I am Janice Turner's No 1 fan - another excellent article

Walking somewhere on the feminist boards is a Venn diagram showing that the overlap between 'masculine' and 'feminine' traits in men and women is large enough to make generalisation impossible. Hopefully the poster will be along in a minute to post it. I've seen it a few times.

Oh God Queens you're right. Bloody hell.

Yes trans identified male

Walkingdead there are differences. Women's brains are on average smaller/lighter than men's. This was taken to show that women were less intelligent than men. Women's brains have blood with different hormones in it going through. Women's hormones have been used to explain why we are irrational, overly emotional, hysterical, and untrustworthy...

Be careful.

Yes there may be differences - although certainly nothing conclusive has been shown. Are any differences due to nature or nurture? The brain is highly plastic. Do the differences map to "masculine" and "feminine" as defined in our current society... hmmm.

Is the difference on average between the sexes greater than the difference between the extremes of the same sex (probably not)

Women have been held back forever by ideas about our innate inferiority, which scientists then set out trying to prove.

Be very careful with this stuff.

I think there is some evidence that mens brains and womens brain do function differently? There have been many studies on this.

As regards brain scans, I recommend a quick dose of Cordelia Fine etc, because you first have to show that men and women have very different brains, before you can claim that brains align with gender......

What's a TIM BTW, an acronym that seems to have passed me by? Trans Identified Male??

Did anyone see that programme on Horizon last night? It showed some research by a Dr that suggested that during brain scans the areas of the brain lit up during a gender oriented task, in the same way as the gender the subject identified with.

Yes just remembered at my work they made some mental health champions and guess how surprised I was to see that of the 10 people who put themselves forward / went into that role, only 1 or 2 were men. It was quite stark.

"mental health" is - according to gender - and both around having issues and being relatively open about it, and spotting / resolving issues in others - is "female"

Of course we've always been accused of being mad by men anyway due to our awful reproductive systems. Yet another reason TIMs are like women but BETTER. They retain all that lovely male logic, obviously. And they certainly do NOT suffer from mental health issues...

Of course men's inability to talk about this stuff (in general) does them a massive disservice - but there's no denying the gender disparity when it comes to this health area.

@suburbanrhonda

Re the training for teachers et al. The trouble it's so subtle - the materials are well designed, have a solid anti bullying approach and are recommended by the anti bullying alliance and of course funded by the NHS. It's just that they are specifically promoting their own narrow agenda and, unlike schools who are responsible for the needs of ALL children, these materials promote the 'interests' of a tiny group in a way which can cause actual harm to some children. They are biased materials and that is something that as a trainer you have to be totally aware - your own bias.

I don't believe that there has been any critical overview of the materials being used, not just in schools but lots of workplaces. The Dfe and the NHS are I think highly culpable for their uncritical promotion of these materials. The trouble is, these groups have set themselves up as the 'experts' and no one has dared question them.

Also interesting.

I think that women suffer higher rates of mental illness than men?
Also, although there is massive stigma, I think women talk about it more?
It is "our" job to keep an eye out for signs of mental health problems or distress in our children
We are the ones who do pregnancy and childbirth which has well documented very high mental health issues attached - 4 in 10 I think it is. We talk about this with midwives, doctors etc
And each other - if there is a "cause" it's easier to talk about - I have talked about mental health and pregnancy / childbirth with lots of women
When something happens at work it is a woman who is expected to go and "talk" to whoever it is that is upset
That sort of thing

Given that TIMs control this conversation, is the absolute refusal to engage with / talk about / consider any mental health side of things, a consequence of this disparity ^^ (and of course yet another pointer that at least the more vocal TRAs retain very masculine behaviours).

The idea that transgender people are somehow 'above' mental illness only serves to further stigmatise those of us who have mental health conditions and that's totally unacceptable to me.

Totally agree with this, Albadross. I am very sympathetic towards anyone suffering from a mental health condition, because I've been there myself. I know what it feels like when actual reality does not match the 'reality' in your head, and that this false 'reality' can trigger very real, and very scary, physical reactions.

But part of my treatment has been acknowledging and addressing this mismatch between actual and imagined reality. There is a massive difference between understanding that someone genuinely, but wrongly, perceives x to be y (or xx to be xy ) and that certain behaviour is a coping technique that alleviates the symptoms, and actually colluding in and perpetuating that false reality by forcing everyone else to say that they believe it too, regardless of the consequences!

The desire to take what women have gained and give it to men is very clear.

Yes, it's staring us right in the face. Our firsts are being trampled over by men who are using their male privilege to strip us of our achievements.

VeryVeryGood yes but imagine the reaction if they asked 100 men to "solve" "women's" problems

*why should it be up to us?

Great post Queen. It's so fucking depressing and I hadn't seen it like that before.

The only thing that struck me about the 100 women thing was the "we're challenging 100 women to solve these 4 problems". Haven't women got enough to do without trying to solve their own oppression? And why should is it up to us? We didn't create the problem.

Jiggly - yes - every time there is a "woman does X" or "first woman to do Y" my first thought is not longer "wow that's great" but "I wonder if / expect it was a man".

Thinking about it from that perspective, there's a point there. It's generally accepted that men are hierarchical, always establishing their position in pecking orders and so on, and gender is an instrumental part of hierarchy. With certain types of men at the top (big, strong, probably violent) and other types at the bottom (gay, gender non conforming, effeminate).

Women's rights have gained ground so much in the last 10 years or so - with women's achievements starting to be recognised in many fields, including historically. Women's sport is shown on TV, talked about more, women's contributions to the space program, war efforts, all sorts of things are coming up. There's a distance to go, but things are improving, women and our accomplishments have more visibility.

At this point there is maybe a nervousness that the "better" women might end up higher in the hierarchy than lower ranking men, and this won't do, will it. As well as being wrong, according to gender rules and roles, it feels that if there are opportunities / rewards there to be taken and they are being taken by women now, then shouldn't they really be going to men first?

So you get what is happening, that things that have started to be given to women, done by women, are now going to men who accordingly to male hierarchy would be low, thus making everything right again.

So you have women's sports, women's scholarships, women's writing / science / etc prizes, women's positions on boards and stuff (if quotas/aims to improve ratios), going to men.

On the other side of the coin, you take men who would be dominated in places like prison, and you put them in with people they can dominate instead, again righting the balance, as it's not right for a man to be treated like that (like a woman).

So we end up with 3 castes -
High ranking men
Low ranking men who get the stuff that women used to get
Women who end up with fuck all, all over again, and reduced means by which to get it, due to no longer being able to self organise or identify themselves as a group in any meaningful way

Huh.

The "first woman to fight on the front line" was a really annoying one, as the person was already serving in whatever regiment it was, and they transed, and voila first woman. Meanwhile the old cunty type of women had no chance whatsoever of being first, as when it was opened up to women they had to do the training first. So there was literally no way that a woman could have got there quicker, so that goes down in history to a man. And when they first cunty type woman gets there - nothing - so what - not the first.

Same with some films recently (I forget which) where it was the first trilogy to be directed by a woman but there was a complaint, and they were changed to the second to do that after the wachowski's, even though they were men in a male dominated industry when they made the matrix.

The desire to take what women have gained and give it to men is very clear.

I hate that they've sucked all the joy out of things that are supposed to celebrate women for me sad

I felt the same listening to this initiative promoted on R4 this morning. In a world with ~3.5bn women and girls in it, they should be able to drum up 100 female candidates.

But if the oft-quoted figure of 50% of transgender young people with suicidal
Ideation is true, isn't that a mental health issue? You can't have it both ways.

It's starting to really piss me off that the TRA movement is talking about mental illness as if it's something dirty and unacceptable. My GP is at liberty to disclose my mental health history to a consultant even if for unrelated issues, because it can and does affect my care. My diagnoses follow me around whether I like it or not, I can't tell a medical professional not to mention it and if I want the best care, why on earth would I? How is a transition more triggering than, say, schizophrenia?

The idea that transgender people are somehow 'above' mental illness only serves to further stigmatise those of us who have mental health conditions and that's totally unacceptable to me.

I wonder if the 40 women who are to fill the remaining places in the 100 women will all be actual women or men who feel like women?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-41394055

"In 2017, we're challenging 100 Women to tackle four of the biggest problems facing women today - the glass ceiling, female illiteracy, harassment in public spaces and sexism in sport."

So if we take each of those in turn - by identifying as women, Martine Rothblatt and Jennifer Pritzker have already smashed through the glass ceiling, I've read at least two articles by transwomen moaning that they're not harassed enough in public spaces and we all know what's happening to women's sport.

I hate that they've sucked all the joy out of things that are supposed to celebrate women for me :(

That's an excellent point, selma.

Totally agree Summer. We also (quite rightly) make a big fuss about FGM, but are encouraging children and teenagers to think it is fine to remove your genitals and, if a girl, breasts. The media constantly reinforces this as a positive choice. So, it's terrible if a girl undergoes FGM, but it's fine if she is encouraged to hate her body so much and to so dread puberty that she chooses to have mutilating surgery that will prevent sexual pleasure and leave her infertile.

(Am not minimising FGM btw - it's appalling - I just think it is also appalling that teenage girls are encouraged to think of self-mutilation as self-liberation.)

So, basically as a doctor, it is not an offence to discuss the possibility of prostate cancer with a transwoman (what about regular screening letters after a certain age? You would not get them if you were registered as a woman). But if they stick their fingers in their ears and go 'la-la-la I identify as a woman, regardless of my male biology', then it is an offence to mention their natal sex if you refer them.

The person receiving the referral letter will presumably have drunk the Kool Aid and know that woman can get prostate cancer too, though.

I wonder how one teaches the history of female inequality without teaching ideas about the basis of difference being reproductive systems and the mental instability they allegedly caused women, the 'weaker' female body frame etc. Or are pupils taught that we have equality now, such things are irrelevant (despite inequality persisting and being prevalent not only here but certainly in developing countries etc). Is it a crime to teach actual, real life women's history? Women were not given the vote for a reason. Because they make babies. It's the hundredth anniversary of suffrage being granted for women over 28 next year - but we cannot talk about the fundamental, historical premise of women's inequality (we have wombs and other female biological bits) and we certainly cannot own it (the wombs and other biological bits make one a woman).

The whole entire argument about female suffrage made by women was the need for women in Parliament to plead women's causes for better maternity care, access to contraception, family allowances and so on. Things which women with women bits need. Imagine that very Parliament now saying it is an offence to mention what makes a woman (or a man). And we think we are more forward thinking than a hundred years ago.

If that were the qualification I'd be a consultant by now

.. daft enough, more like

Luckily not clever enough