And I think I'm starting to understand the root of the total failure to even find middle ground.
Women including a fair amount of feminists come at this from a class point of view. My feminism is and always has been about seeing the differences in how women and men are treated and have been treated in the past, all around the world. And (important bit) linking it all up. Even when I was a child and didn't know the word feminism I naturally had this way of looking at it. I could see that some women may be treated better or worse, be richer or poorer, have more or fewer laws protecting them, and be exposed to different levels of violence etc. That they were all women and girls and the reason for what was happening was because they were female and therefore treated in a certain way.
I think what's going on is very similar to the liberal feminism ideas. Where class considerations are discarded and it's more about individuals.
These are the ideas that say things like anything a woman chooses to do is a feminist act, that social pressures and norms bear no relevance to the choices, that sort of thing.
You see this on here all the time. Mainly on threads about grooming and clothes. Any thread looking for a class view, an across the board look, to take a step back and say when did this start and why is it done, just always ends up with a lot of women getting pissed off because they take it as a personal criticism.
I don't understand that, to be honest. But it's obviously taken that way by lots of people.
I think it's the same thing in this conversation.
The words being used are ones that apply to a class. Female woman girl are words that belong to billions of women, are used to describe us, our successes, our difficulties, our oppression. Our needs as a GROUP.
I think others (and I mean the ones like my friend who is lovely and active in LGB activism who is totally TWAW TMAM) see it on an individual level.
I think it's an idea of individual people who (essentially) people who make the arguments like the ones on this thread want to be horrible to for no reason. It's an idea of a TW at work or a TM in hospital who is vulnerable and why would you not do everything to look after them.
And that if an individual woman or girl (female) is at the hospital or etc then of course they will get treated properly because they are the majority.
So when it's said no one is taking your language away etc I think that's the angle they're coming from. And to them it makes perfect sense.
So that's where this issue comes from and I don't see how it can be resolved.
And I think that's why it gets taken so personally and words like hate are thrown around.
Because of the fundamental difference in how you are envisaging various situations. One side is thinking of individuals accessing services. The other is concerned with women and girls (female) everywhere and connects their issues to an underlying systematic oppression that when discussed has nothing to do with thinking about this or that individual.
I know that there are lots of people who have other reasons for altering the language etc. I'm thinking of the kind lovely women I know who would see themselves as feminists.