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.

Pulling no punches there! But you're right, as I said in my previous post, Americans are the descendents of people who got off the boat a few hundred years ago and set up a brand new society. The power structures we have in place in the UK and other European countries, for better or worse, were already well established when the US was just being born.

It's like, I struggle with the concept of an unelected House of Lords, and particularly with hereditary peers. But I can't deny that in reality, having a bunch of old people with long years of experience debating and scrutinising legislation and almost no democratic accountability (meaning they are less susceptible to jumping on fashionable bandwagons) does appear to be a stabilising factor which has injected a dose of much needed sanity into the proceedings on multiple occasions. In the same way, although I think the political systems of most European countries are generally stuffed full of the same kind of privileged people from privileged families who have all been to the same kind of schools, which is bad for diversity, these systems have been in place for much longer than those in the US, and their checks and balances mechanisms have been honed over a longer period of time.

By contrast, the US often comes across like the student union has been put in charge of running the country.

The "cultural imperialism" thing is very interesting. I've seen a black british friend complain about being told by someone in America that they "should" refer to their ethnicity as "african american" as this is the correct term for people with black heritage, despite the fact my friend is 3rd generation british, feels no real ties to "africa" and has no link to america other than 1 trip to Disney world!

I was also surprised to learn that most americans wouldn't consider (caucasian) spanish people to be ethnically "white" because they correlate them with Latin americans, and consider that to be a different ethnicity whereas of course we would see (white, because of course you can have spaniards of all races) spanish people to be no different to white french, italians, etc.

It was also very apparent during the whole BLM protests - our police force are far from perfect but we have a completely different history both of policing (americans don't have the concept of policing by consent which has been the basis of british policing for nearly 200 years) and of race relations and cultural/social history yet the same issues were transposed on us without any understanding of why it was a completely different situation.

Which meant instead of having intelligent conversations about how policing in britain and the specific problems we face and the interception with race it just all got amalgamated with US issues, we ended up with a few statues torn down and token politicans "taking the knee" (which is again meaningless devoid of the US content behind it as a gesture) and no real useful change.

That's an excellent point. The independence of the judiciary is so important to the functioning of a healthy democracy, and I think we often forget about this.

Oh, it's interesting to know it's not as evident in real life as it is online. Thanks for that perspective.

Wow. Telling a black British person that they should be referring to themselves as "African American" is a whole other level of stupidity and arrogance!

I agree about seeing Spain as a "white" country. Yes, Spanish people tend to have darker skin than British people due to being Mediterranean, but I would see a Spanish person who is not of black/Asian etc origin as white, which is not how Hispanics are seen in the US.

Wow. Telling a black British person that they should be referring to themselves as "African American" is a whole other level of stupidity and arrogance!

Chimamanda Adichie, who's Nigerian, says that in the US people insist on referring to her as African American, and she has to correct them to say no, she's African.

FFS.

Although, I was just thinking some more about this.

It's easier for her because she can just say, "I'm African. I'm from Nigeria."

African Americans, if I understand correctly, call themselves that because they know they are descended from African slaves, but may not know much about their ancestry beyond that because records were not kept.

If a black British person describes themselves as black British (do people do this?) the "black" is a bit redundant because people can see that they are black. But if they just describe themselves as British, they probably get a lot of "but where are you really from?" type comments (which I imagine must be annoying and potentially offensive). However, in a practical sense they probably do know where their recent ancestors were "really from", in that they can say "My grandparents were from Ghana", whereas people who describe themselves as African American need a term to describe themselves which takes into account the fact that they may not know which African countries their ancestors were from.

All a bit off the original topic, but interesting nonetheless.

I think another factor relating to individualism in the US is their history of McCarthyism and anti-communism. In the UK we have traditions of socialism and trade unionism that don't exist there because they were suppressed. As pp said, many of the women involved in the early days of GC campaigning here had backgrounds in trade unions and other spheres of collective organisation. Hard to imagine that happening in the US.

Indeed. After all the so called Pilgrim Fathers* sailed off because they thought Charles I was too liberal and tolerant.
My own tuppence worth is British feminism has deep roots in the trades unions and amongst working class women in general.

• Not sure why they are called Fathers , arriving 130 years after Spanish, French , Dutch, African and other English settlers.

Sorry @Riva5784 bit of a cross post there.

I don't find this explanation makes me sympathetic. Because they have a distorted view on almost all of these issues.

Lots of Republican voters may be against abortion to some extent, and some greatly, but there are also many who are very moderate or even pro-choice libertarians on the issue. Also worthy of note, the majority of Americans, by a fair margin, are actually moderate and don't want what lobby groups seem to push. That's within the AMerican left and right.

There is also a lot of variety among Republicans on sexuality issues, there are quite a lot of gay Republicans, and many fairly nuanced positions on things like same sex marriage or legal freedoms vs things like school programming.

Democrats in my experience really caricature Republicans on many of these issues, and that's what allows them to get to a place where they can't bear the thought that they might agree with any Republican talking point. A ot of the time it seems to me it's deliberate, so they don't have to actually challenge their own views.

I think that the approach to bills of rights and constitutions in the US and Canada may be a factor. You have a really differernt dynamic once something is put into a protected category like this, because these documents essentially over-ride anything the legislative branches do. The UK is very lucky with the primacy of Parliament being respected. The functioning HoL is also helpful.

As an American by upbringing, I think that this is a really interesting take.

Even on the abortion issue - I think it's viewed as the right of a woman versus the right of a baby. And of course babies' rights come before women's rights.

I have a lot contacts in the US from living there/work and I can tell you when the subject is brought up (usually by me, as they are too scared), 99% think gender ideology is batshit. Due to the industry I work in, these are traditionally democratic voters, and they are as stunned as we are at the speed and breadth this extremist position has infiltrated society.

I'm American but I'm only an expert in my own life and place. Nuts who think the earth is flat are nowhere near a sizeable amount. Jesus.

Descendants of puritans are a small group. I don't think we can blame them. Places that are the most captured like the west coast and the northeast have the highest proportion of atheists.

I agree that Mumsnet has made a big difference and the size of the country plays a part. Our for-profit healthcare system is probably making GI more difficult to get rid of.

Well I'm American and thank god I'm not living there right now. Much as I love and miss all my friends and the area I lived, it all seems like a massive shit show, with Biden and Trump right now.
Mind you all but one of my friends are religious republicans, who don't believe in all the men can be women stuff going on. Most are moving out of California to more Republican heavy states. If I were still there I'd be moving state too.
Nothing worse than misogynistic women cowing down to misogynistic men under the illusion that the men think these women are so wonderfully woke

Evidence is mounting about the profound harms this ideology is causing. UK and European countries are recognising this. The lawsuits from transitioned children will start coming in soon. First a trickle, then a flood. Insurers will be less eager to cover "gender-affirming care" when that starts to happen. Medical ghouls will find themselves without malpractice insurance.
That's what will halt things in the USA.

I've read that law firms are already putting teams together to deal with the expected onslaught of medical claims.

I regularly go to offline Let Women Speak events.

However, no way would I go to a similar event in the USA! Why? Quite simply, guns. It just takes one lunatic to make it all go very wrong over there.

I suspect that the basic comparison of extant 'rights' in the UK Vs the USA is a good place to start.
Trans people in the UK are already well protected by legislation. It's a legally protected characteristic. Same as sex. A lot of the pushback here is stemming from women asserting their rights and freedoms. Few people are trying to take anything away.
In the USA I think the rights and protection in law for women and trans people are much weaker. So seeming to oppose the support for a minority is much more loaded.
Privately funded healthcare is also a huge driver when people requiring meds and surgery are your business model.

That's interesting. I have been thinking of McCarthyism a lot over the last couple of days but more in the context of people being afraid of/wanting to ban ideas they disagree with. I didn't think about the trade union/collective bargaining context. Probably because the unions appear to be so utterly captured right now that the idea that older GC feminists might have honed their protest skills on the picket lines didn't really cross my mind.

I don't feel particularly sympathetic towards these women after the way they treated me, no. I'm just trying to imagine how I might behave in their environment.

In the WhatsApp group they quite often put up polls and a recent one was, "Have you ever fucked a Republican?" with the choices being, "Yes", "No" or "I am the Republican". Most of them voted yes, and handful no, none of them admitted to being a Republican. It's like the attitude was that you might have a one night stand with a hot redneck in the same way you might enjoy a greasy burger, but you wouldn't actually have a serious conversation or - God forbid - a relationship with one.

And thinking back, in the very early days of the group (which started on Reddit in 2020), in the wake of all the abortion laws being rolled back there was some discussion about whether to "allow" people with the wrong kind of political opinions in the group. The official conclusion was that a baby bumpers group should be non political, but the fact that the question was even discussed should probably in retrospect have alerted me to the possibility that I was going to find myself in an intolerant echo chamber with no diversity of opinion allowed.

Your comments about Republicans are interesting because it sounds like they might be a more diverse group than Democrats and more accepting of differences of opinion. That mirrors a lot of people's experiences here where even left leaning voters find that dyed in the wool Tories are more respectful of their views than hardcore Labour supporters who see any divergence from the script as an unforgivable betrayal. Is the left more intolerant than the right? Some would say so.

The for profit healthcare system is another excellent point, yes. Transgender healthcare is making a lot of people a lot of money over there.

Slightly tangential, but wrt McCarthyism, one of the most powerful early challenges to McCarthy and McCarthyism was from Margaret Chase Smith with her Declaration of Conscience.

https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Speeches_Smith_Declaration.htm

Chase Smith's Declaration of Conscience:

https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/SmithDeclaration.pdf

Having a choice between the people who know what a woman is but don't think you should be allowed to have an abortion and the people who fight for your right to an abortion but otherwise deny that women exist is a real Hobson's choice, isn't it?