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It is tough to illustrate sometimes what feminists have to deal with when trying to discuss politics and policies that directly affect them. Here is an example of a correspondence between a feminist and a ‘tech writer for the Atlantic’ on a piece that, when published, amounts to little more than hyperbole and trans-propaganda.
Link to the shite article in question.
On 2020-12-04 18:09, Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote:
thank you for these! To clarify, when I say “hate speech” I’m talking about language that dehumanizes, slanders, or diminishes trans women based on their identity, so for example, in this thread: a trans woman is referred to as a “creature.” I’ve recently seen people joke cruelly about how absurd it is that they’re expected to accept “men in lipstick” as women, and people writing that trans women are mostly “narcissists” or that they’re often “pedophiles.” In the post I already sent you, several women were making fun of the Trans Day of Remembrance, which is an annual observance for trans people who have been murdered in hate crimes.
On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 7:35 PM Mary Kate Fain wrote:
Hey again –
Thanks for providing these examples for context to your question! I think it’s a real stretch to classify any of this as hate speech, though. It’s telling that you’ve not been able to find a single instance of actual expressions of hate, calls for or glorification of violence, threats, organized harassment, or doxxing in the gender-critical online community (all things that women experience online daily). Instead, we’ve got some rowdy feminists making jokes, participating in armchair psychology, and a bit of name-calling that would be considered tame anywhere else on the web. Women put up 1/10th of the fight of men online and we get labeled “hateful”?
Honestly, and I say this with all due respect, the constant classification of feminists’ online participation as “hateful” simply because it is not ladylike, or, more specifically, doesn’t conform to the patriarchy’s current demands, is gaslighting. Patriarchy is what’s hateful. I think you’re scrounging a bit for examples to justify the narrative that you’ve been told and that, to be fair, you’ll have to re-tell or else risk being called “hateful” yourself. I get it. Being canceled isn’t easy.
The truth is, and I think you probably know already this, that there is no way we could disagree with gender ideology nicely enough to be “allowed”. It’s not about our tone, our crude jokes, or schoolyard name-calling. It’s because we disagree with the fundamental premise that a man can become a woman simply because he says so. That is why we are called “hateful”. I know this because I was labeled “hateful” for statements that contained nothing even remotely joking, namecalling, or crude. As was JK Rowling, and as were scores of other women.
The reality is that gender critical women, as a whole, are not hateful. Women as a class pose no genuine risk to men as a class; and women do not replicate patterns of male violence either on or offline at any meaningful scale.
I hope this clears that up, but I’m happy to continue to talk it through if it’s helpful. The topic of free speech and censorship online is obviously very important to me, so I’m grateful for the work you’re doing on this piece to raise the issue.
Have a great weekend,
MK
Go to unherd for the full article. It is brilliant.
“This also might explain some of the utter gender gobbledegook we run about how HRT has taught someone to cry and all categories are porous. Whatever.
As a feminist, I have limited interest in all this, in the holes in which other people do or do not wish to put their bits. Sorry it’s rather dull. I am with Foucault in that I don’t believe sexuality is the essential soul or truth of an individual. My concern with this issue is only to do with the rights of women and the welfare of children.
So much of the discussion is about trans women, but the unhappiness of teenage girls must concern us. We have known since 2017 — earlier in fact — that there has been a huge uptick in female teenagers wanting to transition. Presenting to the Tavistock with self harm, eating disorders or suicidal ideation, these girls may end up on puberty-blocking hormones and then go on to have surgery. And for some of them that indeed may be the right thing to do. For others though, it clearly isn’t and to question that is not anything phobic, it is to care.
Why, as feminists, can we not talk about this epidemic of young women who cannot bear their bodies and the thought of what is happening to them: breasts, periods, unwanted sexual attention, the works? Why can you not be a young butch lesbian these days?
In an ideal world, feelings of masculinity or femininity could be achieved without surgery or hormones that may cause infertility. We are far from such a world and I respect the decisions of adults who go through this long, difficult process in often impossible circumstances. Brave, brave people.
My argument to my newspaper, though, has always been if we don’t have this discussion then the Right will, and indeed that has been the case. The Spectator and the Times have covered stories we haven’t, and I have had to write what I wanted to in the Telegraph. Investigative journalism means going into no-go areas. Why can’t we? The liberal Left looks not virtuous but naïve.
Less sexy subjects such as the appalling low rate for rape convictions, the Covid pandemic causing women to lose jobs and be forced back into the home, the complete lack of childcare… all of these things fall by the wayside when the main discussions of feminism appear to be by men telling us men can just say they’re women and if we say otherwise we deserve all the rape threats we get.
There is no actual interrogation of gender and I say this as someone who has written about and studied this subject for decades. There is a simply a belief system.”
Women are adult human females.
That is all.
Sometimes one doesn’t have time to cut through the academicese to right proper call out the bullshite, the Legal Feminist had the energy and time to do so. A million thanks to her. Here are her words.
[JB] …[W]e can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality…
“In other words, anyone who thinks that it is dangerous to let male-bodied people self-identify into women-only spaces is guilty of a transphobic assumption that all trans women are sex-offending ‘cis’ males in disguise, and their only purpose in entering women’s spaces is to offend. This is a familiar move in the debate: “If you won’t let me into the ladies’ it means you think that because I’m trans I must be a perv! Transphobe!”
But that misses the point. Sorry, I’m going to rant a bit here.
The point is male violence, especially but not exclusively male sexual violence. We don’t want to exclude trans women from the spaces where we are undressed and vulnerable because they are trans, but because they are biologically male. They are members of the half of humanity that poses a far greater threat to women than the other half.
We want to exclude males because we are afraid of them. And we are right to be afraid of them. We don’t want to exclude trans women because we think they are more likely than any other male-bodied person to be violent offenders; but because there is no reason to think they are any less likely to be violent offenders. Men are unwelcome in women-only spaces not because we think all men are sex offenders, but because we know that almost all sex offenders are men.
And remember that we are not just spontaneously afraid! We are taught from early childhood that men are a source of danger. We are told it is our responsibility to keep ourselves safe from the ever-present risk of male violence; with the barely-concealed message that it’s our fault if we fail. We learn to limit our freedoms. We try not to be out alone late at night. We learn to be alert to the possibility of being followed; not to make eye contact; to shut down drunken attempts to chat us up without provoking male rage; to walk in the middle of the road so that it’s harder to ambush us from the shadows; to conduct a lightning risk assessment of every other passenger on the night bus; to clutch our keys in one hand in case we need a weapon; to carry a pepper spray, or a personal alarm. And we learn the hard way that these fears that have been deliberately inculcated in us are justified. We are followed, leered at, flashed, groped, cat-called; and that’s those of us who get off lightly. Every woman has stories of male abuse.
We are systematically trained in fear
And then we are told that we must lay aside, at a moment’s notice, the fears we have so obediently learned as soon as a person with a male body asserts a female identity.
Does this give you any insight into why we are so angry?
Let me make it even plainer. There is an attempt to force male bodies into female spaces where they are not welcome; and when we say “no,” that is met with rage, entitlement, abuse and threats of violence – attempts to overbear our consent by force. There are unmistakable echoes of rape. When it comes to attempts to force women who have asked for a female health care provider to accept a trans woman to undertake an intimate procedure, the echoes become deafening.”
Sara Ditum writes for Unherd on the strange route mainstream feminist politics has taken in the UK. The ‘strange turn’ is also prevalent in Canada as many feminists whose goals include female liberation have found themselves without a political home as the parties that traditionally fought for their rights are now advocating for female erasure in society under the guise of being ‘trans-inclusive’.
Any political party that takes the material conditions of women in society for granted will not get my vote.
“Progressive movements, he argues, are no longer beholden to conventional liberal principles. Instead, they “contain within themselves both reformist and revolutionary tendencies, and progressives regularly move back and forth between the two”. This is, he points out, what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology” – successor, because it is primed to succeed liberalism, although it so far lacks an internal coherence of its own.
So a feminist might ask how self-identification would work in the prison system where vulnerable women need to be protected from predatory male offenders, and the successor ideology response would be that we should abolish the prison-industrial complex, at which point segregation would cease to be an issue. Or, if the issue is how to include trans women in refuges, the successor ideology could answer that the real aim should be ending all male violence rather than just ameliorating its effects — a laudable goal, but a remote one.
It’s a shift to utopianism that evades all responsibility for material conditions in the present, while justifying the removal of rights now as a trade-off against the glorious kingdom to come. Why do you need free speech to talk about sex when you have the post-gender future to look forward to? (Means of reaching the post-gender future remaining very much TBC.) For feminism, which has to be about directly improving women’s lives and prospects if it’s to be about anything at all, this is all deeply unsatisfying. If the Right is able to offer at least a common ground of norms, why not work there?
In any case, the idea that feminism inherently belongs to the Left is — if not false, at least a bit flaky. The suffragists and suffragettes covered a whole range of political opinion with outliers on Left and Right, united by their belief that they should be able to express those opinions at the ballot box. The second wave was galvanised by a split between the women’s movement and the anti-war Left.”
bleatmop
The Intransigent One
Mystro
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