Struggling with the misogyny of female TRAs

[TheirEminence]

There is something I don’t understand and I hope MN can help. What is the general psychological profile of female people (trans-masculine, non-binary, women identify as ‘cis’) who are rabid TRAs? Not just going along with things ‘to be kind’ but the true believers with total ideological commitment?

I know we discuss TW a lot on this forum and what we perceive as their male entitlement and often complete lack of understanding for the female condition but what drives female TRAs? There is a strong desire to punish, and a taste for persecution and hunting for apostates, sometimes fairly obvious self-promotion. Sometimes it seems to be strong investment in one’s own or a close relative’s transition.

What is the psychology of this, is it specific to female people - or is this a daft question?

Other than the obvious biologically based differences, mostly based around the fact that it is only women who can get pregnant, in what ways do you think women and men have lives that are in some ways different due to sex?

What happens when that reality runs up against this idea that gender expression as dictated by cultural expectations is not real, not something attached to sex? It locates the patterns associated with the sexes in something other than the body.

What do you mean by this? The cultural expectations are obviously attached to sex, but that doesn't mean we all have to follow them. People can be gender nonconforming without insisting that they are the opposite sex or that sex doesn't exist.

It's actually IMO where GC views go a little wrong, the idea that we could get rid of all stereotyped cultural expressions of sex.

Is that a GC view? I don't think anyone's saying that. It's certainly not something I agree with. The argument is that we should all be able to step outside those stereotypes without having to insist that this means we are the opposite sex or that we don't have a sex.

I think I understand what Mangyinseam means and it’s an important point. I completely reject the idea of an inner gender essence, and yet I wear skirts, dresses, jewellery, perfume etc. Many women do. TRAs often think this is some kind of gotcha. But it isn’t.

If you like having sex with men, an appearance that enhances the perception of sexual dimorphism will help you attract a mate, or it will at least increase your choice. Being perceived as sexually attractive (by either sex) can make one’s life easier (though not always).

I would agree that gender expression is not completely decoupled from sex for most people. And even a very butch lesbian I know wears clothes that show off her (nice, well-proportioned) figure, such as well-fitted jeans and a jumper that ends just in the right place, though no make-up and short hair. These are sexual signals. Yes, body ideals for men and women are not the same in all cultures and times but they generally correlate with youth, health, fertility. We’re social and cultural animals but we are animals.

So sure, heels and lipstick don’t make a woman but it is women who generally wear these, and that’s not just due to capitalist neoliberalism. Men and women across time have expressed the fact that they are reproductively different in creative ways.

I agree with all of that @TheirEminence, but @MangyInseam was referring to behaviour as well as appearance. This is the bit I was taking issue with

SO long as people remain interested in sex, and continue to have lives that are in some ways different due to sex, there will be patterns of behaviour and cultural expressions.

Apart from reproductive capacity, how are men's and women's lives different? This seems to be playing into the idea that a man can live as a woman if he exhibits certain behaviours. And if a woman doesn't exhibit those behaviours, is she no longer a woman?

Some good posts on this thread.

SO long as people remain interested in sex, and continue to have lives that are in some ways different due to sex, there will be patterns of behaviour and cultural expressions.

I took this to mean as a very general average - men will seek out sex with more partners, because they don't have to bear the children. Women will be more choosy about who they have sex with, because of the risk of pregnancy. Now obviously neither the behaviour nor the reasons apply to all men or women, but culturally it is what we see as classes.

Pre easy contraception, this was more of a reality - culturally speaking contraception has been around for a millisecond. I'm always fascinated by how the higher risk of sex-> pregnancy has shaped culture - if reliable and easily accessibly contraception had been magicked up in the 12th century, how would that affect our culture today? Not saying it would eradicate all sexually related behaviours and perceptions but would any aspect have died out if we'd had centuries of women being able to choose when/whether/how many children they had?

^how annoying my formatting got completely messed up!

I came on to say something similar to
Changemyname1000x · 29/10/2022 17:55
who summarised beautifully with
...Its quite frankly a bit thick!

The "trans your child otherwise they'll kill themselves" narrative is really, really compelling.

There is absolutely a neo-religious psychology behind gender ideology. One build on false dichotomy and feelings.

On the one side we have
Happy clappy, rainbows, sparkly "authentic self", Instagram glamour, "trans lives matter (because we're all being killed help us)" (That's obviously Not Actually True) and social media families for anyone feeling a bit of a misfit. And pride parades all supporting the T.

On the other side it's
Boring old women who live in the past, Do you want a dead child? You really want to oppress other people from being themselves? You really believe all transwomen are rapists out to get you? You're just like homophobic people who wanted section 28 (All based on total misrepresentation of the GC argument of course). People who argue this rarely know what section 28 actually was and many Americans on Twitter think it was death penalty for gays 🙄

So that's what you're up against.
If I wasn't a critical thinker, a learner, and a strong minded woman who found proper feminism, I would have come across the situation above and been absolutely outraged that some nasty women wanted to stop beautiful and helpless transwomen from using our toilets! They only want to pee in peace! I would be that woman.

I don't think the mentality of being a TRA is all pure misogyny, that's too reductionist I think.

Female TRAs will probably bend over backwards to help disadvantaged women in all walks of life.
I think it must just boil down to being a bit thick.
A bit thoughtless. Not really thinking about it. Just look! Happy clappy rainbows!

I took this to mean as a very general average - men will seek out sex with more partners, because they don't have to bear the children.

The post I was replying to didn't seem to be about the act of sex, but 'sex' as in male or female. I don't think this paragraph can be interpreted to be about the act of sex:

What happens when that reality runs up against this idea that gender expression as dictated by cultural expectations is not real, not something attached to sex? It locates the patterns associated with the sexes in something other than the body.

This is about sex as in male or female and how that affects behaviour. Obviously some behaviour is (on average) different in men and women due to reproductive capacity, attitudes to the act of sex being one, as you say. But what other behaviours are so different between men and women that you could say one way of behaving is 'male' and one 'female'? This seems to me to be saying that a man can live as a woman if he exhibits certain behaviours. There are differences, but there aren't any exclusively 'male' or 'female' behaviours (other than those directly associated with a male or female body). Even attitudes to sex aren't exclusively male or female.

So , could it be said that Gender Expression is a reality and is - usually - correlated with sex . But Gender Identity is not a very useful idea. To me it seems at once both too rigid somehow and yet too difficult to define?

The post I was replying to didn't seem to be about the act of sex, but 'sex' as in male or female.

Yes, me too, but in the context of 'patterns of behaviour' en masse according to your physical sex, the only real thing they might have in common / are differentiated (apart from size, strength and testosterone) is in their reproductive roles, as you pointed out.

I agree that there are few, if any, other behaviours that are 'male' or 'female', even as a group, apart from those socialised stereotypes that I would also say arise from reproductive roles - traditionally, the main child-carer would benefit from developing diplomatic, sympathetic, social skills, for example, whereas the bread-winner might develop more dominant, self-serving tendencies.

Because historically women were the former and males were the latter, those tendencies and stereotypes have persisted because they were so strongly ingrained. But I don't believe there is anything innately different in a male or female brain relating to those tendencies.

(Re my first point, even if you are looking for lots of sex I wouldn't ever say that means you are a man or male, and vice versa with being picky - hope that goes without saying. I'm mainly interested as to why 'feminine' and 'masculine' behaviours came into being - and even when you try to list them they contradict themselves - Madonna/whore etc)

So , could it be said that Gender Expression is a reality and is - usually - correlated with sex .

'Gender expression' is about appearance, clothes, etc.

A lot of what 'gender' embodies can be described to some extent as 'masculine' or 'feminine' - obviously this varies culturally and over time.

The two terms have been almost used interchangeably in everyday speech and I'd love it if we could get away from this - being male does not necessarily mean you are 'masculine', we need to decouple the two concepts.

E.g. 'my child loves doing 'girl things'' usually means 'feminine things' that have nothing to do with being a female human.

You'll notice this is often used as a linguistic sleight of hand when people want to conflate sex and gender.

Even the fact that you can say 'correlated with sex ' - I think should be questioned when appropriate! Which gender correlates to which sex? why? If gender ideology doesn't think woman means female, in what way does it 'align' or 'correlate'? It absolutely requires the default coupling of 'feminine' and 'female' / 'masculine' and 'male' which I think is unhelpful.

I don’t think the ‘decoupling’ would work so easily as sex (biological sex, not sexual activity) matters in so many walks of life. Not talking about trivial things such as dolls versus toy cars and pink versus blue, but at the group level there are very small behavioural differences even between female and male small children, I believe, and, although this is not a popular argument, one could say they are at least to some extent innate, not learnt.

Of course, just because an individual is an outlier and behaves very differently, that does not make him or her the opposite sex. Whether one should help that person appear as the opposite sex is a question I am not sure about, largely because who is to judge whether e.g. a woman is so masculine that she’d be better of as a putative male? Often, trans-identified people themselves are poor judges of external perceptions of their behaviour. We see examples of this every day ...

So I do think we need the adjectives masculine (typical for males) and feminine (typical for females) as well as male and female, and I also think there is a link between feminine-female and masculine-male but the assumed ‘thickness’ and direction of that link varies (and pretty much determines the different intellectual
positions in this whole debate).

If you’re a hardcore TRA your line of thinking might be ‘feminine’ - thick link - ergo ‘female’; if you’re more of a postmodern TRA, it may be more like female - no link - performance - masculine so why not male; if you’re a radfem GC it might be female - no link - masculine/feminine/whatever; if you’re somewhere where I am it might be female - thin link but definitely a link - mostly feminine but various gender expressions some of which may make your life harder but you can’t change your sex. (Might need assistance of someone with more philosophical training here.)

We are animals, programmed to reproduce, so ofc typical reproductive behaviour has a fairly large influence on overall behaviour. But how that plays out in individuals ... that’s down to the beautiful and infinite diversity among human beings.

Interesting thread.

I've sometimes wondered whether trans rights are a kind of last/new frontier - people assume (wrongly, but in keeping with much political rhetoric) that we've 'dealt with' women's/gay/minority rights, so want something else to fight for.

Thing is that economic inequality/exploitation, arguably the biggest issue by far, has turned out to be really intractable and migrant rights, another urgent issue, are messy and divisive.

So trans rights are sort of an easy win - easy own goal, really, but they give people the illusion that they're continuing the good fight, and (importantly) that it is winnable.

if you’re more of a postmodern TRA, it may be more like female - no link - performance - masculine so why not male

Don't think I get this - why would masculine be 'male' if there's no link between femininity and female? Is it the usual pretzel logic?!

A couple of friends have jumped on this bandwagon.

I think they genuinely believe that this is the same as fighting for gay rights. The irony. They regularly pat themselves on the back on social media for being so inclusive and progressive, as they unwittingly play their part in the erasure of their own sex, usually with the hashtag #bekind

Female TRAs will probably bend over backwards to help disadvantaged women in all walks of life

But they don’t, by definition. They don’t care about vulnerable women in domestic violence shelters, traumatised women in prison, disabled and elderly women who need female only care, rape victims who need female only support groups. They might call themselves “feminists” but their care and concern for women is almost exclusively focused on the “women” who are men.

I know you’re lumping that in under “thoughtlessness” but giving so much thought and attention m to the comfort of men with gender identities while dismissing the real needs of vulnerable women is misogyny in itself.

Misogny often (usually) isn’t overt hatred of all women, it’s hatred of women who express needs or desires that are inconvenient or unintelligible to men.

All I know is that Dylan Mulvaney (sp?) is on the front cover of Cosmo but he's not on the front page of GQ. It's female-targeted media that celebrates the trans movement the most.

Time was that if other men saw a rogue male creeping into the women's toilets they'd have no compunction about stopping him. Now, most men would be afraid that the women would side with the man in a dress rather than be grateful.

There's a strong case to be made that rejection of the TRA movement needs to be led by women. Because frankly women are the most overt enablers of transwomen behaviour.

Yes indeed, women have been duped. And men it seems have been emasculated. The worst kind of men are the winners here it seems.