Can MNHQ set up a new discussion category called Feminism: sex & gender discussion (inclusive, non-GC)

[PlanetLuna]

MN, will you please create a talk group/category of Feminism: sex & gender discussion (inclusive, non-GC)?

MN appears to currently have only 2 feminism categories:
Feminism: chat
Feminism: sex & gender discussions

But the Feminism: sex & gender category on MN is predominantly GC, with its emphasis on trans exclusion ideology. Feminists who do not subscribe to those beliefs are often unwelcome and treated with derision and hostility in discussions. Certainly not always as some GC posters do enjoy open, intellectual discussions but often enough that engagement can be toxic & intimidating all around.

It is almost impossible for non-GC feminists to find inclusive/non-GC feminist discussions, and we have to wade through unpleasant (for us) GC threads while attempting to do so.

GC feminism dominates on UK parenting sites in particular. However, inclusive/non-GC feminism is extremely popular around the world (especially in places like the US, NZ, and AU) and in the UK among younger feminists and those who do not see trans rights as a threat to women & girls’ safety. Many UK feminists are non-GC but may feel silenced on MN.

The addition of another category will help open up and improve MN discussions while reducing the toxicity and hostility that many feminists on both sides experience in discussions.

So I propose the following feminism discussion categories:
Feminism: chat (general)
Feminism: sex & gender discussions (GC)
Feminism: sex & gender discussion (inclusive, non-GC)

@MNHQ

Free speech, innit?

I think ra-ra-pro-trans-ideology, unicorn-poop feminism is a load of hooey, but let them have their board if they want to.

If you shut down other people's arguments, you just end up looking really weak and feeding conspiracy theories and grievances ("They are stopping us from talking because they know they'd lose the argument if we had a debate").

Give them a board. They are unlikely to convince anyone here, because their arguments are, like, silly.

Plus, lurking on such a board looks like it might be a good laugh.

But wouldn’t allowing males to identify as women put women in more danger from “bad men”. We had a “bad man” who identified as a woman (he was a violent male rapist) and who would have been locked up with vulnerable women until women kicked up,a fuss. How is allowing men to identify as women protecting those women? How is allowing men to identify those rape trauma victims who now have to attend groups where males are allowed to be present instead of the female only spaces they want and need. How is allowing men to identify as women protecting survivors of DV traumatised by male presence who may go to a “female only” shelter to find out men are present, and allowed to be because they are “women”? It’s not all toilets and changing rooms. If you allow TWAW you are throwing all those women under the bus. So explain how your feminism allows women to be sacrificed to the wants and needs of men and is still feminism?

It's basic safeguarding end of. No men in women's safe designated spaces. It's a complete violation of women's human rights.

I disagree about your definition of gender critical feminism. To me it is critical of the concept of gender, i.e., the norms, roles and stereotypes which cultures assign to people of the two sexes. The gender identity ideology is NOT critical of gender, in fact supports rigid gender roles, though it differs from the far right in that it allows people to transition out of the box they would be confined to due to their sex.

But the sexist gender stereotypes remain as (I have been told more than once) they are required so that those who transition have something to transition to.

And as I wrote, here the gender identity approach and the far right are almost in agreement, and in opposition to gender critical feminism which sees sex as something we cannot change but argues that we should limit damaging gender stereotypes to the absolute minimum so that everyone could wear what they wish (if it doesn't endanger others), do the jobs they can do without being limited by prejudices of others, etc.

To me gender critical feminism is absolutely NOT about maintaining the 'gender binary' as it is opposed to the very concept of gender and would prefer to do away with it to the maximum possible extent.

As to anti-feminist groups, it's true that many of them are also opposed to the gender identity movement, but as I wrote earlier, for reasons which are diametrically opposed to the ones gender critical feminism has. Gender critical feminism views the gender identity ideology as too sexist, the anti-feminists view it as not quite sexist enough.

But I doubt that we can bridge the gap between our views of the world.

As I have written much earlier in this thread, to me feminism is about fighting sex-based oppression, and if we can't even talk about sex then feminism will be useless. It's not a choice between whose rights to support or not, but about which groups individuals wanting to have new rights (or privileges, in some cases) should be allowed to identify into. If anyone can identify as women, then there is no way to discuss sexism, misogyny and other sex-based forms of discrimination we face.

Your view, to me, looks more like just trans activism rather than feminism. I don't think feminism can be all things for all people. No social justice movement can, and no other movement even tries to do that.

I read the op's post and thought to myself "this is going to be soooo good". Not disappointed. 😀

Suggestionsplease, I think you are becoming very confused when you speak about the paucity of data. The statistics being used both come from a census. I mean this not in the sense of THE census, though this is where some of the statistics come from. I mean in the sense of a census, whereby every single item from the entire population is counted. This is as opposed to a sample, where we just take a few data points and use these to represent the whole. Whilst a sample can have a paucity of data, a census cannot really in the same way. If we only come across a small amount of items in a sample, we could say we have a paucity of data, that the numbers are too small to make any statistically significant conclusion. If we do the same thing with census, it is not that the numbers are too small to make a conclusion, the small numbers are the conclusion. We don’t need to extrapolate those numbers out to the whole population, because they already are the whole population.

@nepeta - great post.

Incidentally, I did a bit of analysis on lesbians in prison. I’m afraid I can’t be bothered to repeat it. Someone claimed that gay people are 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than straight people. (It may not have been exactly 10). I went away and compared the proportions.
What I found was, whilst this was true in the US, in the U.K., proportions of gay and lesbian prisoners were in line with proportions of gay and lesbian people. I showed my analysis on here and no one was offended that I’d done it. I’ve brought it up since, as I do think it shows that higher prevalence of imprisonment may not automatically be indicative of higher rates of innate criminality, but rather a cultural artefact. Saying this has brought robust (and often reasonable) criticism on here. Just because there may be cultural reasons why a particular group of people offend more or are imprisoned at higher rates (which is obviously true) doesn’t mean certain other groups aren’t predisposed to certain types of crimes.
So, me saying that the reason more black people are in prison in the US is cultural, doesn’t mean that the reason more men are in prison for sexual crimes isn’t innate (to use two less directly involved examples).

I think the OP in one of her replies said that the GC pov in feminism amounts to a 'paternalistic view of womanhood and girlhood'. What does that mean? GC feminism is simply the view that sex is a real and meaningful category, that women are persecuted on the basis of their sex and that 'gender' norms are part of the cultural mechanism by which this persecution is achieved.

As part of its analysis of these gender roles, feminism has always been gender critical: it has always centred the fact that gender norms do not map onto sex, and that as a result many women and some men are cross-gender in their soils and in their presentation. It has always stressed that gender-nonconformity is a necessary part of the liberation of women and of some men.

So in what sense is GC feminism upholding a paternalistic view of womanhood? By acknowleding a material reality (sex) that is in conflict with paternalistic gender norms and (in all the wonderful variety of cross-gender presentation and self-experience) proves them to be a regressive and socially controlling lie?

In what sense is the opposing view (that gender is intrinsic to individuals and analytically fundamental to their wellbeing) 'anti-paternalistic' rather than a reductio ad absurdum of paternalist ideaology? @PlanetLuna , can you clarify that for me?

soils = souls 🙄

@GarlicGrace you've articulated my thoughts exactly!

Maybe the OP could call it the 'shhhh, silly little women' board 😂

😂

I think there should be a new AIBU board where posters are only allowed to tell me YANBU. Please could you oblige, MNHQ?

YANBU

So you are asking for an echo chamber.

So, at a public rally two people live-streamed the event in parallel with Standing for women.

They weren’t granted permission, they never asked because it is an open and free public event.

They were not invited. They didn’t need to be in any case, as it is an open and free public event.

It is common for other groups who are not associated with a group can still be interested in seeing what is said at an event. You only have to look at people who have taken to filming women’s events lately. Because they are motivated by things like live streaming protests, or making sure the police are acting appropriately, or because they want to point out the falsehoods used as foundation for gender identity when it become ideological.

The topic is of universal interest because the majority of the population believe that people cannot change sex. And the majority of people believe that a male with a penis should not access female single sex spaces and that no male who has male pubertal advantage should play sport in female sports categories.

Just because one group with different motivations films another group’s speakers doesn’t mean that the group holding the event is aligned with the group filming in any way. What a ridiculous premise that this was even made a ‘thing’.

So, following that premise no person who is responsible for setting a policy on something should attend an event of a group voicing their objections to the policy to understand their thinking in case that person is deemed to be aligned with the people objecting to the policy. And no group who is interested in seeing those objections so they can develop stronger arguments to debate should livestream the event where people are objecting?

Making the accusation that Heart of Oak live-streaming at Brighton meant that Kellie Jay Keen and any woman who spoke at that event was aligned with that group was never based on anything but two people who came and filmed and left.

They may have agreed with the speakers, they may not have. They may have agreed with the general outcomes of the feminists at the event, but they may not agree with the motivations and the theories behind the feminist approach to it.

Just because they videoed the event, never meant they were anything to do with Kellie Jay Keen. And she has confirmed she didn’t know who they were or anything about them.

The UK law states that people can go and stand in a park, wherever they want to, even inside a group of people who don’t know them. And they can film.

If you were convinced that their presence meant anything like ‘Kellie Jay Keen is associated with the far right’, then that says more about you having a low bar for evidence and maybe you have allowed your own critical thinking to be done by other people.

Besides which, can we please have evidence by seeing a manifesto, a list of objectives or a statement as to whether that group are just ‘right wing’ or are ‘far right wing’?

Because we have seen time and time again the accusation of ‘far right’ being flung at anyone with politics starting from ‘left wing but don’t agree with some socialists’ and ‘centrists’. That term has become so overused through lazy people weaponising it. Just as transphobic was weaponised. Just as other words like ‘fascist’ have been.

YADDNBU

Yes, you must report back so we coven can cackle away!

Can you please tell us while we get to ”just stopping awful men”, how many women and girls (female people for clarity) are considered collateral to be considered acceptable to be harmed while we get to this point?

You speak about tiny numbers. But tiny numbers are all that are needed to cause harm. So while we are discussing the things, you, personally, think we should focus on and in the tone we should do it in, how many women in prison are harmed, how many women are losing their sporting opportunities? How many women have self-excluded from public life because they cannot risk finding a male in their toilet or their changing room?

Can you give us a number that you will be happy with as collateral before you are happy to discuss “just stopping awful men” which include the % of those with trans identities that fit into that group too. That by your methods have exposed extra women and girls to harms that could have been prevented.

Is there a number that you are happy with?

Mine is zero.

Lol she got ONE reply which wasn't particularly rude.

An example of this- I read a thread here yesterday by a man who called all trans women autogynophiles. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of women on this thread wouldn't agree with that, but he wasn't called out for that particular comment from what I remember. I found this interesting, when you compare it to every word being torn to shreds on here by someone who isn't GC sharing a view.

The first thing that springs to mind here is that if you found that so inaccurate, why didn't you challenge it? or did you?

The statistics thing interests me. We have claims of trans-genocide (I have to roll my eyes at that even while i think one murder is one too many) but nobody can back up this claim with cold hard numbers.

I'm unsure, and i think many "authorities" (police, NHS etc) are too - is all data gathered only "self-identified Gender" or "biological sex" in one tick box and "gender identity" in another?

Because the logical extension of only gathering data based on gender-identity is twofold. Firstly we'll see a rise in crime that up to now are overwhelmingly committed by men, being now also committed by women. There is no way to know if it is trans women or not if we don't gather data on biological sex of offenders.
That's a double edged sword. If TWAW then we can't ever know how many trans women (or men) are murdered at this massive rate, because nobody is collecting data (and arguably if TWAW we don't need to collect stats on transwomen)

Statistically? A nightmare.

Alice Sullivan at Silencing Women Event in Swansea in March explaining why collecting sex-based data matters — because it stops us knowing the truth and some people don't want the truth to be known:

I remember that Nellodee and thank you for doing that and for reminding us that you did.

Suggestions keeps trying to use lesbians as a comparator for this but has never once produced one shred of evidence that I can remember to support their claim that the statistics for males with trans identities in jail is not reflective of that population. They keep using the comparator of lesbians in the USA for a UK situation. I agree that if you have a census such as we have in the MoJ figures that we can make some indicative statements with that.

And suggestions also has never produced any evidence to suggest that males with a trans identity don’t continue with at least the same propensity to commit sex crimes as the rest of the male population either. They can keep trying to discredit the UK MoJ figures, but the reality is as it always was.

There is no evidence at all to disprove that males of all genders carry the similar rate of committing sex crime.

And it is that risk that safeguarding is based on.

I'm not entirely sure why lesbians in prison should be the comparator for TW in prison. TW and lesbians are not the same thing (no matter what plenty of TW are telling us)