MNHQ transphobia guidelines part 2

[QueenStromba]

First thread here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/2120841-MNHQ-are-going-to-decide-what-constitutes-transphobia-on-MN-What-advice-guidelines-would-you-give-them?

Sitestuff thread that was about is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/site_stuff/2117350-MNHQ-now-email-posters-with-how-to-get-around-the-talk-guidelines?

The thread that was about is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2107862-Following-on-from-the-TERF-thread?

Not a straw man at all Tiggy.

According to you, I am a ciswoman.

I am a 'ciswoman' because in the context of someone calling herself a transwoman, me calling myself a woman makes her as a transwoman 'other' and that is transphobic the same way that calling a politician a gay politician makes gay politicians 'other'.

If I call myself a woman I am being transphobic and what MN is being asked to do is have me say in regard to myself 'I believe I am a woman', and not 'I am a woman'.

Buffy, I was trying to use your theories to explain the complexities of DD owning a certain school bag and it having massive social consequences, and it being pointless saying but it is just a bag because it really is not.

It is a socially constructed symbol of power.

Sorry to go off at a tangent from the thread.

I like your graphic, Flora. I was also going to concur with your statement of growing unease about considerately referring to trans people as their chosen gender. But I see I'd just be adding to a string of the same posts!

Throughout four threads on here now, I've been asking myself why I find them so uncomfortable that I regularly hide them. It's that, really. I've always believed it's good manners and helpful to support other people's ideas about their identity - as long as they don't try to redefine mine, or use my tolerance for their weapon. My life experiences as a woman have featured significant abuses by people (mostly men) taking advantage of my good nature, redefining me, and playing victim when called on it. Now I find this has been happening all along, vis-a-vis a social sector that, knowing it's maligned & marginalised, I afforded extra tolerance. No wonder I'm uncomfortable.

The insinuation seems to be that this is merely FWR regulars so :sigh: the thread is going the same way for that reason.

I'm not a FWR regular. I feel strongly about this. I'm just not able to post with such eloquence and knowledge.

Sorry Kim. It was you.

Sorry Tiggy.

Thanks Buffy even I understood that

Thank you Tunip and Buffy.

Oh - forgot some other things I picked up on and wanted to mention:

• I really appreciate Mathanxiethy's really clear exposition on the inhospitality of the world at large to women, particularly mothers, particularly lactating mothers. It is actually one of the things that drew me to mn in 2009 - a community of people who didn't "Disappear" (as Beach would put it" the grinding humiliation and inconvenience of the whole thing - which otherwise I would have felt very alone with. Mathanxiety exemplifies the articulacy and precision of expressing this side of things at its best - and why the whole "cis" = walk-in-the-park thing is such a big fat insult

• Beach is breathtakingly clear and brilliant.

I would like to echo her in asking Kim to produce some examples of "hate speech masquerading as analysis".

I am a woman and, by nature, intensely analytical. It makes me furious that this very trait which is richly (in ££££) rewarded in men, has caused me huge amounts of difficulty in my professional life ("don't be clever" being a classic disgusted example of a response to a politely phrased critical question at work. Why? Why am I not here to be clever? What am I here to be? Exactly how stupid should I be then, to be useful to you?).

I would be really interested in having some samples pulled out and shown to be unseemly, and why, because [bats eyelashes disingenuously] I would like to see exactly what I can change about how I think and how I express it to see how it can make me rich instead of insulted. [looks in pants to see if the clue to the difference might be in there]

Thanks, Beach.

I do entirely agree with you about the effect of the GRA on transpolitics. I think the law came before the debate and so offered an illusion that whatever you feel is whatever you are, even if it meant throwing a vast tranche of the people (women) under a bus. I still don't entirely understand why the debate didn't really happen society-wide back then. I know I was an avid newspaper reader (was only really dipping my toe on-line) and, even in my naive feminist state, I would have thought this would have caught my eye. I wonder why it didn't.

Painfully, the debate is happening now.

Why can't it be OK for transwomen to be neither women nor men, but transwomen. Why do they need to colonise the category women, totally redefine it to suit their purposes (the epistemological equivalent of pissing all over it), shift all the biologically adult human females over into the new category they've created specially to suit their own purposes and then point at them and call them nasty bigots for showing any hint of disgruntlement?

The doublethink and purposeful obfuscation employed by the people seeking to lay claim to the category 'woman' is astounding. And made all the more dangerous by the way in which they appropriate some aspects of science and produce a supposedly neutral and technical language that is in fact highly politicised and contentious.

Buffy's points about power and knowledge on this thread are really excellent.

Itsnotunusual I'm not a FWR regular either. That place is scary. But if I was a FWR regular, would that make me less of a person? I think not.

I'm not a FWR regular, either.

Kim thought she would get a more sympathetic response to transphobia guidelines for MN on Chat (said so on the Site Stuff thread before posting it here). It hasn't quite turned out the way she expected, from what I can see.

I'm not a fwr regular either

Crotch - the reason the debate didn't happen back then is that the law was passed before women really understood what it meant for them. Or to put it another way, once the law was passed men figured out a way to use it for their advantage.

I think Kim's claim that it is mostly FWR regulars is intended to hide the fact that it really isn't. There are a lot of us and, I'm certain, even more who would comment if the debate wasn't purposefully staged against them.

And the strange, new, pseudo-technical language of genderism employed by transactivism is absolutely designed to deter anyone and make them feel that (1) they aren't knowledgeable enough to comment on the debate and (2) worried that they'll open themselves up to accusations of transphobia (which they don't understand because they can't understand this pseudo-technical language).

Most people don't want to offend people, but actually don't want to have the category woman controlled and defined by biologically male people socialised as male and their allies.

FWR is not scary. It's pretty real and not caveated with the niceties that are expected of women as gender (and sex, because we have not nearly the separation that some on this thread think we have), though. That might be scary, sometimes. You've got to be on your toes and not just post the first thing that comes into your head (if you want to engage), but think deeply about the issues as hand. Because those issue are important enough to demand that. That's all. It's a fabulous learning pond.

I wouldn't say I'm a fwr regular (though) I do lurk their sometimes.

It's not okay to redefine women. We are what we are and there is so much fucking shit that we have to deal with and removing the ability for women like me to speak up about our experiences, because we don't have the right 'vocab' to include trans people whilst also actually being able to say what we want and need - particularly when the issue has NOTHING to do with trans people - is not okay.

So that's where I stand HQ. I am an extremely nice tolerant person, and I've no intention to upset anyone. But taking away women's right to talk about themselves as women, with all the social conditioning and physical and biological risk that is uniquely ours is wrong.

Lots of great posts I want to say "ITA!" too. Buffy that was a great explanation of post-modernism eating itself

Garlic I know what you mean. I agree with that. There is a lot of anger from men when women do not support them. Women also are co-opted to police other women and ensure compliance which includes placing men's needs above women's.