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?

The difficulty is you don't know if it's fetish unless they've written a book on it. or decalre it as such.

I suspect most grown men who start wearing dresses to work are indulging some sort of fetish, but declare it just 'being their true selves.'
So we just accept this while being suspicious and uncomfortable?

The 'wear what you want' mantra doesn't work even if you add 'but not if it's a fetish' as most men aren't going to declare it, and so we still have to go along with it anyway. Not trusting our feelings.

It might work with this one bloke, but all the others who dress it up as Trans and being 'true women spirirts' bollocks we have to accept?

I think Genspect have to have allowed men in dresses to attend (even though I'd rather they didn't), as the social norms have now been so eroded and the belief in 'wear whatever you want' to be your true self, is now so established by TRAs and many feminists.

But they shouldn't have advertised him and his fetish on social media.

The difficulty is you don't know if it's fetish unless they've written a book on it. or declare it as such.

It starts by telling people that Genspect sees it as an unacceptable thing to do, that this is not Pride. Don't wear your fetish to conference, and don't expect acceptance if you do.

It's moving the boundary back towards where it belongs.

I have tried to read all the posts but I might have missed some, so I'm not sure whether this has been already raised. One of the angles Genspect is exploring is ROGD in boys. I think in their clinical/support experience they are starting to hypothesize that some ROGD boys have a sort of early onset AGP triggered by excessive and/or early porn exposure. I think their interest in AGP, which is typically later age onset, stems also from their will to help parents of boys, and the boys themselves.

I'd be all in favour of this, just trying to think through how that would work.

If your fetish is something normal and every day, such as dresses, and you never wear 'mens clothes' can you state someone cannot wear items others are wearing and insist they wear male style clothing?
Even if Phil wore a plain skirt and bloyse it would still be part of his fetish.

I guess they can't 'ban' it, they just make that request and then don't give positive publicity to those who don't abide by the request?

Men in womens clothes was never 'banned' at work, it was just socially unacceptable as others would express their discomfort.

Maybe what we need is more people prepared to express their discomfort (whihc is what is happening in this case) rather then expect Genspect to enforce any rules.

My point is more: feminists are only prepared to express discomfort when there is a declared fetish, I'm uncomfortable in most cases because I suspect it's a fetish even if they're not admitting it.
We seem stuck with that. because os the wear what you like it's only clothes acceptance.

I've skimmed the thread. Will read properly when time allows. But what would happen if everyone just ignored the dress and the man in it. Isn't the issue that Genspect basically "insta-ed" him and made a deal out of it? If I were there I would have walked the other way in the same way I would have if it had been bondage gear, probaby eye raised and yawned. We should more of that and less attention giving perhaps.

That's interesting and makes some sense.

Gensepct have a role in pulling together and understanding the wide range of psychology driving this phenonmenon. And understaning AGP and how to respond to it will be part of that. And AGps will be involved in that.

That is diffrent from the safeguarding focus of SSA, which doesn't need to seek to unedrstand but has to constantly ensure boundaries are in place.
They are paying a vital role in calling Genspect out on safeguarding, but we do have to remeber Genspect has a wider role to manage.

I think the earlier suggestion of seperating these roles may be a good way forward.

Yes, from what I've read, the approving photo posted on SM was the mistake made. Now it’s become Attention-Seeker Gets The Attention He Wanted.

To be honest, Stella’s public output, via her C4 documentary and her podcast, has always showed great empathy/sympathy for men with AGP but not much attention or empathy is given to the wives of these men. So I can see why she might struggle to consider the needs of trans widows (or the needs of other women) in organising the conference. She’s definitely not displaying empathy at the moment in her public statements about the criticism Genspect have attracted.

I have a theory that therapists/ psychologists/psychiatrists find their patients so intellectually fascinating (and thus empathise with them strongly) and this prevents them from seeing the harm that paedophiles and men with sexual fetishes/paraphilias cause to the people in their lives and society in general.

I get this sense when I listen to Blanchard, Bailey, Cantor, Burgo, as well as Stella and Sasha. At times they seem almost naive in their ability to intellectualise these fetishes as sexual orientations that need societal sympathy and understanding. At least John Uhler is honest and blunt about the escalating nature of paraphilias and the need for strict safeguarding - he’s just not popular for expressing these facts.

The indirect effects of a man—even a good man—walking around in stereotypically female dress, in an era when other men who do this expect to be allowed in to female only spaces, to be treated as if they are women—are negative.

Big fat load of unevidenced assumption there. One could just as easily make the argument that the effects are positive, because they show that it's possible to live happily as an AGP transwoman while NOT being allowed (or even wanting to be allowed) into female only spaces. So they destroy the argument that not letting transwomen into those spaces is cruel, transphobic and damaging to their mental health.

This is the problem with indirect effects. It's almost never possible to objectively prove what they are (because they're indirect, so routed through too many variables to measure). So people tend to just assert that they are what they want them to be.

I think the evidence it's negative is the negative response it's got.

Has anyone here read Illy's book? Genuine question - I haven't.

I think I'm just not convinced by the one dimensional and simplistic narrative of him "performing his fetish". I'm going by hearing him on the podcast, where he described how sex was only one part of it. He dresses in women's clothes full time, it's not like he only does it when he wants a sexual thrill.

Some might argue with this but I think really, if the fact that "he's written a book about it" is going to be used as an argument, one should probably have a reasonable idea of what that book says. I suspect it doesn't say what people think it says.

A lot of people saying how he's "forcing" them to participate in his fetish by being shocked by it. Isn't the simple solution to that to not be shocked by it? It's only a dude in a dress. And here I was thinking this is the country that invented panto. 😀

We had decades of feminists painstakingly dismantling the idea of boys' and girls' clothes. He's certainly not the first transwoman to apparently resurrect that idea through the striking juxtaposition of opposites, but it's entirely up to us whether we want to buy into it or not.

That's interesting UtopiaPlanitia. I've not listened to the podcasts so wouldn't know. I agree with your point about intellectual fascination. Think I've seen some of Uhler's thoughts and would also agree there, too.

I think I'm just not convinced by the one dimensional and simplistic narrative of him "performing his fetish". I'm going by hearing him on the podcast, where he described how sex was only one part of it. He dresses in women's clothes full time, it's not like he only does it when he wants a sexual thrill.

Hi, a trans widow here. I think about 99.9% of us have heard the "I wear them for comfort, it's not only a sex thing" or variations thereof. But look at what he was wearing. He wasn't wearing women's slacks and a blouse, or even a skirt and top suitable for the office. My ex wore a tutu "because it was so comfortable".

A hairdresser once told me off for not doing my hair properly - said it would ruin my dress. I thought "what dress?" and obviously never went back. I was reminded of that looking at this picture though. I mean the hair is terrible and the dress looks awful. Not even accessorised!! Definitely didn't deserve a SM call out. Or any further attention. Wish I could unsee it.

Yes.

What I'm seeing here is the familiar argument of 'they're going to break the rules anyway so what's the point of having them'.

Having rules is essential. We don't remove rules because we expect that some transgressors will break them.

So: 'Don't involve other people in your fetish' is a pretty basic rule that a conference involving fetishists would probably do well to state.

Yep. On some levels, narcissism is complex, counterintuitive and confusing.

On other levels, it's plain bog standard one dimensional and simplistic seedy creepiness.

I was at the Women's Equality Party infamous Kettering conference years back and watched the party being torn in two by women who wanted to pander to AGPs and women who wanted to centre women.

It will be interesting to see which way Genspect goes. We all know how WEP has faded into obscurity.

Also, GC is absolutely not an ideology. The only thing "gender critical" feminists have in common is that they know that transwomen are men. That's not enough to call an ideology.

As I said I don't disagree I just think we're now trying to reintroduce rules that the 'wear what you want' mantra got rid of.

The old rule applied to all men so we didn't have to wait for honesty on motivation and apply the rules just to them, whilst having to ignore all those who won't admit their fetish.

I think there was a pretense in the wear what you like it's just clothes mantra, that there is a group of adult men who just like to wear dresses to work for fashion reasons.

We're now trying to undo that mistake, but it still lets most of the fetishists off the hook as they'll use the loop hole we've provided.

I’m not susceptible to the 'cool girl' attitude of 'It’s only a dude in a dress' because I’ve listened to testimony and I’ve read extensively about AGP and the impact it has on wives/partners, on children, on women in workplaces, on the functioning of institutions.

When it comes to these blokes it’s never 'just' a dress; paraphilias are all-consuming and obsessive and escalating in nature - boundary-invasions are a feature not a bug. For alcoholics, one drink is one drink too many and it’s the same for paraphilic men and women’s attire.

While women’s clothes provide this sexual thrill for sections of the male population, this feminist is rescinding her wish to see society behave as though clothing is just clothing. Our society still hasn’t tackled the sexist stereotypes that exist for clothing aimed at women and, as long as both these attitudes exist, wearing women’s attire and boundary-breaking will have a big attraction and be a major thrill for some men.

I have always assumed that every man who wears feminine apparel has AGP.

Am I a bad person who applies lazy stereotypes?

I guess it's hard to define, but your defintion would include Matt Walsh and me who would be neither feminists nor GC, so that definition doesn't work.

I've been around FWR for a long time and invoved in many debates and have seen patterns where I would call it an idelogy and where tenets such as gender is a socila construct, gender is oppressive, women are oppessed, the aim is to abolish gender, have been stated so many times you can see the sytem of thinking behind it. Often referrde to as patriarchy, whihc gender is utilsied by to oppress women.

I'd call it an ideology becuase I think those are tenets which are beleifs, that the world is then viewed through and which can't be challenged.

Not everyone is going to agree on that, but these idaeas occur agaian and again in GC discussions to the extent that I've come to see it as an ideology. One which I don't agree with.

I think what you've defined is sex realism. I am a sex realist interested in women's issues, but I'm not a GC feminist.

And I think this example of men in womens clothes is an exmaple of how some gender norms are not merely social contcuts but have some utility based in reality & pretebding it's all 'just clothes' leads to unintened consequences e.g 'wear whatever you like', has led to narcisstic men making women play along.

Yes. May be as well as reading the chap's book, try reading some of the Trans Widows' threads.

This is the same conclusion I have eventually come to.

Where I'd disagree is the idea that we could ever reach a position where clothing wasn't gendered and where there won't be men who will want to transgress whatever norms arise.

I've come to sthe view that many social norms are not just restrictive pointless inventions but they may be playing some role in maintaining a necessary boundary or role, even if it's not clear what that is.

That doesn't mean nothing should ever chnage, or we shouldn't be open to differnce, but we should change cautiously admitting we don't necessarily forsee consequneces.

It's partly my developing unedrstanding from this within the trans issue that has led me to be more conservative generally in my thinking. Radical chnage in pursuit of utopia whist ignoring human natrure never seems to go that well.

Yes.
And so am I.