Does anyone else feel that the tone has changed on this board?

[ViceLikeBlip]

This board has been incredibly important to me, especially when I felt like I was losing my mind because no one else seemed to see a problem with self ID, and everyone else seemed to believe TWAW (or, I now realise, everyone else was too scared to suggest they might not believe TWAW).

You guys helped me rationalise my thoughts, and realise I wasn't some awful transphobe, and I've been really grateful to be part of this community. And I really felt like I belonged: we were pro women's rights, not anti trans rights, and we didn't believe that all transwomen are dangerous perverts but rather we recognised that dangerous perverts do exist, and they will readily take advtange of any loophole that gives them access to women.

More than anything, you guys have been an absolute mine of information - facts, stats, latest developments, and you've pointed me in the direction of news articles and twitter rows that I never would have seen otherwise. I'm genuinely grateful for this.

But recently the mood seems to have shifted significantly. There seems to be a lot of open animosity and ridicule towards all things trans. The recent outcry about M&S letting some people put their pronouns on their name badges felt uncomfortably close to clamouring to have M&S "cancelled".

I guess I used to feel like this was a safe space where I was with like minded people, but now I don't think everyone on here can hand-on-heart maintain that they're not anti-trans anymore, and it makes me very upset to see this shift happening (and happening quickly).

Why would you consider it magnificent when it is trans rights activists who reduce women to their reproductive roles and not GC women.

I assume that was sarcasm because that really is a magnificently daft post. I want it framed.

334bu
Was being a bit facetious.

But I'm rather pissed off

@334bu

*I want to take the opportunity to PRO PLATFORM this magnificent post.*

Why would you consider it magnificent when it is trans rights activists who reduce women to their reproductive roles and not GC women. No GC women calls women bodies with vaginad!

This is correct.

But I do love saying vagina loudly & frequently in public.

Especially around my kids.

Me to kid: pop that in the bin for me
Kid: nah
Me: oi kid remember the time you ripped my vagina when you came into the world? Well you owe my vagina so off you trot to the bin because my vagina is still crying from birthing you.
Kid: muuuuuuummmmmmm. Ahhhhhhhhh.

Kid dumps the rubbish in the bin as told.

It’s soooo much fun. Best parenting technique ever!

@TRHR

Totally agree with OP. A few months ago I raised concerns about GC being bad for feminism as it undermines bodily autonomy, choice (e.g. if I want to describe myself as cis and state my pronouns that's up to me), and defines women by reproductive capacity which I find regressive. I got called stupid, classist , criticised for reading too much of the wrong stuff at uni (what feminist position criticises women getting an education?) criticised for not reading enough, for not responding quickly enough, for combining replies instead of individual quote tweets... the gatekeeper is unreal. It's another way to tell women what to do and what to think. It's not a 'discussion board' - stating the 'wrong' opinion is not tolerated.

I remember your thread and you still haven't explained to me why

Adult female deer: doe
Adult male deer: stag

Adult female human: woman
Adult male human: man

is more regressive than being defined as a menstruator, person with a cervix, vulva haver, vulva person, person who bleeds and so on.

I recommend you read this. If you wish to refer to yourself as cis, that's your affair, but you have no right to categorise other people as cis.

A feminist critique of “cisgender” | Liberation Collective
liberationcollective.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/a-feminist-critique-of-cisgender/

I'm not sure, foxgoose. Perhaps it might have been a reference to gendered body parts.

For any newish posters, these boards are strictly moderated and various phrases tend to be deleted.

Woah the thought police are here!

Conform to our ideology or else.
Don't respond robustly or else.
Agree with us or else.
Shut up or else.

The 'or else' being: or else you are nasty, viscious women.

The thought police are pretty UNKIND if you ask me.

I’m infertile and it’s never GC women that weaponise my infertility. TRA however have repeatedly tried to use it to suggest that women who can’t give birth are just like TW.

That anyone would be so tone deaf as to compare my imperfect female biology not being able to do what it is meant to do with a TW who can’t give birth because they are fucking male!! highlights yet again how much this is about what men want and fuck any woman’s feelings in the process

Thought police are never kind

@foxgoosefinch my bad, probably was the l*y d*k
I’ll copy it back here without

Could it be that those who sought to split the board feel their goal has backfired?

I for one feel the tide changing and I’m please there is so many more people aware of the batshit that is scarring our children for life, making lesbians uncomfortable around some people that want them to try ‘genitalia that might not be their first choice’ and push for using hospital female wards or female prisons while rejecting third spaces alternatives.
Kind has a limit and it has been reached. As they say you offer them a hand and ... they take your lame purse 😂🤣

@littlbrowndog

Thought police are never kind

And no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

I saw a woman get attacked on twitter for sharing a picture of her own sonogram. She was told it was transphobic to do so because transwomen couldn't get pregnant.

The person telling her all this and going on about how upset they were was thirty-seven years old.

@TRHR

Totally agree with OP. A few months ago I raised concerns about GC being bad for feminism as it undermines bodily autonomy, choice (e.g. if I want to describe myself as cis and state my pronouns that's up to me), and defines women by reproductive capacity which I find regressive. I got called stupid, classist , criticised for reading too much of the wrong stuff at uni (what feminist position criticises women getting an education?) criticised for not reading enough, for not responding quickly enough, for combining replies instead of individual quote tweets... the gatekeeper is unreal. It's another way to tell women what to do and what to think. It's not a 'discussion board' - stating the 'wrong' opinion is not tolerated.

If I remember your thread correctly, it was about telling people how to feminist properly. Terrified of regressive feminism, wasn’t it?

With remonstrations about people not talking about the topics you, personally, wanted. And telling others what the priorities for feminists should be.

I don’t recall much discussion from you on that thread to be honest. It was pretty much the same theme as this post was.

@Hoardasurass

Personally I have found that when 1 side constantly uses death and rape threats whilst simultaneously crying about being "the most vulnerable " group propped up with long discredited statistics. Claiming that they are "the most marginalised group" when they have stonewall etc al rewriting the law as they see fit and bullying, doxing and silencing any dissent. When calling out a sexual predator is answered with claims of bigotry and victim blaming (wi spa). When girls begin raped in school gets covered up (looking at you louden county) When rape victims who understandably can't handle being around an male born persons are called bigots and told to "reframe their trauma " When lesbians are told by STONEWALL that they are transphobic and no better than racists for their same sex attraction Be kind doesn't work! Calling out the rank misogyny and homophobia that underpins all of this directly and with the ridicule it deserves becomes the only course of action and is being kind to women

Hear hear.

@Articus — just when you try to centre men on the board, mn deletes it and all

Sorry Milady my sarcasm detector is on the Fritz.

I dont post on here often anymore after having to take a long break a number of years back.

I used to be really angry about the whole thing and a bit too wrapped up.
Now I am quite pragmatic about it all, and have faith it will all be resolved eventually.

Now I occasionally come on to chime in with a quick no. It might seem short and harsh but I am not here to debate, just share my view in support and be out again.

For me the ultimate answer is a likely a long yes with a lot of caveats, nuance and conditions, but unfortunately I don't feel we (society) are at the stage yet where people are ready for the long answer discussion.

So until then, as the saying goes; 'if you want the short answer its no'.

So until then, as the saying goes; 'if you want the short answer its no'.
And yes I am aware the short no is likely exclusionary to some groups/ individuals who might get a yes in the long yes discussion.

Honestly, I keep saying that if a woman is keen to call herself a cis woman, I'm quite happy for her to do so, because it means 'I am a woman who adheres to the socially gendered behaviour expected of women, and you can expect me to attempt to shame other women into complying with gendered norms'. Every woman who willingly names herself Cis does all those things, so it's a very helpful label and warns me who to steer clear of.

BTW, Radblr is a revelation. I don't post, I just watch in awe as teens and twenty-something angry, intelligent young women rouse each other out of the stupor they realize they've been soothed into. Some of them have been on Tumblr a few years, and got properly sucked in to the stupidity, and once they realize they've been duped, they're firebrands. It's good for the soul. The site is bloody awful to navigate, like LiveJournal had a baby with MySpace, but once you find the radfems, you never look back.

As for tone change here? Not really. It's not what it was in terms of conversation, and obviously you can thank the TRAs for that. But neither is it the only place you can have the conversation now, which, tbh, you can also thank the TRAs for, because by gaming the guidelines, they forced us to get creative, and do so out of eyeshot. Oopsie.

It's always been robust and bracing. I used to be a simpering mouse, and was radicalized into knowing I could actually make a difference. If that's not for you, and you think we can get anywhere by just being a bit more polite, well, if you'd have been in the ascendancy a few years ago we'd have 'gender identity', a religious concept, as legally supreme over material reality. It's only the very rude, obnoxious women who were prepared to stand on the street and be perfectly polite as we explained exactly what was at stake to people who had no idea, that stopped that happening.

I don't really post here anymore. I'm actually far, far too busy. But I salute the women for whom FWR remains their means of speaking up, and I applaud all of you for persisting, and persisting, and fucking persisting, in the face of such egregious bullshit.

Lemon

Scotland is going a totally different way.

We Scottish women are being redifiened as women

Not women any more

Don’t forget us Scottish women English women !

We are under the heel of misogyny here including our government

littlbrowndog

Total sympathies for the scots. It is fucked and I am not saying its not. I just do think it will get resolved eventually. Its unsustainable for us all to live in a world of double think with no language.

And ultimately I have to protect my own mental health, so I chime in where I can succinctly as possible.

I do think there’s been a change of tone too, because the wheels are visibly coming off some of the gender-ideology juggernaut. A lot of the inconsistencies and holes in it are becoming more apparent - and people are reign a lot of the “never happens” actually happening, so it’s becoming harder to justify.

We still get posters on threads here saying “it never happens” and then when you post a link to it happening in broad sunlight, there are flounces and claims of echo chambers.

And the divisions in genderist ideas are whittling away at the reasons for making a case to the public - ie. if the “born in the wrong body”/“terrible dysphoria” narrative isn’t the dominant one any more, a lot of the case for the whole thing vanishes. Much of the “but they are quiet tortured souls who just want to pee in peace” claims aren’t cutting it now that there are videos all over social media of angry transactivists saying “genital preferences are transphobic” or bashing tambourines in people’s faces and shouting.

And this isn’t anything GC feminists or the public are doing: it’s becoming visible from within the movement itself. TRA posters are continuing to act as though those things aren’t going mainstream and reaching the attention of the public, and (like on the cis thread) still claim that the general public has no idea about all this debate — but they do; ordinary people like my MIL who works in a factory and my mum’s neighbour and so on are increasingly saying “have you heard about this?” And they quickly grasp everything about it.

I think it’s not yet sunk in to many of the posters wedded to all of this, that the public aren’t as stupid as they tend to assume.
Ironically, it tends to be the ones who talk about uni, and how MN is so middle class, (but their lawyer and engineer friends would never engage here!) who haven’t quite grasped that the public aren’t impressed by any of it. The average woman actually is catching on about all this, and isn’t buying any of the “you’re so biologically essentialist it makes me weep to see that you are all so wicked and bad feminists!” stuff.

*seeing not reign! Sorry!

334bu
God, not at all, this shit is mental.

@foxgoosefinch

I do think there’s been a change of tone too, because the wheels are visibly coming off some of the gender-ideology juggernaut. A lot of the inconsistencies and holes in it are becoming more apparent - and people are reign a lot of the “never happens” actually happening, so it’s becoming harder to justify.

We still get posters on threads here saying “it never happens” and then when you post a link to it happening in broad sunlight, there are flounces and claims of echo chambers.

And the divisions in genderist ideas are whittling away at the reasons for making a case to the public - ie. if the “born in the wrong body”/“terrible dysphoria” narrative isn’t the dominant one any more, a lot of the case for the whole thing vanishes. Much of the “but they are quiet tortured souls who just want to pee in peace” claims aren’t cutting it now that there are videos all over social media of angry transactivists saying “genital preferences are transphobic” or bashing tambourines in people’s faces and shouting.

And this isn’t anything GC feminists or the public are doing: it’s becoming visible from within the movement itself. TRA posters are continuing to act as though those things aren’t going mainstream and reaching the attention of the public, and (like on the cis thread) still claim that the general public has no idea about all this debate — but they do; ordinary people like my MIL who works in a factory and my mum’s neighbour and so on are increasingly saying “have you heard about this?” And they quickly grasp everything about it.

I think it’s not yet sunk in to many of the posters wedded to all of this, that the public aren’t as stupid as they tend to assume.
Ironically, it tends to be the ones who talk about uni, and how MN is so middle class, (but their lawyer and engineer friends would never engage here!) who haven’t quite grasped that the public aren’t impressed by any of it. The average woman actually is catching on about all this, and isn’t buying any of the “you’re so biologically essentialist it makes me weep to see that you are all so wicked and bad feminists!” stuff.

Yeah, but this always happened when there was a big story, tbf. Sudden influx of tantrums because the debate, shunted away on here, had broken out of the box into the real world and not gone to plan. That's why you get certain posters rocking up to threads like this, (and I don't mean the OP, btw, for clarity) and trying to sneer or goad, because they're venting irritation.

Of course, those breakouts were few and far between a few years ago. Now, as poor LOJ likes to lament, there are stories in the papers every week, and even the BBC has mentioned lesbians being coerced and not said that it's a jolly good thing that they should do for the good of the LGBTQ+ movement. So if there's been a tone change, it's been due to the sea change off the board, giving more women the courage to speak up everywhere, and the resultant cats-bum-faces from those that aren't getting their way nearly all the time any more.

I know this is never going to be settled to the point we can relax and stop. Women will always need to be vigilant. But honestly? I look at where things are right now in comparison to a few years ago, and I'm in bloody clover.