Women are being censored because they wish to discuss the politics of gender. I say NO. Who wants to join me?

[Beachcomber]

Ok, I'm guessing that many here have heard about Julie Burchill's explosive article defending her friend Suzanne Moore against trans activists.

I'm also guessing that there are a lot of women who don't know that trans activists have been becoming increasingly influential in many areas that affect Women's Rights since the 1980s and 90s. These areas include feminist websites and blogs (such as the F word), feminist meetings and conferences, women's music festivals, in feminist literature and in academia teaching gender studies (a subject that used to be taught as women's studies) and in post-modernist and queer theory circles.

Transactivists call any resistance to their increasing influence and presence in these areas of female interest "transphobic". Discussion of gender identity as an oppressive social construct and as a threat to feminism and women's rights is also considered transphobic. Consequently, discussion of women as being a political class of people oppressed due to our sex and our reproductive capacity is becoming harder and harder for feminists to have without being accused of transphobia and bigotry. This is very very concerning.

Numerous women have been threatened or silenced by these people (for example they have been no platformed and/or picketed at feminist events or attacked and threatened after writing articles or essays discussing gender identity).

Let me be very clear that this discussion is about transactivists and people who threaten others into silence. It is not about transpeople in general (some of whom have stated that they are afraid to get involved in the controversy).

In my opinion, no matter which side of the gender identity debate one stands on, surely we can all agree that debate should be allowed to take place. One side cannot be allowed to shout down, threaten and silence the other.

The recent events are not just about differing opinions on gender identity though (or I wouldn't be bothering to post this), they are about women's right to talk about and identify sex based oppression and male supremacy, and therefore to fight against sex based oppression and male supremacy. And that is why this is an important if not vital issue for women's rights.

I think women's rights politics are reaching a pivotal moment - a moment in which we must stand up for our right to discuss our status as second class citizens as a result of the biological fact that we are female. If we can't discuss it, we don't have much hope of fighting it.

bugbrennan.com/2013/01/19/for-every-one-of-us-you-silence-100-more-will-rise-to-take-her-place/

To summarise the link - a well known and influential feminist blogger has been censored for discussing the issues outlined above. She is not the first woman to be silenced by these people. I think it is about time we stood up to them.

Thanks for reading.

freya - that's interesting, thanks. I wondered because I know quite a lot of people whose first reaction is simply surprise that anyone would think feminism still has a role. They see it that their generation (and mine - 20s) has 'moved on' from feminism to LGBTQ issues, because all the purely feminist fights have been won. Amongst these people, it seems virtually everyone identifies as 'queer', which can mean anything from homosexual, to non-gender-conforming, to having solidarity with these issues (I think this is a very appealing way to look at things).

I wonder if this emphasis on solidarity is part of what is going on? People seem to have imbibed the rhetoric that inclusion is the same thing as equality, and that differences of opinion are fundamentally wrong.

I find it really hard to understand what is going on with people of that age. I feel like I'm stumbling around in the dark. I think perhaps there is a lot of emphasis going on over issues like cultural appropriation and intersectionality. This can be incredibly divisive and lead to people only being able to speak about specific combinations they themselves experience. That then leads to other people of the same age trying to create situations of solidarity and conflict arises between the two approaches.

Posting to mark the thread for when I've got time to read & digest.

I thought Burchill over-egged that particular pudding although, to be fair, it's a difficult and emotive topic. It does get very annoying when people insist they share your experience, but actually don't. I fell foul of this often, in my impetuous youth, when trying too hard to join in anti-racism groups. I knew the issues, I saw them playing out around me, I hung out with a predominantly black crowd. But I'm white. I sympathised - and shared some of the experience - but racism was not part of my "being" as it was for my black friends.

Trans women have much to offer feminist discussions, for instance the MtoF Mumsnetters who're able to comment on women's issues from both points of view. (Hilariously, you often see male posters telling them their experience as a man was incorrect!) But if you didn't grow up as a girl, have never had a period or a pregnancy scare, will never know the fear of infertility, the grief of miscarriage or make an agonising choice over abortion; if you do not face an unchosen change of identity at menopause; if you didn't have to fight girly pigeonholing by careers advisors and college tutors ... your life experience is NOT the same as mine. I don't claim to know how you felt and feel, trans people, what gives you the right to co-opt my life and history?

Maybe women should march into trans support groups, aggressively shouting that we know everything they know and demanding to be respected in our delusion.

There was a further issue with the Moore/Burchill farrago. Moore's comments were about elective surgery. The group of transgendered people I know best are among the world's biggest consumers of surgical and hormonal alteration. They are Brazilian travestis. The majority keep their penises. They are elective hermaphrodites, with exaggerated female characteristics. They do not see themselves as "women", they are recognised as a third sex. So that both supports Moore and opens the debate far wider than any of our moaning British trans Minnies want to go.

Hrrmph Will catch up tomorrow, sorry for inevitable duplications.

Flora - you're putting legal and illegal activities all under one umbrella and marking them as out of bounds.

I absolutely disagree with any form of illegal activity or threatening behaviour.

However peaceful protest and dissent is not illegal and are methods that any group should feel entitled to use.

So two questions:
1)Why should trans people not be allowed to use these tactics?

2)Why should trans people not be entitled to recourse to the legal system to protect their rights? Anti-trans radfems do not claim any solidarity with trans people, so why should they expect any in return?

Gendertrender was taken down because Janet Mock objected to them using her picture without her permission (the original was a copywrited image) and calling her a "homosexual male", which violated Wordpress' terms of service. Should she not have complained, but viewed their mockery as "valid dissent"?

How would we feel if a non trans woman had her image used in such a way and subsequently got the website shut down? Would we tell her not to be "silencing"?

Flora - you're putting legal and illegal activities all under one umbrella and marking them as out of bounds.

I absolutely disagree with any form of illegal activity or threatening behaviour.

However peaceful protest and dissent is not illegal and are methods that any group should feel entitled to use.

So two questions:
1)Why should trans people not be allowed to use these tactics?

2)Why should trans people not be entitled to recourse to the legal system to protect their rights? Anti-trans radfems do not claim any solidarity with trans people, so why should they expect any in return?

Gendertrender was taken down because Janet Mock objected to them using her picture without her permission (the original was a copywrited image) and calling her a "homosexual male", which violated Wordpress' terms of service. Should she not have complained, but viewed their mockery as "valid dissent"?

How would we feel if a non trans woman had her image used in such a way and subsequently got the website shut down? Would we tell her not to be "silencing"?

'However peaceful protest and dissent is not illegal and are methods that any group should feel entitled to use.'

Is that true? I don't think I agree. Just because something is not illegal, doesn't mean it is right.

I am strongly against many of the perfectly legal things that groups of men do. I am well aware it is perfectly legal, for example, for people to stand in the middle of my local town, shouting anti-abortion slogans and handing out pictures of mutilated foetuses. Does that mean I think this group should feel 'entitled' to do that? Hell no!

I do think it was very wrong to use an image without someone's permission, though.

But feminists also protest in public. So it would be hypocritical to dismiss it as a tactic.

If the protests used hateful or intimidating language, then that is another matter, but that already falls under the illegal category anyway.

But that's not the same thing.

You said any group 'should feel entitled' to protest. I don't think men who're anti-abortion should feel 'entitled' to hand out anti-abortion flyers to me when I walk down the street. I don't understand the mindset of saying 'well, they are bigots but it's just their view'.

I also don't see how this fits together with your apparent views on this thread. You seem to be outraged people are discussing gender politics - but you're ok with anti-abortion blokes and think they're 'entitled' to protest publicly?

I think it's disingenuous to pretend all viewpoints are created equal. Everyone has a right to make up their own mind, yes. But that doesn't mean every viewpoint is just as good as the next, and all that sets one viewpoint apart from another is perspective. If I believed that, I couldn't be a feminist. I'd have to believe that misogynists have just as good a case as me and should feel equally entitled to speak out. And I don't believe that. I believe that when they decided to advance a view that actively harms women, they lost that 'entitlement' to be taken seriously.

I didn't say illegal I said unacceptable. Silencing women you don't agree with even through legal means is unacceptable in my view. The copyright issue with Janet Mock was a nonsense. Firstly you do not own a copyright in photographs by virtue of being the subject. Secondly, the photograph was replaced when the objection was raised. It was a ruse to shut down a woman's voice.

Yes, I agree with that flora (that silencing women through legal means is still unacceptable).

I do think that putting up a picture of someone without their consent is very wrong. If it was taken down, I can see it may have been mistaken, but it was still wrong. I would feel awful if my picture was put up somewhere without me saying ok, and I wouldn't care one bit about whether the copyright was mine or not.

One issue is that while somebody might have a very valid reason for pointing out that someone else is being prejudiced, if a minority group is constantly being scrutinised for their prejudice out of proportion to the focus placed on the majority, that is surely an issue.

I think feminists have to be careful that collectively they are not looking for prejudice in transgender people more than they look for it in other groups. The focus should be on what purpose wider society is using trans issues for, and that should be secondary to the variety of sexist things wider society is up to. I would be really concerned if feminists were picketing trans events.

The same goes for trans activists. They do seem to have too much focus on people who are representing other minority groups. Dan Savage, for example, who does the 'It Gets Better' campaign. He has been glitter bombed by trans activists (all but one of whom were not transgender themselves) for making quite a minor remark and then apologising. Now, Dan Savage has also made some dubious remarks about women, but if I were to draw up a list of people to picket, glitter bomb or generally respond negatively to, he wouldn't even be in my top 5000. It seems to undermine good people are doing elsewhere to pick them up on other areas where they are not perfect, when the rest of society is not held to the same standard.

LRD - I am not outraged by people discussing gender politics.

I consider Julie Birchill's article and much which passes for discourse on gender trender to be hateful, as they use vile, insulting terms to describe trans people and generally in the case of the latter, state that they shouldn't exist.

Can you see the difference between the two?

As to the right to protest, this would fall under freedom of speech. People have very different feelings about the matter, but I think that the general assumption that people have a right to protest (with the caveats about hate speech) is a sound one.

Yes, I agree with that.

I don't like the idea of constantly picking out people who are clearly extremists, and claiming they're representative. Any group is going to contain extremists, and especially a controversial group. I think someone pointed out early in this thread (or possibly in the last one) that a lot of people who're very vocal are not in fact transsexual. And I wonder if some of these people are more interested in the argy-bargy than anything else.

I suppose against that, there's the constant issue that what seems important to one person may not be to another - I don't like to be told what I should be worrying about, as a feminist. So it's possible, in the same way, that the people who focussed on Dan Savage (never heard of him) were doing something that was really important to them.

I would just love to get to the point where we don't have to be discussing this stuff over and over.

Sorry, that was to freya, though it's probably obvious.

goth - that's good to hear, that you're not outraged. As I'm sure you know, because I've said this so many times on threads you've been on, I think JB's article was disgusting. I'm not sure why you think I'd have changed my mind recently?

You're not backing off from that wording 'should be entitled' - is that deliberate? I think there is a distinction between everyone having a right to protest (which is simply a matter of the legal situation: everyone does have a right to protest, so long as the protest doesn't constitute hate speech), and the idea that everyone should feel entitled.

I'm not sure if I'm splitting hairs here - I want to know if you see a difference there, or not?

I don't think all forms of protest that are currently legal, should be legal, btw. I think we could do a lot more against hate speech directed towards women.

A right is something you're entitled to, is it not?

Within the wider political environment, that's what I view rights as, rather than allowances that the powers that be have very kindly allowed us to have.

A start for ending hate speech against women in the UK would be if gender was a category covered by hate crime legislation. Hate crime legislation covers race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender, but not gender.

Right - I think I'm making a distinction that you'd not intended. I wasn't sure.

Fair enough.

But no: I don't think people 'should be entitled' to make some protests.

I'm curious: what would you have done in the days when women didn't have the vote? Or when marital rape was legal? You presumably wouldn't like to think you'd just have said 'well, it's the law, so ...'. But this seems to me exactly the same situation.

I don't think people should feel entitled to do everything that isn't illegal.

Freya - I would like that very much, but hatred against women is so ingrained in society, I'm not sure where to even start with such a law. Although that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

If you look in the media, some of the most misogynistic things are written by women, which complicates matters.

What would you think would be outlawed by such a piece of legislation?

Freya - I would like that very much, but hatred against women is so ingrained in society, I'm not sure where to even start with such a law. Although that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

If you look in the media, some of the most misogynistic things are written by women, which complicates matters.

What would you think would be outlawed by such a piece of legislation?

I don't think it needs to complicate matters. Women are encouraged to be vicious towards other women to 'prove' how ball-busting they are. It's horrible.

I'd like to see some recognition that words like 'bitch' or 'slut' are not ok. I think the attempts to 'reclaim' slut with 'slut walks' are misguided (though I get where they're coming from). Maybe if we got this message out, in a bit we'd be in a better place to sort out legislation.

I think there will always be areas that look difficult to legislate for, before legislation comes in. If it seemed very black-and-white, we'd already have it, right?

I think anti-racism laws would be a good model.

I would love to see a time when men campaigning against abortion was considered as wrong as white people campaigning against marriages between black and white people.

I think they would have to try and deal with it in a way that was proportionate to the other groups. There are plenty of schools where nothing is really being done about using gay as a slur, so I doubt all slurs about women (and men, who would also be protected under such a law) would vanish overnight.

I believe that the police have already commented about how policing reports about hate speech, death threats etc on the internet is already too big for them to deal with even within existing law.

Just getting the legal recognition would be huge, though. Even if there isn't the capacity to go after all/much of it.

Last from me for tonight. I'm not willing to accept that women cannot speak unless they are respectful, kind and inclusive. It might be ugly but go take that battle to the mainstream before you use it against women. Women as easier targets. Again.

Can we just clear up the using of a picture of Janet Mock please. Janet Mock is a public figure, there are pictures of her all over the internet, in various articles, in videos, etc. Her image is well known and is frequently reproduced by journalists, bloggers, etc.

What happened with GenderTrender is that when the blogger chose an image (that was in the public domain, the sort of image that you would find if you googled images of a public person), she happened to upload an image that was copyrighted. Considering that the image was a still from a televised public appearance, it wasn't unreasonable for the blogger to be totally unaware that the image was copyrighted.

When it was brought to her attention that the image was copyrighted, the blogger took it down and replaced it with a non-copyrighted (and almost identical as it happened) image. She contacted Janet Mock to let her know the image had been taken down.

Is it now illegal to call a MAAB person 'male' or 'man' on a private blog?

I think the writer of GenderTrender has been denied access to her blog because she writes about transgender politics in a dissenting way (and yes the language is often no doubt offensive to trans people) and her blog is read by a lot of people. This is censorship.

Am now off to read the rest of the new posts and also wanted to thank everyone for their thoughtful and explorative posts on this tricky subject.

Beachcomber - You're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

If Gendertrender was removed for anything other then Janet Mock's complaint, why wait until now to do it?

Also, (AFAIK) Wordpress is a US based site, where First Amendment laws apply.

But again, I think you're being disingenuous. Janet Mock is not just any trans woman, she is a high profile figure. Gendertrender purposely showed her picture with that label to try and shame and demean her.

This is the sort of low tactic MRA sites do to feminists, why should feminists be perpetrators of similar nastiness?

There is a big space between always having to "make nice" and being malicious bullies, you don't have to choose one or the other.