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)?

Gosh, some of you have got a lot more patience than me, engaging with this poster.

I am officially here to hand out gin and lemon slices. Tea is laid out in the junior common room for anyone who has had enough and wants a nice sit down. We have sandwiches and cake although I appreciate if you view it through the distorted lens of a dominant viewpoint of total scepticism and you have a worrying, materialistic obsession with cataloguing bad news stories it might appear to just be sardine sandwiches and some soggy crisps. Sardinephobia, I call that.

Oo, no fish sandwiches. I've just had Poirot on the telly and fish sandwiches were integral to the plot and made me feel rather queasy.

the work of about an hour to look at MNWR,

Please stop being obnoxiously goady. It is Feminism and Women's Rights, or Feminism Chat as it is now. Not "MNWR".

It's a bit weird you would happen to just stumble on the feminist board and decide to do some analysis, to be fair. People are strange

No. It is not. It is FWR, a forum for discussing women's rights, and the reason (I'm sure I might have mentioned) trans lives are mentioned here is because the way they are being used to shoehorn destructive wedges into women's rights.

This.

It’s striking that the OP talks so much about hurt feelings, identity and exclusion from the ‘concept’ of ‘womanhood’.

Exclusion is when you have no economic or legal independence, no bodily autonomy, no access to education and no power to vote.

Hi NicolaHare, I see you have returned but not engaged with my questions. I'm really interested in understanding why you hold the views you do, so I'd really appreciate an answer

reposted below for the fifth time for your convenience.

If you want to change minds you need to talk - you know?

Could you give some examples of traits that will help me to identify people with a masculine or feminine gender?

you say I'd also argue that there is a political utility to gender as I define it

what is the political usefulness of gender please?

An explanation of gender as you define it would also be very helpful here

but the ultimate end is worker disempowerment

I think this too but I actually will go a little further - I think it’s about total human disempowerment. Destruction of communities in favour of individuals. Once no one has anyone else’s back, individuals can be isolated and commodified.

The single biggest threat to that is altruistic, common behaviour. So unions, feminism, workers rights, racial grouping, national groupings etc. Feminism is a huge potential threat - imagine if even a fraction of the world’s women united regardless of race, creed and colour, over their common biology.

The aim ultimately is destruction of the ties that bind us. WHY I don’t know. Money? Power?

That's really interesting (if darkly scary) Bowlofbabelfish

it's really notable that many of our recent successes have been achieved via collective action

• holding the labour party to account regarding all women shortlists (ongoing)
• publicising the GRA consultation
• crowdfunding the 'women ask' polling

as just a few examples.

abolish collective action and you render ordinary individuals powerless.

And if immiserated people have no left to turn to, they will turn to the right.

Yep. As you said on another thread recently - it's not this lot winning that we need to fear because they can't win. Reality will reassert itself at some point. What we need to fear is the right wing backlash that will sweep away a lot more than OP and OP's allied idiocracy.

You only see a fraction of my life. I can see only a fraction of yours. The internet accelerates the processes through which we dehumanise each other.

This is an amazing thread, thanks to the numerous clear-thinking, clear-speaking women on it responding to word-salad. (Wanders off to make a winter salad for dinner).

Flitting through as busy right now, but I just wanted to pause on this particular comment above from Nicola.

I don't think you understand women very well. The internet, well, this little corner of FWR (see that F? It's important), does not dehumanise women.

It's actually the reverse.

It's nurtured, grown, fired-up a whole new grass-roots collective of women who are so fed up of being told, yet again, what to think, what to say, what to do, that we're connecting, meeting up, talking to each other in real life as a result.

Whether that's new groups like ManFriday, FPFW, WPUK, LAWS, Standing for Women, or just the group down the pub (yet again, waves to the pub groups )

Very much the opposite of dehumanising.

I don't think you understand us at all.

That must be very frustrating for you.

gendercritter my patience is wearing very thin, I am on my way to the Junior Common Room for a refreshing beverage and slice of sugar filled cake - I'll give the fish sandwiches a miss if it's all the same to you, bleurgh!

It really is an amazing thread, pombear.

So much brilliance. From so many women.

Over and over again I remind myself that the one silver lining about all this is how it’s bringing women together, how it’s leading women to find their voices, how it’s raising consciousness of ingrained misogyny in all sorts of women who wouldn’t necessarily have thought much about it before.

Just a great big 😘 to you all. 🥰😍

It’s striking that the OP talks so much about hurt feelings, identity and exclusion from the ‘concept’ of ‘womanhood’.

Exclusion is when you have no economic or legal independence, no bodily autonomy, no access to education and no power to vote.

There are so many examples where words have been co-opted and redefined to either make them meaningless or rob the people who do suffer with a way to describe their experiences.

I don't blame the op for this, they are obviously just reading from some sort of crib sheet and don't understand or care about the damage they are part of.

But it matters to women.

There is also repeated historical precedent that shows that past a certain point, inequality is both the sign of, and a driver of, the destruction of a civilisation.

Note also that people will put up with an awful lot if they’re physically comfortable. Probably a lot more than they will take it they are genuinely starving, and in fear for their lives.

I can’t remember who said it but someone on here pointed out the other day that it’s not 1984 we are heading to, it’s brave new world. That kind of comfortable but powerless dystopia I’ve always found more chilling than really poverty stricken slavery type stuff. If someone is starving you and there are tanks at the gate, someone, somewhere is going to mobilise and fight back.

If people are fairly comfy, but with that comfort being precarious (cheap consumer goods/food/booze/no job security/massive mortgage debt/student debt) then they are far less likely to rebel and for more likely to conform.

Of course, removing the places where people learn to argue and debate ideas they find repellent helps too: hence the no platforming and the neutering of academia. Oh and a pesky forum where women just won’t shut up? That’s gotta go.

So youve got a populace poorly educated, ill equipped to argue, with a shallow knowledge and cultural base, in precarious jobs, numbing themselves with booze, sugar, consumer goods and reality telly. And ID politics takes care of altruism, class analysis etc.

Stir up inter generational conflict too - all those ‘millennials! The boomers stole your life!’ Articles make me sigh. Don’t blame your granny, blame the elite who are asset stripping the country. Your granny will not live forever. That elite has been entrenched since 1066.

I have to say, for people who claim to be woke, they appear to have their eyes firmly shut.

Oh and let’s add in this call out culture to stifle any non conformity - dare to object, and you’re a bigot,

I think this is why the British are leading the fight back. We have a strong rebellious, pugilistic and non conformist streak. We are eccentrics and we don’t like fascism, fundamentalism or people telling us what to do.

Talking

So much brilliance. From so many women.

Absolutely. I find it really energising and motivating.

The OP thinks this board is a toxic focus on 'trans' issues when, in fact, 'trans' issues has just fired up the focus on 'women's' issues. (Mainly because its premise attacks the fundamentals of women's issues - which is why there's so many threads focusing on that right now - unintended consequences, I'm sure, of the TRA movement!)

Bowl, your rep as the go to for a science take down in deserved. But I think your analysis of creeping totalitarianism should really have its own section to expand upon.

Materialist - right back atcha!

heard a good quote from George Orwell on the radio today

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear

It just seemed apt

I doubt Nicola has watched the other two videos I posted, but I will still post this third one (Women’s Lib in 1970s America):

(Re) watching this (and the one on UK revolutionary feminists I added a couple of pages ago) really draws attention to the fact that we are, right now, grass roots consciousness raising, organising and protesting, just as they were back then.

Revolutionary Feminism > Radical Feminism > GC Feminism.

We really are the second wave of second wave, and I am so grateful that we’ve got here while the OG second wavers are still young enough to be a part of it.

There is something really magical about women sharing knowledge.

Perhaps it will turn out that we really are witches, after all.

Simple. This is the single, most pressing issue facing feminism and women today. Everything else pales by comparison.

Plus, for many, many women such as myself, who have never previously posted on Mumsnet, or anywhere else, about women's issues; this is the issue that has woken us up and radicalised us.