Is it possible to be a feminist and also have some empathy for transgender people today?

[HoundOfTheBasketballs]

I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert here but everything feels incredibly polarised. Like, either you’re with us or you’re against us.
Is there no middle ground in this debate?
I am, and always have been a feminist, but I know and like people who are trans and non-binary. I can’t be the only person feeling confused and conflicted, can I?

No. I have nothing but contempt for trans people. They/Stonewall over reached with Self Id, and ‘no debate’.
So much so, that the decision to seek clarity had to be taken to the Supreme Court.

Nothing has materially changed for them in terms of the PC of gender reassignment. But they simply can’t use female facilities, because Stonewall says they can.

They never could! It was never allowed!
But this judgment makes it perfectly clear, now.

Women are not responsible for fixing all men’s difficulties.

We’ve been lied to, attacked, threatened, mocked over this.

We have a clear definition of woman and we’re out. Op why wouldn’t you do a similar post on a male dominated forum and ask for support for their sex class?

You could equally say:

Why does it bother transwomen if they are in the male toilet or changing room?

Why does it bother other men if transwomen are in the male toilet or changing room?

Once you reword the question you begin to see that, (aside from the questions of women’s safety and security, right to privacy,the difficulties this poses for women who have a history of abuse, the women whose religious sensibilities mean that men in womens spaces limits their freedom etc ) the situation isn’t really one for women to solve, it is a MALE problem that needs to be sorted by MEN.

We women have enough to do sorting out our own problems - like the gender pay gap, the glass ceiling for career progression, the unequal burden of childcare that most women shoulder, the deadbeat dads who renege on their parental support obligations with government connivance - we shouldn’t also be tasked with sorting out problems of inequality , inferiority and anxiety that the other sex has.

It is because women were too quiet for too long that we have ended up here - a growing number of women realised that staying quiet was doing them harm. Of course there are reasons for being quiet - the end result of all this quietness is self-harm.

It can be suicidal empathy.

Agreed. I have empathy for people who are confused, traumatised, unhappy or whatever combination has led them to believe pretending to be the opposite sex will make them feel better, but that's as far as it goes once their response to that trauma or unhappiness is to objectify, fetishise and colonise women and their rights and spaces.

Also, @Diverze it is somewhat alarming of you to claim that a huge number of trans people are very young. Surely the spread should be even across all age groups?…

Are you being deliberately disingenuous?

I don't know any trans people who use women's toilets of the 6 or 7 trans people I personally know.

Are you their 24/7 toilet assistant? How can you possibly know this? Maybe they tell you that but you can't actually know what they do when you're not there.

No, I am not.

The problem with the 'middle ground' approach means people having to buy into the trans concept to begin with. This concept of gender identity is embedded within the embrace of a very powerful lobby, which has sought to influence all of our institutions and organisations with a very radical agenda.

That agenda is rooted in post modernistic theories of the self and society - and has largely been driven by university campus politics in the U.S.A. Social theories such as Intersectionalism, Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory.

How you can have a middle ground with someone who believes in something you know not to be true? Of course, friends and family can nurture and soothe that person's feelings about themselves, and to some extent go along with it...by using pronouns etc...but this cannot be extended to everyone else in society being coerced into having to go along with what amounts to a delusion.

If people are deluded or in denial - as some sort of coping mechanism for their mental health - simply going along with that is not necessarily an act of kindness. And certainly not when entertaining those coping strategies or mechanisms also involves radical impositions onto others and the breaching of their boundaries.

Centring someone's personal feelings cannot come at the expense of reality.And society cannot be organised around these feelings.

And yes. Hayton uses female spaces. If you consider Hayton (who also on MN told us that female breast size set the hierarchy for women) a moderate voice while Hayton uses female spaces, then I wonder at your definition of moderate.

Because to me, a polite male who still insists student use she /hers and who uses female spaces is still a male who is prioritising themselves over female people’s and children’s needs. Just polite about it.

I quite agree, and the fact that none of these transwomen seem to see any issue in that and think women who want to exclude them are just mean old witches shows me just how much they really are still just men. We can't trust them, even the "lovely" ones because they are men.

I've actually been thinking about this more as I've caught up on this thread. I am unsafe every single time I leave the bloody house. And no, of course I don't mean I'm constantly worried about being raped or whatever, but I am on alert all the time.

I recently started going into London again on a regular basis and, having largely NOT been in London very often and certainly not in rush hour, it's really come home to me how vulnerable I am ALL the time. In the busyness and the crowds, it is us women who are constantly moving out of the way of men or at risk of being pushed, shoved, verbally harassed etc. I can choose whether to play patriachy chicken and refuse to move, but do so knowing I'm getting lots of (at best) dirty looks, (medium best/worst) pushed/shoved, and (at worst) full blown attacks verbally and physically if I don't get out of the way. I did it for years unconsciouslly but having been out of it for a long time, the awareness of how necessary this sense of "alertness" is has been exhausting for me.

And the one time I can relax, is when I go into a bathroom or similar. And bloody hell, but I'm not giving that up.

This.

Some men will use aggression to get what they want and some will use polite manipulation. Neither is moderate. Both types have the same goal in mind.

No empathy at all. Genuinely none.

I hope that this judgment starts to shift the focus onto how men can start to accept other men who present differently into their single sex spaces.

I remember reading a very "sympathetic" article about Hayton... and mostly my thinking was, "BATSHIT TWAT"

Exactly. That alertness is like the weather, it's always there, even when you're not consciously tuned into it. Assessing what other people on the street are doing, even those not near you (yet), assessing whether a space is safe (not just a night – daylight, too), all while going about the business of your day. It's so automatic and embedded it's easy not to realise that that hyper-awareness is part of your daily reality. But it's always there, and it's a constant mental load.

Well in that case you are woefully uninformed on the ideological agenda that our children have been taught over the past 10 years in schools, which has told uncomfortable and anxious children who don't fit in that maybe the problem is their gender versus their biological sex. The majority of those identifying personally with this ideology are otherwise vulnerable, either autistic, adopted, or abused individuals. Some of them retain their trans identity for many many years, possibly life, and others do not.

FWR wants, reasonably, to protect children from exposure to this ideology. All power to their elbow.

However the ones who have already been swept up in it and radicalized become instant fair game.

I don't quite understand how autistic and vulnerable teens need protecting until the moment they declare the trans identity whereupon they become the aggressors.

To me there are clear differences in the groups. Middle aged late transitioning men are a totally different ball game to the autistic 21 year old who just believed what he was taught as fact in school and thought it explained his discomfort in his body.

It’s definitely not a social contagion @Diverzethough!

Not exactly, it's more subtle than that. It was taught. It's not just a social contagion. This country told my vulnerable kid this explained his horror of his body.

And you guys on here have explicitly no empathy for that.

To me there are clear differences in the groups. Middle aged late transitioning men are a totally different ball game to the autistic 21 year old who just believed what he was taught as fact in school and thought it explained his discomfort in his body.

This is the viewpoint of many posters in this corner of FWR, @Diverze. You may have missed it. Many posters have school-age, university-age or autistic children who have been the victims of this. We are not seeing all trans-presenting people as the "aggressors" here.

And you guys on here have explicitly no empathy for that.
No, that's not acceptable. You need to read the board more extensively.

Of course. There's nothing difficult about this if we use clear language. So called 'transwomen' are gender non-conforming men. How can we help, support, be empathetic to gender non conforming men?

I carry a small rape alarm and an antique knife with a 2&half inch blade on my key ring not really afraid to use it to defend myself - some times you have to stand up for yourself

Explicitly on this thread over and over again that viewpoint is dismissed, @Greyskybluesky

As soon as you start talking flippantly about all trans people as one homogenous group of bad actors then no, you aren't holding this line.