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 think they take for granted the things that mean that biology doesn’t have to dictate social roles - e.g. contraception, abortion, a legal framework that enforces the law (however flawed) so that women are not physically controlled by men - and don’t realise that these are things that don’t exist everywhere, can be taken away, and need to be defended.

I understand that in younger women - they lack experience, it’s scary to acknowledge a threat, and who wants to be awkward?

No idea what older women are thinking when they say TWAW.

And people have very odd ideas about being higher in the oppression stack excusing bad behaviour. You see that in the behaviour and speech which is tolerated or excused from trans IDing people, while women are policed and picked apart on minutiae of language and behaviour (as well as expected to be 'nice' even while being abused and stolen from).

I once had an interaction here where a poster said that someone who was racially abused could respond however they see fit. So I asked if that meant if I was called a racist slur by a gay man, I could then call him a gay slur? And that poster basically said yes, a person who's been racially abused can respond however feels right to them, it's not for me to say how they should respond.

Society can't function like that, with people who've been oppressed or abused being given a get out of jail free card to abuse in response. She couldn't see my point though. But I think you seen that kind of thinking with trans IDing people being given very considerable leeway for poor behaviour, on the grounds that they're the most marginalised and vulnerable ™ so their behaviour is excusable. It's an abusers charter, if you can get to the top of the oppression stack you can behave how you like.

The corollary which is never considered, is that how can the most oppressed people simultaneously be given so much power and control over others?

@WhatterySquash and @GiveMeSpanakopita agree completely with your observations there.

On @Merrymouse ’s point about lack of experience, I think that’s so true. Teenage girls desperately want to believe they can be/ do anything boys and men can do and be. And society should certainly provide opportunities and knock down barriers as much as possible. But it can’t change hard facts. I was in an abusive relationship in my 20s, you learn quickly how much stronger men are. And when I had my son (different relationship with lovely DH) the penny dropped on why women were disadvantaged in the workplace as soon as children came along. As soon as you have a newborn you are at the mercy of your biology, that’s just how it is. That’s what teenage girls and students don’t get. Those are just my experiences, obviously there are lots more, positive and negative, to be had that will bring it home to you that men and women are inescapably different and one can’t become the other. Instead of wasting time on that nonsense we should be building a society that supports women and everyone to be all they can be, but without being deluded about it.

Hmmm. I wonder if it's not both.

There are certainly people who approach these things from a pragmatic, embodied perspective, and that need to function in the real world keeps them from going off the rails.

But I think it's also the case that within thought and theory there are various levels of seeing connections, integrations, relations, that are hierarchically more complex.

Perhaps it is the people who are both isolated from reality, but unwilling or unable to deal with very complex thinking.

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".

The flip side of this phenomenon has had me scratching my old brain many times. If people I think of as decent individuals and know from previous experience to be intelligent and competent are in thrall to gender ideology, surely those people haven't suddenly become bad or stupid. And if someone I considered a friend has denounced me as a bigot and cut all contact with me, is it, in fact, that I am a bigot and have always been a bigot? Oh, yes, I've wasted a lot of time soul-searching because I can't get to grips with what seems to have happened.

But it's bullshit, isn't it? I've been looking for order in a cult that deliberately creates chaos and division.

That's why I say I do think that people who believe in gender largely are good people just trying to do the right thing.

It's just that they have lost the plot a bit.

Teenage girls desperately want to believe they can be/ do anything boys and men can do and be. And society should certainly provide opportunities and knock down barriers as much as possible. But it can’t change hard facts.

And there’s a weird failure among tras and faux-feminists to accept that women can actually have and do more of what has been traditionally taken by men, IF the differences are recognised and respected. Women and girls can be successful elite athletes if there are proper women’s categories, but not if males and females are grouped together or males are allowed to be “women”. Women and girls can have better access to workplaces, schools, trips, organised excursions if they have the necessary safe places to change, sleep etc.

Pretending there are no differences has destroyed women’s and girls’ sporting careers and opportunities in front of our eyes and has not done that to men and boys. The fact that people pretend not to see or understand that is damning.

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".

To be fair I do think this does happen, and has led to the peaking of a lot of people because they did listen, think about it and look into it. I have several friends who haven’t abandoned me in this way, they’ve either explored it more, or agreed to disagree respectfully. The only one who has cut me out of her life is my fully fledged TRA (and absolutely textbook abuse-surviving, ND and poor-MH-suffering NB-turned-TM) family member.

I also know a really lovely gay man who went all LGBTQ+ flag-waving and pontificating about Most Oppressed And Marginalised etc c. 2015, and has changed his mind after listening to women and also eventually realising that trans ideology is telling him he’s not allowed to be same-sex attracted.

I agree many do just drop and shun friends though - I think it’s the fear of being associated with the reviled bigot and possibly ending up understanding reality and having to join them. My friends who I’m able to discuss it with are not GC or TRA, they’re more “never really thought about it”.

Goodness I have not seen Tara Hewitt mentioned for a while. I forgot about that person.

tara still has an interesting Facebook account. She says she’s a bisexual person, previously she said she was a lesbian I think? She’s been conservative, labour, gay, lesbian, bisexual, deaf, disabled. She’s also trans.

From her fb account, looks like she’s moved to Ireland and she feels safe there, unlike in the UK. She’s taken up golf and has a really nice cover for her golf clubs shaped like a fluffy unicorn. She has quite powerful swing by the look of it!

She posted a video on her fb about the challenges of feeling unsure whether you’re allowed to use the female toilets on a Greek registered ship sailing between the UK and Ireland. She posted this to highlight how difficult it is for transwomen right now. Ordinary women don’t have this problem on foreign registered ships travelling between the uk and Ireland.

this is such an important question

Hi, sorry, I do want to reply to these but been v busy- also found an interesting Substack post which I think has a good answer. On Parents With Inconvenient Truths About Gender Ideology, it's the post called Still A Feminist?

It points to trans kids as a form of Munchausen by proxy for Cluster B - type mothers, and also argues that female friends of trans girls can be v insistent that their friend is a she, sometimes more than the friend is themself.

Incidentally, I'm also reading an interesting book called American Teenager by Nico Lang. It profiles 6 trans teenagers across the US. A v pro trans book, w interesting insights into pro trans parents

. In the first chapter, it's not really clear what makes the teenager think they're a boy, apart from hating to wear velvet dresses and bows to church and wanting short hair. Yet it upsets them a huge amount, causing severe anxiety (notably he went to a v conservative Baptust church & South Dakota is a conservative area generally) Their parents seem v kind but unfortunately misguided. The mum quit her job and now runs a trans advocacy org full time... (Link to interview here-https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=www.yahoo.com/news/south-dakota-activist-runs-supportive-110119601.html&ved=2ahUKEwjrgcXOx8ONAxWsU0EAHU0zL_YQFnoECEYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0O_yhM0Uky_mY-q5FDKgzs)

It's been posted on here that fundamentalist Christian parents may be up for transing the gay away. Generally this isn't the case, bar a few examples. They may be v unhappy to have a gay child, but aren't usually going to prefer drastic surgeries to that, esp as the Bible emphasises not tampering w the body.. But I do suspect that some trans affirming parents may come from that kind of background, and that may feed into their thought processes.

Agree - I think we have to admit though that putting other interests first is a biological thing too : not that we have to automatically follow this instinct. Wisdom for anyone- but esp young women- means discerning when compassion is an appropriate response, and whether the response the person wants is a good idea for them or others.

This - but what I'm getting at is that to some extent women kickstarted the whole queer theory movement that helped get this mess off the ground. The rise of queer theory seemed to coincide & fuel the trans movement, though I'm not entirely clear on the history. As I noted, Butler obvs but also Rubin, Califia were all prominent in queer theory.

I def agree that ordinary, non academia, women were used as - or chose to be used- as flying monkeys for the TRAs. As I put earlier, there are also cases where a lot of the mothers seem to be using their trans children as a type of Munchausen proxy.. Notably, autistic children , who ofc often overlap w trans children, sometimes seem to have a link w parents w a different kind of disorder : sometimes npd or antisocial.

And as mentioned, another male YouTuber has apparently done some videos on girls who egg their trans girl friends on. Overall though, I suspect most mums are not Cluster B but simply supporting bc they have no idea what else to do to make their child feel better..

In the second chapter of American Teenager, the family again seem v loving, but have been through a lot of trauma : the father has PTSD from war & the mother survived multiple operations after a murder attempt from her abusive stepfather. There's a brief mention that their trans son spent most of his childhood 'counselling the adults around him' bit otherwise no exploration of how this trauma could have impacted his dysphoria development.

Agree w all this! The emotional satisfaction part : definitely this. You might think they'd get satisfaction from protecting women & see that as true good works. But it's all become v twisted.

So ARUP was paid to do a report on the meds of people with long-term health problems, and they use irrelevant guff about trans preferences. Lazy bastards. Mind, whoever in government accepted the inadequate report failed in their duty too.

I missed this earlier … Stryker being responsible for millions of cramped, unsafe retro-fitted unisex toilets, installed at great expense, often at cash-strapped public sector orgs, because of an opinion piece he wrote just blows my mind!

That's it exactly. And reading this nicely succinct explanation does give a sense of exactly how they were captured. The idea that biology need no longer determine our destiny was understandably appealing to second-wave feminists writing in the 1980s, when gender stereotypes were being challenged and owning a vagina didn't automatically mean staying chained to the kitchen sink. Those who came afterwards can imagine just how exciting and liberating this realisation was to that generation.

Gender ideology took this to the nth degree and twisted the meaning of essentialism as it twists and lies about most things (most recently the SC judgement). Its bedrock is the very gendered essentialism feminists have been fighting against for decades, and which even they pretend is the opposing position to the one they are coming from (they are either confused, or deliberately attempting to confuse others). Feminists were seduced by the idea of liberation from gendered constraints and were seduced into believing GI was simply fighting for equality and justice, and to cast off conservative social shackles just as they were.

By the time some of them started to realise this, the parasite had already invaded the host and eaten it (along with its critical thinking skills) from the inside out.

@LeftieRightsHoarder @Holeinamole That document was the origin of me being a campaigner for safe toilets.

I found even more disturbing articles and opinions after that.

So then I started looking at schools, who are the canaries in the coalmine for ‘gender neutral’ toilets. I sometimes can’t get my head round what I read. It’s so far from safeguarding.

Are the documents that you mention publicly accessible? (ARUP, Document T)

https://consult.communities.gov.uk/energy-performance-of-buildings/toilet-provision-in-buildings-other-than-dwellings/supporting_documents/Annex%20D%20research%20on%20toilets.pdf

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67167c02d100972c0f4c9b38/ADT_2024.pdf

I have been thinking about this and wonder if people thought that the trans movement was going to go in a completely different direction.

If the trans lobby had stayed more within its lane of men are men but there are more feminine men and women are women but there are more masculine women.

And then had campaigned for the breaking down of stereotypes, so that men and women could wear what they liked, go into a greater range of what were stereotypical jobs for males and females etc.

Instead of TWAW etc. it could have been a meeting of allies and so much more could have been achieved.

I still hope that might happen @FrippEnos.

I have hope that it is, in fact. Eddie Izzard is trying to map out a path. And most trans people i meet don't really get in a tizz about insisting they are the opposite sex, though they might if i got very insistent about it i suppose. It's not for me to say it as I was never bullied with the word, but that to me is what the reclaiming of the word 'queer' is about. A more general word leaving out definitions but covering 'living differently'. I'm happy the law and statistics are clear but how people live is another thing.

Yup, last reference in the document, Susan Stryker’s opinion piece. Unbelievable. Thanks.

I feel like we already had this, really, and there wasn't all that much fighting to do for e.g. little boys being able to wear dresses without parents thinking or being told that they're actually girls, or women being able to have short hair and wear lumberjack shirts and still be considered, and consider themselves, women.