Middle ground

[HDDD]

I've been trying to follow conversations online in regard to gender critical thought, pronouns, selfID, transrights, lesbian erasure etc. And all I can find is extreme views on both sides. Is there a middle ground? Is it here? Is Twitter too toxic? I want to be informed not screamed at.

BickerinBrattle
Thank you for that very powerful update. I didn't know most of it no. It deserves a wider audience that piece. It really speaks volumes in a very clear way about where we are. And it's a powerful call to action to those of us arriving later or those who have no clue whatsoever what is going on/has gone on

That may be the biggest problem in terms of people new to this, there's just so much and most of it is so absurd that a lot of people's initial reaction is that "surely nobody would...", but they have! Multiple times! And then they go "but I mean the government/police/our trusted organizations wouldn't let that" and you're all "the Girl Guides consulted an extreme porn advocate who wants to have the age at which girls can participate in porn lowered to at least 16, so yeah, if you were expecting anything resembling common sense you're all out of luck".

(I appreciate that lots of people with ASD have incredible theory of mind but as a general diagnostic...)

It's a good general diagnostic - but not for a fixed point.

People conceptualise ASD as a fixed point that gets inserted into the system at some point in chronological time. People think of their self, their mind, as a fixed point that gets inserted, and it trips them up.

The incredible theory of mind develops when the cues haven't clicked right and so the person has to consciously figure it out.

When your emotion and your intellect cues are all muddled up and not firing together in a way that lets you slip into a comfortable assertive/responsive dynamic, you have to pick one side or the other to power forward in an attempt to pick up the slack, or you can't find a way to communicate.

Our cues and associations are fucked up by gendered socialisation. We try to find it in the brain and we call it mirror neurons, because we're still searching for the fixed point.

The harder patriarchal violence hits you, the worse the effect on the successful integration of the cues - where 'successful' is 'fitter' in the evolutionary sense.

The younger you are when it starts hitting you, the worse the effect.

The parenting model displayed by the sexed parenting-people (ie all adults) around you compounds the effect. Role modelling isn't about a fixed point. You have to model the dynamic and fix it to the words, or it doesn't click properly.

It's another facet of complex trauma - and you can't see it if you're still thinking of trauma as a fixed point rather than an ongoing pattern of function in the mind.

The ASD tests are picking up aspects of the same phenomenon as the complex trauma tests. They're just using different words for the bit they're both looking at.

The whole "identifying as ASD" thing? Emotionally handicapped by patriarchal trauma, intellect desperately looking for a way to make sense, latches onto computers and reformats itself in their image, in a desperate attempt to make the whole thing make sense - and the whole process legitimised by that absolute twonk who gendered the mind-phenomenon, labelled the male brain as systematising, let everyone link fixed-point ASD-hardware to dynamic computer-software, categorised the whole thing as super-rational and male, and then told us only a certain type of male had that sort of brain.

The sexuality thing - it's the contextual cues and the word cues not matching the internal experience. Cue desperate attempt to reformat brain with words that make sense.

Thanks everyone for the comments about my post. Buried in work at the moment, but when I can take a bit more of a break, I’ll make it into its own thread.

That's good to know Bickerin
It's incredible to see all those events written down in one place.
What happened to Maria brought me here, I was vaguely aware of the other stuff so it's extremely powerful to see it written down.

Great post Tyrotoxicity

It was Simon Baron-Cohen that banged on about male minds. Twerp.

BickerinBrattle
Good piece, really needs spreading far and wide.

The free will people, it's way over my head, but give me a week and I could battle through and understand.... maybe.

BickerinBrattle's epic post is at the top of page 15 to save you looking.

that depends on how many posts you view per page...

Arse, just wrote a big post and it's lost

I have to come back to this.

If anyone has read the affluenza virus, I see so many parallels with how social media is stoking body dysmorphia and identity issues.

How ironically brilliant, some of my post is in this article I've just found.

medium.com/@svenromn/gender-dysphoria-spreads-like-an-epidemic-online-8ab7ee588a5c

There's been a massive increase in flat earthers since 2014 too. Apparently YouTube developed a new algorithm around then which showed similar content next so that you just immersed in an echo chamber of similar films.

BickerinBrattle
Good work.
This is the stark reality, a great one for the lurkers.
It was the Maria case that peak transed me too.

Her attacker was 'Tara' Wood wasn't it?

Tyrotoxicity
It sounds like you're really onto something here. I'll need to concentrate on it a bit.

Barracker
Simon Baron-Cohen that banged on about male minds. Twerp
I will definitely look this one up.

Thanks you lot.

Free will is easy. You think it's fixed points, this one or that one, binary. It's not binary. It's probability. It just feels like free will - you only feel it, you only experience it, it's only real... when you're making a choice.

It's an illusion. It's not a fixed point. It's not a real thing because you define reality as the first three-into-one recursion you emerged into.

If you've got enough positive feedback loops built in, your brain will be able to grasp it. So will your mind. If you're on a doomloop already, it'll break you and you'll have to put yourself back together again.

That's what they tell you to do, when they tell you "you have to process your trauma."

What's processing? Reframing. Rewriting. Changing the words. Finding the words that let you feel the feelings and move forwards instead of being stuck. Stripping the entire system down and realising the problem is in the interface and then reprogramming yourself.

And you can't reprogramme yourself until you stop internalising the badfeel of dissonance+lurch that kicks in and overwhelms your OS and triggers a spiral of intensifying doomfeel. You can't reprogramme yourself until you get over the idea that the problem is a fixed point inside you. And you can't do that until everyone stops telling you you're wrong because your words are wrong, and starts listening.

And then the people who told you to reprogramme yourself tell you the ongoing process of reprogramming and refining along the axis of your trauma is not real, because they're still thinking of gendered socialisation of sexed bodies as being a fixed point that happens to other bodies, because on a very basic level they don't believe other minds are actually real.

What are we trying to model here? What happens when we hit the wall?

The ongoing genderising effect of socialisation on the mind, functions to dampen the possibility of hitting the wall of the body. We're supposed to use it to teach everyone to spot the wall coming and find a way around it together. That's how it evolved, that's why it evolved, that's what it's for.

It's not how it's evolving now though. Because they took control of the words; they control both sides of the process; and they are terrified that if they cede control we will annihilate them because we all teach one another through the gendered-violence cues that, if we hit the wall, someone's going down, and we don't want it to be us, we want it to be her.

That's about the point where you either resolve your fear of death or you hit the wall, get entrenched, settle on your words, and assume a "fixed" identity.

It's not a fixed point.

Furious lurker here just to say, heavens, Bickerin, what an astute and sobering synopsis.

You spell out so clearly many of the ‘real world’ threats and violence against GC individuals who have dared to make their voices heard.

It’s so depressing to think you would be there all day if you did an additional précis in the same vein of the numerous examples of legal action, not to mention the immeasurable amount of online threats, vilification and abuse, pitched against people who have been brave enough to voice their concerns or to protest publicly.

Thanks to bicker for that fantastic post.

Sometimes a picture speaks a thousand words - a video more so - so here's some footage of the masked intruders at the Bristol women's meeting, both blocking the entrances, and trying to burst into the meeting room, where posie, miranda yardley, venice etc were.

But there's also this, from early 2017. The protesting of the Vancouver Women's Library. It peaked me instantly - I was aware of the issues already - but a clearly male person, with a male voice, shouting "I am a woman" at women just switched something over in me.

I don't see how there can be any sort of middle ground, when dealing with individuals like this. Women want to talk, to protect our privacy, our safety, our rights and those of our children - people like this want to rip down our posters, rip down our rights - shout at us that they "are women" and worse.

I would also add that Tara Wood, the transwoman who was convicted of assaulting Maria Maclachlan at Hyde Park Corner, had posted an intention to attack "terfs" on facebook earlier that day, saying they are "worse than fash".

This post was liked by Trans Action for Health in Ednburgh. A directive was quickly sent out after Maria's attack to trans organisations telling them not to condemn the attack. This speaks volumes.

Thanks, Smelbow. Thanks for the thanks; it gives me a little bit of space to strengthen one of the new associations I'm trying to programme in. And it only works because you listened and you told me you were listening, so... thanks.

And cheers to the rest of the vipers, of course. For the words and the wisdom and the patience.

Right. Resistance module is folding back in on itself, lurchwave and biothreat system are realigning and powering down; I did the successful word dynamic edition of the doing-the-thing protocol; all I need now is to appease the sack-it-off protocol, alt-tab out of Self and into the god-circuity, and power down with a nice cup of tea and a sit down.

Oh! That's the thing! Where you do the thing and it's too much and then there's a you at the other end and it slides down the sides of the ribs and then the diaphragm triggers and the head-sides fizz just a tiny bit, because it didn't make you into the bad thing.

The slidey-downy fizzy bit's catharsis, isn't it? That's what everyone was talking about.

Re The video from Vancouver, here's what interests me about that and similar incidents. I don't believe any woman sees that and doesn't immediately realize that a. that's a man, b. not a very nice one, and c. that man is very clearly threatening not only the women he's shouting at at that moment but every other woman in the room and every woman in general with violent consequences if we don't do what he wants. I don't think it's possible to grow up with female socialization and not have your subconscious going "yep, that is a member of the predator class issuing clear and obvious threat signals, and he wants me to know that he's doing it.". The bloke who turned on one of the women on his own side after the attack on Maria at Speakers Corners displayed similarly threatening body language, and in that case you could see the women on his side react exactly as you'd expect. The Vancouver video is a bit of a chaotic mess so it's not as clear.

My question is about the female "allies", both the ones there at the time and the ones who've seen this stuff and who still defend the angry controlling male who's implicitly threatening consequences if he's not obeyed. What's going on with them, psychologically speaking? Are they in denial? Are they totally conscious of the fact that they're capitulating to keep themselves safe and in some sort of fucked up pact with the angry controlling male because they too want to see insubordinate women punished? Stockholm syndrome? Trauma bonding? Some people just want to watch the world burn? What is their motivation?

Because these men are always surrounded by a little troop of enabling women and I don't think we're going to solve this problem without figuring out why those women are playing along. What's in it for them? Some of those women come here to and try to shut down discussions, so figuring out what's in it for them is an up close and personal kind of task whether we'd like to avoid it or not, but it is on a macro scale too.

The female allies is a very interesting question, ProdigalKittens.

Here it is, shown in the (wonderful ) Magdalen video:

I think they do it to stay safe, and to gain male approval. I see them the same as the women who agreed that women should not have the vote, and perhaps the women who bound their daughters' feet.

The particular female ally in the above video actually says "I'm happy for them to hit her" - something I just cannot understand. I don't think I'll ever understand the actions of that woman.

Does she mean she's happy for him to hit Maria rather than her or is this just a malignant person?

I think she says "she's a piece of shit, so I'm happy for him to hit her" - so I think she's happy for "terfs" to be hit.

So impulse to punish insubordinate women and happy to have a violent male on hand to do the job?

I really do think we need to figure this out in order to get anywhere, though I'm sure both the usual monitors and outraged naice people are reporting away as fast as I can type.

Prodigal, good question. Maybe there is a tipping point of wokeness at which female allies abandon any final shred of common sense, fairness or reason? Who knows.

I hadn’t seen the Vancouver library clip before. The lead TRA is reminiscent of India Willoughby screaming “I am a woman, let that penetrate!” on CBB, or the American customer in that gaming store YouTube clip screaming “It’s MA’M!” whilst trashing the place.

It’s so bloody depressing.