Bad faith
Laurie Penny tries to rehabilitate herself.
That’s good, isn’t it? She accuses us of bad faith while in the same breath claiming we want to “make the case for excluding minority groups.” Way to have the discussion in good faith. No, Comrade, we don’t want to make the case for excluding minority groups. That’s not accurate or fair.
I tell you what, I don’t have good heuristics for figuring out what the hell Laurie Penny is trying to say.
I do grasp her meaning in the second tweet though, and that one is just wrong. It’s not a general and universal truth that no request that a particular group or person be accommodated is ever a demand that other, potentially conflicting needs be sidelined. Sometimes a request for accommodation is a demand that other, potentially conflicting needs be sidelined. That can happen. It can happen, and it does happen, and it has been happening in all these demands – and they are demands, not requests – that trans women be “validated” and “included” in anything and everything belonging to women.
The rest of the thread is just blither and handwaving. She’s really not very sharp.
It’s not accurate or fair in the way Penny means it. But what she is deliberately refusing to see, and acknowledge, is that women have any need at all to exclude all men from their spaces. This applies to TIMs as well, because, being men, it is impossible to tell if any given TIM is one of the minority of men who are predators*. Allowing TIMs to self ID as women amplifies this problem, allowing predatory men of whatever degree of “genuine” or “sincere” transness to enter women’s spaces with impunity. Refusal to understand this, or denial that this is a problem is a bad faith move. Because NOBODY CAN TELL THE GOOD ONES FROM THE BAD ONES, it is safest to prevent any and all men, TIMs, AGP, whoever, from entering women’s spaces.
*And I would include under the label “predator” any TIMs who are forcing themselves into women’s spaces for “validation” or gratification. Or to use women as human shields against the violence of other males. Still predatory behaviour, even if you’re not touching, or ogling.
Penny just wants the best of both worlds. She wants to be shouty and preachy at other people, but she doesn’t want the people to shout and preach at her. She’s built herself a nice little golden bridge out of pseudo-babble and plausible deniability and she’s inching backwards across it while still screaming that we’re all a bunch of awful TERFs.
It isn’t very convincing.
I suspect Penny and others are perfectly fine excluding men from the women’s locker room; in fact, that’s important, because it creates a space that (in her view) transwomen and women are welcome and (other) men are not, and that’s important for validation. So the sticky point is not excluding transwomen from the locker room, but rejecting their claim to be women; the locker room situation is just a result. Of course to trans activists it is self-evident that transwomen are women, so it’s just bigotry that excludes this minority group of women from a place that’s supposed to be open to all women.
Minority groups who need to use women’s facilities:
Black women in a majority white area.
White women in a majority black area.
Asian women in a majority non -Asian area.
Non Asian women in a majority Asian area.
And each of those minorities has one thing in common – they are a women. Not men. Not “penis havers”.
Women.
A trans woman, by definition, is not a woman. Women do not need a prefix to state their membership of the group women. They do not need to be CIS women, Lesbian women, bi women, asexual women, or any other prefix women. They just are women.
Why is this so damned hard to understand?
Roj, it’s like the TRAs always say:
Black women are women.
Disabled women are women.
Indigenous women are women.
Jewish women are women.
Trans women are women.
And it’s like Sesame Street says: One of these things is not like the other. One of these things doesn’t belong.
Sure, if ‘male sexual predators and other males that can’t be distinguished from them’ is a minority group.