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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Wrong side of history

514 replies

LyraPotter · 15/01/2018 16:35

Here is something I know to be true: those campaigning against trans rights will fail. Your money will be raised and spent and wasted. Your legal challenges will not succeed. Your relentless attempts to do injustice will fail. You are on the wrong side of history. Your children will grow up knowing better than you. You cannot stop progress. Your efforts are in vain.

And every time I'm proven right - every time a court judgment goes against you and every time a law protecting trans men and women is passed and every time equality is further enshrined in the laws of this country I am going to return to this thread for the pure and petty purpose of telling you I TOLD YOU SO.

OP posts:
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18
SimonBridges · 16/01/2018 07:31

I see what is happening.

People always kick down down don’t they.
Don’t go onto Piston Heads or one of the mainly male forums and shout your mouth of there. No. Come and kick at the people under you who just want to get on with their lives with their rights intact.

Fekko · 16/01/2018 08:29

I thought shania Twain was a cowgirl!

BeyondWW · 16/01/2018 08:29

Isn't Lyra back of her vair important redeye yet? Must be long haul.

Fekko · 16/01/2018 08:30

From fantasy land? No that’s a domestic fight.

SheStoopsToConker · 16/01/2018 08:34

Y'know Lyra, you could engage with some of the questions asked here but no, instead you hurl abuse. I feel sorry for the child you're trying to have.

Redonionricedpotato · 16/01/2018 09:14

I think it was less of a flight that Lyra had to catch and more that his mum turns the internet off at 11pm

lostplot · 16/01/2018 10:49

Dude what an excellent thread, ten out of ten for peak transing!

DodoPatrol · 16/01/2018 11:25

Can we lay off the 'must be a teenage boy' comments, please? If this is a teenage boy, it's one doing a surprisingly thorough job of setting up an online MN personality complete with cats and attempts to conceive (yes I spend too much time on here).

I think it's more worrying that an adult woman, albeit a privileged one by her own account, cannot see the unintended consequences of changes to the GRA, and thus dismisses the concerns of others as bigotry and hatred.

(I also think that some of those 'unintended' consequences are probably fully intentional and being hurried along by the usual suspects - middle-aged dodgy white males - but that's a different matter.)

Ereshkigal · 16/01/2018 11:48

I think it's more worrying that an adult woman, albeit a privileged one by her own account, cannot see the unintended consequences of changes to the GRA, and thus dismisses the concerns of others as bigotry and hatred.

YY. What is it about these zealous ideologues?

PricklyBall · 16/01/2018 11:48

Quite agree, Dodo. There are (sadly) many, many women out there who think of themselves as liberal feminists (and often walk the walk as feminists in 90% of their lives, campaigning for women's shelters and let toys be toys and the like) who have a blind spot when it comes to the excesses of transactivism. This is partly because they have bought into a "package deal" view of left wing politics - that the correct ideology comes as an indivisible whole and to reject any part of it is to reject of it. It's partly because they're women and have therefore been socialised to be nice. And it's partly because they, like all of us who are gender critical, probably have nice, unthreatening trans friends whose human rights they want to protect - and haven't worked out that human rights as a general thing are different from specifically women's rights (designed to protect us in the face of the particular forms of oppression we face because of our biology, and most specifically, because of our child-bearing capabilities as a class).

Redonionricedpotato · 16/01/2018 13:46

Very well put Prickly. I continually despair of the left wing women I know who have fallen for the 'trans are the most oppressed in the world and anyone who says otherwise is a nasty bigot' narrative.

PricklyBall · 16/01/2018 14:28

I think a lot of it has to do with Groupthink and reinforcing each other's views. There are a lot of things (the genuinely appalling murder rate of transsexual prostitutes in Brazil, erroneously generalised as if they applied to the whole world, the faked up suicide stats which Mermaids promulgate) which if true would be absolutely scandalous. Because liberal feminists re-tweet these statistics and share them on social media without ever fact-checking them, the narrative that transwomen are the most oppressed group ever seems self-evidently true to them. Hence rad fems seem the most evil people ever to be (as it seems to them) cheerleading this insane level of violence. Except that of course that isn't the case. (The two women a week murdered by intimate partners versus one transwoman in the last ten years stat for the UK puts this into perspective - not to say that violence against trans people doesn't exist, or that it isn't horrifying, but it really isn't on the industrial scale it is against women).

The other thing which I think is there (because I was that lib fem back aged twenty-something) is a misunderstanding of the difference between a recognition of the role biological reality plays in one's oppression, versus a simplistic belief that this would somehow be to concede some sort of essentialist justification for one's oppression. It's taken me years to get my head round this (and I'm a bright, reasonably politically astute woman).

I think there's a danger that you (generic lib fem you - including my younger self) see the words "women are physically weaker than men..." and hear "women are the weaker sex..." and think mistakenly that rad fems are lining up with all those men they've had to fight their way past growing up, the men who said "women can't do maths, women can't throw properly, women can't, women can't, women can't..." When in fact the position is much more complex. It is that women are weaker on average, and uniquely vulnerable when pregnant and lactating, and that's just biology for you. But that none of this justifies treating women as less worthy members of the human race.

What biology does is (to use the whodunnit analogy I've used in the past) to provide oppressive men with "means, motive and opportunity" - the means is taking advantage of their greater physical strength, the motive is controlling women's reproductive labour and sexuality to ensure that it's their genes (the twatty men's) rather than any other men's genes getting passed on, and the opportunity is the patriarchal system they construct to provide a justifying ideology for that oppression. Biology facilitates those choices, but doesn't make them right or inevitable.

(Compare and contrast femicide and patricide, for example. Young men are physically stronger than older men - hence the massive social taboos against patricide! Taking advantage of one's physical strength isn't culturally inevitable or always culturally sanctioned. Where it's deemed to be a bad idea, all sorts of cultural ideologies grow up to keep unfettered male violence in check. Specially when the potential victims are male.)

FundayMorning · 16/01/2018 15:07

When people like Liam Madigan say 45% of trans pupils in UK schools have attempted suicide...how many people are we talking about

How many trans kids are there?

I'm just wondering what these big numbers actually equate to, compared to say the number of non-trans kids who attempt suicide.

JessicaEccles · 16/01/2018 15:13

I believe that anorexia is the mental illness with the highest mortality rate. Yet nobody thinks it can be stopped by encouraging sufferers to be thinner.

Ereshkigal · 16/01/2018 15:27

When people like Liam Madigan say 45% of trans pupils in UK schools have attempted suicide...how many people are we talking about

How many trans kids are there?

Suicide attempt numbers are based on a self reported survey of 27 trans people.

fairplayforwomen.com/fact-checker/mermaids-tg-lying-unprofessional

ItsAllGoingToBeFine · 16/01/2018 15:41

Suicide attempt numbers are based on a self reported survey of 27 trans people.

That is incorrect (for that particular statistic)

I believe that figure comes from here:
www.stonewallscotland.org.uk/scotland-research/education/school-report-scotland

While the 45% figure is sensational the methodology used to collect the data is deeply deeply flawed:

www.transgendertrend.com/stonewall-school-report-what-does-suicide-rate-mean/

Ereshkigal · 16/01/2018 16:46

Thanks for that Itsall. I hadn't read about that specific Scottish survey.

BarrackerBarmer · 16/01/2018 16:56

So, in a decade's time, when this is a scandal of epic proportions that makes the Jimmy Savile horror seem minor in comparison, when a generation of sterilised and mutilated children are putting forward their first class actions...
and government enquiries are asking "who is responsible?" but the people who cheered this nightmare along (Hi OP) are frantically scurrying to provide evidence of 'which side of history' they stood on?

Let's meet back on this thread then, shall we?

The difference is, the women who are here, now, relentlessly trying to prevent a generation of children from being damaged by zealots (Hi OP) who refuse to acknowledge that BRAINS DON'T HAVE GENDER, well, we won't be crowing or gloating. We'll be as furious and frustrated as we are now that this PREVENTABLE catastrophe happened anyway. Because of people with attitudes like the OP of this thread.

Battleax · 16/01/2018 17:10

£14,620 Smile

Icantreachthepretzels · 16/01/2018 17:14

see the words "women are physically weaker than men..." and hear "women are the weaker sex..."

The interesting thing about women being physically weaker than men is that it's based on a patriarchal view of strength (i.e the thing men will win at - so 'strong' means 'able to lift heavy objects.')

But actually there are lots of different factors in physical strength. If you went with pain tolerance, ability to survive famines, ability to travel vast distances, length of life, resistance to illness, ability to recover from said illness - I believe women win in all these categories. They are all a type of physical strength.

Funny then how it has been determined that strength is measured as the ability to lift heavy objects, and not the ability to live a long and healthy life, surviving food shortages. Because nothing is more important or useful than the ability to carry a chest of drawers single handed, apparently.

Bit of a tangent - but it is one of the many hidden linguistic and ideological ways that male supremacy is upheld - and transing people won't change what type of physical strength you fall under - especially if no cross hormones are taken.

FundayMorning · 16/01/2018 17:56

The anorexia argument is so pertinent. I liken it to offering liposuction to a young boy suffering anorexia - nobody would countenance it. But if he says that instead of imagining himself to be fat he imagines himself to be female we say "oh sure, here you go, we'll just pump you full of hormones and remove your penis".

jellyfrizz · 16/01/2018 18:09

The interesting thing about women being physically weaker than men is that it's based on a patriarchal view of strength (i.e the thing men will win at - so 'strong' means 'able to lift heavy objects.')

Yes!

www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/15/scientists-confirm-what-women-always-knew-men-really-are-the-weaker-sex

Check out the comments to see how upset peoplemen get when it's suggested otherwise.

Datun · 16/01/2018 18:11

But isn't being physically weaker the only way men can maintain the patriarchy?

We wouldn't get raped, abused, harassed or attacked if we were stronger than men.

They don't actually have to do it (although many do) for us to know they can.

DonkeySkin · 16/01/2018 18:16

But isn't being physically weaker the only way men can maintain the patriarchy?

Yeah, it is. I know there are different measures of strength and fitness, but the bottom line is, if women could match men in our potential to inflict physical harm, patriarchy wouldn't exist.

PricklyBall · 16/01/2018 18:17

I think the point about different types of strength is well made, but as Datun points out, the particular sort of strength that matters in a fight is muscular strength/length of levers/reach/height/weight advantage. (I think Datun and I are tag-teaming this point on several threads).

Yes, the strength necessary to walk for tens of miles in search of water or food, or to withstand many many hours in active labour is awesome. But it's not the type of strength necessary to fight off a rapist.

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