TRA Trolls - can we just say NO?

[BlueEyedBogWitch]

A full thread of NO’s might be more powerful than trying to reason with someone who is not interested in reason.

Just one ‘NO’ each, until they get bored and go away. Every time.

After all, it sums up our arguments very succinctly.

I believe that it is possible to reasonably balance everyone's needs. I don't agree that banning trans women from using any public facilities in accordance with their gender is that balance.

great, seems a sensible plan 👍

So what do you suggest? How do you balance women’s needs for single sex spaces with desire some males have to be in those spaces. You can’t have single sex spaces if both sexes are in there.
I do have a solution. We make all spaces mixed gender but segregated by sex. You’ve said sex and gender are different so I can’t see why this can’t work. Can you?

Perfectly put. The reason for avoiding this issue is obvious.

Oh it does indeed. How will we cape though without the regular scoldings we get?

It will be hard @Namelessnelly but we’ll just have to be brave and struggle on.

This is quite important.

The people whose distress matters: male people who dislike their male bodies

The people whose distress doesn't matter: female people with experience of male sexual violence

It's very revealing.

Ok just so I'm clear - you reject the notion of gender identities as things that are separate from sex?

Or are you saying you prefer to refer to it as "the psychological/ neurodevelopmental component of sex" but broadly it's what stonewall etc mean as a thing that can align with or not align with either sex?

I am neurodiverse so please could you be understanding and not answer a different question, but look at the wording I have actually chosen to use rather than changing my words and answering a slightly different question.

And again, it's not "my understanding", it's the understanding and experience of many trans voices. It underlies the Stonewall (and many other charities' and advocacy groups) definition of trans which is why I am interested that you appear to reject it (or conceptualize it in your own personal way).

So you're saying that some people are "trans" and these people get distressed because they are trans, and that distress is called gender dysphoria. And the way we can diagnose whether someone is trans is by observing the distress that results?

You are saying that no-one becomes trans as a result of gender dysphoria?

🎯

We could set up a scoldings rota and take it in turns.

I don’t think we’d pull it off if our hearts weren’t truly in it.

We can identify as batshit crazy. I mean if a man can identify as a woman, we can identify as scolds.

It's pretty grim when you see it in black and white like that

I'm trying to answer you as directly and clearly as I can.

• I don't think "gender" is separate to "sex".

• Rather, "sex", has several layers/ components (with variations across each layer).

• One of these layers is what stonewall call "gender" - which is the neurodevelopmental/ psychological aspect of sex.

• For the most part the different aspects of sex (chromosomes, hormones, gonads, genitals, psychology) all align as they are all part of the same developmental process which is driven by sex-hormone signalling genes that operate systemically across the body and brain.

• However, there are variations in development that can occur where different aspects of sex do not align. e.g. chromosomes do not align with hormones etc. Psychological sex does not align with genitals etc.

It becomes more grim if you re-write more accurately and say "The people whose distress matters: male people who say that they dislike their male bodies, and despite no evidence as to whether it is true claim to need to end women's rights to reduce the negative affects of the self-hatred"

And yet males are male, females are female and sex is immutable and binary. Therefore no males are allowed in female spaces and vice versa. However sad this makes people.

Almost yes.

So you're saying that some people are "trans" and these people get distressed because they are trans, and that distress is called gender dysphoria

This is correct.

way we can diagnose whether someone is trans is by observing the distress that results?

We don't diagnose being trans anymore, we only diagnose "gender dysphoria". This we diagnose by observing the distress.

Whether someone is trans - we can know that by asking them about their experience. They may or may not have gender dysphoria.

I think I had my shift this morning so I request some leave please!

The "sex/ gender, biological/ constructed, body/ mind, real/fictional" theoretical framework which is one of the central components of "gender critical feminism" is false, reductive and unhelpful.

Yet nevertheless, the boring old unidimensional concept of sex has a real impact on real people's lives, especially the roughly 50% of us who do happen to fall into that boring old unidimensional concept of "women" as adult human female.

So while I'm happy to work towards a world where that is no longer the case, for as long as it still happens, we also need to recognise the existence and needs of those people. And yes, that means we need to have that "sex/ gender, biological/ constructed, body/ mind, real/fictional" framework, not because it is theoretical but because it is a pragmatic framework that fits our real lived experiences and helps us make sense of them, and your theoretical framework, I'm afraid, does not. It might work for a subset of trans people but it excludes far too many other people to be a complete and sufficient framework for understanding female people's needs and reality.

And really I'm so so sorry, because I realise you find this unbearably unsophisticated and gauche of me to keep going back to this as if it were somehow real or somehow matters when your theories tell you it shouldn't, but there we are.

As I keep saying, if getting society to stop being sexist based on the female body was just a matter of telling everyone to stop doing it we'd have never needed women's rights and spaces in the first place.

Are we back to sex being “oh so complicated”. What happened to the neurological difference? @Tandora im confused. Now you’re saying it’s to do with sex being not binary? But you said you had loads of papers showing it was neurological? Were they wrong? Things sure do move fast in your field of “expertise”

👍🏻

e.g. chromosomes do not align with hormones etc.

What on earth does that mean? It reads like gibberish to me but perhaps you could explain it?

I have a friend who's a relatively (midway, let's say) prominent TRA, and I've been trying for years, without much success, to coax out of him what he actually believes.

What I think his position is: everyone has a gender identity, which most of us don't notice because it's congruent with our biological sex, but it can be really distressing for people when it isn't congruent. So it's a kind of neurological DSD. That hasn't been proven, but let's allow it for the sake of argument.

Following on from that: he believes that this can all be reasonably negotiated by women (the old fashioned definition) budging up and allowing the new exciting women (the ones with cocks and beards) access to women's single sex spaces. At this point he sometimes goes off on a tangent about how Julie Bindel, Alice Sullivan and Alison Bailey (!) are going to patrol toilets policing women for gender conformity.

I don't find this very persuasive. Amongst other things, like a lot of intelligent lefty men, he obviously hasn't given any thought to the question of why women might want single sex spaces.

So this man, who very sincerely identifies as a feminist ally, is in the position where he argues that male-bodied people with trans identities should be able to enter female single sex spaces on their own say so, while female people who might have a problem with that - because of trauma from SA, because of their religious/cultural background, or simply because they don't want penis people in their changing rooms - need to go away and reflect on why they hold these bigoted beliefs and to come back with a resolution to be better and accept male people in female spaces.

Full disclosure: I don't believe that he actually believes all of this. He's got friends who have trans identities and other friends who have transed their kids - and some are mutuals - and has retrofitted an ideological position to fit his social circle.

Is this any different from Tandora's view that a male person's philosophical belief that they were meant to be female trumps a female person's trauma response telling them to get the hell away from a supposedly female space that includes male bodied people?

The issue with all this sophistry is that when it comes to female-only spaces, langauges, rights and provisions it is being applied back to front

The TRA logic is:

• Women's spaces exist
• We used to think women had to be female people.
• Now we know there are lots of different ways to be a woman.
• Therefore, women's spaces must have been intended for all these people as well.

But this is a logical error because how can women's spaces have been created with reference to people who were not even seen as women when they were created?

A fairer position is

• Women's spaces were set up for female people, based on the needs of female people
• We called them women's spaces because we wrongly thought female people were the same as women.
• Now we know there are lots of different ways to be a woman.
• Therefore, women's spaces should be renamed as female spaces because that better fits the people they are actually intended for