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've been searching round for an analogy which isn't going to be taken as extreme for what I think is one of the central issues of the trans* debate.

So here's my analogy - and I hope by picking a group I used to be a member of, it won't be seen as a crude parody of some minority group. I used to be a Christian - a kind of liberal, wishy-washy Christian. I had a crisis of faith a few years back and would self-identify as an agnostic. One thing that used to upset me, and which actually I still find offensive, is a certain type of atheist who holds that religion is the root of all evil (yes, it has been responsible for a lot of evil things done in its name, no sane person could deny that - but to say therefore that all religious belief is therefore intrinsically evil does not follow logically). So I got tired of being treated as if I were the same sort of person as a member of say, the Westboro Baptists (the genuinely evil bigots who picket funerals of dead service people in the USA because they claim that war deaths are God's punishment for a society that tolerates homosexuality).

Now I think there's a danger of a similar thing going on here - that most trans people want to quietly get on with their lives (and I would, like Buffy, have no problem with sharing a changing room with most well-intentioned trans women, while at the same time seeing that this might be deeply troubling for a woman who'd been sexually assaulted). However, at the extreme end, the trans activists who complain about the cotton ceiling or about abortion clinics being women's health issues are for me an extreme fringe.

But here's the interesting thing - how come this extreme fringe, who (as far as I can tell) are not representative of the views of trans people as a whole, become the go-to spokespeople for the movement? Now, one parallel that springs to mind is with radical Islam - when a mainstream newspaper wants a soundbite, they typically talk to a self-styled "community leader" who is more extreme than the community he claims to speak for. This is partly because extremism makes for good press, and partly because some of the more rightwing newspapers have a deliberate editorial policy of setting Islam up as the enemy of traditional values, and therefore want their readership to believe that an extreme form of Islam is the norm when in fact it is unrepresentative. So the question I'd ask is not so much why the "cotton ceiling" end of the trans spectrum exists (every movement has its extreme outliers) but why it is given so much air-time, and why liberal feminism is so anxious to defend this extreme position? And for me, it was that question that the TERF thread was designed to address - it was not intended as a transphobic thread.

Sorry, just catching up. Beach again, I think it's disingenuous to post those statements in a vacuum. Saying that women menstruate in most contexts is more or less factual. Saying it in a context of defining identity is more provocative. Obviously so.

In the context of an identity debate, saying 'women menstruate' is really the equivalent of 'you can only be a woman if you menstruate'. So imagine saying something like 'you can only be considered black if you have dark skin' -- i.e., grounding racial identity in physical characteristics only. That would also be a controversial statement and some would find that bigoted.

Lurcio that's a really interesting post

On here anyway, I don't think people defend the extreme activists so much as they just keep pointing out that they are the extreme. I think there's more of a problem of people focusing on the extremists and using them to discredit all trans people generally.

I think the point that Beachcomber was making there was that all of the things she mentions are biological truths (excluding the fact that not all women menstruate for various reasons) that you will read in any text book, there are many liberal feminist websites that will shut you down for saying them even if the thread is nothing to do with trans rights. This makes it impossible to talk about things like teenage girls in some developing countries not being able to attend school for several days each month because they are menstruating.

Radical feminists are fighting back because the whole situation has turned into an Orwellian distopia where women can't talk about reproductive rights and things that only affect born women because someone will say "but some women have penises" and the whole discussion is labelled transphobic.

In the context of an identity debate, saying 'women menstruate' is really the equivalent of 'you can only be a woman if you menstruate'.

No it isn't. A statement like 'women menstruate' is a generalization (with potentially the implication that men don't menstruate).

It is nothing like saying 'you can only be a woman if you menstruate' or something like 'all women menstruate'.

It doesn't mean that post menopausal women are no longer women. Or that anorexic women whose periods have stopped are no longer women. Or that pregnant women are no longer women. It is a generalization that most people are able to take at face value. Perhaps if I put it into a context for you that would help.

women menstruate therefore we need to put sanitary bins in the women's toilets (put into this context the section 'women menstruate' would be considered transphobic on many websites and by many people - perhaps by the OP of this thread)

So imagine saying something like 'you can only be considered black if you have dark skin' -- i.e., grounding racial identity in physical characteristics only.

Hah! I think it is you rather than I who is being disingenuous. I asked if you could give racism or homophobic equivalents to things I actually said, not things I didn't say. 'you can only be considered black if you have dark skin' could, at a push, be the racial equivalent if I had said 'all women menstruate' (although it would really be the racist equivalent of a misogynitic statement). But I didn't say that. That is what you decided I said.

Do you think if I say 'women get can pregnant as the result of intercourse' what I actually mean is 'you are only a woman if you get pregnant every time you have intercourse'? Based on your above post it would be reasonable to think so.

No I don' think that will happen here Kim, but the fact that it is happening elsewhere makes it all the more important to discuss how the trans movement isn't good for women while there are still places we can discuss it.

Dreaming - I can see that there's a big danger of picking on extremists and using them to discredit all trans people (which I think is precisely what is done with Islamism vs. mainstream Islam). But I still don't think that's what's going on with the TERF thread (I think you could level that accusation at some of the infamous Changing Room threads in Chat, though I'd be wary to because I am fortunate enough not to have been raped, so I don't know what it feels like to be a woman who has been raped suddenly confronted with a penis in a changing room).

What I think is going on with the TERF thread is an attempt to examine the following: when I first started reading about feminism (in a kind of pick-and-mix random sort of way - it has never been my academic field of study) back in the 80s and early 90s, the distinction between sex (biological) and gender (socially constructed) was central to the analysis of why women had historically been denied access to certain activities. But what I'm picking up from the TERF threads is that in order to defend the view that self-identifying as a woman should be considered as enough to make you a woman (without taking hormones/ having surgery), gender is being treated in an essentialist way - that it is some sort of mysterious "inner feeling" that people have, rather than a complex interaction between biology and social factors which reinforce some behaviours and suppress others in a malleable and varying way. And that this essentialist view is becoming such a dominant orthodoxy that if you try to question it on a liberal feminist website you will get deleted for transphobia.

And this has desperately important practical consequences. I was a gender-non-conforming child (I actually dressed as and passed as a boy for several years in childhood). But at no point did I think I was a boy - it was just my immature way of expressing the fact that boys got to do what I thought of at the time as the cool stuff (cricket, football, woodwork, climbing trees, going to the railway museum) while the girls got the rest (netball, sewing, visits to the costume museum). Now what do you do with a child like that? Hope that she/he will grow out of it? Come to a more nuanced understanding of gender (just because stuff is labelled as "for girls/boys" doesn't mean it actually is - you can climb trees in a dress or play with the dolls house in your khaki "mummy's little monster" t-shirt)? Or reach for the puberty blockers assuming that the child is trans, regardless of serious implications for future physical health and fertility? Because I'd hate to live in a world where the third of these was the only possibility we were allowed to discuss, because all other interpretations of the child's behaviour were trans-phobic.

DB, why do you keep misrepresenting the thread?

I was the poster who talked about women menstruating. The context of that was an international campaign to provide school girls with sanitary pads and toilets in schools because of the girls who get to go to school globally, one in ten of them miss four or more days of school a month due to lack of sanitation.

The trans activist response to that was that the girls should be referred to as menstruators, because calling them girls was transphobic.

It was not in the context of feminists or anyone defining gender identity.

I am finding it very tiresome that you keep criticising things that were not the topic.

I could just keep randomly making up sexist stuff you never said or did, and saying you shouldn't do it, but what would be the point?

I am still waiting anyone to link to a moderate trans activist, and there are plenty of moderate Muslim speakers, so it really is not comparable.

Lurcio I agree that you shouldn't judge a group by it's most vocal and extreme members. That's why talking about trans issues on Mumsnet seems so pointless.

But Tiggy, that slightly misses the point. We expect the Mail and Express to deliberately seek out extremists as examples of Islam, but we expect better from the BBC or Guardian. What's interesting about the whole TERF thing is that as far as I can see, most liberal feminist websites are behaving like the Mail rather than the Guardian - putting the views of "cotton ceiling" extremists centre stage, rather than seeking out more representative viewpoints. And even more bizarrely, putting these extreme views centre stage to the detriment of women's issues. I don't think it's transphobic to say something peculiar is going on here.

Buy Tiggy, in this case it is the most vocal and extreme members that are setting the agenda which is why we need to discuss the issue with them in mind. In this case it really doesn't matter what the transwoman who keeps her head down thinks because they aren't the ones affecting policy and shouting TERF when women try to talk about how we are oppressed due to our biology.

But Kim, it doesn't matter if 99% of trans people don't agree with the transactivists.

TiggyD isn't about judging a group by its most vocal and extreme members. Its about going 'woah, hang on, why are the most extreme members having such a huge influence in non extreme circles?'.

Such as extremists being allowed to dictate what women can say about the sanitary needs for girls in poor countries so that they are able to go to school when they are menstruating. FFS.

Lurcio thank you again for that thoughtful post -- it's really helpful, I'm afraid I have to run out but I'd like to come back later and reply to it.

Beach I said in the context of an identity debate not all the time. I don't think those statements are transphobic as a rule, I can just imagine some contexts in which they could be. If you are saying they are labelled transphobic 100% of the time, then that is excessive. But is that really the case? It doesn't seem the case here on MN, at least, so why have that argument here?

It matters because if it's only 1% of trans people who think this way, why aren't any of the other 99% speaking up and saying "hang on, this is all getting ridiculous now"? So rather than 100% of women having our lives made worse by the 1% of born men who are trans we're actually having our lives made worse by 0.01% of born men who are trans and are arseholes. Great, that's so much better.

We mostly bring up examples of non-trans men claiming to be trans so that they can access women's safe spaces and abuse women. And the vocal 1% of trans women will defend their right to do that until the ends of the earth. Do you not see a problem with that?

Muslims are speaking out about the actions of the few. For example, I read an article a couple of days ago about a man who was speaking out against his son who had gone to fight for Isis.

Kim... is that the same argument as men should speak out against men's violence? Because if it is, then I agree with it.