Reflections on trans presence at a Dykes Who Hike event

[13RidgmontRoad]

For those who don't know DWH, it's an informal mainly Instagram-promoted event and the organisers, two women in their 20s, arrange (relatively accessible) hikes in locations mainly in SE England. Cost to join is £2 a ticket. Yesterday was the first one I've been on, which was 17 miles (Newhaven to Brighton). Around 130 people attended.

There were 5-6 TW on the hike that I could see; two older chaps, one in a dress and heavy makeup, the other looking very much just like a bloke in men's clothing. Four younger ones who looked like the wind might blow them away.

Older blokey one was very annoying - lots of mansplaining on the Whatsapp group, selfies and borderline inappropriate jokes, generally ignored.

Two of the younger ones peeled off about halfway through as they couldn't cope with the rest of the distance. Remaining younger ones were a couple and kept themselves to themselves. They were rather timid and socially awkward, which was a bit of a contrast to 130 hale and hearty lesbians in hiking boots.

I felt like most of the women there just gave the lot of them a wide berth - bit of polite chat then forward or back to join other women.

The (lovely) organisers are quite young and there's absolutely no way either of them would come out and bar TW. I imagine they'd be terrified to take a view. So it seemed very much like weary acceptance. It was rather interesting to observe.

Who on earth is talking about dying? Are you okay?

Do you buy lavender biscuits or have you made them yourself? I imagine shortbread with lavender would be nice.

Anyway.

I hope this group has fun and enjoys its walks.

I also hope that they remain unbothered by trans identifying men.

it’s amazing. I’m a bit obsessed with lavender tbh. Lavender and blueberry cake is amazing as well.

I'm increasingly suspecting that the name of the group was chosen mainly because dyke rhymes with hike.

If it were a cycling group they'd be dykes on bikes.

I think you have misunderstood the point of the OP's post.

That said, the importance of the female half of humanity having clear language that refers only to us is not some trivial "hill to die on"

Bizarre, and also so so sad, that you think it could be.

Oh joyous day, an opportunity to shoehorn in my favourite pun....

And if they smoked weed on e-bikes they'd be Lesbian Dopeheads on Mopeds!

It's even totally on topic... LDOM were men claiming to be lesbians for their own fun and benefit 😂

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaye_Bykers_on_Acid

Honestly, I think even the law of gravity would look creaky under the determined onslaught of Genderists trying to confuse and obfusticate.

"Sure Newton correctly observed gravity with an apple, but what about a banana, eh? He didn't say anything about bananas, did he? Did he even know bananas exist? How can he have a universal law when he didn't know about the existence of bananas? And what about zero-g? How can there be a universal force of gravity if we only need to get into orbit for it to stop working? Universal my arse!"

(Meta post - gravity is in fact very complicated, varies in force over place and time, not fully understood by scienxe yet and far more complex than the everyday person on the street realises. Nevertheless, we can still use that simplified everyday understanding to build bridges that stay up, houses that stay down, play no end of sports, predict the behaviour of apples, celestial bodies billions of miles away and subatomic particles billion times smaller than apples. Just like knowing that biological sex is complex in the details doesn't stop us understanding there are two human sexes and the one one happens to be has real consequences).

fictitious East Germanthrash punk band "Rektüm"

I think it’s the umlaut that makes it perfect

Of course it's trivial! Language evolves and has done since the dawn of the spoken word. It will continue to evolve despite the stamping and caterwauling of people with specific gripes. And also - this is just another level of hypocrisy. Unless of course you demand 'clear language' from those horrifyingly offensive women who call themselves 'trans widows'. As an actual widow - that is offensive and I judge them harshly. I don't demand they stop calling themselves that though.

Language is not trivial.

Women have rights, and these depend on law, which consists of language.

Do you genuinely not see the connection between "dead name" and "trans widow"? Why are trans people allowed to express the break with their past in terms of death, but not the people who shared those old lives with them? Wow. You really do see trans people as higher value than anyone else, don't you?

Language evolves, yes, but it can also be
forced to change as an act of control.

Native languages stamped out by colonisers. People's own names for the places they live, for themselves and their people, erased.

"Trivial"?

Even you, when you try to control the names that women who lose their husband to a transition chose to call themselves. "Trivial", yet at the same time you cannot bear to allow that language to evolve.

So I'll ask again. And given that you spent some time on another thread arguing for the importance of language when you didn't like what was being said but found you could only take exception to how it was said:

Why do you think the female half of humanity is less deserving of a name that means all of us but only us than people who have slightly different shades of ginger hair, or come from different sides of the Mersey?

Do you truly value women so little you can't imagine why anyone would ever need to speak to us or of us, or that we might want speak about ourselves and the reality of being female?

Why do you value us so little that you see no need to connect us to our history and each other? Do you think we have achieved such social, political and economic parity with men that not only do we no longer need Feminism, we don't even need the words in which it could be written?

Or do you, as I think is more likely, not think about it at all? Do you assume we all know really what a woman is so why does it matter if we play along and pretend a few men are "women" too even if that only makes sense in a world where we agree the defining differences between men and women are mental?

Either way, I pity you.

(Also, thank you so much for your considered use of words like "caterwauling", "stamping", and "gripes". This post will come in handy next time someone tries to claim the high ground by claiming Gender Critical Feminist posters on FWR are nasty, agressive or rude.)

Language evolves and has done since the dawn of the spoken word.

But a man has never evoloved into a women.

What you are describing isnt evolution because its not an organic, slow process that we as a society understand. Its a group of men imposing their beliefs on women.

Caterwauling is going on the ever lengthening list of adjectives used to belittle and demean women's speech.

We have had so many!

We are frothing and squealing and shrieking and whining and spewing.

Some people really hate women having a voice at all.

Don't forget to pretending to not know a very well known phrase to (attempt to) belittle. Wouldn't want you to miss that one. I do find it interesting how the GC purity gang strikes so swiftly. Almost as if they have nothing in their lives other than online bigotry.

Right. We all live in caves and have no jobs or human contact. I'm actually a brain in a jar.

You can insult us all you like, it is actually helpful.

Exactly.

You've made it perfectly clear that you're only interested in language when it serves your agenda. I call out hypocrisy where I see it.

Bullshit.

A painfully transparent attempt to deflect from you not addressing a single one of the points I made showing just how shallow your "language is trivial" riposte was.

Back that claim up with specifics or withdraw it.

Are you a widow? Have you had to tell your young children that their father isn't coming home? Over and over again - because that's what you have to do until they can understand that he hasn't just gone to the work. You haven't, have you? All you've done is defend on some women who have decided to co-opt that identity because their husbands left them. It's not the same. The only difference here is that you couldn't give a shit about language unless you can use it to attack trans people.The hypocrisy is staggering.

I presume golf widows come in for equally bitter criticism

The 'trans widows' threads are about abuse. It's not about 'husbands leaving them'. They are threads where women help support each other through terribly difficult abuse.

They're not widows though. You have no issue with these women calling themselves something they aren't - but object to trans people doing the same. Even for the most hard-of-thinking that's hypocrisy laid bare.

Yes. Only I've yet to meet a golf widow who argues passionately that her husband popping on a pair of court shoes and calling himself Deirdre is the same thing as mine dying at 33 in horrific circumstances.

Well it's Brighton, this type of thing is de rigeur I used to live there and TWs everywhere.
If they tried joining a similar group here in Somerset they'd be "accidentally" lost on the way round.