I was thinking a lot last night about the poster on this thread, and NiceGerbil’s thread on Alison Phipps, which have kind of got merged in my mind, as they both seem to be doing the same kind of thing. In order to make any of this work, they have to reverse the dynamic of oppression between men and women so that they’re arguing that women are oppressing men. So male-bodied people’s fears are much more serious than women’s fears, and women’s refusal to accept this is a kind of oppression.
I do think there’s a denseness to this as well as wilful maliciousness, because it’s rooted in the fact that women’s fears and feelings are regarded as just not really there - a woman articulating them is the focus of rage, because it’s just inconceivable that women really have feelings like real people. They must be making them up, or overdoing it, because they aren’t perceived as there in the first place. Without knowing any of us, a poster can plop in and confidently assert that their trans women friends have faced 10x more misery than any of us ever have. Really? Sure about that?
Meanwhile, children might not as well exist at all.
It’s all very Greek and syllogistic:
Trans women have valid fears.
You are snowflakes.
Your daughters should know not to stare at other people’s genitals in the gym (cf Laurie Penny on the WiSpa incident).
Similarly, the Laurie Penny tweet where she says that pre-pubescent girls should know not to stare at other people’s genitals in the gym because it’s rude, is such astonishing DARVO. I do think - hope - in a few years some of the people making statements like this will look back and be ashamed of some of this stuff. The idea that trans women are so much more vulnerable than everyone else that 9-year-old girls are oppressing and victimising them by not averting their eyes fast enough when confronted with a bare cock, is some of the most egregious stuff I’ve ever seen.
How anyone manages to claim that male-bodied adults are victims of the inappropriate gazes of 9-year-old girls, and still thinks they are on “the right side of history” is beyond me. The cognitive dissonance is astounding! I think they are pretending to themselves we can’t see it. We can though, and won’t forget.