Why is Mumsnet so GC?

[ireallycantthinkofaname]

Maybe an odd question but I've never come across another space, online or otherwise, where being GC is the norm. IRL I only ever discuss GC views openly with one family member, whose stance on it is similar to my own, though, so I'm not saying it's unwelcome.... Just curious how/why it's come about. Any thoughts or theories?

Oh God, that's hilarious!

You ignore red's unprecedentedly comprehensive post about why sex matters and how women are disadvantaged by it, with a but listen to me, what about me, this is all about meeee.

How's that 'entire life defying and dismantling gendered strictures and expectations' working out for you?? 😁

Still 'hammering bricks out of that wall'?

Honestly.

😆

Me too.

You know Datun it is a great learning experience though for any person reading who cannot yet pick male entitlement/privilege or misogyny. These posts just continue to be part of the learning process for us all.

It's the unremitting self-centredness that gets to me.

All the more stark on a board about feminism, which, by its very nature, looks outwards towards other women.

I see all the women fighting for this, even the ones who disagree with each other, Janice, Posey, Julie, Clare, and they're all still looking outwards.

They're all getting absolutely fucking infuriated with the sexism.

On behalf of other women.

I literally cannot imagine what it must be like to walk around with male entitlement. Blithely contemplating life from those lofty heights. Fondly imagining that people's reaction to you is something to do with you, and not fucking millennia of socialisation.

And they don't even know it. They genuinely cannot see it.

There's a part of me that occasionally feels sorry for them, in a strange way. That they're walking through life with one eye half closed.

I imagine this might be part of the jealousy to do with women. It can't all just be about tits and arse.

They see the way women are together and they want a part of it.

Not realising that as soon as they attempt it, what they wanted has disappeared already.

"Not realising that as soon as they attempt it, what they wanted has disappeared already."

Yes...

And yet, they can always recreate it to suit themselves in their own group.

The narcissism of demanding that constant right to change everything to suit themselves never sinks into their awareness. But then, I guess that is the point.

But the utmost belief that just by stating their own perceived reality they should be accepted is exactly the male entitlement we continuously point out. And it just keeps on coming. But funnily the attempts at sounding 'intellectual' just makes some posters who try to convince us to accept the impossible seem the opposite instead. It comes across as word salad.

And I look at my own posts and cringe half the time because it is pretzels and word salad, so I consider myself an expert on this. 😁

Dismantling the unnecessary and constricting edifices of gender is good, but only if you can refrain from bulldozing the Chesterton's fences which are in a limited number of cases required between the sexes. If you can't comprehend why they're there and women defend them, it'd be a good idea to back off, not try to push through.

They see the way women are together and they want a part of it. Not realising that as soon as they attempt it, what they wanted has disappeared already.

I find this very sad. For some at least, it's an unsought for and unassuageable desire.

Normally you would expect such a topic to inspire drama and literature. But what we've seen has been mostly one-sided, shallow and insipid.

Indeed. And you'd also think that it would inspire some kind of affinity with women, wouldn't you?

But, no.

It's very difficult to develop affinity with people who are just ciphers in your landscape.

Indeed.

It's like making friends with a doormat.

Raymond published The Transsexual Empire in 1979 and is seen by some as a codifier of the core 'Gender Critical' position.

At no point did I say feminism isn't needed, from 1979 or otherwise. You are arguing with a ghost position you have decided that I hold. I do not. I literally never made or implied this argument. You and Helleofabore keep using me over and over as a stand-in for the argument with the imaginary 'extreme TRA' you seem to really want to have.

Same guy wandering in to yet another thread and making it all about him and his being-a-woman fantasy 🙄

No.

You won't address the critical point about Sex Based Rights.

Instead you are trying to do another attempt at DARVO and say we are the big meanies, because our position is and always has been that sex can not be replaced by gender without doing enormous harm to women because women need SEX based protections.

Your failure to address the point and saying there isn't an issue is the point of contention, not your actual identity.

If “extreme” TRAs and “thoughtful” TRAs can’t answer the same questions is there a difference we should care about?

I imagine there's a fair few woman on this board who are mighty sick of men larping as women sticking their oar in about how they see the world through their womanly eyes with their womanly brain.

After a while it gets very tedious.

Reading through this thread is illuminating. Thank you BH for proving the point so many times that you have no understanding of feminism or the reality of being born as a girl and growing up to become a woman. No idea how women are constantly told by men how to behave, react, what to do, criticised etc.

The contibutions by Red, Arabella, Helle and, oh hell, basically all the women who have engaged with the merailer have been educational, wise, sometimes witty and full of facts.

BH however is still demanding women should be kind.

It is odd because one of the most abusive people I've met always demanded people be kind to him. Strangely enough, he was never kind.

'You and Helleofabore keep using me over and over as a stand-in for the argument with the imaginary 'extreme TRA' you seem to really want to have.'

What is imaginery about a male person activating for their own political aims that then harm all female people?

This is constant misrepresentation of reality is fuckwittery.

Let's go through this again. Why? Because every time that we carefully explain this and male entitlement on this thread, it gets clearer in readers minds so they can see what we mean. Maybe one day it will also sink in to your own understanding of the world.

Material reality

The material reality of girls and women is that their only shared experience that can be labelled 'woman' or 'girl' is experiencing life with a body that fits in the reproductive category of human beings that is called 'female'. So, not just us as women and girls experiencing this directly, but also how the world interacts with us. This cannot change no matter how we conceptualise it as the material reality abides. We can change the label but it doesn't change the experience.

The same then applies to all male people. Male people can only ever experience their lives as being having a male sexed body, no matter when they started their puberty, no matter how slow that puberty was or whether that puberty was stopped. Still a male sexed body.

A male person can make all the body modifications to that male body, it will always be materially realistic in its state as a male body. Because it will fit the bimodality of human reproduction of having a body that was formed around the production of small gametes, regardless of whether that production ever happens.

A male person who makes body modifications experiences their life going forward from that point on as a 'male who has made body modifications'. That male person can then present a superficial outward appearance that emulates what they believe a female person would look like. The material reality here is that this male person can only ever present themselves to the world as what that male person has perceived a female person to be. ie. Their own personal conception of what female person 'is'. That is what society then interacts with. Therefore, even here this is not a true interaction of how society interacts with female people. This is just society interacting with a specific male individual's perception of being female.

Not only is this an approximation of being female that is derived from a male individual perspective. It is one that is only ever from the male perspective. Because that male person has also interacted with the world as a male from birth. From the moment of their birth they have perceived the world and shaped it from the perspective of having a male body. In a society that is shaped by patriarchy still, then that will always be a world where that male person's views have been shaped by the power and entitlement that a male person has because society reflects this in nearly all interactions.

No matter then how a male perceives a female's life, it is not the life of a female human.

It cannot be called a 'woman's experience' because for a male to call their experience of life 'woman', immediately and irrevocably changes the word needed to describe the female adults of humans. That is an act of misogyny. If those male people had created a unique name for their unique shared experience, then that would have been authentic to their material reality.

TLDR1. A male person can only ever be their personal conceptualisation of how a female person lives in the world. That then is not material reality, it is a philosophical belief.

The 'Extreme'

A transgender person has a belief that they have a gender. This is the umbrella label for a collection of beliefs that humans have theorised. Transgender people should and are encouraged to advocate to have their needs met in ways that do not negatively impact in ways that harm another group of people. We are led to believe from many posters that they have lovely trans friends who are male and who fully respect the needs of female people and therefore don't make demands that harm them.

Some transgender people do make demands that harm other groups though.

Those male people who demand that society allows them access to spaces that were always designed to be for female people only are 'extreme' in comparison to the trans people activating that their needs are met by society without negatively impacting on other groups. This also is material reality. Some transgender people demand that their philosophical belief is prioritised over the needs of female people.

This is extreme compared to other transgender people's demands, and it is extreme in nature that any human being is expected to believe another human being's philosophical belief and prioritise it to their own detriment. It doesn't matter that the person making the demand doesn't believe that it a harmful demand even though material reality shows that it is. Material reality abides despite someone's philosophical belief.

Therefore your philosophical claims that you are a woman, is only a belief that you have. The abiding fact is that you are a male person who only lives their own individually conceived version of what a female person lives. You can try to reject that you are 'extreme' in your activist aims. However, you have consistently assured us that you will continue to not respect female people's needs to have our own single sex spaces that exclude you.

TLDR2: That you try to reject that your personal demands are at the extreme end of trans activism is remarkable but unsurprising. It doesn't fit logically to the abiding and verifiable facts. It does fit with a personal belief that you hold.

By the way, for readers, just a reminder.

All those hyperbolic and emotionally manipulative claims about people 'not existing' and 'I have always been a woman' is purely based on this philosophical belief as outlined above.

'you are saying trans people don't exist' = 'you are rejecting my philosophical belief that doesn't reflect abiding material reality'

'I have always been a woman' = 'I have wanted to be labelled as a woman but I live my life as I believe a woman lives but have no experience of or this is my idea of what living as woman means for me. It is and never has been as an adult human female's true life experience'.

The thing about this, is that it is also hypocritical when you pull this mantra like plea apart and analyse it. Because those same people who are demanding that you support and affirm their philosophical belief are in effect, saying that adult human female people do not exist as defined using the historic description of people of the female sex = 'women'. ie, they are denying women exist when they insist they are a woman.

This is the logical outcome of that position. One based on falsehood.

Also all this railing against women who simply reject someone’s belief about world is quite ridiculous when you consider it.

These male people who rail, who make ridiculous accusations, who may claim victim status for not having their belief affirmed, are using women who reject them as a proxy. They really just are railing against the world and nature. The world will move on, the reality of their experience on this earth will remain as it was, not how they described it, however they wished to describe it.

All because some people wish to dictate how others perceive them. And no one has the right to dictate how a person perceives an individual. Not even the most totalitarian and authoritarian person has succeeded in achieving that either. There is a label for those who try though….

Female people, women and girls, are not responsible for the existential crisis of any male person .

I've never read any books on transsexuals. Never will. No interest in them.

The simplicity of knowing that men and women are different is enough.

Gender critical just means knowing that there are males and there are females and that nothing makes one into the other. End of.

When things happened with my brother, the reason we fell out wasn't because of me and my behaviour.

It was behaviour that I wouldn't have tolerated and accepted from anyone that did it. He was rude abusive for no reason and accused me of all sorts of things I didn't do. My mum stood watching him doing it, apologising and making excuses for it. She said she understood his behaviour was unacceptable but she didn't confront him over it. His partner was even more aggressive and prejudiced.

I very quickly realised, that nothing I did would ever be good enough because I represented everything that he wanted to be and couldn't be and he hated me for it. He looked a lot like me so I don't think that helped either - I was always going to be the comparison. And DH was stereotypically male so they hated him for that.

It opened my eyes to the fact it wasn't about being a woman. It was about trying to run away from yourself and blaming the rest of the world for not having what you wanted. And thus it became about creating a victim hood and making constant demands that couldn't be fulfilled. Power and control.

And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

It becomes
'Why aren't you being nice to me?'
'I am being nice to you. Why what have I done wrong?'.
And constantly walking on eggshell trying to please someone who is paranoid and insecure.
Except you aren't doing anything wrong and you can't live like that. And this idea that it's up to you to fix the problem at your own expense is nonsense. It's an act of self harm.

It wouldn't have been ok if he was my brother, so why was that behaviour suddenly ok because he identified as my sister? That was really the bit that opened my eyes and made me think. Identity had nothing to do with the issue. It was about how I was respected and how I was treated appallingly and my own mother was stood there conceding that I wasn't doing anything wrong but my brother was a precious darling and I should suck up this terrible behaviour.

Now I don't think my brother would do x, y or z. But I do understand he's tone deaf to the anxieties of others because he's so caught up in his own.
And that harms other women for various reasons.

Nor do I wish I'll on him. I don't want him to come to harm. I don't wish him to suffer from the medical complications.
But I also understand it's not my decision to make.
But it's not just about him and there are a pile of kids out there for whom they really are being misled and don't have that autonomy. And are being outright lied to and abused because they don't live up to their parents desires.

Then there's my own needs and my own self worth and my own identity.

Women have their own needs. They have their own self worth. And they have their own identity which no one else gets to dictate.

And there is nothing wrong, nor bigoted or selfish about saying 'Actually your demands of me are unreasonable. They are harming me and this is not ok.' And it's ok to put your own needs rather than someone else's unachievable desires and demands first without being made to feel guilty about it.

And the whole thing about men making unreasonable demands of women and expecting them to put their own needs second, is the very essence of misogyny.

Trying to rewrite biology to say that males are women doesn't change reality and women have no agency and self determination over what a woman is, is an abusive dynamic. It's just about control. And it doesn't change the fact that a male is still a male.

And I long since became immune to the magic cloak of identity which somehow protects from accountability for behaviour.

If someone acts in a misogynist way and says misogynistic things it doesn't change because they are a transwoman or even an actual woman. It's still a misogynistic thing or act.

Nor I am responsible for the decision making of mother nature. The laws of biology can't just be broken.

But above all I believe in equal respect regardless of sex. Misogyny is the act of disrespecting someone on the basis of being female.

Yet every time we ask for it to be acknowledged that women are abused or harmed due to their sex so why can't we have protections we are accused of being transphobic. And it's demanded that we capitulate at great cost to use. When we say no, there must be balance because equality and rights demand that vulnerabilities of all are recognised and protected we are told this is unreasonable and not ok.

It just brings me back to my brother and the point that nothing will ever be good enough because the problem is the ideology is merely chasing the wind. It is an impossible dream. Women will always represent the very thing a transwoman can't be therefore women must always give and when that doesn't solve the issue, women must give more. But women can never give enough because ultimately you can't change sex. So why should we go through this ritual of self abuse?

Why put ourselves through that?

It is not for women to solve this problem. And ultimately we actually can't.

And that's kinda the point.

So focusing on our own problems is fair enough. We should not ignore them to appease others who can not ever find satisfaction in an unachievable goal.

If validation were viewed like a drug and it's about chasing that high it would make sense too.

red 💐

I also think that I used to have sympathy for these male people because someone, either an individual or a support group, actively told them or supported them that these beliefs were some kind of reality, based on a philosophical theory.

After these endless extreme interactions of male posters declaring their new version of reality should be supported by society to be treated as if it was the material reality and to not do so is hate, I don’t feel sympathy anymore. I now suspect that there is some disordered thinking that allowed them to believe this in the first place. This is an understatement in many ways, of course, because I don’t want to be deleted.

It started with male doctors experimenting and telling those first few males that they could take women’s language. It snowballed from there.