Following on from the TERF thread...

I happen to have the thread before the deletion still open on my PC. I posted just before I went to a meeting and just shut my laptop with the thread still open. I might edit it and try again. Perhaps that breaks some sort of rule though to edit and repost a deleted post.

I read the post but I can't remember which one it was. I definitely don't remember reading anything controversial (although being "transphobic" I probably wouldn't spot it). When I had all my posts deleted in a trans thread I was very surprised by which one MN had decided was the worst post.

Damn. I missed a Beach post.

What was that for?

Gosh.

Men may live as women and women may live as men but when a gender critical feminists calls a man a woman, the genderists pounce on this and, quite rightly, point out the inconsistencies of agreeing transwomen can be women but treating them differently for some purposes and acknowledging actual women as a biological reality on which gender enforces patriarchy.

I agree Flora. I think Ditum undermined the point of her whole piece with that bit at the end about Cox being 'a beautiful woman'.

If she thinks Cox is a woman, then all she is really doing is judging Cox for performing stereotypical femininity, which plenty of 'cis' women do. Trans activists will pounce on this part of her argument and accuse her, with some justification, of holding transwomen to different standards by demanding that they subvert gender norms, when most 'cis' people conform to them.

The feminist point is that someone does not become a woman by performing femininity, yet it is this idea that is central to trans ideology - the same idea that Ditum was taking issue with at the start of her article.

No woman can say 'transwomen are men' and remain publishable in the mainstream media, so Ditum's hedging is understandable. But you can say something like, 'I understand that sex dysphoria is a real thing,* and some people need to live socially as the opposite sex', or something like that. Saying 'I recognise transwomen as women' while also saying that gender is bullshit and being born and raised female is foundational to being a woman makes no sense. You either believe in an identity-based definition of gender or you believe it is an oppressive social construct.

*Which Ditum did say in her piece, and which attracted the wrath of one trans person in the comments, who says it is insulting to trans people to frame their experiences in terms of dysphoria! Yet trans activists refer to the debilitating effects of dysphoria to justify the need for people to transition in the first place - we are told that it is so overwhelming people will commit suicide if they can't transition; dysphoria is why children need to be given drugs that will stunt their brain and bone development and sterilise them, etc. The narrative changes all the time and has no logical consistency.

Looking at Glosswitch's post, she is making a point about how the purpose of women's rights is to look at the position of women globally, and to try and do something about. So it isn't acceptable to say that gender is just wearing a floaty scarf when for other women gender is about being denied essential resources, health care etc.

I think the same should be said about transgender rights globally. If trans rights are global, then it cannot be defined solely on the basis of trans definitions in a couple of countries (US, UK etc) as a fluid spectrum that is self defined from internal identity that is independent of sexual orientation and biological sex, because that isn't how non binary genders work globally.

There isn't any society with non binary genders, as far as I can see, that doesn't also make a distinction based on biological sex. Some non binary genders are chosen by the individual, with others being given by society based on birth order or perceived beauty during childhood. Some genders are given exclusively to subsets of males or females within a binary. Some are given based on biological sex and sexual orientation together. Some are given based on whether or not you have been pregnant and breastfed but no longer are. Some are a religious role. Some are based on being expected to do child rearing tasks. So in our own society the nearest conceptual categories we have for transgender people in other cultures are not trans people as understood by trans activism in the UK /US, but effeminate gay man, empty nester, maiden Aunt, rent boy etc.

I don't know how trans rights should be dealt with globally, but the focus must be on those in non binary gender roles globally. The pretence that non binary gender is an innate identity with no basis in biological sex or sexual orientation, and that it is a liberating force that breaks down an oppressive binary is damaging to non binary people globally. How exactly, is a society set up into three genders, where attractive boys are selected during childhood and told they are now lifelong members of a sex class relative to all other men more liberating than a gender binary? I don't see how the number of genders changes the likelihood of a system being more or less coercive and oppressive. The job of trans activism should be to represent trans people globally; I can't tell them how to do that.

If people in the UK want to take on identities like gender queer etc, that is entirely their business. Claiming that this is an act that will liberate the whole of society from gender is my business as well. Denying that such identities replace rather than exist alongside sex roles is definitely my business.

I can see that feminism is, in some instances, solely about female bodied people. I can also see in left wing terms that while women are placed in the reproductive class, there are some societies where third gender people are also placed in the reproductive class - assigned to do much essential care of children, to be sexually subservient to male desire, to clean, deal with sanitation etc on the basis of sexual orientation, innate aspects of physical appearance etc. In that sense, I would then view those people as politically the subject of feminism, because I'm not a radical feminist, I'm just a generally left wing feminist.

So I would include any third gender groups globally who are entirely within the reproductive class within my personal perspective on feminism and who feminism should be about, because feminism to me is about the reproductive class. I do not see that any trans groups collectively in the UK are part of the reproductive class. I also don't expect radical feminists to have the same view, because they have a different perspective and that is fine.

From the link posted by AbortionFairyGodmother and Tunip: "If white people—the actual perpetrators of the huge majority of offenses against Black people—used their institutional power to ensure that they were the group of “leuko-racials” that had to change the least and sacrifice the least in order to achieve equality, it would matter."

Yes yes yes. Men, it does matter.

AbortionFairyGodmother, I've just read the Cisgender - cui bono? post. It's utterly brilliant. I would recommend anyone to read it.

It totally exposes the sleight of hand by which 'cis' allows transactivists to claim they are 'punching up' when they're really taking it out on another oppressed group.

From Sarah Ditum:because there are parents who would rather diagnose transness in their gender-rebel kids than face the stigma of raising a child who fails to fit. I would agree with this. I have seen several interviews of parents of children diagnosed as trans, usually boys who have transitioned to being treated as girls*

This is pretty much what Sheila Jeffreys says. She's the woman who's been extraodinariy villified.

The real sadness of all this is that while women (however you define them) are attacking other women, patriarchy strolls on by, whistling.

Have you all seen Glosswitch's brilliant piece, where the analogy she chooses is class?

glosswatch.com/2014/06/24/finding-privilege-class-gender-and-social-justice-tourism/#respond

Glosswitch is brilliant. Her twitter isn't working at the mo else I'd have told her so.

I think it would be far simpler if the feminist definition ofgender went back to being called sex role and the definition of gender was used for other things. I would probably still disagree with the definition of gender but on grounds of racism rather than misogyny, which is anissue that would have to be led primarily by people from other cultures.

Be careful Flora. I've had a post deleted for telling it like it is. Apparently it makes me transphobic.

AbortionFairyGodmother thanks for the link to your blog. Very interesting!

Sarah Ditum's response was very good. My problem with it however is that she ends by saying Laverne Cox is a beautiful woman. As gender critical feminists (lib or rad), our responses fall down when we agree to the delusion that a man can ever be a woman. I know this is done out of sensitivity and politeness but it is very harmful to a meaningful understanding of the issues. The simple fact of that matter is that a woman is an adult human female and a human male can never be and never become a woman. Men may live as women and women may live as men but when a gender critical feminists calls a man a woman, the genderists pounce on this and, quite rightly, point out the inconsistencies of agreeing transwomen can be women but treating them differently for some purposes and acknowledging actual women as a biological reality on which gender enforces patriarchy.

Beachcomber Tue 24-Jun-14 08:30:12
IMO, the difference between genderists (trans or otherwise) and feminists, is that genderists see biological sex as something fluid and abstract and gender as concrete and immutable.

Lightbulb!!

How on earth did that come about? Why not the opposite, which makes so much more sense for anyone whose brains haven't fallen out?

At the risk of coming across as goady (and that's not my intent), I do hope, Kim, (if you are still reading) that you could involve yourself in this part of the discussion, rather than focusing on the changing room stuff on its own.

Why on earth would it matter to these arguments whether there are intersex people?

Look. Race is an obvious place where there is much MORE of a spectrum than sex. Does that mean "queering" race by parodying blackness or declaring it as a white person would be okay? Disability's a spectrum, too. Are disability cheats just "queering" an oppressive system?

Everyone's acting like the fact that scientifically we could divide people in these other ways matters. For 99.9999% of human history, the science of reproduction was so poorly understood that women were thought to be only vessels, rather than contributors of reproductive material, in most cultures.

The reason that oppression divides the sexes into a binary is that for the huge, huge majority of human history, you've needed a vagina when you were born to get pregnant, and a penis when you were born to impregnate someone. It frankly didn't matter to the people using this system whether these classifications left some people out in the cold, it wasn't designed to grant wishes.

Since infertility was very poorly understood, the idea of "well, then, women who aren't fertile wouldn't be oppressed" is stupid. The mechanics of infertility are still difficult to understand, and supposedly infertile women conceive with stunning regularity.

Oppressions can only develop in the context of people's actual knowledge. The single biggest clue people had to whether someone was the impregnable or impregnating group of humans was their genitalia. The understanding of human sexual development, biochemistry and anatomy developed in the last 20-30 years bears literally no relevance to the historical oppression of female people, because historical people did not know how to perform DNA tests or check hormone levels. They only knew how to check what was between the legs.

People can talk all they want about the utopian society they'd like, where it's decided differently, and that's fine. But when we're talking about combating the current effects of thousands of years of historical oppression, it seems like an incredibly handwavey, mansplainy thing for people to say "oh, you just don't understand the SCIENCE that makes all your oppression irrelevant."

-- AbortionFairyGodmother (I also run a blog at culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com, which was linked in this thread)

Sarah Ditum's excellent crit of the Penny ramblings

Here's the thing:
'then we have to question every assumption about gender and sex role we've had drummed into us since the moment the doctors handed us to our panting mothers and declared us a boy or a girl', writes Penny.

But that panting mother always was, and always will be, a biological female. Because sex exists.

And as long as biological sex exists, to be told we are bigots for wanting to discuss it is going to be antithetical to the interests of the group of people which is oppressed on that basis, and promotes the interests of the oppressors.

Pretending that society allows us to grab any gender we like and we will all be equal in the face of that reality is a massive, stinking lie.

It really is that simple.

She is such an arsehole.

I can't bear to read it until I'm feeling psychologically prepared.

www.newstatesman.com/society/2014/06/laurie-penny-what-transgender-tipping-point-really-means

Laurie Penny at it again with her nonsense. This annoyed me:

"cissexual" or "cis" simply means "not transsexual", in the way that "heterosexual" means "not homosexual or bisexual".

Argh. "Heterosexual" does not mean "not homosexual or bisexual" it means attracted to the opposite sex. Her problem is that none of these words mean anything given the refusal to recognise biological sex as a material reality. What would be her definition of "homosexual"? "Not heterosexual"? The OED is unsurprisingly lacking definitions which state that "X" is "not Y". "Cis" has no satisfactory meaning, it's a ridiculous made-up term to promote this genderist ideology.

Personally, I think Butler's ideas on gender as a performance are massively privileged.

Exactly, Beach. As Martha Nussbaum points out in her definitive takedown of Butler:

Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler's focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies.

perso.uclouvain.be/mylene.botbol/Recherche/GenreBioethique/Nussbaum_NRO.htm