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...)

How long have posters on here been actively campaigning to repeal the GRA which was the first time in my life I ever enjoyed partial legal protection against discrimination for my transness?

How long have they been campaigning to remove the protections and rights to access same sex facilities for trans people in the Equality Act by falsely claiming it was always wrong and never intended to protect trans people from discrimination?

How long have they been actively campaigning to remove access to gender affirming care for under-16's, then under 18's, then under 21's or even under 25's?

How long have they been harassing trans women online and in person, doxxing them and trying to drive them out of public life?

How long have they been attacking charities that dared to publicly support and lobby for trans people?

How long have they been crowdfunding vexatious legal cases intended to sap resources from a marginalised minority group who are still underemployed, underpaid and subject to crushing expenses because the NHS long ago decided that driving them to suicide on waiting lists was more cost effective and ethical?

I see the tantrum has escalated to grandiose, even delusional demands that women insisting on our own language, identity, sports, right to privacy and expectating that children will not be gaslit with the born in the wrong body nonsense must behave "compassionately and carefully on a respectful, case by case basis that takes into account the practical realities of all those involved within each particular context". 😂😂

Policing women and women's lives never ends does it.

Much bombast. So bullshit.

You have access to same sex spaces. The ones that match your sex.

How long have women been pushing back against men in their spaces? For as long as men have been invading them.

If you want 'acceptance' go lecture men about accepting other men in their spaces who don't fit male stereotypes.

We'd love to never have to fight this fight against reality. So go crack on and educate the blokes to widen their acceptance.

"I do not want to lose my protections against abusers like Karen White and creepy toilet masturbating edgelords any more than anyone else here does. This issue, regardless of the number of times you say it does not, affects many different types of people who are subject to misogyny in society."

Oh... so we are talking about toilet provisions as being those 'protections' that you are losing?

Good to have that cleared up.

I have noticed in discussions that those saying it is a rights or 'protection' issue don’t like to acknowledge that it about the additional privileges (often described as rights) that the extreme transgender rights activists want. Because equal rights is what they already have.

What they want is additional rights or perhaps 'privilege' is a better way to describe it.

They want to be able to enforce or encourage other people to comply with their philosophical belief. Such as in the way they wish people to use language around them. Such as not using 'male people' for male people.

They want to receive additional privileges not available to all male people to access spaces and opportunities set aside for the sex they are not. For instance, a male person demanding to be placed in a female prison has the right to be placed in a male prison and female prison if they want to (and are not rapists in the UK).

A male demanding to be treated as a female person wants to play sports in a sports category that they should not be playing in. They are not female athletes. So again, they want to have access to the male and the female sports categories.

Or simply they want to ensure that their sub-group of male people never are excluded from female single sex spaces, even when legally organisations are allowed to do this.

Don't forget that there are the gender fluid male people who demand to be female one day and male the next.

And the only commonality between people with transgender identities is philosophical belief. No medical condition needed.

What other philosophical belief gets additional privileges that no one else in the population gets?

And yet, they are being framed in such a way that people would read the posts and think they are 'rights'. That they are 'protections'. No, they are not. And toilet access has been written into the EA2010 as being able to be subject to 'exceptions'. Meaning that it is an additional privilege so to speak.

Spot on. and sadly I remember having this same discussion a couple of times about this.

Butterfly, how can you possibly agree that sex matters more than gender in some cases, and then say in any seriousness, "How long have they been campaigning to remove the protections and rights to access same sex facilities for trans people?"

You are using the opposite sex facilities. That's the whole problem. You need a different solution to it.

because the NHS long ago decided that driving them to suicide on waiting lists was more cost effective and ethical?

Did it now.

Let's face it. When some male people read that they should be excluded from female single sex toilets they react in a predictable catastrophising way. That all that is left to them is the male toilets. There is absolutely not comprehension that they can and should always have been campaigning for third spaces and other equitable solutions.

It also never seemed to once occur to them to campaign to make male single sex toilets safer. That would not have just benefitted them, but all vulnerable male people. There would have been and would likely be huge support for this type of campaign.

No. Instead the catastrophising reaches cacophony proportions that they might lose what was in reality never 'theirs' in the first place. It never seems to occur to them that they have always been in the 'wrong' on this issue.

"Continuing to weaponise it as an authenticity contest is only serving to ensure that 'fuck it, let's just not bother' is the only likely outcome. Whichever way that eventually lands, it is a gift for the far right."

Ah yes... there it is again. STFU WIMS you are enabling the far night!

Gosh... okay then....

Yes. It's basically saying "look, since you are fucked either way anyway can you not just shut up, take it and give the rest of us a chance?"

Men do not even place in the authenticity contest.

Fucking hell, Butterfly, did you really just invoke Karen White?

People like YOU are the REASON women no longer have any protection against people like Karen White.

Because people like you demanded access to women's single sex spaces and because of that we are no longer able to keep people like Karen White out of them.

There is no way of writing or enforcing a law that allows you into women's changing rooms and keeps Karen White out of them.

You never had any protection against people like Karen White. We did, and now thanks to trans activists, we don't.

This should not be difficult or contentious, but in practice getting it right is really fucking hard when you have people quite rightly desperately afraid of letting Karen Whites across the line on one side, and people who have been waiting the best part of a decade to start treatment that they're still going to be monstered for pursuing on the other.

easy one: the person you should be aming your vitriolic ire at is Karen White and those of his ilk. They have ruined EVERYTHING for "genuine" trans people. Not us.

Yes, I know a trans person in their early 40s whose mother said they got all the answers they needed for the psych evaluation off the internet. That would have been more than 20 years ago now.

What was it? Sacrifice and compassion? And do I recall humanity mentioned as well?

That is apparently what we women will achieve by allowing a special case by case, specially selected group of male people into female single sex spaces. All as long as the specially selected group includes particular people.

And of course, all the abusive posting over the past 24 hours and all the hyper-emoting is supposed to reassure us that some male posters are those who should be included in that access. I am not sure what strong and robust safeguarding protocols would look at such a posting history and tick the 'accept' box if it was traceable.

But hey, maybe I am just a 'middle-aged female who has a myriad of hangups from a refusal to engage with decades of advancement in feminist thought who hasn’t come to terms with the fact that they haven’t solved sexism'? I most certainly have seen women today being accused of enabling abuse and hate through their unrepentant words.

I have a mental image of a woman so covered in all the layers of crap society has constructed around her sex that she's completely hidden and unable to move.

The gender critical position is to throw the crap away, free the human and say "this is a woman".

The gender idoleogists want to keep the crap, throw the human away and say "no, this is a woman"

Look at it this way.

Imagine that the Gender Recognition Act was repealed, the protected characteristic of gender reassignment in the Equality Act was deleted, and trans people were banned from using any single sex spaces for members of the opposite sex. Imagine that this was done without your input. Imagine it was done by stealth, and you weren't even properly told it had been done.

What would you do?

Would you accept it, or would you fight back, and try to regain the rights that you had lost?

You'd fight back?

Well, that's what women are doing.

When the GRA was passed, it took away our right for female people to exist as a recognised category in law. It changed the meaning of the word female and left us without a word to describe what we are.

The Equality Act was supposed to give us protection on grounds of our sex, but now there is a legal question mark over whether sex even exists, legally speaking.

Women's toilets, changing rooms and sports were supposed to be for US. They were supposed to respect our privacy and dignity, and improve our safety by giving us spaces free from the opposite sex.

All we are doing is fighting to regain what we have lost, thanks to the trans activist movement.

And if you don't want this issue to just ping pong back and forth, you need to come up with a solution for trans people which doesn't involve women being forced to share our single sex spaces, sports or language with you. You need to think of a way to accommodate trans people in society which doesn't disadvantage women in any way. Because we will never stop fighting for what we have lost, and we will never stop fighting to keep male people out of women's spaces and out of the definition of "women".

'Gender' is predicated on forcing us to submit to the nonsensical idea that we are defined by stereotypes, rather than biology.

Well, quite.

I think I have made it quite clear how I feel on this subject. I wanted to say more and started writing a post in response to a question about it a few pages back but ended up not being able to finish it due to it becoming extremely long and too detailed.

I didn't want to trigger or antagonise people further and realised it was getting dangerously close to sharing personally identifying information just from the sheer amount of contextual details, no matter how hard I tried to anonymise them.

I will, for avoidance of doubt, state my general stance here. You don't have to read it if you don't want to.

I cannot apologise on behalf of nor serve as an ambassador for men in general; I can apologise on behalf of humanity, of whom men are a part, however.

I don't want to give trite platitudes but I want to be very careful with the language I use because I do not want to cause any further harm. I hope I succeed. Please, please read this in the way it was intended.

It feels flat and bordering on offensive to even attempt to write the words, frankly. They cannot encapsulate the reality of what you have gone through - only you truly know your own pain.

You were wronged in ways which are thankfully beyond the reckoning of many people, but which are disturbingly common and utterly inhumane despite being depressingly human. The stats, awful enough as they are, don't reflect the reeling horror of realising that every room you walk into is likely to contain a sexual assault survivor. There is no excuse for it; there is nothing I can say on this forum or anywhere else to make it right, and I worry that even trying to do so can only cause further harm simply due to it itself serving as a trigger, especially coming from this particular human being.

I am not a man; I do not own the sins of men. It is not my place to speak for them. On behalf of all humanity, however, I am sorry.

I know it's a tiny, terrible, shitty little word that's so often used passive-agressively under duress. Here, I mean it. I'm sorry.

Sorry is just a word.

It doesn't mean anything when you say it to a rape survivor who is explaining why she needs women's single sex spaces not to include you.

Not unless it's the start of a sentence which goes like this, "Sorry, I never realised how important single sex spaces are to many women and why it is completely inappropriate for me to be in them."

But it's not.

It's, "Sorry you were raped by a man, but I am not a man."

I do listen, every day, to the many other women in my life whose opinions I trust and use as a moral compass and guide.

@ButterflyHatched are these ‘other’ women the male or female kind?

I also noted that you referenced women as non-transwomen, so you position the sex class women as non-men. How very misogynistic, a male trait, of you.

Sorry is just a word.

It doesn't mean anything when you say it to a rape survivor who is explaining why she needs women's single sex spaces not to include you.

Not unless it's the start of a sentence which goes like this, "Sorry, I never realised how important single sex spaces are to many women and why it is completely inappropriate for me to be in them."

But it's not.

It's, "Sorry you were raped by a man, but I am not a man."

Perfectly put.