Hello, I'm a TRA - ask me anything

[AlphaTransWoman]

Good evening,

I'm a transgender rights advocate. I say "advocate" rather than "activist" because I believe in constructive debate and consensus building rather than the hostile, shouty kind of activism that gets us nowhere.

I am here because I am genuinely interested in seeing if there is some kind of compromise that can be reached between pro trans and gender critical views. Obviously this is difficult because we may disagree about something pretty fundamental. I feel passionately that trans women are women (at least in the psychological and social sense), so there's an obvious divide if you do not.

The question is, can we find ways to co-exist and find an acceptable way forward on some of the difficult issues that arise around trans acceptance? So I'm happy to have a go answering anything you care to ask in good faith. Who knows, we might even make some progress.

*I think ultimately is is about men tending to be more competitive and rational while women tend to be more cooperative, empathic and emotional. Men generally like to be assertive and in charge of things, women are more likely to to be kind and take a supporting role.

So the group that commits 96-98% of the violence in the world are the ‘rational’ ones…..? Really?

And what exactly is ‘anger’? It’s an emotion. An incredibly dangerous one when you combine it with physical strength, and it’s displayed by men too often.

And as for women being ‘cooperative’ and (your favourite), ‘submissive’ - surely we women on this thread have dispelled that myth.

Please look beyond the stereotypes at actual reality.

Fucking hell , low self esteem!!! Any sex can have that .Fuck you dude !!!!!

It's beyond fucking offensive to describe the structural inequalities which oppress women in these ways and what a vile way to try and weadle men into women's spaces. Utterly disgusting

🙌

Awards dedicated to women, along with all-women shortlists and quotas for women on corporate boards, exist because women tend to have low self-esteem and doubt their own abilities. They therefore lack the confidence to compete with men on a level playing field.

No mate, it’s because women have babies.

Perhaps not something that would have occurred to you as your version of womanhood obviously won’t be including this.

But it’s about the only thing that is actually a true difference between men and women as opposed to all your stereotyped crap.

If that's the purpose of these awards, shortlists etc, would it not make more sense to make them specific to mothers?

Oh stop it.
ALL women pay the motherhood penalty. All of us.

Honestly I actually agree with you here, but I've also never been able to fully understand why it's offensive to say that Asian people are brainy, or that black people tend to be really quite good at sports.
Not all stereotypes are negative, also stereotypes don't tend to come around arbitrarily afaik, there tends to be some truth in them somewhere even if we don't like to admit it.

I wouldn’t use the word misogynism. I think sometimes that word is used to mean “extreme sexism” which is not quite what it means IMO. I would however call your views extremely sexist, in that they are all based on an idea that women are like X and men are like Y.
Except you, and all the other transpeople, of course.

No. Women are underestimated and overlooked because society believes that their role is to be mothers and assumes that they are likely to do this at some point. This applies to all women regardless of whether any individual woman ever becomes a mother or not. My own mother had to fight to go to university because my grandfather said, "What's the point? You'll give up your job to have babies after a few years anyway." This was a decade before she had her first baby.

Trans women are not concerned by the motherhood penalty for obvious reasons. There are no real barriers to their professional achievement.

I don't support third spaces

1. Costly and intrusive into already limited space for some men to have special provisions to indulge their fetish
2. Who are they for? "TW" or "TM"? Surely third and fourth spaces are needed ??
3. Too trans identifying men have already made it perfectly clear that what they want is access to women's spaces for it to be tenable.

Because stereotypes don’t need to be negative in order to be harmful. Positive ones can be as well.

oh yiu are Asian surely you must be clever - can you imagine if you aren’t how that can destroy your self esteem. Or the colour of my skin mean I am sporty so I will push myself into a career path that isn’t the right one.

then they can be true simply due to the self fulfilling prophecy

we are all unique. We should be predefined by anyone based on our sex/race or age

Thanks for your explanation, that makes a bit more sense now - I guess I was just being a bit overly optimistic/naive - to me at least things like cleverness and sport seemed so broad and encompassing of a wide range of things that I didn't really think about possible drawbacks

The thread's nearing its end, so my final words to you, Op, are:

More therapy, preferably with a therapist who is professional enough not to agree with everything you say.

Continue to wear skirts and dresses, lipstick and other make up, to have swishy hair. Society needs men to do that in order to help free everyone from the constraints of the patriarchy.

You can call yourself a transwoman all day long, but you will never be a woman. That descriptor is for the XX biological sex.

Stereotypes - even so-called ‘positive’ ones - are narrow and limiting. And what might be positive to one person (‘sporty’ or ‘caring’, for example) absolutely will not be to another person. Because we’re all individuals.

There can, sometimes, be generalisations that apply to a group. But that will almost certainly only be because that group already has that thing in common, not because of who they are as people.

Stereotypes hold everyone back. And gender ideology rests entirely on them. It’s why so many of us reject it.

also i think we can continue to call it misogyny if every utterance of TWAnotW is greeted with shrieks of "transphobia!"

I see we are nearly done in terms of the thread length. Which is sort of a pity because I haven't been able to answer everything.

Thank you for listening to me, even though there's clearly some major disagreements. You've given me a lot to think about, and hopefully I've given you some insight into how (at least some) TRAs see the gender debate.

At least it shows we can talk to each other even though we disagree.

hopefully I've given you some insight into how (at least some) TRAs see the gender debate

You've told us nothing we didn't know already. Hair, clothes and makeup. It always is.

No insight, just insult if you ask me.

Aw shame. You have had ample opportunity to answer. You have deflected, waffled and ignored.

Start a 2nd thread and go through this one, one by one, and answer all the questions. Starting with: what are the stats on TW being attacked by men in men's toilets. I dare you.

@AlphaTransWoman Why can you not call your identity something other than "woman"?

Aye. The OP would make a canny politician on that score.

You've convinced nobody, OP. Brought nothing new to the party. You've obviously deliberately avoided answering anything you don't want to answer. This sort of defeats the object of an AMA (if you ask me) and also does nowt to dispel our thoughts that a large part of Trans ideology is based on entitlement and arrogance.

Traits long associated with the patriarchy.

I haven't learnt anything from this thread (except perhaps Brefugee needs to throw a cushion at something 🤣)

Indeed

More of the usual shite. Pointless.