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Steve QJ's avatar

"what we fear is the male body and mind underneath. We need to keep the focus on the male and his maleness. "

Yeah, it's also been surprising (or maybe just depressing) to see how many men fail to acknowledge that violence, and especially violence against women, is an overwhelmingly male crime.

But I have to say, I think the focus on maleness is already becoming counterproductive. Not because males aren't the perpetrators of the overwhelming majority of violence, but because that violence isn't "maleness."

I see more and more women talking about this issue who are so determined to frame trans people as nothing but 40-year-old perverted men who want to sneak into women's bathrooms, they've lost all capacity to talk about it intelligently (and, of course, they have to completely ignore the existence of trans men).

They also refuse to acknowledge the huge number of women firmly on the TRA side of this argument. Because that too conflicts with the "it's just maleness that's the problem" narrative.

We can talk all day about the fragility of the #notallmen crowd. But the above approach veers pretty close to the #allwhitepeopleberacist playbook. Whether white people, trans people, men or women, careless generalisations of an entire class of people, for the sins of a few of them, doesn't solve problems.

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Grow Some Labia's avatar

As has been stated many times before, most of us know it's 'not all men', although with strangers we never know who. I have to admit, I was never hyper-sensitive about strange males before, but after a couple of years on Medium reading about other women's experiences (and then being dumb enough to set myself up at the headstrong young age of 51 to potentially get raped if the guy hadn't backed off) made me think maybe I needed to be a little more circumspect about men. In fact, it was that incident, and me asking myself *why* I allowed myself to put myself into what I knew wasn't an ideal situation, is what impelled me to come up with my Grow Some Labia message and website & talk about reclaiming female (and other) power.

Not all males are violent, and transfolk (particularly TWs) aren't any more violent as a group but as I'm pretty sure you've acknowledged before, they have the *same level of violence* as men...not women, not TMs. And the reason why there's so much drama in the trans movement is almost entirely the doing of TWs (ie., bio males, most of whom have their original junk), their male allies, and, as you note, female allies (who I think are fairly easily manipulated - they seem to be on the far left rather than the level left). So it's men, at the core, driving the violence associated with the trans movement (not just rapists in prisons, not just pervs parading their ladydick in women's only spaces) but also the violent protests to shut women's speech down that we're seeing here and abroad, most recently in AU & NZ.

I say we want to keep the focus on the males underneath the appropriated marginalization because it's male bodies and male minds women fear, not their choice of costume. As I've noted before, if a guy in a Barney suit raped a woman, we'd say a guy in a Barney suit raped a woman, we wouldn't worry about tarring dinosaurs with a perv brush, even if Barney rapes became a thing.

Violence may not be 'maleness' but maleness is associated with violence, for a good reason.

However, you do make me think of something i haven't really thought of before: Are TMs more violent than we know? Are they not getting the press for it? And if they are more violent, why? Is it the testosterone they're taking?

Thank you, I always need something to Google when I'm exercising on my break ;)

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Steve QJ's avatar

"As has been stated many times before, most of us know it's 'not all men', although with strangers we never know who."

Right, I've used this exact argument myself in a couple of articles. And yes, the TRAs telling women to "choke on their girldicks" or sending rape threats are, obviously, males. I'm not for a second arguing that this shouldn't be vigorously called out.

But a) the people saying "white people are racist" make this exact argument and it doesn't really hold water there either. And b) it's the caveats about women being manipulated when they support any men who claim to be women in female spaces that bother me. Because, as far as I can see, the motivation behind this is to shift the focus onto the "big bad men" instead of taking a serious look at how these insane ideas spread.

This idea that if a woman is behaving unreasonably, it must be because some man has manipulated her, is both infantilising and inaccurate. And this benefit of the doubt is never extended to the many, many non-violent men who agree with those women. Why doesn't anybody claim those men have been manipulated too? Again, that's why some women are so reluctant to acknowledge that trans men exist. Or that young, often gay, men are also deeply harmed by the gender industry. Or that opinion polls consistently show men objecting more strongly to males in female spaces than women.

Yep, I've pointed out a few times that male patterns of sexual violence don't change post transition. I fact, trans women are slightly *more* likely to be sex offenders than men. But I've also pointed out that the overwhelming majority of men don't commit sexual offences. As in somewhere around 99% don't. That's still more than enough reason for sex-segregation to exist in my book. Especially when sexual assault is far from the only reason single-sex spaces exist. But letting a site like Medium colour your perception of pretty much any social issue or group is going to mislead you. That place is an availability bias factory.

p.s. I don't think there's been much research into increased aggression in trans men, but I suspect the effect isn't too dramatic. As I was discussing with somebody else, male/female gaps in aggression aren't that big anyway, and trans men aren't socialised to be aggressive, nor do they usually have the physical stature where physical aggression would be a workable strategy. Small men are less likely to exhibit aggression too (at least towards other men) for similar reasons.

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Chris Fox's avatar

During one phase of the feminist movement on college campuses the radicals were putting up posters of randomly-chosen male students reading "all men rape." None of these students had raped anyone and of course the great majority of men never would. It was an absolutely vile way to make a dishonest point.

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