Labour have committed to single sex spaces

[flumpetto]

Excluding trans

This is a step in the right direction at long last....

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-trans-women-labour-b1924832.html

As that post from ButterflyHatched was in response to questions I asked, here is my short response, I'll do a longer one shortly.

Butterfly your very long screed could have been summed up far more succinctly as it basically boils down to:

Women are not allowed to have any boundaries that male born people cannot cross, women are not allowed to have anything that excludes male born people and if they try male born people will ignore them and dismiss their reasons for wanting them no matter how well evidenced those reasons are, no matter how much harm that causes to women and no matter how many women are excluded as a result.

Women, understand this: your needs, wants and wishes are an irrelevance and won't be considered or respected.

I'll be back with a more detailed response.

Butterfly we get misgendered all the time. Every time women are called cis that misgenders most women. You are persistently presenting yourself as the only victim here and I don't think you will be able to engage in any meaningful conversation until you look up from your self centered position and see that you are not. Most women are looking for a solution that works for all. You are looking for a solution that works for you. That lack of cooperative working is very stereotypically male. If you want to embrace a stereotypically female position then you have to look at the group needs. Which you cannot decide by yourself. Bug words don't hide this core of communication.

Anyone born with a male body but who says that they are in the wrong body/feel like a woman and then demands (not asks for) free access to all women only spaces, by definition does NOT feel like a woman.

I think if you complain about "misgendering" then you are declaring that it's OK to force women to lie, that it's OK to force women to say things that they believe in good faith not to be true, and to force women to say things that directly act against their own interests.

PS Reaction from doctors to The Lancet saying 'bodies with vaginas'.

www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/music/lancet-accused-of-sexism-after-calling-women-bodies-with-vaginas/ar-AAONNN0?ocid=msedgntp

Notwithstanding the content of the article, I like (not) how MSN somehow manage to categorise this as entertainment/music. Sigh.

Cripes, look at that ratio.

twitter.com/TheLancet/status/1441372277786951681

600 likes.

5.2k comments.

I hope you are paying attention, editors.

I think if you complain about "misgendering" then you are declaring that it's OK to force women to lie, that it's OK to force women to say things that they believe in good faith not to be true, and to force women to say things that directly act against their own interests.

Yes. I do not think people have "a gender", gender is an ever-changing and multifarious thing that everyone, not just trans people, expresses in their own way, whether capitulating to or resisting stereotypes, or maybe a combination of both.

Saying that you "feel" like a woman is circular and makes no sense, you can't feel like a women unless you are one and know what it entails, just as I being a white woman can't "feel like" a black woman.

Saying you have female or feminine "gender" makes no sense as gender norms and stereotypes considered female/feminine change all the time and are different in different places and eras. If you mean you like frilly outfits, make up and heels, fine, you can like those and be a man. If you were a British man in the 1660s or even the 1980s you'd be the height of fashion.

So I can't agree that a male-sexed person is "she" and I can't agree that a few stereotypically female cultural choices make a male-sexed person "she" either. (By that reasoning I'd be a he with my short hair, jeans, big boots and ownership of a power saw.)

That comes from a place of logical reasoning, scientific reality and common sense. The view that I have to call a male-sexed person "she" does not – it comes from unevidenced beliefs. Other people are free to believe them but as they are not based on evidence, they shouldn't be used to control me - aside from the reasonable and legal expectation that I don't discriminate against or harass people. So I won't bully or upset a trans person by telling them what I think, and I'll treat them politely and without discrimination - but if they start forcing expectations onto me, then I will stand up for myself.

EXACTLY as with other unevidenced beliefs, such as religions, Q-anon or astrology. Believe what you like. But in a free society, someone else's belief shouldn't coerce my assessment of reality.

I am totally open to changing my stance on this if evidence comes along that a trans person does in some way change sex. But strangely despite the endless arguing, insisting, claiming victimhood and so on and so on, the trans lobby never provides good, sound, scientific evidence. In fact the more closely you look at the evidence there is, the more it points the other way.

Butterfly, if you are resenting the time you are spending typing, how about getting your point across a little more succinctly?

I was going to write a fuller response to ButterflyHatched but it looks as if they have left the building so I'm not going to waste my time I will let them be damned by their own words.

@PickAChew

Butterfly, if you are resenting the time you are spending typing, how about getting your point across a little more succinctly?

Read/reflect more, screed less?

Exactly, @EmbarrassingAdmissions

The engagement with Butterfly has been a very typical example of the "highbrow" posturing, 'splaining and word-bashing that males often do to females n the belief that they are cleverer and can argue all the silly women into submission. I used to get if from my twatty ex all the time. And all the time, he would get cross and flounce because I didn't take it lying down and actually engaged with his pronouncements and pointed out if they made no sense or explained clearly and logically why I disagreed. That wasn't the plan!

It was an entertaining approach!

Now the silly Keira Bell case is out of the way, time to let the reactionary old women know that they are going to be regulated in future!

What's changed we were asked.

Well, I will tell you a (short) story. While the gender identity movement has been all "mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all", women have got less and less interested in male regulation. I know, what a shock!

@RedDogsBeg

I was going to write a fuller response to ButterflyHatched but it looks as if they have left the building so I'm not going to waste my time I will let them be damned by their own words.

Butterfly has flown - not left - the building.

We are half the country. We will prevail and sense will be seen although
may be not by the Labour party.

Theresa May saw sense and did not go ahead with plans for self ID

@Xenia

We are half the country. We will prevail and sense will be seen although may be not by the Labour party.

Theresa May saw sense and did not go ahead with plans for self ID

Well this is the issue. There is no credible competitor to the Tories. They’re all as horrific as each other.

Oops! Sorry! Wrong thread.
Haha

@Jaysmith71

Well I thought it was clear enough. The Nazi's failure was in part down to their Kinder, Küche, Kirche ideology that reinforced traditional gender roles. The reference to uniforms concerned Hanna Reitsch who was presented with her Iron Cross wearing a dress.

Regards the Holocaust, I have read Martin Gilbert and cannot recall any reference to transgender victims, only homosexuals.

You probably won't have seen them referred to as such, sadly. The term existed at the time, but hadn't seen extensive use; the nazis weren't every interested in documenting and respecting the individual expressions of GNC identities they were murdering.

The German Institute of Sexology that performed the world's first pioneering examples of GRS, held records on the first modern attempts to understand gender identity and even coined the term 'transsexual', was raided by nazi thugs not long after they took power. In the process, the first trans woman to undergo GRS - Dora Richter - was murdered, countless records were siezed, and all of the institute's research was burned in the streets. This is the institution that had issued the Weimar era 'transvestite passes' allowing visibly GNC people to go about their lives without being constantly arrested - the lineage of which lives on in legislation like the UK's GRA and EA2010.

There are sadly organisations that claim that the systematic extermination of LGB and indeed T people in the 30's and 40's didn't include the T, but in light of the nazis having raided, murdered and burned their way through the first institution in the world that actually took the T seriously and attempted to respect the claims of those under its care, took steps to protect transgender people from institutionalised abuse, and even coined their name, this stance is pretty hard to defend.

It's a fascinating, if horrifying, part of history, and so much of our knowledge from that time was lost. The 2010's have repeated a lot of patterns that distinguished the 1920's, including seeing the rise of a reactionary authoritarianism in the wake of a time of austerity and economic depression that awakened forces of activism and social justice. I desperately hope that this time, we can avert it; perhaps the downfall of Trump will herald a time of further positive changes, and the breathless momentum and wide cultural uptake of postmodern intersectional marxist feminism - or at least, whatever follows it - will see us through?

postmodern intersectional marxist feminism

i'm just going to stick with feminism feminism if it's all the same you

the kind that cares about women and girls

It's a fascinating, if horrifying, part of history, and so much of our knowledge from that time was lost.

So the evidence is there but not there, which is why those silly historians all miss it.

Fine

Presentist Bollocks in other words.

...Wiemar drag queens, like the characters noted by Isherwood in I Am A Camera, were cross-dressing homosexuals, which is enough for the Stonewall definition, but not what was understood at the time.

A wonderful example of presentism from this period concerns the Battle of Britain pilot George Goodman, who was named in the 1969 Guy Hamilton film as coming from "Israel," a country that did not exist. He was subsequently correctly identified as coming from Palestine, i.e, the League of Nations Mandate, but because this term now has a compleltely different meaning he has been airbrushed and not mentioned in many rolls including on Wikipedia, or retrospectively redesignated as "Turkish" on his mother's side.

He was from Palestine. Not Palestine now. Palestine then. He lived then. Not now.

Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, should have said.

the first institution in the world that actually took the T seriously and attempted to respect the claims of those under its care, took steps to protect transgender people from institutionalised abuse, and even coined their name,

I thought this institute coined "transsexual" not "transgender". "Transgender" dates for the 1960s I think.

individual expressions of GNC identities they were murdering.
allowing visibly GNC people to go about their lives

GNC is not the same thing as either transsexual or transgender. I am GNC, at least a lot of the time and I'm not trans. So are many people, especially gay and lesbian people, who are not trans. The Nazis may not have liked GNC people - as has been previously explained, they were hot on gender stereotyping and restricting women to domestic roles - but that doesn't automatically mean the GNC people they persecuted were trans.

I agree that the Nazis would have been likely to persecute transsexuals and that make have happened. But since there is a significant overlap between homosexual and GNC, it's reasonable to assume a lot of GNC people at the time were simple homosexual.

The concept of "transgender" is what turns normal GNC-ness into "being trans" - as is happening to many autistic, gay and other GNC girls at the moment. But I don't think that was a thing back then. The Nazi attitude to a "tomboy" would have been to expect her to get back in the kitchen and find a man, not tell her she was trans.

Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, translates as "Sexology."

I love the idea that we know there was evidence but the naughty Nazis destroyed it. Another feature of the Nazis was they were fastidious record-keepers, or we would not have Wansee.

(Funny how they never destroyed that.)

the nazis weren't every interested in documenting and respecting the individual expressions of GNC identities they were murdering.

I feel like you're nearly on the same page. No-one cares about the individual expression of women today who are murdered for not being submissive today, either. They see non-compliant female person, they harass her, beat her and kill her. This is happening across the world today, and saying "I'm a boy really" does not save you. They work on what they see, i.e material reality. The Nazis were surprisingly meticulous about record keeping, so people sent to the camps for not toeing the line, whether that was for being a member of the communist party or anything else, will be on record. This was a regime that took time out in the middle of waging a world war to ban German schoolchildren from being taught a particular style of cursive because it wasn't orderly enough. You'd have to parse the language and philosophy of the time, but you'd find evidence.

Let me note here that there are masses of photographic records of German soldiers in WWII literally letting their hair down and dressing up as women, complete with fake breasts. It was an oppressive, totalitarian era in which women disappeared from postnatal wards, never to be seen again, after being overheard saying their newborn son was going to be cannonfodder for Hitler, but men felt safe to photograph each other wearing women's clothes. Even though they would have had to take the film to be developed to someone else.

It is also known that in the camps, the butchers who styled themselves as scientists tried to cure homosexuality. They kept meticulous records of that too, and modern attempts to turn same-sex attracted boys into straight girls seem to have far more in common with Nazi philosophy than they do feminist aims, especially as the Nazis' main issue with male homosexuality was what it would do to the birthrate (the ongoing effects of WWI) if healthy adult men had relationships with each other. When you consider this context, it is not surprising that Hirschfeld's institute was willing to experiment on Lili Elbe to implant female reproductive organs, and that that was their focus. If Lili's psychological and physical welfare had been the focus, they wouldn't have been going for such high stakes procedures.

P.S. I'm not interested in "intersectional feminism" if it's going to involve white people leveraging black people's struggles against other white people. Black people are not weapons to exploit.