Is it too early for a post mortem?

[Appalonia]

So, now that America has categorically rejected transgender ideology, which I do think will affect the rest of the world, is now the time to ascertain HOW did so many institutions, including the Democratic and Labour Parties get so completely bamboozled by this ideology? Which is crazy, not based in material reality, disadvantages half of the population, has physically damaged thousands of young people, and that they didn't think that people would see through it?

I know a lot of people dislike Matt Walsh, but his documentary, What is a Woman, was jaw dropping! We must NEVER let this dangerous idiocy happen again ( and yes I know it's not over...)

Mate all her fellow posters agree with her. Perhaps try Reddit or one of the other male forums if you want people to agree that males can warp reality to their liking.

Oh for god's sake. This is such a tenuous reach. Please can you stop playing the oppositional malicious interpretation game?

I live and work closely with other women all day long and the notion that finding the grim trans woman over there to be intolerably icky is a universal experience amongst Adult Human Females (tm) is not only patently and demonstrably ridiculous, but it also obliterates any hope of having a serious, sober and respectful discussion about the situations where access clashes can arise and which require careful and nuanced consideration.

You are demonstrating the demarcation line between any pretence of 'reasonable concerns' and outright intolerance and I'm increasingly finding myself thinking that it's an active, strategic choice to do so; I have seen no evidence to indicate you are engaging with this as anything other than some kind of vicious point-scoring exercise with a triumphant fanfare and scoresheet at the end. What does your victory lap look like?

I have nothing to 'go back' to - I've never used male facilities as an adult and I'm in my fourties now. I am engaging with this thread because even I am deathly afraid of what the future brings and I'm one of the lucky ones whose transition is an event long, long in the past and who is blessed with invisibility in daily life.

The house of commons has just voted in favour of legalising assisted dying, ostensibly from a position of compassion. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that our NHS - which is currently doing seemingly everything it can to deny trans people access to treatment, deprive them of dignity and drive them to the edge of despair - has any reason not to pursue a Canada-style route of referring desperate people for state-sanctioned termination as a cost-effective alternative to expensive treatment that they'll have to wait decades to access.

If that doesn't scare you - or even give you the briefest pause for thought - then I invite you to read up on your history and consider what that legislation is likely to become under a future hard-right Reform-flavoured Britain egged on by Trump and Musk from across the Atlantic and facing increasing economic pressure and social polarisation.

I reiterate; what does your victory lap look like when you find yourself, as a culture, trying to decide how best to deal with people who your figureheads are already describing as a 'huge problem for a sane society'?

Quoting my own post because I forgot to say that I think cases like these are going to make things politically and socially difficult for the Democratic Party in the States in 2025 and going forward.

The public consensus is changing, particularly with regards to children’s health, and when, because of court cases such as this, more information becomes public regarding the lack of evidence, the lack of knowledge and the prevalence of ideology in this area of medicine I think the politicians who supported these procedures will have to deal with a lot of anger from a public who feel they were not told the truth.

And in the past, some Republicans haven’t seen properly investigating/objecting to these medical procedures as the priority they should have but the Democrats are the party that are most strongly associated with gender identity ideology and so I think they will suffer the most blowback.

It is wonderfully eye opening when readers see this kind of post. Operation: Let them speak does great work.

So, because a male person has been using female single sex spaces for decades, apparently no one who knows the person wonders about it. I mean, they probably know very well about how entitled the person feels so no, I doubt they would question it.

And apparently, we are again back to the ‘it is so rare that female people correctly sex me’ claims.

But this below is outstanding on so many levels:

“The exception is in the event that there is someone present who I know to harbour negative attitudes, feelings, or actions towards transgender people or transness in general because, much like sharing a space with anyone who holds negative views about any other aspect of my personhood, it turns what should be a safe refuge into something deeply unpleasant and frightening.”

Imagine that. Imagine a person who turned what should be a safe refuge into something deeply unpleasant and frightening! Just like a male person using the female single sex space because that male person wants to despite knowing fully that their presence is likely to distress the female people using it !

And this poster declared only pages ago that they were not hyperbolic and were not emotionally manipulative.

That you have never used a male toilet as an adult is irrelevant. That some people choose to accept your behaviour is irrelevant.

You are now an adult and you now understand that your presence as a male person causes some users of the spaces you insist on using distress. You do this with full knowledge that you have taken liberties that you should never have taken.

The spaces for male people are already there for you to use. Plus you can use gender neutral provisions.

Using female toilets for decades really isn’t the defence you obviously believe it is. It is irrelevant how long you have used the spaces, they were never there for your use, you just accessed them regardless of what female people in general felt.

Can you please post like a normal human being, and not an AI bot or someone who has swallowed a dictionary? There is no need for all this "oppositional", "obliterates any hope of having a serious, sober and respectful discussion about the situations where access clashes can arise and which require careful and nuanced consideration." wording. Either you write like this because you think it makes you sound smart, or you are genuinely an AI bot. I doubt you talk like this in real life.

Ironically you can't see how annoyingly smug and antagonistic you sound. Saying you have always used female only spaces and you will continue to do so, to myself, a rape survivor, and other women on here is not only hurtful it shows a lack of respect and malicious intent to upset us on here. You were basically BRAGGING that you will continue to violate women and our spaces - you genuinely didn't expect me to react to that? Your posts are very antagonistic, very belligerent, nasty and stubborn. Accusing women of being anti-trans. Saying you WILL use female only spaces, no matter how much it upsets us, is VICIOUS. It smacks of a deliberate intent to personally hurt me and other readers, to be vindictive and cruel. Its like you are rubbing it in my and our face, and doing a victory dance on us.

I can promise you, you are NOT invisible as a male. And just because you have violated female on spaces from adulthood does not, as I said, justify it. You are not listening to us. I don't care what you use to justify your actions, you are wrong. You are hurting myself and other women. And if you had any human decency at all, you would stop.

You are still trying to minimise the affect of your violating our boundaries by comparing it to everything else. Assisted dying. Trump. I am surprised you haven't mentioned climate change yet. You really don't get it, do you? If you were a woman, you would understand how we feel. That you compare your hurting myself and others and violating us and our rights isn't going to be wiped away by mentioning Trump, climate change, assisted dying, Palestine, or the famine in Africa. You are violating female only safe spaces. You are vindictive, cruel and abhorrent in your behaviour and attitude. And you genuinely don't give a fuck, do you? I actually think it makes you feel happy to know that you are upsetting and hurting us. That you haven't answered what sacrifices you've made (none) or responded to the point about you clocking mens discomfort but not womens proves that you do not even see women as human.

Added to that, you whingeing that the NHS is removing puberty blockers that harm the growing bodies of children shows you have no care for evidence-based medicine. Even the health of growing bodies matters not a jot to you. The only thing that matters to you is ideology, and getting off over victimising and violating women.

“The exception is in the event that there is someone present who I know to harbour negative attitudes, feelings, or actions towards transgender people or transness in general because, much like sharing a space with anyone who holds negative views about any other aspect of my personhood, it turns what should be a safe refuge into something deeply unpleasant and frightening.”

It is really distressing for some male people when the support human class, ie female people, malfunction.

I’m watching Brianna Wu have exactly the same meltdown and using exactly the same arguments on TwiX.

And, inexplicably, like so many trans identifying males, Wu thinks no-one can tell in real life that Wu is male. Wu seems to labour under the misapprehension that the heavily filtered images posted online reflect both a realistic representation of what Brianna Wu looks like and what the rest of the world would see when looking at Brianna Wu.

I don’t know how someone can convince themselves of something so unrealistic, and so unreasonable, so completely. And then to further argue that their access to female spaces should be on the basis of 'looking like a woman’, when that’s demonstrably not the case, is also baffling. Sex is what matters, not physical appearance, but Wu refuses to accept that.

I'm sorry that you find trans people to be an invasive and uncomfortable phenomenon to have to deal with in today's world. I get it. There are some horrible people out there, some of them are trans, and the ones who are tend to be very memorable and cannot help but be perceived as ambassadors. I'm not blind to this - honestly, I'm really not and I dislike how it feels like I don't get to own my own experiences of this.

I've had a deeply unpleasant experience with another trans person myself within the last few years; I once spent a day trapped next to some creep at a concert I had desperately wanted to attend and foolishly accepted a ticket for, then found myself stuck hundreds of miles from home and expected to crash at her house that night. She spent the entire time trying to 'accidentally' make inappropriate contact and get me to accept a drink, kept asking me to go back to hers and then trying to unsubtly grope me on the way back to the station once I'd decided to bail until I got out my phone and announced I was calling the police.

Honestly, I've never come so close in all my life to becoming a self-loathing self-defeating hollow caricature as during that miserable, tearful train ride home. I can see how even trans people become radicalised and seduced down a spiral of hate.

It messed me up for months. It's been constant - and often much, much worse - horror from men all my life (and, depressingly, the occasional non-trans woman with terrible boundaries and an inability to understand no when drunk) and you kind of inure yourself to it after you lose count of the number of times you've been assaulted, but I'd foolishly allowed myself to hope that with all the shit we put up with already, other trans women might know better and hold themselves to higher standards.

Nope. The world just has some shitty, horrible predators in it and the majority - though not all - are at least partially like that due to male socialisation. It's really hard to break out of it, especially for people who have all sorts of other stuff going on, but I find it very hard to be sympathetic. I fucking hate that my own existence in society - and potentially future survival - is shackled to the actions of a small cluster of predatory chancers who are using the trail I blazed with a life of constant fear and suffering as a ticket to get away with atrocious things.

I am not those creatures; I have vanishingly little in common with them beyond some DNA and a few years of miserable conscious existence while society tried to hammer me into a shape that I never fit and had no interest in fitting.

I don't claim the entirety of every woman's experience but I'm not going to lie about the real, practical points of commonality. I'm not saying it to colonise or erase; to have a jolly good time doing a bit of oppression safari. I'm saying it because it happens to us too and it's fucking grim and it doesn't matter one iota how metaphysically neat and ideologically pure the person it happens to is. It doesn't matter how many times you dismiss what I say; claim that my experiences aren't real; claim that I secretly enjoy it or find it validating or whatever argument it is we're using today.

I don't have all the answers, but I do know that every time I hear a demand for trans women to recuse themselves from spaces that supposedly exist to protect women I want to scream.

I don't have all the answers, but I do know that every time I hear a demand for trans women to recuse themselves from spaces that supposedly exist to protect women I want to scream.

That’s because you’re not used to people pricking the bubble of your reality. When it’s framed as

every time I hear a demand for males to recuse themselves from spaces that supposedly exist to protect women I want to scream.

it shows how entitled you are.

trans women to recuse themselves from spaces that supposedly exist to protect women

But transwomen are not women, they are men. They are male. These spaces exist to protect actual women. You are harming women by entering those spaces. I want to scream whenever a male seems to think he has the right to enter a space that was never designed for him. You are not listening to us. Those spaces you enter are designed to protect us from males like yourself. How can they be a space of protection for women when you are in there? You are not being asked to 'recuse' yourself, because that is a false premise. You are being asked to stay out of a space you have no business being in. You are not a woman, you not a female. Therefore you never had the right to enter that space in the first place, in order to 'recuse' yourself.

So in your what, 50s, you got creeped on by a man.

I think the first time I experienced that was around age 12.

Where would a girl go to escape and to try and get help? Possibly a female only space. Which is now inhabited by men pretending to be women.

When I was in my late teens and 20s, we would regularly go into the ladies to escape creepy men in bars and clubs.

I mean, fucking hell. Imagine going into a woman only space to try and get some help and finding a man in there.

This absolutely works for me, and I suspect many women on this board

Stop calling yourself a woman (no reason why you can’t call yourself a transwoman). Don’t use stuff reserved for women. I would happily campaign for third spaces, rights and services which are actually designed to meet your needs rather than hollowing out ours, including your rights to evidenced healthcare.

Be who you are, don’t pretend to be something you’re not. You don’t know that you ‘feel like a woman’. I am a woman and I only know how it feels to be me. I don’t presume to know how other women feel. I recognise what you feel is real, but at the moment it’s mislabelled, and that’s the problem.

Yeah? Nah! The issue is that you are a male person. The issue is not that you are ‘trans’. It is that you are a male person and are just like all other male people in that you are not female in any way.

However, that sounds very frightening and I am sorry that you had to experience that situation.

“I don't have all the answers, but I do know that every time I hear a demand for trans women to recuse themselves from spaces that supposedly exist to protect women I want to scream.”

The spaces are there to protect WOMEN. Not male people who believe they are female people.

Now this is where you have again resorted to emotional manipulation and used the false description of making a ‘trans woman’ into any kind of ‘woman’. Because if you rewrote this sentence to be accurate and to reflect material reality it would read like this:

“I don't have all the answers, but I do know that every time I hear a demand for male people to recuse themselves from spaces that supposedly exist to protect women I want to scream.”

See, that sentence would mean so many less people will support it.

Now, how about all that effort groups have spent force access to female spaces now gets diverted to create third spaces for your safety. Third spaces that are accessible to any person. We have been told that those cubicles are perfectly safe and we should stop campaigning to have our own spaces being converted into them, and stop campaigning that they should be in addition to our own provisions.

Or you going to now tell us that you will refuse to use those specially set up spaces because you don’t want to be in them? Because predatory male people who have trans identifies as per your recent experience will also use them?

Because to that I will say firstly, that remains an issue that female people should not have to solve and the reality is that your groups should have dealt with the issue appropriately first. And secondly, female people are not your human shields. We are not a service that provides certain groups of male people with security and safety.

You keep telling us you are a respected ‘elder’ in your community. How about you start using your position for starting up that campaign for appropriate safe spaces while also campaigning to make all male single sex spaces welcoming to all male people?

Nah. That’s right. That is not the true focus. All of that is sparple.

It seems the only reason remains ‘I will use female single sex spaces, fully knowing that my presence is likely to cause harm and distress to female people, because I want to’.

It always comes back to that. Pure male entitlement.

Ah! I hadn’t read on! You nailed it notbad.

”I am not those creatures”

This is just another emotionally manipulative statement, whether it was intended to be or not. This is a pleading for special treatment.

History has taught society that we should never exempt a special sub group of male people from robust safeguarding processes. And so, for the sake of judging which special male people should or shouldn’t enter female single sex spaces, the answer is no male people beyond about 8 years old should be using the space.

I am not those creatures is a plea to allow a special sub group of a special sub group to bypass safeguarding protocols. The answer is ‘no’.

“I don't claim the entirety of every woman's experience but I'm not going to lie about the real, practical points of commonality.”

There is only the same points of commonality shared by you and female people as any other male person. Just because you have used the female single sex spaces for decades and labelled yourself using our words, doesn’t give you any more commonality than what female people share with other male people.

It really doesn’t.

“I fucking hate that my own existence in society - and potentially future survival - is shackled to the actions of a small cluster of predatory chancers who are using the trail I blazed with a life of constant fear and suffering as a ticket to get away with atrocious things.”

Gosh… the hypocrisy. I won’t say ‘you are nearly getting it’, because we have been down this path too many times. We know you understand that this is rank hypocrisy.

@HelleofaboreYou seem desperate to hold onto an axiomatic nuance-free model of reality that treats men and women as if they are different species and rides roughshod over any hint of compassion. Nor does it acknowledge the experiential aspect of what we're discussing.

Reality isn't that simple; you seem intelligent enough to know it isn't that simple. I can't tell if it's just intentional intellectual laziness or is demonstrative of a deeper and more fundamental issue with how you conceptualise this entire subject, but it seems to lie at the core of your hostility.

I don't believe in original sin I'm afraid.

More hyperbole and pseudo psychology.

What a load of waffle. I don’t have or need a badge declaring my sex, it’s in my very DNA.
Completely immutable.

As do you…

You must be some kind of saint! I'm not completely unsympathetic to Butterfly, but the irony overload in that post just made me laugh.

I am not desperate to hold onto a ‘model’ of reality. I am however someone who believes in reality and that someone’s philosophical theories don’t change reality materially.

This is important for several reasons.

Just one is the material reality is that male people are the perpetrators of 96-98% or higher is sex related crimes consistently across time and many countries.

Just as importantly, a human does not change sex. No matter how desperately someone wants to change sex, no matter how many linguistic fuckwittery tactics or again, philosophical theories, are used, sex is abiding.

Just as importantly, female people need spaces segregated from all male people over about 8 years old.

It is just more hyperbole and emotive to try to position this as treating male people as if they are ‘different species’. Not different species. Simply different sexes.

What compassion needs to obfuscate the reality of people’s sexed bodies?

Oh… right. The compassion YOU demand and expect yet cannot actively give to the people your own actions harm.

I don’t think anyone reading your posts is left in doubt that your talk of compassion is only about the compassion you want and never about you giving any. That is why you cannot answer the questions about what sacrifices you have made.

“Nor does it acknowledge the experiential aspect of what we're discussing.”

What experiential aspect? Of you being a male who claims to be a woman? Sure, you certainly are a male who claims to be a woman. It doesn’t make you a woman though.

You don’t have any experience of being a female person whether that is as a ‘woman’ or a ‘girl’. Yet you have claimed both and that can only ever be a falsehood.

Hostility eh? Stating that you are male and that you use cognitive distortions to prop up your very weak statements is not hostile. That is just more cognitive distortion. It is me disagreeing with you though. And that isn’t hostility either.

If you don’t want posters to interact with your posts, I think you have the wrong idea as to how a public discussion forum works.

Whenever i hear that women are now self-excluding (from toilets, gyms, sex-abuse survivor groups etc etc)

I want to scream. I want Butters to wake the fuck up and see that it's not a tiny number of mentally not-entirely-healthy people being exiled from public life: It is a lot of women.

Women, by the way (predominently afaik women from cultures that like to oppress women anyway, with whom outreach groups have worked FOR YEARS to allow the women to attend, say, OB/GYN appointments, get medical care, mother and baby groups etc etc) are now seeing those women, whose outside the home lives were precarious and based on the whim of some male relative or other, are now hugely restricted.

The posts over this last section of this thread are only important in that they have been a live demonstration of the rhetorical devices and the tactics used by male people who have decided that female people should accept that male person’s version of reality as being universal.

And that is what is happening.

Because if any male uses a female sexed based provision, they have demanded that all people requiring that provision comply with that male person’s philosophical belief. It does not just impact the belief relating to that individual, it changes forcibly the universal belief about the group of people who need that sex based provision.

It is not hostile, or hateful, or incompassionate to point this out despite the overblown emoting that those male people then indulge in.

Because remember, the compassion is one directional when any male person is accepted a being a female person. It is only going towards the male person.

When the compassion should have always been towards the female people needing and using those provisions. If a male person needs compassion, it shouldn’t and should never have come at the expense of those female people. That is the underlying misogyny of those decisions made by those male people, whether they intended to be misogynistic or not.

Hilariously, this is mumsnet. Full to the brim of people who deal with these emotionally manipulative and emotionally laden antics every day.