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.

Yes. I think there's a good slice of people who have no real idea what it is they are purporting to be in favour of, they just get their right on right opinions as a job lot. It saves thinking about things. A lot of people seem not to like thinking about things.

The people shouting 'trans rights are human rights' having no clue what rights they are asking for or don't already have, are the same ones chanting 'from the river to the sea' completely unable to tell you which river or which sea. They just have a vague idea that they're fighting for the oppressed and are on TRSOH.

It's idealism versus pragmatism.

It's about having an idea and whether you like the sound of it versus looking at an idea and thinking whether the proposed solution will work it in practice.

You may like the sound of an idea but when you start to drill down into technicalities it falls apart.

I don't think that's about big picture thinking. I think that's about attention to detail and understanding how the world works on a practical rather than theoretical level.

The idea that men can be women falls apart in one area and it's actually the most crucial. How do you define women from an objective point of view? The law MUST be objective so it can be judged by a third party impartially if there is ever a problem. By the same token if you want protected status for trans people how do you define them?

Assisted dying falls apart with the same intangible issue. How do you define someone vulnerable and how do you define coercion and stop it? You cant. It's simply not possible. And we already have massive issues properly identifying it. And therein lies the problem at the heart of the issue that no one who supports assisted dying really wants to address. The question then changes from can we have assisted dying to how many people being murdered through coercion is an acceptable number to allow more privileged people to have the death they want? That question enrages assisted dying supporters but it's the one we should ask just as we should ask how many women and girls are we prepared to accept as collateral damage in order for men to access women only spaces?

It's these questions of definition and implementation that screwed Brexit too. The Good Friday Agreement was the stumbling block and some of us realised this before the referendum occurred. Then there was an issue with how Article 50 worked and how Theresa May handled that exceptionally badly putting us in a terrible place to negotiate. Then there was a whole debate about how supply chains worked and the minor fact that we are prisoners of geography that supporters of Brexit didn't want to have.

It's all about the practical details and the wording of law. It's not about a big picture for me. It's understanding that nice simple ideas rarely work - because if they did we'd have done them all a long long time ago.

It's idealism versus realism. It's nice to be an idealist, but idealists don't implement shit. They just come up with ideas and dump and run and then scream when they don't get quite what they wanted because it's impossible.

If I feed the crocodile he will eat me last

This was said to me in discussion: if you say transwomen can't compete in women's sports because they're bigger and stronger, aren't you saying that women are too small and weak, forc example, to do certain jobs?

Damned if we do, damned if we don't.

In my experience, it depends which WC circles you move in.

I used to be well involved in communist and socialist circles and activist groups and there it was very much as you say. "Make me a cup of tea little woman and we'll worry about your little rights once we've achieved the glorious revolution." I call them Brocialists. Dworkin wrote very well about them too as it happens.

However, women from the traditional WC (you know, the former industrial heartlands, the people which Labour was founded to represent) tend to be much more clued into the reality of trans madness because, unlike MC trans activists and trendy intersectional feminists who've never done a day's hard graft in their lives, WC women are far more likely to see the terrible implications of trans madness in their jobs, in shelters and in prisons.

Oh absolutely. And I do think the WC feminists who do go along with the T are often doing it because they need to keep their place in the movement (I am thinking of several women who were feisty feminists who became involved with Women's Equality Party and had to toe the line to keep their position).

Yeah, definitely a good point about women in industrial heartlands. I'm wary of seeing too many parallels between trans politics and remainer politics but it does remind me of the conversations about Brexit - where the righteous and correct pro-Europeans could not get their head around how their opponents had come to an opposite position. Lack of empathy and the need to be right.

I also think many working class women who came to loudly oppose trans madness would never in a million years call themselves feminists or political. It just made sense that this was an obvious wrong being inflicted on them by the middle and political class that have a history of imposing 'correct behaviour' on the lower orders.

This is an excellent thread, so much food for thought. Thank you 🙏

At one end you have the extreme altruists and at the other are the personality disorders that lack empathy (extreme sociopaths and extreme psychopaths) and every varialion possible inbetween.

I think if there’s a sociopathic spectrum 😁 it’s inhabited by the gender alphabet followers.

Oh, that's an interesting point. I had thought about woman wanting equality mistakingly believing equality means 'the same as', but really I think of equality as 'equal but not the same'. I think we as a society have lost some respect for traditional female qualities like nurturing, caring qualities and these are not valued in the same way that corporate jobs are for instance. The focus on equality is on equal pay, equal outcome but if society valued women's roles we wouldn't be at a disadvantage for choosing to be a stay at home woman bringing up children.
I have to go back and read the whole thread as I stopped at this comment. But the thoughts that come to mind are that I think we have used our own tendency for compassion against ourselves, at least they have been used against us. Logic and reason were thrown out the window in favour of 'being kind' and I think this is mostly down to an imbalance in feminine and masculine influences in society (coming from both men and women). I think the 'metoo' movement was important at the time but it also had the effect of silencing men (the traits of female anti social behaviour are reputation distruction, gossiping, slander- any man's reputation can be destroyed with a false rumour) so men were afraid to call out the bullshit ( with the exception of a few) because they saw what happened to people who did, and maybe they didn't see it as their fight.

So weaponised compassion combined with female anti-social behaviour/weak men is my first thought.

That's so true.

I don't think that's possible, humans are pretty much hard-wired to be attracted to crazy ideologies, especially when they provide an in-group and a scapegoat to hate.

Sometimes the ideologies are relatively benign, like hippyism. Other times, the ideologies end up having horrific and evil real world consequences, like liquidating land-owning farmers or attempting to wipe out European Jewry.

My point is that we ARE hard-wired to have an in-group and a scapegoat to hate. It's an evolutionary survival thing. The rule of law, and broadly what I would term liberal Christian ethics, evolved over centuries to try to put a curb on this human instinct. But with the trans movement, I don't think we should understate just how much many of its adherents enjoyed being part of an enlightened elite, and enjoyed having scapegoats to cancel, threaten and mock.

You know there's been a lot of posters on this thread who I think are being too kind and understanding, theorising that some so-called 'feminists' espoused trans rights out of fear of male hatred. Well, maybe that's true, for some of them. But I think a lot of women (just like men, and if the evolutionary psychologists are right, even more so than men) really enjoy being part of the cool gang, and really enjoy confected outrage and bullying of the heretics who placed themselves outside the gang.

I think the "bigger picture" idea does have relevance in feminist thought in terms of structural and societal forces. For me, bigger-picture thinking isn't the opposite of pragmatic, attention-to-detail thinking - they can go together.

As an example I used to have arguments with my ex about women changing their names on marriage. His (Mr nice guy wokebro lefty "feminist") take was that women should have a free choice so who was I to lament people doing it. (I should add I wasn't giving anyone a hard time to their face! - just saying things like "Oh I didn't think she'd change her name".

I could not get through to him that I could recognise that each individual woman has a choice in the matter, but the bigger picture where women are seen as lesser/secondary, not the "head of the household" and are the ones to give up their name when men generally don't, is connected to issues like the prevalence of DV, women being pushed out of work because their salary doesn't cover the childcare (as a PP raised, that's pure sexist nonsense it should be both salaries contributing) and so on. Right down to details like men feeling like they shouldn't have to do housework or childcare or have a right to sex on tap - because the effect of this tradition being normalised is that it reinforces the idea that women are seciondary, a possession or adjunct of the man. And to take your DH's name is, IMO, a signal to other women that you agree on this "secondariness" of women, even if unconsciously, and it also continues to normalise inequality.

This isn't about whether I'm right, and of course this topic is open to debate - but what was frustrating is that ex could not grasp this. "Feminism means women have a choice!" is as far as his thinking could get and he would not hear of anything that made it more complex.

With trans issues, this bigger picture is partly that we live in a patriarchal society with powerful forces that prioritise men's interests, and it achieves that function in a plethora of complex ways. One of them is weakening and destabilising womanhood and co-opting feminism itself.

When I first heard of "intersectionality" and found out what it meant I thought "well no shit sherlock. Of course if you are a woman and disabled, or an ethinic or religious minority and gay, you stand to be oppressed on more than one front and it's going to be even harder." I mean duh, that wasn't news. It just seemed like one of these academic obviousnesses with a fancy name that people come up with to make their papers sound impressive. But "intersectionality" is now used to mean "don't get above yourself women, other people are more oppressed, so bow down to them, especially males". It's same old same old and the reason that happens IMO is because the deep misogyny in society will latch onto whatever works.

Yes I think there's a huge amount of confusion over this among "progressive" woke types, and misrepresentation of what their opponents think. I've often heard the basically feminist idea that your biology shouldn't determine or restrict who you are or what you can do, being extended to mean that it shouldn't determine whether you're a man or a woman, which is so upside-down i don't even know where to start. And from there they also then suggest that radical or GC feminists actually believe biology should restrict you into a "feminine" role.

When Kathleen Stock was being persecuted in her job and making the news, a radio 4 news bulletin actually said "gender-critical feminists, who believe biology should determine social roles..."! I mean have they even grasped the basics of feminism at all? Of course that's not what we think - but that had presumably been told to the researchers by the transactivists they listen to.

Just read through thread, so many great answers here! Thanks! Great food for thought. I have wondered about this a lot having found the most militant and aggressive supporters of the trans movement were women. Why would women not see they were effectively giving up their own rights in favour of men?
Brilliant nuanced replies here.

When I first heard of "intersectionality" and found out what it meant I thought "well no shit sherlock. Of course if you are a woman and disabled, or an ethinic or religious minority and gay, you stand to be oppressed on more than one front and it's going to be even harder."

I think intersectionality is a super dodgy intellectual concept because (like pretty much all postmodernist concepts) it only makes sense in the context of a westernised society which is already materially privileged, and it also rests on this idea of 'oppression' as a material thing which can be quantified, so you can add multiples of it on top of each other or take them away, like lego bricks. It's a zero sum concept. Some people have more, some people have less and the ones who have more need to be elevated into a hallowed position so now they get to have privilege over the less oppressed, but somehow that's not in itself oppression because Kimberle Crenshaw said so.

If we look at human societal structures throughout history and across different cultures, they are VERY rarely structured in a simplistic oppressor/oppressee type of power structure, almost never, really. I think intersectionality theory is just a very intellectualised and dry way of looking at human interactions and it's not merely unhelpful, it's done societal cohesion a great deal of harm.

Totally - it plays directly into the "oppression olympics" approach to disadvantage - and that has developed mainly to allow privileged people to feel they can excuse themselves for being white, middle-classs, western etc by adopting some other oppressed status. IMO this is part of why trans is touted as "the most oppressed asnd marginalised" minority to be in - because it's one that it's super-easy for anyone to identify into and so that appeals hugely to privileged people. It allows them to either get themselves off the hook of inborn guilt for not being oppressed, or to tick "diversity" boxes in organisations without really changing the status quo. I think this also explains the rise of "non-binary" - magically oppressed without even having to actually do or be anything at all. See also "asexual" and "bisexual" from people with a 100% straight lifestyle.

Also, it's Foucault, isn't it? Behind Butler's gibberish stands Foucault, and while he might have had a few useful insights, he was a pretty awful man who's responsible for some of the worst ideas in what passes for intellectual life these days.

If you encounter intersectional leftists and every interaction feels like an insincere power play, that's because that's how the Foucauldian sees the world.

Yes, I think the deluge of particularly young people diagnosing themselves as trans and/or in some way disabled or neurodivergent, is an unfortunate result of the spread of 'intersectionality' and the false belief that it is a philosophically sound concept.

In broader societal terms, it bodes ill for the future of the West. When you convince young generations that weakness, rather than resilience, is a state to which they should aspire, the cultural and economic outlook of society as a whole becomes very dark.

I don't mean to sound harsh, because I always enjoy your very insightful posts, Sionnach, but serious question, which of Foucault's insights do you think are useful? Because I've (unfortunately) had to read quite a lot of him, in particular his infuriating misunderstanding and mischaracterisations of Ancient Greek and Roman culture, and I have never happened upon any brain fart of his that I would term 'useful', or even vaguely interesting.

But I think a lot of women (just like men, and if the evolutionary psychologists are right, even more so than men) really enjoy being part of the cool gang, and really enjoy confected outrage and bullying of the heretics who placed themselves outside the gang.

Absolutely this.

People say they support trans rights. If you push them further the first thing they will say is so they can be kind. And they say that because they are told that anyone who isn't, is not a nice person and has the wrong views.

What they don't question is when their very best friend and someone they have known for years to be ultra liberal says "this is bollocks and wrong".

They suddenly just abandon that friendship because they want to be in with the right crowd rather than stop and pause and think "hang on a second, why the hell would someone I know so well and know is a good person, suddenly turn into a monster that should be shunned? Maybe I should think about this a little more and trust my friend and value that relationship".

It's all about virtue signalling to the 'right people'.

"gender-critical feminists, who believe biology should determine social roles..."

What fresh Hell is this? Do people not think or research before spouting this bollocks?

I was thinking of the regime of truth, though probably someone else has done it better. It keeps coming to mind because so much of the narrative seems to be fraying about now.

If there's a version that doesn't involve Foucault's brain farts, I'd be very grateful for it.

I hear you, but I don't even think that is a sound concept because there are many different truth frameworks produced within a single culture, it's not all handed down from on high, not all 'discourse' (urgh) flows in one direction. For example, you've got obstetrics, in the Western clinical sense, but you've also got folk wisdom surrounding pregnancy that gets passed down from mother to daughter throughout the generations, and both have a role (not an EQUAL role, but still a role) to play in how women experience pregnancy in different settings, whether they're with a doctor, a midwife, an antenatal class or just chatting with their grandmother about HER experience of being pregnant and labour. Discourses around pregnancy are multivalent, to use some tiresome postmodernist terminology. If my back's to the wall then I'm definitely going for the full clinical experience, have at it, Western patriarchal medicine! But that doesn't mean my grandmother's experience of giving birth on a birthing stool in her mother's house in a fishing village on a Greek island didn't feed into my experience and emotional approach in an important way. Foucault talked even more bollocks than Marx. And Marx talked lot of bollocks, so that's saying something.

rather than stop and pause and think "hang on a second, why the hell would someone I know so well and know is a good person, suddenly turn into a monster that should be shunned?

It's the modern version of being convinced someone has been possessed by demons, isn't it?