A lifelong feminist
It wouldn’t matter, except that he’s a Labour Councillor.
https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152497636110458881
https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152556948149166081
But what is “one’s identity”? The first definition via Google is “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.” The first in the Concise Oxford is “the quality or condition of being a specified person or thing.” (The Concise Oxford is 1672 large closely-printed pages, so it’s not all that concise.) In other words the first definition is factual. So…trans women are trans women, but that doesn’t mean they are women, and in fact they’re not women, they’re men who “identify” (in a different and rather nebulous sense) as women.
So what are we talking about when we talk about being respectful of one’s identity? Well in Councillor Doyle’s case we’re talking about respecting a fictional identity, and an ever-growing number of people are getting tired of being told to do that. It’s a fiction that men can be women; it’s a fiction that “identifying” as a woman means you are one; it’s a fiction that “identifying” as a woman makes you one. Actual, literal women are under no obligation to believe men’s claims that they are women because they “identify” as such. We would also quite like people to stop calling us “terfs” for saying something so mild.
https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152559741303971840
Excluding it from what?
Not believing people’s far-fetched claims about themselves isn’t excluding them, nor is it depriving them of rights.
https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152563800253575169
Well I can say I’m a lifelong advocate for LGB rights, but that doesn’t mean I get to tell LGB people to accept straight people who “identify as” lesbian or gay as in fact lesbian or gay. It’s not my call.
https://twitter.com/harrydoyle96/status/1152647446461390851
Sigh. He has no problem sharing his space with women who “identify as” men. Fine; good for him; it’s still not the same as forcing women to share their spaces with men who “identify as” women. Trans men are not a threat to men; trans women can be a threat to women.
Councillors should be better informed on such issues.
Harry Doyle identifies as a feminist.
I’m offended by the line If people are offended by myself using the term TERF. That ‘myself’ is too pretentious; by me using or by my use of are more natural. Also, TERF is an acronym, not a term.
Best of all, my using: possessive with the gerund (because the gerund is a noun as opposed to a verb).
/pedantry
[pedantry]
The pretentious misuse of the reflexive pronouns has reached epidemic levels. I’m extremely tired of hearing people say things like, “Please contact Bill or myself.” Me. The word is me.
Acronyms are sometimes words. They are most often considered words when people largely forget that they’re acronyms. Laser and radar come to mind. Regardless, I’ll get really pedantic and say that acronyms are most certainly terms, as they are expressions.
[/pedantry]
Almost every single person mindlessly repeating the “trans X are X” mantra either were, or could have been, at least sympathetic to the concept of Schroedinger’s Rapist. But now, any woman who doesn’t immediately accept that any male could actually be a woman, and therefore not a threat, is a bigot. It’s…kind of amazing.
Acronyms are words. If you can’t pronounce it (DNA, TRA, etc), then it’s an initialism. But, hey, language use moves on and now initialism is losing ground and acronym is being used for everything. In this case, I think it leaves the language slightly poorer.
It’s also just his own view, not necessarily shared by other men, let alone women. I know women who argue that they sometimes use the men’s room, therefore transwomen should be welcome in the women’s room.
Just because some individuals feel comfortable and safe in a mixed-sex restroom setting doesn’t mean everyone should.
At some point, there might have been a legitimate usage for ‘TERF’ just as there could have been for, say, ‘men’s rights.’ But there’s no way either term can be rehabilitated. Karen White, Jessica Yaniv and co. have justified the worst expectations of the far-right ‘bathroom bill’ advocates.
We seem incapable of handling uncomfortable parallels. If you care about women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, you MUST be an ally of anti-immigrant racists. If you resist crackpot brain/gender essentialism, you want to beat up trans teenagers.
@Sackbut #7
Do such women use men’s rooms because the women’s rooms are too busy?
Colin Day, yes, they were avoiding a long wait.
In my experience, women use the men’s room when it is a single use room where only one person can be in it and you can lock the door. That is a different thing than allowing male bodies into spaces where multiple females are in a very vulnerable position, caught literally with their pants down.
Of course, there are probably women who don’t mind waltzing into a men’s room with a line of men at the urinals and commandeering one of the stalls for a minute or two, but that does not negate the very real risk of having men present in women only spaces…nor does it mean said woman will be safe in the setting she has elected to enter. (And if something does happen to her there, it is still not her fault just because she went into the men’s room. It is the responsibility of the men to control their violent rapey impulses).
BINGO.
Re #11:
Well put. I do wish to clarify:
The women I mentioned spoke of doing exactly that. It irritates me that they are so blind to the needs of other women in this area; great that they feel comfortable being in a restroom with men, but they are insisting that all women should feel this way.
They apparently do not realize they are, in effect, advocating for the elimination of single-sex restrooms.
There was a meme going around claiming that only people of color can say what is racist; only women can say what is sexist; only Muslims can say what is Islamophobic. By extension, only trans people can say what is transphobic, and so on. I don’t agree. People can describe their experiences for themselves, and there are commonalities, but that doesn’t mean that everything perceived (or not perceived, in this case) by a member of an oppressed group is accurate and that nobody else (inside the group or not) has nothing to offer.
(The last bit is because I try to make these points about “other” women, and I get slapped down because how dare I suggest to women how to stand up for women’s rights. Sigh.)
Then bed down with a trans man. Then I’ll believe you’re sincere.
Sackbut, PZ was doing that sort of thing for a while – Listen to the women. If they tell you it’s sexist, it’s sexist. I didn’t agree with that then, and I don’t agree that only women are able to say what is and isn’t sexist. I know a number of men who are able to see that just fine, and way too many women who are not. My husband, a lifeling male, was able to spot quickly and easily the problem with a play that was advocating a “blame the victim” approach to sexual assault, while the woman who was considering producing the play couldn’t understand even after three of us explained it to her why it was a problem. She felt the woman in the play should have to deal with consequences of her actions. What actions were they? Wearing a low cut shirt, and flirting. Oh, and having a drink (though no evidence of being drunk).
Those comments of PZs are really laughable now. Listen to the women, he says. Now it’s Punch TERFs. A woman points out the problems of male-bodied people in the bathroom, and the man who supported a woman who suggested that men in an elevator with women could lead to discomfort and problems is suggesting that somehow women are wrong for not wanting men in the bathroom with them. What next? I’m just waiting to see how quickly he throws trans under the bus when the next woke thing comes along, the thing that will be the new “most oppressed” group, and just happen to be in conflict with trans rights.
I think even the phrase ‘lifelong feminist’ is bullshit. Even us female feminists weren’t born feminists. Feminism isn’t ideologically dominant. You have to go out and find it. I think for most of us, we have a growing disquiet with the gender order, which is then expressed when we have our first contact with feminist ideas. For me, I was 14 and reading ‘Woman Hating’ while asking the question of why does my dad beat my mum and why does everyone (including her) let him get away with it. I understand some people have feminist mothers (I would consider myself one) but still, whatever feminism I’ve transmitted comes from times when my kids have encountered sexism and I’ve provided feminist explanations of it.
Galloise Blonde, a great observation. I myself came to it (without a clue that there was a word for it or that anyone else in the world felt like I did) around the age of nine, when my mother informed me that women shouldn’t go to college because it kept them from catching men and having babies. (I sometimes feel like I was born wanting to go to college, because I can’t remember a time when I didn’t, though of course I was born not knowing what college was). Then, after effectively telling me that college was off limits to women, she told me that she would let me go to college because I was so ugly no man would ever want me.
I became a feminist, though I had no idea there was such a thing in the world. I felt all alone until the day my mother started screeching about bra-burning feminists, feminists picketing Miss America, and the fact that feminists were going to force her to leave my dad and go to work. I never understood why women having the right to choose their own destiny meant she would not have the right to choose hers. I still don’t understand that, but I now at least recognize the weird mental gymnastics that lead to that thought.