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A handy guide to prepare yourself for the onerous task of handling the inevitable arguments that crop up when men and their blue-haired handmaidens make their bullshit arguments.
- Narcissism is prevalent here. Same rules as always with narcissists. Do not get embroiled in discussion of their identity, their identity is not relevant to you and outside making clear you do not see yourself reflected in their identity it serves no function but to prevent discussion.
- All accusations are admissions. This is a very reliable compass. They will attribute their own motivations and actions to you because their identity is the only thing they can see and they can only see you as a reflection or threat to it. They are accusing themselves. Let them. Loudly.
- Take every word at face value. Do not get dragged into debating it. They say women’s consent doesn’t matter? Take it at face value. They say they have the right to redefine lesbian to include them and they have pushed women to assert their sexual boundaries by misgendering? They are telling you they cannot recognise consent, boundaries, or female sexuality. This is an admission. Not a debate.
- Do not treat a boundary as a negotiation. It is not/. You set the boundary and when they breach it, gaslighting, coercion, threats, you are receiving an admission of how far they will go to cross your boundaries. Take this at face value.
- Do not be derailed from key points or boundaries, and use all admissions made. They will try to derail from the thing that injures them. Usually the reality of their identity and the threat you pose to it. Stick to their behaviour. The words they have used. Do not get embroiled in discussion of their identity. A narcissists identity is always the hill they will die. Accept when they tell you they cannot separate their identity from your reality.
- You do not have to debate being a woman. You are one. Your biology, the inequality you lived, the knowledge you have that came from this. You do not need to debate whether you are a woman. Or their definition of woman. Outside being clear you do not see yourself reflected in them, you do not need to debate this. They do.
- When you are discussing systems and laws that evolved over 70 years to protect women and girls you do not need to centre their identity in that discussion. It is irrelevant to that discussion. Those systems were fought for and created by women you don’t know, they did that so you don’t have to. You do not need to have arguments that are already done and are reflected in equality legislation.
- Do not have arguments you don’t need to have. It is ridiculous to use failure to validate males as an insult. It is ridiculous to treat ‘you didn’t think of males when you thought about inequality so you are a TERF’ as valid. You don’t need to defend the right of women to self assembly without male supervision, it is yours already, they need to explain why they think it should end. If hearing about their male biology is offensive, that is not your fault. They are male. That cannot be altered. You are not required to repeat things you know to be untrue because of the threat of violence and coercion. You are not required to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘nice’ at a cost of your own safety and rights. EVER.
- Do not defend yourself from accusations which are not accusations. It is not an accusation or a crime to refuse to ignore abusive behaviour, it is not an accusation that you didn’t orbit a males identity and validate him.
- Misgendering and transphobia are insults designed to give men the right to abuse women and claim they are being oppressed. Nonsense. Stick to literal meanings, neither of this things is violent, neither metaphorical or literal and neither of these things warrant a violent response.
- Remember what you are responsible for. You are not responsible for managing their well being, not responsible for their threats of violence, not responsible for harm they do themselves or threaten to do themselves to control a situation. You are entitled to boundaries, to define yourself, and anyone threatened by this is telling you something.
- Remember abusive behaviour is well understood. It is always a problem. It is legally and socially unacceptable to subordinate women with abusive behaviour. Nothing in the word trans changes this and any trans women suggesting it does is telling you ‘she’ is an abusive male.
“A brief outline about me and a small list of things people can do to stop this [ideological] trans tide.”
Resource Listing
This incident explicitly shows how transactivism is not only anti-feminist, but anti-woman, and patriarchal to the core. Women don’t move to remove funding for rape crisis centres. Entitled males do.
So, no there will be no catering to your ideology, not after this. Not ever.
Full statement from the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter:
1. On March 14, 2019, at the end of a flawed and unfair process, Vancouver City Council voted to terminate the yearly grant given to us in support of our public education work.
2. Vancouver City Council’s decision is intended to coerce us to change our position and practice of offering some of our core services only to women who are born female. Our organization’s status as an equality-seeking group and our entitlement to serve women who are born female was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 2003, by the British Columbia Court of Appeal in 2005 and by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2007.
3. Vancouver City Council’s attempt to undermine our autonomy as a women’s group — to decide who we serve, who our membership is and who we organize with — also undermines the protections the law has granted us. Such conduct has no place in a democratic society.
4. Vancouver City Council’s decision to cut funding from Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is discriminatory. Many Vancouver City grants are given to organizations that deliver programs and support to specific groups of people such as Aboriginal youth, Chinese seniors, deaf persons and migrant workers. Rightfully, none of these groups have been challenged with the demand that they demonstrate “accommodation, welcomeness and openness to people of all ages, abilities… and ethnicities.” Such a demand of these organizations would be incomprehensible, as it would contradict the essence and purpose of their work. Yet, this is what is being asked of us under the guise of inclusivity.
5. Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is the longest standing rape crisis centre in Canada. Since 1973, our group has responded to close to 46,000 women seeking our support in their escape from male violence. Since we opened our transition house in 1981, we have housed over 3,000 women and over 2,600 children.
The operation of our rape crisis centre and transition house are forms of direct action, developed for women by women in the 1970s as a part of the second wave of the North American women’s movement. More than just providing immediate safety, we offer a place to group, analyze, strategize and fight back against male violence.
6. In addition to our frontline work, we put a substantial effort into public education, as it’s an essential tool for social change. We are intentional in organizing public education events that are free, open and accessible to all.
7. We are also active in national women’s equality reforms. In the past year, we appeared in the Supreme Court of Canada case of the murder of Cindy Gladue; we conducted cross examinations and made oral and written submissions as a party with standing at the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls; and spoke to the House of Commons of Canada and to the Senate of Canada on legislative reforms related violence against women.
8. We have no doubt that people whose behaviour is not consistent with the patriarchal socially imposed definition of manhood or womanhood, including transgender people, suffer discrimination and violence. Transgender people deserve and must live in safety and have the equal rights and opportunities that are promised to us all. When it comes to our services, we have a collective commitment to see to the safety anyone who calls our crisis line, including transgender people.
9. As part of ongoing efforts to discredit us, we were accused that we “do not support sex workers” (including by a Vancouver City Council member on social media).
Our services are available to all women who have experienced male violence. We provide assistance to women and girls in prostitution who have been assaulted by johns, pimps or men pressuring them into prostitution. We provide assistance to women who are currently being prostituted, women who are trying to escape prostitution, and women who have been trafficked into prostitution.
We understand prostitution as sexual exploitation and male violence against women. Prostitution normalizes the subordination of women. It exploits and compounds systemic inequality on the basis of sex, race, poverty, age and disability. Our analysis of prostitution as a harmful patriarchal institution and our commitment to abolition is derived from, and is reinforced by, the prostituted women who call us and the members of our own collective who have exited prostitution.
10. Being born female still means being trained, socialized and forced to submit to male domination. The fact that we are born female and raised as girls to adulthood as women shapes our lives in profound ways.
Male violence against us is a harsh but common experience, and in no way the only one. Our sexuality is controlled and manipulated — whether by punishing women for not being virgins, or by the promotion of pornography and BDSM as liberating expressions of women’s sexuality. Our reproductive ability is controlled and manipulated — whether through forced abortion and sterilization, pressuring women to get pregnant, or forcing women’s pregnancy through rape.
Being girls and women in this world often impacts both how we look and how we act in private and in public; what we are allowed to do, encouraged to do and rewarded for; and also what we are discouraged from doing, prohibited to do or punished for.
And from that place, in a woman-only space, with other women, who have the shared experience of being born without a choice to the oppressed class of women we come together to organize and strategize our resistance and our fight for women’s liberation
Donate to the Vancouver Rape Relief and Woman’s Centre – They stand in the vanguard against the unhinged patriarchal assault on women and deserve our moral and monetary support.
The article here.
We do not yet know what the root causes of gender dysphoria are. But, if having an evidently male or female body causes you extreme discomfort and distress in social situations, then that is good grounds in itself for society to deal with you compassionately and to make accommodation where it can. We must seek to create a compassionate society that welcomes and supports those suffering from the crippling dysphoria that leads them to seek surgery and manipulate their hormones. It is essential that transgender people are able to survive, thrive and function freely in society without fear of discrimination. It is on that footing that we must approach transgender issues.
But tolerance and understanding of the trans experience will fail if they are based on bad and disingenuous interpretations of science. Trans people are perfectly capable of recognising the reality of biological sex, while having difficulty accepting it on a personal basis. Sound arguments for acceptance can be made without twisting and distorting our understanding of the whole of humanity and indeed the natural world – and there are signs of a trans backlash against the excesses and illogic of the genderists.2
While acknowledging the material reality that there are only two sexes, we must reject the traditional sexist view that self-expression, mannerisms, talents, ambitions and roles in life – other than reproduction itself – must be limited by, or linked to, our biological sex. The fact that much of the left unquestioningly accepts and regurgitates an ideology in which the subjective feelings of the individual trump objectively observable conditions is a sign that we have abandoned the physical, material reality on which our politics is based, and replaced it with a subjective individualism that is alien to any class-based analysis.
Sex is still one of the major axes of oppression globally: female foetuses are selectively aborted because of it, women are enslaved and trafficked into prostitution because of it, girls’ genitals are mutilated and sewn together because of it, girls in poverty are denied education because of it. The Chibok schoolgirls were not asked how they identified before being abducted and raped. Without acknowledging the reality of sex, it is impossible to even name sexism, never mind understand or defeat it.
The left must stop pretending that sex neither exists nor matters. The biological woman is not a myth – she is real, she is here – and she is angry.
The funny thing is how crazy funhouse mirror-y this ‘debate’ is. Women have observable, material scientific fact on their side and only now are starting to be hear in the gender debate. Speaks volumes as to how deeply ingrained patriarchy is in our societies and how little attention we pay to the evinced needs of women and how much more attention we will pay to the gender-feels of men.
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