This has been something that has been playing on my mind about the insistence that feminists are extreme and that ‘bluntness’ is somehow bad.
Firstly, ‘kind’ language that is accurate and can be confusing has led to constant twisting and pivoting where male people use whataboutery to find a point where they can restart their push to get access or retain access to female single sex provisions. We have seen posters this week post ‘Whatabout surgery? Whatabout when a male athlete has been incorrectly identified as a female infant? Whatabout if Khelif doesn’t win’?
Blunt and accurate language should stop these wheedling attempts to find the exception. Because… in safeguarding principles for these types of scenarios, blanket exclusion (ie where all male people are treated equally) are imperative.
The other aspect is again, this false ‘both sides’ rhetoric as if feminists are using comparative violent and abusive language as those male people calling for the death of women or celebrating the fact that apparently all the women who have pointed out the issues will die soon and miraculously the next generation will be fully accepting. None of this is true. Yet we see it over and over again.
Interestingly though, the same people declaring that others are twisting their words, have a posting history where they have done the same thing.
I remember how many posters used the same fuckwittery to denounce JK Rowling. It seems that it never crosses their mind that they are the ones supporting abusive people. JK Rowling has almost always (I cannot find one example of her not) used blunt terms when discussing either her abusers or those abusers who are harming women and girls.
I think any person accusing her of abusing people has a warped moral compass. Why the fuck should women be nice to their abusers ? Why should JK Rowling be nice to Willoughby when he abuses her? Too often people post her ‘abuse’ and have never once looked further to understand that poster has being abusing her and she isn’t abusive she is simply either pointing to their abuse or using blunt language to point out the flaws in their thinking.
But… both sides.
Either way, there is no comparison that women being blunt and unyieldingly using accurate language is being shamed. Look that the emotional cut through of the Upton testimonies when accurate language was used.
It is hard to whatabout when Naomi Cunningham states clearly ‘he has a male person in a female communal changing room’. That is the ‘blunt’ language female people are using and being implored to stop. Versus the language from many male activists collated on the terfisaslur site.
The assymetry of ‘both sides’ is apparent again in the demonising descriptors used for any feminist or women’s rights campaigners who disagree that male people can ever be female. Eg ‘anti trans’, ‘far right’, and now ‘anti rights’.
Then there is the conflation of when posters are making relevant generalisations based on safeguarding principles and posters making unevidenced negative generalisations. Too often too are posters called out for naming behaviour as ‘predatory’ because someone has twisted the post to mean ‘all male people with trans identities are predators’.
How often does a poster who disagrees with female people having single sex provisions complain using the term ‘bad faith’ when they are hypocritically posting in bad faith themselves .
There are so many aspects where the ‘both sides’ rhetoric is false. From the size of the groups, to the behaviour, to the accusations of language etc. Yet some people, even politicians, still use this falsity. And they then wonder why women reject it as a premise.