Misinformation correction: M&S Staff

[BeeSourianteAgain]

M&S have responded to people's enquiries, here's one:

https://bsky.app/profile/dpdormouse.bsky.social/post/3lvuzitrplc2f

As expected the staff member was just doing their job, something that happens thousands of times a day in shops all over the country.

As per normal, the trans panic was manufactured.

I fully expect all the GCs and media pundits who were pushing all sorts of hate to apologise, but as a person on their second LGBTQ moral panic I know very well how it goes.

I knew everything.

Oh wait, I THOUGHT I did. 🤣

Well yes, that too.

It's odd to me because there's no necessary link between older transitioning and creepy attitudes towards women's and children's boundaries, eroding safeguarding etc.

The 40 year old TIM who feels more comfortable in his own skin presenting in a female persona doesn't have to have these attitudes. But you do start to notice the frequency of those attitudes in certain quarters.

I don't think it's a massive stretch to see PIE type arguments resurfacing.

Generally I'm in favour of listening to what people say instead of trying to intuit what they really mean - we get enough of that from visitors to FWR jumping to the dogwhistle explanation. But sometimes...

...sometimes it can be like how westerners can't understand the politics of somewhere like Kenya, where you have a political party that says it's social democratic or liberal and open to all Kenyans, and then you realise everybody in the party is Kikuyu or Luo or whatever.

I agree on both points.

I think sometimes the value of the non-personal shout at the sky abusive post is for the "be kind-wot u say-hell no that is nor right" reader. The DARVO post breaks the abuse down in a clear way so the reader who may not have understood what was written has a chance to understand and make up their own mind.

People dont accept abuse they are subjected to it and a MN poster can only react showing why it is abusive and rejecting it.

Unfortunatly some people come to MN to be abuaive as that it the only way they can make their point.

Others are being abusive just because they can.

I find it more incelly, rather than paedoy if I'm honest .

It's about control.

It's about controlling women and controlling the future with the use of children.

This then legitimises status and power of these males. Above women.

They hate being told no or being laughed at for this reason.

But unfortunately it does enable sexual predators too, so when you erode the boundaries of parents and you remove the protections of teens you create a situation where inevitably incelism enables paedos because it weakens the role of women and mothers in particular to safeguard.

This is a mens rights movement. We've said this all along.

I sometimes look at the Trans UK subreddit for research or laughs, and sometimes I can't bear to look.

As far as I can see there's a divide among the posters there with a majority of mostly young, sometimes very young, TIFs with extremely poor mental health. They're mostly looking for support and, I fear, looking in the worst place.

And there's a minority of creepy uncle TIMs who very much dominate.

What holds them together is the fanaticism, the catastrophising about trans genocide etc.

There's an incel vibe, but I'd be even more specific and think of the incels' beef with the Pick Up Artists.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the PUA scene, much of which is rapey as fuck, but its target market is lonely men who believe there's something they can do to improve their situation. At the milder end it shades into the legitimate dating advice community.

It seems to me the incel scene is full of young men who either don't have the social skills to improve their situation, or are just too lazy, and they wallow in their social ineptitude. It's become their identity. And they hate the PUAs about as much as TRAs hate detransitioners.

Not read whole thread but seen comments about average age of first bra fitting being 11. I think this is really unlikely. My daughter was indeed 11 (puberty hit early and hard) and the fitter seemed surprised she was so young. She was the youngest among her friends to wear a bra.

As others have said, many are in crop tops etc at this age rather than "proper bras".

I don't think it's a massive stretch to see PIE type arguments resurfacing.

It was more blatant a couple of years ago. Do you remember the organisations going into schools trying to popularise the PIE slogan ‘love is love’ and I think it was Asda was selling some very dodgy related merchandise.

I've seen a friend repeatedly use the phrase. I've bitten my tongue about saying "you do know the origins of that phrase don't you?" But she's fully rainbows up. I probably should do next time she does it.

There seem to be more than a few men even more outraged about this story, which is about safeguarding a young teenager, than there are about the usual stories of protecting adult women's privacy and dignity.

What's worse is that they are putting the onus on the girl. The victim. They are saying if the girl doesn't want to be sexually harassed or approached by a man all she has to do is say no. Putting aside the fact that many grown adult women find it hard to say no to scary pressuring men, let alone a vulnerable little girl, they are saying the girl needs to be violated first, in order to speak up. Nowhere do they say that the male should not be approaching a teenage girl about underwear in the first place! They are saying it's ok for him to approach, and then the onus is on the girl to say no.

It's classic predator apologist behaviour.

Putting the onus on a child to say no to an inappropriate behaviour from an adult is exactly what safeguarding is to prevent.

This is why all those posters saying ‘she could have just said ‘no’’ are missing the safeguarding implications.

Yes, and I forgot to mention the power imbalance between an adult male and a child. Especially a female child. It's like if (an analogy) a male teacher came onto a female student, and people are saying, 'well the girl could have said no to the teacher'. Putting the onus on the female student, and not the male teacher. It's like that. Here we have two examples of power imbalance. One, an adult. Two, a male. A male adult. Saying this little girl should 'find her voice' and say no to the adult shows a lack of understanding of the power differential between a girl and a male adult.

It's the predator's playbook - to put the onus on the powerless victim to speak up and say no (and if she doesn't say no, she 'asked for it' and it's 'her fault'), and exonerate the adult male because the victim didn't feel they could speak up, or be believed (quite correctly as we can see from this thread!).

The male adult has power over the child, especially a female child. People are forgetting the power imbalance here.

It's really like #MeToo never happened. We went straight from #MeToo to turbo-boosted turbo-charged mens rights. I think this ('trans'/mens rights movement) was the revenge for #MeToo.Weinstein and his supporters really came back with a vengeance. Women are right back to where we started. Worse; because we have the patriarchy and the mens rights movement under the clear loophole and guise of 'trans'. How convenient. We should have known men would take their revenge for #MeToo in the most insidious way.
Edited as I meant Weinstein, not Epstein.

Marks and Spencer has put the onus on the child in the same way by saying the employee was just working, the customer could ask for someone else.

Totally agree with this

Deep down, plenty of men weren't particularly happy with the shift towards greater respect and consideration towards women.

The second TRA ideology gave them the opportunity to brand us all bigots, Nazis, witches, pearl clutches for standing up to men - they grabbed that with both hands.

I was surprised, when I started to look, how many MRA names I recognised from our fight back in the early eighties to get the PIE shut down. They didn't want children safeguarded then, and they don't want them safeguarded now. It's just a different mask they have put on.

Maybe their applications to join the M&S bra fitting team are still pending and they can see their dreams slipping away…..

Never mind South Park totally predicting some of this - I find each day is getting more like a live action version of Viz.

Its one thing that I emphasize over and over to the next generation. If your brain pings that someone or something is off take it as a given that something is off even if they can never work out what prompted the ping to begin with

It was very visable on Twitter with accounts openly saying that they were MAPs (minor attracted people) and having a second @ which was private plus there were "gamer" type account which were just creepy.

Ans there were a suprising number of "respectable" people who defended the woman in the US who got college funding for her projects who wanted paedophilia recognised as an actual sexual orientation. And the defense was not just the recognition as something which needed treatment or to make it not just "not shameful" so people would seek help but rather it be "socially acceptable".

The adolescent in my family just got a first proper bra aged 13 and 10 months - up until now it was all soft stretchy things that are sized XS-XL etc rather than the 30-44 a-j scale.

(Unsurprisingly, we did not do any of this year’s back to school shopping in M&S!)

Period started early on in year 7 and first bra going into year 9 so pretty much the textbook time scale that you’ve found online - nothing like Natalie Wynn-ch’s supposition.

But then, naming oneself after Contra Points does rather suggest that Nat’s puberty was a male one.

Aaahhh. I wondered why the name seemed familiar and what it was a take on .

Reading this thread in one go was weird. I found the obsessive focus on extent of breast development typical in 11-14 year old girls by one or two obviously male posters disturbing. It rather re-inforced why we never want to be in a position where a (formerly) respected retailer would legitimise males discussing developing breasts with underage girls.
NAMALT obviously but it brought back unpleasant memories of creepy men when I was a teen

Trans identifying men see M&S bra department as their special place and female puberty as their specialist subject, so of course theyll need to flex their knowledge on this thread.

Ah yes, I forgot. Some of these men mistake their chest growths induced by a massive hormone imbalance for female puberty. Therefore they are ‘experts’. Obvs.