Following on from the TERF thread...

What would be a good site to see a different perspective on transwomen's views?

I'm not going to join any trans site, that would be an odd thing to do but I'd be interested in seeing other perspectives.

"I would like transwomen who do not agree with the most mouthy, most OTT transactivists to speak out about it."

They do, but as in many areas of life, the moderates are ignored in favour of the extremists.

Maybe you could join a few trans sites and see what the others are thinking.

Part of the problem is in a simplistic attitude towards what the actual threats that men pose are.

Most men don't want to rape most women. But men AS A CLASS are, all the same, really inconvenient and uncomfortable in certain sorts of space in which we require a certain kind of peace and privacy. just pointing out that rape is, for whatever reason, unlikely, doesn't make men AS A CLASS fit to share women's space.

Analogously - I have been groped intrusively by gay men who insist that it is fine because they are gay and don't want to sleep with me. I don't care if they want to sleep with me or not, I don't want hands of other people on my breasts and bum that I have not invited and if they belong to straight men, or any kind of women who don't want to sleep with me, that is not ok either. (Actually it never is women who do things like this. It may be different if you know Trinny and Susannah but I have never come across women like this in real life.)

gosh who are the non-mouthy, non-OTT transactivists who are standing against this sort of behaviour? Roz Kaveney? Sarah Brown? Jane Fae? These are the people who are in the mainstream press and their behaviour is the same.

kim transwomen should stop trying to encroach on women's space and women's rights. They should not demand that women validate their feelings and should not demand access to women's spaces or women's bodies. I would like transwomen who do not agree with the most mouthy, most OTT transactivists to speak out about it.

What bothers me about this discussion is that there is a lot of taking what the most mouthy, most OTT say and using it to condemn all trans people.

Most of the self-styled warriors against cis-sexism aren't trans, so their words should not be used against trans people as a class.

Holy shit, FloraFox, that's a perfect bit of writing.

feministsunknown.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/on-becoming-a-terf/

This is an interesting blog post.

And as Kim said, some trans activists are selfish idiots. None that I know though.

I thought that most sports insist on MTFs waiting for medication to kick in and for any advantage to disappear.

It might seem petty, but when women's accomplishments are so frequently dismissed and not counted having transwomen be counted as biological women does take away from biological women's accomplishments. I don't want to rehash the other thread but there were several stories where a transwoman who would have trained as a man been treated as a man all her life has now been awarded as a woman..and beaten biological women in sport etc. It seems unfair.

And this might not be an issue in the UK but in the states where Uni costs are prohibitively expensive some athletes can only make it on a sports scholarship. If people who are biologically male are allowed to play on women's teams biologically female will suffer

If we accept that gender is a social construct, something that is performed, then I suppose you choose RFFU ....

Personally, I'm willing to go along with pronouns etc, it's when trans women claim to be women in every sense of the word, and if course the women-only spaces issue, that it gets really, really offensive.

CailinDana wrote - "transgender people will (unwittingly) break down the idea of gender, as if they continue in the current vein, it will become necessary to refer entirely to biology"

It seems to me that trans people are excluded as much by their biology as by their gender.

If trans people unwittingly lost the gender-is-innate pillar of the transgenderism ideology that many transactivists advocate, would those transactivists want continue with another of their main goals, which is to abolish the biological basis of the sex categories of female and male (which they believe are social constructs)?

Has the definition of woman always been about gender? or is this a recent thing and i'ts always been a synonym for female human?

What if trans women were accepted as women in the gender sense, but not as female in the biological sense?

But what counts for a woman? I don't wear dresses or wear makeup, wear men's trainers. Currently hairy as fuck. Am I a man? If I accept someone else's definition of gender do I have to accept that I don't "pass" as a woman myself?

Yesterday I saw someone complaining about an article about fuckinng Mila Kunis. "Mila Kunis wants men to stop saying 'we are pregnant'"

Apparently the authors of the article were cis sexist for perpetuating the myth that men can't pregnant and that only women get pregnant.

It is very interesting to look at the WHO definitions:

www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/

"What do we mean by "sex" and "gender"?

Sometimes it is hard to understand exactly what is meant by the term "gender", and how it differs from the closely related term "sex".

"Sex" refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women.

"Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.

To put it another way:

"Male" and "female" are sex categories, while "masculine" and "feminine" are gender categories.

Aspects of sex will not vary substantially between different human societies, while aspects of gender may vary greatly."

By this the notion of gender could be regarded as sexist and boy is just short hand for 'male child' and girl short hand for 'female child', both of which are biological realities and will bring different physical challenges while growing up.