I don’t like the term “peak trans”

[Amoregentlemanlikemanner]

I mean I get it. But I think your term should be peak TRA.

“Peak- “ is, as I understand it, a reference to the term “ peak oil” with all the connotations of the amount of oil reducing down to nothing.

Which is not, I hope, the way anyone feels about trans people.

Just my take on things

I can’t really agree or disagree with your analysis. I’m not rejecting what you say and it is interesting.
It’s not at all how I was thinking fwiw-not sure if that matters.

OP, I've just re-read your post of 14.20. It doesn't address the question I have asked at all.

Let's start here:

1. Why do you think the phrase 'peak oil' conveys a negative attitude towards oil?

2. Why do you think (as you appear to) that it suggests that people have the power to reduce oil supply, as a consequence of their negative attitude?

3. Why don't you recognise peak oil as a natural, economic and inevitable reality?

The analogy you appear to have inferred between 'peak oil' and 'peak trans' seems to rely upon these attitudes and ideas. Given that you seem to be saying that using the term 'peak trans' implies that people:

1. Have a negative attitude towards trans people.

2. Are seeking to reduce the number of trans people as a consequence of their negative attitude.

3. Think there is some natural limit on the number of trans people.

You see, even if you swap 'gender' or 'specific trans ideology' into your analogy, it still makes no sense whatsoever.

Because oil is a natural, finite resource. It is useful, people like using it. It is running out whether we like it or not. It is not being scared out of existence by anti-climate change campaigners. No-one can will oil into or our of existence. We have no choice but to seek alternative energy sources.

The analogy you used to start this discussion makes no sense.

I think is does matter here, in this discussion - because you expected everyone else to read and understand the phrase 'peak trans' the same way you had.

Your purpose in posting seemed to be to warn people that they should think about it in the same way you do, or at least be aware that others would.

Yet, it seems to me, that you hadn't thought through what was really a knee-jerk response to the phrase, and a flawed one at that. When your response is examined, it is found not to make sense.

For me peak trans just means that as a feminist I no longer regard it as a harmless delusion some people have (that they can "become" the opposite sex) but that with transgender athletes entering women's sports and women's organisations and fostering the girls are pink boys are blue fallacy it is threatening me and I feel I can't ignore it as harmless nonsense any more.

Exactly, Lottie. I'm not a wizard, I can't magic oil out of existence, or magic more of it up. It exists, and we're running out of it, regardless of how I feel about it.

The jerking knee made more sense once the trans friend whose feelings we all ought to be worried about hurting was introduced into the conversation. Also some people just really enjoy instructing other people in what they are or are not allowed to say.

I notice the Financial Times uses the term Peak Beard.
www.ft.com/content/6b638f58-80df-11e7-a4ce-15b2513cb3ff

I just felt the somewhat childish need to reiterate that I, in fact, rather like the term peak trans.

This post is entirely un-avocodo-related.

I mean I get it. But I think your term should be peak TRA.
I have a similar attitude to you, OP, with regard to offensive first lines in a post. This, for example is an effort to control what we can say. Very much in keeping with the efforts of transgender advocates to instruct women on what words we may or may not use to describe our bodily functions and life experiences.
Nothing gentlemanlike about it. Pure authoritarianism.

I think it's very hard when someone has a trans friend or family member. Often they apply the logic that their friend is nice so all trans people must be nice.

Many of us appear to know a nice harmless trans woman. Not many of us seem to know a Agp. So who are the Agps in real life? We must know them. I assume that the Agps on the trans widows threads are other people's harmless trans friends.

My experience with many trans people on here and other sites is that they are nice while you play along and sympathise and obey them.
When you dont play along or disagree the enraged Agp appears. It happens again and again and it's predictable. I think that before people champion their harmless trans friends right to access women they should test the theory that they are actually harmless.

Ask the questions. Ask what it is that makes them feel like a woman. Ask how they feel about self id and the effects on children's safeguarding. Ask how they feel about the loss of women only spaces or trans women rapists being put in a woman s prison.

Ask if they agree with a law that forces young girls to get undressed in front of boys. Ask them what they think about Agp. Because I am certain that many of us will see a very different side to our harmless trans friends after these discussions.

And if you can't have the conversation, that speaks for itself.

Precisely. If you want to know how nice someone actually is, especially if that someone is male, try saying no to them. Then try telling them that they're wrong about something, and asserting your right to put your needs on the same level as theirs.

I suspect that many of the people with nice trans friends who we should all be nice to are mistaking "happy that you're doing and saying what they want you to" for "nice".

I completely agree. The trans widows thread highlights it.

The women, who are being gaslighted and abused, say that everyone else thinks their husbands are charming.

Even their therapists.

Completely agree.

This especially:

‘And if you can't have the conversation, that speaks for itself.’

Hi guys I’m new to this site. Hope everyone is doing ok 👍🏻

Well, I’ve been completely peak transed. I think. Although there could be a bigger peak hidden by cloud. I’ve peak transed DH, and there’s a one-woman 80s feminist revival going on in our house.

But I don’t much care for the term peak trans either. The words sound transphobic to my ear. The term brought me over to the feminist board to find out what the fuck had happened to feminists while I was busy in my comfy bubble, and .... peak!

But not everyone will have that experience. It’s clearly a term that turns dim handmaidens* back without any understanding of what it means, and what it’s shorthand for.

It’s in use now, and serves a good purpose, so I don’t think there’s any value in discussing not using it, but it’s important to be aware that there’s a risk of it being a counterproductive term.

Also, mmm.... avocados.

*Probably also a counterproductive term, but I’m really enjoying it at the moment. 😄

Frankly, the very fact that the term peak trans infuriates transactivists makes it good enough for me.

It is incredibly descriptive of the actual thought process that it results in.

And they know it.

Genuine transsexuals don't go around peaking anyone.

It describes a process that they don't generally contribute to.

But, like everything else with this crazy ideology, they are getting caught in the crossfire.

But there is little to be done about that.

You can't counter, rebut arguments, make a point, or stand up for yourself, if you are relentlessly handcuffed by the 'not all trans' caveat.

When women talk about male violence, they're not talking about all men. They're talking about the men to whom it applies.

NAMALT has to be constantly invoked, before you can even speak about male violence.

It's really not women's fault that certain cohorts of men act like twats or monsters.

Men getting offended by the way other men act should result in them opposing that, not opposing the women who talk about it.

I have found this discussion interesting. I don't think I've ever taken part in a 'trans thread' before but do like to use Mumsnet to satisfy my annoying pedant tendencies sometimes.

The meta-message, if I may be so wanky, seems to me to be about asking open questions, listening and reflecting, even more than about use of language. (Other people do things for reasons we hadn't thought of shock!)

I've shown that I think the OP's connection with 'peak oil' is meaningless. (I suspect that perhaps she and fellow environmentalists were so focused on finding a diverse, low-carbon solution to that problem, as opposed to a continued fossil e.g. fracking and nuclear one - their real foes - that they forgot that the peak oil scenario was not of their making).

But, that fallacy can easily be cast aside and the OP's point about language made regardless. The idea that 'peak something' in the contemporary sense means 'I've had too much of that and wish it to diminish' and that that could be understood as being about people rather than ideology.

What I'm reminded of most though, is discussions in the workplace, one where we have both internal and external audiences. Where some terms are clearly technical and not what you'd use in public communication and others do a good public job without making perfect technical sense. You always get some self-important smart-arse who waxes on about a specific term being flawed because it doesn't work for the audience for which it is not intended (or has no idea about what people outside the technical audience respond to). Everyone else thinks 'duh, just use your judgement, social skills and think about who you're talking to, like everyone else does'. And 'ffs you've just taken up five mins of a half hour discussion that we could have used for something useful'. Again.

Anyway, I love avocados and have done since long before they were fashionable, maybe even before some of you were even born. If I can't have avocados in your preferred version of future imperfection, I'm not coming.

I'm full on will the terf point of view. But I just don't like the term "peak" anything!

Hi Lottie,
For me, the term has/had negative connotations. It’s not an argument thing. I can’t answer your questions, they aren’t ones I ever posed.
I appreciate that for you it doesn’t have negative connotations and I get that you are -effectively-being ethical by examining the point and examining the language. That’s probably as far as we can get.

“I mean I get it. But I think your term should be peak TRA.”

Hi bewilderness,

It would never have occurred to me that this could be offensive. This may Be because I am not an activist. I am an outsider to this debate.
I don’t disbelieve you -I can see that you and people are telling me straight what they really think now. But I can’t accept what you say.

Language is complicated and online language triply so.

Hi Rebecca,
Fwiw, I will think over what you say.

Hi OP, Ok but there's a big difference between saying:

'This is just how I feel about it, I can't explain why, even when I try, it just does and, as a result of that subjective feeling I perceive the term peak trans in a negative way. I wonder whether, for whatever reasons of their own, anyone else does too?'

and, well what you actually posted.

You made it an argument thing by telling people they should understand, if not themselves perceive the term the same way you do. They said 'that's not how we perceive it', you said 'but you should'. Now you can't explain why you do or why they should.

I'm not trying to push you into a corner over that and declare a winner. My point is that that analogy is bogus so irrelevant. I do think you raise an interesting point about use and perception of language. I do also think you've demonstrated, interestingly and somewhat inadvertently, that listening is more valuable than telling here and that how one is perceived, the impact one has upon others, may not be the same as ones self-image or intentions.

That's interesting in this context, isn't it?

Hi Terfinator.
Just wanted to acknowledge your answer.

I’ll confess: I have had relatively few instances where I felt lack of safety around men (the one time it did happen I went on the attack physically which was probably not a great move but hey that’s what the instincts dictated).
I also don’t have daughters.

As a young girl my negative experiences were more to do with feeling unwanted, undesired, not being a proper girl, being too thin, too undeveloped, too brainy,, being called a lesbo on buses -that end of the spectrum (it’s why I don’t respond to posts that start in certain ways. Even now I feel scared the bullies will come back and twist this)

So -because of where my experiences sit on the spectrum- I may underestimate the sheer physical risk that you are talking about.

All I can add is that I am thinking about what you said.

Sorry Terf was replying to your answer of yesterday re safety/privacy.

Lottie I think you are a lawyer!

I think the issue is important and the thread has maybe got more useful as it moves along.

As you say, we don’t need to reach complete consensus.