Reasons to be anti self identifying.

[MillyTantTerf]

As a recent "peaker" I need succinct reasons why I am against self ID as I am coming up against prejudice and resistance when I talk about it at work and on FB. Am proud to stand up and be counted but conscious of how easy it is to get dragged into emotional responses which give no credibility to a dignified argument.

Have come up with a few financial ones;
Car insurance for under 25 males is higher than for females. Can they Self ID and get reductions?
Women live longer statistically so if there are more transwomen will this affect pension payouts?

Please add more.

[MaidOfStars]

SelfID with a cardiac arrest and you’re fetting the wrong drugs.

[MaidOfStars]

getting Is fetting a word??

[MaidOfStars]

But these are sidetracks.

Someone is telling you how to be a woman. Someone is denying you a lived experience.

Someone is telling you that when you go for a smear test, you must accept a man’s fingers inside you.

Someone is telling you that what d you are raped, you must accept a penis man counselling you.

[NewYearNiki]

Someone is telling you that when you go for a smear test, you must accept a man’s fingers inside you.

Fingers dont go inside you at a smear test

[UpstartCrow]

It's racist for white people to declare they identify as BAME.

[HairyBallTheorem]

Oh fuck off with the nitpicking over exactly what goes inside you during a smear test. A woman having a smear test is naked from the waist down (unless you want to nitpick about socks and the precise positioning of the blanket too) while something is shoved inside her and if she wants to insist on a biologically female HCP, then her body, her choice.

Seriously, just do one.

[MillyTantTerf]

I said on FB that a man with all his physical attributes in a dress is still a man. I was accused of "abusing" a vulnerable group and hurting them. The guy seemed completely unable to take on board any fears suggesting I was exaggerating. Felt a metaphorical patting of my little head going on.

[UpstartCrow]

Ask him if he goes around lecturing black people that they have to centre white people in their activism.

[GuardianLions]

Because in all other areas of life, we have to have to accept others' perception of us.

Eg- middle-aged, short, bad-tempered, stronger in language than mathematics, etc, etc.

We might not like it. But other people have a right to say 'if you look at the average lifespan and where you fit into it, you are middle aged'. Or 'being below 5'2" is fairly short', etc. We can be observed, tested, measured, judged against the mean, and so on.

It isn't very comfortable sometimes and some of us might wish we were different or genuinely feel the stats must be wrong because we strongly 'feel like we are 18 years old' or even that mirror lies to us when we see our reflection in it.

However, how we 'feel' is not how others' perceive us. They just use our appearance, behaviour, actions and any other knowledge they have.

'Self-identification' is a deranged form of narcissism, which brushes all of that aside and says:
NO! I get to tell you, everyone, the universe, science and time itself WHAT I AM and MINE IS THE ONLY OPINION THAT COUNTS.

It is based on delusion, is utterly controlling and disrepectful to others' right to make and trust their own observations and is completely deranged.

[TheGoalIsToStayOutOfTheHole]

I am anti self-ID as saying that any man who says he is is actually a woman means the end of womens spaces, and womens rights. Things that have been fought for for a very long time, taken away in an instant. Nothing else is needed.

[Bluedoglead]

Car insurance isn’t like that any more.

[SmilingButClueless]

Also, it’s an easy way for male perverts to access women’s changing rooms and other areas.

If a man says he’s a woman, how would we know if he really thinks he is (i.e. is genuinely trans) or if he’s just there to be close to women in a state of undress.

[Bluedoglead]

What sort of a smear test do you get where anyone’s fingers are inside you?

[HairyBallTheorem]

We have loads of posts on here from women who've been abused by HCPs (usually during their teens when they were too young to realise what was going on beyond a feeling of "this isn't quite right"). Women who've had male doctors shove fingers inside their vagina, who've insisted on doing breast examinations when the women went to see them for totally unconnected reasons.

Larry Nassar was unusual in (a) the high-profile nature of his victims and (b) the fact that he was caught, but he's far from being unusual, sadly.

Women who've been on the receiving end of this will be very, very sensitive to who does intimate vaginal exams. It doesn't matter whether it's actually the HCP's fingers going inside them, or simply holding the speculum that then gets put inside them. It is still going to be a pretty horrible experience. And if those women want control over the biological sex of the person examining them, they should have that control.

I stand by my comment - it is fucking nitpicking whataboutery to be so lacking in empathy that your immediate reaction is "but it's not actually fingers."

[TellsEveryoneRealFacts]

How will they self id out of prostrate cancer?

[TheGoalIsToStayOutOfTheHole]

Funny how two seperate posters cannot actually argue against the point made, but feel the need to post about 'fingers' being the incorrect (in most cases) term.

[OlennasWimple]

What sort of a smear test do you get where anyone’s fingers are inside you?

The HCP definitely needs to make contact with the patient's genitals in order to insert the speculum carefully. And depending on the cell collecting tool, they need to reach inside the patient's vagina to some degree in order to reach the cervix properly.

But as you were - carry on arguing about the minutiae of the argument

[9toenails]

'Self identification' of women can't make sense without some independent (sc. independent of self-identification) notion of what it is to be a woman.

Look:
Question: What is it for a person to be a women?
Answer: If someone identifies as a woman, then that person is a woman.
[That is what 'self identification' is.]

... That is not so much false as empty ; it is incapable of being true in any significant sense. It cannot be that what makes me an X is just my identification of myself as an X, whatever X is.

['I'm a scillion.'
-- 'Really, what's a scillion?'
'A scillion is just what people who say they're scillions are.'
-- 'Yes, but what is it that they say they are?'
'Scillions, stupid!'
--'Yes, but what does that mean?'
... And so on. And so on. For ever.]

The logic of this (its nonsensicality, if you like) tends to get obscured because of course we all know what a women is (what 'woman' means): a woman is an adult human whose sex is female (more or less - nothing hangs on having a precise definition just here). But you can't have that notion of a woman and self identification at the same time. And self-identification as a sole criterion for being a woman (or anything else) simply fails to make sense, as the above demonstrates.

So, a response to people who want you to agree with the idea that self identification makes one a woman is to ask them what a woman is: what, precisely, does the self identifier identify as? ('As a woman, stupid!' - 'Yes, but what does that mean?' ...)

What is a woman? My parents thought they knew; my grandparents thought so too; me, I used to think I knew what a woman is. (See above.) Now some soi-disant (pun intended!) 'trans' people think they want to change the meaning of 'woman'. We know what they want to change it from (see above). What do they want to change it to? They can't say ... because if they were to try to give the new meaning, they would have to deny self-identification. And self identification can't work without that new meaning. So self identification can't work.

I'm tempted to write QED. It really is that simple.

[Undercoverswede]

As mentioned elsewhere, an observation from a non-British person.

When I moved here from Sweden, I noticed how incredibly common it was for straight men to find it very exciting to dress in women's clothing. I had no precedent for this observation in Sweden, and found it hilarious, if I'm brutally honest. Certainly not threatening.

But self-IDing, and demanding entry rights to exclusively female spaces stops the hilarity very quickly.

The whole 'oooh it's such fun/a turn-on/whatever to do girly, pretty things' is not convincing fun for me when it becomes an imperative. It's so not what it feels like to be a woman, unless you are a bit infantile (sorry for being judgemental here, but I have literally never met a woman who thinks like that, unless she kept it to herself).

It's such a super-male thing to do - fetishising femininity. And don't get me started on trying to dominate (and silence) conversations around reproductive rights or sexual violence. The debate can obviously switch from cutesy girly cross-dressing to vicious misogyny at the drop of a hat, if there is no real commitment there, just daytripping.

[thebewilderness]

Can you mandate belief?
Can you codify into law the idea that some people can mind over matter themselves out of material reality and into the opposite sex, and must be treated accordingly?
It is like transubstantiation. A belief that no one actually believes.
Will you allow people to drug and mutilate children based on this belief that no one believes?

[MaidOfStars]

Apologies for posting about fingers and smear tests. It’s very important to point out that no actual fingers touch inside you (they sometimes do) or that you are not legs akimbo with someone peering into your fanny (while the HCP readjusts etc).

Do fuck off. I say who and when and how.

[TheGoalIsToStayOutOfTheHole]

Yeah, regardless of what goes where, it is an intimate exam and people have, and should keep having the right to chose a same sex HCP. The picking up on that by 2 seperate posters, whilst not even acknowledging the actual point was ridiculous.

I actually just had an argument about elf ID with a friend. Who reckoned that noone would be stupid enough to believe that any man who says he is a woman is actually a woman. He was gobsmacked when I showed him the swimming guidance and Labours stance on AWS. He reckons no guy could actually believe that nonsense. I agree. And I would add that no woman would really really believe it either, and this is exactly why there is no argument posted from those who accept selfID..and the preferred action is to yell 'you bigots' in an attempt to stop other people talking about it and making more people realise quite whats going on.

[OlennasWimple]

elf ID

Say what now? Santa's little helpers being invaded by gnomes?

[MaidOfStars]

Oh love elfID!