TERF Wars: May The Feelz Be With You

The current vogue for queering All The Things has resulted in a maelstrom of stupidity that is impacting harshly on women, gay people, and transsexual people as the internet and politicians get hold of ideas best left in the basement and bring them out to play with them. Today I'm going to talk about the harms being done — and what to do about them.

What's the harm?

There are three main areas in which harm is being done:

• bodily autonomy
• sex-based rights
• personal freedom

Okay, let's dig in.

Bodily autonomy

It's usually accepted that your body is your own and you can set limits on who can touch it, examine it, or do anything with it. Well, it was. These days, due to the rise of "inclusivity" (by which we mean, "put male people front and centre") you no longer have a say in who can touch, examine, or do anything with your body. You are now obliged to submit to an ideology with no force of law in order to comply with company policy on inclusivity. I'm not even joking, see what happened to Clare Dimyon at the Royal Sussex hospital in 2018: she went for a mammogram and asked to be seen by a natal female, explaining that as a rape survivor she didn't want to be handled by a male person. The hospital's response was to cut out the details of her personal history and rationale, to omit the fact that it was an intimate procedure, and to include the letter as an example of transphobia. Their "Sorry, not sorry" response was an exercise in self-congratulatory wokeness and excuse-making that should never have been committed to paper. Their insistence on privileging gender identity over the needs of their patients demonstrates the most shocking negligence, but that's just the tip of a horrible iceberg of cruelty that results from treating male people as female in every way.

Sex-based rights

According to the United Nations Human Rights handbook for prisons, these are the rights that female prisoners have:
  

Women prisoners shall not suffer discrimination and shall be protected from all forms of violence or exploitation.

Women  prisoners  shall  be  detained  separately  from  male prisoners.

Women prisoners shall be supervised and searched only by female officers and staff.

Until TWAW was a thing, that's what was done. However, since TWAW came along, bringing with it the fear that someone might be labelled the spawn of Satan transphobic, male people convicted of committing violent attacks and rapes on women have been housed with women on the grounds that they claim to be women. Notice that in all of these cases the "women" have not had any bottom surgery — they're intact males. While we're told that the staff would be trained to deal with this, the fact is even staff have been raped in prison by male prisoners who identify as women. That's just prison. Now think about the shelters, changing rooms, and other facilities we now have to share with men who say they're women. Note that these rules emphatically don't apply to men at all. In May 2018 a group called Man Friday encouraged women to dress in fake beards and enter the men's pond at Hampstead Heath. The men were not amused.

“There were some men annoyed because they felt their privacy had been invaded and some who were concerned about photography.”

Aww diddums. What about the women?

Hampstead Heath has three ponds for swimming in, one for men, one for women and one for mixed groups.

In December the women’s pond changed its rules to allow males who self-identify as women to swim in the pool in order to cater to transgender women.

And they can't use the mixed pond because...? I'm not going to get an answer for that, am I? They should, of course, be using the mixed pond.

Personal freedom

The freedom to speak out about how that faction of the transgender rights movement that treats male people as women if they claim to feel as though they are women (TWAW) impacts on our rights as natal women is being curtailed in a number of ways that chill our speech. That the tech press denies the sheer misogyny behind this as "the community showing you the door" instead of the astro-turfed movement pulling strings behind the scenes and bringing out the worst in people as it does so is terrifying. As leading publications post opinion pieces pushing TWAW, celebrities and politicians get on board with it, and the companies we work for pay for the Gendered Intelligence trans awareness courses, the laws that govern our lives are being undermined and our employment becomes conditional on our willingness to deny the evidence of our senses. Not only are we obliged to declare that the buck naked emperor is fully clothed, we have to be careful not to describe him as being in a state of nature, nude, unclothed, or in the altogether. We can't talk about safeguarding, because that presents the Special People as potential threats and is therefore transphobic. For a marginalised group of delicate blossoms they don't half have a lot of power. I wish women did.

What can we do about it?

There are several options available to us, each of which will serve to pull the pendulum back in our direction. These include:

• give them plenty of rope
• push back
• follow the TWAW lead

Okay, let's take a closer look at them.

Give them plenty of rope

The novelty and ubiquity of the TWAW movement is stretching its luck like an elastic band. Sooner or later, though, it's going to snap. Remember what I said about the story and the message? The same rules apply here.

The way you behave affects the way you are perceived, there's no two ways about it. If you engage in inadvisable activities and reports of this get onto the internet, you may find you have a fire to put out. If you do something cool you could change people's perceptions of you. It's what you yourself personally say or do that enables people to decide whether or not they believe the things you post about yourself — or what other people say about you online. As I've said any number of times, behave consistently with the image you want people to have of you or they won't buy it no matter how hard you push it. - How Your Web Presence Affects Your Reputation, by Wendy Cockcroft for On t'Internet Friday, 29 April 2016

Indeed, the abuses meted out to JK Rowling on the back of her supportive comments towards Maya Forstater are proof of that. I was one of the many people "peaked" by them. Since I tend to side with the underdog and have no time for crude abusers, I sided with Rowling. Since it is currently problematic to speak out against the TWAW movement (I've not been stupid enough to update my CV where nutters can see it), most people will quietly show their disapproval by neglecting to shop at places demonstrating overt support for TWAW, e.g. "voluntary" pronoun promotion or bragging about donating to Mermaids. They may vote for other politicians and not for TWAW supporters. TWAW has already alienated women and gay people; as men begin to be affected they will stop supporting a movement they find abusive and heavy-handed. I've stopped shopping at The Body Shop and Lush, and no longer quote or support the tech blog I was always banging on about before because they love misogyny more than their female readers.Two of its writers still follow me but until they nut up and start speaking up for women I'm staying out of the comments. The views of at least two of its members of staff on women's rights are extremely hateful and harmful, in my opinion, and I will not discuss them here except to say that this is one example of the kind of thing they seem to believe:

I still can't get over how this chap walked away from that conversation thinking he's the good guy. Well, if he deletes that thread, I've got it captured for posterity.

TWAW has jumped a flippin' megalodon in terms of abusive behaviour: while we had come to expect them to abuse prominent transsexual campaigner Debbie Hayton by calling her a quisling and a traitor, they have now decided that she's not trans because she's a biological realist who accepts she was born male. This is big: "trans" used to be presented as a condition requiring medication and surgery that was distressing enough to induce sufferers to commit suicide, hence the drive to include transwomen in women-only spaces. Now it's just a feeling, no changes required, and they are the ones saying it. Engaging with them to encourage them to speak up about what they're really thinking will give us plenty of screencaps and quotes to display. If we keep on collecting and posting these, people will be peaked and turn away from the misogynistic cult.

Push back

I can't help thinking that if the TWAW cult can take over the world our institutions, etc., why can't women's groups? As it is, women's groups have been forming and getting work done in terms of writing for media outlets, producing papers, writing press releases, and organising groups all over the world. I attended a webinar held by the Women's Human Rights Campaign, an international organisation whose stated goal is to campaign to retain women's sex-based rights and to keep women-only spaces for natal women only. This group partners with lesbian and other feminist groups to raise awareness of the harms being done to women all over the world by the transgenderists and to campaign for women's rights. We've already managed to get governments to pause legislation aimed at rendering all women-only spaces mixed by default. Pushing back is essential to saving our sex-based rights given the number of quisling women determined to throw us under the bus to please men:

For instance, speaking at an event on the political representation of women in 2018, Liberal Democrat President Sally Brinton stated that she would be happy with a ‘gender-balanced’ parliament made up of 50 per cent men and 50 per cent trans women. [Emphasis mine] - Blog: Shifting sands on the definition of ‘woman’ in Scots law - Scottish Legal News 21 April 2020

The last thing we want is for anyone to think we're okay with that. We're not.

Follow the TWAW lead

We need to get our own training manuals, etc., on inclusivity into public institutions, the workplace, and everywhere the transgenderists have got their materials in. We need to play them at their own populist, emotional game, crying "misogynist!" every time they call us transphobic and match "bigot" for "TERF" every time until we win.

Abusive behaviour is, of course, out of the question, but the things the TWAW cult does behind the scenes can easily be replicated by women's groups in order to get laws and policies passed that benefit ourselves. TWAW cultists are great at getting women onside. Funnily enough, we're great at getting trans folk onside. We've got Debbie Hayton, Miranda Yardley, Fionne Orlander, The Lonely Transsexual, Buck Angel, and Scott Newgent on our team, and the list is getting longer. They are great at getting celebrities on side (some of which are jumping ship), but so are we. They're getting their stuff into the media, so are we.

We will win

Rampant misogyny and a climate of fear in which lesbians, gay men, transsexuals, and women are being silenced while detransitioning kids whose bodies are ruined for life are being ignored is unsustainable. The queering promoted by the transgenderists has been picked up by the internet and assorted unthinking persons who have run with it, played with it in online spaces where challenging such notions are discouraged, and promoted the resulting excrescences without giving any thought to how it would play out in real life situations. By refusing to ensure that only genuinely dysphoric kids were medicalised they have created an army of detransitioners. By refusing to discuss the ramifications of treating men as women whether they have transitioned or not they have created an army of women who were raped or sexually abused by those men, then further victimised by the people whose job it was to protect them. By refusing to engage with women looking for a middle ground that would work for everyone they have created an army of resentful women who feel threatened by the abuse they received from them. By refusing to allow debate on how transgenderism affects lesbians and gay men, they have created an army that goes by The LGB Alliance. By refusing to accept the tension between women's sex-based rights and the demands of the transgenderists they have created an army of women who have lost their jobs, livelihoods, friendships, and communities and will not rest until this nonsense is over. The more the transgenderists abuse, the more determined those affected by their activities are to fight back.

We've got evidence and facts, they've got lies, threats, and double dealing. We've got the interests of women and girls at heart, they've got the interests of multi-million dollar corporations at heart. About that... brace yourselves, lawsuits are coming and I can't flippin' wait.

We will win!