Anyone in the middle?

[piesforever]

All I see on here is GC rants. I am in the middle, I support trans people but do agree they shouldn't take part in gender specific sport, and there needs to be more caution in "changing gender" for sure, especially hormones and surgery for young people. I do agree some are troubled or young people, who are hating puberty or have had some trauma. Let's support them overall though, it must be horrible whatever the outcome. Anyone else feel a bit of sympathy to both "sides"? In fact, why are there sides, we need to find common ground and help each other!! Instead of being furious all the time. It's not healthy.

hey, here's an idea.

How about we women continue to say "no" and MEN are forced to budge up and provide a solution? How about that. As a once in a 60,000 years action.

Women are being told not to debate.

Literally. No debate.

Trans people exist and will not debate their existence.

Women do not exist and are not allowed to debate our existence.

I'm afraid that i have been very kind and patient and lovely to TRAs in the past.
But now? I CBA with it all.
They can keep their penises out of my sex-segregated spaces, and fight the men for space. I am not budging up.

I did read a lot of it. And I did think some of Alpha's ideas about women (and their differences with men) were a bit old school (I'm being kind about it). I also saw some of the inconsistency on the "big" Space question, but I see a lot of unconscious inconsistency in every person I meet. I don't imagine myself to be immune to the same charge. I suppose my point is that if you want to encourage someone like Alpha to see women without the prism of clothes, old culture and stereotypes, that you have to point it out in constructive terms that perhaps there is more to it than that base on lived experience and history. I believe (as a hopeless optimist) that people are capable of profound change (and I'm not talking specifically about Alpha), but unless we engage with civility, we never grow. I think you've probably got a lot to say that would shape thoughts of people and can be passed on. I'm just saying that if you do it with patience and tolerance you can bring people with you. Calling people disingenuous and asserting malicious intent, is always a bad way to encourage a conversation and not always fair.

Nope. I've been civil. I've been accommodating. So many of us have.

And we are screamed at, Punched. Doxxed. Lose jobs etc etc.

I will start being nice and lovely the minute the TRAs stop all their ridiculous shinenegins and bring something to the table that we can start to negotiate on. Until them: nope. They are wrong. And that is it.

@MargotBamborough even if someone with the power to prevent free speech was telling you not to debate, I doubt you would comply 😃. Women's voices are important, dissenting opinion is important, and I suspect you and others like you will keep the flame of that tradition burning. But you won't all agree!

@Brefugee I'm sorry that you've had those experiences. Take care of yourself!

I am not interested in a middle ground, because the only way there could be one is if it was rooted in cruel racist fantasy.

There is no such thing as gender. There are sexes, universal and unchangeable. There are also sexist stereotypes which are very culture-specific, and which have always changed, through time and across space. In any society, at any time in human history, people have always recognized male and female bodies. The ways they expected males and females to present and behave have varied hugely across time, and still do vary from place to place.

There is also sexual attraction. Some individuals are predominantly opposite-sex attracted, some predominantly same-sex, some both, some naturally inclined to celibacy. Societies' tolerance of these variations differs - the most intolerant have sometimes invented a fiction of an 'invert', a 'two-spirit' or 'cross-gender' person to avoid having to exclude an individual (almost always a man) whose family they don't want to offend but who they do want to discriminate against. Some men and women with intense internalised homophobia have gone along with this through choice - others have done what they have to to survive (see present-day Iran).

There are other reasons for playing the gender game - unhappy young women who in previous generations would have starved themselves or turned to religion and older men with sexual fetishes are obvious example. Both groups need psychological support. But neither proves that gender is anything other than a game that is highly profitable to some professions and industries.

It isn't a game I'm interested in supporting - particularly when I see the terrible damage caused to some of those unhappy young women.

Yup. Threatened with rape and violence, called slur words...

I think lots of posters feel like you, but stop posting as it's just not worth it.

People on both sides of the argument with very strong views don't really want to discuss/listen/engage, they just want everyone to agree they are right.

I think that’s a cop out as so many “let’s see both sides” posters end with “I don’t have any answers, so I’m off to stop thinking about it.”

Which I assume is because they don’t like the reality of the consequences.

It seems that the OP has left the room.

What would the middle ground solution be?

Its clear that some men want to be seen or referred to as women in some, sometimes all, situations.

How can we get anywhere near that and not change the definition of women and female, the ability to have women only spaces, and not have compelled speech?

If you think like the OP, what do you believe the middle ground is?

Don't patronise me please.

Are you quite sure that someone like Alpha wouldn’t be all for seeing women without the prism of clothes?

I'm happy with 3rd spaces. I have zero issues with men wearing women's clothes or whatever, going about their merry way. I might even, if they stop all the histrionics (word carefully chosen) about genocide and so on.

I am happy for people to live their best lives, as long as they aren't hurting anyone else. Men expressing their gender euphoria by filming themselves wanking in women's toilets? not so much

All those hideous blokes in bad wigs, awful make-up and ill fitting clothes posting their photos to a stream of compliments about how great they look? it is not healthy and not good for them.

Not even getting into all the secrecy from schools etc about "transitioning" children etc etc.

Why can't women have a conference addressed by survivors of FGM without a bunch of the absolute dregs of humanity screeching at them. I'd really love to ask HIbo Wadere what she thought of that. The deliberate lying about what people say (JKR) the hounding of people like Jo Phoenix and Kathleen Stock among others. The way the TRAs react to a bunch of women in a park with a megaphone etc.

This is, to me, mainly a man issue. Trans men have a whole different way of doing things for the most part. And so I want men to take point on this and accommodate trans women. (Still waiting for Alpha to get back to us with the stats on attacks on trans women in men's toilets, Not holding my breath)

I will not do the work for them or "educate" myself. I'm a 2nd wave feminist. I have been in this too long to let some idiots who have been on the planet 20 years and have just discovered blue hair dye try to shut me down.

Wow! I’m reading that AMA and I think my eyebrows have shot so far up they’ve gone over my head and are half way down my back now!

haha - read OPs last post on page 40 of that. It nearly made me throw my laptop out of the window.

And THAT is why there is very little debate. Because when they're not screeching "no debate" they are indulging in disingenuous piffle.

Compromise?

The GRA was the compromise. A very very small number of people (5000, not all of whom would be males), all of whom were assumed to either be fully transitioned (without male genitals) or in the process of. Women were not consulted, the impact on them was foreseen but thought to be small enough to not be a serious issue. It was mostly men talking among themselves about the best interests of other men.

Men have taken that compromise and turned it into women raped in prisons and hospitals, vulnerable and marginalised women excluded from any space or resource so that men can have their best choice of all the spaces, several little girls now assaulted by men who identified as women and used that as a means to help their offending, and one of those little girls narrowly escaped being murdered. Multiple issues with women dealing with men ramming used tampons up their bums, wanking in cubicles with the doors open and filming to share on social media, filming themselves waving swords shouting about how they'll murder any woman who - inexplicably - fails to see them as a woman in the toilets, and- I can't go on. We all know. Its revolting and it's become such an avalache I can't go through it all again.

Men broke the compromise. Not women. Men demonstrated that they are fundamentally incapable of respecting women or reciprocation in this, that they take and do not give, that they do not see women's voices or experiences or even their lives and womanhood as anything relevant save for what the male person wants to appropriate and use to meet their own needs.

If you're still wondering, look at the pleas for just think of the 'humanity'.

You will notice that those people are only ever talking about males. They are basically saying how sad it is for those males not to get what they feel they aspire to.

Those people never mention the humanity of the women excluded, without resources, harmed, threatened, dragged through court and raped. They never consider how sad it is for them.

And that tells you everything you need to know about this. Those pushing for these male rights talk all sorts but their actions and their thinking show a fixed belief that sex is binary, and it's all about a hierarchy. Men are the real humans, the ones of value. Women are the walking resources. And they don't have needs or feelings, and they absolutely have no business gatekeeping their bodies from use by men.

I care about the women I'm afraid. They've got slightly bigger issues than people not letting them live their best lives and actualise their authentic selves.

Almost as though @piesforever wasn’t really interested in hearing others’ views?

And the ‘angry women’ trope was a nice gender stereotype on which to end their post. Essentially telling women to ‘behave’. It’s not healthy being angry!
Women must stop being concerned about protecting their sex based rights and safeguarding children. God forbid that any woman does something as upsetting as breaking the gendered stereotype social expectations of portraying a constantly deferential, non-threatening, be kind femininity.

Women have been told “no debate”.

What’s your proposed solution that does not impact on women’s safety and dignity?

What patronising bollocks. It’s the TRAs who are refusing to debate, not women.

To be fair I've had a go. But there's a lot to cover.

Maybe read up on some old school feminist theory Alpha because that might answer why some of your ideas about women are coming across as so offensive even though you seem to prize these qualities.