Where to Start

[PepeParapluie]

I’ve been lurking for a while here and have seen lots of thoughtful, insightful and wise comments from the regular posters here. You are doing a good thing in creating a space where these issues can be discussed fearlessly and there are definitely lurkers like me watching and learning, even if it does take a while to pluck up the courage to say so!

I have spent lots of time reading (not just here) and learning about sex & gender issues and think I am now settled in my own gender critical viewpoint, and could discuss fairly confidently most of the issues thrown up. However, it would take hours of discussion to cover all the ground, and often other people won’t have the time or inclination to spend hours discussing it with me. Sometimes opportunities have arisen to discuss these issues with friends but l struggle to focus on the main and most accessible points.

Many of my friends just haven’t thought much about it and are TWAW by default if you like - think ‘live and let live’ and why wouldn’t we just be kind, but not because they’ve really engaged with things, just because that’s what seems to be socially accepted.

So I thought I’d ask - where do you start when discussing all this with people? What do you think are the clearest and easiest places to start for people who are new to the gender critical side? How do you boil it all down?

Good question OP and good to hear you're wanting to broach the topic with friends etc.

I think sport is quite a good place to start - people can relate to it and its blatantly obvious that having men competing against women is a ridiculous idea. I find it can be helpful to treat the whole topic like I might with any other current affairs issues.... ' did you see that...?' 'I was reading an article and it said....'
Or 'my friend was saying that.....'

You might also get inspiration from here :

Quite a lot of people will have heard, at least vaguely, of the Scottish rapist who was in a women’s prison.

That thread looks really helpful, thanks @Leafstamp , I’ll have a read.

I agree that sport and that prison case are a sort of gateway for lots of people. It’s hard to remember now but I think sport might have been what originally made me think more critically about things.

The ‘good faith’ threads on here a while ago really made me think too, and one thing that really stuck with me was a post (I can’t remember who by now!) or series of posts asking what gender identity actually is and especially what children mean when they say they want to be the opposite sex. I hadn’t really questioned the actual meaning of gender ideology as a thing before then (perhaps that’s daft).

It also just made me think that although the GC side are accused of not supporting or accepting gender non-conforming kids, surely the worst show of support for gender non-conformity is to support transition - i.e to make a gender non-confirming boy a gender-confirming girl. That’s the opposite of supporting gender non-conformity, isn’t it? I’m probably not explaining myself very well!

But this is part of my issue, I’ve now got so many thoughts in my head about all this that I struggle to neatly articulate and explain them to people who haven’t spent so much time steeped in it.

Eddie Izzard is high profile and a good demonstration of what self ID actually looks like in real life.

Plus the Scottish government's difficulties with their Gender Reform bill and the pink-legging-ed rapist. This is the reality.

yes it's frustrating when you are the one realising the magnitude of it all, and people don't really get it.

Sport and prisons are usually the ones that they will agree with you on. But unless they are going to be discussing it in public, they won't see that that makes them outrageously transphobic.

Also, the fact that it's not about using women's spaces, but using the women in those spaces is something that is a bit of a penny drop moment for some people.

The space is irrelevant. It's the presence of the women and girls in the space that provides the validation.

Women are the resource. They are the tool. Their presence is crucial.

It's that kind of cynical and rocksolid sexism that will do it for some people.

My question is generally why is it that women are met with violent threats, extreme rhetoric and such rage, when they raise the issue of women's rights.

There are unfortunately many examples of women losing their jobs, being arrested, being threatened, attacked or abused for raising any of these issues - for asking questions, or attending meetings or stating their beliefs that sex is immutable (and people wonder why more women don't speak up!).

Are women allowed to talk about women's rights? Or are women's rights 'transphobic'? Why is the response so extreme?

@Datun

"Also, the fact that it's not about using women's spaces, but using the women in those spaces is something that is a bit of a penny drop moment for some people.

The space is irrelevant. It's the presence of the women and girls in the space that provides the validation.

Women are the resource. They are the tool. Their presence is crucial. "

Hi there, I have been lurking for a while and am trying to get my head around things. What is meant by the above? Is the reason that third spaces (e.g. gender neutral loos) are rejected by TRAs as what seems to me a perfectly logical / reasonable solution to the issue of loos because there will probably be no women in them?

I really don't understand the loo thing, why can't we just have mens, womens and gender neutral and then everyone is happy?

Robin Moira Wright a prominent lawyer who says he is a woman, says that 'gender neutral toilets' are a 'ghetto'.

So he uses the women's toilets.

The moment he sets foot in one, he is making the women's toilets 'gender neutral' and into the 'ghetto' that he despises. So we all have to use a ghetto because this lawyer who says he is a woman wants it.

Take the Hampstead pools.

There was a mens, a mixed sex and a womans.

The mixed sex wasn't good enough, they had a consultation which they never reported the results of, and made the women's to be 'female gender' not female sex.

So the males get to use, if they wish, all 3 pools.

And the women, get nothing that is single sex at all.

This ideology obliterates everything that is single sex. From Brownies and Guides to the WI. And everything in between. They have infiltrated the whole lot.

They don't want the WI. They want women to know that a man is there. It is part of it.

Thanks everyone. I guess I worry that going in with anything approaching AGP is too far too fast for some people and makes people think I’m just being hateful or transphobic, but the points about why third spaces aren’t acceptable are good ones. That’s a good way to show the impossibility of middle ground ‘solutions’ as third spaces do seem reasonable to average people until it clicks that we can’t have that according to trans ideology.

I wonder @ArabeIIaScott what kind of responses you get to that? I can imagine some of my friends starting with the ‘well both sides…’ stuff! Although I’d happily refute that of course.

A friend I chatted to online, said ‘ I don’t understand why women who have been discriminated against are now discriminating against another group’

i think I replied something like, ‘ why is it discriminatory for women to not want to get undressed in front of a man? Why is it discriminatory for women in prisons, who are disproportionately victims of male violence, not to want men in the prison with them? Why is it discriminatory for women survivors of make sexual violence not to want men in their survivor support groups’. He replied ‘ I never thought of it like that’ and has become gender critical since.

My brother does not believe TWAW ‘ of course they are not!’ He guffawed. But he got extremely angry at me for rejecting the concept of trans lesbians. However, he was surprised when I told him that most ‘trans lesbians’ are fully intact makes with penises, and look obviously male, and that there are now sex guides aimed at lesbians instructing them how to give oral sex to penises. He is no longer angry with me for rejecting the concept of trans lesbians. Most people still think trans women, equals transsexual.

Another friend, fully TWAW ‘Be kind’, ‘my identity is tied up with thinking what the guardian tells me to think’ friend was staggered to find Stonewall have redefined homosexual to mean same gender identity attracted, not same sex attracted, and she declared that ‘absolutely crazy’ She is still ‘be kind TWAW’ as far as I am aware, but this may have given her some pause for thought. My TWAW Pomo addled boss found this so remarkable he thought I was making this up and simply refused to believe me. At this point you can say, ‘so when organizations like Stonewall say TWAW, what do you think they actually mean, if it doesn’t mean this’. Point out all the times, in sports, in prisons, in women’s refuges, in women’s survivors groups etc, that men who identify as women are to be allowed, as far as Stonewall et Al campaign for. Use this to show that they mean it as a literal truth that TWAW in all circumstances，it’s not a ‘be kind, social identity’ it’s a literal truth. And this is what the implication is for women and lesbians.

So I guess it’s listening to what they think and then explaining that the ‘on the ground’ reality of gender ideology is not what they actually think it is.

Or I am Sarah, at the Brighton survivors group for women victims of male sexual violence. There was a men’s group, women’s group and trans group. But a man, obviously male, turned up to the women’s group. When Sarah asked after this for a female only group she was told by the organization that they could not provide a service for her anymore.

Nor could she ask on a Facebook group for survivors of sexual violence if they knew if there was a female only group as that too was considered transphobic.

PP hit the nail on the head. It’s not about the space, or the group, it’s about the other women being there to validate. And that’s why women cannot be allowed their own groups, regardless of how reasonable or vitally important it is for women to have them.

Oh yes. Even a LibDem council candidate found pink leggings rapey man hard to stomach. Told me he shared my concerns and didn't agree with his party on the topic.

If you’re just trying to open a conversation rather than “convert” someone then I agree that sport is a good place to start. Another suggestion is to say that you read JKRs essay on this topic and couldn’t see why she was subject to so much abuse.

'A friend I chatted to online, said ‘ I don’t understand why women who have been discriminated against are now discriminating against another group’

i think I replied something like, ‘ why is it discriminatory for women to not want to get undressed in front of a man? Why is it discriminatory for women in prisons, who are disproportionately victims of male violence, not to want men in the prison with them? Why is it discriminatory for women survivors of make sexual violence not to want men in their survivor support groups’. He replied ‘ I never thought of it like that’ and has become gender critical since.'

Well, it is discrimination. Women do a lot of 'discriminating' every time we make a judgement about a man, avoid walking down a street late at night because there's a strange male there, turn down the offer of a lift from a man we are not sure about.

Women discriminate against males because experience and common sense tell us that men, as a group, present a potential threat.

Your friend is suggesting women abandon all their instinctive and learned responses to safety and safeguarding.

I could have written your exact message a few months ago, OP! I still struggle with where to start with friends, but as most of my friends have teenage kids and/or have other exposure to teenagers through work, i find that is a good way in. The rash of trans-identified teenage girls that looks very much like a social contagion to anyone who looks at it twice; the concern that most parents/teachers have around getting things wrong with those in their charge; the depressing possibility that sporty teenage girls can never live up to trsnswomen sporting records.... these have usually provided a common ground to raise the subject.

Like you, I educated myself (using this amazing forum as a jumping off point) to the point where I have been able to open the eyes of my medical colleagues and now I bang the evidence evidence evidence drum (with colleagues and friends). If there was clear, incontrovertible evidence that the risks of medical/surgical transition were balanced by massive mental health benefits then great, let's prescribe with abandon. But that evidence does not exist. And the evidence base/precautionary principle position can be nicely (and honestly) couched as 'making sure that gender incongruent people get the best care possible'. Hard to say that is transphobic, right?

I realise my position does not address the social issues (shared spaces etc) but once someone is peaked...

I had no idea Stonewall had redefined homosexual to mean same gender identity attracted. Lesbians in the 80s did not march for the right to sleep with men with penises. It is beyond completely bonkers.

Oh yes. Nancy Kelly and her ‘sexual racism’.

But this is part of my issue, I’ve now got so many thoughts in my head about all this that I struggle to neatly articulate and explain them to people who haven’t spent so much time steeped in it.

Have you thought about sitting down and making a mindmap of the issues to clarify them in your own head?

I find mindmaps often help me to clarify the connections between various topics, and that clarification can increase my confidence in discussing them.

Also, I find a natural way to start a conversation on the topic is to talk about whatever's in the news that day (and there's always something!). You don't want to put people off by pushing the issues, and current affairs will definitely raise meaty aspects of the topic to discuss.

Discussing it with people who aren't as familiar with the issues (and without them leaving the conversation thinking you're a dreadful meanie) definitely does get easier with practice. Plus, it's actually really useful to have to explain one's position from the very basics as you're forced to strip away all the fluff and to drill down to the elements that are fundamental to your own position.

I’ve found chatting about Jo Rowling is a good starting point as most people are aware of something going on with her. I begin talking about the rape crisis centres up in Scotland, why she involved herself and what she actually said and why. How vulnerable women don’t want men in their spaces. I then talk about my mum, in her 80’s, who is getting frailer and wouldn't cope well with being forced to share a hospital ward with a man. Its important to show that these ideas actually do affect all of us women, from young girls to the elderly… and to do it in a way that’s clear and allows them to go away and think about ramifications for them, their families.

Pick a single point and start dropping in small bits of info about that one area. I often find some women (and I've been guilty of this too) end up trying to give too much info as Gender Identity is in everything and is everywhere. If you talk about it all, their eyes will glaze over or you'll be accused of being a bigot / obsessed etc.

"TWAW"

"Oh you think they are actually really women and should have access to women's prisons, sports and changing areas. Even when they retain all their male attributes and their penis? Gosh, I don't think I'm totally ok with that".

Thanks everyone, really helpful advice here!

I was discussing JKR with a friend a few months ago - they said they wouldn’t play the new Harry Potter game as a result of her views. I asked them about that and said she hasn’t actually said anything trans phobic, she’s just stood up for women’s spaces. They threw me by saying ‘even if she hadn’t herself, she clearly associates with / supports by liking and promoting tweets of those that have very problematic views’.

Afterwards I thought more about it and felt annoyed I hadn’t challenged that guilt by association (if it’s even true, which I’m not sure it is) but it felt daunting enough exposing myself as an evil TERF at all and it’s always easy to think of things you should have said afterwards. Im sure there will be other opportunities!

Is the reason that third spaces (e.g. gender neutral loos) are rejected by TRAs as what seems to me a perfectly logical / reasonable solution to the issue of loos because there will probably be no women in them?

Exactly.

Validation that they are actually women has to be 100%. Any exceptions means they're not really women.

Which is why the most extreme women only spaces/services are so relentlessly targeted.

For example, a female rape survivors group is, by any normal standard, a place which should automatically exclude men. And always has. But now, these rape survivors are told to 're-frame their trauma', by a transwomen, so that men can attend.

What sort of man forces rape survivors into their male presence?

The feelings, needs and trauma of the women is irrelevant to the fact that their presence validates the man concerned.

It's why a 'third space' is rejected. It doesn't validate. Even the suggestion provokes anger.

India Willoughby famously boasted about how they 'walked miles' at the airport to find the out-of-the-way women only toilet, determinedly avoiding the gender neutral option. Because there was no opportunity to use women for validation in those. And was fuming about the very suggestion.

Women are the resource. Not the space. The space is meaningless without them.