Is there any democracy that is not in thrall to the gender ideologues?

[JellySaurus]

It's like the Western world has lost its marbles. Dictatorships and theocratic countries are bad news for women, anyway. Is there any democractic country that still recognises women to be adult human females excludively?

Thanks for all the flowers everyone, very kind.👐

MagpiePi · Today 10:42

I find it disturbing the number of women who say that a few rapes and assualts might happen but even if they do, it will be such a small number that they don't matter because the important thing is for gender ideaology to be given full rein.

Yeah like in their heads it's equal to losing your phone in the back of a taxi. It's shit in the moment but no biggy you can just get another phone.

No thought to the fact that if just one woman is raped that is one woman to many that will spend a lifetime with that rape popping into her head when she least expects it, having flashes of the rape when they accidentally stand next to a person wearing the same deodorant, when a song plays on the radio. Never mind the multitude of other issues. This is the pg version.

rape isn't like losing your phone, you can't just have sex with someone else and that erases the existence and memory of the rape.

Not one single woman is acceptable collateral damage. Not one.

This is definitely a thing among some younger women. I’ve been accused of misogyny for saying that there’s a physical difference between females and males, that women are vulnerable relative to men. The reasoning, if you can call it that, is I think that there’s a value judgment attached to the type of physical strength that men generally have more of.

So yes, we see all these totally unrealistic films where women regularly beat the crap out of men and are practically invulnerable and we’re supposed to think this is a great step forward in how women are portrayed, and a win for feminism.

Except of course it isn’t, because it’s saying women only have worth if they’re female versions of men rather than for our own selves. And it actually consolidates the idea that people who are physically more vulnerable and not able to easily overpower a would-be assailant are somehow “less”, and consequently less deserving of respect - which is not just anti-woman but also hugely ableist and anti-child.

While there’s a win in having more female characters, this trope is hugely anti-feminist as it’s saying only women who are “as good as” men are inspirational role models; women can’t be valued for the reality of who we are; and the kind of strengths we tend to have more of - eg stamina, endurance, emotional strength, and the small matter of the capacity to grow another human being inside us - are worth less. Worthless, even. Completely unvalued, completely out of the picture when it comes to assessing the social status of a human being.

Patriarchy as usual.

It breaks my heart to see younger women falling for this reinvented version of the same old hierarchy, and deluding themselves their worldview is feminist.

Spot on

This is definitely a thing among some younger women. I’ve been accused of misogyny for saying that there’s a physical difference between females and males, that women are vulnerable relative to men

I have too. But to be fair, I can remember having a similar attitude when I was very young, e.g. and genuinely believing that all we needed was a few self defence classes to keep up. I found out the hard way that I was being delusional but, if you never get that kind of wake-up call, I imagine it could take years for the penny to drop.

So yes, we see all these totally unrealistic films where women regularly beat the crap out of men and are practically invulnerable and we’re supposed to think this is a great step forward in how women are portrayed, and a win for feminism.

@RoaringtoLangClegintheDark I was watching the second series of Alice in borderland the other day. In one episode there this tiny tiny teenage girl. She is constantly portrayed as the kick ass fighter in the group and they have her going hand to hand combat with this massive murdering psychopath bloke who's arms reach is probably longer than she is tall and would have just broken her like a twig but for a good while she's able to rain blow after blow down on him.

I know it's a sci fi, gaming based series but the visual is just so jarring and as an older seen more shit person I know that girl would have been dead before she even got one blow in, but I'm assuming the kids of today think to some degree the girl would stand a chance

Makes perfect sense to me. Sorry you experienced what you did. 💐

I know what others mean about the conspiracy theory side of things - I’ve never remotely been a conspiracy theorist but this has really pulled me up short. There’s definitely been a concerted effort by some very wealthy and influential male people to push through this agenda: those who gathered to form the Yogyakarta Principles for example and the hugely wealthy male people who’ve funded a lot of the lobbying, especially in the USA - Pritzker, Soros etc.

It is absolutely extraordinary how rapidly it’s spread. But maybe not if you marry the twin advantages of real socio-political/economic power/privilege (such an advantage to be male) and perceived victim status in a world that pretends to care about the vulnerable but only when no real sea change is demanded of it.

Supposedly vulnerable male people are the greatest virtue signalling opportunity for those who want to look as if they’re pursuing social justice while actually maintaining the old order. Don’t want to really challenge the fundamentals of the toxic, dysfunctional world we live in, because that would be really painful and messy, but want to look as if you’re doing something really radical? Caring about and centring this “most vulnerable, most marginalised” cohort is the way to go!

But I don’t think it was all planned as such. I don’t think we can overstate the role the internet has played in all this. It’s never been possible to spread false information on a mass scale so immediately, and I think a lot of that happens out of people’s genuine ignorance rather than any design.

Look at the way the internet can degrade the written word: I never once in my life saw “a lot” written as “alot” before the internet; now there’s hardly a day I don’t see it. It happens too often to always be a typo. There must now be large numbers of people who think “alot” is a single word, akin to “along” perhaps, the same way large numbers of people have always thought that “should’ve” is “should of”. The rise of “alot” has happened really fast, in maybe the last decade or so? Someone makes the mistake, others see it, don’t know enough to realise it’s wrong, and adopt it themselves. More and more people see it and do the same. It spreads.

I think there’s a big element of that at play too. More people than we perhaps realise are shockingly ignorant. It’s bad enough here in the UK, and my experience/understanding is that it’s worse in the US where people tend to be more insular and their education system hasn’t got the best reputation. And so much of this issue originates in the US.

The internet has made it possible to spread that ignorance like wildfire. The question is maybe how do we get people to value truth. I have no idea.

Yeah, I had the same misconception and it did take years to realise I was wrong

I'm not very sporty, never had been, so I assumed if I did put in lot of effort to train, I'd have equivalent speed and strength to a sporty bloke. And honestly yes, that was mainly because that's what I'd seen "normal" women achieve in fiction.

I didn't have the experience of comparing my untrained female speed and strength to untrained males because that's just not a thing unsporty people do.

And not being sporty, I wasn't following sporting achievements to see the difference between trained males and trained females. I had a vague sense that men's stats were better but thought it was driven by girls being less challenged to excel and compete when young, and that the gap would close over time.

I'd grown up with "girls can do anything boys can and people who say they can't just have sexist old fashioned assumptions".

God I was naive when I was young!

This is going to be another one for our friends bingo board upthread, but with regards Roarings internet comments, how much did covid help with the recent speed acceleration, all those people whose natural home was not being on line or using tik tok or Twitter suddenly had no choice but to interact with the internet in order to work or have any sort of life.

And no I'm not saying Theres a conspiracy behind covid...slthough...never say never. But I'm being it helped get more people onto the internet then anything had.

Look at the way the internet can degrade the written word: I never once in my life saw “a lot” written as “alot” before the internet; now there’s hardly a day I don’t see it. It happens too often to always be a typo. There must now be large numbers of people who think “alot” is a single word, akin to “along” perhaps, the same way large numbers of people have always thought that “should’ve” is “should of”. The rise of “alot” has happened really fast, in maybe the last decade or so? Someone makes the mistake, others see it, don’t know enough to realise it’s wrong, and adopt it themselves. More and more people see it and do the same. It spreads.

bloody autocorrect and predictive text hasn't helped, my texts are littered with wrong spellings the tablet I'm using thinks are correct and i just can't be suffed to correct them all, I'm ding well if i shoot most of them. Out capitulated FFS it Capitalisesurged

see....I hate it, but I know it's wrong but if you don't know the computer is wrong?

It breaks my heart to see younger women falling for this reinvented version of the same old hierarchy, and deluding themselves their worldview is feminist.

Yes, and it allows transwomen to depict themselves as somehow superior to natal women, as seen in Jordan Grey's recent performance if you can bear to listen to the lyrics.

Yes one of my kids hadn't realised the sex strength difference because of these influences over the years. There are so many strands involved in this. I can remember when the computer game character Lara Croft (academic, beautiful but superstrong) first came out. It seemed really odd and unusual to me (I was not a gamer) but of course WonderWoman on TV was even earlier.....was this really the start of this? I don't think the character was created for the benefit of girl gamers at all.

I agree and yet maybe I willingly lent them my vote. Also when you are LGB and elected as an MP or MSP, you should accept that you have to balance the interests of all your constituents i.e. the heterosexual ones who do not want their kids to be told about 'gender identity ideology' in their state-funded nursery school.
It is a shame that so many LGB people have been slow to recognise the dangers to their same-sex rights from gender identity ideology and the piggybacking of the T.

I hadn’t realised this belief (or delusion) was so common among younger women of other generations too, maybe because I had an older brother who left me in no doubt as to the relative (brute force type of) strength of boys compared to girls.

Although actually I can remember in the 70’s when there were those tennis matches between top flight women and average men and this was used as the gotcha of those days to “prove” that women were inferior - again, the concept of physical superiority (in that domain) being used as evidence of some kind of intrinsic superiority. You can’t claim social and political equality if you can’t beat us at tennis. And I remember getting sucked into that and trying to argue that women could do anything men could do, to “prove” that we deserved to be seen as equal human beings.

Even though I knew it wasn’t true, I felt that acknowledging our physical limitations gave ammunition to those who sought to curtail our rights and freedoms, so I suppose on reflection I realise I’ve been there too.

Maybe we forget how deep rooted that law of the jungle/might is right thinking is.

But the irony it’s so entirely incompatible with all the social justice philosophy that’s supposed to underpin “trans rights activism”, the supposed care and concern for the more vulnerable in society.

Funny, isn’t it, how saying that women are vulnerable is taboo and means we don’t deserve to be regarded as being worth as much as men, but saying some men are vulnerable elevates them to a sacred caste position in society. Very funny.

Actually I’m going to go back on what I said before. I do think there has been a plan of sorts behind this, a concerted effort by those behind the Yogyakarta Principles and the proponents of Queer Theory etc to push this ideology at every level possible. I do think there’s a clear agenda to engineer top down social change.

It’s been their great good luck that the internet has helped them do it, and they’ve certainly exploited that and benefited from it, but the seeds were sown before the internet happened, and have been carefully nurtured in all sorts of other ways. Most especially lobbying, and “training” ventures in every conceivable environment.

@nepeta I agree. I think the current generation of young women genuinely can't see what we are banging on about in terms of women's equality.

I worked in construction from the end of the 80s I was under no illusion that I was not as physically strong as the men, unfortunately to have admitted that at the time wasn't an option, so I'd throw massive bags of cement over my shoulder, I'd carry a bucket full of concrete in each hand and god am i paying the price now.

I had to stick with the women can do anything men can do mantra for way to long due to the bloody career path I took.

But even then when I was physically at my strongest a man could still overpower me if he wanted to and I was very very aware of that. I feel partly responsible for a generation seeing women do these hard physical jobs without also ensuring those girls realised that even so that doesn't make a woman equal in strength to the men.

Sorry to hear that, Boiledbeetle. I once read about a woman solider in one of Prince Harry’s initiatives for wounded ex-service people - she had permanently damaged her back from carrying a pack as heavy as the men’s packs while on exercises, and was going to end up in a wheelchair. I think she was one of the ones who walked to the North Pole while she was still mobile.

Heartbreaking that “feminism” and supposedly giving women equal opportunities can result in such harm. We need to acknowledge the differences between us.

Annoyingly the reason I went through it, and all the sexist shit that went with it was to make things better in the bloody workplace for the next generation, you know like the generations of women before me had. Each generation doing their bit, making small waves, helping move things on, helping make things more equal.

By the time I came out of work the young women coming in weren't expected to be able to lift the same weight as the men.

They could expect their own toilet on site rather than being expected to share the thunder box with 50 men whilst wishing you could pee quicker before Trevor in the forklift decided it would be funny to tip the thing.

They weren't expected to try setting out a building in -5 whilst your boss wittered on about could you try and look a bit more girly when you come to head office next week, maybe wear a skirt.NO!

They weren't expected to organise the cleaning staff and the lunch for the meeting cos you're a girl and women are good at shit like that.

And this is how they fucking repay me. They've had it so bloody easy that in their haste to give away our rights they've given no fucks to the literal pain sweat and tears it cost some women to give them that easier life.

Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

@Boiledbeetle

You're the real deal. As are the women of your/our era. You should be proud you opened the way. Sorry about the lack of appreciation. I see you.

But yes. I go on instagram and get called a transphobic boomer (wouldn't mind but I missed it by a decade) if I say something sensible like, 'wearing a dress and makeup does not a 'real' woman make'.

Years ago, when I turned 40 I felt so sorry for myself. I went around whining that my life was halfway through at best, opportunities seemed closed. I was miserable.

My god now am I glad to be well over 40 and I look with envy at those who are mid 50s and over. I want as many years distance between me and this gender bender philosophy BS as possible.

100% this

Bloody hell, Boiledbeetle you really lived it. I was going to come back anyway to say kudos to you for succeeding in such a male dominated sphere, but having read your last post - well, that in spades. Yes, women like you made such a difference, and it’s unbearable for all of us to see younger women giving it all away, but must be doubly so for you.

I always think we need women like you and many of those on here to be the ones going into schools doing the “training” instead of the likes of Stonewall. We’ll know something is actually shifting if and when that ever happens.

Child transition is probably why we are where we are now.

At one point, TRAs were quite open about how children were going to change people's attitudes towards transgenderism.

Here's Autumn Sandeen (a male who identifies as transgender) in 2010:
"I’ve always said there are two groups that are going to make change in transgender legislation and the “gender identity and expression” related language in legislation. It’s going to be trans youth because they take, you know, they demystify it and take the sex right out of the trans experience...."

There was a youtube video of Sandeen saying this, but it was taken down - probably due to attracting the wrong sort of attention. But it was clear that the aim was to recruit and use children in order to desexualise transgenderism/transsexualism.

Miranda Yardley wrote about it here:
mirandayardley.com/en/suffer-the-children-how-children-became-the-collateral-damage-of-transgender-ideology/

More here from GenderTrender:
Transgender Children: “The Transgender Taboo is a Threat to Academic Freedom”

I first became aware of the absurd idea of transsexual children in about 2016 when the BBC showed a documentary about 'transgender kids'. The trans lobby wanted it banned, but the documentary makers insisted it was balanced, and I wondered why anyone wouldn't want a 'balanced' programme to be shown.

At the time and just afterwards, I assumed that they wanted one narrative and were objecting to dissenting voices and detransitioners being shown alongside those who were promoting the idea of transsexual children. But now, I wonder if they just wanted to keep it quiet that children were being led to believe that they were transgender until there were enough of them for the trans juggernaut to be more or less unstoppable for the reasons you mention.

India - the largest democracy seems to be immune.