Please help be articulate my thoughts, ‘be kind’ is heavily linked to privilege/class

[Temporaryusernamefortoday]

I will start off by prefacing this post with the fact that my title is badly written but I couldn’t think of a better way to phrase it.

This though process was sparked by seeing a post mourning the ‘exclusion’ of trans girls from Girlguiding and seeing a good friend respond with the ‘crying’ emoji.

I can’t help feeling that the invasion of female only spaces, in a way that most likely to pose a threat to mental or physical wellbeing disproportionately effects the most vulnerable women in society and those of ‘lower socio/economic status’.

In my mind the potential for greatest harm is in:

• Prisons
• Rape crisis
• Refuges
• Police custody/searching
• Intimate care spaces ie hospitals/carehomes
• public toilets.

The greatest service users of these spaces are not the ones shouting at everyone to ‘be kind’. They are those who are most vulnerable in society, those who often have fewwer options or a poorer start in life and are therefore more likely to end up as victims of DV, SA, in the prison system, in hospital etc.

I genuinely think that most of the Be Kind brigade view the issue through their own lenses of

• being willing to occasionally be mildly uncomfortable in a public toilet to signal their ‘credentials’
• the TiM

I think they find it easier to empathise with a male of a potentially similar ‘class’ than a woman who is unlike them.

If be intrigued to hear if others think there is an un acknowledged class element to this or if I am barking up the wrong tree/oversimplified this?

@Temporaryusernamefortoday, you couldn’t do better for an intro to Victoria Smith than this new article by her that someone shared over on the Greens thread:

https://thecritic.co.uk/let-them-wipe-bums/

It’s all about exactly what we’re talking about here.

Thank you, I bought both of her books yesterday, Hags for my mother a fabulous GC women who put up with but didn’t encourage my (very brief) be kind phase in 2013 and unkind for me!

Oh fantastic! She is a very pithy writer (I read with a pencil and have to make notes in the margins for myself!) but my god she manages to pull so many threads together so very beautifully. Reading her writing feels like watching a master weaver at work - threads and threads and threads and then, holy cow, an intricate yet coherent pattern emerges.

Hope you and your mum enjoy!

The Sutton Trust says that working class students who succeeded at university are more likely to achieve social mobility, but they seem to equate 'higher income' with 'social mobility'. Class isn't about wealth. You don't become upper class when you win the lottery.
Class is about maintaining a hierarchy by emphasising belonging to a group and differences between the groups. Its possible that completing university gives some working class people an honorary status of belonging to a group but its just as likely they succeed because they develop contacts and qualifications.

OnAShooglyPeg posted about how much more difficult it is to succeed at university in the first place when you are working class. There are barriers. The extra help universities can give can't change the fact that working class students have a fundamentally different experience of attending school, higher education and the workplace, because their lives are different.

I think what I (and the majority of people) appear to be getting at maybe social circumstances/opportunities rather than class (though I do still feel that those two are rather closely linked, I accept they are not necessarily one and the same and this act as a distraction). Having said that I’m quite happy that the following premise is probably accurate:

The majority of those who are instructing others to ‘bekind’ are, due to age (the idealism of youth), social circumstances or opportunities unlikely to be the ones who this rhetoric harm the most. They are also more likely to wield more power due to circumstance or education than those who are most effected by men entering spaces where women are at their most vulnerable.

Their stance on policy and ideology is blinkered by their inability to identify with individuals who are so unlike them ie ‘the drug addicted crack whore’ (I use that incredibly reductive and offensive language deliberately) who is locked up in prison, in a hostel, being strip searched in a police custody suite, rather than the ‘shy demure almost passing trans women’ who they may have come across at university, in a coffee shop etc and felt rather sorry for.

I think thats true; I think they also belong to a category of people who are guided more by what their peers and leaders say than by facts and evidence.

The need to identify with the in group and the reluctance to afford rights or equality to people who are other is why in law, human rights are universal. They don't depend on the 'us' group agreeing with the 'them' group, or recognising 'their' humanity. That humanity is assumed.
Why aren't universities teaching or enforcing this?

I got that and I think you are correct in some ways. Most of the 'be kind' brigade are not going to be in prison. But they do use the NHS, and public lavatories in places such as shops, shopping centres whatever their social or economic class and experience suggests that 'high end' venues are often more into 'be kind' and inclusivity than places at the lower end of the social spectrum (most pubs I have ever entered have separate sex loos - for obvious reasons around the behaviour of drunks). They may also be unhappy enough to find themselves the victims of DV (DV exists through all social classes as does child abuse) or in a refuge for rape/SA victims - at which point they may discover that 'be kind' is a bad idea when it fully impacts on them.
So it's true that 'be kind' is less likely to appear among those lower down the socio-economic scale. I mean that working class people are less likely to think you can change sex. However they are likely to be more wary of saying so when it impacts their job esp in the current economic situation. The brave women who have stood against those like Dr Upton in Fife deserve huge praise, for they have risked their livelihood for the rest of us, many of whom dare not.

I have read Hags. It's excellent. Been meaning to buy Unkind - but busy.

@Temporaryusernamefortoday I think they find it easier to empathise with a male of a potentially similar ‘class’ than a woman who is unlike them.

I had exactly this conversation recently on social media. I think it was a male 'trans ally', but he said the women he knew would much prefer to share private spaces with "trans women" than "chav" women who were inebriated, noisy and unladylike in their behaviour. "Trans women" being gentler of course than chavs (and the women he knew giving consent on behalf of all women).

The research will not capture the experience of the most vulnerable. It rarely ever does.

I am "middle class". I think having single sex spaces teaches girls to realise that they are self sufficient human beings and don't need to depend on men for anything.
My father died when I was small - it was just my mother and I. I went to single sex convent schools until I was 16. The nuns (and my mother) coped perfectly well with all practical things (including all DIY) . I had no tolerance thereafter for "mansplaining" or managerial attitudes to women in the workplace (I had a scientific career).
I thought I was a very tolerant person. Gay people - fine - no problem. But then a very long term friend (also a scientist) annonced he was trans and was going for surgery etc. and started behaving like a parody of a female. I was disgusted. From his Facebook page it seemed as if his only opinion of being female was based on appearance... makeup, shampoo... No appreciation whatsoever of the discrimination he would have encountered if he had been a female scientist.
So - if you want to dress like the opposite sex, fine. But IMO you'd have to pass undetected for some years as the opposite sex to qualify as understanding what it actually involves.

That's really similar to the point Victoria Smith is making, with regards to Zak Polanski's careless talk of bum-wipers in the article TwoLoons linked to. She says that although she agrees with many of the wider points he was making about migration, this throw-away phrase betrays his privilege... that there is a class of people who are, eg bum-wipers or commercial surrogates (or women!) that he is not part of.

Hence the fact progressivism is not very different in outcome to the worst excesses of Thatcherism... the advance of the self at all costs, because the only cost is paid by other people.

No research does fine at that. Sometimes the research doesn't agree with our own personal views and we have to be accepting of that.

I think that it can be described as a‘ luxury belief’ and the woman more in need of single sex services are more likely to live in less affluent areas.
Women who get sent to jail or who use women’s shelters generally are not middle class.

JK Rowling articulated this in her post to Emma Watson:

Like other people who've never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she's ignorant of how ignorant she is."

Violent crime is higher in poorer areas and that includes sexual crimes, this is reported in Julie Bindel’s article about Blackpool and so single sex spaces are more needed.

I think it’s important to note that the women advocating for this will have very little chance of it happening to them.

.Why do so many girls in Blackpool want to become boys

Of course. It's not called "educating yourself out of common sense" for no reason. Working classes don't have time for such daft ideas. It's the chattering classes...

Some ideas are so stupid, only an intellectual would believe them (George Orwell).

It's definitely a certain kind of middle class people who believe TWAW because it's part of the package of 'progressive' ideas like open borders, net zero, anti-Israel etc.

Working class people are less invested in all this stuff and more rooted in reality.

Its so interesting. This is so antidotal, but my son went to a prinary school that had quite a lot of families on lower incomes and trans identities just wasnt a thing.

My colleaugue's child when to a school in a wealther area and there were 5 trans identifying kids that she knew of.

But, teenagers who identify as trqns seem to be more often female and autistic.Class/income seems less of a factor at this age.

I would imagine the primary school vs secondary school split has something to do with where the children are getting the majority of their information from - and to an extent who they trust.

So, primary school kids will be getting their information from their parents (let’s leave activist teachers out of this thought exercise for the moment) and so you may well see a class divide.

Secondary school kids will be getting their trusted information from their peers (and increasingly the internet). You’ll probably stop seeing as much of a class divide in this age group and start seeing things like whole groups of kids “catching” transgenderism from each other.

That sounds like sophistry. These women are less likely to be journalists or activists and possibly no one has asked them!

Someone provided research where they have been asked. There is also plenty more online I found later. Not all of it is in agreement.

The problem is, research like statistics can so often be cherry picked to support the argument of the researcher.

Unbiased reaserch on such a topic would be ethically dubious and unlikely to exist on such a divisive topic.

TBH the only woman I have ever seen using this hashtag was a complete c*nt themselves. Make of that what you will, but I always ALWAYS suspect it is a form of online bullying, where they've fallen out with a friend and are making some obtuse point.

Edit to add I don't think it is a class thing but just a woman thing - the alphas perhaps but it's about making other women know their place.

Well that would go both ways.

Not disputing that, which is why the introduction of men into women’s spaces and the mutilation/sterilisation of children is so abhorrent.

There is no unbiased reaserch to suggest that either of these things are positive actions however there is obvious risk of significant harm, therefore we should not blindly sleepwalk into normalising these things without a proper assessment of the risk.

Hypothesis, unbiased research, action.

Not, as appears to have happened as a result of TRA, Hypothesis, action, ‘research to back up our actions’

Ive seen research that supports gender affirming measures for children. I've seen research that does not.

It's very easy to dismiss any research that opposes your beliefs as flawed or biased when the research that supports your theories could be similarly criticised.

It can be hard to accept sometimes when not all the research supports what you'd like it to support. A lot of us Midwives are a bunch who arent great at accepting research contrary to their philosophy or training I've found. I've seen all out tantrums about it. People should research people's acceptance of research.