Sandi Toksvig "doesn't get it", poor love....

[HootyMcBooby]

Sandi Toksvig slams anti-trans bigots ‘claiming to be radical feminists’ (msn.com)

"I could weep. I don’t get it. It’s beyond me"

Yeah Sandi, I don't get it either.
How is it possible that men can say they are women and have unfettered access to females in their safe spaces?
How is it possible that we are medicating children against puberty?
How it is possible that a woman can be raped on a female hospital ward by a man claiming to be a woman and then gaslighted to be told a man was not on the ward?
How is it possible that men are claiming titles, sponsorships and medals in women's sports?
How is it possible women and females are being literally erased from so many spheres of life, including health/medicine and marketing campaigns? How come the same isn't happening to males?

As a lesbian do you like "lady penis"?
Or do you actually know that men remain men whatever surgeries they may have had, and are just on the "be kind" train?

Have you even THOUGHT about the issues this ideology ushers in?

Actually you don't need to answer that.
It's obvious.

“Be kind” in relation to trans people is such a giveaway as well. I’m a woman. If I say I’m a woman no one has to “be kind” to me about it. It basically means “play along with their delusion, don’t be a meanie” like when you pretend you don’t know your 2yo isn’t really a monster but is them in a costume.

if a TW is really a woman, why is kindness needed? It means “make way for the needy man”

Maybe the certainty about having this essential gender identity is just evidence of really effective socialisation.

It's fascinating, you think about it a lot, you've had it for donkeys' years.

It's got nothing to do with stereotypes, or clothing, or anything of that nature.

You'd be the first person to ever answer this question, but in that case and with every word in the English language at your disposal, could you describe it?

You'll be waiting a long time for an answer to that question. If @ScremeEggs does answer I predict that it will be something like this:

"It can't be described, it's a feeling, just something you know. Everyone has a gender identity, and if you don't think you have one it's because it matches your sex."

How it's supposed to match is never explained. What is also never explained is how the person saying this knows that their feeling about a gender identity is similar to other people who experience this feeling, because if you can't explain what the feeling is, how do you know you're feeling the same thing as other people who claim to have a gender identity?

When one person comes up with words to describe what gender identity is that gains a bit of traction, more people start using the exact same words to describe their previously indescribable experience. Few people want to be the first to describe the feeling.

I think most of it is people wanting to be part of something and to support the cause, than actually feeling gender identity.

Personally I probably wouldn't dispute "gender identity" itself, which may make sense. (Consider magical mind swap scenarios.)

I would question (1) how anyone could know if it was a properly grounded and rational belief, and (2) how it would be enough to make someone a man or woman.

I feel about this the same way I'd feel about someone explaining they had a deep inner natural belief that their deity existed.

Or that everyone had a guardian angel.

Fine. You do you. No problems at all, we're a multi faith society. But your beliefs stop with you, stop expecting other people to agree with you that it's truth, and they must convert to your faith. Stop policing people for not believing what you do.

@ScremeEggs I'm interested as to what extent, or how, your gender identity has anything to do with your sex?

So, do you think of it as something like a bunch of psychological traits, personality characteristics, likes, preferences, skills, dislikes, natural behaviours? And/or is it linked to the physicalities of being in an XX body? (E.g you wear more fitted clothes, don't like heavy lifting, something along those lines)

We will not get an explanation.

We never do.

Because the explanation inevitably boils down to regressive, harmful, sexist stereotypes, and the people with the gender identity can’t risk spouting such nonsense.

So they resort to, ‘it can’t be described, it’s just a feeling’, and in doing so, just confirm that it’s all nonsense.

Of course we won't get an explanation.

Eresh will remember this thread. Sandi dropped a guest post demanding our support for WEP and vanished. We asked and asked and asked why this new party for women thought women's prisons should have men in. Not a sign of her.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/guest_posts/2502963-Guest-post-Sandi-Toksvig-The-time-is-right-for-the-Womens-Equality-Party

Comforting to see that MN was on it that far back.

Depressing to see that WEP wasn't so much captured, as completely useless from the beginning.

I always give WEP credit for getting me properly started on this, and I bet I’m not the only one!

Anthem of Gender Ideology.

Quite jealous of this one, actually.

Fucksake, she never even came back at all!

Rude.

I've been thinking about gender identity and the fact that I don't feel I have one but then I thought about the social construct of gender and thought "Well, I'm fully aware of that and how it impacts upon me, how I've gone along with it and how I haven't through different periods of my life." Now, yes, I was beginning to be aware of that at a young-ish age, maybe as young as 7 but probably a bit later. I knew what you were supposed to be like if you were a girl and what you were supposed to be like if you were a boy. In that sense I almost get gender identity but it is purely and completely a social construct. If I'd been born fifty years earlier the idea of what I should be as a woman would be different from the one I was born into. In fact, it's not so much an identity as understanding constructs and stereotypes. The issue with a lot of the loudest voices, especially those who are very much on the a and the g and the p side of things is that their notion of the construct has sweet FA to do with anything that currently exists. It's part 50s well put together housewife, part 60s sex bomb, part prostitute, part the school girl fantasy of paedophiles. It has nothing to do with anything approaching reality. We only have to look at the recent photos of Eddie Izzard campaigning in Brighton, wearing a pink mini-skirt suit with large fake boobs to see an example of just about all of those tropes.

In that sense I almost get gender identity but it is purely and completely a social construct.

And it's an outside thing imposed upon you (or that people attempt to impose, with greater or lesser degrees of success). Whereas an actual identity would be part of you.

And it's an outside thing imposed upon you (or that people attempt to impose, with greater or lesser degrees of success). Whereas an actual identity would be part of you.

So interesting you say that in the light of what I was just about to post in response to Mouse.

I found the decisive, "first had a sense of a gender identity at 7" really interesting, and it led me to think, "OK, so what was I aware of at 7?"

And no joke, the only thing I could think of that I could in any way align with some kind of realisation of a gender identity - the only thing I associated from that age or so with thinking "I'm a girl" as opposed to "I'm me / a human" or whatever kind of self-realisation takes place as a kid...

...Was a couple of lads chasing after me and my friend trying to lift our skirts up, and our righteous indignation that they shouldn't do that to girls.

In total honesty, that's the closest I can get to a recognition of the kind @ScremeEggs describes.

Isn't that telling? Depressing? Revealing? I don't know. It feels like one of those.

That's it @Catiette . I knew what it was to be a girl not because inside of me somewhere was the inner gendered soul of a girl but because of outside influences. Part of mine, funnily enough, was kiss chase. It was neither particularly pleasant nor horribly unpleasant but to me being a girl was being "chased" by boys. If I'd known the words and of course I didn't, I'd have known that I was supposed to be passive while boys were assertive. (Un)fortunately, I wasn't very good at being passive.

Exactly! It's almost too neat to be true, as it aligns so closely with what we're saying - I could imagine someone responding, "Oh, you're just saying that to make a point"... but it is true. If I think back, of the very few memories from that time that I could perhaps interpret as an evolving awareness of some kind of "gender", a striking proportion are honestly of that nature. Wariness of boys (one smashed my head into a wall at primary). The same friend and I finding a dodgy magazine frozen open in the snow.

I honestly can't place a moment I was aware of anything truly, deeply internal in the sense of a gendered self-perception. I was just me - a girl in the biological sense, in a different body to the boys, and accordingly belonging to a different category or group. I'd describe it as an almost imperceptible process of finding myself in relation to external things - people, objects, values... as opposed to... finding myself. Any innate part just felt like... me!

I'm thinking hard now about how that intersects with my best friends being girls, and the gulf between us and the boys at primary, and that kind of Venn diagram of how I overlapped, or not, with female peers' behaviour and interests.

I felt an affinity with girls that I didn't with the boys, certainly, but my instinct now is that I didn't see that as internal, so much as biological (without the remotest focus on the realities of biology, at least before discussions about periods - rather just a, this is my half of the class, I belong here) - and behavioural (the boys behaving a bit too wildly for me). But is that gender? Because I also punched a bully once (pathetically ineffectually!), and pushed another down stairs (that sounds more brutal than it was - he was vicious). And I hatedhatedhated seeing my friendship group devolve into self-conscious obsessions with make-up around 12, and their bitchiness (anti-feminist, I know, but for whatever reasons, they were - and how!) And I quite explicitly tried to set myself apart from that and refused to succumb to either.

So in some ways I "conformed", and in others I didn't. As now. I never saw it as innate. Just as who I was and how I behaved in relation to larger external groups and patterns.

It is fascinating. If it could be explored in this way, as opposed to imposed as in that survey handed out to little 11-year-olds that I mention upthread, at least. If I imagine being given that survey at that age, and asked, effectively, if I chose to be a girl or a boy... I think it would have messed with my head a bit. Cemented some of these behavioural patterns as more valid than they needed to be. Persuaded me I didn't belong as a girl. Made me really worry a lot more about what, for example, my stoical resistance to using make-up said about me, as opposed to the way I felt about this at the time, which was a (rather worried and self-conscious, yes, but mainly just) proud sense of "I'm me! To hell with that!"

I don't think such a survey would have felt, or been, a remotely positive influence. I think it could even have been quite damaging.

Edited as I think and try to work out what I mean!

I remember I actually resisted make-up because I found the idea deeply demeaning - the expectation that half of us prettify ourselves for the other half. That wasn't some some innately masculine gender. It was all about being a girl in a different way - a latent angry feminist!

Sorry. Thinking "aloud". 😅

I was a tomboy, in the 70s when no one thought that meant you weren't a girl. So I always thought of "gender" - not using that term, but what I would have called being girly, or being boyish - as something I had a choice about, I could choose not to be a stereotypically "girly" girl, even though I felt that pressure.

As I grew up I sometimes did want to be more "girly", eg wear dresses and make-up (though I agree with a PP - what counts as girly is different in different times and places - it's not fixed). I still am essentially a tomboy with a feminine side.

I think gender expression has its place, as it's a way to signal things - such as. "I'm a straight woman putting out signals to potential mates" or "I don't give a shit what you expect me to be like" or "I'm experimenting with twisting stereotypes in an arty way" - all of which I think are normal human behaviour, for different people or at different stages in life. But I don't see it as an inherent identity that can override your sex. It's just culture, semiotics and personality.

You can only have a "gender identity" as a man, woman or "NB", if you have a very fixed, regressively stereotyped set of ideas about what men and women should be like. And the idea that clinging to the stereotype of the opposite sex actually makes you that sex is just bizarre.

Agreed, and if I try to think back to childhood, I can remember being instructed by adults around me that "girls sit like this, girls don't do that, etc" and being very aware that this was what society expected me to be, because I was female. Despite that awareness, I don't think I fully understood how deeply I internalised all that gendered stuff, until I was much older and had got knocked about in life a fair bit.

I suppose, to be generous, once this stuff has been internalised, it's quite easy to mistake the external imposition for something innate.

YY to both of the above (does YY mean, like, YesYes? never been sure... hope so).

I do think there's a biological component to gendered behaviour, too - I don't outright reject that or sees it as the thin end of a slippery wedge to biological essentialism. We see it in the animal kingdom - it feels logical to think that we're not immune to some trends. But how and to what extent nature and nurture intersect? How can science answer that yet? In our gendered (externally, in the sense of social constructs) world, any controlled experiment attempting to distinguish between the two surely necessitates Money-esque abuse.

And in this context, this whole telling kids that "Everyone has a gender, choose now!" does feel a bit like playing with fire, like a massive social experiment in which we kind of artificially intervene in a dynamic we don't understand. We worry, from a GC perspective, that we're, in large part, forcefully imposing nurture on nature, while those in favour of the gender ID question presumably would (if they think about it at all) argue that it's liberating all natures to proudly proclaim their validity! Either way, it's kind of forcing a really fraught issue.

Not sure if I'm making sense. Sorry again for potentially thread-killing monologue. Just more interesting than Netflix.