MNHQ now email posters with how to "get around" the talk guidelines.

[GoshAnneGorilla]

There is yet another thread on FWR about trans people. Like nearly every other thread on there about trans people, it's a load of transphobia dressed up as gender analysis.

Nothing new, sadly.

What is new, is that MNHQ have now sent an email to a poster whose post was deleted, telling them how their post could be within the guidelines, even including a copy of their original post to make editing all the easier. This is because "discussion is important".

So, a few questions for MNHQ.

Are GLBT rights at all important to you?

Will you be extending this " How to bend the talk guidelines" services to racist, homophobic, or disabilist posts too, or is it only trans people who deserve to be discussed in a manner which is extremely offensive?

I am not against trans people. I am against the silencing of women when they try to speak about the effects of gender on their lives.

I'm not opposed to trans people at all. I've recently become very good friends with a trans woman and I admire her greatly for going through all that and coming out the other side at peace with herself and her sexuality. I would always refer to her as her, to do otherwise would just be rude and hurtful.

But like Buffy, I'm opposed to people who come from a position of male privilege to tell us silly women how to do feminism and lesbianism properly. I'm also opposed to giving children untested doses of hormones at an early age which could do untold damage to their bodies when they may not actually be trans, just gender non-conforming (as I was as a child, and my DD seems to be as well).

MN is full of posts elsewhere saying how boys playing with dolls and liking pink 'won't catch the gay' - no-one ever suggests they buy them a subscription to Attitude, smuggle them into G.A.Y. and take them on Pride marches (none of which have long term implications to their health, although a night in G.A.Y. might damage their hearing...) as they MUST be gay, so why is a refusal to submit to gender stereotypes seen as proof positive of trans?

Let me be clear that I'm not saying this about you, Kim. I can only imagine that knowing something is wrong and your body not measuring up to how you feel it ought to be is horribly distressing. However, I am deeply concerned at the recent rush to diagnose gender dysphoria in children and the online and RL plaudits that the parents receive for being 'cool' about it, which serve to reinforce their choices. To question this is not being transphobic.

My DD likes being Thor and Legolas when she plays. She also prefers weaponry to fairy wands, loves taking things apart to see how they work and likes nothing better than to roll about in mud. I don't stop her from playing as she likes, but I don't immediately think she must really be a boy in her head, just that things designated 'male' by our society are more appealing to her than things designated 'female'.

Surely the answer is to abolish gender values and celebrate difference rather than dish out drugs to children?

I find it quite telling that Iran performs the second highest rate of MtF surgeries in the world (first is Thailand) because they don't accept homosexuality but will surgically and hormonally alter a man's body to allow him to sleep with another man. This is not quite the situation in the UK with lesbians but there does seem to be mounting pressure for a 'butch' lesbian to go trans FtM rather than be herself and remain female.

I've read enough to know that there is - and I use this word based on my own thoughts after reading a lot of threads on here - a hate and non acceptance of trans people by a lot of the more radical feminists on FWR.

What do you have to say about the hate and non-acceptance directed against women, and particularly lesbians, by the current vocal trans activists? Why are you so keen that women don't talk about the misogyny and homophobia directed against them?

Nope, won't withdraw - not unless you also withdraw your totally disengenous post saying this:

Why don't people just admit they are against people who are transsexual. Just like people a long time ago -and even now - are against people who are homosexual. It would save a lot of tip toeing about.

I think it's a disgrace that you compare gender-critical feminists to homophobes when the homophobia is coming from this nasty strand of trans activism.

If you'd actually read any of my posts, you'd know what I think. I've stated it here, in the last couple of pages of this thread.

Do you think the violent misogyny and homophobia of this strand of vocal trans activism is real? Or do you think we are all making a fuss about nothing?

I'm not against people who are transsexual and I'm not against people being transsexual. I totally believe that some individuals have body dysphoria.

I'm against the idea that it is possible to change sex and that a transwoman is the same as a bio woman (idem for transmen). I'm also against social and political pressure for lesbians and homosexuals to transition.

I think most feminists have a 'live and let live' attitude to transsexualism. Problems arise AFAIC with the insistence that transwomen are biological females and that therefore a penis is female and abortion is no longer a 'women's issue' it is a 'people's issue'. Or when I'm told that being female is a 'feeling' (a feeling defined by males). Or when I'm told that it is bigoted and transphobic for bio females to want to meet and organize together to discuss women's issues (such as abortion, forced pregnancy, menstruation, being oppressed because we are the sex class which carries and births babies). Or when I'm told that a male bodied transwoman is a lesbian and that born women lesbians are bigots for not wanting to have sex with transwomen. Or when I'm told that I'm 'cis' and have cis privilege (cis privilege is gender privilege; in male supremacist society, girls and women don't have gender privilege). We aren't discriminated against for being transgender but we don't have gender or sex privilege (cos we are oppressed by sex and gender. Indeed gender was invented as a mechanism by which to oppress us for being reproductively female).

If certain transwomen would stop insisting that their 'inner gender identity' trumps biological women's concrete physical sex and lived experience as females in male supremacy, then I suspect we would all get on a lot better. Feminists do not believe in gender as anything other than a social construction - and one that harms girls and women the world over. I'm happy for others to believe in their inner gender identity and gender - I'm just not happy that they insist that I believe in those things too.
Particularly when my whole life's experience as a woman demonstrates to me that gender is an oppressive social construct and a hierarchy which harms girls and women and is the mechanism via which we are exploited, terrorized, abused, controlled and subjugated. I cannot support gender, it harms me and my sex caste.

If people born with male bodies and chromosomes, and who are socialized as male, want to take on the trappings of femininity and 'live as a woman' (whatever that is), I have no desire to stand in their way. They are welcome to oppressive beauty practices, being objectified, restrictive and revealing clothing, cosmetic body modification (from ear piercing to boob jobs), misogyny, being low status, rape culture, street heckling, feeling unsafe going about one's usual business, constant messages about the importance of appearance and all the other women hating crap that is alive and well in society today.

Good luck to them, they will need it. All women have to deal with the above and if transwomen want to experience all that I don't mind. Why on earth would I?

What I do mind is all the other stuff, the biological stuff (the reason for why women are oppressed stuff). On top of all the misogyny above, bio girls and women also have to deal with something else. We have to deal with the biological fact that we are reproductively female and we are the section of the population who can grow new human beings in our bodies. And men want to control that. And we are oppressed due to that. We are controlled and exploited because of that. We aren't oppressed because we wear high heels and act feminine and we aren't oppressed because we have 'ladybrains' - we are made to wear high heels and act feminine because we are oppressed. We are told that the ladybrain exists as a reason for our low status (just as black people were told that the 'Negroid brain' existed).

Girls and women get the shitty end of the patriarchal deal because we have wombs. And that is actually quite important for us because it has resulted in great harm being done to women and girls and that harm continues. And we need to be able to name that. To resist it. To fight against it. To look after ourselves and each other. To find solidarity and support together. We are female because we carry and birth babies and we are oppressed as women due to that immutable biological fact.

And I think transwomen should respect that and they should acknowledge it and be sensitive to it. Being a woman is not about clothes and the trappings of femininity. Being a woman is about being reproductively female in a society which wants to control our biology (whether one reproduces or not).

No transwoman will ever have to worry about getting pregnant, or having an abortion, or not being able to get pregnant, or being traumatized by childbirth, or dying in childbirth, or being forced to be pregnant. No transwoman will ever be married off as a child and forced to bear children for a man who owns her. These are things that bio women have to deal with and they are at the root of our oppression and therefore at the root of why gender exists and why femininity exists. Femininity subjugates girls and women.

If transwomen want to experience some of the aspects of femininity, I won't stand in their way. Don't tell me that that makes you a woman though. And don't tell me that I'm a transphobe because I think being a woman is being reproductively female in a society that oppresses you for a biological fact that you cannot change.

or if it's just selective posting by a few people who find a few blogs and then blow it up and keep posting about it.

So you do think we're making a fuss about nothing. Good to know.

You have posted this kind of thing again and again, Kim, so it isn't "selective reading" at all. Either you believe women, or you don't. You have repeatedly cast doubt on women's experience of encountering this kind of misogynistic and homophobic trans activism with this kind of post, so I no longer believe that you are discussing this in good faith.

Kim, it isn't a few blogs. It is a movement.

The Gender Recognition Act of 2004 is not a blog. It is an act of parliament which says that transwomen are female.

Why do you keep comparing gender critical feminists to homophobes? It is offensive and hugely dismissive of women's lived experience of our biological sex, of our lived experience of being oppressed by gender, and of women's rights.

There are lots of lesbians who are gender critical, do you compare them to homophobes too?

How's does not wanting someone with a penis in a woman's only space make me a bigot?

You know Kim this isn't about a few women thinking that transsexualism or transgenderism is a bit too freaky for our delicate sensibilities.

This is about defending women's rights.

If the transgender movement was not eroding women's rights I doubt most of us would have much of an opinion on the practice itself. It just wouldn't be on our radar. Because contrary to what you might think, the focus of feminism in this area is defending and supporting women, not persecuting transsexuals.

There's all that other stuff that people claim to be trans but don't want to have surgery or hormones. I think that's more to do with people who don't want to live in their assigned gender roles but aren't confident enough to step out and say this is how I want to live my life. They need a label for it. I also get pissed off when transactivists and their allies say words are transphobic when they aren't

I completely agree with this. I think probably we all do. Where the debate is really directed on FWR is towards the fact that, if a woman posted this on many sites, she would be howled down for being transphobic.

I'm glad that this is not the case on MN.

I'm so pro gay and lesbian rights that I can't actually comprehend why anyone would have an issue with gay and lesbian people so to be likened to a homophobe is really upsetting for me. If you'd asked me a year ago I would have told you that I felt the same about trans people. Now that I've been made aware of of how the transgender movement is taking away women's hard won rights I'm no longer pro trans rights in the same way as I am pro gay and lesbian rights. That doesn't mean I'm going to start hassling trans people in the streets.