Blown away by how little a lot of people care about women’s rights

[sundaynamechange1]

I’ve name changed.

How do you challenge or discuss self ID with women who think it solely boils down to sharing a toilet and we have nothing better to do but cause trouble.

Honestly don’t know how I’m going to face them again - which is pretty soon.

I don’t know if it’s purely down to age, they like a bit of a ruckus and being devils advocate or they really are that thick. How can you have pleasantries with a woman who think men get just as a bad deal/ assaulted and that’s it’s fine to put a violent man in a female prison because you lose your rights if you commit a crime.

Honestly I’m staggered today and worried for our future

I'm a little tired of this argument that trans people deserve special consideration because they've been suicidal and battled depression and been attacked.

I'm female. I accordingly was first assaulted at age 9, not raped fortunately. Groping became a fairly normal experience in my teens, as did being followed and the comments were constant. I battled depression in my 20s and felt suicidal as a result. The current threats of erasure of women, the upsurge in male violence, and the increasing excuses for that violence are giving me immense fear for my daughter's future well being. Why should I give transpeople special consideration on these grounds when no one gives it to me?

I just get fed up of the individual sensitivities of some particular males being used to overturn the protections that 50% of humans provably and demonstratively need against the other 50%.

I'm always surprised when people come onto a feminist board and criticise women for centering women and girls.

Some people think it's wrong that women share their experiences and talk about how it's damaging to women and girls, and not focus how it benefits others.

I don't know anyone who has talked about this in real life at all.

I think its hard to see the cumulative effect of lost of teeny word changes/administrative changes on women.

So a transwoman winning a sporting event might raise a few eye brows to those interested in that sport

A transgirl being allowed to join brownies might be noted by that particular brownie group but its just a cute kid.

your work toilets becoming unisex might be noted, by yourself but work toilets tend to be safe compared to public toilets and they were due a refurb anyway

One particular cancer campaign might pop up and because you speak great English and know you have a cervix it just doesn't register that it says cervix havers

you don't have teens so people coming in to your childs school and telling them gender is a spectrum and they get to pick where they sit just doesn't happen in your life.

you're not political at all so you don't notice a transwomen is the woman's officer for a particular political party.

each event isn't particularly significant on its own and its all happening anyway without changes to the law.

I'm always surprised when people come onto a feminist board and criticise women for centering women and girls.

I always roll my eyes but can't say I'm surprised, because it happens so regularly that you could set your watch by it.

Grass that's a really good explanation of what probably happens

I'm confused by feminists who say that this isn't an issue. At a very basic level, you cannot be a feminist if you don't believe in male privilege, I mean there are different focuses and opinions within feminism, but that has to be the one thing agreed on by all feminists, because otherwise what is feminism for?

So even the most liberal sex positive feminist must see how the gender pay gap in IT has been distorted by the number of trans-women (that spent most of their career presenting as male) having their salary counted towards the women's figures.

They just feel sorry for men. Was talking to a woman the other day who felt really sad about people who have to fill in forms with male or female 'when they don't feel like either inside'. I wanted to laugh tbh. Then everybody else was nodding sadly in agreement. I was like MATES what are you like.

People actually believe in the whole identity thing, they believe it's real. One person I work with, otherwise normal, thinks that two year olds know if they have a male or female brain. Most successful PR campaign ever.

I'm convinced every single one of them would watch a man in stubble and a skirt follow their 10-year-old daughter into the toilets and not pursue, out of wokeness. Convinced of it.

I'm forever grateful to my mother for somehow managing to shield me from the "feel sympathy for men at your own expense, and that of other women" aspect of female socialization. Individual men in difficult situations I can of course feel sympathy for, but as a group? Nah. All of the things causing them the most problems they invented and continue to enforce themselves.

I know right - I had to train myself aged 40. I'm training my daughter to be ruthless.

Bizarrely in RL I find it’s the more highly educated ‘woke’ brigade who refuse to see concerns.

It's because this dilution of women's rights and services won't affect them. They're unlikely to end up in prison or prostitution. If they get themselves into an abusive relationship, there will likely be family resources to get them out of it - money for legal fees, access to safe(ish) accommodation, etc - so they won't rely on ravaged services. They have the social capital to assert their own interests. Etc ad infinitum.

They're throwing marginalised sisters under the bus because they can't conceive what actual marginalisation looks like and what marginalised women might need.

What about feeling sorry for the woman? Why is this such a feminist issue? The only transgender I know are F-M, (obviously I know there’s lots of M-F) do you not care if these woman who are now men (that you would still see as woman) could get cervical cancer because they wouldn’t go if the appointment said ‘woman’ do you not care about those ‘woman’?
As long as god forbid no one made a statement that was inclusive of transgender people, who cares if they get cancer right?

And you wonder why many people aren’t behind you on this

I'm forever grateful to my mother for somehow managing to shield me from the "feel sympathy for men at your own expense, and that of other women" aspect of female socialization.

Also grateful to my mum, my aunties and my grandmothers in my assertive, bolshy, matriarchal, working class family who considered female socialisation to mean beware of the rogue penis and take no shit from it.

Eh what? Why don't you care about the women who won't go because they didn't understand the advert? That's just so callous and seriously why would you come on the women's rights board and be callous about women, why would you do that?

my mum was more the resentful feminist type

She would not say penis. I bet she has never said penis.

Some day I'll explain why my mother brought me up the way she did, but not in an environment that's currently as teeming with hostile people as this one is.

Mine would have said cock.

Not when I was a toddler, obviously...

We had bits. Girls had bits, and boys had bits. We still do have bits actually, now I think of it. 'Mind your bits' arf.

I had a cousin with a lisp, would've gotten "bits" mixed up with "biscuits" and then think of the lifetime of confusion that would have lain ahead.

Mine were all big on non-euphemisms so we all had either a penis or a vagina. But they were pretty free with "prick" for any penis that they felt did not sufficiently rise to expectations - and equally free pissing themselves laughing at prick/penis-related punning, such as in this very sentence.

But I don't understand the trans debate. It seems irrelevant and too abstract a worry for me to get concerned about. There are real things to be concerned about. I'm a liberal thinker, I don't mind men in women's spaces or vice versa.

Evidently you don't understand the debate.

Define 'women's spaces'...you really don't mind rapists in women's prisons? really?

Are people genuinely happy with gendered rather than sex segregation? Or are people really not that bothered if women's spaces exist or not, as in they won't campaign for sex segregation to be abolished, but they are happy for them to be removed?

Or can't people see beyond the toilets in debenhams.

Debenhams is great. I signed up to some kind of loyalty credit card thing because of that assistant who looked after the women's change room.

(Me): "Or just start with definitions of 'sex', 'woman and 'gender'."

(Snappity): "it is the gender critical position which relies on these terms but for which I have never seen comprehensive definitions which cover all special cases."

GC definitions cover literally every human being alive or that has ever lived. They include intersex people, GNC people, people who experience dysphoria and people whose presentation and preferences fall outside the sex-based norms of their particular time and place. How is this not comprehensive?

I appreciate your honesty about these definitions being unimportant to transgender ideology. However this doesn't change the fact that many females require protection from some males and therefore single SEX spaces. Can see how clear definitions are helpful in achieving this?

These definitions have been given repeatedly and more precisely/eloquently than I can manage at the moment all over FWR. Feel free to seek them out if my version doesn't satisfy:

Sex: reproductive class (binary, 2 gametes ova, sperm). Disorders of sexual development, infertility exist. We nevertheless all have biological characteristics of our reproductive sex class which are objectively measurable and observable.

Woman: adult human of the female sex class

Gender: social norms and expectations of a particular sex, sex stereotypes. They measurably vary throughout history and according to geography so cannot be inherent.

That should be a sticky