OK, trans community – it’s truth time. One of the biggest differences between the way women are treated and the way that y’all are treated is that y’all are allowed to have safe spaces. You’re allowed to have subreddits that are trans-only, places and events that are just for you. We’re not.
When I tried to start a subreddit for female humans, for example (including the ones who identify as men) so that we had a place to talk about female things, it lasted less than a week, and the admins performed a delicate little dance before banning us for “hate.” They temp-banned me and all my mods, then banned the whole community because we weren’t able to take down the anti-trans posts that were clearly against our rules - and that didn’t appear until after we were tempbanned. Hmm.
Women get nothing: not subreddits, not dating apps, not even an app for women in general. No bathrooms, no changing rooms, no sports of our own; hell, we can’t even get away from y’all in prison! Any female-only event y’all get to hearing about is targeted by protesters, often violent ones, invariably carrying signs threatening harm or encouraging suicide — lovely behavior from people who constantly quote trans suicide statistics as if it’s the biggest crisis on the planet, btw.
Any women’s shelter or rape crisis center that is female-only is also targeted: the sole remaining women’s rape crisis center in all of Canada has been repeatedly vandalized with threatening graffiti, and even had a dead rat nailed to its door. This, in a city with 6 other rape counseling centers available, all of them trans-friendly. It’s not about being denied access to services — it’s sick, twisted, furious hatred at even the idea of women having anything of our own.
You have taken it all: our spaces, our sports, and our safety. You’ve taken our privacy, our dignity, our right to single-sex incarceration, and our right to single-sex intimate care. You’ve taken our identities, and the words we use to name ourselves.
You want us to agree that being female means nothing, is nothing, deserves nothing - no recognition, no separate existence — not even a name. We are “uterus-havers,” “menstruators,” “bleeders,” and “people with cervixes.” “Women” belongs to you now, and you’re even coming for “female.”
You’re taking everything we are, piece by piece — and what do we get in return, for the theft of the names you took from us? “C*s” — a prefix that sidelines us in our own demographic, and which privately, the trans community uses as a slur.
What good little colonizers you’ve turned out to be.
And if they do that to a trans man with intent to bother them, that's harassment and should result in a ban. But by itself, I don't think it's hate speech, so if they want to use that terminology, they should do it only with those who wouldn't be offended by it.
There are plenty of offensive things people use to refer to me, and as long as they don't do it directly to my face with an intent to insult me, it doesn't bother me. It's like the n word, it's fine when black people use it, but it's very much not fine if a white person uses it. Context matters a lot for these things.
There needs to be some form of moderation to verify that they aren't breaking the rules (harassment, threats of violence, etc). But beyond that, I think everyone deserves a safe space where they can vent.
I agree. I'm not trans and have no issue with trans people, so I don't really understand the desire for an exclusive place for either group. But I don't think it's bad for each group to have an exclusive space either.
I agree that the membership rates here would be pretty small, and that's probably why she can't find such a group. She could easily start one, for example.
And yeah, it's certainly icky. My point is that even icky things should be allowed to exist, provided they don't directly harm anyone.