Are women discriminated against due to their biology?

I've tried to remain in the background on some of these issues and boards but its getting to the point where silence is no longer an option.

Agree.

I'm so sick of this argument. If women are only discriminated against on the basis of their gender (what I assume she means by "perception"?) then how do we explain the long, long list of horrendous things that happen to female humans all around the world?

• FGM
• Drugs not being tested on female bodies
• Women's pain not being taken seriously by doctors
• Forced sterilisation in Asia
• Rape of women as a weapon of war
• Menstruation huts
• Maternity care and the treatment of birth injuries
• Feet binding
• Selective sex abortions

I've tried to remain in the background on some of these issues and boards but its getting to the point where silence is no longer an option.

What a sad state of affairs when the victimised group have to prove their victimhood to their own political leaders.

Enraging, dimwitted, crass are words that come to mind.

It's beyond offensive.

It is actually offensive that she is trying to make these arguments, in the face of women's experiences.

Ffs I lost a job for each of my pregnancies...

She needs to resign. This is outrageous.

What kind of research does she want?
Some dry paper put together by a man?
Is our word not enough?
If not, why not?
Ive seen more women speaking out and naming the abuse, violence and discrimination we face in the last two weeks than ever before.
Does she wanna know if my friend who threatened to rape me and then sexually assaulted me did that because he percieved me to be female or because he knew I am?
She would have to ask him about that.
How does his answer affect what happened to me?
And how could I ever be percieved as anything other than female?
Give me a clue?
If there's a way I can move through the world without being threatened, abused, minimised, laughed at and talked down to I'd like to know about it.

I wonder if she applies this same "logic" to other groups. If she thinks that women aren't discriminated against for actually being female but only for being perceived as female then does she also think that trans people aren't discriminated against for actually being trans but merely for being perceived as trans? After all we hear all the time that butch lesbians are being mistaken for transwomen and thrown out of public toilets. It's apparently a super common problem. So surely by KBs reasoning this proves that it's perceived trans status that causes discrimination not actual trans status. Better run and tell all the passing transmen who have experienced discrimination in health care such as HCPs not believing them when they said they were pregnant because they looked like men, or developing vaginal atrophy because the effects of testosterone on the female body weren't fully understood. That had nothing to do with them being trans because they pass so cannot be perceived as trans and perception is all that matters.

But hey now, hold on a tick... Vaginal atrophy? Medication not being properly tested for female bodies? Poor care during pregnancy? Those things sound a lot like the kinds of sex based discrimination that women face. But it can't be! They aren't perceived as women so how can they possibly still be facing the same forms of discrimination? If only there was some clear and common factor which linked trans men and women. Something grouping us together in a way that isn't shared by men and transwomen. It's a real head scratcher.

The cognitive dissonance must be absolutely howling in her ears, though, surely?

fb.watch/4u7Nsuhyp1/

What an unbelievably dimwitted woman. The fact that she's an MP is frankly depressing.

KB asked "Is there research showing that discrimination happens on the basis of actual sex rather than perceived [sic] sex or gender?"

Rather than research, how about the evidence of the discrimination of millions of women and girls every day around the world, will that do? Is that a problem that "exists" enough for you or is your perception a bit skewed by the vacuum between your ears?

I'm afraid my brain went twang and decided I was done with to continue trying to raise Major Tom on the radio. Those tweets were bonkers.

Oh FFS.

Discrimination against, violence towards, structural issues that work against cunty people are just so fucking boring aren't they.

Cunty people have been going on and on forever and who wants to hear it? They need to STFU. one way or another.

A woman genuinely, honestly asking whether there is any evidence that cunty people are oppressed etc because of their biology.

I mean just fuck off.

I think it may come out of the same thought processes which were pretty common from the late 80's onward, that says that the reason sex discrimination is wrong is that there are really no substantial differences between women and men. They will allow for actually gestating and birthing a child, but that is it.

It's the kind of thinking where you have people, including may women, who honestly don't realise that there are different outcomes in sports for men and women, or think that there is no physical explanation that there might be fewer women in certain kinds of very heavy work, etc.

A lot of these people will also tend to believe that having kids doesn't really affect women that much (unless they are silly and want to be SAHMs or something, or are unlucky enough to have bad husbands.)

If you really believe that, and a lot of people were taught that way in school, then maybe you just aren't going to see that there would be much real sex discrimination. It would explain too why they might think of the word woman as not being very much to do with the physical body.

And it's not necessarily anyone's fault. If we found 50 years from now out industrial systems no longer functioned, and we didn't have access to much of the technology of the 20th century, that would make a huge huge difference to the lives of women, in ways that would simply not apply to men.

So - we'd have to figure out how to best manage that. One hopes it would be done with respect and a sense of the dignity of all, in good faith. But the solutions wouldn't look anything like the solutions of 20th century feminism.

The same apples for whatever social and technological and environmental changes happen. And they will happen.

With no due respect, what a moron.

True Stealth, I mean imagine the level of wilful stupidity required to claim that people are oppressed if they actually have characteristic x or if they are perceived to have characteristic x and yet still try to claim that characteristic x was not the cause of the oppression. You'd have to be an actual half wit.

Imagine even thinking that women aren't discriminated against because of their biology.
How do you get there? This keeps coming back to boggle me today.

She's bonkers as conkers. I thought that my MP was bad, but this just goes to show that there are worse examples out there. Some people have absolutely no shame.

I was asked if I was planning to have a baby, during an interview in 1998. I knew the interviewer as it was an internal vacancy. I pointed out to him that he wasn't allowed to ask me that. Luckily I didn't want the job anyway.

I also suspect KB will soon fall foul of the though police for putting forward a theory of gender oppression that doesn't include non passing and non transitioned transpeople. How does her theory that women are discriminated against on the basis of perceived sex marry up with the insistence that someone like Alex Drummond also experiences misogyny? She'll be driven out by her own side soon enough.

Indeed. Is it Jane clare Jones who calls it pretzeling? See also those who insist gender dysphoria is a pre-requisite and those who don't.

How does she explain then that in some regions in China 100% of women had their feet mutilated and none of the men?

Her tweet clearly implies that inaccurately perceiving a male child for a female one is common, else why stress the perception part of this. And yet, none of these apparently frequently but wrongly perceived to be be female males in China had their feet bound. I would like her to explain to me how those carrying out this practice unerringly chose only female children to inflict this horror on.