Meghan Murphy was asked about her uncompromising stance at the Glasgow meeting. And she told us that when she first took an interest in and became active on transgender ideology and legislation, she was being kind and polite and respectful, using preferred pronouns and terms. In response, she was called hateful and transphobic, she received rape and death threats and TRAs tried to get her sacked.
So she decided she might as well be blunt and upfront and brutally honest, precisely because the lack of clarity that comes with pussyfooting around the issue hinders understanding and as Barracker so brilliantly said in Pronouns are Rohypnol language changes perception which changes reaction. To our detriment.
That's why Meghan replied to the STV interviewer's question why she couldn't just be kind and use trans-approved language, that she sees no reason to pander to someone else's delusions, especially not when doing so is harmful to us.
It's not how we say it that is the problem. It's the fact that we say it at all. Nothing but complete submission will ever be enough.
The refusal to acquiesce to the demand that we must suppress our own reactions, our feelings of anger and rage, our despair, sorrow and disgust is an act of defiance. Of refusing to make everyone else feel better even if that makes us feel worse. It is one of the most important steps on the road to liberation.
As a PP said above, when I first became aware that TWAW was not a slogan of acceptance and support but intended as a statement of fact, I too occupied the middle ground. Of being nice and kind and respectful because we must be mindful of the feelings of others, mustn't we?
And I was shocked, sometimes upset and even offended at the uncompromising stance of some of the posters on FWR. And then I finally understood that suppressing my own feelings while pandering to those of the people campaigning to dismantle my rights, was just another instance of providing unpaid emotional labour. At a cost to myself that I am no longer willing to pay.
Especially since this middle ground isn't located in the middle. After thousands of years of oppression, we gained a little ground, claimed it for our own, got small enclaves here and there wrested further from the patriarchy. But the middle? We were never allowed to reach the middle.
And since 2004, most of us have been sleepwalking while the patriarchy once again encroached on women's land. We gave up even more ground by being kind and accommodating, by considering the needs of males identifying as trans before our own. We gave up so much ground that we now stand on the precipice of losing our sex-based rights entirely.
I'm not going to kumbaya to that. I'm not going to censor my rage anymore when yet another entitled man decides that his hurt feelings justify violence against a woman. Not even if other women demand that I must occupy the moral high ground by showing restraint and respect to a violent thug because he identifies as trans. That moral high ground is the edge of an abyss. Being here is not in my interest.
Fuck the moral high ground.
Woman is not a feeling in a man's head. Woman is not a costume. We are born, not worn. After everything I've been through for being born female in a male-dominated world, it hurts my feelings when men claim womanhood.
And I am no longer afraid to say that I find it hugely offensive that a member of the oppressor class thinks he can not only identify into the class oppressed by his own but that by doing so he becomes the oppressed and I the oppressor.
Fuck that shit. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on. If I lived a million years, I still wouldn't have enough time to type all the fuck yous he deserves.
And that is all he deserves. Not my respect, my compassion, my understanding, my empathy or concern. I reserve that for Julie who was utterly brilliant, who hugely impressed my husband even though she went heavy on the male violence and he knows little about feminist theory. He loved that she said she wants to abolish gender. She gave an impassioned speech, she was nothing but kind on the day and it kills me that she and Rosa walked out there on their own where that bastard, that swine, that entitled arsehole was waiting to ambush her. Proving her right.
Male violence. A scourge on mankind. A curse that may condemn us all in the end. And that worm made himself a part of that curse. Knowingly, willingly, eagerly.
So you can fuck right off with telling us to restrain ourselves when discussing such a disgraceful, disgusting, and hateful twat.