some parallels

[Manfreglory]

I've been teasing out this idea, that transphobia and xenophobia have much in common.

• both rest on 'you're not from here; your culture is different; you can't know what it is to have grown up 'over here'/had period pains/gone through labour.

• both reject difference or change in favour of sameness or stasis. 'You look and talk and think differently/you underwent a journey to get here/I can't fully relate to you'.

• both rest not just on culture but on biology: 'Your genes are different than mine/your genotype for phenotype A, B or C aren't identical to mine'.

• both are territorial: 'i sweated blood as a member of this sex/to make it in this society - who are you to come here and demand a seat at the table'?

• both are suspicious of the reasons for transformation. 'You just want the perks of being female; you just want to look up our skirts in the toilet; you just migrated here from Guatemala for financial stability.'

• both demonize, aggressively overstating the chance that the person has or will commit a crime. (Migrants: no need to give examples, just read the news. Trans people: 'you just want access to 'our spaces'' (i.e. the spaces where women/cis women enjoy their privacy from all men, cis or trans) so you can assault us'.

• both minimize or even deny, the need for the transition: 'No child is born trans/those parents were homophobic as the kid was just gay/trans women are men with their dicks lopped off/people should stay in their home country and migration is too dangerous'.

• both hysterically fear that the trans person/migrant will corrupt innocents: 'they will indoctrinate children in school/they will spread religious fundamentalism'.

Gender critical women: ask yourself if you've been radicalized into the new right.

Bloody hell. It's like talking to a child.

That's as rude as I've ever been on this forum, but it comes from frank disbelief at this as Manfr's response to the statistics, arguments and nuance presented.

I remember playing tennis as a teen. I'd always play best against a strong opponent - they'd challenge me to up my own game. And I was often shocked at how much more likely I was to fluff my shots playing with someone much weaker - I just crumpled to their level.

For me, this forum is all about the chance to present a strong argument for the lurkers. I'm mystified as to what is represents for Manfr, as it sure as heck ain't that.

Young transboys/transmen make terrible boys/men because they have absolutely no idea how boys and men think and behave, especially with regard to their interactions with both those of their own sex and the opposite one. How could they, when they think they can become them? Transwomen have it somewhat easier because they can practise the easily recognised performative stereotypes (that in fact many women do anyway). Unfortunately they often get it terribly wrong because their ideas are so sexualised. I daresay some “pass”, at least at first glance, in certain situations, but probably very few.

So you have an inkling of a suspicion.

The issue isn’t that we women are absolutist. It’s that trans girls in sport stop girls enjoying and fairly competing. That only gets more extreme with age. Mediocre middle aged men can beat fit young women who have trained hard fairly easily.

The only approach that prevents that is what you call absolutist.

Transwomen in single sex spaces stop them being single sex. Again, it’s not us being absolutist, it’s what the words mean.

We haven’t had a thousand or more years of differentiating by sex if that were not a sensible way to do it.
It may be a blunt instrument- but it’s effective at the job which it’s designed for.

Wishing the world was less absolutist will not improve the situation of women and girls one bit.

What are your thoughts on the recent NHS Fife case, where a male doctor who calls himself a woman insisted on using the female changing room where his female colleagues were getting changed? And then got hospital management to punish the nurse who spoke out against his intrusion.

For a start, you have misunderstood this:

"Everybody on this forum is certain. Dead certain. Xx Is female and Xy Is male. There is only this."

If you actually asked instead of thinking you are posting great and intelligent 'gotchas', you would actually get some answers that would show this is actually not the full story that you are trying to make it. Chromosomes are just one aspect of who is and is not female. The expert biologists tell us that usually this chromosome categorisation is reliable. However, what is the appropriate statement is that a female person is someone who is born with a body formed around the production of large gametes, meaning having ovaries or that the body intended to have ovaries where there are not gonads present, regardless of whether those large gametes were ever produced, are being produced or will be produced in the future.

"There is no gender."

When considering single sex provisions, gender is irrelevant except for if an additional gender neutral provision is needed. In which case, that is for those needing that provision and the groups that support them to campaign for.

"Usage of a sexed space must rest entirely on the makeup of your blood: your chromosomes."

The usage of a sexed space must rest entirely on a person's sex. As per the body formation categorisation mentioned.

"I find this reductive, naive and discriminatory. It forces people to use spaces designed for their sex at birth when they might have been identifying otherwise for decades. It might terribly humiliating not to mention risky, to walk into that space and be a target for bigots or macho drunk guys. But this, you say, is the price of your kind of absolutism. (The fact that it is someone else's price to pay, and not yours, is just by the by)."

So, a group of people have been using spaces that they should have respected were for the opposite sex to them for decades. And you don't see a glimmer of colonisation in your statement.

Why should a group who should have remained out of the other sex's single provisions be allowed to continue to enter after it has been shown that not only do female people feel distressed by male people being in those provisions they need to be female only, but also that this is all driven by a person's philosophical belief.

Just to be clear again, there is no biological or neurological markers that can be used to categorise someone who has a transgender identity.

'It might terribly humiliating not to mention risky, to walk into that space and be a target for bigots or macho drunk guys."

Firstly, please show the statistics in the UK where male people with transgender identities are at risk of being attacked more than any other group of male people in the UK population.

And if you cannot, why does this group of male people get special treatment over the other groups of vulnerable male people. That is actually direct discrimination.

Secondly, 'It might terribly humiliating not to mention risky, to walk into that space and be a target for bigots or macho drunk guys." This is not for female people to solve by allowing any male person to access single sex provisions.

Thirdly, if a male person is going to targeted specifically because he is trans, what is to stop those attacking male people coming into the female single sex space to attack that male person? Your logic simply does not hold.

"But this, you say, is the price of your kind of absolutism. (The fact that it is someone else's price to pay, and not yours, is just by the by)."

Safeguarding protocols could be said to be 'this kind of absolutism'. No male people above 8 years old to be using the female single sex provisions.

"The fact that it is someone else's price to pay, and not yours, is just by the by"

This is just pure emotional manipulation and it is actually not even true.

A group of male people with transgender identities don't have to use female single sex provisions. There are plenty of gender neutral options available to them. If they choose to reject the single sex provision provided for them though, that is something they must address themselves - without disrespecting the needs of female people in the process. Which is what you seem to be pushing for on this board -that female people have to accept male people into our female single sex provisions and that this is the only acceptable solution.

That 'absolutism' about who must use provisions, seems to be all yours.

This is the type of inconsistency that we have been trying to point out to you.

I will come back to the other paragraphs.

There are videos on BookTube breaking down how male and female authors often get it wrong writing opposite sex characters in their novels. I think we notice when male authors are terrible at writing women. But it works the other way round too, and lots of female authors really have no concept of male friendship or how men interact with each other.

I feel that way when I see a young transman trying to interact with men. They don't know how to do it, and it makes me cringe to see how obviously female their mannerisms are. They seem to arrive at a place of preferring female company even if they don't want to see themselves as female.

There's a common belief among women that transmen pass better, and maybe that's true in some contexts - I think women are better at sexing a person at a glance - but I would be really surprised if men often mistook transmen for male.

To balance my last response - this, in contrast, is a great post. I'm not saying I agree with it all, but it's really interesting.

To address the essence of it, I think most posters recognise the complexities you suggest we ignore, are empathetic about many trans people's plight, and, in a good proportion of cases, actually began this journey thinking as you do.

Many resent having been forced into a proportionately more "absolutist" position than they may otherwise have taken, had this absolutist war not been waged on women and their rights. The stakes set by the TRAs and their ilk are so very high - nothing less than our redefinition and erasure as a legal, political and social class - that previous pronoun-users and space-sharers have been forced to harden their stance, as they saw inches they give became the proverbial stolen miles.

Your post does also misrepresent the degree to which most posters here are "absolutist", though. Your emotive "mass invasion of women's spaces" is indeed unlikely - read instead the numerous posts about how safeguarding works for an explanation of what we actually think. "You put all trans people together" is also emphatically not the case - the priority for many is protecting trans-identifying children, and their different predicament to, for example, grown male transexuals, AGPs and cross-dressers.

This recognition of complexity, coupled with the trans movement's typical failure to recognise or acknowledge it, is what, rather paradoxically, has driven us to a harder line: as long as all these people are "trans", there is no way to distinguish between them, allowing access to some but not others. And indiscriminate access to all equates to massively increased risks to women and children. So as long as TRAs won't permit nuance, we're forced into a rather more wholesale No.

However, I'd say that there's a fairly strong argument that what you're framing as "absolutist" on our part is, in fact, rather more nuanced, and that what you see as your own nuance is actually rather more absolutist. For example, we've been clear that we're largely welcoming of trans-identifying females in our spaces and other threads include nuanced discussion about how best to accommodate those with differences of sexual development.

Of the three possible approaches to accommodating self-claimed "outliers" resistant to sex-based categories -

1. Make female spaces more "inclusive"
2. Make male spaces safer and welcoming
3. Make third spaces more universal

you seem to be focussing on 1) only, presenting our convincing arguments against it as reductively absolutist. Is this an absolutist approach in itself, perhaps?

None of 1), 2) or 3) are easy. All demand large scale societal change. So, I go back to my arguments of previous posts as regards which is the best to fight for - which is safest, and which meets the interests of the vast majority. That would be 3), above. It's certainly not the easiest, of course - that 1) is seen as the easiest target belies the very reason women need their single-sex spaces: sexist disregard for our safety and dignity. And that 2) is never even proposed belies a tellingly absolutist attitude to male and female gendered roles - the former remain unchallenged and unaffected, with the latter expected to bend over backwards.

"While I'm sure of all this, I'm not sure how it should work if somebody identifies as trans and feels trans but hadn't made any changes to their outward appearance or biology. Can it pave the way for a mass invasion of women's spaces? I doubt it but I am not as sure as you all seem to be about your position. You put all trans people together; I suspect there might be different rights of access and usage but I know I'm setting myself up for a virtual bloodbath here."

So, because you are unsure, you feel you have a right to denigrate others the way you have?

Because you feel you have a superior morality but you acknowledge that you are not actually knowledgeable enough to have confidence in how situations should be handled. But you know damn well that MN FWR posters are to be denigrated.

"You put all trans people together; I suspect there might be different rights of access and usage but I know I'm setting myself up for a virtual bloodbath here."

YOU are the person who seeks to put all trans people together.

Have you not noticed on this thread that people are very clearly differentiating between 'groups' of people with transgender identities? This is where it is your own prejudice that has come into play and you seek to tell us what we believe instead of asking and engaging.

NO. Trans people are homogenous. There is very clearly one very obvious grouping with different needs - FEMALE people. Maybe in your rush to accuse women on this board you missed the fact that many of us continue to fight for the needs of all female people. Even those who have transgender identities.

And fuck. YOU have started aggressively denigrating posts on this board and then have the gall to say you are setting yourself up for a virtual bloodbath here.

Perhaps if you had started a thread in good faith, you would have received a very fucking different response. Take responsibility for your own actions here.

Not really. My view is no biological man should be entering women's spaces. I don't feel I can speak for men in men's spaces.

Transmen I've met who are still recognisably biological women are welcome in the women's toilets. I'm also concerned that actually the mindset of "should" use the loo that aligns with their perceived identity risks their safety.

Like I say perception differs. I have no problem identifying biological women who have had breasts removed or very small breasts for whatever reason and have short hair.

Those who have deliberately gone to more extreme measures to in affect, be seen as biological males and enter women's spaces that prohibit biological males will reasonably frighten women.

In practice though as far as I'm aware transmen haven't been doing so, as they being biological women understand womens' perspectives. I.e. I've not seen any court cases of transmen using women's facilities despite objections.

Not so much recognition of complexity. More "I haven't bothered to find out any information but here's my opinion anyway"

Off to find out whether CERN want to know about my views on particle physics. I am unfettered by knowledge or experience, and am sure they will benefit from my open minded perspective.

I actually have sympathy for tp who have been identifying for decades. The ones who transitioned when their were safeguards. Who probably, for the most part, had all the hormones and all the surgeries. The bulk of them may have been genuinely dysphoric. I've more sympathy for their wives and children but that's a totally separate issue. They were tiny in number. When they used women's spaces they were tolerated. Some may have 'passed' because women didn't notice, noticed but didn't care or cared but gritted their teeth. It could have carried on this way for the foreseeable.

So, what changed? It wasn't women, we've been running to catch up. Everything changed when the fire nation attacked tp became the new cause du jour of so-called progressives. The number of tp massively increased, it wasn't just dysphoria men, it was any man with a head tilt and a go-get'em attitude. Naked men in our changing rooms. Filming themselves wanking in the women's toilets. When we became 'bleeders', 'menstruators', 'uterus havers', 'non-men'. Not to be inclusive of tm but because men wanted our words.

If we're 'absolutist' it's because tw became entitled then greedy. How could women compromise? There was no compromise. Do you have one @Manfreglory ?

"Trans women competing with born-women in sport? Another thing I'm still trying to learn about so I can form a meaningful opinion. Not there yet. My daughter was regularly beaten by a trans girl when they were little: I didn't love it and interestingly, nor did the mother particularly. There's that. Unlike most on here, I am not an absolutist and I don't think this is simple."

Well, fuck.

Ask fucking questions. We have loads of studies that show without doubt that even from the age of 7 that male athletes have male physical advantages.

But it really is THAT simple when every fucking study shows that no stage of testosterone suppression in a male body that undergoes any part of male puberty removes male physical advantage.

If you want reading material, the link below is a good place to start

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5142027-save-female-sports-evidence-thread?page=1

Then, when you consider the evidence that no stage of testosterone suppression in a male body that undergoes any part of male puberty removes male physical advantage, come back and tell us all why the fuck should we be allowing male people into female single sex provisions when the average woman has no fucking chance of fending of a male who could have on average 160%+ more grip strength and significant punch power than her.

Seriously, did you never once think that the entire argument about sport is relevant to safety in single sex spaces? Because a female person has a chance to fend off a female attacker, that is what safeguarding risk includes.

But a male attacker? Really???? You think so... please tell us why with detail not just some overly emotional reasoning that you have been feeding this thread since you started it.

Please quote people when you're replying.

Rubbish. Many do have sex organs and would be forced to, under your regime, take their kit off at a women's pool. Think about it.

Isn't @Manfreglory being discriminatory, or, dare I say it, transphobic, in assigning different levels of support and belief for different trans people? After all, if you say you're trans, you are, no debate. Apparently.

A woman with a scarred arm, chest, and excess skin attached to her vulva is not a man.

Yes.

The ECtHR has already ruled that this is discriminatory.

Finally, if male single sex spaces are so dangerous for male people to be, where is the effort to improve this?

Either it is not true, and cannot be held to be true even using statistical trends and logic, or it is true and no one is taking notice of a grave issue across the UK?

Which is it?

Or could the issue also then be solved by very public campaigns that make male single sex spaces safer for all male people? That in every city there are safe male toilets schemes and all the media support.

If it is an issue in the UK, where are the UK stats and where are the campaigns?

Yes. This has been pointed out to them.

That they are seeking to arbitrate according to their personal criteria and that others have to arbitrate too.

Far better that all male people stay out of female single sex provisions and no one has to decide who is 'transgender' enough to enter.

That is the entire premise of safeguarding, after all!

No.

Those female people have simulated body parts that are not penises.

You keep accusing others of absolutism, but this post is just another of your absolutist posts. Those female people can choose to use alternative spaces.

The ONLY person on this thread who is 'forcing' them into female single sex spaces is YOU!

@Manfreglory Are you claiming that a transmen who uses the women's toilets for whatever reason isn't genuinely trans?

R.e. your point about safety of "transgender women". Sure some males who identify as women don't want to share spaces because they feel unsafe.

But that's exactly the same right that I'm claiming. I don't want to share spaces with this biological men either, and you are denying me this right as a biological women.

What about other men who claim they aren't safe in men's toilets, perhaps some more so than transgender women. I.e. a non gender confirming gay teen male who is disabled and supports a rival football team and has previously been assaulted in the men's loos. Is he also allowed in the women's loos?

How is a non-functional facsimile of a penis a “sex organ”?

Isn't it revealing how surprised TRAs are that women are largely fine with transmen in women's spaces? Fascinating how so many men genuinely think we have more in common with men, if the men are wearing make up and dresses.

Because @Manfreglory said it was a sex organ.

So using postmodernism, if someone labels a skin tube surgically attached to a female groin a penis, it is one.

I am starting to wonder how many men (regardless of trans status) just identify women v men based on whether or not they have visible breasts and short hair.