Pregnant people?! It's 'women'

Well, I guess the question is if "woman" is not socially constructed, then how does anyone know that they are one.

What's it like to be a bat? (Thomas Nagel) I will never know, because I am a woman, not a bat.

Betty Boop is a woman, Lara Croft is a woman, Millie Tant is a woman, yet none of these three have a body at all.

These are fictional characters. Not understanding your point.

Femininity is layered on top of being female as a male constructed vision of how female people's existence should be constrained. Femininity is the prison that males put female people in. There, FIFY.

Woman is just adult human female.

@EstieGreenwood

Congratulations on being pregnant. And I'm sorry you've experienced loss and TTC troubles. But I don't know why you think you being pregnant and not caring about people saying 'pregnant people' makes you think you can slate and deride women who DO care about this! With snarky passive-aggressive comments like 'do you PEOPLE have nothing better to do?'

I have been pregnant too, (and given birth/raised a child,) and so have many other WOMEN, you're not unique. And I (like many other WOMEN) am Royally pissed off with the 'pregnant people' and 'uterus owner' bullshit. Anybody and everybody is quite entitled to be really pissed off with this too. Including women who have never been pregnant.

Your opinion is no more valid just because you are currently pregnant.... Other women can be pissed off and annoyed by it, without being derided by you because you are NOT pissed off and annoyed by it.

If you're not angry about this, then you're NOT paying attention!

People who have male-to-female gender-reassignment surgery retain a prostate.

I didn't know that. So we should definitely be talking about people who need to check their prostates for cancer. I won't be bothering to check mine, even though I am a person, because I know I am a woman and haven't got one to check.

Not entirely relevant but when the chips are down transwomen are quite happy to be men. E.g. when hereditary peerages were debated in the Lords it was decided that men who identified as transwomen would keep their place in the line of succession. They wouldn't be bumped out of line and replaced by say an older sister, who wasn't allowed to inherit the title, being female, or a younger brother because he was now the next male in line. Oh no, of course not.

As I say, they correspond to not so great sexist stereotypes which are reductive to actual women.

HTH.

They are also extreme caricatures of women based on sexist stereotypes of women.

Two are over sexualised and have bodies that no woman could possibly have in real life and pander to the desires of men.

The other is an unflattering representation of an apparent left wing feminist who is supposedly angry because she can't get a shag.

I am not sure it's possible to pick three names which illustrate sexism and the fact that men view women through the lens of fuckability and availability more acutely if you tried.

Women are not caricatures. Nor are they defined by their fuckability status.

What she does not have is a sex...because she is a fictional character and therefore does not exist in the material world.

Well, yes. You appear confused by your own talking points. No one here is saying that fictional characters are actual women.

Woman is layered on top of being female as a male constructed vision of how female people's existence should be constrained.

Nah. A woman is simply an adult female human. Like a doe is an adult female deer.

I don't believe in "woman" as a free floating gender identity.

These three are easily recognisable as women. People would never suggest that Betty Boop was a man or non-binary, but she clearly has a gender. People recognise and respond to the gender.

What she does not have is a sex...because she is a fictional character and therefore does not exist in the material world.

These characters have exactly the same genital configuration as He-man (just strokes on a piece of paper, no actual flesh involved),

Don't ask me why I picked PA, I have no idea.

Betty Boop is a woman, Lara Croft is a woman, Millie Tant is a woman

They're not actually women, though, they're fictional characters. And if you have a life sized cardboard cut out of Peter Andre that you say is your husband and kiss every night, you're not actually married to the real Peter Andre.

Every single time ideology crosses into medicine it creates an issue.

And this tends to disproportionately affect women.

That's ultimately why I have a problem with it.

It has no place in medicine.

I want good practice that listens to patients. All patients. Above all this virtue signalling nonsense.

If you get the good practice right, then no one should be offended.

I know I am a woman because I am an adult human female. This is not a social construct - each facet is objectively measurable. The gender stereotypes which are applied because of the immutable fact of our sex are social constructs.

Woman is just adult human female

I don’t want that removed from my sex class

It's unbelievably sexist that women can't define themselves as women.

It's unbelievably sexist and homophobic for transwomen to declare they are lesbians.

It's unbelievably racist to compare the real struggles of racial minorities with the 'struggle' of transpeople to tell the difference between sex and gender.

It's unbelievably religiously insensitive to insist that males should share public changing facilities or bathrooms with certain minorities.

It's unbelievably sexist to seek to go gender neutral on women's health care issues, which are invisible and underfunded enough, without having to cater to this nonsense over actual healthcare provision.

It's unbelievably insensitive and traumatising to gas light patients about the sex of staff if single sex provision has been explicitly requested.

It is not patient led care. That's ideologically led care to the detriment of women.

Betty Boop is a woman, Lara Croft is a woman, Millie Tant is a woman, yet none of these three have a body at all.

They are not women, they are fictional characters.

Is this perhaps the problem?

An inability to tell reality from fiction.

Yes 100% yes.

Woman

Mother

Well, I guess the question is if "woman" is not socially constructed, then how does anyone know that they are one.

Because woman comes with a whole load more baggage than female. Female is a material state of being, but woman is something that is not material. Betty Boop is a woman, Lara Croft is a woman, Millie Tant is a woman, yet none of these three have a body at all.

Woman is layered on top of being female as a male constructed vision of how female people's existence should be constrained. Woman is the prison that males put female people in.

Some people who would never consider themselves homophobic, racist, disablist and sexist seem to come out with some horribly transphobic things from time to time on MN

As Gasp has explained everything is transphobic. But also, have you actualpuffins stopped to wonder how all of these otherwise perfectly reasonable, non-racist, non-homophobic, non-disablist women have suddenly changed entirely and are horrible transphobic bigots? Maybe if you listen, they have a point and there are issues that need to be addressed?

If you come across transphobia on MN, do report.

Quite.

Why must the views of all the women who find it offensive be ignored to satisfy the fantasy of a teeny tiny number of transmen, who still remain women, because you can't actually change sex anyway?

Just y'know, wondering.

Not confused at all. A trans man is a woman, a trans woman is a man. That is reality. I don’t identify into my womanhood, it’s just a fact. I could take testosterone, cut my hair and call myself Brian but it doesn’t make me a man.

Yes, beats me why Parliament wasted time getting an entire Act drawn up by lawyers. It could all have been covered by just telling everybody to be nice to everyone else. Job done.

Please define transphobic. This is a meaningless statement unless you define your terms. So often it seems to mean believing and saying any or all of the following, which most people would regard as so obvious as scarcely to require saying:

• Nobody can change sex
• There is no ladybrain - women's brains are just as capable as men's, and very few jobs and hobbies are only possible for men and boys
• Transwomen are not women, transmen are not men
• Biological sex is real and verifiable and matters in the real world
• Sex is observed and recorded at birth, not assigned
• Very young children don't have the knowledge of the world or the language skills to state that they are trans. It's almost certainly the case that children identified as trans are actually gender nonconforming and they should be supported in that, as gender stereotypes are damaging for both sexes. Social transition is dangerous.
• Social contagion exists and is particularly likely to affect teenage girls and other vulnerable people such as those who are neurodiverse
• Children can't give informed consent to puberty blockers, cross-hormones or mastectomy, and any course of action that puts them on track to have irreversible genital surgery at 18 or 19 is ethically unjustifiable.
• Male sex offenders don't belong in female prisons.
• Males don't belong in women's refuges or women's rape crisis services, either as volunteers, staff or clients.
• Males don't belong in women's sport.
• Sexual orientation relates to biological sex, not gender identity, so same-sex attracted people are allowed to exclude people of the opposite sex from their dating pools; males can never be lesbians, females can never be gay men.
• Sexual fetishes are usually a male thing. Males can have a fetish about almost anything. Some males have a fetish about cross-dressing and female bodily functions. This is a million miles away from having gender dysphoria as a result of trauma. Such males should not be welcomed into female only spaces, and only naive and ill-informed people think otherwise.

I just wish there were a trans person or several here to give their views.

Why? It's nothing to do with them how women perceive what being female involves.

Hopefully these researchers will think harder about how most women prefer to be spoken to about female only issues before they ask for our time.