Guest post: There are wheels that have been squeaking for a lot longer
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Questions are rarely settled without debate.
Is it just me, or have certain tennets of trans ideology met with more rapid acceptance than one might expect? I know I’m noticing the effects of my own aging on my perception of time (incipient curmudgeonly relativistic time dilation), but things seem to have moved very quickly. The squeaky wheel may get the grease, but there are wheels that have been squeaking for a lot longer (say WOMEN, for example) that have not gotten their timely share of “lubrication.” To further mix metaphors, the extreme trans activists come across as queue jumping dogs in the manger, preventing women from retaining (or gaining in the first place) rights they’ve been demanding for ever.
I’m surprised at the number of governmental and business bodies that have accepted/swallowed/caved in to trans ideologies demands without much in the way of question or debate. I can’t imagine it’s strictly out of the goodness of their hearts, or wanting to appear to do the right thing, because many of these same governments and businesses have been glacially slow or downright shitty at that sort of empathic response in the past. I’m not sure that all these institutions could learn to be so responsive to pressure and demands that quickly by simply learning from past mistakes. I can see some elements on the Left vying to be the mostest, bestest and wokest tof rans allies, but not so much government and business. What’s behind this slight, unexpected, change of gears in the workings of power? Are trans rights a way of undercutting feminism that these non-Left institutions have latched onto, just like New Atheism used women’s rights as a cudgel against Islam (and to a lesser degree Christianity) but quickly forgot about them domestically and within its own organizations once their rhetorical value had been spent against foreign, brown theists? Just curious…
The ‘speed of acceptance’ has baffled me as well. Trans acceptance seems to have come right on the heels of the Gay Marriage general acceptance, so maybe some kind of coat tail effect?
One big irony is that it’s being framed as another ‘bathroom debate’ which has the radical feminists on the same side as the the conservatives this time (last time being the ERA). The paranoid part of me sees something engineered in this.
I never thought that Trans rights had anything to do with women’s or other people’s rights. It just never occurred to me.
I’ve got two ‘You can pee next to me’ shirts and when I wear them I seem to get a lot of people who say ‘Nice shirt’. Most of them are women. In any case, if I do think about it, I think that trans rights can only help women’s rights. Most religious people do not like trans rights. When religion wanes, women’s rights will wax.
True to the first statement. But, the second is only true if it is not replaced by non-religious misogyny, of which there is ample to go around.
#2 Kevin:
Well, of course they are. Women are socialized to put others’ needs before their own.
Kevin –
Not at all sure who trans rights could help women’s rights, unless you define women as those who live within the stereo type of what ‘trans’ wish to live in. Personally, I don’t know any women who do. Can’t remember the last time one of my female friends was wearing make-up. How is it you think trans rights will help women?
Anyway, I used to have a ‘live and let live’ attitude about trans, until something happened in trans-activism and I started seeing ‘kill terf’ scrawled around. Then I had to figure out what a terf was. Then, being curious, I had to figure out what was ‘wrong’ with these terfs. I started listening to them, really listening to them. Turns out most have damned good reason to be afraid of men insisting on getting into their ‘safe’ spaces.
As mixed metaphors go,
“queue jumping dogs in the manger”
is the very best I have ever seen.
I shall use it.
Yes, I can see that; it sounds plausible.
This has been my path too, more or less. Until I started to see troubling signs (like Ophelia’s experience at FTB) I’d never really given trans rights, or ideology, much thought. As far as employment, housing, marriage, etc., discrimination against trans people should be illegal. However people want to dress, behave and present themselves, so long as they are not harming others, is fine. But the deliberate conflation of “sex” with “gender” that erases women as an identifiable group, the demands for access to women’s safe spaces, the idea that doctors routinely “assign” instead of observe sex at birth, the incel-like concept of the “cotton ceiling,” the demand that feminism “centre” trans issues, the histrionic equation of criticism or questioning of trans ideology (particularly, by women) as “actual violence” or “genocide” and the implicit and explicit threats of violence against those, again, particularly women, who voice criticism or questioning of these practices and demands are all beyond the pale.
Women particularly are to bow down and accept the rule of their new, “centred” lords and masters, the new standards and paragons of true womanhood. Women particularly are being erased from forms, brochures and pamphlets. When we hear hoofbeats we are told to think of zebras, first, ever and only, however many millions of horses surround us.
Are trans men ever as forcefully demanding of manhood as trans women are of womanhood? Or are trans men keeping their heads down and trying to get along? Maybe I move in sheltered circles, but I’ve never heard of groups of trans men brandishing baseball bats lovingly wrapped in barbwire in woke-approved public performances of intimidation, or desiring gruesome deaths upon gender critical men. As people slightly more recently come to the role of women, one might think trans women might want to sit down and learn a thing or two from people who have been women for their entire lives. I imagine many do, but the extreme activists don’t seem to have time for that. They’re late to the party but insist and demand that they be allowed to take over and rerwrite the guest list. Are former-men-now-trans-women radical trans activists just discovering for themselves and chaffing under the misogyny that women have endured for millenia? Are the being rudely awakened to the subordinate status they share with women under patriarchy? Are they trying to excersize within their new identities and identifications their former power as men over women within patriarchy?
I don’t know what trans women and trans men feel and go through regarding their inner lives and identities. I understand that they are at risk of ostracism, discrimination,bigotry , mental illness, suicide and actual-honest-to-god-not-just-critical-words-violence. I don’t have to understand what their internal struggles are to know that the misogyny of extreme trans activists and their enablers, allkies and apologists is wrong and destructive. I can understand and sympathize with the real challenges and dangers trans women face while at the same time declining to recognize their self-awarded the gold medals in the Oppression Olympics, and rejecting their demands for the centring of their interests over, above and against women. They could do worse than to stand down from battle stations and lay down arms against those they would supplant. If they really understood the importance of the struggle for women’s rights, they would be fighting for them, not against them
Hi Cazz. I am not sure how trans rights helps women. I just, maybe naively, assumed that people who supported trans right would also support women’s rights.
Rob, correct. Removing religion is not sufficient for obtains women’s rights. It is, however, a necessary one, I would argue. All organized religions are man made with prescriptions that benefit men.
Kevin Henderson #2
Let’s break this down.
First of all, we need to define “trans.” As Julia Serano tells us, it’s an umbrella term that covers, well, pretty much anybody who chooses to adopt the term. By the way, most transwomen have male genitalia.
“Trans rights” are being interpreted to mean:
“Trans women are women” and are to be accepted in women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, on women’s sports teams, and in women’s prisons.
Lesbians who express a disinclination to sleep with transwomen, even those with penises, are bigots and “vagina fetishists.”
Gender identity is paramount. Sex is a social construction. (Oddly, very few people seem to realize that this is a 180° turn from most feminist thought of the last 70 years.)
Women talking about their female bodies is “exclusionary.” By the same token, it’s exclusionary to speak of abortion or period poverty as “women’s issues.” (Men and non-binary folks need abortions too!)
Any woman who questions any of the above is a terf and deserves to get beaten up and told to DIAF.
Women who say terfy things are to be no-platformed. They are to be banned from social media and WordPress. If women attempt to hold public discussions about the impact of gender law on The Humans Formerly Known As Women, every attempt will be made to intimidate them and the owners of the venues that dare host them. If the intimidation fails, people in balaclavas may attempt to keep women from entering. If women still manage to assemble, people in balaclavas may storm the meeting and attempt to shout them down.
Every attempt will be made to use the power of the government to silence women who commit Wrongthink.
Every thing listed above is mainstream in trans activism in the US and the UK.
By the way, not all religion is opposed to transgenderism. Some theologies consider the “born in the wrong body” narrative preferable to “homosexual”. See Iran. And see the young effeminate boys trans-ed by good Christian parents who are relieved to learn Jr. wasn’t a fairy; he’s a girl.
That kind of ‘un-opposition’ by religion illustrates it’s deep sickness with sex. It (religion) will form any narrative it can muster, not to necessarily do the right thing, but to accommodate the central dogmas. The motivation to act does not come from the well being of another, it comes from preserving heaven at all costs.
They do this with science as well. Those theologians who like science, they do not say science is against religion, they usurp cosmologies, engineering, and medical procedures and call them works of God.
And often dress in traditional male dress. Which makes it harder to know they “are women”. Which makes it easier to spot TERFs. Because if you don’t automatically assume that the male-bodied, male-garbed person who identifies as a woman is indeed a woman (even if they are a stranger, you do not know their gender identity, and they don’t look even remotely female), then you are a TERF. And not worthy of living.
Perhaps it would make it easier if we all just wore t-shirts that had our gender identity on them…all day, every day, so no one would ever accidentally mis-gender us. (I do have an otter shirt, but it does not actually say that I am otter-identified, it merely says “This is my otter shirt”. And it’s a sweatshirt so I can’t wear it in a Great Plains summer without dying of heat stroke).
The main problem with that is the fact that we are no longer allowed to say “woman”, because that is exclusionary, unless of course we are trans. So we could have men’s t-shirts that say “MAN”, trans-woman’s t-shirts that say “WOMAN”, non-binary t-shirts that say “NON-BINARY” and women’s t-shirts that just say “BITCH”. That would make about half the population happy. The other half doesn’t count because, well, because they are “cis”-women.
Kevin: Religion is an instrument of societal control, but the New Atheist dream that a world without religion would immediately cast off the old chains has been largely and soundly debunked, primarily by the actions and rhetoric of the New Atheists, themselves. Undermining religious conservatives, in particular, does deal with one stumbling block, but it helps to remember there are progressive religionists, too (Quakers, for instance, tend to be a decade or two on the right side of historical changes), who can be counted upon as allies in fights against oppression, at least so long as their atheist counterparts don’t kick things off with, “You’re dumb. Help us.”
I do wonder how much of the extreme trans-woman rhetoric (and yes, it does seem to largely be confined to the transwoman side, with the standard caveats about humans being capable of anything accounting for the handful of transmen extremists) represents the larger body of transwomen, particularly among those who actually seek GRS. I’ve known a small number of transwomen over the years (possibly more, as the ones I KNOW were trans were the ones who transitioned after I’d met them, and I’ve seen enough of them post-transition to realize that I’m not particularly good at telling the difference on sight), and literally none of them have ever spouted off the sorts of nonsense and hateful rhetoric Ophelia regularly quotes here. Instead, they were generally inclined to keep to themselves and were way too busy navigating the assorted difficulties of life to deal with this sort of thing.
The bit that blows my mind is the extreme trans alliance with the ‘non-binary’ movement. The latter absolutely SHOULD be a feminist-adjacent cause, but got co-opted by the trans extremists somehow, even though they always seem to have opposing agendas, to my understanding. To feminist ideology, there’s little difference between ‘non-binary’ and ‘breathing’–a truly ‘binary man’ would be more like a Chuck Norris meme come to life; I’m not even sure I could imagine a genuinely ‘binary woman’, since the definition of femininity is almost always rigged to make sure that no human being could fit all the requirements (because that makes it easier to point out how any given woman is a ‘failure’ to meet the contradictory requirements). Sure, there’s a bit of special snowflake-ism to calling yourself non-binary, but that seems like it could be a window to getting the person to realize that this is the natural human condition, and that the gender roles they’re rejecting shouldn’t be forced on anyone.
Freemage-
I’ve come to feel that ‘non-binary’ is a place for people to hide to escape the dreaded label ‘cis’.
Again I wonder: If anyone—no matter their anatomy, appearance, attitude, lack of conformity to societal “rules” of femininity, or behavior—can be a woman, how do these people know what they are is women? If “woman” means only “person who is a woman,” how can they know that’s the label that best describes them? And why would they care?
if a “jarbindrift” is only “a person who is a jarbindrift,” why would anyone declare they were a jarbindrift? Why would they march in the streets?
(It’s possible I am a jarbindrift.)
Ben, That’s a bit solipsistic, but interesting. Let me ask you this, “Would you die for your gender?” I wouldn’t. I kind of dislike most males. If someone called me a woman, well, then I am a woman to them. I am ok with that.
Strong positions about gender remind me of nationalism. Would I die for my country? Not remotely, even though I think my country (US) is pretty good. I’ve no money on the table for nationalism or gender, but I do like who I am and where I live.
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The title character in Story of O?
Kevin, in your analogy to nationalism @15, we could agree on a definition of “country”. But Ben’s comment @14 considers “woman” defined in circular terms as “a person who is a woman”.
Consider the Stonewall UK Glossary of Terms. They list many transgender terms — including “gender identity” — but they never define “man” or “woman”. Why is that?
I’ve come to the conclusion it’s because trans ideology based on “gender identity” requires definitions of “man” and “woman” to be circular, and if they put that in writing, then the public will see the ideology is incoherent, and no basis for policy. And I read Ben’s comment @14 as wondering why people would march in the streets for circular definitions.
Dave Ricks @18
Exactly. If “woman” has no inherent meaning—or no inherent meaning the activists will cop to—then what’s the point? Why would anyone bother to identify as something with no inherent meaning? If being a woman is only a matter of having claimed to be a woman, why is anyone claiming to be a woman? I don’t think people truly believe in this circular definition.
18/19: fascinating. I am learning a great deal.