Feminism and the idea of a man or woman trapped in the wrong body are contradictory ideas

It's a simple statement Larry, but it's not incorrect.

Convoluted irrational arguments don't equal intellectual arguments. It's a common mistake to believe they do.

I'm not getting into a discussion of reality with you given that I'm not a postmodernist. Most people including yourself I assume accept the idea of real and not real. It's why we all get up in the morning to take part in the real world rather than staying in bed and fantasising about what might have happened to us. A man believing he is a woman is not engaging with his own physical reality. That's the problem here.

Do people here believe that a man with a penis is a woman?

If he goes through the legal process to be recognised as a woman, do you still believe that he's a woman, even if he keeps his penis? How does that fit in with the "wrong body" theory, if males can be women penis intactica, which is what they increasingly do.

Also, the idea of an body map that was mentioned upthread is incorrect. People who are born with missing limbs don't have a prior body map that tells them they should have no missing limbs. The brain responds to what is there, not what is not there.

Body dysphoria - believing that you should have a missing limb or that your body is the wrong shape or size is a mental illness, not a sign of an underlying issue with the body.

I don't think I am disregarding women's feelings,but I do wonder how trans people are expected to live in our society with its strict gender binary.You can believe that gender is entirely a product of society,but that doesn't make it go away.As society changes and people are more free to express gender as they want to,then maybe there will be less people who identify as transexual.Maybe there won't - we don't know.
In the meantime,what do transexual people do? It is easy to say that someone should live as they want and ignore society's conventions,but that isn't easy to do and it hasn't worked for many people in the past.
Men aren't up in arms about FtoM people,are they? Because they do not perceive them as a threat,presumably.I think women as a group can act in the same way.
But that is easy for me to say because I haven't yet been in a situation where I felt I needed to be in a women only space.

"Biology is real. Gender is a patriarchally created social consruct."

That is the kind of unscientific statement which an intellectual feminist seems to be able to get away with while claiming that it represents some kind of "analysis" I.E feminist analysis. You would need to define "real" for that statement to have any meaning, and "gender", unless you are choosing that to be the definition.

In any event, there is a large body of theory suggesting that, due to exposure to male or female hormones in utero, men's and women's brains develop differently. The below link is a fairly neutral article about it, citing both the evidence for this and critiques of it, some from a feminist angle. The point is, unless you are transgender, there is no way of knowing how the feeling of "being in the wrong body" manifests itself. The Op's thesis boils down to the idea that it is based on statements like "I like pink so I should have been born a girl". It may not be. It may be based on the idea that you look and feel wrong in your body, in the same way as someone born with the correct nerves for an arm but no arm might feel. I have no idea as I am not transgender but I can respect the strength of feeling that transgender people seem to show. The fact that the expression of male and female behaviour is a spectrum (and it clearly is) does not prove that it is a social construct any more than the fact that male and female foetuses are exposed to different hormones in utero categorically proves that males and females will automatically exhibit typical male and female behaviours. The reality is that nature vs nurture debates are very hard (almost impossible) to resolve without fairly extreme and immoral experiments.

www.gender.org.uk/about/04embryo/47_hmerr.htm

But Nyac,what about FtoM?If you believe,which obviously you don't,that a MtoF is a woman,then you also believe a FtoM is a man. So where is the misogyny in that? it isn't all one way.

It's also extraordinary to be talking about female humans being "privileged" over male humans. Another of patriarchy's reversals.

I hate these threads myself because they show a complete lack of respect and compassion for women and our reality.

Instead any man who claims to be one has his feelings and desires put above the real needs of biological human females. It's extraordinary. It's also completely based in misogyny. It's only through misogynistic beliefs that the idea can come about that a man who removes his penis is a woman, or even a man who keeps his penis for that matter.

Psychology isn't a science it's a social science.

There isn't a scientitific test for homosexuality either. People have to state that that's what they are.

The irrational and illogical arguments on this thread are incredible.

Nothingold, I see your point about how you think disability is a social construct. However I disagree, some disabilities do limit a persons capabilities. Some people can overcome challenges to achieve more than others thought possible. The point is, being open minded would reduce the impact of society defining what is a disability or what is possibe/impossible. Can this line of thinking not be applied to trans?

I hide these threads , because I find the complete lack of humanity and compassion to the state of mind of another human being is diabolical and makes me ashamed to be associated with some feminists.

They smack of indoctrination and a complete inability to embrace a concept that affects such a tiny proportion of either gender. And trans gender goes BOTH ways and yet the prevailing argument is always anti male.

As much as I see some of the injustices of the balance of equality between the sexes in our society, it not just one way traffic, and I far prefer it to the horror that would be life under the extremism of some feminist ideals.

"TGW - Of course transexual people and men can be raped. Of course they should get support. But surely you can see that some women who have been raped wouldn't feel comfortable in a support group where there was someone who said he was a woman, but looked still like a man."

What do you mean by "still looked like a man" - would you also exclude any women who are very hirsute due to hormonal problems, or who are quite butch? Short of demanding to see what's inside somebody's knickers it's not always easy to determine whether someone is xx or xy.

Reducing somebody to what shape their genitals are is exactly the opposite of what I feel feminism should be about.

I don't see what this mental model thing has got to do with transgender; it seems to be based on a misunderstanding that transgender people want to change their bodies to look like a different kind of body that they have a mental model of. This is not the case.

Most transgender people do not want to change their body. Most transgender people feel that they are one gender and that their body, regardless of what it looks like, is their chosen gender as it looks without modification.

Obviously there are some transgender people who want to have surgery to modify their appearance, but there are also many people who are not transgender who have surgery to modify their appearance. To try and associate transgender people particularly with surgery and psychiatric treatment is just stereotyping.

Transgender is simply a feeling of internal gender identity. It says nothing whatsoever about how people feel about their body. That varies by individual, as it does for people who are not transgender. I respect people's rights to their feelings, as I respect the rights of Muslims, Christians etc to their belief in their feelings about God, even though I don't share them.

But as we live in a society which does expect people to declare if they are either male or female, in a way that we don't make people choose if they are either Muslim or Christian, then if we are dividing people up based on this internal identity rather than on feelings or realities about the external body, then I think we need some basic description of what this feeling is. I only need to know enough about Christianity to treat a Christian person with respect, because nobody is asking me to call myself a Christian. I do need to know what the internal gender identity of men and women feels like, because I am being asked to declare if I share those feelings and if I belong to one of those groups. And perhaps more importantly, I have to raise my children as if they belong to or the other of those groups, so I need an explanation of these gender identities so I can respond to them.

It isn't somehow liberal or lacking in prejudice to say you will treat transgender people as their preferred gender identity if nobody has an understanding of what those gender identities consist of. It is just giving some superficial agreement to a concept without really following through. Rather like saying you don't discriminate against Muslims but then offering them pork all the time and being surprised they pray to a supernatural being because you have no understanding of what Muslims think or feel.

This is an incredibly interesting thread. As a man who has only studied a little psychology, a lot of this new to me, so thanks to all the posters for some very interesting material.

I saw the 'fascist' reference before, and whereas I could see where the comment was coming from, it's a sensitive word to use in a lot of circumstances. I would characterise some of the posts as 'strident' rather than anything else. It is interesting that some people will adapt/discredit science to fit a political dogma, rather than the other way round.

I haven't been able to find those stats. I have found some stats regarding gender dysphoria and transgendered people. But I have found many more regarding discrimination against transgenders.

I don't know, because I don't know enough about the surgery. Do good outcomes include just as many orgasms as before? Maybe some people have a 'what's done is done' attitude and find some elements of mismatching easier to live with longterm than others.

If you accept as a valid premise at least the possibility of a mismatch of biological origin (due to neurodevelopmental glitches, missing or wrong hormones at certain stages of brain development, whatever), then for me that means accepting that people can be justified in making physical changes and social changes in how they live their life, if that's what they feel is right, without that being opposed to feminism.

A corollory of that is that they also have to be entitled to make only part of the physical changes - whatever they feel comfortable with. Bodily autonomy and all that...