Are we extremist and fanatical?

[RogueFemale]

We, as in gender critical/sex realist women.

I saw an old schoolfriend today, to exchange Christmas gifts over tea and biscuits. She's highly educated and intelligent, v. firmly feminist (in the sense of anti-patriarchy, and wanting women to use Ms not Miss or Mrs). Has travelled widely, knows a lot about other cultures etc.

Politics came up and I mentioned Phillipson blocking the ECHR guidance, and how I wasn't happy about it.

Turns out she thinks my gender critical views are extremist and fanatical. Actual words. I knew already she was inclined to the 'be kind' end of the spectrum, and that we disagreed, but this was new - that I'm an extremist.

That I was being unkind and TiM had a right to exist (I said of course they do, but...). That I should keep my views to myself, if I didn't want to be regarded as a nasty person, essentially.

I said, 'you don't understand'. She was having none of it, said she understands very well, and how there's been gender fluidity since time began. (And these poor TiM have nowhere to pee if they can't go in the ladies, as they'll get abused if they go in the mens).

But she really doesn't understand what is happening now.

I tried to tell her about autogynophilia, about how TiM have been attacking women who protest, the pattern these men have of abuse convictions, same as all men, etc. I said I could send her stuff to prove my points, she said, please don't.

Just a bit depressed to be told by an old friend that I'm a fanatical extremist weirdo, really.

Hopefully those unhappy about the tone and nature of discourse on FWR will take some time to read this excellent piece by Victoria Smith that @Catiette linked just above

https://glosswitch.substack.com/p/the-invisible-work-of-saying-nothing

She links it to how Sandie Peggie was challenged for her temerity in telling Upton that he shouldn't be in the women's changing room, for accurately calling him he and numerous other sins. It's very powerful

Like many women on here I've been challenging all this for over 10 years and being "polite" and "kind" has got us nowhere. In fact it's allowed terrible things to happen to children in the name of transactivism. It enabled women to lose our identity, language, sport, safety and privacy - even in areas like pregnancy & maternity care fgs. Meanwhile men have been allowed to rewrite policy and even the law to enable the erosion of women's rights and child safeguarding.

And we nearly lost it all. Discussion and challenge on here has enabled many women to understand and challenge what's happening in their workplace, families & communities. If a few hurty words are spoken to those who claim that sex isn't binary and transitioning children is acceptable then we should be able to live with that.

In a certain context only - civilised democracies where power is expressed via language, and we have reason, law, and societal structures moderated and implemented via language.

Violence and 'might is right' is the antithesis of linguistic organisation.

Undermining/subversion of the linguistic power structures risks a push back towards that opposite pole.

Language has to connect to reality to have meaning. When it becomes uncoupled from reality, it loses value, giving more weight to non-linguistic leverage methods.

'Transwomen are women' is uncoupled from reality and cannot survive in the wild without a support system of coercion. The coercion itself, in revealing the shortcomings of language, also undermines language's value and pushes society towards non linguistuc leverage.

Lies are risky, because they devalue language.

At no point have I suggested anyone should Be Kind. I'm all for free speech and almost never report posts. Sometimes, I think the discussion goes too far and ends up close to becoming a personal attack. Sometimes, it comes across like if you are disagreeing, then you aren't GC. There's then what can amount to a pile on of other posters reiterating what it means to be GC, when there was never any dispute about that.

Its not dissimilar to calling someone who raises any sort of concern about immigration as a racist, or anyone who voices a concern about Israel as an anti-Semite, or, hell, anyone who supports women's rights as a transphobic bigot. It closes down the conversation. Both parties are then on the defensive and it doesn't move the conversation on in any way.

Ooops, this is in response to @ArabellaSaurus . The quote disappeared.

What a cracking article. Yes. All of that.

I might be more interested in defending my rights 'kindly', and speaking of men with gender identities 'respectfully' when there is equal reciprocation.

'Die in a grease fire' etc, no. I owe nothing to these men. I do not respect them, or how they treat women, or their entitled demands for my labour. I'm not going to pretend for them. My female socialised submission button is broken, and it was broken by the gender ideology movement. It is not necessary to remove single sex spaces from women in order to meet the needs of these men; it's merely necessary to fully indulge the fantasy. I will be honest and blunt about this, because dressing that up in nice, disguising terms has led women to the unholy mess we are now in where govt MPs and judges appear to have entirely lost their marbles and are reduced to frantic open lies in court rooms.

Very true. That power structure and coercion was even more profound in 1984.

But it’s still 2+2=5 or else.

From Victoria Smith's article:

'THINK before you speak. Is it True / Helpful / Inspiring / Necessary / Kind?'

This reads to me a distilled version of Buddhist 'right speech', which is a bit subtler, but certainly allows for speech which is not kind, but is necessary.

'The criteria for deciding what is worth saying

[1] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial (or: not connected with the goal), unendearing & disagreeable to others, he does not say them.

[2] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, unbeneficial, unendearing & disagreeable to others, he does not say them.

[3] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, but unendearing & disagreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them.

[4] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial, but endearing & agreeable to others, he does not say them.

[5] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, unbeneficial, but endearing & agreeable to others, he does not say them.

[6] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, and endearing & agreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them. Why is that? Because the Tathagata has sympathy for living beings."

— MN 58'

My bold. It's all in the timing, lads.

"'Transwomen are women' is uncoupled from reality and cannot survive in the wild without a support system of coercion. The coercion itself, in revealing the shortcomings of language, also undermines language's value and pushes society towards non linguistuc leverage".

Great post Arabella. This is all a lie. Adults have enough difficulty challenging it given the threats to livelihoods and personal safety that too many transactivists pose.
The fact that children have been systematically lied to about this is unforgivable. Not just because of the catastrophic impact it has on the developing minds and bodies caught up in this. But even more importantly because when all of them realise it's lies, they are then confronted with the realisation that (unlike the harmless Father Christmas / tooth fairy untruths) untold damage has been done to children they may know. Their belief that our institutions - the law, NHS, parliament, the judiciary and forces of law and order - is fatally undermined as they all promoted this lie knowing it to be an untruth.

Its not dissimilar to calling someone who raises any sort of concern about immigration as a racist, or anyone who voices a concern about Israel as an anti-Semite, or, hell, anyone who supports women's rights as a transphobic bigot. It closes down the conversation. Both parties are then on the defensive and it doesn't move the conversation on in any way.

I think this could be seen as one of the many rather imbalanced false equivalences that can derive from the deeply ingrained gendered standards Smith addresses above. In very general terms:

Women's silence = presumption of agreement
Men's silence = neutral

Women's self-assertion = presumption of pushiness
Men's self-assertion = valid on its own terms

And...

Women denying someone's GC "credentials" = an everyman actively "calling someone racist" (AKA incisive questioning becomes a default assumption of unjustifiable attack)

In each case - as in Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez - male is default and female is "marked" (see also the fantastic essay "There Is No Unmarked Woman" by Deborah Tannen, below).

Man is seen as more neutral, worth the benefit of the doubt or seen as his own blank canvas. While woman is automatically weighted in a way that acts against her own interests. Society's presumptions are pre-emptively painted on her, and immediately used to categorise her - much as, as Tannen suggests - if I remember rightly - (assumptions about) make-up and hairstyle are.

https://www.scribd.com/document/716508996/Tannen-There-is-No-Unmarked-Woman

Edited for clarity.

And let's face it. It wouldn't have made the slighest bit of difference if women had objected in the sweetest, kindest, trill singing away to small children and animal voices. It's the no which pisses entitled men off - it doesn't matter how it's couched. Entitled men just see it as the women being defective support humans.

all that flimflam of doing the Nice Dance is frankly boring after all these years.

😂😂

In my own situation, I've found that doing a variant of the nice dance is what's helped me to move the dial for my daughter. And I've recognised that the only way I can really do this (move the dial) is to help shift it for others like her too. But I do agree with this and with Mrs O that just doing it "nicely" isn't enough.

That's why we need all voices... As has been said above, some people respond to direct clarity, others to a different way of entering the discussion. I'm of the latter type (saying all of this was pretty much the crux of what started all my problems last time 😬😂) and my best friend, who had already fully peaked several years before unbeknownst to me, was edging me along very gently.

Thankfully, for both of us I was in desperate need of information to support my daughter, so when she occasionally sounded like a raging bigot to me (I was still pretty TWAW even though I already thought puberty blockers made no sense and my daughter's autism was getting muddled with gender identity, before we spoke about any of it) I overlooked it for the greater good of everything else she was helping me to learn. She was the one who showed me MN. Not directly but a few screenshots from some threads, then a couple of links. I said I wanted more and asked her where they were from.... and here I am.

We've since laughed about her "bigotry".... which funnily enough, given the OP in this thread, was when she brought up the topic of autogynophilia. I can't quite remember when I made the leap in understanding that this was relevant to my daughter, albeit it indirectly (because that's where the activism stems from) but she helped edge me there. All before I ever posted anything and was still lurking.

To be clear though, even when I'm engaging "nicely" I make the red lines clear. I remember getting a rather shocked look off two people at work during a productive conversation (this was actually during my whistleblowing about the misrepresentation of the Equality Act in a key policy... it was upheld and changed) where I said that although I fully accept that some people will always believe in gender identity, I don't want to see TW in the ladies' loos. We were on a Teams call. We all paused. The conversation then continued. I assume they both decided to pretend they hadn't heard that bit. I have laid out similar red lines when talking about support for my daughter.

And before I forget, thank you for sharing that article @Catiette It's brilliant.

It's interesting to think about the Tannen essay in relation to the narrowing of gendered appearances we've seen since the fabulous '80s.

Long hair = girl
Short hair = boy
Short hair = not-girl (non-binary) etc.

It's not long hair = not-boy (non-binary), is it?

It's still the male default which is favoured, and the female who must adopt the "mark" of a new identity that is "other" from what usually "marks" a girl.

So much for the liberating neutrality of non-binary, hm? It really does give the lie to why so many girls may choose to identify that way - if only they, too, could be unmarked, as the boys are, with their safely neutral short hair...

In all seriousness - sad times.

Great post, OP listen to PriOn1 not your friend. Your not an extremist or a fanatic, your friend my be on the 'right side of history' but your on the right side of the debate, which is why they don't want one.

Thanks for the link, that was a very interesting article.

No it hasn’t filtered out at all, and it’s the new version of being gay - to be accepted without question.

That was not clear: I mean that I think many people do believe that people are simply born ( like people are born gay) mentally not fitting their body, and that people’s bodies are born mixed male and female to differing degrees.

But they are absolutely and utterly wrong.

Gay men and lesbian women are what they are.

This "trans" guff needs to go back whence it came

The only thing gay people ever wanted from others in 'acceptance' was not to be beaten up for kissing their partner in public, or losing their job if it was discovered. Or to be arrested and imprisoned with hard labour if you went a few decades further back.

Requiring other people to redefine their language, play pretend games, provide labour, submission and hoop jumping, change their sexuality and 'learn to cope with' unwanted sex, and to take their clothes off/submit to intimate touch to gratify others was not ever a part of it. Nor is there any evidence anywhere of gay people's desire for acceptance including threatening widely to rape, injure and kill others, or have them lose their jobs and livelihoods, to be shunned or excluded.

This is the only 'civil rights movement' that's gone down that path.

I always find it interesting when some people talk about how they want a more ‘moderate’ solution, no solutions that provide adequate safeguarding for female people are proposed. Sometimes no solution at all is proposed, simply the assertion that there ‘must’ be another way while telling those women saying pointing out the flaws to that assertion ‘extremists’.

I would love to hear a solution proposed by someone telling us we are extreme and that there is a more moderate solution. It never seems to cross some people making that accusation’s mind that they are the ones who are ill informed and likely to cause harm to female people. I have come to believe that a moderate solution that is workable but hasn’t been discussed yet (ie not third spaces for instance as it has been suggested already so long ago ) is a myth. It is wishful thinking to allow those people repeating this platitude to remain in their comfortable position and not have to critically analyse that position.

I think many of us take each suggestion, each new bit of information, and analyse it to assess how it changes our knowledge and position. If someone has a ‘moderate’ solution that provides strong safeguarding for female people, I say make the suggestion! It would be great.

I just keep thinking of Magdalen Berns. Brave and bold and funny.

www.amazon.co.uk/Rather-Rude-Than-Fucking-Liar/dp/B0BS8SJRNT

Yes, I can't send her anything.

Yes, it's unfair, but just have to accept it. Also I don't think my friend really believes that men can be women, just a sort of fudge where they're somehow a bit wommany or something.

Thank you, yes!

Yes, thank you.