Cont: Trans women are not women (IX)

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Shalamar said:
I want to see less negativity and hate.
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I don't think there's actually much hate here. There's a fair amount of negativity, but negativity isn't always unwarranted (for example, hang out in the Russia-Ukraine war thread and you'll find plenty directed towards Russia). I won't fault you for preferring less, but I can't really blame others for being negative when they think something is bad.

Several posts seem to conflate trans-activism with the transgender.
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I suspect that's mostly a result of people not bothering to make distinctions explicit even though they know the distinction exists, just because it takes more effort. And the thread has been going on long enough that people get a bit lazy with language. If you're curious about a particular poster's position in that regard, I'd just ask them for clarification.

So for example, I think basically everyone here, including the "anti-trans" side, want trans people to be able to live as trans people without being discriminated against in housing and employment (absent a few jobs where sex might matter). They don't want trans people to be harassed or attacked for being trans, and they condemn violence against trans people. They think adults who want to transition, socially and/or medically, should be allowed to do so. There actually is broad support here for the most fundamental rights for trans people. The conflicts show up in what might be better described as accomodations rather than rights.
 
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Rolfe said:
Someone who was further along her gender critical journey than I was replied, "No, they don't think that at all. You can tell that very easily by the way they treat transwomen - deferring to them and pandering to their every whim. If they really thought they were women they'd treat them the way they treat women - talking over them, telling them to "be kind" and putting their interests right at the bottom of the priority list."
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Do women really do this with all women? I'm thinking of the groups of mums at the school gate. The ex-lawyers, ex-CFOs, ex-advertising types. The ones who get OBEs, the other women don't put them behind anybody. They wouldn't dare, they are both too afraid of being ostracised to do it, and too keen to socially climb off them. There is fierce status competition amongst them. I think of my work, there are some women who are too nice for their own good, and some who are doormats, but there are certainly some other women that neither would dare to put behind anybody else. I do not agree that women necessarily put women at the bottom. They may perhaps put some women at the bottom.
 
shuttlt said:
Do women really do this with all women? I'm thinking of the groups of mums at the school gate. The ex-lawyers, ex-CFOs, ex-advertising types. The ones who get OBEs, the other women don't put them behind anybody. They wouldn't dare, they are both too afraid of being ostracised to do it, and too keen to socially climb off them. There is fierce status competition amongst them. I think of my work, there are some women who are too nice for their own good, and some who are doormats, but there are certainly some other women that neither would dare to put behind anybody else. I do not agree that women necessarily put women at the bottom. They may perhaps put some women at the bottom.
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Yes, they do. Or rather, a significant proportion of women do it. Women are socialised to defer to men and centre men's desires. The socialisation takes better on some than on others, but there is absolutely no doubt that this is an issue.

Someone made a Twitter meme about it, and why do I always find it's the very image I want that's the one I didn't bookmark...
 
Shalamar said:
Several posts seem to conflate trans-activism with the transgender.
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I know this isn't what you meant, but you should include in this observation the tactic often used by trans-activists to conflate opposition to their activism with transphobia.

There are a number of serious problems with the ideas and principles being pushed by trans-activists, that need to be called out and condemned. Doing this does not equate to transphobia.

Meanwhile, views such as mine: That gender dysphoria is either a mental health issue that should be treated as such, or else a cosplay issue that can be safely tolerated socially, and ignored by public policy, can easily be tarred as "transphobic", even though they're not. I don't have a phobia of furries. I just don't think they should have special entitlements in public policy. And I don't have a phobia of paranoid schizophrenics. I just think they should receive competent medical assistance, not have their delusional mental state validated and enabled in public policy.
 
You know, it's not so surprising that there is a strong vein of "be nice to men" in girls' upbringing. It's still within living memory when, if a girl wanted to have a comfortable life, she more or less had to find a man who would supply her with food and shelter in return for being supplied with housework, sex and offspring. Being uppity and self-assertive and independent isn't a good way to go about this.

Studies have shown that even from birth male and female babies are treated differently by mothers. The boys get more attention. Girls grow up being told they have to be sugar and spice. Boys are praised for assertiveness, girls are told not to be pushy.

A lot of women have an internalised instinct that they (and other women) should defer to men and give men what they want, and not only do they do this themselves, they police other women to enforce compliance.
 
And there are a surprising number of them around. Or maybe not so surprising. Unconsciously, I think they view life as a competition for men's approval.
 
Rolfe said:
And there are a surprising number of them around. Or maybe not so surprising. Unconsciously, I think they view life as a competition for men's approval.
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The way to get ahead in a misogynistic system is to be one. Even if you are female.

(I am channelling Kate Manne here and will post the review I mentioned when I get back to UK)
 
Francesca R said:
Misogynistic women do it.
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I really don't think so. If we interpret every interaction between men and women like this, through the same lens, we aren't thinking, we aren't trying to understand, we are approaching the problem knowing who the good guy, who the bad guy and what everybody's motivation is in advance. This is not thinking. It is just an adaptation of Karl Marx's story about an oppressor class, an oppressed class, false consciousness and all the rest with a crude search and replace done on it to turn it into Feminism. It's great for activism and all to eternally be able to frame everything in this way, but it tiresome and there are so many different versions of it being played. Somehow TERFs don't like this when it is done to them, but it's just the same game with minor tweaks to map it onto a new oppressor and a new oppressed. It's part of the original moulding process of a cookie cutter ideology that Critical Theory came out of. You could just randomly pick ginger people as the oppressed class and play the same game.

Years ago, there was a video by Laci Greene where she talked about how everything was sexist and everything was racist. It was tiring. Sometimes she said it was OK to take a break from searching out the sexism and racism in things. If you go in with the intention of finding where the sexism is in something, you will find it. There will be a story you can tell where it is sexist. There will never be a time where you can't tell a story about society being misogynistic. If men go through doors first, we can say it is because they are putting themselves first ahead of women. If men let women go through first, we can look at it as patronising... they feel they have to "allow" women to go ahead of them. You can always tell this story if you want to.

Francesca R said:
(I am channelling Kate Manne here and will post the review I mentioned when I get back to UK).
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Ah! Thanks!
 
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What's frustrating about "I would like to see less negativity and hate" is, okay, so say something positive. If the discussion doesn't have enough of what you want, add what you want to it! Don't just seagull in to complain that everyone else isn't doing it for you.

If even you, who wants positivity and love, can't think of anything positive or loving to contribute, well there's your sign.
 
Rolfe said:
Yes, they do. Or rather, a significant proportion of women do it. Women are socialised to defer to men and centre men's desires. The socialisation takes better on some than on others, but there is absolutely no doubt that this is an issue.

Someone made a Twitter meme about it, and why do I always find it's the very image I want that's the one I didn't bookmark...
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There are too many different types of power and deference in too many domains. The limited extent to which I will agree is that there are domains, and there are ways of looking at it where what you say is true. There is male power and there is female power and they are different. Very few men wield female type power, increasing numbers of women are being pushed and encouraged to wield male power. The focus is almost always on male power.

STORY 1
I remember a conversation a few years ago with my mother... effectively she was making the case about work "at work" being rewarded, because men do it, and raising children not being rewarded because it's female work. There are lots of things one could say about that, but the idea that raising children is a type of work that isn't rewarded is to reduce all reward to the type of reward that men have historically got more of to the exclusion of all else. If instead of focusing on who earns the money rather than who spends the money one gets a different picture. Again, we are back to the Marxist origins of much feminist thought where it is all about wage labour and materialism etc... It all depends on the story one wants to tell. Amongst themselves, men routinely refer to their wives as the boss, or versions there of. That isn't purely a mocking joke. Happy wife, happy life.

STORY 2
I used to go to dancing classes before I met my wife. One of the things that would happen was that most of the women were used to be being better dancers than the men, and would back lead continually. The women probably in fact lead more than the men. My experience of life is that women have different ways of being dominant than men. If you look at men's types of power, you will find men exercising more power. If you look at women's types of power, you will find women exercising more power.

In short, I disagree.
 
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theprestige said:
What's frustrating about "I would like to see less negativity and hate" is, okay, so say something positive. If the discussion doesn't have enough of what you want, add what you want to it! Don't just seagull in to complain that everyone else isn't doing it for you.

If even you, who wants positivity and love, can't think of anything positive or loving to contribute, well there's your sign.
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The issue is that, if there is actually emotion in the issue being discussed... what is to be done? To one way of looking at this trans-rights activists are causing legions of children to be mutilated and turned into medical experiments for the rest of their lives. How does one articulate that in a way that doesn't cause somebody who advocates that position to feel attacked and hated. One can quibble about the words, but they are right.
 
I thought you ladies might like this. It turns out that women weren't invented until the end of the 18th century.
 
shuttlt said:
I really don't think so. If we interpret every interaction between men and women like this, [ . . . ]
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We don't. But it is a way of interpretating misogyny. Conversely if misogyny is viewed as "hating women" then it is in practical terms marginalised to the point of non existence. Approximately nobody is a misogynist in that taxonomy.

Don't mistake it for some #YesAllMen radicalism.
 
Francesca R said:
We don't. But it is a way of interpretating misogyny. Conversely if misogyny is viewed as "hating women" then it is in practical terms marginalised to the point of non existence. Approximately nobody is a misogynist in that taxonomy.

Don't mistake it for some #YesAllMen radicalism.
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I think it's a deeply negative thing to do to overload words like that. It allows people to motte and bailey like crazy. None the less, I stand by what I said regardless of which meaning of misogyny you go with. Nothing in Marxism depends on the owners of capital necessarily hating the proletariat. This way of interpreting the world is a choice. You can put on the glasses where you interpret the world in this way. As I said, other glasses have been forged where the world is interpret in a different way. They are no more a search for a true description of the world, than the trans-activists redefinition of woman is an attempt to discover the true definition of woman. All these things are the products of long activist traditions.
 
I adhere to Orwell's principle that anyone who espoused pacifism in WW2 was objectively pro-fascist. Because Nazi Germany wasn't pacifist, and wasn't interested in pacifist arguments for peace. The only way to stop them was to fight them. Anyone in England advocating to give peace a chance was effectively advocating to give Nazis a chance.

And I think the same thing is true of trans-activism today. There is a core of misogyny in the trans-activist agenda, and it's impossible to endorse that agenda without being objectively misogynist. Once you start talking about transcending sex segregation, you're talking about women being second class citizens.
 
theprestige said:
I adhere to Orwell's principle that anyone who espoused pacifism in WW2 was objectively pro-fascist. Because Nazi Germany wasn't pacifist, and wasn't interested in pacifist arguments for peace. The only way to stop them was to fight them. Anyone in England advocating to give peace a chance was effectively advocating to give Nazis a chance.

And I think the same thing is true of trans-activism today. There is a core of misogyny in the trans-activist agenda, and it's impossible to endorse that agenda without being objectively misogynist. Once you start talking about transcending sex segregation, you're talking about women being second class citizens.
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The misogynists surely are the men desperate to cling onto male supremacy. Sure, there is an element of gay men who vehemently hate women. However, I don't see how women can be labelled 'misogynist' in the same way just because they aren't violently pro-Women's toilets, like Braverman, Badenough and Truss.

The question boils down to are you with:

  • Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren't who they say they are. ~ Emma Watson
  • my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so. ~ JK Rowling

Of Braverman, Badenough, Truss and Rowling, Emma Watson is probably the least misogynist.
 
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