Be Kind 2.0 and the "Persuasive TRA"

[BridgetPhillipsonIsACowardlyJobsworth]

This is a spinoff from another thread so as not to derail the original.

I thought it would be helpful to have a separate thread to discuss, and document, a phenomenon I have been seeing more regularly recently: the Persuasive TRA.

It occurred to me, after a few posters noted that the recent U-turns by a couple of politicians, and the wheedling TRA responses to the EHRC guidance, were akin to an abuser changing tactics and also asking us to "help" them in the new single-sex regime, that the whole thing is starting to pan out exactly as an abusive relationship often does. When is the most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship? Normally, when she is leaving.

Well, women are leaving the abusive relationship with non-reality that men forced upon us some 15 years ago, and I would argue that now might be our most dangerous/difficult moment.

This is what I posted on the other thread:

I'm starting to see a bit more of what I am calling (in my own head) "Persuasive TRA." Now that they have lost everything that they bullied women for, some activists seem to be changing tack. Women must now fix the situation that TRAs have found themselves in. It seems to pivot on a sort of Be Kind 2.0.

I think women who have been in the game long enough will see through it, but we should be watchful. Stonewall is pivoting, activists are pivoting, and they will be preying on women's socialized kindness: watch for the destination and be on your guard.

I have read several posters on different threads appealing to everyone (women) to help calm trans-identified people's (men's) fears about what this new reality will look like, what it will mean for them (the men) now that they can't just do whatever they want anymore. What about the men's toilets? Are they safe? Where will they go? (Who will fix this problem?)

Well, apparently it is a problem that women can fix, if they just take a moment to think about it. Trans-identified men will be unsafe in the men's, so women need to join the fight to give these men something of their own.

Notice the pivot? The pleading? If you just... If you weren't so.... It can be different if you just... Sound familiar? To any woman who is in, or has escaped from, an abusive relationship, this will be all too familiar.

This is Be Kind 2.0. It's very similar to the original, except that instead of being forced to enjoy our abuse, we are being asked to fix it. And the "Persuasive TRAs" seem to be mobilizing, from what I have seen.

It won't start in the middle (with the women); it will start at the top (infiltrating government, think tanks, charities, etc.) and the bottom (schools). But they will use women to get this moving. Why not? It worked so well last time. And I believe that organizations like Stonewall will be leading the charge: the campaign can be something like Safe Spaces for Trans+ : All of Us Together.

If anyone else has seen this in action, it might be useful to keep a record of it here.

I imagine this thread will eventually be taken over by activists, but, until then, I would be interested in your thoughts.

I had RJ in mind, of course.

Any excuse for a re-watch!

tue one word they can’t hear is “no”.

Maybe it’s a neurological issue. They. And hear it, at least, not if it comes from a woman

with thanks to @Helleofabore

from the "Arm the Dolls" thread:

Page 9 | 'Arm the Dolls' | Mumsnet

"authentic acceptance"

Apparently, that intimidation has not created a situation where girls and women will comply and not show any visual discomfort.

Meaning that apparently, every single interaction with female people that a male person with a transgender identity has, is supposedly authentic acceptance....

...this is part of the harm of this false framing of language compliance as being ‘respectful’.

"it's respect, not compliance"

@FarmersBlonde I hope you don't mind, I picked up on something you were saying early during the Tempest tribunal this morning, and thought I'd add it in here:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5551959-tempest-v-rural-payments-agency-tribunal-thread-7?page=9

It’s probably going to be the next way they’ll try and diminish our experiences.

[Let's call this "wearing our symptoms" (à la Igmum's "wearing our arguments") - the obvious one being menopausal symptoms. Not an entirely new tactic, but one that perhaps we should look out for more, now that other avenues of "performance" are being closed down to trans-identified men. ]

Thanks to FarmersBlonde for this one!

Add "it's going to be soooo expensive to alter all the toilets (that we had persuaded people to change - unnecessarily - to an illegal specification)." See recent thread.

Thanks! Yes, I saw that and thought might be one for the list, so I'm not the only one- it'll be a useful tactic to try, won't it?

100%

One I'm seeing a lot of just today, on several threads:

There are more important issues than...

how women feel about having men in their prisons;

whether or not we should be checking our "chests" or our "breasts" for signs of cancer;

wondering if women are not speaking up about men in their single-sex spaces because they are afraid ...

(to point out a few)

Attemped deflection is not a new tactic, of course, but it's interesting to see it on so many threads all at once. Seems like evidence that the usual arguments are wearing thin, perhaps? Or maybe it's just the heat!

No worries at all. 🙂 Especially after it being said (was it by ST in the tribunal?) that they get menopause symptoms like migraines and dizziness due to taking oestrogen. 🙄

Possible shift from the catch-all "anti-trans" to the equally undefinable catch-all "anti-rights.". From the Amnesty thread. It may be that "anti-trans" is so ubiquitous now that it's lost a lot of its power? Hence the shift? One to watch for.

Thanks to @ProfLargofesse

From the Tempest tribunal, positioning "belief" against "lived experience". Possibly a deliberate tactic to undermine women's ability to rely on the Forstater judgement to protect our right to publicly say we disagree with Genderist demands and with the Genderist beliefs about women by greating a hierarchy of rights where GC "belief" is secondary to Trans "lived experience"

The fallacy here is that while trans people no doubt both genuinely feel and believe what they say, the jump from "I feel this way" to "the way I feel is objectively and indisputably the same as the way the opposite sex feel, and this means in all things I should be treated as if I actually am the opposite sex" is very much a belief (in fact two beliefs, one built on the other) not a lived experience.

@FlirtsWithRhinos thanks for this. Yes, that's going to be a particularly tricky tactic to circumvent, I think. It is essentially fact vs belief, but being packaged (in law) as belief vs belief, them further twisted, as you say, by activists, to be repackaged as belief vs reality!
If that makes sense?

Not sure how to phrase it for the list:

"lived experience " = reality
vs
"GC beliefs" = religious belief?

It really is so twisted!

“Well, apparently it is a problem that women can fix, if they just take a moment to think about it. Trans-identified men will be unsafe in the men's, so women need to join the fight to give these men something of their own.“

But, they don’t want something of their own. Attempts to creat ‘third spaces’ have been universally rejected by TRAs, unisex (‘gender neutral’) spaces are not what they want. They WANT to use women’s spaces.

But, they don’t want something of their own. Attempts to creat ‘third spaces’ have been universally rejected by TRAs, unisex (‘gender neutral’) spaces are not what they want. They WANT to use women’s spaces.

Exactly this. The only spaces deemed acceptable by these MRAs, who apparently speak on behalf of the trans community, are the spaces used specifically by women who don’t consent to using mixed sex spaces. Their objections are clear that using the same spaces as women who show their consent by choosing to use mixed sex (‘gender neutral’) spaces is not what’s wanted.

ETA: it’s the consent which seems to the problem 🚩

It is the consent. For the AGPs and TRAs it’s being able to forcibly over-rule women’s consent that gives them satisfaction. The handmaidens that enable these men to invade women’s spaces are not what makes them happy, it’s gaining access when they know the GC feminists are saying no. That’s the dopamine source.

Attempts to create ‘third spaces’ have been universally rejected by TRAs, unisex (‘gender neutral’) spaces are not what they want. They WANT to use women’s spaces.

It is true that they do not want "gender neutral" third spaces but an influential trans lobby has advocated very effectively for "gender neutral" all spaces.

Those trans activists do not want access to "women's toilets" nearly as much as they want access to "gender neutral" toilets that everyone is forced to use.

Proposals for "inclusive gender neutral toilets" have been an easy "sell" to organisations, although in reality they have often continued to respect men's privacy and dignity by repurposing The Ladies as "All Comers" (sick pun!).

@keeptoiletssafe often mentions UK-commissioned research by Arup. The recommendations reference USA toilet provision studies which prioritise privacy over safety: self-contained cubicles with floor-to-ceiling walls and gapless doors, the preferred option of transvestite patrons of New York night clubs.

Those USA studies and recommendations were produced by well-known male trans activist academics who have dedicated a lot of time and effort to advocating for "gender neutral" to be the only toilet provision available.

That is, they do not want privileged access to The Ladies: they want all women and children to be forced to share toilet facilities with all adult men.

In the same way that PIE glommed on to "Gay Liberation" in the 1970s, paedophiles have been quick to exploit this situation. There is a steady stream of male "trans allies" who have pushed for all toilets to be gender neutral and who have subsequently been convicted of various types of child sex abuse.

There seem to be two main groups of trans identified men as far as "toilet preferences" are concerned.

• "Street level" male trans activists who riot and pour piss over themselves when demanding access to women's toilets, preferably occupied by women, for various reasons which we all know about only too well
• "Respectable" male trans-identified Queer Academics who conduct research and publish papers in peer-reviewed Journals, advocating for solely "gender neutral" provision within multi-user facilities.

Both options are bad for women and children. Arguably, the second option is the worst option as arguments about compromised privacy will lead to installation of "universal toilets": self contained sealed rooms that are effectively sound-proofed and present increased health and safety risks for everyone - with additional risks for women and children.

My worry is that outside of provision for employees, covered by the Workplace Regulations requiring single-sex facilities, that service providers will use the nonsensical costs estimates of re-creating single-sex facilities in order to justify keeping or making everything "gender neutral" by means of signage.

If that happens then IMHO we need to force the battle to be on safety grounds for single-sex facilities, not privacy. Otherwise we will backed into the trap of having to accept normalised "solutions" for greater privacy within "gender neutral" facilities that create even greater risks.

This one very much worries me because I think it's positioning in preparation for using anti-conversion legislation as a weapon to silence women who disagree with Genderism. "Lived Expereince as Gay vs someone else's religious belief you should not" - rightly not ok - becomes "Lived experience as a 'woman' vs someone else's Gender Critical belief you should not be".

The difference being of course that being Gay doesn't involve redefining or taking over someone else's rights and identity. Gayness is not a parasitic identity, Trans is.

I suggest we get ready to argue for our needs and rights as female based on our lived experiences as physically different to male, avoiding the word "woman" entirely.

The way to beat the "conversion practice" tactic, in fact the way to beat all ofthis really, is to stop talking about why TW should not be taking our stuff, and start talking about the lived experiences of female people and why we need that stuff in the first place.

Or prehaps get ready to fight fire with fire should the "conversion" tactic start to be used.

I refuse to be converted to a "cisgender" identity that I do not feel. I am an agender person of female body and as such I share a body type with other female bodied people of any gender, but I do not share anything more with a trans "woman" than I do any other male person.

start talking about the lived experiences of female people and why we need that stuff in the first place.

💯

As each term, such as transphobic, hateful, anti-trans, loses it linguistic moral loading power, that word needs to be replaced. Now it is anti-rights.

They all have been inaccurate representations of feminist’s position on single sex provisions, but accuracy has never been high for those people and groups using the terms ‘anti-trans’ and now ‘anti-rights’. It is purely to attempt to preload the listener or reader’s thinking to negatively judge the individual or group being described as ‘anti-trans’, often to dehumanise and demonise those in a later sentence.

After all, if someone has been categorised this way, then the listener / reader who doesn’t understand the situation will not object to the demonisation / dehumanisation. If the term has been so over used and the reader / listener has considered it and find the term not accurate at all, then the speaker / writer has to make much more effort to convince those readers / listeners that what they sat is true.

It is a ridiculous move but necessary because all those people making the argument have is emotional manipulation, of course.

Thank you so much for reading my long posts over the years. You get it 😊!
You may recall, I started looking at why Approved Document T (ADT) wasn’t mentioning door gaps and traced it all the way back to the core. To me it seemed obvious for health and safety. As it turns out from my conversations with HSE and BSR, the single sex designs still can have door gaps, if in a single sex environment, but there’s so much information they left out to ADT to make it manageable. That the overwhelming reasons for pushing ‘enclosed’ toilets by many people was to make more amenable for mixed sex use was upsetting as it was forgotten or ignored about medical emergencies and prevention of misuse that could have been highlighted in ADT to prioritise health and safety rather than privacy. I realised door gaps were useful to prevent misuse such as drugs, and sex (consensual and non-consensual), but I didn’t realise the extent of what goes on until I did further research. The hygiene aspects are not unimportant too - washing your hands in a sink and drying them with a hand dryer in close proximity to the toilet (and flush plumes) is not ideal. The microbiology is conclusively anti-unisex.

We need safe and hygienic single sex toilets, not more completely private, resistant-to-sound unisex ones, at worst retrofitted (as per the EHRC toilet example). These ‘inclusive’ designs have been a disaster all over the world, once described in court as a ‘vault’.

Schools have been the experiment here. Australia will find out soon - apparently 50% of their new toilets are to be unisex. It’s so predictable and unnecessary.

Thanks for this. I'm working on some kind of summary, as the list is getting too long. I may pinch some of your thoughts, as your comments seem to cover so much of what I want to say about these tactics and trends.

One I’m seeing a lot in the last few days “I care more than you about women’s rights because most women aren’t bothered about this issue, your priorities are all wrong”.

Thanks for this.

Do you mean it's that the leading statement is really "most women aren’t bothered about this issue" but wrapped up in faux concern? Faux concern that "you should be more interested in women's rights?". But, really the main point is that no one cares and no one is interested?

I guess I don't quite understand the "your priorities are all wrong”.