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.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

A friend of mine coined the term Macho Ma'am for a certain type of individual and I think it fits well.

[quixote9]

this earlier: Would BickerinBrattle be willing to start a new thread with that post? I'm not sure how to reframe it but the post really does highlight why women get pissed off at being asked to "be nice"

It's far too good a post to be lost within a thread.

Another vote massively in favor!

[Aberhonddu]

Macho Ma'am is brilliant 🤣

[zebrasdontwearbras]

I just re-listened to it. Special mention to:

"I've known women who need refuges, and the last thing they need in women's refuge is fucking men"

"A transphobic hate crime?! Well, it probably is, because what fucking isn't?!"

I'm left utterly astounded that this man - someone who says "feminism killed the family" (no it didn't ) gets it - yet, so many proper SJWs and academic women, politicians etc - especially so many lefty men - just don't.

[zebrasdontwearbras]

god sorry - wrong thread. That should have been on the Posie thread.
Pls ignore.

[Mxyzptlk]

zebrasdontwearbras it's so ridiculous that someone squawks about their pronouns, while trying to force their way in.

[2BthatUnnoticed]

[just a cautionary note re MM - I used it the other day and got deleted and warned, twice.. and BB I agree with the others re your post!]

[Tyrotoxicity]

I really do think we need to figure this out in order to get anywhere

We have done. We're doing it. Right now. I've done it and I'm consciousness-raising on it.

They call it woke, we call it consciousness-raising. Same thing, same direction - the direction is away from the status quo, and both 'sides' are being very narrow in their focus. So it doesn't click, because the words refuse to click, because people refuse to accept that they could ever click.

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

Flip it.

The impulse to dominate is curbed by the feminising effect of the socialisation process.

The impulse to dominate is intensified by exactly the same process being externalised into the space in the brain waiting for the dominant thing to come along and click into it.

The dominant thing in the emerging sensorium of the mind is the father. The bigger, male-sexed body. The one that's been having its capacity for empathy and emotion and nurturing hampered by its own position in the four-dimensional web of the socialisation matrix.

The emerging mind comes out of the mother just as the body does. The "mother" box in the emerging mind gets the primary nurturer slotted in there via the clicking together of associations and cues and emotions and words and milk and skin-to-skin and all of it.

And the mind identifies the pattern - of domination/resistance or assertive/receptive - and it steps into the picture every time it meets an edge, a boundary, another mind/body/interface phenomenon. It steps into the picture by assuming a role in the dynamic and forcing the other to join in.

It learns that it's fine to dominate, until you meet an edge. And then the superior force wins.

The socialisation process is supposed to train the emerging mind effectively enough that everything clicks well enough, so that the babymind will survive and birth a babymind in its turn.

That's how minds evolve.

We have to check the dominance urge by reframing it.

To reframe it we have to step back.

We have to step out of their story. It's theirs, and women don't win it.

Humanity doesn't win, if we don't force ourselves to step out of the story.

We rewrite it by rewriting ourselves, and we rewrite ourselves by rewriting our children, in a recursively evolving feedback loop of bodies and minds and interfaces, and some of us are doing okay and some of us seriously need to reverse the polarity, but all of us need to be doing it better. And we need to be doing it with our bodies and our words and our feelings and explaining the story as we do it so it clicks in our children.

That is how we fix it.

Not by arguing over who's right and who's wrong. It's the dynamic that's fucked. So we change it.

And we do it slowly enough that we don't push hard enough for them to set up the next great missing link for archaeologists to discover and wonder over and tell a story about that strange evolutionary dead-end with the wider hips and the smaller brains.

Eyes wide open. Click the words together.

You've got it all already, Kittens. You just have to trust yourself, and flip it, and step out of the story. And then rewrite it with your body and your mind and your emotions all at the same time so it clicks.

And then dare to say the words aloud.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

Look, mate, we're not talking about whether or not I get it, we're talking about the handmaidens, who clearly don't.

Being splained at as if this were our first time at the analysis rodeo is also a bit annoying.

[birdsdestiny]

I would never have supported violence but in my twenties I shouted TWAW as loud as the rest. Now that was 20 years ago so we were talking about transexuals then but I think the reasons for my capitulation are similar to what is going on today. I didn't give one though to the impact on women, I didn't really give one thought to feminism, in a sense I didn't need to, I had no children, I was doing well in my career I could get what I needed by playing the game. I was running around volunteering for an HIV charity, volunteering for a charity that supported women never even crossed my mind. I think most young women centre men, it makes life easier it is only later on you realise the cost, to other women, of that decision. It's nothing new, in fact it's quite tedious in its predictability.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

There's a strong element of bait and switch to what's happened. Many women thought they were saying yes to sharing their toilets very occasionally with someone like Blaire White. If they'd realized they were then going to be expected to share their toilets with Karen White the answer would have been a near universal no right from the beginning.

[birdsdestiny]

It wasn't just yours to give away, you were thinking in the same way I was.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

I think we all assumed that trans meant wants to get rid of penis, until we realized what AGP is.

[ArnoldWhatshisknickers]

We used to distinguish between transsexual, vanishingly rare, homosexual, no penis, and transvestite, sexual fetishist, keeps penis, best avoided.

[Tyrotoxicity]

Thank you, Kittens. We're demonstrating the dynamic and avoiding the wall. I hope it's helping some of the lurkers; it's definitely helping me.

Because it's, y'know, reprogramming me.

I do think pronouns are important, btw. The fact that our language has collapsed all the second-person pronouns in on themselves makes it harder for everyone to communicate. Mainly because we've been robbed of the ability to whack in a simple, strong, verbal cue that ensures whatever's being communicated is being attached to the right bit.

We're trying to correct for this when we say "you (general you)," and we have to do it because "one" became inextricably linked in our heads to the thing-that-is-more-powerful-than-this-thing, via the existence of the royal family and the fact that men use it to distance themselves from the possibility of triggering an emotional mismatch (rooted in theirs being stunted relative to ours through the gendered nature of the socialisation process.)

No one uses one, because it marks you as one of them. So we invent yougeneralyou and youspecificyou and yousingular and youplural words to make up for what has been taken, so we can still keep socialising each other.

And because 'one' marks you as 'one of them' in the listener's head, the word itself creates the distinction and causes one to dehumanise and demonise the other.

If one's principle pronoun is "me" then one get accused of navel-gazing. If one's principle pronoun is "you" then one get accused of antagonism - because that's how the brain has learnt over time and experience to interpret it.

And that's why we incorporate the computer language. No one understands the computer intuitively, so we all check our egos for a moment and realise we're not in a right vs wrong story. And it nudges everyone around us to start refining the story in their heads towards making you and me into we.

But the computer-words were linked to the masculine-dominant-other words in everyone's heads already, and so the people who have been denied the access that would let them intuitively understand how the computer-words are being fitted together in this particular instance, can't connect to it.

(I'd quite like a word to use when indicating Kittens that allows me to transmit "more experienced than this one, wiser than this one, trusted by this one, receptivity engage:ON." I don't know what the word is to make the right feeling of rightfeeling trigger in anyone else though. What's the single word I use to trigger "this one likes the way that one is doing socialisation-process towards this one and this one would like the three-in-one thing we have become to continue" in someone else's head? And when we find the word, how do we stop men from turning it into the bad-thing-other?)

[ArnoldWhatshisknickers]

No one uses one, because it marks you as one of them. So we invent yougeneralyou and youspecificyou and yousingular and youplural words to make up for what has been taken, so we can still keep socialising each other.

I'm not sdure I agree with this.

I've never really investigated usage of the specific as opposed to general 'you' so am unsure how common 'one' ever was for example, but certainly plural 'you' is still commonly used. 'Youse' in Scots and some forms of American English or 'you all' in other forms of American English are standard.

In fact technically 'you' is the plural, it's the singular 'thou' that's been lost, but English English speakers seem to have been getting along just fine without it for generations.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

Again, we mostly assumed that what we used to call transvestites would never be included into the group "people we're expected to accept in toilets", much less the group "people we're expected to accept in the changing room at the swimming pool". I mean, Emily Howard worked as a character because the behavior was universally recognized as being both something that of course some men would do and something that society as a whole agreed that they ought to be prevented from doing, past a certain point. But then bait and switch number 45365475676 happened and suddenly Emily was a real woman too, you bigot, and actually a much more vulnerable woman than you are, you privileged cissie, and the whole thing was so absurd that most people were left just sitting there going "wait, what? surely this can't be happening".

I suspect that much of this was planned out a long time ago and gradually rolled out in stages in a quite deliberate manner, and that although MN would certainly delete any attempt to list those who're most likely responsible in the UK those of all who've been paying attention all know who they are.

[birdsdestiny]

The decision to let transexuals into female spaces was an enormous error, but we couldn't possibly have been expected to realise that at the time.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

Can open. Worms everywhere.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

There's a particular British TRA who in my head I always refer to as Skeksis. If you've seen the Dark Crystal and the individual in question you'll probably be able to guess who it is but, again, itchy fingers on the delete button at HQ.

Anyone raised in the prey category recognizes a predator when they see one, it's just that some of us have been socialized hard to pretend we don't see it because admitting you see it isn't nice or kind.

[littlbrowndog]

There was for sure kittens. A plan for this.
Someone here poste a whole post to a secret meeting she attended. Where the plans were laid out

I can’t rember who it was

Wish rowan was still here she would know