Just when you thought Everyday Transactivism could no longer surprise * title edited by MNHQ*

[mirrorisnotmyfriend]

They come up with this.

First post - Why Transwomen Aren't Biologically Male.
www.facebook.com/everydayfeminism/

The comments are encouraging though, that is, the ones that haven't been deleted. Lots of people questioning and calling this out.

That pretty much sums it up doesn't it

It's almost like a game to them- who can try and be the most hard done by, marginalised and offended.

I do wonder if we're guilty on these threads of the opposite - frothing unecessarily, like the Daily Mail reader fed a diet of snippets lifted from extreme Islamist websites who then projects that on to all Muslims.

Having said that, I do think that the transing of children - prescribing lupron off label with its hideous side-effects, encouraging surgical mutilation - is unconscionable. (In an odd sort of way this leaves me with a certain, limited amount sympathy with the whole lady stick nonsense - I'm sure if I had a son who was trans, I'd sooner he entertained the delusion that his penis was a "lady stick" than cut it off.)

I'd just like to say that I identify as greysexual, not graysexual. The latter is an act of cultural imperialism and highly triggering for me.

I think a big difference is, these are the people who are engaging with us when we try to discuss it. Daily mail frothers are not coming up against Jihadists when they discuss that online.

Greysexual just makes me think of aliens

Also, Everyday Feminism is not an extremist site and it has many thousands of followers, and these opinions are supposedly the only acceptable face of feminism as they have set themselves up as arbiters of that.

It's almost like a sociocultural chess game.

If they push classical feminism towards biological essentialism, that's checkmate - it undermines years of separating gender expression from sex (it actually won't, but it will be perceived to have done so and that's damaging enough).

Intersectional feminism will become so diluted focusing on other issues that it will lose the capacity to make any impact on women's rights.

A backlash against trans-issues could end up with feminism associated with backwards looking conservatism - or associated with fanatical 'SJW' hyper political correctness and washed away with a more general backlash against those attitudes.

I doubt it's deliberate, probably just an expression of the fact that classical feminists are mostly of the older generation and formed their opinions in a different socio-cultural environment, but if there are some culture-war hypertrolls creating this effect they're masters of the art.

This is a first class wind up.
Can some ask them to define a woman; and thenask them what they would call someone with the potential to produce eggs? Or the potential to produce sperm.
Absolute nonsense!

Meph - you're still not getting the biology thing.

Feminism: Women's oppression didn't come out of nowhere. We are smaller and less muscular, and vulnerable during late pregnancy/child rearing. Those are genuine sex based biological differences. The decision that we are lesser human beings and that we are ripe for exploitation because of those vulnerabilities is a social and political decision - there is nothing in the bare biological facts which says that these must or ought to lead inexorably to our oppression.

The claim that they must or ought would indeed be biological determinism. But feminists are saying the opposite - that these biological facts need not and ought not lead to our social and political oppression, and that someone who uses our biological vulnerabilities in this way is morally wrong and politically stupid (if you look, for instance, at GDP per capita, it correlates rather nicely with having sane, enlightened attitudes to women's place in the workplace and in political life).

I hear you Most, and I check my conscience for that as well. Unfortunately a lot of this mad stuff is now the mainstream, and has already made serious legislative changes which negatively affects women. I know we like to vent, but raising awareness is so important. Lots of people I know weren't aware of the Olympics Committee ruling last year for example, and were quite shocked and disbelieving when they gasped what it meant.

I think if we don't keep saying that its not acceptable for women to be erased as a category to placate the trans lobby, the powers that be just go for the easier option.

*grasped.

M0stlyBowlingHedgehog

I disagree with none of that. Forget economics, you should see how military power correlates with sexual equality, it's an unopposable argument.

What I'm saying is that that if feminism is perceived to have retreated to a biologically essentialist position, it will be seen to be sharing a platform with those who argue that women are fundamentally unequal as a result of biology; That it's 'natural' for women to take a more nurturing, less assertive role in society due to their inherent biological vulnerability.

The language around trans-issues from non-inclusive feminists is already based around 'rejecting biology' and it being 'unnatural' - certainly on MN threads. If this language within feminism becomes commonplace, how soon before it's turned around against it? It already mirrors a lot of the anti-feminist language from last century.

I'm certainly no more specifically 'pro-trans' than I am pro any other form of marginalised group. It's just very interesting to watch the evolution of identity politics and the pressure that social development puts on older progressive ideologies.

"I do wonder if we're guilty on these threads of the opposite - frothing unecessarily, like the Daily Mail reader fed a diet of snippets lifted from extreme Islamist websites who then projects that on to all Muslims."

I fo think of the his and i try to seek out more mature trans voices to show me it's all not as bad as we see on these trans threads. Just looked on a Reddit trans board. Many look lovely, young vulnerable and makes me ask myself if i am in the rught side. Then i think of Jillian Bearden and Fallon Fox and the pushing in on every female space with no regard to what this means to females and what we think about it - and it just makes me angry again. That i get blocked, insulted, called a bigot for stating what i feel is reason - because i will not bow to their wants and ideology.

It really is all a mess. We keep being asked to be good trans allies - to learn and rethink our words, our beliefs, thoughts. Where is similar asking TW to be good allies to females/women and listen to us?

Just read up about fallon fox. What the? They let people born male fight women? That is just beyond...

"So....if DH puts on a dress and calls himself Margaret - does that make me a lesbian? "

Apparently yes, if you believe this lady.
www.amandajetteknox.com/blog2016/06/dear-internet-please-stop-telling-me.html

The whole blog is very.... interesting.

"Many of us have had or are currently enmeshed in sexual or romantic relationships with people who aren’t women."
So, you're not lesbians then, so stop complaining about it!

Dearie me, us lesbians (who actually may be butch and femme, despite the queer land-grab going on here, butch and femme is part of lesbian history, despite the gender issues as regards butch and femme and feminism) are just plain ole boring that is the problem! Old, fat, unfashionable, and don't want to have a sexual or romantic relationship with someone who has/used to have/wishes they had a penis. Boring ole female homosexuals, in other words.

Here's to boring ole grumpy lesbians and dykes.

If there's no gender, then aren't we all lesbians?

The language around trans-issues from non-inclusive feminists is already based around 'rejecting biology' and it being 'unnatural' - certainly on MN threads

The fuck it is. Neither here, nor on the main boards is this a prevailing opinion or thought - I've rarely seen the word 'unnatural' used - and as to 'rejecting biology' - it's more rejecting 'biological reality' - which is entirely different.

The prevailing opinion is that the only thing that makes a woman is sex, and that women deserve the right to sex segregated spaces and language, but outside of that, trans people can wear what they like and do whatever to their bodies (as long as they are adults), but that it's sad that some people feel that they have to go though that amount of surgery and medication to be happy

I don't understand that blog post... Surely, even if you make the cognitive leap and accept that her husband is now a woman, as she also fancies men then she is not a lesbian but bisexual? Or does lesbian now mean whatever the heck you want it to?

As i said, i try snd seek out less extreme trans voices to not be surrounded by an anti trans echo chamber. This thread on reddit shows the thoughts and feelings on "terfs" or really any female who foesn't parrot and accept that TW are women just like bio women

Forgot link!

www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/5oc1cz/why_do_the_radical_feminists_hate_people_with/

First comment:

TERFs are like Nazi Germany (and other guff).

Response from OP:

Thank you for this comment, made sense.

That's the level of weapons' grade stupidity we're dealing with here.

ChocChocPorridge

'rejecting biology' - it's more rejecting 'biological reality' - which is entirely different.'

Ha! Ok.

Anyway - I'm not disagreeing that the trans-movement is starting to undermine feminism, only that this really does seem to prove the old Nietzchean maximum:

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

It applies as equally to the fanatically cis-misogynist TRAs as the non-inclusive feminists that oppose them.

What exactly do you mean by "non-inclusive feminists", Meph? In what sense are feminists non-inclusive?

I've explained upthread I'm happy to defend trans people's rights to employment, housing, a voice in the political process, the right to go about their life free from harrassment. To that extent I am happy to be inclusive.

I don't want be-penised individuals in my private space (e.g. a communal changing room in which I and they would be naked). I don't want them as potential sexual partners. That's not about inclusivity, that's about my right to dignity, privacy and control over who has sexual access to my body.

Furthermore, I'm not prepared to re-write my understanding of biology to entertain the claim that some penises are female, or that a hole fashioned out of the remains of a penis is equivalent to a real vagina. That's not about inclusivity, that's about a refusal to say the world is flat, "intelligent design" is a scientific theory and humans are not overwhelmingly a sexually dimorphic species.