I ask out of legitimate curiosity, not malice. That’s what Brad’s mother did, and I saw how badly that fucked with his head.
Ann_Hedonia:
But I don’t know her. I might not want her to use the ladies restroom out of fears she might terrorize and rape me.
You say she’s a friend of yours. Ask her. Ask her if she would mind using the men’s room every time she has to pee, just until “we get this all straightened out”. Try to explain to her that my fears of being assaulted by her are valid, while her fears of being assaulted if she enters the men’s room at , say, Yankee Stadium, aren’t.
Why can’t both fears be equally valid? Why are women and transwomen fears being pitted together like this?
My trans coworker isn’t my friend. She’s just a coworker. So I don’t know how she feels about anything. I do know that she tends to use the unisex restroom at work. I don’t know if she does this because she’s trans or because she just prefers to use the restroom closest to her cubicle. But it doesn’t appear that she’s averse to using third spaces. So I have no reason to think she wouldn’t be in total agreement with me that third spaces need to be on the fucking table instead of turning the women’s locker room into the sanctuary for everyone escaping toxic maculinity.
My coworker isn’t someone who identifies as woman but for all intents and purposes presents as a man. I’ve known her since she started transitioning. I know she makes an effort to live as a woman. That may not matter to you, but that matters a great deal to me. If I enter a women’s space and see someone who pings as a transwoman, I’m probably not going to feel any kind of way. But if I enter a women’s space and see someone who pings as a man, I’m going to default to the obvious: there’s a man in here. In some situations, that’s no big deal. But in a women’s locker room? Hell yes, that is a big deal to me. I have been programmed to see this as as a big deal. I won’t be able to shake that programming as long as women’s locker rooms are allowed to exist. If you want me to not be fearful about being unclothed in the presence of a strange man, you should support the dismantling of sex segregated spaces. As long as we segregate along sex/gender, we’re encouraging people’s negative feelings about being in the presence of the opposite sex in moments of vulnerability.
I don’t understand why you seem to want me to think that my discomfort over being vulnerable in front of strange men is a “baseless” fear, considering the sheer amount of violence inflicted by men on women out there in the world. Why is this really a baseless fear, Anne_Hedonia? Do you think that men have never attacked women in locker rooms before? Or do you think, like apparently many people do, that men attacking women in locker rooms is nothing new, so of course women are silly for wondering if this violence could get worse in a world where male-presenting males are given unfettered access to women’s locker rooms? Because both of these positions are 100% BULLSHIT, IMHO. We have a shitload of evidence that men inflict a crazy amount of violence on women, both in and outside of women’s locker rooms. Ergo, it makes perfect sense to worry about all the ways male predators might try to exploit “woman” when certain social guardrails are dismantled.
Transwomen’s feelings are valid. So are ciswomen’s feelings. This is not a gotdamned competition!
You keep talking about how you personally would react in these situations, and if you’re looking for validation on that front, I think you’ve got it just about perfect. But you’re not going to be in every locker room everywhere, and you seem to also be arguing for a standard that precludes anyone pushing back on a woman for feeling “threatened” by a trans woman in a woman’s space. You do at least recognize that bigotry against trans people is thing, and that sometimes its going to be dressed up as false concerns over “safety?” Much earlier in this thread, YWTF linked to an image that was been doctored to make it appear that a trans woman had been hanging out in women’s bathrooms with a sword. Is it fair to question the motives of whoever doctored that image? Do you think they might be motivated by more than a reasonable fear for their personal safety?
I would use their preferred pronouns and promise them no more than that, at least in the short term. Then I would get them a psychologist so that a professional could help figure out the source of their dysphoria and come up with the best treatment plan for it.
For me to be okay with them transitioning, I would need to feel confident internalized sexism and misogyny had nothing to do with their feelings. So when talking to them, I would listen for any sentiment that sounded like:
”I’m not a girl because I don’t like the color pink, I hate playing with dolls, and I don’t like long hair. I must be a boy because I like to climb trees, I’m rational and smart, and I like getting dirty.”
”I hate having breasts because they make me look like a vapid bimbo. If I were a boy, people wouldn’t sexually objectify me anymore. I could just be myself instead of a walking piece of meat. I wouldn’t have to worry about being raped or groped or stared out when walking down the street.”
”Girls are supposed to be pretty and petite. I’m the completely opposite of that. So I must be a boy.”
“I don’t feel comfortable playing the social role of ‘the girl’. Boys have it so much better because people take them seriously. Boys get to be badass superheroes. Unlike other girls, I’ve never wanted to be the damsel in distress. I must be a boy.”
From what I’ve read about women/girls who have either desisted or detransitioned, internalized misogyny is responsible for driving a lot of them to run away from femaleness. It would be irresponsible of me as a parent not to be concerned about this possibility in my own children. This stuff distorted my own thinking growing up, but fortunately, I didn’t come up in a time when transitioning was a thing. I shudder to think what my life would look like right now if it were.
I’m not aware that the image had been doctored. Regardless, I fail to see how that relates to my post about feeling a certain way about men being in women’s locker rooms and how I don’t think my feelings are baseless, given the reams of evidence proving that men are violent towards women, both in and outside of women’s spaces.
Perhaps we should do a poll so that this conversation is not just about how monstro feels but rather about how the majority of ciswomen in the world feel. I think the majority of ciswomen feel a certain way about men being in women’s locker rooms. I think the majority of ciswomen would have a serious problem if suddenly there was a stigma to talking about their concerns about male predators. I think the majority of ciswomen will have a super serious problem if transwomen are allowed to speak openly and freely about their fears of male predators without anyone suggesting they are hysterical or “baseless”, while ciswomen are expected to swallow their concerns out of consideration for both men and transwomen. I think the majority of ciswomen would see all of that as oppressive bullshit. I think the majority of ciswomen aren’t going to be down for trans rights if support of trans rights requires them to be silent on every single thing that matters to them.
But maybe you are right and I’m wrong. Maybe I’m really the minority view and you guys are the majority.
This is interesting, because I actually try pretty hard not to call my daughter a girl (or my son a boy). I call her a kid, or a child, at least 80% of the time.
Now, yes, she is a girl / juvenile female, and I don’t think it’s wrong to refer to her as such. But I also feel pretty strongly that the word “girl” has a social/political meaning in addition to its biological meaning, and when I call her the word “girl” I am often inadvertently summoning that social/political/cultural meaning in addition to the biological meaning.
It’s not about your feelings, it’s about how society should function. If every woman had your attitude, we wouldn’t have a problem here. But not every woman is you, and a lot of them are not acting out of genuine concerns. I’m curious if you recognize that, and if you do, what you think is the appropriate response to those women?
Girl does have a social meaning. I’m 40-something. I will sometimes refer to myself as a “girl”. I will sometimes refer to my similar-aged friends as “girl”. In this context, “girl” = “informal term of endearment for a person of the female gender.”
There is also squooshiness to “girl”. Most people will see your average 20-something female as a girl. Very few people would seriously describe your average 70-something female that way. So in that way, yeah, it is social term of art. We know a “girl” when we see one but we would be hard pressed to describe the rules and conditions behind it.
But I think YWTF is also correct in that there does appear to be concreteness to “girl” that is missing for “woman” even in PC lexicon. The use of “girls” in Girls and Menstruators strongly suggests that even gender ideologues see the value in keeping the biological definition of “girl”. I’m guessing this is because children don’t always have a gender identity.
It would depend on how they are being unreasonable, right? I mean, if another woman told me they are afraid of transwomen and wish they’d stop being cray, I would try to unpack all of that and try to convince them that most transwomen are just like most anybody else. Good people who are just looking for a safe place to undress or pee.
If they told me they didn’t have a problem with transwomen but they are afraid of the excesses of gender ideology, I would validate those feelings. I’m sure there are women who have unreasonable fears to the excesses of gender ideology as well, but I personally don’t feel vested enough in gender ideology to tell them their fears are unreasonable. So I’d just ignore them or try to change the subject.
As I said in the early days of this thread, I had a real-world conversation about this very topic with a sister of mine (not YWTF). She was concerned that my mother would be weirded out by sharing a locker room with a transwoman. I listened to her and then explained to her why I thought my mother wouldn’t be as weirded out as she imagined she’d be. And I also told her that I doubted my mother would even notice, given the natural tendency of folks to avoid looking at anyone’s naked genitalia when in the locker room.
But if my sister had told me that she was leery about using a locker room where males (trans or not) are allowed? I’ve been in enough therapy to know what an invalidating response would be. An invalidating response would be to tell her she’s being hysterical or needs to get a life. Or that her fears are baseless. So I would stay away from those kind of responses. At a bare minimum, I would say something, “I totally get where you are coming from, sis!” And I’d probably tell her that she has every right to be concerned and that it is totally within her right to avoid that kind of situation, damn what the Judgy McJudgersons say. She doesn’t have the right to be hateful. She doesn’t have the right to tell others how they should feel (without facing consequences). She doesn’t have the right to tell a business that they are oppressive for allowing males in women’s spaces (without facing any consequences). But she has every right to her feelings, because her feelings aren’t baseless given what we know about the world. There are perfectly valid reasons why a woman would not feel comfortable showering with strange males. And I think she deserves a validating response from those who seek to change the status quo, especially if they want her to support those changes.
My point is this: When the responses are overwhelmingly invalidating and no one bothers to consider options that balance transwomen concerns with ciswomen concerns, then the “unreasonable women” will always have a big following. Because they will always be able to point to the toxicity of the discourse as evidence that the discourse is inherently harmful and oppressive. I’ve been convening stakeholder groups long enough to know that this is what all marginalized stakeholders do. And marginalized stakeholders suck because they are notorious for blocking progress, usually right when you think you’ve sealed the deal. So it seems to me if we want progress on the trans rights front, we need to stop elevating some people’s feelings over others and actually consider all the freakin’ sides. Considering all sides doesn’t mean indulging all sides. It just means coming up with options that gives everyone something and doesn’t cave to absolutely everything one side wants.
I think for all of us, there’s a certain amount of extra, non-biological stuff conjured in our minds when “girls” and “women” hit our ears. I don’t think this is problem, in of itself. Like any word that relates to people, our minds color in meaning that goes beyond the literal one.
The problem comes in when someone mentally associates “girl” with sugar and spice and everything nice, and mistakes this mental association with the actual meaning of the word. As if everyone has this very same concept for “girl”. No dude, that’s just you and the baggage you’re putting into the word.
It just feels very much that what you’re arguing for - not what you personally are comfortable with, but where you think society should be on the issue - is very much caving to the side that’s threatened by trans rights, and leaves very little for trans people. I’m a little worried that I’ve asked twice about how we should handle bigotry, and you’ve twice answered by talking about explicitly non-bigoted hypotheticals. As much as you are concerned with misogynists infiltrating the trans rights movement and using it to undermine women’s rights, I think I have a genuine concern about homophobes joining the gender critical movement and using it to undermine queer rights, and I’d like to know what you think is an appropriate way to address this concern.
Do you think creating mixed-sex spaces leaves little for trans people?
It’s possible I’ve missed this, but what have you proposed as a solution?
That may be how you perceive it. But you haven’t convinced me that you’re right and I’m wrong.
Just to review, these are what I’m proffering:
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Allow males to have access to women’s spaces but allow those spaces to be regulated along gender-based norms. Which will likely mean that anyone with a dick would be expected to be more modest than anyone with a vulva (no dick waving allowed in the women’s locker room). Which means anyone with a dick who acts in ways that would be perceived as creepy using the “reasonable woman” standard can be kicked out, no questions asked (i.e., they don’t have actually have to be found guilty in a court of law before they can be kicked out).
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We need more third spaces where sex/gender don’t matter. Having a lot of spaces like this would go a long way to convince everyone that it doesn’t matter if vulva and penis coexist in the same locker room (or whatever) together. But as long as these spaces are rare, then people will continue to feel a certain way over vulvas and penises being in close proximity to each other. (If third spaces aren’t on the table, I won’t be moved from my position that trans activisits are more concerned about subverting the status quo for self-centered reasons than they are about changing it for the betterment of everyone. A person who broadcasts to the world that birth sex/gender is no big deal but who also thinks unisex spaces are undignifying is a person I just can’t listen to).
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We need to make men’s spaces more private and safer. We need to do more to keep male predators out of the general population and stop normalizing their predation.
Explain to me how these options are giving trans people “very little”. I understand that they don’t completely validate any and all gender identities 100% of the time, in 100% of all the ways any rando gender non-conforming individual may want. But along with protections from job and housing discrimination, they do check the “civil rights” box. If implemented successfully, they would allow the vast majority of trans people to live with enough security and dignity that they would be able experience the wonders of gender identity validation in most aspects of life. Just because they might not get that validation in all aspects of life doesn’t mean they are being oppressed. It just means that we can’t always get what we want when what we want will likely cause harm to someone else.
My issue isn’t with anything in those proposals, my issue is that you seem to be approaching the situation with the assumption that some percentage of people on the pro-trans side of the argument have ulterior motives, but that the motives on the other side are based entirely on reasonable concerns. I’m okay with a “reasonable woman” standard in theory, but if I’m to take you as representative of a “reasonable woman,” then I’m concerned that the standard only allows for the interrogation of the motives of one side of the issue. I’m concerned that, if you’re successful in politicizing this issue, you’re going to draw the majority of your support not from liberal feminists, but from religious conservatives, and I don’t trust the definition of “reasonable woman” they would almost certainly employ. I don’t see any particular concern about that from your side of the argument in this thread, and in the wider world, I see prominent gender critical advocates openly working with the worst elements of the political right.
I see signs that a backlash is brewing and it will be so big that trans activists aren’t going to be able to blame it on TERFy women without looking undeniably sexist.
The article below is hinting at a major vulnerability for progressives in November. Nothing the Dems are saying or doing tells me they are reading the room correctly on issues connecting with women’s rights. Y’all best believe the team that is coaching Trump is telling him to exploit the hell out of this issue. It’s probably the only winning card in his hand right now.
As the November election approaches, many are waiting to see whether President Trump will come out in support of protecting sports for girls and women, in opposition to the Democrats’ “gender jackpot” agenda.
Maybe it’s because I’m a cynical person, but I always assume that “some percentage of people” in a particular movement have ulterior motives. I think most people who posit that “anyone who says they are a woman is a woman” are reasonable people who don’t take this statement literally. But it would be super stupid of me to assume that everyone who is pushing this message is reasonable-minded. There’s way too much evidence on the internet showing that there are indeed hateful, toxic people pushing this idea. So to keep these hateful, toxic people from gaining any purchase, hell yeah I’m pushing back on this idea. I’m not pushing back on trans rights, but I am pushing back on an idea that I think is harmful to women–an idea that I don’t think it is inextricably tied to trans rights in the first place.
I think a person can be in support of civil rights for a marginalized, oppressed group while simultaneously recognizing that the group has its extremists who should be ignored.
I’m not politicizing the issue. The issue is inherently political. It’s always been political. And it is impossible for trans rights to move any farther without support all kinds of people, both liberal and conservative. Religious conservatives aren’t always wrong about stuff. Liberal feminists aren’t always right. I find traditional gender notions to be sickening and hateful. But I also find the “biology doesn’t matter” attitude to be naive and harmful. I’m not usually a political moderate, but I guess I am on this topic. I actually think most people are. Maybe one day that won’t be. I think it makes sense to approach things in a moderate fashion until that day arrives.
With the question phrased as it was I’m amazed even 25% of people said yes. But perhaps they were assuming some kind of medical transition rather than simply self-identification.
Is the point of that research to look for wedge issues they can use against Dems in the election? If so the latter definitely seem to be handing the Trumpers ammunition.
That ‘Gender Jackpot’ article made zero sense, though.
That surprises me too, but perhaps it shouldn’t. A lot of men’s rights activists and their sympathizers (incels and MGTOW) are against Title IX and see it as the evil brainchild of a vast feminist conspiracy. These groups don’t care about trans rights; they are just virulently anti-female. Just as they always have been.
So this is the irony: at the same time @Miller is scolding @monstro for supposedly catering to transphobic traditionalists with the views she’s expressed in this thread, full blown “shut up and suck my dick, you bleeding cunt” misogynists are using the trans movement to further their ancient agenda against women. The elephant in the room is that a lot of what trans activists are fighting for is exactly what neo-misogynists have been clamoring for decades. And women are supposed to ignore this coincidence? Just shrug it off? I hope that’s not what is expected of us, because if so, that means there is always going to be an impasse and a whole lot of friction.
The other elephant in the room is that every time JKR tweets, it triggers another outpouring of violent, misogynistic threats. There are only so many “suck my girl dick, you bitch” tweets a person can take in before a certain impression sets in. “These are men” is what that impression says.
Title IX, for those following at home, was recently ruled by SOCAS to protect trans people from gender discrimination, meaning it’s no longer legal in the United States to fire someone for just being trans. Needless to say, support for Title IX is extremely high among trans people and trans rights advocates.
Which, of course, is hardly surprising, as both groups are overwhelmingly feminist.
It’s Title VII and it was ruled that this law protects gays and transgender individuals from sex-based discrimination. Sex is a protected class. Gender identity is not.