Please hold my hand. My daughter has drunk the koolaid, and I’m more upset & angry than I think I have ever been. (SC ruling)

[MarvellousMonsters]

This will be long, so I apologise in advance. I find myself in a grey area between radfems and woke-maidens. I don’t hate trans people, I don’t hate anyone, although as a woman in my 50s I’ve had enough male fuckwittery in my life to have a very low opinion of men in general. I do believe that there are some people with such intense dysphoria that counselling and support are not enough and surgical transition is their best solution, but I don’t believe anyone can change sex, or is born in the wrong body.

That said, I detest gender stereotypes and the confusion of sex & gender, I’m the generation of women that fought really hard on a day to day level to reject these stupid made up rules about what girls can and can’t do/wear/think, and seeing the ‘men in a dress’ become accepted as that meaning they are women is a huge step backwards, and it makes me furious.

I honestly don’t care who wears what, if a man wants to wear dresses and make up, that’s fine. I’ve spent the last 15-20 years in t-shirts and jeans, no make up etc, so I don’t see why men can’t wear skirts if they want to. As Eddie Izzard used to say, they aren’t women’s clothes, they are my clothes. (So disappointed that Eddie has now claimed to be Suzie)

I am not a dress.

I genuinely don’t care about sharing spaces like toilets, it’s possible to create safe unisex toilets, the focus on this is a distraction and needs to stop. But when men claim to identify as women and skew crime statistics, that bothers me. Men who claim to identify as women and try to insist that lesbians should date them, that’s controlling and gross. Hospital wards and bays are segregated for a reason, and demanding we use she/her pronouns doesn’t mean a man should be put in a bed in a women’s bay. Same with any communal changing area, be it the gym or a shop fitting room. Women don’t have a penis, it’s really that simple.

This morning the SC ruling was mentioned briefly and my adult daughter is furious with it. She claims it’s a step backwards, that it will cause hate crimes and violence towards trans people, that anyone who supports it is a hateful bigot and wishes harm on a vulnerable minority. I tried to calmly explain to her that no laws have been changed, only clarified, and that trans people haven’t lost any rights, nor will any MtF prisoners be immediately transferred to male prisons to be raped and murdered by the other prisoners. Women aren’t going to be randomly strip-searched by male police officers who will claim they thought it was a man, etc. She just refuses to believe that women’s safe spaces need to be just for actual biological women, because she believes trans women don’t pose a threat, and even when I explained that most trans identifying MtF don’t have surgery etc and are still fully functioning males, and showed her examples of MtF assaulting women, she won’t accept that the actions of these men mean that we should be able to hold safe spaces based on biology. I tried to explain that I understand that trans people are vulnerable to hate crimes etc, and that we need to take steps to keep them safe, but not at the expense of women. We’ve had a long and very heated argument where she has accused me of being a bigot and a bunch of other incredibly hurtful things, mostly by refusing to accept that there is a toxic sub-set of (mostly MtF) TRAs that are actually autogynephiles/INCELs with misogyny at their core, and that these people threaten actual physical harm to anyone (like JKR) who dares to question their claims of womanhood.

Help me. Help me find a way to reach her. She’s an intelligent educated young woman who has been raised with feminist values, I have modelled non-stereotypical behaviours and given her complete freedom to choose her direction in life, with no expectations or limitations based on her sex. I’m genuinely appalled to hear this garbage coming from her.

I've seen a lot of people say that this will cause an outbreak of hate and violence towards trans people, and yet the only people I've seen reacting in a hateful and violent way in the wake of the judgment are trans activists.

Perhaps show her some of the photos of trans activists protesting, threatening to kill TERFs and throw piss everywhere, and then ask her if she is aware of any equivalent behaviour from gender critical feminists.

Perhaps ask her why she thinks it's OK for her to decide that female rape survivors and Muslim and Jewish women should be OK sharing their single sex spaces with biological males, just because she is OK with it.

Perhaps ask her if her opinion would change if her own daughter suffered the same fate as Katie Dolatowski's 10 year old victim while her dad was obediently waiting outside because he knows that he can't go into women's toilets even to keep his daughter safe.

Perhaps none of this stuff is actually helpful for you to get through to your daughter but I'm just so, so sick of this. It's just wilful ignorance at this stage. I'm so sick of all the handmaidens who are so stupid that they can't see past the end of their own, overprivileged noses.

What’s wrong with it is that people are assuming their children can’t have any thoughts of their own. And that you must be right and they only disagree with you because they’ve been conditioned by outside sources.

I do actually respect that my DC, like anyone, can have their own thoughts and viewpoints. Of course I think I’m right - why would anyone hold any views they don’t think are right? - but I think I’m right because of a process of logical reasoning.

For example, if the only evidence that someone it trans is that they say so, that means anyone can be trans and we have no way of knowing if they are just saying that to get an advantage. And as saying it brings males many advantages (eg in sport) and predatory opportunities (eg in prisons) then I don’t think it should override biological sex when we make sex categories, because that clearly disadvantages females, but not males, and that is wrong. I can argue that point on the basis of logic, evidence and fairness.

I am absolutely willing to listen to the case that gender identity should be treated as sex, and to hear the logical, evidence based arguments for that. But no one has ever provided them. I’m still happy to hear them and am open to changing my mind if they are convincing. Fire away.

You're right that trans people are a very small percentage of the population.

It is totally wrong to say that this only impacts a small percentage of the population.

It impacts most of the population, but women more than anyone.

A better question is why anyone thinks it is reasonable or proportionate to compromise the rights, safety and dignity of more than half the population, for the sake of such a small number of people. Some of whom are genuinely despicable. (For example, the ones threatening to kill TERFs and throw their piss everywhere.)

If you're educated and intelligent, can you explain why you don't appear to think female rape survivors should be entitled to single sex support?

Is it not just that so many of us remember what it felt like to be young and sure and full of righteous passion then, but understand now how naive we were and how much we had to learn, and most importantly how the men we believed supported us and also wanted a fairer society somehow still ended up shafting us in the same old ways?

Precisely! Time and experience tends to make you more realistic.

At times you have to agree to disagree ds thinks I am transphobic and also anti men at times I personally am not offended I just remember seeing the world in a simpler way

I am quite sure if I was a teenager or early 20s I would side I would be think the Supreme Court judgement was wrong one I didn’t understand male entitlement and secondly I was more idealistic which many young people are.

your views as you mature often change as I am sure many young people views on this subject will

life experiences will change her views on many issues

This will turn out to be a generational trend...when we look back in the future. A social trend which came about through the academy and the teaching of post modernistic theories in universities from the late 1980s to the early 2020's.

Already, in schools, we see the next up and coming generations are moving on.

My kids both disagreed with me initially. Ds (who’s gay) was the first to change his mind - he started by reading what JK Rowling actually said - not what has been said about her - he agreed that what she said was reasonable. But amongst his peers, if his views were know, they would be violently disagreed with.
Dd was harder nut to crack but she eventually started to question it through the issue of transwomen in woman’s sport. They still strongly empathise with trans people but they support single sex spaces based on biology.

Lots of people support trans ideology because it is nice and idealistic and relies on 'be kind' and 'equality' cliches...but once they've been negatively impacted themselves then they start to perceive matters quite differently.

Take the exampes of girls playing sport being censured and reprimanded for commenting on that fact there are boys in their team. I met a woman once who was in a women's football team, and a trans identified male player kicked the ball so hard it broke her wrist. After that she realised why we have single sex sports, for example, and she also became far more recpetive to arguments that were more generally critical of 'inclusiveness'.

@Mumble12 If you child has a coherent argument they can put that forward. If they cant you are bound to wonder why a previously intelligent person is being a bigot by refusing to discuss rationally and being abusive.

An academic education used to teach you to think rationally. When it fails to do it's not unreasonable to say that.

There are many people who have come out of a university education, in recent decades, which has been steeped in Intersectionalism, Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory, and they then enter into profesions in which they have influential roles.

There are some teachers at my daughter's school ( she is also a teacher) who blatantly further and push their own political agendas - in the guise of education. My daughter witnessed this in a history lesson recently, in which the new, young NQT was pushing value judgements about 'kindness' and 'inclusivity' and making negative political comment about Donald Trump and fascism etc........

My daughter says she bit her lip, but was pleased to see the young teacher got some push back from some pupils.....who countered some of her biased presentations with their own observations and thoughts. The NQT didn't quite know what to do with the push-back...and moved quickly on.

We would never have made any progress throughout history if the younger generations were stifled and not allowed to voice their opinions.

It’s that passion that has driven civil rights forwards over the years. If we stuck by what the older generations thought was right forever, we’d still have black people segregated on public transport and women not allowed to vote 😖

But if your parent dismisses your coherent argument because they’re not open to discussion and change then the conversation is going nowhere is it

Heaven forbid anyone criticise fascism 😂

Are there many teachers in the UK making positive comments about fascism and promoting the idea that critical race theory is anything other than an attempt at understanding the processes that shape and sustain race inequality in society? Because that I would find troubling.

Ahem. As Baroness Falkner explained very patiently on Radio 4 to the hard of hearing, once a male bodied person enters a single sex space it becomes a mixed sex space. It shouldn't be that difficult to comprehend. Judging from what she said, she intends to enforce the law as it has been clarified. That means there will be fines or action against persistent offenders. As she said, simply make a third space available for the non gender conforming people as in disabled toilets or spaces.

Emmeline Pankhurst was 45 when she started campaigning.
Another middle aged woman being told to STFU and let men tell her how to live her life.

Plus ça change, eh.

The point is that history teaching, or any teaching, should not be a vehicle for pushing an individual teacher's personal agenda, especially when in the case above, the arguments and knowledge base was both naive and reductionist.

Having been a teacher myself, what you do is present the students with a wide range of information and you enable them to look at the information in a disapsssionate way, and to develop the skills and tools to be able to think critically; making their own judgements and interpretations.

It is not the job of a teacher to present overly biased presentations or make personal political value judgments. If you do that, and the pupils fear your disapproval, they will not voice or articulate their own reasoning.

Fortunately, in the case of my daughter's school.....there were pupils happy to push back and challenge the teacher on her comments about 'inclusiveness' ( that men should be allowed to compete in women's sports). She was trying to twist the events of the holocaust ( the lesson was about 20C German history) to make points about 'trans inclusion', as one example.

One pupil also said he liked some of the things that Donald Trump was trying to achieve. It doesn't matter what the teacher's own view of the matter is, her job is to help him explore and articulate his own view.

There is no coherence or cogency to the trans lobby arguments. That is exactly what the Supreme Court judges have just discovered.

ETA: Lost the quoted post - replying to @Mumble12

Voice their opinions, yes. Make great arguments with passion for why something is right? Yes. Get out there and be the change they want to be? Great.

But sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes the gate was there for a good reason. Sometimes in that passion to change the old they commit atrocities.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/11/the-cultural-revolution-50-years-on-all-you-need-to-know-about-chinas-political-convulsion

Just because they are young and passionate and caring does not mean they are by default right. Sometimes you get the civil rights movement and sometimes you get the cultural revolution.

Did you read the OP?

We’ve had a long and very heated argument where she has accused me of being a bigot and a bunch of other incredibly hurtful things, mostly by refusing to accept that there is a toxic sub-set of (mostly MtF) TRAs that are actually autogynephiles/INCELs with misogyny at their core, and that these people threaten actual physical harm to anyone (like JKR) who dares to question their claims of womanhood.

It's not the OP who is shutting her daughter down, it's the other way round.

The best defence against extremism is age and experience. Once you've seen your first "Progressive" movement and realised somehow despite the shiny principles the same type of people still seemed to end up in charge and the same type of people still ended up cleaning toilets, and once you've had the privilege over time of getting to know and respect lots of different people from different backgrounds and yes, having the experience of people with views on which you disagree still behaving to others in ways you respect, it's a lot harder to be lead into extremist black and white thinking.

Which is, of course, why "progressive" movements are so ageist, because they need to make sure the perspective of people with actual life experience not just theories and slogans is delegitimised, ridiculed and rejected out of hand before anyone can listen to it properly.

Women with little experience yet of the entitlement and privilege of men are not the best people to decide whether "trans women" are just like women, and women with little experience yet of how their bodies will affect their life directly and through how others see them are not the best people to decide whether biology matters.

I don't think so. I can't see a point where we don't explore how power relations influence the ways in which gender is constructed, maintained, and enforced in societies. Or how those relations intersect with race, sex, class etc. Unless of course we end up with maga everywhere, or Liz Truss gets in again and goes after Foucault.

From my understanding, postmodernism claims that gender is not solely determined by biological sex not that biologocal sex is determined by gender performity. So gender isn't binary, but sex is.

At almost 40 I’ve had more than my share of the entitlement and privilege of men. My husband left me to raise 4 children in lockdown because he fancied sailing off into the sunset with his secretary. My eldest daughter was sexually assaulted by her best friends dad. Neither of these men needed to present as women to be arseholes. Men have enough privilege to just straight up behave how they want. Often with little ramification.

If you think this ruling will have any impact on protecting women, you’ve got your head in your backside.

That's maybe because you are locked into your own paradigm? Your post reads like a picture perfect post modernist narrative. There are many different types of perspective and ways of looking at or analysing society, though.

When I did my Sociology/Philosophy degree in the early 1980s there were still units on 'Women's Studies'......which I took myself; that then morphed into 'gender studies' under the sway of emerging Queer Theory and people like Judith Butler. All american academics, rooted in the american academy and basing their analysis largely on the American experience, as well as out of the remains of the women's movement and the gay liberation movement - both of which had achieved some success.

Left leaning 'progressives' are always looking out for the next, new oppressed group. The centring of structural oppression and its analysis is central to these sorts of paradigmatic theories. They are idealistic and almost religious in their fervour, and see history as moving in a straight line towards perfect equality.

I think this ruling will allow women to again have a political movement that is able to speak directly about the reality of being female, and how the shit that men dump on to us is done because of our sex and because society is still sexist, and mean we can now once again work to support women, and speak plainly in the political arena about whay we need and why we need it to get what we need in place to fight it, rights and social and legal protections, not just spaces but also legal and financial, to deal with that.

So yes, I fucking DO think this ruling will have an impact on protecting women, because it was never about toilets for me, it was about women being allowed to be political and support each other because of our SEX without having to make spaces in that to accomodate and centre the voices of men who may genuinely believe they are the same as us but in reality know NOTHING of what it is to be us.

If you think this was just about whether a man in a dress is allowed in the ladies I suggest you get your own head out of your backside and start thinking with it instead.