We need to talk about America

[MissScarletInTheBallroom]

In the last few days I have posted about my experience of being kicked out of a mostly US based parenting group for not agreeing with the rest of the group's views about JK Rowling.

It was a short conversation, in which I politely attempted to explain the Scottish legislation that came into force last Monday in order to give some political context to her recent tweets. I received various responses along the lines of "the only context I need is that she is a bigot". One woman said that her sibling is trans and that she cannot engage in an intellectual discussion about trans issues when her sibling is a real person who is hurting. Another woman said that she has been raped, and she would be absolutely fine using rape crisis services in the company of trans women. I responded in a way I thought was kind and sensitive to both women, saying I was very sorry about what they/their sibling had been through, but felt that everyone's needs should be accommodated, including women who need single sex spaces, and that we need to be able to have a civilised discussion about this. I said I was muting the conversation overnight, partly due to the time difference and partly because there were 50 of them and only one of me, but that I hoped we would be able to agree to disagree and still be friends. By the morning I had been unceremoniously kicked out of the group.

All the people in the group are are women, ranging from in their late 20s to their early 40s. Most are US based, with a handful of Canadians, Kiwis and Aussies. I would describe them as "liberal feminists" purely to identify the demographic I am talking about, although I consider them to be neither liberal nor feminist.

I have come to the conclusion that, if this group is representative of American "progressives", America is lost on this issue.

I do not wish to repeat my earlier thread about this experience, but instead I would like to talk more broadly about American culture and trans issues.

Whilst I am becoming more optimistic about the UK (with many people now openly agreeing with JK Rowling, an increasing number of gender critical "wins" in the court system and the final Cass Report due out this week), I am dismayed by the position in America.

Can we - by which I mean the UK and other European countries which seem to be having similar epiphanies - change the global direction of travel on this issue without the support of the US, and to a lesser extent Canada, Australia and New Zealand?

If we cannot, can we envisage a future in which most of Europe has decided that women's rights matter and children should not be encouraged to transition, even if the rest of the developed world has taken a different approach? Or are we always going to be affected by whatever cultural norms are imposed on us by the US?

Finally, why is the UK "Terf Island"? What is it about us as a culture which has made British feminists so much more resistant to these ideas which have been so wholeheartedly embraced by American liberal feminists?

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

PS - if there are any Americans reading, I would be really interested in your views on this!

It's because the us is very polarised anyway.

If you're on the left you are firmly on the left.

I had discussions with a woman I knew who's views were essentially GC but given she was in the Deep South and surrounded by homophobic relatives she simply couldn't be nuanced in her eyes as that would lead her to be too right of centre.

It's the way their society has evolved due to layers of immigration and racism. Lack of public health care.

Their "left" is still what we'd see as centre or centre right.

There's much less secularism too.

Apparently the uk is one of the most secular countries.

It may also be down to our political systems and unions etc

Finally, why is the UK "Terf Island"? What is it about us as a culture which has made British feminists so much more resistant to these ideas which have been so wholeheartedly embraced by American liberal feminists?

In a word - Mumsnet. I firmly believe if we hadn't had MN where we were always able to discuss gender ideology issues fairly freely, with relatively little censorship, it would all have turned out differently here.

(I know there have been constraints, and some posters were banned, others left because they couldn't say in plain language what they wanted to say - but it was still a million miles better than any other form of social media for discussing this.)

Firstly of course you never know how truthful people are online of course. I was torn to shreds on a UK group about Strictly Come Dancing of all things for making the mildest comment about women's right to safe spaces after reading reams of worshipping stuff about Layton and his video from Munroe Bergdof. The ring leader told me she had been raped four times but would be fine with a man (in a frock) dealing with her at a rape crisis centre. I rather doubt it myself.
Then of course there is Trump so I seriously wonder what has happened to America in general.

I think there are a few reasons - Helen Joyce lists some of them in her book. As a PP said, politics in the US are firmly polarised and come as a package. If you're a liberal who votes Democrat, then you are probably pro abortion rights, pro gay rights, pro trans rights. That's how it works.

Also agree with the PP who said Mumsnet has been a big factor in the UK in allowing like-minded women to come and debate and organise. Otherwise so many other platforms, like Twitter (until recently) simply banned people from expressing gc views altogether.

The UK is a smaller country, so it's easier to organise events like the WPUK meetings or the Let Women Speak rallies all around the country.

Feminism in the US tends to be very individualised and all about getting the best career, earning the same as men, whereas in the UK it's much more collective and focused on sex-based rights. (This is a generalisation, I realise, because there has been some collective radical feminist activity in the US.)

I think the media landscape in the UK is probably a bit more independent and inquisitive than in the US, though not without its problems.

Definitely mumsnet too

That's a really interesting theory.

I definitely think there's a lot of truth in this.

I am trying to put myself in the shoes of some of these women and imagine that, if the only people I knew who were expressing concerns about single sex spaces and sports were Republican voters who were also prejudiced against gay people and wanted to ban abortion, maybe I wouldn't want to say or do anything to suggest I agreed with those people.

But their refusal to look beyond their own borders, their unwillingness to understand that the political landscape in other countries is not the same, and their insistence on applying a US context to gender critical feminists in the UK, is a form of cultural imperialism which I find very difficult to stomach.

Ironic really, given that we're one of the few Western countries with no separation of church and state.

I honestly believe Mumsnet had made us TERF island. I loved Mumsnet long before I had kids because never before had I seen anything like it. Almost exclusively female user base, with a tone that encouraged robust debate. It's really taught me so much about feminism and the female experience.

Yes! Even male US commentators (Ross Douthat) attribute it to MN.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4512657-The-answer-Is-Mumsnet-I-believe

Thank goodness for Mumsnet!

The Facebook algorithm has decided I want to see various articles about how terrible JK is... mainly from America.
There are some extremely wild claims... the one this morning was saying The Running Grave was about hunting down autistic people and making lesbians sleep with men. If people are spreading shite like that, its no wonder other people think she is evil.

The whole culture in the US is more individualistic and libertarian. In terms of freedom, they focus almost exclusively on the freedom to do things at an individual level (have guns, have abortions, have access to women's spaces ) there is very little fight for freedoms from things at a population level (such as being shot, being ill, being flashed/assaulted).

Unfortunately the churches are the only voices restricting freedoms for people to do things and their logic is usually dodgy as well.

I think the rest of the world can proceed differently to the US. Abortion, gun control, healthcare, etc suggest so.

In my experience the only people who think she is evil are the ones who haven't actually read a word she has written since Harry Potter and are happy to outsource their opinions because actually thinking uses up too much mental energy.

We had a head start with the proposed GRA reform coming at a time when online transactivism was really taking off. A small but not insignificant number of women (and a few men) could see what was coming down the line.

Being a small island that you can travel the length of in a day gave us an organisational advantage. Couple this with many of the women involved in the early days of mass organisation having a background in trade unions and other spheres of political organisation meant we could rally and be effective quite quickly with minimal financial resources.

It strikes me that in the US it's difficult to effect change on a countrywide level and if you could you would need a lot of money to do it.

change the global direction of travel on this issue without the support of the US, and to a lesser extent Canada, Australia and New Zealand?

yes. The US is not an advanced country - I consider it at the teenage stage of life where it thinks it knows it all but in reality knows nada. Much of the population do not have a passport, a sizeable amount still believe the planet is flat, they allow gun ownership and have extreme religions which mean women’s rights are going backwards. I would not expect support from them on this…

change the global direction of travel on this issue without the support of the US, and to a lesser extent Canada, Australia and New Zealand?

yes. The US is not an advanced country - I consider it at the teenage stage of life where it thinks it knows it all but in reality knows nada. Much of the population do not have a passport, a sizeable amount still believe the planet is flat, they allow gun ownership and have extreme religions which mean women’s rights are going backwards. I would not expect support from them on this…

change the global direction of travel on this issue without the support of the US, and to a lesser extent Canada, Australia and New Zealand?

yes. The US is not an advanced country - I consider it at the teenage stage of life where it thinks it knows it all but in reality knows nada. Much of the population do not have a passport, a sizeable amount still believe the planet is flat, they allow gun ownership and have extreme religions which mean women’s rights are going backwards. I would not expect support from them on this…

The legal system in the UK has many faults, and many many disastrous miscarriages of justice BUT it seems to offer objective judgments on gender issues, without bowing to Political or societal pressure to 'be kind'. The judicial system in the US is more fragmented and politicised, and I don't think there's the possibility of a done-and-dusted WORIADS ruling in the US, it would be state-by-state/politicised Supreme Court etc.

Every time we 'garden' for some GC case, I think how lucky you Terf Islanders are to have at least one arm of the state that you can approach with some confidence that you'll get a fair ruling.

Interesting post. Yes, I think gender identity is at its heart a form of extreme individualism. This is how I see myself, this is what I want as a consequence. But "men" and "women" are words describing groups of people, specifically one half of the human population and the other half. Sex couldn't be less of an individualised concept if it tried. When you have an ideology which essentially promotes an individual's right to redefine half the people on the planet to fit their own perception of themselves, it's not surprising that a clash of rights then ensues.

I do agree that American culture seems very individualistic. At a historical level perhaps it stems from the fact that many white Americans (and gender identity theory seems to be more popular among white people) are of European descent, and their ancestors were people who travelled to America in search of opportunities, settling in a society without much of a legal framework. In fairly recent history, they claimed land, settled on it, having claimed it then had to defend it in order to keep it, and established their own local government and political power structures. Perhaps this explains why, even among Democrat voters, there is still a strong tendency towards small state, low taxes and self determination rather than collective responsibility. We only need to look back 70 years to the McCarthy era to see how mistrustful the American people are of anything they see as communism (which in reality is what a lot of Europeans would call socialism or even centrism). I think there are also a lot of parallels between McCarthyism and what is happening today with gender among people in "progressive" circles. To many Europeans, the idea that we should be frightened of people with opposing ideas is one that should be resisted, whereas in the US there is already a strong precedent for it.

But all the above applies as much, and arguably more, to Republican voters, who tend to resist gender identity theory. (And also resist women's right to bodily autonomy, which seems to contradict the individualism principle.) What explains the difference? Just religion, or is there more to it?

I see what you mean about other developed countries diverging from the US on issues such as gun control, abortion universal healthcare. But the difference I see here is that international human rights organisations seem to have latched on to the idea that changing one's gender is a human rights and run with it, whereas they tend not to meddle in individual countries' laws around guns, abortion or healthcare. That is going to be difficult to challenge, regardless of what the US does. I don't want the UK to withdraw from international human rights treaties over this issue.

As someone living in the USA I would agree it is a polarized country and right and left issues get clumped together.
However in day to day life people don't have any issues with JKR, Harry Potter stuff is everywhere.
I use a lot of it in my therapy practice with dc and no one other therapists or clients have ever said anything that wasn't positive.
They can't build more Harry Pitter stuff quickly enough at Universal Studios and the boycott of the computer game totally failed. None of very liberal sounding teens actually avoided the game.
There is a lot more froth online than there is action in real life.