Q&A thread for New Posters

Even if "gender identity" were a real thing, such that it made sense to base things upon it, how would it make sense to accept people's own statement about it unquestioningly?

We wouldn't do the same for age, skills, character... It'd be like doing safeguarding by asking "are you dangerous?"

And it's blindingly obvious, at least to me, that males who claim to have female gender identities are often the most stereotypically masculinely behaved males (if you're not distracted by their dress sense or physical affectations). So this "female identity" has no obvious correlation to what Helen thinks she has.

Unlike many here, I do believe there are clear statistical differences between male and female "brains". I just don't remotely believe the average current trans person is in any way atypical of their sex in behaviour, nor do I think any self report can ever substitute for an objective measure or third-party assessment. (In any circumstance, if it's supposed to be a basis for policy).

How someone sees themself often bears little relation to how they are.

My question is what happened from it being a small group of unassuming people who just wanted to live to an aggressive, uncompromising lobby group with lots of members?

janeclarejones.com/2018/11/13/the-annals-of-the-terf-wars/

Is hilarious, but also a fairly good sketch, I think, of how the movement has changed over the past few years.

have met a few non-binary people who I can’t tell what their ‘biological sex’ is....
In terms of how that person moves through their everyday life - how people refer to them, what spaces they’re allowed into - what do you think should happen?

I think males should always use male spaces, as males as a sex class present statistically a higher threat to women - not just that they are more likely - statistically - to be violent, but also that they have penises and are able to impregnate a woman. I know it sounds brutal, but we are discussing exactly these brutal truths, these are why we have societal rules. We exclude males from spaces where females are vulnerable partly for reasons of dignity, and partly for reasons of safety. I also find males in a small confined space alarming, doesn't matter how they dress or present. (And I would wager that there are very, very few transwomen or male non-binary people who 'pass'. It's very hard to hide all the many physically male characteristics.)

I personally don't care at all where transmen or females who call themselves non-binary go - they represent far less of a threat to women, and in my experience transmen who pass still don't set off my 'man alarm' as males do. I would note, however, that they may be putting themselves at risk by using male designated spaces, but that is their choice.

As for pronouns. Generally, I'll try to be polite. But I will not refer to criminals, rapists, etc who are born male as females. I just won't. It is deeply offensive to me that a rapist asking his victim, in court, to use female pronouns, is respected. I also will sometimes just avoid using pronouns, for the reasons laid out by the fabulous Barracker, here:

fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/

Sorry again. Title of the video is "Gender Identity: Can a 5'9, White Guy Be a 6'5, Chinese Woman?"

Try watching this. You can see the cognitive dissonance in action. 😁

m.youtube.com/watch?v=xfO1veFs6Ho

*an excellent "question" that should read

One question I wondered about was seeing a user post her previous alignment with trans rights.
The user said she'd done a lot for pride and was part of the first trans rallies in the 90s. It was something about sitting on a beach for viability with people who were unassuming and just get on with their lives.
That was my original understanding of trans movement. People quietly going about their day in a dress.
Fast forward and the movement seems to have been hijacked by extremists deliberately exercising misogyny and eroding women's rights as key aim.

My question is what happened from it being a small group of unassuming people who just wanted to live to an aggressive, uncompromising lobby group with lots of members?

Because when I first heard about jk I thought of group a. Then saw actually they have minimal visibility in all of this.

I have a question...

If one can identify as a different sex and this not be sexist, why can one not identify as a different race? How is it different?
Could I put on an accent, dye my hair and tint my skin, have facial reconstruction surgery to look more Asian and decide I'm identifying as a Chinese woman? If I did, would this be considered racist in the way blackface is or would it be acceptable?
If anyone questions what it is about me that makes me Chinese given I have no Chinese heritage, genetics, cultural upbringing etc can I say I'm Chinese simply because I believe myself to be on the inside without being able to give any definition of what about me makes me Chinese?

Is it offensive to even ask this?

I understand where Helen is coming from on the visual identification point; I occasionally find it hard to work out what someone's birth sex is (and indeed have occasionally had to stop myself doing a double take at the sight of particularly butch women at feminist conferences).

I am all in favour of people taking on a personal style associated with another sex, if they fancy, and wish we spent more time as a society fighting for this to be totally accepted, and for them to encounter no problems when using the toilets of their birth sex. Realistically though it is another argument for having separate male, female and unisex toilets whenever feasible.

And now I've just seen the latest Bunbury thread. Feeling a bit of a wally.

🤣

I suppose asking questions in bad faith was always going to come up on a thread about asking questions!

That was a genuine question, btw about sealioning. I thought it was something to do with one poster bigging up another. Didn't mean to stir up a hornets' nest!

I am very sorry that my flippant remark about visual impairment has gone down like a lead balloon and I apologise to anyone who felt it was beyond the pale. It was. I have asked the management to remove it.

And obviously to anyone who actually has a visual impairment I am doubly sorry. xx

I'll take a break.

When people ask well what are you going to do with this person whose sex you cant determine, or who looks exactly like a person of the opposite sex, I do see it as a derail.

Partly because if people are going out of their way to disguise their sex, there is no solution that doesn't involve a third space.

But mainly because it seems to afford TRAs an opportunity to criticise women for not fixing an ideology when it doesn't work for the TRAs, even tho they are the ones advocating for it and women are the ones who aren't.

It's like we want this thing to happen, but now it's suddenly not working, how are you going to fix the thing for us, that we want to happen and you don't?

Beating woman over the head with an ideology that has never worked for women, and now being beaten over the head because it's not working for trans people too.

I end up concluding but it's just another way to criticise women. Whether deliberate, or subconscious.

Why is it woman's job to find a solution? It doesn't, in any way whatsoever, add to an argument that says we shouldn't have sex segregation.

And, to me, it's disingenuous to say it does.

That's my long answer to the question!

Belated thank you Winesalot and Xanthangum

I think that some people who don’t conform to gender norms find the experience of being in a society that enforces those norms so rigidly so difficult and uncomfortable that they are happier being regarded as a different gender.

Are you in the UK? In what respect do you believe that society 'enforces those norms' to such an extent that it makes life so difficult for people who don't conform that they are 'happier' and presumably find life easier by trying to convince other people that they have changed sex?

Do you think this applies equally to men and women? Although I have often found the expectations placed on girls and women to be unduly restrictive, it has never once occurred to me that I might find life easier if I tried to convince everyone that I was a man. Living a lie would be infinitely more challenging than trying to get people to accept the truth - that women don't have to fit into neat little gender boxes.

Changing oneself to suit other people (society) seems wrong. But this 'solution' also entails trying to force other people to believe that someone is something that they are not, so they are also trying to change society.

Would it not be easier to change society to accept that people shouldn't have to fit into neat little gender boxes? This seemed to be where we were going back in the 80s, but now we seem to have gone backwards.

Also here to agree that this is a great idea for a thread. I also am not entirely new but in honesty am sometimes afraid to post because of the ‘are you visually impaired’ type comments. I feel like I shouldn’t be afraid of those but I am. This itself is so interesting as I know I’m caught up in a ‘I don’t like women getting angry’ socialisation thing, and I realise more and more how much anger I have at the experiences I/we have as women, that I need to work out what to do with. But nevertheless, I don’t want to have a discussion and get looked down at for what I think, amongst a group of women when I’ve had that enough from men.

This isn’t a question as such but somehow I don’t know how to separate out the facts/important bits around GC activism, from the anger, if that makes sense. And if I should? I want to always be respectful but that sits with such dissonance to my anger at things that men do. I find it hard to respect people that don’t convey respect. The people I respect the most in these boards are those that are very clear about boundaries, facts and why and how TRA agenda impinges on women’s rights, whilst having respect for the humanity of everyone involved. I don’t know if that makes sense and would be interested to hear what others think.

I have questions that are really important to me about what I do about my incredibly woke organisation. I feel like I need to do something and that I am going to be on the wrong side of history if I don’t, but I am scared. I’d love to talk to someone in the FWR community that I could trust about it, without outing myself and without the information being shared with others. So possibly my checking out the responses to my tone queries is about getting to the heart of how to do that.

This looks likely to be the case here.

"I feel like a ... " has the same sense as "I have a sense of myself as ... ". And 'female' is a cognate of 'woman'. So your purported explanation, though indeed a little more complicated, suffers from the same defect as the original: it is circular and so completely non-explanatory.

We are trying to get an explanation of what X is. It is clear that 'an X is anyone who feels like X' offers nothing towards understanding what X is. Equally, 'an X is anyone who has a sense of themselves as a defining-character-of-X ' suffers the same fate.

If that is the best on offer then it surely is not real.

And no, pointing out logico-semantic errors is not sea-lioning.

*Helen8220
A colleague underwent a social and full medical sex change over a number of years. This was a learning experience for everyone. Our culture changed to using names and professional role as descriptors. This worked well and pronouns were rarely used. Minutes of meetings as well as team conversations used this format. It worked well for my colleague and those of us who had no personal understanding of the notion of internal gender,. As a lapsed Catholic it’s way too similar to the notion of having a soul, a concept I abandoned 50 years ago.

I'd invite all here to read Marge Piercy's 'Woman on the Edge of Time' - it is an early anarcho-feminist attempt to explore what might happen in a world without gender (trigger warning - it might also trigger women who have been victims of men's violence, who have been exploited in prostitution or who have been institutionalised sue to mental illness).