a letter to the woman who called me a terf

[carrotandcornsoup]

To the woman who shrieked at me that I am a bigot and a terf and a hateful transphobe for defending women's rights,

Ten, fifteen years from now, I ask you to remember me.

Remember me when you have your first baby and you're referred to throughout your pregnancy as a birthing individual, a pregnant person, and it makes you feel kind of dehumanised and you wish they'd just call you a woman, a mother, because that's what you are. But they're not allowed, because it's illegal to say only women can be pregnant and give birth.

Remember me when you give birth and you feel vulnerable and exposed and you really want a woman beside you who understands what you're going through and instead your midwife is a six foot man with stubble in a dress and you know he isn't a woman but you're not allowed to object, even when you need to be examined and you just want a woman to do it but you know you can't say anything because that would be hate speech, even though your body is screaming no.

Remember me when your elderly mother, who has lost her mind to dementia, goes into a care home and is told that her carer, Susan, is a woman, because you asked that she only be cared for by women. And even in her addled state of mind, she knows that Susan is a man, and you know Susan is a man, but you cannot object, and she has to allow Susan to perform her intimate care, because to object would be hate speech.

Remember me when your daughter comes home from school crying, the daughter who has spent the last five years training to be the best athlete in her class, her school, her district, she's crying because Lucas in her class, one of the fastest boys, has decided he identifies as female for now and so is allowed to run in her race, and she knows it doesn't matter how hard she trains, he will always beat her, and she can only ever hope for a silver medal now. Or bronze, if there is another Lucas.

Remember me when you go into a toilet late at night, perhaps in a bar, and there's noone else around, and a guy walks in, he has a beard and is wearing jeans and a t shirt, and the way he looks at you seems off, and you feel afraid and unsettled and worried he might hurt you. But you can't challenge him, because if you do he'll say he's a woman and has as much right as you do to be in this toilet, a place where many years ago you might have come to feel safe.

Remember me when you go for a promotion, for a board position at work that's designated for a woman. You've put in the hours, you've worked so hard, you know you deserve it. And the position goes to Lola, who until last year was a 50 year old man. Lola will never do anything inconvenient like needing time off to have babies, or to deal with any health issues that you, a woman might face, like endometriosis, breast cancer, PND. Lola is a woman just like you, and your company are happy that they have fulfilled their quota of women members on the board.

Remember me when you read on the news that crime statistics for women committing rape and murder are on the increase, and now women carry out a much higher number of rapes and murders than they did when you were a teenager or a young woman. And you know that these 'women' are men and that the statistics are wrong, but to challenge this would be hate speech. Remember me too, when these women rapists are locked up with vulnerable women in female prisons and cannot escape, because to challenge the presence of the women rapists with penises in prison with them would be hate speech.

Remember me when your son comes home from school and says that he's learned at school that you can change sex and that some girls have penises and some boys have vaginas and that his teacher said that because he likes playing with girls and dolls that maybe he is really a girl in the wrong body. And you think, no, you are just my wonderful, unique, son, and you were born in your own body. Remember me when a few months down the line the teacher calls you in and says she's concerned that you are not validating your son's identity and that she's noticed you are still referring to him by the name you so carefully chose for him when he was born, and calling him a boy, when he is actually a girl, and that she doesn't want to have to involve social services but she's worried she might have to if you continue to misgender your son and deny his real identity. And you know that she will, because it's happened before in a school near you, and you are afraid.

In this brave new world that you helped to create, look around for your transactivist friends, your lefty male allies, the ones you stood beside and yellled 'terf, transphobe, bigot' with, with you shouting the loudest, because you wanted to show what a good ally you were, how inclusive, how progressive. Where are they now? Why, they are where they always were. Benefitting from the patriarchy. Enjoying the new, improved version of it that you helped them to build by crushing the resistance from the women who spoke up for their rights. This has all cost them nothing; it has made the world a better, easier place for men. It has cost you and your sisters who campaigned with them for virtue cookies, everything.

And me? I'll be where I've always been. Fighting for your rights. Fighting to undo the damage.

I'll have your back, as I always have done.

Inciting hate how?

I just want recognition. To be respected. Not steamrolled and deemed unimportant and second to someone else.

This is my reality. This has already happened to me. This isn't something sort of dystopian future. It's a dystopian present.

And it's hateful to want my own past? It's hate to want my own identity? It's hate to be concerned for the welfare of ALL my family?

For most this isn't something they are close to. It's something that passes them by. This has the power to effect everyone though and undermine far more than most well meaning people realise.

perfectly

Ok so you are fine with a male gynae/MW? Can you understand why others might not be?

Aero read Daim's post.

Why? I am sure she can make her own mind up about what she thinks.

Stirring up hysteria

Interesting choice of words there.

Irony is fifteen years ago I'd have not seen a problem too.

Siblings schoolfriend had come out as trans by that point. Someone well known to our family. There were already strained relationships within the family. I didn't think a lot of it really.

perfectly actually I think op is spot on actually, I can see it happening now, so it is not hard to predict what will happen in the future. Already chikdren as young as 3 can identify as a different gender despite their very young age, and lack of know,edge about the ramifications of this. It is not difficyult to see where it is going, and op has put that into words quite perfectly.

Brilliant piece. This is scary stuff and it's already happening.

I'm so angry about this! I haven't been this angry for a long time. I'm absolutely enraged by the spineless lefty bro dudes like Ed Milliband, James O'Brien, Peter Tatchell and Owen Jones, who are throwing women under the bus in their desperation to virtue-signal to a younger generation, without having considered for one moment the impact on women of losing all our hard-fought political gains and social protections. We are 51% of the population, and yet they are prepared to rob us of our rights as women because of the aggressive and entitled demands of the tiny minority (0.1%) who are trans. In fact, it's probably half of that - trans-identified females don't seem to utter a squeak. This is all about male people and their sense of entitlement to access women's spaces, scholarships and jobs simply by playing with semantics (i.e. calling themselves "trans women" rather than "trans-identified males").

What I've realised is that the bro dudes never accepted the real asks of feminism - they never got the demand for justice, regardless of how often they paid lip service to women's rights or wore the "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirt.

What's so offensive is that none of these labour politicians and journalists are bothering to ask women why we are so angry and so anxious about this. I am deeply concerned about the way this ideology is infiltrating our schools (e.g. adolescent girls who are simply sporty or assertive are being pushed towards dangerous chest-binding and testosterone that will make them infertile), and genuinely fearful of the violence coming from trans activists, who beat up a woman in Hyde Park, surrounded women at a book fair for an hour chanting at them and are issuing threats on social media ("Kill terfs" - a vile term of abuse meaning 'trans exclusionary radical feminists' i.e. anyone who disagrees that a man can be a woman) while silencing all dissent.

To think that next year is the 100th anniversary of our foremothers winning the vote.

Brilliant. I read this on Fair Play for Women today too. I'm going to use this as inspiration to write to my MP again. And I will link to this thread every time I read someone on here complaining about the "transphobia".

sloth, that dude who has just never felt right as a man has managed to hoodwink his parents, his wife, and his children, all of whom have loved and supported him every step of the way. For this guy to reach middle age and demand that anyone who has loved and supported him to date may now not ever refer to his past, to shared history using a dead name, and to wholeheartedly accept that he has always been a woman?

I dunno if you have ever hung out on tg support sites. They are chock full of very disturbed people, and a host of ‘admirers’ who are clearly in denial about their sexuality. By wanking over trans women they can pretend they are heterosexual and not trouble their ‘masculinity’. Of course, it IS possible to read threads about simulated menstruation, faking ‘accidents’ to enable passing, without reading into it that these folk are getting jollies out of it (with a hefty cognitive dissonance when they discuss how horny it makes them feel) but the other option is to view gender dysphoria as a serious mental illness, with ‘transitioning’ as the cure. They don’t like that either.

Look, in a few years, who knows, there may well be some ACTUAL neurological research that DOES highlight gender differences (that are genetic and not socially conditioned) and it will open a whole new view of social conditioning/ nature/ nurture. Maybe it will be along the autism research pathway. But right now we have absolute pink brain blue brain bullshit being used as scientific evidence that ‘this is a female penis’.
A female penis.
The education crisis around this reminds me a little of trying to teach evolution in a religious school. Or creationism in a culture where science prevails.
And you can’t even use ‘some people believe that...’ because you are called a transphobe and a bigot.
I know a number of transgender people. I want them to be able to live however they feel most comfortable, and be happy.
But I don’t want schools to teach that brains are gendered. And that women can have penises. I want them to teach empathy and respect.

There are several trans MNetters who have shared gender critical views and concerns about the political TRA agenda and groups who are creating the legislation and policy. Would you count them as dinosaurs too?

@slothface - I was going to respond to your points in turn (and I can do if you'd like). But for every transwoman I know who doesn't want to trample over women's rights, I know another who does.

I used to think as you do. But I've changed my mind. I will defend trans rights to my dying day. But not at the expense of women's. Because, over and above anything else, I'm a proud feminist.

I’m also very much becoming aware of how the new wave of trans women (and their allies) truly believe they have invented being gender-critical.
It’s fucking hilarious.

Could I ask the minority group here what they think about children transitioning? That's what bothers me most. Almost all children who take puberty blockers are believed to proceed to full hormonal treatment, and as a consequence they are very likely to have a lifetime of medication if they don't detransition. Nobody knows what that might do to their health, but the early indications from children prescribed Lupron for growth problems in earlier decades aren't promising.

A minority proceed to surgery and that is also fraught with problems. It makes me heartsick to think of healthy young women having double mastectomies after years of binding, and perhaps then going on to have radical hysterectomies, and healthy young men having themselves castrated. The surgeons' attempts to provide them with an approximation of the genitals of their assumed gender are really nothing like the real thing and can cause a lot of health problems in themselves.

A great many of them are going to be left sterile and without any satisfactory sex lives.

How can all this be better than just letting children be children and not forcing them to conform to idiotic stereotypes?

I fucking hate being described as a "cis"woman at work.

I work with genitals, all kinds. Trans people are being sold a lie - the surgery is shit. It doesn't fucking work. Give a 6'4" dysphoric person a neo-vagina and she'll still look like a bloke in a frock. And, the neo-vagina has a huge failure rate - 30% can't piss, FFS. And, they all stink. All of them. Real vaginas self clean - a surgically produced cavity that has to be dilated to stop itself from sealing up and will probably re-grow hair, or, might be a newer version of a bit of colon tucked in there because it's "self lubricating" (the mucus from my vag is wildly different from my IBS mucus, doofus) - these things never self clean. They can't. They are not the wonderful, amazing, responsive, transforming, self caring organ that a vagina is. They are a fuck pocket.

And, as for FTM - "we'll cut off a bit of your arm and sort of roll it into a swiss roll with a pipe cleaner in it, that'll do the job. Oh, we'll tattoo the end, it'l be great". Oh, fuck off. Nothing like a fucking cock.

It's a disaster. I feel really sorry for the trans folk I see at work. They've been mutilated.

All this "oh, it's great to be your own true self" nonsense - BE yourself! Be butch, be femme, but, for the love of God, don't cut into your genitals because it's fucking shite.

And, don't call me cis. I'm a woman.

Ive said this before but I did have a male midwife and a trans woman nurse care for me during and after labour. I was happy with this but still support every word of the OP. I had a choice; I could have said no if I felt uncomfortable. I do not want women to lose that right and I absolutely understand why many women would want to exercise it.

perfectlynormal, daim and sloth

So men aren’t beating women at sport? Men aren’t being transferred to female prisons? A 19 about adolescent boy hasn’t taken the post of labour’s woman’s officer, having publically asserted that women’s biology is meaningless?

And Scotland aren’t implementing guidelines that state if a parent refuses to affirm their child’s gender identity, the local authority can intervene?

Oh, wait yes they have.

And given that statistically 37 children a year will have gender dysphoria, how come 50 a month are showing up at gender clinics?

That’s 1963 confused children. All of whom have to be affirmed in a belief system that completely denies reality.

Have you been living under a rock?

Open your eyes.

tunnocks that is shocking. How are we letting people mutilate themselves like this?

It's like something out of some nightmarish Sci Fi dystopia.

But - believe it or not - the right of primogeniture (inheritance of title and thus land and wealth by the first-born son) is now going to be the only exemption to the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. The chaps making the laws certainly act to protect what they value. So the changes are hypocritical (not that I'm particularly bothered by the financial affairs of the gentry!). In the US, a men's university blocked trans-identified females from attending. So while there's an assumption that women's spaces and entitlements are fair game for male-bodied people, men are acting to protect their own spaces from female-bodied ones. In the US and Canada, where trans dogma has been widely accepted, many of the women's organisations - and even lesbian organisations! - are now run by males who identify as trans.

I am now really starting to think we need to raise our voices publicly to fight for our spaces, education and employment schemes, for ourselves and our daughters. I know I'm not the only mum who's troubled by the idea that my daughter (who's very athletic) will soon have to compete against boys who have every physical advantage over her. If the self-declaration law gets passed, there's no reason why the national England Women's football team won't soon be a majority male, just like the national women's team of Iran. Given that over 80% of trans-identified males don't actually have surgery (i.e. still have penises), and many don't take oestrogen, there are real issues of unfairness - not exactly a good signal to give children.

Maybe it's time to think of some creative direct action to make the men in our lives and in public life wake up and show us some support!

I totally agree Sophie, it's the subordination if women all over again. Women's rights are going back, not forward.

I am one of those women that has no problem sharing a changing room or toilets or whatever with men or women, I am one of them women that has no problem with being examined my a male doctor or nurse, if I needed caring it would not bother me what sex the carer was.

I do have a problem however that my choice is being taken away from me. I am lucky to say I’ve never been sexually harassed or assaulted to the point that I now feel vulnerable or intimidated around men (I can’t say I’ve not been sexually harassed/assaulted ever because honestly I don’t know a woman that can) but I am also realistic that it could quite easily in the future and then I would more than likely feel less comfortable around men so I’d like to have the right to request an actual female doctor, or have the right to use a public toilet and not worry that a man will be in there next to me.
Everything you have put OP is sadly exactly how the future seems to be going, and I for one worry about it.

I also worry about the future mental health of our children, as you say if a boy is perceived to not be fitting into the ‘gender norm’ then people are automatically deciding that they must identify as a girl.
My DS is so stereotypically a boy in many ways, he just naturally gravitated towards cars and trains, he most often prefers the male characters more than the female ones when watching cartoons and films etc. but that’s ok as it’s his choice, although I’ve had people accuse me of being a poor parent as I must have clearly pushed it on to him, but would they have said I’d forced him into Barbies and princesses if they were his interests?
Sometimes he tells me he wants to be a girl, and I’ve had someone say that I should take him seriously instead of breezily reply ‘ok sure’, but would that same person have told me to take my 3 year old so seriously when the week before he told me he wanted to be a dog and proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes crawling around whilst panting and licking my face?

This transmania is beyond ridiculous already, and I only worry about how far it will go before people realise how severe the consequences to all will be in the future.

They use colon now?
Huh.
Are you allowed to use the term bro-vagina at work, stealth? (Genuinely interested - I’m curious about the linguistic tensions in the medical environment, given the impact on pg women.
I had a male midwife (actually not for the delivery, as I had elcs, but for aftercare. I wasn’t asked. He gave me a suppository without any real choice (different country and translators only 9-5). I didn’t feel violated, but I am still mildly boggled 17 years later that he just wandered in, waved the suppository at me, rolled me over, shoved it up my bum, and then wandered out again.
Thinking about it, I also had a male obstetrician deliver dc2, and dc1’s cs was a male obstetrician too. The joys of giving birth in countries where men are doctors, and men deliver babies because doctors are men. (Same man who did my elcs told me in English that his wife would always have CS due to it being easier on the female biology than vaginal deliveries - and that as a result she would be much less likely to develop age related urinary incompetence etc etc) Nice guy, but i’m Not sure his wife was going to get much of a choice in whether or not she wanted a vaginal delivery. She wasn’t having one.
Huh.
So out of three kids, only one was delivered by a female, just by virtue of country of birth.
I was referred to as a mother, woman, female throughout though.

Just as a matter of interest, if a transgender midwife delivers a baby, does she assign a sex? Or is that gendered violence?

God that’s a Freudian typo. I typed neo-vagina but it autocorrected to bro-vagina. 😂

Great post, carrotandcornsoup.

Bro-vagina .

No-one 'assigns' a baby's sex at birth. In over 99% of cases, someone takes one look at the baby and says either 'it's a girl' or 'it's a boy'.

The baby's sex is identified from their genitals, it's not arbitrarily 'assigned'.

But how do you know if it’s a male penis or a female penis?

I realize the point is moot, as no self-respecting TRA gives a shiny shit about women’s reproductive health or would ever elect to be involved in anything as biologically based as caring for women during childbirth. I’m just curious about the cognitive hoops that it would be necessary to jump through in order for real actual life to make sense to someone that thinks in this way. There is a degree of narcissism required to extrapolate that the rest of the world doesn’t get it and requires educating, but that these rules only apply to a select few, not the heathen masses. Only my penis is female. This baby’s isn’t. If you call me male because I have a penis, you are committing literal violence against me. But I am merely stating this baby is a boy because he has a penis.

At what point are we no longer allowed to assume someone’s sex based on their genitals? At what point are genitals no longer indicative of sex?

I mean, I know the answer. ‘When the penis owner tell you so.’

It’s not really a basis for anything other than the recognition that reality has become blurry, and well meaning and right-on lunatics are running the asylum. People suffering from gender dysohoria should be treated with dignity and given treatment to ease their pain. They shouldn’t be dictating that their version of reality should be imposed on a dimorphic species.