When/How did the transgender debate start?

[FunderAnna]

Can people tell me the date/s when plans to change the Gender Recognition Act and go for self ID started being discussed? When did moving to self ID become the declared policy of parties in the UK?

Plenty of reading to do, it seems!

Great video RosenbergW, thanks!
(I found this helpful on U.S. prehistory www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2)

Was this U.S. conflict between transexuals and radical feminists in the 1970s echoed here in U.K.? Or was it an issue in the Greenham Common camp?

Here it seemed like it was linked to a divide between feminist (radical/revolutionary types of feminist) lesbians and s/m-loving lesbians, with most gay men cheering on the latter group.

There are definitely anecdotal accounts of animosity between the two camps in the UK including at Greenham. One gate was particularly s/m-y

Thebewilderness thank you for explaning and great name btw.

www.jstor.org/stable/3874367?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Sheila-Jeffreys-Lesbian-Heresy.pdf

If you see masculine/feminine and sadist/masochist as both being about gendered roles of subordination/domination it makes sense that the two debates got linked in with one another

I've just watched this video posted by la scapigliata on twitter, by an endocrinologist
It's worrying that debate has been shut down since the start, even the forefathers of transgender research have been besmirched and written out as they weren't reaffirming.
It's a 40 Mon video, but well worth watching

This is such a useful thread, I had been wondering the same - how did we get here!!

Julie Bindel posted this on twitter earlier

State of this. Trans-activists attacking women on their way into a meeting to discuss gender, screams at @MagdalenBerns "My pronouns are 'they'!!" If only Monty Python and George Orwell could see this. I warned about this in 2004. We have sleepwalked into a nightmare.

Here's the 2004 article:

amp.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/31/gender.weekend7

And link to magdalen's video twitter.com/bindelj/status/987986705604120576?s=20

There are definitely anecdotal accounts of animosity between the two camps in the UK including at Greenham. One gate was particularly s/m-y

SuperLoud there were a hundred million arguments at Greenham about everything (which i consider a plus not a minus) but I don't remember this ever being one of them, nor do I ever remember any of the camps being s/m-y

I do remember a big panel discussion at Wild Court in Holborn, the Camden Women's Centre about whether SM was ethical or not. This was, I dunno, late 80s? Half the hall filled with women in leather and chains and shaved heads, half the room filled with women wearing flannel... I can't remember who was on the panel except for Linda Bellos, who was on the flannel side. It got very very heated, but not antagonistic as such, if I remember right.

Was this U.S. conflict between transexuals and radical feminists in the 1970s echoed here in U.K.? Or was it an issue in the Greenham Common camp?

I have no idea about early days trans here tbh, but I know that the rise of trans ideology has coincided with the rise of hardcore porn and the age of the World Wide Web. I think the line between pre-"umbrella" (drag queens, transsexuals, transvestites) and post-umbrella is all to do with the Web. I'm thinking of Second Life, virtual chat rooms etc, where someone could 'identify' however they wanted. When this was new there was a lot of concern about manipulative people and grooming, paedophiles pretending to be ten year olds etc. But the (very important) move to brand trans ideology as a children's rights movement has, as the trans activists wanted, "taken the sex out (Autumn Sandeen):

And so what we used to see as grooming is now "expressing identity" and noone can argue that a person isnt who they say try are on the net. And we have people who live as men during the week and "as women" at the weekend and we call this brave rather than sexist (and creepy).

I do know that some prominent trans activists here were very much tied into anti-censorship (meaning pro hardcore porn) activism. Roz Kaveney for example, who was active (and I think maybe a founder?) in Feminists Against Censorship. That was your standard antifeminist-appropriating-feminism backlash group. Funnily enough Roz was also a member (and a founder?) of Backlash, a group opposing laws criminalising extreme pornography.

Jane Fae also has a background of opposing extreme porn laws. So although I don't know how our history here parallels (or not) the US, I think the sex industry/trans activist/anti feminist crossover is strong here too.

Jane Fae is also in the forefront of the campaigns against rape-by-deception laws, which is pretty grim.

TAs spend a lot of time talking about how they're wrongly accused by 'terfs' of being perverts and sex offenders, but then many of the prominent TAs are activists fighting to have continued access to extreme pornography and fighting against women having safe spaces, including by trying to tie up rape crisis and women's shelters in legal knots (and therefore put them under threat of financial difficulty). It's all out in the open but we are mean bigots when we join the dots :/

These are the things that transgender advocates have in common with Men's rights advocates. They want to legalize pornstitution and rape. That may sound extreme but they say so on the MRA blogs.

Blue gate or yellow we think, aa - more likely blue.

There were women who left to become empowerfulised through prostitution if that rings a bell - wages for housewives type of feminists

Brilliant thread. Lots of homework!

SuperLoud I've just read that Shelia Jeffery's appendix about the link between facism and s/m . Oh my god, this stuff goes so deep doesn't it?And now I understand on a much more profound level just how fucked up it is that we are in a porn epidemic, and that so much of porn is women being abused and dominated by men.

There should be a FWR award scheme, with badges or a certificate every time you go up a level...

I have a badge machine!

There are probably women who remember things differently from SJ but she has been so wonderful at chronicling things and unpicking the political connotations from her POV.

Great thread, very interesting.

By sheer coincidence, I happened to pick up my copy of Stepford Wives tonight. The introduction:

"In 1972, Ira Levin told us what lay ahead. Oh, he sounded a loud, clear warning about some pent-up male reaction to the Women's Liberation movement."

Never have these words rung truer, than right now.

We are having our very language, to describe ourselves as women, banished as "transphobic". The definition of woman is being attacked and altered. We are being told we are hateful, Nazis, bigots for talking about the rights and safety of women and girls.

The Paul Elam-type MRAs seem practically harmless in comparison - although a lot of them seem to have happily jumped on this bandwagon to deny women rights of free speech and free expression.

International Wages for Housework was co founded by Selma James, who was a co-ordinator for Global Women's Strike, and also the first spokeswoman for the English Collective of Prostitutes. I dont know what these orgs were supposed to be at the start but for a long time they all seem to be antifeminist 'backlash' groups. They are all based at the Crossroads Women's Centre in London and I think probably have a big crossover in terms of their membership.

SuperLoud Wages for Housework did do their culty-entryist thing at yellow gate in the last days of Greenham, which is pretty well-documented, but the other gates explicitly distanced themselves from their batshittery.

And in those days the English Collective Of Prostitutes was much more open about the fact that 99% of them had never worked as prostitutes, but were taking a political stand. (Actual prostitutes hated them.)

I think the people involved in all these things, just like in trans activism, start many small groups with grand sounding names and set themselves up as 'experts' in those areas. It is never clear who the membership is or how representative it is. They also specialise in entryism, which is to say that they enter political groups and movements in order to subvert them to these activists own goals (see for e.g. Sisters Uncut - were they always antifeminist or have they been infiltrated? I don't know, but they started around the time of Occupy I think? And I think a lot of entryist and other dodgy activity happened around Occupy)

Yes AA, lots of these fake 'sex worker' groups about, e.g. here is a good piece about the International Union of Sex Workers: www.toomuchtosayformyself.com/2009/01/09/the-great-iusw-con

If anyone ever wondered why Amnesty are pro prostitution, their draft proposal on 'sex work' was written by IUSW activist and pimp, Douglas Fox:
thefeministahood.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/what-amnesty-did-wrong

I know I'm going off topic but all these things are connected by little threads. Entryism and appropriation tactics, antifeminism as "feminism", 'sex workers rights' as 'trans rights', why "TERF!" is so often followed by "SWERF!".

A good detective could cover a wall with string and pins connecting it all I'm sure.

It kind of seems like a strong reason for Trans activists to do a massive character assassination of radical feminists, eh?

Definitely.

Understanding these groups entryist tactics also helps make sense of how a small number of prominent TAs have become fairly evenly spread around as LGBT representatives in the Greens, LibDems and Labour, all with matching goals. And then weird cross party things happen, like Green TAs complaining to Labour about Miranda Yardley. Just odd little things that seem a bit off on their own but collectively start to make a pattern.