So ... Does this indicate that you CAN be 'born the wrong gender'?

Oh God, another epic cross post with buffy!!

"But then you have a social science like economics where the variables are massive. Billions of people, various governments, political systems etc.
So it's very hard to predict what the outcome will be in various scenarios. Eg you apply quantatative easing expecting it will achieve X but actually it achieves Y."

The thing is, there is a massive confounding factor that means that the methods that are useful in a chemistry lab aren't really useful in society - and that is the social itself. People are not molecules and they do not behave in completely predictable, rational ways - rather, they exist in a social, political, cultural world that is full of all kinds of inequalities and ideologies. It is not that these structural and ideological features distort some baseline 'real' that subsists underneath them, as if they are some kind of gloss over the material - they ARE the real - and if you use only quantitative methods drawn from positivistic and materialistic sciences to try to investigate the social, it's extremely likely that you'll miss huge features of interest.

In terms of hypotheses: again, these work well in a lab where the whole point is to reduce variables and thus uncertainty to isolate specific mechanisms. But in the social domain, that's often impossible to do. And even if it were possible, it's not necessarily going to get you to the heart of the issue. If you think about any question (and a hypothesis is to some extent always a kind of question), it is framed in a given context, to given assumptions - and it is those assumptions 'behind' the kinds of questions that are asked that are often the most interesting and revealing things because it is here that ideological and structural factors are at play. (In gender terms, this might be investigating why women are seen as weaker-minded by looking at underlying assumptions about gender. In analysis of a bit of poetry, it might suggest that what is meaningful lies not in anything you can count but in something about language).

None of this devalues the place and power of something like inorganic chemistry in its own sphere. I, for one, am not advocating a return to the world of pre-scientific medicine and technology! Rather, it sets some limits to the somewhat imperialistic tendency of science to think that it can describe every truth everywhere in the universe for everybody, suggesting that other methods might be more useful and applicable to the social, artistic and historical domains - and, indeed, that these might be shot through with differences of culture and perspective that we should not attempt to reduce or remove.

"you can't determine if a person can't enter a female space because "you still have your penis""

We shouldn't have to. Claiming to "feel like women", they should understand why this is a problem for women & have the sense to stay the hell away from female spaces until they have a female form.

Slugs

We live in a society where male bodied people have been separated from female bodied people for certain matters for decades.

In a way, this is in itself irrational because the majority of male bodied people would not attack a female bodied person even if she lay naked in front of them.

So the rational solution for everyone would be individual privacy regardless of body type.

Different cultures draw the line in different places eg mixed nude saunas, cultures where topless women are the norm as much as topless men.

I really don't want to get onto toilets again if possible as I think this discussion is more interesting than that.

"I don't see why a trans person's fear is more important than mine"

It is because they are males and therefore matter more than us females who can be pushed around.

In the vast majority of cases men do not pass well as women. Where they do pass, women are unlikely to care but that is still an encroachment on women's spaces. The difference between that and a butch women is that the woman is actually a woman.

But my point was slug how can you say for certain that person is a man?
There's not many occasions in toilets or changing rooms where people's genitals are exposed.

You could well see a fully functioning man like my dh in a female space but he looks female enough to pass.
But then you could end up feeling threatened by a very butch women who does not and has never had a penis.

Oops posted too soon.

I also want to know how to be a trans ally - beyond saying of course you're a woman

I find it really heartening that in the real world it's clear all of you would treat a MTF with respect and use the pronouns she wants.

Obviously in the real world (day to day living not a Drs office) you aren't able to tell what someone's genitals look like.
So you can't determine if a person can't enter a female space because "you still have your penis"

My dh would probably pass quite well as trans (he's quite pretty, short and petit). With a makeover I bet he could pass pretty well even with no hormones and still keeping his penis.
His best mate however (6 foot 1 and huge, massive jaw) would probably pass less than dh even after hormones and surgery.

All I'm trying to say here is that maybe genitals aren't a good practical way of saying who can and can't enter female spaces.

And it takes the focus off both trans issues issues and women's issues and puts the focus on semantics

Such a good point slug. I like this debate but it is just a talking shop.

Garrick obviously you are a total star and are making a lot of sense.

I get frustrated with the 'a trans woman is a woman', retoric. BuI I would want to be respectful of trans people when I meet them on line and in real life. Being respectful of individuals and maybe being happy to use the pronouns etc people may ask to be used doesn't mean I agree with everything they say, nor does feeling uncomfortable about the way female spaces are compromised mean I don't feel a need for safety for trans women.

It seems very sad because I feel females could be allies of trans women and vice versa, and some are.

So we are back to "they aren't real women" and "it makes me angry."

I think I'll take a break from this thread, I've really enjoyed the discussion but I think this is the point where I do have a different opinion.

I just don't feel the same threat or encroachment that you feel. What's in someone else's pants isn't really any of my business.

Pointing out its not a real vagina over and over again. I don't really know why you would do that. You wouldn't say that about a woman who had been in some sort of accident and needed complete reconstruction. That's a matter for her and her doctors. No one else's businesses.

Massively agree with Garrick and Whirlpool. Thr reductivist medical view of surgically created "vaginas" is especially troubling

Good post whirlpool.

Yes Whirlpool. I agree with all of that. And the same the other way around. If I am correct it is also impossible to create a fully functioning penis. From a very quick google (not at all in depth) it appears that various options are available to simulate erection but they must be operated manually.

It reminds me a little of the case recently in Ireland where a medically dead woman was kept artificially alive in order to continue her pregnancy, to totally mixed reaction, half revulsion, half interest in the possibilities. It's similar in that it's a gross oversimplification of what the body part in question actually does. It's extraordinarily arrogant of doctors to assume oh yes, we know what this bit does, we can recreate that no problem. It just seems obvious to me that we don't really know what we're doing in this respect, and if it wasn't happening to actual humans, or is without a doubt providing a better option than the alternative, then okay, but I can't get behind the idea that it is a better option.

I think there are some more kind of things that get miscommunicated between the "sides" here, thinking about it.

One "side" takes the stance of people who are gender critical and / or say that a man can't literally become a woman in every way including biological, to mean that they are saying trans people can't don't shouldn't exist.

Speaking for myself, quite obviously trans people exist, it is entirely apparent that they genuinely feel that they are not in the body that they belong in, and this is frequently a cause of massive difficulty, turmoil, leading often to a terrible time and mental health problems and of course people who do act in ways that don't meet gender roles often get a shit time from lots of other people including violence and really serious harm.

The problem for me is not to do with individuals or even trans people as a group getting (correctly) protected in equalities laws and so forth. The problem is when the ability to talk about the people who when they are born everyone says "it's a girl" (or "it's a boy") is removed. And the insistence from some that trans people are literally and in every way the sex they feel internally, and that their experiences growing up are genuine experiences for their internal sex etc. Because then you have to start denying the biological realities of the problems that women face, the actual genuine shit that women and girls get because of their sex, and you get fucked up anomolies which put members of the group previously known as women and girls at risk.

The other thing that bothers me is that any other trans existence is met with such a totally different reaction. Yet a man says "I'm a woman" and everyone is all "yup totally you are of course" what does this say about what society / the world views women as? It's still "not man" isn't it. Was it on this thread or another someone said "what would you call a person who has had the surgery and now has a vagina" and my response is, it's not a vagina. A vagina is a complex organ with various different functions. You can't "make" one. Surgery makes a facsimile of a vagina. This erasure or treatment of women and their bits and bobs as just, well you can make one of those easy, it really sort of undervalues? erm, reduces what we are and what we're made of.

Women's bodies have always been considered lesser, problematical, unmentionable, or as a selection of orifices and so forth. The idea that they are for show, rather than function, all of this seems to support that idea, somehow.

Sorry a ramble there.