Gender Discussion #66

[bluecups]

The thing that tipped me into full blown terfdom was this, I'll try and keep it succinct.

My best friend for 20 yrs was a man who was awkward around women (he only ever had one girlfriend in the whole time I knew him), very gentle and sensitive. Or so I thought.

In 2017 I, my sister and him went on a caravan holiday. When he was elsewhere, my sister said "So how long has XXXX been wearing ladies' underwear?" I was gobsmacked, this was news to me. She had caught a glimpse of him getting changed in the awning wearing full, frilly lingerie, stockings, the lot.

I kept a lid on my emotions till we got home and then confronted him. I said what he did privately was up to him but that it was wildly inappropriate to bring his perversions on that holiday. I was fuming and told him to leave me alone for a few days whilst I calmed down and then we'd talk.

I'll never forget his response - "Sorry, can't do that. You will talk to me". I immediately got a bad feeling in my stomach.

He then proceeded to stalk and harrass me for two and a half years.

He set up dozens of social media accounts and email addresses to harrass me, left numerous gifts, cards, flowers and letters at my house. His emails and messages could switch from "You're the best friend I ever had, I love you and I'm sorry" to "I hate you, you evil cunt, I hope you die a painful death alone" in the space of an hour. He threatened to kill himself if I didn't speak to hm. He harrassed my family and friends.

I moved 70 miles away (not just because of this tbf) and he found out where I lived and threatened to move there saying "I'll find you and I'm dangerous because I have nothing to lose".

In one of his rambling emails he said, tellingly, that he thought was a lesbian trapped in a man's body and that women had always rejected him so he wanted to dress up as one as a fuck you to women who blanked him and that it was the only way he'd get his hands on/in women's underwear.

It was absolutely terrifying. My sweet, gentle almost asexual friend was actually a perverted, monstrous, deranged incel autogynephiliac man who had hidden his true character from me for twenty years. I was enraged and heartbroken in equal measure. We had never had a single cross word or disagreement in those two decades. He properly switched on me, it was like living in a parallel universe.

In the end I got someone to have a word in his ear (I'll say no more than that) and he finally left me alone. To this day I have no social media accounts in my name and I'm only ever two metres from a weapon in my (extremely secure) home.

He made sure I couldn't go to the police as my closest female friend grew and sold weed and he said if I did he'd grass her up.

These freaks walk amongst us. I am now extremely distrustful of anyone. If my best friend of 20 years could do this to me, who the hell can I trust?

He knew my views on trannies which is probably why he never told me. But this absolutely tipped me into complete terfdom. These men are bitter, dangerous and they hate women.

Sorry for the long post.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

 

[Brian Butterfield]

Morning!

 

[Tofino]

View attachment 2986028

The removal of the spousal veto makes me incredibly angry because anyone should be able to divorce anyone for any reason they want. Including ‘partner has changed gender’.

 

[mozzarellagirl]

Translation - "I fantasise about teenage girls"


View attachment 2992008

I am so disgusted by this.

Being a teenage girl in this world is fucking hell, school as a teenage girl is hell, being around boys and men as a teenage girl is hell. First relationships for teenage girls usually involve some form of emotional abuse/ sexual assault / cohercion . Prom is utterly anxiety including, the pressure to look perfect and beautiful and asked to prom by a boy is hell. Experiencing your formative years a girl in this world is HELL.

The privilege boys have in their childhood and teenage years is infinite. No chains, no punishment for being male. This MAN had that freedom and those privileges and he’s whinging about some pedalo fantasy of what a teenage girl is. Let me guess, sleepovers wearing only knickers that have pillow fights that end in kissing and scissoring?

There’s not such thing as ‘femininity’, it’s a patriarchal trap made by men. There’s no such thing as failing at it because it isn’t real. Imagine thinking teenage girls could “fail” at that. Imagine thinking femininity is synonymous with teenage girls… outed.

He is not homesick, because you can’t be sick for a home that is NOT YOURS to begin with.

Back the fuck up. Pathetic ugly scrote.

 

[Metropolis]

Fetish Week is coming up. Part of Pride apparently.

I don’t get why parading fetishes is part of pride. It’s about sexual orientation not about showing people what you like wearing for sexual activities.

 

[Scotch Mist]

JK Rowling, June 21 2024, The Times

On Thursday evening, I went to the best book launch I’ve ever attended, and I’m including all of the Harry Potter launches, crazily memorable though those were. This one took place in a large, old, wood-panelled room in the middle of Edinburgh, and the evening was so warm the windows were open, so we could hear the distant strains of bagpipes from the Royal Mile.

I’d arrived straight off a plane from London, and when I got into the room I thought “damn, of course,” because most of the women there were wearing the suffragette colours: green, purple and white, and I was head to toe in black jumper and trousers, like a mime, which was ironic given what we were there to celebrate.

This was a belated, post-publication party for The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, the book of essays to which I contributed, and which came out last month. “Wheesht” is a Scots injunction to be quiet: “haud your wheesht” means “hush!”

The book has contributions from 30 or so problematic Scottish females who didn’t agree with the former first minister Nicola Sturgeon’s vision of a country where a man could become a woman simply by declaring himself one.

Among the writers were politicians, journalists, activists and policy analysts. However, many contributors have no public profile. Some had written their essays anonymously.

I can’t use the word “ordinary” for the latter women, because they’re about as far from “ordinary” as you can get. These are the women who risked (and in some cases, lost) their livelihoods by standing up against an ideology embraced by Scottish politicians, state institutions and by the police.

These supposedly ordinary women fought because they could see no alternative but to fight: for other vulnerable women and girls, for single-sex spaces, for the right to speak about our own bodies as we please, and to retain the ability to call a man as a man, without which no analysis or activism around sex-based issues and inequalities is possible.

There were speeches, a lot of cake and laughter, hugs for those who’d never met in person, and a feeling of delight and celebration that the book had been such an unexpected success (it caught the publisher off guard, as he admitted at the party; there have been several reprints already).

The women there were so funny, so brave, so determined; I don’t think I’ve ever felt as much solidarity in a room, a solidarity that stretched across party divides. I still felt elated and inspired when I got home.

On entering my sitting room, I found my husband watching the leaders’ debate on TV and I reached the sofa just in time to hear from another woman who didn’t fancy hauding her wheesht.

“Three years ago,” the woman in the studio audience said to Keir Starmer, “you criticised your MP Rosie Duffield for saying ‘only women have a cervix’. You recently backtracked on this. What do you believe now, and how do we know that you will stick to your views?” Ah, Cervixgate. I remember it well. It was September 2021 and I was sitting at my kitchen table reading over the chapter I’d finished the day before. The TV was on in the background, my husband was making toast, and I thought I must have misheard what the Labour leader had just said, so I reached for the remote. I rewound the programme and replayed his answer, then rewound and replayed it again.

I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, you see. I’ve been a Labour voter, a member (no longer), donor (not recently) and campaigner (ditto) all my adult life. I want to see an end to this long stretch of chaotic and often calamitous Tory rule. I want to want to vote Labour. But I hadn’t heard Starmer wrongly. When asked whether he agreed with Rosie Duffield that “only women have a cervix”, he’d responded, “well, it is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.”

If you’d catapulted me forwards in time from 1997, the year Labour last succeeded in ending a long stretch of Tory rule, and told me their male leader would appear live on television, dictating what women were allowed to say about their own reproductive systems, I’d have had no frame of reference by which to understand what would have seemed an utterance of outright lunacy.

Unfortunately, by 2021, Starmer’s answer had to be seen in the context of a Labour Party that not merely saw the rights of women as disposable, but struggled to say what a woman was at all.

Take Anneliese Dodds, the shadow secretary for women and equalities, who, when asked what a woman is, said, it “depends on what the context is”. Take Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary: “I’m not going to get into rabbit holes on this”; Stella Creasy, Labour candidate for Walthamstow: “Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes … But they are now women and I respect that”; Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney-general: “Women who are trans deserve to be recognised, and yes — therefore some of them will have penises. Frankly, I’m not looking up their skirts, I don’t care.” Dawn Butler, the former MP for Brent Central, actually announced on TV that “a child is born without sex at the beginning” (I choose to believe she meant the lesser of two insanities here: a sex, not that children really are delivered by stork.)

Some of this is almost funny, but loses its humour when real-world consequences of gender ideology arise. When asked whether violent sex offenders who transition should be rehoused in women’s prisons, Lisa Nandy, the shadow secretary for international development, said: “I think trans women are women, I think trans men are men, so I think they should be in the prison of their choosing.”

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the candidate for Salford, said female victims of male violence shouldn’t use their trauma “as an argument to discriminate against trans people” and vowed to change laws to stop women’s refuges excluding men who identify as women.

David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, called women like me “dinosaurs hoarding rights”. Lammy, too, has form on the vexed question of cervixes: “A cervix, I understand, is something you can have following various procedures and hormone treatments.” It’s very hard not to suspect that some of these men don’t know what a cervix is, but consider it too unimportant to Google.

So, there I was, on the edge of my sofa seat on Thursday night, waiting to hear Starmer clarify his views on an issue that places many left-leaning women on the spectrum between anger and disgust at his party’s embrace of gender identity ideology. Did he still maintain that women and cervixes ought not to be mentioned together?

“On the biology,” Starmer began, “I agree with what Tony Blair said the other day, in relation to men having penises and women having vaginas.”

“So you’ve changed your position?” asked the moderator. “On the biology,” emphasised Starmer, leaving the impression that until Tony Blair sat him down for a chat, he’d never understood how he and his wife had come to produce children.

“That doesn’t help on the gender… some people don’t identify with the gender they’re born into …”

And off we meandered into the familiar trans activist talking points where so many Labour frontbenchers appear to feel most comfortable: “… my view in life is to give respect and dignity to everyone, whatever their position. And I was worried at the time, you referenced that particular debate [when Rosie Duffield stated biological facts], by the way in which the debate was being conducted, because it got very toxic, very divided, very hard line …”

In the interests of full transparency, I should say that Rosie Duffield’s a friend of mine. We’d probably have been friends no matter where or how we’d met, but we found each other as part of a group of women fighting to retain women’s rights.

She and I share more than the occasional meal and a fairly sweary WhatsApp thread. Last month, a man received a suspended prison sentence for sending both of us death threats. Rosie was to be taken out with a gun; I was to be beaten to death with a hammer. The level of threats Rosie has received is such that she’s had to hire personal security and was recently advised not to conduct in-person hustings.

Is this what Starmer meant, when he talked about toxic, divided debate? A female MP in his own party being intimidated and harassed? Or was he referencing the activists in black masks who turn up at women’s demonstrations with the declared intention of punching “Terfs”, an intention that has more than once translated into action? Was he perhaps thinking of the trans activists who sang “f*** you” over a microphone as women from all over the world queued outside FiLia, the feminist conference, to discuss issues like female genital mutilation? It didn’t seem so.

The impression given by Starmer at Thursday’s debate was that there had been something unkind, something toxic, something hard line in Rosie’s words, even though almost identical words had sounded perfectly reasonable when spoken by Blair.

It seems Rosie has received literally no support from Starmer over the threats and abuse, some of which has originated from within the Labour Party itself, and has had a severe, measurable impact on her life.

But she fights on, like all the women at the book launch, because she feels she has no choice. Like me, she believes the stakes are too high to walk away.

For left-leaning women like us, this isn’t, and never has been, about trans people enjoying the rights of every other citizen, and being free to present and identify however they wish.

This is about the right of women and girls to assert their boundaries. It’s about freedom of speech and observable truth. It’s about waiting, with dwindling hope, for the left to wake up to the fact that its lazy embrace of a quasi-religious ideology is having calamitous consequences.

Two hours before I watched Starmer fail, yet again, to get off the fence he’s so reluctant to stop straddling, I met the woman who wrote what I think all contributors would agree is the most important chapter in The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht. It’s called A Hashtag is Born. The writer coined the phrase “women won’t wheesht”, which has now been taken up as a feminist battle cry in Scotland and beyond.

She wrote anonymously about being smeared as a bigot and a transphobe for wanting female-only intimate care for her beautiful learning-disabled daughter (I know her daughter’s beautiful, because I met her, too). In part, this mother wrote: “The material reality of a man is not changed by how he perceives himself, and telling vulnerable women and girls to ignore their own discomfort to accommodate a man’s perception of himself, is gaslighting.”

I cannot vote for any politician who takes issue with that mother’s words.

If you choose to prevaricate and patronise rather than address her concerns, if you continue to insist that the most vulnerable must embrace your luxury beliefs, no matter the cost to themselves, I don’t trust your judgment and I have a poor opinion of your character.

An independent candidate is standing in my constituency who’s campaigning to clarify the Equality Act.

Perhaps that’s where my X will have to go on July 4. As long as Labour remains dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to retain the rights their foremothers thought were won for all time, I’ll struggle to support them. The women who wouldn’t wheesht didn’t leave Labour. Labour abandoned them.

Source: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politic...like-me-ill-struggle-to-vote-for-it-rrgbcrkd6

 

[holliebollie]

I had a conversation with my manager the other day (she has two daughters) and she said, ‘I kind of get what you’re saying but what about if someone REEEEEEAAAALLLY believes they’re a woman?’ I asked if she would be happy with her girls going to guides and having a ‘woman’ aka a man in a dress sleeping over in the dorms. She said they usually have two members of staff so she wouldn’t mind. I asked what happens if both are actually men?
I find it so hard to remain calm in these situations. It was also two of them against me. Both said they agreed no men in women’s sports. I said, ‘how can you know there is enough of a difference in men and women to not want men in women’s sports, but not worried about men in women’s spaces??’ I even asked her how these men ‘really’ think they’re women when they have no idea what being a woman is like, and never will. I said I would start identifying as Chinese and just use all the old stereotypes. Would people love me or think I’m a racist twat like they did Rachel Dolezal?? Maybe it just gave her something to consider

 

[ButtonDownTheHutches]

and what qualifies it to have that status? It's a wall...

It’s a … trans wall? Or something?

Edit: I’ve got it! It’s a STONEWALL!!!

 

[Justhereforthedrama]

the actual gall of it.
This transitioning bloke has been taking hormones for 18 months and he comes on to a women’s group and mansplains shaving your legs to them.
Absolutely mental.

 

[nothanksbabes]

Here we go again. Let’s try and destroy another woman’s legacy by retrospectively claiming she was trans. Fucksake
Bloody nonsense

"Reactions to the Brontes' use of androdgogy tell us how gender was viewed at the time"

No, they tell us how WOMEN were viewed at the time.

Women used male aliases then with the same motivation some women declare them selves "non binary" now - because to be female is to be less than, and to be male is to be human.

Women aren't seen as fully human in patriarchy - that we might want to escape that by whatever means possible (spoiler - it's not actually possible) is a symptom of misogyny and fuck all to do with anyone's navel-gazing idea of gender identity.

 

[Also_smoke_and_mirrors]

I have been travelling over the last few days with a wheelchair user. The irony of being surrounded by flags and warm messages about how everyone’s important/equality for all when train companies are bloody hopeless at access requirements - ramps are missing, lifts aren’t working, the wheelchair space is next to the loo and full of luggage - just makes me want to scream.

Anyone who is LGB or even T and thinks big business cares is an idiot.

As is Emma fucking Bunton

This is exactly what I said a few threads back. Our office was told we should put our pronouns in our email signatures to be inclusive (no one has put they. The ones who have done it have used the pronoun you would have automatically assumed from their name or profile pic) but the same office has had a lift out of order so 3 people with differing disabilities or medical conditions have had to work on ground floor by themselves as they can't get up to 4th floor to join in with our team meetings. They just join via zoom and someone has their laptop in the meeting and zooms them when the meeting starts. Inclusive in a way that benefits no one, but exclusive in a way that discriminates 3 members of staff.

 

[TheMiceInTheShed]

It isn't "kind" to tell children that they can change sex.

It isn't "kind" to mutilate healthy children's bodies.

It isn't "kind" to allow women and children to be placed in danger to placate perverted and violent men.

It isn't "kind" to take away the hard-fought-for protections that women need and deserve.

It isn't "kind"to turn half of the population into doormats for the other half.

You can stick "be kind".

 

[Tofino]

Just seen

Exeter Uni lecturers 'pressured' to sign 'anti-transphobia pledges'

Lecturers at a top university say they've been 'pressured' into signing anti-transphobia pledges and declaring their pronouns.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Imagine where the world would be if all these people and organisations put the same effort into standing up to violence against women and girls as they do for making sure men in dresses feel validated and can play out the fetishes publicly.

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

I have been travelling over the last few days with a wheelchair user. The irony of being surrounded by flags and warm messages about how everyone’s important/equality for all when train companies are bloody hopeless at access requirements - ramps are missing, lifts aren’t working, the wheelchair space is next to the loo and full of luggage - just makes me want to scream.

Anyone who is LGB or even T and thinks big business cares is an idiot.

As is Emma fucking Bunton

 

[Mugglewump]

I can safely say my armpits have never smelled like vagina.

 

[TooFarScone]

Lots of young women claiming to be non-binary are having their healthy breasts removed (which makes 0 sense), so no, non binary isn’t harmless.

Isn't it strange how non-binary females must have their breasts removed but non-binary males keep their cocks.

 

[Peachsquish]

 

[GinaAllenso]

I stumbled across this thread and I'm so glad I did! It's very refreshing to feel less alone in this crazy world. Sometimes I feel like the majority are in agreement with all this trans indoctrination, but it's good to see so many people feel the same way I do. The icing on the cake for me was when they tried to suggest that not only 'women' suffer from cervical cancer. I can't believe this is out there being promoted. I have a 3 year old daughter and it breaks my heart thinking of this messed up world she is going to grow up in.

 

[bluecups]

Translation - "I fantasise about teenage girls"

 

[Badirene]

I have never understood the need for Pride acceptance propaganda to be everywhere - why does your local cafe, high street or M&S need to support LGBTQ++? Surely they support everyone?
I don't see 'Older people welcome here' or 'We support our disabled customers' signage everywhere - but I see Pride propaganda - so does that mean they don't support other marginalised people?

If companies started supporting the elderly or disabled they would need to spend serious money on making premises accessible for those communities. It's easier and cheaper to throw up a few flags and tell everyone you are inclusive. So no, those organizations don't support those communities as it costs them. All this literal flag flying is cynical nonsense by corporations and ego inflation by those that hijacked pride.

We have a small town here in Ireland that went "inclusive" by making the zebra crossings into pride flags, Yeah Inclusive! Except nobody considered that the visually impaired that need guide dogs cannot use these crossings as guide dogs cannot see the various colours and are not trained to cross them. So "inclusion" meant visually impaired people cannot access certain places and their world is shrunk even smaller. But who cares about that as long as Brian, pronouns she/them/fuckwit feels centered.