I posted this last night, on a thread that got taken down because the topic breached the moderation principles.
It was hard to write, and I don't want it to be lost. So instead of starting anther thread on that topic I'd like to start one on what I think is the underlying reason why 90% of us did not agree that "opting out" of the gender binary is the best solution for the unique problems that plague members of the female sex class.
A previous poster wrote "Some people (mainly women) have been victims of abuse which they wouldn’t have been subjected to if they were men. Perhaps they don’t want to be identified with the difference that they feel caused this to happen to them." which really made me feel heartsick for young women today, who have been cut off from the wisdom and hard won experience of previous generations, and inspired me to write the following.
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As a lesbian in my sixties with a history of terrible abuse, reading this makes me sad for those women and girls who have been tricked by the pervasive genderist dogma into futilely trying to opt out of being female, while still living in the same dangerous world that views vulnerable females as fair prey.
How convenient for a world that abuses children (particularly girls), and women, to have come up with a way of getting victims to ignore the abuse, ignore the imbalance of power that enabled it, and individually attempt to identify "out" of the difference that attracted the abuse, while ignoring the plight of all the helpless, trapped children and doomed women coming along behind them.
Back in the 70s and 80s we women got to talking, in women's circles, in women only spaces. Magical spaces, so safe that words we never thought we'd ever be able to say were spoken aloud. We soon discovered that what we thought was our own, very private, very personal history of incest and sexual exploitation was not, as we had previously though, something that had only happened to us in the entire history of the world, and something we could never ever speak of to another living soul. We were aghast to hear so many other women telling near identical stories, and it dawned on us that, despite what we had been taught to believe, we really were not responsible for what had been done to us. We heard other women making excuses for their abusers, and suddenly recognised that we had been doing the exact same thing. Together we realised that the shame we had been carrying was NOT OURS to bear.
We helped each other to heal, to turn our anger outwards, to take control of our nightmares and change how they ended. We raged, we organised, we spoke out and we had each others backs when we finally went public to shame our abusers. This happens often now, people speaking out about historic abuse, and (thanks to the women's movement) victims can now expect to be treated with respect and consideration, so young women today will have no concept of how traumatic it was to go public back then. Back when nobody spoke about incest and child abuse, except as sick jokes, and survivors (especially the ones whose mental health had been destroyed or whose coping strategies had involved drugs, sex and alcohol) were routinely dismissed as deranged, vindictive, unhinged harpies, falsely accusing respected pillars of the community, and anyway it's all water under the bridge, there are two sides to every story, and least said soonest mended.
We set up women's centres, women's holiday camps and women's refuges. We raised the money, we learnt DIY so that we could do the renovations and necessary upkeep. We held courses to teach other women life skills, so that crushed women who had been controlled by men their entire lives could grow in confidence, sort their own finances, learn to drive, use their own power tools, unblock their own drains, and change their own plugs.
Groups of fierce, organised women are a terrifying force to be reckoned with, we changed the world for the better. Individual women who chose to opt out of womanhood, hoping to secure their own safe future without any consideration for the women and girls they leave behind are to be pitied. Perhaps things would be different if women's spaces still existed, if groups of women had the privacy and security to sit in a circle and take turns to talk from their hearts, and to listen without interrupting, about the things that were important in their lives. The energy of those circles really did raise our consciousness, their colonisation and destruction is a terrible loss. It breaks my heart that girls and young women no longer have access to those magical spaces, and any desire to recreate them is pilloried as hateful and exclusionary.
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So, instead of getting offended by old fogies like myself drawing similarities between the non binary people in 2021 and the people in 1975 who based their entire identity on their Zodiac sign, lets talk about how we can throw a life line to the girls nearing puberty in 2021.
What can we do to build their critical reasoning skills? To help them see through the sophisticated manipulation from advertising and social media that permeates their lives?