This is going to seem like a bit of a killjoy post and as much as I don't want to detract from the positive vibe of this thread, posters need to be realistic about what social media can achieve, particularly when it is being used anonymously.
Real life doesn't happen on Twitter. The vast majority of people live their lives surrounded by different views and outlooks and we manage to coexist quite well . On social media, we wrap ourselves up in the comfort of only those who share our views and this distorts our sense of success. Talking down a transactivist online isn't a victory but often just a form of bullying. It's the same the other way round. No one has the moral high ground on social media.
We also tend to hugely distort the influence that social media has on the grown ups. Most of us put down the laptops, the mobiles etc and move on to work, home life, family life, community and put the online spats to the back of our minds.
Social media distorts human behaviour and there's a backlash because of this. If you post anonymously, then you are perceived as a troll. There isn't a huge amount of sophistication to social media but it has its own rule set that doesn't reflect real life social interaction. It's perfectly acceptable to be anonymous in real life when you fear for your safety but that doesn't apply online when it becomes a measure of the lack of accountability and credibility of a poster.
Transactivism hasn't gained traction because of social media, the social media simply provides a supporting role and a source of "facts". Transactivism has actually followed a very liberal approach in achieving its aims. It went for the social, political and educational structures. Softly softly approaches to the BBC, softly softly approaches to schools, government, the NHS. It took acceptable faces of transgenderism in the likes of Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner to test the waters and it's now using school children as the public face of their oppression.
Transactivists kept the insanity for online - the claims that transwome menstruate, that neo vaginas are indistinguishable from vaginas, that fetishism plays a role - all of this is hidden from the general public.
Transactivists took advantage of the growing backlash against feminist gains, against political correctness and piggybacked on this. They hijacked liberal language and spouted feminist theory and in doing so , appeared non threatening and familiar to those who want to be perceived as tolerant and open minded.
If you look at where transactivism has gained and lost, you can see the ways in which society can be influenced.
Online - that's just a shit storm to those who choose to actively participate. To everyone else, it's just noise. I'm not sure there's a war to be won here. An online presence, yes, a source of facts, yes, but as a tool to make real gains ? I'm not convinced.
Lobbying. It works. People spend millions on this. You need a think tank, an action group, a policy, an aim, a tone that doesn't alienate or attack but that focuses solely on the gains you want to make and puts this to MPs, to schools, to the NHS, to social services, in a way that shows demonstrable benefit to society.
Community - we all talk about politics and religion freely. We need to stop pussy footing around tranasactivism. Why not talk about transwomen going to female prisons with our colleagues, friends and family ? Doing it in real life brings it back within the social norms that we don't attack, we don't shout down and we don't threaten someone we know and are having a conversation with. We need to stop letting the norms of social media influence real life.
Transactivism is losing in 2 main areas and having difficulty with a further two -
Old fashioned feminist activism. The women's marches largely shut down transactivists apart from a few online. There remains a power in demonstrating sisterhood. We don't always need to talk about transwomen but simply about women. The world still knows what that means. Take transwomen off the agenda and focus wholly on women, do it in a spirit of openness and honesty and love and leave them no place to speak up or to speak out. They have made the mistake of thinking that online support equals real life awareness - it doesn't so we need to take advantage. We need to step up the campaigns for women's rights, not dilute them with trans rights. If transwomen want to support these marches, groups and campaigns, great, if not, they show themselves for what they are.
Children - as supportive as people are to the idea of little Jonny, now Jemima, using the girls bathrooms, there is still huge distaste about little Jemima throwing away her future fertility, about being chemically castrated and cheerfully heading towards irreversible surgery. We can capitalise on the fact that society still aims to protect children while transactivism actively seeks to hurt children.
Legislation - it isn't in their favour yet. Case law tends to find in favour of sex and not gender. We need to seek judicial review or challenge a transwoman being put in the female estate. We need to find an acceptable case and fund a legal challenge. Whether it's allowing transwomen to access women only refuges or competing on a sports team, we need to get this in court. That way the science can be heard without the hysteria, we can seek to define women, gender, transgenderism.
Fear. We need to stop hiding. People I work with know I'm not generally a cunt. So when I express views on transgenderism, they don't automatically think to shout me down or to get me sacked. They tend to give me space to speak. I give them space to speak. I listen and debate. I concede where necessary - so we have unisex bathrooms at work but we won't send opposite sex case workers to visit vulnerable service users. We put ourselves in a position where if a trans person challenged us, we could make a credible case for showing that we uphold the rights of transpeople but balance it on a case by case basis with the needs of others. We don't tolerate trans hate speech but we define what that is, not the transactivists. We ran our policies by our solicitors and that opened up another discussion about trans vs women in another professional firm and demonstrated that in the real world, people are capable of supporting both trans and women whilst distinguishing between the two. We couldn't have done any of that if we kept silent or hid behind a twitter account.
It's like the old colour blind thing. It used to be cool to pretend that we didn't see the colour of people's skin, that we were all so tolerant and hip. What we really achieved was to take away our ability to identify and speak about racism. We told ourselves that colour didn't matter when sometimes it was the most important factor. We need to prevent transactivism doing the same with sex. Sex matters and we need to bring the discussion back to that and keep it there.
We need to realise that transwomen are not the threat they pretend to be to us as individual women. The die in a fire rhetoric is online bullying shit but it won't be addressed by us just shouting louder. It will be addressed by bringing it out in the open and letting it die in the scrutiny of real life. We need to put names to petitions, funds behind women's resources and stand outside with our signs. We need to take the responses of MPs to the media and shame them for inadequate responses, we need to ask sports committees to publicly explain why women are being shut out of competing fairly, we need to encourage debate with transactivists in the public sphere, we need to write to newspapers, the media, the police, our local GPs, our local governments and ask them to explain themselves and ask what evaluation they did of the impact of their policies on women and girls. Do we know how our government records crimes by a self identified woman, by a pre OP transwoman, by a post op one ? Do they understand the wider implications ? Do they have a policy and if not, why not ? A twitter egg can't demand answers to those questions. But you all can.
As always, there's nothing easy about being a feminist but we need to put ourselves out there. It doesn't need to be big and dramatic but it needs to be visible otherwise there is no point.