We need to examine why so many women (including some prominent feminists) pushed the trans movement

[AliasGrace47]

I've seen quite a few posts on here placing the responsibility for gender ideology catching on on a combo of misogynistic & influential autogynephiles, and gay & straight men who backed them up.

I definitely think the core of the TRA movement is misogynistic men. But we also need to try & work out why several feminists promoted this stuff. After all, Butler's Gender Trouble is the Bible of this.

It's notable that supporting gender ideology and supporting paedophilia seem to correlate. Gayle Rubin is a notable influence, as is the now Patrick Califia. Both wrote in the 80s that child-adult 'sexual contact' could be OK.

I react strongly when some bloke posts gleefully that 'this is the natural outcome of feminism'

Me too, @PermanentTemporary

I’d say it’s the natural outcome of patriarchy reacting to feminism. Can’t let the women get too uppity, we must find a new stick to beat them with. All the better if some of them beat each other (and themselves) with the new stick.

Occam's razor states, roughly, that the simplest, most elegant explanation is usually the correct one. So I tend to agree with Kathleen Stock that the most likely answer is that they're morons.

For me, this is at the core of it. I remember thinking this way - because somehow I had taken on board the idea that someone could "really" actually be the opposite sex to their body, and needed to transition and "live as" the opposite sex, including having surgery etc, to be happy/themselves. I don't know how this was inculcated into me but it's how I thought it worked - since long before the modern gender movement took off. I didn't think it through.

It was when the gender movement started taking off and I really started thinking about it that I realised I was not able to square the circle of how exactly someone can be a woman in a man's body (for example) when they've never experienced being female, and so cannot know that's what their feelings mean. At the same time I was becoming increasingly aware that being "trans" seemed to have a lot to do with stereotypes and representations of women that certainly didn't reflect my actual life as a fairly tomboyish woman, and that it was clearly misogynistic and homophobic to claim you are the opposite sex via transition or even just self-ID.

But I remember feeling SO guilty about that - that I could "see through" something that was meant to be gospel that these people were poor sad souls who everyone had to put on a pedestal and treat as the sex they wanted to be. It took a lot of thinking, discussing (including on FWR threads) and reasoning to get to a point where I was OK with having a perfectly rational, evidence-based opinion - because the message that we must all, especially women, be nice to a (claimed) oppressed minority is so powerful.

And I have been aware of more radical feminists like Greer and Dworkin since my teen years, have a very rational and logical attitude to most things and can't stand bullshit. It still took me years. Besides gender issues, it took me years to really see how patriarchal society has created a fluffy "don't hate me, I'm nice honest!" form of feminism that prioritises not being mean to men, and traps well-meaning women into thinking feminism means centring anyone who is flavour of the month or viewed as oppressed, and bleating on about choice and empowerment. It serves to redirect women's awareness away from structural inequality, social context, physical realities of femaleness, the ways in which we are trained to make particular choices or effectively given an illusion of "choice" but no real options.

"But I remember feeling SO guilty about that - that I could "see through" something that was meant to be gospel that these people were poor sad souls who everyone had to put on a pedestal and treat as the sex they wanted to be. It took a lot of thinking, discussing (including on FWR threads) and reasoning to get to a point where I was OK with having a perfectly rational, evidence-based opinion - because the message that we must all, especially women, be nice to a (claimed) oppressed minority is so powerful."

I remember this and I always knew men were not women. It is once you think through the legal and social implications that it starts to stop making sense.

A lot of women work in the NHS, and the training has been pushed hard there.

That’s very well put @WhatterySquash

I think it's a specifically sexual/patriarchal thing. Similar to how Ariel Levy & later Louise Perry pointed out that prude-shaming put a lot of men in a nice position for hookups, strip clubs, porn, poly etc The sexual revolution did benefit women but men a lotcmpre

I've seen men blame feminists for making men feel bad for being masculine and thus becoming trans. That could be for some, but generally I think it's the lobby pushing it via porn etc

I’m a child of the 60’s, and had my teenage years in the gender-bender 80’s.

I never had anything but sympathy for men who dressed as women. I think Hayley Cropper from Coronation Street (1998) led me to believe that transsexual men were harmless and just wanted to get on with their lives.

Even when the GRA came into effect in 2005, I remember feeling it wasn’t right and uncomfortable but hey didn’t affect me so so what?

I can even remember messaging a trans sexual man on OLD to express my sympathy at the abuse he was getting online. I think I even mentioned his great legs. Yes I’m cringing now!

However I can’t remember what peaked me, but maybe 8-10 years ago I started to see where this was going. probably mumnset, but can’t remember.

Saw what was happening with #BeKind and realised I had to step up.

Saying all that I don’t understand why women are still TWAW, although I think more and more are peaking everyday. Most don’t know the full story and in their head are just defending lovely gentle Hayley Croppers

Coincidentally, a nice lady a follow in Substack, The Critical Butch, has just posted a thread asking why women were so nice they ended up kowtowing to this misogynistic ideology. I feel like if feminists (amd women in general) do some soul searching, maybe we can prevent pernicious ideologies taking root again.

Yes I remember there was an early training session given by TRA Tara Hewitt to a group of NHS managers and in this video Tara both says that cross dressing for sexual reasons is an accepted reason for being “trans” and, paraphrasing, that “trans women” suffered more when they were diagnosed with breast cancer due to their gender identity.

Yes - I have been admonished by someone, usually sensible, who works in the NHS as some of these people have very difficult lives. I think some of the training (like we heard from Mermaids) creates a very intense emotional guilt that is hard to break through.

Helen Joyce's latest newsletter was on this topic. Behind a paywall, I'm afraid, but she mentions a fair few of the things discussed already. Here's another bit:

So most men can simply ignore this topic, and they do. If a pollster happens to ask them what they think of it, they say “it’s nonsense” and move straight on to thinking of something else. Women don’t have the luxury of ignoring it. We have to have a view.

And the sad truth is that, given the longstanding facts about who has power and what benefits each individual woman as opposed to women in general, asked to decide between a position that benefits some loud and entitled men, on the one hand, or pisses those men off but benefits all women, on the other, many women will choose the men. It’s more dangerous to piss men off, and potentially more beneficial to please men. Plenty of women are much more interested in what men think of them than what other women need.

It even makes sense in evolutionary terms: you want a man to regard you as his partner, protect you and your children and share his resources with you, while other women are to a large extent competition. Even if you don’t like evolutionary arguments (I do), men simply have more to offer.

https://www.thehelenjoyce.com/joyce-activated-issue-109/

Although another thing I find odd is how so many women are willing to switch off any previous sensible understanding of how men will exploit opportunities to ogle, harass, predate and abuse, or just take advantage.

If the indicator of being trans is simply saying so, and being trans means you are allowed entry into opposite-sex spaces and sports no questions asked, it's mindblowingly obvious that a) that gives males power and advantage over females but not the other way around, and b) some men will take that chance to validate a fetish, get better access to victims, or to win medals and money that are there for the taking.

Watching women wriggling around trying to claim that men would never do that and males don't have an advantage in sports and so on is just flabbergasting to me. The same "feminists" who can somehow understand that women are at greatly elevated risk of attack by both male strangers and male partners/family members compared to female ones, who understand that lots of men lie and cheat and have a vastly higher rate of sex offending than women, then pretend they can't see that self-ID is a chancers' and predators' dream.

And I think they often know it's making no sense - but they MUST ASSERT TW are harmless because it's just so unthinkable to be mean to poor oppressed trans people and be one of the reviled "bigots" who thinks it's not adding up.

Agree. I guess I’m just a heartless bitch. Or less gullible. One of the two, or both.

From my own experience I had my 18 and 19 year old screaming at me that I was a bigot (I’m old school socialist feminist and was involved in campaigns around AOC and section 28 etc) they just couldn’t see my point.

DD1 now 23 is almost out of it - still refuses to drop Cis but generally gets the whole men can get the fuck out - why do women have to give way ness of it all, still get the odd ‘but what about…’ be kind stuff but she’s working it out.

DD2 is 21 and more mellow with me - she listens and disagrees with a lot but generally sees where I am coming from.

they were schooled at the height of the madness and it’s taking a while to de program them 😂

It sounds like you're my age. I never believed TWAW, but I was #bekind for the sake of a more tolerant society, as I saw it. I peaked around 4 years ago, when I discovered that one of my oldest friends literally believes TWAW. Her husband has become her wife, so perhaps she has an excuse. Suddenly she was saying things like "Trans teens only show symptoms of autism because they're prevented from being their authentic selves," and "Why does my partner have to go before a magistrate's court to prove her gender [in a particular country] when they can just accept her word for it?"

Among women who go along with all this, I don't know what proportion are just #bekinders and what proportion believe it literally

Today DH had a work call for his company. During this work call they were all asked to share various things on their social media to promote the company / make the company look good. The guy promoting it said he had a target of 100 employee take up.

DH said he wouldn't. And he's right. Blindly doing this devalues genuine feed back / sharing / reflect etc. And it makes all the employees somewhat unthinking robots who just do what the company ask them to do.

It's an unhealthy dynamic on many levels.

Keeping your personal social media separate from your work life is what we should do. Blurring the boundaries between work and private is unhealthy. We should be able to say no. We should be able to say 'this is my private space where I keep my work away, and I'm able to switch off and it's free from my job.' I should feel free to NOT be wedded to the company 24/7.

It quickly can make a company culture almost cult like if employees feel pressured into doing this and if they don't they are regarded as 'not being committed enough' to the company. There's something about this performative virtue signalling to your superiors which is seriously off.

It's deliberately trying to whip up bandwagon propaganda. It makes me seriously uneasy.

DH is sensible and fortunately very valuable to the company and belligerent enough to use other parts of the company ethos to politely tell them to fuck off if they did try and push it. But I can see more junior and vulnerable staff feeling that have to use their social media to join in with this nonsense otherwise they will be somehow ostracised.

I do think that as a rule, individuals should be made more aware of how and when they are being used in a manner like this for herding of behaviour for aims that may actually be counter to the interests of an individual.

We should be asking more questions about how and when we are being asked to do something that goes beyond the boundaries of our actual job and encroaches on our private life.

I know a self-declared feminist (SDF) who knows a sad, gay man who wishes he were a woman. He is a typical HSTS and has had surgery as an adult, so that he is now 'straight'. SDF says that whenever she reads or talks about trans issues, she thinks about this sad friend.

Puberty blockers = my lovely friend is sad.
Men in women's prisons = my lovely friend is sad.
Rape and death threats towards women = my lovely friend is sad.
Etc.

It is like SDF has a short circuit in her brain that stops all thought beyond the existence of the sad friend, and that pretending that TWAW is kind (urg). SDF would not be happy with the word 'pretending' though, because anything other than faithful adherence to TWAW makes her friend sad.

@DustyWindowsills yes I believe most are #BeKind and don't actually believe TWAW.

None I'm sure, would be happy for their teenage daughters to have to change I front of a transsexual man! Or for their daughters to lose at sport against a man.

I'm currently having to deal with my sport having a transsexual girl join our club. It's a women's only club/team/sport. The ladies are tripping over themselves to #BeKind in a genuine considerate way.

This is a very confused young girl with multiple mental health issues, who I feel deeply sorry for, and the club are NOT helping by using he/him pronouns.

I will call them their preferred name but will not call them he/him. It's just such a fucking mess. I expect to be looked upon with contempt but if this person really thinks they are male why are they joining a female team?? There are plenty of mixed teams in this sport/hobby/club.

Sorry went off on a rant then.

Moving on from my earlier flip response (though I think it's basically correct) I think Helen Joyce makes a good point. I don't know whether women make a conscious calculation when it comes to the benefits or disadvantages, but you can see that a lot of women aren't interested in what happens to other women. So:

They don't care about women sharing prison space with rapists, because they know they'll never go to prison.

They don't care about women not having access to women-only rape crisis centres of domestic abuse services, because they believe they will never need those services themselves.

They don't care about women who take part in competitive sport losing out to men, because they don't take part in competitive sport themselves.

They don't care about severely disabled women needing intimate care from women, because they're not severely disabled.

And so on. From a self-interest point of view, it makes more sense to support men in their desire to do what they want than to support the women resisting them.

Yes, this always gets me. I don’t care if the men invading women’s spaces call themselves men, women or anything else. They are men, because humans cannot change sex. I don’t want any men in there.

Over the last few years I've been through all the permutations of why the hell would feminists/woman swallow the trans ideology and I keep coming back to the same conclusion - because they're stupid.

I was an ultra tomboy as a kid way back when, wanted to be a boy because their toys, their activities, their lives, were simply more interesting to me and gender stereotypes were very strong then. I did the whole short hair, cord trousers (no jeans then for kids) thing. Loved it when people called me "sonny". I remember telling my parents I wished I were a boy. But through it all, even at the age of 7 I never thought for one moment I could be one. Why not? Because I wasn't stupid - and even if the zeitgeist had told me it was possible I still wouldn't have believed it, just as I never believed in my Catholic teachers' belief in limbo for unbaptised souls. Some things are simply implausible even to a 7 year old.

Interesting you mention Susan Stryker.

Susan Stryker was instrumental in the lack of toilet safety in design for public toilets in the U.K. Probably didn’t even know it either.

ARUP did a report, commissioned by the government, for toilet design for people with long term health conditions, which fed into Document T. What they should have thought about was the fact these people may need assistance if they have collapsed. But they never looked at door gaps as a design feature. They never looked at many long term health conditions either - no mention of diabetes, epilepsy, heart conditions, asthma, endometriosis etc. ARUP did discuss gender a lot including non binary crotch heights measurements for urinals. They decided enclosed private cubicles were the best design for people with long term health conditions and the evidence for that was an article by Susan Stryker and Joel Sanders. These two said that transactivists preferred enclosed toilets in New York nightclubs. It was an opinion article. They have an American company called Stalledonline and talk about their ‘inclusive’ toilet design being akin to a civil rights movement. Yet their designs have been going years and as of April 2024, when I last looked at a talk Sanders gave to Harvard, he hasn’t done assessments on them. They don’t factor in safety for women either in their private mixed sex cubicles other than people will look out for women (!).

ARUP got a Stonewall award the year after this report. The people with long term health conditions in the UK got a less safe toilet design.

It's the progressive stack of oppression. Get to the top of the stack and you outrank everyone else.

Pretty much nails it.

Because they are so privileged that the issues would never touch them. They can afford private healthcare, or at least private room care in the NHS. They don't have disabled children or parents who might be vulnerable. They and their children don't bother with sports so don't care that men are taking women's places. They will never go to prison so don't care about the vulnerable women banged up with men.

They don't think very hard full stop TBH.