More likely?
Amnesty International explains its view on women’s rights.
“We live in a society that is more likely to discriminate and commit violence against transgender people, so we are proud to stand with them here in the UK and around the world,” they say.
“More likely” than what?
They don’t say. What does that mean then?
It’s similar to that “the most vulnerable in society” of Jolyon Maugham’s on Monday. Maugham’s is more precise in a way, but it’s still just an assertion, and it’s not true. It’s not difficult to think of people who are more vulnerable than trans people (trans people as such, trans people who are vulnerable because of being trans). Uighurs come to mind. Women and girls in Pakistan. Children separated from their parents and imprisoned on the southern border of the United States. Women and girls in India. Atheists and humanists in Nigeria. Homeless people in the US. Women and girls in Saudi Arabia. Rohyinga. Racial minorities pretty much everywhere. Religious minorities pretty much everywhere. Poor people pretty much everywhere.
Why is it that people who think they’re cutting-edge progressive are so convinced that trans people are more vulnerable than the poor, the minority, the persecuted, the subject to enslavement? Why does Amnesty International, of all organizations, claim (however vaguely) that they are the most subject to violence? Why have all these people forgotten everything they know?
Amnesty then goes on to type the flat lie that “there is absolutely no evidence” that men would use self identification to get access to spaces where women are vulnerable: there is in fact a lot of evidence that men have done exactly that, which counts as evidence that they “would” do it. Having done it and doing it now=evidence that they will go on doing it.
I don’t know. It’s as if they’ve all been slipped a “forget what you used to know” pill. It’s not possible to make any sense of it otherwise.
I guess it’s because well-off middle aged Western white men (we know they don’t mean ‘transpeople’, they mean ‘transwomen’) are able to use their privilege and cultural capital to craft and disseminate messages that are particularly appealing and resonant to other well-off middle aged Western white men, and other people, male and female, who’ve learned to think like and believe with them.
My understanding is that reality is that most female abuse isn’t by violent men committing violence, but creepazoid men being creepy — leering, peering, groping, and moping around trying to shock or get a rise out of a female. Giving nasty men another opportunity to do so to vulnerable women expecting privacy along with an ability to plausibly deny it when confronted (“Gee, I’m just more comfortable here”) is itself nasty.
And an organization which deals with political prisoners and genocide buying into the idea of transgender individuals being “the most vulnerable “ beggars belief.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
https://medium.com/@sue.donym1984/the-transgender-movement-and-bad-stats-a-debunking-compilation-31760947b382
Sastra:
And it’s worse even than plausible deniability because the entire point is to make women justifiably frightened of the social backlash if they complain about any behaviour at all they find creepy.
The two ‘answers’ I see most often to the obvious truth that self-ID in women’s spaces will lead to abusive behaviour from men are:
1. Men can already gain access to women’s spaces if they really want to.
OK, so this argument admits that men are abusive and the solution is to make it easier for them to abuse and harder for women to prevent it or to complain when they do abuse. Nicely done.
2. What are you going to do, check everyone’s genitals? Why are you so obsessed with genitals?
This is especially tiresome and I see it everywhere at the moment. More generally, the standard answer to any proposal someone doesn’t like is now inevitably “how are you going to police that, genius?” almost always ignoring the fact that either we’ve done just fine without policing it so far or we can police it perfectly well, thank you. Both happen to be true in the case of women’s toilets.
No, just a glance at the face is enough if the shouty transwomen who put their mugshots on their twitter headers are a representitive sample. I think it’s fair to say that there are male faces and there are masculine faces, female faces and feminine faces. Men can have masculine or feminine faces but they are on the whole unmistakeably male faces, and the same applies to womens’ faces.
And when you see a hundred angry transwomen screaming ‘suck my girl-dick’ one has to wonder just who has the genitalia obsession.
It is a little beyond the pot calling the kettle black for people who as a group can be defined as being obsessed with someone else’s genitals to pull out the ‘stop talking about genitals’ card.
Ah, the old “you’re getting raped now a lot so why complain about being raped more often?” gambit. And the libfem toadies of the trans cult cannot seem to see the misogyny inherent there.
If you think it’s true that saying you’re a woman = being a woman, then no, there is no evidence that self identification will be used by men to get access to spaces where women are vulnerable.
On the other hand, if you think men are still men after uttering the magic phrase there are stacks of evidence. Every instance of a male person expecting unfettered access to women’s spaces after claiming womanhood is another example.
I guess this is why it’s so important to get everyone to agree that TWAW.
I just remembered that the reality is that men who abuse children already have plenty of existing opportunities to do so, as can be seen by the vast amount of child pornography online. So, no point in background checks for people working with children, or making sure random strangers can’t just waltz into primary schools, or being suspicious of the guy in his thirties who has no children but always hangs around playgrounds. We should make all of those things easier for anyone who self identifies as perfectly nice and not at all predatory.
Catwhisperer, so true. And there is the other fact that, in places where they are allowing transwomen full access to women’s spaces, it is not usually necessary to even speak the magic words. Where I work, we have been forbidden to question the sex/gender/identity/fantasy of anyone in the bathroom that looks like they don’t belong. They don’t even have to say “I’m a woman”, because to even ask invites abuse, added to official reprimands that go on your permanent record (and some have checked; those ‘reprimands’ are supposed to expire and be removed after a stated length of time, and no one ever removes them. They remain in your file).
So it would be no threat to masculinity at all, because not having the say “I am a woman” leaves a man free and clear to enter the women’s bathroom, creep on the women just trying to use the bathroom, and leave again without having to worry he has feminized himself.
Iknklast, yes. What it boils down to is that we are to assume that anyone entering women’s spaces is a woman. Let’s hope none of the men who believe they are men get ideas, eh?
“The reality is that men who abuse women already have plenty of existing opportunities to do so” … therefore, let’s take away what refuges exist. Novel reasoning, to say the least.
“Amnesty then goes on to type the flat lie that “there is absolutely no evidence” that men would use self identification to get access to spaces where women are vulnerable: there is in fact a lot of evidence that men have done exactly that, which counts as evidence that they “would” do it. Having done it and doing it now=evidence that they will go on doing it.”
It would be useful to have references to refute this lie.
There’s a Facebook group called This Never Happens that has been collecting the evidence for years.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1722756661380462/