Trans rights activism, a GC male perspective

[RealityFan]

Hallo Mumsnet allies, from recently-joined new comrade in arms. And a male to boot.
I've been deliberating leaving some thoughts on the scarred landscape that is trans activism, from an XY perspective. I'm unsure of how much interest a guy's thoughts are here.
My opinions range from the autogynephile/porn "sharp end" of the phenomenon, through my views as a male non parent on the phenomenon amongst teens, through the threat to free speech/institutional capture area, segueing nicely into the Labour Party's position and what this means post-2024 GE.
I need to be frank in this discussion, and some of what I might say may rub some readers the wrong way, but it's my heartfelt analysis.
I'm seeing very little from GC men online, save for Graham Linehan, Malcolm Clark, Dennis Noel Kavanagh, Simon Edge, Colin Wright, Billboard Chris, Wesley Yang, Jon Pike.
My take is of someone who's really thought a lot about this subject, has really weighed up lots of factors, and has really come down on the GC side, indeed is working hard to reconcile very strong emotions on the subject.
I'll post my thoughts if that's wanted, let me know.

Sure, appreciated.

I really was unaware the AGP side was so widely understood. And tbh, my "championing" of male-only spaces ended up derailing the thread.

I'm also found it interesting to be told more than once I was bringing nothing new to the discussion, and that this is a female fight, plain and simple.

I think your analysis is simplistic and unhelpful. I do think all the rationale for single sex spaces should be clear and properly considered. But their context in a broader power and dominance structure means that equality is not achieved by offering the same for all. That's a level playing field assumption and following that simplification leads to maintenance of the status quo. Not one person as far as I can see has said that'll male only spaces are over stepping. Nor that a desire for them belies a desire to get one over on women. The actual consequences of single sex spaces need examining and in many instances the benefits csn be achieved without the costs through other provisions. Where they can't, the motivations for their request should be examined and 'I fancy it' is not a good enough argument from either sex.

@RealityFan

I don't think it is a 'female fight, pure and simple'. I can't recall anyone actually saying that, but I might have missed it.

I think what we are saying is: thank you. Men are necessary to speak up and tell other men. I think that was said a lot earlier on. Join in discussions on here by all means. Don't be put off. This site likes robust debate. I think we've all had a spanking on here from time to time for saying something uneducated or contentious. I know I have. You've seen it happen on this thread to others too. We disagree. Often.

You would do well to assume that women on
This particular board know this subject better than the vast majority of men and more than a lot of other women too. Most of us have been researching, learning, talking, listening and debating for years now. A lot of us have come up against AGPs. We have the occasional visit from them here too. We have some idea of where they are coming from.

We also have a fair few trans widows, who have a better insight than anyone else of what makes those men tick.

So stick around and we might actually give you some things to think about too.

I agree @literalviolence .

I feel words have been put into our mouths because we critique false equivalence.

Also, I don’t think anyone said that women can’t be bad, or some such thing.

There’s basically been a lot of back and forth.

WDIT
NAMALT

would have covered most of it.

What is the rule of misogyny about pattern matching too?

@RealityFan To be fair, I think that in the very recent past any particular mention of that 3 letter acronym would lead to a post getting reported and deleted. So it would look as if no-one is really talking about/aware of that aspect on here. But it doesn't hurt to get it out there for new visitors. On my part, I am quite used to seeing "This is what feminists wanted, you took stuff from men, now enjoy your just deserts" type posts on social media, so the element of this being a backlash against feminism wasn't new knowledge. I think that's true for quite a lot of people and why I think it raised peoples hackles when you started talking about it although I didn't get the impression you meant it in the same way at all.
I actually found the discussion about single sex spaces useful. It clarified my thoughts in some ways and I think that helps when arguing in favour of single sex spaces in real life rather than online. So it was useful for me.

And yes, the success of the SFW event (and lack of violence) was the best news of today!

I think this is right.

Lots of GC women who have been around for a while have heard some of these talking points in more aggressive and unpleasant tones over the last few years.

'Feminists: this is all on you.'

We have also been wearied by men popping up to say 'women, you are doing this all wrong'. Or even (most insultingly) 'why are you leaving this to the men? Where are the women?' (The audacity of that one!)

You haven't done that at all, but we have had that so often that a hint of it gets the hackles up. It's not really about you. It's like the last drop of water that sends it all spilling over the top, if you see what I mean.

Also, I don't want to celebrate too soon but if we can talk openly about AGP on here now than that is truly excellent news!

And personally I want to bring the word "ally" back to its original meaning - that is "a person or group that is associated with another for some common cause or purpose". (Rather than the more recent, purity spiralling SJW definition).

Sure, willdo. This forum certainly beats my specialist hobby one. I've never knew letting off steam could feel so good.

Keep the food for thought coming.

"Also, I don’t think anyone said that women can’t be bad, or some such thing."

It kind of implied it to me when you said this;

"I can’t believe we are now saying men need boys clubs for protection from ‘false accusations’ on the same thread that ‘poor dads’ get a sympathetic mention for needing to dress up as superheroes because their terrorised wives and children fled from them.

Are we going back in time?"

Apologies if I misunderstood, just it came across to me as though you were saying false allegations were a silly justification for why men may want single sex spaces, as if they don't happen.
Or that the dad's dressing up as superheroes (I didn't see that part of this thread so can't comment more in depth specifically) are solely the abusive ones, as if men can't also face abuse from their female partners as well :s

More than happy to apologise further if that wasn't what you were implying >.<

There is always a danger, when you place the burden of proof with the oppressed, that the threshold of acceptable proof will never be reached. We can agree to disagree but I think the default should be mixed sex spaces unless there is a clear and reasonable justification for single sex. I want it, women make me think of sex, it's how it's always been - none of these are reasonable justifications. Redressing balance, fairness in sports, dignity in intimate care, protection from violence - those sorts of things are reasonable justification.

What I was talking about was “women do it too, women do it too, women do it too” as a deflection from the total asymmetry of male violence against women compared to any women’s violence against men.

It has been used to shut women up and invalidate the reality when women speak up. I believe some 60% of calls for the police are domestic violence situations and the overwhelming majority are perpetrated by men. There is a pattern here.

Women making ‘false accusations’ against men is extremely rare - apparently it is in keeping with people making false accusations against any crime - theft, harassment, etc, etc. (Fun fact - many false accusations of domestic violence are made by abusive men against their female partners as a way of using the police to punish and control them if they dare try to defend themselves or retaliate). Amongst misogynists, incels and MRAs, this ‘false accusation’ thing is greatly elevated- as though lying is a ‘woman thing’ and ‘the poor men having his life ruined’ is so much worse than all the women and girls who have had their lives, their self-confidence, their mental health, their destinies, ruined by male domination, bullying, sexual abuse, rape, and so on. I know so many women with stories of male violence, particularly sexual violence. I don’t think any of the men have suffered any consequences. Even in a situation, a friend at college, complained that her boyfriend had been accused of taking part in a group assault and I don’t think that ended in a conviction- the victim was monstered though.

Saying that it is not symmetrical, it is not equivalent, or male violence against, male domination of, women and girls, is not mirrored back at men, is not the same thing as saying ‘no woman ever does anything bad’.

When people feel the need to focus on the bad women, to over-emphasise their importance in the scheme of things, it is par for the course for feminists. Both women and men favour men and see criticisms of men and male dominance/male violence as threats to the status quo, to stability.

I even see it in myself. With the Billboard Chris situation, him being assaulted by the screaming man, I end up feeling more haunted by the smug female police officer smiling throughout. She reminded me of Lynndie England in Abu Graib.

A feminist forum is not the place for our natural inclination towards blaming women for everything. It’s for unpicking our natural tendency to blame women for everything.

Here are some classic MRA tropes/phrases:

’False accusations’
’Man having his life ruined by lying woman’
’Parental alienation syndrome’ (a made-up ‘syndrome’ to describe the behaviour of women trying to escape and protect herself and her children from an abusive/controlling husband/father)
’Man just needs some space’ (from nagging woman who gets off on making him feel bad for buggering off to the pub instead of doing his fair share of housework and parenting)

If posters in FWR lean towards these tropes over any feminist analysis, I feed like the clock has been wound back a couple of decades.

There is a reason I ask if women have brothers or went to a single sex school, because in my experience, I have noticed that women who have no brothers have not witnessed sexism and inequality in their own family, and women who went to girls’ schools have no insight into male bullying of females at school.

In fact, a woman who has been behind this big push to get rid of single sex toilets to create ‘anti-bullying toilets’ went to an all girls’ school, so she has no damned idea what it is like.

I absolutely do. Im actually undergoing CBT to manage my reactions to TRA, and work at my inner peace.

@RealityFan just reading through, I'm intrigued to know what your therapist has made of your opinions?

You also mentioned being at a conference and hearing about a child psychologist banned from her own conference; was it Professor Michele Moore you read about?

I'm also interested to know what it is about your background or perhaps professional experience that makes you care so much?

Dh only got interested through sport. We don't have daughters. Or I think he would more. He's since been overly annoyed by clients wanting mixed sex loos as the building regs are actually fairly restrictive. You get many more toilets for the space with single sex toilets in stalls in a room. But have to provide a set number for the amount of people using the spaces. So it fucks up some layouts.

Fully agree.

Four of us in a close friendship group, all of us are the older sister to one sister (one who is an engineer does have a much younger brother.)

Engineer and another friend went to private girls schools . My other friend and I to mixed sex state schools. We of state school background seem to be more realistic.

The other two have heaps of self confidence but seem to have no idea how the real world works, Despite the other one being a nurse. Both aware that sexism exists and do challenge it but can't seem to see the more nuanced stuff including safeguarding aspects.

Both of them appear to be idealistic lefties and celebrated Corbyn. Not much room for compromise. Though claim to like debate. My state school friend who's been a social worker her whole life is like me and sees complexities. Not fans of the tories either but more realistic about what works and what doesn't.

I doubt any golf clubs / cigar lounges or debating societies have ever been free of women. The woman may not have been members but they will have been pouring drinks and cleaning the toilets.

But you didn't think about that did you? You didn't see them as of equal value did you?

Well, whether it's the past few years of everything being online, opinions filtered and magnified by social media, and me spending way too much time online, I've noticed I've became way more easily triggered, way more "single issue" in my politics, and very easily "herded".

I think tbh whatever our opinions on anything, the online world we live in is as big a curse than anything else I can imagine, from obvious things like the death of bricks and mortar retail, to the escalation of social trends, the latter mutating wildly while also digging in like Japanese Knotweed.

I truly believe the online world is too fast and too complex for our brains to evolve coping mechanisms to. And we're seeing tragic evidence of this amongst teens and the social contagion we're all worried about on MN (as well as the new ones, tics etc), and the radicalisation of the younger TRAs.

It's from this PoV that Ive found myself being peaked by this subject and seeking out CBT.
I've done a real deep dive into the AGP phenomena that drives the poison, gotten extremely agitated hearing one report another of female athletes denied, the harassment of women at GC meets, the crime of cancelling and shaming academics with GC views, and the lunatic end of the phenomenon on Reduxx etc.

What has particularly peaked me, certainly more than the individuals (now I have derision rather than anger for the visible players like Lia Thomas, Emily Bridges, Eddie Izzard, Posie's attacker etc), is the institutional capture side of things.

Once you realise herd mentality and purity spirals really are a thing (I'd always been blissfully unaware or skeptical), you start to "get" how pretty much the whole of MSM, medicine, thinking therapies, social sciences, hard sciences, arts, linguistics, even philosophy, can fall prey.

Hell, becoming aware I've been just as guilty in the past of being easily corralled and doubling down on opposite politics opinions (slavish devotion to being a Tory voter despite shitshow since 2010, becoming somewhat radical on Brexit, realising how Little Englander over all my adult life I'd been on migration, despite both my parents WW2 generation from E. Europe).

So, therapy has got me drawing away from anger with individuals like Lia, realising that institutions radicalise themselves, and the final conclusions that I don't have any natural political group anymore, and that I can't "rely" on the postmodern societal elites that are driving the TRA agenda throughout every institution.

Therapy has enabled me to feel good about myself. Indeed, I've really interrogated my views on all aspects of TRA, and unlike other areas of political beliefs that have unravelled as I've learnt more, I'm doubling down on hardcore GC attitudes.

My therapist believes TRA can't survive contact with cold air of reality. This being borne out by Sturgeon debacle more than ever.

I also believe it'll be the kids that save us, Gen Alpha absolutely appalled by the selfishness of their Gen X siblings and freaked by society acquiescing to insanity.

And a big part of why I'm here is the dive into my own murky past, my somewhat brittle views on women decades past, my personal freedoms trumping women's comfort attitudes, my questionable reading and viewing material.

I am a therapist myself, and thus view all this thru a certain prism. Also being somewhat on the autistic spectrum, my empathy side is badly jarred by what I'm seeing as extreme non empathy with girls and women.

And I retain my deep cynicism that I've always applied to narcissists and attention seekers. But never in my wildest nightmares did I expect the worst ones of all to drive public policy.

I'm still working thru the ramifications of stuff like Posie's attack, Lia Thomas, men running rape refuges, Sturgeon preventing amendments stopping rapists Self IDing, Starmer's inability to read the room or have any principles, science and medicine captured, an MSM not worth the paper it's written on.

As a logical objective humanist, I've always argued with my Christian friend that at heart humans are altruistic as a species and will find the best solutions. Is it really gonna have to be women en masse rising up and an acknowledgement that we've so let kids down, that will right this ship? For the first time I'm really questioning those high up in society I've reflexly trusted. I don't want to become a bitter nihilist.

Mentally, my mindset as someone approaching 60 is kinda back in my late teens (1980)...given up on religion, no trust in politics or adults generally. At least the music and TV and movies were better then, lol.

--

Not sure on the professor's name, but it was another early peaking moment, and they kept coming...so much has happened in four years.

Isn't that the point though? The staff aren't of 'equal value' (I mean, they are as human beings, just not within the artificial hierarchy of the club's membership). The gradations of status are based on class and wealth.

Forcing everything to fit the template of gender as the prime, or only, lens for understanding the world complicates any subsequent analysis and reduces the chances of achieving genuine understanding. The private/state school example cited by a PP is also surely just as much about class as it is gender (and btw ... what makes the world of the privately-educated any less 'real' than the world of the state-educated? That type of language is itself problematic - it seeks to alienate the experiences of a class of people and diminish their perspective).

Quote RealityFan: 'Is it really gonna have to be women en masse rising up and an acknowledgement that we've so let kids down, that will right this ship? For the first time I'm really questioning those high up in society I've reflexly trusted. I don't want to become a bitter nihilist.'
Please do not be too hard on yourself. I am a similar age to you and I have politically gone the other way to you.
I now vote Conservative despite having been a Labour Party Member most of my adult life. I did vote Remain but understood why others did not. Could not stomach Corbin.
Free speech is absolutely the most important thing which underpins democracy. It is severely under threat from the political centre and liberal left. The Tories do not really deserve to be re-elected because of all their in-fighting and wastage of an 80 seat majority (except for being willing to spend whatever it took during Covid to stop society totally breaking down - it is easy to be wise after the event - they actually managed to get the homeless off the streets and into hotels) but I think they are a safer bet than all the others who really are totally in thrall to genderwoo.
At least Johnson spoke out against TW in women's sport despite his wife's Stonewall fan-girling.
Staggered Theresa May was suckered in to 'Be Kind'...relieved Johnson and Truss decided to ditch self-id.
Labour? I feel so insulted by their attitude to my sex-based rights, I can't see myself every supporting them again. Pointless in my current constituency anyway but that wasn't always the case when I lived in tother places.
Remember a vote is just an X on a piece of paper. It is worth casting for the lesser of 2 evils but it is not worth falling out with people about or agonising. Enjoy life. You only get the one.

I didn’t read it that way, though I may of course have got it wrong.

The way I read it no-one here agree with what you outlined, but some men will have that point of view (and enough women too, sadly) and maybe it feeds into this movement.

Maybe it doesn’t, maybe they are separate.

When people bring out the «women can be violent too» I do agree, women can certainly be violent. But if I slap my DH hard, he will Get a small bruise, if he slaps me hard he will break my neck.

So the two kinds of physical violence are not the same.
When it comes to psychological violence the two sexes are equal. Though again, the male will have the advantage of backing his abuse with the implicit or explicit threat of death to a much, much higher degree.

When it comes to single sex spaces it seems people were talking about two different things.
Single sex spaces for safety and dignity vs single sex clubs based on hundreds of years of women being not considered fully human. The way I read it people agreed we need the former but certainly not the latter.

It is good to have it hashed out properly. I find discussions like this help me iron out my own thoughts, even the discussions I only read.

It is hard to follow a fast flowing thread! I don’t know how you guys keep track so well.

I forgot one other thing. Despite having read the books by Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock etc, I still don't really know how this collective insanity of institutions took hold across the western world. Money must obviously be a factor but beyond that I do wonder if it is eugenics coming around again just like it did in the 1920s on the left about 100 years ago. Why else are 'elites' so willing to see gay people transed away, autistic people rendered infertile and so on. But that seems too dark for democracy so perhaps it's just 'follow the money' after all.

On single sex spaces, I am in a Book Group with some neighbours, all female. There is no reason why a male partner couldn't come along but they don't because they get that it is about female bonding. It is almost an unwritten rule.
Yes men did have to make changes in behaviour when all-male Oxbridge Colleges started to admit women in the 1980s. No more blue movies could be shown in the Junior Common Room.
It is silly to pretend that the sexes are not different in many ways.

Therapy has enabled me to feel good about myself. Indeed, I've really interrogated my views on all aspects of TRA, and unlike other areas of political beliefs that have unravelled as I've learnt more, I'm doubling down on hardcore GC attitudes.

My therapist believes TRA can't survive contact with cold air of reality. This being borne out by Sturgeon debacle more than ever.

I highly doubt your therapy claims. I'm sorry to be sceptical, but this whole thread seems a bit of a wind up.

Therapists help you explore issues. They do not express their opinions on something like TRAs or AGP. As a therapist, you should know that. It's 101 stuff.

Also you seem to be obsessing over men, AGP, and Gender Criticals. That is not healthy in my opinion. Your therapist would normally help you not to be so obsessed.

AGP as a theory, is widely discredited in the professional mental health profession.

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that trans is a perversion and all for kink, and sexual reasons.

But that doesnt explain trans mean (who were cis women). Are they also AGP's? No, generally they seem to be explained as misguided lesbians or doing trans, as their friends are.

I honestly don't think you can judge trans people unless you talk to them. Without realising what they go through, having some empathy, and recognising it is not some porn obsessed hypno fetish......well....you lead to a position of intolerance.

And it is fair for trans people to push back against people who would not tolerate them.

Still, the thread does have some fun content, so I am enjoying the postings and misogyny throughout.

My advice: Live your life and don't obsess over a small minority of people. It's not healthy. Look at Glinner - seems to spend his entire life on this stuff. Surely wasted, but everyone makes their own choices.

Permission to don a tinfoil hat please!

The way I see it, is that it has been opportunistically seized upon by probably Russia/China to undermine Western democracy. I found it fascinating that somehow, men in the American military have been targeted with ‘hypno-sissy-porn’ with extremely high-production values, and the men addicted to it even got paranoid “Where’s all this come from? Why does it have such high production values? Why is there so much of it? Why does it make me want to be castrated?”. I think we on the ground are being toyed with so that we tear our own democracy, our families, our bodies and our countries apart at the seams. Then who gets to take over and clean up?