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.