Midday today on Radio 4, new programme AntiSocial talks about the toxic conversation on social media about trans rights and women's rights

[nauticant]

Midday today on Radio 4 is a new programme called AntiSocial which is about how debates on social media can turn nasty. The series starts today with:

Why is the conversation about trans rights and women's rights so toxic?

This week, two sports governing bodies decided that trans women should not compete in women's categories. Other sports announced they would review their policies. There's a row about that, but beneath that is a deeper argument about how the tensions around gender identity are discussed and debated.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0018h14

An example:

twitter.com/PlaceSteph/status/1392364548145881088

I thought the mention of participation in sport was particularly badly (perhaps intentionally so) handled by the presenter.

Steph was allowed to make a number of assertions which were left unchallenged and therefore, to the less informed, left established as “facts.” If sports are to be covered in another program, then why ask the question / give Steph the opportunity to state that one-sided load of BS?

I thought Milli was very articulate throughout and did an extremely good job, particularly as she was working against clear bias in the way that program was structured.

Someone posted recently I think that that statement is banned on here, and that if you assert it the post will be deleted. Is that true?

It was the More in Common report. I think somebody upthread has very helpfully linked to some MN threads on it.

Thank you

I wonder how the hardline TRAs are reacting to the programme.

I also felt MH did a good job in difficult circumstances. Have just bought her period book for DD!

The horse has long since bolted about the 'we just mean people who have had some kind of meaningful transition'. It's over. That one's been exploded. Because as has been proven: there is no one on the door gatekeeping, no one goes around doing 'passing' assessments and awarding entry badges, and many people show highly distorted thinking on whether others are aware of their sex and transition even in the face of obvious evidence.

If any male may enter female spaces then all males can and will enter female spaces, including the ones with beards and swords and with any agenda, plus it's handed the male sex the entitlement and power to say to females I can make you uncomfortable and exclude you and go where you want however it affects or distresses you and you can't stop me . In fact I can call the police on you or threaten or hurt you if you dare because it's fine to do what you want to sub human women who thwart males t*s.

Damage done. Ship sailed. Ex parrot. And still the unmentioned issue that even if you restrict it to the Layla Moran assessed, meaningfully transitioned, absolutely lovely TW - their presence still excludes some females from the female single sex space to let males in.

So the question is still: should we take access and inclusion away from females as a sex class and let some females have no resources at all, in order to give more access and inclusion to males as a sex class and let them have their preferred choice from all the resources? Which is sex based, and flat out male supremacist. It sees male people as intrinsically more valuable than female ones, and never needs a genital check to know if you're one of the winners or one of the losers. Which makes an absolute nonsense of 'some males are women'. No. They are not. Women don't get privileged like this.

And frankly if the TW in question is that lovely, why are they so very uncaring about their impact on what you'd think they'd see as other females?

Haven't listened yet. But it annoys me thd way laurel Hubbard is used to say 'look she was crap and didn't do well at the Olympics, therefore nothing to see here'. She holds the NZ national record for women.

Excellent posts, Artichokeleaves. Thank you.

And a female athlete lost the chance to be in the Olympics because Hubbard decided to come back from retirement.

The BBC researcher should be ashamed to get basics wrong - I wanted to shout at the radio, "Gender is not a protected characteristic". And all that assigned at birth and cis-gender stuff - Milli wasn't given the chance to say why the terminology is so demeaning. Felt one sided - I've heard worse, but still disappointing.

There was, a while back, a TW on FWR who said that s/he'd shyly gone into women's changing rooms and, I think, the women's pool on Hampstead Heath and 'it had all been fine, and [my] friends were very encouraging' and 'nobody minded'.

It seemed to be an absolute eyeopener when people on here said that just because women hadn't openly objected didn't mean they didn't mind.

And credit where it's due, that person said they wouldn't do it again. But it had just never occurred to them that they were creating a problem for anyone else.

[Yes, I know anyone can say anything on the internet.]

India Willoughby last week on a Twitter thread was celebrating with other TW that somewhere there had been a gender neutral additional toilet provided alongside the men's toilets. With a sign on it saying that there was a single sex female toilet somewhere else in the building.

Willoughby and the other TW were gleefully sharing how they'd made a point of going and walking the extra way to use the single sex female toilet.

They could not give a fuck for their impact on women. They could not give a fuck who they block and exclude. It's power, it's control, 'I just want to pee' my fucking ovaries. The whole point is making it very clear to females that they will do what they want and females can't stop them and hee hee hee.

Any remaining, lingering sympathy I had disappeared then.

I caught the last few minutes in the car at lunchtime, marking my place now while I go to find the download.

One of Steph's claim to fame is they were an organiser of the protest of the Filia conference. You know, the protest with the "suck my d*ck" placards. Aimed at female survivors of sexual violence.

Steph really isn't the smartest tool in the box, looking forward to this debate!

That was an excellent show. Wonder if steph regrets their "terf Island" comment, given how terf was later, correctly, described as a slur.

I thought Milli was absolutely brilliant. And Reece was very interesting too. I do feel we need to find some middle ground on some of the issues.

It had its flaws, but I thought the programme was a pretty OKish attempt at covering the issues for an uninformed listener. Baby steps, as they say.

But at least she wasn’t Fallon Fox.

Yes, I wouldn't possibly have imagined that as being a necessary step forward for a BBC interview a week ago. As I said above, baby steps!

I listened to the second half. Can anyone shed light on this:

48 minutes in: "There isn't any problems in hospitals we've already established that through something like 30 Freedom of Information requests, there's not been a single complaint from a cisgender woman about a transgender woman being in a hospital ward so we've looked at something like I can't remember how many patients but it was something like 22 million, something incredibly high, and this is over a period of 2 years."

I thought if nurses disclosed to a patient that another patient was a transwoman they could be disciplined, and the Royal College of Nurses would not support them. And that NHS policy was that female patients who complained were to be treated as a problem. So how could any woman complain about the presence of a transwoman? Why would any woman risk making a fuss after a nurse told her the evidence of her own eyes and ears was wrong, or that she was the problem?

Or is this a subtle distinction between women not complaining about transwomen as such but objecting to some transwomen's behaviour in the women's ward, which isn't recorded specifically as a complaint about transwomen?

Given that it took months for a hospital to admit to the police following the rape of a female patient that any male was even in a women's ward, though the hospital had CCTV evidence of the attack (Baroness Nicolson raised this in the House of Lords) how reliable would these 30 Freedom of Information requests be?

Followed by "Ultimately I also agree that the debate is going to be potentially worse." Well yes I expect so. And the more denial the worse when the lid comes off.

I can substantiate this. First screenshot is a woman posting about the provision. Second screenshot shows two male people boasting about using the female-only toilet.

We heard far less from Milli than we did from Steph.
All the "experts" seemed to be trams advocates.
It was still interesting and lovely to hear from Milli.
Loved the irony of Adam talking over Milli speaking about women being silenced.