The words that have been pulled over your eyes

[FlirtsWithRhinos]

I initially wrote this as a reply to a thread in relationships, but rather than derail the thread I decided to post it in FWR as a thread in its own right about a common accusation made against gender critical feminists.

It is a response to the claim that the only people who object to the word "cis" are people who deny the existence of trans women, and that such people are transphobes.

"Transphobe", like "trans woman" and indeed "cis woman", are just the words trans activists use to hide what is really going on.

These words exist to hide one simple truth: Trans women are not, in any objective, real way, in any way outside their own heads, in any way that is real to anyone else, any closer to being a woman than any other man is.

"Trans women" in reality are just men who for some reason feel compelled (or sometimes just really want ) to adopt a cross-sex persona playing out whatever their idea of what a woman is.

The words exist to make it sound like a reasonable thing when such men demand that their wives, children, friends and family, colleagues, officials, all of society pretend they are women, let them enter private spaces for women, let them touch or counsel women in roles reserved for women, let them take prizes for women, let them speak for women.

Because we'd never accept that as ok from men. But it's ok for trans women, and if it's not ok that's transphobia.

And we'd never say women in general are more privileged and powerful than men, but call the men trans women and the women cis women and suddenly everyone nods along. And if they don't it's transphobia.

But I don't believe the thing that makes men and women different is our minds. And without that belief, the whole thing falls apart.

How many women on here have been sexually assaulted or attacked or had violence or aggression by non trans men? And how many have had that from trans women?

Looking forward to @NoKnittingAllowed telling us exactly how these male people are different from ‘average men’.

Cor

have you ever met any male and female humans? Do you have any understanding of male vs female sexuality? Your posts suggest not

So you now expect women to recount their trauma ?

Well done.

When are you going to attempt to answer, how does one tell the difference between a trans woman who doesn’t wish to cause harm from a male who does? Women everywhere would benefit from this crystal ball like insight. Do tell.

What does it matter if the victims of those assaulting trans women are on here or not? They exist.

Also, obviously, there are going to be a lot fewer victims of trans women than average men. That doesn't mean that the average trans woman is any less dangerous than the average man.

I find them different because I've suffered SA and various other forms of abuse from your average man but never from a trans woman. If you've all suffered that from trans women and in much larger amounts than from non trans men then I'll accept your obsession with trans women.
I'm not ducking out but I have to go bed now, up early for work.

non trans men

😂

dearie, dearie me. I think you mean ‘men’

Because trans women have no more claim on the rights, language and spaces of womanhood than any other man.

To fight the bad behaviour (sexual and social), the marginalistion, the overspeaking, the exploitation, the sexual objectification, assault and agression, women need to be able to speak clearly and unequivocally to men, to each other and to power about what it is to be female.

(TRA on behalf of) trans women's demands to remove "female" from the definition of a woman take our language away. Without female-specific language it becomes impossible to describe what is happening to us and why it happens. It disconnects our embodied female experiences from our history and from the rights, spaces and opportunities that were supposed to be there to support us in the challenges that being female brings.

Have you seen the sort of things that trans women believe (or claim to believe) women are to justify their claim to be "women" in ways that are in the mind rather than the body? How can we stand up to a society that belittles, objectifies and sexualises us if at the same time we allow those definitions of us as valid?

So for me, it's not that I am especially scared of trans women over other men (although I do think it's impossible to be a trans woman without a reductive and frankly somewhat fucked up idea of what womanhood entails, and for some of these men that idea of womanhood is extremely fucked up), it's that I think the assertion that womanhood is mental, sex doesn't matter and a man who feels like his idea of a woman has no meaningful difference to an actual woman is very very very harmful to women's ability to name and fight the exact male oppression that you highlight.

I think Flirt’s’ thread is going well.

We are having a real time demonstration in how language works to create falsity.

Because we have posts that imply that male people with transgender identities are not like the ‘average man’. So we should stop discussing those with transgender identities apparently. While not finding out how they are different at all!

Yeah OK, we can see whether they are wearing a skirt or not.

What we can't see is whether they intend to harm us.

They're all men.

You know that hon.

There are about 200 times as many men as trans women.

If you'd had the misfortune to be sexually assaulted 200 times by a male perpetrator, and one of those male perpetrators was a trans woman, that would be consistent with trans women being as dangerous as the average man.

Outside the sex trade, there are not many women who have been sexually assaulted 200 times.

I see. So the definition apparently of a transwoman is that they have not committed any abusive act towards female people?

Are you fucking joking?

Plus I notice the goal posts have changed. Now it is ”suffered that from trans women and in much larger amounts than from non trans men then I'll accept your obsession with trans women.” Fucking hell. That is grim.

So rather than experience any abusive act, it now has to be experience it in much larger amounts?

Do you even hear yourself at this point ?

You are very ill informed.

I have suffered abuse from men including a man wearing wig/dress/lipstick. I don't know if by your metric this means I am allowed to discuss it or not. What is 'much larger amounts' - are you going on a proportionate basis, or just basic number of assaults? Do we weight different assaults on the severity of it? Type of abuse? Which counts as 'larger amounts' between, say, sexual harassment and indecent exposure? Look forward to more detailed info. We may need a spreadsheet.

Because transwomen are claiming we don't exist, as women, unless we have some unspecified 'feminine' essence of the kind used to oppress us (an essence which most women I've met do not have and do not want). We're arguing for our right to exist as women.

I don’t think you need to have personally experienced something to know that it’s a possibility. The way safeguarding works is not to wait for incidents to occur but to try to prevent them from occurring. We know that trans women offend at the same rate as other men and are statistically more likely to be convicted of a sexual offence than your average bloke.

I’ve never been raped but I know it’s men who rape whatever they identify as.

Have you not looked at the relationship threads on here? The ones from women whose men are liars, cheats, abusers, rapists...
Then there's the threads on misogyny, Andrew Tate, and the effect on young men.

If you can’t read a post about women’s rights and the unacceptable liberties taken by men who identify as women without thinking of men’s genitalia, that’s a you problem.

I suspect it will just be a constant shifting of goal posts at this point. There is no intention for any positive contribution, just like there seems to be little attempt to understand the current situation.

Of course, there are two problems with that.

The first problem is that it appears to adopt an "innocent until proven guilty" (or "woman until proven rapist") approach.

That means we have to accept that they are women until they actually harm us. And only after that, when the damage has already been done, are we allowed to say that they are not women and insist on a little safeguarding. Of course, we are only allowed to have this boundary in respect of the man who has already harmed us. We must treat all other men who say they are women as though they are women until they prove otherwise by raping someone.

The second problem, of course, is that the trans rights lobby, backed by many mainstream politicians, has actively fought for trans identifying male rapists and murderers to be held in women's prisons. So clearly, "has not committed any abusive act towards women" is not in fact a requirement. You can still be a woman whilst raping women with your womanly penis, apparently.

'interesting'?

Abuse is not a fucking parlour game we're discussing for shits and giggles.

Your posts are unbelievably offensive, frankly.

I used to be fine with cis as a categorisation tool. A cis person does not claim a cross-sex gender identity, but a trans person does (let's not get into the enbies).

Then someone pointed out that this could be read as the 'cis' person claiming a birth sex-aligned gender identity, as opposed to having no beliefs about gender identity (for me, the proposition that everyone has a gender identity, which can be sex-incongruent, is unfalsifiable and therefore not worth debating).

So cis is part of the paraphernalia of a metaphysical belief system to which I do not subscribe. I therefore avoid it, which is sometimes awkward.

I believe in trans people just as I believe in Christians. So if my disbelief in God makes me an anti-Christian bigot (it doesn't), my disbelief in gender identity makes me a transphobe (it doesn't).

I don’t know, we object to convicted rapists larping as women being put in women’s prisons, we object to watching girls and women being elbowed out of their sports by mediocre men, also larping as women. We object to women who have been raped being told to ‘reframe their trauma and stop being a bigot’ because they’d rather not have a bloke larping as a woman as their rape counsellor.

It’s great that you can’t see why we would put so much effort into fighting this regressive, misogynistic, homophobic ideology, but we don’t need you to see it, we just need you to leave us alone to get on with it, and if you’re a woman, benefit from all our hard work in standing up for women and girls, just like you’ve benefited from all the hard work of the millions of women who fought before us.

HTH.

TW are men, just the same as any other man, and it is specifically them who are demanding access to women’s singles sex spaces. They also commit sexual offences at a much higher rate than men in general.