The Democrats Need an Honest Conversation on Gender Identity Part 2

[Ingenieur]

Starting a new thread in case the first fills up.

This has been an interesting debate, which of course the ‘left’ will now see and use as confirmation that anyone who does not abide by the TWAW mantra must be Trump supporting far right religious fanatics (eg Nuala on WH). Because a Republican got single sex toilets to stay single sex on Capital Hill.

My prediction is that there will be no ‘honest conversation’ for the Democrats but instead a doubling down of #bekind. Certainly at grassroots. The more politically astute senior leadership democrats might have that conversation.

Here in the UK I’m expecting a hard pushback from TRAs. Men don’t like being told ‘no’. Especially by women.

@BonfireLady you were thoughtful in your response to pink chestnut. I’m sure you navigated many difficult conversations with adults involved with your DDs care. For me, these adults have profoundly failed gender questioning children and teens. And shouldn’t have.

This is “no debate” come back to bite.

Democrats couldn’t push back against Republican advertisements because it would have exposed their deeply entrenched position, avowed policies and the paucity of their arguments, based as they are on un evidenced belief.

I still find it deeply troubling that the political parties I would naturally support have gone down this rabbit hole of ridiculousness, and continue to push back against common sense, scientific fact and women’s concerns.

I'm here for this new centre. Let's reclaim sense and reason.

Hear hear 👏👏

Come on Keir and Ed, you can do this too... all you need to do is remember that you know sex is a binary. The rest will naturally follow. People can believe whatever they like about an inner sense of gender, a gender identity, but that doesn't mean we need to support their belief as if it was real. Wake up. You'll get lots of us coming back to you instead of spoiling our ballots - or in my case voting for my local Tory MP after wrestling with what to do for about a year, when faced with the fact that the leaders of my natural political home have lost the plot by forcing everyone in to a belief that they don't hold and are doubling down on how we're allowed to talk about it all.

@DrBlackbird thank you. Yes, lots of difficult conversations already behind me. Several more currently ongoing. But so far so good, if a little bumpy.

Edited for clarity.

I'm trying to think of the conversations the Dems actually should have. So for example they need to point out the utter batshittery of highlighting things like "yes, we think that trans prisoners should be able to have taxpayer funded reassignment surgery while in prison" instead of saying something like "prisoners should be housed in the prison appropriate to their sex, and we will look into giving over a separate wing to those with a transgender identity"

etc etc. Instead of going for the absolutely nuclear "bring it to EVERYONE'S attention" things they were talking about.

Instead of "for sure men should be allowed to go in women's toilets if they say they have a trans identity" into "toilets will be segregated by sex and we will encourage adding additional unisex facilities wherever possible" etc etc

I find it incredibly that political parties which have been so behind 'me too' are also totally blind to the outcomes and needs of women who have been harmed by gendered violence.

What this says to me is that it was never about women's rights/safety.

They are all just 'in' issues through which their signal their 'progressive' credentials.

Instead of "for sure men should be allowed to go in women's toilets if they say they have a trans identity"

They have to do this, because their ideology demands that they can't make a distinction.

@BonfireLady

Unfortunately the part that is still unaddressed is the mandatory training which positions the importance of gender identity as if it's factual.

I want to say after our conversation yesterday that I do understand why you personally take a softer approach, but to me that's why I think the more people saying publicly what a load of absurd nonsense this ideology is, the better. Even if there is pushback at first. It's a conversation society badly needs to have. That's just how I feel about it.

Like you, I do value a range of approaches, and I make a point of not getting drawn into the frequent infighting over the best approach in the GC movement if I can avoid it. I tend towards the blunt approach but I'm grateful for the negotiators too, and I know they sometimes have to do a deal with the devil on pronouns etc just to be heard or get a seat at the table.

But I'm extremely glad that there are some brave people who tell it just like it is.

Sorry meant to quote you, annoying formatting! @BonfireLady

and this is why they simply cannot complain that people deserted them in droves.

Beardy bloke in a dress. Hmmmm you really cannot tell they have a trans identity.

Bonkers.

They're tied to this stated belief like a millstone, and they'll still be repeating it as the ship goes down with them on it.

I think there may be a shift, but it will be painfully slow. Identity politics is so embedded and thousands of people within the Party have a real stake in it. Then there’s the question of donors … There are parallels with the SNP which clung on until things just fell apart for them.

Did anyone see this yesterday. Seems like POTUS hasn't read the room.

https://x.com/POTUS/status/1859388244015677874

Sorry for those who don't use X it's the normal presidential recognition of the Trans Day of Remembrance.

Today, on Transgender Day of Remembrance, we mourn the transgender Americans whose lives were taken this year in horrific acts of violence. Every American deserves to be treated with dignity, and live free from discrimination. Today, we recommit to building a country where everyone is afforded that promise.

This.

Me too had some important elements, but overall it was a stupid, poorly thought out movement that accomplished little. And it was always going to accomplish little because it wasn't looking at real people and real behaviour and thinking about how we shape behaviour in populations. It was just virtue signalling and allowing certain people to trade in victim status.

This is what most progressive issues seem to be now. There isn't even any room to talk about crafting effective solutions, much less discuss the fundamentals.

I had a weird experience yesterday reading the reddit for libraries. Someone was complaining about homeschoolers in their library - it was, I think, a reasonable complaint/question.

However, I was really shocked to see the amount of antipathy to homeschooling itself among the library workers.

Keep in mind here, library workers tend to be very heavily progressive. I was at a conferernce last month, I haven't seen that many masks in two years! In the US 98% identify as Democrats.

I used to be very involved in the homeschool community, going back 30 years. There were always conservative homeschoolers, but just as many or more liberal/leftist ones, and lots in the middle. Most had a view that ultimately parents chose the best education for their kids, which might or might not be public school. Particularly on the left, lots of parents saw public school as a bit of a conformist vehicle for the state.

Now, on this reddit thread, you could see the opposite idea - these people did not like that parents thought they shouldn't put their kids in a state approved school. They thought it was weird that parents would question what was being taught in a "good" school district - weird and dangerous.

Anyway - it really struck me that progressives today do not seem to be the progressives of my younger years, who were a little suspicious not only of authoritarians, but any narratives by the government going unchallenged, and who wanted critical thinking taught to heir kids. These people are timid, want an authority to tell everyone what is right, and are suspicious of anyone who questions the state. They have what seems to me to be a weird trust in the state.

Me Too was a very useful moment.

I remember that on FB plenty of my ex-military colleagues (we're all women) just put Me Too as a status.

And in our military groups too, and bloody Norah all the blokes telling us that we were overreacting to what had been a bit of fun, or that it hadn't happened etc etc. Shocking.
my DH is in one of the groups and i had to remind them of the day one of the corporals i worked with grabbed my boob in a bar, and DH punched him before i could even get a swing in. and was charged for it.

Then they were all "yeah but once". But in the end we did manage to have some good conversations about what we had been through ("but you should have complained at the time"....) and what actually went on. And some of them got it.

So in that respect Me Too did a bit of good.

A lot of the Me too supporting men are creeps, and the first to say that women have to undress in front of men if those men identify as women. Just look at for eg Neil Gaiman.

All good.

Yep, I totally get it that you and I are approaching it differently.

For me, that's the essence of "centrist": a common goal (stopping this enforced acceptance and all the harm it's doing to children, vulnerable young adults and EVERYTHING related to women's rights) but a different way of getting there.

Yes, absolutely.

@TempestTost

I used to be very involved in the homeschool community, going back 30 years. There were always conservative homeschoolers, but just as many or more liberal/leftist ones, and lots in the middle. Most had a view that ultimately parents chose the best education for their kids, which might or might not be public school. Particularly on the left, lots of parents saw public school as a bit of a conformist vehicle for the state.

Now, on this reddit thread, you could see the opposite idea - these people did not like that parents thought they shouldn't put their kids in a state approved school. They thought it was weird that parents would question what was being taught in a "good" school district - weird and dangerous.

Anyway - it really struck me that progressives today do not seem to be the progressives of my younger years, who were a little suspicious not only of authoritarians, but any narratives by the government going unchallenged, and who wanted critical thinking taught to heir kids. These people are timid, want an authority to tell everyone what is right, and are suspicious of anyone who questions the state. They have what seems to me to be a weird trust in the state.

That's interesting - without knowing the content of your actual thread, I used to belong to some Facebook homeschooling communities (US-based). In the last few years, these became quite rigid in focus: Christian, flat-earth, no evolutionary study, humans never went to the moon type of thing.

It could be that librarians are expressing a concern for the children exposed to this type of education.

There are certainly people like that, but by no means the majority. There are more homeschoolers now in the US than there have ever been, mainly because school quality is so poor.

It's possible some imagine that all homeschoolers are flat Earth people, though that seems quite sheltered, to say the least.

But that wasn't really what I was so surprised by. It was more the extent that this group of people are almost the opposite of what they imagine. They are really just so conventional, and I would almost say temperamentally conservative. Very little imagination, no real impulse to question, and seemingly very motivated not to step outside of the safe box.

It's like an updated version of the old fashioned conservative, prissy librarian.

I came across this tweet thread from an American Left-leaning man discussing what’s going on in the US at the moment with regards politics, election fallout, Congressional toilet policy, free speech and I thought it might be of interest to the thread:

https://x.com/Rob_ThaBuilder/status/1859276515508199830

“Ok, time for a nuanced discussion on this topic, and some backstory:

I suspect a large chunk of ppl who currently are absolutely opposed to ANY man in women's spaces today (myself included) would have probably agreed with Chad here 5+ years ago (myself included).

Most of us probably would have thought something similar, like "well, if the person is passing and looks like a woman, I don't see the problem with them just using the bathroom". And if that's all that was happening - ppl who pass as women just using the bathroom - the current backlash occuring now likely would never have happened.

But that isn't all that happened, is it?

Over the past few years, it became increasingly clear that something else was going on, and that accelerated when Elon Musk bought this platform and prioritized the ability to speak truth against politically convenient narratives. We started seeing videos of men masturbating in women's bathrooms, started seeing SM posts of very obviously non-dysphoric men taking "trophy hunting" pictures of themselves triumphantly posting pictures of themselves in women's bathrooms, smugly bragging about their new access to these spaces, and gloating about the fact the actual women whom these spaces were created for couldn't do a thing about it. All of these things that we saw were things that we never saw on pre-Musk Twitter, and anyone posting them was banned.

And very quickly, we were radicalized.

There was a window - albeit brief - a few years ago when the trans community could have done something to prevent much of this. They could have acknowledged that self-id was a disaster, that it was a safeguarding nightmare, and that the so-called "true trans" (for lack of a better term) was outnumbered 10 to 1 by predators, perverts, sexual deviants and sex pests PRETENDING to be trans just to satisfy their paraphilic desires. This was obvious to any impartial observer easily a few years ago. Had the trans community correctly recognized the issue, recognized the safeguarding nightmare it was creating, and began policing itself and made very clear that these types of men did not represent their community, things MAY have turned out differently.

But they didn't. Instead, they doubled down, they said "anyone who claims to be trans IS trans" and called anyone concerned about the safety of women and girls in these spaces bigots, Nazis and transphobes. They refused to compromise even one inch, while demanding women give up everything. Absolutely no sacrifices were required by the men who wanted in, and every sacrifice demanded by the women who said no.

And so we were forced to come to the logical conclusion that, well, apparently these predators and sex pests must actually BE part of the trans community. And since they're the majority of the trans community, that must mean the community as a whole is a degenerate, sexually deviant group of predators who are a danger to women and girls, even while we acknowledge that there DO exist trans ppl who are not that, who really just DO want to live their lives in peace. Unfortunately, they are the minority. And in short order, we were radicalized.

And so that window for an alternate scenario closed. Positions have hardened on both sides, and all of the people who might have considered compromise a few short years ago have landed on the only reasonable position: that since the trans community refuses to police itself, we will have to do it for them. And since women CAN NOT TELL which men in their bathrooms "just want to pee" and which ones want to jerk off in the next stall listening to THEM pee, the only safe and effective solution to this problem is that ALL men - regardless of how they identify - must be kept out of women's spaces. And for all these ppl, there is no going back.

And the trans community has absolutely nobody to blame but themselves for that.”

Link to the rest of his thread (with videos & reports of men behaving inappropriately in women’s public toilets - content warning) which gives examples to explain his change of mind on the issues he discusses above:
https://x.com/Rob_ThaBuilder/status/1859277572359463091

What a cracking Tweet

Interesting @UtopiaPlanitia that the second tweet you posted doesn’t seem to exist anymore but the first one does. Someone didn’t like the videos and reports of badly behaving men? Tricky that the posts do probably break posting guidelines but by removing them, it’s easier to deny they happened and the evidence that men DO carry out those behaviours is erased. Easier for TRAs to carry on insisting/pretending it never happens.