Why is misgendering taken so seriously when verbal abuse to women is treated so lightly?

[loveyouradvice]

Like many, I have grown up learning to ignore leering men and crude comments, being taught by friends and mothers that to walk on past is the best approach.

I lose count of the number of times I have coped with comments like these, when just walking down the street:

“Oy darling, you’ve got great tits"
" You can come to mine any time you want a rogering"
" I really fancy giving you one..."
and many more

Often frightening, sometimes really scarey, occasionally easier to laugh off, if one is feeling strong, but always with the power balance in their favour.

So little is done about this - yet misgendering is treated as an increasingly important crime - with cab drivers sacked for accidentally misgendering, companies apologising and the victims outraged.

It seems to be those who have been socialised as men who shout loudest - I have not heard transmen being as outraged.

Is it because men really have no idea what women face every day, what is "normal" for us from puberty on?

Or am I missing something?

You're not missing anything. Having a penis then not have one (not literally 🙄) can cause lots of truth abuse.

It's such a crazy time I can hardly believe where it's going.

Ime the people who are most vocal about people being purposefully/abusively misgendered are those who are also vocal about women’s rights and everyday sexism, because they’re more aware of gender issues and structural sexism than most people who haven’t had to consider these issues in depth.

Plus trans issues have much more recently become part of the public discourse so you see more about it everywhere, leading to the idea that that is taken more seriously than other issues, when actually what the media chooses to report and focus on has little to do with how seriously an individual/group takes a single issue.

Verbal abuse of women has been going on since the dawn of time, so it’s getting fewer column inches than relatively more recent trans and gender issues. Plus many media will report trans issues not to be sympathetic to them but because they’re guaranteed high engagement due to current high interest levels from both sides of what seems to be a slightly contentious debate.

Hope that makes sense.

A narrative has been very cleverly created that trans people are THE most persecuted, victimised group of people who have ever existed. False statistics about murder and suicide are widely repeated as fact and people are so desperate not to further marginalise the most vulnerable group in history that they will fall over themselves not to commit literal violence by saying a wrong pronoun. It's a very effective campaign.

Because it's happening to men
But misgendering is taken more seriously when women do it. When men do it they are left alone
Men deciding how women should act
Same old it just now wears a dress and make-up

Because its only banter / a compliment and women should be able to take a joke..... Because what men say is more important than what women feel?

Depressing.

What on earth is misgendering?

Yes I would also agree that it is only a problem when women do it. There was a recent thread on twitter of men very vocally stating that they wouldn't consider transwomen as partners and there was not an iota of criticism. I've seen lesbians threatened with rape for daring to say the same thing. Men have found a great way to abuse women and still manage to position themselves as the good guys.

Because we struggle to see sexism for what it is and how pervasive it is. We ignore it. Interesting that much has been made of Russia's LGBT rights record (quite rightly) but little of their shocking views on abuse against women. Only last year they decided that giving your wife a few slaps wasn't really all that bad and changed the law accordingly.

Ask yourself why we cannot legally recognise hate crimes against women but we can against other protected groups.

Cath2097 it is calling a transgender person by their natal sex.... but deeply confusing as some do consider themselves still men

So Miranda Yardley, a transexual, refers to themself as a man and he.

But others who were born male, and may still look like men but see themselves as women, are "misgendered" if called "he" or, for example, asked unintentionally by one poor taxi driver if they were a man, confused when they had a booking in a woman's name.

It has become a crime in the States... and transpeople here can get very upset about it when it happens to them.... seeing it as a hate crime if they are called He or a man.

In the recent London case of a 60 year old woman being assaulted by what looked like a man to her, she was reprimanded in court and told she wasn't getting any compensation (in spite of them being found guilty) because she "misgendered" them, calling them "he".

Because men don't like being laughed at by women...and that is pretty much what misgendering is taken as.

...because the trans person complaining, more often than not, had a penis at some point or increasingly still has a penis and their brains are still full of male entitlement despite the fact their outward appearance may be a bit more femanine. That totally and obviously makes their needs/wants/desires more important to respect than those of any female.

Can change the outer appearance, can't change the effects of prior societal conditioning though.

YANBU.
Deliberate misgendering is unkind but I am sure the sheer volume of abuse women encounter daily is of a different scale entirely.

I think that is what I find so tough Beamur.... that the "unkind" is treated as more important that the ongoing abuse of women.....

I have sometimes wondered both when and how, men making abusive comments start. Lots of boys from perfectly 'nice' backgrounds, with good male and female role models (etc) but yet will still use unpleasant, objectified language and behaviour.
Men who will yell and banter in the street, yet go home and are nice husbands and kind fathers. I don't get it.
My very lovely DH and I were talking recently about #Metoo and I asked if he was honest, has he ever in his life made a woman feel bad or uncomfortable, or pushed a sexual boundary a little too far? Even he had to admit to being less than spotless at times.

"Ime the people who are most vocal about people being purposefully/abusively misgendered are those who are also vocal about women’s rights and everyday sexism"

My experience is completely different. You've only got to look at the amount of Trans Men who want to shut down the talking about born-Female issues. They seem to want to create a level playing field, were there isn't one.

There seems to be a denial about the difference having a male body makes when faced with having another Man shout abuse at you. Or doing Sports, having illnesses etc.

Trans rights activists promote the idea that transgender people are the most vulnerable and oppressed group that exists, so misgendering them is "literal violence" which leads to them being murdered in great numbers. This despite the stats indicating that in the UK men who identify as women are less likely to be murdered than other groups

But we're told that sexual threats and insults hurled at women by passers by are just banter and we shouldn't make a fuss.

Weird, huh? You'd almost think that the one group was privileged over the other....

Reminds me of an article I once read in Huffington Post (and can't now find) in which a MtF complained that some strange man had touched them, I think while crossing the street. This idiot was whinging that it only happened because they were trans. A man would never touch a woman he didn't know, this person insisted, thereby revealing their total cluelessness about reality for the sex they claim to identify with.

Yes, that murder one is strange... I gather that men are most at risk, followed by women, followed by transpeople... and that transpeople in this country don't get murdered for being trans, but for usual reasons (i.e. partner usually).

I've often wondered who decided to promote that and whether transpeople do actually believe they are the most oppressed group ever - or whether they feel it is good publicity

In this country, I would have thought it is clear that women and children in poverty with domestic violence as the most oppressed.

Do they have to be one and the same...why can't we say 'let's not be rude to women' AND 'let's not misgender someone.'

Misgendering can be used cruelly as a tool to hurt people under the guise of ignorance.

I always wonder about these 'every woman experiences' blah blah blah. I have never had so much as a wolf whistle aimed at me in all my 29 years. Maybe I'm just too ugly!

Because 'misgendering' is happening to men, so it's a big deal. Abuse of women, meh, get over it, they're only women.

I think it's because the oppression of trans people and the oppression of women are different. They overlap at times, but because the way they are discriminated against has been (and still is) different, the responses to verbal harassment like this will be different.

Misgendering isn't really normalised because trans people aren't normalised. The general consensus on them in Western society has been condemn them or pretend they don't exist. As such, when discussions happen about it it's usually conducted between people who have genuinely sat down to learn about it, rather than it being common knowledge. IME, it's usually 1) people who aren't cisgender - by that I mean people who are trans or identify as outside of the gender binary, 2) people who are "woke"; essentially, those who like to be educated about social justice issues or 3) gender critical/ TERFs etc. With the latter excluded, they're going to be against (probably rather vehemently) misgendering, so a large proportion of the discussion going on is people who are going to be very upset about it. Society has never really denied the existence of women, it's just normalised the abuse of them. So when discussing verbal abuse, every Tom, Dick and Harry will have witnessed catcalling and be happy to jump in and say "it's just a compliment."

Women are also continuously fed the rhetoric that it is just a compliment, which sort of causes friction where some women are saying that women should just accept the verbal abuse, it's okay, it actually makes her feel good. This piggybacks on comments from men that women should just take it with a smile, it's not that bad, it isn't harassment, etc. etc. On the other hand, trans people are usually told it's inconvenient or selfish to expect other people not to misgender them. They're very rarely told that it should make them feel good. Very few people will deny that misgendering has a negative effect on trans people, they're just expected to suck it up. It's more of a "life's not all about you" than "you're being oversensitive." As such, misgendering is automatically an unkind thing to do, whichever way you look at it - but verbal harassment of women is often portrayed as complimentary or nice.

You could probably write a whole essay on this, but I think those are the biggest reasons. Really I think that we can analyse this as much as we want, but effort would be best spent working to eradicate both problems.

That's a very interesting point that it's trans women making the most fuss about abuse because they have no prior experience of the kind of shit women have to deal with from childhood onwards...

Whipsmart I think that is a key part of it...

together with the fact they haven't really found out what is happening to very oppressed women either here or abroad... the realities of domestic violence combined with poverty that truly shock all of us when we first learn about it

I always wonder about these 'every woman experiences' blah blah blah. I have never had so much as a wolf whistle aimed at me in all my 29 years. Maybe I'm just too ugly!

Maybe- though if you get called ugy, fat, weird etc - it’s always the same folk snd same reason. I actually feel empowered with the invisibility that age brings that these unwelcome humiliating attacks have disappeared or have lost thevpower to anger or hurt me.

What on earth is misgendering?

Misgendering is the crime of correctly identifying someone‘s sex.