"TERF Island" - Pondering why we're so "TERFy"

[WitchyWitcherson]

I was pondering this morning, what do you think it is about the UK that makes us so critical of gender ideology in comparison to other English-speaking western cultures?

Is it that Scottish Gov have gone full gender-woo and we're able to see it happening on a smaller scale?
Is it the setup of our medical system that has put hurdles in the way of pharmaceutical orgs pushing medical transition?
Is it a culture of critical thinking, a history of good educational outcomes for girls?
A high number of people who don't follow mainstream religion, or at least aren't really radically religious?
The attrition of traditional gender roles over the last 50 years (although gender woo is reversing this trend)?

I think it's an interesting discussion anyway? Obviously it's incredibly complex!

Agree

For me the difference is in who the resistance is coming from.

In most of the West it's the religious or conservative groups who are interested in maintaining gender roles based on the underlying sex.

However in the UK it's mostly coming from feminists who acknowledge sex but reject the regressive gender stereotypes.

It's a fundamentally different objection, and those from abroad, or who only consume media from the US, wouldn't appreciate this.

Helen Joyce talks about this in her book. She certainly cites the existence of Mumsnet as one of the reasons why the UK is so Terfy. I think she's right - so many other platforms (Twitter, Reddit etc) have censored any criticism of gender ideology, making it difficult to find like-minded people. Mumsnet is a huge forum where women gather to discuss matters that are important to them. It also has the advantage of being pseudonymous, allowing people to express their thoughts freely.

Another reason she gives is that the UK is quite small, so it's been easy to organise across the country - look, for example, at FiLiA, which every year draws people from around the UK, or the number of public meetings WPUK has held attended by hundreds of people.

It's also true that our political system is less polarised than the US, though I'm not sure about other English-speaking countries.

Our press is also less craven than in other countries - for all the faults we have with our media, we still have a spirited, defiant, anti-authority attitude that has allowed certain journalists, such as Janice Turner and Julie Bindel, to investigate what's going on and write about it.

I think the one other factor is the accident of timing. Countries such as Canada and Ireland followed the Denton's playbook, bringing in self-ID legislation under the radar by tying it to other legislation such as same-sex marriage. By the time the UK government put forward its self-ID proposals in 2017, people were starting to wise up to what was going on and were able to organise.

I wonder whether it's also partly down to relative stability.
Continental Europe has suffered terrible wars and huge population migrations; the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have a lot of recent immigrants and/or geographical mobility.
In the UK it's not unusual to know about the lives of family members going back three or four generations - what they did, where they lived, where they went to school etc.

Therefore narratives about socio-sexual matters that go "it's always been this way" can be evaluated against what you know. Sometimes you look back and oh, yes Uncle Frank who never married and, er, ah, ohhhhh.

Other times you look back and go, no, this seems to be a new thing, what is going on?

Add MN on top of that as a forum where "old enough to remember" women can swap stories, and...

Ah her book is on my reading list! I'm on the last couple of chapters of Laura Dodsworth's "Free Your Mind" at the moment (very much recommend it if you haven't read it already!), but will bump Helen Joyce up the list ❤

Very interesting points!

Really interesting points, especially on the multi-generational "remembering". One of the first books on my TERF reading list was Victoria Smith's Hags and it gave me such a new perspective on the importance of listening to your elders, and in particular taking on board the advice and experiences of the women who came before us. I wish I'd read it when I was 18 rather than in my 30's!

I very much doubt gender ideaology would be on the list of top 10 concerns for 90% of the population.

Well that depends on who you ask, what you ask them about and how you frame the questions, and how big your sample size is, Aaron.

Do I recall that in a poll, newspaper-lead, I believe, 30% of people didn't know that a trans woman is actually a man? And the MSM get tied up in knots, misusing TiM and trans man interchangeably, for example.

How long did it take for it to be ascertained that Audrey Hale (Nashville school shooter) was a TiF- is that right??

I think many more people would go 'hang on' if they realised the #BeKind of allowing men in dresses to use female WCs also allows them to access female changing rooms and prisons.

Sturgeon found out the hard way.

Personally, I don't miss an opportunity to 'educate' via the medium of making the assumption that any sane person would call out this gender bollocks.

I've had to 'spell it out'a time or two, but I've almost never encountered anyone who thinks humans can change sex, or who think it's okay for men to appropriate womanhood. Interestingly, it's often the wealthier who are more equivocal. I guess they can't imagine a situation where their sex-based rights might be challenged.

So keep up the good work, denizens of TERF Island!

@WitchyWitcherson "BTW my use of TERF throughout my post is used tongue-in-cheek, it's my experience that many women, myself included, do not wish to "exclude" trans people in any way, only to use sex as a determining factor when there is a need to define humans e.g. for medical/sport/undressing reasons.)"

I would agree. I think most of us wouldn't have wanted the 'exclusion' of the transvestites, or transsexuals of the past because the vast, vast majority of them understood that it was physically impossible to change sex. They 'stayed in their lane'.

Unfortunately, the TRA have made these people's position untenable, so their acceptance (as well as gay-acceptance, alarmingly) is being pushed back in the face of this loud, violent, aggressive movement forcing women to cede their hard won sex-privileged spaces to fetishistic men.

Mumsnet is just one place where this is being discussed. However, I think you are not correct about the lack of concern about these issues. Everyone I speak to has concerns about it when you ask questions. Maybe because currently most of my friends are either parents or are women needing intensive health care or are people working in large organisations impacted by issues around single sex provisions or have trans people working with them or for them. The impact is wide and awareness and concerns are growing.

So yes, many people feel they have greater concerns. But that doesn’t mean that this is not also a concern for them.

Isla Bryson and her delightful pink leggings woke a lot of the general public up.

I wonder how different we are from the rest of Europe? There's been legislative pushback in the Scandinavian countries, I don't know about elsewhere. I think most European countries have a history of revolution and pushing against authority and we have more democracies than any other continent so things we think of as being peculiarly British actually exist across Europe to a greater or lesser extent than here but much more than in other continents.

We might be thinking about it the wrong way round, and that actually the other English speaking Western countries are the outliers because they are countries of immigrants with the various kinds of baggage that can bring. The US most of all which is culturally very different from the UK and Europe.

Having said that I'd say 1) Mumsnet 2) The same thing that makes us resist ID cards - British exceptionism (we like to think of ourselves as different).

One interesting thing is that there is substantial opposition to gender ideology in the US, but the debate is framed very differently there. There was an international survey recently on the issue (I can't recall where now) and the US had a larger proportion of people opposed to gender ideology than the UK.

But of course in the US, it's become one of those issues like abortion, where if you're for it, you're progressive, and if you're against it, you're an evil right-winger. For that reason, a lot of progressive people in the US are simply too frightened to speak out on gender ideology for fear of aligning themselves with the far right and its package of anti-abortion, anti-gay and lesbian, anti-immigrant attitudes.

@WitchyWitcherson - yes I did mean the U.K. and I think the law has got us into this mess. Look at the FWS appeal - in the U.K. as I understand it - anyone with a GRC has legally changed their sex forevermore! The U.K. remains a complete mess - the Forstater case is a court of appeal case only and while it has set some precedent, is the U.K. that far ahead? I hope we might be but am not holding my breath! Forstater was one small victory in an ongoing war against women’s rights.

Hasn't being gender non-conforming been fairly mainstream here for a really long time though? As an 80s kid, it's really hard to understand how clothes inform your gender when we were brought up with Annie Lennox, Boy George etc as examples of living comfortably within your sex but pushing the external representation of gender.

Things just weren't quite so obviously codified pink for girls and blue for boys for earlier generations.

FreddysSquishyBollock · Today 09:15

A cultural tendency towards old fashioned fair play (emphasis on being a good sport rather than being a winner)

That was my first thought, but it occurred to me that it can't be just that, or all the women missing podium places would be smiling and saying, "Jolly good show, Harold! Erm, Helen!"

I think many British people do have good bullshit detectors, even if it can manifest as truculent grumbling. On the whole, we don't like bullies and extremists, which is why Communist / Fascist revolutionaries have never had real popular support.

As a nation, we tried burning Catholics, then burning Protestants, then we cut the king's head off and got something worse and breathed a sigh of relief, when things went back to normal, if still a bit crap.

JKR?

I love this question.
I often wonder, am I so terfy because I live on Terf Island? Is it in the blood?

The Mumsnet thing, well when I discovered gender bollox I found my way to these boards. My feelings were already there and luckily this forum is full of people who agree.

I also often think, we're a nation with many old punks, despite what the youngsters think, so many terfs seem to be of this non conforming era.

We're also a liberal country with a liberal conservative government. Want to be a butch lesbian? Go right ahead. Want to be an effeminate gay male? Yes, of course, be yourself. And we also love eccentrics. I don't think we require people to 'change sex' to become more palatable to us or to make sense to us.

We also have pretty decent women's rights compared to other countries and I agree a strong sense of fair play.

I think it first started being used derisively to refer to women on MN, e.g. this tweet from 2017: https://twitter.com/JulieRei/status/834433962789384192

We are not especially patriotic; largely secular and our religious people are less fundamentalist: culture of piss taking; culture of challenging authority and not revering academics (genderism has been a top down "astro turf" operation as opposed to grass roots); largely politically moderate / centrist, but all to the left of eg USA; a left wing with genuine socialist roots despite some misguided thinking currently; yes to national awkwardness! And, controversially, culture of a tabloid press which dares print what more worthy publications won't.

We are FAR from perfect but, compared to other places I have visited or know people from, most people here are tolerant of difference. Long history of immigration into old, high density cities means many of us live happily in very mixed communities. Wealth disparity is still unacceptable but we're nowhere near as ghettoised as many other countries. Classism is still rife but there is also a lingering respect for plain speaking.

Mind you, I think gender activists and lobbyists have exploited our national love of institutions such as the BBC and NHS to get as far as they have.

That our publicly funded BBC and NHS have been complicit in all this during a time of financial hardship no less, is heartbreaking.

Hear hear @Hopelesslydevotedtoshrews. Perhaps the ‘gender bending’ of the 70s and 80s was happening more in the UK than in other places, so that when we reached the point where men in dresses were claiming to be women, we all went ‘Eh? But it’s just clothes!’

Leftie GC women (which I would say describes most UK TERFs) tend to be the most relaxed about gender non-conformity. Most of us don’t bat an eyelid when our 4 year-old son wants to wear a Disney Princess dress and we offer our kids a range of toys to play with from both the ‘pink’ and the ‘blue’ section. Because we can be a bit rebellious and stubborn too. If someone tells us that Lego and trucks aren’t really toys for girls, we get annoyed and buy them anyway for our daughters.

This will be a huge contrast to some of those in the US who, on the surface appear to be GC but who on closer inspection are actually just conservative and often religious, and don’t like anything different from the ‘norm’. They know that men can’t be women but they might also think that a man can’t like make up or ballet etc because they think it ‘goes against nature’ or whatever.

That’s why arguing with American TRAs can be especially frustrating because they assume, based on some of the US TERFs they encounter, that our TERFery comes from the same place and that we want our sons and daughters to conform to gender stereotypes when nothing could be further from the truth.

It was Tara Hudson that really triggered me, along with the realisation that the Women’s Equality Party were campaigning for violent males without GRCs to be allowed into women’s prisons.

That was in 2015. In 2017 Venice Allen set up the first event, We Need to Talk. She invited Stonewall to debate but instead, TRAs bullied the initial venue into cancelling and beat up 60-year-old Maria MacLachlan at Speakers Corner, where we were all waiting to find out where the new venue was. They then followed us there & protested outside with chants of BURN IT DOWN.

Shortly after that Fair Play for Women started, & we were all out in red T-shirts handing out leaflets about self-ID.

Mumsnet is a massive bubble for this issue. I very much doubt gender ideaology would be on the list of top 10 concerns for 90% of the population

In line with previous posters, when you discuss this in real life most people grasp the consequences quickly once you cut through the obfuscating language and explain what’s happening @Aaron95 . It’s not something that’s necessarily on their day to day priorities and concerns, but that’s a different claim from whether they think it is important to get it right.

Apologies - I put ‘U.K.’ regarding the FWS appeal case - but of course this appeal was in Scotland - although doesn’t this make it even messier?

if a FTM person with a GRC has to remain legally a man this case does appear to fit with the mess Britain is in?