To think that society would not be immensely simpler were women denied the right to vote and own property

Of course life would be simpler for misogynistic men if women had no rights.

Life would be appalling for women — and not in the least simple. But women don’t count in the opinion of men like RMW.

What @FlirtsWithRhinos said. Great post.

Quite. If a man wanting to envisage himself as a woman had no impact on other women it would not matter in the least.

If being a woman isn't simply being female, physically and nothing else, then i don't know if i am one, and i don't know what I'm conveying to someone if I say I'm a woman - it might be utterly incorrect. So I'm in an uneasy state of limbo when this isn't defined.

This makes total sense and I think is at the root of a lot of misunderstanding/ discrimination. We see (different) others as a threat where they threaten our own understanding of self/ identity. Hence that stereotyped trope of some of the most 'macho' homophobic men being closeted gay - e.g. American beauty.

But I would put to you again, that trans people being trans doesn't actually say anything about who you are. You are a woman. You have a female body, you understand yourself to be female/ a woman and (presumably?) always have. Presumably you are recognised by others as being female/ a woman, etc. Nothing has change for you, your identity isn't under threat.
But recognising trans people is to recognise diversity in sex/ gender. there are experiences of sex/gender that look different to yours. That doesn't make you any less you, it just means that some people are different to you. There isn't only one way to be female/ a woman.

No you are all good. It's extremely refreshing to have an exchange with someone who really wants to engage. So please interrogate away. It's so hard to explain on mumsnet posts because it's actually a really complex issue - the GC approach of 'sex is real', 'gender is false/ constructed' is much easier to communicate/ summarise in a soundbite - so perhaps why it's been more persuasive to you?

The crux of it is that while gender critical feminism deconstructs 'gender' - recognising that harmful stereotypes/ ideas about what it is to be a woman have held woman back, they hold on to a simplistic, binary (/hierarchical), essentialist understanding of 'sex'. This understanding doesn't make sense scientifically (hence the recent statement in the BMJ about the SC judgement), or from the perspective of social theory. There is actually no way to meaningfully separate gender from sex - as gender is ultimately just the knowledge that gives meaning to bodily differences. So holding on to a fixed sex binary reproduces a gender binary. This can be seen in practical ways - e.g. gender non-conforming cis women being subject to harassment in female toilets.

And now I will point out that trans people saying the dictionary definition of man/woman is wrong and should be something else (but what? The eternal question) would be what I, personally, would mean if I say "redefining" things that affect everyone.

If being a woman isn't simply being female, physically and nothing else, then i don't know if i am one, and i don't know what I'm conveying to someone if I say I'm a woman - it might be utterly incorrect. So I'm in an uneasy state of limbo when this isn't defined.

Thanks for the above, tandora.

My way of analysing this kind of conflict is to pick stuff apart (coldly, if you like) to identify where the disagreement stems from. I've been told that this isn't always enjoyable to others or something that comes naturally/ comfortably - who knew?!

Believe it or not, that's how I started on FWR years ago ... really wanting to be on the gender side, I just needed to understand the position fully and have someone who knows "better" explain the apparent contradictions and illogicality and sexism (as it appeared to me, but being sure I must have gotten it wrong).

Since then, anyone on here who holds the "gender" position, and is literate and willing to put their position across, is in the unenviable position of attracting a grilling by me... It's nothing personal!

No you are right, I didn’t actually answer your last post- I got frustrated and read the wrong intentions, thinking that no matter what I said you weren’t reading it and just repeating the same question/ point. But I see now that you were genuinely trying to engage I just hadn’t made myself clear enough, so I do apologise.

I can't see a direct response to this post at 12.55 yesterday - could you copy and paste the response you're talking about?

If you're joking with me then sorry, I'm not great at detecting what's a joke and what's literal

Hey @potpourree i don’t think you are stupid. You are right I got pissed off and could have done better. After I wrote that post tbh I regretted it- and then went on to try and answer your question.

I apologise. Tbh im definitely embittered by some of my experiences engaging with posters about trans issues on mumsnet. My fault of course as for some reason I continue to try!

Thanks for being respectful.

Shit sorry! Thread moved fast and i missed it. I'll go back and look.

I didn’t “choose not to answer” I continued to answer you but you didn’t engage in any way with what I wrote.

I think it’s really important to distinguish two things.

The first is what being trans is. The second is how we should organise society to include trans people. Anti trans sentiment so often conflates the two - as questions about policy start from a position that being trans is not really legitimate or real, that it is simply a false (and harmful) ideology.

The fact that some women are trans, says nothing about who you are: it does not redefine your person in any way. You are still the woman you were before, with the characteristics you had before, for the reasons as before. Just as someone being gay says nothing about who you are or what your sexuality is. Yes you could say that recognition of gay people redefined understandings of sexuality - it expanded our understandings of diversity - that not everyone was straight, that differences exist, but it didn’t redefine straight people. This is exactly the same for recognising trans people.

The question I asked you that would help me get to where you are in understanding this was this - you chose not to answer.
That doesn't mean a "win" for me, at all, so it's not a tactic, but it means the clarification I need isn't there so I'm none the wiser.

Does that make sense?

"So tandora when you talk of bodies being female, do YOU mean something other than, as you put it, "being born with a vagina/ xx chromosomes etc " ?
If so, what?"

Ok, so it's a personal thing rather than caring about the actual points being made or trying to communicate what it is you're trying to say. That's absolutely fine!

I fully accept i may just be too stupid to understand what you're getting at. I'm not neurotypical, so I'm used to it.

I hope you find yourself able to think about your questions in your own time, and maybe one day you'll be able to articulate your views in a way that even people like me can grasp instead of getting angry that they don't understand.

I would love to know, so that I can learn, what was wrong with my post that you quoted, if you can specify?

Here is the biological essentialism “they will be female , regardless ” you are assuming your understanding / meaning / knowing of “being female” and stating it’s self-evident / determined because of biology.

Your understanding of personality or behaviour isn’t essentialist, but your understanding of femaleness is. You have failed to appreciate that being female is itself a social construct. That’s not to say that biology isn’t real.

@potpourree i was briefly interested in engaging with you, until it was clear that you are just another poster who will read your existing point into anything I write, regardless of what I actually write , and repeat yourself ad nauseam.

I see you have now turned this into “I see we haven’t got an answer to this”. Typical tactics.

This whole “redefining others” is another complete nonsense. Trans people being trans says absolutely nothing about who you are, any more than gay people being gay says anything about who you are. You could say that being gay “redefines” sexuality. There’s really no difference.

As for ideology being bad? Of course it’s not. For example, when I say it’s fair to say my belief that trans people should be included in society is an ideology, I also think that’s a positive thing. But calling being trans an ideology is harmful and false- just as it’s harmful and false to call being gay an ideology (which of course homophobic people used to do). It’s a means of dismissing what is actually a fundamental characteristic of a person- suggesting it’s somehow false or make believe. “Trans ideology” is anti trans terminology invented by gender critical feminists and others who share the goal of trying to make trans people disappear.

Oh @Tandora I am disappointed. I genuinely thought you were smarter than this.

Firstly, please re-read my original post. The issue is not and never was what trans people believe about themselves. It is that genderists go beyond that into redefining everyone else.

The ideology is in taking that self belief beyond the personal and making it into the definition of all women and men, keeping the existing social groups but taking their meaning away from simple observed biology (because yes, DSDs notwithstanding, for 99.9999lots of the population including almost all trans people it really is that simple) into some sort of mental characteristic(1) regardless of whether the people being redefined recognised themselves in that or not, in order to claim that trans people's self image is an actual, objective reality and therefore justify reorganising society around it.

Do you see that? The ideology is not the right of trans people's right to define themselves, it's the need to redefine everyone else to make their subjective "truth" into a universal one, something to justify the TRA demand to reorganise society around it.

Secondly, you seem to have got the idea from somewhere that "ideology" is a criticism. It's not. It's a description. Feminism is also an ideology - it's both the systen of thought that seeks to understand and explain the experiences of women (OFM) in society and a belief that a better society is one in which women are not structurally disadvanatged. It's absolutely an ideology, one I wholeheartedly sign up to.

Do you know when ideologies are dangerous? It's when they hide. When they pretend to be "just the way it is", "just progress". If a movement is trying to change society and also trying to pretend it's "just a natural next step", "just doing what the people want", "just the way young people think and that's progress", be afraid. People who want to change society for good reasons should be happy to stand up and make the case for why.

So, to that old worn gay analogy. I'm afraid you really are barking up the wrong tree (and incidentally maybe betraying a little bit more than you intended about how you think, hmmm?).

If a person believes they are same sex attracted, they are same sex attracted. That's it. They feel the attraction, they can name it as such from their own self knowledge. No one else is redefined. The people they fancy don't have their own sexuality redefined simply because someone the same sex happens to fancy them. All society needs to do to accomodate gayness is to say "ok, that seems fine to me, find someone who fancies you back and be happy!"

But when a person believes they are the opposite sex in some inner, ineffable way, that their place in society is not with the others of their sex but with the opposite sex as one of them, sharing their privacy, adopting their language, defining their reality and their social identity, that is not simply a person describing their own reality, that is a person imposing their own beliefs and prejudices about their own sex and the opposite sex onto everyone else. For society to accomodate that, it has to agree that those ideas about men and women are real, that the fundamental, most meaningful difference between men and women that leads to all the different gendered outcomes is not that we have different bodies and deal with different social constructs but that we are fundamentally different in our minds, and that it is right and proper that anyting that is usually restricted by sex, whether that is language or privacy or rights or intimate touch, should be made available to membeer of the opposite sex based on a gender they can claim to have and their targets cannot challenge or deny having themselves regardless of whether they do in fact experienece this alleged similarity of mental gender.

Accepting that, accepting that redefinition of every single fucking human being that exists, a definition that I am telling you unequivocally is NOT how I and many many other people expereince ourselves, is a hugely different proposition to simply accepting the utterly uncontroversial observation that some people fancy people who are the same sex.

And frankly I'm aghast that you could consider the simple fact of same sex attraction anywhere near as fundamentally redefining to society as replacing every single human's self knowledge with an unevidenced and pretty damn sexist system of gender identity.

(1) I say "some sort of mental characteristic" only because this is the best guess I have as to what you actually believe, because despite being very very certain this thing is so hugely important we need to destroy women (original sex based meaning)'s rights, protections and political voice, belie our history and invalidate our language and our own lived experience to accomodate it, you are apparently unwilling or unable to say what it actually is. And who knows, if someone would just bloody tell us what this apparently simultaneously totally obvious and utterly unsayable thing we supposed "cis women" and trans women have in common is, we might evern recognise it and all this would turn out to be a huge huge miscommunication and we could skip off hand in hand into the pink and blue sunset. But how can that ever happen, how can we see our error, if no one can ever be clear about what it is we are supposed to be feeling that would make all this make sense? Why does it have to be done as an exercise of power and dominance and "you will accept this" unless the reason is there is no reality, only the exercise of power?

I see we did not get an answer to this, so I think that about sums up the logic of the arguments given today:

Biological essentialsm: a belief system that suggests certain characteristics, behaviors, or abilities are inherently linked to one’s biology or genetics.

Me: One's biology has nothing to do with one's characteristics, behaviours or abilities.

Poster: These are the same views.

-- now actually, sanluca came up with an interpretation of what Tandora might have been getting at - "that by saying women are slower with regard to sports, or more impacted by menstruation cycles or menopause, or uncomfortable in mixed sex changing rooms or overall more vulnerable, that in Tandora's mind is showing weakness and she is strong so hence she doesn't want this?"

Tandora hadn't presented any of this position herself, so I have no idea if this is what she meant, but it's true that 'abilities' in my post above might not be accurate. Mental abilities I don't think have anything to do with one's sex. Physical abilities - yes you are more likely to be limited by being female in some measures. So I take back an aspect of that - one's biology does in some way relate to one's physical abilities, although the variation is huge within one sex class. Just thought I'd clarify while I was repeating this post from earlier!

Well for a start being trans isn’t an ideology

Do you accept that the definition of trans (people whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth) requires believing that there are gender identities that either match (i.e. are the same as, or sit comfortably with), or do not match, each sex?

If you don't think any sexes match any genders, who would be trans?