This is getting out of control - Ladyfest

I'm only understanding half of what I'm reading,I'm trying to keep up and join the debate ,but I keep loosing the thread with the words I don't understand😪

*raise the worry

Petal I'm with you on the confusion and I have dipped my toe into the feminist threads. I'm non the wiser and layman's terms are thin on the ground. Loads of links but a bit high brow and intellectual for me.

Tv can't influence that... Can it?!

They didn't so much as raise the memory Lurcio as to flag that this was already happening.

No we don't but apart from a baby group we go to where no one but me and his sister interact with him, he doesn't really get a chance go be influenced by society. Yet

Surely he is occasionally in the room when the TV is on?

Bad form to bring other threads into this, TiggyD, but since you have, it's worth pointing out that you have a long track record of being, shall we say, deliberately provocative on the feminist boards. You are also (if memory serves me) very much of the "if a transwoman says she's a woman, she is" school of thought, regardless of whether that transwoman has a fully functioning penis or not.

For the record I do not believe that all or even most transwomen are rapists. Some however, undoubtedly are (Davina Ayrton for example). And furthermore, as has been explained over and over again, there is the worry that men who are not trans but who are sexual predators will take advantage of sloppily drafted laws (gender self-identification) to gain access to women's spaces. This is not just an idle worry on the part of radfems - the professional body representing psychologists who work in British prisons put in a written submission to Maria Miller's parliamentary committee to raise this worry.

Need, my older boy gravitated towards cars as a toddler. My youngest boy loves pink and has a baby doll. My eldest isn't any more of a boy than my youngest, they just like different things. The youngest is far more rough and tumble actually and play fights a lot more but if I take him for a walk he will chirrup 'pink flower!' every time he sees one with great delight because he loves them. He will always pick the pink option of anything if there is a choice.

Penguin - same. It's just different child personalities.

Does anyone speak German? How are German women reacting to this on twitter etc?

And can I point out that even though the people in charge of this believe the word "clitoris" to be transphobic in this context, they have clearly failed to realise that their reference to "female anatomy" is just as transphobic going by the same reasoning. A penis and scrotum are female anatomy if you feel female . Or so I have been informed.

i just know my brain is female

I know my brain is female because the rest of my body is female, so it sort of figures.
Outside weird cases where someone has parts of their fraternal twin inside them, the brain is usually the same sex as the body.

Why does the theory of no sex difference between brains remind you of Stepford Wives? I mean, that book was about men being frustrated by the fact that women are actually human, just like them, and wanted to change it.

Hm. Perhaps we should open another trans thread and take the discussion there.

Back to the Ladyfest ... I should have suspected something when I noticed the .

Petal: re this male/female brain thing, perhaps it would be a good idea to read some serious research about neuroplasticity and the way that behaviour, thought, the environment, life experiences etc. cause changes in the brain.

My second child is way more physical and rough & tumble than her older sister. At 15 months she could easily overpower her 3 yo sister in physical play. I think if she'd been a boy I would be attributing the differences between them to their sex but because they're both girls I put it down to personality.

Ok ,so when someone has had a full sex change,then they can be allowed in women's loos,changing rooms..but a man in a dress with a penis ,even if he identifies with women,should not be allowed in.....how is that wrong? If indeed it is...I would be very angry if a man in a dress came in to my female space ,in the loo or changing room....would the law be on my side?...so why are these men going to the festival?

No we don't but apart from a baby group we go to where no one but me and his sister interact with him, he doesn't really get a chance go be influenced by society. Yet

At 15 months he's probably quite aware of his surroundings. We do not live in a gender neutral world.

I do think there are some differences between boys and girls even as children.

For example my son has been raised in the same way as my daughter. They both play with the same toys. Dd has a lot of pink toys so ds is fully exposed to pink. Yet at 15 months he has gravitated towards cars. He is also a lot more rough and tumble than what Dd is. Now that could just be him, or it could be that he is a boy

Virgin,I hate pink,I hate cleaning and cooking...none of that makes my brain female...I'm so frustrated because I can't think of kthe words to explain what I'm meaning.i just know my brain is female...so if hormones are there from birth waiting for puberty ,that's got to mean the brains are different ,different hormones in each one

I'm sat in tesco,looking at everyone walking around,and it feels like step ford wives or zombie people,they can't all have the same brain,with no differences...it can't be down to nurture / conditioning... Surely the mans brain makes him do his thing and the woman's brain do hers.it can't just be down to sex organs what makes us the gender we are ....I'm not a feminist or a man hater...I'm all for equal rights and if women want to celebrate their labia,fantastic...if men want to wear dresses ,great get on with it p,no problem,if women want a women's festival fantastic.why should their festival be censored in any way...why can't the men who want to be women have their own festival,and not gate crash the women's one,then they won't be offended by hearing about body parts they haven't got

So, my partner is disabled - he has very severe osteo arthritis and will need a knee replacement soon. He is involved in a few disability action groups. So I'm imagining a 'disability-fest' where an event is planned to talk about ways to celebrate your crutches or stick, because some people (dp included) can feel embarrassed about using them and this can affect their life and self perception negatively.
Then some wheelchair users declare that they find this activity violent and exclusionary because they are unable to walk at all. And so the organisers cancel it with apologies, in order to be inclusive.

I think non-disabled (or trans-disabled ... there are people who feel their functioning legs aren't truly part of their body, after all ) people complaining about feeling excluded by talk of crutches would be a better comparison here.

But other than that, you hit the nail on the head.

I never heard of women with PCOS complaining about anything done to celebrate menstruation, even though there are some for whom menstruation is very painful, and some for whom it is not regular. Older women, likewise, never complain.

There's also women who don't have legs (but don't complain about celebration of leg hair), women who don't have breasts anymore (but don't complain if other women walk around topless or celebrate their breasts in any way) women whose genitals were mutilated (shouldn't they be the first ones to complain about feeling excluded by the celebration of normal vulvas?), and so on and so forth.

there has got to be some differences between a male and female brain...

Well, yeah, there is. For all I know, the XX chromosomes that are part of your genetic makeup are also in your brain.
There are differences - there just aren't any that make you like pink or want to clean and cook.

I'd wager that female brains are about as different from male brains as female hearts from male hearts - we know that there are different symptoms for a heart attack in men and women. But for all I know, hearts can be transplanted to the opposite sex.

Most of the differences seem to be caused by hormones. The brain is part of the body. It is not possible to have a female brain in a male body, or the other way round.
The brains of lesbians who take testosterone do change, some of them become attracted to men - why would this be the case if they had before been heterosexual male brains, and this had been the cause of the attraction to women (as homophobic gender extremists would have us believe)?

Well this thread is certainly making me rethink Greers's position- it's heartbreaking that an excluded and victimised group like MtT can use the welcome they've had in some sectors to try to silence/ deny the reality of another group suffering discrimination and exclusion.

Because most people don't think all that much.