Thread 2: Why can't people respect the rules around toilets!?!?

[Underbudget]

Darn it the thread filled and I wanted to ask @tandora a question. Is this within site rules to start another to do this as I don't seem to be able to tag her? Feel free to report/delete if it is.

Previous thread here: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5372111-why-cant-people-respect-the-rules-around-toilets?page=1

'Tandora · Today 07:51

Eh? Mental health is everyone’s concern that’s why we have a health system.

No one’s rights come “first”- we need to find solutions that respect everyone’s rights.

There is no “female suffering” involved in respecting and including trans people. It will have virtually no impact on your life whatsoever.'

I wondered @Tandora if you'd read my post earlier on that thread, where in my head, children's rights come first? As the basic premise of child protection?

My post (in response to a different poster) if you missed it, was this:

Underbudget · Today 00:51

Slow to reply and expect thread has moved on, but surely you can empathise with a girl victim of csa feeling terrifed at finding themselves alone with a very male bodied person in a public loo between them and the door? Why does that child's feelings mean less than the adult males?
And what if that particular male bodied person WAS a rapist? That people saw entering from the outside but didn't want to "offend" by challenging them. And a child was born from a child as a result?
Doesn't a child's right to safety and protection come before ANY adult's feelings? Especially when a child can be born from rape as a result? As could ONLY happen to a female?
Fellow survivor of CSA here so I can understand you may have issues in thinking around this. I have spent years in therapy due to being overtrusting because my boundaries were fucked.'

I genuinely want to be in a place where all rights are respected, but I can't personally process this risk in any way that makes sense to me. I simply cannot agree with or process that allowing a male bodied person, unsupervised access to a child victim of CSA in a vulnerable space, whether a real or a perceived risk, does not harm that child. As a male, they are not being discriminated against on the basis of their sex, as ALL males are excluded from that situation, rightfully so. No right minded person believes all males are rapists, just as and no right minded person believes all transwomen are. But some of both ARE and that's a fact. I accept that a trans person may feel excluded from having their social transition recognised by not being allowed in the single sex spaces of the gender of their choosing, but equally, a girl in that situation also feels distressed. Why does that adults discomfort trump the discomfort felt by the child? A trans person deserves somewhere safe to go to the loo, but that's not in the women's loos. If that protects just one single child from reliving horrific trauma or worse, then that's what has to happen.

I would truly like to understand your view, ideally in a way that acknowledges the trauma of a child in this situation.

Because they are uninteresting, as are all my interactions with you. (The latter also being unpleasant).

OK, here's the thing.

1. Beth Upton is a biological male. The Supreme Court has confirmed that for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex means biological sex which means that Beth Upton, whether he had a gender recognition certificate or not, is male.
2. Sandy Peggie is female.
3. This means that Beth Upton and Sandy Peggie are not the same sex.
4. If Beth Upton and Sandy Peggie are in the same space, it is not a single sex space.
5. If it is not a single sex space, please tell us what exemption in the Equality Act permits the exclusion of men from it.

You disagree that in a culture where women are openly treated as less than human, men will show their contempt in more than one way?

Yoh know it’s not an unhappy accident. Just two ways of expressing misogyny.

I didn't suggest it was an unhappy accident. I said that forced segregation of women and high rates of VAWG are both present in societies with low levels of female inequality, but that the segregation doesn't cause the violence. The two issues co exist due to a view that women are inferior, the possessions of men to preserve from other men and control as they wish.
Locking women away in these societies is done in the way we might lock our possessions away here, to keep them from being stolen and preserve them for our own use.
When the possession is a woman, it does have a protective factor from other males, although not from the male who 'owns' the woman.
In a society where women are not locked away as possessions, separating ourselves from men of our own free will still offers the protective factor from unknown males.

It allows that if people may be discriminated against based on perceived sex even if this is different to their birth sex. The examples are a trans women genuinely suffering indirect discrimination if he is discriminated against in the same way that an actual woman may be discriminated against, and a trans man excluded from a female-only space because she looks so much like a man that to include her would jeopardise the legimate object of that space.

It nowhere allows that people may be excluded from discrimination because their perceived sex does not match their body sex. As indeed it should not, because this would weaken the protection of trans people and anyone else who might be perceived as not of their birth sex.

The EA act is about defining protected characteristics, establishing that it is generally not allowed to discriminate based on a PC, and then establishing an exception that makes discrimination based on a PC allowable in limited circumstances. It is not about defining exceptions to the PCs themselves.

I didn't suggest it was an unhappy accident. I said that forced segregation of women and high rates of VAWG are both present in societies with low levels of female equality.

The two issues co exist due to a view that women are inferior, the possessions of men to preserve from other men and control as they wish.
Locking women away in these societies is done in the way we might lock our possessions away here, to keep them from being stolen and preserve them for our own use.

Yes I agree with this. But I also think the two are absolutely mutually reinforcing of each other (through the medium of reinforcing strict gender roles)

When the possession is a woman, it does have a protective factor from other males
Disagree.

In a society where women are not locked away as possessions, separating ourselves from men of our own free will still offers the protective factor from unknown males.
I'm not sure about this, would need to think on it further.

Plus, it's beyond ridiculous to suggest that allowing men to access women's toilets makes women safer from violence. If a woman is experiencing violence from known men in a domestic setting she won't be made even slightly safer by being forced to use unisex public toilets.

Anyways interesting legal discussion with @MyCleverCat . Much more productive than the usual nonsense, so thank you for that.

Wish you all a good day.

x

Exactly

"an exception to the general prohibition of gender reassignment discrimination"

It allows that the person with the PC may be discriminated against.

It does not follow at a person with the a PC may be excluded from an allowed discrimination that is based on a different PC.

Admitting a trans woman into a female service does not factually make the service mixed sex, the question is does it make it 'mixed sex' in the eyes of the law for the purposes of interpreting legal provisions related to the exemption from (birth) sex based discrimination through the provision of (birth) single sex services. I am arguing that in law this can still be a single sex service, even though the definition of 'sex' is 'birth sex', in cases where the ‘gender reassignment process [had] given [the person] an appearance or attributes' such that they were perceived to be the (opposite) birth sex, BECAUSE in such cases the presence of a trans woman in the single birth sex space is compatible with establishing the (legal) conditions necessary for the provision of separate services to enable more effective service delivery for (birth) women and (birth) men.

Why are you arguing this when the Supreme Court judgment acknowledges that passing trans people may need to be excluded from single sex spaces for both their own sex and the opposite sex?

"Yes I agree with this. But I also think the two are absolutely mutually reinforcing of each other (through the medium of reinforcing strict gender roles)"

Oh I 100% agree. It is an irony that the segregations that protect us also reinforce the fetishisation of our differences.

We should absolutely be working towards a world where men behave so well (not just VAWG but general equality of respect and behaviour like not talking over women, seeing women and intellectual and professional peers, right down to leaving shared spaces like toilets clean) that the only reason to segregate by sex is the purely physical.

But until we reach that nirvana, single sex provisions support women in the here and now with the men we actually have. And taking them away hurts women.

Fix the men, including those men that are trans women, first, then we can talk about whether we still need those single sex provisions and protections.

You've missed the end off the sentence you disagreed with. I said from other males, but not from the male who 'owns' the woman. I'm aware that forcibly locking women away puts them at greater danger from the men who hold the key. But just like locking up any other possession it does mean that other men can't get to them, so the protective factor is against unknown men. Just as it is in separating ourselves from choice in our toilets and changing rooms.

@FlirtsWithRhinos is nice that you and I are starting to realise that we do share some points of consensus.

This for example: It is an irony that the segregations that protect us also reinforce the fetishisation of our differences.

I think this is an excellent way of putting it.

Yes but I don't think it actually protects them from other males either.

On an academic, theoretical and sociological level, a system that allows for the forced locking away of women does not protect women. However on a practical individual level it's common sense that if no unknown males are allowed access to a woman because she is locked away, she will not be harmed by unknown males. Regardless, the discussion we are having is not about a society where women are segregated from males by force. We are talking about a society in which men and women are permitted to mix freely, and within that women are choosing to seperate themselves to evoke the protective factor of denying access to themselves by unknown males.

removed, glitch posted it half written (is anyone else finding the post feature behaving weirdly recently?)

@Tandora We've always shared plenty of points of agreement.

If you read my posting history you'll see I've been making the exact point above, and the earlier point about what matters to me is that female people are recognised, supported in our fight to escape the physial, social, cultural and economic challenges dealt to us by Patriachy, for years.

I know, and have said many times before, that I think most Genderists are coming from a good place at heart with respect to women (female people), but have been diverted by Genderism's on-the-surface promise of a world where sex is not important and can safely be ignored. Genderists have mistaken the laudable Feminist aim of "remove the sexist constraints that hold women back - a woman can be anyone she wants to be" for "remove the sexist idea that only female people can be women - anyone who wants to be can be a woman".

But "woman" is just a word. The sexist shit happened and still happens to female bodied people happened and happens because of our bodies , how society reacts to our bodies and how we grow to understand our own selves within those experiences and we can't identify out of that because it doesn't start from inside us, and for as long as that is true, we need our own name and our own representation and our own legal rights and our own physical and cultural spaces to understand it and to fight it,

So the point we differ is that I do not believe pretending some male people are interchangable with female because of the inner beliefs of the male person no matter how genuinely felt is fair to female people, and I don't believe taking away the language and history of female people to bestow it on male people and pretend they were always part of it and suffered it alongside of us is fair to female people who need to be able to speak of the reality of what it is to be us, and I do not believe that accepting a definition of woman which is belittling, reductive and often sexualised is fair to female people.

Haha I like the concept of the meme. Very clever. Only, ofc, I would exactly replace the label "genderism" with "GC feminism".

I'd love to chat to you all about it further, it's so hard on sound bites on a social media forum, and where the conversation is so divisive and toxic.

Things I absolutely share:

what matters to be is that female people are recognised, supported in our fight to escape the physical, social, cultural and economic challenges dealt to us by Patriachy, for years.
we need to be able to speak of the reality of what it is to be us.

I agree with both these statements.

I don't exactly know what you mean by a 'genderist' and this is not a label that I would apply to myself. However, it is important to clarify that I certainly do not believe in a world "where sex is not important and can safely be ignored". I believe that sex is important. Sex matters.

Where we diverge is that to you 'woman' is just a 'word' whereas, 'female' is something crucially important. But, as with so much theory, that is too simple, too neat, too binary, too reductive a framework to reflect reality. In fact, both 'woman' and 'female' are just words, and at the same time, they both mean something important, something material, something that matters in the real world.

You also say -
The sexist shit happened and still happens to female bodied people happened and happens because of our bodies.
To this I also say both yes and no.

In some ways the sexist shit that happens to us happens because of our bodies, and because of this we do need a "name, representation, legal rights and physical and cultural spaces to understand it and to fight it". But to say all of the sexist shit that happens to us happens to us because of our bodies - to locate that shit in our bodies - is to naturalise that sexist shit itself.
But that sexist shit is not natural, it's a product of patriarchy. Patriarchy has created the illusion that it is natural in order to facilitate our oppression, to keep us in our box, to demand that we conform to the categories to which patriarchy has assigned to us. But we don't need to be constrained by them, and in fact they are an illusion, because being female is not one singular thing and there is no singular way to define what it is to be female, how a female person must experience the world or how they must live. Female is a category. To the sense that we recognise it as important, we assign a word to it. That word creates a meaning, that process of meaning making is creative, it is changeable, it is gender. This is why another binary framework that is too simple and too reductive is the separation of 'sex' from 'gender': of the 'body' from the 'social world', of the 'mind', from the 'body. All of these things are fundamentally intertwined and interconnected in complex and inseparable ways.

When it comes to who and what trans women and trans people are - this is a whole other avenue to explore, but for now suffice to say the position is absolutely not that "some male people are interchangeable with female people". Nor is the project to "take away the language and history of female people and bestow it on male people". These are misunderstandings and straw men imposed on trans inclusive voices.

We can recognise multiple forms of diversity, multiple languages and multiple histories. One need not and does not replace the other - although the two do certainly intersect.
Finally, the reduction and sexualisation the construct of 'woman' doesn't come from those who support trans people. It comes from the patriarchy, which also imposes sexualisation on trans women.

So much more to say, but I'll leave it here..

Where we diverge is that to you 'woman' is just a 'word' whereas, 'female' is something crucially important. But, as with so much theory, that is too simple, too neat, too binary, too reductive a framework to reflect reality. In fact, both 'woman' and 'female' are just words, and at the same time, they both mean something important, something material, something that matters in the real world.

Oh no. "Woman" is an important word. It means adult female human.

This is why we do not accept trans identifying males as women.

Tandora doesn't believe woman means adult human female, she doesn't have a word to describe adult human females.

Yes, and since that's the case do we actually know that Tandora is a woman?

I was trying to edit, but got cut off. I wanted to edit -

In some senses it is right to say that the sexist shit that happens to us happens because of our bodies, because patriarchy has assigned certain meanings and roles to our bodies, and used those meanings/ roles to demand that we stay in our place. This is why - to naturalise those categories, that meaning, those roles, "woman is an adult, human, female" is to locate that shit in our bodies instead of in the world. It is to naturalise that sexist shit itself. But that sexist shit is not natural, it's a product of patriarchy. Patriarchy has created the illusion that it is natural in order to facilitate our oppression, to keep us in our box, to demand that we conform to the roles/categories which patriarchy has assigned to us. But we don't need to be constrained by them, and in fact they are an illusion, because being female is not one singular thing and there is no singular way to make meaning of being female - how a female person must experience the world or how they must live. Female is a category, and important category, a material category, a biological category and a social category. In the sense that we recognise it as important, we assign a word to it. That word creates a meaning, that process of meaning making is creative, it is changeable, it is gender. This is why another binary framework that is too simple and too reductive is the separation of 'sex' from 'gender': of the 'body' from the 'social world', of the 'mind', from the 'body. All of these things are fundamentally intertwined and interconnected in complex and inseparable ways.

I'm not even sure she agrees that female exists as a category.

In any case she refuses to confirm she understands that Beth Upton is not female.

I use "Genderist" to mean someone who believes Gender exists as a meaingingful and positive mental gender/gender identity that is a discrete and separate thing to gendered socialisation based on sex, that this Gender is an important differentiator between humans and is a positive thing which should be respected and embedded into our culture with more weight and authority than sex, and that it is Gender rather than sex that determines "woman" and "man" as distinct types of people.

That contrasts with "Gender Critical" which means seeing gender as an entirely social construction based in sexism, and as such a negative thing which has to be acknowledged and to the degree that it has real world impacts on both men and women worked within, but is ultimately a restriction and limitation of the human potential of both sexes, both in limiting how we see ouselves and how others see and treat us, and in obscuring real structural reasons that the sexes end up with gendered outcomes -(for example, if you believe that women naturally prefer to be the default parent, you won't notice all the social expectations and working practices that subtly make being the non-default parent harder for women than men)- and as such the ultimate end goal is to move beyond at and then the sex-based protections that exist to mitigate these gendered harms will not be needed any more.

But to say all of the sexist shit that happens to us happens to us because of our bodies - to locate that shit in our bodies - is to naturalise that sexist shit itself.
But that sexist shit is not natural, it's a product of patriarchy. Patriarchy has created the illusion that it is natural in order to facilitate our oppression

I mean yeah, that is Gender Critical 101 😂Pretty sure I posted almost those exact words within the last few days in the Sex Realist/Gender Critical thread.

And I literally said, in the post you replied to "The sexist shit happened and still happens to female bodied people happened and happens because of our bodies , how society reacts to our bodies and how we grow to understand our own selves within those experiences and we can't identify out of that because it doesn't start from inside us,"

I'm not sure how you read how society reacts to our bodies and how we grow to understand our own selves within those experiences as "that sexist shot is natural" because I'm saying the exact opposite. Gender is the sexist shit, and no it's not natural.

Haha I like the concept of the meme. Very clever. Only, ofc, I would exactly replace the label "genderism" with "GC feminism".

Thank you. But you see, that would not make sense because Gender itself is a constuct of Patriachy. The belief that men and women have different minds was constructed out of the Patriachal belief that men and women are different in ways beyond our bodies.

Think about it. If Gender Identity came first and the idea that the Woman Gender Identify gets assigned to female bodies and Man to to male was just an invention of Patriachy, why would someone's mind be a "Man" or a "Woman" in the first place? Why the binary? It makes no sense at all. It only makes sense the other way round, that Patriachy constructed the gender differences between men and women to both justify and enforce the Patriachial social ideas. And so all Genderist is doing is swapping Patriachial ideas around. It's not challenging the fundamental beliefs beneath them.

The idea of a "Gender spectrum" is still ultimately agreeing with Patriachy that gendered behaviours are real. To use a trivial example from another thread, it's arguing about whether being at the bad and maths and liking pink end of the scale goes with a female body exclusively, and never thinking to ask why bad at maths and liking pink even go together at all.

In my head I imagine a football pitch. Patriarchy designed the field and set the rules. Genderists are still following the rules, they are just asking to swap ends like a football match at half time. Gender Critical feminists are saying - "Hey guys this shed has rugby balls and ribbons and mountainbikes and throwing balls and hurdles and beanbags and OMG is that a hangglider??? and has anyone noticed there's a whole big field outside this pitch we aren't using with space for people to play lots of different games all at the same time, and doesn't anyone think we should try playing something other than football now?"