woke.

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

unless they’re the wrong kind of feminist ones, obviously.

Fuck off with this shit. It's not anti-feminist to be anti-transphobe.

[Monkee]

I think @Keith Houchenis referring to TERF opinions. In which case, those opinions are definitely not welcome.

[Keith Houchen]

6 minutes ago, Uncle Zeb said:

Fuck off with this shit. It's not anti-feminist to be anti-transphobe.

But it’s very misogynistic to dismiss concerns of women because they upset frail masculinity. 
 

World of difference between being transphobic and safeguarding a protected category. As I said, there are absolute wretches who hate trans people because they are trans people, they can get to fuck. They’re the sort to hijack women’s issues to peddle their hate. Like they give a fuck about feminism.  But of course, that’s not the issue being discussed here. Nick asking what the problem was is the issue. 

[Guest]

14 minutes ago, Monkee said:

I think @Keith Houchenis referring to TERF opinions.

If I misread this part then apologies, Keith.

I think you're still unwittingly going to bat for TERFs and other transphobes by propagating some of their framing though.

[Keith Houchen]

54 minutes ago, Uncle Zeb said:

If I misread this part then apologies, Keith.

I think you're still unwittingly going to bat for TERFs and other transphobes by propagating some of their framing though.

Fair enough. I’m honestly answering Nicks question. I’d say listen to women in the replies and try and understand why they’re sick of men telling them what to do. Obviously we can all disagree with and dismiss the opinion we think are hateful and vindictive. It’s not like one collective voice, I just believe men should sit it out when it’s women’s issues. 

[Nick James]

It's a bloody minefield this trying to be a good person lark.

Fair points raised by Keith and is probably why I should have stayed quiet in that I didn't think about other groups I could be discrediting with a well meaning post.

Maybe time to take a break from social media for a while and certainly keep quiet on social matters that ultimately don't concern me.

Edited October 25, 2022 by Nick James

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Keith Houchen said:

I just believe men should sit it out when it’s women’s issues. 

 

1 hour ago, Nick James said:

keep quiet on social matters that ultimately don't concern me.

Not to prolong what I hope is largely settled here, but to clarify why I've been banging on: it's not just a women's issue, it's an issue of humanity. 'Trans rights are human rights' isn't some empty slogan; any one of us could have been born in that position, vastly outnumbered and misunderstood by those who fear or despise us and decide our fate.

If I've come across as angry in the last few posts it's because I feel it absolutely matters for the more socially privileged on the side of this minority to not wash our hands of the topic because it's someone else's domain, or because we've allowed the bigots to convince us we're being gallant by not voicing our support where it's needed most.

[Devon Malcolm]

7 hours ago, Keith Houchen said:

I’d say listen to women in the replies and try and understand why they’re sick of men telling them what to do.

Including trans women. Because they are women.

[Keith Houchen]

32 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Including trans women. Because they are women.

Sure. 

[Dead Mike]

4 hours ago, Nick James said:

It's a bloody minefield this trying to be a good person lark.

.

Maybe time to take a break from social media for a while .

Twitter is an absolute skip fire of a platform. It's not representative of anything & most don't even mean what they're posting. It's a just a game, and a really shitty one at that.

[Keith Houchen]

5 hours ago, Nick James said:

It's a bloody minefield this trying to be a good person lark.

Fair points raised by Keith and is probably why I should have stayed quiet in that I didn't think about other groups I could be discrediting with a well meaning post.

Maybe time to take a break from social media for a while and certainly keep quiet on social matters that ultimately don't concern me.

As Zeb said, it is everybody’s issue but it’s one where women should take the lead. 
 

When you take the emotion out of it and look at it from a cold, legal and medical perspective, it’s easy to see why some women are angry. Sex is a protected characteristic, it’s one based on biological fact and not feeling. These rights took a long time to achieve and now they’re being told that their protected characteristic doesn’t count because some biological males should be included also because they identify into it. Their argument is that sex is more important than gender and personality I don’t  think that’s unreasonable or bigoted. Saying all trans women are rapists etc, yeah I think that’s bigoted and repulsive. 
 

Trans women are women, they aren’t biological women though and that’s the issue for some women’s groups. You can’t just identify as a protected characteristic. That’s the problem with Izzard, Izzard spend decades saying he was a transvestite and did loads of stuff raising issues of gender non conforming. Now all of a sudden, overnight, Izzard says she is a woman and as you say the only thing that’s changed is the pronouns. Izzard had a full life of the privilege that comes with being male but because, in their own words, they now say they’re in “Girl mode” these groups see that as taking the piss. And I honestly don’t think that’s at all bigoted. Just for the sake of clarity, I’m not saying these views are my views, I’m saying this is some women’s perspective and it’s why they were angered by your tweet. 
 

You mentioned men in the replies. Apparently there are a lot of gay men who are new to getting involved. This is because some gay men are being called bigoted transphobes by TRAs because they don’t want to have sex with someone with a vagina. Likewise lesbians are being called the same because they don’t want to sleep with someone with a penis. I will say I don’t think that’s bigotry in the slightest, it’s same sex attraction not same gender attraction. 

[Devon Malcolm]

15 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Izzard had a full life of the privilege that comes with being male but because, in their own words, they now say they’re in “Girl mode” these groups see that as taking the piss. And I honestly don’t think that’s at all bigoted.

If somebody comes out as gay or bisexual later in life and get shouted down for living as straight for so long, that's bigotry. If somebody comes out as transgender later in life and gets shouted down for identifying with their biological characteristics for so long, that's not bigotry. I don't think Nick's opinion is the actual problematic one in this thread, in all honesty.

 

[Keith Houchen]

3 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

If somebody comes out as gay or bisexual later in life and get shouted down for living as straight for so long, that's bigotry. If somebody comes out as transgender later in life and gets shouted down for identifying with their biological characteristics for so long, that's not bigotry. I don't think Nick's opinion is the actual problematic one in this thread, in all honesty.

 

I agree but I’m specifically talking about a person who says they have “Girl mode” and “Boy mode”. That’s different to what you’re portraying. 

[Tommy!]

The issue always seems to be around what toilets people use (so I can see why the ukff is so interested), so I think we should just go back to one big open communal trough, like ancient Rome but with less swans necks.

Edited October 25, 2022 by Tommy!

[BomberPat]

12 hours ago, Monkee said:

@Nick Jamesthere was absolutely nothing wrong with what you said. I saw that Eddie was trending earlier today and [stupidly] clicked the link. The amount of pure bile was sickening. And it was from all angles - men, women, left wing, right wing, old, young. The language was horrendous and I didn’t even read that much.

It reminded me of what I read last week after watching Jordan Grey on Friday Night Live.

Social media makes me sick sometimes.

I think rallying against Izzard is probably the biggest misstep the TERF lot have made in a long time. A lot of what they argue can, when their worst excesses of vitriol are taken out of the equation, be made to sound reasonable (that's the whole point), but when the person they're pointing to as a danger and indicative of what they see as the problem is, as far as I can tell, a broadly well-liked and respected public figure, that's going to backfire on them. It's one thing for them to pick on someone who's only known for being trans, or to rage against hypotheticals, but millions of people who have previously had no skin in the game have watched Izzard's stuff and enjoy it.

4 hours ago, Uncle Zeb said:

 

Not to prolong what I hope is largely settled here, but to clarify why I've been banging on: it's not just a women's issue, it's an issue of humanity. 'Trans rights are human rights' isn't some empty slogan; any one of us could have been born in that position, vastly outnumbered and misunderstood by those who fear or despise us and decide our fate.

Not only are trans rights human rights, but they are the thin end of the wedge, as we're seeing across the board. I'm deeply uncomfortable with the use of the phrase "biological sex", because it implies a simple tick-box binary that isn't that straightforward - there are countless definitions used of "biological woman" that do not apply to all cisgender women (or, of course, definitions of "biological man" that don't apply to all cisgender men, but trans men are routinely ignored or rendered invisible in these debates), so it's clearly not an adequate category. The repeated TERF and transphobe clarion call of "adult human female" is particularly egregious - it suggests that the words "adult" and "female" are any less contentious, yet "adult" is arguably even more socially constructed than "woman" or "female", for a start. Historically, there are times and places you wouldn't have even been able to get a consensus on "human", either. 

There are countless question marks over the concept of "biological sex" - is it chromosomal? We're taught in school that if you're XX you're a woman, if you're XY you're a man, but that's not true. There are disorders that mean someone with XY chromosomes will appear to be, for lack of a better term, "biologically female", that will go unnoticed until they reach puberty and don't menstruate. Some women retain Y cells from their fetus after giving birth; so another way in which "biological women" will have XY chromosomes. 

Then there's DSDs, intersex, CAH, and other conditions where children are born with ambiguous genitalia. Some children are born with testes and a womb, for example, and will likely undergo multiple surgeries to "correct" their sex/gender identity to whichever doctors decide to assign them at birth, sometimes from as young as a few months old. Strangely, these don't seem to get a look-in when people opposed to transgender identities talk about "unnecessary" or gender affirming surgeries on children. Whenever this is brought up, it tends to get handwaved away as a rare exception - ignoring the fact that, even if it happened in vanishingly small numbers of cases, the fact that these conditions occur at all outlines the lie of always clearly definable and binary biological sex should be enough. But it isn't vanishingly small numbers of cases - it's a little under 2% of people, roughly equivalent to the number of people with ginger hair, or the number of people born a twin; I'm a twin, and no one has ever written off my life experience for being statistically insignificant.

Then there's testosterone levels, where - whether intersex or "biologically female" by whatever category you want to assign that - can be considerably higher than what's considered normal for a woman. In sports, that's often the primary way of policing female involvement. So there are examples of cisgender women, assigned female at birth, being disqualified or else overly policed for having a heightened testosterone level because it's seen as giving them an advantage through being insufficiently female by the standards that have been fairly arbitrarily set.

Beyond all of that, there's a ton of pop science bullshit - you don't have to look far into transphobe discussions to see them bordering on phrenology; there's discussion of male and female bone structure, bodily proportions, and so on, and even outside of that weirdness, there's assumptions about height, hand size, Adam's Apples, and so on. The point I'm making with all of this is that any policing of transgender women will also impact cisgender women as well, because by not being able to find a single legal or "biological" definition of women that encompasses all cisgender women to the exclusion of trans women, significant proportions of cisgender women will only be discriminated against and excluded by whatever definitions are settled upon by any anti-trans legislation. Outside of a legal framework, gender non conforming cis women and men face heightened abuse as a result of trans panic, as do women who simply don't fit a societal expectation of what a woman "should" be. My brother's ex-girlfriend was 6'4", and on multiple occasions was complimented on how well she "passed" as a woman, because the assumption was that no woman that tall could possibly have been born "biologically female" - now, in these cases, it was a fairly benign interaction, but it's easy to see how that assumption of her sexual identity could have been taken negatively. There are many stories of cis women being abused, insulted, harassed, and even assaulted, for entering women's toilets, because of the assumption that they were "biologically male". None of this panic helps anyone, least of all trans women, but not cis women either. That's before even getting into how much the anti-trans lobby comfortably shares spaces with the far-right, with anti-abortion activists, and with anti-LGBT+ activists of all stripes. You'd be foolish to think that people working against trans inclusion in society won't turn their attentions on gays, lesbians and bisexuals once (if) they win this one.

 

On the toilet issue - aside from the fact that many countries, and many establishments in this country, have had gender-neutral toilets for years without incident, or my belief that all public toilets should just be individual lockable self-contained cubicles containing toilet, sink, etc. anyway, we've shared public toilet space with trans people for as long as there have been trans people. Trans women didn't only start needing to piss five years ago.

The other, grimmer, side of the equation is that I have several female friends who have been assaulted in women's toilets. In none of those instances did the perpetrator feel the need to dress up as a woman (or, even more absurdly, live their entire public life as a trans woman) in order to gain access to that space - they were opportunistic sex offenders who just walked right in through the door, because there wasn't anyone around to stop them, and the sign on the door didn't put them off. Because if someone is prepared to commit a transgression as egregious as sexual assault, they're not going to think twice about the lesser transgression of entering a toilet with "women" written on the door - it's like expecting someone fully committed to robbing a train to be turned away because he didn't have a ticket to get through the barrier.