Is this woman a transphobe?

[smokedout]

Are Teuchter’s friends transphobes in your view smokedout ? They’re not much interested in policing women’s physical space, and I don’t think they are all man hating lesbians.
Your caricature just ignores most of the people I think you’re trying to smear.
Maybe the focus on these big names that you allude to a lot (posey jeffreys whatever) is not helping much with understanding what’s really going on, imo, outside of the loudest voices on twitter.

I'm not trying to smear anybody, I was talking explicitly about the gender critical movement, their tactics, motivations and ideology. It may be conveninent for people to frame this as people just asking questions or having concerns with a few extremists who can be handwaved away but the reality is there is a large and well funded movement, with supporters across the seats of power, scouring society looking for anything which makes trans lives easier, or recognises our existence and trying to destroy it - with I should say some success. And every day their rhetoric becomes more extreme and more openly tolerated. Within hours of the Bell verdict Transgender Trend announced they would begin campaigning against trans healthcare for under 25s. There are calls from people judged as soppy moderates by many in the movement such as Woman's Place for bathroom bills and laws that would make the most conservative bible belt republican blush - and they are being listened to. The far right are increasingly turning their attention to trans people, with approval, and even collaboration from some in the GC movement. Conspiracy theories are flourishing and becoming ever more elaborate, trans people are accused of everything from being groomers to homophobes to paedophile enablers to secretly plotting to destroy women and children, and violent right wing men are listening and nodding along plotting. And yet it is the gender critical movement that claims it is being silenced and abused, and that trans people, or 'TRAs', and increasingly anyone who thinks of themselves as Queer, are the aggressors whose so called ideology must be eradicated by any and all means necessary to save womankind.

This is a fucking emergency for trans people. There are trans people leaving the country they are so scared of what might be to come. Everything that trans people have fought for to enable us to live with some dignity and safety now feels under threat. So I make no apologies for discussing the gender critical movement and to claim that doing so is smearing Teuchter’s friends is like complaining someone raising concerns about the organised far right is trying to smear their mate who's just a bit worried about the impact of immigration on the labour market.

 

[bimble]

I get where you’re coming from I do.
I’m not following it at all anymore tbh, because it was -it really was- full of hate (the ‘movement’, the loud ones, online). I’ve got almost nothing in common with the shouting people there. Think the fear of being called a transphobe drives people into the arms of that online extremism, it feeling unsafe to discuss in real life.

Curious as to whether you have thoughts on how come the UK seems to be an outlier, a sort of hotbed of ‘gender critical’ women.
My sort of partner reckons it’s to do with colonialism but I’ve never quite understood what he means. (We do not discuss this ever anymore, it almost split us up).

 

[belboid]

Did that happen? I'm not denying it, btw, just don't think I've heard that particular allegation before. Do you have a source, please?

“Even deep voices, male insignia like baseball caps and boots can make women nervous,” wrote Lee Lakeman, a founder of the centre, in 2006.

Canada's oldest rape crisis centre stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women | The Chronicle Herald (and various other places)

 

[smokedout]

I get where you’re coming from I do.
I’m not following it at all anymore tbh, because it was full of hate and fear (the ‘movement’, online). I’ve got almost nothing in common with the shouting people there.

Curious as to whether you have thoughts on how come the UK seems to be an outlier, a sort of hotbed of ‘gender critical’ women.
My sort of partner reckons it’s to do with colonialism but I’ve never quite understood what he means. We do not discuss this, it almost split us up.

I think it's a lot of things but mostly the monopoly of the right wing media in the UK - once Murdoch and the Mail come for you you're fucked, look what they did to benefit claimants for over a decade. Also perhaps things like personal privacy is culturally more important here than elsewhere, the UK has never had topless beaches, or mixed sex toilets (or saunas!) like some comparable countries do. There is a strong conservative streak in the UK and always has been.

I think there's probably some truth in the idea that colonialism has played a role in forming social attitudes. The British Empire was responsible for the criminalisation of homosexuality in many places and launched a campaign in India to try and drive the Hijra people into extinction.

Years after her murder, the provinces launched a campaign to reduce the number of eunuchs with the objective of gradually causing their "extinction". They were considered a "criminal tribe" under a controversial 1871 law which targeted caste groups considered to be hereditary criminals.
The law armed the police with power of increased surveillance of the community. Police compiled registers of eunuchs with their personal details, often defining "an eunuch as a criminal and sexually deviant person". "Registration was a means of surveillance and also a way to ensure that castration was stamped out and the hijra population was not reproduced," says Dr Hinchy.

Eunuchs were not allowed to wear female clothing and jewellery or perform in public and were threatened with fines or thrown into prison if they did not comply. Police would even cut off their long hair and strip them if they wore female clothing and ornaments. They "experienced police intimidation and coercion, though the patterns of police violence are unclear", says Dr Hinchy.

So it's certainly there in the UK's history, how much that lingers and influences social attitudes today is difficult to untangle.

 

[SpackleFrog]

The goal of most 1970s radical feminists was to destroy the sex class of women not endlessly police the borders. There was a universal recognition that whilst women may have been oppressed due to their physical bodies this was not inevitable and certainly not a natural state. Many believed that womanhood could only be understood in relation to male dominance, that patriarchy invented and policed what a woman was. This famously led Wittig to declare that as a lesbian she was not a woman and her arguing to demolish the sex classification system - a goal shared by Dworkin and Firestone. It is no surprise that most of the surviving women involved in that movement support trans inclusions, it is perfectly inline with the writings and imaginings of most 1970s radical feminists.

As many of it's adherents will angrily point out the gender critical movement is not a feminist movement but a movement which includes feminists. It is a world away in both ideology and goals from radical second wave feminism. It is essentially a conservative doctrine that instead of calling for radical and revolutionary change accepts male violence as a biological inevitability from which women need protection in the form of single sex spaces and that the role of feminism should be to protect those spaces. They are not fighting a class war in the way Firestone understood it with the aim of destroying the sex class system. They are conceding defeat, and accepting society as it is, or as it was before trans people came along and ruined everything.

Thats an interesting point there. I didn't live through the period myself, so I accept its quite possible I'm influenced by the people I see quoting some of these thinkers - not specifically in relation to trans issues but on more general questions of womens oppression.

 

[SpackleFrog]

Not trying to claim superior knowledge due to that just your takes on this are so clumsy and your boots so big that it sort of feels disheartening.

I reckon your boots are bigger and clumsier than you give yourself credit for.

 

[Santino]

“Even deep voices, male insignia like baseball caps and boots can make women nervous,” wrote Lee Lakeman, a founder of the centre, in 2006.

Canada's oldest rape crisis centre stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women | The Chronicle Herald (and various other places)

That's not evidence of what Athos asked about.

 

[Athos]

“Even deep voices, male insignia like baseball caps and boots can make women nervous,” wrote Lee Lakeman, a founder of the centre, in 2006.

Canada's oldest rape crisis centre stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women | The Chronicle Herald (and various other places)

Thanks. But, as far as I can tell, that's not saying they denied access to any females in the basis of a skinhead haircut or DM boots.

 

[bimble]

I think it's a lot of things but mostly the monopoly of the right wing media in the UK - once Murdoch and the Mail come for you you're fucked, look what they did to benefit claimants for over a decade. Also perhaps things like personal privacy is culturally more important here than elsewhere, the UK has never had topless beaches, or mixed sex toilets (or saunas!) like some comparable countries do. There is a strong conservative streak in the UK and always has been.

I think there's probably some truth in the idea that colonialism has played a role in forming social attitudes. The British Empire was responsible for the criminalisation of homosexuality in many places and launched a campaign in India to try and drive the Hijra people into extinction.



So it's certainly there in the UK's history, how much that lingers and influences social attitudes today is difficult to untangle.

I’m just going to plop this here. In another dimension of this website somebody sent me this link, in answer to my question.
And you can listen whilst cooking, no visuals just a nerd.



eta: Whole thing well worth a listen but just go to 26 mins in if you've no time.
It's Thatcher, basically. The resulting class consciousness that she helped foster in her wake and the rocky ground that exists here for simple identity politics given the fact that she did all of that whilst being a woman, is his take. I'm buying it.

 

[belboid]

Thanks. But, as far as I can tell, that's not saying they denied access to any females in the basis of a skinhead haircut or DM boots.

It is, at the ery least, evidence that their 'gender criticalness' is as shallow as fuck

 

[Athos]

It is, at the ery least, evidence that their 'gender criticalness' is as shallow as fuck

Yeah, I think that's a fair criticism. But their purpose is to keep women safe, rather than to critique gender.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

It is, at the ery least, evidence that their 'gender criticalness' is as shallow as fuck

They're a women's collective, going since the 70s to provide shelter for women escaping male violence. They don't exist to provide a stance on gender criticalness. I think that's a clumsy-sounding statement, although it is quoted out of context, but it doesn't come close to demonstrating what you said.

Do you think it is wrong for this collective to be allowed to make its own decision on trans women? I think it is important that they should have the autonomy to make the decision for themselves. The campaign against them, which may see them closed down conceivably, has helped nobody.

 

[bimble]

Do you think it is wrong for this collective to be allowed to make its own decision on trans women?

clearly yes, everybody must agree, basically if a person says they are a woman they're a woman. that's it. Isnt it. Anything diverging from that is bigotry.

eta i'm buggering off again, these threads are so not good for me . have fun all.

 

[belboid]

They're a women's collective, going since the 70s to provide shelter for women escaping male violence. They don't exist to provide a stance on gender criticalness. I think that's a clumsy-sounding statement, although it is quoted out of context, but it doesn't come close to demonstrating what you said.

Do you think it is wrong for this collective to be allowed to make its own decision on trans women? I think it is important that they should have the autonomy to make the decision for themselves. The campaign against them, which may see them closed down conceivably, has helped nobody.

I cba to go over this yet again, so all I'll say is, the woman who said it still plays a leading role, and their leadership is one of the few non-uk womens groups who are active i the 'GC' movement.

Of course they can make their own decisions, but they then have to bear the consequences. Which led to a loss of 3% of their funding from the council and a host of complaints from other organisations (of women & LGBT groups). Doing good things doesn't give them an excuse to behave in an exclusionary way and more than it does, say, the Sally Army. The funding the council would have provided them went to a different organsiation, so that support was still there.

Ohh, and I'll just throw in the other obvious point - any organisation that refuses any men in it are discriminating against those large numbers of women with caring responsibilities. Unless you think it's a good idea to leave male children/dependent adults with an abusive partner.

 

[Border Reiver]

I'm not trying to smear anybody, I was talking explicitly about the gender critical movement, their tactics, motivations and ideology. It may be conveninent for people to frame this as people just asking questions or having concerns with a few extremists who can be handwaved away but the reality is there is a large and well funded movement, with supporters across the seats of power, scouring society looking for anything which makes trans lives easier, or recognises our existence and trying to destroy it - with I should say some success. And every day their rhetoric becomes more extreme and more openly tolerated. Within hours of the Bell verdict Transgender Trend announced they would begin campaigning against trans healthcare for under 25s. There are calls from people judged as soppy moderates by many in the movement such as Woman's Place for bathroom bills and laws that would make the most conservative bible belt republican blush - and they are being listened to. The far right are increasingly turning their attention to trans people, with approval, and even collaboration from some in the GC movement. Conspiracy theories are flourishing and becoming ever more elaborate, trans people are accused of everything from being groomers to homophobes to paedophile enablers to secretly plotting to destroy women and children, and violent right wing men are listening and nodding along plotting. And yet it is the gender critical movement that claims it is being silenced and abused, and that trans people, or 'TRAs', and increasingly anyone who thinks of themselves as Queer, are the aggressors whose so called ideology must be eradicated by any and all means necessary to save womankind.

This is a fucking emergency for trans people. There are trans people leaving the country they are so scared of what might be to come. Everything that trans people have fought for to enable us to live with some dignity and safety now feels under threat. So I make no apologies for discussing the gender critical movement and to claim that doing so is smearing Teuchter’s friends is like complaining someone raising concerns about the organised far right is trying to smear their mate who's just a bit worried about the impact of immigration on the labour market.

I see no chance of legislation being made in England against trans rights. If anything the ratchet is likely to move the other way. There is always Scotland. I expect the recent High Court ruling on hormone blockers to be overturned. Parental consent has already been found to still exist.

 

[Border Reiver]

I think it's a lot of things but mostly the monopoly of the right wing media in the UK - once Murdoch and the Mail come for you you're fucked, look what they did to benefit claimants for over a decade. Also perhaps things like personal privacy is culturally more important here than elsewhere, the UK has never had topless beaches, or mixed sex toilets (or saunas!) like some comparable countries do. There is a strong conservative streak in the UK and always has been.

I think there's probably some truth in the idea that colonialism has played a role in forming social attitudes. The British Empire was responsible for the criminalisation of homosexuality in many places and launched a campaign in India to try and drive the Hijra people into extinction.



So it's certainly there in the UK's history, how much that lingers and influences social attitudes today is difficult to untangle.

The UK has always had nudist beaches. There is no English law against toplessness or public nudity.

 

[Knotted]

I’m just going to plop this here. In another dimension of this website somebody sent me this link, in answer to my question.
And you can listen whilst cooking, no visuals just a nerd.



eta: Whole thing well worth a listen but just go to 26 mins in if you've no time.
It's Thatcher, basically. The resulting class consciousness that she helped foster in her wake and the rocky ground that exists here for simple identity politics given the fact that she did all of that whilst being a woman, is his take. I'm buying it.

I've come across him before. The whole trans rights="self identity essentialism" thing doesn't wash. As he's talking Marxist materialism, he's explaining the real material movement in terms of the (supposed) ideology, which is exactly anti-materialist (at least in Marxist terms). As I was trying to get at above, people explain their reality and desire for change in terms which may well be imperfect, but defeating the ideas ("self identity essentialism") will not change the basis for the movement which in any case has several competing ideas (self identity, performative theory, medicalist ideas etc.). I am aware that elsewhere he is very fussily concerned about defending feminist theory against queer theory, but I don't see feminist ideas about eg. sex and gender as being brittle. They're social/ structural theories that you can ring fence from biological nuances and ideas from queer theory, I think, without much damage to any of these theories. You can allow for a bit of fuzziness in your categories in social theory. Some footnotes may have to be written, and that doesn't seem like a massive problem.

As for the Terf island question. He seems to be just comparing the UK with the US (I haven't watched the whole thing) but in doing so he's more highlighting the US's peculiarities rather than the UK's - that Reagan's neoliberalism wasn't as explicitly class based as Thatcher's. The US's politics revolve heavily around race because of the history. It's odd to claim that the UK is particularly class conscious in a Marxist sense, nice thought, but huh? And I don't see how you go from Marxist (or subconsciously Marxist) to gender critical. Again from a Marxist materialist pov the gender critical movement is not a product of gender critical ideas, it's a product of material interests. Not that I have a good answer to this question.

 

[smokedout]

I’m just going to plop this here. In another dimension of this website somebody sent me this link, in answer to my question.
And you can listen whilst cooking, no visuals just a nerd.



eta: Whole thing well worth a listen but just go to 26 mins in if you've no time.
It's Thatcher, basically. The resulting class consciousness that she helped foster in her wake and the rocky ground that exists here for simple identity politics given the fact that she did all of that whilst being a woman, is his take. I'm buying it.

God he waffles, I can't sit through all that. I think he seems to be saying that the premise of third wave feminism, and by extention post modernism which he presumes created trans inclusive ideas, is equal inclusion of women within power structures but because Thatcher was a woman and wasn't very nice then third wave feminism never took off here. And because Thatcher's legacy was economic and not social (try telling that to LGB people), whereas Reagan's wasn't then this made everyone in the UK much more class conscious and influenced by Marxism which rejects identity politics and so is sceptical of trans people. Sorry but it's ahistorical, dishonest, garbled nonsense which seems to be more a clumsy attempt to smear trans people from the left by associating them with Thatcher than it is an attempt at meaningful analysis.

 

[smokedout]

Apologies to Knotted who managed a much more decent critique than I could be bothered with that I hadn't read when I posted.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

Ohh, and I'll just throw in the other obvious point - any organisation that refuses any men in it are discriminating against those large numbers of women with caring responsibilities. Unless you think it's a good idea to leave male children/dependent adults with an abusive partner.

There's always been a debate in women's refuges about how to cope with boys/young men. It's not easy to make decisions and you can be criticised whatever way you go, on theoretical, practical and legal grounds. It strikes me that firstly, this is a diversion (not unheard of, tbf), secondly, that any such decisions should belong to those running and living in the refuges, and thirdly, any such decisions should not be subject to change on any kind of regular basis, otherwise no-one will know where they stand and they could spend all their time debating the issue.

 

[Knotted]

Apologies to Knotted who managed a much more decent critique than I could be bothered with that I hadn't read when I posted.

Thanks. No worries.

 

[SpackleFrog]

clearly yes, everybody must agree, basically if a person says they are a woman they're a woman. that's it. Isnt it. Anything diverging from that is bigotry.

I don't know why you didn't just say that in the first place.

 

[hitmouse]

Curious as to whether you have thoughts on how come the UK seems to be an outlier, a sort of hotbed of ‘gender critical’ women.

My working hypothesis is because this hell island is under some kind of a curse, because that's how I explain most things about the UK, tbh. I'd guess that some of it is due to the closed nature of the British media/establishment, meaning that once people get entrenched as, say, the media's go-to voice of British feminism they're quite hard to shift? Guessing you must have seen that Sophie Lewis article from a few years back, which I don't think is that great but kind of has a go at trying to provide an explanation? This tries to cover the history as well. Again, I'm not actually a huge fan of the podcast and have only listened to a few episodes, but there's a show called Blood and Terf that covers this territory a lot, here's an episode they did on "the long march through the institutions". In either that episode or a different one they talk about an article covering this history, but I can't find it now and I didn't really think it was a great article anyway,

 

[ska invita]

My working hypothesis is because this hell island is under some kind of a curse, because that's how I explain most things about the UK, tbh.

I reckon most things can be traced to Restoration | English history [1660]

 

[19force8]

What kills me is how some parts of the left in the UK have gone full transphobe, eg the morning star.

 

[Spanner]

What kills me is how some parts of the left in the UK have gone full transphobe, eg the morning star.

Not sure one unauthorised and quickly unpublished cartoon equals “gone full transphobe”

 

[SpackleFrog]

Not sure one unauthorised and quickly unpublished cartoon equals “gone full transphobe”

 

[bmd]

That's not evidence of what Athos asked about.

Has Athos ever talked about anything with a genuine desire for knowledge? I honestly haven't seen that. All I've seen is a shit-stirring cunt.

 

[bmd]

You can't 'simply' identify into womanhood though. The process takes two years and because of people like you the changes to the Gender Recognition Act have been dropped so you will also need to provide medical evidence of gender dysphoria and be signed off by a doctor. Which is what all this is actually about remember - that despite a government consultation that showed 80% of people support removing the requirement for medical evidence to transition, we continue to demand trans people provide medical evidence.

Eddie Izzard is hardly a representative example, is she? And in any case she's quite clear that she wants to be treated as a woman from now on - not to switch between boy and girl mode as you claim. Eddie Izzard: Comedian and actor opts to use pronouns 'she' and 'her'

There are trans people and there are non-binary people but there are not people demanding to be allowed to switch gender on a whim as you claim.



Again, this is a complete fabrication. There are no serious left wing people considering voting Tory; that's completely oxymoronic.

This is the problem, all of it, that I have with Trans people. I am a natural born man. I was seen as a male from that moment and treated as such. The external view of me has moulded me just as much, if not more tbh, than my own view of me. I was expected to be a male. To act like one. To eat like one. To walk like one and on and on.

Trans people, do what you want, call yourself what you want. I really have no problem with that. But it's your lived experience that sets you apart from me as a man and my sister as woman. Yes, that very probably is totally shit for you. I don't want it to be but I can't change the reality and neither can you just by saying some words.

 

[krtek a houby]

How do natural born males (aren't all males born "naturally" or with medical assistance) act, eat and walk, in general?