Let’s start with “women are women,” shall we? It’s never been established that governments agree that women exist, and are full human beings with rights. Solve that problem first.
For being one of the most THE most powerless, oppressed, and persecuted group in the history of the multiverse, People of Gender sure seem to have it their way to an unusual degree.
Would Jews in Nazi Germany be be able to tell Aryans exactly what they were obligated to say unless they wanted “a formal complaint” and “a police visit?”, and would the German Police at the time be doing their bidding by showing up at the door of ordinary civilians for making non-threatening statements that some Jews might consider offensive?
Would the Taliban regime in Afghanistan – or anywhere else for that matter – have so many days, weeks, or entire months dedicated to “female pride” that you couldn’t keep track of them all, and would you be unable to walk through the streets of Kabul for more than 10 minutes during any of these periods without seeing at least half a dozen feminist flags?
Would the 2nd in command in Myanmar be proudly displaying Rohingya symbols or slogans on his social media profile, and would the 1st in command be using his very first day in office to muscle in special privileges for Rohingyas?
Would Chinese companies be changing their profile pictures on social media into the Uigur flag (if there is such a thing) at least once a year, and would they be offering crawling apologies, firing employees etc. at the first hint of protests from Uigurs?
Would south African Universities during the Apartheid era be cancelling books, talks, lectures or entire courses in anticipation of protests from blacks?
If you asked any of these groups to tell you about the struggles they were facing, is there any chance that fucking pronouns (!!!) would even make the list?
Of course not! It’s almost as if they weren’t the most oppressed group ever after all. Indeed when you look at it from such a perspective, the alleged “oppression” is beginning to look suspiciously like privilege. Crazy-talk, I know…
Why are you so obsessed with hating trans people? From a compassionate perspective, wouldn’t it be more helpful to argue that we need more support for folks who need it?
As for claiming trans folks have the most privilege… Trans folks get murdered, harassed, and fired. Do you think we should stop having the government talk about indigenous rights because if they do that means indigenous people have the most power?
And in the end, intersex people also exist, which I expected critical thinkers who appreciated Science to know and accept. Where are they supposed to go? What proof should they be forced to submit before getting help?
Plus, many of you here have talked about being gender non conforming. Have literally none of you short haired, bin makeup wearing women been told you’re in the wrong bathroom? I sure have and it’s terrifying. If you want to defend your right to be non gender conforming and occasionally pee or use a change room at the gym, principles like those you’re disparaging are there for you too, whether you agree with the current language around gender or not.
And if I was to ‘come out’ as a closet giraffe, would I then be free to munch on whatever roses or other plants that took my fancy, and up to any altitude, in whatever botanic garden or public park.?
The possibilities are truly endless here; all thanks to those brave and selfless blokes who choose to dress up as women and pioneer the way for all, just like Daniel Boone, into whatever public restrooms, washrooms or shithouses they wish..Wigs off to them all.!
It’s not about hating trans people as such (though there are plenty of deeply obnoxious people who claim to be trans) so much as it is about despising the ridiculous ideology and the pressure we’re all under to believe in it.
Certainly I agree that people who need support need support. (That’s a tautology by the way.) I don’t see why we should believe that trans people need support more than anyone else, or that we should all spend most of our time paying attention to trans people.
People who aren’t trans also get murdered, harassed, and fired. Women get murdered at much higher rates than trans people do. I don’t see why I should shift my attention from women who get murdered (and assaulted and raped and kept locked up and/or veiled and so on and so on) to men who say they are women.
I’ve never said intersex people don’t exist, so I don’t know why you bother to tell me they do.
I have a couple of times been briefly mistaken for a man in the women’s toilets. It wasn’t remotely terrifying – just a momentary misperception followed by apology and a shared laugh.
A lot of trans people don’t seem to be in favor of being gender non-conforming; if they are, they decide they must be the opposite sex. For those of us who don’t wear make up, who wear long hair and earrings, who work in STEM fields and dislike knitting but do like to cook – are we gender non-conforming? Or gender fluid? I would say we are just women who like what we like. All too many people would say we are trans or NB.
Hell, we’re all NB. There is no special thing about being NB. I have in my entire life known ONE person who fit their gender stereotype to a T, and he had to work very hard at it. (He was also an asshole, so take that for what it’s worth.)
Have literally none of you short haired, bin makeup wearing women been told you’re in the wrong bathroom? I sure have and it’s terrifying.
While accepting that it must have scared you shitless, then likewise for the female occupants, if you think of them for a moment. I mean, having to deal with an obvious male (ie as normally sexually dimorphic) in their females-only facility, could have left them reluctant acceptance-wise, just as standing up there at a urinal in a men’s dunny while dressed up in drag likely left you a shandy short of the horrors. I can only imagine the comments and jocular remarks you probably got from whatever fellow donger-equipped occupants you encountered.
But there are ways out. My suggestions for you include: 1. carry a kids’ plastic seaside sand-bucket with you at all times that is small enough to fit into your handbag of choice but large enough to hold everything likely to be dumped into it. (If it has a screw-top lid, so much the better.) Tip the contents into the nearest sewer inlet asap; 2. dress up baby-style, with say a beach towel for a nappy (diaper). Get your wardrobe altered to suit (pun not intended.) One such nappy chock full of turds will I expect also serve as an excellent weapon if you happen to get into a bar-room brawl. 3. Wear a Scottish womens’ earasaid (female kilt) at all times, which is identical to the male kilt, save for the sporran (a purse that also covers and so protects the privy parts.). But most if not all sassenachs would be totally ignorant on that point, so someone born male, albeit wishing otherwise, can wear kilt plus sporran regardless.
Hope this helps.
PS: A lot of water under the bridge here since my post @#4. But my regards to your fellows; What, When, How, Where and Who. (After Kipling.)
@ Why; “ Why are you so obsessed with hating trans people? From a compassionate perspective, wouldn’t it be more helpful to argue that we need more support for folks who need it?”
Women are folks who need support, and this change, as advocated in the OP, reduces, alters, and makes support inaccessible to many, many women. Women are already murdered, harassed, and fired at rates higher than trans folks face, and this would make that worse.
It is generally accepted that, in trying to fix a problem, it is unacceptable to do avoidable harm to other vulnerable groups. Trans should not be an exception to that concept.
Who here is hating trans people? Having seen far too many linguistic word games and novel, unilateral, ideosyncratic redefinitions of basic terminolgy, you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t immediately trust your definition of “hate.” There is much questioning and criticism of gender ideology and trans activism here. This is not hatred. The actual results of acceding to the demands of trans activism have harmed women. Trans identified males remain males** for life, whatever they wear, whatever surgeries and treatments they’ve had, whatever they claim to be. It is not hateful or bigoted to say this. To say it is hateful to call a male human being a male devalues the word “hate” to meaninglessness. Being male is not in itself a hateful state. But males, however they identify, have no place in women’s facilities.
As for claiming trans folks have the most privilege… Trans folks get murdered, harassed, and fired. Do you think we should stop having the government talk about indigenous rights because if they do that means indigenous people have the most power?
Trans activism has attained a remarkable degree of power and influnce in an incredibly short space of time, much of it on the back of questionable claims of being “uniquely” marginalized and downtrodden. A great deal of this has been behind closed doors, beyond public scrutiny or accountability, and without the input or consent of women, whose rights were being eroded or given away to men who demanded them. If they really were as powerless and persecuted as they are made out to be, trans identified males would not have the power and support of so many government departments and business organizations. For example, they’ve managed to get UK police departments to investigate the mildest statements of fact as “transphobic hate crimes.” Yeah, that’s marginalization and powerlessness. Have women ever had that degree of police attention for rape let alone Tweets? If misogyny was as much of a concern as “transphobia,” the police would be investigating absolutely nothing else at all.
What trans activists are demanding (recognition as the sex they are not) are not “rights” at all. Humans can’t change sex. “Gender identity” does not override sex. Women’s sex-based and sex-segregated (not “gender-segregated”) facilities (prisons, hospital wards, rape shelters, sports teams etc.) should not be made available to men, however they “identify.” Trans identified males remain males for life, whatever they wear, whatever surgeries they’ve had, whatever they claim to be. It is not hateful or bigoted to say this.
There is no right to be taken as what you claim to be, otherwise we would be forced to bow to the (self-declared) fact that Donald Trump really is a stable genius. Naively accepting all claims people make about themselves is not a thing, and certainly not a “right.” In fact society usually protects itself from malicious claims of this sort through laws that punish fraud and identity theft. Men claiming to be women is fraud against, and identity theft of an entire sex, a practice which is celebrated, aided, and abbetted by far too many in society, including the same governments that have otherwise outlawed harmful, false identity claims.
I have never seen any trans activists admit that Self-ID opens the doors of women’s facilities to opportunistic predators using this carte blanche as an all access pass. NOTE: I am not claiming that trans identified males are all “opportunistic predators.” But males as a group represent, statistically, a threat to women’s safety. Trans identified males remain male, and thus, part of that potentially threatening demographic. How do women tell the difference between a “harmless” male and one who is a predator? They can’t. The best rule is to keep all men out of female spaces. Period. Women have every right to consider any male entering their sex-segregated spaces as a potential threat, as they’ve already demonstrated a propensity to violate female boundaries. Gender Self-ID undermines this safeguarding measure by allowing men who declare themselves to be women unfettered access to women’s spaces on their own say-so. All a man has to do to bypass this usefull and valuable rule is to say “I identify as a woman.” Suddenly it’s now the protesting woman who is supposed to be viewed wth suspicion as a hateful, “transphobic” bigot, rather than the man demanding entrance to a place where he does not belong. Somehow, women are supposed to trust this man, no questions asked. Women should be under no obligation to tolerate such a gross violation and threat to their health, dignity and safety.
Women defending women’s rights (like Maya Forestater, JK Rowling, Allison Bailey, Julie Bindle, Kathleen Stock, Rosie Duffield, etc.) are routinely tarred as hateful transphobic bigots. Meetings that women organize to discuss their rights, or to just talk about things of importance to women are routinely mobbed and picketed by tans activists and their allies. We are told that “women’s rights” is nothing but an anti-trans dog whistle, and that any such discussions that do not include men who claim to be women are hatefull and bigoted. WE are told, despite the protests of many women, that there is “no conflict” between women’s rights and trans “rights.” These women have a different opinion, which is not allowed. Well, if women’s rights are “anti-trans,” it follows that trans rights are anti-woman. They are profoundly so.
Women’s concerns are real. These are not far-fetched, hypothetical, preposterous, irrational “phobias,” but the result of real harms that are actually happening. To paraphrase a venerable observation, men who claim they are women are afraid of being misgendered by women; women are afraid that men are going to kill them. Men who are violent sex offenders, who claim they are women, have been moved to womens’ prisons, where they have assaulted prisoners and staff. Men, claiming to be women, have been placed into what were originally meant to be exclusively female hospital wards. When women have complained or protested about these and other such occurrences, they have been accused of “transphobic” prejudice and bigotry. I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will: it is not hateful or bigotted to point these instances out; nor is it hateful or bigoted to oppose the disastrous consequences that these ludicrous policy decisions have had. It is not bigoted or hateful to seek to end the policies that have allowed these outrageous incidents to occur.
Trans activists have repeatedly stated that women resisting this invasion of their spaces have no legitimate self-interest in doing so, and that their supposed concern for their own welfare is a just a thin pretext to persecute trans identified males out of sheer malice and bigotry. I beg to differ. Women have every right to prevent harm to themselves at the hands of any , including those men who claim they are women. They have every right to oppose and overturn the legal and regulatory decisions that have so put them at risk, resulting in harm to women subjected to this ill-advised, ill-conceived and unjustified exercise in so-called “inclusivity.” All of these outcomes were foreseen by women whose counsel and concerns were ignored and ridiculed, and who are still ignored and ridiculed. Not all “inclusion” is good. Not all “exclusion” is bad.
If male facilities are unsafe or threatening for trans identified males to use that is not women’s problem, or responsibility to solve. Somehow, trans identified males’ feelings of distress or unease are more important than women’s feelings of distress or unease at sharing their facilities with men. Men’s feelings are to be respected and catered to; women’s feelings are to be ignored and over-ridden. Why? Why must women be forced to surrender their spaces and their comfort for the sake of men who don’t want to use the spaces set aside for their sex? Instead of demanding safety and dignity from their fellow men, they’ve focused their energy on degrading the safety and dignity of women, and slandering women who have the temerity to speak oiut against these efforts. It didn’t have to be this way, but it is. Had trans activists had directed their efforts on opposing male violence rather than invading women’s spaces, the relationship between trans activism and feminism would be very different than it is now.As it is, trans activists and their allies, along with the captured institutions whose power and authority have been wielded against women who say “No,” have much to answer for. It is not hateful or bigotted for women to demand those answers, or demand redress for the actual harms done to women in pursuit of a these misogynistic policies. It is not hateful or bigotted to demand the rollback and removal of those policies.
And in the end, intersex people also exist…
Yes, and?
My understanding is that the preferred trm is DSD, or Differences in Sexual Development, and that “intersex” is considered offensive by many people with DSD conditions. These people are not a “third” or “intermediate” sex falling between male or female. They are still male and female. Their particular conditions are, as far as my understanding goes, specific to one sex or another. Their existence does not render the concept of the sex binary invalid or unclear. It does not turn sex into a “spectrum.” It does not mean humans can change sex. The only relevence the existence of DSD conditions has to gender iideology and trans activism are the strategic appropriation of its “assigned X at birth” phraseology (as a way of diluting and muddying the concept and definition of sex to a degree sufficient to allow men to fall within the definition of “woman”), and the addition of the “I” to the forced-teaming LGBTIQetc. alphabet soup “community.” So for me, the deployment of the “Intersex Gambit” is a sign of either ignorance or bad faith. Should you choose to respond, I’ll thank you in advance for not using any of the following ploys. I’ll save you the trouble by responding to them in advance:
– “Transwomen are Women; it’s right in the name!” If that’s the case, then seahorses, saw horses and pommel horses are all Horses.
-“Clownfish can change sex!” Humans aren’t fish. No mammals can change sex.
-“Transwomen are just another kind of Woman, just like Black Women, Disabled Women or Tall Women!” No’ they’re not. Trans identified males are male; everyone else on that list is female, and no less female for being Black, Disabled, or Tall.
-“By defining women by their biological role in reproduction, you’re saying post-menopausal or infertile women are no longer female, no longer women!” I’ve only ever heard trans activists make this (strawman) argument. That would be like saying that a car that had run out of gas was no longer a car, or that a clock that had stopped was no longer a clock. Trans activism is just so very, very desperate to decouple the concept of “female” or “woman” from their reproductive role in sex in order to gloss over the inescapable material fact that no male will ever produce ova, and that the male body can never be turned into a female one. One might end up with a crude approximation with which some might be able to pass, but none of the work that these men have had done to them will turn them into an adult, human female.
If you want to defend your right to be non gender conforming and occasionally pee or use a change room at the gym, principles like those you’re disparaging are there for you too, whether you agree with the current language around gender or not.
Trans activism obliterates gender non-conformity by reifying gender roles rather than dispensing with them. One’s “gender identity” is supposedly more basic and fundamental than one’s sex. Yet a man is male whatever he wears or whatever he likes. Same with women. A man in a dress and lipstick is no less male than any other man; he is also no more female than any other man. If the basis of “gender identity reinforces the idea that liking “girly” things makes you a girl, then the patriarchy is safe and secure; genderism is serving it, not smashing it. To paraphrase another venerable observation:
Patriarchy says “If you’re a woman, you must wear a dress.” Gender ideology says, “If you wear a dress, you must be a woman.” Feminism says, “if you’re a woman you can wear whatever you want.”
There’s also the inherent homophobia in “transing away the gay,” which is exactly what Mermaid’s founder, Susie Green did to her son when he showed unwelcome signs of effeminacy. Her husband couldn’t stomach the idea that their son was gay, but they were happy to mutilate him in a misguided and impossible attempt to turn him into a girl. https://www.thedistancemag.com/p/susie-greens-disappearing-ted-talk
I’ve already said too much, so I’ll stop here. If there’s a TL;DR it’s “Show me the hate.”
*Trans identified males are not women and can never be women. A man can no more identify out of being male any more than he can identify out of being a primate, mammal, or tetrapod. It’s just an unalterable fact of material reality.
Why are you so obsessed with hating women? From a compassionate perspective, wouldn’t it be more helpful to argue that we need more support for folks who need it?
As for claiming women have the most privilege… women get murdered, harassed, and fired. Do you think we should stop having the government talk about women’s rights because if they do that means women have the most power?
And in the end, women who have good reasons to not want to share private spaces with males also exist, which I expected critical thinkers who appreciated Science to know and accept. Where are they supposed to go? What proof should they be forced to submit before getting privacy and the right to free association?
Plus, you have complained about people who are gender non conforming nevertheless not wanting to be forced to share private spaces with people of the opposite sex. Have you never been forced to share space with someone likely to be an aggressor? Who has actually actively BEEN an aggressor? I sure have and it’s terrifying. If you want to defend your right to invade women’s spaces while they pee or use a change room at the gym, principles like those you’re disparaging are there for you too, whether you agree with the facts around sex and the behaviours of men or not.
One might end up with a crude approximation with which some might be able to pass, but none of the work that these men have had done to them will turn them into an adult, human female. To believe that being female is so insubstantial and superficial that simply donning womanface is sufficient to turn a man into a woman is hateful. Believing that women are obligated to accept this destructive, misogynistic lie and all of its consequences without complaint, is hateful too.
As for claiming trans folks have the most privilege…Trans folks get murdered…
I’m so tired of this. Here in the United States, trans-identified people get murdered at rates LOWER than average.
Per Human Rights Watch, 41 “transgender or gender non-conforming people” were murdered in 2022. (Don’t know who the hell they were counting as “gender non-conforming “–bet they failed to count a lot of us! Ahem)
Per UCLA’s Williams Institute, there were 1.6 million trans-identified people in the US in 2022.
41 is approximately 0.0025% of 1.6 million.
Per the FBI, there were 21,156 murders in the US in 2022.
The population of the United States was approximately 333.3 million (I’ve seen a lightly higher number quoted, but I’m using the higher figure in order to be scrupulously fair.)
That’s 0.0063%
0.0063 > 0.0025%
(Murder victims in the US are disproportionately black males. This tendency holds true for the trans-identified population–54% of those murdered in 2022 were black trans women, per the HRC.)
Have literally none of you short haired, bin makeup wearing women been told you’re in the wrong bathroom
I’m small and long-haired and it’s never happened to me. But I know butch lesbians it’s happened to, and they never considered it a big deal.
If it’s a bigger deal now than it used to be, maybe that’s because women are on edge from autogynephiles intruding on our spaces.
you want to defend your right to be non gender conforming and occasionally pee or use a change room at the gym, principles like those you’re disparaging are there for you too, whether you agree with the current language around gender or not.
We want EVERYONE to be free to be gender non-conforming, WITHOUT this ridiculous insistence that being a woman or a man is a matter of gender conformity (or of some mystical subjective non-falsifiable inner essence.) We want people to be free to do their thing (as we said in the far-off days of my youth) WITHOUT being forced to pretend male humans are women if they declare they are. We don’t want “gender identity” to be prioritized over sex in situations WHERE SEX IS RELEVANT.
Why is this so fucking hard to understand? It ain’t rocket surgery.
‘Have literally none of you short haired, bin makeup wearing women been told you’re in the wrong bathroom? I sure have and it’s terrifying.’ I have, on more than one occasion, and it is not terrifying.
“I don’t see why we […] should all spend most of our time paying attention to trans people.” You have chosen this life. You’re the ones running this blog and hanging out here. This isn’t something trans folks are asking you to do. The percentage of articles here about trans people is pretty far from the proportion to which it’s discussed in the media or society at large – it’s your obsession. It seems like you used to have other hobbies, like actual feminism, at least some of you. But now you’re obsessed with trans people and think your obsession is their fault.
I’m here because I was looking for an old friend and I found she’s been internet poisoned and that makes me really sad. I’ll leave you now to your hobby, because obviously an internet stranger can’t help you.
The problem with crying wolf at the first sight of anything with fur, is that people quickly stop taking anything you say seriously. So what was it this time? Did someone post a picture of a suffragette ribbon on Twitter? Did someone’s defense of single-sex spaces as “single-sex” constitute rhetorical or epistemic “violence”? Did failure to cancel a non-violent talk or lecture that nobody was forced to attend cause People of Gender to fear for their lives? Did the correct use of pronouns force a Person of Gender to commit suicide? Did actual same-sex attraction on the part of lesbians (in other words, lesbians being lesbian) leave a male “lesbian” with his “lady-cock” (you know, the one he’s been repeatedly telling women to suck) feeling “dead inside” (that’s “murder” too, you know!)? Did someone look at a Person of Gender the wrong way?
To the extent that violence against trans-identified individuals, specifically for being trans, is a real problem, at least to an excellent first approximation zero percent of it is coming from feminists, or even from people who have anything but contempt for feminism. To claim that Donald “grab’em by the pussy” Trump and his ilk are at all motivated by feminist concerns is as dishonest as blaming anti-fascism for the crimes of Stalin.
If there are that many real examples of feminists stirring up “hatred”, or even advocating “violence” (up to and including “murder” and even “genocide”) against trans people, denying their “right to exist” etc., why aren’t trans rights activists pointing to that rather than feminists saying that biological sex is real, that it can’t be changed, that it sometimes matters etc.?
Why do all the actual examples of hateful or violent rhetoric (“Kill TERFs!”), or even violent acts – gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan have been violently attacked by TRAs at protests, appear to come from their own side?
Why do even the most basic premises of their argument – including such obviously relevant “details” as the definition of “woman”, what is meant by “trans rights”, and how they are supposedly being violated by, say, women’s right to female-only spaces – appear to be best left unspecified?
If the situation of trans people in our age really is comparable to the situation of Jews under Nazism (as is frequently alleged!), why are we even talking about fucking pronouns or JK Rowling writing some of the least hateful things I have read in my life? As I have previously written: Never mind “first world problems” or even “luxury problems”, these are Utopia problems! If pronouns or JK Rowling are even on your list of grievances, then, again to an excellent first approximation, every other person who ever lived had more reason to complain than you do.
It’s as if you were waking up after years in a coma back in 1944 and hearing a lot of rumors about persecution of Jews. Now imagine you were asking surviving Jews to explain what the fuss was all about, and no one mentioned Hitler, Nazism, or the Holocaust with one word. No mention of the Kristallnach, the Wannsee Conference, or the Warsaw Ghetto. No references to Auschwitz Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Treblinka, or Zyklon B. The absolutely worst concrete example anyone could come up with was something like:
There are people out there who don’t believe in God, which sort of implies there’s no such thing as God’s chosen people, which sort of implies denying the existence of that which the Jews are, which sort of implies denying the existence of Jews, which sort of implies envisioning a world in which Jews don’t exist, which sort of implies advocating genocide.
Imagine if they said:
Refusal to validate our identities as God’s chosen people is so hurtful to Jews that it’s forcing us to commit suicide by the millions, therefore atheism amounts to genocide
In reality, of course they wouldn’t be saying anything even remotely like this. It’s unthinkable! People suffering from real persecution and violence don’t have to resort to this kind of tortured inferences, and language games, and stretching of word meanings beyond the breaking point to make their case. And yet if you look at the actual specifics, most of the accusations leveled against gender critical feminists by TRAs are, if anything, even less substantial than this. Indeed my personal “peak trans” moment came from realizing that the genocidal “TERFs” I kept hearing about included at least half the feminists I was following on Twitter at the time and witnessing the glaring contrast between these women’s actual words and the words and attitudes put into their mouths by the TRA mob. There was no going back after that.
If this were a legitimate social justice movement, practically 0 % of their time and energy would be spent fighting feminists while close to 100 % would be spent fighting toxic masculinity. Instead it’s more like the other way around (Indeed, far from fighting toxic masculinity, they are actively engaging in it). As Not Bruce pointed out, it didn’t have to be that way. There should have been a movement promoting the interests of individuals genuinely suffering from gender dysphoria, but that’s not the Trans Rights movement we do have. What we do have is in all relevant respects a Men’s Rights (euphemism for Anti Women’s Rights) movement, with far more in common with “incels” than a legitimate social justice movement. Most traditional “transsexuals” (almost exclusively gay men), never literally claimed to be women, were mostly trying to fly under the radar and get on with their lives, and did not demand any special accommodations on the part of women. The infinitely entitled and ultra-aggressive straight men now demanding access to female only spaces, women’s sports, lesbian events etc. are not oppressed, they’re oppressors; not victims but victimizers. Not a single person throughout history has ever been less oppressed than William “Lia” Thomas, and nothing could be further from “social justice” than empowering this privileged asshole and sick pervert to wave his boner around in women’s changing rooms while cheating them out of their hard-earned medals and destroying anyone who tries to get in his way. The way so many “leftists” (whatever the Hell that means these days…) have come to embrace such obvious injustice as “progressive”, just goes to show how little actual thinking goes into shaping people’s political allegiances. In my movement skeptic days, I used to think people were strongly attached to their ideas. I now think that crediting the average person with having anything worthy of the designation “ideas” is far more than they deserve (“ideas” would imply some actual content that could be judged on its own merit regardless of who was promoting it or the words used to describe it). Rather than ideas people are attached to labels “I’ll support anything as long as it’s called ‘leftism’, ‘progressive’, ‘social justice’ etc.”), and they are attached to tribes (“I’ll support anything as long as the people on my own ‘team’ are doing it”). The actual content is hardly even relevant as witnessed by the fact that many of the people who would now gladly go out of their way to destroy other people’s lives for thoughtcrime were expressing virtually identical opinions less than ten years ago.
If you had told us back in 2010 that trans rights activism would become a matter of such great concern to us, I suspect most of us would have thought you’d gone bonkers. I know I would. Until less than ten years ago trans rights activism was about as peripheral to my interests as anything you could possibly imagine. The amount of time or energy I spent worrying – or even thinking – about it was to an excellent approximation = 0. And despite what you may think, when trans rights activism did appear on my radar, I was very much predisposed to sympathize. I know it’s not just me.
What happened was not that people like me became “radicalized”, “drunk the Cool-Aid”, adopted some radical new “ideology” etc. It’s just that sometime during the last ten years so many of the things we all* used to know went from “obvious” to “thoughtcrime”, “heresy”, a reason to get people shunned, bullied, cancelled, fired from their jobs, dragging their names through the mud all over the internet, going out of your way to destroy their lives. We didn’t seek out this battle. It was brought to us.
I think Graham Linehan speaks for many when he says that he shouldn’t have to spend so much time and energy talking about this topic (at enormous personal cost). Nor would he have to if the mainstream media were doing their fucking job. But since they’re not, unfortunately, it falls upon people like Graham and Ophelia (and to a lesser extent those of us who comment on blogs such as this) to do whatever they can to bring attention to the institutional capture, the erosion of women’s rights and protections, the 180° reversal of what used to be the LGB movement (from defending same-sex attraction to attacking same-sex attraction), the mass-application of experimental medical treatments on children with no meaningful oversight or regulations etc. etc. So to paraphrase Graham Linehan again, the real question is not so much why we are talking about these things as why you are not.
Oh, and although it shouldn’t need saying, accusing people of being “obsessed” and focusing on a topic too much (I’m sure you apply the same standard to TRAs who keep obsessing over “TERFs” and JK Rowling…), does not amount to an actual rebuttal.
*As I keep saying, I happen to know for an absolute fact that many of the people who now pretend they never knew the difference between biological males and biological females have said things that could get them labeled as TERFs, attacked and vilified any time.
Plus, many of you here have talked about being gender non conforming. Have literally none of you short haired, bin makeup wearing women been told you’re in the wrong bathroom? I sure have and it’s terrifying. If you want to defend your right to be non gender conforming and occasionally pee or use a change room at the gym, principles like those you’re disparaging are there for you too, whether you agree with the current language around gender or not.
Point of clarification – claiming to be transgender is not welcoming nor helpful to the GNC, by claiming to be transgender, GNC are moved from a gender they don’t fit to one that they conform to based on social roles, standards, expectations and limitations. Instead of trapping people in the other sex’s gender expectations (and sexually reconstructing a simulation of their body parts or poisoning them with cross-sex hormone regimes for the rest of their shortened lives, why not celebrate the GNC aspect and break down gender restrictions.
We are not about hate, I can’t speak for everyone, of transgender individuals except for those who are directly and specifically odious (as Ophelia mentioned) to those of us who dare question or stand up for the rights and safety of those who are directly affected by trans ideology, for those harassed and whose careers are affected because they dare speak up, and for those whose bodies are mangled to service gender. Any hatred is directed towards a destructive social movement that has taken over, and regarding which any sort of critical thinking is dismissed as bigotry and towards many critical thinkers there is vociferous hate directed (and mainly towards women who don’t comply.)
“I don’t see why we […] should all spend most of our time paying attention to trans people.” You have chosen this life. You’re the ones running this blog and hanging out here. This isn’t something trans folks are asking you to do.
But they are. They’re DEMANDING our attention. Who’s organizing the continuous string of “Trans Days/Months of Awareness/Visibility/Rememberance/Vengeance/Hangnails? Who’s issuing the “Daily Reminders” that TWAW! CLAP*CLAP*CLAP*? Are these the acts of a demographic trying to keep to themselves and avoid the spotlight?
The percentage of articles here about trans people is pretty far from the proportion to which it’s discussed in the media or society at large – it’s your obsession. It seems like you used to have other hobbies, like actual feminism….
Feminism? Glad you mentioned it. All of this Trans Awareness/Visibility/Rememberance/Vengeance seems to come at the expense of women. There’s been no concerted effort to redefine men, or erase them from the public communications regarding their health. Women aren’t inviting men into their spaces and onto their teams. It’s not our side’s idea to call men “she” in news reports, and announce their sports victories cheating as normal and acceptable? That violence committed by trans identified males is recorded by the police as violence by women? How is any of this not a feminist issue? It’s not “obsessive” to be concerned about this ongoing erosion of women’s rights. Captured media aren’t telling the story honestly. When they’re noticed at all, women who question or resist are painted as hateful bigots. The rest of us are supposed to shut up and submit. This is not how open democratic societies are supposed to work. This is creeping authoritarianism. There’s your “poisoning.” It’s not paranoia when they’re actually out to get you.
All a man has to do to bypass this usefull and valuable rule is to say “I identify as a woman.”
In many situations, they don’t even have to do that. All they have to do is walk into the women’s room, because it is considered hateful and bigoted to even ask what sex they are, or point out that they are in the wrong place. The woman in the woman’s restroom who questions the legitimacy of the male body in that space will be the one vilified, tormented, persecuted, and for all we know, fired, questioned by police, or losing their membership in organizations they value.
When even asking is considered hate, no man has to bother to “identify as” a woman to access women’s facilities. All they have to do is walk in. That is an open invitation to predators, even if there was not a single TiM who ever assaulted a woman or had fantasies of assaulting women.
What happened was not that people like me became “radicalized”, “drunk the Cool-Aid”, adopted some radical new “ideology” etc. It’s just that sometime during the last ten years so many of the things we all* used to know went from “obvious” to “thoughtcrime”, “heresy”, a reason to get people shunned, bullied, cancelled, fired from their jobs, dragging their names through the mud all over the internet, going out of your way to destroy their lives. We didn’t seek out this battle. It was brought to us.
And of course, we all remember that this is particularly true of our blog host here. The entire reason that she is blogging here at B&W rather than that former aggregator**, is because of a months-long, sustained campaign of harassment and bullying that she endured a few years back because of a single incredulous comment she made about Bruce Jenner, famous & celebrated male olympic athlete, being gushed over by Vanity Fair on his debut of “she/her” pronouns and womanface performance, after many months of continuing to tell the world to refer to him as “he/him”. And then BAM, there he is one day, 60-something years old in a slinky dress, with swapped-out pronouns and tens of thousands of dollars in superficial surgeries talking about living his “true self”, and seemingly the entire online Skeptical community that had previously been scoffing at the mental gymnastics required to believe in religious claims without basis in reality suddenly swooned in religious delight at it all. People who had been forcefully arguing for the rights of women were in a complete froth demanding that those rights be given to Bruce Jenner and his ilk. It was mass psychosis, which only a few seemed to have escaped, and like a scene out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers those few were noted, attacked, and outcast.
**And a few months after Ophelia left that aggregator, those who remained turned on each other in sustained infighting, accusing one or another of being insufficiently trans-religious; a civil war that eventually resulted in all the sufficiently pure ones leaving to start their own aggregator. I have to admit I laughed at that. It was Animal Farm in real time.
Let’s start with “women are women,” shall we? It’s never been established that governments agree that women exist, and are full human beings with rights. Solve that problem first.
For being
one of the mostTHE most powerless, oppressed, and persecuted group in the history of the multiverse, People of Gender sure seem to have it their way to an unusual degree.Would Jews in Nazi Germany be be able to tell Aryans exactly what they were obligated to say unless they wanted “a formal complaint” and “a police visit?”, and would the German Police at the time be doing their bidding by showing up at the door of ordinary civilians for making non-threatening statements that some Jews might consider offensive?
Would the Taliban regime in Afghanistan – or anywhere else for that matter – have so many days, weeks, or entire months dedicated to “female pride” that you couldn’t keep track of them all, and would you be unable to walk through the streets of Kabul for more than 10 minutes during any of these periods without seeing at least half a dozen feminist flags?
Would the 2nd in command in Myanmar be proudly displaying Rohingya symbols or slogans on his social media profile, and would the 1st in command be using his very first day in office to muscle in special privileges for Rohingyas?
Would Chinese companies be changing their profile pictures on social media into the Uigur flag (if there is such a thing) at least once a year, and would they be offering crawling apologies, firing employees etc. at the first hint of protests from Uigurs?
Would south African Universities during the Apartheid era be cancelling books, talks, lectures or entire courses in anticipation of protests from blacks?
If you asked any of these groups to tell you about the struggles they were facing, is there any chance that fucking pronouns (!!!) would even make the list?
Of course not! It’s almost as if they weren’t the most oppressed group ever after all. Indeed when you look at it from such a perspective, the alleged “oppression” is beginning to look suspiciously like privilege. Crazy-talk, I know…
Why are you so obsessed with hating trans people? From a compassionate perspective, wouldn’t it be more helpful to argue that we need more support for folks who need it?
As for claiming trans folks have the most privilege… Trans folks get murdered, harassed, and fired. Do you think we should stop having the government talk about indigenous rights because if they do that means indigenous people have the most power?
And in the end, intersex people also exist, which I expected critical thinkers who appreciated Science to know and accept. Where are they supposed to go? What proof should they be forced to submit before getting help?
Plus, many of you here have talked about being gender non conforming. Have literally none of you short haired, bin makeup wearing women been told you’re in the wrong bathroom? I sure have and it’s terrifying. If you want to defend your right to be non gender conforming and occasionally pee or use a change room at the gym, principles like those you’re disparaging are there for you too, whether you agree with the current language around gender or not.
And if I was to ‘come out’ as a closet giraffe, would I then be free to munch on whatever roses or other plants that took my fancy, and up to any altitude, in whatever botanic garden or public park.?
The possibilities are truly endless here; all thanks to those brave and selfless blokes who choose to dress up as women and pioneer the way for all, just like Daniel Boone, into whatever public restrooms, washrooms or shithouses they wish..Wigs off to them all.!
It’s not about hating trans people as such (though there are plenty of deeply obnoxious people who claim to be trans) so much as it is about despising the ridiculous ideology and the pressure we’re all under to believe in it.
Certainly I agree that people who need support need support. (That’s a tautology by the way.) I don’t see why we should believe that trans people need support more than anyone else, or that we should all spend most of our time paying attention to trans people.
People who aren’t trans also get murdered, harassed, and fired. Women get murdered at much higher rates than trans people do. I don’t see why I should shift my attention from women who get murdered (and assaulted and raped and kept locked up and/or veiled and so on and so on) to men who say they are women.
I’ve never said intersex people don’t exist, so I don’t know why you bother to tell me they do.
I have a couple of times been briefly mistaken for a man in the women’s toilets. It wasn’t remotely terrifying – just a momentary misperception followed by apology and a shared laugh.
Why, why are you so obsessed with mischaracterizing what is said here?
A pretty fuzzy blurry blotchy portrait, wasn’t it.
A lot of trans people don’t seem to be in favor of being gender non-conforming; if they are, they decide they must be the opposite sex. For those of us who don’t wear make up, who wear long hair and earrings, who work in STEM fields and dislike knitting but do like to cook – are we gender non-conforming? Or gender fluid? I would say we are just women who like what we like. All too many people would say we are trans or NB.
Hell, we’re all NB. There is no special thing about being NB. I have in my entire life known ONE person who fit their gender stereotype to a T, and he had to work very hard at it. (He was also an asshole, so take that for what it’s worth.)
Why @#3:
While accepting that it must have scared you shitless, then likewise for the female occupants, if you think of them for a moment. I mean, having to deal with an obvious male (ie as normally sexually dimorphic) in their females-only facility, could have left them reluctant acceptance-wise, just as standing up there at a urinal in a men’s dunny while dressed up in drag likely left you a shandy short of the horrors. I can only imagine the comments and jocular remarks you probably got from whatever fellow donger-equipped occupants you encountered.
But there are ways out. My suggestions for you include: 1. carry a kids’ plastic seaside sand-bucket with you at all times that is small enough to fit into your handbag of choice but large enough to hold everything likely to be dumped into it. (If it has a screw-top lid, so much the better.) Tip the contents into the nearest sewer inlet asap; 2. dress up baby-style, with say a beach towel for a nappy (diaper). Get your wardrobe altered to suit (pun not intended.) One such nappy chock full of turds will I expect also serve as an excellent weapon if you happen to get into a bar-room brawl. 3. Wear a Scottish womens’ earasaid (female kilt) at all times, which is identical to the male kilt, save for the sporran (a purse that also covers and so protects the privy parts.). But most if not all sassenachs would be totally ignorant on that point, so someone born male, albeit wishing otherwise, can wear kilt plus sporran regardless.
Hope this helps.
PS: A lot of water under the bridge here since my post @#4. But my regards to your fellows; What, When, How, Where and Who. (After Kipling.)
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_serving.htm
@ Why; “ Why are you so obsessed with hating trans people? From a compassionate perspective, wouldn’t it be more helpful to argue that we need more support for folks who need it?”
Women are folks who need support, and this change, as advocated in the OP, reduces, alters, and makes support inaccessible to many, many women. Women are already murdered, harassed, and fired at rates higher than trans folks face, and this would make that worse.
It is generally accepted that, in trying to fix a problem, it is unacceptable to do avoidable harm to other vulnerable groups. Trans should not be an exception to that concept.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on No escape for women […]
Who here is hating trans people? Having seen far too many linguistic word games and novel, unilateral, ideosyncratic redefinitions of basic terminolgy, you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t immediately trust your definition of “hate.” There is much questioning and criticism of gender ideology and trans activism here. This is not hatred. The actual results of acceding to the demands of trans activism have harmed women. Trans identified males remain males** for life, whatever they wear, whatever surgeries and treatments they’ve had, whatever they claim to be. It is not hateful or bigoted to say this. To say it is hateful to call a male human being a male devalues the word “hate” to meaninglessness. Being male is not in itself a hateful state. But males, however they identify, have no place in women’s facilities.
Trans activism has attained a remarkable degree of power and influnce in an incredibly short space of time, much of it on the back of questionable claims of being “uniquely” marginalized and downtrodden. A great deal of this has been behind closed doors, beyond public scrutiny or accountability, and without the input or consent of women, whose rights were being eroded or given away to men who demanded them. If they really were as powerless and persecuted as they are made out to be, trans identified males would not have the power and support of so many government departments and business organizations. For example, they’ve managed to get UK police departments to investigate the mildest statements of fact as “transphobic hate crimes.” Yeah, that’s marginalization and powerlessness. Have women ever had that degree of police attention for rape let alone Tweets? If misogyny was as much of a concern as “transphobia,” the police would be investigating absolutely nothing else at all.
What trans activists are demanding (recognition as the sex they are not) are not “rights” at all. Humans can’t change sex. “Gender identity” does not override sex. Women’s sex-based and sex-segregated (not “gender-segregated”) facilities (prisons, hospital wards, rape shelters, sports teams etc.) should not be made available to men, however they “identify.” Trans identified males remain males for life, whatever they wear, whatever surgeries they’ve had, whatever they claim to be. It is not hateful or bigoted to say this.
There is no right to be taken as what you claim to be, otherwise we would be forced to bow to the (self-declared) fact that Donald Trump really is a stable genius. Naively accepting all claims people make about themselves is not a thing, and certainly not a “right.” In fact society usually protects itself from malicious claims of this sort through laws that punish fraud and identity theft. Men claiming to be women is fraud against, and identity theft of an entire sex, a practice which is celebrated, aided, and abbetted by far too many in society, including the same governments that have otherwise outlawed harmful, false identity claims.
I have never seen any trans activists admit that Self-ID opens the doors of women’s facilities to opportunistic predators using this carte blanche as an all access pass. NOTE: I am not claiming that trans identified males are all “opportunistic predators.” But males as a group represent, statistically, a threat to women’s safety. Trans identified males remain male, and thus, part of that potentially threatening demographic. How do women tell the difference between a “harmless” male and one who is a predator? They can’t. The best rule is to keep all men out of female spaces. Period. Women have every right to consider any male entering their sex-segregated spaces as a potential threat, as they’ve already demonstrated a propensity to violate female boundaries. Gender Self-ID undermines this safeguarding measure by allowing men who declare themselves to be women unfettered access to women’s spaces on their own say-so. All a man has to do to bypass this usefull and valuable rule is to say “I identify as a woman.” Suddenly it’s now the protesting woman who is supposed to be viewed wth suspicion as a hateful, “transphobic” bigot, rather than the man demanding entrance to a place where he does not belong. Somehow, women are supposed to trust this man, no questions asked. Women should be under no obligation to tolerate such a gross violation and threat to their health, dignity and safety.
Women defending women’s rights (like Maya Forestater, JK Rowling, Allison Bailey, Julie Bindle, Kathleen Stock, Rosie Duffield, etc.) are routinely tarred as hateful transphobic bigots. Meetings that women organize to discuss their rights, or to just talk about things of importance to women are routinely mobbed and picketed by tans activists and their allies. We are told that “women’s rights” is nothing but an anti-trans dog whistle, and that any such discussions that do not include men who claim to be women are hatefull and bigoted. WE are told, despite the protests of many women, that there is “no conflict” between women’s rights and trans “rights.” These women have a different opinion, which is not allowed. Well, if women’s rights are “anti-trans,” it follows that trans rights are anti-woman. They are profoundly so.
Women’s concerns are real. These are not far-fetched, hypothetical, preposterous, irrational “phobias,” but the result of real harms that are actually happening. To paraphrase a venerable observation, men who claim they are women are afraid of being misgendered by women; women are afraid that men are going to kill them. Men who are violent sex offenders, who claim they are women, have been moved to womens’ prisons, where they have assaulted prisoners and staff. Men, claiming to be women, have been placed into what were originally meant to be exclusively female hospital wards. When women have complained or protested about these and other such occurrences, they have been accused of “transphobic” prejudice and bigotry. I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will: it is not hateful or bigotted to point these instances out; nor is it hateful or bigoted to oppose the disastrous consequences that these ludicrous policy decisions have had. It is not bigoted or hateful to seek to end the policies that have allowed these outrageous incidents to occur.
Trans activists have repeatedly stated that women resisting this invasion of their spaces have no legitimate self-interest in doing so, and that their supposed concern for their own welfare is a just a thin pretext to persecute trans identified males out of sheer malice and bigotry. I beg to differ. Women have every right to prevent harm to themselves at the hands of any , including those men who claim they are women. They have every right to oppose and overturn the legal and regulatory decisions that have so put them at risk, resulting in harm to women subjected to this ill-advised, ill-conceived and unjustified exercise in so-called “inclusivity.” All of these outcomes were foreseen by women whose counsel and concerns were ignored and ridiculed, and who are still ignored and ridiculed. Not all “inclusion” is good. Not all “exclusion” is bad.
If male facilities are unsafe or threatening for trans identified males to use that is not women’s problem, or responsibility to solve. Somehow, trans identified males’ feelings of distress or unease are more important than women’s feelings of distress or unease at sharing their facilities with men. Men’s feelings are to be respected and catered to; women’s feelings are to be ignored and over-ridden. Why? Why must women be forced to surrender their spaces and their comfort for the sake of men who don’t want to use the spaces set aside for their sex? Instead of demanding safety and dignity from their fellow men, they’ve focused their energy on degrading the safety and dignity of women, and slandering women who have the temerity to speak oiut against these efforts. It didn’t have to be this way, but it is. Had trans activists had directed their efforts on opposing male violence rather than invading women’s spaces, the relationship between trans activism and feminism would be very different than it is now.As it is, trans activists and their allies, along with the captured institutions whose power and authority have been wielded against women who say “No,” have much to answer for. It is not hateful or bigotted for women to demand those answers, or demand redress for the actual harms done to women in pursuit of a these misogynistic policies. It is not hateful or bigotted to demand the rollback and removal of those policies.
Yes, and?
My understanding is that the preferred trm is DSD, or Differences in Sexual Development, and that “intersex” is considered offensive by many people with DSD conditions. These people are not a “third” or “intermediate” sex falling between male or female. They are still male and female. Their particular conditions are, as far as my understanding goes, specific to one sex or another. Their existence does not render the concept of the sex binary invalid or unclear. It does not turn sex into a “spectrum.” It does not mean humans can change sex. The only relevence the existence of DSD conditions has to gender iideology and trans activism are the strategic appropriation of its “assigned X at birth” phraseology (as a way of diluting and muddying the concept and definition of sex to a degree sufficient to allow men to fall within the definition of “woman”), and the addition of the “I” to the forced-teaming LGBTIQetc. alphabet soup “community.” So for me, the deployment of the “Intersex Gambit” is a sign of either ignorance or bad faith. Should you choose to respond, I’ll thank you in advance for not using any of the following ploys. I’ll save you the trouble by responding to them in advance:
– “Transwomen are Women; it’s right in the name!” If that’s the case, then seahorses, saw horses and pommel horses are all Horses.
-“Clownfish can change sex!” Humans aren’t fish. No mammals can change sex.
-“Transwomen are just another kind of Woman, just like Black Women, Disabled Women or Tall Women!” No’ they’re not. Trans identified males are male; everyone else on that list is female, and no less female for being Black, Disabled, or Tall.
-“By defining women by their biological role in reproduction, you’re saying post-menopausal or infertile women are no longer female, no longer women!” I’ve only ever heard trans activists make this (strawman) argument. That would be like saying that a car that had run out of gas was no longer a car, or that a clock that had stopped was no longer a clock. Trans activism is just so very, very desperate to decouple the concept of “female” or “woman” from their reproductive role in sex in order to gloss over the inescapable material fact that no male will ever produce ova, and that the male body can never be turned into a female one. One might end up with a crude approximation with which some might be able to pass, but none of the work that these men have had done to them will turn them into an adult, human female.
Trans activism obliterates gender non-conformity by reifying gender roles rather than dispensing with them. One’s “gender identity” is supposedly more basic and fundamental than one’s sex. Yet a man is male whatever he wears or whatever he likes. Same with women. A man in a dress and lipstick is no less male than any other man; he is also no more female than any other man. If the basis of “gender identity reinforces the idea that liking “girly” things makes you a girl, then the patriarchy is safe and secure; genderism is serving it, not smashing it. To paraphrase another venerable observation:
Patriarchy says “If you’re a woman, you must wear a dress.” Gender ideology says, “If you wear a dress, you must be a woman.” Feminism says, “if you’re a woman you can wear whatever you want.”
There’s also the inherent homophobia in “transing away the gay,” which is exactly what Mermaid’s founder, Susie Green did to her son when he showed unwelcome signs of effeminacy. Her husband couldn’t stomach the idea that their son was gay, but they were happy to mutilate him in a misguided and impossible attempt to turn him into a girl. https://www.thedistancemag.com/p/susie-greens-disappearing-ted-talk
I’ve already said too much, so I’ll stop here. If there’s a TL;DR it’s “Show me the hate.”
*Trans identified males are not women and can never be women. A man can no more identify out of being male any more than he can identify out of being a primate, mammal, or tetrapod. It’s just an unalterable fact of material reality.
Why:
Why are you so obsessed with hating women? From a compassionate perspective, wouldn’t it be more helpful to argue that we need more support for folks who need it?
As for claiming women have the most privilege… women get murdered, harassed, and fired. Do you think we should stop having the government talk about women’s rights because if they do that means women have the most power?
And in the end, women who have good reasons to not want to share private spaces with males also exist, which I expected critical thinkers who appreciated Science to know and accept. Where are they supposed to go? What proof should they be forced to submit before getting privacy and the right to free association?
Plus, you have complained about people who are gender non conforming nevertheless not wanting to be forced to share private spaces with people of the opposite sex. Have you never been forced to share space with someone likely to be an aggressor? Who has actually actively BEEN an aggressor? I sure have and it’s terrifying. If you want to defend your right to invade women’s spaces while they pee or use a change room at the gym, principles like those you’re disparaging are there for you too, whether you agree with the facts around sex and the behaviours of men or not.
A small thing I’d like to add to my #12:
I’m so tired of this. Here in the United States, trans-identified people get murdered at rates LOWER than average.
Per Human Rights Watch, 41 “transgender or gender non-conforming people” were murdered in 2022. (Don’t know who the hell they were counting as “gender non-conforming “–bet they failed to count a lot of us! Ahem)
Per UCLA’s Williams Institute, there were 1.6 million trans-identified people in the US in 2022.
41 is approximately 0.0025% of 1.6 million.
Per the FBI, there were 21,156 murders in the US in 2022.
The population of the United States was approximately 333.3 million (I’ve seen a lightly higher number quoted, but I’m using the higher figure in order to be scrupulously fair.)
That’s 0.0063%
0.0063 > 0.0025%
(Murder victims in the US are disproportionately black males. This tendency holds true for the trans-identified population–54% of those murdered in 2022 were black trans women, per the HRC.)
I’m small and long-haired and it’s never happened to me. But I know butch lesbians it’s happened to, and they never considered it a big deal.
If it’s a bigger deal now than it used to be, maybe that’s because women are on edge from autogynephiles intruding on our spaces.
We want EVERYONE to be free to be gender non-conforming, WITHOUT this ridiculous insistence that being a woman or a man is a matter of gender conformity (or of some mystical subjective non-falsifiable inner essence.) We want people to be free to do their thing (as we said in the far-off days of my youth) WITHOUT being forced to pretend male humans are women if they declare they are. We don’t want “gender identity” to be prioritized over sex in situations WHERE SEX IS RELEVANT.
Why is this so fucking hard to understand? It ain’t rocket surgery.
‘Have literally none of you short haired, bin makeup wearing women been told you’re in the wrong bathroom? I sure have and it’s terrifying.’ I have, on more than one occasion, and it is not terrifying.
“I don’t see why we […] should all spend most of our time paying attention to trans people.” You have chosen this life. You’re the ones running this blog and hanging out here. This isn’t something trans folks are asking you to do. The percentage of articles here about trans people is pretty far from the proportion to which it’s discussed in the media or society at large – it’s your obsession. It seems like you used to have other hobbies, like actual feminism, at least some of you. But now you’re obsessed with trans people and think your obsession is their fault.
I’m here because I was looking for an old friend and I found she’s been internet poisoned and that makes me really sad. I’ll leave you now to your hobby, because obviously an internet stranger can’t help you.
Why #3
The problem with crying wolf at the first sight of anything with fur, is that people quickly stop taking anything you say seriously. So what was it this time? Did someone post a picture of a suffragette ribbon on Twitter? Did someone’s defense of single-sex spaces as “single-sex” constitute rhetorical or epistemic “violence”? Did failure to cancel a non-violent talk or lecture that nobody was forced to attend cause People of Gender to fear for their lives? Did the correct use of pronouns force a Person of Gender to commit suicide? Did actual same-sex attraction on the part of lesbians (in other words, lesbians being lesbian) leave a male “lesbian” with his “lady-cock” (you know, the one he’s been repeatedly telling women to suck) feeling “dead inside” (that’s “murder” too, you know!)? Did someone look at a Person of Gender the wrong way?
To the extent that violence against trans-identified individuals, specifically for being trans, is a real problem, at least to an excellent first approximation zero percent of it is coming from feminists, or even from people who have anything but contempt for feminism. To claim that Donald “grab’em by the pussy” Trump and his ilk are at all motivated by feminist concerns is as dishonest as blaming anti-fascism for the crimes of Stalin.
If there are that many real examples of feminists stirring up “hatred”, or even advocating “violence” (up to and including “murder” and even “genocide”) against trans people, denying their “right to exist” etc., why aren’t trans rights activists pointing to that rather than feminists saying that biological sex is real, that it can’t be changed, that it sometimes matters etc.?
Why do all the actual examples of hateful or violent rhetoric (“Kill TERFs!”), or even violent acts – gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan have been violently attacked by TRAs at protests, appear to come from their own side?
Why do even the most basic premises of their argument – including such obviously relevant “details” as the definition of “woman”, what is meant by “trans rights”, and how they are supposedly being violated by, say, women’s right to female-only spaces – appear to be best left unspecified?
If the situation of trans people in our age really is comparable to the situation of Jews under Nazism (as is frequently alleged!), why are we even talking about fucking pronouns or JK Rowling writing some of the least hateful things I have read in my life? As I have previously written: Never mind “first world problems” or even “luxury problems”, these are Utopia problems! If pronouns or JK Rowling are even on your list of grievances, then, again to an excellent first approximation, every other person who ever lived had more reason to complain than you do.
It’s as if you were waking up after years in a coma back in 1944 and hearing a lot of rumors about persecution of Jews. Now imagine you were asking surviving Jews to explain what the fuss was all about, and no one mentioned Hitler, Nazism, or the Holocaust with one word. No mention of the Kristallnach, the Wannsee Conference, or the Warsaw Ghetto. No references to Auschwitz Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Treblinka, or Zyklon B. The absolutely worst concrete example anyone could come up with was something like:
Imagine if they said:
In reality, of course they wouldn’t be saying anything even remotely like this. It’s unthinkable! People suffering from real persecution and violence don’t have to resort to this kind of tortured inferences, and language games, and stretching of word meanings beyond the breaking point to make their case. And yet if you look at the actual specifics, most of the accusations leveled against gender critical feminists by TRAs are, if anything, even less substantial than this. Indeed my personal “peak trans” moment came from realizing that the genocidal “TERFs” I kept hearing about included at least half the feminists I was following on Twitter at the time and witnessing the glaring contrast between these women’s actual words and the words and attitudes put into their mouths by the TRA mob. There was no going back after that.
If this were a legitimate social justice movement, practically 0 % of their time and energy would be spent fighting feminists while close to 100 % would be spent fighting toxic masculinity. Instead it’s more like the other way around (Indeed, far from fighting toxic masculinity, they are actively engaging in it). As Not Bruce pointed out, it didn’t have to be that way. There should have been a movement promoting the interests of individuals genuinely suffering from gender dysphoria, but that’s not the Trans Rights movement we do have. What we do have is in all relevant respects a Men’s Rights (euphemism for Anti Women’s Rights) movement, with far more in common with “incels” than a legitimate social justice movement. Most traditional “transsexuals” (almost exclusively gay men), never literally claimed to be women, were mostly trying to fly under the radar and get on with their lives, and did not demand any special accommodations on the part of women. The infinitely entitled and ultra-aggressive straight men now demanding access to female only spaces, women’s sports, lesbian events etc. are not oppressed, they’re oppressors; not victims but victimizers. Not a single person throughout history has ever been less oppressed than William “Lia” Thomas, and nothing could be further from “social justice” than empowering this privileged asshole and sick pervert to wave his boner around in women’s changing rooms while cheating them out of their hard-earned medals and destroying anyone who tries to get in his way. The way so many “leftists” (whatever the Hell that means these days…) have come to embrace such obvious injustice as “progressive”, just goes to show how little actual thinking goes into shaping people’s political allegiances. In my movement skeptic days, I used to think people were strongly attached to their ideas. I now think that crediting the average person with having anything worthy of the designation “ideas” is far more than they deserve (“ideas” would imply some actual content that could be judged on its own merit regardless of who was promoting it or the words used to describe it). Rather than ideas people are attached to labels “I’ll support anything as long as it’s called ‘leftism’, ‘progressive’, ‘social justice’ etc.”), and they are attached to tribes (“I’ll support anything as long as the people on my own ‘team’ are doing it”). The actual content is hardly even relevant as witnessed by the fact that many of the people who would now gladly go out of their way to destroy other people’s lives for thoughtcrime were expressing virtually identical opinions less than ten years ago.
Why #18
If you had told us back in 2010 that trans rights activism would become a matter of such great concern to us, I suspect most of us would have thought you’d gone bonkers. I know I would. Until less than ten years ago trans rights activism was about as peripheral to my interests as anything you could possibly imagine. The amount of time or energy I spent worrying – or even thinking – about it was to an excellent approximation = 0. And despite what you may think, when trans rights activism did appear on my radar, I was very much predisposed to sympathize. I know it’s not just me.
What happened was not that people like me became “radicalized”, “drunk the Cool-Aid”, adopted some radical new “ideology” etc. It’s just that sometime during the last ten years so many of the things we all* used to know went from “obvious” to “thoughtcrime”, “heresy”, a reason to get people shunned, bullied, cancelled, fired from their jobs, dragging their names through the mud all over the internet, going out of your way to destroy their lives. We didn’t seek out this battle. It was brought to us.
I think Graham Linehan speaks for many when he says that he shouldn’t have to spend so much time and energy talking about this topic (at enormous personal cost). Nor would he have to if the mainstream media were doing their fucking job. But since they’re not, unfortunately, it falls upon people like Graham and Ophelia (and to a lesser extent those of us who comment on blogs such as this) to do whatever they can to bring attention to the institutional capture, the erosion of women’s rights and protections, the 180° reversal of what used to be the LGB movement (from defending same-sex attraction to attacking same-sex attraction), the mass-application of experimental medical treatments on children with no meaningful oversight or regulations etc. etc. So to paraphrase Graham Linehan again, the real question is not so much why we are talking about these things as why you are not.
Oh, and although it shouldn’t need saying, accusing people of being “obsessed” and focusing on a topic too much (I’m sure you apply the same standard to TRAs who keep obsessing over “TERFs” and JK Rowling…), does not amount to an actual rebuttal.
*As I keep saying, I happen to know for an absolute fact that many of the people who now pretend they never knew the difference between biological males and biological females have said things that could get them labeled as TERFs, attacked and vilified any time.
Point of clarification – claiming to be transgender is not welcoming nor helpful to the GNC, by claiming to be transgender, GNC are moved from a gender they don’t fit to one that they conform to based on social roles, standards, expectations and limitations. Instead of trapping people in the other sex’s gender expectations (and sexually reconstructing a simulation of their body parts or poisoning them with cross-sex hormone regimes for the rest of their shortened lives, why not celebrate the GNC aspect and break down gender restrictions.
We are not about hate, I can’t speak for everyone, of transgender individuals except for those who are directly and specifically odious (as Ophelia mentioned) to those of us who dare question or stand up for the rights and safety of those who are directly affected by trans ideology, for those harassed and whose careers are affected because they dare speak up, and for those whose bodies are mangled to service gender. Any hatred is directed towards a destructive social movement that has taken over, and regarding which any sort of critical thinking is dismissed as bigotry and towards many critical thinkers there is vociferous hate directed (and mainly towards women who don’t comply.)
But they are. They’re DEMANDING our attention. Who’s organizing the continuous string of “Trans Days/Months of Awareness/Visibility/Rememberance/Vengeance/Hangnails? Who’s issuing the “Daily Reminders” that TWAW! CLAP*CLAP*CLAP*? Are these the acts of a demographic trying to keep to themselves and avoid the spotlight?
Feminism? Glad you mentioned it. All of this Trans Awareness/Visibility/Rememberance/Vengeance seems to come at the expense of women. There’s been no concerted effort to redefine men, or erase them from the public communications regarding their health. Women aren’t inviting men into their spaces and onto their teams. It’s not our side’s idea to call men “she” in news reports, and announce their sports
victoriescheating as normal and acceptable? That violence committed by trans identified males is recorded by the police as violence by women? How is any of this not a feminist issue? It’s not “obsessive” to be concerned about this ongoing erosion of women’s rights. Captured media aren’t telling the story honestly. When they’re noticed at all, women who question or resist are painted as hateful bigots. The rest of us are supposed to shut up and submit. This is not how open democratic societies are supposed to work. This is creeping authoritarianism. There’s your “poisoning.” It’s not paranoia when they’re actually out to get you.In many situations, they don’t even have to do that. All they have to do is walk into the women’s room, because it is considered hateful and bigoted to even ask what sex they are, or point out that they are in the wrong place. The woman in the woman’s restroom who questions the legitimacy of the male body in that space will be the one vilified, tormented, persecuted, and for all we know, fired, questioned by police, or losing their membership in organizations they value.
When even asking is considered hate, no man has to bother to “identify as” a woman to access women’s facilities. All they have to do is walk in. That is an open invitation to predators, even if there was not a single TiM who ever assaulted a woman or had fantasies of assaulting women.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on No escape for women […]
And of course, we all remember that this is particularly true of our blog host here. The entire reason that she is blogging here at B&W rather than that former aggregator**, is because of a months-long, sustained campaign of harassment and bullying that she endured a few years back because of a single incredulous comment she made about Bruce Jenner, famous & celebrated male olympic athlete, being gushed over by Vanity Fair on his debut of “she/her” pronouns and womanface performance, after many months of continuing to tell the world to refer to him as “he/him”. And then BAM, there he is one day, 60-something years old in a slinky dress, with swapped-out pronouns and tens of thousands of dollars in superficial surgeries talking about living his “true self”, and seemingly the entire online Skeptical community that had previously been scoffing at the mental gymnastics required to believe in religious claims without basis in reality suddenly swooned in religious delight at it all. People who had been forcefully arguing for the rights of women were in a complete froth demanding that those rights be given to Bruce Jenner and his ilk. It was mass psychosis, which only a few seemed to have escaped, and like a scene out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers those few were noted, attacked, and outcast.
**And a few months after Ophelia left that aggregator, those who remained turned on each other in sustained infighting, accusing one or another of being insufficiently trans-religious; a civil war that eventually resulted in all the sufficiently pure ones leaving to start their own aggregator. I have to admit I laughed at that. It was Animal Farm in real time.