Gender Discussion #9

[AnderbeauJohnson]

Ugh - all the simpering replies to this...




I'll tell you what - seeing Stonewall being torn down brick by brick is making my pride month - I've been dreading hearing all the lies spread about historical LGB people, dreading being told repeatedly how wonderful it is to be 'same gender attracted', dreading seeing companies that piss over women's rights to sex-segregated places deck themselves out in rainbows as though lesbians and bisexual women don't exist.

You always hear them say 'pride is a protest' - they're right, and pride month is the perfect time for this protest to be happening.

 

[SqualorVictoria]

I have no interest in hearing anything a TiM has to say about feminism. Unless it's 'feminism is for women so I'll step aside'. They have nothing to teach us. Nothing

 

[emmer_moans]

Maya - “Gender critical beliefs and gender identity beliefs, are both protected under the Equality Act, and so too is the lack of belief. No-one can be forced to profess a belief they do not hold like Transwomen are Women and Transmen are Men and punished if they refuse.”

I now feel I have tangible quotes I can use should my Stonewalled employer start insisting on pronouns and forced participation in beliefs. We can use the quote i typed above from Maya’s video, and we can use the judgement text from the judge himself. A sigh of relief because this means a recent legal precedent has now been set that we can refer to. Let’s hope Marion Miller’s case now gets the same good news, and also for Allison Bailey and other women currently awaiting legal proceedings.

ETA, just seen JKR has retweeted Maya. Wonderful.

 

[colouredlines]

I've lurked on these threads for a while, but I haven't commented before. Like some other people have said, even the act of posting on these threads can feel daunting. Anyway, I saw some familiar people from the Jack Monroe threads, so figured I'd stick my head above the parapet.

Like many of you, I've been quietly watching this gender drama unfold for a few years, feeling wary and confused. And then I saw something fairly recently that really upset me:

There is a woman I vaguely know on my Facebook. She has a lot of MH struggles. She is a chronic oversharer - I know more about her medical conditions than my own. When she was TTC, she would post every time she got her period. You know the type. She is also extremely woke, and loves telling people to educate themselves.

She had two sons and, when pregnant with her third child, posted a lot about wanting a girl. When the scan showed a boy, she made no secret of how upset she was (which...admittedly I am childfree, but this seems like such a hurtful thing to do). She really wanted a girl, but this was to be her last child.

Fast forward a year and her middle son now wears stereotypically girly clothes, uses a gender-neutral nickname, is "they/them" and "still figuring out where they fit on the gender spectrum".

This child is four years old and attending weekly sessions with a gender specialist (they are in the US). Every post about the kid gets so many cheerleading comments.

Honestly, this breaks my heart. I feel so, so sorry for that little boy.

(Unrelated...but one thing I wanted to add, with respect to the HAES discussion upthread. One thing that the FA and TRA crowd have in common is trying to cross sexual boundaries - people who don't want to have sex with some of the worst FAs are always being told to re-educate themselves, just like in the transbian world. Oddly, though, a lot of FA women want to be with tall, conventionally handsome, muscle-bound studs and not obese men, just like the transbians who don't want to be with fellow transbians...)

 

[scot_nursey003]

Has anyone seen that the #dropyourpants smear campaign has been dropped because of widespread backlash against it? Because of the “Pervy” “and sexually violent” overtones! Excellent news!

 

[LaLa247]

It’s incredibly easy to win arguments you’re making up in your head isn’t it?

 

[LaLa247]

This was just a random tweet but I’ve seen many tweets from people like this one who also support self ID for women’s spaces - I just can’t see how these two beliefs are compatible?
It’s scary how little critical thought people will put in to what they’re saying..they’ll just share the accepted thought of the moment.

 

[2020two]

I have contacted RA about their selling Eric Gill, who is well known for documenting the rape of his daughters, other family members and his pets. Rapists are ok, gender critics are banned. Weird. Will anything happen? No. They'll just insist we separate the art from the artist. Either we do that for everyone, or non at all.

 

[sheleg]

I can honestly say that there hasn't been a moment in my life when I haven't immediately known someone's sex on seeing/meeting them, regardless of their "gender". No need to see any genitals (thank goodness). It's always blatantly obvious.

 

[JoeBloggs]

Today while out I noticed a male to female trans person, middles aged and just going about their business looking at clothes. No rainbow, not trying to be obvious or stand out just trying to live their life. They are the trans people I am happy to support. Not this new breed of angry flag worshippers.

I saw a tweet about a teacher who said trans is the new self harm amount teenagers.

 

[judgejohndeed]

Has anyone else seen the Tweets (that stupidly I didn’t screen grab) about how there’s currently nobody in the UK authorised to do ‘bottom surgery’ for I think trans men? I believe someone said something like, there’s ‘only’ 1 million being spent on trans surgery (could even be 10 million - I don’t remember now but don’t want to inflate the claim based on my bad memory). Anyway, over the weekend I saw a Tweet from a woman who is dying of cancer even though there is a drug around that would potentially save her life, and the NHS won’t fund it. To me it seems criminal that any surgery is happening on perfectly healthy tissue because individuals with clear mental health issues demand it, but we won’t fund an expensive drug that might literally save someone’s life. I’m so done with this system.

 

[LaLa247]

I know this is just a stupid tik tok comment but I have to vent somewhere, I’m so fuckinf angry! Just because I am unable to have not own biological children does not make me the same as a man!! I am, always have been and always will be a WOMAN! Fuck them for using infertile women as a shield! She even went on to accuse the other person of misogyny for saying women have babies as ‘not all women can have babies’, you’re the one one who just said I was the same as a person born MALE.

 

[Buswanker]

I am SO glad that I’ve found this thread. I thought that I was the only one who is just completely gobsmacked by it all.

 

[WadieHaddadsChocolates]

View attachment 607111

I'm guessing it was a penis-haver who thought the hashtag #dropyourpants was a great idea

100%.

A significant amount of women avoid smear tests due to embarrassment, fear, pain on previous examinations or cultural issues around exposing yourself to male medics. That laddy 'drop your pants' thing which comes off as a mocking order, will not help.

 

[witchofwestbyfleet]

We don't want to stop you. We just want women to maintain sex-based rights and private, female-only spaces

 

[AnderbeauJohnson]

On the fat positivity movement I'm very split, I think it has good points and bad points.

For reference - I was an underweight child who became obese in my early teens and am still obese (about 8 stone above my ideal BMI weight for height) in my mid-thirties. I've tried every diet imaginable but they all eventually ended in tears with me blaming myself for not being 'strong enough' to stick to them until I ended up diagnosed with binge eating disorder last month and, right now, I'm not yo-yo dieting for the first time in my adult life. I think I've lost a bit of weight from how my clothes are fitting but I'm trying to repair my relationship with food first before focusing on any weight loss.

I spent years hating myself and my body - I wouldn't go out and socialise because I thought everyone would judge me. I wouldn't exercise in public for years because I thought people would comment (once I actually went to a gym not one person said anything negative towards me). I wouldn't date because I couldn't understand why anyone would want to be with me. I wore clothes that I hated because I wanted to hide away from everyone.

That isn't a healthy way to live your life. And if you do want to change your diet/lifestyle doing it from a place of self-hate is, for most people, a lost cause. That's where I think the good side of fat positivity comes in - it tells people to not hide at home and be a hermit, but to go out and live your life, regardless of your weight or body shape, and to wear clothes that you like, even if people see them as 'unflattering'.

If most of your friends/family/colleagues are slim it can also be handy to know people who feel the same way as you do.

Where fat positivity falls down (in my opinion) is the 'crabs in a bucket' mentality - being obese, for many people (including me), physically sucks. Yet when someone in that community wants to lose weight to improve their physical and/or mental health they are ostracised. There are plenty of videos on YouTube of people who lost their entire online support system and all of the people they considered to be their friends literally overnight. I think a lot of the big accounts such as Tess Holliday and Virgie Tovar are still stuck in the high school mentality where they are now the 'popular girls' that they always wanted to be and it is such a catty mindset that a lot of people in the fat positivity movement fall into.

There is also a lot of anti-scientific opinions - for instance, people don't get [insert medical condition] because they're overweight, they get it because people are shaming them for being overweight. There is also an instance that calories in / calories out doesn't work, you'll frequently get people who say 'I ate 500 calories a day for six months and gained weight'... that isn't physically possible. There are medications that can make it harder to lose weight (either physically or through making cravings for food very strong) but if you're in a 2000-2500 calorie deficit for months on end then you're not going to gain weight.

They like to constantly say that '99% of all diets fail' - if you're doing those nonsense things you find in Take a Break that say 'lose 10lbs in 7 days' then of course you're going to gain the weight back afterwards. If, when you've dieted you think 'great, that's over, I'll eat what I was eating before I dieted' then of course you're going to gain the weight back. Unless you have a medical condition, if you are in a calorie deficit over a sustained period of time then you'll eventually lose weight.

Overall I think it started out as a good idea but became very toxic in the end. A lot of people, especially younger women, are potentially going to have untreated eating disorders because they're too worried about being seen as a 'traitor' to seek help. Or because they believe that it isn't physically possible to sustain weight loss and are frequently told that doctors 'are the enemy'

As a side note - if anyone is suffering from general emotional/occasional binge eating,I highly recommend the book Brain Over Binge - I'm part-way through and my symptoms (both bingeing and obsessively thinking about food) are already greatly reduced and reducing further. Obviously different strokes for different folks but I really like it.

 

[2020two]

On the topic of kinks, its pretty telling that the majority of mainstream kinks involve degrading women. And, you know, women are literally dying as a result of men acting out "kinks".

Ugh yep. I was dating a man for a couple of months and randomly one night during sex he decided to choke me. His entire weight was on my neck. I didn't think oh this is kinky! I thought shit am I being murdered? And fought him off as if I was being attacked. He didn't understand why I was crying, he thought women liked it. Porn is selling the idea that women literally enjoy being beaten during sex.

 

[emmer_moans]

I feel a little more emboldened now because as long as I don’t harrass anyone (I wouldn’t anyway of course) I can now avoid submitting to the gender cult at work and can quote the Forstater judgement. I’m not going to go all Terfy at work but I am now less likely to worry at work, and if things come up at work where women need to speak up (re: toilets etc) then I feel if I do it without emotion and stick to fact, it may be okay. I have been terrified of being seen as a transphobe but now I can say, I am protected in my belief that sex matters.

Long story short, I am no longer afraid regarding refusing to put pronouns on everything. I’ll still keep my twitter anonymous because well, there’s still nasty people out there that could try to report me and put me through what the student in Glasgow had to go through. But, I feel a lot of pent up anxiety about it has melted away overnight.

 

[Peachsquish]

 

[2020two]

Slightly OT from what’s being discussed but I feel like this thread has become sort of a safe space to discuss anything feminism (but not that wishy washy kind). I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this lately but I’m so fed up of reading article after article about secondary schools demonising girls uniforms and making out that wearing a skirt is ‘too distracting’ for all the males in the building. Get a bloody grip. Any teacher that is ‘distracted’ by the length of a teenage girls skirt needs sacking and reporting immediately and any boys who can’t control themselves around the female sex need to be put in isolation until they learn basic respect for others.

This has nothing to do with ‘appropriate dress code’ imo, girls have been rolling their school skirts up for literally decades, it’s like how boys often made their ties really short and stubby. It’s just kids pushing boundaries and learning where the line is. Why all of a sudden is the news flooded with articles like this calling for skirts to be banned??? At one point all girls could wear to school was a skirt and now they want to ban them ffs. Leave girls alone. Teach boys not to be pornsick instead. Funnily enough I’m seeing these articles not long after it was revealed that sexual assault is rife in schools, can I smell victim blaming

I was waiting for the tube fairly recently when a group of school girls walked past with short skirts on, not massively short but clearly rolled up. The bloke next to me said to his friend "no wonder girls are raped dressing like that". I did call him out, but it's shocking that people still think this way. Girls are always the scapegoat.