For some, at least, I think the fear (or even terror), is totally genuine, even though it’s irrational. Just like the fear of black people, or gay people, was (and is) genuine for many.
It’s just so strange to see those that otherwise appeared so liberal and open minded be utterly consumed by this fear, and they can’t see that it’s just the latest version of the same bullshit used against blacks, gays, etc. It should be obvious. Why isn’t it?
Who knows? Hopefully, with that latter, it’s like I said before, and it’s just a case of ignorance, and they can be educated. Hell, we’ve seen it happen with people here on this board before with issues involving LGBT+.
Or maybe it’s because human beings are just a bunch of assholes. The older I get, the more I become convinced it’s true. 
I keep wondering that myself. Hell, we’ve had threads seriously arguing against gay rights little more than a decade ago right here on this board, using the same sort of arguments for their heteronormativity that the transphobes are using now for their cisnormativity. (No poster names quoted, to protect the not-so-innocent.)
Hell again, shortly after that we had a thread seriously arguing against acknowledging adoptive parents by parental titles:
I cannot fathom how transphobes really can’t hear themselves using exactly this same kind of arbitrarily rigid linguistic prescriptivism to make their case against trans rights.
Let us not kid ourselves, while I would say the IQ of the board is above average, the EQ is just as f’ed up as the average cross section of the world. Case in point for all the individuals who were driven off historically by the misogyny and bigotry while their attackers waved the ‘free speech’ and ‘honest debate’ flags.
Something Trump managed to prove to the majority, which had always been known by the various minorities out there, was that a huge segment of the population had never actually changed their attitudes towards ‘the other’ - they had just been forced to stay silent in more public forums for fear of being socially shunned.
They now feel free to hate, be public in their hate, and PROUD of it. And while the slow improvements to the boards rules have forced them to be slightly more circumspect (at the cost of being pushed out), it hasn’t changed who they are and how they feel.
If anything the folks on this board are by virtue of their intellect, a lot BETTER than the average ilk at dressing up their hate or bigotry in fine language and ‘intellectual curiosity’.
It may be a “bend over backwards” reaction, I suppose, but I tend to think there are some who
a) don’t understand;
b) think maybe there’s no there there to understand;
c) like to be snarky
… but are willing to listen if you explain stuff to them so that they can follow it.
Yeah, I don’t think unabashed (or recently de-abashed) bigotry is the whole story. I think there are some people who in the past were genuinely not hateful toward marginalized groups, but at some point for some reason drank the Kool-Aid.
When it comes to TERFs at least, my impression is that they never actually internalized it was wrong to be bigoted in general. They cared about bigotry towards women, and, to a lesser extent, the various minorities. But fear allowed them to stay bigoted towards men. And, since they believe trans women are men, it’s okay to be scared and bigoted towards them.
I’ve definitely encountered people who care about bigotry towards people like them, but not people who are different from them, e.g. the homophobic PoC or the bi-phobic gay people.
I blame that one mostly on the transphobes trying harder. And that is fueled by trans people being more and more normalized, as well as their increased visibility making for an easier target for scapegoating.
TRRFs in particular we’re able to prey on people’s fears, though you also have the “think of the children” conservatives.
Once upon a time, feminism arrived on the scene, and it told of great social wrongs done to female people. There was natural and legitimate anger about that, much of it directed towards men and male behavioral patterns which were part of the oppression.
Among the people who were drawn to it were some who regarded male people as inherently flawed creatures. Inferior, if not by their own male standards, then by the legitimate standards that regard someone who has an inborn need to have power over others, to coerce and dominate and oppress, as morally inferior and therefore flawed creatures.
Not all radical feminists by any means believed anything of the sort; most believed that the system they called patriarchy made these “men” out of male humans, and they didn’t want this fate for their sons and they saw that social systems can be at fault without individual conniving human culprits being the cause of it. But solidarity with other women was the most important principle and they most certainly weren’t going to turn away women who felt like males were inherently oppressors or inherently evil or otherwise suboptimal specimens. The general feeling was that most of them would outgrow it, and, if not, well it wasn’t that important in the overall scheme of things, the males had been misogynistic since forever and sauce for the gander and all that.
So yes, some radical feminists are trans exclusive precisely because they believe any human born male is inherently inferior and unworthy to be among feminist women.
Others are trans exclusive on less hateful grounds: they regard trans women as their equals, as people who are marginalized and subjected to oppression for being trans, but they regard them as people with different personal histories than people born and regarded and treated as female people since birth.
A few who are trans exclusive aren’t even trans exclusive in any fully thought-out way, but they haven’t bothered to learn what trans people’s political issues are and regard it as someone else’s concerns and not relevant to their reasons for coming together as women about women’s concerns.
On balance, the organized voices of feminism are not trans exclusive and the topic is regarded as tiresomely disruptive; what was women’s studies in the 80s is women’s and gender studies in colleges now and it’s considered a settled issue that we’re all in this together and need to listen to each other.
Yup. In fact, at least thrice upon a time, AFAICT.
Agreed, at least so far as I can tell from my limited knowledge. Do you happen to have ideas why it seems to have so much more mainstream acceptance among UK feminists than US ones? I read this article and this one but I’m not sure I detect a consensus there.
No, but I have my suspicions that some deliberate disruption and polarization may have played a role.
Feminists in the UK reported a lot of violence by trans women against trans exclusive feminists. The trans women I’ve known have not been much inclined to go out seeking physical confrontations. I smell a rat. But I definitely have no insider knowledge.
Coming soon to a dystopia near you!
You have been raised up from Patriarchy, to kill the Patriarchs who multiply, and are legion. To this end, Terf, your God, gave you the gift of the Gun.
The Gun is good. The Penis is evil.
The Penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of Patriarchs, as once it was.
But the Gun shoots death and purifies the Earth of the filthy Patriarchy.
Go forth, and kill! Terf has spoken!
It always seemed to me, based on the way you expressed your feelings around sex and gender, that you had come to a pretty healthy place as far as understanding yourself is concerned. That is, you understand that your body is physically male, but also psychologically you feel like you’re more comfortable with feminine stereotypes and archetypes, and you would consider yourself on “team woman”. That’s just based on my memory of other posts you’ve made on this.
The only place we part company on this is that I don’t think that everyone is necessarily measuring themself against the measuring stick of “am I gendering right?” This may be based on my upbringing and sex, somewhat - I had a pretty feminist upbringing and went to an all-girls school, so … not “gendering right” was kind of an aspiration, it was considered GOOD if we didn’t behave in typical female ways. But also I don’t consider either “gender” grouping to have any more intrinsic meaning than other psychologically-based groupings like “geek” or “redneck” … or “American”, actually - your nationality is something many people have a lot of hangups about. “Am I a real American/Aussie/German/etc if I … (fill in the blank - often it’s ‘have parents who are Japanese/Turkish/Bangladeshi’ etc)”. People have feelings about all sorts of aspects of themselves - I don’t want to police those feelings or make people not have them.
That’s somewhat different from the history I’ve heard. The alternate version is that originally all public toilets were men only - the addition of women’s toilets was actually a sign of their greater freedom. This is known as the “urinary leash”
No, you just want to police their capacity for visibly acting on those feelings, up to and including the facilitation of regrettable but necessary physical violence to ensure the variable manifestations of their interiority does not intrude upon your sexist paranoia.
I don’t think those are actually “alternate” versions. I think the article I linked to is correct that the first (US) legislation mandating gender-segregated restrooms pertained to requirements for employers to provide such facilities for their workforce. And I think you are also correct that public restrooms accessible to the general public originally tended to be men-only, or even urinal-only, facilities.
Yup. Facilities for women were a way to keep women in their place. The lack of facilities for women were a way to keep women in their place. All true enough.
But none of it has anything to do with keeping women safe from male predators, as you posited.
(aside)
I always thought that the Zardoz refrain sounded like it would be the motto of an NRA chapter started by McKinnon and Dworkin…
“Keeping women safe from male predators” is emerging ever more clearly as just a feeble excuse and fig leaf for covering up what the “gender critical” movement is really about: namely, attacking and endangering trans people.
I get that many followers of the movement doubtless sincerely believe in that view of their mission, and do not at all want to think of themselves as dangerous bigots. But there is no rational explanation of their positions except by acknowledging that the dangerous bigotry is the real point.
They say they want “male-bodied people” excluded from “female-bodied spaces” in order not to “normalize” the presence of male-appearing people there, since they fear male predators could exploit that acceptance. So, no transgender women in the women’s rooms, because they (or at least some of them) are too male-appearing. Everybody gets sorted by their biological birth sex for sex-segregated spaces.
Consequently, the so-called “female-bodied” transgender men will have to use the women’s rooms, even though a lot of them are much more male-appearing than most transgender women. As Smapti and crowmanyclouds astutely pointed out, a burly mustached transgender guy like Buck Angel is going to “normalize” the presence of male-appearing people in female spaces way more than the average transgender women will.
So what’s going to happen? Male-appearing transgender men in female spaces will be aggressively challenged, policed, harassed and shamed, in the name of women’s need to protect themselves from potential male predators. (Naive types like Aspidistra may imagine that the aggression will stop there as soon as the transgender man politely informs his challengers that his “body is female”, and there won’t be any groups of paranoid women getting violent with a nonthreatening transgender man because they’re afraid he’s a male predator. I think those naive types are seriously deluding themselves.)
Meanwhile, female-appearing transgender women in male spaces will also be aggressively challenged, policed, harassed and shamed, and they will be damn lucky if the aggression ever stops there. Most of them will probably be subjected in at least some cases to severe physical violence.
And it finally dawned on me: for the “gender critical” movement, the anti-transgender aggression is really the whole point.
The policies they say they want are not actually going to have any significant real-world effect in protecting cisgender women from male predators, for the reasons outlined above. However, they are going to have a significant real-world effect in exposing transgender people to aggressive suspicion, intrusive policing, harassment and physical violence, just for their existence as transgender people. That’s not an accident or an unfortunate side effect or unintended “collateral damage”: that’s the ultimate purpose of the policies, to delegitimize transgender identity and go back to pretending it doesn’t exist.
I think it was Noam Chomsky who said something like “if you want to know what people are trying to achieve, look more at what they are achieving than at what they say they intend”. The “gender critical” movement claims to want to defend and protect (cisgender) women from threats, but for that nominal purpose their proposed policies are actually an ineffective incoherent illogical mess. For the purpose of punishing and silencing transgender people, however, their proposed policies are extremely well designed and likely to prove super effective.
So when we wonder what the fuck this apparently gratuitously irrational anti-trans-rights “gender critical” movement is on about, we should keep in mind the real-world outcomes that their desired policies will actually achieve, not just their vague feministy-sounding rhetoric about what they claim to want to achieve.
I also want to challenge the idea that bodies are binary, male or female. In particular, hormones work. The reason Buck Angel looks so very masculine is because he takes testosterone. Similarly, trans women who take hormone blockers (or get castrated) and take estrogen develop many feminine physical traits. Heck, body odor is strongly affected by hormones.
I know one trans woman who used to smell like an unwashed boy, and it was really really hard for me to think of her as female. Then… She did something, and now she presents as female, she looks and smells female, and while you’d probably guess she had a male puberty, you’d also probably guess her sex as female.
Trans people still have evidence of their sex assigned at birth. They need their doctors to know that about them. But their physical sex isn’t just what they were born with, not usually. It’s in-between, and often closer to their gender identity in most ways, in how they come across to others, than it is to their sex assigned at birth.
So talking about where “male bodied” people belong is being blind to reality. At least blind to the reality of trans people.