Only trans women have vaginas, women have 'front holes'

Intersex people are only useful or worthy of consideration if they can be either:

1. used as a stick to beat women with or
2. used to demonstrate some ridiculous point a particularly childish trans whacktivist is making.

Now that you mention it, isn't it weird that unisex toilets were built to accommodate the trans, but apparently, when there were just intersex people, no one thought that they might need their own space?

And that there are laws that allow males to pretend to be women in their passports, but most countries don't have an option that allows intersex people to just honestly state that they are intersex?

Rocky - I should have mentioned the test is a big pile of bollocks, but we are all having a good laugh trying it out.

Thanks Matilda, I will have a look.

I am finding my silence increasingly uncomfortable for me. My problem is I do not want a trans person to read a comment I make and think I am U accepting or disapprove of them. I do not want someone who is already undoubtedly fragile to be further kicked by something I say.

I need to find a way to separate out the support and compassion I genuinely feel for people in a conflicted situation from the anger I feel at the political manoeuvring of the situation to further marginalise the rights and voice of women living in patriarchal societies And I need to find way to articulate that effectively.

Rocky - cis is a term used by transactivists who want to push the line that "womanhood" is defined by how you feel inside, rather than your biology. And biological women then get distinguished with the tag "cis" (which they steal from technical language in other fields - cis meaning aligned with, trans meaning cutting across). Transactivists typically define "cis" as a person who is happy that their biology and gender line up, rather ignoring the fact that if you consider gender to be a set of socially determined and oppressive stereotypes, chances are you won't think of your gender as lining up with your biology. My biology is what I was born with - gender is something "done to me" by other people (the teachers at school who said I couldn't do woodwork or cricket because I was a girl, the careers advisor who told me not to be a physicist, the employers who pay me and my female colleagues less than male colleagues on the same grade). This is why so many of us find "cis" offensive. Transactivists will tell you it's neutral language, intended to distinguish between "women" whose annual check up should involve a cervical smear (front hole smear?) and those whose check up should involve a prostate antigen test. But in fact it's a way of making a claim about our place in the world and our attitude to it - cis women like pink and words and clothes and high heels, and are happy about that.

Try the "sage" test over on the feminism section - you'll find that there appear to be very few "women" on mumsnet and a hell of a lot of F to M cross-dressers who should have surgery but are in deep denial about our trans status .

RJ
Time not to be quiet now

Excuse my ignorance and slight derail. Can someone explain what "cis" means to me?

That pamphlet is something else.

Reading about target, my worry is that this is being picked up as an issue by conservative Christian groups who are also not famed for supporting women's rights. Women are becoming a pawn in a game between one set of male dictated values and a second set of values dictated by people who have a male perspective of the world whether they identify as female or not, and nowhere in that is the voice of women themselves being heard and acknowledged. Any attempt to say "hey guys there's a problem here" is shut down as transphobia or alternatively jumped on and taken over by a male agenda.

I stay quiet on trams threads usually for fear of being regarded as transphobic and o think perhaps that says a lot about where things are.

I work in a school. I have already raised objections to an assembly held in Jazz Jennings in which Year 7 were told that Jazz identified as a girl from 16 months because as a toddler, Jazz preferred dolls to trucks. We were shown clips of 6yr old Jazz on national tv with her parents who were being praised and lauded for being so brilliant as to transition their child from toddlerhood. I voiced my concerns to the deputy head and suggested that I put together an assembly on feminism with my form (who were outraged after the assembly and shared stories of how they played with all sorts of toys as children and never thought it meant they were the opposite gender). The deputy head agreed with my concerns, admitted she felt uncomfortable reading out Jazz' rhetoric in the assembly and thought that an assembly on feminism was a good idea but that there wasn't an available time slot for it.

I am concerned about what will be coming next into schools. I am anticipating training on trans inclusion and expecting that we will be given the unthinking, unquestioning party line to tow on this issue. I'd really like it if some of the articulate, intelligent posters on here would help me come up with something in advance of this that I can put forward to senior management if necessary. I don't want to be considered transphobic, inflammatory or trouble making - but if this comes into my school, I'm not happy with accepting it blindly. I think a clear, logical, reasonable rationale would be a really useful thing to have perhaps for all of us to use to challenge our schools or workplaces if they begin to implement worrying changes in order to follow a transactivist agenda.

felas

I am delighted to report that target's sales are down and so is their share price.

This is what happens when you insult and endanger your customers.

Target in the US recently introduced a transgender friendly changing room policy and then this happened
mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/us/target-transgender-idaho-voyeurism.html

Mathilda how ridiculous. As I said, I'm all for safe spaces. Shouldn't it be the other way round?!!

Slinky - I believe from press reports that this is precisely what has happened in one case in the USA - the trans person now has a whole large changing room to get changed in, the entire girls' swimming team is now squashed into the janitor's closet.

My browser hadn't updated, obv i was referring to math's earlier post.

I'm inclined to think that gender neutral cubicle loos are a good idea - are there cases where they are problematic? Would there be any problem at all in having them in infant schools to avoid the ridiculous concept of small children being 'trans' and something wrong with their bodies if they aren't gender conformists - which of course is absolutely normal.

So there could be the frankly bonkers scenario of a whole class of girls objecting to sharing with a boy who identifies as a girl. Do they then have to squish into the loos to change leaving one person in the change rooms?

Quite, Maths. I remember an article in the Independent (who should know better... but there we go) by a transactivist, saying that women owed it to transwomen to dress in skirts, etc. so it was clear what the gender rules were which transwomen should copy. I remember at the time a mumsnetter rather pithily summarising it as "But remember, women, to buy your skirts from M&S frumpy range while I buy mine from Dolce e Gabbana, so I can do womanhood better than you."

I'm thinking back on the experiences I've had with gender neutral toilets. Some are fine - my newly revamped local library has excellent ones - individual cubicles with basins which open onto a public corridor. OTH I remember a clubbing experience where the club had replaced separate toilets with a unisex area - women's cubicals down one wall, men's down the other, a central array of wash basins. It was horrible. The toilets became yet another area sleazy men could hit on you - and somehow that added a whole extra layer of vulnerability to the experience. And in another library, they had a gender neutral toilet which was a separate room down a dimly lit corridor, with cubicles for the toilets and washbasins in the main area. I ended up alone in there, and again felt very vulnerable (I should point out I am not someone who scares easily - I used to walk around alone late at night in a very rough area of an inner city of a large Northern City known for its high rates of violence).

And the communal changing room thing is just totally awful. We struggle enormously as a society with trying to teach girls and teenage women that they are allowed to insist their boundaries are respected, against massive social pressure to coerce and shut up and "be nice girls". A society which says "you've got to let uncle fred kiss you", a society where even on this site there is at the moment a thread about "do you let your husband have a quickie when you don't want it just to shut him up?" and an enormous number of women are saying "yes" - not just to the "oh go on, I know I'll get in the mood" sort, but the "I'll stare at the ceiling and dissociate by thinking about something else" sort of sex. And yet somehow we've got organisations like Mermaids persuading schools to make authority figures (teachers) say to girls, speaking in an official capacity, "Girls, your boundaries mean nothing. They are there to be pissed all over. Shut up and put up. And if you don't shut up, you are the ones who will be disciplined."

I suppose it would just be too simple to say 'Ensure that all parts of the curriculum are used to challenge gender stereotypes (yes, a thousand times yes-but just as important in the maths class or games lesson as PSHE), and support the development of a positive individual identity unconstrained by such stereotypes.'

You would think this is the sensible solution, wouldn't you?

But since 'gender identity' (as opposed to medical transformation) is all about 'performing gender' - i.e. adopting what is often a quite grotesque and caricaturish version of mannerisms and clothing and personal appearance in general of the target 'gender' - an audience is required. Not just an audience - the target 'gender' must participate in the performance.

'Passing' requires the presence of people in the target gender. It requires complete acceptance and approval and validation from the target 'gender'. It requires complete pandering to the fantasy and suppression of all the intellectual and instinctive response of the target 'gender'. The target 'gender' must treat the interloper in the psych ward and the homeless shelter and the battered women's shelter and the school showers and the girls' basketball team as a member of the 'female gender' not just in theory but in practice. Otherwise an unspeakable act of transphobia is committed.

mummy lots of High profile cases (though I think main,y in the states) of teenage males identifying as females and insisting on using the girls changing rooms, despite th protests of the girls - Lila Perry is one IIRC. There's a photo of Lila (who looks and sounds like the teenage boy they are) clearly with a semi erect penis under his silky skirt. And teenage girls are just supposed to shut up and get changed in front of them.

And Mermaids is a fucking sinister organisation.

What I'm confused about is whether an anatomically male child would gender identify as female just to get access to the girls' changing areas and toilets. I find this whole situation extremely disturbing and question why the anatomically male child cannot change in the toilet instead of the girl being forced out of her safe space.

Shouldn't trans adults need to find their own safe space and not encroach on those of others - toilets/changing rooms etc? Shouldn't this also should apply to children with school staff ensuring the gender specific and trans children's safe spaces are maintained? I'm less clear about how toilets would be managed.

In some universities, all toilets are now gender neutral. I'm a bit on the fence about this one as I regularly used the men's in the student bar in the evening to avoid queues. But now that I'm a parent, I'm not happy with my DD going to university with gender neutral loos.

It's absolutely disgraceful 222CherryCoke. And you have described it all so well and all its implications.

And of course, girls in Ireland are all making things up when they allude to sexual assault, molestation, harassment, ogling.

This is after all the country where a woman was recently brutally murdered and has been rightly called an 'invisible woman' by a blogger holding mainstream journalism to task for their execrable reporting of the crime. It's the country where girls and young women were imprisoned for decades for the crime of being different, for not conforming to the rules, or often for the crime of being raped.

Wait until some girl gets impregnated by a 'transgirl' in a school changing room, or by a 'transwoman' in a public pool changing room, or in a women's psych ward or in the women's and children's section of a homeless shelter.

Then we'll see the 'progressives' tie themselves up in knots trying to explain it away.

Yes, exactly. It's a blatant case of "girls move over and give up space to the boys because they matter"

Like this from ItsAllGoingToBeFine's quote from Mermaids.

It would be far more appropriate to look at offering an alternative changing arrangement for the child who feels uncomfortable around the trans* person.