Are we arguing about the wrong thing?

You mean some did?

This discussion makes me think about the AIBU thread about the rapist who is incarcerated in a women's prison for raping a baby. (Since incarceration they've had sex reassignment surgery.) On MN in general, ie not FWR, discussion of trans will produce a lot of "trans women are women" type arguments but on that thread very few posters were able to bring themselves to speak in those terms. The particular individual involved caused a cognitive dissonance in the minds of posters that was too large to bridge with a slogan.

Agree with what you say Oscarino. I think for some women in addition to some internalised misogyny (which let’s face it, is often an understandable rational conclusion to arrive at to rationalise how women are often treated..) there’s also perhaps a reaction based on having had bad experiences because of their being a woman, so they feel kind of sometimes a bit of a feeling like fuck it, if you want it that much, it’s not going to be what you think to live as a woman so you’re welcome to it, let’s see how you get on.

Exactly. Now, how do we get the BBC to give us a series of spots on the main news to get that message across?

Mary Beard??

women have the right to define ourselves – in language and in law – separately from males. Female human beings have the right to an ontological category to ourselves, a name to ourselves and the language to define our physical and social reality.

Exactly. Now, how do we get the BBC to give us a series of spots on the main news to get that message across?

Great thread. We are getting closer to the nitty gritty of the problem as a collective unit, but kudos to the poster for a huge step forward.

This puts in words a concept that many of us, I'm sure, were beginning to formulate in the back of our minds - that the whole shebang comes down to one simple set of interconnected questions:

(*throughout this woman and man take the meanings as stood in 1900. You may wish to insert penis bearers, XX/XY etc but pink brain, feelz, ladydick are not the discriminators in this argument, the dick, at birth, is the one)

-do women as a group and men as a group merit differential collective nouns;
-do women and men have significant differences in terms of needs and rights;

I'm a bit tired but that's what it comes down to

I wonder whether the misconception some seem to hold that womanhood is an elite club you can join / a status you can 'earn' rather than an immutable biological fact arises from the fact that men have constructed 'manhood' in precisely those terms

(obvs to 'be a man' you need the bio underpinnings in addition to the status / initiation stuff, but it would be perfectly consistent for female biology to be perceived as too unimportant to be necessary to the definition in the same way)

Bolding is beyond me sometimes.

It's strikethru for me - I think it's part of a bizarre initiation ceremony to get that working

Sorry about my formatting. Bolding is beyond me sometimes.

DonkeySkin.
Why waste a perfectly good word like 'woman' on lowly creatures with cunts, when it could be so much nobler, imbued with the humanity that only penis-havers can bestow?

I know, right? Trying to keep ‘woman’ for ourselves when there are men, actual men, who want it. Selfish bitches we are.

I said this in another thread. People, including some women, talk about expanding or broadening the definition of “woman” as if it is a waste of a good word for it to mean only “adult human female”.

oscarino yes that riles me too. I can only conclude that men who think like that are targeting the category 'woman' and women themselves becasue they feel they have a good chance of success in pushing women aside, rather than challenging men who would metaphirically or literally punch them back into their place. They are the kind of men who prefer to do the metaphorical or literal punching.

Women being 'kind' in this context is merely seen as weakness and stupidity. We don't earn respect for that, and probably don't deserve it either.

Yep. I'm 100% supportive of the fey, gentle blokes being themselves. Trying to convince either themselves or others that they're women is not being themselves.

I've much more respect for those trans women and gender-nonconforming men who want to keep the definitions of 'woman' and 'man', and be included as fully real males. The 'gentle fey boys' are just as much young males as macho blokes. An androgynous and/or nerdy young woman is fully female.

Very well said. I can confirm that even diehard trans activists, in calmer moments, say ‘of course we aren’t arguing that’ - you correctly state that it is an ideological position. How we are to best meet that position is a question in and of itself. You are probably right that the correct counter-argument is that women have a right to define ourselves.

The obvious test case for the argument might actually be ethnicity. And if we are to accept that a self-proclaimed gender is legally binding, then it follows that whites people should be able to claim that they’re are black, and be received as such by the black community, and vice versa. You would, in practical terms, make it illegal to ‘see race’.

The kickback from the black community against whites who claimed to ‘not see colour’, with the latter from a privileged position initially being unable to see the problem with that stance is a good case study. It is also an argument that has been largely won by the black community - it is now mostly accepted that it is daft to claim to not see colour, and that it diminishes and invalidates the structural inequalities ensured by PoC.

There are also other useful symmetries. In academic terms, neither gender nor race are ‘real’ but social constructs, while the same cannot be said for sex or ethnicity, which are indisputable facts.

We should take this as the template, perhaps. The two cases are mostly parallel. Those who start from the structurally more privileged position and argue that they have the right to impose ‘not seeing gender’ on those who have to live with hegemonic social constructs are the dominant voices in the debate.

And, just like in the US many white people feel that PoC have more privileges (a.k.a. when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression, whether the numbers support your position or not), so many dissatisfied men argue that women have more privileges ‘these days’.

If we allow ourselves to step back from the often infuriating arguments in the heat of the moment, this picture is really quite clear.

White people who used to say (like the GOP pretty much did 100%) that racism was over and that they ‘didn’t see colour’ are now revealed as precisely privileged and rather clueless. Hiding racism to yourself doesn’t make you a less racist person, and black people never bought it.

Can not precisely the same be said and seen now, albeit with sexism in place of racism? Neither value is necessarily visible to the person holding it; in fact, outright racists and sexists are usually easier to deal with (albeit more explicitly unpleasant). We cannot rely on men seeing their own sexism, even when they ‘identity as women’. While I would not make this judgment of those who transition medically, those who choose to retain intact male bodies are quite obviously comparable to DJ Westwood.

I said this in another thread. People, including some women, talk about expanding or broadening the definition of “woman” as if it is a waste of a good word for it to mean only “adult human female”.

there is something reductive and insulting about being a human being with female reproductive biology, such that any category which contains ONLY those persons must necessarily be a degraded and inferior one

It's exactly the same impulse which is causing female people to identify 'out' of womanhood.

If you assume that possession of a female body and reproductive system renders you intrinsically inferior it's no surprise you might want to believe that sex is a social construct that will wither away when everybody attains enlightenment.

Fetch meant cool in the mean girls films

Trying to make fetch happen.

How do you work that out garden

Sloth - that is the problem I have too. Everyone I talk to assumes we are talking about transsexuals, eg former gay men who now present in a very feminine way. I think this is why Paris Lees and Munroe are wheeled out constantly as the voice of trans, because they fit into this image, roughly. No-one believes me that the huge problem is with people who are attracted sexually to women, who may be AGP, and who have not had, and will never have, have surgery to remove their sex organs. So demonstrably no different from any other male, other than that they are stating that they are women. No one I know can get their head round this. Everyone equates it with gay rights and thinks of hyper-feminine gay men.

I told a friend the other day that there are trans women now who don’t have surgery or even necessarily any treatment, who were straight men before they transitioned and now identify as lesbians, and she literally didn’t believe me. She just laughed and accused me of being ridiculous.

Show her that recent news segment with Jess whatsisname the "non-binary woman" being indistinguishable from any other random male on the street while banging on about how scared they are of women holding meetings.

I read somewhere, I can’t remember where, “if female is about identity not sex, how do they know which unborn babies to kill?”

I honestly thought that was it; nobody could argue gender over sex when faced with that question. I totally underestimated the fuckery some people are capable of - now I’m shocked but no longer surprised that people will argue that a man who raped a baby is female.