Q&A thread for New Posters

@Helen8220 if you are of the opinion that pretending everyone is the same despite reality as a way to plaster over problems (‘I don’t see colour’), then I can’t help you. Is it not better to not deny the reality that we all see, but treat people with the same dignity regardless of the differences? Nobody has to buy ‘gendered’ clothing or toys for children. We can’t linguistically obfuscate some very real world problems and facts away. Male violence is a thing. Sex is the single most reliable determiner we have of likelihood of being a victim or perpetrator of sexual assault. Denial of the significance of sex in a sexist world is dangerous for women and girls. Your way is not an experiment I’m willing to undertake with women and girls as collateral I’m afraid, and I justifiably don’t trust the male sex to self declare. Males don’t have to like the no, but they’re going to have to accept it, it really is that simple.

@Edenember

The ‘social significance’ is attached to the body, not the words though. Women and girls globally are subjugated, denied rights, sold as child brides, genitally mutilated, trafficked, raped because of their female bodies, and they can’t identify out of it. It’s such bullshit western blind privilege to think in terms of the luxury of identity. If I identified as a male tomorrow, would it deter an attacker from attacking me? Would it wash if I declared it? Would it stop the abuse, or would he laugh in my face? And why are you pretending that we can’t accurately sex other humans in 99.9% of cases? Virtually all? It’s an innate skill even very young children can perform instinctively, because it’s been necessary for evolution. Your physiology is the primary declaration of your sex, not the words. The words aren’t the big reveal or announcement, you being in the room is. Words are used to describe the world around us, we need them to have commonly agreed on definitions otherwise they wouldn’t function. To deny reality never helped anyone, this reminds me of people claiming they don’t see colour and thinking they were helping. To linguistically muddy waters or whitewash would not make reality stop being.

Maybe if everyone stopped banging on about how men and women are profoundly different, stopped declaring babies’ sex before they’re even born so they can buy them the socially expected clothing and gifts, stopped unnecessarily dividing up children in primary school into boys’ and girls’ teams, changing rooms etc, then we would see how that changes things. You clearly don’t think it would make much of a difference. I disagree

Yes. Also, I've seen people actually describe the phrase 'women's rights' as 'dogwhistle transphobia'. That should spell things out pretty clearly.

Yes, it does.

if someone says “there is no conflict between trans rights and women’s rights” and then in the next breath says “you feminists are hostile to trans rights”, then somethings afoot because both of those things can’t be true.

Yes. Also, I've seen people actually describe the phrase 'women's rights' as 'dogwhistle transphobia'. That should spell things out pretty clearly.

So the only way to get to a place where people are truly free from gendered norms and expectations (or at least, free to adopt them or reject them as they wish) is to detach the concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ from biological sex and allow people to inhabit them as they wish.

I'd quite like to be truly free from having gendered politics inflicted on me, and my language and sense of identity and own choice of self definition forcibly adapted to fit your personal preferences and sense of superiority of understanding. I'd like to reject that as I wish.

But I suspect your apparent view of freedom and respect for others breaks down at that point.

The ‘social significance’ is attached to the body, not the words though. Women and girls globally are subjugated, denied rights, sold as child brides, genitally mutilated, trafficked, raped because of their female bodies, and they can’t identify out of it. It’s such bullshit western blind privilege to think in terms of the luxury of identity. If I identified as a male tomorrow, would it deter an attacker from attacking me? Would it wash if I declared it? Would it stop the abuse, or would he laugh in my face? And why are you pretending that we can’t accurately sex other humans in 99.9% of cases? Virtually all? It’s an innate skill even very young children can perform instinctively, because it’s been necessary for evolution. Your physiology is the primary declaration of your sex, not the words. The words aren’t the big reveal or announcement, you being in the room is. Words are used to describe the world around us, we need them to have commonly agreed on definitions otherwise they wouldn’t function. To deny reality never helped anyone, this reminds me of people claiming they don’t see colour and thinking they were helping. To linguistically muddy waters or whitewash would not make reality stop being.

@MoleSmokes

Your comments about travelling on crowded tube trains suggest a lack of insight into the predictable consequences of being female

I obviously can’t claim to have insight into everyone’s experiences of ‘the predictable consequences of being female’, but having been a female for a good few years now, and in that time been on many tubes and buses, and found myself in quite a few gigs, clubs and other places in close proximity with a large variety of other people, you must accept I have some insight into these matters.

@PothoIeParadies

Helen, I would like you to read through this thread about a girl being attacked on the top floor of a bus. Pay attention to the number of people who blame the girl for being irresponsible because she went upstairs on public transport.

www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2303625

I’ve just read through that whole thread. That’s a very shocking incident, and some people have made some pretty stupid comments on it (and rightly been pulled up by others for those comments).

Helen - ”To deny that ‘woman’ means more than biologically female is to deny inescapable reality.”

I don’t think that anyone is suggesting that there are no predictable consequences to being female, only that in order to be a woman it is necessary and sufficient to be female.

Your comments about travelling on crowded tube trains suggest a lack of insight into the predictable consequences of being female

But yes, we are transphobes if we notice the difference and irresponsible if we don't and fail to adjust our behaviour and movements accordingly.
🙄

Young women literally cannot win.

One sector of society tells them they should not even admit they can see the difference between men and women!

But if you get attacked in a train carriage, it will be "didn't you notice you were alone with a man?"

Wow I've not read all the comments but there are a few that say "I'm not victim blaming but.. "

Helen, I would like you to read through this thread about a girl being attacked on the top floor of a bus. Pay attention to the number of people who blame the girl for being irresponsible because she went upstairs on public transport.

www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2303625

Helen8220:
So the only way to get to a place where people are truly free from gendered norms and expectations (or at least, free to adopt them or reject them as they wish) is to detach the concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ from biological sex and allow people to inhabit them as they wish.

No this is not the only way. There is another (obvious and better) way.

It is this: detach the concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ from gendered norms.

-- Or, perhaps, which is equivalent: detach gendered norms from the concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’

That will be much simpler. And we will not even have to rewrite the dictionary.

[" woman: ... an adult female human being." (From OED.)]

It is, perhaps, useful to see the divide between us in such simple terms, Helen8220:

Some of us wish people (men and women, boys and girls) not to be defined by gender norms, thinking as we do that that has been, and remains, a mechanism of oppression. Others you for instance really really want to emphasise the way people have been so defined; indeed you wish this to be reinforced.

Can you see why we might say, 'No, thanks'?

I’ve never heard anyone say it makes them uncomfortable (or at least, in the case of the tube, specifically uncomfortable because of the sex of the people).

I have in the past gotten off and on the same train again to avoid certain male people standing too close during rush hour. I have known female students who came in with white goo on their clothes after having men stand very close to them on a packed train.
I know many women and girls, me included, who will think twice on taking public transport late at night when there already men in the transport in question. Including the driver. So for your experience, there is a different experience,
Now that I am middle age, I can actually travel easer. And afford a car.

You would, cranberries.

The Academie Français is still riven over feminised/masculinised professions. That’s only taken, like, a hundred years to get movement on, and now we’ll have to gender neutralise again, hou la la! I’ll bring the popcorn.

After that, the people at the Académie Française. I will need to film that. You can't even type the literal equivalent of "I went to school" in French without revealing what sex you are.

It's odd that all this drama about gendered language seems to be coming from English-speaking countries when we're speaking one of the most non-gendered languages.

1984 was supposed to put people off the idea of using language to control thought. And yet here it is, alive and kicking. Amazing.

I absolutely think that all language should stop operating in a way that requires people to be marked as male or female. While we’re on the subject, I very much hope all theistic religion will eventually go the same way as gender norms and become a relic of the past

I don’t think you’ve even begun to engage with my point, but if this is the aim, then at least your worldview is consistent.

Barking, but consistent.

However, even if this all worked, was possible across every language, and everyone in the world signed up to it, humans would still carry on being born either male or female. We just wouldn’t have words to describe it any more. There would still be be prostate glands and ovaries, breasts and Adam’s apples, xx and XY chromosomes.

In the real world, however, it’s plain to see that this sort of thinking doesn’t engage on any level with any kind of class analysis, structural or cultural differences. It’s forged in an ivory tower, a utopia, a thought experiment. It has no practical application.

I’d love to see the reaction to you telling an Arabic speaker that gendered conjugation is transphobic and sexist and needs to go. Please can I be there?

To deny that ‘woman’ means more than biologically female is to deny inescapable reality.

And also seems to deny the fact that cultural and social expectations can and do change. What you can't change is physical reality.

To deny that ‘woman’ means more than biologically female is to deny inescapable reality.

How so? That strikes me as semantic sophistry.

You might like Finnish. No separate equivalents of he or she. They've got one third-person singular that is used indistinguishably for a person of either sex.

And Indonesian. This is quite interesting for a Vice article.

It's another reminder that a gender-neutral language doesn't necessarily mean a gender-neutral society. Indonesian society is pretty patriarchal and these kinds of beliefs rise to the surface regardless of our language.
“Of course it doesn’t mean that people who use Indonesian language aren’t sexist," Katrin told VICE. "It doesn’t matter how ‘neutral’ a language is, as long as the content is sexist, the society and culture are sexist. So we need to address the gender problems in our society, not only in the language."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3jg9e/why-google-is-adding-gender-pronouns-to-bahasa-indonesia-translations

@Helen8220
My view is that the concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are too thoroughly infected with gender (as evidenced by the fact people are almost invariably referred to using gendered pronouns which make it very difficult to enter into social interactions without adopting a gender) to be re-claimed as denoting only biological sex. To deny that ‘woman’ means more than biologically female is to deny inescapable reality.

So the only way to get to a place where people are truly free from gendered norms and expectations (or at least, free to adopt them or reject them as they wish) is to detach the concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ from biological sex and allow people to inhabit them as they wish.

What are the "concepts of 'man' and 'women'" that you want to "allow people to inhabit", if they are not to do with sex and they are not to do with stereotypes?

I know that changing terminology or concepts wouldn’t stop sexism overnight, but I also think a blurring of the boundaries between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ over time will help to erode sexist stereotypes

Are you saying that if some men can 'become' women and some women can 'become' men, that sexist stereotypes will disappear? If there are no stereotypes, and if (as I believe you are saying) a woman is something other than an adult female human, how does a man 'become' a woman?