What broader issues has the trans (lack of) debate opened your eyes to?

[FredFlintstonesTunic]

For me, it's really exposed how large media platforms (i.e., a few very rich and powerful people) can shape public perceptions (e.g., by blocking, shaming, nudging and belittling certain ideas and/or people, and promoting others).

I'm no longer so quick to dismiss other people's unusual opinions, or to label them "conspiracists" without looking as openly as possible into what they're talking about (including from sources associated with intelligent people not necessarily in the mainstream media). I don't trust Wikipedia (or Urban Dictionary) without question (which I shouldn't have anyway, but...). I have more respect for people who are willing to say unpopular things (e.g., left-wingers who don't like the EU). In general, I'm far more likely to take news stories with a pinch of salt.

Anyone else?

Not that I think women are broken but I have surprised myself in some situations when I realised I was subconsciously seeing men as the default human. I think this goes a lot deeper than we realise.

Please don't take this as an attack as I'm trying to make a general point rather than pick on you, but could this, versus not doing this, be a big part of what radfems used to refer to as being woman centered? I don't think I do this at all, if anything I'm more likely to see women as the mental or emotional norm and men as a class as broken in some ways. The world being designed for men in a physical sense has been visible and infuriating to me from childhood. I'm thinking that if you do see men as the default subconsciously, even if consciously you know that's wrong, then your perspective on a lot of issues would be quite different and you'd probably find yourself bristling a lot when talking to radfems.

Woman centred is something I’ll need to read up on but I definitely do not see men as default human. I see the world doing that despite the fact that women are the ones gluing everything together that allows blinkered men to glide through the areas which require facilitation.

I think the issues we see with lack of attainment in boys, rise of incel culture, sex split in 3rd tier education, general dissatisfaction in men under 40, the appalling statistics for men’s mental health could be attributed to the inbuilt mental world model that’s loaded into men and boys that achievements, personal progress and status will just arrive.

Because it did just arrive for every generation of men before them, and it’s still happening for some of them. These blinkered men believe their successes are due to innate superiority. They were actually achieved because the entire system was loaded to exclude other groups from competing. If you stop half the population from getting on the playing field every single space has a man in it.

It has become more difficult to load the system due to pesky Equalities legislation. The number of competitors has doubled. The spaces that were 100% men are not 50% women, far from it but the numbers have changed to include more women and as a result fewer men.

Generations of women and girls have been brought up to know they’ll have to work hard, fight for access to spaces, do it on your own. These women are rightfully taking up spaces, jobs, university places. They are not primed to become a man’s life facilitator.

My suspicion is the backlash and ram raid on women’s rights is men’s anger as a class at their personal losses in a world that is no longer allowed to innately favour them. They are competing with women at work and expected to contribute to the domestic load. They look at the generations of men above them, who achieved greater success, were 100% facilitated at home and think why is it different for me? It must be women’s fault when it’s actually the rebalancing of society towards sex equality. It must be a lot easier to blame women than accept that your class has benefited from inequity and are not innately superior.

That’s so well articulated 2ndStar.. I’ve only quite recently become aware of incels/MRAs etc., and have been shocked and bewildered by the level of hatred for women that seems to exist. I had naively thought that things had got a lot better since I was a young women in the 80s, because on the surface they seem to have. But what’s lurking under the surface is pretty scary - especially for anyone with young daughters. Your post has helped really me understand what’s going on. Thank you.

Though it’s still scary.

It is scary, but the way I see it is, isn't it better to know what you're up against than to have it blindside you?

Thank you. It’s been something I’ve been thinking about for ages, trying to understand where the backlash, vitriol and all the milder versions of anger against women come from. It is scary.

If you strip it back to basics, every single thing that has resulted in legislation to protect women has resulted in a loss for men. They can’t argue against individual pieces of legislation without taking the position that women are not allowed equality, or bodily autonomy and thankfully the progress that has been made would make that unpalatable to most of society, in the UK at least. But they have as a class had their ability to exclude and dominate reduced. With that comes a reduced ability to succeed and achieve status. It’s not surprising they are angry.

In a way, it was the 2 world wars that resulted in the progression of women’s rights. It became impossible to argue that women can’t do something when women have been doing it because men were not available to fill the jobs.

Two generations of women were used (thank you FloralBunting) for essential work, lauded for it, treated with respect for contributing to the country then cast aside at the end of each war. There was even legislation passed to enforce this at the end of the Second World War. A magnificent propaganda campaign was then produced to promote the nuclear family with women at home looking after their families.

The women cast aside at the end of WW2 may have had mothers, aunts, neighbours who had been cast aside at the end of WW1. It’s no wonder that the 60s and 70s resulted in massive activism. Young women supported by two generations of women who were used and disgarded.

You’re right of course Prodigal, but sometimes I wish I’d kept my head firmly under the sand, because I feel quite powerless, personally.

My awakening started with MeToo, I guess. Not so much the revelations of past abuses (because Ive got plenty of my own experiences) but the fact that things don’t seem to have changed that much and in some ways have got even worse. And the reaction of a lot of men (and some women) to the movement have been disappointing, to say the least. How does women speaking out against widespread sexual harassment and assault become reframed as an attack on men?

And now (largely thanks to MN) I’ve become aware of all this trans stuff, which feels like some crazy dystopian nightmare. Aargh. I’m just grateful to the women (and men) who are braver than me and are prepared to stick their heads above the parapet to fight this madness.

Even for straight men, any women that they are not interested in sexually (even if subsciously), they tend to dislike them and treat them with contempt, I think. I've come to this conclusion as I got older, more invisible, and noticeably, men treat me differently to when I was younger and prettier.

So for some gay men who are not interested in women, it's like there's nothing really preventing all that contempt and dislike for women.

This really resonates with me. I've certainly learned through experience that being gay doesn't automatically make a man empathetic to women or women's issues. I was embarrassingly naive about that when I was younger, much in the way that so many young women today are about men identifying as women for ONLY the purest of reasons.

It's a bit like the realisation that men can be rightwing OR leftwing and still be massive misogynists - not such a surprise, with hindsight.

This difference in men’s behaviour based on whether they see a woman as a potential sexual partner is what FloralBunting described as “use”. No use for the woman no reason to treat her as a human being.

@TheProdigalKittensReturn

I'm thinking that if you do see men as the default subconsciously, even if consciously you know that's wrong, then your perspective on a lot of issues would be quite different and you'd probably find yourself bristling a lot when talking to radfems.
Perhaps I didn't explain myself very well. I actually consider myself to be a radical feminist and yet I still sometimes stumble over moments where my subconscious sees men as the default! I find it shocking that that can still be the case, even after years of being a feminist. (And as a child I always noticed inequalities too - I guess I am trying to say we all have blind spots, so how many more must men have if even feminists have them?) I don't think I really understood the first part of the post, what do you mean by being woman centred?

Good post 2ndstar. I used to buy into the naive idea that "feminism benefits everyone" but it really doesn't benefit men. What we gain they lose. I don't know where that particular lie came from - perhaps fear at angering men too much and needing to sugar coat it? Perhaps it helped lead us down this toxic road of "feminism is for everyone" so it's stripped of its core purpose and becomes meaningless.

They're losing advantages that they never ought to have had in the first place, but it's not surprising many of them don't see it that way given that part of what male socialization instills is selfishness.

Yes that’s a great post 2ndStar I’d never thought of it like that, thank you.

The lie was possibly the true statement that feminism benefits society. Probably heard by men as benefits them because they see themselves as society. Plus as mentioned further up, every piece of legislation that stopped women being treated as non-people had to be passed by men to exist.

I think that in each period after a gain feminism has been diluted by younger generations as a natural consequence of their own experiences in a world where change had already happened. Meanwhile the larger scale impacts are rolling on.

A very small subset of important dates
1975 - Sex Discrimination Act
1993 - 50/50 sex split in higher education
2009 - women outperform men in higher education
2014 - the years maternity leave women fought for has been generously changed so it can be shared with men or female partners. Not extra leave for the non-birth parent, zero government cost, an option which creates a new problem for women with abusive partners.

Meanwhile in the background of this time period men are losing out for every woman’s gain, the pornification of society is out of control, women are being deemed as having consented to sexual violence that killed them, and apparently we missed a memo that gave away the word woman that has resulted in regulatory capture and the systemic destruction of every single thing that was only for women. The very things that were supporting the slow progression of equality.

www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=45a5a7f5-ffbd-4078-b0b7-4bfcccab159d

That adults can lie in the way that your 3 year old can look you in the eye, chocolate around their mouth, their hand in the biscuit barrel and swear they didn’t eat the chocolate hobnobs (it was actually the cat who did it- and you don’t have a cat).

yet I still sometimes stumble over moments where my subconscious sees men as the default! I find it shocking

I do this too. It's just that so much of public life is male. It's really hard not to follow how society thinks in general. And I am very much an independent thinker, but still a product of the society in which I live.

Oh and that the Freemasons still exist and protect each other. Edward Lord’s dodgy survey about whether to let TW into all women spaces - carried out for the City of London Corp was met with derision by all who saw it. So biased and amateur was it that it had to be reviewed by a third party firm to check its validity. The firm that won that tender was an ‘impartial’ firm who had never before been involved with analysing survey data and whose only qualification for the gig was membership of a statistical analysis organisation - which you can buy over the internet for 30 quid without having any qualifications or experience in the field at all. Somehow a survey that discarded 50pc of the responses was still found to be valid by this firm with no expertise.

When challenged, the City of London Corp said this group (a two man band made up of ‘mates’ of Edward Lord) had won the survey review work by competitive tender. Lord claimed privately that he had the City Corp CEO and Solicitor protecting him.

All this was reported on Mumsnet and nowhere else. Where the fuck are the journalists on this ?

Adding to the list - that it only needs a small number of people in strategic positions to get guidelines and laws changed to suit them. Those who want those changes to happen will tend to be highly motivated to get into those positions.

Oh and that the Freemasons still exist and protect each other.

The thing with this is that if you get too deep into it you start to feel like you are part of an alien pyramid television documentary.

When challenged, the City of London Corp said this group (a two man band made up of ‘mates’ of Edward Lord) had won the survey review work by competitive tender. Lord claimed privately that he had the City Corp CEO and Solicitor protecting him.

Edward Lord and many prominant TRAs were very open about how they were creating and influencing public policies at the September 2018 conference 'We're Still Here' organised by Jane Fae. Dawn Butler MP (former Shadow Women's & Equalities) was the key note speaker.
The report is important reading:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3398737-We-re-Still-Here-Conference-8th-September-A-report-from-the-inside

Everything everyone else has said and how easy it is for a highly motivated, well funded tiny group of people to manipulate the media, the legal system and the political system to impose their agenda on the public. How pitifully few defenses our democracy has against these tiny lobby groups. How easy it is to marginalise the views of ordinary people and define those views as outside the Overton window of what is acceptable discourse.

And how utterly shit the Guardian and the BBC are. Those bastions I once believed could be trusted to report news and issues with integrity, have really failed and shown themselves to be as easily manipulated and untrustworthy as the Boogeyman Murdoch empire. I agree with whoever said the media outlet is irrelevant, it's the journalist that matters.

I see a lot of parallels in how women are being treated re the trans issue, with the marginalisation of working class voices which eventually led to Brexit and the crumbling of the red wall.

Crumbling of the red wall. Sort of already happened when Jo Swinson lost spectacularly the GE when she refused to say what is a woman.

I think it's been happening for years TBH -since Blair made it clear that he wasn't interested in re establishing jobs which pay wages you can actually live on, in the Labour heartlands. You can coast along for years on goodwill, history and tradition but eventually that capital will be spent.

They're so stupid, they learn nothing.

They've been shitting on women for years and they think our goodwill will never run out, that they're entitled to it and our votes, just like they thought they were entitled to the red wall.

If nothing else, this has shown me how reluctant people are to relinquish their insane ideology even when it's clearly damaging them.

I suspect that idiots like Little OJ actually know they've gone too far down the batshit road, but they have no idea how the hell they can turn back and so all they can do is dig in. It's been an education to witness this behavior.

I realised that I have no acquaintances, friends, colleagues or loved ones who have not been tinged by the stains of misogyny and patriarchy. Everywhere I look, I see the by-products of entrenched male privilege.

My DP bristles at the idea that men as a sex class are dangerous to women as a sex class - though he himself acknowledges that he has never known an adult woman without an experience of physical or sexual violence.

I have lost beloved friends, because they could not or would not believe I was raped - despite having been similarly victimised. And the deafening indifference to my requests for women only spaces from the Police, the NHS and our letting agent (so that not even my home was in violate).

In more than one workplace there was no PPE of a suitable size for me, because at exactly average UK female height for my generation (5'6"), I am still not a default person. Even my phone is too big to truly be comfortable while typing this.