"What makes a women" NY Times article

I think that at least in the past, feminism has looked at women as a class. I'm not saying that any one feminist or group of feminists has necessarily got it right in how they included different groups of women and their concerns, but as a whole the analysis and criticism came at being a woman as being part of a class.

I don't believe class doesn't matter anymore, but in the present day identity politics has somewhat replaced analysis of class structures. The current ideal is choice, which is completely at odds with the older philosophy. I'm much more personally able to understand the class analysis than identity politics but I do think if you're an identity person you would also have trouble understanding my position which is where a lot of the calling opinions 'phobia' comes from I think.

I actually think I agree with a lot of your last post, TheQuestforUnderstanding.

Just marking my place and lurking. to all the brilliant posters.

Yonic, Beachcomber et al. Sorry, my post are too long, and thanks for making the effort to read them and respond to them. I do appreciate that some (or all) of what I say may be taken as STFU, and just another man telling you how you should be thinking. I didn't mean to come across like that but I see it must have done. And I can see I'm intruding, so I'll make this my last post. Obviously, I don't know what its like to live with the continuous sexism visited upon women and that I can't appreciate just how hard it is to have your voice heard. Maybe there's a hard limit on how a man can understand feminism, and I'm just going to have to accept that.

At least I've reached a position on trans women. Trans women like Jenner are trying to achieve happiness in the same way teenage boys buy the latest Apple products. They see an image of success and aim for that, and fail to understand that the people they are trying to imitate aren't fulfilled individuals. In striving so hard, achieving her change and gaining accolades, Jenner, and the society that congratulates her, perpetuate the myth that looking good is the same as feeling good, and that being a successful person is the same as being a good person. It isn't true. It's a lie the rich and powerful tell us to get money from us and to keep us under control. Jenner is not a poster-girl for libertarianism, minority rights and personal freedom - she, and trans-women like her, are the literal embodiment of the worst type of social conformity.

lightningsprite thank you. Can I ask about the religious element (I am Christian). No worries if you would rather not say.

Sorry deregged means deregistered.

thanks.... what does deregged mean?

Nice nails.

The chains graphic was done by a radfem on Twitter called @secret_sass who has since deregged (not sure why). She said she was okay with it being shared.

That's awesome Bertie! Can you do mine too?

It was on page 2 of Beachcomber's link to The New Backlash.

As an aside, do you like DS' nail varnish? It took me bloody ages

BertieBotts love he little picture of the chains, where did you get it?

As to what makes a woman... The physical realities of being biologically female affect many women and girls all over the world catastrophically. For example, sanitation in many developing countries prevents girls from getting an education and places them at risk of disease. It seems absurd to me that this goes on and at the same time we are having the discussion about if the terms 'vagina' and 'FGM' are exclusionary.

Lived experience outside of the expressly physical is also important. For example, my partner and I are expecting our first child, and we've been reading various books on the subject. This has been a bit of a revelation for him, as he's been reading material specifically aimed at women, and has been able to experience that awareness that the author isn't talking to you, because of your sex. We have since discussed how I have frequently come across texts that assume I am a man as if women don't do the tasks involved, and often enter a room where I am in the minority as a woman and am taken to be in a more junior role because of it. I have also worked in areas where the opposite is true, and the men who have worked there have described the experience of being a minority as new and a little disconcerting, but they were often embarrassed by being assumed to be the manager, when they were the junior member of the team.

As far as what it feels like to be a woman, I don't have any thoughts beyond this. For me there is the physical body, and the way society has treated me because of it. I don't see enough credible research suggesting that there are male and female brains so I don't like to hear this used by transactivists, but understand it's a very complex issue and any simplification is going to lose something. I clearly have a different concept of gender than they do. Philosophically this is fine, 2 opposing ideas can exist and be discussed by people who do and don't subscribe to them, but politically it's much more difficult. All I really know is that some people say they feel like a woman, and I don't feel anything other than I live in a female body and am treated in certain ways by society.

What a great thread. Thank you.

Bertie, I agree about the attitude of putting quote marks around pronouns and refusing to use the names people have chosen to be addressed by. If someone asks me to refer to them by a new name I see no problem with that, and I will use whatever pronouns they prefer. As a possible limitation to this I don't see how using someone's old name is necessarily a slight. I don't know how Caitlyn Jenner feels about the use of her old name, but unless she made a point about not wanting to hear it, I would assume it would be correct to say that Bruce Jenner won Olympic medals but I have seen people be challenged (often quite strongly) for saying that. I do understand that the term 'woman' and female pronouns may mean different things to other people, though. Similarly, I don't regularly use women only spaces but understand that these are very important to many, so while I don't place much importance on a pronoun other people may think differently.

Feminism should (to me) be about achieving joint and equal rights, freedoms and responsibility for both men and women at the same time.

Yes, well, men say this a lot. It generally means that they haven't;

a) properly thought about what feminism is

b) ever asked an actual feminist what feminism is (and heard her)

Feminism is different things to different people but it is essentially a social justice movement. It is a social justice movement that used to be called 'Women's Liberation' - and I wish it was still called women's lib because the notion of liberation is extremely important in feminist tenets.

Logically, if women seek liberation, it means that there is an agent which they need liberated from.

And that agent is male violence (AKA patriarchy/gender/sex roles/domination and subordination). There is no point talking about equality and rights if one ignores the context within which one seeks to achieve them. That context is male supremacist society (which dominates, controls, exploits and abuses girls and women) and the societal male violence used to enforce and maintain that supremacy.

Women's issues are not considered unimportant because women concentrate on them and women are not considered unimportant because they concentrate on women's issues. Neither women nor their issues are considered important because human females have been awarded low value and status in male supremacist society. Girls and women are considered less human than boys and men. Until you change the actual context all we can do is tinker with a few details (and we call this equality!!).

So, if we look at one of the concrete examples Thequestforunderstanding gave, that of abortion, a (radical) feminist will examine abortion rights within the context of patriarchy and therefore PIV, compulsory heterosexuality, rape culture, the fetishization of youth, the feminization of poverty, the exclusion of women from power structures, women and children as chattel, etc, etc.

Thequestforunderstanding, you say you are here to use us as a sounding board for your thoughts on a book - so I will give you some honest feedback. I think you need to think a lot more about what feminism is and what gender is. Firstly because of the content of your posts and secondly because of where you have decided to post them. A lot of women don't want to be used by men and have their time taken up by men when we are busy discussing our issues with patriarchy, in the main because it is patriarchal behavior on the part of the man but also because men usually start off by telling us what they think feminism is/what it does wrong/what its aims should be. And this, generally whilst having a poor grasp themselves on the basics such as gender.

Now, back to the topic of the thread. I just wanted to say that I can't remember where I first came across the The New Backlash blog, it may have been on MN - I just wanted to say thank you to the posters here who appreciate it and please share it.

I am all for people wanting to live/identify as the other sex but I draw the line at being told, that as a consequence I have to shut up about my own lived experience as a biological woman. And at a purely biological level, a man can't become a woman and a woman can't become a man.
And I never ever wear fricking nail varnish but I have birthed two children and terminated two pregnancies. I started having periods when I was eleven and I am currently on medication to control something that is directly related to the fact that I have ovaries.
So I am not going to refer to myself as a 'cis-woman' as what I am is a real life biological woman and I will use the term 'trans-woman' to identify that there are people who have penises but choose to live in a way not typical for an average man.
I fully support their right to do so as long as they in return adknowledge that they have a different lived experience and will never truly be an actual woman woman.

it had to happen: scroll down to the comments on this Buzzfeed article about a woman involved in civil rights whose parents have announced she is actually Caucasian and only pretending to be black. It is being argued by some that if she is black in her mind, then hey presto, she is black. Another commentator makes a direct analogy with Caitlyn Jenner. So the argument used to explain gender identity and trans is perhaps becoming influential in other spheres. Where it is at least equally problematic:

Buzzfeed

I am uncomfortable with a lot of the trans-critical literature, because they are often SO vehement in refusal to use trans community terms, often putting quotes around terms such as transgender, woman, prominent MTF personalities' female names, etc. Sometimes using excessively sarcastic or hyperbolic or just snarky tone in general. I just find it othering and unnecessarily hostile, and I feel like it clouds the issue, because the totally non-liberal, but also not especially feminist criticism of trans theory is "Eww freak". I feel like sometimes radfem stuff comes across as a bit "Eww, freak" rather than "This is problematic because X"

In my liberal way I just want to scream "But why can't everyone just PLAY NICE?" but I know that it doesn't really work that way, that it does make people on both sides really angry.

I am liberal politically, but I do like the radical feminist ideology of getting to the root. So I suppose I'd say I'm a radical feminist, and I find I can follow most radfem arguments well enough, even the controversial ones, but on this topic I find it really hard to empathise with radfems when they speak this way about people. I just feel, don't forget they are real people. You might think they are delusional or disagree with what they are saying but they're also obviously going through some painful stuff, and I just find it unhelpful to be so rude, frankly. I haven't yet found an article I feel confident to share, because they all appear to contain some variation on "Trans isn't real". I believe it's a real struggle for the people who go through it. I just don't think it's the right answer as a movement to "smash the gender binary", because it's more reinforcing it than anything.

Yy to your 10:48 post Bertie.

I liked this a lot from Beachcomber's link. I added credit so if anyone wants to download and share the image please do.

"Women are different from men, but really not that much different at all. The last thing we should be doing is highlighting the differences between the genders, and should instead be focusing on the commonalities."

I think you are misunderstanding what we are doing. We are pointing out differences in the way men and women behave. I think most of us on this thread think that the way people behave has a large dose of social conditioning attached to it. If we ignore this how are we to enable people to behave in whatever manner they choose i.e. in what is traditionally feminine or masculine or a bit of both. Everything is just going to continue at the current status quo. We have to name the problem in order to tackle it. And as Canyouforgiveher has stated we, as women, have different lived experiences. We should be allowed to talk about those experiences and name them. Your post smacks of telling us to STFU about this.

"Women are allowed to have control over the reproductive stuff..." Well that's very big of you to "allow" us to have reproductive rights. See it isn't even a given that we should have reproductive rights. Someone a man has to allow us to have them. Except, of course, as Basil points out, we don't have those rights they are only granted to us if men see fit to grant them to us and if we fit some criteria that they have designated.

"How do we know women aren’t important? Because they’re overly concerned with women’s issues!" I'm not sure how that statement is an answer to that question. Women's unimportance is not down to the fact they focus on women's issues (and this is the first time I've heard anyone say this). It is the fact that those issues are considered unimportant. Feminism raises the importance of those issues (amongst other things). You say you are third generation feminist ally (I don't believe men can be feminists) yet you don't seem to understand the basic tenets of feminism or the roots of women's oppression.

I am totally that right-on lefty liberal who is simultaneously horrified that I am not accepting everyone perfectly, while also being horrified at the simplification of gender roles into two binary compartments by certain trans activists.

It's really bloody confusing and horrible bit of cognitive dissonance. It literally hurts to try and reconcile these two beliefs. I'm at a total loss as to how to explain it to people, especially when they are in the "horrified liberal" camp, and they genuinely don't realise that they are throwing women under the bus with this.

How do you? How do you talk about it? I'm normally articulate, but whenever I try and talk about this I babble and make giant glaring errors which manage to offend both sides all at once.

"Women are allowed to have control over the reproductive stuff (which most men don’t want to have to think about that anyway) the stuff which means they can cook nice dinners and have the kids clean for when dad gets home, but are largely shut out of stuff that directly effects the “important” parts of the lives of men. "

When you say have control over the reproductive stuff, what do you mean?

The reproductive stuff - the medicine, the law, the social assumptions about it - is controlled by men. They're the ones still in the majority in decision making in those professions. How is that women having control?