Just had a blazing row with dd

[steppemum]

So, dd is gender non binary, has changed her name and want sot use them/they pronouns.
This is the end of a long process of about 4 years, she is 15.

I am supportive up to a point (she can call herself what she wants)
But I have gently pushed back against the theory behind it, as I am GC.

We have just had a blazing row. She said that 70% of the victims of DV were men.
From a 'very big and respected men's rights group' that have 'proved' that these are correct and that men's rights don't get any media attention, like the poor bloke who died in Australia at the hand of his wife and she didn't go to jail.

I'm afraid I flipped my lid. Lost my temper and gave a a full force lecture about feminism and the oppression of women. Gave a her a load of statistics about number of women killed every week by their partners, about women begging for help with stalkers who then kill them, about the 2 families in the UK killed since lock down began by the MEN, about how as a women she will face, discrimination, glass ceiling, physical danger, etc etc, because whether she likes it or not she is a WOMAN, and women have faced that since the beginning of time, and so no, my heart doesn't bleed for the poor menz. She said in divorce women always get the kids, so I mentioned all the single mums whose feckless partners bugger off and leave them with no money and no support holding the baby.
She gave me a load more fake statistics from her men's rights group. which she can't name.

I am so so fucking angry. I hate the fucking internet.

So, apart from my crap parenting, does anyone know the men's rights group she may be refering to, and can anyone counter these statistics with facts? Not just police report facts, (they are apparently all biased) but does anyone know how I can dig behind her facts to see where they come from?

You can also point out that many of the men that suffer domestic abuse are in same sex relationships.

Also show her the stats for violent crime in general and ask why domestic violence would be different given it's a one on one situation and men are stronger.

What I would concede is that women can be just as unpleasant and emotionally abusive as men but that because men are physically stronger and not left vulnerable by pregnancy and childbirth (also financially) they are often in the more powerful position to enact abuse.

Heyduggee that’s great. Make her look at sites critically and talk to her about manipulation, fake news, lies, statistics and propaganda. Talk about journalism and ethics and let that sink in.

Op if she was born a male and coming out with this, I don’t think you would have had the push back on here.

Parenting isn’t pretty. Sometimes you have to fight the good fight.

If you dont want to directly challenge her beliefs perhaps just show her this website of teenage boys competing in sports against Olympic female medallists.
boysvswomen.com/#/

(Sorry, dont know how to make clicks link on my phone)

When I read it, and read every single race, it was absolutely stark to me the physical differences between men and women (and if you extrapolate that.....)

Spoiler alert, aside from the one or two long distance races, every single race was won by teenage boys - against Olympic females medallists - and in a lot of the races, the Olympians would'nt even have qualified for the teenage boys races. Now tell me that males do not have a physical advantage over females starting from their teenage years. And yes, some men will use that physical advantage against women...

Apologies if someone has already linked to this, but even the Mankind Initiative (an organisation that is obviously very pro-men) has statistics showing that women are far more likely to be the victims of domestic abuse:

www.mankind.org.uk/statistics/statistics-on-male-victims-of-domestic-abuse/

Commiserations, OP, you’re between a rock and a hard place.

Can I suggest a different tack? Don’t try to explain to her what the reality is. The reality is self evident to anyone who isn’t trying to con themselves or others. Try to find out from her why she is so determined to believe these lies. Yes, she’s been brainwashed by internet crap, but she has chosen to seek this internet crap out.

There is always a reason for people to be in denial, and there’s a reason why she is. Perhaps it’s because it’s easier to live with these lies than with the truth that despite the advances of feminism, misogyny is still ingrained in our society and women are still second class citizens in so very many ways, whatever our status in law.

Can you put the focus on listening to her? Ask her why she wants to believe this, what she gets out of it, how it makes her feel? Maybe it gives her an illusory sense of power, a sense that she has more control than she actually does in this fucked up world we live in. Women hurt men more than men do women, yay, I’m safe after all!

And it wouldn’t hurt to spell it out, as often as is necessary, that you are guided first and foremost by a desire to protect her, keep her safe in a world that is often dangerous. And not by some gratuitous need to control her, as it can often seem to teenagers.

Why does she want to believe this? Are there ways she doesn’t feel safe? Are there other worries she has that are feeding into this? How did she deal with puberty, what changed for her? Fitting in with her peers is obviously huge and it’s clearly very worrying that all her peers are subscribing to the same bullshit, so it’s going to be very hard for her to drop it; but the more you listen to her and try to find out what lies beneath this particular “teenage rebellion”, the more she will be free to start using her own critical thinking.

Maybe ask her to find all the articles she can relating to domestic violence since lockdown began...

I hope @steppemum comes back. You're not a bad Mother, in fact teenagers can tend to need reminding that you are a fully actualised person with your own feelings and thoughts. You've probably shocked her by feeling so strongly about this, and made her think twice.

She doesn't "need" to hear it, you want her to understand it. Completely different and not available during a very intense argument.

When you're both at the limits of anger youre both unable to take any argument in. It's not productive. The way to make your non binary daughter aware of female discrimination is not to shout it at her in rage.

Drip drip. Small questions, why on earth is your childs one example of female violence taken from the other side of the world? Ask her why it's news. Is it because it's unusual?

It's hard and its not surprising you reacted, i know I would have done the same.

Try and find common ground.
Yes the statistic that 70% of DV victims are male is obviously incorrect. DV is a bigger issue for women than men because we are most often the victims and killed by it. But, what she was trying to communicate is true- that male victims of DV do exist and are often not taken seriously and are socialised to not report abuse. Maybe meet her halfway and agree with what is true? She wanted a discussion about DV and men, and by switching it to a discussion about DV and women you’ve proved her point- that anytime anyone mentions what about male victims they’re treated to a fire hose of “women have it worse”

Yes we know women have it worse. But shouldn’t a society acknowledge and try and help ALL DV victims? It’s similar to wanting to talk about racist hate crimes against Asians and the person you are talking to exploding and saying they don’t care about the poor Asians because black people suffer far worse from racist hate crimes.

It wasn’t a good thing to lose your temper over this. Your DD strikes me as very caring and open minded to be thinking about ALL victims of DV.

On teaching her how to think critically and evaluate reported statistics (which are often mis-reported or misrepresented by even reputable media sources) a good book is Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Science-Ben-Goldacre/dp/000728487X?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

It is just right for a teenager to read and learn from. I gave it to my DD at 15 when she was telling me obesity presents no health complications and doctors are just “fat shaming”
It really really helped!

Ro

This is the paper cited for the 70% on that wikipedia I linked.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/

I haven't read through the paper, I was just trying to figure out for Op where that 70% figure came from...I can't find anything all saying 70% of victims of DV are male, so i'm thinking someone has seen this on wikipedia and went with that.

i think wikipedia is increasingly MRA and is very poor on women and womens issues.

non binary girls are misogynists ime. youve got an uphill battle op but she'll come through im sure.

I hope @steppemum comes back

Me too heydugge

non binary girls are misogynists

Please explain this. Non binary really means that a person does not identify with either gender (gender being a mass of stereotypes and roles dictated by your sex). How does this make a person a misogynist? Are you saying only cis-gender people can be feminists?

Please explain this. Non binary really means that a person does not identify with either gender (gender being a mass of stereotypes and roles dictated by your sex). How does this make a person a misogynist? Are you saying only cis-gender people can be feminists?

Anyone who thinks there's such a thing as "cis" has sexist beliefs imo. I can't see a way around that.

Thank you for posting the paper

“Methods. We analyzed data on young US adults aged 18 to 28 years from the 2001 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which contained information about partner violence and injury reported by 11 370 respondents on 18761 heterosexual relationships.

Results. Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.”

Interesting....going to read it in full. But it’s safe to say the OPs DD has misunderstood this statistic if she’s going around and saying men are DV victims 70% of the time. It’s really 70% of 50.3%(half) or 35%

I haven't read through the paper, I was just trying to figure out for Op where that 70% figure came from...I can't find anything all saying 70% of victims of DV are male, so i'm thinking someone has seen this on wikipedia and went with that.

Oncewasblueandyellowtwo Thank you for the link, you may well be right.

If its the case then its a good opportunity to unpick with young people & to get them asking questions & developing critical thinking skills.

2007 study
Method:
We analyzed data on young US adults aged 18 to 28 years from the 2001 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which contained information about partner violence and injury reported by 11 370 respondents on 18761 heterosexual relationships.

The paper includes discussion of the limitations.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/

What do you mean by that bluebooby?
“Anyone who thinks there is such a thing as cis has sexist beliefs”?

What beliefs would those be?

The beliefs that there traits, interests and characteristics which are inherently male or female. The belief that your personality can match or not match your sex.

M K Fain
'Non-Binary Is the New “Not Like Other Girls,” and it’s Deeply Rooted in Misogyny'
(extract)
In the summer of 2018 I lived in a house with 3 other women. We spent a lot of time together that year, and there were many late-night conversations about the sexism, misogyny, and male violence we had experienced. We talked about not fitting into what society had expected of women, we stopped shaving together, and we encouraged each other to not be ashamed of our natural bodies. We called rape crisis lines, organized protests, and exposed violent men in our communities. Mitali shaved her head in a defiant act of rebellion against Indian expectations of beauty. Joy became empowered to use her voice to speak up for the oppressed. Miriam* started to confront her religious parents and come to terms with her sexuality. The four of us dreamt of what a feminist world could look like and envisioned our lives free from patriarchy and violence.

Now, one year later, all three of them identify as “non-binary” — no longer a woman.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, non-binary means:

An adjective describing a person who does not identify exclusively as a man or a woman. Non-binary people may identify as being both a man and a woman, somewhere in between, or as falling completely outside these categories.
So how did three feminist women who were bravely defying gender norms and tackling the male violence in their lives suddenly decide they are non-women? (continues)

I mourn for these women who have disowned their womanhood, choosing to run and hide from the oppression of their gender rather than boldly reject its power over their selfhood. To have so much pain, misogyny, and fear inside of you is to live in a constant state of unsettledness, never feeling safe or comfortable. In our last days together, I tried to show them a feminism that rejects gender rather than embraces its lies — but since I am “female” and they are “not” I could not possibly understand their pain. They said I was hateful.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Women and girls should be able to live in a world free from gender and all forms of patriarchy and male violence. We should be allowed to be women and be complex, creative, and whole. We should not have to reject our biological reality in favor of magical thinking in order to cope with the world in which we live.

Non-binary women are a testament to the great pain of being a woman, and the desperate need many of us have to find an escape. At the same time, women who claim to be non-binary throw all other women and girls under the bus. The claim that we are privileged for identifying with the sex “assigned to us at birth” misses the inherent violence in being a female under patriarchy. In some countries, 70% of women have experienced sexual or physical violence from an intimate partner. 137 women are killed every day by a member of their own family. At least 200 million women and girls alive today have experienced genital mutilation, mostly before the age of five. This is why feminists argue for sex-based rights for women and girls. (continues)

The uncomfortable truth is this: saying you are “not like other girls” is not an identity, it’s misogyny. Non-binary-identifying women like to claim an extra degree of oppression over women who they call “cis,” a term which implies that certain women are complicit in their own oppression. But we are not privileged for maintaining an understanding of the basis of our oppression; you are privileged if you believe you can escape it.
4w.pub/non-binary-is-the-new-not-like-other-girls-and-its-deeply-rooted-in-misogyny/

I suppose some people who define gender with terms like cis or non binary or trans AND have conflated gender to mean sex would have those beliefs, but it’s a bit presumptuous of you to assume this when “cis” merely means a person who identifies with the gender stereotypes and roles for their sex.

i agree bluebooty.

'“cis” merely means a person who identifies with the gender stereotypes and roles for their sex.'

Yeeeeesssss, which is why it's sexist as all fuck!

Did you mistype there?

Wow rowantrees.
I can’t give a full response as only have 5mins. But I disagree with the extract you posted. I do not agree that saying you are “not like other girls” is misogyny. If anything, that belief appears to be a desperate attempt to enforce feminine stereotypes and gender roles on girls. That we must all be like each other. Which then means conformity.
Every girl is not like other girls imho. We are all unique. It doesn’t make us any less a woman.

If that is what cis means, then pretty much everyone is trans.