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.

With respect, one AMA (which I haven’t yet read) is a drop in the ocean, and in no way negates the persecution for gender heresy experienced by the likes of Kathleen Stott, Jo Phoenix, JK Rowling and Maya Forstater.

@AlphaTransWoman The AMA thread is now full, but could you possibly explain why you feel the need to use the word "woman" for your identity?

Yep

The big issue is urinals. Unlike in a women's toilet, you've got people standing there with their genitalia exposed. I think it's not appropriate for me to be in that situation while presenting as female. Cubicles aren't ideal but are a lot more private.

Don't mens toilets have these cubicles in them anyway?

They are the perfect 'unisex/gender neutral' toilets, just add a sanitary disposal box in the cubicles and change the sign on the door and the issue is sorted.

The big issue is urinals. Unlike in a women's toilet, you've got people standing there with their genitalia exposed. I think it's not appropriate for me to be in that situation while presenting as female.

Why not? You said on the AMA thread that you look like a bloke. So why do you think it's not appropriate for someone who looks like a bloke in a dress to use the men's toilets?

It's not a problem for women because women don't have penises
Stay out of women's toilets
Honestly, why are we expected to negotiate with men committing sexual crimes such as flashing and voyeurism?
Fuck off

oh come on now. You said yourself in that thread that you hadn't answered questions.
So i challenge you to go back and start Part 2 and answer the questions this time instead of blithering on about your womanly feelings and silky dresses.
And try, this time, not to keep harping on about the harmful gender stereotypes because we have told you several times that women are oppressed because of our biology. No amount of feels puts you remotely close to that.

https://twitter.com/BridgetPhetasy/status/1715064482760667273

Helen Joyce explains in this clip why there is no middle ground:

We have created a social movement out of an obvious crazy delusion. And the consequence is that the craziness is everywhere, because we've embedded it everywhere. Like, HR departments are saying crazy things, governments are saying crazy things, doctors are saying crazy things, charities, NGOs, sporting bodies.

And the funny thing about this one - well, it's not funny at all, it's horrific - is it breaks things in exactly the place where they're supposed to work. So, if you are a women's right organisation, and you decide that men can be women, it doesn't just break you as in you go and do some random other stuff, or you become useless - you actually become a men's rights organisation. You turn through 180 degrees and you work back against your actual founding principles.

And this works for all of them, like anti-censorship organisations become censorship organisations, gay rights organisations become horrific, rapey, disgusting organisations trying to push heterosexual man on lesbians and try to sterilise gay kids.

I don't see how a compromise can be possible if we begin with the mantra that trans women are women, trans men are men, and nonbinary are nonbinary.

It erases the existence of the material sex categories 'women' and 'men', it invalidates the embodied identities of most people, and it makes feminist work against sex-based oppression extremely cumbersome to carry out (as we will have no words to describe the victims of sexism and misogyny, can't gather data on how these relate to sex etc.)

It also seems to have an in-built sexist tendency, given its desire to define 'women' and 'men' on the basis of sexist gender stereotypes, and given the observable differences in the speed and level of linguistic erasure of the two sexes (it's the female sex which has been erased from language for many years, while the erasure of the male sex is barely beginning).

The picture below is a recent example of that differential erasure as it erases 'woman' as a biological category but not 'man'.

There is no middle ground, you are a TERF according to TRAs, I've never seen any GC wish harm to a Trans person but plenty of hate directed in the other direction 🤷‍♀️

I don't hate GC feminists and I don't think you wish us any harm. I'm worried about some of the implications of GC ideas for trans people which is why I think it's important to engage constructively even though we might disagree on some fundamental issues.

Ultimately we do have to live together in society.

TRA are expecting us to find a compromise for a situation that we gain nothing from.

Woman and female is redefined, single sex spaces lost and compelled speech is demanded. What do women get from this?

You already have all the spaces you can ever need.

We don't have to sit back and let you take ours as well.

Gender critical just means acknowledging that sex is real and gender is a load of made up nonsense which harms everyone, but particularly women and children. If fighting against gender and acknowledging that sex is real is harmful to some people, can you explain why it is harmful?

If it's because they want to reinforce gender stereotyping and pretend that people can change sex, then we're never going to find a solution.

There are many ways of thinking that humans will tend to fall into. Some are innocuous. Some are not. Those that are not, we try to watch out for and educate and self-discipline ourselves to stop doing. Or at least, we do if we think it's an improvement to our society to change that way of thinking.

Humans may indeed have a tendency to culturally mark male and female. That doesn't mean we can't stop, or at least, minimise it.

Sorry it has taken me ages to get to this one.

I know I'm not a man.

I don't fit that template. I really like women and I feel comfortable dressing as a woman and being treated as one. So it seemed like the right thing to be. Something closer to my inner self and how I like to act and be seen.

I appreciate some women here don't want to accept me as one. But I hope that some sort of compromise can be reached.

This just means you're a man trying to mimic what you think of women as being.

Humans may indeed have a tendency to culturally mark male and female. That doesn't mean we can't stop, or at least, minimise it.

I do think it means we can't stop it. We are sexed animals, it has a profound impact on our experience of life.

Think of every cultural association of, say, motherhood. That is a fundamentally female experience, it is deep in the psyche of all mothers, and all children of mothers. There is no way that there will not be language, art, and other cultural artifacts that reflect that.

Sex differences are pretty similar, the vast, vast majority of people are very invested in noticing the sex of other people, there is huge investment in sexual relationships. There is a reason 90% of stories and the majority of pop music is about romance or sex. There have been cultures that don't express this much with clothing, but that is usually because of environmental and technological constraints. Even in places like Maoist China, which tried to erase these differences and had a huge propaganda machine and cultural pressure too, young men and women went out of their way to try and bring them out through clothes and grooming, often on the sly.

Yes this. And let's be clear. Alpha is ignoring any questions with depth behind them. It's nor a conversation. It's a sermon from a self appointed all knowing male. When Alpha properly engages, so will I.

What on earth is 'being treated like a woman'?

What compromises do you want?

TW to be on all women's short lists? Fuck off, you have male advantage so aren't eligible.

TW being in women's spaces? No, because you're as likely to assault us as any other male.

Third spaces? thing is most TRAs don't want that

Being seen as a woman? No because to do that means most women are no longer women

To invest in therapy services which help you detach from the harmful stereotypes you've grown attached to? Yes. This I can support. I'd like you and other trans people to be free from the restrictive messages you feel unable to unhear and therefore to live a happy life.

If you were born male, you're a man. That's just a biological fact.

But I can't get over how offensive this post is.

You seem to see being a woman as some sort of role play. As though we all dress and act in the same way, and if you mimic what you see as typical womanly traits, you should be accepted as a real woman. Real women don't act like women because we don't have to. Being ourselves is acting like women, because any way a woman behaves is acting like a woman. A man trying to act like a woman comes across as either ridiculous or offensive.

And what do you mean when you say you want to be treated as a woman? This is something that men who want to be women often say, but I've never understood what they mean by this. What is it about the way women are treated that you find so appealing?

So when they insist it is womanhood, no matter how much they genuinely believe it, when they take our name and history for themselves, what they actually do is overwrite the knowledge, history and experiences of female people with the knowledge, history and experiences of male people.

Very well put.

I know I'm not a man.

Could you take a step back, Alpha, and consider that the worst thing you’re doing to yourself, the deepest source of your pain, might be the lie that’s twisting you up? Anything based purely on a lie is going to be fragile and need endless effort to sustain. It must be exhausting and demoralising.

And it breeds endless dishonesty. You say you like women, but you’re entrenched in a movement that harms women.

How can you live an authentic life when you’re endlessly trying to be done thing you can’t become?