I can't get my head around the phrase "Transwomen are women".

So if you don't know what it feels like to be a different gender canyouforgiveher what is it that makes you feel like the gender that you are? Assuming your female, what is it that being a woman means for you? How do you know you're a woman? How does that feel?

I think it's terrifying that people are giving hormone blockers/hormones/surgery to children based on some stereotyped idea of gender. I think people will look back on this in the future and think it is barbaric and insane.

Before we got to a stage where people seem to think it's a good think to give kids hormones and lead them to thought of having surgery on healthy bodies, 80% of kids who express feelings of being transgender grow up to by healthy homosexual adults. Unfortunately the childhood transgender narrative has been co-opted by late transitioning mainly white heterosexual men.

So it's the parent's fault nikkinack? That's a fairly epic parenting fail then (crap, I said the wrong thing to my newborn girl and now she's a boy!). I'm feeling a bit better about the bits I got wrong myself. Didn't people think mothers were responsible for turning boys gay through their parenting too?

I don't know what it means to feel a different gender - there are several books describing it though. Jennifer Boylan is one author who has written extensively on what it feels like.

That seems to be a mother with a very strict, oppressive view of gender and a complete inability to allow her child to express herself other than by letting her shift gender boxes completely. Poor kid. I rolled my eyes at, 'Your wardrobe was by this time mostly boy clothes. I say mostly, because I snuck in girl clothes in dark colors…they had tiny embellishments, embroidered hearts and bows that reminded me that one day, you could be my little girl again.'

Yeah those things stood out for me too. I feel really sad for that little girl.

What does it mean to 'feel' a 'different' gender? That's what I don't get? What things can one feel that are boy things or girl things?

A child who feels transgendered is very different from a girl who is a tomboy or a boy who prefers playing with girls. I don't know what I would do if I were the parent of such a child but I know that no parent actually wants their child to transgender and if they do accommodate it is part of a very serious and difficult decision that is felt to be in the best interests of their child's mental health. Can't do links properly but below is a recent article from our local newspaper (this is not the child I know) which gives the parents perspective of a very young child who feels a different gender.

www.boston.com/life/moms/2015/02/26/letter-son-jacob-his-birthday/a2Jynr9Jhc3W8VQ9lVFx8N/story.html

This is an interesting discussion. There is a man in prison here in boston for killing his wife. While in prison he started transgendering (and at one point had a ruling which forced the state to pay for his treatment including final operations) and is now referred to as a woman. I have difficulty referring to him as a woman in the context of his crime because it seems to change the facts of the case to refer to a woman killing her wife rather than a man killing his wife.

I used to get called a tomboy a lot as a child. I didn't like it because I knew I wasn't trying to be a boy, I was just a girl who had short hair and liked climbing trees etc which I knew weren't 'boys things' they were just the things I liked.

I think "Transwomen are women" is difficult to get your head around because it's not true. It would also be difficult to get your head around the statements "the sky is green", or "two and two equals five".

However many times it's repeated, I will continue to not believe it because it's patently bullshit.

I have no problem with anyone living as they like to live and I will address anyone by any name or pronoun they choose, but because I do not believe that transwomen are women, I am transphobic and a bigot in a lot of trans activists and their allies eyes.

So be it. I think they're bigoted for denigrating my lived experience as a biological woman. I might even go so far as to call them biophobes if I were pushed.

Time for this pic again.

It's not surprising children aged 6 don't express concern. A lot of boys that age still think their penis might fall off or children think they might grow up to be a pony.

Of the two girls DCs went to school with who said they were boys (the DCs refused to believe they were girls at the time) one is now a very glamourous teen and the other a seemingly happy young lesbian. Both sets of parents took a laid back "wear what you like" attitude without any visible nashing of teeth or interventions from the school (other than to permit the girls to wear the boys' uniform). There was another boy at school with very long hair who my then 6 y.o. described as a "boy camoflagued as a girl" (no gender ID issues). When my DD complained about the girl's uniform I said she could wear the boys' if she wanted but she recoiled in horror.

Kids' views of sex roles and gender IDs are not like ours. My DD embraced pink at that age because she wanted to be on "team girl". IMO when kids see girls and boys are split into two groups by society, I think it's natural to want to be in one team and shitty when they realise the things they like to do are not allowed because those are for the other team.

Someone please tell all politicians people are people?! It'll save them all these headaches!

Sandor yeah that's an interesting study. I wonder why FtM are more likely to be criminal than cis women? Possibly the effects of testosterone? Or it could be because of unemployment due to discrimination => acquisitive crime

Definitely more research should be done, but it's a very sensitive topic so not many academics leaping at the chance!

I think 'transwomen are women' is such an easy sound bite.

Ooh let's not be prejudiced against the trans community.
Let's be inclusive.

But it's so bloody trite.

Being a woman is not a choice, any more than being black or being disabled is a choice.

Transgender men (transwomen) commit crime at the same rate as non transgender men
"Criminal activity, particularly violent crime, is much more common among men than women in the general population. A previous study of all applications for sex reassignment in Sweden up to 1992 found that 9.7% of male-to-female and 6.1% of female-to-male applicants had been prosecuted for a crime.[33] Crime after sex reassignment, however, has not previously been studied. In this study, male-to-female individuals had a higher risk for criminal convictions compared to female controls but not compared to male controls. This suggests that the sex reassignment procedure neither increased nor decreased the risk for criminal offending in male-to-females. By contrast, female-to-males were at a higher risk for criminal convictions compared to female controls and did not differ from male controls, which suggests increased crime proneness in female-to-males after sex reassignment."

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885

>>i have to say, i think some people are trying too hard to hold onto gender identity and creating a 'thing' where there doesn't need to be one

>But isn't that what those who say transwomen are women doing except in reverse?

Well, quite. If it is TERFish to hold to a view that biology is a legitimate aspect of the definition of "woman" then surely it is BFETA (biologically female excluding trans activist) to insist that gender is wholly a mental construct?

canuouforgiveher In our fairly mainstream primary school a child aged 6 recently decided to re-orientate from male to female - with the support of his parents. the school was amazingly supportive in communications etc. and there wasn't one child who expressed concern.

As a parent I would express concern, and as a woman who was once a little girl I would express concern. Why?

When I was a child, I liked to pretend I was a boy sometimes. I was too young to understand all the nuances of sexism, but as far as I could see, boys were allowed to do all the things I wanted to do, like climb trees. I hated wearing dresses. I didn't fit into the stereotype of a pretty frilly little girl.

I started using a more masculine version of my nickname and wore my hair short.

Thank goodness no one thought of making me permanently into a boy. Thank goodness no one thought I had better be medicalised, no one took me to see psychiatrists, no one booked me in for surgery.

Fortunately, my parents just treated it as a phase. One that many children go through. I find the idea of transgender children ludicrous. They are just children.

My daughter goes to a high school which is pretty progressive and liberal. Thus when I asked her who were the females in her spanish class (relevant for different reasons) she told me there were 2 and also one person who identified as "they".

In this high school, they can accommodate that identification (my dd and all her classmates are very comfortable with engaging with people with whatever (or neither) gender they identify with. It actually hasn't caused any problems.

While I am sympathetic to the posters who talk about dearly won and held female spaces I don't think male violence on women is really going to be solved by keeping transgendered men out of female bathrooms. I don't think that is the problem with male on female violence.

I know a few transgendering teens - in both directions. In our fairly mainstream primary school a child aged 6 recently decided to re-orientate from male to female - with the support of his parents. the school was amazingly supportive in communications etc. and there wasn't one child who expressed concern. I also met a few transgendering teens when my child spent some time in a psychiatric unit. It is not an easy hand to have been dealt in life -to feel your insides don't match your outsides. Especially if you don't have support from family and friends.

So I am all for supporting people identifying exactly how they want. I think it is easier to change public toilets etc than to change people. And surely public spaces should serve us - not the other way around.

But ...I am a woman. not a cis woman. I am a woman. I have a vagina, I have had periods, children, lactation, treated crap at work and otherwise because of my gender - oh and here comes menopause. I also have the history of women to look back to and absorb and realise this is my history. In the race to be better to trans than we were to every other marginalized group, we should not dilute the term "woman" because god knows we've served our time and taken our crap. I am proud to be a woman and would never identify as any little modifier on that word.

Feeding into the questions about what it means to 'feel like a woman' or 'feel female', OP asked back on page 1 about how we define 'woman' if transwomen are women.

Does anyone have an answer? Or at least know of an alternative (non biological) definition proposed somewhere? I've looked, but couldn't find anything that didn't include the terms 'female' or 'woman', and wasn't based on biology. The best I could come up with was 'not a man.' But then you need to define 'man'... You can't say a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman/feels female, because then you still haven't actually defined 'woman' or 'female.'

I find the whole thing very difficult to get my head around. I'm much more comfortable with sticking to the old definitions and creating additional 'categories' of people, like trans and intersex. Apparently that makes me a bigot though

i have to say, i think some people are trying too hard to hold onto gender identity and creating a 'thing' where there doesn't need to be one

But isn't that what those who say transwomen are women doing except in reverse? Like others I am unsure about what "feeling like a woman " means.

Ok Still,... you don't like acronyms. So, to suit you better, you would be called a transphobe. Which is the vocabulary which to them describes what you're saying. Hope that's clearer for you.

And Obsidian, the only people who are trying to hold on to a gender identity are trans people. RFs want to get rid of gender identity and all the socialisation, bigotry, violence and hatred that goes along with that. I don't get people who indulge in bigotry either, which is why I'm slightly perplexed that I am being told that I fit into a specific box, even when I don't. If RFs have their way, everyone would be free to be what they want to be, without the rigid gender structure which is held in place most strictly by trans people.

If Trans people are actually concerned with the undoubtedly heavy burden of violence perpetrated toward them, then surely it would make sense to turn on the people who are doing that? Because, let me make this really clear, those people who are being violent to trans people aren't RFs, or even feminists of any stripe. They are men. Men socialised to violence. Men socialised to be violent toward things and people they don't understand. The same type of men who are violent toward women.

RFs want to name the problem, it seems that a certain section of the trans* community wants to blame women. But then, women have always been an easy target, feminists even more so.

It's not bigotry to know that transwomen are male.

Tweets like 'transwomen are women' are aimed at educating people who haven't considered, let alone accepted, that gender and sexuality are fluid and mutable. Imo.

That made me laugh. It's not education, it's inculcating a dogma that can't be satisfactorily explained.

No obsidian, because straight men are not oppressed by gay men. If 1/5 straight men in Britain had been raped by another man, then you might have a point, but in this case it is women who are legitimately frightened of people who they perceive to be make (however that person identifies). To deny and belittle those fears is deeply antifeminist.