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.

I think we have a typically British approach to this. The CofE has an almost entirely ceremonial role. At the ceremonial level, church and state are merged, just as the royal family merges into state at a ceremonial level. When it comes to power, royalty and church are pretty effectively limited to lobbying. Obviously there are still some vestiges of real power, but the monarch cannot easily use the constitutional rights, and operates behind the scenes. Likewise the church still has a few bishops in the House of Lords but they rarely hold the balance of power on any issue.

It’s a constitutional fudge, a result of the gradual historical separation and sidelining of both the monarch and the church, which has left us with a practical, though not complete, separation of church and state. The comparison with the USA is fascinating. In the US, there is a clear constitutional separation, helped by there being no real equivalent of the CofE, but in practice the church, particularly some sections of it, has a lot of influence.

Not read the full thread , but I have had direct experience of the cultural imperialism. It’s a silly example, but astrology is an interest of mine . I have had to deal with people being genuinely baffled , that I don’t have my time of birth, written on my birth certificate, because it is done that way in America!

If we are Terf Island then we should be proud. Make a flag and fly it from the rooftops for the rest of the world to see.

I was on holiday recently with a group of women, two from the US, three brits and one Scandinavian. One of the US women mentioned JK Rowling and that she had become right wing fundamentalist. Myself and the other British women disagreed and explained JKR is a women's rights activist and definitely left wing. The same woman then asked our opinion about the local ice hockey team she plays in. They are trans inclusive and recently admitted a recently transitioned trans woman, this led to a number of women leaving the team. The trans woman is 6ft4. The other US woman the explained her annoyance at a trans woman claiming a womens title for thru hiking, despite male advantage.
Both women are in the same place a lot of us probably were - how to accept difference, balanced against fairness, safety of others, boundaries etc. I imagine its the same all over the US
I think being out and proud in our conversations is the way to go and is what has changed things here in the UK. Hopefully our friends in the US will feel more able to have open conversation as time goes on.

I agree with the poster above that the geographical difference makes campaigning in the UK alot easier. As does our strong history of left wing campaigning. Womans Place already had the connections and understanding of political structures in order to chip away at the people who needed to listen.

We have this, which I find quite moving.

It's an engagement map about Laurel Hubbard taking #Nini's Olympic place on the NZ team.

https://twitter.com/wepwomen/status/1406949765682708481?s=21&t=kU2c5k0PbZY0jl5IS2tRkw

Reminds me of the beacon lighting in Lord of the Rings.

Only on page one disclaimer!

It's also about recent European history. We were much more in the middle of WW2, Spanish civil War. Dictatorships in Europe, The division of Europe between east and west. The EU. Brexit. Ukraine war. Yugoslavia. The USA is more distantly involved due to geography. Stuff happens "over there" somewhere distant.

I suspect that the individualism PPs have mentioned means that US citizens have to think a lot about supporting themselves as there is no back up safety net.

Thanks for the thread, going back to reading the rest now!

I don't really like the word "Terf" because of its negative connotations, but I am proud that a small country which has in the past been dubbed the 51st state of America is shaping up to be the voice of reason on this.

The fact that we accepted the idea that people can identify as the opposite sex in the first place shows that most people's basic instinct is to be kind, and to live and let live. But not to the point of allowing obvious injustices to flourish unchecked, and not to the point of pretending to believe obvious nonsense either.

British "Terfs" are not objecting to trans people.

We are objecting to an anti-scientific ideology which harms women's rights and child safeguarding and goes against our principles of fair play.

We are also, in general, both tolerant and sceptical of religion. We'll respect other people's rights to believe in it but we're less likely to actually believe in it ourselves, and strongly resistant to the idea that the believers should be allowed to force it upon us.

And I do think we are very resistant to authoritarianism. We resisted Nazism. We resisted communism. In recent years we have had various factions resisting both the EU on grounds of sovereignty and the right wing dog whistles of Britain First/UKIP/Nigel Farage. We are at heart moderate, tolerant, freedom loving people who abhor dictatorship of any kind.

So it's unsurprising that we are resisting this too, in our usual, firm but understated British way.

"You can put on a dress and I'll call you Susan if you like, but please keep your cock out of the women's communal showers, love. I'm all for live and let live, but let's not take the fucking piss, alright?"

I am in the USA. I haven't read the entire thread so some of my observations may have been mentioned.

Firstly about 70% of the population in the USA agree on a number of issues, such as wanting universal healthcare, supporting abortion up to 12-16 weeks and closing the border to illegal immigration. What we have on the political stage does not represent the majority of Americans. It explains why a substantial number of people who voted for Trump would have voted for Bernie Sanders (the closest candidate to offering what that 70% want and politically left of Biden) and also voted for Obama. This is literally the case for some of my in-laws in California, supposedly the most liberal state, who swung from Obama to Sanders to Trump.

Up to a third of Americans who could vote do not in every election and the political leadership in the USA is uninspiring and just as diabolical as in the UK at the moment. Leaving a majority feeling politically homeless and unrepresented.

We all know that just like the UK population was manipulated online with the Brexit vote, social media has exaggerated the differences in the American population. The majority of Americans (of all races and groups) for example thought the country was no longer seiously racist until the advent of social media which has been sowing division and confusion. Could Gender Ideology have spread like wildfire through the youngest most online generations without smart phones and social media (introduced in 2007)?

As for supposedly dim, religious Americans who are all gunmad, it's the Red states (Republican led, socially conservative) who have banned puberty blockers and Trans surgeries on the under 18s.

Most Americans are not extremists on either end of the political spectrum. It's the harsh economic climate and globalism (especially since Clinton signed NAFTA) which has caused a great deal of poverty and despair across the USA as the class divide has widened.

What we need to look at is the enthusiastic take up of Trans Ideology and so-called Trans rights with all the (literal) flag waving by huge US corporations. This all occurred directly following the financial destabilization and banking crisis of 2008. With Occupy Wall Street and protests against income inequality that took place and the great swell of anger among Americans across the nation, this ideology has been great at distracting the population, together with identity politics to divide the nation along sex, gender, race and sexual orientation lines and preventing the working class uprising that had been happening.

To buy into the demonization of the white working class, blaming them for the countries woes is just as bad as blaming Gammon and Karens in the UK.

Surveys consistently show that working class Americans (including whites) share the same policy desires and are not racist or anti-immigrant, any more than there there is a "Trans Genocide" happening.

To illustrate this class divide we can examine where "Trans Kids" are coming from. They are mostly within white liberal upper middle class families. Very few are found in poor communities, especially Hispanic and Black, Asian working-class but also white. For all their struggles, the working-class in many places still have some kind of community and common sense that acts as a buffer against the prevailing fashionable ideologies of the East and West coasts and university elites.

If people have struggled to unite against Gender Ideology in the USA it's because they have been aggressively silenced and demonized.

It seems that the law courts are where the push back is coming from, again due to the American emphasis on individualism. A lot of cases are making their way through the courts, including one to be heard at the Supreme Court soon.

Let's not forget that 24 states (almost half) have passed laws successfully protecting children from medicalization and banned Gender Ideology in schools, or introduced various combinations thereof, but because they tend to be in the middle of the nation and the South, MNers may not realize how many.

www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/104425

I would also like to defend Americans against their lack of passports. The continental USA is bigger than the entirety of Europe and has a vast geography of beaches, mountains, deserts, wilderness, forests, lakes and plains. They also have a large range of cities and entertainment centers. Americans do travel, within the USA because you can go to a tropical beach, snow covered mountains or hike an untouched forest here within your own nation. The equivalent is sneering at Europeans for never traveling outside Europe but discounting if they regularly visited 2 or 3 other countries by driving there.

Also the USA is a long way from the rest of the world and it's expensive to cross an ocean every time you want to visit Europe or Asia, even South and Central America can be expensive. Many Brits have never visited North America but we wouldn't criticize them as we all know it's expensive and people may prefer to visit a neighboring country instead.

You also need money and time to travel internationally. At least 40% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. And many are on modest incomes and tight budgets. They generally get a lot less vacation time than Brits and Europeans, so will use their 2 weeks a year to visit family and maybe have a week in Florida if they can afford it. Since COVID and rapid inflation, many families in the USA and UK have not had extra money to flash on international travel.

Thanks for this perspective. I have to admit that the idea that the same voters might switch their allegiance from Obama to Trump had not occurred to me. I thought that the swing was determined more by which side was more successful in getting people out to vote. From our less informed perspective in the UK, it's easy to characterise Trump as a demagogue without looking closely at his manifesto across a range of policy areas. And it's easy to dismiss someone who voted for Trump when he was referring to Mexicans as rapists and promising to build a wall as a racist, but if that same person previously voted for Obama it becomes harder to explain.

One thing you're absolutely right about, and which I struggle with somewhat, is the fact that it is the red states who are clamping down on gender ideology.

Let's take your last paragraph as an example.

You say:

"Let's not forget that 24 states (almost half) have passed laws successfully protecting children from medicalization and banned Gender Ideology in schools, or introduced various combinations thereof, but because they tend to be in the middle of the nation and the South."

The liberal media would phrase this more like:

"Almost half of US states, mainly central and southern states held by the Republicans, have passed draconian new laws restricting access to life saving healthcare for trans kids, forcing schools to misgender and deadname them and banning them from participating in sport."

I recently came across a piece published in the American media, I forget where but it might have been the NYT or similar, which was highly critical of the new laws passed by one state in particular. I want to say Ohio but I could be wrong.

Essentially, it boiled down to, "They have passed laws banning the medical transitioning of minors, prohibiting schools from teaching gender identity theory as though it were fact and socially transitioning children without their parents' knowledge, and ensuring that only girls are allowed to compete in girls' sports."

I found myself thinking, if you look past your own gut reaction to words like "Ohio" and "Republican", all that seems eminently sensible. It is precisely what gender critical feminists in the UK are calling for, and the direction the Tories seem to be moving in. And let's not forget that the Tories, whilst being on the political right in the UK, would not be considered particularly right wing in the US, either socially or economically.

At the same time, I don't like to think of myself as being aligned with red state voters on this, even though it appears that I am, because I suspect that many of them take this position for different reasons, and are also likely to oppose things such as gay rights and access to abortion. But maybe I am wrong about that.

It's also why I feel conflicted about Riley Gaines, who is doing a great job of raising awareness of the impact of gender ideology on women's sport. But she's so unapologetically conservative, I think it's too easy for liberal women to dismiss her as a bigot rather than listen to what she is actually saying.

I listened to a fascinating podcast interview recently, where the interviewee gave examples of survey questions and responses to a cross section of democrat and republican voters. The questions covered race, gender, gender identity, and economics.
The survey questions were specifically designed to ask the questions in a completely unbiased and reasonable way, and the results showed a much closer gap between dems and reps than expected.
The survey results suggested that when presented with moderate options to choose from, most people preferred a moderate or realistic solution. In all areas of questioning.

I've been searching for it everywhere to no avail (I'm hoping someone else on here heard it and can source it!)

Anyway, on my searching travels I came across this US research org, with a detailed survey on US attitudes to gender identity from 2022.

Might be of interest here?

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/

The political parties in the USA have fundamentally realigned. The Democrats rather than being the party of the working-class now take their policy stances from what elite universities and their students want.

Trump has changed the Republicans forever. A lot of his policies: bringing back manufacturing jobs, no more foreign wars, would have been Democrat policies in previous generations as they benefit the working-class who lost the well paying manufacturing jobs and fight the wars.
The Republicans tried to get the typical pre-Trump candidate on the ticket for this coming election but Republicans didn't want them, as they are usually hand-picked by Wall Street.

There is such a huge social divide in the USA that the NY Times and most media had no understanding whatsoever of Trump's appeal. They just didn't recognize that his policies were similar to Bernie Sanders.

The working-class in the USA is not living in the same America as that of the upper middle class. The middle class or middle America has been hollowed out. Middle class in the USA doesn't mean what it means in the UK. It did mean the comfortable middle American, who could own a house, car and support a family. Basically the modest American Dream of security.

Rob Henderson's life experience and work is very enlightening in this regard. I would highly recommend his autobiography that was published this year "Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class".

That's interesting, thanks.

Someone close to me used to work in military intelligence. Their view was that Trump, whilst being undoubtedly a piece of shit, is actually good for the rest of the world from a security perspective. Other US presidents have typically been much keener to engage in traditional warfare against other countries, whereas Trump doesn't much care what happens outside the USA, but is considered unpredictable and volatile enough that the world's more unhinged countries prefer to keep a low profile rather than piss him off and risk him pressing the red button, which the Obamas and Clintons and Bidens of this world will never do.

This is interesting, but shows the diversity in political thought. FYI The source is biased in favor of Democrats so be aware of that with how they frame some things. NPR is National Public Radio, it should be neutral but is massively Pro-Trans so they are among one of the sources that can misunderstand or demonize anyone right of progressive. This is still interesting though.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/09/1053929419/feel-like-you-dont-fit-in-either-political-party-heres-why

I am definitely no fan of Trump, but I do understand why he is popular with certain groups, especially those described as the Populist Right in this breakdown. Significant are their thoughts on economics:

• highly critical of the U.S. economic system; a majority believes the "economic system in the country unfairly favors powerful interests, that businesses in this country make too much profit and that taxes on household income over $400,000 should be raised"

I think it’s sometimes easy for Europeans to not grasp this - as I said up thread you can be very well travelled in the USA without ever leaving the country. Which in some ways I think contributes to the misunderstandings I used to get. Because some Americans I met while living there had seen quite a lot of their country, and while there was a huge variety in geography and culture, wherever they went the currency was the US dollar and CNN/Fox was on the television. So there was an assumption that it would be the same when they came to England.

the currency thing in particular was mind boggling. I really had to work hard to convince a colleague that they needed to get some U.K. pounds and that they would not be able to use US dollars cash in the high street when they visited the U.K.. I had to introduce them to the concept of a travel bureau to exchange currency. They had seen films and tv shows where the US dollar was seen as desirable in developing countries/during wars and extrapolated it to modern day Europe. I finally got through to them when i asked what they thought would happen if I tried to pay for my groceries in U.K. pounds.

A massive difference is that when we get new legislation it affects most of the UK. In the US its very difficult for them to get new legislation passed at a federal level even if its beneficial or popular. They value individual rights over collective benefits.

Thanks for starting this thread OP - and huge thanks to contributing Americans. I've learned loads from posts here.

So have I!

Again, this is down to size of the nation and every one of 50 states being as big (or many times bigger) than a European country.

Every state has it's own legislature and people tend to understandably focus on their local state politics if they want something done.

In terms of size people need to imagine traveling for days non-stop and still be in the same country. I drove with friends from Washington D.C. to California many years ago and it has really helped me appreciate how truly vast this place is, and how much of it is empty, or seemingly so.

'The University of Please Yourself, California ' - the Rutles.

Just to revisit a link I posted earlier, I initially posted it just to demonstrate how many states had introduced laws protecting children; however this link is really for physicians to warn them where they could be sued, fined or potentially go to prison for medicating, operating on or abetting someone doing so of so-called Trans kids.

So as we all expected, as soon as the reality hits that a doctor or therapist could potentially go to court, lose their license and livelihood or even freedom, they take note.
It does seem that it may be court cases in the more liberal states that will tip the balance in favor of non medicalization.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/104425

I often end up posting this on threads with American contributers (NAAALT, obvs) or people whose thought is heavily influenced by American online content.

https://deadwildroses.com/2019/10/07/handy-venn-diagrams-the-radical-feminist-position-on-gender/

It is overwhelmingly clear that they only conceive of two of these circles. They seem entirely oblivious to the fact that women are essentially under the control of men in both the religious conservative and gender ideology circles.

Here's a link to an article about our National Public Radio. I used to be an avid listener and knew people of all political positions who also were. Maybe it will give some insight into why a woman who considers herself progressive might be so unwilling to entertain a different viewpoint.

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust

As a Gen Xer myself, I am of the opinion that there is something very specific about the education Gen X girls and women had in the UK in the 1980s, combined with the politics and social environment of the day that has compelled and enabled so many to lead the push back against Gender Ideology in the UK.

Personally, I remember assuming we had reached a point where we could express our personalities and do any job as women. It didn't occur to me that 30 years later we would be in a situation where the culture, including theorists at "progressive" universities would try and force women into stereotypes, or dismantle us entirely into parts that make babies and an outward appearance of perpetually sexy sirens for men's consumption, which other men would decide was what women "really" were and which they could become. So much technology, apps and places online where people are, especially young people, is built by and is maintained by young single men. The online world projects and protects their preoccupation with porn and gaming. It's created a new frame.
But Gen X women are still operating out of the old frame and can clearly see how this is so much a recent phenomenon and creation. We have also had kids, raised them to adulthood and are in, or approaching menopause and are very rooted in the reality of biology.