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

jenny

Giving birth isn't a gender stereotype, but the idea that motherhood is integral to being a woman very definitely is

It sounds like we agree on this. That's basically what I was saying. If you have two women one has given birth and is a mother, the another has not.
What I was trying to say, albeit very clumsily, is that I would expect both of these woman to "identify as woman" feel like women, have no gender conflict etc.

womb congrats on your pregnancy, hope you are having a healthy happy one.

It's been discussed before but no I don't think there is a single simple definition of "woman" that works for everyone (and that's even before we consider transwomen).

As I mentioned before the Olympics has issues coming up with a straightforward test / criteria for what is a woman. And that's just biology, they don't care about what is going on in your head.

This guardian article goes into the sex is not binary stuff and talks about sport

www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2015/feb/19/nature-sex-redefined-we-have-never-been-binary#img-1

This article in nature is basically the same stuff but more sciencey

www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943

Garrick, you know PCOS doesn't mean you can't have children, right? I got my diagnosis at 15 and also thought it meant that. It does make it harder, but in the end, it turned out a VERY inexpensive over the counter B-vitamin (inositol) makes many PCOS women's menstrual regulation and ovulation normal again--it's been well-studied in a lot of endocrinological journals and has few side effects.

Six months after starting it, my periods had been 100% regular every month...and then dried up again. And it turned out I was pregnantI'm now 15 weeks along with my son. Even if you've got a beard, even if your PCOS spikes your testosterone crazy high, it's quite possibleif it's a part of the journey you imagine for yourself, don't give it up because of this!

It isn't the "wrong" gender. It just doesn't match his internal gender. This makes him different than most boys... hence the idea of "wrong" coming up. Most people are not born this way, and thus it is easy to discriminate with wrongness of being who we are.

I think the bigger question, which we as a society are not asking, is what is going on in the brains of all these people who identify as trans. IMHO I think lots of different things may well be going on but because we are all expected to buy into the same trans narrative, 'have always felt like a girl' etc, then we never get to the bottom of it. I met a trans woman recently who only 'knew/felt' she was a woman in her 50s. Not everyone has the same story. Some hate their genitals, and cannot wait to have them removed, others are happy to live alongside them - a woman-identity but to keep the penis. As far as trans men go it seems quite possible not to have surgery but to use testosterone and look very masculine outwardly (no idea about under the clothes) but in terms of facial hair, muscles etc. I think it is important to recognise not everyone is trans for the same reasons.

I don't want to deny anyone's experiences but I was pretty pissed off when a trans women viewed me with suspicion because I did not want to be called 'cis'! I was calling her what she wanted to be called but somehow that did not extend to me!

My own journey is trying to understand trans issues and I want to be a friend and ally to trans people but I am very frustrated by the way some trans women are trying to get into some female only spaces and define how females can talk about things relating to females.

Trying to tread this path is very hard and frustrating at times. My encounter with that one trans woman was a bit like 'agree with me or I can't talk to you.' But I'm also not a radical feminist and I expect would disagree with a few rad fems too!

I hope there is a middle path between all these competing 'needs'!

Night all.

What an interesting thread. Flora as always spot on.

I have experienced fertility issues and felt very frustrated and perhaps angry that my body failed me. I don't think I felt less of a woman (because I was not) and certainly never felt like a male! I can totally see why women feel sad at the loss of the uterus. Whether they were planning on using it (again) or not. This is all biology and is not to do with gender or gender identity which is simply constructed around what society thinks females or males should be like IMHO.

On most days I don't buy into it, but I do sometimes wonder where all this comes from. One thing that I find interesting is that I like the company of women, I feel safe with them, I am straight so it is not a sexual thing, it is just I like being amongst my own sex. Can that be explained by sex/biological rather than any kind of 'gender identity' or is it to some extent about being socialised together?

Although gender is, I think, constructed, it is still real in that we all know what we mean by it, except when people bend the rules! Someone asked me to define masculine and I said something like not a flowery shirt! Then saw the hottest' most masculine man in a flowery shirt. What does it all mean!?

Plus what it means to be masculine or feminine now varies a lot from what it meant in the past, or what it means in other geographical locations.

And that seems very obvious and straightforward to me FloraFox.

I don't see people needing to go into these huge deliberations to explain what a deaf person is, or what a pet owner is, or an Italian, or a child.

A woman is an adult human female. In a sexually dimorphic species, the female of the species has the body type which is potentially (if functioning) capable of producing eggs and bearing children.

This has nothing to do with motherhood being integral to the life of any particular woman although in most cultures the life experiences are shaped to greater or lesser extents by her ability or inability to bear children.

Her personality and traits are not determined by her ability or inability to bear children.

Giving birth isn't a gender stereotype, but the idea that motherhood is integral to being a woman very definitely is.

I think it is extraordinary that you can't define what a woman is, and yet you keep mentioning things that are very much connected to having an adult female body - hysterectomy, birth, breasts.

You seem to be saying all of these other women think bring a woman is to do with having a female body but you don't think that is what being a woman is - those are just individual, personal, internal experiences as far as you're concerned.

I don't think it is odd at all to feel that way after a hysterectomy if you had children or wanted them but couldn't have them.

So if all those experiences of having a female body aren't what being a woman is, what is a woman?!

Got to go to sleep now, toddler has tonsillitis and actually looks like he might sleep well now he's medicated.

If we are going to include giving birth as a gender stereotype, then no.

yonic I thought of the mother one because of an odd thing my own mum said when she had her hysterectomy.
She said it was odd to think that her baby making days were definitely behind her. And she did feel like she had lost of part of her womanhood, or words to that effect.

I remember being somewhat baffled as she was 54 at the time and my dad had had a vasectomy years ago but it was odd she really did feel a loss.
I couldn't get my head round it at all at the time but it did have quite an impact on her.

Both of those examples are gender stereotypes - large breasted mother.

Can you explain what a woman is without relying on gender stereotypes?

See, I just don't recognise any of those things. I can see how it's a personal goal to be a parent and a disappointment if not. I can see how someone wanting to be pregnant might be angry at their body if they couldn't be. But if they feel "less of a woman" for that, what do they feel instead? Surely not "more of a man"?

Sorry Yonic I was just trying to express that gender identity is very much personal to the individual (clearly not very well).

A less superficial version could be that one woman feels that being a mother is important to how she feels as a woman.
I think that is fine and it shouldn't make a woman who has not had kids feel like "less of a woman"

"So for one woman she might find having large breasts as essential to her womanhood. But it doesn't mean it applies to me. "

Err, what? So if that XX woman happens to have small breasts, then what? She doesn't perceive herself to have womanhood?0

Sex determination is not complicated in the vast majority of people. Billions of people throughout history who could not read or write have known what to look for if they want to reproduce. We don't read of ancient Greeks puzzling why two men might have sex but neither gets pregnant.

Glad you liked it slug I couldn't help but wonder if there will be a legal third biological sex in the future.

garrik
And this is where transwomanhood offends me - many transwomen seem to be saying, even insisting, that tits, hair, clothes & makeup form the core meaning of my sex

I guess the reason this doesn't bother me is that I view gender identity (not gender stereotype stuff, just the feeling of being a particular sex) as an entirely personal and internal matter.

So for one woman she might find having large breasts as essential to her womanhood. But it doesn't mean it applies to me.
I think how you feel as a woman or a man is entirely an individual thing.

Perhaps I haven't put that across very well - I think that the RadFem perspective is more that yes, please, dress however you like and we don't mind if you want to dress like a typical man or a typical woman or a butch woman, camp man, absolutely anywhere in between, whatever. Pronouns, I don't mind, it doesn't affect me, so why should it bother me.

Where it affects me as a woman is when somebody who is not a biological woman wants to be classified as such because it muddies the waters. Does that make sense? It's really just in a sense that we haven't finished fighting this fight yet and this is quite hugely getting in the way, and if nothing else, it just seems a bit self centred and rude.

Sorry Garrick, you've totally lost me with Ben Mitchell.

WhenShe, you know, I don't think there is.

Because if it means for a biological male to transition to biologically female, then that's impossible. But if it means for a person of the male gender to transition to the female gender, and the radfem in question doesn't believe gender is something that you get to decide yourself, then that would also seem impossible (or arbitrary, perhaps)

If it means for a person socialised into male gender roles to change their behaviour and appearance so that they fit into traditionally female gender roles, then that is just a person changing their behaviour and appearance. Why does it have to have anything to do with gender, except for the fact that we live in a gendered world, which radfems want to fight. Hence (you would think) - on the same side.

If it means any of the above but also to be referred to and considered as and genuinely to be female in every sense of the word then radfems are going to get upset about that because as Whirlpool says, biological males and biological females are not treated equally and we haven't finished fighting for that yet, so we can't afford to have the waters muddied with biological males insisting that they are, in fact, biological females and insisting that we include MTFs every time we talk about problems which affect biological women. If everything were equal then perhaps it wouldn't matter, but it's not and it does.

This, however, is not what transwomen are asking us to agree upon. They're telling us they feel like a woman, then describing that in terms which relate only to gender - not sex

Sorry just re reading the thread and saw this from Garrick.

I'm just trying to imagine this from a transitioning MTFs point of view.

You want to transition from MTF and want to pass as a female. So you do your best to feminise your appearance so that you "pass" , But this reinforces gender stereotypes about what a woman looks like, so some people don't like it.

I'm just wondering if there is a feminist approved way for a male to transition to female?