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).

When NHS Fife vs the sane people Thread 19 started I thought 'this will be quite slow, and will give us a chance to mull over the events of the last fortnight'

it filled up remarkably fast

So Thread 20 started, and I though 'this will be slow, maybe the last thread for a while'

and then the Sunday evening update 'wtaf is going on are they mad?!'

Kinda sad I have to go out, who knows how many catch-up pages there'll be when I get back.

How did you do that?!

It looks like a ransom note!

The ability to change font style and size in posts is a closely-guarded secret. Only The Few know how to do it. I think they wear cloaks with hoods and have secret handshakes and worship a giant golden gerbil or something like that.

The ransom business wouldn't surprise me in the least, but don't be scared - I think they'd be easily bought off with cake or Tunnocks. Or both.

𝗜 𝘩𝐚𝘃𝙚 𝒃𝐞𝙚𝑛 𝙞𝙣𝗶𝐭𝒊𝗮𝘵𝐞𝐝

I would also like to be initiated! I can offer any cake or Tunnock that can be sent by email.

Check your messages

Thank you!

Definitely tl; maybe dr.

The guilt by association piece was interesting and really spoke to me. I've noticed on Twitter which I use less and fewer that there are people I used to admire who have moved toward too much of what the right hold close to their hearts and/or that I get shown tweets from someone who is followed/follows someone I follow and their tweets are offensive to me because they're bottom of the barrel rightwing populist. It's part of the reason I've backed away from the twitters, that and Musk who needs to stop impregnating women and fuck off into infinity and beyond. Or to Mars and crash.

I want people to understand that the right is coming from a place of hate. They hate trans people, they hate lesbians and gay men, they hate women. They love that the left is at war with itself although why they're so happy about it right now when the left is forever at war with itself as so beautifully parodied in The Life of Brian. I believe that most of the terfs I know - although there's an ex friend in real life who I think needs to have a word with herself but that's been a longterm thing with her - are not coming from a place of hate but a place of being an actual feminist who wants women to be space and to keep our hard fought for rights. It's such a huge difference and it needs to be repeated again and again.

I'll always be left wing in so many ways and I refuse to reject the left just because parts of it are rejecting me. I've always been aware that the left, and especially the willy wagging types you get on the left, have a tendency toward idiocy. Having dialetic materialism "explained" to me by someone with a willy and very little understanding told me from my teens that a lot of men will undermine you and pressume that you're not as bright as them just because. Now we see the idiocy and the misogyny in different ways which is - sort of laughably - detrimental to the very community they want to support - and let's be very clear that community is men who want to be women and rarely if ever women who want to be men. The whole furore with Emilia Perez has made that clear. The progressive and frankly emotionally and intellectually stunted left had decided that Karla Sofia Gascon must be a paragon of virtue because SHE's sO bRAvE! No one bothered to look at her social media history which any company with decent PR would know you should do before jumping into bed with someone. It turns out that Karla is a racist who didn't really mean it because she knows what it's like to be hated and what's our beef with Hitler anyway, it was only opinions. These progressives so stereotypes of their own making and not actual real people. I could argue that we terfs do similar with our AGP stuff but I'm aware that we see beyond that, that it's not the only thing we see and we are at least aware that however we identify, however malajusted and sometimes downright idiotic that might be, we are all people with multiple layers. It's possible to be a trans racist, just like - and I remember this from back in my days - it's possible to be in a wheelchair and be an absolute piece of shit. None of us are saints because of one part of our "identity".

Anyway, wanging on. Guilt by association and how I feel about people who are in similar beds to mine is something that's on my mind a lot. One last interesting thing. Nobody thinks that the right are getting into bed with the left and that's just another little bit of misogyny because we're mostly women who are terfing.

All sounds right to me, Mouse.

Nobody thinks that the right are getting into bed with the left and that's just another little bit of misogyny because we're mostly women who are terfing.

Good observation @MouseMinge.

For some reason one or two far right or religious right turning up anywhere makes an event far right. Even if 99% of the group are lefties.

There has definitely been a move towards right wing groups alongside terfism. I think when you are told you're a fascist repeatedly you worry less about having unacceptable opinions. And the left are still dragging their feet, so allowing Trump (ffs) to seem sane on this point.

The most leftie religious person immediately gets described as 'far right' once the clueless dimwits find out.

One of the most startling things I've learned from all this is how enthusiastically a lot of these people don't just forced-team others, they leap into the embrace of whatever cause they think looks attractive and switch their brains off with the kind of sigh of relief other people might feel when they take off tight shoes.

Thinking is hard work, so much easier to let other people do it for them.

For some reason one or two far right or religious right turning up anywhere makes an event far right. Even if 99% of the group are lefties.

But strangely enough, they can't see that even the possibility of a male human being able to self-ID into a women's space makes it a mixed-sex space.

Spot on, MouseMinge! Very well said, there are quite a few nebulous thoughts from inside my own mind expressed clearly in your post.

Which nearly puts me into DeanElderberry's category of

Thinking is hard work, so much easier to let other people do it for them..

only I did actually think the thoughts myself, I just let MouseMinge express them coherently for me😄

We all do that. I was remembering some of the people in the 'old place' Mouse and I once frequented. So dim they'd win prizes, a few of them.

A lot of them identified as smart, though.

Thinking, like many things, is out-sourced, or privatised nowadays. It's the modern way!

The shenanigans at the ET in Dundee and related threads in the last few weeks have got me wondering. It seems that there is a very deep institutional misogyny within the NHS that probably permeates all aspects of its work. Where I live [East Mids] we get almost daily news updates of the Ockenden inquiry into the Nottingham Hospitals maternity scandal which just gets ever bigger and more shocking. Of course this is one of many such scandals in recent years and I am wondering if there is a link between that institutionalised misogyny and the mind boggling awful services provided in too many hospitals. I am fairly new to these boards [6 months] so it is possible that there have previous threads, so please sign post if that is the case.

Difficult to know how much is misogyny and how much is incompetence. Sometimes wonder if anyone takes pride in their work these days - but a post on one of the threads was about experience with Sandie Peggie from a patients point of view and had a lot of praise for her.

Thinking is hard work, so much easier to let other people do it for them - is a phrase I'm storing to use with the "be kind" bunch.

@FarriersGirl I don't know is my unhelpful answer. I fear everyone is a bit distracted by Fife at the moment. Welcome, anyway.

I find the Mumsnet search facility unusable so I google my search with 'mumsnet' and it usually turns up previous threads. I don't think appalling treatment of women in health care is an NHS specific problem but there's evidence women's pain is given less consideration than men's.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/feminism/4593482-sexist-nhs-to-stop-ignoring-womens-pain

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4028737-The-NHS-is-run-by-misogynists-say-women-forced-to-give-birth-alone?flipped=1&page=1

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4107908-Doctors-just-talk-shit-about-women-s-health-don-t-they?flipped=1&page=1

Am I Being Unreasonable gets more traffic. https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5214317-to-ask-why-womens-healthcare-is-so-bad

If you look at the use of AI, you are not wrong.
It's a scary principle. First hoovering up all the thoughts of actual thinkers, and then spouting texts and "answers" that somehow sound right but are only hot air.

This seems off-topic, but it is another side of the same thing.

AI can be useful of course for pattern-spotting - as for medical diagnoses. But I worry a lot that everyone just refers to external material instead of thinking themselves. It's very important that people cannot start to say: The AI made me do it and outsorcing their thought processes.
(same as they are now claiming to never have heard of the problems of the GRA).

I agree. It's an extention of the problem of people driving into rivers because the sat nav told them to.

gah, we can't retract react buttons. I meant to thank @Lovelyview for the really helpful suggestion of how to search for Mumsnet stuff without using Mumsnet's lousy search function, and ended up 'agreeing' instead, when I'd never have thought of that solution.

So THANKS.