Countries that are truly liberal, safe, and not captured by gender ideology?

[HelenaRavenclaw]

I just listened to Ted Cruz grilling a New York judge to ordered a trans-identifying male serial rapist to be transferred to a women's prison. It seems like there's nowhere we can get the best of both worlds, a place where men are not allowed to legally identify as women and invade women's safe spaces, and where society is progressive and safe for women. The most "progressive" places like California, New York, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, etc. are captured by gender ideology. England fares slightly better than Scotland, but with Labour likely to be at the helm soon I have little hope for improvement in this regard.

Places that don't pander to gender ideology are unsafe in other respects -- the deep south of America has widespread gun ownership and racism, the middle east's treatment of women is appalling, and so on. Without sacrificing quality of life and healthcare safety standards, is there any "first-world" democratic country, or region of such a country, that is truly good for women?

What an oxymoron. I don’t know what it will take for the penny to drop with liberals, that liberalism leads to societal decay.

Indeed, and in "first world" countries where people don't need to worry as much about real problems like health, food, etc. , they have more time and money to spend on creating and upholding ideological labels and policies...all at the cost of women's safety and dignity.

I think you are looking for a post-liberal society. Which might not exist yet.

It’ll take a lot to get past this falsification and harmful ideology

I’d say we were taking steps but that’s likely lost now

It’ll take some time if it ever happens

Where would people pick to be first?

I ask from ignorance: are the Nordic countries (Finland, Iceland as well as Scandinavia) not better in this respect?

It seems like they all have gender self-ID in place, so a man can legally "become" a woman whenever he fancies, without any clinical diagnosis of dysphoria or hormone treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_self-identification#Nordic_countries

Sweden passed gender self-ID just last month and lowered the minimum age!
https://apnews.com/article/sweden-vote-legal-gender-law-minimum-age-9cfb3c6879ae03c3187f520eed308377

That’s a bit like asking for a libertarian low-tax capitalist society which also has strong restrictions on gun ownership and free universal healthcare. A complete oxymoron.

Support for transgender rights is past of the liberal worldview, no different from opposition to racism & homophobia. Liberals don’t pick & choose which (in their view) marginalised minority groups it’s ok to discriminate against. Unless it’s Jews, of course. Because they don’t count.

Or women - but of course they’re a majority!

Eurovision should give you a clue.

I worked in SE Asia (SK) in the 2000s and back then it was pretty conservative. Very safe though for women and kids and well developed.
I'd imagine Japan was similar.

I don't know how much it has changed now.

There was a lot of racism though and disability prejudice. I wouldn't go back now unless I knew that had changed.

Is that liberal in the modern american sense of the word?
Dictionary definition here:
adjective

1. willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas:

"they have liberal views on divorce"

1. relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise:

"a liberal democratic state"

Promoting e.g. individual rights doesn't mean gender ideology is somehow inevitable. The problem comes when some individuals "rights" are promoted at the expense of other peoples and when there is complete denial this is the case (e.g. the right of a man to be in a changing room with pre-teen girls versus the rights of those girls).

Its not "liberal democratic" ideas that are the problem per se. Its stupid people and people that don't understand the concept of competing rights.

As opposed to "those liberals"/"libs of tik-tok" in the sense of how American republicans would characterise everything they dislike about their opposition. What another poster referred to as "the liberal world view".

By 'truly liberal' you presumably mean 'socially liberal' which is exactly the group most likely to endorse gender ideology. Those who oppose gender ideology tend to be socially conservative (at least to some moderate degree).

And women. The only majority treated as a minority.

I agree with you and before gender legislation was brought in in many countries societies could be liberal and not undermined by a harmful ideology

We’ve taken a wrong turn, who will get past it?

Except for Iran which is far from liberal but OK with transgender (comparatively). Or South American countries which tend to be much more socially conservative but have embraced gender ideology to differing extents (even though there is still lots of genuine discrimination/violence at ground level). Or India. Or, closer to home, somewhere like Malta which has fairly illiberal policies when it comes to e.g. abortion but is super keen on trans rights.

I just don't think seeing the world through this very American prism is helpful. Of course, we have lots in common in America and its good to see where there are similarities (e.g. the eagerness of many left wing parties to pivot to identity style politics) but there are lots of ways in which the American political landscape does not = the UK or the world more generally.

@anothernamitynamenamechange Completely agree. I mean liberal as a mix of those two definitions, i.e. supporting freedom of speech, religion, same-sex marriage, abortion, etc. and not being racist / misogynistic. Essentially what US Republicans would call "those liberals", but without their support for gender ideology, kids drag shows, and explicit sexual content in children's books. (Not to say I agree with Republicans on everything else obviously... e.g. I disagree with their definition of "freedom" which includes gun ownership, which I suppose is statistically more of a threat in America than the "freedom" of men in women's toilets.)

@HelenaRavenclaw That's probably where I'm at too. America's a funny place really because they seem completely divided by a shared set of values. You an have someone talking about "freedom/individual liberty", "protecting children", "the other side banning books" "fighting totalitarianism" etc etc and its a complete toss up whether they are a hard core republican (US party) or a hard core liberal (US party).

Hello do you have a link to the ted Cruz judge thing please

We have to face the reality, that Terf Island is the best available option.

Yes women's rights are under attack, but we are the only country where there is enough support society wide that a fightback is happening, not from the right, but by a movement that unites left, centre and right. I genuinely think that long term the attempt to crush women's resistance in the UK is going to fail. It will take years to fight back, but we have an ever expanding network of people fighting for the rights of women and gay people .

Our side is getting stronger, despite setbacks. SEEN networks are being established in all branches of our society and are legally protected and are only going to grow and become more powerful.

Our Free Speech protection movement is gathering strength too.

Every day the sexist horrors of the gender movement are being more widely reported. People are not going to put up with it.

Obviously fighting against Labour is going to be difficult, but Scottish women already wrecked the SNP. Teaching Starmer a lesson is not going to be anymore difficult than taking on Sturgeon.

This election might not be decided on women's rights, but the election in 2028 will look very different.

I don't know why we are different, but I genuinely think it is something to do with deep embedded nature of our society and country. There was a reason that Mary Wollstonecraft came from the UK. There is a reason that we have Mumsnet. There is a reason Britannica has a trident.

For those who think we are going to be defeated, there is a key problem. We have BETTER LAWYERS. In a country based on hundreds of years of laws that matters.

We have to face the reality, that Terf Island is the best available option.

It seems so. I thought Sweden was having second thoughts, but it seems there, it's one step forward, and one step back.

I think we’re top but we’re about to have a GE

@fromorbit 👏

I think part of the answer has to be tempering idealism with pragmatism. I don't think the situation is hopeless.

The UK (or mainly the English??) have a historically longer and culturally more embedded sense of rights than any other group I can think of.

It makes sense to me that they'd be better able to handle the concepts of universal rights (including women!) and competing rights.

If you can hold both those thoughts in your mind at once, you're automatically a terf. Trans ideology requires erasing women as step one. And at least in the US, competing rights give people mental breakdowns. So complicated! That's why so many free speech absolutists and libertarians here.