Following on from the TERF thread...

kim, do you think you are female by gender or female by sex? Sorry if that's too personal, it's just that you said "It's surprising how often you get asked your gender".

But it isn't a question of fitting into a binary world. Trans people already have documentation of being able to travel, drive a car etc. It is just that they want different documentation as a source of validation.

How does that compare to my female relative who cannot travel abroad because nobody will insure her and cannot drive a car because nobody will insure her, due to a rare medical condition? She is in a tiny proportion of the population, like trans women, but the whole of third wave feminism hasn't decided to make her condition the redefinition of womanhood, identity or demanded everyone refer to themselves as a woman who either does or does not have the condition. Who is socially validating her?

Most often, forms ask for sex so that they can track statistics on participation of men and women in particular activities or services. Sometimes it's to help with identification. Sometimes it is probably irrelevant.

Collection of statistical data is one of the areas where GRCs can lead to the obfuscation of women's lived experience. For example, in diversity statistics collected by workplaces or in relation to crime statistics. IMO these should be exempted from the GRA.

I shouldn't really get involved in trans threads. I get the rage when I do. But they bring up so many fundamentals that are about me as a woman and as a feminist that they are like moth to a flame.

Brilliant, Kim, if you feel more comfortable not being a man. I don't blame you, in some senses, cos I wouldn't want to be one either. But just because you don't want to be a man does not mean that you are a woman. I know that in this society it might do and I don't know the answer. I do know that it makes me so angry to see and hear the erasure of woman as a defined entity in law and in the practice of a minute minority , given that it is that very entity that results in shocking treatment exactly because women are women, as almost universally understood.

then how would you define someone with physical male characteristics but something in the brain that says otherwise. What are they?

A person with a penis is either male or intersex. A person with a vagina is either female or intersex. Even if the cause is biological, this person would be male or intersex (although the fact that this person may have fathered children rules out intersex).

A woman is an adult human female.

An intersex person raised as female since birth may also be regarded as a woman.

The existence of a tiny number of people with disorders of sexual development does not negate the reality of reproductive sex, nor the consequences of the oppressive social hierarchy (gender) that has been built on top of it.

A person born with no legs is a human being even though human beings are a bipedal species.

MRKH is considered a congenital abnormality affecting women.

Your link says they are women. I have no reason to doubt it.

This is an article published this week in the Wall Street Journal by the former head of psychiatry at John Hopkins university. He closed the gender clinic there where the awful experiments were carried out on children by John Money.

genderidentitywatch.com/2014/06/17/paul-mchugha-usa/

What makes a woman a woman is:

a. adulthood.
b. having physiological traits that are mostly female.

What makes a woman a woman?

Kim, what they are is a male with a brain that says otherwise, regardless of whether or not the cause is biological.

What they get called by other people depends on the society and the personal wishes of the person in question.

It is considerably more complex and thus more useful than 'there is no truth'. More useful is to say there is no neutral truth. But I can well imagine how this complexity has been converted into a source of power in discourse by some.

I agree Buffy that is is important to interrogate the neutrality of truth, especially as it is presented in the social sciences. But postmodernism IMO has indeed converted this critique into a discourse of power that functions to defend the status quo.

As I recall, [Butler] separates bio and social but points out that what people see and react to is the performance. You do not necessarily know the sexuality or physicality of the person based on that performance. So the performance becomes the reality in social terms, this is what people use to judge you.

This is an interesting deconstruction of Butler's performative theory of gender from a radfem blogger. Basically, she points out that Butler individualises what is actually a coercive social process.

The second, related consequence of this application is that Butler has framed Gender not in terms of a cultural system into which we are conditioned, but as a thing that we do. Moreover, as a thing that we can electively do in the same way as making a bet. By treating Gender in the same way as performative verbs, the stifling norms of Gender simultaneously (and confusingly) become “a domain of freedom and agency”. This treatment elides the reality that Gender is in fact a set of cultural products we internalise through our social learning from birth. Gender socialisation shapes and constrains who we are in a very real way, whether we like it or not. Even oppositional displays of “playing with Gender” have been necessitated by the constraint of imposed Gender in the first place. There is no opt out.

rootveg.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/i-say-it-therefore-it-is-so/

Kim, though I know this makes me transphobic in some quarters, that still doesn't make a man a woman. Unless the definition of woman has been changed without most women knowing.

Oh, it has? Well, blow me down.

Well, quite. Actually, I know a woman with chest hair (pcos), a woman with a deep voice (smoking). Not a woman with a penis, though.

I assume Kim meant people who had penises, chest hair and deep voices?