What TRAs or 'gender' advocates and 'gender critical' feminists agree on.

[WrongKindOfFeminist]

Thought it might be useful to find points of commonality.

Ever the optimist! 😊

1. Gender stereotypes can be restrictive and limiting.

I can. They don't like the Good Law Project or Helen Webberley and think they are grifters.

Inclusivity means everyone.
No it doesn't.
If inclusivity meant everyone, every group/body/organisation/society/association would have to be open to the entire human race.

The word 'inclusive' is from the same root as 'enclose' - to enclose is to put a barrier around something to keep the inside in and the outside out, so to speak,
A sheep enclosure is to keep the sheep in, and, ideally, the wolves out.

So for a group to be 'inclusive', it must include everybody who belongs to the category included in that group. But it does not have to include everybody, that would be silly.

So I'm not going to cry havoc and let loose the dogs of discrimination law if I can't join a support group specifically for people who are left-handed, or for people who own Maseratis.
They are inclusive as long as they welcome all left-handed people, and all Maserati owners.
Your definition of inclusivity would mean that I could insist on membership, despite being right-handed and not even liking Maseratis - too showy😏

So a group that is designated as being for all women - and the Supreme Court has made it clear what 'woman' means - only has to be open to all women to be inclusive.

If it was also open to men, it would not be an inclusive women's group, it would just be a inclusive human being group, and there are plenty of thriving, lively, human being groups out there to join and enjoy

Gender stereotypes can be restrictive and limiting

Nope, many of the TRAs are living breathing stereotypes

Everyone involved is human and has human rights.

Nope, if TRAs believed this they wouldn't be trying to remove/reduce others rights.

Violence and harm is wrong.
and
Violence against women is a serious problem

The violence and threats of violence are coming from the TRAs

Better data is needed

You might have stumbled upon one here, but remember that TRAs have refused any data, reports, studies or anything that means that trans can be 'measured' or defined.

People should be free to express themselves

Yes, but only as so far as it doesn't conflict with others rights see your second point.

We have a winner.

Depressing isn't it? I was reading something recently about how GI has broken the social contract. The generally accepted conventions that allows citizens to rub along together, respecting differences and making accomodations when necessary.

Sadly extreme transactivism blows this apart by intimidating and bullying people out of what they know to be true. That there are 2 sexes, that women and children at times are vulnerable due to their specific characteristics and that being allowed to speak freely is essential for a democratic society.

As soon as you hear a politician uttering TWAW, women can have a penis or "it doesn't matter if some children are sterilised and harmed via puberty blockers - it's for the greater good" then you know they're intellectually and morally incapable of being an effective leader of people.

The damage done is immense and while we're watching institutions and people slowly reversing over that golden bridge, the casualties are massive.

"Better data is needed" is not going to work as a point of agreement unless there is first agreement on the definition of "better" - because there are people on both sides who would only consider data to be "better" if it supports their existing position. There are matters of faith and belief at play here and it is difficult to apply the scientific method in such circumstances, so many proposed pathways of genuine scientific enquiry have been shut down for being inherently transphobic to even formulate the question that the proposed research intends to gather data on, while data showing that a high percentage of self-selecting people who chose to answer this survey have experienced X is upheld as good research. Equally I wonder how the GC side would take it if rigorous scientific proof emerged for a reliable method to identify which people are definitely going to be in the category of those who will only find peace through body-modification-surgery (though I am not sure an ethical technique exists to generate such proof)

On what questions are ‘better data needed’ and in order to meet what needs?

I feel on quite a lot of issues in this field we have a ton of data, but absolutely zero agreement on its implications.

For example, we have enormous amounts of data on sport performance variation between men and women, particularly in sports that make a lot of money like golf and football. But we’ve just spent a ludicrous 25 years or so in a mess because an athlete with CAIS argued that both she AND any male person who felt female should be able to compete in the Olympics. Literally the entire sport argument stemmed from that.

To me it is obvious that the excellent data we have on quite a lot of things (to take a few examples: sport performance - child development and psychology - numbers of female prisoners vs male prisoners convicted of sex crimes - how to write a solid question for the census without making a complete Godawful screwup - the difference between policy made by activists and policy that takes a broad range of views and needs into account - the impact of trying to operate a specialist service which is overwhelmed with referrals as if it is functioning normally) needs to be applied, not studied over and over again by rewriting ‘men’ as ‘transgender females’ and getting jobs off the novelty of our analysis.

Good point.

Ugh. Bad flashback to that time a transwoman came on a transman forum where any promotion of sex or gender stereotypes was explicitely forbidden in the rules, and they just wouldn't let go of the "cute, soft girlie" persona! All, "I'm such a woman, you're such men, tee hee" in every post. They didn't last long, since they obviously couldn't stick to the rules.

I agree. I trusted politicians very little to begin with, and I now trust all of them not at all. Even if a politician says s/he knows what a woman is, I want to see the action that supports those words. Words are not enough, and I don't think they ever will be again, for me.

OP, it's a nice idea, and an interesting exercise (I'm enjoying the discussion). But, I'm not sure we will ever find anything that activists wouldn't twist to mean whatever they wanted it to mean.

They want stuff. Usually our stuff. If activists can successfully argue that the sun orbits the Earth, because they are convincing enough and because they want something they can get only by twisting the meaning of "orbit" then that's what they'll do.

Have I mentioned that I'm jaded and cynical?

We might have a better chance of agreeing on more things if we asked people who feel that they are trans, but not activists. Maybe.

Yes.
That' why I say that we (to some extent) agree in what the problem is, but not in the solutions.

I believe that (some) people identifying themselves as non-binary are looking for a way out - and picking what seems the easiest way even if it means radically oversimplifying their model of the world.

Yes, good points.

Although within that statemwnt we could maybe say:

'Gender' and 'sex' are different things - as another point of commonality?

Just that that viewpoint asserts sex is mutable and gender isn't, whereas gc feminists would claim the inverse.

I wonder if we could posit reasonable trans activists/genderists?

To try and find some shared agreement.

See also: Pride is a corporate grift

Sounds like a very deliberate breaching of boundaries.

Interesting questions.

I agree that on population level those differences exist and that it makes sense to notice them. It makes sense to consider them part of the gender in the sociological sense.

But, what should we do about them? Can we use the observations and apply them as expectations on individual people? In which contexts it is ok and in which not?

I'm not sure whether I'd consider them stereotypes, but if I won't it creates (artificial and subjective) classiffication of "good and bad" observations, which doesn't help.

We can side-step it by trying to better distinguish sex-based and society-induced differences but that's just another mess.

Maybe it is about seeing a difference between "observing gender" = seeing population level differences and "enforcing gender" = expecting people to behave that way.

Sorry - this makes no sense as phrased.

Both the word gender and woman are contested words.

Feminists know that women are biological females and that gender is a social construct often used in sexist ways to restrict or criticise women for nor conforming.

TRAs think a woman can be anyone who says they are one.

TRAs think gender and sex means the same.

As such no discussion can be had as framed.

Let alone the idea that either group has its own manifesto that each has signed up to.

Even TRAs are not all the same.

And feminists are not all the same.

I don’t think either side likes Stonewall or Amnesty nowadays.

As for better data, I think it was Steph Richards who was crowing about there being a new test that would prove people were trans, but he stopped talking about it very quickly when the TRA community responded with horror.

Eddie Izzard, in his early days of being a self-described bloke in a dress, was defying gender stereotypes. When he started talking bollocks about knowing he was a girl because he liked heels & nail varnish he was reinforcing them.

Anyone who says they are whichever gender or none because of personality or whatever is reinforcing tired old sexist gender stereotypes, whichever box they’ve jumped into.

Edited to add that people are obviously welcome to identify as whatever gender they want as long as they don’t take that as a reason to use spaces for the opposite sex.

'Gender' and 'sex' are different things - as another point of commonality?

TRAs have only recently moved to this position and are rewriting history to say that feminists support gender stereotypes and therefore feminism is bad for women as it forces them in to these stereotypes.

Oh absolutely. I've seen plenty of people post on Reddit or FB that I'm tempted to tell "hey, you're gender critical - you just define the words man and woman differently".

TRA discourse on that one is changing though. I've seen an absolutely massive amount of them recently arguing it was a massive error ever to admit there's a difference between sex and gender and that really with cross-sex hormones they're changing their sex as well.

Isn't the point of agreement that if you are born male you aren't necessarily (and aren't obliged to be) masculine, and if you are born female you aren't necessarily (and aren't obliged to be) feminine?

I think both sides concur on that; although the TRA side persistently and wilfully muddles up the gender critical feminists (who agree with them on this) with the sexist conservatives (who disagree with both of us and want manly men and womanly women only).

The disagreement begins with what it means and what you do about it.

GC feminists say being unconventional for your sex is unremarkable; just crack on and be a gender nonconforming member of your birth sex and fight to be allowed to do this.

TRAs say if you are gender nonconforming it means you are really in some way a member of the opposite sex and can only be happy if you oblige society to treat you as if you really are that sex. Some also think changing your body to a facsimile of the opposite sex is essential too.

I'm out of patience with TRAs.

Tell me why I should give a flying fuck what they think when I'm still fighting for my sex-based rights, when there are still plenty of ordinary men and women out there who think feminists are making a lot of fuss about a minor issue that could be resolved with more kindness and tolerance, mainly from women. When I had an intelligent, politically savvy guy tell me recently that in the long run terfs will inevitably lose and fade away because all the funding, contracts and clients/members/users will go to 'inclusive' women's groups. He's not a TRA, he understands sex, he just doesn't think it matters much.

Here's something that men (almost without exception, even the sex realists) have in common with TRAs: they think that any man who is [committed/crazy/desperate/psychiatrically abnormal enough] to have his genitalia chopped off deserves full access to women's spaces and services.

Trans-identifying people get far too much attention. Let's not be part of that.

I have just had a very detailed discussion about pineapple on pizza with my DH, which we have never had in the 16 years we have known each other. It was possible that it could have ended in divorce.

But we are agreed. It is nuanced. We would not refuse to eat a homemade pizza with pineapple on it, and it is acceptable that Hawaiian pizzas exist, even in our presence in a pizza restaurant. The conversation then detoured into a detailed discussion of pizzas consumed separately in Rome and frankly how shoddy they are, then into a discussion about pineapple rings on gammon.

Ultimately we agreed that it depends.

And the fact that we were in full nuanced agreement shows we are perfect for each other.

I am so astonished and delighted I have just fallen in love with him all over again.