Are you a real woman?

Just adding a hurried follow up to say under no circumstances do I think testicular cancer is amusing.

Not sure if this is the right place for this or if I'll get deleted but some days I just think fuck it and it made me smile.....

Badly written and a misrepresentation of Murray's point to boot. Talk about building up a strawman!

As for the assumption that all of us here presuppose that women share all of their experiences - I think that is a misunderstanding of the feminist argument. Which is that:

Not all women experience all of the things that arise from having a female body and from being born female in a male-dominated world, but all of those who experience these things are women.

That's why they are called women's experiences - because only women qua females have them.

Thankfully not all of us suffer male violence, but the vast majority of us fear it because we have either experienced it ourselves or know someone who has.

95 to 97% of us menstruate at some point during our lives and those who do not will have medical investigations to find out why. That makes menstruation pretty much a near universal female experience.

80% of us become mothers. No idea what percentage become carers, but I do know that women are four times as likely to adjust their working hours to take care of someone at home. Don't know what the overlap is between these groups, but it is highly likely that not all carers have children themselves.

So, given the amount of caring work women do - whether that is looking after children or parents or partners - the sacrifices women make to take care of others can also be considered a near universal experience.

And according to official statistics, 70% of us experience sexual harassment and 40% male sexual or physical violence (the extent of how these two groups overlap is again unknown). But 80% of serious sexual assaults and rapes go unreported, so who knows how high the number of affected women really is.

So while not all women experience male violence and not all who do experience the same and are effected to the same extent, again we can say that so many females experience unwanted attention and/or unwanted touching coming from males that it is a near universal experience, too.

And so on. What combination of these things an individual woman experiences we obviously can't know, but we can make a few reasonable assumptions as to how widespread they are and therefore how much of a problem.

That doesn't mean that all women's lives are effected to the same extent, and not all women are disadvantaged to the same extent but a large number of us are disadvantaged, discriminated against or oppressed at some point in our lives and we also know many other women who are effected even worse than us.

Nobody is forcing anybody into a sisterhood or assuming it must exist - I avoided all things with even a whiff of sisterhood for all of my life and didn't experience anything remotely like it until 17 months ago. Nobody cared. Not even me.

But I have realised that I cut myself off from a source of incredible strength and support and love. Yes, it's not all been kittens and roses, but what in life is? I've realised that I would rather have this sisterhood, warts and all, than not. And that's a decision we all have to - and can - make for ourselves.

multipurpose tits!

My tits so far have not been able to vacuum or hang the washing out. I'm working on it!

'Oh and to add to all that it gives people (men and some younger women) something to beat up older women about, a dismissive, "It's her age you know, take no notice of her.'

Yes men were always deeply respectful of older women before this handful of progs on the tv and radio 😁

A woman is just a woman.

If you have to define the difference between a real and fake one.

If you are having to define what a 'real woman' is then by default you also have to define what a 'fake woman' is too.

Oh.

Well, there's a clear difference between beliefs around women, that dont make you female or male, just beliefs, and then there's my woman's orgasm, g'spot, vulva, vagina, uterus with its painful contractions of very bloody periods and wonderful amazing baby bearing, and the multipurpose tits!

Other than that, I have comparable spatial skills, DIY abilities, I can drive a car safely for many years, multitask, study to high level, love babies and men (and their penises in context), I don't even mind long hair in men, or skirtish type things like kilts and wraps, pretty sexy.

But I feel very averse sexually to men claiming to actually change biological sex because they say so.

Even if I identified as being a man, I would know my biology was against me.

My biology is woman, there's no getting away from it, but it doesn't, hopefully, over-define me as a person/competencies.

Such arguments are based on the misunderstanding that a CIS women’s lack of privilege, automatically correlates to an inherent feminist understanding. My trans partner has a much better grasp of feminist theory than many CIS women I know, but I doubt this would gain her acceptance into Murray or Adichie’s ‘real’ woman category

I doubt that the author of this horrendously badly written article would expect a white person with an excellent knowledge of black history to be welcomed into spaces, forums, programs etc created for or aimed at black people, purely because they have a sound theoretical knowledge base. And that’s because a black person does not need to know anything about black history for their race to be relevant to their life experiences or for their cultural background to inform their choices or affect the opportunities that are available to them. Knowing feminist theory does not make you a woman. And it doesn’t entitle you to invade women’s spaces.

There are so many straw men in this article it’s ridiculous. It’s extremely weak. It would be easy to copy and paste the entire article and demolish it, one sentence at a time with simple common sense counter arguments.

Why give a shit about gender though?

Quite. They are different things, gender is meaningless, especially for reasons of segregation, makes no sense to base anything on which stereotypes you follow or a 'feeling' in your head. Meanwhile, sex is a reality and it matters in a few areas of life. In the areas of life where sex matters, of course 'gender' is still as meaningless as ever.

I get that some people feel 'gender' is an important part of who they are. But..again that has no bearing at all in areas where sex matters. of course.

Oh and to add to all that it gives people (men and some younger women) something to beat up older women about, a dismissive, "It's her age you know, take no notice of her."

The writer does have a bit of a point here. There is a tendency on here to make sweeping assumptions about negative aspects of being female which all women are assumed to have experienced. E.g how awful puberty is for a girl; not walking in the dark; being embarrassed by periods.

The latest "thing" is the menopause. We have programmes about it, articles about it, we need to teach children about it. I''ve been tempted to throw something at the TV and say, "Some people have a difficult menopause, some of us barely notice it, some are so relieved to never have to worry about periods again and some are somewhere in between all that." I'm glad mines over and I think they make it sound bloody terrifying.

Why give a shit about gender though? It just seems restrictive and regressive. And especially if it’s something you can change, and something that can’t be defined, or means different things to different people, then ultimately it doesn’t mean anything at all.

Sex is the only difference between men and women. Any other apparent differences are just as a consequence of sex.

This whole thing just boggles my mind.

Get with the 'modern world'. It's all much more complicated now that 'gender' has replaced the old fashioned and medical word 'sex'.

See something (else) that makes no sense to me at all, is TRA types will agree with GC people that gender and sex are different things. BUT, will insist on using gender for stuff thats segregated on sex. So changing rooms are segergated by sex. Sex is different to gender, sex is biological (agreed by all it seems). However, for some odd reason thats never explained, changing rooms should be segregated by gender (and internal thing that cannot be defined) not sex, despite it being sex segregated!

Aso, despite saying sex and gender are different things, they will constantly conflate the two and use gender INSTEAD of sex on purpose, to try and confuse issues.

Yes, sex and gender are different things. So, gender has no bearing whatsoever on sex.

It's this simple.

What's the one, sole purpose of trying to fog/confuse and pseudo metaphysicalise the issue of what constitutes a woman?

It's so men can get to be women. That's it. That's all.

I see what's in that for men who want to be women. What's in it for women?

Zebra

Get with the 'modern world'. It's all much more complicated now that 'gender' has replaced the old fashioned and medical word 'sex'.

Gender is the new term now to define men and women.

Soon MN will be a relic of that old fashioned view that women were women.

I think I heard that interview. She doesn’t have a biology GCSE obviously. She believes that you are a woman of you think you are.

I don’t get why this is even a question.
If you were born with
Ovaries + vagina = woman
Testicles + penis = man
None, all, or a combination = intersex

I don’t understand how this is such a debated question.

I think there is a cohort of men who don't understand reality. They simply don't get it.

Nevertheless, if you examine their ideas closely, you will find that what they really mean by ‘real’ women, would exclude many born with vaginas who have just been blithely assuming they were women by default all this time.

For them a ‘real’ woman appears to be someone who understands feminist principles inherently through their experience of being an underprivileged female.

That's a gross distortion of what Murray said. She said real (biological) women tend to know about all the social shit that comes with being a real biological woman in a way transwomen never will.

Also, ciswoman means female woman and transwoman means male woman. That makes transwoman an oxymoron.

The whole point is that the group on people on the earth of the type that does all the birthing, and everyone knows who they are, and they have been treated in a variety of ways through history often bad because of this, must not be allowed to name themselves as a group.

This is a huge political step coming from a place of extreme misogyny.

Not everyone who is insisting that female is anyone who says they are female realises the end game, maybe, but plenty do.

According to popular trans ideas, most cunty people in the world are not women, are not female, are not girls. In fact are not anything.

So there's that.

Is this related to that (rather good) article Murray wrote a while ago?
Worth a read, and I wouldn't say Murray's definition of a woman is quite what the author is claiming!

Btw woman's hour can be very good, sometimes. Sometimes it is crap, and the issues they cover range from the trivial to the very serious. So you'll have a segment about FGM, followed straight after by something about knitting.
It's a real mixed bag.

I love Jenny Murray though, I think she is a particularly good interviewer because she can switch between very different styles depending on who she is interviewing.

Man alive - that was poorly written!

'recently wrote'

I found that really jarring.

Who wrote the article and (also) who was the editor, because they both need a talking to.

Stockholm syndrome alert!

What absolute cultified guff.