OK, sorry I wasnt catching your drift.
It was supposed to be a big all-encompassing "they" covering many years and not something unique to u75.
There are different sorts of concerns about trans issues, ranging from the reasonable to the transphobic, and some awkward blends of both. It seems to be especially bad in the UK. Some very specific schools of radical feminism have given an ideological, campaigning and rhetorical edge to this stuff. Some otherwise opposing interests have aligned, such as some of those particular feminist schools and evangelical religious groups and right wing media, and people who are in no way genuine friends of feminism.
Some are sincere in their beliefs, concerns and priorities, others have figured out that they can use the energy from these issues to further their broader cause. Fears often centre around proposed legislative changes, and how this could affect things such as safe spaces for women. Beyond the very real substance of this issue, others use it as a chance to promote the false narrative that this is and must be an issue of conflicting rights, where one must trump the other, and the others concerns must be marginalised. Attempts to explore the raft of possibilities where trans rights are advanced but where safeguards are very much in place to make sure womens rights and safety are not eroded at all, and are advanced too, are all too infrequent. And people start to assume bad faith at that point, because those who truly care about trans rights but are also quite rightly focussed on womens rights and safe spaces and preventing male violence, should be able to persue the latter without doing such a thoroughly unconvincing job of pretending to actually give a shit about trans rights.
I've seen that last bit play out numerous times. On the personal level, we will get some people saying how bad they feel that a particular trans member of u75 feels so awful by some of the things that are said. They will express sympathy and empathy for that person, but this never actually extends as far as having a decent discussion about how to protect trans rights at times like these. We know that over the last few years it was proposed legislative changes that fuelled a lot of the TERF arguments here and elsewhere. But after a while I picked up on the idea that these people did not just have a problem with the proposed legislation, some of the specific things they were saying were also at odds with the existing rights of trans people in this country. I asked on numerous occasions for them to clarify their support for a raft of existing and possible trans rights, and on almost every occasion they remained silent. Of course this maybe because they did not want to engage with an arsehole such as myself. But it still stands out to me as something distinct from many other more mainstream forms of bigotry, where people who want to avoid being bigots normally have no hesitation in compensating for any particular problem they have with some aspect, by providing many warm reassurances on all the other fronts where, even in their minds, there should not be a conflict of rights.
