TRA understanding of 'what is a woman'?

An acquaintance tried the brain-in-a-jar thought experiment with me. As in, if you removed someone's brain and put it in a jar (and somehow kept it alive and functioning), they'd still know they were (had been?) a man or woman. So he was trying to argue the idea of man or woman wasn't necessarily tied to a physical body (and conveniently ignoring the decades of life experience of living in a sexed body)

But this still doesn't work, never mind the scientific implausibility. If I truly was just a brain, then how would I express, or be interpreted as being, any gender/social role at all?

Say you could grow the brain from scratch without the physical body, how would it pick up all the social signals around gender anyway? Pink and blue jars?

I'm none the wiser!

If I went to the GP and insisted I identified as a donkey, I suspect I’d be taken to the nearest psychiatric unit and treated accordingly because my perceptions of reality are questionable.

Remove the word donkey and add any other word you could think of and the situation would be the same.

Yet there one exception to this, is that feeling you’re born in to the wrong body is perfectly valid.

It blows my mind 🤯

KaycePollard, yes, absolutely, if one regards appropriate treatment as “phobic”!
I have always felt that gender confused/dysphoric young teens require proper psychiatric assessment and therapy, not blind affirmation and puberty blockers.
So many are simply gay, autistic or both, or are reacting to previous sexual abuse or trauma.

[quote PandaParty]Have a look at this drivel, OP.

www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/qke4po/good_answers_to_gotcha_questions/[/quote]
God. One even tries to use Black Swan Theory.. and fails miserably!

Actually, scrolling down, they fill up multiple Bingo cards in the first few responses!

If anyone hasn't encountered TRA logic that is a great place to start.

@Jamdown123 all you need to know is, and I paraphrase a few of those answers, as you are asking that supposed Gotcha! you have a closed mind, are not worth talking to, are dangerous, etc

But this one really caught my attention:

ii) Gender identity is the knowledge of one's own gender, but where does that knowledge come from?
- The same place as proprioception and the knowledge of self. Wherever part of the brain that is.

Proprioception? Now, I taught the basics of that for decades. If knowing where your limbs are at any time is the same as your sense of self then I am in a good position to explain it

It would mean that your sense of self is more accurate from a distance than it is close up, and, that sense of self will be more accurate when not practised and, maybe more importantly, sense of self would start deep within tendons, muscles, even hair follicles, any part of the body capable of movement... not, as the writer seems to have assumed, in some place in the brain.

To continue the analogy, sense of self would have to have two analagous points of reference (in proprioception ends of a bone, joint, hair follicle etc). So societally that would mean the individual and an onlooker - they would have to agree in order for the sense of self to be understood, in the same way as the cerebellum and thalamus interpret data.

Talking of the brain, cerebellum and thalamus aren't where 'we' live, that's various cortexes - I haven't thought about words like anterior cingulate cortex in years

I could go on...

@Babdoc, you androidphobic person, you !

TRA definition of a woman: Apparently it's an internal feeling that one is a woman.

I can't be a woman, as I have no internal feeling of being a woman. I simply am one.

Re the spoon comments: I have had mentally ill patients with fixed delusions, who identified as unusual things. One was firmly convinced that he was an android.
Strangely, neither I nor my colleagues felt we should “validate” him, call him a robot, or offer him WD40 to lubricate his joints. We sectioned him for psychiatric treatment. (antipsychotics and ECT). With resulting clinical improvement.
I suppose that was “literal violence”.

Anything concrete yet?

Maybe we need to pool all the answers together and submit them for comment.

Didn't English Rugby describe us as people who have not gone through a testosterone puberty?

That would make small boys women.

Well, Shakespeare would be OK with that, I suppose.

@GenderAtheist

What about products - are they wherever the seller feels that they are? Can I sell my old Ford as a brand new BMW because I feel that’s what it is?

Doesn't it depend on how the product identifies? Your Ford could be identifiying as a Rolls Royce...

I'd like to know, too.

How do they know what a male body is then? Transphobes.

Controlling female bodies and shutting down female voices is a lot easier than challenging the male gaze

But the female gender associated with the male gaze is only interested in serving men and attracting their gaze..

@RobotValkyrie

"Nah, much easier to get validation by bullying lesbians into unwanted sex."

Sex? Don't you mean gender? Thought gender trumped sex?

Controlling female bodies and shutting down female voices is a lot easier than challenging the male gaze.

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
Then you'll be a Woman

Most recently I've had TRAs ask me how I would feel to wake up in a male body. They think I would 'know' I'm really a woman.

Well, you’d presumably remember spending your entire life until this morning in a woman’s body, and everything that went along with that.

“How would you feel to wake up in a male body and with all your memories of ever being female completely erased?” but that works less well as a gotcha.

If you accept that premise, it's not a huge stretch to profess that the term "woman" can also apply to any male who fancies himself sexy while imagining himself female. It's still a feeling in a man's head.

Well, perhaps we should be asking a (cis) male?

I mean how can anyone be a woman on the grounds of gender and demand anything? When the gender associated with woman is defined by their servitude?

Clearly "woman" is a feeling in a man's head?

Fairly sure that for many (not just TRA) "woman = the kind of bodies your average (cis het) male finds sexually attractive".
After all, isn't it frequently implied that any female doing "unattractive" stuff is "unwomanly"?
My mum sure seemed to think that "being a woman" was all about maximising your attractiveness to the dominant sex (and I guess it's a valid survival strategy in a patriarchal world...)

If you accept that premise, it's not a huge stretch to profess that the term "woman" can also apply to any male who fancies himself sexy while imagining himself female. It's still a feeling in a man's head.
Who cares about what females (= objects) feel or think? It's never really been about us and our lived experience.

Most recently I've had TRAs ask me how I would feel to wake up in a male body. They think I would 'know' I'm really a woman.

(I can't say for sure but I think I would just feel like me and would happen to be male).

So the 'gender' of the female sex doesn't get to define the language. Accept gender and be a woman under those terms, then you lose the power to define yourself.

Or since gender is a cultural construct reject it. However, this does involve allowing the female sex to define themselves.

Oh, the dilemma!🤷‍♀️

It's a social construct, a concept or a feeling.

Just when you think they've been pinned down, they move the goalposts again

The 'definition' has become more and more submissive and pornified as we go along.

[quote PandaParty]Have a look at this drivel, OP.

www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/qke4po/good_answers_to_gotcha_questions/[/quote]
Yes, quite. The word woman is absolutely meaningless, but also very important if that's what someone wants to be called, but also an ethereal essence with no objective criteria, but also a label that should certainly define important rights.

It's all so slippery and disingenuous. Not to mention extremely offensive.

I'm not a biologist, but I gather there are circumstances in which a person could have XX chromosomes and be male. This is because very, very rarely the SRY gene which is normally found on the Y chromosome can end up on an X chromosome instead. In that case, a few weeks after conception, when every embryo, male or female, produces a huge amount of testosterone, the presence of the SRY gene means that the embryo would develop from that point on as male. Without the SRY gene, the testosterone just washes through and the embryo develops as female.

I find this kind of thing fascinating and it makes me wish I'd studied biology a bit longer.