Are you a big fat cissexist?

Vestal, that struck me too about the Afghan example.

It isn't considered necessary for those girls who grow up disguised as boys to follow girls' gender roles in childhood for them to fit into adult female gender roles.

So why restrict girls at all? Why are they not all out being allowed to go where they like, go out without a chaperone?

Presumably because small pockets of females being allowed to not follow the rules makes no real difference.

But if all girls were allowed freedom, gender roles would collapse.

In fact, the girls who are disguised as boys being allowed to chaperone mothers and sisters is reinforcing gender roles.

YY Vestal. I think you do remember correctly. You generally can't change your mind. And women tended to want to do it to avoid the strictures of being a woman in such an incredibly patriarchal society, plus it was the only honourable way for the family to get a girl or woman out of an arranged marriage.

There's also the sworn virgins of Albania, who "transition" to male as adults or at any point in time when it turns out there will be no male heirs to their father's estate.

They are treated as male by the law, but are not allowed to marry women, which implies that people very well know that those women are not male. (A relationship with a male will end up in them being killed, if I remember correctly, that's why they're also called sworn virgins)

Patriarchal societies are more at ease with making exceptions for some (un)lucky few than abolishing gender roles altogether.

Exactly, she dressed as a man at several times in her life for practical reasons. But it was thought to be a reasonable precaution as a vulnerable woman acting in a military role. I've seen some dickwads try to claim her as trans.

From wikipedia:

Heresy was a capital crime only for a repeat offense, and a repeat offense of "cross-dressing" was now arranged by the court, according to the eyewitnesses. Joan agreed to wear feminine clothing when she abjured, which created a problem. According to the later descriptions of some of the tribunal members, she had previously been wearing male (i.e. military) clothing in prison because it gave her the ability to fasten her hosen, boots and tunic together into one piece, which deterred rape by making it difficult to pull her hosen off. A woman's dress offered no such protection. A few days after adopting a dress, she told a tribunal member that "a great English lord had entered her prison and tried to take her by force. [i.e. rape her]" She resumed male attire either as a defense against molestation or, in the testimony of Jean Massieu, because her dress had been taken by the guards and she was left with nothing else to wear.

Indeed. Similar to the occasional English teenage girl who joined the navy pretending to be a boy. Didn't Joan of Arc also pretend to be male at one point to be able to lead and fight?

Deogratis, yes, the Afghan Girls:

www.theweek.co.uk/middle-east/60664/bacha-posh-why-some-afghan-girls-are-raised-as-boys

They mostly don't want to swap back to female gender roles, and some prefer to live as adult men in terms of role.

But we assume that at least within the family, they are not expected to deny what sex they are?

They are always interesting issues to debate. In some Afghan groups with no sons a girl will be nominated as a boy in their very gender stereoptyped families and get to play boys' games, go out, where free boy clothes etc etc. I think they then have to move back to being a girl as they get older.

Gender is always worth debating. I have a lot of characteristics some people think are male but I call human.

I hope everyone human can be kind to other including trans people struggling with their gender and who have felt trapped in the same body just as I hope they can help women in our massive struggle to be treated equally.

I'd hate to be the dude charged with restocking the tampons in the mens' loos.

most. boring. job. eva.

In fact, if you grew up all your life having to urinate out of a hole in your abdomen, and having to see some weird guy who made you rehearse sex acts and discuss how he wanted you to have surgery to make you a vagina, wouldn't you be thinking there is something wrong here. You would come to realise (which he did around nine) that you were not a girl.

Because that isn't what girls are.

Why would David Reimer ever have accepted that he was female simply because he was socialised as a girl?

(I actually don't think he was really socialised as a girl, but for the sake of argument let's pretend he was).

If I was told my entire life that I was a girl, and then I got to puberty and very obviously wasn't, because I had no uterus, no vagina, no normal breast development, no female hip structure and so on, why would I continue to believe a lie?

It is rather like if someone told you over and over again during childhood that you couldn't walk, and then one day you found out you actually could, why would you keep maintaining the lie, simply because you had been socialised to believe it?

"David Reimer, whose botched circumcision as a baby led him to be renamed and raised as a girl. If there was NO sense of sexed identity he would have been socialised as a girl and been at ease with this as he had never known anything else. However, he wasn't, he always had a profound sense that he was a male"

It is conceivable that the brain functions expects certain functions from the body and is in conflict when these hormones & functions don't appear. In fact, there is now some evidence in support of this: 1/3 of male babies born to women exposed to an estrogenic drug during pregnancy turned out to be transgender women vs 0.3% occurrence in general population, as shown in this study.

But that is sex, and when brain's expectations don't match realities of the body, that sounds very much like a disorder e.g Body Integrity Identity Disorder.

Yes Plays! Nail on head there!

I asked this on another thread and nobody answered so I'm going to yell

WHY ARE TRANSWOMEN CONSIDERED A SUBSET OF WOMEN WHEN MUCH MORE LOGICALLY THEY ARE A SUBSET OF MEN???

I think a lot of anti-trans rhetoric stems from this belief that trans dogma assumes that we have an actual gender at birth. I know that some fools people on twitter think that, but my understanding is that it is internal sex identity at birth and goes along these lines:

• We all have a sense of self. Religious people call it a soul, philosophers might call it an id or an ego, centuries of thought have gone into establishing what this sense of self is that separates man from beast. Nobody really knows. It's probably in the brain somewhere. We still don't really understand the brain (I did some neurolinguistics at university and it was a very very new area based on a lot of "probably.")

Some people have a sense of self which includes a sense of their own sex, i.e. that they are a man or a woman. Like freshwater,* I don't, but I am willing to accept that my experience is not universal and that many people do.

• This is NOT a 'gender identity' that means we are born with an overwhelming desire to play football in blue versus bake cupcakes in pink. That is social construct.

• This sense of self and sense of sexed identity is immutable. (Here we pass into probably). This is largely based on the case of David Reimer, whose botched circumcision as a baby led him to be renamed and raised as a girl. If there was NO sense of sexed identity he would have been socialised as a girl and been at ease with this as he had never known anything else. However, he wasn't, he always had a profound sense that he was a male, 'transitioned' back to male when he discovered the truth, and eventually committed suicide.

• For the extremely obvious reasons there is no ethical way to replicate this with a larger sample size. Some people say yes BUT Reimer was abused by the doctor who did the research (John Money) and his issues were not to do with sex identity but with a traumatic childhood. That can't have helped but I am willing to accept that the case points towards a sex identity.

• It is plausible that when a baby develops, something triggers a female sense of self but a male body (and vice versa). We just don't know enough. What we do know is that there are a large number of human beings who all report that this is their experience. Again, I am willing to accept that this points towards a sex identity.

That's the 'dogma' you refer to.

Unfortunately as tends to happen with science, particularly science on the cusp of 'known' and 'probably,' it has been corrupted into shrieking lunatics posting on twitter about how shewees are cissexist and calling each other TERFs.

There are norms and expectations based on people's sex, yes. As a woman, you are expected to be maternal, nurturing, not intellectually rigorous or challenging.

But there is no such thing as people actually having gender from birth, like trans dogma assumes. Nobody gets born with an overwhelming desire to wear skirts and do housework.

Cote - that was what I meant - and I also agree that this confusion is partially allowed to happen because people wanted to avoid the word 'sex'

The trouble is, that whilst I don't want to believe in gender norms, other people do, so I have to live with them no matter what my gender is - there's no hiding that I'm a woman, and people make assumptions about me based on that, and that's why I'm a feminist (plus, if I took the other route and decided that trans was the way forward, the surgery needed to persuade people that I was a man would be horrendous and unconvincing)

Just seen this on Twitter, which I thought was apt:

Why do men hurt transwomen?
They can't accept femininity in males.
Why do you insist TW are female?
You can't accept femininity in males.

"I don't believe there are 2 genders though"

I don't believe there are any genders at all and have a sneaking suspicion that the 'gender' thing in English language is due to your reluctance to say, write, or read the word SEX.

The two other languages I am fluent in don't have a word for 'gender'. On hospital papers, applications, etc you see "SEX: M / F".

I'm going to air quote everything from now on,

Only when explaining why we had sold out of girls quotation kinder eggs and only had boys quotation kinder eggs left, yet again. (Because girls and boys preferred the pink ones over the blue ones)

Did the staff have to speak with air quote accompaniment in the quotation rooms?

I don't have to wonder about the tampons in the men's quotation room.

I worked in a supermarket where there were tamoons in the men's quotation room and the women's quotation room.

I knew this because many males came and complained about the tampon machine being in the men's quotation room.

However, my mind was occupied by the bigger question of why anyone would pay £3.00 for a vending machine packet consisting of one tampon and one sanitary towel in either the men's quotation room or the woman's quotation room when they were in a fucking supermarket full of packets full of the tampons and sanitary towels for less that £2.00

Of course as a cisexist I was just more annoyed at it being considered reasonable to charge £3 for a period.

Good point about being a 'TEF'.

Whoever came up with 'TERF' in the first place probably thought that they were being really smart because they were riding on the wave of the 'radfems is all manhaterz who eat baby boys for fun' thinking that neoliberals, right-wingers and MRAs have spewing for a couple of generations.

They no doubt thought that, instinctively, lots of women would distance themselves from gender critical thinkers due to us being painted us narsty radicals.

It's not working though. And it is not working because most women read articles like that one and think 'what a load of crap'.

Oh Jesus I had no idea what a TERF was. i am not a TERF but I am a TEF. I don't think there is a place for trans issues within feminism, full stop. No radical needed. As previous posters' have said, I am very happy to support the end of discrimination and the need for groups to have their needs met. Just not under the badge of
Feminism.