British 'man' becomes pregnant

Really interesting points, Beach. I speak French to a point but other gendered languages fluently. I hadn't given the issue of gender language any thought, but I imagine it's also problematic in the other languages I speak.

Can someone remember where information was on fetal development in trans gender

Someone on another thread said that the embryo doesnt get the right hormones so the body stays 'male' but the brain develops as 'female'

I belive it was debunked on the threads but i cant remember the for and against arguments

If someone could link to the thread or pm me i would be grateful

The article is exploiting a very troubled individual.

His family fear for him as he has had a 'chaotic' life. His parents have split because the father is a drug addict. He is angry that he's been put through this (he wanted the NHS to freeze his eggs until he was 25, but they refused). He's unemployed but is intending to save enough money to send his child to private school.

Yet he is being celebrated with sensationalist headlines over being trans.

this trans couple in Ecuador had a baby last year

I could not get my head round it (still can't)

I've looked into a bit more - and it seems the most common usage is not as a noun but a 3rd person masculine past participle. It means "enclosed" as in "he enclosed the garden with a wall".

The article was trans positive - it was pretty well a straight translation of the article in the OP.

One of the things that I find unsettling about this situation is the ease that there seems to have been in finding an informal "sperm donor" via Facebook. They don't know anything about the donor, about their health and family health. There's absolutely no way that the child can find out anything about their biological father should they need or want to.

It was a sperm donor, Silverdream. I think she found him on Facebook. He didn't charge for the sperm.

Was his partner gay , bisexual or straight.

Yes all, please do ignore the troll saying 'look at meeeeeee, look at meeeee' and get this thread back on topic.

Aside from the linguistic conundrums Beach, (and one of the headfucks to me learning basic French was the idea that inanimate objects had gender), did the article signal any particular perspective on the issue?

I was thinking that exact thing, but it would only work if everyone did it, otherwise the subject of the thread changes and if you tried to stick to the original you could end up feeling like the hidden one.

Prawn, since MNHQ has decided not to give us a "hide poster" facility, a previous denizen of FWR, StewieGriffinsMom (who was fab, and I miss her) invented the "virtual hide poster button". The idea was you pretended you'd pressed it then proceeded through the thread on that basis.

Link to the article www.francesoir.fr/societe-sante/royaume-uni-hayden-cross-un-transgenre-de-20-ans-est-enceint-de-quatre-mois

YY Prawnofthepatriarchy to both your posts.

As you say the whole "pregnant man" thing is a headfuck and I find the reporting misogynistic and stupid but the ones that cause real trouble are transwomen.

I saw something today in the French press about this pregnant transman which made me smile wryly. Being written in French there were additional linguistic problems to those posed by pronouns - they had to use a word that exists but doesn't mean what they had to use it to mean.

In French, nouns are masculine or feminine and adjectives agree with the noun. So if you describe someone as "big" if they are a woman they are "grande" and if a man they are "grand".

The headline of the article was the equivalent of and they had put the word pregnant in inverted commas because for the sake of grammar they had to use the masculine word but the problem is that the French masculine version of pregnant a) isn't an adjective but a noun b) doesn't mean pregnant. They weren't sarky inverted commas and the article was similar in content and tone to the one in the OP. It really was a grammar / language issue.

Although I live in France and speak French I hadn't thought about this aspect before. There are going to be real language problems as certain words just don't work or even exist which would be grammatically correct and trans correct. Also, the French are very strict and protective of their language and there is an institution called l'Acadamie Francaise which decides what is officially French and what's not.

I know language is fluid and all that but things are going to be very complicated for any language that has gender.

Sounds exciting, and useful too, Helen. Tell me more, as a search has got me nowhere.

They impart the secret power to hide posters and avoid derails!

What are SGM buttons Helen? I looked them up and they seemed to be army souvenirs. Think I'm missing something.

Did you read this Qwerty?

Aside from the issue of the thread itself, or the derail, have you actually got any sense of appropriate online behaviour, Qwerty? Because if you scroll back through this thread, there are huge stretches where every other post is by you, and some patches where there's strings of 3 or 4 consecutive posts by you. On a thread which wasn't started by you, in a section (feminism) where as a man you should be thinking "hang on a minute, is my voice the one which should be dominating the conversation?" You seem to lack any basic awareness of the give-and-take, and more importantly, of listening to the other person's point of view which characterises normal healthy discourse, whether online or in real life

Or this?

Qwerty, it is nobody's job to give you an education. If you're sincerely interested you could do some reading. Your performance here demonstrates that you don't know anything as much about feminism as you think you do, and that you aren't prepared to actually listen to anyone

You didn't take any notice if you did.

I'm really not a troll. And I'm not trying to minimise anything, which people seem to be suggesting I'm doing for some reason. Of course violence (rape, murder, assault, FGM, honour killings and all sorts of other awful things) maintains patriarchy. White supremacy used to be maintained by lynching, whipping and raping black people and chaining them up in galleys.

All power is imposed through violence. It can be directly physical, or it can be imposed politically or economically, or in other more diffuse ways. Human power works by effectively crushing a subordinate group into compliance and divesting them of full personhood. Whenever people get power, they have a tendency to abuse it in this way. Violence will always partly characterise human social structures.

Of course individual people won't always abuse it - but the people who do abuse it do so in ways partly determined by processes of socialisation (among other things of course). This could be because they live in a society where women are considered inferior beings, or one where Jews are considered inferior.

But no one is born with a predisposition to misogyny or antisemitism. That is really all I am saying. Which of this do people disagree with?

Returning to the poor, much abused thread, there are a number of issues. The first is the complete batshit bollocks of a woman becoming deliberately pregnant while expecting anyone to believe that she's a man. "His uterus" is no more credible than "her penis," and I couldn't utter either phrase without a staggering amount of eye rolling.

So I don't believe this pregnant person is a man, and I would take a lot of persuading to accept that she believes it either. OK, there's always going to be a disconnect between body and aspiration if you're hoping to be seen as the opposite sex, but actually getting pregnant is surely the ultimate reverse?

I don't see that pregnant men will affect healthcare directly because regardless of how she identifies she'll be treated as a woman though the poor HCPs will be reminding themselves at ever contact to use the right pronouns and not cause offence by acknowledging that she's performing the ultimate female work.

There's all the rest, though, that sex based protections will simply vanish if men, legally speaking, can become pregnant.

Generally speaking, though, it's the transwomen who pose problems. Transmen were raised with female socialization and tend not to be demanding. It's the transwomen who want into female spaces, whereas it seems plenty of transmen feel safer in the ladies and are not agitating to get into men's facilities.

I have to I say of the two options, I prefer the in-your-face piffle of "Pregnant Man" to the coverage of the fell runner found guilty of attempted murder in which the Guardian completely failed to mention that Lauren Jeska was a man, who tried to cover up his cheating to win trophies in women's categories.

Beachcomber you're completely right about the importance of male violence in maintaining patriarchy. Rape, DV, murder, assault - none of these apart, I'd guess, from murder are pursued and punished at the rate they would be were male violence seen as the anathema it should be m

Women can only be liberated when their status is such that the use of physical violence against them is considered a massive wrong, something that makes outcasts of its perpetrators. Nowadays it still often seems to be minimized as something men do, the boys will be boys argument.

Men who are feminist allies know that violence against women is never justified. My DH said that as soon as a man raised his hand the relationship was over, because if a woman didn't know that however fierce an argument violence was impossible, then how could a woman speak her mind? There are already plenty of men who believe this. We need more.

With this issue, it helps that the personal is political. We, as women, are in a position to teach all the men and boys in our immediate circle to analyze male violence and to speak up whenever they hear their peers minimizing male violence.

Me too, Charlie and Prawn.