Thread derailment

[Temporaryusernamefortoday]

Wondering if I am the only one that’s noticed more and more thread derailments. I’m not talking about TRA taking a TWAW stance but an individual being deliberately obtuse or missing the point of an individuals posts to create an argument about a tangential element. It just seems rather insidious and designed to prevent proper conversation.

This is not a TAT but a thread about a phenomenon.

Of course you do.

But it is also a criticism, something you claimed not to have done.

The people who vehemently express this to you.

I dont reject anyone's word.

Most trans people (not me, obviously) are adamant that not only are they not their biological sex ("TW are not men"), but they are the opposite sex ("trans women are women"). You agree with them regarding the first statement, but you disagree with the second. So yes, you reject their word on that matter.

I wouldn't say all the trans people I have encountered think that TW are women. At least some have a similar take to me in that TW are TW (not women or men). But yes the TM are vehement about not being women.

Honestly, I even find the phrase "TW are TW" sexist and offsensive. Whatever these men are, they are not any closer to womanhood than any other man. I really wish society would understand this and stop allowing the word "woman" to be used to label mens' personalities as if there was some actual connection there.

Yes because my view is consistently that men don't have vaginas. So individual views that don't align with my core belief are heard but not influential over my conclusion.

The thing is, my core beliefs can change with exposure to new information. With enough information that leads me to believe they are indeed men or are still women, I will alter my stance.

As I said, I mostly think about TM but there isnt any reason for me to feel differently about TM than TW.

Surely this is not a matter of perspective, though, it is a matter of fact. Biological sex is real and verifiable and cannot be changed.

You can only have a perspective that some male people are female people if you first of all embrace and accept the belief in 'gender identity theory' without question? There would be no 'trans' if people were automatically the sex they say they are.

I've posted in depth on this before so I'll just give a quick note and try to find the original post:

It's really interesting to me how much of trans identity expression is expressed by relation to the female not the male.

Trans women gain breasts, trans men remove them. Trans women do not feel accepted unless they are accepted as women in the places only women can be, trans men (in your experience) are more concerened with distancing themselves from other women than being accepted by men.

I think it goes back to Patriachy's framing of women as the Other to be filled and defined rather than as humans just as varying and fully realised as men.

There may be something to that. I think part of it is that you can't gain inherent privilege very easily. So TM will never feel quite aligned with men because they can never gain the privilege that comes with being born male.

(Also aware we've derailed a thread on derailing - the irony!)

Another interesting outcome of this thread is that in looking back at my old posts, I realised someone posting at that time was almost certainly an earlier incarnation of one of the current me-railers.

It actually reassures me to look back at this and see my arguments are consistent regardless of who I may think I'm talking to.

Edit to add: That's not an oblique dig at anyone of this thread - I don't think the me-railer in question is on this thread.

That I 100% agree with, it's a point I have made myself as well.

Correct me if I'm wrong, squishedpassanger, but it seems to me that you are walking a line between:

allowing that others may be having a substantially differernt experience that you don't have access to (I am not a woman,) on the one hand, and

saying that they are in fact the opposite sex in any way that is sensible/coherent/doesn't obliterate others experience.

So a kind of fuzziness in terms of allowing people to describe their own experience, without necessarily allowing them to simply define reality.

Is that a reasonable interpretation?

I think that pragmatically, that can often be a reasonable way to operate with regard to a lot of human issues. Particularly in professional settings where we may have to leave room for other people to think in ways we don't agree with without it becoming a focus.

It can also be most appropriate where there are real questions about what you might call the "facts" of the situation. If there are multiple theories that fit the available facts, or where you personally feel unsure you have a good handle on what is really going on.

I used to feel more than way about gender, but I think the medical questions are actually a lot better understood now, and there are some firm conclusions we can draw - the main one being that "tans" is not a special category of people, and it's actually quite a damaging idea for individuals medically, and society generally.

In particular, I think individuals thinking of themselves that way almost always have real underlying issues that are ignored as a result of that conceptualisation, and 100% of the time they would be better off if they did not think their problem was "being trans."

So I don't feel like I can or should leave room for that idea to flourish. But I don't think some level of what I'd call leaving room for fuzziness is necessarily logically inconsistent.

Yes it is a reasonable interpretation but there are some things I'd want to clarify/expand on that I cannot at this moment due to time.

This aggressive posting style is exactly what details a lot of the gender threads.

Then when it is called out they all start saying "I don't see any aggression" "who is being aggressive?" And so on with the gas lighting and my favourite "it's not aggressive, it's robust" 🙄

Then come the cake conversations and it's obviously behaviour designed to make posters feel belittled and to put them off engaging further.

That's not "derailment". If the premise of the thread is "look, here's a feminist icon saying something important we should listen to", and a significant portion of the response is women challenging that . . . that's fair. These aren't trolls who have come in from outside to stop the conversation. They're just women who disagree. That's well within the bounds of healthy debate.

My complaint on there was the level of discussion.

It wasn't about lets all gang up with all the terrible things we can think about Margaret Atwood.

This has been part of the dumbing down of FWR. The issue was about is the fanatsy in the Handmaid's Tale about to become a reality.

That's what I mean about FWR becomeing twitterish.

Feminism is an issue.

The problem is, particularly on virtual feminism is it revolves around personalities.

So if those responding aren't being very interesting, why would I bother to read the thread!

It was boring.

This again is the problem of the drift from core feminism.

ie feminism based on women as sex class that is oppressed by the male sex class.

At this point in history the most overt expression of that is TRAs.

But if that discussion is not grounded in a feminist analysis it just becomes a single issue campaign, and open to being coopted by the right.

But I think this is another part of the trend that has made the forum less feminist, more endlessly ground hog day discussions.

The articles you post are often very interesting @IwantToRetire

But your obvious disdain for other posters and for your threads not proceeding in the way you had envisaged is tedious.

I dont have disdain, I just dont have to discuss in a way that isn't what I meant.

We could have a whole other thread that is about how OP titles can be so easily misinterpreted because those responding view it through their view of the world.

ie quite often the first of second post to an OP can derail the intent of the thread.

You imply I am in the wrong.

Has it ever occured to you that you could be wrong because you have decided what the thread is about?!

And in leaving a thread I am allowing others to divert the issue, rather than endless come back to argue about points I have no interest in.

As as PP has said, great that a thread about derailment has become a living example.

And illustrated that it isn't just the derailer, but those who respond.

It interesting that yet again in retelling what is in fact FWR history some are so determined to pick an arguement they dont even say well that's interesting I never knew that, or it might have started like that, but as time has moved on.

So I am going to try one more time.

There used to be Feminism and Women's Rights as a forum on MN.

But the ability to have a thread on the forum about women's sex based rights, paticularly at the time the Government was consulting on bringing in self id, meant that GC / sex based rights became a dominate issue.

And with that discussion about people who said they were trans, what it meant etc..

And at that time the combination of MNHQ being overly sensitive meant that lots of posts were getting deleted because they were being reported as transphobic, or whatever?

Without consultation and based on an idea a few had, but were never thought through MNHQ arbitrarily set up another forum called Feminist Chat (what that was meant to mean who knows) and renamed FWR which kept the url of fwr with a title that users didn't accept and MNHQ never explained.

But clearly indicated that it was okay to talk about sex and gender, and those who didn't want to had their own chat forum.

Where you would have thought anyone who wanted to talk about differnt strands of feminism would got to discuss as it was not under the MNHQ's banner of "Sex and Gender".

But the other part of the history is that, and those who were around for some time before that was that regular contributors to FWR had started to leave, some saying explicitly it was because they felt stiffled, and or didn't want to have to go back to rediscuss what to them were basics. Or even thought well that FWR had been useful but want to move onto something else. (Occassionally you will see on threads someone say I miss xxxxxx poster.) And it did feel that women with knowledge and experience had moved on. Or felt the restrictions made genuine exchange impossible.

So I do understand that if you weren't part of FWR at that time it isn't clear why and to what purpose MNHQ did what it did.

But on the other hand, because you didn't experience it doesn't mean you can deny it. That's like saying to someone your history is irrelevant to me.

So MNHQ's misnomer of "sex and gender" is or was taken as meaning on this thread you could be discuss women's sex based rights without someone having a fit of the vapours and running to MNHQ because someone had said sex is a biological fact, and that they are transphobic.

Effectvely the split by MNHQ was a reflection of the division that TRAs had created in real live, as much as in the virtual world that MN provided.

Which boils down to, threads are not proceeding in a satisfactory manner because we are dumbed down and don't have THE CORRECT THEORY.

Well, that's us told.

Perhaps it would be useful to have a pocket guide that we could consult when there's a danger of us deviating from orthodoxy.

... Aaaaand there you go, doing exactly what @IwantToRetire has invested a lot of time and effort in explaining about.

She's politely answered the unasked question: "Why do you long-timers feel this way?"

Further questions nobody has asked in this thread: What does feminism mean to you, and why? What are your reasons for this understanding? Would you call this 2nd-wave feminism, or what? How do you see it fitting with newer versions of feminism?

I'd love to think this lack of interest or curiosity is because you all (critics) have a truly solid grasp of the answers. But I think I'm being reasonable to deduce it's more that all you really want to do is moan about perceived orthodoxy, rigidity, unfriendliness, or whatever "mean girls" phrases you individually like to chuck around.

Now I'm cross with myself for rising to it 😬

And on a thread dedicated to a conversation about thread derailment, @Squishedpassenger completely derailed it by turning it into an argument about the meaning of feminism.

Fucking well done.

ETA I stopped reading this thread at about 12:30 and it is possible that a miracle happened in the following nine and a half hours.