Could we ban "transvestigating" threads on here?

[Christinapple]

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5225715-ilona-maher

This one for example. Transvestigating is an informal term given to when people play detective and try to determine if a given person (usually a woman) is transgender or not from how they look e.g. photos.

I've seen it more than a few times on Twitter anytime a woman who is tall or muscular or "masculine looking" appears. Quite often, women are wrongly mistaken for being trans.

As well as being transphobic, IMO this harms all women and reinforces stereotypes of what men/women should look like. And the idea of obsessing over people's appearances like this just doesn't sit well with me.

Any sensible woman, when encountering a person whom she knows may be a threat, is going to use her best defences.

The first defence is to grey rock. Do/say nothing. Get quiet, unobtrusive. Get away as quietly and quickly as possible. ('flight', but elements also of 'freeze').

'Fawn' is also very common. Be extra nice. Be kind. Be complimentary.

'Fight' is an unlikely approach to choose for a woman, given the strength differential between males and females, so it'd usually be a very last resort.

No woman should ever feel bad for having used any or all of these approaches to ensure she is safe.

Oh, and I 100% believe your "experiences of embodied existence" (hey, I think I recognise that one as mine actually) are real. I just think you are mistaken to believe they are the experience of womanhood.

Your experiences are real, it's just that you have got the wrong label for them.

Why does that matter? Because in insisting on taking this label anyway you are harming other people both by asserting the exeriences that you have had are meaningful to their identity and in dismissing the relevance of experiences they have if they ones you cannot share.

"Imagine how frustrating it would be to have a chorus of people saying your experiences of embodied existence aren't real whenever you try and engage with them."

People who claim to be something that is materially impossible to be should not expect society to comply with their philosophical belief as to what they identify as .

Male people who claim to be female people are not female people and do not experience life as a female person. It is not 'denying' someone's experience to say this.

However, it IS denying a female person's experience for a male person to state that they are female in any way when they are not.

We should be allies.

How can someone be an ally if they are actively acting in ways that are likely to cause some female people distress and who acts in ways to harm female people collectively, and who knows this, yet refuses to change their behaviour?

Except, presumably, just being themselves without feeling the need to butcher their body in order to fit in?

Just observing that @Christinapple never came back to this thread.
They made a demand and left.

But how unusual! 🙄

And:

"Imagine how frustrating it would be to have a chorus of people saying your experiences of embodied existence aren't real whenever you try and engage with them"

No one is saying that trans people's experiences aren't real. They just aren't the experiences of being the opposite sex. Because that is literally impossible.

Bloody hell, words have meaning, you can't just randomly decide to throw in whatever ones you like the sound of and expect your sentences to be meaningful to others!

Fawning often contains an element of pity.

It's nice to have a stable foundation from which to then work to improve society for all victims of patriarchical oppression, isn't it?

That would be women and girls. Women and girls who are currently experience the violence that is men stealing our very language.

Leaving aside the weirdness of thinking that women who have to have an ultrasound, automatically get directed to the maternity unit (!! There's really nothing more to be said about that assumption!), if I was a man who fondly imagined I passed seamlessly, I would not spend my days trying to convince women of it.

In the same way that so very many women couldn't give a flying fuck if transwomen start to call them men, hoping it will hurt.

Butters if you can't grasp that, it's like someone telling you you're not a human being, but a different species.

It matters not. Only to the person doing it, who you would think is rather weird to even try.

"Leaving aside the weirdness of thinking that women who have to have an ultrasound, automatically get directed to the maternity unit (!! There's really nothing more to be said about that assumption!)"

Having had numerous procedures that fall under the word 'scan' in my life, it really would be weird for a person giving information to make that assumption.

And I whole heartedly abhor, utterly abhor, this relentless barrage of showing off double mastectomy scars on social media. Now you say that there is active initiatives to do so. How incredibly breathtakingly irresponsible.

If a woman wishes to remove their breasts (‘wishes’ as in adult, not vulnerable, not pressured, been fully informed about risks etc) then they are free to live however they wish without feeling ashamed about these choices. That does not necessitate posting across social media.

The damage comes from high profile individuals such as Elliot page showing off their double mastectomy on social media and, in doing so, influencing thousands of young, highly vulnerable girls struggling to navigate their emerging adult female bodies in a porn saturated world.

After witnessing this influence multiple times I can tell you that I despise the likes of those attention seeking narcissists who post without so much as a fleeting thought of the damage they do on their vulnerable followers.

I was reading this psychologist's take on all this recently : A few edited extracts below - link to the whole twitter discussion which includes the context underneath

"Gender ideology, has over about 20 years conditioned Western women into a state of ‘learned helplessness’. We feel that nothing we can do will make any difference.
That transgenderism is too big to fight.
That men in dresses will be in our toilets and changing rooms, that they will be in our hospital wards and rape crisis centres and that they will be ‘chestfeeding’ babies and that there’s nothing effective we can do to stop them.
We are also under the coercive control of these transvestite men.
........ ........
We are in a self-censoring psychological trap as effectively as anyone who lived under the excesses of Communism. I also think there is some degree of Stockholm Syndrome going on. We are inadvertently ‘aligning’ with our abusers. Which is why even my post naming a triple murderer who stabbed his wife 23 times, killed his two children and then who decided he was a
‘woman’, was criticised as being not ‘WORIAD’.
We have to break the conditioning....."

https://x.com/Psychgirl211/status/1866538807429857526

It's horrible and heartbreaking that this is happening.

It is devastatingly unfeminist - an active rejection of decades of progress.

We have guidance banning children from gender non-conformance in schools.

We have gender non-conforming women being challenged and harassed when accessing appropriate services.

We have banned healthcare for trans children in this country. Non-trans children are still allowed to access these treatments. It is only the trans children who are banned.

We have demagogues calling for the ban of all healthcare for trans people. For them to be driven out of employment. For them to be banned from accessing appropriate single-sex facilities. For all legal protections to be removed.

Social media is full of brutal culture warriors issuing their sneering dismissals of other people's basic humanity, revelling in the suffering their words cause.

Trans people aren't the ones doing this.

We have gender non-conforming women being challenged and harassed when accessing appropriate services.

Once again, you are on very high demand, and it's probably selfish of me to ask that you'd follow up on my previous questions but...

I'm a taller and blockier than average lesbian with a tobacco-impacted voice. I have friends who are 5'10'', even blockier and with deeper voices. We don't wear make-up, dresses, skirts, etc. etc.

But none of us have been challenged anywhere.

How is it that your OFAB friends were, in your presence, while you were not?

We haven't banned children from health care or gender non conformity.
Society has belatedly realised that children need safeguarding from dangerous adults gaslighting them that their bodies are wrong but a sex change is the solution. That the "healthcare" treatment offered to gender questioning children lacks research, evidence and has been unethically influenced by powerful adult trans lobbyists - not by the rights and needs of children.
Finally the need to safeguard children from making decisions that will render them infertile and negatively impact on their brain and body development is being taken seriously.

Shameful it's taken society so long to see this.

I don't doubt that; it's a very recognisable behaviour pattern.

I used to do it all the time around people I perceived to be transphobes likely to harm me; I still reflexively do when navigating dangerous social environments. Complete mode-switch toward desperately trying to placate and please them.

I did it online when I first started posting openly about trans stuff years ago. Reading back on some of those old threads and the obvious fawning going on is quite painful.

@ButterflyHatched we have asked nicely STOP FUCKING CALLING US "CIS" WOMEN.

We are women. Just pack it in. You are provoking on purpose knowing we can't reply in any meaningful equally nasty way because we'd be instantly deleted.

We have banned healthcare for trans children in this country.

Now you are talking dangerous nonsense. Children who have been indoctrinated to believe they are trans can access healthcare the same as other children - with one significant exception that is mental health support. Transactivists demands means CAMHS have ignored their mental health needs and instead referred them to gender clinic which offered witchcraft and snake oil. Cass has belatedly gone some way to reintroducing evidence based healthcare and we can only hope these children will now finally be treated for their mental health conditions.

For them to be banned from accessing appropriate single-sex facilities.

No one is demanding males like yourself should be excluded from male facilities. You really need to stop with these lies.

@ButterflyHatched

Trans people aren't the ones doing this.

I'm sorry, but you are. You and your allies and your overreach is the reason this is happening.

As I said in one of the posts you ignored, if only gender nonconfirming people had stuck to being proudly gender non-conforming in the sex they are instead of trying to conform to the gender construction of teh sex they are not, we would be allies in this. We would have common cause against the groups who want to enforce gender stereotypes onto us. And you would not have to fear your "gender affirming healthcare" being taken away because no one would have come up with the crazy concept that someone's body has to be adjusted - has to be damaged - to fit their personality in the first place.

But as it is we cannot be your aliies because we are fighting for our existence. Against you.

If you get what you want, we cease to exist as a meaningful legal, cultural and social group.

And you feel you are figting for your existence against us. If we get what we want, you cease to exist in the legal, cultiral and social way you currently understand yourself.

Does that not in its own right tell you something is wrong here? If two groups contest the same name, is the answer not to recognise the two groups need different names?

All we want is to continue to exist under our original name, the one linked to our history and our social and legal rights. It is the aggression of transgenderism that has created this split.

Please, find your own identity. Stop colonising ours.

(And I think you have been spendng too much time on social media - you at least used to be original but rhat litany of complaint above is just the standard TRA misrepresentations. "Non-trans children are still allowed to access these treatments. It is only the trans children who are banned." - bollocks. These are treatments for precocious puberty. So called "trans" children presenting with precocious puberty woudl get them the same as any other child. It's the specific use to delay normal puberty for no reason other than ideological beliefes about gender identity that is being stopped)

That's why nobody is believing it.

Some men, obsessed with women's anatomy, will want to appropriate pregnancy ultrasounds to work into their own narrative. Forgetting, in their excitement, that it's not even sex specific, let alone pregnancy specific.

Social media is full of brutal culture warriors issuing their sneering dismissals of other people's basic humanity, revelling in the suffering their words cause.

Says someone who freely professes to ignoring women’s boundaries and through deceit intruding on women’s spaces. Dismissing women’s basic humanity.

Meh. Certainly your confidence in displaying your contempt for women shines through all the word salad. However on here you're choosing to try to control intelligent and wise women who are immune to smears and sneers. Although I'm still (probably naively) surprised when you repeatedly dismiss the need to safeguard children - on a board full of women. 🙄

It's a strong argument, however we're on a thread asking people not to 'transvestigate' people due to the climate of fear it generates.

Attempts to discuss it have historically been dismissed with the refrain of 'we can always tell' and yet the evidence to the contrary is something I live every day.

I feel noticeably less safe just existing in public in daily life than I did around 2019. I've seen more and more people get routinely challenged by deeply frightening, aggressive anti-trans activists with seething hate in their eyes; it scares the hell out of me.

I have it easy in this regard - I can be pretty confident that it isn't going to be an active fixture of my immediate future, even if the paranoid witch-hunts go even further.

The majority of trans women don't have even that minor solace.

It is a behaviour that is negatively affecting both trans and non-trans people - non-trans women are being caught in the blast radius as well.

I think we should be allowed to acknowledge it and ask for it to stop.