Misogyny and other gender issues. - The Bear and Badger

nick_md

Yeah it seemed like such a nothing interview.

LivDiv

I kinda feel like that in general with Newsnight.
The segments are all too short for any form of in depth discussion and for the most the guests arent interested in discussion either, just shouting their views.

Then it is on to something else before the viewer has time to really absorb what they have watched.

It is all react, react, react.

Matt_82

If there is a useful or even just interesting debate on transgender stuff it won't be on Newsnight and it won't come from Linehan.

mistercrayon

Can anyone explain this?

https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/1229479868011864065?s=20

Deputy Labour leader candidate Dawn Butler says that a child isn’t born with a sex?

It feels like people are so worried about being cancelled that they bury themselves way deep into the ideology? And then say blunderous things that feel like they fit in the ideology even though they seem ridiculous?

I think there is a mix of vulnerability and an instinct of the precariousness of the statements that are made that causes such an intense feeling (In the way a pub man will shout you down because they’ve lost the argument in reality).

Diluted Dante

I think shes just mixed up her words. I'd need more than that 10 second clip, but I suspect its that Madely is asserting that people are defined by their genitals and Butler is saying they are not.

RedDave2

I get quite confused by this to be honest and I'm always interested to read how the moe enlightened of you guys (and I mean that sincerely) post on this thing. I have tried to read up but I get a bit lost in the battle between pro and con sides. Neutral positions tend to be heavy in biology.

My god daughter is a bit unusual in that she sometimes feels more like a boy but I do wonder is this more down to how society tries to gender things anyway. Its confusing for an adult, and really confusing for a 9 year old.

nick_md

Surely she meant gender not sex, I think the operation is still referred to as SRS, sexual reassignment surgery. Sounds like just a brain fart but yeah, would need to see more of the interview.

Armitage_Shankburn

nick_md wrote:

Surely she meant gender not sex, I think the operation is still referred to as SRS, sexual reassignment surgery. Sounds like just a brain fart but yeah, would need to see more of the interview.

What a mistake though..that is a fundamental one.

Funkstain

I don’t think I’m enlightened, but I do think that people can decide to be whatever the fuck they want to be as long as it doesn’t cause harm to others, and this bizarre weirdly conservative need to impress “traditional views”, whatever the fuck they are, on people who’ve made different choices is awful.

There are proper discussions to be had - like is there an actual problem with men identifying as women purely to use female safe spaces, or is that an overstated hysteria used by weirdly controlling preachy identity fundamentalists - and confusing gender identity with sex at birth is just another dumb politician fluffing her lines. At least she’s trying to say “look let people be what they wanna be”

Funkstain

I always try and figure out what interest these people have in telling people how to live their lives, and dismiss people’s views as “woke” or SJWs or snowflakes or apache helicopters and I always always conclude they are cunts

RedDave2

I'll throw one out here, as I had not considered it really, but it ties in with should ones choice be free of implications on others.

I was talking to my mum and aunt about how I'd love to make all the bathrooms in the restaurant unisex and just have cubicles. At present we have 2 urinals, cubicle for men, and 3 cubicles for women. Due to space the handicap toilet is in the women's which is an issue but a rare one.

Both women said they would hate to see this become standard and I asked why. Simply put, they felt that the women's toilets in large areas is not just a bathroom but a whole social area for women. Specifically free from men. To lose that, especially in areas like pubs, would be a real lose. We then discussed the gender thing and what if someone identifies as female. While they supported this person's right to choose, they didn't want it to eman they would lose something from society that they felt vital to the social scene. (I think similar has been discussed before here).

So while we, for the most part I think, all agree that people should be allowed identify as what they like, it's glaring when it will have a knock on effect to the gender which has already suffered quite a bit (and still continues to)

Funkstain

There are very interesting discussions to be had about what it means to be a woman: can a trans woman really “understand what it means” to be a woman, experientially; are there criteria or judgements covering exactly what is needed to accept a trans woman in safe spaces like pub loos, etc. Not something for me really, I’m not a woman.

I was ranting about the state of public discourse on the matter which is mostly a vile joke

mistercrayon

the problem is different people want to live their lives differently in the same space and neither group is the er “normal” one.

The other problem is that it is an already historically oppressed class (women) that seem to have their right taken away in the quest for facile progressiveness (even the ability to say “ffuck this shit” without so much as an argument but rote ideology). It seems casually easy to trample on a class of people who have had to fight to get equal rights to men for over a hundred years. It seems to me women have entered this weird space that they are not majority enough to get implicitly equal treatment in society to men but are majority enough to have any rights they’ve earned to be traded as sacrificial.

GooberTheHat

Funkstain wrote:

I always try and figure out what interest these people have in telling people how to live their lives, and dismiss people’s views as “woke” or SJWs or snowflakes or apache helicopters and I always always conclude they are cunts

Or they're trying to create an out group that they can drum up support to rally against. Why people fall for it I don't know. That doesn't preclude the cunt moniker though obvs.

RedDave2

Funkstain wrote:

I was ranting about the state of public discourse on the matter which is mostly a vile joke

Totally, and it becomes very hard to cut through the black and white sides approach to find the grey of the issue (if that makes sense). Its not a problem specific to this issue, so many things seem to be approached in an 'Us' vs 'Them' approach but in this case I'm genuinely a bit lost as to how this can be approached in a way that screw one side of the debate over.

I've never bought into the idea that a man would legally pretend to identify as female just to get into the womens toilets but when Women say that they wouldnt be comfortable with that situation, its a bit different to a man saying it. Men havent been oppressed in the same way.

* I realise I'm verging very close to sounding like Graham Linehan but to be clear, my main issue with GL was his tone and viciousness in his comments. There is a degree of merit in some of what he says regarding children. And in saying that I dont fully agree with him. Fuck, see? complex to discuss this without feeling you are offending someone.

Diluted Dante

The thing, is, requiring people to use the toilets that match their birth sex means that you are forcing transmen in to womens toilets.

What do you think is more likely, a cis man legally changing gender to access womens toilets, or a cis man just saying he is a trans man to access womens toilets? How comfortable would women be with someone with a big bushy beard being in the womens bogs?

Funkstain

mistercrayon wrote:

the problem is different people want to live their lives differently in the same space and neither group is the er “normal” one. The other problem is that it is an already historically oppressed class (women) that seem to have their right taken away in the quest for facile progressiveness (even the ability to say “ffuck this shit” without so much as an argument but rote ideology). It seems casually easy to trample on a class of people who have had to fight to get equal rights to men for over a hundred years. It seems to me women have entered this weird space that they are not majority enough to get implicitly equal treatment in society to men but are majority enough to have any rights they’ve earned to be traded as sacrificial.

Not all of this makes any sense, but the bits that I'm taking from it are:

1) why does giving a trans woman the right to identify and live as a woman have any negative impact on the rights of other women, besides the aforementioned safe spaces?

2) what impact on er "normal" people does it have if there is a trans person in the same space as them (again other than traditionally safe spaces)?

3) why does the women's liberation and feminism movements have to "compete" with other equality movements? Or why are they being trampled? It seems to me that there is a LOT of noise from those who feel that there's a lot more to do before every trans woman is allowed unfettered access to spaces reserved for women - it's all I read about, because it's a critical conversation to have and sort out?

Armitage_Shankburn

Biological women want their own spaces. They are mistrustful of men. They have grown up being hit, deceived, tricked and all sorts of stuff. None of this is trans people's fault. It's men's. It's shocking so many men are eager to call these lifelong egalitarians transphobes, while they live the life of Riley, getting their dick out at the urinal, not a care in the world.

All this debate needs is some empathy, not joining camps or worse, voyeurism.

cockbeard

I'm not sure I'd be described by anyone as enlightened, but I do have a lot of friends who have at different times felt uncomfortable enough in their own body that they've asked their friends to treat them as if their body was different. In more recent years a few that have taken that further to undergo gender reassignment treatments and/or surgery

Gender assigned bathrooms are bullshit, and recent bullshit at that. The fact that we grow up without nudity and feel so much shame around the body and sex is probably a contributory factor in the amount of people who don't want their body, a thing as simple as separating nudity from sex (thanks Page 3) would be useful there, but it culturally several decades too late, a lot to change now. The idea that a female bathroom is a "safe space" is ridiculous, the amount of sex and drugs I've had in female toilets is more than enough. There should be no safe spaces, because there should be no unsafe spaces, but that is something that men need to explore

Anecdotal, but most people I've seen who went down the reassignment path, whether that's through other peoples perceptions, hormones, or surgery, started down that path through a sense of shame about their own sexuality. That is a crying shame, I can fuck and be fucked by whoever I wish (informed consent permitting) and I should never feel shameful about it, only if I lied or coerced someone should I feel shame

cockbeard

Basically what Gnozo said, but maybe with a little less shame

GurtTractor

I listened to this the other day, there was talk of how we might make progress with this kind of thing (Identity, Stories, and Cosmopolitanism) -

Thankfully there is a transcript available so I don't have to try and find and paraphrase the relevant bits -

0:17:43 SC: Yeah. And I like your definition because it highlights the extent to which the identity is not simply from within ourselves, it’s so shaped by how we interact with the rest of the world and how they interact with us. In fact, sometimes identities are sort of forged by common enemies in some way.

0:18:00 KA: Yes, yes. I mean, Charles Taylor says that they’re dialogical. I like that word because if you’re… Part of what that means is that if you’re going to change them or shift them around, you’ve got to get everybody on board. And it may be that you might have a view that the insider’s views about how things, how a certain identity should work, should be given extra weight, but in general identity is a part of a system of identities. And so, everybody has a stake in it. You can’t change what it means to be a woman and just leave what it is to be a man completely free-floatingly independently intact.

0:18:37 SC: When you draw a boundary, it separates two things.

0:18:39 KA: Yes, it separates two things. And so, the agreements about where the boundary lies are obviously required, as it were, the consent of all parties or at least they’re only going to be settled if you can get the consent of all parties. And certainly the meanings of these things. There are socially available meanings when, you know, if you’re a parent and you have a male child and a female child, the way in which their gender identities are available to them is going to depend on more than just what you think and more than what they come to think, it’s going to depend on how people in the world think about those things and different people in the world may think differently. It’s very much a matter, I think of it is as something that inevitably involves negotiation and perhaps compromise because a change in the system that is very good for some people maybe, may actually take something away from other people.

0:19:35 KA: Now, it may be, as in the case of the changes in the gender system produced by the kind of feminism that goes back to John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft, those changes took away some things, some privileges from men, and a jolly good thing too. I mean, so sometimes what’s taken away from people they weren’t entitled to, but still, they lost something. And so you had to, to make it really work, you had to get them on board. And I think this is something that I feel is a little bit missing in the discussions about trans issues is the recognition that it is an issue for cis people as well as trans people. And that though the system needs to be changed in ways that will allow trans people better lives, they can’t do it without bringing the rest of us along. And that means they have to make arguments, they can’t just declare things, and they have to help us understand what it is they want, not just be annoyed with us for not understanding it, and so on.

0:20:40 KA: Now, I mean, I agree with the main thrust of what they’re up to, but I think sometimes people behave as if the resistance that comes to what they want is… It may be unreasonable, but it’s not… It comes from a place of people genuinely having a stake in the cis-trans system. And therefore, having I think the right to participate in trying to understand what’s going on.

0:21:03 SC: Well, and this is one of the issues that inevitably comes up when one such group, one such identity, has been historically discriminated against. There are things that they want and they’re a little bit impatient. And one can forgive them for being impatient, right?

0:21:19 KA: No, no. They should be in a hurry.

0:21:19 SC: Maybe they don’t want to sit and listen to detailed arguments one way or the other, or even, let me put it even more strongly than that. They can see what one person sees as a dispassionate philosophical argument one way or the other as an attack on who they are.

0:21:34 KA: Yes, and they do, and it may be. But what I was arguing, I suppose, is that you can’t always get what you want.

0:21:47 SC: Yeah, no, I agree, yeah.

0:21:48 KA: And that you have to… Look, it’s a very interesting thing how… I think young people, people in their teens and 20s today may have a hard time understanding why lesbian and gay people in the ’50s and ’60s, and maybe before, were not just mad at their families, and not just angry with them all the time. And kind of saying, “Take it or leave it. This is who I am.” But that is what happened. People negotiated with their families and when their families reacted badly to coming out, they didn’t stomp out of the room and leave. They stuck around and patiently… Well, this is a sort of an average story. There are lots of stories away from the mode. But I think, what works, it turns out, isn’t insisting immediately on getting your rights, even though they are your rights. What works is a little bit of patience and working with people to get them to see what is… What may be difficult for them to see because… And is too easy perhaps for you to see because you are living it. You’re living a trans identity and…

0:23:17 SC: It’s clear to you.

0:23:18 KA: It’s clear to you what’s going on. I think another thing to be said is that the negotiation isn’t just with cis people. It’s not as if all trans people have the same views about everything…

0:23:29 SC: They’re not, right. Or all…

0:23:29 KA: Just any more than gay people or black or white people or anybody, Catholics. People have disagreements within the tribe. And again, you can declare somebody to be doing the wrong thing as far as the tribe goes, but that isn’t the way of persuading anybody, simply stipulating that they’re misbehaving and that black people shouldn’t do that or gay people shouldn’t do that or whatever, or that you’re letting down the tribe. So I think that the… Dialogical is a good word, Charles says. If we see them as a dialogue with other people, and if we see that everybody has a stake in it, even if the stakes are much bigger for some people than others, still everybody has a stake because it’s a system of identities and the meaning of the identities, like all meanings, is a common possession, like the meanings of words. ...

mistercrayon

For clarity by “normal” I meant men. Let the women and the other minorities scrap it out seems to be what is happpening because there is an implicit power dynamic in soc dominated by men in general. Mostly gained (I think) through physical strength and the act of pregnancy and babies by default hindering women in a capital based society.

The thing is feminism isn’t a homogenous thing. You have classified stages of feminism that are in contrast with each other. As a separate example to trans rights Even in “feminism” you have some people who think sex work is a liberating choice (if I can use my body to make cash I should be free to do so) and others who think it reinforces the dynamic of power (ie the people with money pay a few people but maintain the structure that keeps the general flow of capital from men and crumbs to women).

The rub is: if some women feel that they don’t want trans women in their single sex spaces who am I to say no? And how many women is it okay to tell to “get over it” or “it’ll be fine” before it’s not okay to tell them that. I’m in the easy mode class. My performative progressiveness has no cost to me. And yet we do feel as a society we have needed to separate men and women (pretty damn easily) for years. On the flip side if Im talking to a trans person who am I to tell them if they have a dick so they can slum it with beefy criminals after they’ve been cancelling their net testosterone for years or simply pretend to act differently than who they are? So both people have legit claims from their own perspective but they are in conflict.

I’d also say that from what I’ve seen the fights have been in safe spaces and teaching about this idea that people are in the wrong body becoming more and more normal (an extremely nuanced conversation so perhaps too much to ask to do well in text on a forum)

Funkstain

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

Biological women want their own spaces. They are mistrustful of men. They have grown up being hit, deceived, tricked and all sorts of stuff. None of this is trans people's fault. It's men's. It's shocking so many men are eager to call these lifelong egalitarians transphobes, while they live the life of Riley, getting their dick out at the urinal, not a care in the world. All this debate needs is some empathy, not joining camps or worse, voyeurism.

I agree with this - and I'm really not sure how I can add to the debate, really, since my stakes are very low. I just want people to get along, man

My beef is with those who wade into this debate from an entirely unempathetic, "women are women and men are men what's this weird millennial bullshit" stance which is massively common, and has nefariously co-opted parts of the debate which object to / have reservations about trans folk moving into territory previously reserved for cis folk (and also blundered into the contentious areas of adolescent / pre-adult transitioning options)

poprock

Funkstain wrote:

… those who wade into this debate from an entirely unempathetic, "women are women and men are men what's this weird millennial bullshit" stance which is massively common …

If people were to be honest about their opinions on this, I think UK surveys could draw up an interesting venn diagram showing crossover between that anti-trans stance, anti-immigration stances, performative jingoism, brexit voting, Johnson supporting, and all of the other things that are wrong with this country.

Spoiler:

RedDave2

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

Biological women want their own spaces. They are mistrustful of men. They have grown up being hit, deceived, tricked and all sorts of stuff. None of this is trans people's fault. It's men's. It's shocking so many men are eager to call these lifelong egalitarians transphobes, while they live the life of Riley, getting their dick out at the urinal, not a care in the world. All this debate needs is some empathy, not joining camps or worse, voyeurism.

So on the nail it broke the hammer.

Diluted Dante wrote:

The thing, is, requiring people to use the toilets that match their birth sex means that you are forcing transmen in to womens toilets. What do you think is more likely, a cis man legally changing gender to access womens toilets, or a cis man just saying he is a trans man to access womens toilets? How comfortable would women be with someone with a big bushy beard being in the womens bogs?

Not disagreeing with you on this. I generally cant think of a proper solution other than to have the single unisex cubicles - but then I'm back to taking away what has become a safe (and social - its not just about the safety aspect) space for women. As a principle, I absolutely believe people should be allowed identify as what they like - but I think practice is so much harder in this case.

mistercrayon

poprock wrote:

Funkstain wrote:

… those who wade into this debate from an entirely unempathetic, "women are women and men are men what's this weird millennial bullshit" stance which is massively common …

If people were to be honest about their opinions on this, I think UK surveys could draw up an interesting venn diagram showing crossover between that anti-trans stance, anti-immigration stances, performative jingoism, brexit voting, Johnson supporting, and all of the other things that are wrong with this country.

Spoiler:

And we could label the big lump in the middle of the diagram ‘GAMMON’, accept that they’re the majority by sheer weight of numbers, and start trying to figure out why they’ve all become such selfish knob-ends.

This kind of oppositional “I am good because I have good opinions and therefore everyone is a baddie because they have the bad opinions” is in part why we are in a lot of this mess.

Brooks

People who hide in toilets are cowards, no mercy.

Armitage_Shankburn

Funkstain wrote:

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

Biological women want their own spaces. They are mistrustful of men. They have grown up being hit, deceived, tricked and all sorts of stuff. None of this is trans people's fault. It's men's. It's shocking so many men are eager to call these lifelong egalitarians transphobes, while they live the life of Riley, getting their dick out at the urinal, not a care in the world. All this debate needs is some empathy, not joining camps or worse, voyeurism.

I agree with this - and I'm really not sure how I can add to the debate, really, since my stakes are very low. I just want people to get along, man

My beef is with those who wade into this debate from an entirely unempathetic, "women are women and men are men what's this weird millennial bullshit" stance which is massively common, and has nefariously co-opted parts of the debate which object to / have reservations about trans folk moving into territory previously reserved for cis folk (and also blundered into the contentious areas of adolescent / pre-adult transitioning options)

When you analyse these young people's point of view, there is a lot there. Not enough time to post, but at university there was this Croat guy who got enough marks in his mods (maths mods they square your mark, no idea why) to get four firsts. Second year scraped a first. Third year scraped a 2:, fourth year got a 2:2 overall. Meanwhile he started turning up to bops in women's clothes, the vibe was he was a weirdo cross dresser. Make up, dancing alone in bops. Then dancing alone with his headphones in the grounds at night, clutching a bottle of vodka. First of all, we should have been kinder. I did make an effort to dance with him and speak to him, but who knows, maybe he identified as a woman? Maybe I'm misgendering him right now?

Gender is bullshit, it's a construct. It feels real just like language, money, status, etc... But it's made up. That is the central feminist message and there is undoubtedly truth in it.

Sex is real... To an extent. There are biological fringe cases, glitches in the code as it were.

To the extent I disagree it is that young people sometimes seem to be reinforcing gender. But when you analyse it they're not - it's just often the simple takeaway in a social media age.

And they're young and overenthusiastic, so overreach is real: stridence strays into violence and aggression..against old women this looks like good old fashioned women hating to my eyes. As got sports, don't get me started. Decades of progress in competitive women's sport risks being undermined by a slavish self-id policy there.

But it's only in a few examples that there is overreach. Mostly my objection is about the how not the what.

Funkstain

Yes sports is another problematic issue.

I do believe there are solutions for these issues, which will invariably require compromise from interested parties ("loss of power" to use the parlance of Gurt's transcript), and the only way to make opponents compromise in a negotiation, is to (again paraphrasing from transcript) explain, offer, and persuade. Stridently affirming "wrongness" (transphobia, gammon) won't get you anywhere. Arguably with some (gammon) you wouldn't anyway, so fuck em. But trans rights (and as importantly, trans acceptance) is an achievable thing and so should be pursued, thoughtfully and inclusively.

poprock

mistercrayon wrote:

This kind of oppositional “I am good because I have good opinions and therefore everyone is a baddie because they have the bad opinions” is in part why we are in a lot of this mess.

No. I genuinely believe there’s a common thread of selfishness and ‘I’m alright Jack’ attitude underpinning a whole wide range of current intolerance.

I see things like anti-immigration and anti-trans sentiment as symptoms of a wider malaise. And I don’t believe there’s much hope of truly improving things until that wider malaise is examined and addressed.

Until then, we’re in danger of creating sticking plaster solutions that, while addressing the practical issues (like equal pay and gender neutral bathrooms) ultimately serve to undermine real lasting progress because they’re easily dismissed by the intolerant as ‘lefty PC gone mad’ and actually increase division.

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