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.

Oh God! I'm going to go to Hell in petrol soaked underwear for that post.

Lets try again.

Yes there was.

And you can't mention certain subjects now! Or it appears from the recent deletions even warn other pages not to talk about it!

Posters not pages.

When these boards on monitored to the extent that so many posts are reported, we can all take comfort in the fact that we're gaining ground.

The thing is on a discussion about whether men can be women and an OP who wasn't willing to answer questions then left in the middle of the night the continuing deletions just make the other side of this argument look really bloody petty.

Ooh I’d like a read - can you tell me her name please? I missed it at the time and then couldn’t find the link I’d clicked to watch the video.

TIA

@SpicyMoth Yeah, we know those thoughts weren't yours but rather, they belonged to the tra you'd spoken to.
I almost replied on a point of order regarding the ice skating - i have never, in all my years, seen anyone skate more beautifully than John Curry. Never. and that includes Torville & Dean. So, your tra wasn't even correct on that one really. Though come to think of it, i imagine that Finnish skater cancels John Curry out, sadly.
:-/

This is like a cosmic dance.

If it's not the men IDing as women and invading women's spaces, then it's women like this OP telling other women that "women" is a social construct and then after dropping this bombshell, leaving the room.

In both cases, anger and frustration from the sex based class under attack is provoked, while the other parties, either biological men or transmaiden females, stay unscathed.

It would be fucking ironically hilarious if it wasn't such a shit show of existential threat and seriousness.

Well that's a big disappointment I've joined the thread and the OPs got shirty and left..... you naughty women giving OP all those difficult questions to answer like......... what's a Woman 😉

it's always a disappointment.

I'd understand it if we'd asked for the required amount of rocket fuel required to get a 4 person crew and one dog to the moon, with an onward journey to Saturn then slingshotting back to earth, but something as simple as what is a woman?

It's a logical starting point so we can all discover where the OP, as the person with the differing viewpoint from the majority, is currently at in their head. As they'd already stressed that TWAW I and everyone else really needed to know her definition of that question in order to proceed.

Instead of getting an answer we have now had more than one poster accuse us of using it as a gotcha question.

It's fucking insane! They know deep down what the correct answer is but because of this urge to be kind and inclusive they find themselves in an impossible position of not being able to answer the simplest of questions.

I'm sick of it. Especially as true to form they threw a strop and got loads of posts deleted in order for us to look like we've all been horrible meanies ganging up.

To those late to the thread most of the deletions from us lot were references to a food substance whilst we passed time waiting for the OP to return to answer the first question so that we could get the discussion going. The OPs deleted post included calling a poster a rat.

Given that this thread turned out to be exactly what we all knew it would be I think the OP was given many chances to turn things around. Instead we were accused of all sorts.

So to those who actually would like a good faith conversation with a bunch of women who may or may not agree with you on some subjects, but share more common ground than you realise, it's quite simple: if you want a good faith discussion make sure you start a thread when you have time to tend to it properly in a timely fashion as things move fast on here. Don't have a go and tell posters what they can and can't post in your opening post. And if you truly want a discussion then answer the fucking questions you get asked!

Well... I can dream of one actually being in actual good faith one day can't i? Until then there's always cake!

Well, I hope that the obvious Swiss-cheese evidence of frantic TRSOH reporting, coupled with the lack of substance in the few TRSOH posts, is proving very educational to any undecided lurkers.

Good faith or not, what do you think?

SpookyFBI no, but I did a fairly substantial piece of research the other day into means and standard deviations of muscle strength between men and women of various ages, which was another thing you suggested.

Wow, my first deletion. Ironically I was trying to make it clear what the rules were about what might get you deleted.

I often get distracted by metadiscussion on these threads - but like other posters I do think the politics of how we talk and are allowed to talk are very revealing and also pertinent.

heavens to murgatroyd look at all those deletions

why the heck MNHQ choose to make themselves the tool of people who like to exercise coercive control over others I'll never know.

brings a whole new meaning to the term 'good faith'

I do think the person who persuaded the OP that some men are women is interesting. As Helle points out, emotional manipulation was no doubt at play.

And I do feel for the OP. they were posting around 11pm and then flounced at 4am ish. That's not the sign of someone using the site for fun (which is after all what MN is for). But I would argue the fault lies with the person manipulating the OP and the OP herself rather than the people pointing out the inconsistency of her position.

Amazing really. TRA men and transmaidens try to make women feel guilty when women say No to them.

And then again when they force the "conversation", pull out voluntarily, and try to make women feel guilty for "forcing" an end to that convo.

Guilt and feeling bad, 24/7.

Indeed Bernard.

I got over my be kind phase when I realised my tween (at the time) was being bullied at school and I was looking for excuses for the bully and had started telling my own child to ‘be kind’. That was before I joined MN.

However, the pull to be kind was very strong. Now I know I am kind but not to a fault. I probably have too refined sense of fairness (and right and wrong) for that. It is a two way street in most instances.

So, I understand that people can be told that being kind and tolerant means being an ‘all in’ ally and fighting what others consider hate because an influential person said so. But I would be highly embarrassed to post anything with the tone of moral superiority I see some posters post here and on social media with. That moral superiority comes from having no real confidence in your own argument but believing you have the moral high ground anyway so you chime in to make yourself feel good.

If OP ‘genuinely’ (as in the title) wanted ‘good faith’ discussion, I would suggest they should have first checked their understanding of the intentions and aims of the feminists they describe as gender critical first and secondly, check the intentions and aims of second wavers. The fact that those main principles of their argument were demonstrably wrong meant they were never as informed by that ‘brilliant’ and ‘non-judgemental’ person as they thought they were.

In fact, if the OP was in good faith, rather than now leaving thinking they have been proven right about how hateful people are, they would be thinking, ‘fuck, if what I understood was so factually wrong, I need to think about this again’. It all depends on how much influence the imparter of the falsehoods has in their life I guess. After all they were supposedly ‘brilliant’!

people who are fooling themselves about the big stuff are unhealthy to be around, innit?

I really question where this fucked up misrepresentation of what second wave feminism was seeking to change and establish came from.

Was it initially misrepresented by men and men’s rights activists? Was it the next generation of feminists who did it? Does anyone know? I haven’t read into it at all. I just cannot believe that anyone would be so ridiculous to believe that feminists honestly thought that women never needed to have considerations made for their female bodies. That anyone ever believed that women thought their bodies were just the same as men in reality rather than using it as a device for wedging open discussions where women were prevented from entering occupations and sports deemed inappropriate for them rather than being based on science.

It is absolutely demonstrably false when you start to even consider that women and men have had for decades different lifting maximums under OH&S laws. No knowledgeable feminist was petitioning to have those removed. They worked with industries and unions to have those and other accommodations implemented to ensure women were safe while not being denied opportunities to do the work.

Those feminists then worked very hard to inform employers that adding women to diversify the work place was beneficial. Not that ‘women were exactly like men’! How fucking absurd.

Yet, how many times do we see it. Even now there are academics saying women sports people just haven’t been pushed enough and with changes in training they will be competing with men and winning. No! Just no! That is a recipe for shortening women’s sporting careers and causing them lasting bodily damage.

One thing that always occurs to me regarding these debates (not debates) is that if the TWAW side are so certain of their views, how come this debate is so new. As in how come these views have only arisen since this crazy ideology took hold. I’m not sure if I’ve made myself clear here!

Quite!

Using the phrase " willing to discuss" is suggestive of a mind-set which is adopting a position that they are happy to explain to others - not so much as a genuine dialogue.

I've not managed to read all the hundreds of posts on this thread but could someone summarise if there is a reasonable response to the issue of why so many countries who allow self ID are also performing the best for women in them, as measured by the global gender gap index (which looks at how woman fare compared to men on economic, political, education, and health-based criteria)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/244387/the-global-gender-gap-index/

The top 4 countries in this list support self ID, as do many of the countries in the top 20. If self ID is the huge problem for women that some people think it is, why are these countries doing so well for the women in them, across such a broad range of measures of wellbeing?

On this thread people want to centre the debate on an objective definition of 'what is a woman?' but these countries have proceeded on a basis where they are using no clear objective definition, so clearly their success does not hinge on this point.

The proof is in the pudding...they are achieving great outcomes for women alongside policies of self ID.

Now I am sure people will point out anecdotes, individual cases, single issue concerns in prisons and sports for example, and I am sure there will be valid concerns. I am also confident personally that they can be addressed within a broader framework of self ID...safeguarding can be carried in a nuanced and precise way such that self ID does not trump safety concerns.

But to focus on emotive anecdotes when you have a wealth of data in front of you showing how well some countries are doing for women alongside policies of self ID, is a real mistake I think.

You mean like Argentina - where violence against women and girls is so endemic that when a woman is murdered it is also recorded as a femicide?

The country in which when a woman was murdered by two trans identified males it was not recorded as a femicide becaue they identified as women; and yet when a male who identified as a woman was murderd by their boyfriend, it was recorded as a femicide because of them identifying as a woman?

What craziness is this?

That is the point isn't it. When you can no longer define what a woman is, actual women, as well as the crimes against them, are erased.

@suggestionsplease1

I haven't read the Statista report you have cited (Statista is a market research firm for an advertising company parent group) but if it's anything like the WEF gender gap index it looks at vote enfranchisement, health outcomes, educational attainment and rstes of economic participation etc. which are positive features of almost all Western economies and is unrelated to to the issue of Self ID.

Methodology and sources are important here, rather than headlines, and correlation doesn't equal causation.