Late to the party
But really wanted to address this idea that the current generations are so keen to jump for trans rights because they haven’t fought other rights wars/don’t recall a time when women faced discrimination (badly paraphrased I know).
I’ve lost any hope of eloquence before I’ve started, and I don’t really have the strength to rant at length, so I hope this isn’t lost in translation so to speak ....
I think this is a really dangerous assessment of the difference between generations and their views on this.
I grew up with ‘women’s rights’ being encoded in law. I had it deeply ingrained that we had ‘equality’. That women can do anything men can and so on. It mattered not a fuck to the reality that my girls body was used by men who felt entitled to it. It made no difference to how i was shamed for female biology. It was entirely meaningless when I knew I was at risk everywhere, because I was a girl.
It didn’t matter that I didn’t see any fights for rights in my lifetime, I never saw the results of it either. Being told we have equal rights means fuck all when the day to day reality is that we don’t, not in any real way that I could have accessed. I doubt I have a particularly unusual experience of that.
Being told you have rights when you can’t touch them is a form of mass scale gaslighting. If the reason I was being targeted and abused wasn’t because women didn’t have equal rights then why was it happening to me? It’s a kind of head fuck to be told that women have it so much better, with the legal rights protections to prove it, when your every experience in the world proves it isn’t true. I think I coped by modifying my behaviour to find ways of being safe, but I always remember feeling shocked that any woman wouldn’t need to prioritise safety in this way.
So if my every experience was that my female body was used by men and that at best other women shamed or blamed me for this, looked the other way, or actively took pleasure in it, facilitated it in my mother’s case, then hearing how much better women have it now basically silenced any hope I had of speaking up about my reality of being female. The illusion women had rights basically took my voice away, took away my language, long before this came along.
I coped by adjusting my behaviour, as a false illusion of safety I couldn’t really control. But I expect plenty nowadays would take the experience of being told women have it better these days, while living with their reality that we don’t, and see their body as wrong, identify their female biology as being the problem.
My mother used to be all publicly big on child protection. She’d actively talk about what I should do if anyone ever touched me in front of other people, she’d have me recite things like he touched my vagina in front of others to show she taught me to speak out if I ever needed to. All the while she was handing me over to whichever boyfriend was currently raping me most nights. It was this big gas lights head fuck to ensure I was as well groomed as could be.
I feel a lot like that’s how it must be for the younger few generations right now with regards to trans ideology.
Women don’t have it any better at all these days. We never have. A few laws made no fucking difference to the vast majority of us. We grow up and live with the same misogyny and male violence all other generations do. We might get mat leave or whatever, but the economy is still set up to mean it’s women who will leave work or go part time or not take the promotion after we have kids. The day in day our reality for most of us is no different than it ever has been. All the while we are told women have it better now, we have choices now, we have rights now. But our reality very often says otherwise. Being told we do when we don’t already takes our language from us- the same way my mother took it from me with her little game about how to speak up. So of course our language being further removed by trans ideology isn’t something that sets off red flags for many of us. It’s like this equality illusion (which was only ever given to silence the fight for liberation) has mass-scale pre- groomed a generation to be blind to trans ideology.
If you’re every day reality is being a girl is completely unfair, unbearable and unsafe, all the while your told women have equality and freedom and progress, then where else do you go than to identify it’s your female body that’s what’s wrong. Because how can you even access the language that might enable you to identify and speak up about living as a girl when you already know ‘equality’.
I’m tired and not up to explaining how clear this is to me, how the idea that the support for trans ideology is at all about the need to be woke and fly a flag for some fight falls so far from the truth for so many. Maybe it’s a bit part for some but imho not most by a long shot. Too many of us know that women don’t have it any better at all, without any way to identify why that is or how to speak up or how to fight it because we already have equality (except we don’t, and equality is a useless wet blanket idea that matters not at all in reality-liberation is what would have counted, that couldn’t be wiped out the way equality is now).
We’ve already grown up being gas lit to fuck about being a woman, we’ve already had our meaningful language taken before this current rewriting of words, we are already groomed ready for this predator to make us doing all the running, we are entirely blind to how coercive they are because that’s nothing new to us.
I think it’s so so so important that the support for trans ideology among younger generations isn’t misunderstood as some wide spread identity flaw due to being too far removed from suffragettes. Because I think the way bigger problem is despite everything suffragettes did, all earlier feminism did, hasn’t made real life any better for many many younger women- we’re just told it did- but we still all live as the second sex, only we’ve never had the words to say that as you did because we always had it fed to us that we got it so much better.
God that’s even less articulate than I thought I’d be..... and for the record I’m not that young, not even a millennial, not quite, but I think I still see how they fall prey to this because I had the same lived experience. And I think it needs understood how at risk of this all younger women are, because understanding that is part of addressing it I would have thought.