Women's rights general conversations - Thread 9

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of Thread 8.

There is so much excellent information and so many active discussions on FWR that I wondered if it would be useful to have a thread to sort of "cross-fertilise" between them - airing little thoughts or vignettes that wouldn't themselves merit their own thread, to highlight other posts/threads of particular interest or to point to notable developments on fast-moving threads so that casual observers know where to look.

(For example, "the X thread has meandered onto a fascinating discussion of Y" or "Poster P's amazing analysis on thread Z might have relevance to the scenario in thread W" or "Has anybody noticed this recurring theme that keeps coming up??" or even "Random bloke asked me to smile while I was choosing onions in the supermarket, grr"- that sort of thing).

Y'now, just musing, but you'd think that menstruation alone (at best, inconvenient, often much worse) would be sufficient deterrent for men wanting to become women, let alone child-birth... ( I remember memes about "what if men gave birth?", and they chimed in nicely with this):

https://kottke.org/24/10/if-adam-picked-the-apple

and that's before we start on PCOS and all the other things I only dimly understand. But hey, supposing you could be a woman without having to do all that, wouldn't that be great eh?

You're so right, duc748! When a man says he feels like/identifies as/has always know that he is a woman, one word always springs into my mind: PERIODS!
When you think about it, having periods for a huge chunk of your life is an extraordinary experience - the pain, the inconvenience, the inevitability - there's nothing like it, and if you have never experienced it, you haven't a clue what being a woman is like...
Sorry I got carried away there, I should acknowledge women with secondary amenorrhea.

I also think that regularly having period pain alters a woman's attitude to/tolerance of pain, compared to men. I have chronic pain, and have also had some very painful one-off medical conditions, and I find I've been measuring acute pain levels against period pain - is it as bad as the worst period pain I ever had? if not, it's not so bad then is it? I've survived worse!
But a man experiencing the same level of acute pain would have no such comparator.
Maybe that's what makes women more resilient.

Love the poem, thanks duc748!

Although, we unfortunately know that at least some males-with-lady-gender are very turned on by the thought of having periods/period pain/PMS.

I didn't know😱but I should've guessed -ultimately everything, every experience, every fact, every word, associated with biological women is under threat of appropriation and fetishization.

A consequence of this is that being moderate, tolerant, 'kind' is opening the door to more and more appropriation of women's rights and experiences. It's becoming increasingly obvious that just as there is no middle ground between being male and being female, there is no middle ground in defending biological women's rights.

Dead right, Marie.

This is painful. You can feel thr squeeze of his brain tying itself in knots. https://x.com/WTSmith17/status/1853103155698868555?

I'd say "fucking hell" but that Righteous man is just the fast-speaking audio version of all the Righteous people and their whataboutery/Gish-galloping/goalpost-shifting/overcomplimacated/performativistic/word-salady/wriggly/slimy/mendacious/chickenshit-cowardly/can't-even-admit-to-themselves-what-they're-really-saying/high-on-their-own-Righteous-farts posts that I've had the misfortune to tarnish my eyeballs with over the years (particularly reminiscent of the folks of the old place).

I can't watch it. The YouTube algorithm has been throwing it at me, and I'm just 'nope'. I think I'd find it too enraging.

Basically his whole thing was 'there is no risk and if there is a risk then women can choose to stay home'. Which is pretty much all their whole thing.

I do wish men would ask other men why is it that men feel at risk from other men in the men's changing rooms and what they can do about it rather than always go down this route but that never seems to happen.

It's very much what you'd imagine, apart perhaps from the direct, up-front admission of not caring. Usually they are little more circumspect about announcing that women are nothing to them.

But the constant attempts to drag the conversation from changing rooms to the less challenging 'bathrooms', the denial of any problems, the refusal to see the female point of view, and the long pauses as the brain cranks round to the next approved thought are all quite predictable.

The interviewer's reminder that you're not allowed to take your pants off and waggle.your penis about in a playground 'You do know that, don't you?' was quite amusing.

I was in the supermarket the other day. At the entrance there was a table where the British Legion were selling a range of poppy merchandise. They had a little box containing the fugly pins with the mash-up of the poppy and the progress flag. Someone, not me, had taken the time to turn them all face down.

That says a great deal, cake. Was a BL person at the table?

Sorry, who is it being interviewed in that clip, are we supposed to know?

There were several, all older. I didn't have any cash on me so I just coasted past but I will go back to donate and may ask them about it. I'm struggling to thing of a way to broach the subject that doesn't start 'What the f...?'

I'm actually quite salty about these and that the BL is a Stonewall champion. That veterans are over represented in prisons and the homeless, but they're spaffing donations on this! Although there does seem to be a military man -> tw thing too. Perhaps that's it? Or they're 'being kind' and think Stonewall still supports gay people?

I have seen a lots of loud TRA voices being men who went to private schools with cadet corps. Something about exposure to that military-driven commitment to a 'men and officers' mindset and the status obsession that goes with it seems to encourage a very odd and unhealthy attitude to masculinity and to women.

An anonymous Democrat voter, I think. It may be explained in part one but that seems to be more about US politics so I didn't watch.

The interviewer has done some work with Boghossian so is clearly into that type of 'examine the logic' school of thinking. But from a quick scroll of other videos also seems to be a Trump supporter, showing that clear thinking isn't always transferable. (Or at least that few people do the work of applying it across the board.)

Or that some people take "my enemy's enemy is my friend" way, WAY too literally.

If the interviewer's other political leanings are the cause of his miraculous clear thinking on this specific issue, that merely demonstrates the need for people to let go of their fucking Bundles of Correct Beliefs.

Or maybe that 'bundles of belief' is a fucking stupid concept anyway, and each topic/situation should be judged on its merits.

Exactly!!

🎯
It's just a way of keeping people in line and preventing them from asking questions.

It's very hard to persuade people that being politically on the left does not mean abandoning sex realism and thinking male bodies don't belong in spaces where unconsenting females are vulnerable.

Obviously I disagree with the premise of the article, and think taking a sarcastic swipe at David Tennant is no bad thing.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/harry-potter-jk-rowling-david-tennant-b2641426.html

But I found one paragraph particularly interesting:

"Tennant was hitting back at Badenoch’s views on LGBTQ+ rights; the now Tory leader previously fronted the party's election pledge to make biological sex a protected characteristic in the Equality Act. Currently, gender reassignment is a protected characteristic."

Should we tell them?

It's an issue I have and a reason I've been backing away from Twitter because my enemy's enemy is rarely my friend. I don't know much about the interviewer apart from the Trump thing and a lovely tweet from him where his tongue is brown from Musk's arsehole.

I notice with these people that our thoughts are similar but often not the same. Some of these people - I'm not suggesting the interviewer because I simply don't know - come from a place akin to hatred and definitely deep intolerance and I refuse to go there with them. I seriously doubt that many of them have any real regard for women/women's rights but the pretence that they do can gain them some strange allies/bed fellows. The minute it becomes clear that someone is pretty far to the right I seriously question what they want from all of this.

The interviewer is a fan of Musk who leans toward eugenics with his desire to impregnate as many women as possible with his allegedly genius grade sperm. His stance on worker's rights is abysmal and the Tesla truck is an abomination. Back to seriously, he now supports Trump along with our interviewer. Trump who helped, deliberately, to destroy women's right to choose. We knew of one woman who had died as a direct result of this and last week learned of another. Doctors too scared to treat women for fear that they will go to prison for their actions. These will not be the only women and there will be many more. Trump is a known, and as of last year or this year, shown in court to be, a sexually abusive man. You cannot support a person like him and give a shit about the human rights let alone the rights of women.

I feel similarly to soi-disant right wing allies on this side of the pond. I despise many of these people for their lack of humanity. They hope that we'll be lured over to the dark side because of our "agreements" and I have seen women I admired wander along a path that I find close to unconscionable.

It's hard, so hard to not lose one's moral compass in all of this.

Excellent post @MouseMinge and I very much agree.