Is it only white middle class women who are GC?

[Ziegfeld]

I recently summoned courage to have “the talk” with an old friend who is gay. I wanted to know his current thoughts on sex based rights, and I thought (as we are old friends) even if we disagreed we could have a civilised conversation about it.

Unfortunately I think he called me transphobic about five minutes into the conversation when I asked, so if we say let’s have self ID, how do we tell whether someone genuinely believes themselves to be a TW or is a man simply announcing he is a woman solely for the purposes of accessing women-only spaces for bad intent. ( His answers to that were “well we need safeguarding” and “there are hardly any TWs, this isn’t a real concern” and “well ideally we should all just have gender neutral changing rooms”)

Some more things were said by both of us which I won’t go into here because I am sure we’ve all heard them before.

But then he said that it’s only white middle class women (like me) who have a problem with self ID and allowing TW access to women’s spaces. He said that working class women and women of colour have no problem at all with it.

I don’t think this is true - look at Allison Bailey for example. But I would be interested to know what other MNers think. Is this a race and class issue? Or is it that white middle class women tend to have more platforms to speak out than other women?

It’s weird i live in an ordinary place wher everyone goes to local schools. Scotland

Not one I know thinks that men can turn into women

The girls and boys I work with are just mocking it and seeing it as attention seeking

It don’t affect them. They just pass it off as a fad.

And the attention seekers will say they are non binary to, get attention

Oh good, it’s not just my imagination then.

You’ve all said things I wish I had said. But I felt like I was really tiptoeing around, trying not to be aggressive as we have known each other for a long time and I was sitting in his back garden at the time.

He also said “I used to be in the same place as you a few years ago but I’ve actually got to know some TWs now”. He sees them as gentle harmless souls to whom white middle class women (especially “old lefty lesbians” and “awful Mumsnetters”) are being vile. He said that a TW had told him that they weren’t a coloniser but an asylum-seeker… so why wouldn’t I (Z) want to help an asylum-seeker?

The whole thing has actually upset me so much I couldn’t sleep the last two nights. If people I thought I were decent and I liked have so little concern about women’s rights and women’s safety, what hope do we have?

PS I did ask about the transman thing. He said that sexuality was not static or clear cut and therefore he could not rule out being attracted to a transman in the future but it had never to his knowledge to date happened. Which I thought was fair enough, although am not sure if I believe it.

Essentially OP he is looking at it through the eyes of a white male, with no attempt to try and understand why the statement he made might ring true to him, but doesn't actually tell the whole story.

But then he said that it’s only white middle class women (like me) who have a problem with self ID and allowing TW access to women’s spaces. He said that working class women and women of colour have no problem at all with it.

Did you think to ask your dumb arse friend why middle class women opinions didn't count in his mind?

But then he said that it’s only white middle class women (like me) who have a problem with self ID and allowing TW access to women’s spaces

He’s unaware of the number of white middle class males queuing up to give away women’s rights then?!

[quote nauticant]Here's a working class woman's account of what it's like to encounter at the grass roots level the gender identity ideology as pushed by privileged university students:

web.archive.org/web/20180315031511/https:/twitter.com/LucyLoveslife1/status/973852316787933184[/quote]
This. And also Lipstick Alley.

Almost nobody outside certain middle class bubbles buys this shite.

Odds on your friend was told this by a middle class white person. Odds on they were also male.

Ask your friend when he last performed cunnilingus on a man.

The whole thing has actually upset me so much I couldn’t sleep the last two nights. If people I thought I were decent and I liked have so little concern about women’s rights and women’s safety, what hope do we have?

There is hope because of women like Amy Jones who brought the prisons Judicial Review against the UK Government and will carry on campaigning with many others to protect the female prisoners still locked in with dangerous male sexual offenders.

'I was sexually assaulted in a women's prison... by a fellow inmate with male genitalia': Read Amy's story and decide - can it be right to put trans sex offenders in female jails?'
Julie Bindel for The Daily Mail
24/7/2021
(extract)
"Amy would contest this. 'Some female prisoners have been punished for 'transphobic behaviour' when complaining about transwomen being housed among us. It's outrageous. How could they not recognise the danger we were in?

'J is a serious sex offender. This judge's decision is insulting to her victims, to all female prisoners and to women everywhere. At least this case will have alerted the authorities to how dangerous J is.'

Amy believes the outcome of the case is so iniquitous that she intends to continue to campaign.

'I want to train as a lawyer,' she tells me. 'I want to help women who have been unfortunate enough to end up in prison because of the abuse they suffered in childhood and beyond.

'I would never have imagined this; that sex offenders would be allowed to prey on the most vulnerable women in society.'

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9819631/I-sexually-assaulted-womens-prison-fellow-inmate-male-genitalia.html

current thread
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4304592-DM-article-interview-with-female-attacked-in-prison

He’s a man? What’s he got to lose? He can keep his beak out then.

He’s talking out of his arse. (Guess my class and background)

LOL

Does he actually KNOW any working class women (or men)?

It's the other way round. It's an ideology of white, privileged middle class people.

A white gay friend once told me that as a Black woman I should have more empathy for TW and he found my GC views hurtful and harmful .

Oh well. I had to let him know that I stopped caring about the hurt feelings men experience a long ago.

OP your friend is taking shit. As a PP mentioned, we have a lot on our plates plus we know our opinions are not heard or truly valued so it feels exhausting to speak up all the time but many Black women are definitely GC!

Korean Radical Feminists

Sadly a large percentage of my middle class middle aged white friends are sucked in by the TWAW thing but it’s a natural instinct on their part to be kind and discussions highlight how little they actually know about the debate with its differing viewpoints

@Theeyeballsinthesky

OP I would just love your friend to trundle around say for example Boston (the lincolnshire one) Middlesbrough, Chatham (I was born there) & Wolverhampton with photos of alex Drummond, Laurel Hubbard,& Danielle muscato Abd ask them if they’re a) male or female & b) which changing rooms they should be in

He’s living in an utter bubble which he can afford to do because as always none of this affects him

Yep! I saw a news report from Stockport (I think) earlier in the year about plans to make the public toilets in the town centre gender neutral. Local women interviewed for the article said bluntly that they’d rather wet themselves than share a public toilet with a male-bodied person.

The most prominent voices in this movement are middle class and there's a very good reason for that.

If Maya Forstater had been a deliveroo rider we would never have heard of her because she would not have been able to afford to pursue her case.

If Helen Joyce had been a 0hr care worker she would not have written a book because she would not have been able to take a long unpaid sabbatical.

If JKR had been a shift worker at her local chicken shop nobody would have given a shit what she said in the first place.

There are thousands and thousands of very smart GC and/or feminist women who do not have the financial, educational or social clout to make their voices heard. Some speak up and nobody cares or notices, some speak up and lose their jobs and nobody cares or notices, most keep their heads down and who can blame them, because there's no recourse to law if you are poor.

A few brave middle class women are in a position to change the law and change the conversation and brava for them that they are doing this because it will make things better for all women and girls.

Nigerian feminism by twitter.com/sugabelly

feminism.ng/

"A philosophy of women's agency, grounded in truth, and centred on women.

It has become necessary, due to years of derailment and distraction, for feminism, and the focus and goals of feminism, to be redefined.
I’m calling it Nigerian Feminism, because this is the model I think all Nigerians should follow, but really this is universally for all women.
You can also call it Focused Feminism.
In a nutshell: You're not a Feminist if your Feminism betrays women and includes men.

Love, SB

"But there exists among the young Nigerian progressive set, so busy sucking at the teat of popular western movements, a certain myopia to the damage some of the ideologies they parrot do, and how far back women are slipping as they flock to trendier movements.

They eschew the work yet undone because it’s low profile and thankless, preferring to haunt social media where, power drunk on neologisms signalling their in group status, they occupy themselves with boosting their social cachet by scavenging for outrage with which to attack thought criminals.

Theirs is a lurid combination of blind acceptance of anything and any choices that make people feel good, regardless of the impact on women.

Women are merely an afterthought in a frankenfeminism that cares more about how many intersections you can claim to be defending as if they're pins for the collecting.

Never mind over 90% of the imported issues they spend their time talking about aren't even in the top five major concerns facing women in Nigeria."
thread
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4274101-Nigerian-feminism

A white gay friend once told me that as a Black woman I should have more empathy for TW

Great "friend" there implying your relation to womanhood is somehow akin to a male person's, because you're black

My white working class male and female friends also aren’t aware of the complexities of the debate but don’t believe TWAW, they call a spade a spade and believe identity politics are daft.

@ClumpingBambooIsALie

A white gay friend once told me that as a Black woman I should have more empathy for TW

Great "friend" there implying your relation to womanhood is somehow akin to a male person's, because you're black

Exactly. The racism of these people is so entrenched, they can’t even see it.

He said that sexuality was not static or clear cut and therefore he could not rule out being attracted to a transman in the future but it had never to his knowledge to date happened. Which I thought was fair enough, although am not sure if I believe it.

He was telling you that of course he wouldn't enjoy a sexual relationship with a transman but you had to be gaslit into thinking that perhaps he would. Which of course you both know is untrue because he's a homosexual. No real friend would feel comfortable in gaslighting you like this.

They make up a good majority, aye.

Of course not. Sounds like it was just an unpleasant ad hominem way to dismiss you.

Setting aside ethnicity and class, it’s striking that he sees women as uniquely gender critical (and transphobic). Surely this would at least make him pause and wonder why self ID worries women so much more than it worries men? Or are women really so much more likely to be bigots?

@Saltyslug

My white working class male and female friends also aren’t aware of the complexities of the debate but don’t believe TWAW, they call a spade a spade and believe identity politics are daft.

Yes, most people don't buy it at all IME.

Gender ideology has only recently spilled out of universities. An important part of it is befuddling the “uneducated” with obscurantist language and ideas from above. Think Judith Butler.

Within that 'asylum seeker not coloniser' metaphor, men as a class are the oppressive regime that's being fled.

As a man, he's part of that regime: tell him to sort it.

I wonder if maybe to some extent he's drawing on the distorted version of intersectionality that's prevalent among gender ideologists.

Not the version of intersectionality that's about being conscious things like the way oppressions compound each other, such that being, say, a British Asian man who is gay results in a qualitatively different experience than of being either one alone.

Rather, the version of "intersectionality" that means you tot up all the groups you belong to and hold them up on a sheet to prove your most-oppressed status. In that version, being white and middle class is something that plonks you at the bottom of the queered hierarchies, and should be considered a source of shame that means you should shut up even about things that impact you directly.

I can sympathise with the urge to counteract the situation we're in, where the white and middle-class have had a disproportionately loud voice for a long time and in many arenas still do. But to use personal characteristics of (white) race and (middle) class to imply an individual's opinions on something that affects them should be disregarded is… not going to help us all in the long-term.