Following on from the TERF thread...

The F-word stats are indeed depressing, thank you almondcakes for taking the time to trawl through the articles. Liberal feminism is severely broken if it's dedicating 6 times the effort to the rights of a tiny percentage of born men than to reproductive issues which affect 100% of women and are the biggest reason for our oppression.

I'm also pretty saddened that born men have taken over the dykemarch. Even if we accepted that Sarah Brown is really a woman, she (use of female pronoun to avoid deletions for calling a spade a spade) isn't a lesbian because she has a male partner. From what I've heard, bisexual women aren't even particularly welcome in the lesbian community so how the hell have bisexual born men taken over?

Man-made language again, isn't it? Words are really important, so these trans and cis weasel words need to be challenged. So, the trans thing should be reserved specifically for those who genuinely make the transition, or are in the process of doing so. The ones we are discussing should be called - ooh, how about political females. The cis nonsense is superfluous. Real women are real women. No need for any qualifier.

And where does it leave those of us who like to keep men at a minimum is their lives? Suppose I want to employ a gardener or a plumber and choose a woman to do the work but a man arrives instead? Or I want to use a female taxi driver but she turns out to be a he? Don't I have the right to tell them to go away any more?

Feminist Times is similar - they had 'gender week' but you weren't allowed to comment unless you bought into trans ideology so it seemed a bit daft, really.

The F-Word is also depressingly pro 'sex work'. I don't even think of it as a feminist site anymore. In their weekly links they say linking to an article doesn't necessarily indicate agreement with its contents, but they will NEVER link to anything remotely gender-critical or anti-prostitution.

Also, wow, almondcakes. Those stats about The F-Word made depressing reading.

Thanks Annie, I knew that mightn't be a good analogy.

(BillnTed - short answer is yes, as ANC was a movement of liberation for all South Africans, not just Black South Africans.)

The more I read these threads, the more questions it poses for me.

Why do I, as a woman born, have to suddenly label myself as cis?

What the fuck is cis anyway? I know what it's definition is, but what does it actually mean?

Since when could anything other than a biological female either become pregnant or have an abortion?

Why, when things still aren't right for women should I be forced into advocating for biological men? As far as I'm aware, biological men are more than capable of making themselves heard.

How can someone decide that today and this year, I am going to perform 'woman' and the whole world has to leap through the looking glass and make that true for them?

Why can none of the people who write out that quote from Simone de Beauvoir not see that the unwritten clause afterwards is 'by living as a girl, and having your whole life shaped by that'?

Why do trans* people believe that they can dictate who they can have sex with, when even a patriarchal system such as the law states that women can say no?

Why am I not allowed to state how unsafe I feel about unexpected penises without being labelled a TERF or a bigot? I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that I don't want people with penises to be in places where I am only expecting vaginas.

This might be a bad analogy, but thinking back to apartheid South Africa, did activists of Indian origin demand that the ANC promote and disseminate their stories?

If feminists and allies make things better for women so that women are more likely to be considered equal, surely the knock on effect is good for trans people (if both sexes are equal, less jarring for the worldview than it is right to transition from one to the other, I think)

Yes, that leapt out at me, Basil

It's always the women who are expected to do the accommodating, isn't it?

And this absolutely horrified me:

"Cisgender feminists must not only make space for trans women within feminism, but enable their voices, perspectives, and stories to be disseminated and promoted."

WTAF? Sorry, but if trans women want their voices heard, let them do their own bloody activism alongside feminism, don't demand it at the expense of female voices, perspectives and stories - and certainly don't "promote" it over that of actual women. If that's somehow transphobic then I think I must be too, which is weird, because I get on very well with the one trans woman that I do know in RL. (sorry, I'm aware that this sounds like 'some of my best friends are black' but then in RL my friend doesn't insist on her experiences trumping everyone elses and has actually fully transitioned...)

This stood out for me from that article Beach linked to:

"Cisgender feminists must include and advocate for trans women."

Really? Feminists being told how to do feminism again? That's never happened before has it? Oh wait.

Apart from which I reject the label cis.

Gosh almondcakes at those stats. I knew the F-word had been eaten by right on trans liberalism and whataboutery but those stats are bad.

Totally agree with Tunip about indoctrination in academia. And all you say callindana.

This is outrageous too gendertrender.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/breaking-news-lesbians-stage-protest-of-heterosexual-male-keynote-speaker-at-london-dyke-march-2014-threatened-with-arrest/#comments

I used to love the F Word. It used to have a much more varied bunch of contributors and it felt really pioneering and interesting.
The trouble is that now they've taken such a trans/queer-focused approach, it means that only a certain type of feminist wants to write for them, so they're much narrower in all areas than they used to be.

I picked the F word because it seems to be the best known mainstream feminism site in the UK.

almondcakes WTAF. Was that supposed to be a site about women's rights?

What can be done about all this harmful bullshit?!

There seems to be an issue that women are making up that trans activists are taking over feminism, such thing as the cotton ceiling, reproductive issues ignored etc. So I have gone through numerous weekly round ups from the F word, covering 150 feminist links.

Articles primarily about:

Reproductive issues (abortion, breast feeding, miscarriage, sterilisation, infertility, childbirth, menopause- most not mentioned at all) : 3%
Disadvantaged groups excluding trans (lesbians, gay men, race, regionalism): 10%
Transgender rights: 18%

There was one article exclusively about lesbians. The topic was how lesbians should be shown having penetrative sex more on tv.

Articles criticising cis women were 7%, many complaining about lesbians.

There was one article exclusively about motherhood. This was about how mothers inconvenience childless women by needing help with childcare.

"But I don't see why I am supposed to accept that as applying to me and my understanding of womanhood as well. "

This is a good point.

The graduates of gender studies are often the most rigid and simplistic in their thinking, rather than being the people who grasp the political meaning of what they're saying. It makes me wonder if these courses are sometimes more about indoctrination than real education these days.

I am so, so fed up with this idea that gender identity must trump any other possible meaning of womanhood or you are a bigot. If someone wants to define himself as a woman because he thinks his supposed brain sex outweighs social conditioning or whatever, that's his choice. But I don't see why I am supposed to accept that as applying to me and my understanding of womanhood as well.

And as for the attempt to define other people's sexuality by telling lesbians that if they want to call themselves lesbians they must accept people with male bodies as possible sexual partners or else be bigots, honestly, I have no words.

I know the abortion article is . This is exactly what radical feminists have been predicting for decades. Transgenderism has acted like a stealth movement - laws and the dominating philosophy in academia have been changed on the sly before the public debate and exploration of the issues.

Now it is too late for the public debate to happen because the debate itself is transphobic. Neat huh?

The author of the abortion article also wrote this www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16462-transphobia-has-no-place-in-feminism

Despite being a graduate of Women's and Gender Studies, she doesn't seem to understand what either a woman or gender is. And notice how she totally misrepresents de Beauvoir and uses her to paint radical feminists as essentialist.

And this stuff is being given mainstream airtime and it is transphobic to say WTF?

When I first became aware of these issues I really thought that common sense would prevail but it seems the rad fems I was hanging out with at the time are being proven right. The Gender Recognition Act was passed very very quietly, with no consultation from feminists and indeed with vaste numbers of women either not being aware of it or not appreciating its significance. And now it is too late.

Am finding this thread very interesting, am sort of following the post-modernist bit too, but for the second time on this thread - a standing ovation goes to grimble

You see Beachcomber's example about abortion rights makes me feel like we're in some Orwellian nightmare

That and children diagnosed as trans, and no safe spaces without men allowed...