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.

Although I don't agree with every point you made, I want to offer sincere and serious thanks for this class-based analysis.

It's the first time in a long time I've seen such a thing, anywhere, on any issue.

Tangentially - a few years ago I tweeted a plea for the 'progressive' middle class to ask themselves whether they were keen on Self ID because they are far, far less likely to be on the sharp end of it, just as they are less affected by structural sex inequality generally. The intervening years have shown that all of us impacted in one way or another, simply by virtue of our sex, and the reinvigoration of patriarchy that effective self ID both reflects and enables - but it's still the case that the vast majority of those seriously impacted at a safeguarding level will be working class girls and women. We don't hear that enough.

@Universalfamily gets it. I lived in the US, moved from a blue state to a red state. Saying OP you are uncomfortable agreeing with some red state people is buying into divisive caricatures. The black working class in my university town were pro-Trump and anti-immigration. Same with the conservative Hispanic immigrants who'd made it. I've met white rednecks who had no problem with me being gay.
I am also a conservative Lesbian and loathe Trump and hate what Biden has done to women's rights. My best unvaxxed buddy is a gay man who's conservative too. My late Republican mother was going to vote for Bernie Sanders...

Thank you @Universalfamily for bringing facts and intelligent analysis to this thread.
I would encourage people to take many things they read on this thread with a pinch of salt however.

People might find today's New York Times article and the comments interesting, although they should have pressed Mermaids for their definition of "extremist"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/health/europe-transgender-youth-hormone-treatments.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jU0.Hamw.77L-b08eNWRS&smid=url-share

The comments are interesting.

Yes there's definitely a silent majority that finds this all ridiculous.

Are you American?

I get the impression that NYT readership is predominantly Democrat, is that correct?

Yes and yes the NY times also has a very strong pro-Democrat editorial stance and always officially endorses the democratic candidate for president.

However I agree that lines have been blurred in recent years between the members of the two parties like PPs have said. It makes sense because the "party lines" became so strict that some people will start to deviate, and if you think about it each party will have roughly 150 million people. There are also factors like people of color and the working class realizing that Democrats aren't doing much for them either, the whole insane antivax thing spreading, a small minority of evangelical Christians having outsize influence on abortion while most Republicans aren't hard-line against it, etc. etc.

In some ways it's not helpful to think of the US as the same kind of political body as the UK. Or at least at the same scale. It's a bit more like, the EU vs individual countries, where each state is a country. Or even as if each state is like Scotland or Wales, but the federal level has somewhat less power than Westminster in the UK.

There are quite inflexible rules in the US about what things fall under the rule of the states, and what falls under the federal government. A heck of a lot of things fall to the state. Gun laws for example, in some states they are very minimal, you can carry a handgun around if you want, but in California they are very strict, more like the laws in Canada.

Americans find the idea a lot of Brits have that the federal government should make every state do the same things, if they are worthwhile laws, rather similarly to how a Brit might react if someone asked why the EU didn't just get to impose laws on individual countries. It seems obviously ridiculous to them. If France and Germany want a similar law on something, they have to each pass a similar law.

The thing is, if liberal women are dismissing ideas and questions because someone like Riley Gains, or a Christian congregation, are "too conservative," all that really shows is how anti-intellectual and narrow minded their viewpoint is.

I am not sure that dressing it up for them is going to change anything. These are people who see themselves as sympathetic to the oppressed who are, at best, failing to ask themselves why the working classes don't seem to agree with their politics. Just as often, they believe it's because the working classes are sadly intellectually lacking or perhaps just bigoted.

Many people who wanted Sanders to win the Democrat ticket, when he was pushed out by Clinton, (who was seen as firmly supporting Wall Street, a war-hawk, and a person who disdained working people,) switched to Trump, because a lot of his policies were quite similar.

Trump has also consistently gained ground with Hispanic and black voters. Hispanic voters are now almost as likely to be Republican as Democrats. Black voters are still more likely to be Democrat, but Trump has doubled the number of his black supporters. And currently the largest group of black Republicans are in the under age 30 category.

I don't think the British media gives a very accurate sense of the political landscape in the US.

Hispanic voters are now almost as likely to be Republican as Democrats.
Honestly this makes sense, although lower income they are more likely to be socially conservative.

It is also worth noting that Biden while very progressive on trans issues is far too centrist for many Democrats, particularly younger, liberal city ones.
One of Biden's successes was building a broad centrist consensus. What comes after him is likely to be more not less progressive.

Hispanic voters are now almost as likely to be Republican as Democrats.

A Pew poll that came out yesterday said that 61% of Hispanic voters favor the Democrats while 35% favor the Republicans.

About six-in-ten Hispanic voters (61%) are Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, while 35% are Republicans or Republican leaners.

• The Democratic Party’s edge among Hispanic voters over the last two years is somewhat narrower than it was in years prior.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-race-ethnicity-and-education/

Has anyone raised the perennially broke and tight fisted NHS? In theory it dispenses on the basis of clinical need, not ability to pay. That has to be one of the biggest cultural and economic differences between UK and other anglophone countries.

If America has gone for gender, I believe Tranada is even worse. Why is that? Do the US and Canada actually have legal self ID? Or is it de facto?

Perhaps the unpopular experiment that never was in Scotland served as a warning to how things might go in this country and galvanised women.

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

Late to this thread, but as an American I'd like to point out that according to WDI USA's recent poll, this group is not only not representative of American "progressives," but deeply unrepresentative of American voters overall.

WDI USA asked a series of questions about specific situations relating to sex and gender. On every question, majorities of even the self-described "very liberal" cohort supported female-only spaces and opportunities, and caution when it comes to pediatric medicalization.

In addition, the self-described "very liberal" group accounted for just 7% of voters.

Overall, large majorities of voters including Democrats and liberals supported female-only spaces and services + caution on pediatric medicalization:

--- 4 in 5 respondents (including more than 2 out of three Democrats) defined women as "adult humans who are female"
---Just 10% of respondents thought a female high school basketball team should face opponents who were "either female or male, as long as they considered themselves girls."
---Just 9% of respondents thought a home health care agency should be able to assign either a female or female-identifying male aide to an elderly or disabled woman who requested a woman to help her with showering. And just 9 % of respondents thought that a patient who requests a woman nurse for her breast exam or Pap smear should be provided either a female or female-identifying male nurse.
---Only 11 percent of respondents thought a female airline passenger should be patted down by either a female or female-identifying male TSA officer.
---When asked what adults should do when female children say they are boys, “non-binary,” or something else other than girls, just 12 percent of respondents, including 17 percent of Democrats, thought they should seek immediate medical intervention for a 15-year old, and only 7 percent (including 11 percent of Democrats) supported immediate medical intervention for an 8-year old.

As I see it, the problem in the US is not that large numbers of people believe in gender souls.

It's that 1. voters are accustomed to politicians ignoring their positions completely and as a result have become increasingly disengaged from the democratic process 2. people are terrified (for all the reasons PP have outlined) that speaking out on the issue will lose them (and their entire families) their livelihoods, health care, and maybe even more and 3. media outlets here have worked almost in lockstep to reinforce the message that everyone else can see the Emperor's new clothes---if you don't, there must be something wrong with you.

I don’t think that being religious or not, is a matter of breeding as in literal DNA.

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

Good thing that fewer than 50 is too small a sample to conclude anything about America.

I really don't think the puritains had anything to do with all this.

I had a similar experience in a mum’s group of mostly US mums. I didn’t get chucked out though, I just knew I would be if I said anything. Many of them have “trans kids” and are the sort of virtue signalling “allies” that just love the opportunity for this sort of lime light so I’ve little doubt what was driving the contagion. As a lesbian I couldn’t just sit and watch without saying anything and didn’t want a pile on so I just left.

Another bump group I’m in has a similar over representation of “trans kids” but we’re a bit more of a close knit group so I’ve managed some small moments of push back, for example against the word “queer” as being a slur and unhelpful as a descriptor.

Both groups also had a lot of women discovering their own “queerness” which generally seems to mean some sort of non-binary or a/greysexual and mostly makes me eye roll.

I lived in the USA for 10 years and a lot of the possible sources of this have already been discussed up thread. You have to remember that anti-sodomy laws were only struck down in 2003 and I think at that point there were still 14 states with laws on their books. I think a lot of the “pro trans” is born of a desperate desire to be on the “right side of history” on this one and show that Americans aren’t all bigots. I think this is particularly true of those living in traditionally red states. It doesn’t help that many of the things we’d advocate for like an end to drag queen story hour and bathroom bills were brought to the fore by very religious republicans and while they might have talked about protecting women and children it was very much the same rhetoric people heard around LGB people so there’s an automatic uncritical thought that they were wrong on that so must be wrong on this.

I don't really know much about Bernie Sanders but it's interesting to say some of his supporters switched to Trump because that seems to be quite a common phenomenon. I've heard it called the horseshoe effect, where the two ends curve in on themselves and start getting closer.

There were some definite similarities between the Corbynite wing of the Labour Party and the Brexit Party in the UK, and in France I think there was some crossover between the far left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far right candidate Marine Le Pen. Although I think most people who voted for Mélenchon in the first round abstained in the second round, some will have switched to Le Pen and quite possibly more than switched to Macron.

It goes to show that the line between popular and populist isn't always very clear.

I totally agree that dismissing someone like Riley Gaines because of who she is shows up the intellectual paucity of your argument. Yes, maybe she's an out and proud conservative from a red state. Yes, maybe she has lots of views you disagree with. Yes, maybe she's rubbing shoulders with people you think are reprehensible. But ultimately, is she correct when she says it's unfair and discriminatory against female athletes to let Lia Thomas compete in women's events and use women's communal changing facilities? I believe that she is. And I believe that if you refuse to support Riley Gaines on this issue but you would support someone else whose views and persona you find more acceptable if they said exactly the same things, you need to take a long hard look at yourself.

And you know what, maybe Riley Gaines' political views are fixed in stone. Maybe if you sliced her in half she would say "Republican" all the way down like a stick of Brighton rock. Or maybe her political identity is more fluid. But one thing's for sure, if the only people listening to what she has to say and holding their hands out to her are the kind of people who want to ban abortion and recriminalise homosexuality, she and others are going to move closer to those people. Whereas if you listened to what she has to say and held your hands out to her, you might find more common ground than you think, and she and others might move closer to you.

I caught the tail end of antisocial on radio 4 last week. I didn’t catch it all, so may have got the wrong end of the stick, but it seemed to be about having conversations with people from opposing sides. There were what appeared to be Palestinian and Israeli people who met to discuss ways forward, others saying, you can have these meetings, but what do they really achieve?

Then there was one woman who appeared to be an American democrat. She was saying that having any conversation at all was completely impossible. It really struck me that you had Jewish people seemingly saying, yes, they would have dialogue with people from hamas, and then this American woman who felt that the gulf between the two political sides in the US was wider and less crossable!

I had a similar experience in a mum’s group of mostly US mums. I didn’t get chucked out though, I just knew I would be if I said anything. Many of them have “trans kids” and are the sort of virtue signalling “allies” that just love the opportunity for this sort of lime light so I’ve little doubt what was driving the contagion.

I'm in a very similar mums' group and by today they've just mostly decided that Europe on the whole is transphobic and Cass is biased and probably a right winger. Oh well..

Someone else will have to fight for America's children then. 😢

Out of interest, has the Cass Report gained any traction in north America? Either in social media or MSM?

There was a piece in the NYT. Jesse Singal's commented on TwiX. More widely, don't know.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/health/europe-transgender-youth-hormone-treatments.html?

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1778212785354395823

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1778438618526494848