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.

I'm asking you to please not use the actions of utterly vile predatory men to shame trans women into silence when they ask not to be hounded and harassed in daily life.

This is not an unreasonable thing to ask.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/deception-gender-proposed-revision-cps-legal-guidance-rape-and-serious-sexual-offences

People can wail and weep and talk about how they are so terrified that they are forced to conceal their sex.

That's one thing in day to day life.

Deceiving a sexual partner about your sex is illegal.

yes. I think that the "TERFs are not the problem" thread was highly illustrative in so many ways.

@ButterflyHatched How about reading the room before you try and hijack someone else's story of assault and rape to try and make it all about you? Fucking appalling behaviour.

Did you seriously just make @Garlicwest's post about having been the victim of a serial rapist all about you?

It's honestly jaw dropping. Zero awareness. Nothing.

"You have lost nothing."

Says the male person who refuses to acknowledge that just by their own entrance into a female single sex space that they have changed it to be a mixed sex space.

"You have lost nothing."

Says the male person who has insisted on threads that they are 'female' and use the words we need to describe our bodies as unique to any male, even one with extreme body modifications that have removed genitals, for themselves.

"You have lost nothing."

Well.... we certainly haven't lost misogynistic male people who never consider female people's needs should be fully respected.

Stop it. These terrible crimes are not about you. You've a fucking nerve to respond to one of his victims with a self serving post promoting your sex by deception mantra.

Never was the advice that when someone shows you who they really are, believe them the first time, more apt.

Chat GTP, give me the biggest DARVO possible.

OK. I have come up with this:
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.

Garlicwest

I'm so sorry to hear that, you have my complete sympathy.

"Never was the advice that when someone shows you who they really are, believe them the first time, more apt."

Yes. Very apt.

Twice in less than a week. It is a feature, not a bug.

I’m sure you have ‘embodied experiences’ but they aren’t female experiences so feminism isn’t for you.

There's just no end to the narcissism. Centring a woman's assault experience to leverage your own stealth??? Pretending that a clinician is sending you to a maternity unit for a fucking ultrasound??

And this absolute nonsense in reply to me I feel noticeably less safe just existing in public in daily life than I did around 2019.

This is what I mean. Butters will use any old argument to back up whatever point they're making, even a point that contradicts all the other points!!

For someone who stands next to women who themselves get misgendered, over and above butters, who walks into a hospital and immediately gets sent to the maternity unit, despite not being pregnant or a woman (honestly it's just making me snort), but somehow, butters is still in more and more 'danger' of exposure as time goes on!

It's risible jibber jabber, with the usual side order of trying to distress women, whilst remaining within the guidelines.

As existences go, it's unsurprising that it is as isolated as butters has claimed (when trying to make a point, which contradicted the point straight after).

As predictable as the rising sun

I disagree. It's my opinion that it's entirely deliberate.

Ear bleedingly whiny, but deliberate nonetheless

If you think this was about "silencing" transwomen you understood the exact opposite of the point that was being made.

I don't want to appropriate Garlic's horrific experience to make the argument so I'll go back to my point from my orginal post.

You were at that point having fun with the idea that women cannot always tell immediately (probably true, I suspect I don't always notice with a passing glance, although over time and contact that changes) and the well worn trope that apparently we've had trans women all round us forever and never noticed.

My point was that deceiving women is not harmless and "hey, we violated your boundaries for ages and you never noticed so why worry about us now?" is not the killer argument you seem to think it is.

Women and girls (original female meaning) grow up as prey. We grow up knowing we are to many men fair game, that taking from us something we would not willingly consent to by lying, deceiving, coercion, emotional blackmail, negging, future faking, sneaky voyeurism, sharing private photos to friends and sex tapes to porn sites is basically considered no foul no crime if it's in pursuit of a man's orgasm. The French case is not an abberation to women, it's just the natural result of men's belief our boundaries are there to be cicrumvented.

And when we complain society tells us it's not his fault, of course he's going to try it on, it's our own fault because we should have known better, been smarter, we shouldn't have been stupid enough to trust someone who swore up and down we could trust him, who told us how much we hurt him with our reticence and lack of trust, who made it a test of our love and good faith to believe his lies.

That's the context that you come into when you try to tell women if we don't find out then it doesn't matter.

I'm beginning to think you could be right.

Well, remember Datun this is a poster who doesn't use emotional manipulation, hyperbole or catastrophising in their posts apparently. Or maybe they just mean they don't use these rhetorical devices in every single post all at once... just most but because of that extreme polarisation and absolutism that we see in most posts, despite the constant denial, because it is not 100% of the time, it means it is 'never'. Because language can be made to mean whatever someone demands it is, even the very opposite of well established language conventions.

I used to think it was a lack as suggested, but after this past week I no longer can think this. It just isn't possible.

Of course, I doubt very much that butters has ever even heard of John Worboys. Not something that would bother their psyche.

Good grief. I will not indulge attempts to force a trans woman into a trauma top trumps contest while she is asking for people not to engage in behaviour that is seeing marginalised minorities hounded from public life - and harming non-trans women as well.

I have already been drawn into disclosing far more than I am comfortable doing in a hostile environment within the last week and really don't want to revisit it again.

@Garlicwest I'm so sorry to read what you went through. I got caught up in my frustration at the suggestion that we've lost nothing that followed your post, and have now read what followed on from that. If your experience doesn't convey what it means to us to keep our words, identity and collective voice, I don't know what can. The concrete evidence of the harms we're resisting is myriad, the stats and data overwhelming. Your own, anonymous, example, is devastating. Sending you thoughts and empathy from a random on the internet, for what little it's worth.

This is what I mean.

Don't get me wrong, there will obviously be people who are this narcissistic, but I don't think it's that common. Responding to the observation that you're centering yourself, by centering yourself is just more of the same deliberate bollocks, IMO.

And, of course, absolutely puts to bed the deluded nonsense that no one can tell!!

@Garlicwest 💐from another random woman on the internet

A woman disclosing a horribly traumatic event in her past is not a fucking game.