Genuinely willing to discuss in good faith

[beachcitygirl]

Hello.

This is a thread for those who are uncomfortable with black and white and less than civil discourse around self id.

I welcome those with different views but I don't on this thread welcome those who only want to state their firm settled opinion without nuance or discussion that self id is absolutely wrong.

It's my view that there is no point in discussion if mind firmly made up.
I'll respect your legal right to that view but there's not much point chatting about it and pissing each other off.

There are plenty threads of gc women hoping to create more gc women and that's fine.

I'd like this to be a different space. A place for anyone with genuine questions, discussion points and where we all try to be civil and attempt to answer each other in good faith. Anyone who is unsure, let's talk:

My views are that trans women should be treated in every aspect as women and they are our natural allies against misogyny and the patriarchy and that women are more than their biology.

God damnit.

Busted.

#niccageimpersonator

I would also be really interested to know the argument that swayed you from an undecided view to being fully TWAW. I've known quite a lot of people go the other way, but relatively few be converted from GC to TWAW.

Do you have any red lines (sport, prison, health care), or do you believe TWAW in every single situation?

@Eyesofdisarray

Here Boiled have some cake it's lemon drizzle

Me: 😞😳😱😨😰😬😫😮😯😪🙁😖😔😒😦😧😲😞😟😤😢😭💀

That pesky return button!. I'm drooling just reading the ingredients!

But around 5 years ago I was very anti self id. Thankfully I had a brilliant person take the time to talk to me non-judgmentally and patiently and eventually I realised all my questions had been answered and all I was left with was

"Thats not common sense " and as an educated woman I recognised that is not good sense and so I thought hard and i recognised my misgivings came from a fear of the other.

Care to share this 'light bulb' moment with us @beachcitygirl ?

as an educated woman I recognised that is not good sense

Please do share with other educated women how you came to believe that caring about excluded and harmed female people is not good sense, and that providing for male choice and feelings above female need and equality is?

Please don't be selfish about this, you could be saving so much time and stress.

I'm having a nightmare on this thread trying to remember who I am? Am I me? Or am I an imposter? This is the second thread where i posted using Nick username first! It's killing me!

For what it's worth @beachcitygirl , I agree with some of what you said over on that other thread.

Namely this part;
"Re the definition of transphobia. For me I think if you wouldn't say the same about a person of colour or another race in this context then its worthy of self examination.

This can come from a place of ignorance or fear.
Both are understandable emotions but we cannot and should not expect society to discriminate against others because of the fears of ignorance of some.

I did not see the post about the woman who would rather have looked for any other job than work with a trans woman. However if (and ifs doing some heavy lifting there ) That's clear transphobia & should have no place in society imho"

As much as I do feel like there are valid concerns to be had re; some aspects of trans activism, I don't feel as though it's helpful to by default assume the worst of everyone if they've given you no reason to be suspicious, especially in the case of a work place where you'll see them every day.
That's kind of asking for trouble imo.

Just because predators will take advantage of laws doesn't mean every trans person you encounter is definitely a predator abusing the system, and I can see how it can become a slippery slope when that's immediate instinct.
Benefit of the doubt unless evidence points you to believe otherwise is generally the best rule.

By all means raise the issue of having a single-room locked cubicle for sure, it's not acceptable to me to expect women who have faced abuse to be 100% okay with sharing a loo designated as female, with someone who has a male body & strength.

But at the same time, I think I'd also have to draw the line at "avoiding them at all costs" (paraphrasing from the aforementioned removed thread) because I can't lie, that does start to veer towards being openly discriminatory in my mind. They're still a person, no matter how they're choosing to express their gender.

My main issue is the repeated conflation of sex and gender during good faith discussions.
I agree sex and gender are different things, and will respect a person's pronouns. But in that vein I don't see what's wrong with calling TWomen, TWomen as opposed to just women.
Surely to be called a TWoman or TMan would be more validating of your lived experience of not feeling right in your body, HRT, and surgeries? People would know without them needing to explain anything.
Rather than just going by woman or man thereby erasing that you went through that intensely gruelling stuff, and opening you up to unexpected reactions when the truth does come out and someone feels "lied to".

I'm sure we've all also heard about people hiding that they're trans and other people freaking out about it when they find out. If they said TWoman or TMan from the beginning, that wouldn't even be a problem to begin with???
Like logically that move doesn't make sense to me honestly :/

I think other poster's issues with it may be that they flatly don't accept "gender" as something with any validity because it basically boils down to how you dress, and what your interests are.
Which is insanely gender stereotyped and kind of anti-feminist tbh. If you like pink you must be a girl etc.
I can also see that PoV on it, but ig that's just a compromise I'm willing to make that others aren't as much.

I suspect I'm one of the people the OP thinks is an irredeemable bigot

for what it's worth I have worked with 3 men who role played as women in my career to date. I guess my language indicates what I think of their choices. However I've managed to work with them just fine. I've worked with lots of people who have views I think are pretty sketchy. In one case I even nipped what I considered to be work place bullying on the basis of 'trans status' in the bud (no bullying on my watch thanks).

so, yanno, nuance

<goes back to being evil and kicking puppies in the face>

We effectively have self ID in the UK because we aren't allowed to ask for GRCs. Bryson wasn't in possession of a GRC, so if we aren't allowed to ask because it's rude, upsetting, intrusive, none of our business it creates defacto self ID. Men with GRCs can access women's spaces but we can't ask men in spaces if they have a GRC. There are exceptions under law but if you try to use them you face a barrage of abuse, a loss of funding. We tried to let a few rabbits in the hen house but as soon as we opened the doors the foxes barged in. Tough on the rabbits but guess what it's even tougher on the hens. So until someone can give a clear and defined safe way to separate the rabbits from the foxes the henhouse needs to remain for chickens only.

Perfectly summed up. Why are the foxes feelings more important than the hens, who are statistically more at risk from foxes than foxes are from hens?

I've not heard that analogy before, that actually encapsulates things so well imo!

Love Nick cage and cherries

Transgender women are only interested in miniscule.parts of womanhood like high heels and too much mascara.
.They have no interest in the important bits -being a mother or having a career or seeing to elderly parents or a new member of the family or fulfilling an ambition, climbing Everest or writing a bestseller about it
They are complete human beings who perform many roles in society

Just because predators will take advantage of laws doesn't mean every trans person you encounter is definitely a predator abusing the system, and I can see how it can become a slippery slope when that's immediate instinct.Benefit of the doubt unless evidence points you to believe otherwise is generally the best rule.

Giving the benefit of the doubt is the opposite of good safeguarding. We do not exclude men from women's spaces because we assume all men are predatory but because some are and we do not know which ones.

Transwomen are male and exhibit the same pattern of criminality as other males. In the prison population, transwomen are represented in the sex offender population at a much higher rate than other males. Even if transwomen sex offender are sent to a male prison they would be permitted access, under self ID laws, to female spaces upon release. Women should not have to pay the price for indulging the demands of sex offenders.

A smart person would ask why transwomen commit sex offences at a higher rate than other males. Could they be just be predatory males lying about their trans identity?

I agree to some extent. Avoiding working with any transwoman does definitely sound the very definition of transphobic.

However, we do discriminate against whole groups of people who are, in the vast vast majority of cases, perfectly nice and harmless.

Men, both gay and straight, disabled and non-disabled, whether POC or not, trans identified or not, should not be in single sex female spaces.

So, would I expect an Asian man, a disabled man, a gay man to not be in a women's group sexual assault counselling session and query it in strong terms if they insisted on being there even if was distressing me? Yes. So not transphobic because it applies to all people who aren't part of the protected characteristic of female sex. And I don't believe that you can self-identify into the female sex if you are male.

Why is it always the same thing, an OP comes on and supposedly asks everyone to engage and then refuses to engage themself, calls us all transphobic and flounces off. Every.Single.Time.