Experiences of a Trans Person

[invalide]

I think it might be healthy to document here the experiences of someone from the other side, and for you to pay it some mind.

I'm an early-twenties STEM student working in renewable energies, and outside of my course I'm a photographer and musician. I've travelled a fair amount and adore my home country of Scotland. Living in Glasgow, I have found a queer community of beautiful people who create a joy to everyday life I treasure.

At the beginning of this month there was a 'Let Women Speak' rally held here that some of you here attended; I have seldom felt more unwelcome and stripped of dignity than while in your crowd, carrying out my photojournalistic duties (images 1&2). While capturing Kellie-Jay Keen pathologising my friends as subhuman perverts and members of the crowd flaunting their homophobia and their use of dogwhistles (subliminal far-right messaging) I was being brazenly looked up and down, receiving steely gazes and pursed lips and hushed whispers behind my back. While photographing the first speaker after Keen, who began her piece portraying autistic people as children devoid of agency, I was approached by one of you who made it clear I looked too queer for their liking and was squaring up for assault. I made my way out at this point (captured at 8:42 here and 9:09 here).
The atmosphere your movement brought to George Square was one I've only before experienced while documenting far-right rallies in Eastern Europe, where I have been hounded through the streets and beaten up for the same reason. I assure you, your ideology would feel very much at home there.

At the other side of the square things couldn't have been more different, you were bathed in colour and music and hugs and laughter, the place is full of friends dancing and dressed resplendent in whatever camp pretty things they felt like (images 2&3).

Ours was a crowd of locals; I strained to hear a Glasgow accent in yours.

Ours is a city that at short notice manages to fill the top of Buchanan Street (image 5) in solidarity with the queer community - the last time I saw it like this was during COP26. It's one that fills George Square in a candlelit vigil for Brianna Ghey.

Your movement has meant I'm called a pervert and a groomer while going about my average daily life. Our morally vacuous, increasingly fascist political class (thinking also of Magnus Hirschfeld and of Martin Niemöller's famous poem) is picking up what you've started and they're running with it. You may not call yourself a homophobe, a white nationalist or an antisemite, but you're sitting awfully comfortably considering that those that do find your movement incredibly attractive.

Fancinating thread.
The problem with all of this is 'bollocks'.

Dress how you like but I see no change without surgery. Why don't they have it?
Being a woman is not a pick and mix!

I also note it is always mtf who have a lot to say for their selves. However alarmingly most new trans people are young women. I don't see them threatening violence. In fact they are most scared of men 'showing them what a real man is'. It is a fucked up ideology. Wear a dress if you like, leggings too but without an altered passport you are your natal sex. End of.

They don't have to flash nowadays, if they say the words they can walk into a women's changing room and take their sweet time. Ditto, they don't have to peep, they can stare.

And a woman who complains....bigot!

^nilsmousehammer · Today 09:29

I do absolutely love this assumption from relatively new posters who have arrived to 'sort it all out' in their superior wisdom, that the women in FWR have never had any experience or spent years reading about this, and got to the point of 'no' because of that journey and study and endless discussions and negotiations.^

Some of us new posters here had years of discussion and reading and study in another place, but had to relocate a few months ago when it was made clear that we were frightening the TRAs.

I'm so grateful for Mumsnet and all the thoughtful, fierce and forthright women (and some men) here who let us join them.

What do you call a pack of ten faintly whispering Baby bels?
A decibel.
Sorry, just catching up with the cheese pages in this thread!

Together? Or as two separate courses? Of course you may have already answered this by the time I catch up with my own post!

So I'll just say I'm finding it very hard to find cherry pie filling these days. But even if I could I'm afraid it wouldn't be going on my cheeses on toast...although...hmmm..why not? Adds it to the list of possibly delicious but sounds utterly revolting recipe pile.

But screaming that they're all just perverts and it's all just a sexual kink

Why can't @JusteanBiscuits get their head around the idea that SOME ARE perverts - whether that's Karen White, or Isla Bryson, or whoever - and they don't come with a big sign over their heads that says "This one's a wrong 'un'" in flashing neon lights. So ALL men have to be kept at arms length - and out of women only spaces - to be sure that none of the perverts get in. I'm sorry (/not sorry) if some men feel like they've been tarred with the pervert brush but hurt feelings come waaaaaaay below women's rights not to be assaulted.

There is no middle ground here - no men in women's spaces.

It's such a clouded thinking, isn't it.

it's not because a person identifies as trans. Because there are women who identify as trans, and they aren't being excluded.

it's because a person is male, and it doesn't matter how they identify.

It just so happens, that if you create a cohort which is given unfettered access to women and girls when they are vulnerable or undressed, guess who's going to use it?

That's the first problem.

The second problem is that most women want privacy from males, whether they are trans or not.

And many man who disregards that should be excluded automatically, purely on that basis alone.

As other posters have said, women saying NO should be enough. Women repeatedly pointing out the predatory nature of men who won't respect our boundaries is done as a response to why, why, why?

And the response to women saying no is threats!

luckily i live in Germany. So while Cherry Pie Filling (in a tin) isn't A Thing, those big glass jars of morello cherries and the like are available and you just need to thicken up the juice.

In the event i had some camembert and sourdough bread because DH is off and that's what he made me. Acceptable.

So, OP, did you really enter a group of women with your face covered as so many of the protestors do? And you then get upset that women did this: "I was being brazenly looked up and down, receiving steely gazes and pursed lips and hushed whispers behind my back."

Or, were you otherwise easily identifiable from you having been over to the other group?

I think it is time you be honest with all those posters who are here supporting your rather obvious attempts to portray violence against women who disagree with you as 'righteous', 'justified', and just 'retaliation'. Because having just seen one of these protests up very close on Sunday, I suspect you have decided to leave out a lot.

Also, it must have done your head in to only be able to report some pretty dramatically exaggerated 'they looked at me funny and whispered'. Mean mummies!

Not only is she a bigot, SHE is the one who is thrown out.

It's happened.

(Bars, swimming pools, Spas etc)

Male feelings trump actual biology.

ENCOURAGED AND ASSISTED by some women.

SICK.

OK, news just in via What's App. My wife says she's sure it's from the BBC and here's what I found:

www.bbcgoodfood.com/user/731259/recipe/beef-guinness-and-stilton-pie

It certainly looks like what she's made previously.

Re middle ground and compromising....

Can you tell me what trans women are offering up to women as part of that compromise?

It seems awfully like all the compromising goes one way ...

The OP entered the SFW group and....got looked at. The poor lamb, those women should have at least lowered their eyes. I wonder what would have happened to any woman who'd have gone into the tra group?

Is the OP or any of his staunch defenders prepared to hazard a guess?

@SinnerBoy that pie looks amazing, thought the recipe is a bit pearl clutchy about stock cubes. What's wrong with Knorr or oxo?

Ooh. I didn't think of using the ones in a jar. I've got some of those!

Ooh that looks heavenly!

Thanks, looks amazing!

I'm also interested in how anyone can achieve compromise which doesn't exclude some women from participating normally in society?

ohhh cherries AND kirsch! I'd make Black Forest Trifle out of those (so cherry jelly if you use jelly, chocolate cake and those sprinkled all over the cake)

Have sent the pie recipe to my chef. I will be needing that pronto.

back to the point: am also interested in what compromises the TRA are prepared to make.

IcakethereforeIam · Today 12:29

SinnerBoy that pie looks amazing, thought the recipe is a bit pearl clutchy about stock cubes. What's wrong with Knorr or oxo?

Erm, I don't know, but we have Bisto and those Knorr Stockpots - cheap in B&M and Home Bargains.

Oh God that sounds devine. I never get further than opening a had and eating them straight out of the jar!

Re the TRA. I think the answer is NONE.

...

lifeturnsonadime

You just don't understand!

That is what I have been told now by a few posters over the last month. And when I and others have asked for clarification, it is abuse.

The 'compromise' and the 'middle ground' is supposed to be just accepted to be 'reasonable' and 'achievable' and miraculously never discussed on MN FWR and proposed by any of us before!

So, Shhh! You just don't understand, "lifeturnsonadime"!

back to the point: am also interested in what compromises the TRA are prepared to make.

I suspect the women here still hopeful that middle ground can be achieved in fact mean that there will be some way to make it just the males they approve of themselves as ok.

With more experience and reading and talking to activists they will realise that practically this is impossible for a number of reasons.

For a start, there is no consensus among women as to what is acceptable, and many are not able to use mixed sex spaces regardless of degree of transition or sincerity of belief.

Then you have the issue of there is no gatekeeping on the door, and male people quite bluntly say 'I'm coming in and you can't stop me'.

Then you have the issues of passing/not passing and how unkind that is, degree of surgery and how that pressures people towards very distressing and expensive surgeries with high risk, and legal challenges, and eventually you realise that if it's yes to any male at all, then it's yes to all of them. It is not possible to admit some and not others, or prevent it being exploited. The GRA was the attempt to do that and it's in burning wreckage at this point. Nor was it women who broke it.

Then you have to face that this compromise inevitably means 'well yes some women get totally excluded from society' which is usually explained without facing up to the dirty bit behind that which is 'but those women don't include me or my mates, and are not my kind of women or women I'm going to meet and have to look in the face of, and they're a bit beneath me really so I don't care about them, and besides I have this underlying belief that women should sacrifice for men and men's happiness matters more than women being a bit stroppy about equality'.

Which is just not ok.

The compromise is third spaces. Many women will gladly share them with males of all genders. Families would find them really useful.

But you are going to have to face that male people do not want third spaces because a) that permits some females to get away with disobedience b) that maintains a corner of femalehood that a male person cannot unlock which messes with their sense of transition, and c) the access to the females is what matters and not the access to the space. Whether you wish to change in the presence of other females undressing to confirm your sense of belief in your identity, or to carry out an assault, you are still in that space to make use of non consenting women's bodies. Because you're not interested in any other part of them.

And note too: that many women would be in the third spaces still won't do, because a and b. And c: consenting women who are not suffering are not enough . The wanted ones are the ones who say no. Where suffering and punishment can be involved.

Movement of love and cuddles? Seriously? Only in a Professor Umbridge is a cute kitten loving sweetheart kind of way.

But you are going to have to face that male people do not want third spaces because a) that permits some females to get away with disobedience b) that maintains a corner of femalehood that a male person cannot unlock which messes with their sense of transition, and c) the access to the females is what matters and not the access to the space. Whether you wish to change in the presence of other females undressing to confirm your sense of belief in your identity, or to carry out an assault, you are still in that space to make use of non consenting women's bodies. Because you're not interested in any other part of them.

And note too: that many women would be in the third spaces still won't do, because a and b. And c: consenting women who are not suffering are not enough . The wanted ones are the ones who say no. Where suffering and punishment can be involved.

This is the key point, and it's one that many people who self identify as the voice of reason with an excellent solution that no one has come up with yet often don't quite grasp.

This.