What on earth is going to happen to women?

[Tinseltower]

I’m actually really worried. In the past couple of weeks I’ve seen Theresa May’s speech on how being transgender is not an illness, on how they will be given equal rights including access to vinerable women’s spaces. I’ve seen labour following suit, criticising Margaret Thatchers speech about homosexuality and likening it to the transgender movement, saying they won’t get it wrong. It’s not the same at all! What is going to happen to women in all this? It seems their rights will be pushed to one side and I’m actually rather worried. Can enough of us stand up to be heard?

Crimes will still be crimes. Rape, sexual assault etc.
The only difference will be that they will be committed most often by Self ID women.
Only half of the trans identified males in prison in the UK are sex offenders right now.

PERF - I'm sorry I didn't give you the exact answer you were looking for. Please tell me what I should have said.

Please, just answer even 1 of the questions you have been asked!

I will cheerfully admit, I have answered your questions, tried to be helpful but have decided that you are here simply to massage your own ego precisely because you are refusing to enter into any exchange of information, viewpoint.

If you aren't sea lioning us just bloody respond. Given the number of, initially very polite and helpful, questions you have been asked it really shouldn't be hard!

Snibble- you are right I have no skin in the sports game- I’ve always been spectacularly dreadful at sport.

I’ve come to the same conclusion as you CuriousaboutSamphire. I believed I was answering a genuine person at first but the signs are all there.

And they got a lot more agitated when we started mentioning the fishy bastards...

You're now just sounding like you came here to stir up trouble. The "I don't understand it all" patter only works until you've had the issues explained. If this stuff doesn't interest you then you are on the wrong thread. I avoid the breastfeeding threads as my kids are teenagers

The whole point about this is that anyone is what they say they are, at any point.

Any man who says he is a woman is literally a woman at that point, and exactly the same as all other women, and muct be treated as such. If he's a man again tomorrow then that is fine too.

Will this work for women? Not really. If I went into work and said I was a man, I would not immediately be accepted as such by all the men, and treated as such.

And what do insincere people hope to gain?

For women, it might be a way out of the various types of discimination we face.

For men, it opens up access to areas that were previously closed to them.

And the men will still be bigger and stronger than the women, and we are still socialised to be polite and kind, the dynamic is just vastly different.

eg the difference between a TIM who has had no treatment going into a womens prison, and a TIWoman who has had no treatment going into a mens prison. Are the risks / benefits the same?

The inequality - both between the sexes (biology) and between the genders (socialisation) mean that all of this is a terribly uneven playing field. Add into the mix the large minority of men who are sexually predatory and you've got a very unpleasant set-up.

I have seen your dog and pony show a thousand times, NameChanger. You help no one.

NameChanger, if you answered or acknowledged any question....and I tried to be helpful and posted the factsheet etc and you have no response. I haven't been rude.

but you just keep repeating that you can't see a problem instead of addressing all the examples you've been given.

I agree that 90 out of 100 people on the street don't know - but the first time I used the word "Brexit" on MN I was roundly told off for a) inventing a stupid word and b) talking about something that would never happen.

100% of people don't find out about new laws or proposals for news laws all in the same day, it's not how life works. So we are trying to explain it to you, and you are ignoring us or being rude.

what will happen to women? We will keep on going

Of course, we always do. Through discrimination, exploitation, poor treatment, dispossession and trauma.

But why do you think we should make it worse for ourselves?

Honestly, I really am not worried about men self identifying as women to rape women. I think that would be so infinitesimally small a number of people. I AM so worried about what we are doing as a society to our children. Gender confusion is a really really normal thing that most children experience and play around with. What children need is plenty of acceptance and variations in gender norms being freely shown (it’s okay to be a pink loving, gentle chap or a football mad muscular woman). What we are doing instead is basically dismembering and disfiguring our young people when what they need is reassurance that they are great just as they are. It’s heartbreaking.

PERF - I'm sorry I didn't give you the exact answer you were looking for. Please tell me what I should have said.

Do you think that TIMs should have a right to enter female spaces even if women don’t want them there? Do you think that the TIMs feelings are more important than the women that don’t want them there?

Honestly, I really am not worried about men self identifying as women to rape women. I think that would be so infinitesimally small a number of people.

I’ve read similar comments before, but it only takes one pervert to affect numerous people. They don’t stop at one victim.

We haven't lost.

It's entirely possible that the UK will become the first country from which the pushback begins.

We are ahead of the curve, we saw this coming BEFORE the law has changed unlike Canada and other countries. We are organising and we are growing exponentially.

As another poster said Right now it is a race to raise consciousness

It really is.

We will reach critical mass. We just are in a race against time.

Never forget that you can silence a woman, but you can't silence her vote. We are half the country, and every political party needs our vote. Right now they have a cartel and they are all holding fast with "TW are W". They do this because they are confident that women will be inert. They think we will stay put because there is nowhere for us to go, and they are counting on us each sticking with our allegiances. They don't believe that we can or will move and swing our vote.

Its a very dangerous thing to create a class of 33 million people who think they have nothing left to lose. They are creating a situation where they need us and our votes more than we need them.

We can move our votes. We can destroy any party we choose to. We have enormous power. It isn't even about having a viable alternative to vote for. It's about a show of strength. All parties are vulnerable to women withdrawing their votes tactically. If women work together strategically we can create chaos for political parties, and they will end up courting us, competing with each other, instead of ignoring us.

For years my vote has felt almost pointless. For the first time I actually believe in the power of a body of women to completely change the course of a nation.

It's not over, not yet.

We are half the people.

This is thread is like panic buying 10 loaves of bread and 20 bottles of milk because someone said they saw a snowflake fall in Scotland.

If you can't sleep at night because a man might watch you washing your hands, then I feel a bit sad for you. Maybe you need to step away from the computer occasionally see that the sky is still there.

I was trying to understand the paranoia, then the inmates turned on me, so I pointed out their rudeness and left the thread. Good night, sleep well.

standing ovation for BarrackerBarmer

You are right, mummy.

Sadly there are too many sea lions people who will deliberately derail posts by focussing on toilets and others (myself included) who want to explain and so allow ourselves to be derailed. That's why we sometimes sound ridiculous and need a quick reset!

It is about the sudden and complete overturning of what we know about sex and gender and the unbelievably cruel insistence that 'gender fluidity', aka "don't care what it is I like it and want to wear it" must be accompanied by medicines and surgery (but only if you are a boy, it seems!).

Hell, I'd be sporting a saline pump and penis right now had my own gender fluidity been taken as a desire to be a boy. Short hair, shorts and trousers, no make up and a hearty dislike of dolls - Ooh! I must always have been a boy! Bollocks!

If you can't sleep at night because a man might watch you washing your hands

I tend to lose sleep over a man previously violently assaulting me. I also tend to lose sleep over my sisters rape and rage that I couldn’t prevent it.

We can all see what you are. The lurkers can see what you are, all you are doing is helping us.

No one turned on you until it became apparent you will weren’t her to discuss anything at all, only derail.

Don’t let the thread door hit ya.

okay so NameChanger22 has left the thread

I did an AS and ironically, given my example about being told off on MN for "making up" the word Brexit, NameChanger22 started a thread worrying about Brexit!!

You've got to laugh

@BarrackerBarmer - I can sort of see that we might be the first country, but equally I think there are so many women who just refuse to see a problem with men, that will cause issues. Then there's the fact that there's such a massive difference between Tories and Labour and many women will say, actually, this isn't the hill I want to die on.

Anecdotally, joining MN has been a shock to me - I had no idea that so many people were living in a way of "it's not happened to me so it can't be a problem".

Mummyontherun86
What is the required number of women and children that need to be raped and abused for you to worry that there is a problem with women and children being raped and abused? A hundred? A thousand? A million?

Feeling sad for us

inmates Oooh! Your mask slipped there. Night night!

Barack I do hope you are right. But to be 50% of the vote we need to persuade the youngest of us female voters. Currently they are not convinced that there is anything wrong with Transwomen being women... let's be honest, a year ago I too was happy for anyone to present as they wanted to, why not?

How do we bridge that gap?

Agree Snibble. My husband doesn't really get why I'm upset about the whole gender identity thing because if a woman identified as male it wouldn't bother him and it wouldn't be any sort of a threat just something to talk about in his coffee break. He does think it's all bonkers and you can't really change your gender it's just make believe and did the Scottish consultation but I do think men are just going to ignore this as transsexuals and the women who object to them who get called names by the BBC and the Guardian don't interest them that much

Male violence is the greatest human rights crisis the world has ever known.
10th rule of misogyny: The worst thing about male violence is that it makes men look bad.

The reality based community is not an easy and comfy place to live for trolls.