FB Groups and JK

@Fukuraptor great post.

And it’s an old point but worth repeating for the “youth” generation who think they have invented “gender nonconformity”: because gender roles are social, they change a lot over time, and in complex ways. Almost all women today are “gender nonconforming” compared to some gender expectations of the 1970s or 1980s or earlier. Some gender roles from 1980 involve women staying at home and deferring to their husbands and being expected to like cooking and be naturally maternal and sexually available; on the other hand, in 1980 a woman or girl could have short hair, wear no makeup, play with Star Wars Lego, wear unisex jeans and a t-shirt and not shave her armpits and still not be thought of as somehow “unwomanly” or “not girly”.

And as we regularly point out, there are plenty of gendered social expectations that transwomen really do not seem to want to adopt - like being paid less, overlooked at work, expected to defer to men in a meeting, smile or speak in a low voice, and apologise first for having an opinion with lots of nice hedging words to seem less “angry”.

The idea that all we need is “self-determination” and “autonomy” seems to believe in this fallacy of an internal “gender essence”. Whereas socially constructed gender is constructed by other people. Trying to pretend it is all internal and everything will be great as long as you force people to use the pronouns you want is laughable naïveté.

It's like you think this generation have invented gender non-conformity.

Adult human females have been gender non-conforming for a long time. Some of us go by the label feminist, others don't both with a label.

I can't think of a single woman (female) in my life that absolutely conforms to gender roles or stereotypes. Some may do a bit. But a lot don't at all.

Two points

1. It doesn't make us any less women (female). We aren't men or in-between.
2. We are still affected by our female biology and society's treatment of women (females) and we cannot identify out of our oppression.

It's this mass miscalculation and misclassification that people creating this new terminology have made that most other people, Muggles if you will are happily fulfilling the gender role assigned with their observed sex at birth.

Men (males) might be slightly more rigidly conforming because of homophobia, but even then, the men and boys I know well aren't at all stereotypical men.

I don't know what made you or the people coming up with the idea that gender roles are followed by most people but so don't think it survives contact with real human beings who have a huge variety of personalities, presentations, preferences, careers, hobbies etc and have either male or female bodies.

I have my own guesses that it isn't a coincidence that this movement has gained such popularity amongst people who were babies and young children at a time where clothes and toys were highly coded by gender. I wonder if it has made that generation feel that gender is somehow super salient to their lives. Whilst they are also being told that sex is less relevant because women have the vote and equal pay etc.

I'm not that much older (36) but old enough to have had children and experience the biological realities of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding and note some of the sexual inequalities that still exist.

Back on point. Those identifying the majority of women as cis have made a mistake in mapping most women's lives into the new paradigm.

If I was compelled to identify my personality through the gender version of the horoscope/enneagram/Hogwarts house/Myers Briggs then it wouldn't be Cis.

It would be agender/no gender/undefined.

Which is under the umbrella of non-binary, which is under the umbrella of trans. Transwomen are identifying as something many women reject.

The binary in terms of gender identity (as opposed to biological sex) really doesn't exist. Because gender is bullshit and feminists consciously reject it but even when people don't think about it a lot, they usually have aspects of their personalities/interests/hobbies/careers which are not rigidly conforming to the traditional gender role associated with their sex. Because we are all human and these things are just part of the human experience whether they are traditionally associated with men or women.

The people who seem most keen on traditional gender roles and stereotypes seem to be those who identify into them rather than have them imposed on them.

Which probably alludes to how important it is for humans to feel self directed and free. It feels freeing for a transwomen to chose to conform to opposite sex stereotypes, but that doesn't make performing feminity liberating for natal females.

@Flowerpotsnake
gender ideology is interesting as a thought experiment

Look at the push to change language because changing a word really has no consequence.
Right?

Why not make small changes?

transwoman and women
becomes
trans women and women
becomes
trans women and cis women

Women is the "Gender" class
Cis women are a sub-class who's rights are shared by males who identify as women.

What implication has that for the sex class women?

Ireland is an example of where the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) allows a woman(female) to be legally recognised as a man(male). Anyone over 16 can obtain a Gender Recognition Cert (GRC).

The GRA also recognised two different gender roles for women and men, but like many law which was poorly written will need the Courts decide what these roles are or are not.

Females obtain the lawful rights/ recognition of a "man" and "loose" the lawful rights/ recognition that "women" have.

Prisons are not "safespaces" but historic numbers indicate women are less likely to be held for violent crime.

The Irish prison system is split by sex, only legal females can be lawfully housed in the female system.

Limerick prison has 28 female spaces; Dublin 147 including a mother and baby unit.

At least two biological males, with GRC's were in the female system (Limerick) in late 2020. Both presented a GRC in Court to ensure they were sent to the Female service.

Extracts: www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40352726.html

"The report said both women were subject to Rule 63 of the Irish Prison Rules 2007, which relates to vulnerable prisoners who may be at risk from other prisoners or who might pose a risk to other inmates."

Both would likely be under the same rule in the male system, one due to the nature of the conviction, the other as a danger to inmates and prison officers.

The inspection team said solitary confinement “causes psychological harm” to people in prison.
It's actually recognised as a form of torture. Inmates provide "involuntary" social interactions and mental stimulation to other inmates.

"The women raised concerns that when searches were being conducted a male officer was present in addition to a female officer," it said, adding that a small number of prison officers referred to them as "he/him".

In this situation female employees are expected to ignore safeguarding rules which are designed to protect the prisoner and the employee.
One of these two male prisoners had to be managed only by male officers in the children's service due to the very serious risk posed to women.

Given that precedent females who are lawfully male could only be lawfully held in the male prison system. To avoid this females with a GRC would be obliged to conceal their legal sex from the Court.

What about other legislation?

Most existing legislation for sex specific healthcare is written as either womens or mens care.

So it would be lawful to refuse a female/GRC male State funded medical care if its funding provision is for women. While the public system /HCP will continue to provide care, the individual involved is "defrauding" the State.

Even though the Abortion act came into existence after the GRA males can't obtain lawfully abortions either. It was either forgotten (unlikely with all the women who claim that TRA's were vital in getting the law passed) or TM were ignored. Now Mother and woman are in the Consitution so I suspect that the Court would decide that birthing new citizens is a "gender role" for women.

How about adding "women and those who hold a GRC" to single sex provision?

No rather to avoid this "problem" and support "Gender identity" a new act to provide free period products will be for a "persons need" or the longer definition "reference to a person's need for period products arising from menstruation".

So the first hurdle around the provision of (appropriate) period product would be to prove a woman is still bleeding. The State would have the right to examine the "evidence".

Using "people and function" laws carries a real risk that some women are accidently excluded from legislation rather than being ignored for political reasons.

Whitefire my mum's homemade ones were the best. I don't like mince pies much, but cage ones with as little pastry as possible are better.

^ ahh you see that is all about biological essentialism or something. They too are blinded by the roles forced on people due to societal expectations and if they didn't have the terms male and female all would be hunkey dorey.

I think it's that, and obviously this the fault of the GC in 2021 and absolutely nothing to do with history of mankind since Eve took a bite out of the forbidden fruit.

And you do realize that the mere existence of this kind of segregation is upholding gender, right?

Wavedancer99 best get onto Plan International, Unicef and the United Nations Girls education Initiative and the Malala Fund. In their report on Covid and girls education, they say single sex facilities must be ensured.

"Ensure sustainable financing for safe,
accessible and age-responsive hygienic
single-sex WASH facilities in schools,
including in remote, fragile and conflict."

plan-international.org/publications/building-back-equal-girls-back-school-guide#download-options

Flowerpotsnake

In fact as far as I can see, the push to cleanse people of their birth sex when it comes to things like medical records goes directly against the interests of trans people themselves and could lead to serious cases of misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment. Denying the reality of their sex could actually kill them.

Yup, at least one transman has nearly died on account of being recorded as male on medical documents. The individual seems to have been unwilling to voluntarily disclose it and under the impression that sex did not make any difference to treatment.

extract

It was 2016 and Cameron Whitley was gravely ill. He was urgently in need of a kidney transplant, which should have been no problem. He was young and otherwise healthy. He had medical insurance. He even had several gallant friends willing to undergo major surgery for him.

There was a catch, however. His doctors were missing a crucial piece of information – one which, until then, no one had thought to look into. Without it, they weren’t able to put him on the list.

And so, more than a year after he first turned up at a hospital in the US Midwest with mysterious ear pain – eventually leading to a diagnosis of chronic kidney disease – he was forced to go on dialysis. By this point, his organs were functioning at less than 8% of their normal capacity.

But here again, Whitley hit a snag: his doctors were in need of another vital piece of information – and without it, they couldn’t work out how often he would need this treatment. They had to guess; they got it wrong; he became yet more unwell. All this time, his friends were practically throwing their kidneys at him.

Finally, just as Whitley, who is an assistant professor of sociology at Western Washington University, was approved for a transplant, his dialysis treatment led to massive blood loss and the operation had to be delayed. “It was really hard. I was horribly sick,” he says.

What was going on?

Whitley is a transgender man – he identifies as male but his biological sex is female. He has been living as a man for around 20 years. In his words, he fully “passes” as one, for want of a better term – and he is registered as a man on all his legal documents, from his passport to his medical records.

(Continues)

In Whitley’s case, the problem was how the severity of kidney disease is assessed. The usual protocol is to calculate a patient’s “estimated glomerular filtration rate” (eGFR), which measures the amount of a certain waste product in their blood and therefore shows how efficient their kidneys are at filtering it out. If the eGFR is below a certain level, it’s an indication that their kidneys are failing and they are eligible for a transplant.

There are several different lower limits for an eGFR, depending on things like a person’s weight, age, sex and race, which are intended to reflect the natural variation in the human body. Based on the female cut-off, he would have been allowed a transplant immediately. But he’s registered as a man on his medical records, and this meant his doctors used the male eGFR level. He wasn’t put on the list until he reached it – a decision that ultimately delayed the surgery by over a year, and very nearly cost him his life.

Indeed what difference would it make if there are women with penis and women with vulva?
It's only labels imposing by western society for some unidentified gender role.

Women and men all college graduates. All working way, looking to move up through the ranks. Promotion after promotion, and by some odd coincident the women with penis or men with penis get the bulk of the promotions.
But women are still being promoted.

If woman/female is an identifier not one of two sex groups how would an employee prove that the top jobs were all held by men with penis or women with penis while the women with vulva were somehow career limited or actively managed out of the business?

It was a HR conundrum.

Will this though process be applied to other real categories? Say age or race? If not, why not?

Ignoring male violence, taking away women's language, placing male sex offenders in female prisons. That isn't progressive, just more rights for men and less for women.

What a thread…
Having read through it, I’ve been struck by a few points that I’ve pondered before when I’ve seen TRAs in full flow. For a start, though gender ideology is interesting as a thought experiment, it’s incredibly impractical and won’t work outside of a utopian society that just doesn’t exist, there are too many potential negative consequences. Of course, your dyed in the wool TRA will deny those potential negatives, but as we’ve seen from ‘It never happens’ those negatives are already becoming very apparent and cannot be ignored. All the while women are preyed upon by men just because they’re female, it won’t work. All the while women are discriminated against in society for no other reason than their sex, it won’t work. You just can’t reject sex as an important category in favour of gender without not just sweeping existing sex based problems under the carpet, but actually creating lots more. As has been stated already (and pretty much ignored because it’s very awkward) there are different medical needs based on our sexed bodies. Men and women need different bladder catheters, present different heart attack symptoms, have different cancer risks. In fact as far as I can see, the push to cleanse people of their birth sex when it comes to things like medical records goes directly against the interests of trans people themselves and could lead to serious cases of misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment. Denying the reality of their sex could actually kill them. The only conclusion I can come to is that because gender woo is mostly a young person’s game, these harsh medical realities are just not on their radar…yet (because some numpty might come along and state that it’s the job of medical practitioners to take both into account when dealing with an individual, why should medics waste their precious time and create unnecessary delays to vital treatment by doing that when all they need to do is know the patient’s sex and diagnose accordingly?)
Another issue I’ve noticed is that the push to end sex segregated spaces is deeply lacking in empathy. Insisting male bodied people are let into women’s prisons verges on psychopathic, it’s that detached from simple, human feeling. For surely, if transwomen belong in women’s prisons, then trans men belong in mens prisons? Why are you so willing to inflict so much harm on trans men? Why are you perfectly happy for a women who may well have been a victim of male violence and exploitation her entire life to be made to share a cell with a male person?
How is it reasonable to expect female survivors of male sexual violence to share, and try to come to terms with, their trauma in a group with a male person, however they identify? Just why is it not acceptable to have some exclusively female only spaces in these circumstances? Why do you have no empathy for them? Because it hurts trans women? Okay, then why is trans women’s hurt so much more important than cis women’s? Why are you prioritising them in this way, because as long as there is also provision for trans women (and I would argue that trans women’s experiences of male violence are not the same as cis women’s because they’re not female, so I don’t see, apart from at best a sense of validation, at worst something rather darker, what they actually have to gain from that).
The phrase I often see used is ‘Why are you throwing trans women under the bus?’, fine, so why is it then acceptable, laudable even, to throw cis women under it instead by ignoring their particular sex specific needs and issues? Why should ANYBODY be chucked under the wheels of the number 75?
That poor busdriver…

Yes exactly - it’s “no labels for me but yes labels for thee - except when I want it to be the other way around of course”

Which basically sums it up.

Or we could sum it up as:

“Rights” and “autonomy” and “self determination” mean me being able to do whatever I want, but you having to do whatever I say.

So to be clear:

-any kind of single sex provision (changing rooms/sports/prisons) is bioessentialism, which is just like racism.

-the words "man" and "woman" are just socially constructed labels used by the desperately old-fashioned and uneducated.

-except when a man wants to call himself a woman and access women's spaces, when it's very important for the rest of the world to know exactly what he means by "woman" and to ensure he gets what he wants.

I actually think it can be useful for people to see what the baseline actually is, to have no single sex spaces ever and no acknowledgment that sex exists unless it is for the benefit of the sex denying individual.
This is so far from lived reality it is helpful to see it in black and white.

@Wavedancer99
Nothing about "sexed bodies" demands strict imposition of those labels. It is purely your choice to do so, imposing those labels on others, against their will.
By labels you were referring to man and woman.

For language to be comprehensible, we have be pretty strict in how we use words. Otherwise I could say that I am floating under the carpet with my fourteen warthogs, when I mean that I'm sitting on the sofa with my two dogs.

Sometimes - in a medical setting, in a setting where female safety is an issue, in sports where fairness is an issue - we need to be really strict about what we mean by 'man' and 'woman'.

A label 'imposed against my will' can still be accurate.

Don't argue with an idiot, they'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

Every time we get visitors on FWR like this current iteration I'm always reminded of^ Orwell's 1984.^

Julia makes sure she's the one shouting the loudest during the 2 Minutes Hate because she's the one who has all the doubts.

It doesn't matter how loud they shout, and how many shout along with them.

The truth is the truth and we all know it, and so do they.

Ah, I don't do Twitter. Maybe that's where I'm going "wrong".

Goodness. What a clear demonstration of the determination of men to browbeat women into accepting compulsory nudity / vulnerability in the presence of males. No single sex resources / spaces ever cos it's transphobic!

Actually, I'm really angry about this @MumsnetHQ because it now looks as if I've posted something bad when I certainly haven't, nor would I ever do that! I haven't had an email to notify me of the unfair deletion either so I'm just supposed to sit here and take the smear on my posting character. It's not on at all.

Oh come on! I didn't make any personal attacks, I stayed completely within the guidelines, I didn't post anything that could be taken in the slightest as being discriminatory or prejudiced even by the most disingenuous overseers so what's with the deletion?