this piece starts out with a comment about tish hyman. in the follow up tmz interviews with the gold's gym agp, when asked if he'd use a third unisex space if offered, he hedged and said no there'd have to be mtf and ftm rooms and then tapered off prolly thinking about the nbs. wish someone had pointed out his own hypocritical discomfort at being forced into a 'trans inclusive' space, just as he demands women be now.
Power typically is intoxicating, and even corrupting, which is often followed by a reckless disregard for those people deemed a danger to our own strongly-held beliefs and interests. There was/is the immense influence obtained so relatively quickly through #MeToo and especially woke-fueled Cancel Culture, mostly via social media, that has ruined the careers and lives of public figures, including those daring to publicly counter hardline woke ideology and its resultant government policy.
I’ve long viewed humankind, as individuals and collectively, as not being very good at moderation. Still, while the social/political pendulum can swing to extremes, such great shifts should be expected with historical social injustice, which includes that suffered by the transgender community.
A similar pendulum-swing effect might also occur in response to the prolonged immense economic injustices in Western neoliberal democracies, had there not been the enormous obstacle of virtual corpocratic and big power/money interests with which to contend. The police and military can, and probably would, claim they had to [using political terminology, of course] bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority during major demonstrations against economic injustices.
P.S. I basically agree with (what I understand to be) author JK Rowling's perspective on this matter: The problem is not with genuinely transgendered people but rather with biological males taking advantage of a mass-media-empowered ‘woke’ political climate to invade biological females’ privacy and especially their sports competitions. She’s also against what amounts to the anatomical surgical mutilation of little children with a condition called gender dysphoria.
the metoo ref sounds bitter. but pray do tell how we might tell the "real transgender" males from the other males? spoiler: we cant. people can dress and act however they want. no male can actually ever be female, nor truly conceive all it entails
I love this! But one historical thing you should be aware of, Amy, is that the best term to use is "suffragists," not "suffragettes." This was something I learned in a presentation about the fight for women's voting rights in the US. the activists called themselves "suffragists," but their opponents coined the term "suffragettes," using the feminine diminutive suffix to mock them.
Karma? How about a false equivalence? Suggest you go over the data and points presented by Sousa about the dangers of men in women's toilets and locker rooms. Perhaps also research, or even simply ask yourself, why feminists may have wanted access to men's locker rooms: Was it, as Sousa's data demonstrate for men (including trans-identifying), to commit voyeurism, expose themselves, reaffirm claims that they were actually men, or to sexually assault men and boys? Doubt it.
Using the word ‘bathroom’ when we actually mean ‘toilet’ is still jarring for me. It has spread from North America to the rest of the world. It’s actually privacy for using a toilet that is the issue for women and girls around the world. Men in changing rooms are still not accessing a ‘bathroom’ as such. Sorry for being pedantic, but historically women have fought for single sex toilets in schools, workplaces, etc. bathroom to me means a room with a bath or shower, or both. We don’t usually need those, we need toilets.😀
Yes, I hear you. And thank you for the comment. I welcome women being "pedantic." Or being however they choose when they are passionate about the cause of women and girls! I appreciate it!
to me (american), "toilet" is the porcelain pedestal itself. bathroom is a much more polite way of speaking about where many toilets reside in a room.
also, many of the bathroom invading tras like to say how they 'just shit and piss and leave like everyone else' in the female bathrooms BUT that is NOT all women do in them.
we ask eech other for tampons, pads and toilet paper. we may wash our panties out in the sink after an accident. some of us may have just lost a wanted pregnancy and saw blood or chunks in the toilet. some may have other abnormal bleeding, postpartum issues, post abortion issues, or other issues dealing with our FEMALE BODIES. women do not 'just shit and piss' in the bathroom, and some times we even need assistance of our fellow females.
women should not be forced into single sex stalls to hide from the gaze of interloper males, when we tradiitonally are more open to each other's female needs in those single sex communal spaces.
Makes me think of the Sandy Peggie trial, Dr. "Beth" Upton was surprised when he heard testimony that Sandy needed to change abruptly because she was having a heavy period. Men, of course, would never consider that women might have a physical need for privacy because of the workings of our female bodies. And he's a freaking doctor!
I get that, we use euphemisms instead of the word ‘toilet’ too. But, if talking about the suffragettes, they wouldn’t have called them ‘bathrooms’, in fact probably used some other euphemism. It felt jarring to me, which undoubtedly shows my age.
Men don’t necessarily like sharing ‘bathrooms’ with women either, we had an exhibition here about a year ago with unisex toilets and hand washing basins. The men looked quite haunted, as if they couldn’t wait to get away, I think they felt shy as they were so outnumbered by the women. The opposite of the obnoxious trans.
I recently joined a gym in Colorado, and asked specifically about men accessing women's spaces. I was told "we very much frown on that." And then I saw the sign at the entrance to women's lockers-- it says that boys over 5 are not allowed. Boom. That takes care of it.
Every chance I get, I remind people that the rights that have been taken from us were already fought for and won. I don't think young girls know this. We need to demand they be restored. Scott Weiner, Barack Obama and Gavin Newsom etc. took our agency away from us. We don't need to grovel and beg for them back, we need to demand they be restored. This is a civil right issue.
What I explain to people is that there are CONSEQUENCES to being born in a female body. Those consequences include male violence and sexual assault, male voyeurism, male exhibitionism, menstruation, pregnancy, miscarriage, postpartum period, lactation, perimenopause, UTIs and STDs that effect women differently than men, and dozens and dozens of gynecological conditions, that men will never have any idea about. For those reasons, women deserve the safety, privacy and dignity of single sex spaces!
Please take some responsibility for yourselves. You are not merely passive victims, but active perpetrators and perpetuators of this patriarchy, with full legal rights and agency, and more power than you seem willing to acknowledge. For the most part, women are leading the fight against women’s rights in this case.
Too many men definitely hold a misplaced yet strong sense of sexual entitlement. As a good example, I came across a shocking article headlined “‘Grave Sexual Abuse’: When the Word Rape Doesn’t Apply To Boys” [by Zahara Dawoodbhoy, 21 Sep 2020]. It’s about a South Asian nation/culture in which men have been raping boys with impunity, as the boys dare not resist or complain.
There, girls’ vaginal virginity is traditionally/normally verified before an arranged marriage takes place. The ‘virginity’ of boys, however, seems to not be an issue, and therefore they cannot be sexually ‘spoiled’ or considered raped.
That is a very morally messed-up perspective of and justification for the societally systematic rape of boys!
The following relevant segment is taken from the extensive article:
----
........ “I think there is a myth that it only happens to female children, and that has to do with the cultural aspect of people feeling that rape is a female-related issue,” Sonali Gunasekera, Senior Director of Advocacy at the Family Planning Association (FPA) told Roar Media. “That is probably why this archaic law is still in place — because that's how it was seen from afar.”
Despite this myth, the fact remains that instances where young boys are raped in Sri Lanka are surprisingly frequent. Director of the Child Protection Force, Milani Salpitikorala, says that 90% of her current cases involve young boys, and the idea that the boy child is somehow less susceptible to sexual abuse and rape in this country is completely false.
“Our mindsets are set in a culture of ‘Don’t worry about your child if he is a boy,’ but the boy child is as unsafe in the hands of perpetrators as much as the girl child is, if not more,” she said. ........
_____
Even here in the ‘enlightened’ West, male victims of sexual assault or rape are still more hesitant or unlikely than female victims to report their offenders. They refuse to open up and/or ask for help for fear of being perceived by peers and others as weak or non-masculine.
I’m so sick of the men who are hysterical because they feel excluded from female private spaces.Even if they wear skirts and high heels they are still men , and they should stay out of our private spaces.Trans “ women” are fakers …they’re men.
This is brilliant! Amy, thank you so very much for all of the work you're doing on behalf of women and girls! You are truly a heroine of the female sex! I'd also like to add that reading your posts and watching your videos is like a form of therapy for me. I can't tell you the psychological toll that working in an environment that enforces "gender identity" ideology is having on me. From mandatory use of wrong sex pronouns, to having to share restrooms with crossdressing men, to the display of trans/pride flags, banners, stickers etc. everywhere, it all weighs heavily on my psyche.
Hi Amy - just to warn you (and other readers) that when I clicked on the Target Study link it took me to a strange looking page and my antivirus software immediately altered that it was a malware site. I'd love to look at the study, so if you can get the correct link up again that would be fantastic. Thanks for the great work you do!
One thing I would encourage people to do is to google your state's "trans self-ID laws." I did that in answer to some comment on Face Book, and I was shocked. In California, it is ILLEGAL for a gym or any business to prohibit men from randomly accessing women's spaces, as long as the man declares himself "trans." In some states that even means "non-binary." I looked up four states, (CA, MN, NY and CO), and none of them required any kind of documentation for an adult. Some required a doctor's signature on a form for minors, and some required a notarized signature to change the sex on a drivers license.
That's right. In CA, males are allowed in our gyms, spa saunas/steam rooms, rape centers, female prisons, locker rooms, bathrooms.....we have to do trainings at work that say if you question a person's preferred pronouns, that could be harassment. I wrote back to the company that made the trainings and said that 'forcing people to use compelled language is against our 1st amendment'. We need to remind people of our rights, (that are being violated.)
It's completely upside-down! Men going into women's spaces and exposing themselves used to be called "sexual harassment." Now it's called "trans rights." The same is theoretically true for women in man's spaces, I suppose, but if that's happening, there's no reporting on it, or it's very rare. At any rate, men are not complaining, nor are "trans men" reporting adverse encounters in male spaces--or in women's spaces for that matter.
this piece starts out with a comment about tish hyman. in the follow up tmz interviews with the gold's gym agp, when asked if he'd use a third unisex space if offered, he hedged and said no there'd have to be mtf and ftm rooms and then tapered off prolly thinking about the nbs. wish someone had pointed out his own hypocritical discomfort at being forced into a 'trans inclusive' space, just as he demands women be now.
Power typically is intoxicating, and even corrupting, which is often followed by a reckless disregard for those people deemed a danger to our own strongly-held beliefs and interests. There was/is the immense influence obtained so relatively quickly through #MeToo and especially woke-fueled Cancel Culture, mostly via social media, that has ruined the careers and lives of public figures, including those daring to publicly counter hardline woke ideology and its resultant government policy.
I’ve long viewed humankind, as individuals and collectively, as not being very good at moderation. Still, while the social/political pendulum can swing to extremes, such great shifts should be expected with historical social injustice, which includes that suffered by the transgender community.
A similar pendulum-swing effect might also occur in response to the prolonged immense economic injustices in Western neoliberal democracies, had there not been the enormous obstacle of virtual corpocratic and big power/money interests with which to contend. The police and military can, and probably would, claim they had to [using political terminology, of course] bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority during major demonstrations against economic injustices.
P.S. I basically agree with (what I understand to be) author JK Rowling's perspective on this matter: The problem is not with genuinely transgendered people but rather with biological males taking advantage of a mass-media-empowered ‘woke’ political climate to invade biological females’ privacy and especially their sports competitions. She’s also against what amounts to the anatomical surgical mutilation of little children with a condition called gender dysphoria.
the metoo ref sounds bitter. but pray do tell how we might tell the "real transgender" males from the other males? spoiler: we cant. people can dress and act however they want. no male can actually ever be female, nor truly conceive all it entails
I love this! But one historical thing you should be aware of, Amy, is that the best term to use is "suffragists," not "suffragettes." This was something I learned in a presentation about the fight for women's voting rights in the US. the activists called themselves "suffragists," but their opponents coined the term "suffragettes," using the feminine diminutive suffix to mock them.
Ahhhh…. thank you so much! I appreciate the note!
In the UK, women campaigning for the vote embraced the word suffragette and it's now the commonest descriptor (yes, early opponents used as slur):
https://www.britannica.com/video/difference-suffragist-suffragette/-259238
Interesting. Maybe this is something that over 100 years later it really doesn't matter; that both terms are equally OK for modern audiences.
Karma? How about a false equivalence? Suggest you go over the data and points presented by Sousa about the dangers of men in women's toilets and locker rooms. Perhaps also research, or even simply ask yourself, why feminists may have wanted access to men's locker rooms: Was it, as Sousa's data demonstrate for men (including trans-identifying), to commit voyeurism, expose themselves, reaffirm claims that they were actually men, or to sexually assault men and boys? Doubt it.
Using the word ‘bathroom’ when we actually mean ‘toilet’ is still jarring for me. It has spread from North America to the rest of the world. It’s actually privacy for using a toilet that is the issue for women and girls around the world. Men in changing rooms are still not accessing a ‘bathroom’ as such. Sorry for being pedantic, but historically women have fought for single sex toilets in schools, workplaces, etc. bathroom to me means a room with a bath or shower, or both. We don’t usually need those, we need toilets.😀
Yes, I hear you. And thank you for the comment. I welcome women being "pedantic." Or being however they choose when they are passionate about the cause of women and girls! I appreciate it!
I don't think you want to share bathrooms or showers with men, either.
— from a fellow pedant
Ew. No!
Indeed!
to me (american), "toilet" is the porcelain pedestal itself. bathroom is a much more polite way of speaking about where many toilets reside in a room.
also, many of the bathroom invading tras like to say how they 'just shit and piss and leave like everyone else' in the female bathrooms BUT that is NOT all women do in them.
we ask eech other for tampons, pads and toilet paper. we may wash our panties out in the sink after an accident. some of us may have just lost a wanted pregnancy and saw blood or chunks in the toilet. some may have other abnormal bleeding, postpartum issues, post abortion issues, or other issues dealing with our FEMALE BODIES. women do not 'just shit and piss' in the bathroom, and some times we even need assistance of our fellow females.
women should not be forced into single sex stalls to hide from the gaze of interloper males, when we tradiitonally are more open to each other's female needs in those single sex communal spaces.
Makes me think of the Sandy Peggie trial, Dr. "Beth" Upton was surprised when he heard testimony that Sandy needed to change abruptly because she was having a heavy period. Men, of course, would never consider that women might have a physical need for privacy because of the workings of our female bodies. And he's a freaking doctor!
I get that, we use euphemisms instead of the word ‘toilet’ too. But, if talking about the suffragettes, they wouldn’t have called them ‘bathrooms’, in fact probably used some other euphemism. It felt jarring to me, which undoubtedly shows my age.
Men don’t necessarily like sharing ‘bathrooms’ with women either, we had an exhibition here about a year ago with unisex toilets and hand washing basins. The men looked quite haunted, as if they couldn’t wait to get away, I think they felt shy as they were so outnumbered by the women. The opposite of the obnoxious trans.
The link to the Target study is broken.
Great article: typo noted.
"In many places this change has taken place with no pubic commentary, debate, or due process."
I recently joined a gym in Colorado, and asked specifically about men accessing women's spaces. I was told "we very much frown on that." And then I saw the sign at the entrance to women's lockers-- it says that boys over 5 are not allowed. Boom. That takes care of it.
Is it a privately owned gym? Just curious.
Yes, it is.
Every chance I get, I remind people that the rights that have been taken from us were already fought for and won. I don't think young girls know this. We need to demand they be restored. Scott Weiner, Barack Obama and Gavin Newsom etc. took our agency away from us. We don't need to grovel and beg for them back, we need to demand they be restored. This is a civil right issue.
What I explain to people is that there are CONSEQUENCES to being born in a female body. Those consequences include male violence and sexual assault, male voyeurism, male exhibitionism, menstruation, pregnancy, miscarriage, postpartum period, lactation, perimenopause, UTIs and STDs that effect women differently than men, and dozens and dozens of gynecological conditions, that men will never have any idea about. For those reasons, women deserve the safety, privacy and dignity of single sex spaces!
Great to hear from you, Amy. Thank you for the important historical context.
“Women and girls are told”
By whom??
Other women and girls, mostly.
Please take some responsibility for yourselves. You are not merely passive victims, but active perpetrators and perpetuators of this patriarchy, with full legal rights and agency, and more power than you seem willing to acknowledge. For the most part, women are leading the fight against women’s rights in this case.
Woke women, I might add.
Woke women are now defending males who transgress against us. LOL :-(
Too many men definitely hold a misplaced yet strong sense of sexual entitlement. As a good example, I came across a shocking article headlined “‘Grave Sexual Abuse’: When the Word Rape Doesn’t Apply To Boys” [by Zahara Dawoodbhoy, 21 Sep 2020]. It’s about a South Asian nation/culture in which men have been raping boys with impunity, as the boys dare not resist or complain.
There, girls’ vaginal virginity is traditionally/normally verified before an arranged marriage takes place. The ‘virginity’ of boys, however, seems to not be an issue, and therefore they cannot be sexually ‘spoiled’ or considered raped.
That is a very morally messed-up perspective of and justification for the societally systematic rape of boys!
The following relevant segment is taken from the extensive article:
----
........ “I think there is a myth that it only happens to female children, and that has to do with the cultural aspect of people feeling that rape is a female-related issue,” Sonali Gunasekera, Senior Director of Advocacy at the Family Planning Association (FPA) told Roar Media. “That is probably why this archaic law is still in place — because that's how it was seen from afar.”
Despite this myth, the fact remains that instances where young boys are raped in Sri Lanka are surprisingly frequent. Director of the Child Protection Force, Milani Salpitikorala, says that 90% of her current cases involve young boys, and the idea that the boy child is somehow less susceptible to sexual abuse and rape in this country is completely false.
“Our mindsets are set in a culture of ‘Don’t worry about your child if he is a boy,’ but the boy child is as unsafe in the hands of perpetrators as much as the girl child is, if not more,” she said. ........
_____
Even here in the ‘enlightened’ West, male victims of sexual assault or rape are still more hesitant or unlikely than female victims to report their offenders. They refuse to open up and/or ask for help for fear of being perceived by peers and others as weak or non-masculine.
I’m so sick of the men who are hysterical because they feel excluded from female private spaces.Even if they wear skirts and high heels they are still men , and they should stay out of our private spaces.Trans “ women” are fakers …they’re men.
This is brilliant! Amy, thank you so very much for all of the work you're doing on behalf of women and girls! You are truly a heroine of the female sex! I'd also like to add that reading your posts and watching your videos is like a form of therapy for me. I can't tell you the psychological toll that working in an environment that enforces "gender identity" ideology is having on me. From mandatory use of wrong sex pronouns, to having to share restrooms with crossdressing men, to the display of trans/pride flags, banners, stickers etc. everywhere, it all weighs heavily on my psyche.
Hi Amy - just to warn you (and other readers) that when I clicked on the Target Study link it took me to a strange looking page and my antivirus software immediately altered that it was a malware site. I'd love to look at the study, so if you can get the correct link up again that would be fantastic. Thanks for the great work you do!
One thing I would encourage people to do is to google your state's "trans self-ID laws." I did that in answer to some comment on Face Book, and I was shocked. In California, it is ILLEGAL for a gym or any business to prohibit men from randomly accessing women's spaces, as long as the man declares himself "trans." In some states that even means "non-binary." I looked up four states, (CA, MN, NY and CO), and none of them required any kind of documentation for an adult. Some required a doctor's signature on a form for minors, and some required a notarized signature to change the sex on a drivers license.
That's right. In CA, males are allowed in our gyms, spa saunas/steam rooms, rape centers, female prisons, locker rooms, bathrooms.....we have to do trainings at work that say if you question a person's preferred pronouns, that could be harassment. I wrote back to the company that made the trainings and said that 'forcing people to use compelled language is against our 1st amendment'. We need to remind people of our rights, (that are being violated.)
It's completely upside-down! Men going into women's spaces and exposing themselves used to be called "sexual harassment." Now it's called "trans rights." The same is theoretically true for women in man's spaces, I suppose, but if that's happening, there's no reporting on it, or it's very rare. At any rate, men are not complaining, nor are "trans men" reporting adverse encounters in male spaces--or in women's spaces for that matter.