The feminist case against anti-trans feminism

[spannablue]

Sorry to have been away for a bit- work got busy and my DS3 had flu.
Anyway I thought this might be interesting

www.versobooks.com/blogs/4090-i-m-not-transphobic-but-a-feminist-case-against-the-feminist-case-against-trans-inclusivity

Charming! What a bastion of reasoned debate.

Why engage in reasoned debate about a blogpost that acts like scientific data did not exist? It is like reasoned debate with my kid about that Martian that ate up all his chocolate at once.

I agree ShowofHands, though, before entering the debate, I would like spanna to define 'woman' and 'female' in a noncircular objectifyable manner, so we all know, what we're talking about.

Charming! What a bastion of reasoned debate.

People are pissed off with you because you don't engage in debate. You just plop someone else's blog or a really brief 'what do you think of that' OP and people engage and you don't even have the courtesy to come back.

And why don't you put across your own argument in your own words?

Interesting that Spanna never quotes any of the Jewish or Muslim women who explain they are prevented from using mixed sex spaces.
Or condemns any of the trans activists who call them bigots.

I'd read it spanna, except that I'm afraid recommendations from people who use words without meanings is as edifying as a chat with my labrador.

Is it like a game to you? Like British Bulldog?
"All the people I 'tick' are women, the rest are men, line up on opposite sides" kind of thing?

Is that what this whole assigned at birth schiz is about? Doctors just randomly picking two teams?

Here's another one

You just plop in one TRA argument after another, though. Hardly "reasoned debate".

The second link is the same kind of a hit piece. So, obviously, attempts by transactivists, including the 'part time trans persona' Natacha Kennedy, to get female academics fired for speaking out, don't count as silencing.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/eb941d92-b2ec-11e8-8fb1-ac438dd6af00

I might as well post up a load of tweets by TRAs telling GC women what to do in no uncertain terms (you know the one, usually involving dying in a fire, sucking transwomen's ladycocks, etc).

Now that is "silencing".

Yes, if you could also define ‘intersectionality’ while you’re at it? Because this idea that all oppressions are lumped together in one big ball as the article states is really not how I would define it. And seems rather to be watering down and defanging the analytical framework proposed by the black feminist who coined the term in the first place, while we’re at it.

Charming! What a bastion of reasoned debate.

I wasn't debating. I was taking the piss. Is that not allowed now, either?

If, on the other hand, trans women are thought of as a subset within ‘women’ – much like the group ‘white women’,

Gosh. spannablue do you think humans can change sex?

trans activists ‘hounded’ abuse victim
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lib-dem-trans-activists-hounded-abuse-victim-b6dx39tv3

''A victim of domestic abuse was removed as a judge of a radical thinking prize and “hounded” out of her role within the Liberal Democrats for saying that she did not believe that men who identified as women should have access to women’s refuges.

Natalie Bird, 38, a mother of two who fled an abusive former partner, was accused of “dangerous transphobia” by transgender activists in the party. She had said that opening up safe spaces without proper safeguards to anyone who said that they were female could put women at risk.

She opposed segregating women’s refuges by chosen gender instead of biological sex.''

This is not feminism, its not feminist activism.

Is it anti-trans to worry that we’re fucking up support for young people by taking away medical and mental health support? Or that they can go to a lawyer rather than be referred to a gender specialst?

Is it anti-trans to want to keep a minimum of 2 years in the GRa because many, many young women who explore their gender identity detransition?

Is it anti- trans to not want 16 year old girls to have their breasts removed because at that exact point in their lives they don’t know who they are? Is it anti-trans to understand that the child at 16 is not the same child they are at 18, or the adult they are becoming?

Ian it anti-trans to be worried that we are making decisions which will make matters so much worse for young people? We’ve fucked them on Brexit, we’ve fucked them with student loans.

Is it anti-trans to want to understand links of gender identity and autism?

Is it anti-trans to want to encourage young people to explore who they are before committing to irreversible changes?

Looking forward to your reply OP

In fairness to that article, it does acknowledge that a feminist position is not necessarily transphobic and seems to engage with the points we make rather than accusing us of being bigots and thinking all trans women are perverts pretending so they can access vulnerable women and that we deny their right to exist etc.

However their central rebuttal is that trans women are not like men when it comes to propensity to commit violence against women. I do not agree. Most trans women pose no physical risk but nor do most men, and my understanding is the risk is largely equivalent.

Also it doesn’t engage with the presence of a penis in female spaces and what that means for abuse and rape survivors, or some sections of religious communities eg some Muslim women.

And it drew parallels with subconscious bias with immigration etc which was really poor.

However while I think the article is bollocks - and I actually am open to a compromise involving trans women in certain spaces - it does at least seek to engage with the arguments constructively rather than shouting TERF bigot #nodebate etc.

Actually, I don’t really understand the OP if I’m honest. I’m on day 2 of waking up really fucking angry about all this.

OP, sorry your child has been ill however, no one missed you because, as with this thread, all you do is post bullshit and then never engage with the reasoned discussion unless it's to move the goalposts. It makes you look like an idiot.

@spannablue, tagging you in case you haven't seen all the replies to your thread

So the article says “think of trans women as a subset of women, like white women.” Ok, but “white women” are women who are Caucasian. The adjective “white” tells you they are women with this additional property.

It doesn’t seem to work in the same way for “trans”. Trans women are women who are “trans”. But what does “trans”mean? It means they are male and are transitioning to be female. So trans women are women who are male. This makes no sense. If the category of “woman” can include males then I’m afraid I don’t know what the word means anymore.

Given that trans women are male, I don’t see a good reason why they should be thought of like “white woman.” It’s like saying “trans dogs should be thought of a subsection of dog, like toy dog.” Except in this case “trans dogs” refer to cats.

Spanna

But you don't debate do you? You don't engage. You have demonstrated that. It is a pattern of posting that's been seen many times before.

So the women posting regularly ignore you and would rather spend their time posting elsewhere.

I'll tell you what does happen sometimes. A lurker will get tired of you being unchallenged. She'll feel that she needs to articulate the arguments that the regulars can't be bothered making as you don't engage. So she'll post, she may eventually get fed up with you "clown dancing" and cease to engage.

But you know what, she's posted, she's honed her argument and hey presto we have another active and engaged poster, she's not a lurker anymore. Hey, she might even feel empowered enough to discuss this offline, maybe even become more of an activist.

So keep up the good work Spanna, you're doing a grand job. 👍

Excellent analysis wee
Really to be logically consistent trans women would be renamed trans men and then would be a subset of males who are trans.
Hang on, didn't we used to be able to use a term just like that?

PS embarrassed to admit that I missed the Germaine Bunbury stuff. Please can someone tell me where I can get a summary of her work?

QuentinWinters

Have sent a PM.

It also asks you to imagine how bigoted it would be to exclude (from women's spaces) women belonging to some minority if it was shown they posed a particular risk. I think the reason that suggestion is so abhorrent is because it is so obviously untrue, we all know that e.g. black women are not as dangerous to other women as men are - the suggestion is clearly untrue and offensive. In a different world, where some minority of women is as dangerous to women as men are, the idea of excluding that minority might be very sensible and fair. But it's too different a world from ours for our intuition to tell us what's right in that world.

It also asks you to imagine how bigoted it would be to exclude (from women's spaces) women belonging to some minority if it was shown they posed a particular risk.

The TRAs use this excuse for an 'argument' so often it's embarrassing to see them do it once more.

Thing is, women are women - no matter what other characteristics they might have - and transwomen are not women.

I am actually thankful for spanna's post, as it made me revisit the outrageous attempts of Natacha Kennedy - a self-identified 'transwoman' who cannot even let go of their male privilege to the point where they would be ready to give up their male identity, thus listed at Goldsmith under a male and a 'female' identity - to get female academics fired for daring to voice an opinion.

Knowing Natacha Kennedy's persona and actions means knowing the heart of TRA activism. Males who sometimes sport a skirt doing everything in their power to silence females with an opinion. That's it in a nutshell.