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.

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

Mr Cholmondeley-Warner I presume.

Incredibly, it seems that we're back to the "different but equal" battle of last century - but fighting it on both fronts now, reduced to defending our own "difference" even as we seek equality despite it. A patriarchal masterstroke, some may say.

Transgenderism is a patriarchal masterstroke especially in how it’s re/asserted male rights over (female) health, education, sports, but even language and the very meaning of words and it’s managed to do so by piggybacking on to progressive causes and their institutions.

Unfortunately, it’s damaging that cause from within eg the Democratic Party is collapsing under infighting at a time when America desperately needs an effective opposition the most.

Haha 🤣 Know Your Place!

"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'."

The thing is OP, again you have drawn a number false comparisons based on your own misunderstanding. That is why people are reading your posts and are bemused. It has all been done before, there has been not one point in your OP that we haven't addressed many times before on this board.

Feminism has always been about there being only one requirement to be female, that is having a female body, while living your life any way that you choose within your country's legal system. How else can feminists campaign to overcome a millennia of oppression based on having that female body without acknowledging the basis of the body and the direct impacts of having that body.

Your comparisons are all using mischaracterised attributes of feminists to make your false point. You have created a caricature of a group of people you disagree with in your mind and you have created straw man arguments to discredit the group. Have you considered why you have done this?

Why are you so determined to find a way to discredit a group of women?

The OP is comedically silly.

Sex is sex, it is real and universal. Males cannot become women. Females cannot become men.

Race and nationality are artificial constructs. Foreigners can integrate into societies by learning and following laws and customs. Colonists, particularly Imperialist colonists, who insist on imposing their own cultures over the indigenous ones are unlikely to integrate.

Most violent criminals are male.

PS, @Boiledbeetle is a real delight, that is true.

Though I'm sulking because I can't do fancy letters.

Thanks for saying the only thing that needs to be said.

Like the ‘belief’ that the earth revolves around the sun. And, the ‘trans’ pathway of the sun revolving around the earth, per se, not existing.

Dreadful when people make ridiculous nonsense up, and others don’t ‘believe’ it.

That's the garderobe/wardrobe thing, with the theory about ammonia keeping valuable clothes free of insects. Always a bit unconvincing, and I'm not going to be inviting drunk men to pee in any of my clothes storage areas..

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garderobe

What? I didn’t know that. I don’t know much about Reform, but I thought old Farage went for what he thinks are popular opinions?
Mind, it would make sense for the far right to support transgenderism, as it’s a male supremacist movement. Keep those uppity women in their place.

Oh no. One of his mps was saying men totally belong in women’s prisons if they claim to be “ladies” and he backed her up. So technically the TRA are now supported by the right wing. It’s hilarious.

Reform have some conflicting views on where male prisoners should be housed if they declare that they are female .

Just to clarify - she’s not an MP she’s their new prisons spokesperson (I think) - a former prison governor.

Which goes back to the point about this analysis being rooted in North American cultural imperialism. The UK is a society where there's both gender critical and TWAW beliefs right across the political spectrum. Nobody tell OP what our Communist Party have to say on the issue or his mind will explode!

Ah. My bad. I’m still laughing at the TRAs though. How long did they claim we were right wing?

@Manfreglory, come back!

Your opening post did make me think, insofar as I had the same visceral reaction to it as others - I felt it was patently absurd, but really enjoyed the challenge of clearly explaining why. I was also encouraged to see you refer to "teasing out" and "asking yourselves" difficult questions - we need more of this on both sides.

So, now that many of us have done as you asked, in various ways - @Nachoinseachthu's spot-on extension of your metaphor, my step-by-step breakdown, various people explaining why the analogy of colonialism is more apt, the fab one-liners really getting to the heart of the issue - isn't it time for you to do your bit again?

Pick an argument and have at it! Really read and reflect on it, as quite a few of us have on yours, perhaps actually quoting it to ensure you don't slip into misrepresentation, and are instead meaningfully engaging with it, bit by bit by bit.

Can you do that? Are you willing to try? So few of our visitors are, and it does tend to mean that each visit really just offers an intellectual exercise / thought experiment for us to test our views and thoughts. We do, and we find they pass! Again, and again and again! Without any further engagement from the challenger to show us where we're going wrong, this will keep happening.

Surely this isn't what you want, is it? To give us a platform to prove our points? If you genuinely, deeply care about trans rights, "educate us", as the saying goes, where education doesn't mean empty catechisms, but gradually "teasing out" a deep understanding.

Can you come back and give us something more to work with, Manfreglory?

Citizenship and ethnicity are not the same thing. You can change your citizenship but your ethnicity remains encoded into your DNA. There's a whole industry built on DNA genealogy and finding where your ancestors came from. It's particular common as an interest in the US.

Weirdly there's a whole social trend to this too. Native American DNA is highly coverted (as are all the indigenous DNA ethnicities) on Ancestry DNA Reddit. Getting even 1% is prised. There a whole issue with there being a common family myth that there was a Native American ancestors which is often made up nonsense as it was a more palatable way to explain away darker skin than Jewish ancestry or descent from slaves in some way. The more DNA ethnicities you have the cooler you are somehow. It's all a bit Pokémon - Gotta Catchem All.

What isn't liked is one or two ethnicities only. That's generally considered 'boring' (it far from is - it shows a real culture history and for DNA purposes these individuals are particularly interesting as reference points for everyone else. OR an ethnicity of English, Scottish, Welsh, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Germanic European (which is fairly typical of someone from the UK or UK descent.) It's fascinating seeing how many Americans don't want to be purely White Western European in ethnicity! The only exception is Irish - it's regarded as fairly cool. It really feeds into this idea that victimhood is cool which is cultural the thing right now.

I've seen a few arguments break out over this trend with people (rightly) pointing out how warped (and actively dangerous) this preference is.

If you are white British I'm afraid you are likely fairly screwed as you are unlikely to have 10+ DNA ethnicities. Your family history is too dull for US tastes. Sorry. (This is absolute bloody nonsense btw).

That's because @Manfreglory doesn't have any counter arguments. Though I'm sure we'll get some new versions of "evil bigots" soon enough

I've been a feminist since before most of the elder statesmen of the new right were out of nappies.

Farage was still diapered up at 15, right?

I'm not too optimistic we'll get meaningful counter-arguments, but do try to live in hope. I mean, Red's post above shows the quality of engagement you can get here if you've really got the conviction and insight necessary to engage meaningfully. The typical lack of engagement encourages me on several fronts - not only in reinforcing that "our cause is just" 😁, but also in that it sometimes does suggest to me how brittle the conviction, as well as the arguments, of many TRAs must be. If it rests on little more than straw man misrepresentation, with an aversion to deep reflection, I think that shows the beliefs themselves are surface-level, under-sown by unacknowledged kernels of doubt. I think it reinforces that this period of insanity really will be relatively short-lived, in historical terms, at least. You can't live a lie indefinitely.

Great post. The reason (one of many reasons) the OP’s analogy is fails is the power balance is reversed.

I can't be the only one who thought of this when they saw 'wearing their wardrobe/the wardrobe of their choice'

Re-posting as it was just glorious - and provides a delightful interlude as we await the return of the main event. 😎

xenophobia isn’t justified
Possibly not, in the strict translation of 'irrational fear of strangers', but rational caution of strangers is a survival mechanism. I would also argue that, in a way, it shows respect for those strangers. It acknowledges that they have strength and agency, that they may have allegiances and dreams that differ from yours, that they may intend to act in ways that might not be to your benefit. Unquestioning acceptance of strangers can indicate a lack of respect. It assumes the strangers are weak and pliable, that they will fully accept your way of doing things, that they will put your needs ahead of their own. Consider the shock of the chattering classes when immigrant minorities show agency and vote in an unapproved way.

So I would make a similar argument with transphobia. 'Irrational' fear may be unjustified, but rational caution of men claiming to be women is very much justified. It shows that we think they may be tigers, not kittens to be petted and fawned over, and in that sense it is a type of respect.