The thing that really gets me is that it will not have the effect of protecting cis-women anyway.
There are a whole lot more women out there with masculine characteristics than there are trans-women. Which means that, for every “male body” you challenge in a women’s space, you are challenging several cis-women who just don’t quite conform to your expectations of gender norms.
So, the way I see it, they hate transgender people so much, they are willing to harm fellow cis-women in order to hurt transwomen. That’s not protecting women.
I note Aspidistra has not yet told me, an old fashioned butch, where I’m supposed to piss. I was born female, I consider myself 100% a woman, most blokes recognise I am not one of them (my wrists being so tiny they make sparrows think their legs are fat are a dead giveaway) and many have reacted badly to my existence so the mens is not an option, it also isn’t where I belong. Women are more likely now than ever to just think I’m a predator with all this ridiculous “men want to rape you in toilets by pretending to be women” bullshit. So where do I get to take a leak? We’ve always been around, we nonfeminine sorts. I don’t want to pass as a fella, it is just if I put on jeans and a tshirt I look different to other women in the same clothing.
I’m not trans, I am just a different sort of woman. Where do I go? How do TERFs resolve this? Am I supposed to drop my dacks to prove I have nothing swinging?
This is comparable to what has been happening with Dave Chappelle. When asked about his jokes about transgender people, his attitude is basically, “No one has it as bad as black people, so I’m not interested in your sob story.”
I’m sorry, but some people just creep me out……and I’m talking about the anti-trans people and the bizarre right-wing obsession with genitalia.
They’re called private parts for a reason, because they’re freaking private. That means none of your goddamned business, unless you’re my doctor or intimate partner.
Whenever I meet or casually encounter another person, I NEVER concern myself with thinking or speculating about their genitalia. I might notice their face, their clothing, their hairstyle and their demeanor and make a determination about their gender presentation, but I’m not side-eyeing their crotch and thinking “Does this person I just met have a dick or a pussy?”, because that would be a psychological invasion of privacy, not to mention seriously creepy. And I find it disturbing that someone I casually encounter might be obsessing about my privates.
And the idea that I am expected to, on demand, verbally reassure some entitled snowflake that I encounter in the ladies room that I do, indeed, have a pussy instead of a dick just so she’s not scared to pee in the same room as me,…while she’s locked inside a freaking cubicle with a deadbolt, no less….just gives me a full-bodied squick.
If that woman asked I wouldn’t tell her, I wouldn’t “reassure” her that I was “female-bodied, I’d tell her my genitals are none of her damn business and that if she can’t accept that, she should just arrange her schedule so she can always pee at home.
I am a cis woman with short hair who’s had bilateral mastectomy without reconstruction. I expect to be challenged in a women-marked restroom at some point, and my response will be to yank up my shirt to show the scars and scream “Cancer! Cancer!”
I’ll also say that I’ve changed clothes in many locker rooms and hostels and by changing my top in a toilet stall or simply turning to the lockers or a corner, have never startled anyone with my breastlessness.
Probably by invoking a fantasy scenario where any other cisgender woman in a restroom who’s worried that you might be a male predator will just politely ask you if you’re female, upon which you will politely respond that yes you are female, and she’ll thank you and that’s the end of the incident.
They may also try to promise you another fantasy scenario where once all those transgender people are put back in their birth-sex-segregated facilities where they belong, all the (cisgender) women will feel lots safer and more trusting of their fellow women and they will stop being so nervous about your unfeminine-looking presence.
Of course, neither of those two scenarios is at all realistic, but that doesn’t mean a TERF won’t believe them.
This is the kind of post that makes me wish the “like” button was enabled on this site. Because he’ll yes. Who goes around staring at other people’s crotches and worries about what’s under their pants.
I suspect we simulposted, you said it much better than I and I wanted to acknowledge that and thank you as one of those put at risk by these irrational philosophies.
The strongest thing I’ve said on the subject of transpeople is that transwomen are behaviourally similar to men and transmen are behaviourally similar to women. Anything else is coming straight out of your imagination.
Ok, I think we’ve reached the point in the thread where I need to wrap this up for a while. I may be back the next time someone posts anything as egregiously oblivious as referring to the rebranding of sex-based groups as self-identified-gender-based groups as a “simple linguistic shift” that nobody need have any concerns about - otherwise, probably when the next unpleasant drop from the Cass Review comes. I expect it to contain quite a lot more information about exactly how harmful gender medicine and gender-affirming “care” has been to many (probably the vast majority) of those children unfortunate enough to have gone through the process, which whistleblowers like Sue Evans have been trying to get action on for nearly two decades.
The problems with the redefinition of man/woman to mean gender identity rather than sex encompasses womens’ safety issues, the right of solely same-sex attracted people (especially women) to be same-sex attracted without harassment (and yes, “cotton ceiling” is harassment, and it’s repellent rapist-rhetoric bollocks) and the right of children to have medicine that is evidence-based rather than ideologically driven.
The issues between feminist groups and trans groups won’t go away until trans groups understand that some of what they want (in particular, gender self-id) completely negates the rights of women to have our own issues addressed politically (Kay Green’s blog has a particularly good timeline of how the conflict has been progressing in the UK, and what the fundamental problems are)
Nobody wants trans people to die, get beaten up, or have to sit in their houses all day. We do want our reasonable concerns to actually be heard and addressed rather than be slammed as bigots for saying that anything at all is damaging in Gender Theory and its implementations, and to actually be able to use language that makes sense to us rather than the frankly weird convolutions of gender-based language.
I think there may, ever, have been sexually predatory males lurking in the women’s toilets. Although honestly, from a predator’s perspective, it doesn’t seem like a productive strategy: there’s the likelihood that women come there too often, so there’s a plural number of women and hence a witness and the prospect of interference in one’s nefarious sexual schemes, and there’s also the likelihood that women come there too seldom, so you spend all day lurking in a women’s bathroom with nothing happening. But ignoring that, yeah, sure, there may have been such.
Would they have in any way benefitted from presenting as female themselves? How? To fool whom? And to what end? I mean, if it’s the kind of women’s bathroom where entrance into them is closely monitored, those are likely to be the ones full of women using the facilities, yes?
I don’t see any net gain for a bathroom-lurking sexual predator to socially position themselves beforehand as a woman. If anyone does, unpack that for me.
But you are willing to passionately and counterfactually advocate for policies that are going to massively increase the likelihood of that happening, and that will not accomplish jack-shit in terms of significantly increasing the safety of cisgender women.
If you advocate policies that will substantially increase the likelihood of a bad outcome while not achieving any other goal, you may not consciously want that bad outcome. You may even sincerely believe that you’re opposed to that bad outcome. But you are nonetheless deliberately and uselessly facilitating that bad outcome, so you bear some of the responsibility for the harm done to its victims.
Bullshit. Acknowledging the right of transgender women to be called women does not intrinsically pose a danger to cisgender women, and your continually repeating that assertion without any evidentiary support does not make it so.
Bullshit. We can stand up for the undeniable right of all cisgender lesbians to be free from harassment in dating whatever women they personally prefer, and politely declining to date whatever women they personally don’t prefer, without denying transgender women the right to be called women.
Bullshit. We can stand up for the right of children to have appropriate medical care (by, you know, leaving those decisions up to the medical professionals, parents and children who actually know what they’re talking about, unlike a bunch of random concern trolls on the internet?) without denying transgender women the right to be called women.
You can get all your reasonable concerns actually heard and addressed, with my blessing and my willing participation, without denying transgender women the right to be called women. Because that transphobic bullshit has fuck-all to do with the actual reasonable part of any of the concerns you’re talking about.
We can see what it is you’re doing, and it’s all just making up feeble excuses to go on denying transgender women the right to be called women. Because punishing and suppressing transgender identity is what your movement is fundamentally about.
Well, the transphobes haven’t been able to rationally or convincingly “unpack” any of their bullshit reasons why allowing transgender women into women’s bathrooms is allegedly increasing danger to cisgender women in the past five or ten years we’ve been having these discussions. So I think you shouldn’t get your hopes up that they’re going to be able to manage it now.
It’s a bullshit claim, made for bullshit transphobic reasons. There you go, unpacking complete.