How to deal with DH response re trans issues

[Carikube]

I've read a lot of threads on FWR over the last few months and feel as though I know where I stand on things. However I am having issues bringing DH "over" to the cause as it were and don't know how to deal with it.
I've explained why I'm not happy with self-ID, shown him recent articles eg the one about Karen White etc but he keeps telling me that these are only a small percentage of things to worry about in the grand scheme of things.
We have three young DDs so I feel this is something I want him to get on board with (and I do have to say that on a more general basis, he is quite the feminist so I can't argue about that), but he keeps saying that we have bigger things to worry about, eg how Brexit will impact us as a family/country etc. His point is that the proportion of crimes committed by men who self-ID as women is far smaller than those committed by men against girls/women so I should focus my anger where it matters. I'm finding myself getting too emotional about his response to have a rational discussion to point out why I think he should care more.
Can anybody wiser come up with reasons to make him become more concerned?
[Might not be posting again until morning so please bear with me....]

The fact my ex husband failed to take my concerns about women's equality seriously was a large part of the reason he's an ex. It underscores a general attitude about women's rights to express themselves about facts that men find uncomfortable. He felt I hated men and therefore him. In the end, I did.

No, yep isn't a new poster, I recognise her style.

But I reckon her attitude and your DH's (and my DH's, come to that) are a bit complacent.
They don't care about privacy.
They don't care about religious minorities.
They don't care about the dignity of pubescent girls. Or boys.
They don't care about women's sport.
They don't care about health statistics.
They don't care about crime statistics.
They don't care about equalities policies designed to even out disadvantages.
They don't care about the biological differences that since time immemorial have made women into second class citizens, or even not citizens at all but chattels.
They don't care about the biological differences which first attracted your DH and you in the first place.
They care more about the feelings of a tiny percentage of men than the feelings (and safety - it's not all about safety but some of it is) of a large number of women.

But don't tell him this all at once. I asked my DH to google Alex Drummond, and he said "(AH) is taking the piss, isn't (AH)?" But if AH (who may for all I know be a very nice person) is a woman, how can we tell the difference between a woman and a man, and why should this matter?

Got to dash now or I'd cite examples and sources of all the above.

But worth bearing in mind DH is entitled to his own opinion, but he's not entitled to yours and your DDs'. And vice versa.

My dh knew nothing about the issue until it happened in his own house. He was furious! We host teenage foreign language students dh one strict rule is that we only host girls as their room next to our dds one student we were allocated was clearly a boy but with eye shadow, sharing a room with a fellow female student and we had to accept this. Dd aged 7 said loudly "but he's a boy mummy". Confused girls, furious dh and me in breach of the no mixed sex students in one room rule. Brave new world.

To my mind this is about a fundamental cultural shift which is about far more than a few transsexuals. It's about boundaries being blurred or eroded and a very nasty group of men throwing their weight around and getting exactly what they want to the detriment of everyone.

It's an argument about what a woman is. If you change the definition so anyone can be female, you suddenly can't keep a great many biological females safe. To my mind it isn't even really about the men who will identify as women to cause trouble - although of course some will and will get away with it. Am I ok with the fabric of society changing so completely? Am I ok with the fact that on principle women everywhere will be less safe? Absolutely no way. Women are valued so little as it is. It's pulling us backwards. Everything regarding our safety hinges on us being defined by our biology.

Discuss it in Orwellian-1984 or cognitive dissonance terms.
Does he not mind the fact that stating the obvious (eg a person with a penis is not a woman) is being twisted into being described as hatespeak?
It is the erosion of liberty (not just females' but his, too) that worries me. It is like Martin Niemöller's First they came... poem. By the time your DH wakes up it may be too late.

Carikube my DH has, for a long time, nodded sagely and said he agreed with me, but not really "got" it, I'd mention stories as they came out, get the nodding head, "hmmm very interesting". And then the Challenor story broke, and the issue of safeguarding within the political structures. DH is politically active in the LP, and this was his "peaktrans" moment. He has so peaked that he is challenging people who post in LP Facebook groups, he is asking questions in public. He hasn't even said NAMALT in weeks!

I'm sure something will happen to cause your DH to "get it", it just needs to be the right story and the right time.

It must be extremely frustrating living with someone who has so little concern for women and girls rights and saftey.

What does he think about Karen White, Aimee Challenors lies and Jess (NUS person, sorry can’t remember surname). These people have been able to behave as they have because they are surrounded by people with the same attitude as him. Every single one of them were waving big red flags and it was women like you OP, who shouted “look, this isn’t right, do something” and fuckers like your H told people like you to stop worrying your pretty little head and to stop being transphobic.

I don’t think he’s a feminist at all.

DH nodded and smiled at me for years over the TRA issue.

Years of thousands of words, much arm waving and examples slid off making little impact.

But being asked to proof read "husbands" version of this (I did not need it proof read, I just wanted to see if it had the desired effect) , knocked him so hard off the fence that the same day he drove over to our gay mates, showed them the sons/brothers version, and knocked them off a fence they didn't even know they were on. Our gay mates are movers and shakers in the regional LGBT. They are now plotting to bring the issue to a wider audience in the community to avoid similar colonisation of their groups, charities and association. The three of them are concerned that Britian's insanity (and that is what they are calling it) will be contagious.

And this was pre-Challenor. So I need to update the website the QR code leads to, cos at this point Ms "staple vaginas shut and shove female faces in bowls of dog pee" looks very small potatos.

You could try the dads version and see if it focuses his mind on the reality that females he loves are the chips he is gambling with in his low risk/ insanely high stakes thinking.

Which is what I think my DH was doing too. Until he realised that the risks were increasing dramatically with rapidly crumpling barriers between male/female places and spaces. And the high stakes were spiralling upwards as the nefarious spotted vastly increased access at the low cost of a simper and "but I'm a lady ! I get to go in".

high res version

drive.google.com/open?id=1-0aZhIyJOLNtq9OYv4gTJyy5lhobDXh7

For me it is about erasure of women in the public domain. We were just getting going and starting to make some progress on things like equal pay and all-women shortlists. Sex-segregated spaces were important for women who wanted not to feel undermined or objectified, particularly in places where their bodies could be exposed like changing rooms and swimming pools. We still have a very long way to go wrt crimes against women by men and domestic violence which are not taken seriously (look at the high-profile rape and assault cases this year by professional sportsmen, for example). Trump and his cronies in America are threatening on hard-won abortion rights, and Eire only just voted in favour of them this year. Even language is being used to undermine the existence of women with examples of the removal of words describing in favour of “people with cervixes”, “pregnant person”, “cis” etc.

So men who say they are women but are clearly not and who insist on invading and dominating these arenas, whether they have harmful intent or not, present a very high risk of undoing a lot of things that have only been going a small way to protect women and girls from inequality and abuse.

And this is not consistent across the trans debate. It is very specifically an attack on women that must be flagged and resisted. Remind him that men are not threatened in the same way by women saying they are men, are they.

CesiraAndEnrico is it ok to use those fantastic posters? DH has a number of LP meetings all over the place in the next couple of weeks...

Most of us on here started from the 'of course transwomen are women' and wanting to be inclusive and kind.

And of course it’s fine to offer an inclusive and kind explanation for transgenderism, but I am not prepared to lie to children who (in the absence of any prejudices or prior knowledge of the issues) can tell a man from a woman.

TrumpsToddlerTantrums

Absolutely. I will try and make a new website to attach this weekend, but if you have one of your own, or know of a better "focused on making males feel all protective about real women they actually love rather than uninvolved in all this trans stuff" one... on the high res version you can paste a new QR code over the old one.

Since I made them there has been a growing number of men sticking their necks out as a result of the Challenor case, and now the Karen White case.

(Unsurprisingly) Suddenly lots of "nowt to do with be-willied me" ears have pricked up and as one poster put it "the wheels are starting to fall off the trans propaganda bus".

The more men that can be triggered into singing from a new hymn sheet of the emotionally involved, the faster the bus skids over the edge of a cliff.

And explodes.

Into oblivion.

You lot did all the groundwork, all the legwork, took all the hard punches, the collective spitting in your faces, paid the highest prices for being resolute, informed and informing.

And it's sucks, because in a perfect world that would be enough. But the world is not perfect and for a more timely the blokes need to get their shoulders behind the bus and join in giving it a hard, group shove too.

Similar situation here, DH has acknowledged my worries but he does feel I'm wrong as well as transphobic. He identifies as very left wing and is very "woke", beard anf all. Much as that enrages and saddens me, we've just stopped discussing it; I'm not going to change his mind and who knows, maybe it will all come out in the wash and be a non-issue once our girls are big enough for it to effect them.

Weirdly RatRolyPoly was really helpful in this yesterday; DH, like Rat, feels that man and woman have a social definition and male and female are biological terms and that does make more sense re TWAW (although I'm not entirely convinced). I think of man and woman like ram or ewe - rooted in biology - where he sees man and woman to refer to gender, not sex. DH is under no illusion that humans actually change sex, and it really helped me when we found that tiny but very important bit of common ground. Can you focus on what you have in common?

Yes focus on that.

A focus on sex involves acknowledging things like men, including your DH being bigger, stronger and less vulnerable than you.
Most good men have spent years switching their focus away from that in order to regard women as equal. So it’s a hard bit of thinking for him...

I think it may take time. Keep at it.

I liked this post from Women's Voices Matter on this - a good list of points. .

Speaking to your ‘woke’ other half about gender critical ideas. A woman’s voice

Although I'd add to it, the fear that one of your children will be taken down this path as a teen. Trans is the new self harm / anorexia for teens, especially teenage girls. But they're causing life long damage and making themselves sterile in the process.

Does your DH want grand children? Has he considered that if any of your girls turn out to be gay, gender non-conforming, depressed as teenagers or simply find puberty and persistent harassment from men difficult, they may end up on a path to sterility.

Is Transgender The New Anorexia?

If you don't want this to be a path they go down, it absolutely makes sense that you stand against this ideology being taught in schools.

Btw I think Rat posts in good faith and makes good points

Frankly, I would give him the reverse psychology treatment.
Tell him next time: yeah, I guess, you are right.

And a couple of days later you can tell him (depending on how old your kids are), with honest, happy excitement, about this sleepover at Girl Guides where you heard through the grape wine that apparently a self-IDed stranger transwoman at the very start of her transition will give personal care.... and you find this inclusivity very thrilling; or talk about your trip to the swimmingpool, where last time there was this lovely penised lady, and how this is a fascinating new world, where your kids will grow up feeling all natural about that...

I don't think dicussion help much. Presenting him with possible real-life scenarios while naturally conveying to him, that you are really fine with that (and therefore won't take over the role of protector), should force his hand.

His point is that the proportion of crimes committed by men who self-ID as women is far smaller than those committed by men against girls/women

But that isn't true - check out the BBC article on it - self-id trans are significantly over-represented in prisoners convicted of sexual offenses.

Oh, I've just re-read, and it could be read another way, that if there are 100 offenses committed by men and 1 offense committed by transwomen, then it's a small percentage and not worth worrying about. I wonder what percentage is worth worrying about?

I'm not sure personally that increasing access, just because it's only a small increase in violence is something I could support in any situation - surely the only acceptable direction is a reduction in violence.

No, yep isn't a new poster, I recognise her style.

What?

'Ploppy ploppy rude rude ploppy ploppy anyone who posts on FWR trans threads no matter what their opinion is a menmber of kkk and will chase me round the board...'

Thats an actual style? Really? Who knew...

DH, like Rat, feels that man and woman have a social definition and male and female are biological terms and that does make more sense re TWAW

See i can see the sense in this as well

But woman is used as a catch all in legal documents and all sorts of things and some people are already using to use the word female to describe themselves

Our society doesn't use woman as a social thing...if it did then i think most of the issues I personally have would disappear

Yes, I had a little frisson of delight when I saw we'd been compared to the KKK by a "feminist".

I've been very left-wing all my aware life, defending the oppressed (insert all the stuff I've spent my adult life - and I'm 60 - fighting), etc and within a week I've had a PM calling me a Nazi and been part of a group compared to the KKK.

Because I say a man can't be a woman and women have the right to safety and privacy.

Btw I think Rat posts in good faith and makes good points

Wouldn't disagree with this

The problem is that woman as a social definition means things which are not financially rewarded or equitable in society.

In the nineteenth century, the social and legal meaning of being female was that a woman was her father’s and then her husband’s property, without equal access to education and employment (because she was biologically female).

The social and legal meaning of being female was that a man could rape his wife till 1990; that he could have sex with her when she was asleep and it not be rape until 2010 (Scotland).

Those are the gendered social norms attached to being female. Gendered social norms have changed enormously to the benefit of women in the last one hundred years. All the opportunities which your husband’s daughters have are due to feminism rejecting and challenging gendered social norms.

Ask your husband if he understands and agrees with that assessment, that gendered social norms are cultural and malleable.

If he agrees this, why on earth would it follow that gender is innate?

Gender is the set of socially constructed norms which male and female bodied people have to accept/negotiate/resist/challenge in the world. Gendered norms are not static, so how can gender be innate? It is not because what gender means changes over time and depending on place.

If he believes that his daughter’s are equal citizens in the world, why would he subscribe to an ideology which inscribes certain characteristics to women? Characteristics which happen to lead to less financial reward and more sexualisation?

Rogue apostrophe in the last paragraph

Cesira

Great posters, thanks,