters in terms of how we address multiple problems.

I think the whole concept of inclusion has really been warped in how we think about it tbh.

I posted about a real world experience I've had with a men's only group recently and how a few of them think it's dated and want to make it inclusive to include women.

Except it got me thinking and as part of this I'd been talking to a recently divorced man who had been sent to me to introduce him to the mens group (long story in itself).

Anyway as part of that conversation it became very apparent he'd been almost pushed out of mixed sex organisations locally by his ex. And he was feeling very isolated and it was a very messy divorce.

He actually clearly needs the support of men away from the complications of this.

There are also men in the group who quite frankly are liabilities. Their wives don't trust them (for good reason) so the idea that would get away with spending as much time in a mixed sex group wouldn't exactly work for anyone concerned! Male or female.

Then there's the singletons who don't want to be part of a group dominated by couples. And the men who yeah do actually lack confidence. There's a few who are clearly autistic and don't really do well amongst most women.

And the men who have had health issues (both mental and physical) which are mens concerns.

Or simply as a group to get away from family and work pressures.

DH has been part of it for a long time and it's been really positive for him. I know them well and do socialise with them but it's HIS support network which seems lacking for men at an age where women effectively have the school gate.

So it's massively inclusive in its own right. Within its own legitimate reason for a single sex organisation.

Lots of these men would ultimately self exclude if it did become mixed sex for above reasons. This doesn't mean they can't have inclusive events as part of their running where they do associate with women.

The problem is we have lost sight of why some of these groups were established - both male and female and how they still have a positive and powerful role in our society which we should value.

We should aim for both and inclusivity in multiple ways but also protect single sex where single sex exists.

As I say it comes down to what we are taught to understand and value. We been taught that inclusivity only means men and women. It only is valuable to our society to have almost monotone groups with no diversity of group.

This is about a narrowing of thinking not an expansion of horizons in its own way.

We need plurality of views and opportunities.

There's nothing stopping groups from being mixed sex but declaring they are particularly aimed at providing for women and transwomen but they are not single sex.

Transwomen have different needs which needs recognition in their own right and get lost if women were to dictate and dominant on numbers alone. That's why we need group exclusively for transwomen.

But we also need single sex provision for a reason. A legitimate aim in a heavily stereotyped and gendered world. A legitimate aim for biologically led reasons. Both are valid. And this isn't exclusive to women.

Men do talk differently in the presence of other men. We need to create healthy environments for this because what has happened in recent years is there's almost an unmet need and demand for these spaces which has become toxic masculinity because of this sense of verboten and lack of perceived need/value. We are seeing this recognition slowly creeping in with people like Gareth Southgate saying there's a real need for good male role models for young males.

Why are we seeing this through only one lens? It makes no sense.

Why have we got to this point?

Exactly. I get so frustrated by uninformed people assuming we’ve jumped on a bandwagon. I joined MN primarily because you could discuss this sensibly here, while on the main forum I was posting on I was attacked just for expressing my doubts. That was 12/13 years ago. Long before “right wing media” took it up, long before JKR and even Glinner. I started out reading the brilliant GenderTrender blog and “Fourth Wave Now”. On YouTube the amazing and much missed Magdalen Berns started making videos in early 2016. I had started getting into more radical feminism in 2012, when a few things happened that I couldn’t ignore. I’ve been a feminist since my early teens. When I was a young child I was enraged by the song “Soldier, soldier” because my sense of fairness was offended by the cheating, deceptive wanker.

Indeed.

Fascinating posts.

Red, your last is so true. Trans-as-ideology feels like a symptom of an increasingly troubled society. It intersects with - illuminates and concentrates - so many current concerns and trends. I do like your posts on the wider political context.

It’s very sad, really. So many well-meaning and vulnerable people, all swept up in something that claims to celebrate the individual - yet almost by definition subsumes them: sex, gender, culture, critical thinking, political voice… all flattened by this into aggressively reductive right-thinking homogeneity.

You can’t have rights without responsibility, inclusion without exclusion, or even kindness without sacrifice. The wholesale denial of the sheer complexity of equity and equality that seems to lie at the heart of “trans” is maybe understandable in the current context - but so very, very dangerous.

Loving the descriptions of selves on here. I am small with a small frame and i could not avoid looking very feminine no matter what i wore.

so i lent in to it (not minis or wads of make up)

It worked well for me as i did not fit the stereotypes feminists are often portrayed as.

I worked and led in the VAWG sector for many years, and my gob and assertiveness, quite often came as a suprise to many who thought they were dealing with a delicate sweet flower.

Seemed to help ram home there collective internal and external mysogny.

One of my lightbulb moments was looking at the linguistics on here and the phrase 'transwomen are women'.

And I came across the phrase 'thought terminating cliché' in political propaganda terms and a means to control people in groups (for political agendas or other situations such as religion with particular reference to cults).

These mantras are easy to spot and recognise.

We saw a huge amount of use of them from 2016 onwards really - Brexit campaigns heavily used them.

It's a case of once you see it you can't unsee it.

And the curious go "well what is it power wants me to stop thinking about?"

Social media is all about stopping critical thinking and encouraging heard mentality. We want x because everyone else has this or this influencer thinks it's great.

They are naturally neutral in intention but can very much be used against the interests of the person they are designed to 'capture'.

The level of propaganda we have in our daily lives has escalated enormously in the past decade and honestly I don't think the majority of people are equipped to process and recognise this.

I have since realised that authorities have to give a good in-depth argument including the cons not just the pros for me to be persuaded. But this is a matter of understanding what's going on and not many people are doing it.

Transactivism is a symptom of a wider problem and movement. The whole omni-cause is completely indicative of it.

You don't belong and aren't a good person if you don't sign up to the full spreadsheet of 'values' without a second thought or the remotest hint of public debate.

But yes for most people it's just much easier to switch off and not question and challenge.

Oh, yes, MN hate 'troll hunting' more than anything.

Thank you, Red.

A powerful post.

I'm a fucking third gen non binary - my GRANNY was non binary before it was even a thing, ffs.

Powerful stuff, @RedToothBrush !

I remember telling a couple of friends and them asking a few questions and them suddenly shutting down as they followed the immediate obvious line of questions and eventually went "oh that's too complicated to bother with, I'm just going to take it at surface level even though you have literally just said how much it's affecting you". They checked out because they didn't WANT to think about it.

Even trans people themselves are directly affected by this. Before MN, I had only the cliché, "I feel like a man," to explain myself. Except it didn't really explain anything. It was just a thought-stopping mantra to use on myself and others: "Don't think too deeply about this, because I can't explain it any better."

Except I could explain it better. And I did, once I came here, and people asked me, "But how?" and "Why?" There was a much better explanation, and I'd been cut off from it because everyone was supposed to Be Kind with me and never confront me in any way. That wasn't fair to me as a person, because I deserve to understand myself better.

It's also not a good policy at society's level. We need to understand people to better help them, to provide them with services that better attend to their needs. Just going, "Well, we don't really know, so we'll just provide this one service and hope it covers everyone's needs" is not right or good or fair. We can't argue that we're doing our best if we don't even try to figure out what's going on.

They aren't not fitting in because they are trans. They are becoming trans as a reaction to not fitting in. And therefore finding kindred spirits in one another, at least

This isn’t examined enough. It’s just taken as a given that they are trans and every issue they have comes from that. I think for most it’s that they feel like oddballs or have other issues and find being trans gives them an identity and the attention they want.

Remember the Timeline.

This was a subject on MN long before Twitter, The Fail and other media and political outlets talked about it.

There were threads and threads dedicated to "how can we get the message out there? How can we get the media to take us seriously? How can we get representation in the political process?"

We had Lily Madigan and the erasure and exclusion of women from grass roots politics before all of the hype. And it was pushed as legitimate.

We were here precisely because there was nothing and nowhere else to go and no one listened.

Until it got so impossible to brush under the carpet it couldn't be ignored. Because we had so many men like those in the video, throwing their weight around.

I studied gender stereotypes from age 14 as part of GCSE media studies. That gave me a good grounding of media manipulation and identity. And crucially marketing and selling identity to women - usually at a higher mark up than for the same product for men.

I then went through a period of really wishing I was a bloke because it would have made my life so much easier in many respects. All my friends were male, I was a tom boy and all my interests were associated with men. Music, football and the cult of the late 90s. I never fitted in and really struggled with my own sense of identity in my early twenties.

It was only when I hit 27/28 that was beginning to settle down (didn't really fully resolved it for another ten years though). So when DB made his declaration and demands that he should be recognised as a woman and any doubt whatsoever was bigoted and should not be tolerated but he could behave however he likes with my mother's blessing it was NEVER EVER going to wash with me. I was already well down that pathway of thinking. It has never really been about feminism as such for me. Just bloody common sense and rational.

I remember telling a couple of friends and them asking a few questions and them suddenly shutting down as they followed the immediate obvious line of questions and eventually went "oh that's too complicated to bother with, I'm just going to take it at surface level even though you have literally just said how much it's affecting you". They checked out because they didn't WANT to think about it.

That was isolating. And I always felt it was designed deliberately to be so. That's why MN is so hated. It stopped the isolation (and then sense of hopelessness and powerlessness) of women dealing with the consequences of someone in their immediate circle transitioning. The transwidows in particularly cut through with remarkable stories which were all carbon copies. And then the parents of children who had children who had almost been scripted only to find out that Mermaids literally were encouraging coaching to get drugs on their own forums.

This isn't something that we read in The Fail, it's not something Elon influenced us about and Queen Rowling didn't make a declaration we blindly followed.

We were there before them.

We were experiencing this before all the headlines.

It was affecting our daily lives and it was a struggle to get listened to at all without being cast as villains (yeah that's for that one Wes. Still not forgotten that one).

That's it for me. Everyone wants an easy life. Being kind is an easy life. Challenging and asserting yourself (which many women really struggle with generally anyway) is much harder. Again power and control.

We have always been several steps ahead because our experiences have been repeated and replicated so many times before we get online videos that reflect our real world experiences.

Men have asserted themselves and then told women not to be assertive as it's rude and bigoted and aggressive. This line alone tells you everything you need to know.

Classic stereotypes used against women which somehow don't apply to men. We see it again and again. The tropes trotted out about lesbians and black women. The slurs against women of a certain age.

It is about enforcement of stereotypes not about liberation from them.

It is ALL by power and control. All of it.

I did have my first deletion last week - I was very proud (and slightly bemused. I think it was because I openly said someone may be trolling).

I also think it was, even more than that, because in the same post I asked some very difficult questions that they really didn't want to hear.

Questions that expose the damage the particularly aggressive loyalists are at risk of doing to the population they claim to be protecting - that puncture that inflated and ironic sense of self-righteous condemnation - can get interesting results (and, I hope, open the possibility for some reflection alongside the inevitable discomfort).

And good morning to all the stalwart late-nighters! (I had to get up at 5am so I think midnight was my limit)

I have been deliberately watching my tone, because I'm tired of being deleted. And it's working (so far) and I've had some interesting results! My new "charm offensive" is simply to stick to the facts and refuse to get emotionally involved. And to be unfailingly, nauseatingly polite. It seems to be producing results. It really does seem that if I stick to one question for a couple of hours, eventually they run out of deflection points, and out comes the truth! And an answer of sorts. Amazing. And I don't get deleted. 😀

I shall continue along this vein. I've already had one activist admit that nobody can tell if a man is lying when he says he's a woman. I call that progress, of sorts.

I do like your approach of hitting them with facts. With lots of angles to consider. I hope they read it all.

Now... to work on my spelling...

My trans family member initially “came out” as “non-binary” in about 2017 and it was the first time I’d heard the phrase. I thought “how can you come out as something that’s just been made up?” But I also thought, “hang on a minute, I’m loads more “gender non-binary” than you are!” I’m a tomboyish woman with a big range of interests including both traditionally feminine and masculine things. Family member had always been more of a feminine female.

Then I realised everyone is non-binary. Loads of things that everyone does aren’t gendered at all. Almost no one sticks to a pure sex stereotype. It is not gendered behaviour that makes you a man or a woman.

I actually think “non-binary” despite being nonsense logically, can sometimes be a safer way for confused gender-indoctrinated young people to have a trans bandwagon phase without having to fully commit, and I’ve seen several come out the other side. But it can also be the start of a pipeline towards medical transition, as with my family member.

Yeah, it was a bit of a mini-lightbulb moment for me, too. My thought process was more like,

Hmm. I fit most descriptions of non-binary fairly exactly.

V

Ooh, and it would have reassured me to have it during that period at school when I baulked at the other girls' pancaked make-up and thought, 'What's wrong with me?'"

V

So maybe it's a good thing. The liberating challenge to gender roles everyone seems to think. At last, girls like me have a word and identity that's acceptable

V

...Which means it's not acceptable to be a girl without a skirt hoiked up to my waist... which kind of confirms my earlier fears that girls can only be that way...

V

*Alarm bells ring Fucking hell, that's fucking Victorian! *I'm not doing that to them! I will not be complicit in suggesting that "girly" behaviour is somehow innate and necessary to being a girl!

V

Oh my god, that was a narrow escape. Patriarchal, sexist values are seriously insidious, aren't they? They really nearly "got me" that time it!

V

Ho, hum - back to the difficult but necessary project of modelling that a girl can be anything and any way she wants. Maybe we'll get there in another hundred years, if enough of us do it...

Ha!

(Technically, you could have asked for any of the pronouns out there, but if "they/them" is already too much, I imagine that "zie/zir", for example, would be even worse 😅)

Also; love your username 💙

@RedToothBrush

You cannot rock up to the office on Tuesday as George and expect your work mates to suddenly treat you as Grace on Wednesday. This is extremely unreasonable and absolutely about power over them. Even twelve months down the line, this is still problematic. Even twenty. Because we know and can't erase that knowledge because it's visual and spoken. It's in every day matterisms due to skeletal differences. It's in everything. It's uncanny valley.

Yup. I wish this were made clear to everyone who considers transitioning, especially the young ones: "People ARE going to clock you, even unconsciously, and sometimes they ARE going to forget (or simply not realise) that you'd like to be treated as the opposite sex, and that's not their fault. They won't be doing this to hurt or offend you. It's just natural. It's uncomfortable, yes, but they won't be doing anything wrong."