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.

Isn't it a brilliant thread.
Thank you so much everyone - what a good start to the day reading this has been

Yes thank you so much everyone. I am trying to read each reply and respond to it and read the links and watch the videos people have posted but it's a challenge because people have said so many interesting things!

Agree that this is a very interesting thread. I don't know enough to make any groundbreaking points but am reading with interest.

I mean, you say "progessive" in quotation marks and I think I get what you mean. We aren't the first to jump on every bandwagon, but we have nonetheless tended to be earlier adopters of "progressive" laws such as abortion rights, same sex marriage and gender recognition. I think it's only really thanks to gender critical activism in the last few years that we haven't - yet - got full self ID and a trans inclusive ban on conversion therapy. And our public sector is Stonewalled to the hilt.

Where I think you may be onto something is that I think British people are naturally quite sceptical and generally think that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. We are on the whole pretty tolerant people and happy to live and let live, but we aren't really into magical thinking. That means that all the "trans women are literally women" has had to be done by stealth, as per the Denton's document, because if you'd said half of this stuff out loud to the average British person ten years ago they'd have just laughed. I think even now when Labour politicians say a woman can have a penis, the average voter is looking at them and either going, "You what, mate?" or thinking, "Yes but obviously you don't really mean that, you're just being kind."

I think now the public is waking up to the fact that actually they do mean it, and actually there really are people like Karen White and Isla Bryson in women's prisons, and that some of the teenage girls they know who have adopted a boy's name and pronouns really are trying to make irreversible changes to their bodies.

The natural scepticism goes both ways in the sense that whilst the average British person isn't going to believe that a woman can have a penis, they are also pretty resistant to believing that there's been some big conspiracy by shady LBGT lobby groups to force us all to respect people's pronouns and make it illegal not to believe that a trans woman is a woman and all the rest of it, and tend to think it's all just a bit of a transphobic dog whistle by the political right. But as more stuff comes out like the Scottish hate laws and the Cass Review I think people are starting to understand just how baked in this ideology has become and they're starting to speak out and say, "Hang on a minute, this is batshit."

Where I think you may be onto something is that I think British people are naturally quite sceptical and generally think that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. We are on the whole pretty tolerant people and happy to live and let live, but we aren't really into magical thinking.

That's why I think the situation is so bizarre here in Scotland where we've always viewed ourselves/been viewed as a straight talking, somewhat no nonsense group of people. But GI has been swallowed hook, line and sinker by our institutions.

It isn’t an American thing. It is an online thing. You always get more extremes online because more moderate people are less likely to post about issues that they aren’t that bothered about. Your experience is of one group of fairly like minded people. America is a vast country with a vast population of people with a wide range of views.

Also, if someone is close to a trans person they are very likely to find your views upsetting regardless of what country they are from because their loyalty will lie with the person they love not some random person on the internet.

It sounds like your group was slightly more tolerant than mine in that you didn't get kicked out altogether, but still, there's just no room for nuance here, is there.

I keep going over what I said to the group and wondering whether there is a way I could have expressed things differently to make my point hit home.

Like, if I could have a do-over of that conversation I'd probably say something like, "There is a political context to JKR's views which you really need to live in the UK or at least have a solid grasp of UK current affairs to understand. For a number of years she has been concerned about various laws and policies in the UK which are designed to protect trans people from abuse and discrimination but have had unintended negative consequences for other groups, and in some cases, for trans people themselves. One of these areas is prison policy, where people who have been convicted of violent crimes against women have been allowed to self ID as women in order to be housed in a women's prison, where they have then gone on to commit further violent crimes against the female inmates. Another area of concern is access to rape crisis support, where the trans inclusive policies adopted by essentially all rape crisis organisations have meant that female rape survivors no longer have access to the single sex support they need. For clarity, nobody is saying that trans people shouldn't have the same support if they have been raped, just that sometimes separate provision is needed. She has also raised concerns about a number of safeguarding failures in paediatric transgender healthcare, which are consistent with the findings in a major new review commissioned by the UK government and similar evidence emerging in many other European countries. JK Rowling is allowed to express her concerns about these things, which are happening in her own country. It is important to understand her comments in this context rather than applying assumptions you have made, as Americans, based on the situation with regard to trans rights in the US. We are talking about two very different countries. In the UK, trans people have all the same rights as everyone else, plus a few extra rights for their specific protection which nobody else has, and British people are on the whole very accepting of trans people. If that's not the case in the US, you need to direct your anger towards the people responsible for that situation, not UK based feminists."

But I doubt they would listen.

What about the average Scottish voter? Have they swallowed it? Or do they just not have anyone else to vote for?

I'm not so sure.

I'm terminally online and I'm dyed in the wool gender critical.

Offline, I only know a handful of people who claim to believe TWAW. One of them is one of my closest friends and she is not very online at all. But she works in London in a fairly captured sector. I am also not sure she really believes it, she's just deep in "be kind".

I think the USA is so religious compared to the UK , that I think it's more polarised. It isn't as difficult to accept an inner gendered soul when their culture is all about god and patriotism and inner feelings.
I just cannot discuss the topic with most Americans , as I feel that our cultural divide really is too much. The anti trans Americans are hardly ever for gender critical reasons, and mostly for just keeping to your gender roles reasons.

I know it's not always the way, but it's too often for me to want to expend the energy.

There's definitely a 'vote for SNP/Independence no matter what' aspect which doesn't help. And quite a lot of us are politically homeless - SNP, Scottish Greens and the Lib Dems are a lost cause but other parties (with some honourable exceptions among MSP's) are pretty captured too.

However, there's a strong pushback from people across Scotland and our feminist networks, despite the best efforts of the Government to silence us, which has helped bring a lot of this stuff to public knowledge.

Too true.

An interesting thread. I don't know enough about the USA to comment on it, but a few thoughts strike me about the UK, or more specifically, England.

The public sector - we have a longstanding and highly developed public sector where the idea of what is best for the population or group of people as a whole is embedded in its purpose and reason for existence. It employs a huge number of people. Public sector roles (that require training) are generally regarded as professional roles and are also female dominated. Therefore, even though institutions became captured, I think there was immediately a group of women who were able and ready to think: 'Hang on, this proposal might be fine for the individual transwoman but what about the general population of women and girls.'

Political privacy - there is a strong trait of political privacy and the secret ballot in England. I don't know how all my friends vote. I have an idea, but we would never talk about it as we are all far too polite and want to avoid any resulting disharmony! This has declined a bit in recent years with social media and Brexit making everything so public, but for decades it was accepted that an individual's vote was their own business. So perhaps that leads to people more readily making up their own minds on a particular topic?

Eccentricity - there is a strong seam of eccentricity and individualism in English culture. Whether that is fashion, habits, hobbies or political thought. It is tolerated and accepted that people can be 'different' and the people who like to plough their own furrow just aren't bothered about being different from the mainstream. Whereas I get the impression, albeit from popular culture, that US society is more conservative and homogenous in its ways? Plus the existence of the aristocracy - anyone from the upper middle class or aristocracy doesn't really give a fuck what people think about them. So again, a higher readiness to think independently?

I had a similar experience with a friend's American Facebook connections. The online discussion mentioned JKR and I was immediately branded a bigot and a terf for stating that she had been subject to a witch hunt.

America seems to be in the same place we were about 2-3 years ago. Can only express relief that it is starting to become becoming easier to talk publically about these matters in the U.K.

Ultimately they really need to own their own shit, rather than blaming people like JK Rowling speaking up about things happening in her own country for the fact that voters in their country have put Trump back into office.

But this is a classic example of where there just seems to be no room for nuance.

For example, a few years ago if you'd asked me whether a trans woman is a woman I would have said yes. I hadn't given it much thought, but I would have said yes all the same. I vaguely knew someone who had transitioned in their early 20s and had all the surgery and whatnot and was happy to refer to them as a woman.

I was also, at the time, very aware of JK Rowling as a political commentator, not just as an author. At least as far back as 2014, she was all over Twitter in the run up to the Scottish independence referendum, attracting a lot of criticism from Scottish nationalists. Then a couple of years later she was stridently anti Brexit. So she has never shied away from the prospect of pissing off large swathes of her fan base by taking a political position on a polarising subject. I was also aware of her philanthropy, which gave some other clear indicators of what causes are close to her heart.

So about four years ago, when I started hearing online that she was a transphobic bigot who had been radicalised by the far right, I just didn't believe it. What on earth does a pro union, anti Brexit, pro immigration, Labour supporting strident feminist have in common with right wingers in the US? Nothing at all. So I read what she had written and decided that I didn't agree with the criticisms of her.

But for someone in the US, if you only knew her as a children's author and didn't have all that very UK-specific context about her political views, I don't know, I imagine you'd be more likely to believe some shit stirring Buzzfeed article about how she is a transphobic bigot who "doesn't believe trans women are women", especially if you then looked at her Twitter account and saw her objecting to women being called "menstruators" or getting angry about male rapists in women's prisons, which I accept could sound like a frothing moral panic if you didn't understand that it is actually happening.

None of this changes the fact that if they think a British children's author has the power to harm trans people in the US simply by tweeting that trans women are men, that really doesn't say very much about the strength of their own democracy, does it?

And in any case, Trump got elected in 2016, when JK Rowling's pet subject was still Brexit, and nobody had any inkling that she "doesn't believe trans women are really women". Clearly she's not to blame for that, so maybe they need to look a little closer to home if they want to fix the problems in their own society.

I’d agree that in the US, the TWAW ideology is more politically aligned ie if you believe that, you’re much more likely to be a trump hating democrat. Don’t forget who Biden appointed his assistant secretary for health. And if you’re a non believer, that viewpoint is seen as aligned with the Christian Right. However, many Americans that I know just are plain unaware of the issues. Their news focus is not even state, but primarily on their city ie Seattle Times.

Whereas, many, but not all, British FWR posters strike me as being both politically aware on a national level and politically centre/centre left/left than conservative right but now politically homeless. Certainly I’m considering spoiling my ballot for the first time ever. Deeply disappointed in all parties.

I agree. If I wasn’t able to voice my opinions here then I don’t think I could anywhere.
Also, I’ve gained more information from here too.

I am planning to spoil my ballot.

I'd been considering drawing a picture of a penis and writing "no woman has one of these" on it, but I am also thinking about writing JK Rowling underneath the names of the candidates and drawing another box and ticking that one.

One thing they have in the US that the UK lacks is the write-in ballot. You can write in any name you want and (depending on the state) your vote is counted. That's how you get people voting for Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson.

That's awesome.

If they vote for a real person, for example, Dolly Parton, and that person gets enough votes to win despite not being a candidate, can they actually be elected to office?

In theory yes, but I don't know if it has ever happened.

US campus originated theories have a lot to answer for: Intersectionalism, Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory. It started with the academy.

The U.S is also home to very powerful big pharma. Pharmaceuticals are big business.

The american culture and ideals of 'Individualism' whereby the individual can be "whatever they want to be".

All of the big social media companies were founded in liberal U.S cities.

American here. A close relative (think son) said he was trans. I said I was fine with it, as long as I could call them Loretta.

I have a friend, she's from New York but now lives in Florida.( She used to live in Liverpool, where I live, for 30 years because she was married to a. Brit). She's most definitely critical of gender ideology, and it is not because she believes in traditional roles. It is because she has a very finely tuned bullshit detector.

Also, if someone is close to a trans person they are very likely to find your views upsetting regardless of what country they are from because their loyalty will lie with the person they love not some random person on the internet.

Most of us don't want the person we love to be hurt, yes. We may well disagree on what will hurt them more, whether their hurt outweighs the disadvantages to others, and what is in their long-term best interests, though.