A pleasant surprise

[APleasantSurprise]

NC for this as very outing.

I came across a number of Tweets from a user whose profile described him as a serving officer with the Met. This is the complaint I sent yesterday:

Jon Killen, a emergency response officer in the MPS and LGBT+ officer, is issuing Tweets that I consider misogynist. His Twitter account (@LDNResponseCop) clearly identifies him professionally, so he cannot argue that he's only offering personal opinions. I cannot think his social media presence is doing anything good for the Met. It seems highly unprofessional. Certainly I would have less confidence were I involved in an incident and had to deal with Jon Killen than I would in a generic officer. Please look at what he's saying - and the response from many LGBT Twitter users who find his Tweets offensive. The police must be seen to be impartial.

I got a call from an inspector this morning. He'd gone through the officer's Tweets and agreed with me. He said it wasn't a disciplinary matter as there were no personally offensive Tweets but that the Tweets definitely overstepped the bounds of what a serving police officer should be saying on social media. A conversation was in order and he would be talking to the officer soon.

Only a small step, but I was pleased the Met seems to have taken it seriously.

your hatred of our trans sisters Your priorities are showing there, Zoecb. Only concerned about males who identify as trans, I see. No concerns for females who identify as trans? Trendy feminism, forever entering the males.

Lol *centering, not entering. 😬

Is that a new form of feminism then.

birdsdestiny It may be a slightly extreme branch of feminism.

I know exactly what my words mean thank you and I stand by all of them including the censored ones.

Insisting that transwomen are not women is the evidence of hate and it is rife here. I don’t see how that point could be any clearer. You are denying people’s existence as what they are.

And I have as many transmen friends as I do transwomen friends thank you very much and I care about the nonsense they go through as well. Interestingly Margaret Attwood’s observation of ‘men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them’ maps pretty well onto transpeople as well. My transmen friends seem to have a higher instance of ridicule in their encounters of bullying, while my transwomen friends have more intimidating encounters with risk of violence. As with gender-based violence generally, it’s women who are statistically in more danger. It’s as if the word feminism is acknowledging that women are disproportionately affected by archaic views of gender - fancy that!

I’m just baffled people can be proud of their transphobic views rather than ashamed. Once again I wonder what joy it can bring you to tear others down, especially other women. This kind of thing is exactly why the only partially-informed are reluctant to call themselves feminists.

(Oh, and nothing extreme about a bit of pegging 😜)

Oooh im doing that as i type spartacus

Not such a pretty mug though

Oh please! You asked up thread if any of us had trans friends. If you weren't so new here you'd know tha the answer to that is a fairly resounding yes. It is also possible that an acual trans person is one of the posters responding to you - there are a few and they don't always feel the need to share their trans status!

The problem is that you are were many of us were a few years ago, me included: Be nice, inclusive, transwomen may not actually be real women but it doesn't hurt to include them. We all rubbed along, women pretended not to notice, swallowed their feelings of unease, and nobody rocked the boat.

Then came the TRAs. They changed things dramatically. Some women pointed it out about a decade ago and most people reacted as you are now. But over the last few years thing have changed. Aggressive transwomen have made huge incursions, done much damage to women in female spaces. That is real women being hurt, physically, by men claiming to 'feel like a woman'.

So no. I won't feel ashamed at saying, consistently and ever more loudly, transwomen are not women and cannot be given free access to female spaces. This has to be a discussion, not a fait accompli so shut the fuck up, stop throwing out the insults and threats and start talking.

You see, it is not me, or posters like me, who are partially informed or who should feel ashamed of our views. You may, over the next couple of months, if you stick around and read and try to digest what is really being said here, come to change your mind.

If you look through many FWR threads you will see many posters, me included, post exactly as you are now. So I know some of how you feel, what you are thinking, why you are thinking it. Then you will see a different thread... a lightbulb moment. I wonder what it will take for you. Karen White doesn't seem to have, so what will it take? How many women will be hurt, raped by transwomen, reported in headlines, discussed here, before you will stop seeing any discussion of that as transphobic?

Insisting that transwomen are not women is the evidence of hate and it is rife here.

Material objective reality is not ‘hate’. We don’t need to ‘insist’ anything, it’s factual. Males cannot be women. A woman is an adult human female. You can rant and rage at that all you want, it doesn’t change facts. Feminists don’t prioritise males in their feminism, so I don’t really understand how you can say with any kind of authenticity, that you are feminist, given your disgusting contributions here.,

Insisting that transwomen are notwomen is the evidence of hate-red of women and it is rife - here--.

Fixed it for you

Well you get the gist...

Your amended sentence doesn’t even make sense by the way...

I will absolutely not change my mind and become bigoted, no. Spaces calling themselves female spaces are only truly such if they include all women. I would not feel safe around gender essentialist fundamentalists/extremists who seek to exclude and isolate transwomen, perpetuating the hatred and danger they constantly face. Feminism needs to be intersectional to have a positive effect. It’s no good only arguing for feminism that benefits white middle-class straight women. That is rather throwing all other women under a bus for personal gain. Feminists and women really need to start lifting each other up rather than shaming each other for not being the kind of woman you think they’re supposed to be. Let people live.

Also it’s really unsettling to hear the use of ‘males’ and ‘females’ in their noun form in the kind of syntax I only ever see used by incels :-/

It’s no good only arguing for feminism that benefits white middle-class straight women.

Nobody is doing that. I’m Māori. Many women on this board are lesbian. Many are WOC. None of us are disadvantaged by female only spaces.

Don’t use women of colour and lesbians to support your prioritisation of men.

Your last comment makes no sense at all. It is a load of nonsense.

I know I should grey rock, but I’ll bite, at least for now....
Zoecb is Karen White a woman? Aimee Challenor? Jess Bradley? They all identify as such and if transwomen are women as you claim then they must be. In which case my next question is....how do we keep women safe from these “women” who funnily enough behave exactly like men, right down to the use of the penis as a weapon and silencing other women? How do we protect women as a class from men as a class if we include people who are indistinguishable from those men except for how they choose to see themselves and include them in the group “women” instead?

while my transwomen friends have more intimidating encounters with risk of violence

Have a bit of a think about where that violence comes from, and who enacts it.

I can tell you now, it is not from Mumsnet, nor from radical or gender-critical feminists.

Violence perpetrated on transwomen is from men. And men who see these transwomen as faulty men (not women) who challenge these men's fragile notions of masculinity (toxic masculinity) so much that they need to destroy the person who challenges them.

Women are murdered by male intimate partners/ex-partners/relatives at the rate of, on average, two women a week. Every year - see Counting Dead Women

Male and female are bloody nouns! What the fuck is with the incel shite?

And that bollocks about feminism being white MC etc because it isn't intersectional.. cos it doesn' accept men as being women. Yet more of that word salad!

Feminism doesn't need to be anything. There are many forms of feminism, always have been. GC feminists are responding directly to the known, clear and present danger of accepting your ideology that transwomen are women.

Currently the main brand of feminsim on MN is GC feminism. That has not always been the case. Mainly because women are capable of thinking and responding to direct threats, wherever they come from!

Feminists and women really need to start lifting each other up rather than shaming each other for not being the kind of woman you think they’re supposed to be. Says the peson shouting at feminists for not being the right kind of feminist

Let people live. tell that to the many, recenty documentad cases of woemn being raped and murdered by transwomen. And when you find a recently documented case of a transwoman being raped and murdered by a woman we can talk again...

I will absolutely not change my mind and become bigoted, no.

Funnily enough, I view people who believe that women are nothing more than a wish, a desire or a thought in a man’s head, as misogynistic and bigoted. It ignores the reality of the physical changes, harassment, sexual assault/rape, sexualised view of, and patriarchal control many young girls goes through, before they become full grown females. It removes our right to have our female reality recognised.

Goes = go

Did I miss a tissue referece? Blech!

I’m just baffled people can be proud of their transphobic views rather than ashamed.

Caring about womens rights = transphobia these days. So going by that definition, I am damn proud to be 'transphobic'. God forbid anyone actually consider women (adult human females) at all as thats just awful awful transphobia, and maybe transmisogyny which is of course 100x worse and more common than actual misogyny.

Hate speech indeed, to agree that its impossible to change sex and..well males are male and females are female

Also this is a bit baffling

Spaces calling themselves female spaces are only truly such if they include all women.

Female only spaces are only female only if they only include female people. As soon as you add even one male, the space is not female only. Obviously.

I am also wodnering which definition of 'trans' you use? As Stonewalls actually covers half the women on this board. And often, it turns out when people argue so passionately they think trans means transsexual, which it really does not anymore, hell even transsexuals are transphobic if they do not want to shit all over womens rights.