Help me argue that What it Feels Like For a Girl doesn't prove terfs are wrong

[Pluvia]

I'm in a women's discussion group with a woman who is an expert in her field of medicine. She's worked for some years with the WHO and other major agencies and has only recently returned to the UK after about a decade working in Geneva, with stints in Ethiopia and elsewhere in the developing world. Her specialist field is a particular area of women's health. She knows what a woman is.

Sex realism/ the GC pov seems to have completely passed her by. She has no idea of the complexity or reality of the situation and thinks trans people are vulnerable souls who probably have some genetic or neurological predisposition that leaves them feeling that they are in the wrong bodies. She thinks Cass is unduly harsh. Although her life appears to be focussed around women's health, she seems blind to the feminist or women's rights issues inherent in GI.

She has no idea about sexual fetishes, AGP, attacks on women, the misogyny and homophobia that lies behind so much GI. She can't understand how someone like me, who appears to be so reasonable on so many other topics, can be so cruel when it comes to transpeople. I asked her to read Helen Joyce's Trans and she said she tried but couldn't bear the hatred that she experienced in the first few chapters. She has now sent me a link to What It Feels Like For a Girl. which, she says, will show me what I've misunderstood and why my attitude is so harsh.

I'm not going to watch WIFLFAG and give a misogynistic, homophobic gay man any oxygen. Any thoughts on what I can say that might get through to her? At what point with people like her does one just give up?

And yet you feel that others should think the way you do - despite all the evidence against that philosophy 😀

hilarious!

You can’t transition gender - you simply expand it…

so you mean the man who illegally and deliberately tried to use single-sex bathroom provision set aside for women - and was called out for trying to deliberately break the law! You would expect a barrister to know the law 😀

but I agree with your second paragraph you do seem unable to see…

The law is unclear?!
😂😂😂😂😂

you mean the law that parliament themselves wrote!

the law that has been on the statute books for 15 years

the law that was clarified by the Supreme Court in April in words that can be understood by most 5 year olds

the law that Parliament’s own body has already clarified in interim guidance with clear instructions to immediately act upon

the law that the Scottish parliament understood so easily

the law that I and 90% of other adults could explain to parliament and our MPs in words of few syllables?

that law - which Parliament are deliberately breaking?!

the only harassing was a male trying to use female facilities - I would love to see a court case where they sued because they were not allowed to break the law and harass women!

No. Why is it women’s problem to “empathise with transpeople”? Where is the empathy from males with a trans identity when they are told their presence in female spaces makes women uncomfortable and anxious? If makes with a trans identity feel uncomfortable in male spaces, that’s on men to resolve.
you’re right though. We should work on society to accept thst anyone can present how they like and a man in a dress is just as much of a man as one wearing trousers and should be welcomed and accepted in all male spaces. That could be a good project for you rather than scolding women for objecting to men in their spaces don’t you think?

Maybe try it from the perspective that trans people are being let down hugely and that they are victims of a society that doesn't tolerate feminine makes and masculine females.

Most men who call themselves trans don’t appear to be feminine to me. Many of them exhibit very male typical behaviour. The fact they’ve put on a dress painted their nails doesn’t make them feminine. Obviously some are effeminate from a young age but these seem to be the minority. I also doubt that men being welcoming of TW into their spaces would change anything. The type of TW who insists on barging their way into women’s spaces doesn’t want to be welcomed into male spaces, they want to be welcomed into female spaces. The fact that some men are antagonistic towards cross dressing men is useful for arguing they belong in female spaces.

OP I think you’re on a hiding to nothing. This woman is unlikely to be convinced by anything you have to say. I frequently try and read stuff from the trans activist point of view. It’s extremely hard work because the arguments are all over the place and nothing makes sense. Men can become women because clown fish can change sex isn’t a convincing argument. It’s interesting that the reason given for not continuing with HJ’s book is because of the “hatred”. No comment at all on the cogency of HJ’s arguments. You can’t change this person’s mind with facts and reason if she believes TWAW.

Hi OP - I am also struggling with the idea of engaging with WIFLFAG, even though it is set in Hucknall, near where I am from. The premise sounds overwhelmingly homophobic and misogynistic to me. I can understand how troubled the main character is, but the fact that he was bullied for being gay and abused/ took part in lots of degrading sex, so sees himself as a woman (because real men aren’t gay and only women have degrading sex) feels so horrible and offensive to me… more so as it’s endorsed by the BBC. The fact is, most of the men who are trying to claim they are women are attracted to women, not men. So when they come into our spaces or claim they are lesbians, there are obvious problems for women who don’t see them that way. In that sense this series, as well as being offensive for women, seems pretty irrelevant to the main debate… if all trans women were in fact gay men, I don’t think things would be anything like as heated… there would be no male ‘lesbians’ and probably a lot less interest in men forcing their way into women’s spaces.

Helen Joyce’s book is very cool and rational, but it is framed as hate. Two inoffensive middle-aged women politely challenge a hulking great bloke in the women’s toilets, and they are accused of harassment.

There is no arguing with people like this - they are beyond reason. Might as well do something more productive with your time like listen to a podcast or do a crossword.

@Pluvia
You could suggest Material Girls instead. Kathleen Stock is/was very sympathetic to trans people and the style might be more palatable to your friend.
But on the whole my impression is that she is a lost cause. She's very invested in being "a nice person".

Coming back to this post, I thought of another analogy which may be relevant, which is that of unrequited love.

We are all familiar, in legend and in real life, with examples of this. The person who is broken hearted because they cannot be with the person they love. Perhaps that person is their ex partner who has decided they do not want to continue in a relationship. Perhaps they are married to someone else, or just not interested. Perhaps the object of their affections is a celebrity and the attention is entirely unwanted and considered stalking and harassment. Perhaps the person they love is dead and can never come back, or perhaps they are a figment of their imagination and never existed in the first place.

The person whose love is unrequited may be incredibly sad. They may be entirely truthful when they say they will never be happy unless they can be with the person they love. They may say they will kill themselves if they cannot be with that person. They may even do it.

But sometimes fixing someone's sadness isn't something the state can or should try to do. Sometimes it is impossible. (Parliament cannot legislate to bring a person back from the dead or a fictional character into being.)

And sometimes it is unreasonable. Hopefully we all agree that it would be wrong to compel someone (whether that person is Sally Brown who works in Sainsbury's or, I don't know, Claudia Schiffer) to be in a relationship with Harry Bloggs when she doesn't want to be. Even if that makes Harry Bloggs desperately sad. Even if Harry Bloggs does actually kill himself over it. Sometimes people's unhappiness can't be fixed, or the price of fixing it is too high, and it's not our responsibility to try.

It’s not a “transwoman actor” - the actor is a man who doesn’t identify as a woman. I think he’s possibly “non binary”.

Or, and I know this is a bit of a crazy idea, maybe we don't have to look at things from the perspective of how trans people feel. Maybe how we feel is just as valid, if not more so because there are about a hundred times as many of us and it's downright offensive and outrageous to believe that the feelings of one trans woman are more important than the feelings of a hundred women.

Gender critical feminists are not responsible for the fact that gender non conforming people don't fit into socially constructed stereotypes. We are pretty much the only ones actually fighting to combat those stereotypes themselves and getting precious little thanks for it. At some point it's actually fine to say, "OK, we understand that you are sad but it's not within our power or responsibility to fix it."

Everyone is either male or female. RMW and PL are both male. 'Trans' is the term used to describe those who, for whatever reason ( and there are many) choose to present as the opposite sex, often going as far as to have radical surgeries.

'Trans' is simply a framing device....people with trans identities are not a totally different category of human being, and 'being trans' is not a fixed condition, either ( unlike 'Sex') and we know that because of the large numbers of people who adopt 'trans' identities and then either desist or detransition.

It is interesting to listen to the stories of people who have adopted trans identities: the story of PL included. But the background the the ' transition' of PL proves nothing, other than that severe abuse and distress can lead people into adopting a cross sex identity; and it certainly doesn't counter the essential objections and concerns of people who understand that sex is real and who have profound concerns over the protections afforded to female people and to children.

NOPE.

No one is above the law, not even parliament.

Parliament has to respect the laws it previously made, and if it no longer agrees with those laws it has to change them through the correct legislative process.

If parliament made a law which says that female only spaces are for female people only, it cannot simply decide to disapply that law because it no longer agrees with that principle.

They need to stand up in the House of Commons and say in public that they want to change the law to make your rights as a trans woman trump my rights as a woman, and take the risk that the electorate tells them to fuck off to the far side of fuck at the next election.

A few have challenged my suggestion of arguing that trans people have been let down. I do think they have and I do think that homophobia is at the heart of a lot of trans procedures. That doesn't mean I don't agree with the position that women are the victims in terms of female spaces being taken over etc....

I am thinking how to be persuasive with an individual who sounds like they won't easily be persuaded and so I thought maybe the argument focusing on trans people being let down might be more effective at getting the individual to think a bit broader.

Your ‘intelligent’ group member holds similar views to my intelligent feminist colleagues who I dearly value. So I just never speak about this topic with them anymore.

@GallantKumquat Thank you for that very detailed account of Trans. I read it when it first came out, in lockdown, and my memory of it was a bit hazy and amalgamated with all the other things I've read since. But yes, I couldn't remember HJ being hateful or harsh, just very clear and factual, and the accusation of hatefulness surprised me and made me wonder whether she'd read it or been told by someone else that it was hateful. Your excellent account of it, particularly the transexual homosexual TW analysis, will help me in my response. I may find my copy of the book (if I haven't given it away, I gave several copies away) and quote from it in responding to her.

Thanks to everyone for your considered responses, I'm reading them all. I really like this woman and would hope that we could be sisters in the fight and friends. Perhaps it's the fact that I find her otherwise admirable that encourages me to keep trying to chip away at her stance on this subject. I'll give it another go or two, but after that I think I probably need to assume that all those years of working for the WHO have indoctrinated her — and maybe she needs to hold the officially sanctioned WHO line if she's to work with them in future. WHO was thoroughly TWAW when I last checked, so I'm presuming it still is.

If you've given her something to read that's tough for her to digest, then you really need to do her the decent of watching at least some of About A Girl, as a starting point for conversation, and to model the behaviour you want her to reciprocate.

It's a bit hypocritical IMO to expect her to read something she doesn't agree with but refuse to do the same yourself.

FWIW, I used to give people Helem Joyce's book, but unfortunately, Helen is on record saying some things that are very off putting it you're on the left, and I suspect I may have lost a 40 year friendship after giving that book to the wrong person :(

Now, I give people Hannah Barnes's Time To Think about the scandal at the Tavistock as it's written with compassion, details proper investigative journalism and the facts speak for themselves.

I haven't said how I feel nor have I watched the series. It just seems to me that if OP refuses to watch some of it when her friend has read some of the book then they're not going to be able to have a proper discussion. You can't just expect someone to adopt your point of view without finding out why the other person thinks as they do.

@AidaP
RMW is a male bodied person who wants ‘to pee’ in the loo clearly marked as reserved for female persons aka women. The Supreme Court has told him ‘that’s not on, mate’.

For a ‘barrister’ that’s an interesting disregard/ ignorance for legality.

BTW, there were all comers loos available….

So that she try to understand why her friend thinks as she does and then try and show her why her point of view is more valid. Surely that makes sense?

Societies that enforce rigid ideas of gender are harmful to everyone, not just trans people. And the ones who suffer most from it are women.

Why are you hit harder by the plight of those who choose to harm themselves, rather than those who are harmed by others? [Edited to add an acknowledgement that transed children may fall into the latter category But that is harm caused to some boys and all girls, with double harm to some girls..]

People always find it easier to see and relate to direct harm to a single person than more abstract harm to a group - human nature

I mean as a group, yes a large umbrella, of people that when discussed on this board most people generally know what is meant by the word trans.

Do we though? Because my mum would tell you that her friend's adult child who had a penectomy and vaginoplasty at the age of 19 and has a gender recognition certificate is a trans person, but that my pregnant friend's adult spouse who impregnated her after coming out as a trans woman isn't.