I am gobsmacked by what I'm reading on other forums

[WallaceinAnderland]

This (my underlining)

"It seems to me, that the core issue that is behind all the bigotry and transphobia is the issue of predatory men. Obviously, I know that certain bigots won't change their minds. I'm not talking about that minority, I'm talking about the easily swayed majority.

"The whole "debate" centres around protecting women. I think we need to reframe it. We need to reframe it so that we protect ALL women (including trans women and women of colour) from predatory men."

I mean, what the actual fuck? Can this person not see their racism?

In all honesty I think there are posters who tell people to get off threads not just in this part of MN but more widely. It’s deeply unpleasant and I think grim behaviour but it does happen. It’s a public forum, and you will meet all sorts of people including the belligerent and mean. It isn’t the whole of MN though and just as one driver being an arsehole doesn’t mean all are, some posters behaviour is not all of us and not condoned by all.
Anyone who writes “Women and black women” is displaying some weird thinking and I would be extremely wary of.

People get worked up about absolutely everything on the internet. I guess because the stakes are relatively low. I lurk on the Reddit Forum for the TV show Supernatural (man I love that show, and the pictures of people at conventions with the stars make me very happy. I can’t explain it).

The mods frequently have to delete downright nastiness. About fictional brothers fighting fictional monsters. People are peculiar is the lesson I have learned. And they seem to be especially peculiar on Reddit

Polling from the UK and Ireland shows the vast majority support the SC judgement, and share the same views as women on MN.

As soon as we give any consideration or thought to the rights of women, same sex attracted people, and transmen, the 'be kind' arguments collapse.

Because we have to be kind to everyone. Not just men who say they are trans.

i think we need to be a little careful here dismissing the issue of race as nonsense.

Yes it has been misappropriated and applied as a direct comparison/justification by TRAs, (the usual weaponisation of the oppression of others) but there is a significant area of black centred feminism that addresses the dehumanising of black women as unfeminine and masculine (see research on perception of pain and medical treatment for black women) and lesser, or not proper women . This is where the supposed commonality of black women and trans women's experiences overlap.

I don't believe for a moment that most people saying "and black women" in the context of trans allyship actually understand this and they are being stupidly and casually racist - mistakenly reinforcing the idea that trans women and black womanhood are equivalent - but the original thinking behind this is more complex and is rooted in some areas of black feminism, which should not be dismissed out of hand.

I mostly go there for amusing pictures of cats. I have to keep reminding myself not to go into the comments. The pedigree cat subs are insane.

I suppose certain niche communities can thrive there. The Strike sub seems pretty chill. The Harry Potter subs... I don't even want to look.

It's just another instance of attempting to piggyback on another cause. A common tactic of trans activists, as advised in the Denton's document.

I agree that transactivists don’t give two hoots about the problems black women face as a result of the interaction of sexism and racism.

but I do think it’s easy to underestimate racism when you don’t experience it. I remember my jaw hitting the floor when I read in this article about a racist slur that a government employee had used to describe Michelle Obama when she was First Lady https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/27/michelle-obama-wounded-racism-first-lady

It just hadn’t occurred to me that people still spoke this way. the lack of respect is staggering. And if you don’t experience it, it is hard to understand that it happens

I guess the point I’m trying to make is

yes transactivists are just jumping on something convenient to try to muddy the waters

yes black women experience staggering amounts of racism

yes men are not women though

I have friends who are trans allies who literally think this way - that single sex spaces are the equivalent of US Jim Crow laws from the 1950s.

They can't see that

"Black women experience racism that white women are often oblivious to"

and

"My friend who transitioned at 55 and doesn't remotely pass feels sad about not being able to use the ladies' loo"

are not the same thing.

And therefore they reveal their own privilege.

It’s just a thought terminating cliche that people come out with. Nearly all other sites where there is a talk forum are equally, if not more of an echo chamber on this issue than Mumsnet, but in a way many of the posters who criticise MN approve of.

Yes and another thing is, many of the female dominated subs are moderated by men who desire to be women. So they clamp down hard on any comments that may challenge the false identities of these men, even indirectly.

My first post on this thread was about the irony of feeling ‘shut up’ on this forum as, because a particular poster, I’ve been warned by MN even though I haven’t broken any guidelines. This has made me extremely wary of posting here ever since.

I don’t see how any of the above applies to me, sorry. I don’t hold any of those views.

Agree.

I think the distinction I am trying to make is that I am cautious and mindful of dismissing a black feminist response to trans issues. While I don't agree that they are equivalent (the TRA position) I do want to understand and support the inclusive feminism that arises from many black feminist thinkers. (just to say there isn't a homogeneous black feminism there are of course many and varied positions),

I think i just want to be careful about calling out something as racist and perhaps instrumentalising it in a similar way to the TRAs - ie simplistically and reductively. I am presuming of course that the discourse is predominantly white here.

But @BernardBlacksMolluscs my personal position is the same as yours.

Exactly. Some of them are extremely problematic individuals too.

There are plenty of black and minority ethnic (for want of a better term) women who think these TRA comparisons are racist and appropriation and want no part of them.

@Ereshkigalangcleg agree! And I know that!

Yes - I'm very cautious about mapping from one identity marker directly to another.

I have Romani heritage. I don't normally self-describe as Roma, because I didn't grow up in the community, and generally view it as just an interesting bit of my family history.

But on certain corners of Reddit you quite often meet gadje - people who aren't Roma - noisily taking offence on our behalf. Dogpiling someone on the basis of "don't you know the g-word is a slur equivalent to the n-word" (Eh, not really. It can be used as a slur, but it's often used in the community as a self-description, and there are other, less ambiguous, slurs.) This is when I'm sometimes provoked into saying, "hang on, I never delegated you to speak on my behalf."

Anecdotally, these often seem to be African-American women who are taking their specific experience of racism and extrapolating it to other minority groups who may have very different experiences.

There are also plenty of white women who claim to be Roma when they aren't, but that's another story...

Stuff gets complicated 🤣😅

But men are never women.
Women’s rights are allocated according to sex not identity.

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-dentons-document-78d

It's tied to the 'colonialist' view - that Europeans introduced the idea of binary sex to populations in other parts of the world who until then had not known that sex was binary or that men were different from women - it boggles the mind how these civilizations progressed, but never mind...
The 'woman of colour' bit is based on the words of Sojourner Truth, who said 'ain't I a woman' - which had nothing to do with transism any more than de Beauvoir's words about women being made not born. Both refer to the subjection of women and how they are socialised with the add-on by Truth that black women had an extra layer of subjection on them compared to white women (of the ante-bellum Southern US states, at least those with money).
It's tosh, of course.😡

Black women are as much women as any other biological female person, obviously. Only racists disagree.

Men are not women in any sense, because they are not female.

The end.

https://www.trust.org/resource/only-adults-good-practices-in-legal-gender-recognition-for-youth/

Denton's document is still up, fwiw. Interesting to read it again.

'...there is no doubt that in the future activists will seek to put pressure on politicians to open up access to minors, as can already be seen in some countries.'

😶

(page 64. That is a verbatim copypaste).

It's tied to the 'colonialist' view - that Europeans introduced the idea of binary sex to populations in other parts of the world who until then had not known that sex was binary or that men were different from women - it boggles the mind how these civilizations progressed, but never mind...

I am not an expert in the indigenous cultures of the Americas or Australia, but I've heard enough guff from queer theorists that when I hear white people bandy around phrases like 'two spirit' I assume that the original usage in the ethnic language was a pejorative for effeminate men.

I might be wrong, but I'm more likely to be right than someone who thinks pre-colonial Australia bore a close resemblance to Old Compton Street on a Friday night.

What's even more annoying is the ones who've discovered a factoid about linguistics and say 'what about that African language with 16 genders' - no you muppet, they're noun classes. Fulani speakers in west Africa are mostly devout Muslims who did not build their language around queer theory.

The BBC article on how Welsh didn’t reflect the “genders” of non binary people was amusing.

In Swedish they actually managed the pronoun thing. Because if han is "he" and hon is "she", introducing hen as a gender-nonspecific third person pronoun is pretty elegant.

But noun gender doesn't really play a big role in Swedish. If Welsh grammar works anything like Irish, I don't see how non-binary could work in those languages. (Though there are probably people on committees in Cardiff and Dublin coming up with ugly proposals.)