Still Genuinely Willing To Discuss In Good Faith

[Catiette]

I've taken the plunge and started a new thread. In the interests of good manners, an addendum that I may be disappearing to work for a while myself, as this has all been far too interesting to allow me to achieve any of my urgent weekend work to-dos today - I hope that, in the light of that, creating this follow-up thread isn't bad form. I just thought other people may want to continue discussing these issues (mainly, now, the redefinition of woman, and statistical trends re. women globally), and I'd definitely dip back in when the urge to procrastinate overcomes me next. No worries, of course, if people think we did it all to death on the old thread - we were fairly thorough, methinks(!), so can also just let Good Faith Discussion #2 rapidly fade into Mumsnet obscurity. 😀

Adults make all sorts of ill advised choices even when there is evidence it is bad for them.

We still make efforts to discourage smoking. Drugs are banned. People can't just sell a kidney.

Health and Safety to stop the idiocy of adults is an entire industry.

But trans?
No nothing NADA.

@RedToothBrush @Transparent2

Thanks for your input. Maybe I need to revise this view a bit! Yes, agreed that adults can be vulnerable.

I have explained below that in my view I think trans requires continued cognitive dissonance from the trans person and others, which does need to be properly understood by the trans person as a basis for informed consent. (Ie what is and isn't possible in terms of better aligning yourself to your chosen sex) I suppose I assumed that an adult would have done that thinking, but I suppose even that is a leap maybe. Thank you for bringing to my attention.

Do you have a link to this thread? Sounds like a very interesting read.

There have been young people saying that girls who had transitioned and had mastectomies who 'detransition' can 'regrow' their breasts by taking oestrogen.

Remember that misinformation and poor understanding is generally very common. How many children/young people had/have ideas like you could prevent pregnancy by not kissing, or by having sex standing up?

There is an alarming tendency to assume children and young people have adult understanding. If 'gender identity' is an 'innate feeling' and not a learned idea, then presumably children are born with this and can 'uncover' it. Can 'find their true self'.

I think this is quite important to look at. It only makes sense if we consider 'gender identity' to be an innate, inborn quality, not a learned one.

To expand on this, I was mid-responding to toaster's post about a school class on stereotypes:

This is part of the curriculum. Schools (I'm in Scotland) are pretty good on challenging stereotypes.

I would note that when children are very young, their ideas about sex are very scant and easily confused.

They notice very young (maybe 2/3) that there are men and women, and that these are different categories, perhaps in terms of 'mummy' and 'daddy', then expand this category to include other people, then they notice that they themselves fit into one or the other category.

Next, they observe and learn the social 'rules', which is to say, stereotypes. I guess it starts as wanting to know how to sort the sexes, how to identify which category people fall into. And there can be confusion between gender and sex at this stage. Which is to say, questions like 'is he a girl' if a boy has long hair, etc. The understanding is blunt, simplistic, and often wrong.

This is when you get interminable conversations about which colours are for which sex. (When I was a child, the 'rules' didn't seem to be so overtly colour coded.)

Gradually children develop a more sophisticated understanding of gender, of biology, and of sex. It SHOULD be fairly straightforward, but I suspect a lot of very confused children are going to have the two terms conflated.

I would suggest that 'gender identity' is a learned idea. A feeling based on ideas that the child/person has absorbed and learned about sex and gender.

As I undesrtand it, this is what de Beauvoir meant when she said 'one is not born, but becomes a woman'.

We are born whatever sex we are born. We then learn our gender roles/rules/stereotypes.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3348290-It-will-never-happen-resource-thread

Thank you!

nae bother hen!

This one is also for anyone wanting to read more :

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3145470-Break-it-down-for-me?page=1

it starts off with great posts explaining issues etc and when the discussion stopped, it became an archive so many studies and decisions etc are linked there. If a link doesn't work, copy it and try an archive site.

Sadly, many of the discussion points are still the same today.

Always a good one for those who think 'It's a conspiracy'...

I wonder whether Spooky will watch this. I have mentioned Queer Theory and Foucault a couple of times now and I hope that they have started to look it up. But I also expect that there will be some way that this will be dismissed.

People only have to start reading the stories that only in the past few years have been published about the victims of the French lowering the age of consent to understand that when we ask 'who else benefits', we are not being 'conspiracy theorists', we are fucking looking back on fucking real life history and the impacts these decisions have on society.

There is a reason that in these instances extreme activists (in general) want to try to invoke some kind conspiracy theory, 'far fetched' trope. After all, who would have thought that a rapist by the name of Bryson would expose the complete lack of integrity of the GRR in Scotland.

I mean, the Jacob Breslow / Mermaids association ought to give pause for thought, shouldn't it?

Just one bad person Keating

It is also true that PIE tried to piggyback on gay rights in the ‘70s and ‘80s. But perhaps the difference is that the adult / child sexual boundary has to be blurred or removed according to Queer Theory, because all norms and boundaries need to be transgressed. That wasn’t true of the thinking behind gay rights. The transgender movement is based on Queer Theory, and uses Queer Theory as its academic justification. So in that sense, transgender ideology is necessarily linked to those pushing the adult / child sexual boundary, which of course is there to provide some protection for children.

It’s not surprising that those invested in trans ideology don’t tend to like this inherent link being pointed out.

I'm another lurker popping in to thank @SpookyFBI for their time and patience. Also many other posters who were equally as patient in asking and answering questions, notably @ArabeIIaScott .

A few posters on here seemed to think that this entire thread has been useless, so I thought I'd de-lurk for a moment to say that it hasn't been useless at all, not to me. So many of us lurkers are aware of all of the issues but aren't knowledgeable enough to get involved on this board, as most posters have so much more information than we do and it's pretty counterproductive to join in with questions that have been done to death.

I stopped lurking on this board for a while as it was proving bad for my mental health, but I would always click on threads that appeared to be debates between both "sides". 9 times out of 10 I'd leave quite frustrated, but this thread has really surprised me and I've read it pretty much from beginning to end over the past couple of days.

In my mind, progress can only come with respectful conversation and other than a few prickly posts here and there, I think the thread has achieved just that. I really hope that this type of thread will be making an appearance on this board more frequently.

@RedToothBrush I wanted to particularly thank you for your post of 10:40 very well put I thought.

The other strand of thought that I didn't want to be lost is that very early on in the conversation Spooky you said "I’m very sorry that you’ve been told you’re not a woman. No one should have done that to you." Thank you, that's kind, I understand where you're coming from and that no harm or offence is intended but I wonder can you see that

"I see a trans woman as a woman who happens to have been born in a different body" that is they have the special soul spirit essence of womanliness that makes them like womanly things and behave in womanly ways is, from my point of view, telling me (and other woman who stray too far from the Platonic ideal of femininity), I'm not a woman...

I do not share the special woman soul/spirit/essence, I am not feminine, I do not like the things that are on the gender ideology worksheets, I am to the left of the barbie / GI Joe spectrum. I took the wrong subjects in school and university. I'm the sort of woman who has often found herself surrounded by guys doing guy things.

Fortunately I grew up before this idea became prevalent and am quite good at not believing things I'm told without thinking about them really thoroughly for a long time first. Now for me to say 'you are calling me a man, or at least not a woman' might upset you or make you splutter in outrage. Fair enough it is to some extent a me problem - it's called rigid thinking, and it's a sign of Autism. I'm not trying to attack you - more to help explain my point of view.

Put it like this the set of people who feel and behave like Dylan Mulvaney does not include me, or my daughter. If I ask my daughter if she is a spotty person or a stripey person she will not know. If I show her videos of Dylan and explain that Dylan is a spotty person she would be able to answer confidently that she is a stripey person.

We do need biology words, words that be unequivocally understood (even by women for whom English is not their first language) and explained (even to autistic girls) and that is a thing women are currently being denied. Replacing the word 'women' with things like 'cervix havers' is not clear enough either to people who English is not their first language or just not so great, or to women like my mum who never got taught ANY of the words for her own biology because female anatomy was too dirty / shameful to be discussed without euphemism.

The three concepts encapsulated in the primary meaning of the word woman are :human adult female. I believe all three of those elements of the concept are important. The people who 'only' have female biology in common, still have quite a lot in common (even though we are often very different).

I don't really like the word 'female' by itself as a compromise. Partially because it removes the concept of adult and there is a long established history of men not accepting women as full or proper adults and this is an ongoing pattern of attitude and behaviour still seen today. Also though I'm emphasising the NAMALT of ignoring and blurring the adult / child distinction when they want to seduce a girl, they convince themselves it's fine there still one of the good guys because they get to draw the line between the good guys and the bad guys and all the good guys like me are going to stay on this side of the line because she really is only just a eeny teeny little bit below the age of consent. And the other reason is that it removes the concept of human; and you don't have to spend many minutes on the internet (or seconds on reddit) to find the word female being used in very openly dehumanising and pejorative ways.

However it is sometimes the case that compromises can simultaneously be workable and not leave you totally happy. The thing that shot this compromise out of the water was that it was instantly taken up as an identity word too as soon as anyone started to try and use it where they may previously have used woman, see also reaction to real women, biological women, natal women.
trans woman page on wikipedia if you think that that isn't true or I'm exaggerating "Trans women have a female gender identity"

I posit that this is not because there is an actual objection to the words used - it is the act of referring to ourselves at all, that is being objected to.

3. Women speaking for themselves are exclusionary and selfish.

https://4w.pub/the-rules-of-misogyny/

to see that point or agree or at least partially agree does not mean you have to believe all men are like that or that all TW are indeed I'll explicitly say NATWALT
but some are and in both men and transwomen the people who shout the loudest in the most confident and aggressive way seem to have the biggest voice and most media attention.

Using body parts just gets more and more dehumanising and less and less clear...

A message that 'cervix havers' should go and have their cervix checked is not a clear or helpful message especially when you have a Transwoman on tv aggressively arguing that she does have a cervix and if anyone says otherwise she'll get it out and show us.

You've previously agreed that from a biological perspective it is true that sex exists and is (at least sometimes, important meaningful significant) can you agree that women can't talk about ourselves unless we win back / are allowed to keep some words with which to do so.

I am clear that the biology words I want us to keep are men/woman & boy/girl, although at this stage I think that there do need to be identity words too.

There are transwomen who say I can't have the words woman or female as biology words I find that upsetting and very disrespectful. Are you happy that that is a fair and reasonable position for them to take?

What words would you think women can keep to use to describe the class of people who have female biology in common.

sorry for accidental bold formatting was not intentionally being shouty

I also wonder whether people who disagree with feminists support the current protests and the 'cancellation' of events and termination of employment of those feminists?

And how they square that huge hole that is forming?

How do people dismiss the totalitarian and authoritarian aspects of those involved in supporting trans people? How do they look perceive these aspects while framing others who are simply disagreeing as being 'far right' or being 'influenced by the far right'?

Do they see the extremism that is there in plain sight and wonder why any one thinks that type of action is going to work? Or is it simply hand waved away as 'righteous anger' as we have seen it said by spokespeople of Stonewall no less?

That intimidation and threats are acceptable actions to silence women who have different views?

Thank you for de-lurking! And also yes, thank you @ArabeIIaScott for the questions, info and thoughts that you have shared here. Like you and others have said, it doesn't matter if it's been said on other threads at times. Seeing it said here in this conversation introduces it with a different context.

Caught up more quickly today, but will fall behind again soon. Reading carefully til now, but may have to start skimming, as sacrificing too much to keeping up! There’s so much going on I may have missed other people making these observations, but…

Re: people pointing out @SpookyFBI hasn’t defined gender identity, I think it’s important to notice what she has done – acknowledged it’s hard (impossible?) to do this, often in really thorough and thought-provoking posts. This is a far cry from the usual cries of bigotry and flounces, and also far from taking the easy questions first. I think one of the biggest problems we face is the refusal of those invested in gender identity to acknowledge that it is indefinable, so this, for me, is a really big thing. I was thinking of the religion analogy Bonfire explained so well, too: an agreement that this is a relevant metaphor for it in some respects at least provides a context to our concerns that we shouldn't be re-shaping society around it.

I also thought Spooky’s point about people struggling to acknowledge other points of view is applicable to everyone to some degree, actually – that basketballing gorilla video exposing how insanely (or not, I guess that's the point) human perception is should teach us all that what we think we’re seeing, however closely we monitor ourselves and attempt to compensate for attentional etc. biases, isn’t always what we could see. I had no aversion at all to seeing a gorilla stomping through a ball game, yet didn’t notice him. So I can well believe that I may not see arguments I see as being concretely detrimental to women’s rights - and often really offensive to me - entirely clearly. However carefully I check my thinking, I’m still doing this through the flawed filter of my own consciousness, too. I think what gives our arguments staying power is our readiness to acknowledge this, even as it really, really rankles for our more measured approaches to be rewarded with unconsciously ironic silencing!

I'm guessing I am one of those 'prickly' or 'combative' posters who are apparently doing it all wrong and should just listen and eat humble pie. I have listened, I have researched and I have run out of patience, the reason being this is not some airy-fairy thought experiment that can be just be discussed in the abstract it has real world consequences if enacted to the extent that is being demanded.

The entire basis of Laws and society will have to change. Adherents to this ideology claim this will benefit everyone, therefore it is up to them to explain, show and prove that this will be the case beforehand, to be open to full and frank discussions about the pros and cons, who will benefit the most, who will not, what checks and balances should be introduced, if any.

Is it beneficial to women who have been raped to be forced to refer to their rapist as 'she' in Court?

How does it help a woman who has been raped to be forced to believe that the person who raped her is merely a woman with a different body?

Is it beneficial to one set of prisoners to be served up as potential victims to another set of prisoners?

Is it beneficial to place young people on lifelong medication, medication that will and does cause a multitude of health problems which will, inevitably, impact their lives in the long term?

Is it beneficial to have a group of young people sterilised, to impact their sex lives and indeed their chances of a relationship?

Is it beneficial for one set of people to never be able to excel and achieve in sport?

Is it beneficial for one set of people to exclude themselves from society because they are unwilling or unable to use facilities they pay through their taxes for?

Is it beneficial to remove from one set of people their safety, privacy and dignity?

And those are merely the tip of the iceberg of questions that need to be asked and answered.

If you are going to re-order society. re-define words and base everything on a nebulous feeling of 'gender identity' which cannot be explained, which is different for everyone and doesn't exist for some people, and has no workable criteria the onus is on you to be able to show why and how this will make society function better for everybody, and be convincing. Throwing around abuse, being dismissive and refusing to look further than your nose end won't cut it.

I am in full agreement with all of RedToothbrush's posts.

I too am angry, I am sick to the back teeth of being told to be nice in the face of what is being done to women.

To explain and justify everything - even the concept of what a woman is

Exactly. Why do women have to justify and explain themselves, men never do. Which proves just how misogynistic this whole agenda is.

Ultimately, if just 5% of the female population are deeply uncomfortable with males in their spaces - for all the reasons of safety and dignity that are listed and demonstrable - then that should be enough to force the rethink it deserves. The reality is that level is considerably higher and women are still just told to suck it up.

Again, the misogyny is blatant.

Thanks for the questions, Viola. I have a list for my next Difficult Conversation I'll add some to. I'm increasingly thinking that questions are the safest way forward in live convos eg. "So what should I use now to refer to adult human females" > "Oh, OK. So you're saying that we no longer need a word to describe that class of humans. What makes you say that?" etc. One idea I've been playing with is creating a flow chart of these that really forces people to acknowledge the implications of what they're saying. (Genuine question: does anyone know of a website or app that would let me do this online?)

This is why I would question Spooky saying, “If there really was one sensible side and one irrational side then the issue wouldn’t be so divisive and very few people would oppose it.” History shows people are more than ready to embrace the utterly irrational at the expense of the sensible!

A few other thoughts, mainly, rather selfishly, because I keep losing track and really want a reference point for posts I've found useful. But also to thank these people...

In the light of all the above, I liked @RedToothBrush's comment that “there is a deliberate and active move to discredit and silence the women who have gone through the process of trying to understand and come out the other side going 'no'. And that in itself leads to stronger 'nos'.” And then, later: "Everything is stacked up against women to assert themselves. To explain and justify everything - even the concept of what a woman is…. We, women, do not consent. This should be enough, and yet it is not.”

@howdoesatoastermaketoast's last? long-ish post brilliantly expresses to me how, just, wrong, it is for us to be redefined without our consent - the ultimate in "mis-genderinglabelling; why is our offence not valid? I copied this into my questions doc., Toaster - hope that's OK!

Lastly, ToothBrush's rationalisation of so-called conspiracy theories got me reviewing my thinking there, depressingly.

(And Toaster’s lesson plan at 1056, is amazing).

thanks @Catiette

Yo, GailBlanche, prickly can be useful, too, imo. 😁

If you are going to re-order society. re-define words and base everything on a nebulous feeling of 'gender identity' which cannot be explained, which is different for everyone and doesn't exist for some people, and has no workable criteria the onus is on you to be able to show why and how this will make society function better for everybody, and be convincing. Throwing around abuse, being dismissive and refusing to look further than your nose end won't cut it.

Absolutely.

And RedToothbrush has made some excellent posts that look at the underlying dynamics of all of this. It's something that seems to have affected so many aspects of life, so quickly. Sometimes that's why it seems hard to discuss - where do you start? Where do you stop?

I see once again we have a post applauding the brave heroism and how much a genderist has done, whilst ignoring the fundamental point that they told us all bluntly and outright we'd not done enough to understand the issues.

Sorry I'm not letting that slide. Not when the boot was firmly put in to tell us to educate ourselves. Once again.

All the Cassandras making the point that all their arguments have been ignored for years gets ignored and how the genderist hasn't remotely recognised how well informed and educated posters are here is left to slide unchecked by a post going 'coo coo look at everything they've done'.

Let's be honest here, the only real effort put in has been to manage to avoid getting into a slanging match by staying calm throughout. It's a tone shift. That's it. Nothing else has really happened.

It's always like this. There always has to be this pandering to the genderist and treat them as virtuous despite the boot being put in about education even AFTER all the numerous posts by women demonstrating knowledge.

Women can never do enough to prove they have even a single valid point.

The words 'utterly tone deaf' spring to mind here.

Instead I'm left with this impression that all that's really happening is an attempt to once again to try to condition women by being more civilised and appealing to that socialisation to 'be nice' whilst simultaneously putting the boot in and trying to recruit in trans spaces.

And yep, that little gem hasn't slipped my notice either.

Note: It's not in a neutral space, it's in a trans space away from impure thoughts and questions of MN and the nasty GCs. It's trying to isolate women from a group in order to slowly break down resistance...

Hmm a bit like a cult might do.

That's not encouraging thought and engagement at all. Encouraging engagement would involve acknowledging the knowledge and life experience of women AND THEN talking about engagement on a level playing field by encouraging that within their OWN spaces and having a determination to open up debate rather than just relocate to a 'friendlier plane of existence'.

I'm mindful this is pretty much the only place we are allowed to speak freely. Do you think a woman going into a trans space will either feel able or actually speak freely and ask questions on her terms in this current climate? Or will she just be 'told' what she should be thinking? It's a suggestion that sets up women into a situation where the power balance is really 'off'. It bothers me.

Again I am going to refer back to my post about the centre of attention and hanging off every word and the dangers of that for women.

What I want is the good faith argument to go back to the trans space and for there to be an understanding that women aren't out to 'get' anyone and that oh actually maybe these women have valid life experiences and data. And DON'T need educating as they already know a fair bit and maybe we need to talk WITH women rather than talk AT women.

Anything else is just cheap hot air.