Young TRA women and their motivations

[LittleWhingingWoman]

So I don't understand where young women in particular left their lived understanding of men behind in favour of drinking the "Be Kind" potion.

Have they never experienced sexism? I'd find that hard to believe. Do they think if a man puts a skirt on he magically becomes a girl?
It's almost like they don't grasp what is going to happen to them. Do they think that TW are their allies?

It's incredibly bizarre.

@secretskillrelationships Would you listen to anyone who thought you were stupid, naive, lacked critical thinking you're referring this to how these tumblr/twitter posters think about GC feminists or older women by this aren't you? Or do you mean it's absolutely fine for the derision and contempt to go one way, and everyone else has to listen and be told they are wrong? How can there be a right/wrong about which sex bears children etc?

Tribalism has a lot to answer for. You see it everywhere on here - these people are good ergo their views on x must be good and if someone else believes y instead they are automatically bad. Add in a healthy dose of internalised misogyny, ageism, and the fact that many teens are being brought up to believe we're the 51st state and its hardly surprising that young women want to stay far away from the demonised "TERFs".

I just don't have the niceness in me to pretend that when someone's said something dumb, they've not said something dumb. The idiot friend I referred to above said she thought we needed to break sport down into multiple categories to recognise the gender spectrum. The doormat I referred to told me that whilst she didn't disagree with JKR she disagreed with the manner she went about saying things as it hurt feelings. I'm sorry but I'm too old to be patient with that nonsense. I don't think we get anywhere by pretending there is any validity to those believes.

The other thing of course is that men protect men, but they don’t indulge young men in saying nonsense. My male colleagues are pretty brusque and straightforward in putting younger men or any students in their place and telling them why they’re wrong if they come out with daft stuff.

But women are always expected to coddle others’ feelings and coax them towards enlightenment - especially younger women - in case being told the truth alienates anyone. And not just being told the truth; but specifically told it by a woman which is somehow regarded as terribly injurious to the psyche. If young people think they are so progressive, why do they still seem to believe that it’s older women’s job to mother their egos?

One young woman told me recently that she believed that the “most important role” for feminist women these days was to “bring men to the table” — as always, women are meant to be there doling out the metaphorical suppers and coddling the poor men (and enbies?), but this time even the young women think this is progressive.

I think they have many hard life lessons to learn, unfortunately,

@PermanentTemporary

A lot of girls understand very well what it's like to be excluded from the 'in crowd' and are just as likely to experience bullying by other girls as from boys. They may have male friends who were bullied for being gay. They don't like seeing people excluded or judged for the way they look.

I can disagree with them about sex and gender while still understanding this viewpoint. It's not rocket science, surely.

But surely understanding what it's like to be excluded from the 'in crowd' would make you less, not more, likely to pile on and exclude people on social media?

And surely it's boys, not girls, who might bully boys for being gay? so no reason to pretend women are bullying them?

And where would they even imagine that we want to exclude males from women's spaces because we don't like the way they look? I don't object to big masculine-looking women, who are just as female as I am. I object to any man intruding in women's spaces, no matter how small and feminine-looking he is, and regardless of whether he's wearing make-up.

Women are still subtly socialised into being a collective mother for all society. They sometimes misplace maternal caregiving behaviour onto the wrong people (often the adult men in their lives).

When ones caregives like this, there is a tendency to view the recipient are terribly vulnerable, just like one would regard a small infant, even if the recipient is a perfectly capable adult. There is no shortage of people who will take full advantage of this, and those people don't get what they want, they can always try a bit of #bekind at them.

A lot of them will not have heard of, or experienced enough shit yet to make them think. Others will simply bend to whatever wind blows the hardest. It is simply easier to submit to the strongest, most dominant narrative in their social groups.

This why the whole #be kind thing is so corrosive to younger women.

4thwavenow.com/2019/03/20/tumblr-a-call-out-post/

This fabulous piece by detransitioner Helena demonstrates just how much young people involved in social justice (as so many are) police themselves and each other.

But surely understanding what it's like to be excluded from the 'in crowd' would make you less, not more, likely to pile on and exclude people on social media?

Not always, I don't think.

Some people who aren't very insightful might respond by themselves piling on and excluding those they perceive to be the baddies.

And then there is also the desire to be seen as the good so you won't get excluded again yourself.

@georgarina

They're told it's the right way to think and don't question it because that would be wrong. Disdain and hateful names are given to those who do question, and it's perceived that the only ones against it are 'privileged white Karens.' Women's equality isn't on-trend so it's not seen as a priority - there's more focus on entitled women needing to be kind. Also, statements such as "hormones remove all physical differences" are treated as fact.

In my experience from being at uni not too long ago and having TRA student siblings.

As the mother of a 22 year old transitioning daughter I find this a really interesting insight into the TRA movement and how young females can hold hateful feelings towards GC older women and feel good about doing it at the same time - solving the cognitive dissonance by calling us privileged white Karens. I also think that when I was a student and with my contemporaries, experimenting with daft ideologies, Marxism, anarchism etc. the lecturers treated us with the amused contempt we no doubt deserved. Now they are applauded and supported in their ludicrous beliefs by the so called adults in the woke -captured universities.

As the mother of a 22 year old transitioning daughter I find this a really interesting insight into the TRA movement and how young females can hold hateful feelings towards GC older women and feel good about doing it at the same time - solving the cognitive dissonance by calling us privileged white Karens.

This is part of the issue with 'cis' labelling. It positions biological women as the privileged subset of 'women,' with trans women being the marginalised subset. Framed that way, it's easy to see biological women as unkind and exclusionary, rather than fighting for the preservation of their rights and identity.

@Aroundtheworldin80moves

Because their Trans friend is nice Because they are fortunate enough not to have experienced abuse/assault (and hopefully they never will) Limited life experience

Overall... they are naive.

This. They’re useful idiots.

@nightwakingmoon What strikes me in that Tumblr piece is that men are still called men, but the word women always has to have a label or prefix attached. It's astonishing how blind they are to the misogyny.

I think its social media tbh.

my SIL is TRA, she thinks facebook is a news source. On a personal level, i feel like she identifies with their sense of exclusion. I believe a lot of trans people feel like they don't fit in and are highly depressed and to a certain degree, every teen feels like they don't fit in. But in the past, we dealt with it in other ways but now changing your gender is apparently a coping mechanism! Younger people are more likely to feel like they don't fit in, and so they are more sympathetic.

I am in my 20s but I feel like even though I don't have a great deal of life experience, I know for a fact that changing your gender is not going to solve any mental health problems you have.

also think that when I was a student and with my contemporaries, experimenting with daft ideologies, Marxism, anarchism etc. the lecturers treated us with the amused contempt we no doubt deserved. Now they are applauded and supported in their ludicrous beliefs by the so called adults in the woke -captured universities

That’s quite condescending. What is not a ‘daft ideology’ in your eyes? We learned Marxism (critically of course) and we also considered feminism and it’s history and theorists. Both still play important parts in my own analysis of the world.

From their perspective, the older generations represent everything that’s wrong in the world from climate change, to racism and homophobia.

This is actually just really ignorant though. However, I suppose we can't blame them for the crappy state of the education system.

@nightwakingmoon

The other thing of course is that men protect men, but they don’t indulge young men in saying nonsense. My male colleagues are pretty brusque and straightforward in putting younger men or any students in their place and telling them why they’re wrong if they come out with daft stuff.

But women are always expected to coddle others’ feelings and coax them towards enlightenment - especially younger women - in case being told the truth alienates anyone. And not just being told the truth; but specifically told it by a woman which is somehow regarded as terribly injurious to the psyche. If young people think they are so progressive, why do they still seem to believe that it’s older women’s job to mother their egos?

One young woman told me recently that she believed that the “most important role” for feminist women these days was to “bring men to the table” — as always, women are meant to be there doling out the metaphorical suppers and coddling the poor men (and enbies?), but this time even the young women think this is progressive.

I think women are their own worst enemy here, because the majority of the time when you get people in the workplace or academia or whatever complaining about this kind of straight talk from older people, it's female workers and students. The supposed feminizing of academia in order to make it more amenable to female students was largely about making it less adversarial.

I had a discussion this week with DD about insurance for new drivers, and the fact that young women drivers are in general safer drivers compared to young men. She was extremely resistant to the idea of generalisations along these lines, even though in this case there is statistical evidence.

There are many situations where it is not helpful - and is indeed prejudice or bigotry - to make assumptions about particular groups. So it may not feel natural for a younger woman to think in terms of men as a group, as opposed to specific individuals who behave in unwanted ways.

Once you have children yourself (or reach the stage where having/not having children becomes a consideration) you cannot avoid the fundamental differences between men and women, which reach beyond individual behaviours or circumstances. And then the GC viewpoint becomes crystal clear.

@KoalasNext15km Some facts are not convenient or pleasant, but they're still facts.

But what about Emma Watson? She understands feminism and has experienced sexism. Yet believes in this ideology and piled on JK Rowling, the person who gifted her career?

They want us to be either forcefully converted or sterilized to "protect the sanctity of the female sex"

This is shocking. Since the whole trans conversion thing in Parliament I have been wondering exactly what it is that GC women are supposed to want for trans people. Where has this come from? ‘Forcefully converted’ (by which I suppose they mean ‘forcibly’ but never mind that now) - what kind of conversion would be forced upon a trans person? All I can see is vulnerable young women converting themselves into double mastectomy patients.

And sterilisation? Isn’t that what children being given puberty blockers would suffer? That’s what GC people are against!

I’ve followed the debate for a while now but I’m still mystified by this alleged trans conversion threat.

nightwakingmoon
I am sad that they just won’t critically analyse the ideas they’re presented with - there’s a real desire to follow along with authoritarian thinking at the moment, which you just didn’t see in youth culture ten or fifteen years ago. I do fear that they will find their experience confusing and alienating as they mature - how will the young women understand their experiences of sexism when they are so programmed to imagine men as vulnerable victims, and themselves as entitled “cishet Karens”? Will they develop any empathy for old and actually vulnerable or ill people at any stage?

MangyInseam
This is actually quite a scary situation. Education ought to be taking teenagers out of this kind of thing. While it might seem just foolish on the face of it, this kind of behaviour in adults is hugely anti-social and manipulative and justifies all kinds of evil.

I agree, except I think this kind of thinking has been around longer, possibly is related to a human tendency to follow leaders or the (apparent/local) majority, rather thank think things through yourself.

I noticed this a decade ago in the group of young people with activist leanings I was part of.
From my POV any kind of drive for equality was based on an underlying principle that all humans are worth the same, so it naturally followed that racism, sexism etc made no sense. But this equally applied to "isms" that hadn't yet been named or any kind of social hierarchy. Whereas those around me seemed more as if they'd been told, say, racism was wrong, so would be anti-racist, but not think about why.
This leads to what I termed back then "the hierarchy of isms" where it's apparently fine to be discriminatory to one vulnerable group in the name of standing up for another group. And this was evident not just in their viewpoints but actual social behaviour. For example, they rounded on a guy who had his own vulnerabilities for supposedly being sexist towards me (he really wasn't!), whilst another man who had higher social status would say openly sexist things and never be challenged. More relevant and apparent in a wider way now, mocking people with a poor education or learning difficulties for badly spelled arguments borne out of frustration, or painting them as racists without considering the real hardship and class inequality behind some of these viewpoints. And this is how we end up with white het males viewed as the "most oppressed", the top of the isms, and any conflict of rights will favour them.
As you say, a total lack of critical thinking, people just wanting to be seen/see themselves as "good" and going along with what they're told that is. As humans have been doing, eg. via religion, for ever...

Unfortunately there has always been a section of women/girls who act against their own interests. Back in the days of the suffragists and suffragettes there were women who thought females should not have the vote. Female TRAs are the latest iteration of 'let's all suck up to men and put them first'.

They don't have the maturity to dismiss accusations of transphobia or bigotry. If you know you are not transphobic or a bigot, what does it matter? My response to that accusation is "I don't care".

I'm really pleased you're a young person not blinded by all the garbage. That gives me great hope.

Sorry...im new here! My last post was supposed to quote one of the other posts here, but it looks as if I've made a mistake with that!