Friends suggesting transphobia and misogyny both rooted in policing gender roles

[Pyjamatimenow]

Friend of mine has posted on her social media ( a very long detailed post) that basically trans rights are women’s rights and that what she sees as transphobia is akin to people who ‘punish’ women who don’t fit into gender stereotypes, don’t get married, don’t look ‘feminine’, don’t have children…Says she’s a feminist and defends the rights of trans women to live safely etc …whatever that means. Cis women mentioned several times. I don’t normally comment on these kinds of things on FB but struggling with this particular post! If I were to say something what would you say?

Has already been tried at Hampstead Ponds.

They were indeed asked to leave.

Well that makes things very clear. Bailey thinks it's fine for people to choose their own categories based on what stereotypes they feel they have in common. Bailey is wrong, that is not how categories work. It is very harmful to women to allow men to identify into their category because it means the category can't do the work it is supposed to do to protect the interests, needs and rights of the people with female bodies.

Thank you for explaining to us all that you don't understand the difference between stereotypes (social expectations) & typical behaviours (more common behaviours).

May I suggest consulting a dictionary to avoid further embarrassment next time?

Uh huh, & what sex wears dungarees & pinafores more often?

Next.

So it has escalated. I’m actually quite surprised. I asked her what she meant by living ‘safely and authentically’ and she’s come back with something along the lines of ‘I’m not interested in debating, we are proudly LGBTQ in my group, please feel free to leave if these beliefs don’t align with yours…’.

Can't blame her. It's one thing to ask questions out of genuine curiosity & another to snarkily do so. You clearly aren't a good faith interlocutor & she knows it.

It is relevant if she is challenging the code.

'safely and authentically' must mean something quantifiable.

At a guess women (more of us working in cleaning, childcare and caring and needing protective clothing), but so what?

'No debate'

How 2022 of her.

5 minutes ago you were claiming dungarees were unfeminine. Now you are pointing out the women are the main wearers of them.

But even if a pink, sequined, lacey, flower patterned dress is the most female coded item you can think of a man doesn't become a woman by wearing one. He is just a bloke in a dress. It matters not if the dress is a black shirt dress or the pink sparkly one. Clothes don't alter the wears sex.

If you are attempting to play dumb to the obvious quantifiable safety issues trans people face as a result of hate crimes then why would anyone in their right minds entertain you as an honest broker?

You realise Facebook is a social media app not parliamentary question time?
Oh wait……

You don't understand. It's not just wearing the clothes, it's wearing the clothes because you really really want to wear the clothes. Because your entire soul yearns for pink lacy dungarees and frameless glasses and the ladies toilet and you can never be truly you without them.

Like transubstantiation, it doesn't work just performing the same action, only if you truuuuuuly belieeeeeeeeeeeeeve.

"5 minutes ago you were claiming dungarees were unfeminine. Now you are pointing out the women are the main wearers of them."

Just the opposite actually.

"But even if a pink, sequined, lacey, flower patterned dress is the most female coded item you can think of a man doesn't become a woman by wearing one. He is just a bloke in a dress. It matters not if the dress is a black shirt dress or the pink sparkly one. Clothes don't alter the wears sex."

No one is saying they alter biological sex. The context is common inclinations with a biological sex makes them more associated with them.

I accept that safety can be quantified (and would be grateful if e.g. Stella Creasy would do so and make some concrete proposals when discussing Equality legislation).

I'm less clear on the relevance of living authentically.

…now if we’re talking safety, I indeed have a lot of data and evidence that men and women should have separate toilets.

One aspect that we can quantify is the risk of being murdered. What is quite clear when we do quantify this is that men who identify as women are an order of magnitude less likely to be murdered than other men. This holds true even in the favelas of South America where the risk to male trans prostitutes is highest - it is still much lower than the risk other men there face,

Oh dear. It's all very "Workers of the world unite" isn't it.
How you react now really depends whether you care about her group. The pompousness and word salad would incline me to flounce but I don't have much patience for these things.

Your thinking is just so muddled it’s not worth engaging with.

Stereotypes are not the same as expectations.

They are drawn from fairly commonly experienced real behaviours. If they contained no kernel of real experience, they would not survive as stereotypes.

Societal expectations are when “society” expects individuals from both sexes to conform to the stereotypes that exist.

In this context, stereotypes can be harmful to anyone who doesn’t conform to them. Most people do not conform to all or even the majority of the stereotypes associated with their sex.

None of this is particularly controversial.

Confirming to some of the stereotypes associated with opposite sex does not make you that sex.

You are essentially arguing that you want to organise the world by whether people’s hobbies, clothing choice and personality traits align more with male or female stereotypes.

Whereas the world is organised by sex because we are mammals and men have huge physical advantages over women should they choose to use them. Women are vulnerable to men.

I am sure you don’t dispute that the vast majority of violence is committed by men (people with male bodies).

There are plenty of public trans figure who claim that their sex has indeed been altered. The receipts are all out there, no point gaslighting otherwise.

Also, less clear on why the solution to this is to decide that some male people who feel scared, but not all male who feel scared, can use the ladies loos.

I mean, we don't open the ladies loos up to men in the wrong team's shirt and I know plenty of pubs where that's far more likely to get a kicking than being trans.

Well do you live authentically ? Are living authentically now by expressing your personality traits/organic inclinations? Living your life freely making choices based on what fits your personal disposition?

Maybe think about how this applies to you & whether women in say Victorian times could live 'authentically' or had to repress their natural inclinations that men didn't.

It’s no debate because there is nothing coherent to debate.

And there's plenty of countries where men are murdered more than women but that doesn't mean there isn't a women's safety issue there.

I’m completely lost as to what you are going on about.

people can wear what they like. (Well I can’t wear a bikini to work- apparently it isn’t ‘professional’). What has that got to do with what sex you are?