Continuously willing to discuss in good faith: part 3

[BonfireLady]

Continuation of thread: part 3. Hope those tagged below don't mind.

@catiette and @arabellascott, you both mentioned possibly starting a continuation of the thread so please forgive my keenness! I couldn't see anything when I started writing this so I thought I'd kick it off.

I watched the video that @spookyfbi shared, then read the transcript excerpts (thank you @helleofabore) and comments.

Long post alert! But I wanted to share my thoughts in full. Although I feel very embarrassed sharing this on an FWR board (I am fully prepared to get shot! 😂), I want to do so because I think it helps illustrate how an opinion can be formed. In order to explain myself, I'm going to frame it with some excuses context:

As I said in the previous thread, my daughter had told me she thought she was transgender and asked her dad and me for puberty blockers so that she could explore everything. To support her, I unturned every single stone I could find on the subject of gender identity in autistic girls (there's not a lot of info so I had to piece it together). By now, I had read on the NHS website that the effects of puberty blockers and brain development were unknown so that was a hard no. We weren't going to let her do that to her body but we were still open minded that one day she may be our son and we knew we would love her just the same.

I immersed myself in everything I could find relating to gender identity. Science papers, news articles, Benjamin Boyce detransitioner interviews, a therapy book on gender dysphoria etc etc. I also spoke with people from the LGBT+ community so that I could get an all round view. I've said on previous posts that I still value these conversations.

I didn't come here as it was nowhere near my radar. I also didn't read the Daily Mail or Telegraph as I had been brought up on the Guardian and frankly, they were evil publications in my head. And as for Glinner...... No way. I'm not on Twitter but I'd seen some copies of his Tweets in the Guardian and Independent and I didn't want that kind of input. I couldn't imagine how anyone like him could help me find information that could help my daughter. I just thought he was a nasty rude man who enjoyed taking the piss out of marginalised people.

(Suffice to say I have since I overturned everything I've just said in the last paragraph 🤦‍♀️).

Even though I had done soooooooooooooooo much research in to autism and gender identity in children, it never occurred to me that JKR's infamous Wombund Tweet had any connection to my daughter's situation. She just sounded a bit ranty to me and I couldn't see what was so important about declaring yourself to be a woman. I was aware that people were calling her transphobic but that made me even more certain that she was just a nutjob (sorry JKR 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️) because gender identity (as I saw it from my research) had nothing to do with her status as being a woman. I thought "of course you are. And?" and moved on. I eventually read her essays, because it kept coming up in the press and I concluded that she had written nothing transphobic (in fact she said she stood by transgender people so I was pretty baffled as to why people were so angry) and so I ignored her again.

Then... along came Isla Bryson and the Nicola Sturgeon. I slowly started joining the dots and lurking on here to inform myself. By now I was already reading the Daily Mail when it had articles about gender identity and children but still no Glinner. I felt that he was a massive step too far. I balanced out my guilt at reading the Mail by also reading Pink News. I was still very targeted in what I read about. If it didn't help me to directly help my daughter, I skipped past it.

So what has this got to do with the Mica video from the end of the last thread? I'm sad to say that there is a time when I would have believed pretty much all of it if it hadn't been for my shift in focus thanks to Isla Bryson, Nicola Sturgeon and (retrospectively) JKR.

In fact, I'll go further. I would have been really hooked from the start of the video because I find the suffragettes fascinating. I know a fair bit about the story and I always make sure I vote because of what they did to secure that right. I didn't know anything about Sylvia Pankhurst though, so that bit was so interesting. By this point in the video I would have been hungry for more. I know we've come a long way in equality of the sexes but we're not there yet. I would have seen it as a really interesting immersion in to lots of facts about what I could be a part of to change the world for the good of women. I'm not stupid. I have good critical thinking skills (if I didn't, I wouldn't have been able to support my daughter as I have done) but it would have appealed to the militant side of me. I'd have probably skipped or filtered out the weird bits in the middle with the guest (?) speaker (Caelen?) as I found them difficult to follow. But I'd have tuned back in again for all the bits about why today's feminists were the equivalent of the suffragettes in (how it is described as) their exclusion of everyone who didn't meet their standards of a "real woman". I would have assumed everyone on this board and everyone at the LWS events were just bigoted women who couldn't stop talking about the word woman. I'd have conceded that JKR did have a good point that "people who menstruate" sounded wrong, I would have seen it as an odd obsession to be talking about women's rights and the "erasure of the word woman". Sorry
everyone 😬😬😬 Obviously I never did assume that because I came here first, just to be clear!! 😬😬😬😬
I'm just imagining what could have been, if I saw this video at a different stage in my exploration of gender identity. I think I'd have been as disinterested in all the things on this board as I was about JKR's Tweet: just a passing nod while I got on with my life. Worse than that, there's probably a chance that I'd have just found everyone very ranty. I'm not sure if I'd have tried to join in or just dismissed anything you were all talking about. I have no idea because I was so disinterested in the subject of women's rights (I thought we had our rights so all was good) that I'd have filtered out anything important that was being said.

I'm not influenced by online influencers. I make my own mind up. But there's a good chance that the suffragette bit combined with the modern fight for women's rights bit would have helped me form exactly the type of opinion that the video was created for.

Interestingly, as far as the video goes, the bit about the "sterilisation of kids" was such a tiny throwaway comment that it may as well not have been there. If I didn't know better (thanks to my obsessive research in this area I know lots on this subject!!) I'd have assumed it was a conspiracy theory, rather than the sad medical scandal that I believe is currently unfolding in most western countries.

In other words, I'd have been the perfect candidate for being convinced that the women on this board were bigots. Sorry again to all. Obviously I don't think that now at all!

Also, a final sorry goes to Glinner. I eventually started reading his substack when a friend (at the time the only GC person I knew, in real life or online) sent me a 3 part story that had been published by Glinner which was written by a mum who helped her gender incongruous daughter navigate everything. I still think he's blunt in his style but I also think what he's doing to help raise awareness is amazing.

Sorry for the length of post.

What?!

a man can wear a dress and it not be a fetish in the same way a woman can wear a dress and it not be a fetish.

what exactly do you mean by cross dressing? There is nothing inherent about a dress that makes it only for a woman’s biology, so you must be talking about social norms. If there is nothing inherent about a dress that makes it only for a woman’s biology, then why can’t a man simply want to wear a dress for no particular reason?

I am not talking about trans women here (perhaps that’s where the confusion is coming from?) I’m not talking about a trans woman who wears a dress because it eases her dysphoria. I’m talking about a man who does not identify as trans, perhaps identifies as cis, still uses the men’s toilets and has no interest in female only spaces, and recognises that clothes are just clothes and decides he feels like wearing a dress today, just because. And I’m talking about his female colleague who feels uncomfortable about that, because she believes that men should behave in a certain way and that women should behave in a certain way. Because she believes in the gender essentialism described in Mica’s video. This person feels equally uncomfortable about trans women, not because she’s concerned about the legal implications of losing female only spaces, but because she just feels like men should behave a certain way and women should behave a certain way and she doesn’t like it when they choose not to. Is this person gender critical?

I’m trying to understand what you’re trying to say but I’m not familiar with the quillette essays or the Christine Burns model so I’m at a disadvantage here.

my understanding:

1. there are biological men who experience gender dysphoria and identify as women and wish to be treated as such
2. there are biological men who don’t experience gender dysphoria but still identify as women and wish to be treated as such
3. there are biological men who neither experience gender dysphoria nor identify as women, but do think that there’s nothing inherently female about dresses, make up, long hair, or any of the other things modern western society tends to associate with femininity, and so might sometimes choose to wear these things for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with trying to be a woman
4. there are biological men who do think there is something inherently feminine about dresses/make up/etc and would never choose to wear these things

1 & 2 are what we would call trans women, 3 & 4 are men who may identify as cis men or may just identify as men. 1 & 2 want to be legally recognised as women and there are people who object to that for a variety of different reasons but they can be generally split into two categories.

A. They have no personal problem with any of these people living their lives but are concerned that there would be safety implications for women if the law was enacted
B. They’re personally uncomfortable with 1, 2 & 3 and they think they should have the power to either legally force or at least socially pressure 1, 2 & 3 to all behave like 4 for their own personal comfort

now i suppose the impression I got from my discussions on the other thread was that A was gender critical and B was not, but perhaps I'm
mistaken about that. Are they both gender critical? Or would some of A and some of B be gender critical, and the rest of A and B are not. Or something else?

a point was made in the other thread about defining and understanding terms so we can properly talk about them and I’m trying to do that here. I understand if you’re sick of this so perhaps someone else can explain, because I literally just started learning about this a week ago and we’re not all on the same page here.

Apologies I just noticed the quillette studies will linked. I will go read them then return if I still have questions

To explain the ‘movement’ side Spooky, the dishonest forcing together of groups, does hide the fact most people in this false group are not part of any movement. They simply are people with certain beliefs.

But yes, there are the extremists at one end who fight non-conformity. These are NOT feminists.

Therefore when people try to align people such as Matt Walsh who seems to embrace gender stereotypes and who has extreme opinions about abortion with feminists, it demonstrably false. He seems to have his own prejudices against feminists and actively shuns feminist principles.

Yet, he was mentioned in that video as being aligned to feminists! Remembering that video was used to disparage feminists!

Now that really takes some bad faith. Yet, it is constantly done.

This board appreciates that Matt Walsh has a voice and uses it. He has remarkable clarity under pressure, he doesn’t get phased. He might have clear thoughts on other issues too, but he is otherwise ignored.

This is a board about the feminist discussion of prioritising women’s and children’s needs above those of adult male people. There is a feminist movement, for sure. There is not much connection with other groups though to make a ‘movement’.

There might be discussion, there might be an action from time to time that some of the other groups jump on to push. But it is not a connected movement as such. Except at the feminist level. There may be feminists intersecting from different groups.

I would ask you to explain who the men are who like wearing dresses who are not doing it as a sexual fetish?

I am sure they are out there, but how do you, personally, see them presenting that is not an indication that it is a fetish.

I would say those men don’t choose dresses that are designed to enhance women’s breasts etc. those men choose designs that are about other aspects of wearing a dress. Such as flow of fabric as one option. Something that has dramatic appeal maybe? For instance, Harry Styles choices might be what I am thinking.

However, that will be rarer than say those men who are aroused by seeing themselves dressed as a woman I would expect. I doubt there is statistics for this though.

By the way Spooky, there may be some of us who can answer with great in-depth knowledge about who the people are who do want to enforce gender roles and stereotypes. I don’t know that many of us have ‘insider’ knowledge though.

When we moved from Australia a few years ago, I was shocked by how some of the children here clung to stereotypes. My child was told constantly they must be the opposite sex by their peers because they did x.

Why?

You seem obsessed with categorising people into different subsections and listing out what you think each different category does and doesn't believe in the hope of getting into even more arguments about which tiny detail might be incorrect.

Who cares?

Whether people are transphobic or not for whatever reason they might have or whatever level they are phobic on...doesn't change the facts. Which is that this whole ideology is based on flawed studies and the treatments cause harm.

SpookyFBI

I do think it’s useful to distinguish between a mother saying ‘no’ to her daughter not wanting to shave her legs because she still holds onto unexamined biases about what men and women should do, and a woman saying ‘no’ to losing a space she can escape to if a man is harassing her. I don’t think it’s useful to lump both of these things together because that’s where a lot of the misconceptions in the video come from. From my understanding, the first concern is not gender critical, but admittedly I’m still new to this. What language would you use to distinguish these things, or do you not think they should be distinguished?

Gender critical feminism (which is not the same as being gender critical for non-feminist reasons) would 'interrogate' why in some societies women are expected not to have any body hair or at least any visible body hair when most women, in fact, do naturally grow body hair, though on average men grow more hair than women. Some possible reasons are the society's desire to accentuate and increase naturally occurring sex differences or the society viewing being child-like (children don't have body hair) desirable for adult women, though other reasons are possible.

So the reason a mother would want her daughter to shave her legs would not be a gender-critical feminist reason, almost the opposite, i.e., gender-conforming and uncritical of the gendered norms which tend to encumber women and girls more than men and boys.

The example of a woman saying 'no' to losing single-sex spaces could also have several different explanations or motivations, but the idea that gender, rather than sex, should determine who uses those spaces is absolutely not a gender-critical one. In that more basic sense this example could come from a gender-critical foundation.

Traditionally, feminists have been critical of gender rules, roles, and stereotypes, because they can easily be shown to be one of the main tools that are used to subjugate women.

The unfalsifiable concept of an abstract gender identity is not exactly the same thing, but in practice the two do get combined and rigid gender boxes are supported by many online trans activists. So something which is an undesirable thing from a feminist point of view (to create additional cultural rules about how women and men should behave) is now sometimes seen as desirable within the trans activism.

Why? Because it is actually useful to know why so many people just think you’re transphobic. Because I think there are lot of lay people like me or like Mica or people who watch her videos who think all these gender critical people who are going on about female only spaces must just want women to be in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, and since that’s not what they want they vote against anything you’re trying to get put into law. I don’t know, maybe you don’t care if the wider public has a better understanding of these issues… I think it’s worth trying to understand how these misconceptions arise

What do you mean how do I see them? I don’t understand the question.

a boy could want to wear a dress like Elsa because he likes the character. There’s nothing sexual in that.

a woman can choose to wear a dress for any number of reasons that are not sexual. I’m not sure why you think a man couldn’t do the same.

yes it’s probably very rare, because there is considerable social pressure on men to not wear dresses, that even if a man wanted to, the drawbacks would likely outweigh the benefits. So if you got together all the men (who identify as men, not counting trans women here) who wore dresses in public, statistically I’m sure most of them would be doing it specifically because they’re getting off on the humiliation, because that wouldn’t be a drawback for them. But if you somehow removed the social stigma (not just from their current society but from their upbringing as well) then rounded up all the men who were wearing dresses, I’m sure a much smaller percentage of them would be doing it for sexual fetish reasons. I’m sure many of them would be wearing a dress for the same reason a woman might choose to wear a dress.

and yes, sure, in this scenario I’m talking about a dress designed for their body, without breasts etc…

It's not misconceptions, it's deliberately lying to keep woman who are worried about their right and children silenced. This hasn't been done by mistake, it's done to stop people listening.

Welcome to your first basic understanding of what being oppressed is.

Ah, thank you for the explanation.

so taking what I said in my earlier post, category A would be gender critical feminists, and category B would be gender critical for non feminist reasons, but both categories would still fall under gender critical?

You need to step away from trying to categories everything. The world doesn't work like that.

Well Mica may have done it deliberately, I can’t really speak to her motivations, but I certainly didn’t. And even if Mica did do it deliberately, her motivation would likely have been for clout or to make money, not to silence women. There may be some people who are deliberately trying to silence women, but I highly doubt that’s what the vast majority of lay people are doing. The vast majority of people are just perpetuating their unexamined but sincere beliefs.

True, there is of course nuance. But when you’re still new to a subject simple categories can help to understand the basics

Basically;
Feminists (and most other people) recognise gender (stereotypes are harmful) and believe they should be removed. Biology is fact and clothes don't matter. Two sexes

TRAs think gender stereotypes are very important but what ones you adear to make you that thing (IE dresses long hair ect) anyone can choose but it changes your whole person. Gender trumps any kind of biological sex.

Mens right activists and general male arseholes, homophobes and so on like the way gender stereotypes oppress and fight to constantly enforce them. (I've, Men are Men and eat a lot of stake)

I hope that helps.

Obviously that's very simplified, you also have transMen like Scott Newgent who are not gender critical because they are trans, but recognise harm is happening to children and that they were lied to / taken advantage of.

Trying to categorise a whole population who agree there are two human sex's will get tiring for you.

The transwidows thread also really help with shining a light in just what is that inner essence that makes a man feel like a woman? The disconnect between the public presentation and the side seen only in private by the family is so huge for many of these men. I think it’s really important to get that glimpse of the difference between what some of these transwomen choose to show us, the public, and what they reveal behind closed doors. Perhaps the most important thing for many of us on here is that we cannot simply believe what people choose to tell us about themselves, because so often, it’s simply just not true.

I would say the view that trans rights activists think gender stereotypes are important is a misconception as well. Gender identity may not be well explained but every text I’ve seen that does try to explain it makes it clear that it’s separate from gender stereotypes.

Then explain what presenting as a trans woman / trans man is to me without using stereotypes....

Find one example if someone finding out they were trans with stereotypes.

Find one example of a parent discovering their child was trans without stereotypes.

What is said and what is actually happening are two different thing.

You don't have to post a reply to those questions, but I've been down this road so it's a good experiment just to think about.

Here is one to get you started;
https://www.insider.com/how-my-toddler-came-out-as-trans-to-our-family-2021-9

While I don’t necessarily agree with you, there is of course, a difference between a boy wearing an Elsa dress and a man wearing a dress designed for a female body. But I suspect you know this.

Obviously, there is also a difference between a man wearing a ‘skirt’ and a dress. Kilts, sarongs etc.

However, I feel a men can wear whatever they want as long as they are not including others in their kink non-consensually.

The fundamental issue I see here is the ‘treated as a woman’ part.

What does it mean to be treated as a woman? And how is this different to being treated as a man?

I would argue that we should be treated the same (unless some bodily difference is involved e.g. health, contraception…). And if no bodily difference is involved then why treat someone differently? Isn’t that just sexism.

Off topic, slight;ly - but in the last thread a lot of discussion was had around how much time and emotional energy had been put in by women into understanding the whole trans phenomena. This was in response to a suggestion that we needed to educate ourselves, and that perhaps if we did we would understand the trans experieence.

Anyway, I watched a really good programme on Netflix yesterday ( for the second time) called 'Regretters'. Others may already have watched it, but if not it is certainly worth your while. It is a Swedish production featuring two male transsexuals ( full re-assignment surgery) who have come to regret their surgery and are back to identifying as men. Both were also seeking to have surgery to restore the semblance of a penis.

Two very different characters, with different backgrounds and motivations. One homosexual, at a time when being gay was still illegal in Sweden: he was one of the first to under-go transsexual surgery in the 1960's. The other, a troubled man, clearly still struggling with gendered expectations and roles, who I suspect was motivated by AGP - although this was not overtly stated.

Very sensitively done........and very interesting.