In exceptional circumstances
Even people who aren’t 100% “trans women are the most oppressed ever and you have to give them whatever they demand” are still desperately cautious about how much they’ll let women keep. Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian for instance:
When Nandy told a recent hustings that “trans women are women” there were whoops of delight. But ask around for women feeling alienated from Labour over this issue and they’re easily found.
Some are survivors of domestic violence who resent being told to “educate yourself”. Others are bewildered that decades of loyally knocking on doors seemingly hasn’t earned them the right to be heard. They long to hear someone defend what is still Labour’s official policy: promoting trans equality but defending powers in equality law that let organisations exclude trans women from all-female spaces in exceptional circumstances.
In exceptional circumstances? Women’s organizations should be required to include men (who say they are women) unless the circumstances are exceptional? We can’t just have women’s organizations as a matter of routine, because women need to organize and we have a right to organize as women? Being able to say men aren’t invited isn’t allowed unless we have a damn good reason, with other people deciding what “damn good” means?
That’s like saying labor unions have to include bosses in ordinary circumstances. It’s like saying LG organizations have to include straight people unless they have a damn good reason not to. It’s like saying women don’t have a right to organize, basically.
Yet it’s still not too late to find common ground. No compassionate human being should want a woman who has been raped or brutalised to feel traumatised all over again by sharing counselling or refuge services with someone they perceive as a threat. Even a person who poses no danger whatsoever can inadvertently frighten a traumatised person, if something about them – a sound, a scent, a habit – triggers flashbacks. But nobody should want trans people to feel unsafe or cast out, and barring a trans woman from women’s services seems the cruellest of personal repudiations.
No, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I can think of much crueller ones. It seems at most disappointing for men who want to be accepted as women. Women need women’s services in a way that men don’t, even men who say they are women. Being a man who thinks of himself as a woman is not the same kind of thing as being a woman, and all this pressure to pretend it is is just more oppression and I’m sick of it.
Some refuges have now accepted trans women (excellent risk assessment helps, and careful laying out of accommodation). Some schools absorb gender-questioning pupils without fuss; teens queue happily for mixed Topshop changing rooms; and with time, maybe we’ll wonder why unisex loos were ever an issue.
Because by then men will have stopped raping and molesting and spying on women? Hahaha that’s funny, of course not. So why then? No reason, just a pious hope that ignores the reality of being (not pretending to be) a woman.
If transwomen accepted that they weren’t a kind of woman, but a kind of man, then compromise would at least be possible. Reasonable lines could be drawn, particularly regarding transwomen who had undergone surgery and hormone therapy.
But if, instead of classifying themselves with gay men, they classify themselves with black women, disabled women, and red-haired women — while insisting that ‘gender identity’ alone is sufficient to be a woman — then every line and limitation will look like bigotry and prejudice. The ideology makes even “exceptional circumstances” too much for them to bear. It erases them and denies their existence, overblown assertions which bring up images of Nazi death camps and slavery. They’re not going to compromise. Hinsliff is fooling herself.
Imagine an immigrant support organisation being made to also support locals in all but exceptional circumstances. Imagine a diabetes support organisation being made to also support non-diabetics in all but exceptional circumstances. Imagine a ‘locals against fracking’ organisation being made to also support locals for fracking.
Imagine an organisation organised around [thing] being made to also support [not that thing] in all but exceptional circumstances. It would undermine the entire point of the thing.
Respected women politicians in the SNP who are bringing up their concerns about the Gender Recognition Act get vile abuse from some other SNP activists. The activists are known to the party but not dealt with.
“Much of this might appear to the world that exists outside the political bubble as angels dancing on the head of a pin. I was pleased more than I ought to be last year when I spelled out the meaning of the word TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) to my pro-indy, radical-feminist, cool-for-cats daughters. If this pair don’t know what it means then the vast majority of population won’t either.
This is how trans extremists want it to be. They are keen to have this legislation signed off before the rest of the population wakes up to the reality that women’s safe spaces have been legislated out of existence.
It also explains the viciousness directed at people like Joan McAlpine and Joanna Cherry who are merely trying to alert other women to this peril. ”
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18237953.kevin-mckenna-snps-female-talent-deserves-better-trans-warrior-abuse/?ref=fbshr&fbclid=IwAR0GWzzTUpTcLSHiFE090ayf77qsGciDKadJlMlxUNzHvXd2C6wc3vXvRhs
Comments under the Sunday Herald’s articles are usually people entrenched on one side or other of the indy debate abusing each other. However this one is from people who are scratching their heads and asking what’s this about? while others explain self-identification and the difference between sex and gender.
So the stand that the women are taking is getting people more informed about the issue.
Women-who-want-to-be-men are probably no threat to men. Men-who-want-to-be-women are seen with reasonable justification as a threat to women; and women understandably do not like to be threatened.
Men-who-want-to-be-women have to face the fact that our species sexual dimorphism works in their favour, and if they compete against women in sports and other physical competition, they have a considerable natural advantage.
Why this sexual dimorphism is so pronounced in humans is an interesting evolutionary question.
But in any case, I suggest that the whole issue will be resolved the day following the murder or injury of a genuine woman in a womens’ toilet, changeroom or whatever females only space, by a man-who-wants-to-be-a-woman.
Then men-who-want-to-be-women will find themselves increasingly shunned by both sexes, and will either have to campaign for facilities for men-who-wish-they-were-women separate from both male and female ones, or make arrangements of their own, such as carrying a hot water bottle in a backpack, and relieving themselves into it whenever necessary in whatever privacy they can organise. Or (shock horror!) using male dunnies.
I speak as a father of two daughters, and grandfather of one granddaughter.
The rest is bullshit.
Quite a good essay by Hinslip – nicely hitting some highpoints, amusingly characterizing the “collective struggle” as “People’s Front of Judea stuff”. Certainly the whole issue bears the hallmarks of “The Rape of the Lock”, and the Lilliputian civil war over soft-boiled eggs.
But profoundly depressing too as Labour seems to have been set the Herculean task of squaring the circle, of endorsing the transdogma that “transwomen are women!”, of asserting that black is white. Rather like Ignatius Loyola asserting that “if [the Church] shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black.” Maybe Labour will be luckier than the Catholic Church in clasping such vipers to its bosom, though I rather doubt it.
And I think we should make no mistake that that battle is largely, as Jane Clare Jones amusingly put it in an essay of hers that you reviewed recently, “a bun-fight over some mythical essence of womanhood”. For which many TRAs and gender-criticals might be equally faulted, although the former more so than the latter. Somewhat apropos of, Sahar Sadjadi in their “Deep in the Brain: Identity and Authenticity in Pediatric Gender Transition” [Journal of Cultural Anthropology], noted the “merging of science, magic, and religion in explaining children’s gender transition”.
Sad state of affairs.
Omar #4 wrote:
No it won’t. They’ll say it wasn’t a real transwoman, or an isolated incident, or they’ll point to the specific problems of that specific individual and argue that no group, ever, is without bad apples. And they’d be right.
Besides, there’s already documentation of abuse:
http://womanmeanssomething.com/violencedatabase/
Most feminists argue that the real concern isn’t over transgender women being violent or abusive themselves, but that once men who identify as women are allowed in the restrooms, there is no way to keep any man out. There are transwomen who do not pass as women; there are transwomen with penises; there are transwomen with beards; there are transwomen who wear men’s clothing. We’re not supposed to make a distinction because that’s “transphobic.” Any law which makes any distinction between those variations to let in some but not others will be argued against because the explanation for what makes a natal male a woman is internal.
From what I’ve read on various GC websites, most incidents in women’s bathrooms gone gender-neutral involve creepy men peering through the stalls, hanging around the sinks with clothing removed, striking up conversations on intimate topics, and so forth. These usually aren’t reported to the police, especially if young girls or teens are involved. What the creepazoids look for is plausible deniability: if someone calls them out they can look confused and harmless. No they didn’t. They just wanted to pee. They’re a woman. Are you transphobic?
‘But in any case, I suggest that the whole issue will be resolved the day following the murder or injury of a genuine woman in a womens’ toilet, changeroom or whatever females only space, by a man-who-wants-to-be-a-woman.’
I don’t think there’s been a murder, but there have been at least a few injuries. Here’s the most recent I’ve read about:
https://www.womenarehuman.com/man-transsexual-arrested-for-assault-on-pregnant-woman-in-restroom/
Samuel Johnson, thank you for mentioning the Sahar Sadjadi paper. I found it online and am reading it now.
“Deep in the Brain: Identity and Authenticity in Pediatric Gender Transition”
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.14506/ca34.1.10
I was told at my school that if I wanted to start a woman’s caucus in the Faculty Senate to study and address the issues of women on campus, I would have to make it open to men, which would, of course, include those who are the biggest problems for women on campus.
And our multicultural club has to allow anyone to join, which would be okay, except the thing seems to be turning pretty much white, which makes me wonder which of the white folks decided to go all “multicultural” – probably those who don’t want the others around, would be my guess.
And Campus Crusade was told they would have to allow people of any religion, as was our Freethinker’s Club, even if the Christians decided to swamp the club, elect themselves to office, and turn it into another Christian evangelical club.
Lady Mondegreen #8:
De nada; share the wealth, praise the lord and pass the ammunition. :-)
But quite an impressive and well-evidenced essay by Sadjadi, though I sure don’t follow it all, nor have I even read all of it to the depth it probably deserves. A very complex and murky topic, and not at all easy to see to the heart of it. Of maybe some relevance, and likely to provide a bit of illumination, is an Atlantic essay from 2000, “A New Way to Be Mad”, which draws some parallels with those who seem rather desperate in wanting to amputate various limbs:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/
But one of the threads that Sadjadi emphasizes and that seems reasonably clear is, within the transgenderist point of view, the “cultural privileging of the internal and rejection of the external”.
However, where I think Sadjadi is barking up the wrong tree, though they have plenty of company, is in not realizing that the terminology we use to define and describe various states and categories – “male” and “female”, in particular – is entirely a matter of consensus, entirely an “external” agreement, though generally based on solid facts, among the community as to what various words actually mean. And in which case, any “internal” claim to the same words is literally meaningless, and should be given very short shrift indeed.