"I Got Kicked Off a Mumsnet Forum After Asking People About Transphobia" (article)

[Snowshimmer]

www.vice.com/en_uk/read/mumsnet-transphobia-north-carolina-bathroom-bill

Lots of posters sounded offended by me inviting responses from "cis and trans" users, although my phrasing wasn't meant to antagonise; I just wanted to give all genders a chance to respond

No attempt to try and understand why women here didn't like to be called "cis", or any attempt to understand our concerns.

I must have missed the original thread. I took a break from forums and social media for about five months. When did this Vice journo pop up?

A few weeks ago.

Thanks Palmer.

There are a few comments beneath the article. Be interesting to see if she responds.

Poor crappy journalist!

Maybe we should send her some wooly hugs?

She must be spectacularly shit to have written an article worse than the recent Daily Fail's Mumsnet articles!

It's good to see the BTL comments aren't on her side.

Quotation from the Vice website article:
"a 2013 report by the National Coalition of Anti Violence Programs in the US found that trans women were almost twice as likely to experience sexual violence as non-trans people."

BUT

"A 2011 survey of 6,456 transgender and gender non-conforming people in the United States found that up to 20% of the trans women surveyed had been subjected to sexual assault. Specifically, 12% of the trans girls and 20% of the trans women prison inmates, who were surveyed, reported sexual assault. This compares, for example, to a 2009 survey of 5,446 US college women, most of whom were not trans, which found that 19% of these women had experienced sexual assault during their time at college."

quoted from the Transmisogyny article in Wikipedia, based on the following sources:
"Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey". National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Sexual Violence - Facts at a Glance published by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .

Krebs, C.P. et al. (2009) College women's experiences with physically forced, alcohol- or other drug-enabled, and drug-facilitated sexual assault before and since entering college, Journal of American College Health, volume 57 number 60, pages 639-47. doi: 10.3200/JACH.57.6.639-649.

Is it not just a call to arms for transactivist to come and abuse the ill informed ignorant 'vagina havers'?

Oi VICE! you can fuck off. And if you keep writing shit articles like that you won't keep your Vice Job any longer than you kept your MN job.

Let me just check I'm reading what I think I'm reading there Vesuvia -

If you compare those two surveys, then women in college report sexual assault at the same rate as trans women prison inmates?

Because that is a stat that should be out there..

I'm sure there are issues and they're not really directly comparable, but then neither are any of the stats I've seen bandied about by trans activists.

I'd be interested to see lifetime rates of sexual assault for born women/girls vs transwomen. Though I doubt the transwomen would pipe down at all when confronted with those stats. That College article above gives 19% of female College students being assaulted during, what, 3or 4 years of study? What about all the other years either side of that?

I would assume the percentage of women who experience sexual assault of some kind would be closer to 100%

Quite.

"I would assume the percentage of women who experience sexual assault of some kind would be closer to 100%"

Agreed.

Hand on heart, can anybody here say that they have never been groped, groomed, or pressured to perform a sexual act, to name a few?

Seems very uncomfortable with the notion that Mumsnet users might be interested in gardening, teething and transgender issues. Because of course it's very weird if mummies think about anything other than being mummies.
Very young, very stupid, very addicted to gender stereotypes. Troubling that the latter seem to have such a hold on young people. There is no other explanation for their tolerance of this crap.

Karlos - I think there are other explanations. A lot of people just don't have all the information. Some of them did a lot of reading years ago when "transgender" was usually used almost exclusively, in the media at least, to refer to people with gender dysphoria, and they just aren't aware of the different sub-groups that the term now includes and the implications of what these other groups' inclusion means for women. This was me until very recently. I didn't actually realise there was a debate, I just thought it was an issue of prejudices and winning rights. Not that I ever engaged much given I thought it was a non-issue though which kept me in the dark.

I agree with your assessment on the gardening, teething and transgender front though.

I totally agree, singingsixpence. They don't understand what's at stake. They don't understand they're actually advocating acting opening up women's spaces to predatory men, both transgender and otherwise.

Advocating, not advocating acting.

I was like that too, venus and sixpence. I think we were all like that.

Cote

I know I can't claim that. Everyone female friend I know has had at least a "questionable, pressured" experience, some unfortunately have had much worse ones.

No, Cote, I've been coerced and sexually assaulted more than once, and raped.

Yep. Me to. Don't know any woman that hasn't - back in the day when I was out and about it was completely normal to have strangers hands touching uninvited on a night out.

I went back to the article to see if the author had replied to any comments. Instead there another commenter posting a lot and is concerned that MN is some evil nest of transphobes ruining things for poor parents of trans kids. We're just mean for no reason at all. Again no attention paid to what posters here are actually concerned about.

Also this is one the most popular article on the site...
www.vice.com/en_uk/read/sex-workers-favourite-clients-margaret-corvid
Ughhhh

That favourite clients article I've seen before, but interestingly now seeing it linked on a transgender thread, I've paid closer attention to the last paragraph, clearly a transgender prostitute, stating she is performing a "highly feminist act" through servicing the partner of a man. Then ends by saying these are not necessarily men with female partners.

"Women should also experience the pleasures that men routinely pay for". Seeing as she means transwomen, it's all still about male (penis owning) entitlement to sexual pleasure so nothing feminist there at all.

The article has an undercurrent of pro-decriminalisation throughout, which I disagree with, but most points laid by the sex workers themselves I'd agree with such as preferring clients who are clean and respectful.

Basically, snowshimmer, I agree you can clearly see Vice's editorial agenda and readership mentality from just a few articles in.

Nice to see that yet again, valid concerns about any old bloke using female spaces and claiming special snowflake status has been changed to "women think all mtt are predatory".

Its pitifully predictable.

Hand on heart, can anybody here say that they have never been groped, groomed, or pressured to perform a sexual act, to name a few?

OT-
Was discussing this with a friend a few months ago. I caught myself using a well worn phrase when discussing a mutual 'friend' we hadn't seen for some time. "Oh I remember X, he was all over me that time at X". "All over me" is my euphemism for "sexual assaulted me".

Even writing this here makes me feel guilty on two counts. One -I feel bad comparing being groped to 'real' sexual assault. Two - I feel bad on the perpetrators as they were usually drunk and acting in a basically socially acceptable manor. Yet when I pick one of these experiences at random and break it into actions there is no other name for it.