Why DO people 'believe' transwomen are women?

I wish people would not refer to the David Reimer case as it is not a good example of anything other than abuse. The poor child and his twin were abused by their doctor. He was raised as a boy until about 2 I think, until an operation went wrong and destroyed his penis. Appallingly it was decided by this doctor that attempting to turn him into a girl/woman was a better option than leaving him be. He was then repeatedly abused, physically, sexually, psychologically by the doctor.

He was a boy, that was in a boy's body. That's not evidence towards the idea that transgender men are actually women in men's bodies.

There are people out there who can help with Intersex and androgen insenitivity syndromes.

They are not transexuals and have been at pains to dissociate themselves from the likes of GIRES and Mermaids.

Having said this and given it some thought I think sometimes anomalies can occur and the person affected may feel genuinely feel they are of the opposite sex.

Has anyone heard of case of David Reimer? A male who was raised as a girl but didn't know his true sex. He became aware that something wasn't right even though he was raised as a girl and his parents eventually told him the truth in his teens.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/samanthakatepsychology.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/david-reimer-possibly-the-most-unethical-study-in-psychological-history/amp/

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

Also there are some scientific studies that indicate androgen exposure in the womb may have a masculinising affect on females. Whilst androgen exposure in womb may have subtle effects, other medical conditions such as androgen insensitivity syndrome- a male with xy chromosomes is born and will grow with a female outward appearance.

I think sometimes there are genuine medical conditions that could cause someone to have genuine feeling that they are in the wrong body and I have much sympathy for these people.

My issue is self declaration, surely the process needs to be carefully managed by medical professionals. I do feel it is a medical condition- either physically or mentally.
The proposals to self declare trivialise the issue.
I also don't like the way the issue is being promoted to children- if it's a medical condition, and I think it is and should remain so, it should not be promoted as a life style choice.

A rolled up flap of skin from someone's arm or leg is not a penis. Especially not if you have any intention of attempting to have sex with it.

They dont believe it otherwise there would be no such class as 'orientation' or 'homosexual' or 'bisexual'.
Being gay could never have been illegal. Homophobia couldnt exist as a concept.

I find the phrase “transwomen are women” so vague that I don’t understand what people actually mean by it.

“Transwomen” is an imprecise word. Does it encompass men who occasionally wear a dress and high heels? Are they “women” when wearing a dress but not otherwise? What about men who simply “feel” like a woman but present as male? Is “transwomen” in this context intended to encompass anybody who self identifies - even intermittently - as a woman?

Then there is a huge problem with the second part of the phrase. What is meant by those people actually being “a woman”?

Does it mean being a woman for all purposes, or are there limits at all? “Woman” has a particular meaning in sport to determine who is entitled to compete as a woman in certain events. I can’t believe that everybody who expresses a belief that “transwomen are women” actually thinks that this should entitle anybody who self identifies as a woman to compete in women’s sporting events.

Similarly, is there really a belief that all “transwomen” should be treated as a woman in every single context? So that somebody who is a man in every outward aspect should be entitled to women’s scholarships, access to women’s prisons, to be able to bathe women suffering from dementia without question no matter how confusing or frightening it might be for them?

As soon as there is any acknowledgement that there should be some limits to the phrase (whether to the meaning of “transwomen” or to the extent to which they are considered “a woman” in law or everyday life) the whole phrase becomes utterly meaningless. And the absurdity of refusing to engage in any debate (“#nodebate”) becomes clear.

That twitter thread is hilarious, nauticant - it's the way he admits he won't have sex with transwomen, thinks there should be exceptions so transwomen shouldn't be sent to women's prisons or compete in women's sports, then says (when someone points out that this is getting distinctly terf-y on his part) "I can't be a terf because I'm not a radical feminist."

Newsflash, Robin my boy, terf is something other people call you. I know people labelled terf who are women, but not rad fems (or indeed any sort of feminist - including some on this board who are highly gender critical but reject the label "feminist.") You can be labelled a terf while being a transwoman yourself. Funnily enough, not many men get labelled terf, which kinda makes you think the label is not so much about the person's views, more about identifying them as a latter day witch. A suspicion borne out by the go-to follow up threat of "die in a fire."

Can I ask people about someone I know who transitioned from female to male a few years ago. He's lived his life for around fifteen years or so as a male. He's had as much surgery as I think is possible and now has no breasts and has a penis. He has sexual relationships with women. Is he a man? I don't know him well at all but I could never think of him as female.

As other posters have said, most of the people who unthinkingly chant four legs good two legs better repeat "transwomen are women" don't believe it. Here's a very clear example:

twitter.com/greenrd/status/951948874331099137

For a lot of people, I think they believe it because they believe (or have been told) that it’s an essential part of being pro-LGBT, pro-feminist, pro-wanting trans people to live happy, discrimination-free lives. It isn’t just another belief that goes along with those, it’s PART of those, and if you reject it then you’re a TERF who hates trans people and wants them all to die. Want to be a non-TERF? Then you have to believe this, it’s not optional.

For them it’s like the young-earth creationists who will swear on their life that Noah herded dinosaurs onto the Ark and scientists are covering up the proof. They do that because they’re told: if you reject this, if you doubt this out loud, then you are rejecting your entire religion and community.

For both groups there’s no point saying “but that’s batshit, that makes no sense”. They aren’t considering it as an isolated belief.

Only speaking from what I’ve heard from my teens and one friend, they truely believe that you can be born in the wrong body (I know, I’m working on it) Trapped like Stephen Hawkin with a body that doesn’t match the inside. They want these poor blokes to be able to escape and they’ve been sold a lie as to how successful these operations are. They are also being kind, they haven’t seen the hate from TRA’s

"Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State"

Joseph Goebbels, re propoganda

They were part of my team.

I agree. That was thing that really made me click on the yawning gulf between the TRA words and actions and those of trans people like Miranda Yardley and the MNetters who post here. Miranda is very much on the team of biological women, is interested in representing their interests and works damn hard on behalf of that team while sucking up a lot of abuse. The MNetters here post all over the forum and not just in the feminist politics bits, they are interested in the experience and issues of other women, they think about and talk about all women in their posts, they feel very much of 'the team' as opposed to just having gender critical views aligning.

The TRA agenda has no interest in biological women of any kind, it focuses entirely on appropriating the appearance and the perceived entitlements of being female. (But women can keep the boring and unpleasant bits.) They demand obedient silence on all issues pertaining to female biology (which is most of women's issues and politics), total intolerance of women claiming any independent life experience of their own, absolute disinterest in promoting or supporting issues affecting women and girls unless it's to take it over and refocus it as a trans issue, and not only don't care whether that silences and harms women's interests but actively believe women have no right to protect or focus on their own interests. They could not be further from 'team woman'.

This 'passing as a woman' thing bothers me.

Partly because I can easily understand how people buy into it.

Whilst at the exactly same time, knowing that it, quite clearly, doesn't seem to actually work that way.

First of all, you would have to take the vanishingly small number of men who do actually pass. Consistently.

They would then also have to never mention that they are trans. Not an omission that appears to characterise the ideology.

They would then, if they were disadvantaged in any way by being perceived as a woman, have to deliberately keep their biological sex to themself, even though it disadvantaged them. (Knowing they were being passed over for promotion because they were childbearing age, for instance).

They can, at any point, opt out of passing. Opt out of oppression. In the blink of an eye. An advantage not extended to women.

And even then, they would not have the disadvantage of getting pregnant, not getting pregnant, contraception, menstruation, gestation, menopause, etc.

So claiming that men passing as women experience similar disadvantages to women, is only looking at things in a very superficial way.

Plus relies on someone being determined to be complicit in their own disadvantage.

And, from what I can tell, applies to a minuscule percentage, because, certainly most women, have a finely tuned radar when recognising men.

EggsonHeads wrote - "womanly elements".

I hope you don't mean the womanly elements from ancient Greek culture: earth and water.

That's spot on Wiggy - I remember that feeling (not about trans issues, which weren't headline news back when I were a nipper, but about biology) when I was a young lib fem in my twenties. I think the fear of biological determinism is at the root of it.

It's about understanding the difference between the material conditions underlying a certain set of disadvantages, on the one hand, and the belief that biology deterministically causes those disadvantages, on the other hand.

I looked at rad fems saying "biology matters and immediately (and mistakenly) heard "oh fuck, another set of people telling me how I ought to be based on my biology."

What of course I ought to have heard was this: Where does your oppression come from? What's at the root of it? What's the "means, motive and opportunity" for the crime of oppressing women. And the answer is:
Means = on average physically weaker hence vulnerable to physical threat (particularly when pregnant or lactating)
Motive = taking control of women's reproductive capacity to ensure that your male genetic material (which you can't gestate and turn into offspring by yourself) gets continued.
Opportunity = the whole patriarchal system created by the threat of male violence.

What I didn't see was that identifying "means, motive, opportunity" is very very different from saying the crime is inevitable, or isn't a crime at all because it's the state of nature. Those false conclusions are biological determinism, identifying means, motive, opportunity is simply identifying the way the world is.

Am I less of a woman because I don’t perform much in the way of femininity? Of course not. So why does a man performing femininity become a woman? It’s nonsense.

Perfectly put! They’re men performing femininity. They are NOT women, however much they want to be & however many people say they are.

NC for the new thread.

I said the rosary on this one for years.

I can explain why I used to think it:

Like eggs I thought that defining womanhood as female biology was reductive. That there are many women who don't have uteruses / periods / ovaries / breasts and yet are still women. What do women have in common, other than being perceived as / treated as women? So if the unifying factor is "perceived as a woman" then that would include transwomen. Especially those whom I know, who "pass" and experience the same misogyny as other women. When they're being offered a job paying less than a man, or asked to make the coffee, it's not because of their chromosomes but because of social perception of them as women.

On that basis I was quite prepared to accept that trans women are women. I didn't think that they had literally changed into people with female chromosomes but that for everyday purposes they were fighting the same fight and living the same life as other women. They were part of my team.

That was particularly since I matured politically in the age of identity politics where we were encouraged to look critically at our differing experiences as women rather than collective ones. "When can you comment on an issue? When you have lived experience of it" was another part of the same catechism.

What changed my outlook was the redefinition of "transgender" to mean not just transsexual but anybody who doesn't identify with the social stereotypes associated with their sex. Well, that includes me as a GNC woman - am I now transgender? Apparently so. And then it included a whole lot of people who have no intention of being perceived as a woman (and old fuddy-duddy me! how terribly BINARY of me to think it!) but still want the crumbs of advantage we can collect which are meant to protect those of us who DO experience life as women from those who don't.

And then I thought "fuck that."

No one actually believes it though, they are just humouring, it's quite sad when you think about it.

And I dare say that even the most blue haired unicorn girl at Brighton Institute of Madeyuppey doesn't actually want to be naked in front of the ones she doesn't personally know, especially if the TIMs in question are her fathers age.

Trudat.

Its transubstantiation.

At the moment of the bell ringing in the mass, the bread wafer and wine are turned by the priest into the actual, literal body and blood of Christ.

It's been argued over for centuries, whether it's just symbolic or whether through divine intervention this bread wafer changes to something else even though you can't see any change in its material reality. Most Catholics for centuries haven't believed it but said they do, and many people have been burned alive for not going along with it. It's the belief no one believes. No one would dream now of making that a legal compulsion under threat and make you chant the mantra of belief.

Here is a biological man. Everyone, from his mother and midwife to his doctor and people he passes in the street knows he is a biological man. However at the moment of his internal choice of identity happened there was transubstantiation and although there is no change in actual material reality he is now a woman.

No. It's a symbolic change, everyone knows this, it was perfectly ok to be polite and go along with this, but that politeness has been exploited to the point where it is damaging many others in its path for no good reason and it can no longer be indulged.

I've got a FGF (fabulous gay friend) and believe me, that fella knows where the bodies are buried. He's as gender critical as I am, god love him.

Nobody actually thinks TIM are women. Nobody expects them to make the tea or wipe their mother in laws bum. Nor do any straight men want to have sex with them.

And I dare say that even the most blue haired unicorn girl at Brighton Institute of Madeyuppey doesn't actually want to be naked in front of the ones she doesn't personally know, especially if the TIMs in question are her fathers age.

I wonder if EggsonHeads now actually having been asked to think about it, is struggling to compile a list.

More from 1984...

'On the contrary,' [O’Brien] said, 'you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.'

He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in.

'Do you remember,' he went on, 'writing in your diary, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four"?'

'Yes,' said Winston.

O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'

I went straight to pandora bracelet with the mention of elements

Which is now worrying me