That it's not just what you say, it's also how much you talk about it.

[NicolaHare]

Surprise, another trans thread! But the dynamics of online spaces fascinates me.

Take MWR. Some stats. Feminism Chat has been active since 2010. At this moment 364 pages of threads have been generated. 144 of those pages contain threads that were created or active since January this year. At the beginning of 2018 a significant portion of threads were trans themed and these threads tended to contain the most posts, and the board has only grown more fixated with the topic since then. You have to go quite a ways back to find a page of threads that isn’t 90-95% to do with trans people.

Nowhere else on the site is so obsessed. For example: on the LGBT themed boards you only have to go back 1 or 2 pages to find threads from 2017 and earlier. There aren’t any trans threads in the 1 and a fraction page of threads from 2018 on the politics board. There are, I think, about 2 in the half dozen pages of threads from this year in the currents affairs and news forum. And in 2018, all the education forums combined have generated about 5 trans threads.

This is weird, right? Why is a general feminism board with an overwhelmingly non trans userbase so fixated on a group of people they don't belong to and the issues surrounding them? It would be weird regardless of what anyone in any thread had to say on the subject.

Not surprising, though. Trans sceptical feminism ironically almost always ends up focusing on the transgender question to the exclusion of all other topics that its proponents believe that trans inclusive feminisms are neglecting, and so neglects them to an even greater degree. Honestly, I’m sceptical that they are being neglected at all: it seems to me that conversations about pregnancy, menstruation ect are happening in public view at far greater volume than ever before, taboos surrounding bodily functions are increasingly discarded by the discourse and pop culture, and that when we talk about erasure we’re actually quibbling about terminology, the trappings of language and not the substance of the conversation. To assign a motivation to the common theme on feminism chat of “We are being silenced elsewhere!” a significant part of it might be the catharsis of imagined persecution. “We are saying the truths THEY don’t want you to hear! We are rebels!”

(This interview with a former gender critical trans woman is worth reading. It’s American and several years old, but it describes the many of the other toxic intellectual cul-de-sacs you can observe in MWR. www.transadvocate.com/is-sadism-popular-with-terfs-a-chat-with-an-ex-gendercrit_n_18568.htm)

But to set aside the discussion of substance. Do you think that the mere volume of trans threads in feminism chat is indicative of a kind of transphobia? If it were a forum of straight people talking about nothing but same sex attracted people, even if what they had to say was positive would we not be inclined to see in it's users a troubling insecurity with regards to queerness. If it were a forum of white people talking about nothing but people of colour in the most effusive terms, would we take this at face value or would we assign sinister motives (as the resonance of Get Out suggests many would)?

she concedes your point.

You don't even know what you're saying, how it's coming across, and what it's saying about you and your attitude, do you?

If a trans supporter refers to a trans lesbian, you can bet your bottom dollar he or she is referring to a transwoman.

You are right. However the trans umbrella is so big that I think it also very clearly covers women who are lesbians who identify as trans - whether they identify as male or pansexual or queer.

To be clear I have no problem with anybody identifying as anything as long as it does nobody else any harm. I just think that for health purposes if nothing else it is important that words have meaning.

Thing is, people can assert that gender is assigned by society based on (blah blah insert sexist bollocks about "presentation" here), but the fact remains that if the average person sees a male human dressed in what said person would consider to be a feminine presentation they will correctly sex the person as male. They may then decide to play along with the "presentation" and what they think the person doing it as attempting to convey about themselves out of kindness, or out of an attempt to appease so the person doesn't get angry and create a big scene, but the initial identification of and awareness of the person's sex does not change, and sex is the category that we automatically note and "assign" people to. Some people are attempting to force a switch to "gender" as the primary category, but it isn't working because the ability to discern sex is inherent and overrides all the other superficial cues.

TRAs know this too, I think, they just want it not to be true.

Trying to bully lesbians into submitting to corrective rape certainly is a little bit selfish

Wow, transperson 'identifying' as a lesbian acknowledges it's a selfish impulse to attempt to guilt lesbians into sleeping with male bodies? What deep, helpful self awareness that should be applauded.

Or, you know, should be a baseline thing to know if you're a decent person and the fact that it marks someone out as more 'self critical' of the trans movement is a very good indicator of exactly how much rapey bullshit is normal in the transactivist narrative.

If you want your rapist to be punished by the law you are a carceral feminist which is a bad thing.

Weird how the practice of navel gazing self-reflection always has the practical consequence of suiting the menz, isn't it?

You don't even know what you're saying, how it's coming across, and what it's saying about you and your attitude, do you?

No.

why, when feminists have spent a long time trying to dismantle the prison of Gender, you think it's a very important inner essence that must be slavishly enforced?

Where did I say this?

Thing is, a lot of trans people figure out they're trans through gender non-conformity (hence the complex links between trans and drag communities). If your feminist project is to dismantle the rigid enforcement of gender roles, the lived experiences of trans people suggests that this would lead to more people coming out as trans, and not as CG theory suggest all dysphoric people deciding that they can happily live as masculine women and feminine men.

*GC theory

Weird how the practice of navel gazing self-reflection always has the practical consequence of suiting the menz, isn't it?

Those completely unintended consequences just keep coming!

Holy fuck. What happened to our educational system?

Tragic, isn't it? It's like watching someone insist that the earth is flat because they really really want it to be.

Throw away the key I say #carceralfeminist

Wow, transperson 'identifying' as a lesbian acknowledges it's a selfish impulse to attempt to guilt lesbians into sleeping with male bodies? What deep, helpful self awareness that should be applauded.

Self-reflection is for vagina people, silly! If you have a penis you already know everything you need to know, and it's the vagina people's job to make allowances for how very hard everything is for you.

If your feminist project is to dismantle the rigid enforcement of gender roles, the lived experiences of trans people suggests that this would lead to more people coming out as trans, and not as CG theory suggest all dysphoric people deciding that they can happily live as masculine women and feminine men.

I don't see how this necessarily follows. Feminists want to move away from being hidebound by gender roles. Don't you think that the "rigid enforcement of gender roles" has something to do with why many of these people feel they can't express themselves how they want to?

Can you list some of these masculine and feminine traits OP?

yes, NicolaHare. You are asking that we reframe our understanding of what constitutes a woman or a man. Please could you give some examples of how to identify a woman or a man using masculine and feminine traits?

thanks.

All the essays and discussion in the world cannot POMO away material reality.

People who get pushback for stepping outside sex stereotypes (gender) are not trans. They are entirely normal human beings with preferences and a personality. Feminists and many others applaud and support them. Whilst simultaneously acknowledging the material reality and existence of reproductive sex.

Most of these are spectrums of a kind and if a person falls on the masculine or feminine side for the majority of traits, society usually assigns to them the label of male or female.

Thank you for agreeing that concepts of gender are based on complete and under shit

Masculine or Feminine are nebulous concepts that change over time and have transcended biology.

No they haven’t. A farmer with no rams will not have lambs in the spring, regardless of the ‘gender identity’ of the Ewes.

Wow, transperson 'identifying' as a lesbian acknowledges it's a selfish impulse to attempt to guilt lesbians into sleeping with male bodies?

The word OP used was "concedes". Grudgingly, I suspect, both for the author and the OP.

‘Complete and utter shit.’ Words are so important.

No, you miss the point entirely. You said that we call people male or female based on cultural shifting mores about what constitutes masculine and feminine traits. You haven't demonstrated this assertion to begin with.

Your assumption that gender nonconformity means GC people want masculine women and feminine men as an end goal is where your misunderstanding shows most clearly - I reject the arbitrary category 'masculine' and 'feminine'. I don't want you to look at a woman and think she is 'masculine' at all, because your Genderist thinking has already enforced certain arbitrary things into a binary which I reject.

Hilarious, isn't it? The grouchy, reluctant admittance that OK, fine, maybe it is unfair to try to social justice aikido people into sex they don't want, are you happy now you heartless dream-killing witches?

I still can't get over OP''s theory that 'if a person falls on the masculine or feminine side for the majority of traits, society usually assigns to them the label of male or female.' Lest we forget, the 'label of male or female' is 'assigned at birth'.

How does this work? Or is it just another case of 'gee, the words I use don't need to mean shit'?

I love you AAK! 😁

the lived experiences of trans people suggests that this would lead to more people coming out as trans

I no more care that somebody is trans than I care about whether they become a catholic. It is only relevant when it affects my rights and the law of the country I live in.

Love you too!