Thursday, 7 January 2016

Answer to Lisa Muggeridge part 1 (draft)

In this post I'm exploring Lisa's attitude to transgender people as indicated by her shockingly uninformed Blog entry posted yeatserday.

Tomorrow I hope to be dealing with the argument we actually had which was about transgender children's right to live as themselves and the implication with respect to medical treatment, parent consent, etc.  The following though was never part of our original discussion and I find the fact that she brought all this up after the discussion ended to be incredibly bizarre.


Lisa started off with a fairly reasonable statement that even sounds respectful and seems to recognise the situation that trans people find themselves in
I can’t imagine gender dysphoria, I don’t have to which is a privilege I know. It’s a serious condition, and way beyond what most of us experience even if our lives are a constant struggle between others expectations and what and who we are.
She referred to me as a woman and again sounds perfectly reasonable:
Earlier today I got into an altercation with a woman I have spoken to for a long time. A trans woman. Although the trans has always been secondary to woman for me. If you are taking the shit to live like a woman you are one.
Although I’d take issue with the word “altercation”, more of a Twitter spat.
Anyway, as the article goes on her views n trans start to go a bit, erm, towards the TERFish end of the scale.
At 3 you are likely to want to wear a tutu and welly boots all the time and if given the choice of how you identify are likely to choose batman or Peppa Pig. Even without gender dysphoria, if your gender identity is sorted by 30 you are doing great.
At 12 I thought I was a lesbian, at 15 I wanted a boob job, and the things I thought I wanted and thought I was at that age were the delusions of a child who I no longer am.
Now, she is confusing gender identity with gender expression. As far as I know Lisa Muggeridge has never identified as male or non-binary or any of the other possible ways of being trans. No, in fact she’s talking here about ways to express gender and not gender identity at all. What doesn’t happen except in a very tiny number of cases, is people changing their gender identity. As for “batman” and “Peppa Pig” your guess is as good as mine. Sounds to me like the anti same sex marriagers who made the claim that soon we will be able to marry our dogs now that gay people can marry.
Most of us learn about womahood continually throughout our lives as our gender creates walls around those lives.
If this statement means anything it seems to be an attempt to cast doubt on my identity as a woman, but of course what she doesn’t accept and the crucial thing she’s missing is that I was never male and I too formed ideas about womanhood throughout my life, from the point of view of someone who identifies as a woman. And previously she’d said:
Earlier today I got into an altercation with a woman …. Although the trans has always been secondary to woman for me. If you are taking the shit to live like a woman you are one.
And when we move further in to her Blog she’s suddenly calling it “trans ideology” which is a far cry from
I can’t imagine gender dysphoria, I don’t have to which is a privilege I know. It’s a serious condition….
Now, the gloves are about to come off as Lisa decides to deliver a series of TERFy punches.

To label anyone who does not have [gender dysphoria] is the equivalent of labelling anyone who doesnt have a cold. It is ridiculous.
I think she’s referring to use of the word cisgender, which describes people who are not transgender. TERFs seem to have taken against the idea that trans people be allowed to use a prefix, “cis”, that has been part of the English language for centuries, and prefix it to gender to mean the opposite of transgender. If we have transgender then it follows that there must also be cisgender, or transgender loses all meaning. Also without using cis instead of having cis women and trans women making up all women, instead you have the situation where you have trans women and then women, or natural women, or born women. There is no acceptable alternative that does not demean trans people, particularly trans women, and this is obviously why TERFs oppose use of the word cis.
Your gender identity does not give you teh right to decide every woman’s gender identity.
Now she has decided that somehow a word that means “not transgender” now changes every woman’s identity, like saying calling things that are not big “small” somehow changes the identity of not big things. Of course, it doesn’t.

While it is a distinctly male trait to believe you have that right.
And just before this she’d called me “a woman” and said, “if you are taking the shit to live like a woman you are one.”Now she's suggesting I am displaying a "male trait" in order to further undermine my identity as a woman.
Of course I don’t think I have that right, I never claimed I did, I’ve never tried to do it, and the conversation we were having was not about this, at all.
Now IF I had a child who struggled with their gender
Now she can’t even say the word “trans”. Struggling with gender is not trans.
The sheer fucking nonsense of online trans activism, the utter stupidity of the debate being had, the genderqueerfluidtranswhatever, is narcissism. Pure and simple, and its abusive and distinctly male.
Finally, the mask is off. She thinks its all nonsense. Well done, Lisa, you have finally released your inner TERF.


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