feminism or transphobia?

[giraffezoo]

Long time lurker of this forum, first time poster.

I have read through many of the threads on here and I have to say there are lots of views that I find quite shocking.

There almost seems to be two sides of the ‘gender critical’ movement on here that I can see.

The first seems quite reasonable. They wish to have protections in place for women and their rights. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree (e.g. trans folk in toilets, transgender prisoners etc) they are stating a view based on safety and women’s rights.

The second bunch are the ones who I find myself disagreeing with, and who post things that I personally consider as transphobic. Some examples of this would be: refusing to use someone’s pronouns or citing being transgender as a mental illness which needs to be cured.

I feel that the first group are genuinely feminists who are concerned with women’s rights, and feel as though they need to speak out on their own concerns. The second group are masquerading under the pretence of feminism to say hateful or controversial things.

I am interested to hear other views on this point (and I’m sure there will be a lot here who don’t agree with me!)

Pronoun demands are not neutral political beliefs. Lack of pronoun demands is the default neutral position and I have seen many recruiters publicly confirming job applications with pronouns are automatically discounted becausr of all the red flags they raise. But it's what you want so 🤷🏻‍♀️

I think you should have backed out yesterday, to be honest....this is all becoming very unedifying and i'm sure it is not good for your mental health.

I’m not really sure what you mean by unedifying? And I wonder what medical school you went to that gives you the authority to a. Diagnose my mental health and b. Advise me on it

But using preferred pronouns isn’t a neutral political act, is it? That’s the point many of us are saying. A neutral environment requires people to leave their faiths, details about who they prefer to sleep with, and their ideas on gender, Gaza, the current government, trump at home. A neutral environment is one where you turn up at work, appropriately equipped and do your job and get on with it without discussion.

Can you provide links to these posts, because my suspicion is that is not what they say. Everyone here knows that being judged on the basis of one's sex is an everyday reality.

It’s not what I want it’s just the reality I live in and have to work in.

Yes sex does. I'm glad we agree.

No I’m not doing your work for you. It’s active if you just go into the board you will see. The op is a man who’s a little sexist it’s not going down well

And you will be given jobs. But just not at places that require you to present neutrally when it comes to political beliefs.

The demanding of so called ‘pronouns’ [gendered] could not be more political. It is part of a coercive ideology.

I believe gender exists too. So I don’t think we do

I didn't diagnose a mental health condition, did I? i suggested that getting caught up in scenes such as you are now is not good for your mental equilibrium. We've all been ruffled for days by what goes down on social media. You don't require a medical degree to understand that.

And the view of many CG women is that the trans movement entrenches harmful sexist gender tripe and that the world would be a much better place if we said a boy who likes pink sparkles is a boy and a girl who likes tractors is a girl rather than say ahhh you must really be a girl because of your love of pink sparkles, off with 'her' penis.

We aren't saying the gender stuff is fine or doesn't bother us we are saying we don't think you have to confirm to sexist tosh to be a particular sex. That is the point, we are critical of gender, sex is real, binary and immutable, the rest is a social construct that changes over time and location and has no bearing on whether someone is male or female as their bodies determine that.

Perhaps, but this is a significant cognitive load to put on someone. We use sex based pronouns instinctively.

Avoiding them takes a degree of mental effort and will be a lot more difficult for some people than others. There are going to be lots of slip ups and that's going to cause angst for everyone.

I'm just not sure there's good reason to encourage this. It seems like a lot of effort for the majority to cater to a minority who, if they can't deal with factual references, have significant mental health issues. It seems like therapy for this group is a more sensible approach than avoiding references to their sex.

If you mean gender exists and impacts you every day, I agree with you on that mattala.
I believe gender is the set of socially-constructed stereotypes that are imposed on children, and which are still going strong, having had a bit of a dip in the late 70s and 80s thanks to the women's movement.
Then along came Disney princesses and sparkles and fairies and butterflies and sugar and spice all over again🙄

So I agree that gender stereotyping is a daily occurrence, unfortunately.

I fought hard against the gender stereotyping I experienced as a little girl, and I won😄I'm still a woman, just a gender non-conforming one.

None of that understanding of gender in any way alters the fact that humans can't change sex, and people who identify as trans remain in the sex they were born into.
Transwomen are men, trans men are women.
Any campaign that claims otherwise, seeks to make the law or education or medicine or language say otherwise, has that basic fatal flaw. It's based on an impossibility.

It exists as a concept, not as a measurable reality in the way that sex is.
Also, people's definition of and constructions of 'gender' differ.

Gender is a real social construct that exists and we build our lives around. I’m not saying it’s good or that I disagree with you on your ideas. Just that the concept exists and we can’t opt out

At the point at which you say people should use individual's "proper pronouns' you are going beyond 'not saying it's good". You are engaging in an act of entrenching it.

Then it must be a very politicised environment - of the sort which trains people to think the approved thoughts. 'Pronouns' are rooted in an ideology.

We can absolutely challenge it at every opportunity though. Girls/boys can express themselves whatever way they want, wear whatever clothes they want, do whatever hobbies/jobs they want, etc, etc.

Thats what we used to do in the aughts, before all this complete nonsense took over.

Hi OP, assuming that you are posting in good faith, I think that you probably haven’t thought enough about the topic, which is fine, most people haven’t.

i get from one of your previous posts that you regard trans offending as “different” and “not the base case”, so you discount it. This means that you can make everything else about being kind. But this is very simplistic - you could equally say that most men are decent, so women need no safeguards at all and having single sex anything is not kind.

It’s obviously not the case that all trans women are sex offenders and no GC woman would claim that is the case (although there is unfortunately an overrepresentation in the offending statistics and trans women offend at a rate that is higher even than males, whether because males commit crimes at a male rate on average however they identify, or because disreputable people use trans as a cover or because that category and the way that trans is now interpreted allows people who would have been cross dressing flashers to be counted as trans women). But that is not how safeguarding works. The bigger point is that, if we are all compelled by “be kind” to call everyone whatever they want, it’s a slippery slope to being compelled to treat everyone however they want (which means access to toilets and changing rooms and overriding certain safeguards that exist, access to single sex sports etc).

It’s not really logically coherent to say that people are awful people not to call people by the names or pronouns and shame them into “performing” true belief that someone is the opposite sex but then say “of course they are not that sex” when it suits you because someone is a sex offender or when a male wins the women’s race or when you don’t like your daughter sharing with a male on a school trip or when you decide that actually having a 6 foot intact male showering in a female communal shower is a bit awkward - that point is too late because harm has occurred and you’re rowing back after the fact. If you are enforcing a sex based category in your mind in many safeguarding situations, it is more honest to use language in a way that clarifies when this occurs.

As an example, I don’t have an issue personally with calling a bloke in the office “Brenda”, given that names can be gendered or unisex, but it would be unacceptable for me to openly refer to him as a woman, because that means accepting that he needs to use the women’s toilets and I don’t agree that he does. And I think that it’s better to approach this with clarity, rather than at the point at which Brenda demands to use female spaces. So there is some kind of boundary that needs to be drawn somewhere. Does this make sense?

To my mind 'proper' pronouns are sex based.

There was no societal discussion about why this should change or why it benefits society as a whole for certain people to declare 'their' pronouns and expect everyone to dance to that tune.

Given that, you can't really expect people to play along with a change they haven't agreed to.

We don't "build our lives around" a concept. We can acknowledge that such a concept exists ( even though its definitions are various and diffuse), and we can engage with the concept; reflect upon it; disect it ;and then decide how we want to deal with it going forward. Nobody is obliged to adhere to anyone else's conceptual understanding.

No, it's the environment you're actively trying to create but can't.

Thoroughly agree with this from CautiousLurker2 - A neutral environment is one where you turn up at work, appropriately equipped and do your job and get on with it without discussion

Again I agree with you that we can't opt out of the influence of gender, and I know there are posters on here who will vehemently disagree and say 'I don't have a gender!'

However, I obviously go much further than you when you say 'I'm not saying it's good', I actually think that gender stereotyping has done untold harm to generations of little humans who never reached their full potential as adult humans, men and women who could have been more complete human beings if they'd been let grow up as people first, rather than as 'what men are supposed to be' and 'what women are supposed to be'.

I agree: the concept exists, and I've spent all my life fighting it.

Yes, humans are susceptible to manipulation and propaganda.

You think that women who think the same as has been thought for the whole of time - that humans can't change sex - are the ones who have been manipulated by propaganda?

Really??!

🙃