Just musing on trans-inclusive feminists and it struck me..

[bitgoadyquestion]

I know some clever and 'feminist' trans inc feminists. It has totally baffled me how they cannot see that biology is very important for women's spaces. Recently I realised that in my social circle all the TIF also have bad daddy issues. And poor relationship boundaries.

Maybe that's why any disagreement is met so vehemently, kinda like subconsciously 'I have no boundaries, so you aren't allowed them either, I can't say no to the daddy figure so nor can you'.........

(Am out for the rest of the day and name changed for this, been here since the mouldies but interested to see what others think).

I am not a psychologist/psychiatrist but I know that there must be some reason for their fucked up way of thinking

Well if you look at the issue through the filter of transgenderism being a symptom of distress, I think a lot of the behaviours and rhetoric begins to make sense (as in, it has context and you can see where it's come from - not that it turns out to be correct).

Like someone pointed out recently the rates of narcissistic personality disorders seen in people who present at gender clinics is out of proportion to the general population, and that also makes a lot of sense.

I think when you have distress, confusion, vulnerability and/or trauma on one hand, and a group of adults who are driven by the need to justify their own choices on the other, and sell these choices on as "the answer", it's easy to see how people are driven into the ideology.

And when this new family of theirs tells them that they are going to be hunted down and dragged from their homes, and that their only option to be safe is to close ranks, and anyone who questions the Family is actively seeking to harm you, it's easy to see how people are too frightened to leave, and it's easy to see how outsiders think that TERFs are violent, right-wing fascists and must be stopped.

And if they do have a change of perspective and do leave the cult, they're often bombarded with the most acidic vitriol from the people who said they would always be there, discredited, ridiculed, and facing the cold, stark reality of what they have done. In which case it's easy to see why they would go back into the cult.

I have nothing but sympathy for trans-identified people. It's the ones who want to justify their own mistakes by legitimising them, mass-marketing them and reframing them as 'rights', and will cheerfully throw kids and young adults under the bus to achieve that - those are the people I reserve my utter contempt for.

Honestly? I think many of them have little to to with trans people and support trans inclusion as a concept without thinking through the reality.

Either that or they have been lucky enough not to need a women's refuge or rape crisis service and can't empathise with women who need these spaces to be safe and single sex.

I think a lot of them have a lot of trouble with middle-aged women generally and particularly their mothers.

Perhaps it’s because of how old I am, but the pattern I have seen repeating among transactivist women of my acquaintance is that it’s often women who have trouble accepting ageing so they can’t bear to diverge from what young people think. It goes with them dyeing their hair funky colours rather than let it go grey….

IMO its normal to go through a stage as a teenager when you begin to break the bonds with your parents and form new ones with your peer group, as preparation for leaving home. Liberal feminism seems to me to be an extension of that phase; creating an identity for yourself while forming strong allegiances with men.

I have no boundaries, so you aren't allowed them either

This is very true for many things, not just transactivists.

When someone with no boundaries meets someone with boundaries they’ll likely judge them as:

• Uptight
• Stuck up
• Selfish
• Cold
• Unfriendly
• Boring

I'm not sure about your precise analysis, but i do think that the issues of boundaries and limitation are pertinent.

If a woman is still holding out for the idea of there being no meaningful difference between men and women then she might refuse to acknowledge differences. She may put any felt differences down to being an indvidual rather than being female.

One obvious question for trans inclusive feminists if they really believe there are no essential differences betwen males and females ( apart from body parts) that might warrant single sex spaces, is how come so many of them spoend most of their time campaigning about male violence towards women, or about how having children cretaes a gender pay gap, and so on.......

Some of the younger feminists I've met truly believe that trans people are the most vulnerable people in society. They went to single-sex schools so were never told they weren't as good as the boys, they're in the early stages of employment so haven't seen their whole career go down the toilet through having kids, they demand full participation from their partners and they're all a tiny bit queer (in their heads they are, any way).

I try to hold compassion for them and be glad that the work of the elder women have allowed them to identify so closely into their privilege. Time will sort them out.

*When someone with no boundaries meets someone with boundaries they’ll likely judge them as:

• Uptight
• Stuck up
• Selfish
• Cold
• Unfriendly
• Boring*

Definitely! Women I know have been very strange about my stance on stripping and things like nudity. Sorry but don’t assume everyone has the same boundaries.

Ah yes. A discussion in which it is proposed that a woman can not form her own opinions or beliefs without a man (her father).

It’s so very hard being a woman … since we apparently have no agency over our thoughts or minds.

As 'trans inclusive' in fact when put through the bullshit translator means 'will exclude and harm women for people with penises'....

the behaviour is meeting a need. And it's highly sex based thinking, with only two sexes. Which makes reciting the catechism regarding of course there are many sexes and no one knows which one any male person might currently wish you to performatively support them as being anyone is an act of self flagellation to the higher power.

The social cookies and inverted religious behaviours are all mixed in with this too.

Hard agree.
Almost 27, and went to an all girl's school - Can confirm at least from my experience and that of friends that there was a LOT of issues with mothers. Generally a lot of shouting & guilting in the home.
A fair few have gone 0 contact.
I count myself lucky that divorce changed my mum entirely and we've since mended our relationship.

Holly Lawford-Smith's book* has stuff about liberal vs. radical feminism, and to me those sections gave an additional cue about one of the reasons for being inclusive of men who identify as women in feminism. The liberal feminism began with the desire to expand the rights and roles of the liberal political movement from just men to also women, so the starting point there was not in biological sex but in social and political exclusion of a group.

If you pay little attention to biological sex, then you wouldn't really care terribly much about new people wanting to enter the previously excluded group. Though of course women were excluded from the liberal rights on the basis of their sex and not because of some accidental oversight, and I don't really mean that today's feminists would think in those terms; just that the foundation of their ideology does de-emphasise the importance of sex in causing the subjugation of women.

My own impression is that progressive women trained in the universities from early noughts onward came into the feminist movement with a basic bundle of beliefs focused on intersectionality, privilege, and inclusiveness, and not on women's rights.

My own experiences from that era is also that very little critical assessment of that trinity (intersectionality, privilege, inclusiveness) at all, not even to point out when they can be misused (which they now are fairly often) was allowed.

The one radical feminist in one group who tried to do that, in fairly gentle and questioning terms, was kicked out. This was a signal others then accepted and either stayed silent or left.

When news reported about events where the basic bundle of values got thoroughly shaken (men ranked lower in race privilege raped women ranked higher in race privilege, say) it became impossible for that remaining group to address the nuances in the issues or to even speak for the victims. The Cologne mass sexual harassment, for instance, was then not even mentioned. The sexual slave markets of ISIS were never mentioned and so on.

And all this came from the privilege-based theory about ranking types of oppression and then only truly speaking for the ones who rank highest on some global scale.

Not sure if I could write that clearly enough, and of course it's only my own experiences from a handful of groups.

But I also think that lots of people of all kinds, including feminist, have just thought that the trans rights are exactly like the gay and Lesbian rights, without any infringement of the rights of others in most areas of life, and that the concept of 'rights' in the two cases is also exactly the same and equally fair.

*I recommend her discussion in that book about what feminism should or could mean, if it should be about trying to make women's lives in general better or if it should be limited to trying to make women's lives better where the reason those lives are not good has to do with being a woman.

I share your confusion @bitgoadyquestion is it that they still at their core don't want to be too much trouble? Deeeeep down they can only engage in a form of feminism that doesn't anger the men too much?

Nobody does womanhood like a man and some of these (mostly younger) trans inclusive feminists seem to think it's like a stigma they're sharing out, ie, you can be a woman, you can be a woman. Rather than no, we're the women and you aren't a woman.

It's an interesting conundrum.

I don't think there's one simple reason but in my social circle (I use the term deliberately in so far I mingle with some of these people but wouldn't class them as friends iyswim) I see a lot of tribalism.

So one friendship circle is very TWAW another is GC and then there is a group that have given it no thought at all.

What I haven't see is fractures within these units where one person (or more) disagrees with their group think.

I honestly believe that far more people than would admit it, know that you can't change sex and don't want men in female spaces, but are too scared of being socially isolated to say that or being perceived as not liberal/progressive.

Hmmmm.... my father was a nasty man and I don't have a good hand for picking male partners, so I guess that qualifies as 'daddy issues'? But I'm as GC as they come. I would have thought that women who learned in their childhood homes what men are capable of tend that way.

The feminist but trans-inclusive women I know are typically just naive, have had little exposure to the reality of narcissistic or aggressive men whether presenting as trans women or otherwise, and buy into the notion that this is the next frontier of liberation, iyswim. They definitely don't all have daddy issues.

I think it's an easy mistake to make, really - to assume that some kind of trans-inclusive compromise is possible for most or all situations without exposing women to harm. All you have to do is to disregard the fact that for any possible way of harassing women, there is a considerable number of men who will go for it. I suspect a lot of women underestimate the male nastiness out there.

And 'feminist' is often just shorthand for a woolly commitment to equality that doesn't fully recognize how difficult it is to achieve equality in the face of the necessities imposed by human reproduction (among other things).

The split within my own circles of 40-something women seems mostly to be along the lines of those with children tend more to being terfy and those without tend more to 'be kind'. My theory is that for women of my age (and realistically, class / background) we were brought up to believe we could do anything the boys could do. And for most of our lives that was true. Then those of us who had kids really started to see the difference, and how much of a factor biology was in that. I'm pretty sure the gender pay gap doesn't kick in until people start having kids, then (roughly) dads earn more and mums earn less, for example. And no matter how supportive my husband was, he couldn't help with the sheer exhaustion that breast feeding caused. So my peers who haven't had children haven't really felt or faced the same issues to the same extent.

To be really clear, I don't believe having a child is a prerequisite to becoming a terf, or that women without children don't face discrimination, but I suspect for younger women it can help bring in to focus issues that perhaps don't seem as obvious before that point in their lives. That or we all became radicalised by Mumsnet 😁

I find that the most vocal people are liberal feminists, but they only want to talk about empowerment of individual women. This often means presenting oppressive and/or patriarchal expectations as empowering for women with a healthy dose of "please like me because I'm not like those nasty anti-men feminists".

Many other people like the sound of "be kind" and believe in boundaries. Once it becomes clear that "be kind" only goes in one direction on a few issues they realise that it's even more important to have boundaries.

V interesting post Nepeta

So much of this seems to boil down to the seeing of everything through political critical theory: who is oppressed by whom, the hierarchy, yada yada. If you don't subscribe to that belief system, then none of it makes much sense.

There's definitely something to the "Has children Vs Doesn't". I totally agree!

I saw the other day that it's been reported that over 50% of women in the UK aged 30 are childless.
Used to hate the Daily Mail, but this article is actually fairly well written and really puts things into perspective.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10447507/Half-women-childless-thirty-time-ever.html

Begins to make more sense when you start to realise that people with actual experience around children, what they're like, what they understand, what they can and can't consent to etc, have literally become the minority.