How has the media conditioned people to 'be kind' re transgender debate?

[FriendofJoanne]

It definitely has; when I saw a friend a few months ago and shared the Sex Matters petition and said "but there are only 2 biological sexes" she said "but you can't say that any more".

I feel that we have absorbed the message that speaking against the trans rights movement is to be a bigot or transphobic but I'm looking for evidence of how this happened if anyone can help?

I've read the Shonagh Dillon paper (here if anyone hasn't read it) but that focuses on social media rather than mainstream. Does anyone know of anything which looks at mainstream media? Thanks

Ugh.

I'm not sharing my womanhood with men.

If that means I'm not being kind, I don't care.

I genuinely thought it would end in divorce for me when I became aware of all this, my Husband couldn't believe all these 'good guys' could be in the wrong if sensible people he respected were saying let's all just be kind it must be the terfs who are the evil baddies.
Thankfully after lots of look this is happening and this is happening (things he thought couldn't possibly be actually happening) and if our daughter wants to compete in sports competitively are we really evil for saying hold on a minute that is not fair and he came round but initially due to all the media bollocks he thought I'd turned into a transphobe and I thought he was being a mindless sheep but he listened so I've stayed married to him, he's a lucky man.

We all know that sharing womanhood is not about the shit bits of being a woman.

Sharing womanhood is such a trite awful phrase

No a man can’t borrow some of my XX chromosomes

They’re male. There’s nothing they can do to change their biological reality

I'd start with the guidelines and moderation here on FWR, OP, while keeping it in mind that this is has for years been the cutting edge of open mindedness when no one else would host the conversation here at all and HQ have dealt with endless flak, attacks, shaming, loss of income and legal threats.

Women have only been permitted to talk at all if they talk using the prescribed terms issued by male people which frames everything to their advantage.

Stating reality by using words such as man and male and correctly sex pronouns are regarded as acts of intentional harm.

Language has had to be twisted through many hoops to be able to talk about it at all.

Any themes that the political lobby in question found too threatening (did not want people to see or think about) were deemed as unacceptable and people have been deleted and banned: specifically including child safeguarding.

Any thread here gaining traction will have at least one person shaming and ridiculing and trying increasingly bizarre pokes to make women annoyed enough to break the guidelines and be deleted (or to get a thread removed when it's turning out to be very inconvenient), and shouting mantras. The script includes things like (with tedious predictability) All normal people do x and don't complain! There's only a few of you and you'll be dead soon. Black and white extremism: if you don't let me say X is fine then you're guilty of Yism. You smell and were seen consorting with Satan (association with any number of random agencies which are supposedly 'bad' and are usually not actually in existence in the UK).

The evidence is all over most of the long threads and goes back years. Link it to coercive control, then look up political capture, then do a bit of reading of Lundy Bancroft and ChumpLady's blog, then look up a bit around advice for women coping with toxic relationships/abusive and/or addicted relationships. S'quite interesting what you'll start to notice. You could write a PhD about it, but you wouldn't be allowed to get very far because to discuss it wouldn't be 'kind'.

Oh and my personal favourite 'be kind' shaming script:

" I personally have no boundaries, and/or am privileged enough to not be personally disadvantaged or affected by X and apparently lack capacity to know or care about any other women who are not me/whose life is not as privileged as mine and are affected by X, so I speak for all women and say X is fine!"

It's a version of the 'let them eat cake' misquote from Marie Antoinette, supposedly due to her being unaware that poor people shouting about their need for bread weren't merely having a whinge about the baguettes being slow out of the oven.

For me, I had a bit of a moment of clarity. Despite being GC, I drifted along into a live and let live mentality of accepting pronouns and even the transgender child as a proper concept.

I'd spent my youth hating adults criticising me and my choices, I was never gonna do the same as an adult myself.

And as easy as that, I slunk along being generally complicit and passive tbh, but never feeling that great about it.

Then a whole bunch of trans issues and stories coalesced after 2019, to electroshock me out of my cloudy thinking, and I became aware that my compromise couldn't hold, that indeed the issue was now more zero sum game.

Around the time of the Abigail Shrier book, GC consultants silenced within their own conferences, JKR pile on. And then ramped up as the Lia Thomas case exploded, with attendant doubling down from the likes of Owen Jones, Ash Sarkar etc, and at best, tumbleweeds re rational discourse from the MSM.

And once I realised the pronouns were being imposed on me as requirement not request, and that the medicalisation of youth was predicated on a concept with no basis in science, and having extricated myself from the herd mentality and purity spirals of Brexit, I was damned if I was gonna deep dive into another toxic hot mess...that was when the elastic in my brain hit maximum stretch and I rebounded, never to return to cowardice and compromise again.

For me, the test of character here is, do you accept the concept that a male can become a female, vice versa, or that you can become both, or neither. Not do you "feel" the opposite, but that you "are" the opposite.

And by extension, do you accept kids can have an innate gender ID, that can change, and must be surrendered to as an adult.

If you do, fine, but I don't, and never will.
But I look back to my period of lacking rigour and character, and see how easy it was to kowtow to the pressure from polite society.

Sharing womanhood is such a trite awful phrase

It is and very look at me! look how wonderful and kind I am, woo-hoo go me!

Kindness to women though? Nah, fuck that. Hypocritical virtue signalling irritants.

Otherwise known as "the Emma Watson".

"Of course trans women are women and are welcome in women's spaces", says woman who is not an athlete, has never been in prison, has never had to use a rape crisis centre or women's shelter and has probably not even used a public toilet since she was 9 and shopping with her mum in Debenhams.

Children have been part of it - get a cute sad face eight year old boy on TV in address and long hair that the big bad meanies won’t allow in the ladies toilets. Ignore the stubbled 40 year old rapist in a ‘baby girl’ fetish outfit.

https://twitter.com/anyabike/status/1661995006511525888/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1661995006511525888&currentTweetUser=anyabike

As Helen Joyce says in this clip you can't think through the issues if you can't use the language.

Stopping honest and straightforward language from being used in the press was intentional. The right words can be used without mocking and derision but making them completely verboten was for another reason, it was intended to prop up the illusion and never break the spell.

It didn't work.

We're not "sharing" womenhood though, are we. Men are taking the bits they like the look of; mainly lipstick, heels, frilly knickers, lesbian pillow-fighting and other tedious porn-related stereotypes.

They seem to be less interested in "sharing" maternity leave, caring for elderly relatives, being paid less and doing more housework.

Most people are fairly kind polite to people on first meeting - unless they are given reason to anticipate something negative. 'Kindness' does not mean having to go along with someone else's personal belief system, though, nor feel compelled to use pronouns in an atmosphere of coercion.

Trans identified people are not a monolith ( as you pointed out earlier) - they are just regular people like everyone else. They are also just as likely to display the full range of positive and negative behaviours as anyone else. Just because someone has a trans identity it does not entitle them to special treatment, or mean that they are uniquely kind, sensitive, loving people.

If a purported value is not unconditionally and equally extended to all, then it's not a value. It's a performative thing that is meeting the needs of the person exhorting it. It's also part of the recognised dynamic of abusive relationships.

Hence the 'inclusion' that includes him while excluding her.
The 'intersectionality' that ignores all female intersections.
And the 'kindness' she must supply (which actually translates as sacrifice, subordinate, enable and have no boundaries) but which he would openly deride suggestion of extending to her.

The words are nothing more than a cold attempt to manipulate the well intentioned using words for personal leverage and personal gain. We've been had.

So when I see the TQ+ political lobby extending and modelling towards women the kind of treatment they would like women to supply in return to them, I will be glad to participate. To the extent to which they do.

My first encounter with a transgender woman (that I know of) was about 24 years ago. On a military base I was stationed on. She was the person the contractors sent to collect the sanitary waste bins. We passed her as we’d just left the mess after lunch. Our first thought was ‘that must be the shittest job ever’, the ‘that’s brave, coming on a base full of squaddies and sailors who aren’t known for being gentle’ then we talked about how driving the urge must be to go to those lengths and no doubt receive horrible comments and discrimination every day.

It wasn’t in the media then. We weren’t ‘being kind’. We were decent human beings thinking about another human being.

HTH

100% this @Beowulfa
I seem to remember reading that Jamie Shupe (not sure what his present incarnation is) said he performed housework badly dressed in lipstick and heels and then expected sexual gratification in return from his wife for his (pathetic) contribution.

Also that Debbie Hayton tried to take over all the jobs his wife had done in the marriage (to validate his new female identity) and stopped doing the jobs he had previously done.

It wasn’t in the media then. We weren’t ‘being kind’. We were decent human beings thinking about another human being.

Were you really though? Were you thinking about the female human beings that will self exclude from their own single sex spaces once they become mixed sex? Were you thinking of the wife and children human beings that have their lives turned upside down by their husband and fathers transitioning? Were you thinking about the female human beings in prison having to share space with rapists? Were you thinking about the female human beings who have put their whole lives in to sports that they can't win because males have decided they want to be included?
No, I don't think you were. But you go ahead and pat yourself in the back for being so kind.

Dialsquare I totally agree with you

Thank you SO MUCH for this book recommendation NotHavingIt!
As I too have recently become obsessed by the concept of boundaries (personal, social, cultural- the works), inspired by both my personaI process in recent years, and by seeing the same conflicted attitudes mirrored in society right now- I was intrigued. Have just downloaded the book sample- and from what I've read so far, it is deeply validating to see my inner musings echoed and articulated.

Going to splash out on it!
I love mumsnet!
Much appreciation to you.

It's not discrimination to say that someone shouldn't be using spaces and services or competing in sports for members of the opposite sex.

It is not cheap for a paperback, butIi think that is because it is more of an academic book than a mass market book.

Sounds like we are going through a similar sort of personal process at present. 😀

Boundaries represent limitations and defintions, but without them there is no true integrity, no real achievement, and a break-down social cohesion.

I genuinely don't understand what point is being made here.

It's the "HTH" at the end that's throwing me off.

Trying to tell us we are all big old meanies I suspect @SaltyColin

My comment is to the thread title... the whole movement reminds me of covid when informed consent and my body my choice, became the target for hatred and being labelled mad anti vaxxers.

Protection for single sex spaces and believing in science doesn't make someone suddenly phobic of a proportion of the population.

Like another poster said, it's been infiltrating everywhere for years but in a clearly coordinated way.