That women should not be banned from Social Media for asking the question ( Thread 4)

[Langrycleg]

Many women have been suspended from sm for asking the question:

“Do you believe that male sexed people should be allowed access to changing rooms and showers for female sexed people and teenagers?”
Seems like a perfectly reasonable question which we should be allowed to ask.

Let’s vote with our AIBU.

This is entirely off thread but as you mentioned DARVO, and Jennifer Freyd was behind the use of that term, I’d like to say her book betrayal trauma theory is an incredible piece of work, in itself and considering who she is in relation to it.

Thank you, will check that out.

Secondly whilst it is claimed that many of the genuine concerns are rooted in the threat of male violence - in particular men accessing women's spaces, this seems to be a much more significant concern when it comes to trans people and not male identified males. [...] I'm not denying that there are concerns about men, and with good reason, but it seems to me the concerns are often not just that someone might have been born physicially male but also that they are trans. That trans people, or trans women specifically are actually viewed as a greater threat than men which is why the FWR board spends far more time discussing the threat of the trans than the endemic male violence all women have to deal with everyday.

You know this is not true jj1968. All of the claims you make here have previously been examined and disproven in exhausting detail.

We object to the presence of males who identify as trans in female-only provisions because they are male, not because they are trans. Of course you can continue to disbelieve every single one of us who has explained, in painful detail, her own personal experiences with male violence and the inequalities she has suffered because she is female and why she therefore needs female-only spaces, services and provisions to exclude all males, regardless of how those males identify.

But stop pretending that we haven't discussed male prison guards, males cleaning toilets, males taking jobs for nefarious reasons. We have. These are well known issues that those in authority have accepted as issues and have undertaken measures to address. That those measures are not always working continues to be a concern, and there are a number of established and funded groups who seek to address this. We certainly discuss these issues whenever they come up (voyerism was a recurring theme last year for instance).

And stop pretending that we are only concerned with male violence. We are also concerned with the impact of transgender ideology and legislation on our fight for equality. Trans rights claims to women's rights are detrimental to women's rights claims to women's rights. All of our rights. Not just to our safety, but also dignity, privacy, justice, equality, opportunity and development.

The reason why on FWR we focus so much on defending our right to keep female-only legal set asides female-only and why excluding males from them means all males, regardless of their identity is because the only groups currently working on that are grassroots groups of ordinary women taking on the establishment without the money, power or influence that longstanding organisations have.

I don't think anyone male truly understands what it feels like to be born, brought up and live as female in a male-dominated world. So I certainly don't expect you to ever understand us or empathise. But I do hope you'll find it in you one day to stop being so disingenuous and accuse us of motivations that we have demonstrated many times are nothing but figments of your imagination.

If this was a movement to include all male people who are small or gay or disabled in our legal set-asides, then we would make the exact same arguments - that they need to keep out of our spaces because they are male, regardless of their vulnerabilities.

It feels to me as if people are ganging up on people who are gender none conforming and bullying then to accept a transgender identity and medical reassignment to sterilise them

Because a trans identity is not the only choice for someone with GD

Charlie 👏👏 brilliant post.

@midgedude

It feels to me as if people are ganging up on people who are gender none conforming and bullying then to accept a transgender identity and medical reassignment to sterilise them

Because a trans identity is not the only choice for someone with GD

When I was at school for a while a group of mostly girls started bullying me because they decided I was too feminine. They began using a female derivative of my name and referring to me with female pronouns, including constantly correcting anyone who referred to me otherwisee. At the time I was in inner torment about my gender and trying desperately hard to show I was a boy. All through my childhood I was picked on for being like a girl.

I sometimes wonder if those girls are now gender critical and going round telling misgendering trans women and telling them they are men. In my own lifetime I've seen those who are male who were gender non-conforming go from being attacked for not being proper men to being attacked for not being proper women. So please don't tell me that it was trans people doing this bullying because in my experience trans people are the most tolerant people of gender nonconformity I have ever known regardless of how people choose to identify.

A group of girls regularly bullied me fir not conforming enough to femininity
So did some teachers

It really didn't help me either

So to me, those girls are now the tra supporters not GC

You do realise that a GC person tends not to care how feminine /masculine someone presents?

@CharlieParley

If I was approached by a bunch of religious misogynists who decided that being trans was okay as long as you fully transitioned and wanted to form an allegiance against gender critical feminism to help protect trans rights I would tell them in no uncertain terms to fuck off, as I suspect would any other person you might claim to be a TRA.

You might. Trans rights organisations didn't. The GRA is the product of homophobia. It was explicitly written in the way it was and publicised in the way it was in order to continue not to allow same-sex marriage in the UK.

At no point did trans rights organisations raise this issue, let alone say no, we don't want recognition in this way. It did not happen. They worked closely with homophobes for years in order to further their rights.

(I am confident in stating this because prior to lockdown I spent every day in the National Archives working my way through the letters, memos, minutes, pamphlets, briefings, comments, legal opinions and so on and so forth exchanged between all actors engaged in writing the GRA. Handwritten notes. Written up phone calls. Nada. Not one objection to homophobes working hand in hand with trans rights organisations finding ways to appease the "religious right" aka the church in order to get the GRA done.)

This is a very good (and very well researched) point, Charlie.

Homophobia and misogyny were at the core of the GRA.

Let us remember too that the GRA specifically excludes biologically female trans people (ie those who identify as men) from being able to inherit as if they were actually men.

From FPFW:

Despite the Lords passing this Act to enable someone to legally change their gender ‘for all purposes’ they did manage to include an exemption so that it did not apply to the inheritance of a peerage or honoury title. This would mean the eldest daughter could not inherit land and title from her father by changing legal gender and thereby leapfrogging the succession of the younger brother.

From the GRA explanatory notes:

The descent of any peerage or dignity or title of honour will take place as if a person recognised in the acquired gender were still of the birth gender.

Deep in their heart of hearts, every one of those peers who voted for this knew exactly what the difference was between male and female, and who was “naturally” first in the pecking order, when it came to the crunch.

As did those trans activists who worked with them on this .

I sometimes wonder if those girls are now gender critical and going round telling misgendering trans women and telling them they are men.

Why? stop your negative generalisations about gender critical feminists, it's against MN talk guidelines, and believe it or not they apply to you too. Women who are gender critical are not bullies, and there is no more reason to believe that they were the school bullies when children than the average TRA.

We can tell you whatever we like jj, you don’t get to dictate what we can and can not say. Compelled speech is not acceptable.

I can very safely say that almost all of not all of the gc women on here are also gnc.

Yet it’s transactvists who bully and threaten us.

Your descriptor of being made fun of for being a feminine boy reminded me very much of Gano’s description of how the violent femmes got their name. There’s also god knows how many female punk bands who came about because they weren’t ‘proper girls’.

When did being made fun of for not being gender conforming go from something that formed punk bands to the kind of thing that makes men remove women’s rights?

You need to look up the word attack jj. Women having boundaries isn’t an attack. And if you’re male then there’s no way you can be a ‘proper woman’. If you were a ‘proper woman’ you’d know what we all know- if doesn’t matter if we are a ‘proper woman’ or a gnc one, we all get targeted by men regardless. If you had lived that as we do then you wouldn’t be so keen to throw away our rights to single sex protections.

Again, to reiterate various pp:

We are also concerned with the impact of transgender ideology and legislation on our fight for equality. Trans rights claims to women's rights are detrimental to women's rights claims to women's rights. All of our rights. Not just to our safety, but also dignity, privacy, justice, equality, opportunity and development.

Feminism is allowed to centre females. I don’t have to fight every other cause and fix every other issue in the world when my very existence is constantly and entirely threatened by self id removing the legal definition of woman, and therefore every sex based rights legal protection. I just don’t have the luxury to not prioritise women’s rights.

Women are allowed to prioritise women’s rights and not punctuate every ‘I’m pro women’s rights’ with the ‘but I want to fight for trans people (or any other group) also’. Falling for appeals to sex role stereotype socialisation that means women must step up for every other marginalised group is a big part of why we keep giving away our legal right protections as it is.

Feminism is allowed to just prioritise females and not compromising isn’t actual violence.

That is incredibly offensive, jj.

But I'm sure you know that.

So, you aren't interested to hear about how women feel on the subject? Why does that not surprise me. Not once, in the many, many, many posts you've made here, have I ever read a single word in empathy or compassion from you towards women. Nothing but attack, and now you're somehow recasting feminists as your high-school bullies? That's quite telling. It's also a fantasy. And, as I said, highly offensive.

stop your negative generalisations about gender critical feminists, it's against MN talk guidelines, and believe it or not they apply to you too

Hear, hear.

The comment was an interesting insight into jj’s mind though, and the level of projection that goes on in there.

CharlieParley
The GRA is the product of homophobia. It was explicitly written in the way it was and publicised in the way it was in order to continue not to allow same-sex marriage in the UK.
At no point did trans rights organisations raise this issue, let alone say no, we don't want recognition in this way. It did not happen. They worked closely with homophobes for years in order to further their rights.
(I am confident in stating this because prior to lockdown I spent every day in the National Archives working my way through the letters, memos, minutes, pamphlets, briefings, comments, legal opinions and so on and so forth exchanged between all actors engaged in writing the GRA. Handwritten notes. Written up phone calls. Nada. Not one objection to homophobes working hand in hand with trans rights organisations finding ways to appease the "religious right" aka the church in order to get the GRA done.)

That was a heroic labour, CharlieParley. And confirms what I had suspected, given what I know about the GRA.

Nothing but attack, and now you're somehow recasting feminists as your high-school bullies? That's quite telling. It's also a fantasy. And, as I said, highly offensive.

Not all gender critical people are feminists, some far from it. And do you honestly believe your movement is so pure that there are no bullies, no-one motivated by prejudice or transphobia and that everyone acts perfectly all the time? You've literally had high profile people banned from here for bullying the mods.

"Your movement" is troublesome

Do we believe that everyone who is GC is a paragon of virtue? No. Do you believe no transperson would ever harm anyone?

Oh, come on, midgedude, you know the answer to that one!

Most of society is 'gender critical'. Very very few people believe that humans can literally change sex. Or that stating you feel like a man or woman inside makes it so.

A lot of people are polite though. And also scared to talk about it.

In my job sex is important. I've found out that the men on my team and one of their wives thinks it's all rubbish. People are scared to say anything though. The woman, it turned out, is totally pissed off with the whole thing. She mentioned sports, prisons etc. I had never discussed it with her before and didn't lead her.

Society is not behind this. They just feel out of their depth and of course for the men it makes no odds, and might improve things for them generally, and for some of them a lot.

Go on jj, for your next trick why don't you tell us all how Simone de Beauvoir was totally a trans advocate because 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'? smile

😂😂😂

Great post, LangClegsInSpace - the whole of it - brava!

It's a shame that you were bullied in school, jj. I suspect we are of a similar vintage, & I experienced bullying too.

I'm quite attuned to it when I see it, & I see a heck of a lot of it directed at feminists for defending women's rights. Which I deplore.

I also deplore any bullying aimed at you, as a trans person.

Disagreement isn't bullying, however.

@midgedude

"Your movement" is troublesome

Do we believe that everyone who is GC is a paragon of virtue? No. Do you believe no transperson would ever harm anyone?

No and I've never said that have I? In fact I have repeatedly condemned misogynist and violent language being used against women in the name of trans rights. Some trans people, although more often male trans allies, have acted like complete arseholes in this debate. I'm not afraid to say that. Yet I've rarely seen anyone from the GC side, with a couple of high profile notable exceptions, who is prepared to condemn anything said or done in the name of gender critical activism. Most of you all couldn't even bring yourselves to condemn Posie Parker for winding up right wing men with guns just days after an attempted armed coup by the same political faction.

Well I don't keep up with the activists , although winding up right wingers with guns sounds ok by me.

Unless the term winding up means something different to you?

It’s not a movement it’s our lives. Women don’t get the luxury of identifying our way into a ‘movement’.

Again, I simply don’t care if there are gc people out there who are bullies. It’s not my job to police them.

There’s nothing pure about fighting for our lives. We don’t get to dress it up with pretty words like pure. Fighting for the legal definition of women to remain based in biology isn’t pure or Nobel or kind or whatever the fuck, it just is what it is, there’s no way of escaping that reality for us women. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for other gc women who also tick every other box of what we care about, we don’t have that time because this isn’t a cause for us, this is our entire existence. Redefine the legal definition of woman and all sex based rights protections are gone. That’s the same if we are ‘proper women’, gnc women, gc women, or the bullies you refer to. This one thing irrevocably effects all woman, whether they realise it or not. Of course, anyone who isn’t female wouldn’t grasp that as they don’t live our experience. Identifying as a group whose lived experience you can’t even grasp let alone have any empathy or compassion is really something.

Deep in their heart of hearts, every one of those peers who voted for this knew exactly what the difference was between male and female, and who was “naturally” first in the pecking order, when it came to the crunch.

It's utterly specious to compare that to actively working with groups like the Heritage Foundation and ADF. Almost all pro LGBT legislation ever introduced has contained caveats to appease the conservative and religious right. That doesn't mean that people were fought for them were allied with the religious right, just that the pragmatic process of trying to get laws passed in a parliament in a country with a strong conservative element means making some compromises.