Obsession with transwomen fetishises sex difference

[spannablue]

Just read on Twitter:

'The problem with patriarchy is not due to men having penises, it's due to the lie that this random feature of birth confers & signifies rank, power & domination. We must not collude in that by fetishising sex difference & aggrandizing genitals that happen to be on the outside.'

What do you think?

Also, some of the children most at risk from the TRA approach to safeguarding are the trans children themselves. I know Lang will be along to point this out too, but just to reiterate - creating a class of children who teachers are to keep secrets about, even from the child's own parents, puts those children at risk.

I think the idea of Foucault "fixing" De Beauvoir is my favorite part of this increasingly odd thread. Indeed, isn't it obvious that a woman's ideas must be fixed by a man who's just trying to help?

Right!?!

AngryAttackKittens
Absofuckinglutely. Imagine being a gender non conforming child. Wondering why you feel different. Wondering if you're being judged by your peers. Wondering if you are loved by your parents. Wondering what you did wrong to not be like the other girls. Then some creepy person tells you it's not your fault, you're ill and they can help fix you, but to keep it secret from your parents. Well, maybe they don't love you anyway because you're not like the other girls and not like your brother so perhaps this person is right...makes my fucking skin crawl. It's grooming. No child should be on puberty blockers. No child should be on cross sex hormones. No child should be binding their breasts or wearing a packer. No child should have any kind of trans surgery. Nobody under 18 should have any of this done especially, especially as the number one reason given (in terms of MtF in particular) is that the boy will look more feminine if he is never allowed to grow into a man. Literally basing the huge irreversible decision on how fuckable he'll be as an end result. Judged by AGP men who keep their dicks, their beards and their sex drive no doubt.
I'm going to stop there before I get banned for saying the wrong thing.

Yes, Lisa Muggerudge was also writing, about “Butterfly” that what she saw was a dysfunctional family, and that anyone who insisted you had to take a child’s symptoms of dysphoria at face value and not investigate the child’s and family’s history was also telling you something about themselves.

On that note, Lisa's take on the matter on her youtube channel:
(I feel like a Lisa Muggeridge fangirl, lately, always posting her vids. )

The moment an adult says "we don't have to tell your mum and dad" a child's sense of danger should start ringing like a fire alarm. Training them so that it doesn't is classic grooming and even if your intentions were entirely benign would be a terrible idea.

big decisions that can go badly wrong are made by egos who have misplaced belief in their own competence and infallibility

This is one of the points made and discussed (with ample evidence) in the book by the psychologist (academic/research) Carol Tarvis I mentioned earlier in the thread. There's also evidence about this put forward by - I think - Daniel Kahneman? in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, showing the high failure rate of predictions by all sorts of experts. The researcher Philip Tetlock also comes to mind in this area - I'd have to look it up.

Hi, EatPeanuts

I liked how you put this in your post:

I understand that 'exclusion' sets off all sorts of alarm bells in those of use who have studied dehumanising regimes and read postmodern theory. But under the logic of self-ID there is no objective way to define who is trans and who is not. You cannot base public policy on that.

I'd be interested in hearing more about your views on postmodern theory and how it influences people's thinking. My knowledge of the subject is limited, but I have read about it, if that makes sense, and I saw it first-hand in DD2's English Literature A level studies. The post-modernist "takes" on Dracula are truly bizarre!

Ooh, tell us about the analysis of Dracula.

I posted this on another thread but hope it fits here:

Following the Karen White debacle this seems to be the latest set of TRA talking points. Now it’s about individuals being responsible for risk assessments, being blamed if their crystal balls are not 100% accurate. And it’s for police and others to mop up the mess afterwards, because who cares about the collateral damage - it’s only women and children.

Whereas those of us who actually work in safety and safeguarding know that the point is to design systems which absolutely minimise the risk at source. It’s a system issue, not an individual issue. No expert is infallible and human judgements, as in psychiatry, are even less reliable than other types.

In my line of work I’ve actually been reviewing some major safeguarding failures from the 90s and 00s and before. An almost ubiquitous common thread is that someone in authority relied on their own judgement and ‘risk assessment’ of an offender or potential offender rather than there being systems in place to prevent offending. This meant that a good liar, which psychopaths are by definition, could easily pull the wool. Then there was a major incentive for cover up once the offences became known, because said authority person needed to protect themselves and their institution from people knowing about their ‘failures’. Putting the blame on individuals always leads to cover ups.

We learnt as a society, slowly and painfully, that relying on individual judgement to protect the vulnerable didn’t work and we needed systems and risk assessments on a population basis.

So no, relying on prison officers and psychiatrists to use their individual judgement on who is and isn’t a risk won’t work. We know that. We need systems in place (in this case, no men in a women’s jail) so that such incidents can’t arise.

Further, a major part of the safety of these systems is a no blame culture for raising concerns. If a junior, or any, member of a team can’t raise safeguarding concerns for fear of being told they’re a transphobe, then this is also an abusers’ charter. Look at all the grooming gangs where people couldn’t raise concerns for fear of being called racist, and then tell me why we shouldn’t raise concerns about people with penises being locked up with vulnerable women.

Without knowing the context, id agree.

It's not just a bit of flesh and muscle that is the problem. Its what humans who have one grow up learning about themselves and girls/women as a result.

I also want to take my virtual hat off to Lisa Muggeridge, who has been sounding the high alert about safeguarding with relation to the trans issue for a long while, including on here. At first I, even with professional experience in safeguarding, couldn’t really see what she was worried about and thought she was exaggerating - I’m glad I never said so. She was extremely prescient.

Coming back to another thing spannablue said:

Why would you have to un-read Foucault, Butler and other postmodern theorists? Why not use them critically to investigate the discourse around trans?

You surely cannot ignore the political claims made on the basis of trans identity. Trans rights activism wants to re-define the category of woman (not of men, as is always pointed out). This is a massive political gambit. This is what Aimee Challenor et al. are trying to do, it's not about 'just living their lives', their entire claim to political power and office is based on being trans.

Go on, find me the empty signifier at the heart of this. My guess is you are a humanities academic trying to do the right thing. Just do it.

And, by the way, isn't it interesting that, in the early 1990s, Judith/Jack Halberstam criticised Catharine Mackinnon's anti-pornography arguments (pornography leads to violence IRL) by pointing out that '[c]ollapsing real and imagined is a totalizing activity, it refutes to read difference, it refutes the interpretability of any given text, and it freezes meaning within a static dynamic of true and false‘ (Halberstam 1993: 199).

So maybe we shouldn't totalise meaning by refusing to acknowledge difference ...? Which is exactly what trans activism in its current political form wants to compel us to do.

But, as I've said before, I understand that this is uncomfortable for anyone who has also ever been read as 'different'. This is why we are in this whole mess.

Whereas those of us who actually work in safety and safeguarding know that the point is to design systems which absolutely minimise the risk at source. It’s a system issue, not an individual issue. No expert is infallible and human judgements, as in psychiatry, are even less reliable than other types.

I am working in a very different field, with technical processes and lab-experiments, where there is a huge amount of general rules for everyone to follow (= GLP, good laboratory practice), that are meant to account for all eventualities and prevent failure, always with redundancies put in (if this fails, the next measure should hold...).
This idea of just winging it and removing a rationally straightforward safeguading level and leaving that part to professionals' personal feelings and inclinations instead, when the actual wellbeing of humans is at stake (and not just an experiment that costs you a week to repeat), annoys me to no end.

AngryAttackKittens

Re Dracula: Apparently it's not the proto-feminist "new woman" central character, Mina, who is the "real feminist" in the book. Despite the fact that she supported herself before marriage, is clever and independent, vocal and assertive, comes up with numerous solutions to problems that otherwise would have made their plans to foil fall through, and accompanies them to Transylvania to confront Dracula in his lair, where she wields a pistol with the best of them, and is presented as central to the success of their efforts.

No, the "real" feminist heroes are the three highly sexualised female vampires who make up Dracula's harem, and are completely subjected to his dominance and control. This is because they, unlike poor repressed Mina, freely demonstrate their sexuality by behaving like male fantasies and biting men on the neck.

I'm not joking. This isn't just one academic paper, there are loads of them. This is presented as the "feminist" interpretation of the novel.

Potplant2

Those are excellent points, which hadn't even occurred to me. Yes, of course this will lead to cover-ups. And this is even more important:

Further, a major part of the safety of these systems is a no blame culture for raising concerns. If a junior, or any, member of a team can’t raise safeguarding concerns for fear of being told they’re a transphobe, then this is also an abusers’ charter. Look at all the grooming gangs where people couldn’t raise concerns for fear of being called racist, and then tell me why we shouldn’t raise concerns about people with penises being locked up with vulnerable women.

i knew about the importance of the no-blame culture, but it didn't occur to me to apply this to this area. There absolutely would be fear of being labelled transphobic affecting anyone who had to make these decisions in the current climate.

deepwater I also work in a similar field.

I suspect the overlap between those pushing the Pomo/tra line and those who have worked in safety critical industries of any type is fairly small. ;)

Still - this isn’t rocket science, it’s common sense. the average person knows that it’s safer to keep the kitchen cleaning chemicals out of the kids reach than to just tell them not to touch them. This is common sense stuff that people in real life do every day. They remove the opportunity for danger. It’s parenting 101 really isn’t it?

as far as I can see, postmodernisms’s replacing of material, class-based politics has coincided with a devastating weakening of the left and certainly no advancement and in fact much decay in the material conditions for women in the UK and the US as a result of austerity and rising male misogyny.

This.
Judging by its real life results postmodernism is the ideology of the masters to do as they please and remove any framework to challenge them.
And all because Foucault and his ilk wanted to fuck boys unopposed.

I'm not joking. This isn't just one academic paper, there are loads of them. This is presented as the "feminist" interpretation of the novel.

(Seriously, these people are so thick that it feels unkind to assume that anyone can actually be that thick, therefore I'm forced to conclude that they're actively trying to undermine feminism, that being the more generous interpretation of the whole "sex positive" movement.)

EatPeanuts I had to look up empty signifier, and got this:

The notion of floating [empty] signifiers can be applied to concepts such as race and gender, as a way of asserting that the word is more concrete than the concept it describes, where the concept may not be stable, but the word is.

Is this an accurate definition? Can you elaborate in more detail on how you see this relating to seeking political power? I find this really interesting.

The situation being pushed damages the safeguarding frameworks as well. They rely on having as robust a system as possible because they know from bitter experience that all loopholes will be exploited.

Why are TRAs pushing ideas that will damage safeguarding?

I'm not joking. This isn't just one academic paper, there are loads of them. This is presented as the "feminist" interpretation of the novel.

Those three vampires obviously took Foucault's advice of 'womaning right', while Mina is stuck in Simone de Beauvoirs flawed vision of a liberated woman, a vision that Foucault, thankfully, fixed.

(yeah, I know, this hypothesis involves time travel, somehow, but, let's face it: time is probably a social construct, too ).

Also in the film version I assume Sadie Frost's character is the more liberated one, because you see her boobs and she flirts with lots of different men.