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?

[RosenbergW]

The ECP are a pro sex industry lobby group connected to Feminist Fightback, Education Not for Sale (ENS), the IUSW and SWOP, GWS and WAR, among others. All of these have a whiff of front group about them, but you'd have to do some digging to find out. Their name is pre "sex work" but they have embraced the term.

The ECP are pro- "brothelisation" which is "the state legalisation of brothels":

www.feministcurrent.com/2013/06/24/arguing-against-the-industry-of-prostitution-beyond-the-abolitionist-versus-sex-worker-binary/

FF and ENS to my recollection were pro "self defining" trans. I'm sure there must be some feminist out there who could join all these dots.

[RosenbergW]

I feel like I may have taken this off topic going into the 'sex work' orgs but at the same time that movement is so tied up with trans activism and anti feminism that the picture seems only half filled without a look at it.

[YetAnotherSpartacus]

The ECP are a pro sex industry lobby group - but were they always? I'm thinking late 70s and 80s (I thought ArcheryAnnie was referring to this period too)? The whole debate was different then and the groups you reference mostly didn't exist.

[RosenbergW]

I don't know if they always were. A bit of research into Selma James might cast light?

[SuperLoudPoppingAction]

Before all that, Selma James was into encouraging women not to join unions because they were sexist. She wanted to create women's unions instead.
What better women only union than a union purporting to represent women in prostitution?

[YetAnotherSpartacus]

I remember SJ from the Wages for Housework campaign. I never agreed with her, I tended to think that there was something more fundamental re gender going on in terms of who did the housework, but I never saw her as nuts. And yes, she was pro-decrim, but I was too then, on the grounds that the Nordic model was over a decade away ... (and I am not 100% behind the NM for some complicated reasons).

[Ereshkigal]

Much of their campaigning remained on the quiet. The passage of the 2004 law to give trans people legal status was "remarkable," says Burns, because "the government was able to pass an entire act in parliament without anyone throwing a fit in the press"

Hence the utter rage that it's in the media spotlight occasionally now, and women dare to discuss it openly here.

[YourVagesty]

Bruce/ Caitlyn Jenner did it for me

The Caitlyn Jenner media frenzy has made my jaw hit the floor so many times. Perhaps the silver lining to media's fawning over CJ is that it actually woke a lot of people up and turned them in the opposite direction to the one the media hoped for.

[RosenbergW]

The UK F-word blog was always a liberal leaning but used to be at least welcoming to radical feminists even, promoting the Carnival of Radical Feminists (a regular round up of RF blogposts). That changed when trans identified male Helen G got involved, even their first article on the site in Jan 2008 declared that radical feminists were 'biocentric' transphobes:
www.thefword.org.uk/2008/01/a_period_of_tra_1/

And it went down hill from there. I think that marked the start of the marginalisation then casting out of radical feminists from online mainstream feminist discussion in the UK.

Posting this because it was a demonstration of how a single trans identified person entered a feminist group/site and immediately and deliberately took aim at the radicals and others critical of trans politics. This has obviously been repeated over and over at many women's and feminist groups and organisations.

[SuperLoudPoppingAction]

Helen G was a v odd individual to be around - very aggressive and intense. It seemed like a weird pally group developed around the F Word and Helen was some weird virtue signalling prop but the younger and more impressionable editors must surely have been quite vulnerable to indoctrination.

[RosenbergW]

This article by Helen G shows that the Equality Act never went far enough for trans activists, in fact they were very unhappy about it:
www.thefword.org.uk/2010/08/some_are_more_e/

It links to Zoe Brain's blog, another TI non-woman who haunted The Guardian's comments section (and it seemed every other comment section on the internet too) spreading misinformation about legislation and research related to trans. Zoe singlehandedly put an enormous effort into persuading non-feminist onlookers to see trans women as the most oppressed type of women, who just happened to be born with the wrong bodies. Comments sections were where a lot of manipulation went on before social media to soap up the public and hide what was going on.

[Ereshkigal]

Thanks Rosenberg, very interesting. Some typical empathy for women in the comments:

I don’t like that example of rape victims at all. I mean, excuse me? A transwoman is a woman, a transman is a man.

[Bowlofbabelfish]

Just place marking so I don’t lose this! I’ve asked how this started a few times - I have a lot to read.

[PencilsInSpace]

Amazing thread, thank you!

There's an article here which includes the history of words associated with transgenderism. This image is an early version of the trans umbrella from 1994 and already including 'drag' cross dressers, transvestites and transvestic fetishists.

[RosenbergW]

Laurie Penny probably deserves a special mention. She became the trendy go to person for man friendly 'feminism' in the early 2000s, arguing for freedom of expression for her neo Nazi hacker troll mate Weev and bigging up her plagiarist harasser mate Johann Hari, while also arguing that Julie Bindel and radical feminists in general were transphobes who shouldn't be given any platform. Penny's influence on young people (mostly students) around the time of Occupy student fees protests definitely caused damage to the ability of feminists here to critically discuss porn, prostitution and trans ideology without being called bigots. I don't like to single women out for anti feminist activism but it would be silly to pretend none of her work had an impact.

[SuperLoudPoppingAction]

Yeah no need to single out when Stavvers also deserves a dishonourable mention

[RosenbergW]

I can't even begin with Stavvers.

[AdmiralRoland]

The ECP is a branch of Wages for Housework. They used to have a million branches, all with a different angle - WinVisible (disabilities), Wages Due Lesbians (self-explanatory), Black Women For Wages For Housework (ditto), Payday (male allies), etc etc. What it meant in practice was that the same group of women would just appear with different labels.

I come back to them because Wages for Housework had quite a distinctive MO, which they have been deploying on various women's organisations since the 1970s. It goes, broadly, thus:

1. Get involved in a campaign, organisation, movement. Make friends. Say all the right things. Be visible, take credit for some of what the group does. Establish at least partial ownership. Be very loudly as right-on as they can possibly be, and especially work on what they perceive to be any "weakness" of the group - eg if not many disabled women present, focus loudly on the need for disability rights, and claim to be the ones with expertise on this.
   
   
2. Start to make demands. Start to change the focus of what the group does. Start to change the very foundation of how the group operates. When challenged, use the goodwill and political credit established in step 1) to bull their way through.
   
   
3. Create a crisis, and some scapegoats. Focus on a few women who have been resisting WfH's influence and monster them, on whatever fabricated nonsense they can cook up. Force everyone to take sides. Force everyone who has taken WfH's side to drop their old friends and allies, and join in the monstering. Any who don't do this are monstered in turn.
   
   
4. Divert the entire group's resources, goodwill and womanpower into dealing with this crisis. Exhaust everyone. Anyone who doesn't submit is driven away.
   
   
5. Produce literature claiming any political gains of the group for themselves.
   
   
6. Rinse and repeat.
   
   ...sound familiar?
   
   I don't claim there is a direct link with TRA-ism (apart from, perhaps, groups like Misters Uncut, who also have links with WfH), but the MO has been amazingly familiar to see repeated with the current trans activism.
   
   What makes it so difficult to deal with is that much of what they do (like TRAs and like politicians like, say, Trump) is so brazen, you don't think anyone could do it, and you don't think anyone will be taken in by it. But by sheer volume and repetition, mixed with "woke" language, it gets traction.
   
   Example: I have witnessed a white would-be WfH apprentice approvingly described as "an honorary black woman" by a WfH leader as a reward for monstering a non-white* woman for racism (ie the non-white woman was called racist by WfH). Just writing these words down, it seems incredible that anyone took it seriously, but they did.
   
   And critiques of WfH are passed down in whispers from woman to woman, from organisation to organisation, not published, because women who have witnessed them in action don't want to be monstered in turn.
   
   
   
   

• I am using these weasel words because I don't want to attract any more attention onto the woman thus monstered, even though it was a very long time ago, and specifics might be identifying.

[RosenbergW]

That sounds very familiar. Thank you for a thorough explanation of the dynamics at work Admiral.

[ArcheryAnnie]

I have always seen Stavvers as Rik from The Young Ones, but without the charm.

[OvaHere]

This is a fascinating (and disturbing thread). Thanks for all the knowledgeable contributions.

[Ereshkigal]

Thanks Admiral I have bookmarked this thread! Learning lots.

[ArcheryAnnie]

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

Really? I did some research re them and didn't know this. At the time, it was pre-Nordic and the debate was very different (from memory). It was about decriminalisation (the favoured option over criminalisation) and police entrapment and scary Johns. I don't recall anyone glamorising prostitution or saying it was a choice until the mid 90s. There were connections with the French collective too from memory.

Yup, YetAnother. It wasn't then about glamourisation, as you say, but about establishing themselves as the go-to-radical group on this issue. The famed occupation of the church in Kings Cross by masked ECP members (most of whom had never worked in prostitution) really pissed off actual working prostituted women, because it entirely disrupted the (awful, but still workable) relationships they had with the police. It was done without consulting them, and they were not best pleased, because it directly made their lives more difficult.

[thebewilderness]

We used to have GSA, Gay-Straight Alliance in high schools. Now it is the Gender Sexuality Alliance, GSA.

[Wanderabout]

This just dropped a few pennies:

"MRAs deploy a human rights framework to argue men are oppressed."

Sounds familiar.