Boundaries (again)

[xxyzz]

I googled and there was a recent thread on here on boundaries, hence the again part of the title, but that one focused mainly on men overstepping women's boundaries by posting on FWR.

I wanted to look at boundaries more generally, as they seem to be key to the whole current debate.

Jane Claire Jones has interesting threads on this eg. twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1329001324864823297

Her posts and others got me thinking - and apologies if this is all really obvious, but new to me - about how the whole debate really centres on concepts of boundaries and whether or not they are acceptable. Hence for feminists, it is natural to assert that women have the right to have boundaries, for example to say 'no' to sex as we want, and to live our lives as we want. Safeguarding is all about ensuring that children's rights to boundaries are also respected and policed, especially give children are too young to be aware of their own rights to say no to to inappropriate things or things they don't want themselves. So feminists have no problem with boundaries. Broadly, we think boundaries are both necessary and good, to keep us safe. They are the protective walls we draw around ourselves to ensure our own autonomy.

Yet TRAs (MRAs) try to present boundaries differently. Hence the term T*. The term 'trans exclusive' only works as an insult because it presumes that excluding anyone - ie drawing boundaries - must be wrong.

I think the difference surely is who is drawing the boundaries, and whether they are in a dominant position or not. So, to use an example where women have been on the other side of the boundary, until recently women were excluded from many all-male spheres, such as universities, all-male clubs etc. Here the boundaries were intended to protect male privilege, not keep men safe, as they were not in any way being threatened, being the dominant class. That was an example of boundaries that were, indeed, exclusive. They could be called 'women exclusive', if we felt like using that term. Most people (certainly on the left) would agree that those boundaries are wrong.

But how have a movement of what is largely, in the UK and US, composed of well-off white, straight, middle-class men, managed to persuade so many people (including women) that women are no longer entitled to have boundaries that keep out out transwomen, on the grounds that (they claim) transwomen are less privileged than women?

And more than that, how have they successfully managed to extend the attack on women's boundaries to even refusing women to have a word to describe ourselves and our shared oppression? Hence all the attacks on the word 'woman' and replacement with words that dehumanise us and refer to our body parts or functions only eg 'cervix haver, 'birthing parent' etc.

Why have so many fallen so quickly for the lie that women are not allowed to have any boundaries? Either theoretical ones like what we call ourselves (cf. also compelled use of pronouns) or physical boundaries involving single-sex spaces, eg the endless arguments over toilets, changing rooms, rape shelters and prisons. Or sexual boundaries eg the cotton ceiling or physical ones relating to who we allow close physical access to, eg. the rights to ask for a female HCP to undertake intimate examinations or medical care. Or job-related boundaries eg women-only shortlists or women's sports.

Put together, all of this adds up to a huge assault on women's rights to have any protective boundaries.

And yet TRAs are still successful in painting women as the aggressors for demanding any boundaries at all!

And yet it is only very recently that rape within marriage has been outlawed, in both the UK and US. It is within the last decade that Jimmy Savile and then the Me Too movement have suddenly made people aware that both children and adult women are entitled to have boundaries against sexual assault.

Explain how the many women (and men) who get Me Too, who oppose Trump's assault on women's rights, can yet accept and even actively support this wholesale assault on women's rights to bodily autonomy and boundaries?

Because I just don't get it.

Meant to say really thought provoking posts btw OP

That's very interesting.

I think you're saying that we only see boundaries as "wrong" when they are drawn in order to protect a dominant position, or to enable exploitation or oppression to continue. This doesn't suggest that only oppressed people have the right to draw boundaries - on this analysis boundaries are permissible where there is no dominance issue in play at all.

For instance when 8 year old girls exclude boys from a game, or vice versa, there is no question of a dominant position being defended: hence our seeing that sort of "boundary" as acceptable. Similarly to go on Brownie camp you need to be a Brownie - that's a boundary, but it's perfectly defensible as the Brownies are not a dominant organisation (surely? surely the Brownies are not oppressive nowadays?).

Similarly when I choose not to consider women as sexual partners, but only men, that boundary is an acceptable one because let's face it having sex with me is not the route to power and advancement.

I agree that that does seem to be how most of us judge whether boundaries are acceptable - and it does make clear that the "no men in the ladies' toilet" boundary is a perfectly acceptable one. Unless of course you consider that women are an oppressor class....

Its a clear attempt by men to reframe lots of perfectly acceptable boundaries, where no power relationship is involved, as being oppressive and exclusionary.

@xxyzz forgot to say, yes, in a way being ‘inclusive’ is generally targeted at the more privileged, that’s what the woke rule book says, TRAs know this and that is why TRAs have created the narrative that women have ‘cis’ privilege and trans are the oppressed victims - it’s basically untrue and a lie.

The other thing about queer theory and post modernism is the reality denial. There is no objective real, only subject ‘lived experiences’ , god I hate that women phrase. Sorry for rambling ....🍷

@persistentwoman

That made sense to me terryleather , But then I have also partaken of

Glad it's not just me, chin-chin!

@LaValliere interesting, however I don’t see that there are good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable boundaries. A boundary is to create and maintain a class or category of thing/people, e.g. you are either a member (or not) of a gym, scouts, hockey club, the sex class of women, citizen of a country. It is just fundamentally USEFUL, aside from good or bad.

*It's luxury beliefs for the middle classes.

It's liberal narcissism where being seen to be "good" and "woke" is a currency that will allow you to progress your career and think of yourself as a good and righteous person no matter what the actual costs to others of those beliefs might be, as it's unlikely you'll be the one sharing a cell with a male with a trans identity for e.g.*

Yes to this Terry

Gncq - thank you. Just failed to get a job, so good for morale to read your comment. :)

I completely get why this boundary-breaking of women's boundaries would appeal to men (particularly dodgy ones) - but why are women falling for it?

Manifestation of the default male concept, I suspect.

The general public still hears "trans" and thinks "male, probably gay, with intractable sex&gender issues." And in their heads they position "female, probably straight, no sex&gender issues" as the comparator.

When people start to notice the plight of the female, potentially-gay, being totally screwed over by sex&gender issues people getting inadvertently hurt, they take note and reassess. But they notice the male manifestation of phenomena first.

Basic human psychological tendency rooted in sexual dimorphism; we're probably stuck with it. But it does mean we have to shout about things quite a bit to get noticed.

And also @HecatesCats. :)

Also fear. Fear of upsetting men. Fear of being accused of terrible things. Fear of being the person who gets it wrong.

Lots of really good points.

Agree about the male default and women needing to shout louder, and also the fear of male violence if one dares to disagree.

And agree to a point with the idea that there's luxury beliefs get-out clause for some women meaning they can afford to ignore the impact on women more generally.

Though I think that lots of those women who shout loudest about the need to centre transwomen are actually going to be impacted by the attacks on women's rights, and will get a nasty shock at some point, particularly young women.

I think young women don't realise how much they're likely to be penalised by an inherently misogynistic system as they age so they're more likely to buy into the idea that feminism has achieved amazing ends to the extent that women are hugely privileged and need to protect trans people

LaValliere - yes, you're right. Thinking about it, it's true that boundaries are allowed by equals or by oppressed classes, just criticised as 'exclusive' when exercised by what are seen to be dominant classes. I see BolloxtoGender's point, that boundaries are in themselves neutral and useful, but we don't live in a neutral world, and in reality, boundaries are often about power relations. That can be - as with Trump's wall, or the confines of a men's club - about who is literally in (inside the boundary) and who is out (the 'others'. Or it can be less tangible. But struggles over e.g. who is allowed in somewhere as unglamorous as a bathroom/toilet, is, at its heart, I think, a power struggle for dominance over that space. Even somewhere as literally crappy as that women must not be allowed to posses. Must not be allowed to use it to flee from the presence and power of men.

Following on from this, thinking about whether there are occasions where boundaries would be frowned on between equals?

I guess following on from LaValliere's analogy of 8-year-old children, an example could be a child forced to share a toy with another child, say, against the first child's will? Where a higher value of 'be kind' suggests that they should share? Or is it that possession of the toy makes the first child dominant and therefore required under the 'be kind' ideology to 'be inclusive'?

I've been reading kathleenstock.com/the-pity-party-on-the-left-2/ for more on the 'be kind' ideology.

So is dominance something that was one has permanently by virtue of one's status or identity, or is it temporary, based on one's current possessions and position? Can lack of dominance be self-identified into? I think we all know the answer to that. In the child analogy, it could be the brutal but cute child pretending to be a delicate little flower to get sympathy from the parent in a fight with the other child.

So the status as victim seems to be something conferred on people largely through self-identification? Though objective differences can count too. But this is why so many abusive men successfully manage to gaslight others into believing that they are the victims of their dreadful ex-wife or whatever.

And yet...women are routinely disbelieved and gaslit when describing our own oppression. Is it just down to the universal truth that Women Are Blamed For Everything? If so, that makes dealing with this pretty tricky... :(

I think if you have to see boundaries through the lens of power (as opposed to what simply IS, i.e. you either are a woman or not, in that class or out ) you can argue that the power at play of the TRAs is to break down the boundary and definition of ‘woman’ as a class that you are born into, to prove that they CAN and have the power to, regardless of reality, whilst they argue that they are the oppressed breaching the boundary and that women need to ‘be kind ‘ and inclusive- which is nothing close to reality.

This all gets very circular if it is just words and not anchored in reality 🍷not sure I’m making much sense.

And yy, HecatesCats, if I was a young woman, I would far rather kid myself I was part of a dominant group than subscribe to the view that I was bound to be oppressed due to a sex I couldn't change!

Hence the astronomical rise in teenage girls transitioning - massively more comforting to believe one is in a position to be in control, than to accept one isn't and will have a massive fight on one's hands to change that. Far easier to buy into the idea one can change one's own body, even with all the dangers that entails, than to attempt to change society! Particularly if conversations have been shut down, so you have no idea there is older female solidarity, or that anyone else is worried about women's place in the world. Or if you have seen what happened to a few prominent women like JK Rowling, and aren't going to risk anyone thinking you're the same.

All this points to the need for female solidarity to be very loud and very overt. We do this anyway, but visibility really matters. Seeing Magdalen Berns gave me the confidence to know that I wasn't allowed in all the ideas I'd secretly thought - and that other women thought the same and weren't afraid to say it (very entertainingly).

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Voltaire quote comes to mind...

But struggles over e.g. who is allowed in somewhere as unglamorous as a bathroom/toilet, is, at its heart, I think, a power struggle for dominance over that space. Even somewhere as literally crappy as that women must not be allowed to posses.

There was an interesting thread recently in which a regular poster admitted that they had always felt jealous of girls having it easy, jealous of their perceived submissiveness and jealous them being 'pampered' and 'privileged'. My interpretation of their motivation in wanting access to female spaces was to validate their 'identity' and to resolve those feelings of jealousy, but also to escape other males, to avoid feeling threatened, to avoid having to compete with other males and having to endure facilities that are treated with disrespect by other males. Viewing women's boundaries as a bar to a perceived and misguided idea of 'privilege' and wanting to access that privilege by virtue of feeling different.

Particularly if conversations have been shut down, so you have no idea there is older female solidarity, or that anyone else is worried about women's place in the world.

Divide and conquer

There is no objective real, only subject ‘lived experiences’

This one always makes me

Objective reality and material reality are not fucking synonyms! The former is a manifestation of a collective dominant ego. The latter is real. The clue's in the name.

And the "we're only women cos that's what we collectively call fanny-people" line leads to the dehumanisation and erasure of all the fanny-people who don't fit the currently-dominant mould.

The entire bloody point of feminism is to expand the socially-constructed definition of "human" to include all females' subjective realities. Which they're really quite spectacularly failing at when they insist their subjective realities are more valid than ours.

Sorry that made little sense to me, I think we are at the point of words and definitions again.

This from Helen Pluckrose I thought is insightful.

Oh, I wasn't expecting it to be understood here, we don't go in for pomo wankery round these parts.

I just get annoyed cos the mainstream kids are butchering philosophy. And the dictionary. Wounds me deeply. Someone pass the

Amen Tyro

I appear to have also been butchering language and don't have the excuse of youth or even as I've not had any.

Should have said: "Seeing Magdalen Berns gave me the confidence to know that I wasn't alone ". Oops.