Web of confusion
Y?CA Scotland.
First: “We refer to our primary audience as self-identifying young women and girls.” Why self-identifying? Why not just young women and girls? Silly question. Because that would be transphobic. It has to be a matter of opinion rather than a matter of fact, because otherwise it’s exclooosionary.
But the YWCA has always been for young women and girls, just as the YMCA has always been for young men and boys. They’ve never been the YSIWCA ad YSIMCA. It was always an objective observable fact, not a self-identifying mental state. Why change it? To appease people who go off like sirens if they’re not appeased.
And then, not satisfied with having already given away the W to people who call themselves women, they do it all over again but worded differently. Their audience is inclooosive of people of marginalised genders – which are who now? Plural marginalised genders? What are we talking about? How do we know? Why is the fog so thick? And “who feel comfortable in a space that centres the experience of young women and girls” – but you’ve just revealed that you don’t center the experiences of young women and girls. You’ve just announced that you think of girl-being as a matter of self-identifying rather than fact or body, so you don’t center the experiences of young women and girls, you center the experiences of people who tell you they think of themselves as women or girls.
You can’t do both. You can’t insist that being female is a matter of “identifying as” and still pretend you center the experience of female people.
“Young self-identifying man or marginalized gender, there’s no need to be down, I said young self-identifying man or marginalized gender person, pick yourself off the ground…”
From the popular Village People song, YSIMCA.
Heh I had that song in my head the whole time.
Figured as much.
I suspect the “marginalized gender” people are the non-binaries and other they/thems. We wouldn’t want them to feel left out (insert a rolling eye emoji here). The trans “women/girls” are obviously included in with the actual women/girls; to do otherwise would be genocide.
Okay, but why would a non-binary feel comfortable in a place that centered young women and girls? They aren’t women or girls; they aren’t men or boys. They exist in some sort of snowflake unicorn limbo between them, refusing to acknowledge having either gender. If they are neither, then the YWCA is not for them. The YMCA isn’t, either. They should start up a YNB+CA.
That sounds like way too much work. Far better to leech off the YWCA while whining about the injustice of their special unicornitude going unrecognized.
Not centering the actual women and girls… centering their *experiences*. Which men who imagine themselves to be women and men who imagine themselves above all the rest of us both want to hear about, because otherwise how could they repeat those experiences to claim them as their own?
*shudder* ugh scratch the touchy-feely kumbaya veneer and the guts underneath are all just creepy gaslighting and gross voyeurism :-/
I’ll bet the TiMs attending would be some pissed off it it ended up being all TiMs and only TiMs in attendence. I think that’s why they insist on having it both ways. They need women and girls there to validate them, to show everyone they’re just “one of the girls.” They can’t do that if it’s a total TiM sausage fest. Then they’d be being ghettoized, and they’d have to find some group with actual validating females in it so they could join. Again. Any exclusively TiM accomodation (which you’d think they’d be happy with) denies them the validation that
sharingexropriating women’s facilities and resources they crave. A sporting event made up entirely of TiMs would be a complete failure. They’d just be competing against other cheats. Where’s the fun (or validation) in that?As much as they’d hate to admit it, they need women present. Women are the secret ingedient that they can’t do without because TiMs can’t validate each other. It doesn’t work that way. How many “trans lesbians” date other “trans lesbians”? The “cotton ceiling” doesn’t refer to TiMs. Why is that? Without actual lesbians in the mix, any TiM is just a heterosexual male, and they know it. It’s really quite a bind they’ve put themselves into, and they’re doing their damnedest to use women to get themselves out of it. But there’s no resolving this inherent contradiction, especially when gatekeeping women “withhold” the validation that TiMs so desperately need. Why can’t women just shut up and be kind?
It’s just like the attempted hostile takeover of the word “woman.” Changing the meaning of the word “woman” so that it includes men destroys the meaning they’re so desperate to latch onto. If women abandoned the word and took up a new one for themselves, TiMs would come around to appropriate that new word too. They can’t be their “true selves” without women being forced to accept them as women. It’s like TiMs are trying to extract some sort of stamp of authenticity from the women they’re forcing themselves on. It’s sick and twisted. Just as TiMs reject third spaces for toilet facilities, open categories in sports, trans exclusive rape crisis accomodations and counselling, they demand access to women’s spaces and, ironically, women’s approval. Anything else marks them out as not being women, which of course, they’re not. I can’t but imagine that helplessness in the face of this insurmountable contradiction must fuel some of their anger.
Women who refuse to submit quietly underline the fundamental untruth and delusion behind gender ideology and its demands. Without women, any gathering of TiMs is just a bunch of guys in dresses. Women are the needed, forced audience. It’s no fun if you’re not transgressing anything or anyone. Who do you lord it over and demand “centering” from if not women? Being given your own facilities robs you of the validation that using women’s facilities supplies you with. Third spaces will never be acceptable because they’re transphobic, cutting you off from the women’s spaces you need and deserve. If women pack up their tent and leave, you will follow them, because like it or not, you need them. Women are the fact that won’t go away, and that you can’t let escape.
Maybe it varies by region, but our local YMCA long ago dropped all men/boys orientation and is now for everybody, so we men have already lost. ;-) Weirdly they are still officially (in their web page “about” section and in some of their literature) a Christian group, but in practice they ignore that as well.
The unfortunate problem with the YWCA is that women, especially young women, are some of the most pro-trans-“rights” people around, so women-led groups are (on the whole) the first and most eager to open their doors to transwomen. If it were just men oppressing women, then the problem would have a straightforward solution (women running their own groups), but when most women are on the pro-trans side, what can women do?
There’s a guy who goes by “Billboard Chris” on Twitter who wears a sandwich board with messages like “no kid is born in the wrong body” and “children cannot consent to puberty blockers” and travels around protesting various trans policies and issues. I don’t agree with a lot of his conservative views, but it is interesting to read descriptions and see videos of confrontations he has. Aside from trans people themselves, the people most likely to march up to him, start an argument, and refuse to listen to any counter arguments are overwhelmingly young women. He frequently comments on the demographics:
https://twitter.com/BillboardChris/status/1632490266077835264
Snowflake Unicorn Limbo should be the name of something. A gathering place – bar, coffee shop, pizza parlor, whatever. Or it could be a dance.
We need a physics Nobel Prize for the first to mathematical describe this quantum
member state. Shroedingers’ Gender.
Schroedinger had to deal with only two states: alive or dead. The determination of gender identity has a number of potential states in the scores, and is growing. That’s a lot of superposition going on. What’s more, the vast majority of these identities remain completely indeterminable however many observations are made. Consequently, it’s likely these calculations are going to use a lot of imaginary numbers. Given that so many of these states are themselves completely imaginary, that makes perfect sense.
We’re going to need a bigger blackboard.
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