Help me reply to my "BeKind" brother in NZ, please!

[Fubbs]

I'm in a WhatsApp group with my Dad (in Ireland, as I am) and brother (in NZ for years). I've been trying to explain what's been happening to women's rights but it's ended up that they have expressed compassion for Barbie Kardashian so I've plainly failed (although my Dad did post that Monty Python "because I say I am" speech so I think he's not totally on board).

(Bit of a lead up to it, before that particular part of the conversation, I got the "KJK is a Nazi, not welcome here" line from my brother. I pointed out she'd been attacked and Nazis were in Australia and he didn't mention that and denied the Nazis were there and said there were more protesters than attendees at the Auckland Let Women Speak meeting (I think that proves KJK isn't popular for him). He didn't bother reading thecountess.ie for a very good summary of the issues. He's married with a wife, two boys and a girl. I'm married, two boys).

I asked why it was okay to house a violent man (to be fair, my brother hasn't tried to correct my sex-based pronoun use) with women and he gave me "prison authorities are doing their best for everyone), I countered that women have rights too and that includes single sex spaces. Final message so far (there's quite a time delay) and woke up (I'd my phone on silent, I've been waking at night in turmoil that he doesn't see it and is happy to basically throw me to the wolves):

"Yes, your position has been made clear.

need legal (legislative, judicial, enforcement) society/facilities/legal institutions to figure the mess out for all.

An example I shared earlier about professional level sports bodies [athletics] making a deision, regarding competing, shows it is possible but even that is not the end of it but a single step in a conversation, a process, an evolution.

It will not be straightworward nor easy nor quick but it will requre a lot of hard work from everybody on a good faith basis, because that is where most of us are and I hope not in a bad actor basis because that is the horrific but rare example, abhorrent to all"

Oh, I see my brother has joined the debate 👋🤣

Then if you see what is happening in Europe, I think women have lost more rights to transwomen than here, such as males who say they are females in football in Spain, plenty of madness in France, Germany and probably Italy.

I'm in Germany. I am not feeling any madness and i am as terfy as they come. I am howver also generally of the opinion that there is no harm in people peacefully going about their business if they are not bothering others.

So what is my actual experience of living in one of these mad awful countries? The changing room at our swimming pool, and all other pools I've ever been to in decades of living here, are cubicles in a large room. They are not floor to ceiling and there is plenty of opportunity to look over the top, under the bottom and even open the doors from outside. I have never seen or experienced this and i swim weekly. I took my DCs swimming weekly for about 15 years. No issues.
Male and female showers, no penis on sight anywhere. (except for tiny children)

Changing rooms in shops? curtained cubicles in places as disparate as Primark, TK Max, C&A (we still have it), department stores (like Debenham-type things) and upmarket clothes shops catering to both sexes: anyone can use any one.

day to day life is in no way impacted, and i don't know any of my friends who live in big cities who have experienced problems either. None of my friends or acquaintences have experienced trans women hanging round toilets wanking or creepily asking for/offering Feminine Hygiene Products etc etc.

I do think that there are likely to be some issues in some places at some times. But it isn't a constant barrage of deviance. (although, TERFy as i can be, i don't think genuine trans men or women are deviant. Bandwagon-jumpers, not so much)

I might've thrown my Dad under the bus a bit, I don't think he's up to speed on TIMs (or understand why any man would think they could become a real woman) and when he asked about BK, my bro got in first and posted to an article using female pronouns for him so he might not realise BK is a man and be expressing sympathy in good faith. Plus, there's a bit of a disconnect between him and female prisoners, doubt he's ever had more than a passing thought about them. My bro knows (better than me obviously 🙄) what he's saying and happy to point out where my silly views are incorrect. I don't want to explode my dad's brain, trying to decipher the new tortured language gives me a headache sometimes. My Dad a similar age to the woman used as a punch bag in NZ, as is my Mum. Can't see my Dad finding it acceptable for someone to punch my mother and it would be easier to explain it on those terms to him but I don't want to potentially cause friction. I'm not even sure who of my friends are GC and I'd hate to be disappointed in them. I've few enough as it is 😂

You're being very restrained.

I would have said, "By the way, Dad, in case it's not clear to you from that article, Barbie Kardashian is actually a biological man who has 16 criminal convictions including for sexual assault and has threatened to rape and kill his own mother. But because he identifies as a woman whilst doing these things, he's now housed in a women's prison with vulnerable women serving sentences for stealing money to buy drugs."

"Because it doesn't bother me and I've not been affected there is not a problem at all. I am the authority on everything and other women's life experiences are irrelevant, because I know everything and I'm the moral authority which should be dominant"

I'm sure there's a damn few lesbians on here, fed up of being demonised and having males crack on to them... But yep, they don't count and this is unimportant to society as a whole, cos you are happy and don't see what the problem is.

Or jewish and muslim women who now feel they can't use public facilities or leisure centres, which they used to go to and use single sex provisions for and now can't because its incompatible with their faith and their community.

But yeah, crack on.

This post is even more ironic given it was posted AFTER my last post highlighting lived experience...

i don't get why you won't just show your dad who BK is, show the video of the elderly woman in NZ getting her skull cracked, and then just leave him with that info?

And then just tell your brother that if he's happy to throw women under the bus that's fine, but those women include you, his mum, his wife and his daughter. Well done. Slow handclap.

Then ignore him

I'm sure there's a damn few lesbians on here, fed up of being demonised and having males crack on to them... But yep, they don't count and this is unimportant to society as a whole, cos you are happy and don't see what the problem is.

no i do have an issue with all those things. These are the reasons that we should be fighting this tooth and nail.

But all the heat and noise is directed at the other things - and this is causing a distraction.

FWIW There are plenty of muslim (looking, but with hijabs and speaking Turkish) at our pool. I am also assuming that there are muslim (and other) women not coming to the pool and i hope they have somewhere else to go.

Our gym took our strictly ladies only part away (but generally not for transwomen) and the women only entrance - but when we pointed out that several members would have to stop coming, they reinstated it.

There are lots of facets to this argument. But digging on me because i personally haven't seen a lot of what gets reported is - meh.

I'm in France and all leisure centres are like this and have been since long before the gender borg showed up. This stuff isn't affecting women who want to use public leisure facilities in France because these places weren't single sex to begin with. I don't know where that leaves Muslim and Jewish women. The country's belief in secularism and particular mistrust of Muslims makes France pretty disinclined to cater to people's religious sensibilities.

Trans people keep a lower profile here. I don't know whether it's because they know the French are socially conservative and only tolerate them as long as they are discreet, or whether it's because there aren't so many women's spaces for them to try and gain access to.

The thing that i was taking issue with was the inference that some European countries (IIRC Spain, France Germany and maybe Italy) have batshit laws and daily life is mental.

It isn't.
There are certainly issues - a young trans man was stabbed in what has been established as a hate crime in Munster last year, we just had the trial ( didn't read how it went) and especially in places like Hamburg, Cologne and Berlin (trying to keep up it's reputation for hedonism i think) clearly have a much more developed and visible trans community etc. And i am sure there are issues.

But they are not all over the news constantly, or all over social media constantly, in the way it is in the UK. Maybe I'm not seeing it because my German Twitter tends to revolve more around football and language than feminism and i don't have a subscription to a German newspaper and i hang out more on MN than the German equivalent. I just don't know.

I go to big cities fairly often. The only unisex (or gender free) toilet I've seen was a single toilet in Starbucks in Cologne and women taking over all except a very few toilets in a football stadium when Ed Sheeran played.

Please stop posting whole blogs/articles from GC writers, unless you are actually the author. It's such an unfair thing to do.

Post a link to signpost to their sites, so that people can engage with them, support their work through advertising revenue (clicks) or donations(for those who fundraise) and help them to continue. These people are doing really important work, often at the cost of abuse and loss of income from other sources. The least we can do is support them, instead of stealing their work.

If that was to me, I apologise - here is the link - please do go ahead and pledge your support.

https://theministryhasfallen.substack.com/p/guest-post-an-explainer-to-an-old

Thanks, @TiedUpWithABlackVelvetBand - I didn't tag you, because loads of people do it, and I know it's done with good intentions of wanting to share great writing.

I agree with this.

I think there is a perception that the whole of continental Europe has succumbed to the gender borg and I just don't think that's true. I think it is far more pervasive in the English speaking world than elsewhere.

The EU, in any case, is not one country, but a group of countries which all have their own unique culture, and so gender ideology will manifest itself differently in each of those countries, depending not only on that country's laws about gender identity, but also that country's culture more generally.

I've already mentioned that in France there are fewer single sex spaces to begin with, and also that the people are more socially conservative so I think trans people are more inclined to go about their lives quietly and not be too visible for fear of provoking a backlash. But I think there are other factors too.

For example, the French language just doesn't bend to accommodate gender ideology in the way English does. So, French speaking trans women might call themselves "elle", but there is no real equivalent of "her". This is because possessive pronouns, the French equivalents of "his" and "her" are gendered according to the gender of the object being possessed, rather than the person doing the possessing. "His table" and "her table" both translate as "sa table" because the table is feminine. The person's gender comes into play more at the end of verbs, usually with an extra "e" being added at the end when the person is female. But the "e" is silent, so you only see it in written French. This also makes non binary language impossible to accommodate. There have been moves to accommodate it, with the introduction of a new gender neutral singular pronoun "iel", but when spoken quickly it just sounds like "il", meaning "he", and as for the verb endings, unfortunately they are binary. You either have an extra, silent "e", or you don't. So "iel", in practice, defaults to the masculine and becomes virtually indistinguishable from "il". All this means is that French speaking trans people have far less scope to express their gender identity through grammatical gender, as it's much harder to noticeably change your pronouns.

I also think that the way grammatical gender works in French might make native speakers of French naturally more resistant to the idea of people changing their gender. In English only people and animals have genders, with all inanimate objects being neutral. This makes gender inextricably linked with biological sex in most people's minds, because the genders correspond to male and female, and anyone using the gender which does not correspond to their biological sex is making a statement. In French, every inanimate object has a gender, and they don't change. If a table is irrevocably feminine and can never be masculine in a French person's mind, I imagine it might be somewhat harder to imagine a person changing their gender.

I am convinced that this - together with the fact that most online content about gender ideology is written in English - goes some way to explaining why the idea of gender fluidity just hasn't captured the French in the same way. They know that trans people exist, they know that some people have gender dysphoria, and trans people's rights are well protected in France. But fundamentally, I think the prevailing view is that humans can't change sex and gender dysphoria is a mental illness. I cannot imagine a French politician doing what various Labour MPs have done, insisting that a woman can have a penis, or that a man can grow a cervix. They'd be laughed out of town.

Also - one more thing, sorry - the UK was criticised by the Council of Europe for being incredibly transphobic. I think media reports of this may have given people in the UK the impression that the whole of the EU is far more woke than the UK. This simply isn't true.

I expect the Council of Europe simply got their information about the UK being a horribly transphobic place where trans people are being murdered every day from the likes of Stonewall, and didn't bother to do any fact checking before criticising the UK. The UK isn't very popular, after all.

Agree with this - I think the language points are v important. Also many continental European countries are actually still quite socially conservative, as you say, plus still much less secular and more religious (largely Catholic) than the U.K.

(Is it going too far to suggest that “living as a woman” is far less appealing in some continental European countries than in the Angliphone world? France and the Mediterranean countries are still pretty sexist, especially in the workplace, in ways that are often quite surprising to the British/Americans. I wonder whether adopting “womanhood” as a lived role is just a bit less of a pleasing prospect in, say, Italy, Greece or Poland, than in the U.K. or California, say.)

Plus rights-based discourses / social justice movements in Europe have always been much less individualistic and identitarian than in the US and North America. And gender ideology is overwhelmingly American / Anglophone in sensibility, and often highly influenced by social media.

I'm always interested to hear what other gendered languages do. I have sort of not too bad-ish-a-level-a-long-time-ago French so I'm not up with how it is now.

But in German? There is a whole huge thing about gendered language and how to accommodate using both genders in spoken language. Hard to explain if you don't speak German but it basically boils down to using what sounds like the feminine form (which is an ending to the male form) with a tiny break between them when speaking or an asterisk in writing. This is HOTLY contended on and off the internet, but it's also not new since the whole trans/self ID thing became a hot topic. I've been doing it for years, or using a "generic feminine" when speaking and telling men "they're included too" (it's usually the other way round") as a 2nd waver it tickles me to see the reactions.

Not forgetting the German penchant for getting naked - with zero sexual connotations - "at the drop of a hat". So mixed saunas (segregated sex saunas are also available) and nude bathing areas at large lakes and beaches, naturist camping sites and clubs aren't unusual.

I'm not aware if there is a SWF or Let Women Speak kind of organisation here.

Also - one more thing, sorry - the UK was criticised by the Council of Europe for being incredibly transphobic. I think media reports of this may have given people in the UK the impression that the whole of the EU is far more woke than the UK. This simply isn't true.

interesting point - it could also be that, as you said on a previous post a lot of the discourse is in English, and a lot of the films we see of conflict between groups of people are in the UK so it does look as though there are constant running battles there.

Not sure about pp mentioning that living as a woman might not be as attractive in some countries, since i think it's only Spain that have passed laws (yet) on Self ID?

The question about whether "living as a woman" is more attractive in certain countries than in others is an interesting one.

I can't speak for any country other than France, and even when speaking about France, this is only my opinion.

But I do not think that "living as a woman" is a negative thing in France. Yes, there is some everyday sexism here that we might not see so much in the UK. Equality between the sexes is an important pillar of the constitution. It's written into the civil marriage vows which everyone marrying in France has to make, they'll question you about it in your citizenship interview etc. The symbol of France, Marianne, is a woman. So I do think women and womanhood itself are valued and respected in France.

When it comes to men vs women, the French believe we are equal but not the same. They even have a phrase, "vive la différence !" which basically means men are from Mars and women are from Venus but we should celebrate our differences.

In short, I doubt men in France are less likely to want to identify as a woman due to perceived low status of women.

Regarding the nuances of the language, I thought of another important point.

In French, the words "male" and "femelle" are only used about animals. Everyone knows that "un homme" is an adult human male and "une femme" is an adult human female, but the phrase "adult human female" would never, ever be adopted by the French. They wouldn't call themselves "femelle" because they like to think they are better than farmyard animals, and I suppose because these words inherently refer to your role in reproduction/breeding, which is considered distasteful.

For that reason French women have not relinquished the word "femme" because there is no other word or phrase in the English language referring to female sexed humans. So a trans woman must always be a "trans femme" and never a "femme".

In the French language, sorry, typo!

There are a few countries in Europe with self ID now.

I found this page:

https://tgeu.org/trans-rights-map-2022/

What I find most shocking about this is that one of the countries which seems to have the most liberal trans rights / self ID laws is Malta.

Malta, which has a total ban on abortion.

that site has a lot of words Isn't there just a picture of a map with self ID countries in a different colour?

I haven't found one so far. I actually stumbled across that when I was looking for the raw data about trans homicides, which used to be available on the TDOR website.

(i know I'm lazy, i don't want a graduated varigated colour map according to how many rights trans people have - i want a quick visual representation without making 42 clicks of where Self ID is in operation)

RosaBonheur · Today 19:56
Thank you for all those details about the French. How interesting.