Do you ever wonder if you're disappearing down a rabbit hole on trans issues?

[MaMaLa321]

For the 1st time, I had a heated discussion with a good friend on this. They firmly believe that my concerns are a marginal issue, compared to misogyny in general, poverty, the climate etc. and that it doesn't matter that politicians are so hopeless at discussing it.
TBH it took me aback - maybe I'm going dotty, but then I think that it really is important. Does anyone else feel this way?

I don't really see this as just about gender ideology, though that's about the most immediately toxic part of it.

I think it's part of a much larger problem around very authoritarian approaches to though, suppression of some of the really important elements of liberal democracy, identity politics and race specialism, the destruction of journalism, creating and imposing false narratives about politics and history, etc.

So no, not small, and likely to undermine all the parts of society we depend on to work out other problems like the environment.

@MaMaLa321

For the 1st time, I had a heated discussion with a good friend on this. They firmly believe that my concerns are a marginal issue, compared to misogyny in general, poverty, the climate etc. and that it doesn't matter that politicians are so hopeless at discussing it. TBH it took me aback - maybe I'm going dotty, but then I think that it really is important. Does anyone else feel this way?

Your friend is absolutely right. This entire board is a rabbit hole, and absolutely does not reflect the concerns, obsessions or beliefs of people in the real world.

Your friend is absolutely right. This entire board is a rabbit hole, and absolutely does not reflect the concerns, obsessions or beliefs of people in the real world.

No, and that’s because of things like this board and its posters. If we all sat back and offered no resistance, there would be zero incentive for the government not to introduce self ID, affirmative medical treatment for children, etc.

But if those things actually happened then it would become a much bigger deal in society.

Why as women do we have to wait for something to become very very problematic for us before stopping it?

I think it's on balance a bigger issue than your friend considers it to be - but it's not something I focus on. I think we all have a finite amount of energy / resources and we are all best placed to know how / where to use them. I take more interest in intersectional issues than about trans issues. But I do find it curious that we've got to a place where politicians can't answer with any clarity what a woman is.

It is not a rabbit hole at all.
I was all for being kind and inclusive. My friends son came out as Trans in his/her early twenties.
Then the JKRowling «cancelling» happened, and I was shocked to find out how all this shit was hurting the sex based rights that are SO important to me. To my children, both my boys and girls, and especially my non-verbal daughter and the care she will need to receive for the rest of her life.
To all women, who need sex segregated safe spaces.

I also got called a terf without understanding why. (To do with Hannah Gadsby and a support group for autistic people). Investigating that and more, I stopped being «kind».

When Sarah Everard’s murder can be talked about by top male officers as pretty much her own fault for not being ‘street smart’, when the integrity of safe single-sex spaces are under such threat - and already breached, when any man can self id as a woman half the week and win top women’s prizes,
That is when we should all have gotten up in arms about it last week!

I am late to the party, but the good things are rather a lot of us seem to be arriving now.

I had to come off Twitter last year. It was too much. I couldn’t help mentioning some of the things I’d seen and learnt. Unfortunately, no one understood and conversation got hostile with a few friends who just couldn’t comprehend anything was wrong.

Some friends brought it up again recently and one asked if she got surgery and changed her name would I not accept her as a man? I said I’d absolutely support you, use your name and pronouns, if that’s what you wanted. But I’d always know you were a woman. If my husband wanted to ‘become’ a woman and have our child call him ‘mother’ and me call him my ‘wife’, I’d feel that was gaslighting and abusive. I certainly wouldn’t accept that he was a woman because he said so.

They were shocked.

All toilets should be unisex! It’s ridiculous they weren’t! They did admit that maaayyybeeee, at a push, trans women shouldn’t be in women’s sports. But women’s prisons were fine, and I had read too many false statistics if I think men and women commit, on the whole, vastly different types of crimes. All criminals were bad! My problem was I was reading too much!

I fucking despair.

They were very much of the belief that this was the same as homophobia and it was shocking for them to know I felt this way. They came to the conclusion that because I had a daughter I was over invested and maybe a tad hysterical.

I did some thinking, more reading up, tried to see it through the lens they did, like I did years ago. But no. Once you see it, you really can’t un-see it.

I had a discussion with a woman. Well educated, intelligent, considers herself politically aware.
Because she genuinely believes in an inner sense of gender, an inner self, which may be separate from the body she has huge sympathy with trans people and sees GC beliefs as hostile and unkind.
We chatted about gender stereotypes but she cannot accept them as a social construct, she thinks they are something deeper than that.
As I hardly ever wear dresses, never makeup, have short hair, zero interest in handbags, shoes etc, I asked if she thought that meant I am not a woman.
She honestly didn't know.
Which wouldn't be so painful to me, except I gave birth to this woman.

Ouuuuuch youkiddingme.

Yes, at first I did see it also as a marginal issue. One that wasn’t as important as many others.

Sometimes I still feel like this. Climate, change, health, poverty, abuse, violence, they all I guess come above women’s changing rooms if I’m honest.

However I am realizing how connected they are. I started to take note when I went for jobs and they weren’t even recording whether I was a biological woman or not on the equalities forms (only self identified gender, not sex). My jobs increasingly mean I have to be very careful what I say. I’d not experienced that before, always had healthy debate.

Then I noticed inappropriate safeguarding issues around children. Things like sex education in schools dominated with gender beliefs, telling young kids stuff that I felt was a safeguarding issue.

And now I feel that facts and science are under attack from, I don’t know how to say, silly hystrionics. I think the world desperately needs truths to remain truths. I don’t think it’s OK for a medical journal to refer to me as a body with a vagina. I don’t want to vote for someone who thinks men have cervixes. I want a compassionate, non-discriminatory world for all, but not one where people tell me what to call myself and call facts lies.

Your friend is absolutely right. This entire board is a rabbit hole, and absolutely does not reflect the concerns, obsessions or beliefs of people in the real world.

I did used to think that perhaps feminism was way too focused on trans issues - that there were ‘better things’ to look at. Like domestic violence. That is true to an extent. Maybe sometimes we should just react but not spend so much energy. I don’t really, but I can feel myself getting sucked in. Sometimes it is good discipline to ‘act’ such as write a letter of complaint, but then don’t think about it too much. Waste of energy.

However to answer the above. I have many younger middle class friends who are very trans friendly or whatever the word is. They don’t get my point.

But I also have many normal I guess friends who are not that up with ‘issues’ with the whole debate, and don’t live in middle class / trans friendly areas. And they have no idea that anyone would call themselves ‘cis’, think the whole pronouns thing is odd, don’t really notice any of this going on but would not tolerate it if it came closer to home. That’s a very large group of people who take not much notice - but if a bloke with a beard came into their little girls changing room in Next would be up in arms.

Yep, this is about far more than just the women's rights thing. That's huge, obviously, but the fact this battle's even happening is just one aspect of a wider problem.

Good, long article on that by Matthew d'Ancona:

The Kathleen Stock case is about much more than trans rights

The campaign of intimidation against the Sussex University scholar is a parable of much else that is wrong with our culture – and a terrible sign that we are becoming cavalier about free expression

Full text has been posted on Ovarit.

I did used to think that perhaps feminism was way too focused on trans issues - that there were ‘better things’ to look at. Like domestic violence.

If we are specifically talking about the impact of domestic violence on women, we need to be able to define ‘women’.

Fundamentally the ability to name sex is a women’s rights issue.

I think you’re completely right Necessary. Yes this is ostensibly about womens rights being eroded andI’m furious about what has and is happening but it is also part of a wider issue. In the 21st century the government, political parties, the nhs, the civil service, universities, the media and many parts of the judiciary have all either accepted or just gone along with something they know is simply not true, that a man can become a woman. They know fundamentally this is impossible and yet they have actively promoted the idea that it is possible.

It feels part of a much wider issue around facts v emotions and emotions coming out on top everytime

I am sympathetic to the argument that fighting patriarchy, if you believe in it, means fighting for everyone who suffers from it, including femme-presenting men who I agree do suffer a particular form of discrimination and violence.

I still dig my heels in at the idea that femme presenting men are women, or that women can be defined as 'those people who are targets of patriarchal violence'.

Of course it directly affects you. You know who it doesn't affect? Men.

It is infuriating also because it re-inforces stereotypes that are really harmful.
That you must be a woman if you like pink and frilly clothing. And worse; what are you if you do not?
If you can read a map, can park in tiny spaces, have interests that are not deemed «feminine», then what?
And the implications of that takes us right back to «don’t worry your pretty little head about these things»-territory. Where women must be Nice, and kind, and timid, and shut up.

TW are TW, and good for them. They have all the human rights as the rest of us. They may not have women’s rights, because they do not belong to them.
They should be treated with respect and dignity, but that is not the same as extending sex-based rights to people of another sex.

The problem is men being violent and that is the issue that must be adressed. TRA’s are men being violent, so will refuse to look closer on that issue until it is forced.

Thank god for this particular rabbit hole. I come here for a dose of sanity, though thankfully I`m noticing, that many more people I talk to are starting to do a tiny swerve away from the full acceptance of the TWAW and all that goes with it, so maybe we are heading up to sunnier plains.