How do we counter this ‘Inclusive’ narrative...

[ThePrincipal]

...everyone seems to get hooked onto ‘inclusive’ as a PC , inherently good thing, and instantly buys into the trans narrative.

Can we come up with a woke sounding hook to counter this?

people have to be retrained? It sounds like those camps in China where they are trying to reprogram dissidents.

Yep. Been thinking of this as well. I want to reread Wild Swans.
Also 1984 and Handmaid’s Tale.

I've initiated a couple of fruitful conversations by musing on the tension between girls and women being taught that they have a right to say no to things they find coercive and uncomfortable and scary in every area of life except when it comes to the issue of giving access to transgender people. Trust your gut feelings: if you feel uncomfortable then say so, we're told. Except, of course, when faced with a man wanting access to women's facilities, when we're supposed to smile and be nice and override those internal alarms that ring when we encounter someone who identifies themselves as something they clearly aren't.

I find it staggering and utterly depressing, that despite all this drive towards inclusivity, actually, if you’re a disabled person, most companies and places aren’t even remotely inclusive. In fact if you raise their duty under the EA to make reasonable adjustments, they get very defensive indeed.

Inclusivity has nothing at all to do with a genuine wish to create a welcoming and accessible environment for everybody, it’s a shiny badge to virtue signal and look woke and caring. When companies bang on about inclusivity, yet can’t even be arsed to add an extra line of code to links and buttons on their web sight so they can be accessed using a screen reader for eg, which I’m told is not a difficult thing to do, or pull a jib when you ask them to send documents in a specific format, the whole inclusivity label looks meaningless and vacuous indeed.

I know I bang on about my own disability, and I’m sure there are people who have just as challenging a time and worse, but it really gets up my nose when I constantly get it rammed down my throat how inclusive I should be when people like myself are just as invisible and ignored as we ever were. Now we’re at the point where in order to include certain individuals, other people who were included have to be pushed out. That’s not even starting on the impact self ID policies have on disabled people, who have scant enough inclusion afforded to them in the first place.

Instead of this constant branding, why don’t companies and organisations just get on and do their job properly. If they were doing that inclusion wouldn’t even be a thing, because they’d find a solution anyway, they just might not get a round of applause and a pat on the back for doing so.

It’s all about the labels, about the packaging. The idea that there should actually be any substance to things anymore has gone out the window. Good intentions meet the need to make more money, so they get perverted into something that is the antithesis of how they began, but they look pretty, and nobody has the power to question, because how can you argue against such a worthy endeavour? But of course the endeavour is to look good, preferably with the least effort possible, and to be seen to be doing good. Maximum results with minimal thought and effort, basically. It all rings very hollow with me.

There is an inherent tension between 'inclusivity' and boundaries. I draw the line at the violation of boundaries.

Inclusivity has nothing at all to do with a genuine wish to create a welcoming and accessible environment for everybody, it’s a shiny badge to virtue signal and look woke and caring.

Very true. There are very few places - the only ones I can think of right now are the Autism Society and the Picturehouse cinema in Clapham - that are inclusive for autistics. Everywhere else the attitude is: you have autism? Sucks to be you. Now fuck and stop bothering us.

I wrote this about how such political language as ‘inclusivity’, ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ are used to deny us our right to declare our own boundaries.

Hey, Miranda. Nice to see you and I hope you are well.

Badstyley I'm a web developer, sorry about the crappy websites, accessibility isn't exactly high priority most of the time unfortunately and not well known about 

I try to do my best with it but sometimes I miss stuff, the client doesn't fill in the alt text for photos or the design doesn't really allow for the best experience. I have done a site where the client was keen for it to be accessible so I spent ages using a screen reader (Like running a sander over my brain btw) but now said client is terrible at maintaining the site and does things like using pictures for text with no description 

I’m very confused by ‘inclusivity’ work place/school policies.

Doesn’t the current law trump any of these policies at the moment?

Olderthanyouthink
Precisely, inclusivity is bullshit. If it was really an aim they’d be making an effort to include people who have hitherto been excluded, not shoving the wrong kind of people out to satisfy the whims of those who are already adequately catered for.

I’m not blaming you btw, for the lack of accessability. No most people don’t have a clue, and most don’t care to find out. Like I said, invisible and ignored, even when the means are easily accessed and relatively simple to implement.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend passed me a copy of a reply from his female Labour MP. It shocked him.

She believed that TWAW and needed to be included in women's services, in women's amateur sports etc but that there should be stronger protections for 'vulnerable' women through 'guidance' from government and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

She doesn't get it. She hasn't woken up to the grassroots opposition that will push against top-down dictats that seek to destroy the word Woman. She has no idea that parents, and grandparents and other carers and concerned adults, will go to extraordinary lengths to put the rights of upcoming generations of children before 'inclusivity'.

There is going to be a battle. It will hinge on things like inclusivity, freedom of speech, the misuse of the term 'transphobia', and the very definition of Woman. As a MNetter said elsewhere: This isn't a drill!

I've resorted to "fuck inclusivity".

‘Inclusive’ is when you include EVERYONE e.g. women and men can vote, buses aren’t segregated according to race.

sometimes however discrimination is necessary e.g. alcohol only sold to over 18s, disabled parking spaces. There must always be a good reason to segregate. Sometimes it’s to enable a particular group to be included e.g. limit access to disabled loos so that people who need them can use them and aren’t stuck at home.

I would ask any organisation why they are segregating a service or facility. If they can’t explain why they are just randomly excluding.

Badstyley That's what pisses me off so much about this whole inclusivity pretense. If this was really about including hitherto excluded groups, the online consultation survey would have been accessible for instance. But it wasn't.

And the kids at school that are now being taught all this gender bollocks would be spending just as much time exploring disabilities or old age (I mean there are fantastic ressources and tools where you can get an idea of what it feels like). But no. Instead we're virtue signalling where it costs neither time nor money to do so.

ThePrincipal Ask your employer if they intend to include everyone in spaces designated for breastfeeding.

Some spaces and services are designated for a specific group. Making them inclusive discriminates against the people they were designed for.
Thats not inclusive. Its oppressive.

It's very hard to understand why it's legal to discriminate against a woman on the grounds of religion (e.g. can't be a catholic priest), but a woman who would feel uncomfortable sharing a changing room with a man because of her religion apparently just needs to get over herself.

Thanks, Miranda, that link was very helpful. I’ll be making notes and using your points.

By asking the question:

Is it Really inclusive or does it accidentally exclude?

Ask questions. Keep posing this as questions.

Cults are about restricting critical thought. The effect of telling people it's not as inclusive as they thought can trigger a defensive reaction and make people instantly switch off to your point.

Pose it as a question and it has a better chance of hitting the mark. It makes people start the process of thinking. Often even if they don't want to.

Give people pointers and a guide to think their own way out of this.

Thank you 🙏 clever MNers. Really good points, approaches and ways of reframing the word ‘inclusive’. I’ll have those up my sleeve.
I don’t want to become THAT mum or The trouble maker, so I shan’t be confrontational about it, but got lots of ideas to approach this.

Another thing simmering in my mind is, what language can we use to be more assertive rather than defensive (of our rights) in how we talk/right about this. I think this ‘spin’ might be quite important, it’s certainly what the TRAs use...maybe it’s in the male psyche....and we need to do some double think?

Or maybe it’s worthy of a separate thread. Hope I’m making sense.

I don't think I have ever heard of anybody receiving provision for anything because they self diagnosed that they were autistic.

It's possible to argue that the word 'autism' has lost meaning because it now covers too wide a range of diagnoses, but autism has always been a subjective diagonosis.

Even if somebody were 'faking' autism, they would still have to demonstrate that they met the diagnostic criteria for autism.

I'm still waiting to find out what the diagnostic criteria for having a female gender is.

Perhaps share this Times article! by Naomi Firsht, 'I am not a walking cervix or a menstruator. I am a W-O-M-A-N'
(extract)
All of this tiptoeing around the “woman” and desire for inclusivity is done so as not to offend transgender people. As such, the term “womxn” is used because it supposedly includes trans-women in its definition; while any reference to the medical needs of women must be altered to ensure trans-men, who may have the same medical needs, do not feel offended.

Well I’m offended. In fact, I’m appalled. Have any of these organisations casually erasing women thought about how long it took women to fight for a voice in public life? Have any of them spared a moment to consider that women spent years demanding the right to be recognised as women, as a distinct group from, but of equal importance to men? Women fought to not be reduced to their biology. Yet in 2018 we must once again be reduced to menstruation, a cervix, a pregnant person.

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And it isn’t happening to the men. No-one is replacing the word “men” with “mxn” in publicity campaigns, no medical organisations are raising awareness for “people with prostates”.

And so we find ourselves in a situation where a billboard bearing the Google definition of woman as “adult human female” in Liverpool is removed after a complaint that it “makes transgender people feel unsafe”.

Transgender people are, of course, entitled to live free from discrimination and with dignity, as we all must be. But somehow the rights and feelings of this group have been elevated above those of other people.

Today, workplaces are encouraged to use a transgender person’s preferred pronouns and be sensitive to how they want to be addressed. Yet, at the same time, use of the word “woman” in a publicity campaign is considered too controversial.

I am not keen on today’s identity politics which seeks to sub-categorise people into smaller and smaller groups, usually based on criteria you can do nothing about: race, religion, sexuality etc. I prefer instead to think of people in a universal sense, as all in the same category of human.

As such, I had never thought that much about what it means to be a woman. Until the word itself became a bone of contention. The fact is, being a man or a woman is an integral part of how most people define themselves.

Language is important. We use it to define ourselves and to express ourselves. To have to fight to use the word woman in 2018 is a worrying sign of a society that has lost its way. Women get periods. Women get pregnant. These should not be controversial statements.

When the quest for inclusivity means the erasure of half of the population, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong."

threads with share tokens:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3410155-Naomi-Firsht-in-The-Times

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3410156-Im-not-a-walking-cervix

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i-am-not-a-walking-cervix-or-a-menstruator-i-am-a-woman