Female paramedic tells anecdote for IWD, gets abused on Twitter for being transphobic. Helen Lewis and Hadley Freeman wade in 🙌

[HeyRoly]

twitter.com/xliserx/status/971809699539505152?s=21

^So I read this Twitter thread today, started by a paramedic called Lisa, and noticed it was SO quickly derailed by screams of "whataboutery", in this case "what about trans women?" (more about whataboutery here from this excellent blog that I discovered in this sub and immediately bookmarked: victimfocus.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/stop-asking-me-what-about-men/ ) to the extent that the original point of the tweet - female paramedic abused by man she'd arrived to rescue - was completely lost. I read it this morning and couldn't believe that a woman making a flippant joke about not having a Y chromosome and having breasts turned into a flaming re. "bio essentialism". Lisa also tweeted "Remember, a woman gave birth to you once" and immediately gets schooled on "not all people who give birth identify as women" and "cisgender narratives are so dominant!" (gosh, I wonder why?)

Lisa tweets later on to say:

Tonight I learned why women don’t share their experiences. The world is terrible. People are terrible. My phone is blowing up with hatred like I’ve never seen in my whole life. Shame on you. I’m a real person. You send your mean @‘s into the void, forgetting exactly that.

Helen Lewis retweets Lisa and says:

Let’s all be honest about what’s happening in cases like this. Gender theory is just being used as an excuse to “correct” women constantly. Men don’t get this when they talk casually and colloquially about being a man

Frankly, it’s a testament to women’s socialisation to be nice and sensitive to other’s feelings that this doesn’t get pointed out more. No one has bombarded @arobertwebb with demands that he talk about the small percentage of men who have vaginas

twitter.com/helenlewis/status/972035005986811904?s=21

Hadley Freeman retweets Helen Lewis and adds:

When I wrote about my miscarriage last year I got multiple tweets and emails telling me I was being transphobic for writing about the chaos of female biology. Do men who write about, say, prostate cancer receive similar? I’m guessing the answer is no.

twitter.com/hadleyfreeman/status/972049768141729792?s=21

I would quite like to buy all of these women a fucking drink.

Apologies for any incoherent writing. It took me ages to compile all those links

Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
By Lundy Bancroft.

Good shout. I wd still be married to a raging narcissist were it not for that book. Lifesaver. Makes sense of the abuse.

I'm a huge fan of Drag Race, but the trans issue is confusing. Rupaul got an absolute SLATING for saying, essentially, that doing drag is a gay male "thing" (although many drag queens are drawn to drag due to gender dysphoria and subsequently come out as trans). Season 9 was the first time an out transgender queen competed, but Rupaul said that they wouldn't have been allowed on the show with breast implants (the contestant in question has implants but got them after the show).

So it seems the consensus is that transwomen absolutely can be drag queens.

BUT:

If transwomen are women and transwomen can be drag queens, why can't women be drag queens (and there is no doubt at all that women absolutely would not be acceptable in the drag world; "bio queens" are pretty much derided)? And if a transwoman is a woman, how can it be drag?

Anyway, it just highlights the lack of logic to the whole argument. If transwomen can be drag queens but women cannot, that just seems to prove that transwomen and women are not the same.

HeyRoly: "Anyway, it just highlights the lack of logic to the whole argument. If transwomen can be drag queens but women cannot, that just seems to prove that transwomen and women are not the same."

Absolutely. But logic is the last thing I've come to expect from TRAs.