Kathleen Stock OBE: Trans Women Aren't Women : A discussion

(Much better way of saying it)

There is a huge difference between ‘accepting’ people socially for who they and accepting people in law for purposes of accessing the rights of females.

Welcome to the future. Things have changed

Oh this is getting silly 😀

It hasn’t changed females are still females, males are still males

Ive always been very happy with treating transwomen as women but there are clashes of rights and that where i have run into difficulties with my original opinions

I could get on board with being a transwoman actually. None of the inconvenient biology of a woman. No need to change my name or confuse my children by swapping pronouns. Sounds good.

Can I be one? If not, why not?

I did not mean to be rude. So far this discussion has been respectful, and I'd like it to stay that way.

Perhaps then don’t accuse women of lying because they disagree with you.

It demonstrates how unaware you are of thousands of years of patriarchal disbelieving and dismissal of women’s testimony and knowledge.

It’s pretty wilful ignorance actually.

You are never going to agree they deserve the title 'woman' and I won't be able to convince you. But more people accept that if someone feels so strongly they are the wrong gender, and henceforth want to live their life as another gender (or non-binary), it's their life, their business..

Except that it is not just ‘their business’ is it?

The denial that ‘their business’ impacts on females is the heart of the issue. It fundamentally denies the needs of females for protection against discrimination for millennia due to having a sexed body that is female. And I am glad I don’t have to include lengthy sentences about production of gametes as it seems you understand that sex is a reproductive function and therefore reliably there are only two.

This discrimination is different to discrimination that trans people experience but some trans people who are female, also experience the deep and abiding discrimination against their sex still. Even as a transitioned female.

So, someone claiming to be a female impacts on others via health care, via sport, via education (via content, opportunities and at institutional level), via employment, via relationships.

And I also disagree that the population is growing more accepting of it. As females realize that it really is just another way that they are being discriminated against, the push back will continue to grow.

Welcome to the future. Things have changed.

Hahahahaha. Thanks for the belly laugh.

Oh and also that cheesy statement is typical of this whole bandwagon. Thinking that soundbites and smug retorts of the type used by 12-year-olds in arguments with their mum, equals some kind of convincing position.

Welcome to the future. Things have changed

They’ve certainly gone backwards. Because not being happy with your “gender” relies on you thinking that there is such a thing as a strictly defined, inescapable gender that’s been “assigned” to you. People have known for centuries that that’s not true and that they could break out of stereotyped sexist gender roles. That became easier over time too. And now transactivists are pushing those sexist roles and saying if you don’t fit in a stereotyped role then you have something “wrong” and need medical treatment and to change to deny your sex. That’s a crappy, sexist regressive future which is why we resist it.

Welcome to the future. Things have changed.
The immutable fact of binary human sexual reproduction has not - and will not - change, in that females and males are needed to create new humans.

Because they have transitioned, or because they always felt the gender 'male' was all wrong, and only living as a woman, identifying as a woman would end the psychological pain of being assigned a gender they felt deeply uncomfortable with.
Please define "gender". Who specifically assigns this gender? What does a natal male mean when he says he can "only live as a woman"?

more people than not, according to that survey, medical experts around the world and the World Health Organisation accept the best thing to do for their health and happiness is to accept them and treat them as women, not 'feminine men.'
In other words, "medical experts" and ostensibly the WHO would have us agree with lies no matter the harm that would come to those forced to lie. Rubbish.

And I would imagine very soon dictionaries will include trans-women under the definition of woman.
You imagine wrong, as transwomen are natal men and cannot be women.

This is not indulging a mental condition - the WHO removed gender dysphoria as a mental disorder in 2019

Due to political lobbying by trans groups.

Welcome to the future. Things have changed.

Nope. Everyone still knows who to treat like shit.

Welcome to the future. Things have changed

Er, what?

I’m trying to imagine what you mean here, and I’m coming up empty handed. Care to expand?

What has changed?

Transwomen remain male. Women are female. Where sex matters, that still matters.

Welcome to the future. Things have changed.

“Woman” isn’t a title though. It’s a descriptor, a categorisation. It can’t be earned, or awarded. It just is. Same for “female”.

FWIW, I am entirely on board that people should be enabled as far as possible to live in the way they please. However, there is a clash of rights here, and pretending that there isn’t, or demanding that women simply acquiesce doesn’t help anybody.

''I would love you to answer this question, for me. You accept that biological women (the kind who make babies) are women. You say that trans women are a 'subset' of women. By virtue of what are they a subset? What makes them women as opposed to feminine men?''

Because they have transitioned, or because they always felt the gender 'male' was all wrong, and only living as a woman, identifying as a woman would end the psychological pain of being assigned a gender they felt deeply uncomfortable with. You are never going to agree they deserve the title 'woman' and I won't be able to convince you. But more people accept that if someone feels so strongly they are the wrong gender, and henceforth want to live their life as another gender (or non-binary), it's their life, their business.. more people than not, according to that survey, medical experts around the world and the World Health Organisation accept the best thing to do for their health and happiness is to accept them and treat them as women, not 'feminine men.' This is not indulging a mental condition - the WHO removed gender dysphoria as a mental disorder in 2019. And I would imagine very soon dictionaries will include trans-women under the definition of woman.

Cracking post, weebisom, I would love to see the response to that.

This position seems to me to be a little like the bait-and-switch hooha that followed the DfE guidance that terminology such as “born in the wrong body” should not be used in children’s education. The announcement was then followed by an avalanche of frantic back pedalling from all the organisations and individuals who had been saying this, denying that they had ever said it, despite the mountains of evidence of them saying just that.

If all these legions of trans activists and allies don’t think that trans women are women, are female, and that there are no distinctions, the debate wouldn’t look the way it does, because we wouldn’t have an issue.

If you strip away biology, what 'makes' someone a woman?

I don't think the 'mother' analogy really works. As PP has pointed out, 'mother' is a social role as much as a biological one. It is also a legal role.

If I see a random child on the street and 'identify' as that child's mother, take the child home with me and begin to care for it - I am not that child's mother. I am a kidnapper. If I ignore a random child in distress on the street, I might be lacking in compassion but I won't be taken to court for child neglect.

If I adopt the child, I assume legal responsibility for the child and am responsible for the child's care and upbringing. In that way, there are certain defined roles of a mother. A mother who neglects, abandons or abuses her child from her child's life is said to be a 'bad' mother.

Even if a mtf transitioner is granted a GRC, what does that mean? What legal responsibilities are assumed by virtue of being recognised as 'woman'? What social role do all 'women' play?

What makes someone 'bad at being a woman' or 'good at being a woman'?

I have seen online someone say to a woman about a transwoman "she's more of a woman than you'll ever be!" What is meant by such a statement? To me, I felt the statement was meant to imply that that the mtf transitioner was kinder, sweeter, sexier etc. than the person to whom the comment was addressed.

However, if that was the intention behind the comment, we must therefore assume that woman = kind, sweet, sexy etc. And so an adult human female who is not kind, sweet or sexy is not a woman.

I do not accept this.

Bilinda B "Natalie Wynn and Abigail Thorne both know that they used to be male-bodied, they are not under some delusion that they were born a fully intact biological women with all eggs inside them; they are women - trans-women to be precise (which is a subset of women).

So here's the problem. Some trans women say that by virtue of having a 'female gender identity' they literally are female. They say that any person with a female gender identity literally is female, and that their bodies (penis, prostrate, and all) are fully female bodies. They say that they experience periods, and PTS. .They deny that they are 'male bodied' even having so called 'male genitalia. And they would say by virtue of taking hormones they have literally changed sex and are no longer male but as female as can be.

On the other hand, you have some trans women who adopt a more postmodernist approach, which is to say that there is no such thing as a biological female at all. The entire concept of biological sex is a socially constructed 'will of the wisp', a fiction, an illusion. They would say that there is no such thing as "biological sex" (the scare quotes are often included) and so the ONLY thing that women have in common are their female gender identities. And because they share the same gender identity as women, they literally are the same as women.

So you have the "we are literally female " (by redefining what 'female' means) crowd, and the "we are the same as women" (because female doesn't exist, and all we have in common is gender identity) crowd. Both claim to be in all ontological regards identical or equivalent to women. It is now deeply unfashionable for trans women to admit that they are male bodied and that they are different from women.That is what I meant when I said that trans women say they are literally the same as biological females. They either claim to have literally changed sex (Julia Serrano says this, for example - by taking hormones they have physically changed biological sex) or they claim that there is no such thing as biological sex, only the category 'woman' of which they are one.

I would love you to answer this question, for me. You accept that biological women (the kind who make babies) are women. You say that trans women are a 'subset' of women. By virtue of what are they a subset? What makes them women as opposed to feminine men?

I would also like to hear your interpretation of Nathalie Wynn's gender identity, because based on the 'gender critical feminists' video and the "JK Rowling' video, Wynn has a postmodern nihilistic view of gender in which the very question' what is a woman' is meaningless (following Wittgenstein), and so the only thing there in terms of womanhood is a bare self-declaration, which means that trans woman are ontologically the same as so-called biological women. But maybe I'm super confused and Nathalie at some point has declared "I'm a male, I'm not LITERALLY a biological woman!" I maybe haven't watched those videos.