Worrying Increase in Transphobia

[PorcelinaV]

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/09/09/transphobia-uk-press-media-negative-coverage/

An increase in transphobic sentiment among the British public has been fuelled by hostile coverage of trans people from the right-wing press, argues data journalist Ell Folan....

Unfortunately, newspapers still have a great deal of influence on the public and political agenda in Britain, and nowhere is this more obvious than in how perceptions of trans rights have changed.

As recently as Feburary 2021, an absolute majority of British voters (51 per cent) agreed with the statement “a transgender woman is a woman”, including 6 in 10 women. Just 34 per cent disagreed. But after years of negative coverage from the press, those numbers have changed.

In April this year, only 33 per cent of voters agreed that trans women are women, with 47 per cent disagreeing....

It is clear that the media plays an important role in shaping public perceptions, and unless their negative coverage is corrected and refuted, public opinion will continue to worsen.

Trans women are men.

The public are starting to better understand the issue.

“Real trans people” @Talltall

is Isla Bryon a real trans person? What about Karen White? Are they a real trans person?

if not, how do we tell the difference

personally I think putting men in prison with women who are then raped rather “horrid” but I’m a big mean transphobe like that!

It's what happens when uncompromising dogma meets reality.

Instead of fighting to be seen as equal while being different such as the gay community, the trans movement compels you to disregard science, language, your rights & even your own eyes. Was never going to end well.

Gosh we haven't had a good old fashioned 'you're all howwible twansphobes!!' thread on here for ages.

What a treat for a Sunday morning

Stating a biological fact is not denying someone's existence.

Such drama

@Theeyeballsinthesky

i don't believe in self diagnosis.
but how do you tell isn't a reason to discriminate against all. Is it?

I would love someone to explain how they differentiate between "real" transwomen and "pretend" transwomen.

Where is the evidence?

Because as far as I can see, any man who says he is a women is pretending.

When you say 'discriminate', in what way do you mean?

I think it goes like this:

OP - re "It is clear that the media plays an important role in shaping public perceptions, and unless their negative coverage is corrected and refuted, public opinion will continue to worsen."

it is not negative coverage to point out the glaring RL problems that arise from making "A = B" government policy contrary to all rational thought and the evidence of our eyes, and penalizing those who dare say "A =/= B".

I don't know how old you were at that time, but we have been talking about these matters on MN in exactly the same way at least as far back as 2014. It is not because Daily Mail recently saw the light that MN ditched trans ideology.

MNers were overwhelmingly conscious of biological reality and realistic about potential dangers and problems to girls and women from the first time the theory "TWAW" was aired around here.

Which replies are transphobic? It's not been a long thread so shouldn't take long for you to find the comments you are referring to

A few posters have mentioned these stats so I thought I would add the graphic

Most people are pretty reasonable. When they originally answered that trans women are women, they thought they were just signalling that TW should be treated with kindness and treated most of the time as if they were women. They knew everybody understood they weren’t really women, but it was a kind of social contract where people indulged their wishes and treated them as women in most circumstances.

That worked very well for decades. However, two things happened: firstly, a small group of trans activists pushed the idea that TW are actually women in every sense. That’s absolutely not what most people agreed with, and once those people found out that they were being asked to say that a TW was indistinguishable from a woman and in fact an actual woman, they were annoyed and reacted. They also realised the potential damage to women’s rights. The more the small group of activists pushed and became extreme, the more people reacted. It’s wholly counter-productive.

A few years ago you could have asked two questions - 1) Should we treat TW as women in some social situations and use their chosen pronouns? and 2) Are TW actually women? You’d have got the majority of people agreeing with the first question but not the second. But now the number saying Yes to the first question is decreasing. This isn’t because of prejudice, it’s because that previous kind concession has been taken advantage of, making people wary of agreeing anything.

The second thing that happened is that the meaning of trans changed and gender identity ideology became prominent. Now there are people saying they’re ‘trans’ who most people would judge to be nothing of the sort (and which is actually quite offensive to people with dysphoria) It’s become a ‘cool’ label to claim. Tied up with this is the surprising increase in regressive stereotypes, which most people are incredulous at. Got short hair, like Maths and don’t like make up? Perhaps you’re actually a boy? People are then reacting against these silly stereotypes and the pathologising puberty. Added to that, the vast amount of genders, promoted by Tumblr and the like, have made the whole thing ridiculous.

I do agree that this could result in real transphobia, and also in a backlash against the lesbian, gay and bisexual communities too. This is very worrying. Fortunately, the number of people claiming to be ‘trans’ because it’s ‘cool’ seems to have decreased a lot in the last couple of years. Once we’re back to the very small numbers of people with dysphoria, then they can be properly supported; people will have confidence in the social contract we had previously (treating them as if they were the opposite sex in most circumstances while everyone, including the trans person, knows they’re not); and the situation will calm down and be a lot better for us all.

How else do we protect women? We don't say 'changing room for women plus men who are nice and mean no harm', do we? We exclude all men, not because all men are a danger, but because you can't tell by looking which is.

But they don't seem to be able to explain it better. I keep asking, and I keep waiting, for a coherent explanation.

Public opinion has not changed at all, what has changed is some of the media starting to report the truth of what trans means or does not mean. People if they fully understood the question would not agree twaw, so expect that to continue to go down as the wider public see what has been happening.

I can't do the applause emoji but I want to for this. Well said.

The answer to this is very simple.

Not all men are dangerous. We don't know which ones are, so we keep all men out of women's single sex spaces. We discriminate against them all, every day, on the basis of their sex, because this is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim (allowing women to safely exist in society).

There are toilets and prisons and even rape crisis groups for male and female people, and everyone is either male or female so everyone has access to these things.

So we can (and should) discriminate against all trans women in exactly the same way and for the same reason that we discriminate against all men by telling them that they can't come into women's toilets and changing rooms or join our rape crisis groups: on the grounds of their (male) biological sex.

If a subset of that group (biological males) believes that they are unable to use facilities for biological males and that requiring them to do so would have the effect of excluding them from participating in society, they need to campaign for their own spaces. Not demand access to women's spaces which makes some women unable to use them.

Yep. I believe that sums it up.

Exactly @MargotBamborough

my DH is absolutely lovely, the least dangerous kind man I’ve ever known

he’s still not allowed in women’s spaces because he’s male, that’s not discrimination that’s just being sensible.

The only thing all trans women have in common is that they are men.

Can’t help thinking that they had to call in reinforcements after the complete chucklefest that was the revived James Esses thread.

You either view this from a position of privilege that you have never needed female single sex spaces or from the need to be kind and compassionate to male people while disregarding the needs of women who disagree that some male people should access female spaces.

Either way, you don’t have permission to ignore the needs of the women and girls who have spoken out and told the world they need spaces that do not allow access to male people.

Ignoring those women and girls in your pursuit of utopia is cruel.

I think it's kind of racist to use race as an analogy. Not least because of the common and blatantly racist trans activist trope "transwomen are women, just like black women are women". I see single sex spaces referred to by trans activists as "apartheid"! This gross appropriation conveniently ignoring that transwomen, being male in a patriarchal world, are the "white people" in any race analogy anyway. Apartheid was for the benefit of the powerful class whereas single sex spaces protect the vulnerable class.

Support for trans people needs to be fought for without appropriating other rights movements and using them as a shield. Crucially support for trans people needs to be fought for trans people as trans people. No more pretending we don't know what sex people are and that safeguarding isn't important. Remove the speech control, the coercion, the deception, the leveraging male privilege to privately influence police, government and corporations (powers that campaigners for racial equality don't have quite so much of).

Trans rights activism would have found so many more allies with an honest approach. But less power I guess.

I expect those figures in the OP were lifted from that survey which TRAs always chop to remove the question about whether intact males are also women.

Either way, this has nothing to do with some dastardly genocidal media plot.

No Debate was ALWAYS intended to fog out discussion and thought. We always knew sex is immutable, and matters, but No Debate meant we couldn't think it out loud. Media coverage of what has been happening to children in the name this ideology has flattened No Debate, and any debate at all, any critical thought, exposes twaw as a disingenuous and often sinister lie. It's so ridiculous, it's surprising those figures are not much lower, even.