Germaine Greer

Here's the Stonewall Trans Advisory Group, which includes the bearded professor saying they are "broadening the bandwidth of what it is to be a woman." Funny, I'd have said he was broadening the bandwidth of what it is to be a man...

Slugs there had already been a case when a male bodied individual saying they identify as a woman was given access to women's refuges (in Canada I think) who went on to sexually assault 4 women (including one 15 year old). TAs claimed they weren't truly TG but the individual has never said that. Also cases of a male bodied tw having to be moved to a different women's prison from the one they were in because they had got at least one inmate pregnant. Were these Relationships truly consensual?

slugs I gather people of that nature are currently taking advantage of refugee children.

Lol and great post limited period only. Jack pisses me off too (I'm being less eloquent obvs!)

My point is that you don't have to be MTF to be fucking difficult.

No, there is a lot of special snowflakery from women too, but most of the really nasty stuff I want to slit GG's saggy throat, anyone? is coming from men.

I am so relieved to find this thread. I am surrounded by people who think GG is evil or senile or just wrong and it's making me crazy.

Yes, it's 'womanface' and I agree with Flora about pushing drugs and surgery onto children in order to correct them.

It's died down today but I was non-plussed by the multiple threads on Chat started by women falling over themselves to congratulate Jack Monroe on becoming transgender.

Er, why?

I found Monroe's message in their blog utterly batshit and baffling.

But that's their prerogative. They is an adult and may have whatever lifestyle they choose to follow. They wants 'top' surgery, which I take to be a mastectomy to rid them of their DD breasts - they talks about the size of their breasts a lot in their blog.

Liz Jones, the journalist who writes a lot for the Mail group, has had a breast reduction because she disliked her breasts along with other bits of her body which she starved into submission.

She is ridiculed and abused on MN. Admittedly, she is an easy target; but why her and not Monroe?

Monroe was also thoroughly shitty in their blog about a gay female partner who wanted to be involved with a woman who identified as a woman and didn't want to be with someone who said they weren't.

It was their (Monroe's) choice but don't understand why so many people felt the need to wave pom poms though.

And fuck me, but I'm so fucking tired of using Monroe's preferred pronoun (they/them) rather than their first name (Jack/Melissa) and making it clear when I'm talking about them or someone else.

It seems that 'it' is not an option, so out of courtesy I won't use it.

My point is that you don't have to be MTF to be fucking difficult.

On one of the links upthread, someone made a comment about "womanface", likening it to "blackface". To me that describes perfectly what Caitlin Jenner is doing. It is offensive to see my womanhood reduced to such a bloody cliche.

Love Germaine Greer.

In the future I think transactivists will be seen in a similar light to those people in the 80s who believed that no gay men would ever be child abusers and exposed children to abuse in places like Islington boys' home.

In the future doctors and parents who push drugs and surgery in children will be seen in the same light as people in the past who gave electric shock therapy to homosexuals or promiscuous women.

I wonder if trans people and drag would be seen in a similar light to minstrels in the future.

I don't think the anti-trans people will look like the racists of the 60s. I think the people who continued blindly perpetuating the entire stupid construct of gender will be the ones looked back on as ridiculous, and inevitably some trans people will be included in this too.

I think my biggest issue with the trans community on the whole is the obsession with misgendering. They are so hot on someone misgendering them... and then assume that because I have a vagina and long hair, I am a ciswoman. I find 'cis' to be hugely offensive anyway, but it's also incorrect, because a) I reject the concept of gender anyway, and b) when I have to describe my gender, because society insists on it, I describe myself as agender/genderblind, but people keep describing me as cis. That's misgendering every bit as much as calling a trans mtf 'he'.

I don't care how someone dresses. I care if they dictate that dressing a certain way is 'female' or 'male'.

Honestly, I am interested as to your opinion re: the acceptability of dress up as temporary entertainment versus more permanent changes reflecting beliefs about identity.

And I personally think that in a couple of decades a lot of anti-trans feeling will look like those kinds of unbridled racism that you see in clips from the 1960s does now.

I hope that we wont be so stupidly pink/blue sterotyped and that gender will have just fucked off and we will be left with bodies and personalities.

I mean that I am suspicious of ideas that there is an 'authentic' or 'essential' or 'biological' femininity that is rooted in the body. I recognise that many people believe in this, but I personally do not. Along with many, many third wave feminists!

I am not sure that any school of feminism believes there is any sort of femininity rooted in the body. There is a material reality of being female and a system of oppression that is rooted in that material reality. The oppression is rooted in women's actual and potential sexual and reproductive capabilities. Women are oppressed based on this material reality tegardless of how they "identify" with concepts of femininity.

I suspect there are a lot of feminists like me who don't read books on feminist theory who had no idea there were waves of feminism.
Noodleeatingpoodle's post sums up the problems I have with transexuals. I'm not going to go around being rude or abusive to anyone who wants to or has changed their gender but I do find the idea that you have to change your gender because the other gender is totally different to how you feel to be very sexist. It goes with girls being pink frilly things who can't read maps where as men are macho and can't multitask but like football.
We really aren't that different. There is far more overlap between the sexes than differences.
Don't change your body, change the way you think about gender and sexuality. Stop the stereotyping.

'I didn't know second wave feminism was still A Live Thing!)'

I don't know if it makes us second wavers exactly, but I think a lot of people my sort of age kind of drifted along with the third wave and then when we stopped and looked at it, an awful lot of it didn't seem to make as much sense as the second!

There are aspects of the second wave that really needed reworking (the lack of attention to non-white women's experience is a massive thing) but the queer theory turn in the third wave has taken it further away from being a movement I can relate to and which has something useful to say about my experience. Some of the second wave books by writers like Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin still feel fresh and urgent to me. (And after all, it's not like all the problems the second wavers identified have been fixed, have they?!)

a trans person can identify as what they like, but it doesnt make them a woman.

"I mean that I am suspicious of ideas that there is an 'authentic' or 'essential' or 'biological' femininity that is rooted in the body. I recognise that many people believe in this, but I personally do not. Along with many, many third wave feminists! smile

(In fact, my experience of feminism in my everyday life and feminism on Mumsnet are poles apart - I am genuinely surprised and intrigued by this!! I didn't know second wave feminism was still A Live Thing!)"

As far as I am aware, second wave feminists don't believe in essential or biological femininity. In fact, I thought they believed the complete opposite: that notions of femininity are a social construct and not actually real. I may be wrong though.

I am female but not feminine. It's not that unusual surely?

Care to explain?

No.

msrisotto - yes, of course.

the XXed Then you believe that a trans person could identify as female without there being any real philosophical or ethical issue or authenticity problem! In which case we agree! Hooray!