Are feminists getting played?

This idea of equality with men works okay for a lot of women who don't have children.

No, it doesn't. I have no kids and I face the following for being female:

• Sexual harassment and assault, which are based on my sex not my gender conformance or lack of because it doesn't matter how long or short my hair, what I wear, etc, I am harassed. Even as a child.
• Fear of pregnancy.
• Pressure from men to tolerate unprotected sex, even though I take most of the risk from that.
• 6500 genes are expressed differently throughout the body depending on sex, but my sex is routinely excluded from medical research so how medicines and treatments affect me, and even how illnesses affect me, is not as fully understood as it is for males.
• I have a medical condition (migraine) that affects three times more women than men, but my workplace's sickness policy was designed for men and as a consequence I am at risk of losing my job.
• Agonising menstrual cramps, with a limited range of treatments to help them (thanks to my migraine, I cannot take oestrogen), all of which have side-effects.
• My hands are about average compared to most women but smaller than most mens', so everything from garden tools to mobile phones is too big for my hands because it was designed for men. I have been injured several times because holding items is a struggle and I strain my hands trying.
• Car seat belts and other safety features were, until recently, not tested on a manniquin that represented women, only one for men. Even now, women make up over 40% of in-vehicle RTA fatalities, even though we cause fewer than 10% of RTA fatalities.
• Fall arrest gear, hard hats, safety boots, etc are designed for men, giving women less protection and causing injuries. Many supplier catalogues do not have safety boots in women's sizes.(1)
• Assumptions made about my competence at work based on my sex, and certainly not my gender (I don't wear feminine clothing or makeup).
• People talking past me and over me at work and in other parts of life. The time that a mechanic kept talking to my then-bf about my car, when it was my car and I had said it was my car not his, is particularly memorable.
• Discomfort from bras, which are a sex thing. Even transmen wear binders, which cause discomfort too. Whether covering nipples or hiding them completely, females are expected to suffer for having breasts.
• Assumptions made about my sexual habits and intelligence because of my breast size, a factor beyond my control and caused by my sex.
• The male gaze, directed at me no matter what I wear because I am female.

(1) Source: actually trying to buy some for a project at work, we had to go outside our tender framework to get safety shoes for female staff, which meant forms and weeks of delays, for safety kit that the men had delivered within 24h of requesting it. Wearing lots of socks isn't an answer, the toe cap and midsole plate need to cover the right part of the foot to protect it. And men aren't expected to wear lots of socks to cope with ill-fitting kit.
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no one would actually get to the point of what I'm saying before their attention span shifts elsewhere.

Well exactly. Language should aid communication, not make it more bloody difficult!

StopThePlanet

I see your and raise you . What a lovely compliment, thank you!

🥂

Datun

Thank you so much! I've learned so much from your posts over the last two years - to a point that my mom will ask if a post I like and share with her is yours. Thank you for all of the time and effort you have put into FWR.

The idea of having to use so many words to describe the material reality of being a woman instead of using the word woman is infuriating. I'm verbose enough as it is - having to use all those words to describe the material reality of being a woman would just completely dilute anything I have to say - no one would actually get to the point of what I'm saying before their attention span shifts elsewhere.

StopThePlanet

Excellent post.

Can you imagine having to describe all those things by saying people with short bodies and large reproductive organs, or people who don't have a certain heart figuration. Instead of just women.

It's a nonsense premise.

I don't know if the OP is posting in good faith. It's sometimes difficult to tell.

But the idea that women should be known by possessing certain characteristics, rather than as a collective eliminates a class analysis. And it's something that TRAs promote.

Are feminists being played? Yes, all those woke lib fems who vow solidarity with transwomen are definitely being played. They will eventually come to realise that placing men's rights at the centre will end with their total betrayal, like in every other social movement throughout history.

Are feminists getting played?

Question seems a bit meta, OP. Or maybe I'm just a bit paranoid. Do you mean in general or are you just referencing the seemingly concentrated efforts to give the posters on FWR the runaround with all these very similarly focussed threads this week?

Either way, yes but its not like were not used to it or unaware of it. I guess that's what happens when you're fighting a war on two fronts with bad faith operators from both opposing sides intent on sowing dissent.

And I just want to add that talking about AGP, menstruation fetishes, furries, paedophilia and all the other weirdness is absolutely necessary.

Unless you understand what crawls out when you lift up the stone, you're not going to appreciate the implications of the laws.

Since gender is being used more and more frequently by scientists, health professionals, politicians and others when what they actually mean is sex, it's only a matter of time before people propose that the Equality Act be updated to change sex protections to gender protections to reflect how language has changed and is currently understood.

Sex impacts how we respond to drugs, how the world is designed around us, even how we have heart attacks. Gender has no impact on any of those things it's all about biological sex.

For example, only one out of eight women will encounter similar symptoms to a man experiencing a heart attack. Because women have heart attack symptoms different to men, women's heart attacks are considered atypical heart attacks (unless they are that one in eight) leaving them often to be ignored. Women's symptoms include headaches body pain stomach aches et al whereas men typically feel a surge of pain down their arm accompanied by chest tightness without any of the aforementioned women's symptoms. Women get brushed to the side or ignore their symptoms when they're having heart attacks because they're told that's not how people experience heart attacks.

Every civilization currently standing used man (male) as the default for the design of most things from government to medicine to business.

There isn't even a crash test dummy that represents us for crash tests - it's a smaller version of the male dummy but doesn't represent the differences in our internal structure which is affected in real crashes by seatbelts, airbags, and structural protection (frame, steering wheel positions, pedal distance from seat et al). The fact that I have to push the seat 8in closer to the wheel than an average sized male puts my body at a significant disadvantage in a crash compared to any average size male body.

The seatbelts we currently have (across the chest and across the waist) are dangerous for pregnant women (better than not wearing a seatbelt in most cases) as they aren't designed with the pregnant female body considered.

Men are in the default position for humans in relation to design... not because they present male (gender) but because they are biological males. All of the things designed with men in mind benefit men that present as women because they have male bodies regardless of what their genitals look like. They have male hearts (larger) they have male lungs (larger/more capacity) they have male muscle and bone structure, and they do not have the space that we have between our ribs and hips because women's bodies have room for our larger reproductive organs. These are facts these differences not subjective things - they are what they are due to sex.

I haven't been sexually harassed or assaulted because I present as female (gender) it is because I am a female. I haven't been fighting my way to the top because I present female but because I am female in a male-dominated profession. I didn't go to some doctor and have boobs sewn on or had a penis removed/inverted or attempted to adopt stereotypical perspectives to 'present as a female' I have large breasts and a vulva/vagina/cervix/etc. because I was born a female and went through female puberty. Regardless of how I dress it's very obvious that I am a woman, everything about my body screams woman whether it be profile or fully in view.

I have a right to call myself a woman and know that it sets me apart from men, I have a right to spaces without men in them, and I have a right to my own bodily autonomy as well as language to describe myself.

TRAs like to put me in their bucket because I don't have children so they like to say that they're women like I'm a woman. They are attempting to strip away my humanity and deny me as a 'real woman' outside of their definitions. I don't identify as anything I just am a woman and all the other words used to describe who I am are impacted by being a human female.

So by working, I meant trans prisoners now having a dedicated trans wing. The GRA result announcement being kicked into the long grass. Scotland backtracking. The sports issue coming to the fore and being headlined. The Tavistock being held to account for their administering of puberty blockers.

Exactly so.

It is women finally being heard in some quarters that is causing others to have doubt and begin to ask questions about transgenderist ideology.

So we persist in doing what we are doing.

I think mumsnet is pissing people off, yes. A major thorn in the side.

I have no interest in pissing people off. I just want to protect women's rights. And it's not just mumsnet, it's every gender critical feminist fighting this.

So by working, I meant trans prisoners now having a dedicated trans wing. The GRA result announcement being kicked into the long grass. Scotland backtracking. The sports issue coming to the fore and being headlined. The Tavistock being held to account for their administering of puberty blockers.

It's working. So fuck 'em.

I think mumsnet is pissing people off, yes. A major thorn in the side.

I disagree on the grounds that there is something real to being a woman, and no amount of semantics or shifting of bathroom signs will change that.

I think there is something in this.

it's almost like: while it's important to state reality and boundaries, if you give the trans too much credence and too much energy their reality starts to take on a kind of force of being "the" reality.

And yet at the same time it can't ever become "the"reality, because it's not just words that mean something, it's also true that reality itself means something.

So women are sort of trying harder than they really need to. There's an argument to be had for withdrawing feminist energy when needed.

Like women discussing the different types of transwomen. While it is interesting to do so, and it's bringing a lot of paraphilias out of the woodwork that our mothers and grandmothers had no idea about, ( just how weird and creepy men actually are) they're all just men as far as I'm concerned. I don't see any distinction at all between TW and men. I mean there isn't is there?

If the word woman is changed that will be imposed on women. Women have not chosen a word and claimed it for themselves.

Exactly so. Another violation of women by men against the consent of women.

Rape Culture yet again.

The change in the meaning of the word "gay" is nothing like changing the meaning of "woman".

The word gay, meaning homosexual, came from gay people themselves. They called themselves gay. They defined the new meaning of gay. They owned the new meaning of the word gay. It gave homosexual people another way to describe thrmselves. As an oppressed group this was a powerful statement.

If the word woman is changed that will be imposed on women. Women have not chosen a word and claimed it for themselves. Instead the word woman will be changed from its current meaning from under our noses. There is no other way to describe ourselves. As an oppressed group women lose the opportunity to make any kind of statement.

OP's mum might regret that the word gay is no longer primarily used to mean "happy'. But it does still mean that, and in the right context could still be used to mean "happy".

Words have meanings. Of course language changes, and on the whole I embrace that. But this is not about a natural evolution of language, it is about taking a word from the people it describes and giving it another meaning without the consent of those people.

Like, concede women's rights bit keep reproductive rights.
Because all we are is baby machines? Because that's what is most important to all women? Which of my rights are you planning on conceding?

It infuriates me that we have to deal with all the ways trans issues affect women on top of all the other shit we had to deal with before. But we can't pretend it's not happening.

This essay is one of the best explanations for what is happening:

www.openculture.com/2017/01/hannah-arendt-explains-how-propaganda-uses-lies-to-erode-all-truth-morality.html

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end---is being destroyed.

The Radical trans agenda is having major and life changing consequences for children too.

Heterosexual AGP men are using children as their human shield. Their mantra is "born this way".

The section about AGP in this analysis exposes and refutes that mantra:

4thwavenow.com/2017/12/07/gender-dysphoria-is-not-one-thing/

Laws are made of words. Words matter.

^ This.

Since gender is being used more and more frequently by scientists, health professionals, politicians and others when what they actually mean is sex, it's only a matter of time before people propose that the Equality Act be updated to change sex protections to gender protections to reflect how language has changed and is currently understood.

Then where will protections for biological women be?

You're wrong, OP - language is everything and in civil society, it's what protects the vulnerable.

We're smarter than this

Smarter than what? I'm confused.

Objecting to the radical trans agenda is not 'running around like a headless chicken'. The Radical trans agenda is having major and life changing consequences for children too.

"If being a woman is nothing real; if there is no material reality to being a woman - then women's issues cannot be properly addressed."

I disagree on the grounds that there is something real to being a woman, and no amount of semantics or shifting of bathroom signs will change that.

Here we have someone who fails to understand boundaries, I think.

It is exactly those 'semantics' that are used to express those boundaries. Those 'semantics' state "this is a boundary across which anyone to whom that boundary does not apply must not transgress".

I don't care if they love or hate us running around like headless chickens.

It's working. So fuck 'em.

I disagree on the grounds that there is something real to being a woman, and no amount of semantics or shifting of bathroom signs will change that

Well we are in agreement then. Being a woman is the reality of living in a female sexed body; going through female puberty etc

maniak

If your post gets reported, it will be deleted.

You are allowed to refer to Yaniv as a male. Because we got special dispensation over this particular case. But not the others.

It will be deleted, but it has to be reported first. None of us will report it, but if this is being watched, and someone else does, that it will be gone. It's up to the moderators at HQ as to whether or not it constitutes a strike. It may not, but if you did it again, it would. Three of those and you will be banned.