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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

DEBATE NOT HATE: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT GENDER

336 replies

blackistheneworange · 24/09/2017 10:24

Sorry if this is on here already but just seen it on twitter.

It's this Wednesday in Brighton which may be too short notice for me but you can book here. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/debate-not-hate-we-need-to-talk-about-gender-tickets-38129665857/amp

OP posts:
Datun · 29/09/2017 10:27

I just want to add, that it is entirely possible to be a feminine transwoman while still maintaining that you are biologically male and staying out of women's spaces.

The irony is that the men who do that, get far more support from women. The very act of them understanding women's problems, makes women feel far more empathetic and 'sisterly' towards them. Their 'femininity' comes across as genuine, discourse settles into recognisable and familiar patterns. Acrimony is nowhere to be seen. Threat is absent.

TheWeeWitch · 29/09/2017 10:34

Yes exactly @Datun

People like Miranda Yardley and my brother will always have the support and empathy of women because they are openly respectful and they genuinely just want things to be better for everyone.

retreatwhispering · 29/09/2017 10:34

Clare There is a lot of overlap between radical feminism and your position. You'll find that gender critical feminists do exactly what they say on the tin - we dislike gender norms as much as you do.

What you describe is a perfectly normal way of being a man. Some men are 'feminine'. Sometimes overwhelmingly, obviously 'feminine' in the same way that some women are overwhelmingly, obviously 'feminine'. There is nothing wrong or weird about being a feminine man.

But being a feminine man doesn't make a person actually female. Which is why I think that men should be looking to make sure that feminine men are accepted within their ranks.

'If we could be tolerated as a temporary anomaly'
You know, this is exactly what has happened up until now. Women have often tolerated trans women in female spaces as a courtesy. The proposed difference now is that we will be obliged by law to accept anyone in our spaces who declares themselves to be female. This is simply unacceptable.

Have you come across the YouTuber peachyoghurt? Check her out if you haven't. She is a very masculine woman and speaks with great wisdom on this topic.

AdalindSchade · 29/09/2017 10:45

I think a lot of women including (especially) radical feminists understand very well why some men want to identify out of masculinity. And logically I suppose that means they identify into femininity. The problem is that man==masculine and woman==feminine. Being a feminine man is not being a woman. Yet this is the new orthodoxy of the transgender movement.

ClareFlourish · 29/09/2017 10:55

Thank you for the responses.

This is the way I took, in order to survive. I wish society were otherwise. There are challenges to gender norms and renewed pressure to enforce them.

"Autogynephilic men". I feel embodiment fantasies [[https://clareflourish.wordpress.com/2016/08/21/female-embodiment-fantasies/]] describes the phenomenon better. We don't do this for sex kicks. I took testosterone suppressants before I transitioned.

Should women lose out to accommodate "these men"? Many women accept and welcome me. Can it be more than a zero-sum game?

any compromise that may originally have been possible, has now been shot to bits with the advent of violent, sexually motivated men appropriating your issue.

I don't know whether you would call me sexually motivated. I doubt anyone is wholly sexually motivated. My cross-dressing friend once spent a whole week cross-dressed, and by the end he was heartily sick of it. Videoing people is not provocation. Hitting people is wrong. And I am not violent. Can reasonable people talk together and find a way forward?

Transition angers those who wish to enforce gender roles. They see it as subverting gender roles. I want things better for everyone.

Transition was my lifeline. Please do not take away my lifeline before we can create a better way.

ClareFlourish · 29/09/2017 11:00

I have learned something about links.

"Female embodiment clareflourish.wordpress.com/2016/08/21/female-embodiment-fantasies/" explains the phenomenon better than "autogynephilia".

ClareFlourish · 29/09/2017 11:01

Oh gawd. I should use the preview.

"Female embodiment fantasies" explains better.

clareflourish.wordpress.com/2016/08/21/female-embodiment-fantasies/

Datun · 29/09/2017 11:03

claire

Your link didn't work for me, I'm afraid. Could you try it a different way?

Transition angers those who wish to enforce gender roles.

Could you explain this? I see it as the opposite. Transitioning encourages gender roles.

Please do not take away my lifeline before we can create a better way.

I'd love to create a better way. What are your suggestions?

Datun · 29/09/2017 11:06

claire, can you explain why you think women would welcome men who fetishise the idea of being a woman into their spaces?

And no, women don't have it. It's a male fetish. Women do not fantasise about being women, because they are women.

TheWeeWitch · 29/09/2017 11:12

clareflourish.wordpress.com/2016/08/21/female-embodiment-fantasies/

Here is Clare’s link Datun.

Datun · 29/09/2017 11:16

Thanks witch The third link worked for me, in the end.

BeyondNoone · 29/09/2017 11:17

”Please do not take away my lifeline before we can create a better way.”

Huh??

Have you bought into the activists idea that radical feminists wish to literally cease the existence of transpeople? How are we taking away your lifeline?

The talk was about changes to the existing law. The existing law that did allow you to transition.

ClareFlourish · 29/09/2017 11:20

I am welcomed. I go into a toilet for the usual purpose. If anyone goes into a toilet as a fetish, if they do anything which gets that noticed by others, public order offences should apply. In Australia there was an outbreak of theft of handbags from cubicles while women were on public loos. If there is actual offence, deal with that then. I would support you.

At a conference, I spoke with a woman who objected to trans women in the women's loos. After, I used the women's, but felt self-conscious about it, especially as I was drying my hands and a woman I knew came in, and greeted me. I was completely keeping myself to myself as I generally do, and she felt snubbed.

Conservatives: see the bathroom bills in Texas and North Carolina.

MaximumVolume · 29/09/2017 11:23

I'm in the Labour party & just tentatively suggested this as a topic for our CLP Women's Group discussions one person (not the organiser) who was sympathetic once I explained & had no knowledge of these issues really. Any idea how to approach with the group as a whole?

Can anyone recommend some calm & clear writing on the subject that I can circulate for beginners who probably take a default sympathetic position on trans rights because they're nice people who haven't thought through the hidden consequences?

Datun · 29/09/2017 11:27

clare

At a conference, I spoke with a woman who objected to trans women in the women's loos. After, I used the women's,

Again. Women saying no isn't enough.

If anyone goes into a toilet as a fetish, if they do anything which gets that noticed by others, public order offences should apply

Not only are the women on here very well informed, there are many women on here whose ex husbands are AGP.

It's very disingenuous of you to suggest that in order for a man to exercise his fetish in a women's space, he would have to commit a crime.

A man, any man can intimidate a woman by doing virtually nothing. Certainly not committing a crime.

A man claiming to be a woman, in a woman's space, and being aroused by his own presentation, is involving the other women in his fetish.

And he may only be washing his hands.

But since you've already acknowledged that a woman saying no it means nothing to you, it's no surprise that you see nothing wrong in that.

sleighbellend · 29/09/2017 11:35

Clare - how exactly does Julia Serrano know what women feel? Women don't get aroused thinking of themselves as women because, duh, they are women.

AdalindSchade · 29/09/2017 11:42

‘Cis women have this fantasy too’?!

ClareFlourish · 29/09/2017 11:43

"A woman saying no means nothing to you". It really does. You may make me a monster if you wish. You don't think compromise is possible, and you blame others for that.

Datun · 29/09/2017 11:43

sleighbellend

The theory goes that when a woman looks at herself in the mirror before going out on a hot date she turns herself on. Completely confusing appreciation (or not!) with arousal.

Or when a woman imagines having sex with a hot lover, and gets a tingle, that's autogynephilia.

Complete protection and a desperate attempt to equalise a male fetish.

Datun · 29/09/2017 11:45

ClareFlourish

You just said yourself that a woman objected to you using the bathroom, but you used it anyway!

How is that you not disregarding her saying no?

And again, I would love to hear the compromise that you have in mind. What is it?

Lancelottie · 29/09/2017 11:47

This stood out to me:
We experience events like that one at Brighton as repressive, trying to shut us out of the only way of being ourselves which society tolerates

If you mean the 'Debate not Hate' meeting, can you explain why you find any discussion of a way forward to be repressive?

differenteverytime · 29/09/2017 11:51

I don't think anyone here wants to take away your lifeline, clare. We want to keep the law as it is, and I hope from what you say that you've been able to find the best way to live with yourself within the law as it stands. What we're saying is that the proposed changes to the law need to be discussed, not steamrollered through, because unlike the existing law it poses a threat to women, girls and children. It is also IMO a threat to many gay men, lesbians and trans people.

I completely agree with you that gender is the poisonous root of all our issues. I also agree that we don't live in the world I (and you?) would like to see - a world where gender roles are not entrenched and enforced. Instead, we live in this toxic, gendered environment, and I fully understand and support anybody's wish to express themselves in any way they wish - within, outside or against the gender binary. I respect the pronouns and names of everyone I encounter. So we have so many things in common.

So much of what you've posted makes me so sad and angry at the steamrollering and polarising that's going on with this issue. We aren't trying to roll back your rights or take away your lifeline. That's what the extremist end of the trans movement is telling you, but we honestly don't. Many of us are the parents of teenagers who have abruptly declared themselves to be transgender, and are appalled at the lack of support available to them, and to us, to try to find out why this is so suddenly the case. We think there must be a wide variety of reasons for this - issues of toxic gendering such as the ones you have mentioned. But increasingly, the only explanation that we are allowed to accept is that our children have simply ALWAYS BEEN the opposite sex (not gender) from the one that they biologically are. And increasingly, the only treatment we are allowed to accept is immediate affirmation and hormonal treatment. But those decisions should be taken only by adults, not by young children who are still developing. We want children to have the space to explore and be critical of toxic gender roles, not simply to be bundled into the opposite role. But we are being told that, if we don't go along with current dogma that the child must be medicalised ASAP, our child will commit suicide, and we will have caused it. We are 'literally erasing them'.

So when we talk of lifelines: either you believe us - that we mean the best in this, that we want our children to free to explore gender without being forced into one box or another before they're ready to decide, that we want them to have the same lifeline that you have... or you think as the extreme transactivists do, and would say that we would 'rather have a dead child than a trans child'. This is a group of parents. Which do you honestly think is more likely?

MaximumVolume · 29/09/2017 11:52

@ClaireFlourish I must admit I hadn't read to the bottom of the thread. I apologise if my request appears insensitive straight after your posts.

My feeling in your situation is that it would surely be better if you had been brought up in a society where you could express as feminine with nobody batting an eyelid.

This is a situation that radfems would love to see. We worry that children wearing dresses well be forced down a route of medical issues if they happen to be born boys. That they will start on puberty blockers & progress to cross-sex hormones & have a lifetime of health worries because of the effects of these drugs.

Several transwomen & parents of trans kids have told their stories here & medicalisation is currently the overwhelming path kids expressing against gender norms are steered onto.

Anything else is labelled gatekeeping or conversion therapy by the trans lobby, ahs stories of detransition are treated as heresy.

And those are just my concerns for trans people, I haven't even touched on the -unintended- consequences to women's rights that the proposed changes to the legislation will have.

So you can see why we do need to discuss this, but please do not thing that I don't value you as a person, that I wish you harm or that I wish to deny your self-expression.

LadyChatterleysKnickers · 29/09/2017 12:04

if they do anything which gets that noticed by others, public order offences should apply.

Absolutely. However that should then mean that transwomen are absolutely safe and able to use the mens toilets.

I have never had the slightest concern about transwomen sharing public bathrooms but with this bill, now I do. I don't want to be used as part of someone with autogynephilia's fetish. I absolutely don't consent to the intimacy and vulnerability of undressing and toileting around the kind of TRA maniacs who battered the woman at Speaker's Corner and shout about killing and raping terfs and cis women. The bill makes it all or nothing, and the people who will lose by this are the very trans women who have peacefully shared bathrooms for years.

don't take away my lifeline

By doing what? I don't understand. I don't agree with gender boxes - I will passionately defend anyone's right to name themselves, dress and present however best fits them in terms of gender, without stereotyping, without this being grounds for any form of discrimination or harassment. I absolutely stand behind the rights of people to be safe from male violence in all forms, and the provision of safe prison facilities, toilet facilities and medical care so that no one has to enter a space in fear of violence, as well as a strong national approach to addressing male violence.

I just won't lie and say that biological sex doesn't exist and a man can be a biological woman with a penis, I won't agree to the erasure of women, their language and their lived experience as biological woman, and I won't agree to the end of the right of biological women to equal respect and safety by having the same facilities for biological women only.

Can you explain how that is harmful to your needs?

MagdalenLaundry · 29/09/2017 12:11

ClareFlourish
You lost me when you used cis. Do you realise how offensive it is
I will respect any person but it some situations I want to only be with biological females. Do you accept that?

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