Reaction to that BBC news article

[WallaceinAnderland]

I've just seen a thread on Reddit reacting to the BBC News article about the assault at Greenock Prison. Predictable OP but pleasantly surprising responses.

OP - Here we go again with more drama. Another news case that will be used to intesify the hate towards us that make it seem acceptable brand us as sexual devients all because of a very very small number of people like in any demographic

Responses

-You’re calling the reporting of a sexual assault of a imprisoned woman (i imagine she had few places to escape to. Scary as hell) “more drama” Really??

-Yeah, I really don't like how quickly our own community can rush to sweep these things under the rug sometimes. I've been unfortunate enough to encounter a few trans women who are sexual abusers and am aware of several more in my wider community and it's really not as vanishingly rare as I would like it to be. I don't want to speculate as to why they do it but honestly I think it's worth a better discussion than 'ugh the media is making us look bad again'

-I think we need to think about horrific early life conversion therapy practices when we discuss trans crimes like this. I suffered through ECT treatment as a child and forgot I was trans for over 40 years. I'm 47 now.
My violent thoughts all that time were a ghostly memory of my own treatments, that the ECT robbed me of the ability to remember. My own family hid this from me my whole life so I would stay straight. It worked, except I was always extremely unhappy and could have succumbed to crimes many times over the years.
I see things like this and think "what if I hadn't realised..."

-I don't think you need to pre-emptively make excuses for violent trans women. Maybe she has a pathological, trauma-induced reason for her crimes or maybe she doesn't, but it's no excuse for anyone else who commits horrible acts of violence and it shouldn't be for her.

-You see an accusation of sexual assault and think you could have done that?
I can see how repression leads to anger and frustration and maybe being aggressive…but to try and rationalise causing sexual harm is abhorrent. Utterly sickening if I’m honest.

-Sympathy for the victim of this utter monster. I've nothing but contempt for sexual predators.

Thought I'd share as I've not seen anything like this before on Reddit.

There's another thread which mentions this as well, so it looks like other people have noticed the Reddit comments

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5520730-alex-stewart-strikes-again

I'm quite cynical, I've just posted this:

The attempt to sound "reasonable" is purely due to the fact that the apologists for trans everything/everywhere need to try, somehow, to separate the "real" trans from the "fake" trans (ie the good from the bad) so they can claim that every trans-identified man who commits a crime is not "one of them."

It's just a disingenuous attempt to keep the illusion going that trans-identified men are the most vulnerable victims to ever walk the planet. It's truly shocking to see how quickly they turn on "one of their own " if he dares to stray from their rulebook of the path to righteousness.

I would be happy to be wrong about this, but that's how I see it.

I've been unfortunate enough to encounter a few trans women who are sexual abusers and am aware of several more in my wider community and it's really not as vanishingly rare as I would like it to be.

I can't believe they are finally admitting the risk.

Here again, on a different thread

OP I've just been forced to watch a Harry Potter Studios Ad

Response

-We are the only people that care about this…not even all trans people care about boycotting HP.

-No offense but, just ignore it?

-We all get crap ads. Not sure why it's such a big deal?

Have the grown ups been allowed back in the Reddit room?

The OP on the increasingly bonkers “Are we really women” thread has said that all the community speak with one voice.

He hasn’t, as far as I know, clarified if it’s the voice of Alex Stewart, Isla Bryson or the bloke who cut his own balls off & shouts about punching terfs.

They’ll have been banned by 6 I’m sure!

Quite. As the OP quotes: Another news case that will be used to intesify the hate towards us that make it seem acceptable brand us as sexual devients all because of a very very small number of people like in any demographic

They're starting to get the idea.

It's very good to see the acknowledgement that every population group will have predators, deviants, criminals, the unsafe. They're right. It's not the whole population, it's a small number in the population. Absolutely agree.

This has been women's case from the start. Obviously - and demonstrably, with abused and injured women having been left in the wake of this awful policy - abusers and sex criminals don't come with a helpful tattoo on their forehead. Even 'careful risk assessment' as the SNP insists happens, did not save this woman from being harmed. This is the whole reason for the need for women to have single sex spaces; the population is unsafe. You cannot separate the dangerous from the safe.

Women's position - locked up women, women who need to use resources and spaces, should not have to play russian roulette with whether or not the man in the room is 'safe' or not. And that's putting aside the issue of that woman has an entitlement to privacy and dignity, and not to be forced to be involved in someone's identity.

Transactivist position - some women getting injured and hurt is ok, and has to be ok, and women shouldn't see this as a reason to say no to men in their spaces because its too harmful to those men.

Hate - nonsense. It's merely women and reasonable men with a grip saying this is not ok, ever, women are not resources for men or a lesser kind of human, and saying that the answer should be no to any men in any women's single sex spaces. End of.

Other solutions can of course be looked at to meet trans wishes, but they can't involve taking things away from anyone else. Like the hope of not being sexually assaulted by a man in a bloody women's prison, quite possibly leaving lifechanging damage, because the SNP were busy wanking away about their righteous beliefs.

I also think it’s worth highlighting the tension between trans identity and willingness to commit sexual violence. To me these have always been radically incompatible - you cannot give someone the benefit of the doubt with regards to the integrity of their claims to transgender identity if they have demonstrated themselves to be sexually abusive. It doesn’t track, how can you seriously wrestle with gender identity and dysphoria and then decide to assault someone physically? Their claim can only ever be understood to have been in bad faith the whole time.

No true Scotsman?

This sounds totally unreasonable to me - the argument that if a trans person is incapable of committing sexual violence, so if they do they can’t be trans.

It has been tried. Sturgeon for one, trying to create 'rapist gender'.

Once you engage in playing the game that some men are women - and explain and burble away sex, and risks, and normal common sense and critical thinking, and all the rest of it - you are standing a man in front of a woman and giving him every chance to abuse the situation he is in. And all she has is the hope he's not in the mood today. While being as embarrassed as hell, uncomfortable or driven out of the space, but no one cares as he hasn't yet demonstrably, seriously, beyond all burbling and doubt, hurt her.

Like the unutterable bastard that tried to tell lesbians they could 'learn to cope' with providing unwanted straight sex to men, there's no belief that women deserve anything more than this out of life. In the belief of those like the SNP, woman are the toys of men with nothing more than hope that today one doesn't break them.

Fuck that. People that insanely incapable shouldn't be making any decisions about anything at all except the date of their next appointment with their therapist.

It is also important to remember that having a criminal record of seriously sexually assaulting/raping women is no bar to having a GRC. There is no way to separate out the well intentioned from the ones with the beard and fake tits to the knees, the ones with the swords and machetes, the ones calling to kill women by internal violation with a splintery weapon (how fucking disturbed do you have to be....) and the ones who after years of 'safe risk assessment' suddenly one day hurt one of the women sacrificed to them.

I am horribly aware of how hard it is for women to report such complaints, have them taken seriously and recorded - because of fear of the bad PR - never mind be reported to the police and be charged. This bastard will have really hurt her.

I'm not sure if the hullabaloo on those subs got a lot of traction here, but one of the moderators, someone who already had problematic behavior (look up BardFinn), had advocated for another mod who was on the sex offender registry. This is especially awful considering how many teenagers are in that sub and get messages and unsolicited hugs from these people.

It was on the dl because so much of these people's business is conducted off-site. Unshockingly, this information came from discord, supplied by another member who didn't come out with the information due to how disturbing it was, but because he'd been wronged personally.

There was a huge drama over it, one of the only times the mtf subs got any kind of push back, and in the end, it looks like they allowed the predator back in as a moderator using a sock account.

BardFinn, the mod who allowed this subhuman in to the mod team, was also the creature behind getting the women's liberation sub hijacked and taken over by an mtf mod team. So they're extra tetchy regarding optics recently.

These responses are heartening. There should never be any excuse for sexual violence and its good to seem some TW who are not only seeing reality but happy to voice it, AND haven't be banned.

I spoke about my experience with a sexually aggressive TW in a thread about TW and how they make up statistics. After I was being told I was a liar and if what had happened had been reported my account was then banned by Reddit.

Glad to see that this type of discussion is finally being had by the community.

Well blow me down, there's more of it today

OP
Am I being discriminated against at work?
When I first attended work as a woman, I was wearing some fun trans t-shirts I had bought, one that said "I survived testosterone poisoning" in trans colours, and another that said "Trans rights or I bites" with a trans coloured dinosaur on it. My boss immediately decided that this was the time to enforce a dress code at work, and that everyone had to either wear a high-vis top or a company logo'd black t-shirt, something that was not a rule anyone followed prior to this. I was also called upstairs and told that I was quote: "Not allowed to make any political statements."

Responses

-Honestly it's a bit much for a work environment. I'd feel the same if someone came in wearing Christ is lord on a shirt. You don't need your whole personality to be "I am trans".

-To be fair to your boss, I don't think you should be wearing pro trans clothing at work or labeling a work bathroom with a trans positive sign.

-Just blend into the background as a woman. Cut the trans stuff. What you do in your own time is up to you, what you do in work time is work. Sorry if that's blunt, but if you want to transition to be a woman, be a woman.

-What's the nature of your work and dress code? Your profile says you're an American who recently moved to the UK. Is wearing humorous t-shirts signalling identity, politics, religious belief, personal interests, commonplace at your workplace? Your profile says the only way you can signal your femininity is by how you wear your hair, and makeup. Is it possible that you are making your time at work all about you and your trans identity and getting a bit insufferable?

-I don’t agree with people saying to only be openly trans in your own home. But there is a line. The complaints could have been related to your tshirts, the ‘testosterone poisoning’ is insensitive towards men in general even as a joke, including to trans men and also transmascs. And ‘trans rights or I bites’ is political messaging which is unlikely to be wanted if you represent the company.

If Reddit are pivoting, which, although I think it unlikely, is possible, we'll need to be extra vigilant about where the next platform pops up. Because there will be another platform. Abusive, incel types will never completely fade away into their separate "mom" basements unless we shut down the internet completely.

It may be that public opinion is shifting in the US, which is where it needs to shift, for the rest of us to get back to normal someday. Whatever it is will be advertising and money-based, not ideological.

Captured activists will continue to be captured, even if society gradually moves on to the next weird craze. But activists will start to stand out more against the normality around them, and their power will wane. That's what is needed, but they won't go quietly.

Possibly, there are factions with the activist "communities" that are starting to realize that the movement is running out of rope. It's where they will pivot to that worries me, and how that will manifest itself.

The third(?) comment: forgot trans for 40 years then remembered a 7 yr old's beliefs?
Presumably now the compass to steer life by.

Erm. Yikes.