What's going on with Genspect?

[MalagaNights]

I've seen Stella O'Malley tweet about being unfairly attacked.
I've seen a weird exchange from James Lindsay about feminists trying to take down Genspect.

But I can't work out what's happened or who is fighting with who.

Any ideas?

It shows ignorance of safeguarding protocols in both situations and, because of this, now Disney will attract job applications from men who want access to both women’s clothing and young girls - not something that is considered a safe idea (borne out by decades of offending patterns in both USA and Europe).

Irrespective of whether a man in a dress in a children's dress shop is within the social contract of "acceptable" or not, I completely agree with you on this point. If they are going to encourage freedom of expression through choice of clothing, they need to be aware of the risks that this brings in and decide how to manage these. They could derisk completely by banning any male staff in dresses or they could put in protocols that accommodate this as an option. The easiest from a risk management perspective is obviously the first one.

@UtopiaPlanitia your point about boys in dresses has given me lots of food for thought. It's a double-edged sword: at the moment, a boy in a dress is likely to end up on the Jackie Green pathway to being transed. However, ideally any boy that wants to wear a dress can do so without anyone believing that this means that they are actually a girl.

We're in such a mess with this in the public discourse. I'm really starting to think Stella called it right: that raising awareness of the paraphilia will help with so many aspects of the problem. This is a worthy shared goal of so many "GC leaning" stakeholders in this. The key is to raise it in a way that breaks out of the echo chamber, as she said. Otherwise it's just a bun fight and giant game of whack-a-mole between those that try to do so and those that shoot them down as bigots.

Yes, I find the discussions really helpful. Mostly enjoyable, sometimes difficult, but always worth it. Sharing and listening to thoughts with people on this board really helps to demystify the often baffling topic of gender identity. Which in turn helps me to help my daughter.

Actually I think you're wrong on 'autoandrophilia', although I imagine there is not much mainstream concept of it.

There is plenty of lesbian erotic literature over many decades that refers to some 'butch' lesbians deriving sexual satisfaction from wearing typically male underwear and packing with soft dildos. There are detailed accounts of this, and the effort and detail that was taken over these processes, and yes, description of sexual arousal experienced during these processes. Eg can be found in 'Awakening the Virgin' and 'The Good Parts' ...short story lesbian erotica edited by Nicole Foster.

And if it's about comfort, and it being rational to want to be comfortable, well there are plenty of women who rationally find it more comfortable to be in skirts or dresses, why can't men say the same thing? I would have thought it probably would be more comfortable for them to be fair 😆

We certainly know that men who wear kilts have better sperm counts as their testicles are at a slightly lower temperature compared to men who wear trousers.

Is that a rational enough reason for it?

If it was about that they'd be choosing to wear kilts, or skirts designed for men to differentiate from women's clothes in some way, they'd be trying to make it socially acceptable by degrees.

They wouldn't be swanning about in ballgowns, or fairy godother costumes, with lipstick on.

It's such a load of bollocks.

I imagine there is some truth to this, and if lesbains ever start to attend conferences packing enormous obvious dildos down their trousers for everyone to notice, we should definitely take them aside and say it's inappropriate.

Meanwhile in the real world...

I think Stella called it right too but I have noticed over the last decade that society doesn’t want to know about AGP - in fact, society goes out of its way to avoid hearing about it. It was always that way with transvestism too - it was okay to joke about it but not to take it seriously as something that happened and needed to be addressed because it negatively affected women and children.

KJK, Meghan Murphy, Glinner, Reduxx, KPSS etc are all shouting about it and society shuts them down. I think because it makes people feel uncomfortable acknowledging the truth about there being men like this and so it’s a case of covering the ears and loudly shouting "Can’t hear you!"

WPUK and organisations that don’t mention it in their campaigns seem to be seen as more acceptable somehow. It’s almost like society is angry at the people telling them about a serious problem that needs to be addressed, angry that they can no longer claim ignorance of the issue and are now expected to do something about it.

Women started sorting this out for ourselves 140 years ago, way before we even had the vote. Men have never shown an interest in a rational skirts campaign so I remain sceptical.

If that's what you want to go for though, good luck to you.

Beware of men's sex rights advocates infiltrating your rational skirt movement. It's a common problem.

Exactly this. If there are some women for whom 'autoandrophilia' really is a thing, it's still not the equivalent of AGP. There's not the same level of compulsion, escalation and boundary violation that you get with male paraphilias.

CERTAINLY I TAKE IT YOUN REFER TAE RESEARCH ON KILTED SPERMS FAE THE UNIVERITY OF BAMS AND THE COLLEGE O FANNYBAWS RIGORIUSLY REVEWED AND TESTE D

So why can I buy boyfriend jeans and boyfriend sweaters targeted at women but DH cannot buy girlfriend jeans and girlfriend sweaters targeted at men?

Journalist Wesley Yang, quoting Ritchie Herron, posted an interesting tweet regarding this discussion that’s arisen following Genspect:

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1728035019061358632

@ wesyang
"The campaigns have activated many paraphilics"

This is such a key point. The paraphilics of the past were seen as largely incorrigible because attempts to treat them mostly failed, causing sexologists and clinicians to contemplate societal accommodations for this suffering remnant.

But that's of course because they were the paraphilics who persisted in their compulsions even in the face of powerful stigmas and taboos -- those were the untreatable.

We are in the midst of an ongoing social contagion that has activated many who would not otherwise have been reached by these compulsions. Societal accommodation normalization of the condition under these conditions would simply multiply the numbers of those drawn into it while preventing many who could be cured of these compulsions from even attempting it.

Maintaining boundaries premised upon the clear establishment of healthy norms (it is better to not be in the grip of powerful sexual compulsion than to be in it) is a key part of minimizing the scope of these obsessions.

Quote:
Replying to @ TulipR
However, the rate of escalation has been magnified. Consider the last ten years of trans news, inclusion, awareness, etc

The campaigns have activated many paraphilics, both ego dystonic and synotic to escalate where they may not otherwise.

It really is pretty infantile to speculate that these things can be moved by degrees...

What are the degrees...do they involve non- Scottish men wearing kilts...mmm ...I can just see the cultural appropriation backlash on that. ..😆

Perhaps there is a kind of ...1991 culottes movement for men.. as they gradually transition from 'mens' trousers to 'womens' skirts 😁😆😄... increasingly thinner fabric and baggier legs...? Would that work for you perhaps..?

Get real.

These transitional societal movements do not occur by increment.

They did not occur by increment for women.

Look at the figures for women ... look at characters like Anne Lister - she did not start wearing incrementally male attire...trousers by degree 😆, she boldly wore whatever the hell she wanted..and to hell with the conservative society around her that tried to censure who she chose to be.

This.

Thank you, I've wondered about this before.

What effect does 'trans awareness' and 'trans acceptance' have on, say,Andrew Miller? Who'd been stealing underwear all his adult life? He then 'comes out' as trans in middle age and his paraphilias apparently escalate sharply, with horrific consequences.

I've said before that if someone is seeking a boundary to push against and instead meets encouragement, what happens?

These transitional societal movements do not occur by increment.

They did not occur by increment for women.

Didn't they? What was the exact date on which the switch occured from women wearing trousers being seen as totally unacceptable to trousers being a perfectly normal piece of clothing for women and most women owning at least one pair?

If the change didn't occur by increment there must have been a sudden overnight change which can be pinned down to an exact date.

We know with children & young people that if they are able to continually breach boundaries, their behaviour escalates and subsequently frequently involves criminality. Presumably this also applies to a number of men.
Crimes like indecent exposure are a gateway offence to more serious crimes as the Couzens case demonstrates and there's a range of similar evidence in relation to a range of crimes (see current debates about shoplifting etc).

Does the current insistence that men must be welcome in places where women undress etc rather than it's a boundary to breach contribute to escalating crimes against women? There's a lot of evidence that a significant % of men insistent that women must make themselves available when naked / vulnerable openly display their own fetishes while barreling through all our institutions, especially in relation to children. They also appear to be very successfully removing once firm safeguarding measures (see adults in Mermaids, Stonewall, Girl Guides, the rubber man in the NSPCC, the penis player pianist, the male prostitute footballer etc). None of who would have been socially acceptable 20 years ago and their behaviour would in many cases have been sanctioned & criminalised.

Now they're celebrated😡

Quite obviously this did happen incrementally. I remember my parents commenting about first seeing women wearing trousers with a front zip, back in the 50s or 60s and commenting on it as it was so unusual.

In the 80s my school uniform was only skirt or dress, 6th formers wore their own clothes, but not trousers.

Even now some women think a skirt is smarter for interviews and some situations,

The incremental changes are still going on.

If men want to normalise skirt wearing for men then it too needs to happen incrementally.

In the part of Ireland where I grew up, the parish priests preached against women wearing trousers in the late 1960s and, like you, my school uniform in the 80s for girls (including PE kit 😡) was skirts and knee length socks (not even in winter were tights allowed).

I didn’t wear my first pair of trousers until, at age 16, I convinced my mother to buy me shorts for playing tennis. And there was a fight for me to buy jeans in 1989. Once I got to Uni, and bought my own clothes, it was trousers/jeans all the way but I still received criticism ‘Couldn’t you wear a nice dress/skirt?' was a frequent complaint from family. I was made wear a skirt to my graduation, because I wasn’t paying for my own outfit (can you tell I’m still bitter about it? 😂). And I remember that women wearing power suits to work in cities in the 80s still largely wore skirts with their big shoulder-padded suit jackets.

In my experience, wearing trousers was broadly seen as unfeminine until the 90s when jeans (and then trousers) became accepted for teenagers and older.

I'm not convinced that it's possible to put the genie back in the bottle to suggest that men work incrementally towards normalising skirts or dresses. It's already been put on fast forward because of the way in which the trans umbrella expanded beyond the original and rare dysphoria. I'm not saying people shouldn't call it out but it may end up feeling more like shouting in to the wind.

Instead, raising awareness of the acronym, and the fact that it escalates because it's about boundary crossing for a thrill (not dysphoria) is what may make the biggest difference. Hopefully, moments like this Genspect episode will bring different voices in to the mix to help with this, to add to those that are already doing it. Eventually a critical mass will break through. I'm imagining at the beginning of paedophilia being "outed" that there may have been the equivalent of Benjamin Boyce's mockery, with those asking if people were suggesting that all men should be excluded from working with children just to address the risk that you can't see inside people's heads to understand if they do or don't have a fetish. And others pointing out that not all those who are a danger to children are men. Voices like Mary Whitehouse, who stood firm (and also had very conservative and religious values and judgement) were sadly easy to mock and dismiss.
As painful as it's been to see infighting on the significance of the man in the dress, it does seem to have shifted the dial a little in how people are discussing the acronym online. Whether that's enough to break through the bubble that we're all stuck inside regarding this discussion is unlikely but we've already had Isla Bryson, Andrew/Amy Miller and the rules around women's sports (and the TRA entitlement/anger) before this. So it's likely to help rather than hinder. The public discourse seems to be heading in the right direction 🤞🤞

In the meantime, the short term focus IMO is to push back on gender identity belief being compelled as a truth separately and in parallel to this. This one is easier by comparison. It's still possible to feel compassion for people who believe that they have a gender identity, and are distressed because they feel that they are trapped in the wrong body, without having to hold a belief in gender identity yourself. This therefore makes it more palatable for the Be Kind parts of the public to take on board.The easiest pushback still remains pointing out that not everyone believes that we all have a gender identity, therefore education, healthcare, laws and sport shouldn't accommodate it as a truth.

Sorry, coming in late & haven't really read this thread for the last few days, but just listened to "The Queens' Speech" podcast, made by the gorgeous Dennis Kavanagh and Clive (not sure of his last name). In the mods recent epi. they speak with Dr Az Hakeem, who's a real expert on the varieties of gender dysphoria - particularly for men.

Very interesting & enlightening.

Yes. If a disorder centres on pushing and/or transgressing boundaries, then removing those boundaries is potentially exhilarating, terrifying and enraging.

Children who don't have clear, firm boundaries and rules keep hitting out until they come up against one. Partly from fear and partly from the desire to find someone to day 'no'.

I guess.the same applies to disordered adults. Only with potentially far more serious consequences and often with sexual motivations entangled, too.

'Queering' boundaries, undermining norms, transgressing boundaries will pretty inevitably lead to more extremely disordered behaviour.

Indeed @ArthurbellaScott . Yet people with disordered behaviour and a lack of boundaries are regularly elevated by the media and institutions - funded and celebrated almost as role models.

Thanks @UtopiaPlanitia going to have a read now. The history of clothing is something I kinda fell into via a book on a wide variety of resistance/change movements that focused on their visual identity, primarily clothing, and what they were trying to communicate