TikTok feminists

[TheresABootOnMyNeck]

Since the SC ruling I’ve been algorithmed into feminist tiktok, many with humongous followings, nearly all with pronouns neatly displayed.

They collectively have some very astute observations on men which, being a masculine looking and dressing lesbian working in a male environment and seeing these men “in the wild” as it were, I wholeheartedly agree with. In this way I truly appreciate their input. There are posts that make me wince due to their accuracy, and MRAs flock like flies to a cowpat to correct them and try to prove how awful women are, which is usually a sign that they’re on the right track and men wade in to defend their behaviour.

Put a man in a dress though, and he is magically a woman, is no risk to women at all, despite evidence to the contrary, all of his misogynistic ways disappear unless they make TW look bad (like Lily Tino) and then they cancel them. Those who question the ideology are literally Nazis and bigots. And views that are not TWAW are right wing and inherently violent towards women (the male kind). This is a hill they would willingly die on.

Why? How can they, in one breath see what so many men are like and speak so eloquently about it, yet at the same time are so blind to what trans stuff does to women?

Please help me to understand.

Every single man could reject toxic masculinity tomorrow, and women would still suffer discrimination without a legal system that recognises that they are different to men, and that to participate equally in society, they need specific rights and protections.

I wonder if they really can see anything clearer though. There’s a type of person who will eloquently proclaim whatever the current orthodoxy is. Today their thing might as easily have been sustainability or BLM or whatever else. In an earlier era it might have been the glories of the empire or the good news of Jesus.

There’s isn’t a contradiction because they aren’t looking for logic but for easy approbation.

Why do you presume that I think that? Because I don't.

It's true that you would be jumped on and called a bigot for questioning gender idiology in many places.

How I have been accused of thinking
"some men become magically 'non men' and thus all well established safe guarding protocols should go out the window

Because I dared to question this thread....

Unfortunately a lot of women just don’t value women. Including other women. It never fails to disappoint me. I think if we had all spoken with one voice from the start, this movement might never have taken hold. In answer to your question op - it’s easy to posture as a feminist. There’s no cost to highlighting male failings - it’s fairly standard to do so now. There is, however, a huge social cost to standing against the trans movement. So it’s safer to go along with it.

I struggle to see the 'appreciation' here.

More like seeing women as nothing more than a hole to fuck and men being turned on by a paraphilia which means that they seek out what they see as humiliation = being a woman.

It's misogynistic at it's core.

What’s my objection?

The mixed sex, private design is less hygienic, more difficult to clean, often less well ventilated, easier to pick up airborne diseases from, more likely to smell, more risky for the occupant and rescuer in the event of a building evacuation, more risky if you have a medical emergency as you are less likely to be rescued in time, more risky if you are a woman or child and someone wishes you harm as you are in a enclosed sound resistant space, more likely to have criminal activities happening in them, more likely to have people having sex in them, more likely to be used for drugs, unsafe for those with invisible disabilities where they are more likely to collapse or have hypos/seizures/strokes.

It takes longer to queue up for all the inconvenience of all of the above because you have to wait for the person to wash their hands inside the cubicle. Although if it’s a man that is statistically less likely to happen as men spend less time washing their hands, if they do wash them at all.

If you are a healthy man, you are least unsafe in them. Which it sounds like you are, so it is less likely you will have considered the above.

I am a woman who saw another young woman who had collapsed in a cubicle in a nightclub and rescued them in time. The door gap saved her life. It wasn’t a ‘bonding experience’, she’d choked on her own vomit and had turned blue. We did what I hope anyone would do and got her out of the cubicle, scooped the vomit out of her mouth and whacked her on the back and she started breathing again.

I have been researching toilets for a few years and can give you examples of all the above situations except I haven’t timed the fire one.

The reason they are in new builds is because manufacturers make more money out of them and some architects are pushing them as ‘inclusive’ without actually applying any critical analysis as to why public toilets have door gaps. They can look swish and sleeker.

Most people hate private mixed sex toilets in public spaces. Particularly women - even if they campaigned for ‘gender neutral’ toilets they then realise the pitfalls in reality. They are not as safe nor as healthy as single sex toilets with door gaps. I have yet to find a risk assessment which argues for them.

That’s my objection(s).

Since October 2024 in England, single sex toilets are the default. You can have the universal (unisex) toilets once you have enough single sex toilets.

I struggle to understand it too. A man puts on a wig and lipstick and all of a sudden he's a woman. It's when they say "preditory cis men are a threat to women, trans women aren't". Every single time I shout "they are fucking men". Absolutely no joined up thinking.

No wig or lipstick required, just an identity.

Oh yes, hard agree.
I’ve worked with men for over thirty years now, they forget I’m a woman and their true natures come out, and honestly they are worse than most would imagine.

Something happens when you don’t present as “woman” enough for men to see you as someone to make a minuscule amount of effort for. You see the behaviour that wives, mothers, friends don’t see. Even the lovely family men. Makes me grateful to be a lesbian on a daily basis!

That too! I genuinely cannot comprehend how a man says he identifies as a woman and it is accepted that he is now a woman. I just do not believe that the TWAW lot look at these very clearly male people and believe they are men. I really wonder what internal conversations they have with themselves.

Which is still a step up from “get the F off my post you fucking nazi” ?

Someone who believes TWAW could explain clearly why they believe that and why they don’t believe women should have single sex rights, but no one ever can.

I understand what you’re saying though. Insults never result in discussion and progress.

@Waitwhat23 those images never fail to make me throw up in my mouth.

Libfems presumably see these quotes which spell out that these TW are exactly like the men they're posting about (and pretty much every TW that places themselves in a position of some authority), but nope, oblivious! It’s mind boggling.

I think this is definitely true and a very interesting concept.

TikTok is very American and the liberals are having a very hard time so I can see why they’d feel they’d need to show an alliance with trans people. Trump and co are foul towards trans people and there’s that sense that you don’t want to be on the wrong side.

That page of quotes! Why is it always about sex and never about childcare and employment rights. Oh yes. Because they don’t care about those things. Because they’re not women so they’ll never be part of the feminist cause. Their agenda is not the same.

What one person would describe as 'being non-binary', another would describe as 'not identifying with sexist stereotypes'.
Whereas I would describe it as a fucking insult - they are saying I don't identify with sexist stereotypes, but are telling you that you do and that there is no other way of being a woman unless you do conform to stereotypes.

I mean, the easiest way to understand the 'blind spot' thinking of 'but WHY can't they see the bleeding obvious?' is to put yourself on the side of the debate in a different moral/contested opinion, one where you fall on the traditionally liberal side.

Imagine someone insisting to you that all the facts support that, for example, abortion is always wrong, children are harmed by growing up with same sex parents, that there is a god/heaven/hell, or that men are superior to women, there should be no restrictions on gun ownership, or climate change is fake, or whatever, and they don't understand how you can possibly not agree with them when you're otherwise such a sensible person. Would it change your view?

But beyond that, I can offer my perspective as an ex be-kinder:

1. ignorance. Not that they are ignorant people, but there's so much about this topic that isn't covered by mainstream news. People on both 'sides' vastly underestimate how little the average person knows (and previously I would say 'cares' but that is changing slightly now) about this issue.

A lot of people still couldn't say definitively whether a trans man is a man who is now a woman or vice versa. The vast majority of people I've spoken to assume that all transwomen get their penises removed.

The over focus on toilets by the media means that so many other issues, the ones that (mountain-top)ed me, aren't common knowledge - things like transwomen medically producing "milk" for babies, rape crisis centres, the % of transwomen in prison for violent offenses, pretty much everything on the terf is a slur website, etc. The converse of that is that the 'facts' that are bandied around without qualification about the high percentage of trans murders, "most vulnerable" 'it's this generation's section 28' etc. they do believe, because again they haven't seen them contested, and have seen them repeated by people they trust/admire (celebs etc).

2. Not being personally impacted - most women won't ever go to prison or know someone who has, so the possibility of being locked in a cell with someone with a penis, doesn't really matter to them. They aren't competitive athletes so don't really care whether women or men come first in a sport they don't care about. The number of transpeople is so tiny they don't really see their lives being impacted in any negative way, so don't understand why GC people are making such a fuss.

3. Personal experience - they have trans friends/family members whom they like/love. They know their trans friends would never want to hurt people, so they assume all trans people are like them, and therefore should be treated kindly. Nobody wants their friends to be discriminated against.

They might genuinely see their trans friends as their 'new' sex. Posters here insist that you can always tell (and I agree often, maybe even usually you can), but I know 2 trans men, one of whom I classed as a really good friend, and I (and the rest of our friends) had absolutely no idea until they told me. Even now I hugely struggle to think of them as anything other than males in my head. I would feel utterly ridiculous calling them 'she' and, again, despite the majority viewpoint on MN being that 'we welcome transmen into women's facilities,' realistically I know if my mum or gran or whoever saw my friends in the women's loos they'd be really freaked out. Because they look like men, muscley, beardy men!

4. They honestly don't care. Again, lots of posters on here insist everyone cares about the importance of female only spaces really and are just being handmaideny or performatively woke or whatever but there are women who honestly are completely not bothered about sharing services, changing facilities etc with men, trans or not. Perhaps they have a very queer or just mixed sex friendship circle so are completely used to sharing bedrooms on holidays, etc with male friends. They don't see any difference between a gay male friend, a gay female friend or a trans friend - they'd happily share a bed with any of them.

Lots of young people travelling (me included) actively choose to stay in mixed sex hostel dorms rather than splitting the friendship group. We all genuinely preferred to be with men we knew than women we didn't. It's not exactly the same but in lots of countries in europe that are a lot more relaxed with nudity than us, people legitimately don't bat an eye about being naked in a sauna or topless on a beach with people of the opposite sex.

When GC people insist that women only spaces are needed because women are a) vulnerable and b) want women-only spaces they think, well, I'm a woman and I'm not and I don't, so if they're wrong about that they're probably wrong about everything else too.

so lots of reasons, and of course 'be kind' and 'being on the right side of history' play huge parts too.

I saw one post that said

“You aren’t afraid of trans women in toilets - you are afraid of predatory men”

So close yet still not able to join those dots.

Just to be clean I am ofcourse not suggesting all trans women are predatory. But that we are indeed afraid of predatory men and we cannot distinguish who is and who is not.

This drives me bonkers. It would be great if they could give us pointers on how to tell the difference.

Some women treat feminism as an identity, and others as a political movement that encourages each of us to engage in personal growth.

@5128gap & @Bobblebottle I agree with your posts.

I used to think that trans women were good for feminism because they demonstrated how much of society's image of "womanhood" was just social conventions that could equally well be inhabited by men.

Then I realised (TRA-style) trans women and trans men were insisting the exact opposite, that meeting society's stereotypes for a woman was the fundamental truth of being a woman, and that sex and the challenges of being female-bodied were being written not just out of womanhood but out of society's narrative altogether,. At which point I did a very fast 180!

The reason I don't think it's a both sides have merit thing is neatly summed up by @MarieDeGournay 's comment :

However, they claim they have a 'female gender', so TWAW is not about men changing sex, but men having a different gender identity from other men.

How that is supposed to make transwomen entitled to avail of sex-segregated women's facilities is not clear.

It's the heads-we-win-tails-you-lose-ness of it that stops Genderism being a credible proposition.

On the one hand Genderists want to define men and women as not based on sex, but on the other also want to insist we can't separate by sex outside these apparently unrelated-to-sex groups of "men" and "women". That is the problem, the fundamental unfairness.

It's not about whether what trans women feel is medically real, or emotionally genuine, or even whether it is what truly makes "a woman" a woman, it's about it not being the same thing as being physically female but still demanding to be treated as if it is, as if women's resistance to being touched by male hands and viewed by male eyes was never about their maleness but about the presence of an inner gender even though at the same time no one is supposed to be able to know without being told what inner gender someone has, and as if all the history of wwomanhood and the rights that women have because of that history didn't actually happen to female people at all.

Once you stop looking at trans people, trans women in particular, and focussing on what is fair or not fair to them, and think about the female people and what is fair or not fair to them, the whole thing falls apart.

@onceandneveragain I mean, the easiest way to understand the 'blind spot' thinking of 'but WHY can't they see the bleeding obvious?' is to put yourself on the side of the debate in a different moral/contested opinion, one where you fall on the traditionally liberal side.

Back in the day I was against abortion. I helped to run pro-Life conferences, gave talks, went on marches. At the same time I was also pro unilateral nuclear disarmament. I joined protests at Molesworth and Greenham Common and was arrested at one point. I had the pretty unique experience of seeing the difference between how the police treated both sides, how different flavour news outlets reported both sides, how right-wingers and left-wingers discussed both sides. I had pro-Life posters ripped out of my hands by feminists at Uni and got called all the usual right-wing slurs that GC feminists complain about now. At the same time I was being told to FO back to Russia by passers-by at CND marches. I also came to realise how disappointing some politicians are; opining on matters that they have not done even the most basic research on and often unable to follow even the simplest logic train.

The fact that I was receiving applause and condemnation from both sides helped me to become very good at seeing both points of view. For what it's worth, I have changed my mind on both those issues, partly through engagement with reasonable people on the 'other side'. With those past experiences in mind I have genuinely tried to understand the gender ideology POV. But there is nothing there to understand. It is all constant re-definitions, exclusive appeal to emotions and thought-terminating cliches.

My post got deleted which ironically proves the point I was making that Malaga Airport is a bit of an undiscovered destination that visitors really don't want to share, so people don't even know it exists!