Following on from the TERF thread...

I wish it did, CallinDana, but anytime I see this raised, you get a bunch of people coming in and totally derailing with the "people can be raped by fingers, too! Do you want to exclude all finger-having people, do you? DO YOU?"

...which also gets pretty tiresome having to go through the whole "yes indeedy but most rapes are by penises and you are deliberately taking the piss" conversation yet again.

"What I mean is, if the debate around female space is pushed far enough then I think it'll come down to "if you have a vulva you can enter here, if you don't get lost -" which, over a long period, could actually do a lot to strip away ideas of gender as what you'll be saying is, ok, we have two basic types of genitals (with some variations in between) and those genitals relate to nothing else to do with a person - they can wear dresses or suits, want to be called man or woman, it's all a matter of choice, we just restrict based on anatomy not on any notion of gender" - does that make sense?"

I agree with this - when we are splitting say toilets into "womens'" and "mens'" its about anatomy rather than "gender" isn't it?

"It's true that men want to be alone together, however they don't want women alone together. Men would be just as happy if not happier with a world where men went to the pub/whatever and women were locked into individual cupboards. The fact that women do have a secret world apart from men bothers them intensely."

Do you GENUINELY believe this!?

The issue isn't actually with trans* or with feminists, the issue, as ever, comes back to men's behaviour.

So true. The paradox for feminism is that in order to abolish gender as a meaningful ideology, we have to reinforce it by segregating ourselves. Our long-term objective is incompatible with the short-term necessity of protecting ourselves from men's harassment and violence. I don't think there's any way out of this trap. It needs men to renounce the privileges and entitlements of their gender, and that's out of our remit.

unless it becomes unacceptable to refer to someone's sex at all, there will be words for 'person with willy' and 'person with vagina'. Won't there? I cannot see how we can get by without such words, even if we don't need to know someone's sex as much as we think we do at the moment

I'm struggling to think of more than a handful of contexts where these words are useful, aside from enforcement of / resistance to heterosexist patriarchy. The cancer I'm statistically most likely to get is one that affects men and women equally. Do we need a separate pronoun for "child of smokers"? He-him/She-her/Re-gal.

I used to look quite androgynous and people often got my gender wrong. These days, not so much. This is not because I have started taking my knickers off in public.

Oh and (getting the rage even more) how the hell do you teach your children how to avoid unwanted pregnancies when they're old enough unless you're allowed to talk about the type of contraception appropriate to their biology?

Someone made the brilliant observation upthread which I think is worth repeating: "trying to be so open minded they fail to notice their brains have fallen out."

What's really giving me the rage about that article is the idea that gender is a "thing", immutable, fixed in stone - where for me (having struggled all my life against gender as this set of oppressive and arbitrary little boxes other people want to force me into) it's so clearly a fluid, culturally variable social construct.

And I shall continue to allow DS to talk about his willy, while simultaneously having conversations with him about how it's alright for boys to like pink, play with whatever the fuck they want, and that toys are to be classified as either interesting or not interesting (to you - and it's fine if other people make the classification differently) not as boys' or girls' toys. And that boys can wear pink dresses if it takes their fancy and aspire to be ballet dancers, and girls can wear khaki trousers and aspire to be all-in wrestlers.

I just read that article, and what I got from it that I am getting very, very tired of the notion that knowing that the configuration of your genitals makes a difference to how you are treated in the world is "creepy".

All very interesting. I think both the points above are fair in that in its crudest form, for me, patriarchy would be 1) Men and women are different, and 2) men are more important than women.

"it challenges the idea of separation, which is fundamental to patriarchy" - no, the idea that male access to females must never be impeded is fundamental to patriarchy. And that is what transwomen wanting to go in female spaces is about, and why they are largely supported in this.

Like, I don't think you'd say that lesbian separatists are the foundation of patriarchy would you?

It's true that men want to be alone together, however they don't want women alone together. Men would be just as happy if not happier with a world where men went to the pub/whatever and women were locked into individual cupboards. The fact that women do have a secret world apart from men bothers them intensely.

The article WhosLookingAfterCourtney was talking about

I must be having a seriously stupid day, because none of it makes sense.

The author suggest that we shouldn't be calling children with penises boys, and children with vaginas, girls, because cissexism. Even asking a woman if she knows whether she's having a girl or a boy is supposedly problematic.

I can't link on my phone but the article was on Everyday Feminism and was called '3 examples of everyday cis sexism'

That's what the article I read was suggesting buffy, that it was cis sexist to tell your children that boys have willies and girls have vaginas, to say that women have periods, etc, etc.

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

A lot of the trans activist rhetoric seems to be denial of biological reality.

Public toilets, changing rooms, reproductive services are separate because of biological sex, not gender identity.

I read something recently arguing that talking about periods, abortion, pregnancy etc as women's issues was 'cis sexist' because they affect men too. Surely thisis madness?

Perhaps the separating of sex and gender would be a good thing, but I would still defend born women differentiating themselves. Born men too .

Yes, I'd agree with that grimble

CailinDana I agree it would help for people to examine why there is sex separation for certain things (including statistics). I am concerned that there is no opportunity for examination because of accusations of TERF etc.

Excuse me butting in but I see transwomen with penises wanting to be accepted as women as another way for male entitlement to try and impose itself. They want to eat their cake and have it too.

Either that, or I have entered a parallel universe.

I think we are agreeing as much as we are cross-posting

Without wishing to be pedantic, I think the aim of feminism is to abolish gender and make sex irrelevant, IYSWIM. Is that the same? Probably.