A call to arms

[IAmSproutycus]

Hello folks,

I’ve been thinking all sorts of thoughts about the current situation over the last few weeks/days/hours, and although there isn’t going to be as much coherence to my writing as I’d want, I just wanted to post something rather than nothing.

There are going to be hard times ahead. The biggest hurdle that we face is our fear. That fear is not misplaced. Many of us have been disturbed by the news that our fellow women have had social media accounts closed, been suspended from jobs or prominent positions, or been targeted by police as a direct result of their refusal to remain quiet about their concerns. We know that we are referred to as ‘TERFS’, and that we are exhorted to ‘Die Cis Scum, Die’. Worse still, we are told that one of our sisters was assaulted for no reason other than that she attended a talk (at which trans representatives were also present and part of the presentation and discussions of the evening). This news (and the other innumerable small and larger instances of aggression) inevitably creates a climate of tension and fear. We fear sharing our views both privately and publicly for the very real possibility that there will be repercussions. We fear the repercussions for our continued education, employment, and social standing. And, for many of us, we fear the repercussions where we are most vulnerable as women: we fear the repercussions for our children. We fear not being able to put food on our children’s plates if we lose our jobs. We fear the abuse that they will surely receive if we speak out as this debate continues, and we are called upon to speak up. And as we continue to hear examples of the aggression directed towards us for speaking our truth, we may even fear for their physical safety. I am aware of the risks we face in speaking out. I feel so very scared. But I cannot remain ignorant of the risk we face by remaining silent.

I feel a deep sadness at the rift that this issue may cause between women and our trans sisters. I stand with transwomen (and transmen) in their struggle for recognition of their needs and access to services and will continue to do so. I have provided training to various organisations across the UK on trans issues and needs, and again hope to continue to do so. I have used my relative privilege as a platform to amplify the voices of those with less power. I now face the accusation of transphobia by so-called trans-rights activists when I raise the question that many of us raise: that we need to discuss how to best meet everyone’s needs without eroding the long-recognised needs of women to feel safe. I make no claim to have the answers to that question, but I am chilled at the strength of belief that we do not have the right to ask the question by the refusal to consult, no platforming, and #nodebate.

And so we need to collectively think about how to keep raising that debate, and to show our individual support of the issue. I remain in absolute admiration and awe of the incredibly brave women who have identified themselves in public to speak on our behalves. I owe them, as do many of us, an enormous debt of gratitude. Their ability to speak out despite facing the same barriers, spoken and unspoken threats, and risks faced by us all gives me heart. I am aware that many of us want to contribute, but do not know how to do this safely. (It may be that it is not possible. Possibly this is an issue that will require us to be prepared to lose everything to save something).
And so, in comradeship sisters, I ask that we dig deep. I ask that we spend some time, individually or collectively, thinking about what we can do to speak up whilst staying safe. Again, I have no answers, but a very big list of questions. I've been thinking about the amazing feminist activism of the Garneau Sisterhood (Google it). They managed to achieve so much because they had a clear identity/ 'brand' (e.g. Garneau Sisterhood), and all the activism was done without a single person having to speak up - posters and campaigning was done anonymously by the Garneau Sisterhood.

I think it would help if we had a collective term to define who we are (there’s lots of good reasons for this if we’re trying to make this an issue of public awareness). Yes, we’re ‘women’, and hell yes I’m keeping it, but so are lots of other women who are not yet on board with the cause. We need something other than TERF to show that we are women who are particularly supportive of raising this debate. Whilst we have used the term with humour in the attempt to defuse the power of a word placed on us by trans-activists, we are not TERFS. We are most of us not exclusionary. I want to fight alongside my sincere trans sisters, not with them. I want to find a good solution so that we all feel safe, and I say that it’s the men who need to budge up and make room for us all. We all fear male violence and the risks of losing safe spaces. We cannot allow the power of our righteous fury to be diluted by the same tired old divide and rule strategies of the patriarchy. And so, I propose that we cannot call ourselves TERFS (although, man, there are some BRILLIANT usernames people got out of that 😊).

Anyhow, I’m running out of time here, and I’ve already fed the smallest child all the junk food in the house to buy me time to post. I meant to be so much clearer with my thoughts. I meant, if we can find a way to make our voices both loud and safe, that would be great. Thoughts very much welcomed. Signing off, in comradeship.

Oh, and sorry to name change so often. I do get worried about some of the things I post

Your terminology contradiction to your claim, that you want only to discuss, debate, and keep people safe, in the face of aggression from the people you consider a threat.

'A call to arms', 'comrades' - what in hell are you proposing to do?? No wonder you feel society is not supporting your approach.

As a woman and a feminist (and just as a civilised adult human), I want no association with your rhetoric and "call to arms".

You don't speak for me.

my new name,: what laqnguage would you use then?

I think I get where you are coming from. I will think on this more. I too am not trans exclusionary (every person has human rights and should be treated with respect, dignity and kindness) however I don't think I could ever refer to anyone as a trans sister.

Well said Sprout. I agree with you 100%.

How strange that you should post this when a new organisation was born only yesterday: CASID ~ Campaign Against Self-ID. Not yet been advertised on MN because it's not fully set up yet.

There is already a Facebook group. 100 members joined, then it was made secret, whilst a poll is currently being held on whether the group should be secret or public. So far "public" is winning outright. If enough people want it, there will also be a parallel CASID group which will be secret.

I will start a fresh thread about CASID later on, maybe tomorrow. In the meantime anyone wanting to join the FB group can email their Facebook name to [email protected] and they will be added.

Members are already commenting saying we are sick of having to hide away in the shadows just for having an opinion on a political issue. We aren't advocating anything illegal or immoral.

The more we stay hidden, the more these TRA terrorists win. And, worse, the more that hide, the more dangerous it is for people who are "out" because our cowardice makes THEM look like a tiny minority of extremists when in reality they speak for the majority of the population.

I can name as I am sure you can, a good 25 women (and some men) who are out in their own names, writing newspaper articles, speaking at WPUK and We Need to Talk meetings, etc. It's doing them a great disservice if we hide because it keeps their names prominent.

There are nearly 70 million people in this country and the trans are about 1%, of which a tiny minority are violent. The 99% should not let themselves be kept in terror of less than 1%.

I agree with you OP.

At first, I'd have said I was a liberal person who'd happily share most spaces with trans(sexual) women.

Seeing the extent of autogynephilia that was included in trans now, and how aggressive they were in forcing access to women, I almost swayed right over to an anti-trans position.

I'm now coming around again to a position where I want there to be a distinction between "transgender" and what I'd call the genuine transsexual (ie, no penis, that's my bottom line). I think sharing certain spaces with genuine transwomen is ok, but I want it to not be the default. I want clarity restored on what woman and female means: sex. I want to halt this slide towards "gender".

I want the default to be segregation by sex, not gender. I don't think that is a particularly contentious or controversial position to hold. I am not in any way ashamed to say, publicly, to everyone who knows me, any politician, any employer, that when there needs to be segregation, that it needs to be by sex. And I'm willing to be "out" as someone who thinks sex is a key category.

Mynewnamerabbit Hi. I make no attempt or claim to speak for you. You, presumably have your own voice.

SciFiFan Yes, I hear you on my choice of language. I mean to say that I feel that there is a Venn slice of similarity in my needs and that of some transwomen. There is also a very fat not shared Venn portion. On the portion that we share, and for the needs of transwomen that do not directly take from the small portion of power or space afforded to women, I offer what support I can. My feminism (and to each her own) is not lessened by my use of people's preferred pronouns and choice to be included, but the current issue is not about sincere transwomen and their needs. It is about women. Hope that made more sense Typing one fingered whilst smallest is firing a bog roll rocket over my head. I'm just aware that our activism can be misunderstood as a wholescale exclusionary stance.

Terfinghell . I'd very much like to be involved with that group. I'll keep on the lookout for information.

Thanks Sprout. I too agree that it would be helpful to have a more coherent group voice.

I’d also like to join Terfing. I’d rather be out than secret, though I understand there may be a need for both.

I do think it might be wise to avoid too much use of the term comrade / comradeship. I’ve only heard that word used within organisations which are left wing. I think it might put some women off and to me it seems important to appeal to all women from all parts of the political spectrum.

Oh that makes sense, Tri, thank you. I used the word pan politically (just made that term up ! ☺) to mean 'in friendship' or sort of 'in in it togetherness, but I can completely see your point.. I guess it's
partly my point:: I think we need to be both visible (I'm getting ready to out myself) and also an anonymous political collective. Individually, they can take us down by criticising our sexual orientation, or colour, or class and use divide and conquer. The power of something collective, like a group such as Getting help mentioned (hey that's autocorrect for Getting help!), is that we are less dissmisable together, and we can use the same hashtag, websites to arrange activism, Twitter feeds etc.

Dammit, autocorrect for terfinghell!

I'm sorry, I'm struggling to get past "trans sisters"

I honestly think the only way out of the mess is to provide an escape route to allow men who have transitioned to properly accept that they are and always will be men, and for them to come to terms with that.

I won't pretend any man is any kind of sister. Brother, maybe.

We need to be truthful. I only use the word 'transwoman' sparingly, and only for providing clarity in a specific conversation where I might otherwise be misunderstood.
But even the 'transwomen' that are gender critical, that I admire, like and respect, those that are 'transsexuals' and post op etc - they are still men, and I reserve the right to be truthful about that, and to retreat sometimes into spaces that they are barred from because they are men. They aren't my sisters. They are friends.

The root of the whole problem was when it was decided that a few limited, exceptional cases could pretend to be the opposite sex if they met certain conditions. The problem was never that we didn't stay vigilant and police the conditions well enough.
The problem was that this was always a lie foisted upon women. This loophole was always the wrong thing to create.

Trying to reset things back to a time when only a few men were allowed to foist the lie isn't the solution. We need to start again, only this time with a genuine respect for women in law. One that acknowledges that we are not a group of people that one can identify into. EVER.

Barracker is so right!!! They can't be trans sisters because they are MEN!! We really need to be consistent with this.

Trying to reset things back to a time when only a few men were allowed to foist the lie isn't the solution. We need to start again, only this time with a genuine respect for women in law. One that acknowledges that we are not a group of people that one can identify into. EVER.

Hear, hear.

I would also add that it's a pipe dream to imagine that we can return to a time when there were strict rules about who was and was not allowed to 'transition'. The medical profession lost authority over the trans narrative a long time ago; they are not getting it back. The old model of 'transsexualism' (which was always based on a lie anyway) is long gone. No use pining for it, or imagining that women and 'transsexual' men can form a cohesive group in law and policy, while other men are shut out.

I know a lot of feminists are nostalgic for the days of 'transsexuals' because they were in general so much less crazy and woman-hating compared to the 'transwomen' of today, but consider that this is rooted in the 'nice guy' fallacy, whereby the abusive behaviour of some men makes their less abusive brothers look wonderful by comparison, such that women are excessively grateful to be treated with even a tiny bit of kindness by men, and fall over themselves praising them for managing to demonstrate the most minimal standards of decency.

Transsexualism and transgenderism aren't wholly unrelated concepts. In fact, the second grew out of the first, and might be regarded as a natural progression of it - once you've decided that some men can have a 'woman feeling' inside them, who are you, or anyone, to say which of them should be able to make that claim? As Barracker says, the only thing to do now is to challenge the ideology at the root, and for women to assert hard boundaries.

Further: to say 'we all fear male violence and the risks of losing safe spaces' simply isn't true. If it were, then trans-identified men would not be pushing for any man to be allowed to identify his way into women's spaces on his say-so. I don't believe that TIMs fear other men in the way that women fear men - if they did, the political agenda of the trans movement would look very, very different. They wouldn't be bent on trashing all of women's boundaries and protections, for a start. They would not just empathise with women's fears about self-ID but share them.

TRAs like to paint TIMs as being at extreme risk of violence, but they do this solely to emotionally manipulate people in order to gain political leverage. Their actual agenda betrays that they don't fear other men at all.

I'm with Donkey and Barraker I'm afraid.

The only trans sisters I could have would be TIFs as they are female.

I want to add, that even if men were entirely peaceful and no risk to women at all, I would still be defending my right to differentiate myself from them, and to spaces that exclude them for my own dignity.

I no more want to undress in front of Gandhi, my dad, or any man, no, not even if they are completely harmless.

Because I am physically profoundly different from men and I insist that they respect that and afford me the dignity I demand.

Society can not grant them the right to be deemed 'the same' as me, without stripping me of my right to be respected as different from them.

It is this constant male tearing down of the boundaries I erect that I find so exhausting. The refusal to let me just BE.

BarrackerBarmer wrote - "The root of the whole problem was when it was decided that a few limited, exceptional cases could pretend to be the opposite sex if they met certain conditions. The problem was never that we didn't stay vigilant and police the conditions well enough."

I agree with your first sentence. I'm not sure yet that I really understand what you mean in your second sentence.

I think there is actually a scrap of logic and consistency in the transactivists' mantra that "transwomen are women": they claim that all transwomen are women - no exceptions. I don't agree with this but I think it is at least consistent.

Very many people accept that "post-operative penis-less male people are women". Some gender-critical feminists share this opinion. A huge problem with this view is that it denies biology as much the transgenderist's position, conceding womanhood on the non-biological basis of which male people have altered their bodies "enough" to be considered women or honorary women. It accepts the idea that there are two types of human adults - men and non-men.

If women had never accepted old-style post-operative transsexual male people as women or honorary women (but society had instead recognised and accepted transsexual male people as a vulnerable subset of males with equal human rights, but not womanhood or femaleness), we would not be in the situation we are in now with the danger that gender identity self-identification poses to women and girls. This line in the sand could have be defended with a consistent biology-based argument. That was not done, because e.g. back in the 1970s Janice Raymond and others were dismissed as evil witches and alleged exterminators of transsexual males for warning that giving an inch to some male people would eventually result in other male people taking a mile. And now here we are in 2018 - who could have predicted it? The seeds of self-identification were not sown with the invention of social media on the Internet. They were sown in the 1970s backlash against second-wave feminism. Self-identification in 2018 would have had zero chance of success from day one, if the loophole of "some male people are women" had not already been conceded by women between 1970 and 2018.

I know from personal experience that the social conditioning of women to be nice to men is very ingrained into women and I know only too well that it is extremely difficult to go against appeasement of patriarchy. I'm not trying to blame anyone, just trying to give my opinion about why we are where we are now.

I think any two-sex version of womanhood is an intellectual inconsistency that weakens feminist opposition to misogynist transgenderism.

vesuvia
agree with you completely.

That was what my second sentence was supposed to convey.
That I see a lot of people arguing for an honorary, special category of transwomen to still be considered women.
Oldfashioned transexuals.
That we should reject self ID, but accept "GRC panel approved ID"
That the problem isn't that men are identifying as women, but that too many are/ those who are not fully committed are/ those who don't meet xyz conditions are
That if we only push back self ID, we'll return to the happy state of gatekeeping just a select few 'approved' men into womanhood, and we'll police it properly this time.

I'm saying this isn't a problem we can contain by policing and gatekeeping better. The stopgap solution has failed, and outlived its shelflife.

The can is open, the worms are everywhere, and we need to chuck everything out and start again.

I think any two-sex version of womanhood is an intellectual inconsistency that weakens feminist opposition to misogynist transgenderism.

This. And to be honest it becomes about who you like, not any objective standard.

ONE GENDER

This says to me, for all future aims of equality and fairness, mutual respect and life fulfilment for all humans, that there is only one gender.

Sex - male and female
Gender - one gender.

Good points, and well made, thank you for the clarifications. Yes, I can see the sense in not using a term (trans sisters) if this reduces any public/debate focus on the point that I/we/some people (delete as appropriate) understand transwomen to be a category of men. It's important for me to think more carefully about what language is the most useful when framing this.

Sprout - I feel you with a desire to find compromise and on most of your other points. I think that this debate has shifted so slowly and imperceptibly to the "transwomen are women" viewpoint that would be very difficult to bring it back.

If you really don't believe (as I now do) that transwomen/or men can ever transition to the other sex it is very difficult to find space in the public debate. Even uttering the line "transwomen are men" is tantamount to hate crime.

SonicVersusGynaephobia - I have had a similar journey swinging from liberal to the opposite end but now I would like some compromise. I think sex segregation is a good position to argue for because otherwise the debate get's too complicated. What's next, intersex - people changing genders from one day to the next?

I also agree with all the other points that too much ground has already been given in this debate and it's hard to get anything back.

I agree we need a new name - Terf is a slur and I think we should control our own name. Why do men get to do all the naming? Having said that I did hear that the label Suffragette was a derogatory term which they managed to reclaim. Terf also is excluding of transwomen and says that this movement is working with natal-women. If the trans activists carry on being so hateful people will see it for what it is and it could actually be a word you may want to use?

What's next, intersex - people changing genders from one day to the next?

You are pretty confused with your terms here - intersex is a real congenital condition - you are misusing it for someone choosing to change what they identify as?

Or are you saying you don't believe in the condition even, nor in triple x, or xxy...all of which are people who don't fit a strict definition of male or female?

I think that there is a danger that medical terms like intersex (which are real) are conflated with subjective terms like non-binary or gender fluid in the same way that sex categories (male & female) have become conflated with gender. A socially constructed & subjective idea of the self should not take primacy over the biological. Too many people have hijacked the term intersex to validate their personal identity because they don't conform to the category 'cis.''
Nobody does, that's real life.

Trans have grossly overreached and misjudged the feelings of the populace

I think this is true. As I say someone criticised JK Rowling on facebook the other day and nearly every comment was in support of her, saying that she had only said the truth.