British 'man' becomes pregnant

When we say "man" we never just mean a penis and xy chromosomes
Eh? That's exactly what I mean when I call someone a man, actually. It's quite simple in my world, apparently.

Gallavich maybe I should have used the terms masculine or feminine. Presumably they're not determined biologically?

You're being perfectly clear, slithy. It's a rum 'un, and no mistake 🙂 (Attention seeking bollocks, actually, but I have been will be deleted for saying that).

Slithy I don't know. When we say 'man' we never just mean a penis and xy chromosomes. The word carries all sorts of identitarian connotations. Inevitably.

I wonder how the paper got hold of this story?

Womanhood and manhood aren't social constructions. They refer to the state of being adult male or female humans.

Changing the meaning of woman and man to be 'person who identifies as a woman or man' isn't feminist and it isn't helpful. It's insane.

Thanks M0stly. I think you're right, overall. Modern feminist analysis can be divided (albeit very crudely) between the envisioning of a genderless utopia where there are no men and women but only 'people' who 'identify' as whatever they like; and the more realistic aim of a more
humane culture in which men and women (with all their differences and sexually dimorphic characteristics) can interact on a more equal basis.

Being pregnant is a very female thing.

I don't understand why someone who claims to believe that they're a man - or claims to actually be a man - would actively choose to embrace this very female thing.

Incidentally I think the "why be pregnant - surely it's a form of self-hatred?" idea is wrong. Quite a lot of people have a strong urge to become a parent, and often to become a parent to a child that is genetically theirs. I find nothing strange about wanting to do this, and I can see a transman seeing pregnancy as a somewhat unpleasant means to an end and living with a certain amount of cognitive dissonance for 9 months in order to have a child. (Hell, I thought of it as a mildly unpleasant means to an end, albeit without the cognitive dissonance caused by gender dysphoria, and I'm quite comfortable with my biology).

Qwerty

Because once you say men can get pregnant, you open the door to the loss of protections against discrimination given to biological women. Actual pregnancy and maternity is a separate protected characteristic in equality law, but refusing to hire a woman because she might get pregnant in future is covered under sex (not gender) discrimination. If it's argued that men can get pregnant too, potentially the way the law was framed might mean the employer could get away with discrimination against women on biological grounds.

Biology and the cultural expectations founded in it is the critical reason why women all over the world are discriminated against. Not gender identity. No one really believes men can get pregnant.

It's precisely because gender is a social construct that some feminists are bothered by calling a man "she" and this woman a man.

But surely the corrective to gender construction is gender deconstruction? You are either in either in favour of men being confined to being 'men' and women confined to being 'women' (whether those identities are innate or constructed), or you aim to disrupt those norms?

I guess I'm thinking of Dworkin and what I take to be her view that patriarchal oppression will only end when identity is no longer gendered on patriarchal premises. Maybe that isn't a view representative of modern feminism though..

Floggingmolly I agree with you.

Sparechange from the bit of this story I read it seems the pregnant person actively sought out a sperm donor.

I find this all very puzzling.

" You can't assert that anatomy isn't destiny (as most, though of course not all, third wave feminists do) and then complain when someone asserts a gender identity that challenges anatomical gender norms. "

Qwerty - I think in a way that gets to the basis of the problem with third wave feminism. Yes, anatomy isn't destiny, but for second wave feminists, it is the material condition against which to make sense of our oppression. When you look at what is done to women world wide - restrictions on contraception and abortion, sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, female genital mutilation, restriction of women's access to education, jobs, and the public political sphere - this isn't happening for an arbitrary reason. It's not like an imaginary dystopian society which arbitrarily decides to discriminate against, I dunno, people with ginger hair. Two things make sense of systematic and widespread, cross-cultural, cross-historical oppression of women, and that is men wanting to control women's reproductive labour (because women are the sex that have children, not men) and "because they can" - because the obvious, inescapable sexually dimorphic characteristic in humans is that men are on average, and with quite a large d value (see thread on brain sex) bigger and stronger than women.

But the crucial thing is that none of this makes it ethically justified to oppress women - that's the point, to my mind, of feminism. That yes, there are biological differences, but no, these do not justify treating women as less than entirely human - denying them the vote, paying them less for the same work, not paying them at all for a lot of their work (because "caring" isn't important), denying them the right to own property, denying them the right to bodily autonomy (saying no to sexual partners, saying no to unwanted pregnancies).

The claim that biology is not destiny in the sense that biological sex has nothing to do with personhood is not the same as saying biological sex is irrelevant to understanding the world and to making sense of why women are oppressed and denied personhood in a lot of cultures and political systems.

The thing is, querty, I just can't reconcile simultaneously deciding to get pregnant and identify as a man. They really are mutually exclusive states.

querty232
It's precisely because gender is a social construct that some feminists are bothered by calling a man "she" and this woman a man.
They are reinforcing the presentation a person chooses to display (ie their "gender") as a physical and actual reality. Which it isn't.
The only physics actual reality is that we are born men or woman and no amount of exterior fancy dress or incorrect pronouns will change that.
Feminists are bothered by the erasure of women by this trans-trend.