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...)

I don't identify as 'a trans woman.' Some people who have transitioned between binaries do actively identify with a trans identity and, while I don't really get it, I try to understand and be compassionate.

I'm a woman. Before that I was a girl. My body has always been very reluctant to develop along lines we would classify as male despite my karyotype, and largely gave up at the point where male puberty would normally proceed. (I later found out there are genetic reason for this in my case - at the time I just couldn't believe my luck).

My experiences aren't identical to those of other women who lived in other circumstances and I'm not claiming they are. They are quite different from those of most trans women as well. They certainly haven't stopped me from fighting tooth and nail for women's rights all my life!

It was exceptionally difficult to do this when the prevailing strain of feminism was dominated by Greer and Raymond and pop culture was gripped with the seething horror of early reality tv sensationalism, but I kept fighting where I could. I crushed every part of myself down as small as I could and set aside the nuances of my own experiences until the world was ready to consider the manifold nature of womanhood in greater depth.

I can't stop you from viewing other women outside of your experiences as your enemy, though I will continue to beg you not to waste effort on slicing the definition of woman up into unsupported and easily defeated bite-sized chunks. What's happening in America right now is terrifying and won't stop no matter how many times we break off pieces of ourselves to placate it.

My feminism is not conditional or dependent upon the benevolence or acceptance of other women with different life experiences. I'll keep fighting for all people who are subject to inequality, sexed or gendered or otherwise, as long as I still have breath in me.

It might be that it is strategically sound to go back to silencing the parts of my own experiences that don't fit a single 'right kind of woman' narrative. We are, after all, facing a tide of weaponised ignorance so heavy that its like has not been seen for a century, and we have seen both historically and currently that even nations once considered to be leading the way are vulnerable to regressive demagoguery.

Either way, though, that won't stop me fighting for all women; regardless of their paths through life or circumstances.

I can't stop you from viewing other women outside of your experiences as your enemy, though I will continue to beg you not to waste effort on slicing the definition of woman up into unsupported and easily defeated bite-sized chunks.

Transwomen are NOT women they are male, they are men, they are not other women outside of our experience they are not women at all.

And this is where it all falls down because you will not accept that and you will not accept, despite women on here patiently explaining and evidencing to you, the direct harm including these men in the category of women causes to women and girls. You and the Democratic Party won't countenance it and that is what has made it easy for Trump to exploit the issue, the blame for that does not lie on here, or on the women who tried to speak out about the issues being caused by imposition of the trans agenda, it lies squarely on the shoulders of Democrats and trans ideologues who shut down and threatened anyone who dare try and speak up for women and children. Own it.

@ButterflyHatched perhaps I have you confused with another poster, but weren't you registered male at birth and didn't you go to a boy's school?

Without in any way wanting to pry into private medical information, on what basis were you a girl / are you a woman?

We are not simply a body that was "reluctant to develop along lines we would classify as male" - we are not the "other" to men, nor defined by our differences to them. We are a separate class of human, complete in our own right. We do not realise over time we are female because we don't feel like the other boys.

If I have misremembered your background I apologise, but if not I will tell you very simply so I can link back to this post every time you disingenously act as if you have never heard this:

It is incredibly offensive that male people believe they have the right to colonise womanhood because they believe our lives are a better fit for them than their own. They do not see us or our lives at all, simply their own sexism reflected back at them. For some men it is their desire to be sexually dominated, for others a bullied boy's wish for refuge, for others a subconscious rejection of being gay, but it is always a reduction of us as human beings into something that serves a man's needs. It is colonisation. We experience it as such, and to place your narrative about us over our own is indeed the action of the coloniser.

@ButterflyHatched

Transwomen are men.

Men don't oppress transwomen on the basis of sex because they don't think transwomen are women, they think they're men.

That's why the word for transwoman is different to the word for woman. Because 99.9999% of human beings understand this difference whether or not they outwardly pretend not to.

@ButterflyHatched

My feminism is not conditional or dependent upon the benevolence or acceptance of other women with different life experiences. I'll keep fighting for all people who are subject to inequality, sexed or gendered or otherwise, as long as I still have breath in me.

Will you fight for the right of female people, those born female, those identfied as female at birth and so suffering the inequalities that come with that body, to speak up as female people, to have a social name and a political voice that means them and them alone, to have spaces that are female only, to have rights that are female only, to have opportunities that are female-only, to counterbalance the inequalities that they face because of their sex? Not their gender, but their sex even though that excludes you?

Because if you cannot do this, if you cannot ackowledge that female people exist in their own right with their own needs that you are no part of, your so-called "feminism" and all your pretty words above are a self-serving, misogynist lie.

This reminds me of how my two year old acts.

All attention is wanted, so just scream, roll around, make silly faces, start shouting so that everyone will look at you. Talk nonsense just to provoke a response.

"I crushed every part of myself down as small as I could and set aside the nuances of my own experiences until the world was ready to consider the manifold nature of womanhood in greater depth."

Whatever you imagine "the manifold nature of womanhood" is, it cannot, I'm afraid, be experienced by anyone born with a penis.

And if you really did know or understand anything about the long and bitter history of the fight for women's legal rights, and why they were needed, you'd already know this. And indeed exactly how women and girls had OUR natures and experiences "crushed" purely because we happened to be members of one biological sex. That's the sole reason we were chosen for the experiences we had, and a core feature for many of those experiences and how/why women are and were seen and treated a certain way in society. Cosplaying it, often fetishising it, is NOT the same as being it. Or being a member of the demographic who has historically been treated that way. You only have to look at Afghanistan or Iran to see that the rights of women and girls to be seen as full, equal members of society, as full humans, can and will be taken away in a heartbeat. Solely by virtue of the sex they are.

Nobody who fails to understand this knows the slightest thing about "feminism". So please, do come back to us when you are a member of the demographic that has been treated as the property of males from time immemorial. A great deal of misogyny we experience arises from that.

FWIW I don't reply for Butterfly. I reply for a wider audience so the twisty turny manipulation does not stand unanswered.

Because the simple truth is that female people exist. The things that happened to us because we are female still happened and will still happen. Taking our language away and saying "women can be male as well" does not change those facts. That's the truth their emotive and manipulative rhetoric is trying to hide. Once you see it, once you shine a light on the fact of femaleness and ask "and where does this fit in?" the whole thing falls apart.

I'm sorry you've had a hard time but none of this is relevant to what a woman is.

A woman is a female person, not a male person.

And if you think female people don't have the right to exclude you from their single sex spaces then you are not any kind of feminist.

Registered male at birth; exclusively attended mixed state schools.

Formally transitioned at school; became 'the weird boy who thinks he is a girl' at a time decades before any of the current social attitudes or legal protections were in place. Teachers unable to even comment or support due to Thatcher's S28.

I've walked this path a long, long time. I have no experience of adult maleness - puberty was slow and late and stopped entirely by GnRH agonists without completing, I was regularly being assumed to be a girl in class by teachers and I stopped being socially perceived as male even if I tried by my mid teens.

None of your taxonomies make sense. No interest in 'sexual domination' - this awareness came from a young age long before any kind of sexual awakening. Hardly a refuge from bullying - quite the opposite in fact. No parental prompting - in fact, they were extremely cautious.

I'm not running from anything - it's just who I am and have always been. I'm afraid if you are looking for some kind of sinister 'explanation' to trivialise these experiences then you are going to have to blame the genetic blueprints that informed the biology of the body my mind grew from.

Have a lovely evening.

I'm not running from anything - it's just who I am and have always been.

Nobody is denying that you are who you are.

It's just that what you are is not a woman.

It's frustrating that you won't even try to see things from the other point of view.

I have no experience of adult maleness
Oh, please…
You have absolutely zero experience of womanhood, in any form.

Indeed, @ButterflyHatched's experience of adulthood is a type of experience that only a male can have. Because only a male can experience life as a trans woman.

This is just a narrative you've created for yourself that has no bearing on reality. Women are not obliged to believe you or have our rights decimated in service of you.

Your adult maleness is why you repeatedly appear on this board to gaslight and berate the women in it.

It wasn't a taxonomy, just some examples of the various things the male bodied project onto us.

I believe your experiences are true. Nevertheless, they are not womahood or girlhood.

You see, woman and girls do not have this experience of somehow knowing we are female. We simply learn that is the name for the people who have this type of body. It's not a magic word, it's just a label for a thing, a thing that continues to exist and has real consequences for the people who embody it whatever messing around we do to language.

So when you take that word and apply it to something else, in this case a feeling about yourself, it's not defining you as part of the same group as us, because in taking the word and changing it to include you, you made it mean sometihng different that no longer means us.

You simply cannot find a way to make yourself "a woman" without destroying everything that connects the word to its original meaning, and therefore to the people, the rights and the history that used to go with it, because that original meaning was simply a word for something you have never been.

This is what I mean by projection. You had a feeling about yourself and you found something external to anchor it to. But that anchoring is just your own beliefs - about what a man is and why you are not one, about what a woman is and why you are one. It has no connection to the relaity of living as female. It is a different thing. So it is disingenous and yes, colonising, to take our name, our resources and lived reality and redefine it into something that works for you, into something you can claim rights to.

Hey, but it's ironic that finally replied to me after I mentioned that I don't really mind that you don't! What a funny coincidence eh?

I hope you have a lovely evening, and that you reflect on my words and on the right of female people to be recoognised as a meaningful group in our own right, with the shared experiences, challanges and risks that come with being female and derserving of the political, moral and legal rights to mitigate them.

None of your taxonomies make sense. No interest in 'sexual domination' - this awareness came from a young age long before any kind of sexual awakening. Hardly a refuge from bullying - quite the opposite in fact. No parental prompting - in fact, they were extremely cautious.

Got to say though, did LOL a bit at Hatched getting miffed at having someone else's definition of who they are and why they are who they are applied to them 😂

@FlirtsWithRhinos that is the best I have ever seen that explained.

It is but sadly it will make no difference whatsoever to Butterfly's insistence that women and girls must give over their rights, their spaces, their services, their sports, ignore their lived experience and just bow down, move over and allow themselves to be trampled over for males who say they are women.

We are not considered worthy enough to have anything of our own and asking for it just brings down their wrath on our heads.

Very patronising! You do know that women in Britain were onto this long before Trump, Musk and the media got hold of it. That the Left has failed to grasp the nettle is their own fault

Agree!

With all respect to your personal journey...but a woman is an adult human female......that's it! If you were not female at birth, you are still not female now.
Best just to be who you are, but be accepting, also, of what you are not.

Pretending that marginalised minority groups are invasive/predatory colonisers

No pretence needed, if this is a reference to gender ideologues. The invasions and predations are happening in plain sight, and the associated appropriation of language has just been examined in the highest court in the land.
The more they are seen, the more they are seen for what they are.

Butterfly may well feel other than male and perhaps there’s something physiological implicated but that does not make butterfly a female. A female is born female and has a female karyotype.

Interesting Twix thread I came across today and I thought it might be of interest to the thread. It’s an American summarising a podcast episode on which Democrat election campaign heads were interviewed about their thoughts regarding the campaign they ran for Harris.

The TLDR is that they seem perfectly happy with the campaign they ran, it was all the voters’ fault that Harris lost:

Link to first post in thread:
https://x.com/caesar_pounce/status/1862233194143023591

Link to entire thread viewable without Twix account:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1862233194143023591.html

The comment "I can't stop you from viewing other women outside of your experiences as your enemy" is also utterly offensive. And factually incorrect.

I know a great many women (and also men) "outside my experiences". Like many here, I'm a well-travelled intelligent person who's lived in multiple countries, worked in multiple jobs, and has been making friends from all walks of life all her life. I am not the sort of person who needs others to be "like me". Literally none of the many women and girls I know and have met throughout my 50+ years with lives "outside my experiences" (because we all have different lives, backgrounds, ages and experiences) were born with a penis. Not one. Because women and girls aren't the half of the human race who are born with penises. Ever.

I don't see Butterfly or men who identify as women as "my enemy" because they're "different" from "my experience" of women, as if I have somehow lived a tiny narrow life where we're all walking fucking Barbie dolls, housewives or whatever regressively-minded transactivists imagine "cis" is and "can't cope with anything outside of that". I haven't, quite the opposite. If that's the response, then frankly, I've probably met far more variety of people in my life than this person has, and perhaps they need to meet more women outside THEIR clearly very limited range of reference. They've clearly never met many feminists for a start and demonstrate very little understanding of the actual arguments.

I DO see misogynists who make false claims about my and others' beliefs as the enemy though, yes. They are enemies to all women. I do see appropriators and men who threaten women if we say no to them as enemies. I see men who id as women as what they are - Men. Who imagine or pretend they are women for a variety of reasons, some sad, some sinister. Regardless, that doesn't change the facts. Nor require me to agree that they are actually women or the same as women. They simply are not. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with being male. Males come in all shapes and sizes, including those who don't feel like society's idea of "masculine". This still does not make them women or "girls" as many claim, and anyone who is trying to compel me to agree that is the case is an "enemy" yes. Because they are trying to get me to deny reality and facts.