Why can't you *feel* like a woman?

I'm not that omniscient - I even got the title of the film wrong, it's "Beauty and the Bike" :D x

“An acquaintance of mine has made a film called "Beauty and the Beast" looking at why girls in the UK don't cycle, and I could bang on about the subject for ages, but if I do I'll completely derail the thread”

Oh I’m happy enough to defer to your knowledge... I’m more just saying, I do think when you start actually looking at things that have a difference in sexes, it’s rarely as simple as it appears to be...

(But do look up Rachel Aldred's research on women and cycling, if you're interested in a feminist, or at least, women-focused, approach to transport.)

Agree to differ with you, @tabulahrasa. An acquaintance of mine has made a film called "Beauty and the Beast" looking at why girls in the UK don't cycle, and I could bang on about the subject for ages, but if I do I'll completely derail the thread :)

“i take your point about risk-taking, but here's why I keep on banging on about it. I'm into sustainable transport. Hardly any women cycle in this country (80% of cyclists are men) and when they're asked why not, the biggest reason is that they're too scared.”

Hmm... I suspect it’s nowhere near that straightforward though, I mean yes risk aversion could account for the difference by sex, but what happens between 16 and 20 where girls that do cycle suddenly stop? (I don’t know btw, I just suspect it’s got chuff all to do with being more risk averse)

“However - it IS men who have most of the road accidents”

That never factors in that in mixed sex couples or groups that the social norm is for men to be the drivers... I mean if men really are more likely to have a road accident isn’t being a passenger with a male driver actually the riskier behaviour?

I don’t know that I have a point here tbh, rofl... other than that if you really look at anything it becomes way more complicated than just a difference by sex.

@SardineReturns - i take your point about risk-taking, but here's why I keep on banging on about it. I'm into sustainable transport. Hardly any women cycle in this country (80% of cyclists are men) and when they're asked why not, the biggest reason is that they're too scared. As well we might be, because there's no decent flippin' cycle paths and when drivers kill people it's filed under Shit Happens.

Now I know you could hypothesise that this is down to social conditioning, too - women being used to victim-blaming - and you'd have a point. (and there are other reasons why women don't cycle. It's harder to go around on a bike if you've got the kids to pick up and the shopping to collect. And cycling is a stigmatised activity, and men can get away with stigmatised activities better than women can.)

However - it IS men who have most of the road accidents and Deaths by Misadventure.

If I'm right and women tend to be more risk-averse than men, it's another example of Equality not being Equity. All cyclists are put at risk by the current appalling lack of decent and safe infrastructure. But women are more disenfranchised by it.

Going off the subject a bit but - I hypothesise that where there are differences, physical or psychological, between men and women, they always have something to do with reproductive biology. But, you know, it's ok to disagree with me, I'm not going to issue death threats, unlike Some People.

Re asking the public at large about gender identity
Many times my mum has told me I should’ve been born a boy. I asked her why
Because I was a tomboy when I was a child; I never liked playing with dolls; I liked grubbing about in the dirt, climbing trees and playing football; I wanted my hair short and refused to wear a dress.
When I was a teenager I didn’t act like a girl; I never put on make up; I never dressed up and short skirts and skimpy tops; I wasn’t interested in hairstyles; I never chased round after boys.
Now I am an adult I don’t act like a woman; I sit with my legs wide apart; I hate doing housework; I like drinking beer and watching football; I strut around the place like I am a man.
I asked her how this makes me mail, or more importantly, how it makes me not female. Apparently it’s just not how women behave.
I have had this all my life, and from lots of people, men and women alike.
How do I know I am a woman; I bleed out of my vagina for a week out of every month; I have become pregnant, carried a child and given birth; I have been looked at and commented on as if I am and because I am a woman’s body; I have been encouraged to do all the things that women should do, and warned against doing things that will put me in danger because I am a woman.

I have been expected to carry out all the duties and presentation of being a woman, and failed miserably, it would seem, yet I know myself to be a woman.
I have no idea whether there is a difference between men’s and women’s brains, or if I have a more masculine brain than other women and to be honest I don’t really care.
If gender is a set of standards we need to measure up to, or thing we need to perform, then I’m not interested in having one. If it’s a set of behaviours that we are taught related to our biology, then I’d rather nobody had one.
I know myself to be a woman because I have a woman’s body, and sometimes I feel like a woman because I get treated like one. There is no definition in my mind of how to be a woman other than the one that I am.

Sorry for the rambling post. I’m still trying to get my head around the idea of what it is to be a woman, or if there is a way to be a woman, aside from physically being a woman. I’m not sure there is, so my head is twisting in circles trying to come up with one.

Sorry, I just assumed you were from the UK

Yeah its seriously hard to claim here, and there is a very low fraud rate. We have to have demeaning 'examinations' and hen in many cases the person assessing us lies, and then their word is taken over the word of various specialists that actually treat you. Its a bit mental. The success rate for tribunals when people appeal against the decision is something like 70%...which shows how bad the assessments are tbh. They are just there to get you off benefits not to assess your illness and how it affects you.

We experience a show and tell of our position on the gender hierarchy from the day we are born. It is deep conditioning.

Maybe it's more difficult in the UK, I don't know. Certainly with back, it should be easy. It's not understood, is it? You could have a problem in a totally different place and it results in back pain. You could have a disc problem but it turns out that isn't actually causing the pain. It might also be that it's not the case any more, this was from some lecture related to health insurance where it was discussed.

I was unaware, where I’m from people claiming a bad back happens quite a lot apparently (relatively speaking).

I would genuinely love to know how they manage this, given the sheer amount of medical proof thats needed in order to claim disability benefits. I need to learn something from them tbh, as I have a shitload of proof yet am still denied.

I've just eaten a whole bag of fruit pastilles as I'm pre menstrual and craving sugar.

I feel sick

I know I'm a woman due to the pending blood

Should say that on the diversity forms stuff (again DSS aside), plenty of people who others would say are disabled prefer NOT to identify this way, for personal reasons.

Like I say, not so cut and dried.

Disability is interesting.

Many forms (not DSS) now ask "do you identify as having a disability" or similar -

Many people are not "officially" disabled, as it were, but still have limitations, and there is a huge amount of personal and political stuff around disability.

So people can and do "identify as" disabled - people who another observer might say in their view was not. It's all subjective.

Where it's not something like a diversity form - and material benefits can be gained, then there are objective tests (or they try to be) and there is a certain threshold of disability that needs to be passed.

The interesting one is on some public sector jobs they commit to interviewing anyone who declares they have a disability (but they don't check, obviously).

Anyway.

When there are material benefits, then you need to have an objective test of some type.
Where there are no material benefits, does it matter? Yes, I suppose, if it takes something from someone else e.g. some of their space. Most people would say that "identifying as disabled" when you wanted to use the accessible toilet was a shitty thing to do.

Not sure where I'm going with this really :D just that disability is maybe not such a cut and dried example as it appears at first sight.

I was unaware, where I’m from people claiming a bad back happens quite a lot apparently (relatively speaking). There’s also evidence such claims increase during recessions. But fair enough, i think what you said just makes the point stronger.

If anyone could identify as disabled and claim disability benefits, then it becomes useless (and yes I know this benefit is prone to fraud already, but the point stands I think).

On the contrary, the rate of fraud in disability benefits is extraordinarily low.

But I get what you are saying. Just felt the need to point that out as a lot of people seem to think disability benefits have a huge margin of fraud, when its not actually true. if anything, people who should be able to claim are denied and have to go through year+ long tribunal processes (I include myself in that, even with seriously shitloads of medical evidence behind me, the word of someone who was a retired midwife, with no experience of my illness was taken over my consultants, GP, pain clinic, the lot)

It’s not objective. You can’t have a subjective definition and base rights around it. If anyone could identify as disabled and claim disability benefits, then it becomes useless (and yes I know this benefit is prone to fraud already, but the point stands I think).

Also it’s circular. A woman feels like a woman.

however humans regularly group people based on personality, or other vague notions of things like nationality.

Nationality isn’t a vague notion, it is a legal status that can only be gained through certain routes. It has nothing to do with personality.

Humans might sometimes attempt to group people by making assumptions about personality, but ill-founded generalisations have no place in government or law.

You can't feel like a woman because being a woman is not a feeling.

I know I am a woman when I look at my body, my biology

I feel like a woman through shared experience - in waves of different intensity through my life....

• being told I couldn't fight because I wasn't a boy- aged about 8 (I've always loved a bit of rough and tumble!)
• being allowed into the Headmistresses garden with the other girls, but none of the boys because they were too rough
• enjoying the power of looking sexy and how men reacted
• dancing in Heaven with mates and feeling SO LIBERATED that none of the men were interested in me and I could just be myself
• overwhelmingly when giving birth - the most amazing miracle in this world
• as a young mum, as a "mother" - sharing joys and challenges of babyhood
• in middle age as menopause rampages
• sharing and talking to DD as she grows up... exploring thoughts and boundaries

and most of all now, when I feel deeply threatened at an almost visceral level by the incursion of men with penises into our female spaces, whether physical or social

I haven't read any Fine or any Greer. Its on my to do list, honest!

I don't think its only hormones and biology. But also how people treat you based on that biology. Which will play a large part in forming your personality. We can only go on what we think though, as no experiment would ever happen due to the nature of the question tbh.

The reason I don't believe in innate gender identity is because I don't have one at all. I have thought about this so much and even if I woke up tomorrow in a male body, I would still feel the same. I would obviously be a bit freaked out at first, but I would get used to it. I don't 'feel like' a woman, so I would just..deal with it. I might even enjoy the extra freedom men get!

Of course its possible that gender identity is real and I simply am 'a-gender' and this is why I don't 'feel like' a woman. But I can only really go off what I personally believe. I do think that others really believe they have a gender identity, and respect that belief. Just, I don't believe in it myself at all. I guess its very similar to being an athiest. I do not believe in god at all. But I respect that other people do believe it. This whole 'gender' thing is very similar to a religion I think. You either believe, or you don't, or are somewhere inbetween. But you cannot try to force people who don't believe to believe.

If this post seems odd, its because I was just typing it all as it came into my head, so its my thought process

am actually genuinely interested in the reply. I am too. I'm glad you ask because it prompts me to think more. I don't have easy answers to give. Having read Greer, and thought about how I personally have developed, and compared my experiences with other women in RL, I do think there is something deeper. I am not the same as man. Even if you could rewind the clock, give me a hysterectomy, pump me full of testosterone, and bring me up as a male, I don't think I would be like a stereotypical man. I can't do the experiment. I can only say what I believe, which is terribly unsatisfactory, I know. As I said previously, is my development linked to oxytocin and the female hormones I've been subjected to through my life? That's plausible. Do I think it is cognitive? Well, hormones are controlled by the brain, so yes. More than that? I don't know (yes, I've read and enjoyed Fine's book - even she, if you read carefully, does not conclude men and women's brains are identical, she does says they are vastly more similar than most people would believe).

Also

I feel there is this idea in British feminism that women are exactly the same as men but with social conditioning and certain physical and sex differences tacked on.

Well yes, women are the same as men, except when they are not, sounds about right

The differences are biology, and then how people treat us based on biology. If you think there is more than this, please explain what else? I have never seen anyone attempt to explain this, and am actually genuinely interested in the reply.

If you went to the public at large, they would have no qualms about assigning themselves feeling of gender.

I would think that when asking the general public how they know they are a man/woman they would generally say 'because I am'. Or refer to biology. The only other possible way to answer is to revert to stereotypes. Which obviously do not apply to everyone who is male or female. So I know I am a woman because I like to bake cakes is bollocks, as many women do not like to bake cakes, and many men do.

merrymouse I am not questioning anybody else’s experience, but if something can’t be objectively described or observed I don’t understand how it can usefully be related to a group.

I see what you mean, however humans regularly group people based on personality, or other vague notions of things like nationality. These are broad, hard to measure. I think we are a select group on here. If you went to the public at large, they would have no qualms about assigning themselves feeling of gender. The feminists would say that's all because of conditioning. I'm think it goes deeper and is relatively unexplored, maybe that's why it's hard to define. Greer in her Female Eunuch talks a lot about developing femaleness away from the make gaze, liberating the feminine in us, exploring what femininity really is. I feel there is this idea in British feminism that women are exactly the same as men but with social conditioning and certain physical and sex differences tacked on. I'm just beginning to understand it might not be the case.