'Transwomen are women' - our new reality or soon forgotten?

[deepwatersolo]

I have read an interesting article of a gender nonconforming gay man, Connor Kelly, which in a nutshell says he will never believe that transwomen are women:

key quote.: In making a new social taboo against saying something that is true we have gone down a rabbit hole into a land of mental and linguistic gymnastics where everyone knows the truth but no one dare say it.
medium.com/@connorskellymusic/what-happened-to-our-movement-a1239d7a11d5

I have the feeling more people start saying this (including Greens), and Lisa Muggeridge has basically already declared that women in the UK have won this.

Yet others , most I would say, particularly in the establishment, stay on course and the new elected Policy Coordinator's first tweet was apparently 'transwomen are women....'
twitter.com/djandyhealey/status/1037990650040512512

So, where will society go?

I think the consequences of the TRAs' policy wins are erasing public support/endorsement for this statement.

For example, whereas people were likely willing to accept/indulge the transgender colleague in a bad wig and dress, the likes of Hannah Mouncey, Laurel Hubbard et al, with very masculine physiques, conspicuously publicly 'taking the piss' will have consequences for those less assertive transpeople. Not to mention the nonsense of 'transgender rapists' and 'her penis'

I think Connor Kelly is overlooking that it wouldn't take many legal cases by people with an agenda to establish a climate of fear in which we self-police our language and expressions.

I'm so accustomed to Mumsnet's Guidelines now that it genuinely takes me aback to read articles in which the subjects are 'misgendered'.

I flirt between feeling hopeful that as more stories come out that the tide will turn- especially on Twitter, seeing more (unfortunately) men “come out” as GC and lending their non-hysterical TERFy
voices to the discussion.

Sometimes though I get very downhearted about the whole thing- the amount of liberal commentators that I would otherwise have a lot of time for who parrot TWAW and respond to various trans people in patronisingly “supportive” tones does my nut in.

I struggle to calibrate myself against the general population now and what they know or don't know.
I have to remind myself that most people don't know that almost all TW keep their penises, or the cotton ceiling, or rapists in women's prisons, or men in women's sports.
I've been immersed in this for so long it's hard to imagine that other people could still be oblivious of the scale of the issue.

The TWAW position is unsustainable for the human race. It's like those children's games where the leader says one thing and the kids have to do the opposite "I say left and you go right".
You can do it for a while if you concentrate hard.
But you have to return to reality eventually because we can't function in a society where opposite meanings exist.

The TWAW game will inevitably end. I see our role as holding the line to prevent that game from being deeply embedded into our laws until normal service is resumed.

Politicians are still pushing this in defiance of reality and common sense. It will be very interesting to see who is behind it.
I'm not saying there have been inducements, but it has come out of nowhere and many politicians are refusing to engage with women.

Its an extreme and strange belief to have appeared out of nowhere.
I don't know a single women who has woken up one morning with the sudden revelation that trans women are literally women. But then I only know ordinary, everyday women.

I'm fed up of it. I don't post as much as I used to, partly because I don't want to fall foul of the new misgendering rules, & get banned.

I think society will grow out of this.

The Millennials are going to have it the worst when they hit the real world (some having had irreversible body modification) and see that no one believes "sex is a spectrum/is irrelevant" and will themselves see the light.
This gender ideology cult is so toxic there is no way it is sustainable, for us as a species or as thriving individuals.

Keep talking. Keep telling the truth.

dinosaurkisses
Hopefull that the tide will turn- especially on Twitter
That's a hope too far imo sorry! I am just hopefully Twitter will simply die away as most social media sites do. It's run by California, the land of make believe.

Thankfully real-world people don't live on Twitter.

I don't know a single women who has woken up one morning with the sudden revelation that trans women are literally women me neither! I do know many women who are conditioned to be extremely polite, and fearful of being bullied though. That's most women I know.

Its an extreme and strange belief to have appeared out of nowhere.

It appeared in 2015 when the government (Dept of Equalities) issued booklets aimed at shops, service providers and employers. The booklets said that transwoman had to be treated as women, even where there was no diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

The recommendations coming out of the Maria Miller Trans Enquiry made people keen to get ahead the curve - Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence provided the training and resources.

The government dropped a major bollock, I believe. They thought it was an easy win and uncontroversial. The fact that the government didn't see a conflict of interest with women's rights needs explaining.

I don't know a single women who has woken up one morning with the sudden revelation that trans women are literally women

me neither. i've only ever witnesses people go the other direction (myself included); from automatically thinking TWAW because lefty liberal, to applying logic and reasoning and discovering about the intact penises and threat to women's rights and realising they are not. apart from Ralph Little - wtf happened there?

But to answer the Q, whatever public policy and opinion, the biological facts will never be changed. women (old fashioned use of word) as a class will still be the child bearers (or uterus donors if we get that far). men as a class will still be physically stronger. There'll just be some really confused people milling around.

I flirt between feeling hopeful that as more stories come out that the tide will turn- especially on Twitter, seeing more (unfortunately) men “come out” as GC and lending their non-hysterical TERFy
voices to the discussion.

… Raises hand!

I'm a bloke, and been lurking recently on these threads, especially as I noticed more and more of my broadly lefty friends espousing TWAW views, and I'm going "are you sure?" And then reading up here and in other places, but it's frightening. Seems like the world is going mad.

'I do know many women who are conditioned to be extremely polite, and fearful of being bullied though'

I think that's exactly what's going on. 'This obviously male looking person is telling me that he believes he is a woman, so I must 'respect' his feelings and go along with it all, and avoid thinking too hard about it all'

I'm hoping that sunlight is the best disinfectant and that the more this issue gets discussed, the most people will realise that facts still matter, and will resist the nonsense and the gaslighting

If you live in an authoritarian states it does not matter if you belief.

Only that you obey.

They make you obey via law and social control in a climate of fear or fear of being reported even if there are few actual 'enforcers'.

The issue here is whether those who espout the TWAW stuff have enough power to force compliance fully across society and prevent a backlash in the process.

The numbers on this matter. A small backlash from a narrow section of society with a few TW victims would help the cause, because it supports the narrative. But if a backlash is more widespread and broad in nature, without violence then its more difficult to sustain control. The more who challenge, the less social control via herd psychology there is.

My worry is that the TRA thing isn't coming in isolation though. It's coming as part of a broader far left movement, which means that it is harder for a backlash to manifest itself because those supporting it simply have more power to control in the first place.

All the stuff about 'you don't want people to dislike you for being transphobia and homophobic' is all herd psychology and control and is particularly effective in certain demographic groups.

Everyone I know, literally every single person, laughs at the idea that trans women are women and think I'm going mad when I say that technically, a man doesn't have to do anything but say they are a woman and that makes it so. 5 min later and a quick Google on their phone or whatever and you can see it dawning on them.

Unfortunately I think it will take something even more horrendous than the stories we have already seen for the wider population to 'get' it, but they will. It's already happening, GC posts on twitter are getting more likes and retweets (just my observation, I certainly dont feel as frustrated as I did when I go on there!) and the media are starting to cover more stories rather than be complicit in the hiding of the issues.

I think in 20 years it will be seen like the dancing plagues of the middle ages, hollow earth theories or lobotomy.
People will think it really strange and ask why did this issue spread in a population? How did people believe that? why did the medical profession support it?
It will be a curio - did you know that in UK 2018 people felt afraid to state that men have penises?

It hasn't strictly come out of nowhere although to most people it feels that way.

I read an newspaper article from 1995 yesterday that talked about transgenderism and although it lacked the authoritarian slant that the activism has currently the prevailing theories were still apparent.

At the time the article was printed TWAW wasn't a thing and it seemed that more focus was on the gender bending aspects of queer theory. It's easy to see why a lot of people bought into it on the ground level because rejecting gender roles and stereotypes aligns very much with feminism.

At some point trans/queer ideology and radical feminism have parted ways but I feel at the start there was probably some common ground.

I find myself wondering if in the last couple of decades the rest of the first world hadn't moved towards the pinkification of all things female and other very binary stereotypes and we hadn't hadn't the growth of accessible porn to such a degree whether we could have ended up in a timeline where males and females could be gender fluid without the need to deny the realism of biological sex.

I'm another one who went from believing TWAW to GC. I can respect another person's feelings, I will defend their right to dress and be addressed in the way they're most comfortable with. I know pronouns are an issue for some people on here, but personally, I don't care if someone wants to be referred to as he, she, they or whatever other word they've come up with. I take issue with the idea that saying trans women are trans women is offensive.

I take issue with the idea that there is 'literally no difference between trans women and women' unless it's when TRAs want to focus on the oppression faced specifically by trans women, in which case, there is a difference because women are oppressing trans women. I take issue with the idea that feminism must centre trans women, even if the topic of discussion only affects biologically female people. I take issue with women's trauma and the issues specifically facing females being dismissed and brushed off. I take issue with being told that oppression isn't based in biology issues such as selective abortion of female fetuses and FGM being brushed off because 'they're not really issues in this country' but the high murder rate for trans women is frequently referenced despite not really being an issue in this country. I take issue with the double standards. When is a straight man more oppressed than a lesbian? When he identifies as a woman.

To answer the question, I think that there will be more instances of things which 'never happen' - sexual assaults in bathrooms/changing rooms/women's prisons, women being turned away from rape crisis centres for not wanting to share a space with male bodied people, lower level/school level women's sports being dominated by trans women etc. I think there will be a disproportionately high representation of trans women holding women's shortlist positions in politics/companies which have such positions. I think all of that will have to happen before people start realising how dangerous #nodebate and the silencing of women's voices is. Then, more people will start realising this is something that affects them and their families and more people will start to vocally question TRA logic.

I don't think the transactivists think that anyone really believes. They only want us to obey their instructions. If we suddenly welcomed them in to our spaces and really did believe, they'd think of something else equally or even more obnoxious to do. It's a power thing for them.

All the stuff about 'you don't want people to dislike you for being transphobia and homophobic' is all herd psychology and control and is particularly effective in certain demographic groups.

It's also really difficult for parents or anyone who works with children to separate the issues. I really struggle with it because I do want Stonewall etc.. and sex education within schools to help my child and others to better understand sexuality and improve acceptance. I'm also okay with them understanding that people with gender dysphoria exist which is why a small minority of people are trans.

What I'm not okay with is the very real possibility that my son might leave these sessions wondering if he is actually a girl because he liked dolls when he was small and sometimes wears nail polish.

If any of the orgs could apply a bit of common sense when it comes to children and young people an inevitable backlash could probably be avoided.

Kinky Boots (we watched it last night) was made only ten years ago. Seems so innocent now.

I don't think we can go back because what really drives this (beyond the politics) is that medical techniques are improving. You cannot uninvent that.

But we can go forward, past the TWAW nonsense.

This a marketing exercise. In the same way that cigarettes were sold with health claims by doctors, sugar was sold with claims by dentists that it was not harmful, dietary saturated fat was demonised despite not evidence for it being responsible (solely) for heart disease, eggs were to be avoided because they caused high cholesterol (they don't)...

I could go on. In all of these examples a small core of people knew the claims were incorrect, but the money Juggernaut was on its way.

Many of these claims resulted in long term changes to our lifestyles that led to long term harm - yet still no one was willing to say "hang on" and those who did were put into the "looney" category.

The main drivers of this type of behaviour are money and reputation. no one wanted to lose their financial investment and no one wanted to be shown to be wrong. So marketing campaigns were launched to keep everyone believing the lies.

I can't see that much is different here. We are just only now starting to see the financial links, the political connections and the reputations that are on the line should the truth be accepted and the lies refuted. there's too much at stake to go back.

I think we've got a whole generation to wait.

I think the government known its a hornets nest and know if it goes through with the reform it will be a political disaster.

We are in a unique position because the impact of this in Canada and USA ( and women’s sport in many counties ) can be referenced, rather than it being an abstract idea. Which by the way I originally supported without any thought of what it really means.

The tragedy is transsexuals who just want to get on With their lives and stand by women are getting lumped in with these nutters. It’s going to be so bad for them.

Every day the TRA behaviour speaks for its self. Labour women’s officer LM tweeting that the news that Karen White sexually assaulted women in prison ( with her penis ) is transphobic really highlights this self centred and frankly insane behaviour. Women are assaulted and a Labour women’s officers first response is deeply concerning and shows no care for the women assaulted.

I mean if I start to list all the examples we’d be here for ever.

It’s tipping and lots of young people are starting to question it all too.

Keep talking to people about it if you feel you can.
Just let them carry on. They are their own undoing
Stay strong 💪🏻

If you live in an authoritarian states it does not matter if you belief.

This is my perception of the matter, too. 'Authoritarian' is a strong word but essentially, people not daring to say what they think is exactly what is going on.
That is why I thought, ok, with the Bradley and Challenor matter, the 'Hey, the emperor has no clothes' moment has now come. But somehow, that moment has only come for some, and others seem to really believe it, or be invested in it (at the moment, I doubt there is fear to speak out?).
Who knows, maybe, if this can be maintained for a couple of generations, it could become the new normal, with the real life effect of sliding into a pre-woman's rights world, where women have lost the capacity to even describe their sex based oppression.
But it seems so unthinkable to me that this can be maintained for generations. I think, it will rather tear society apart. Can you imagine some girl from some rather conservative immigrant background finally and barely persuading her parents that she can join some three-day excursion with her class and then the parents find out, she might share the bedroom with a penised 'girl'!?!
I can't see this succeeding, and yet, most of the establishment doesn't seem to even consider there might be an alternative thinkable path. It is all rather kafkaesque, really.

I honestly believe that in years to come when tens of thousands of people haven't been opting for self-ID on some kind of whim that most people will wonder what all the fuss was about.