Guardian - Living in a Woman’s Body.

But @9toenails, Hume is referring to the concept of the immortal soul there - not the modern sense of self posters here are referring to (which of course is the “self” referenced in the “unstable sense of self” that is mentioned in the DSM V). A complete lack of internal sense of who one is is a cause for concern. Some people do seem to have vastly richer inner worlds than others; but children in even the fairly early stages of language acquisition are generally keen to express preferences (particularly in the negative ) & share interests. Were we able to ask him, doubtless Hume would have views on the experiences he describes in the passage you quoted (beyond his stated frustration with those who disagree with him about this matter): I would not presume to argue that indicates the presence of a soul/sacred inner self; but it’s clear that Hume was blessed (no pun intended) with a temporal “Inner Me”.

The ongoing & seemingly-endless “must shoehorn TW into everything (ostensibly) for & about women” is both infuriating & crushing. Every tiny TINY gain women [have] manage[d] to make gets snatched away from them. I’d had quite enough of toys being taken away from me because another child usually a boy was having a tantrum & demanding I “share” (aka not have my turn) by the time I was, oh, about 2y3m/2y4m (I tried very very hard to be patient & understanding). Ditto boys pushing past the queue for the slide at playgroup; boys saying I “wasn’t allowed” to like/do/play & even SAY certain things; & boys absolutely hogging the playgroup pedal cars with grown-up help! “Those are the boys’ toys Nitro…” And now my peer group & I are (allegedly-supposedly) The Grown-Ups; & despite a glorious burst of Girl Power & Toys Are Just Toys/School Subjects Are Just School Subjects (etc), it’s all rather plus ça change as regards grabby tantrummy boys snatching at what girls have; & girls being told by The Grown Ups (eg British Cycling/Girlguiding policy makers/Scottish Government/Stonewall) that they have to “share nicely” (ie “Oh just give him it! Yes & that one too! It’s not as if there’s nothing left for you to play with, I’ve no idea why you’re whinging at me now. And look, he’s being really kind & saying you can play with him. What do you mean you don’t want to? That’s very VERY unkind of you & I’m really disappointed in you. No, I’m taking ALL your toys away now because you’ve made him cry & you can just sit & think about what you’ve done. I’m going to have to tell your parents about this when they come to collect you… SO disappointed.) & “Be Kind”.

As @KrakowDawn says, it is offensive nonsense to state that none of us are beholden to our bodies. Most women quite literally pay in blood for, even if not fertility, the health benefits that come with [still] getting your period. (Three cheers for bone mass!) Of course, even with treatments my periods are so heavy I sometimes need blood transfusions on top of routine iron infusions (going on the pill is indeed not an option): freakishly flexible as I am I can’t harness and shape this, or any other aspect of my disabilities away. How wondrous would that be, to never again be a hair-tugging fist-clenching lip-biting ball of pain, thrash-squirming as you try to just make it hurt enough less to be bearable? And no more flooding! Indelible memories of the soul-crumpling awfulness of it happening at school might at least have the edges smoothed off by the end to ruined bedding… Sometimes I have a sense of needing to apologise to my body because, purely by virtue of being a woman, I am automatically denied certain treatments, will receive less pain relief at a lower dose in an emergency & if I have an MI it may - even now - be missed, because of the differing presentation.

Before my (unmistakably female, even if the adult bit has been questioned even in the last year - suppose at least nobody’s queried the human?) body was quite so broken & I Was A Real Person, one of my hobbies was singing. Certainly there are women who can’t sing soprano; & even most sopranos don’t have the range I used to (all that singing I’d done was very a fantastic base for SaLT, but unsurprisingly the NHS were concerned with getting me speaking again, not returning to singing); but my voice, & how I could use it? Unique to me - & down to my female body*.

Ballet for me meant pointework. Men can do pointe (Bottom in the Dream is the most famous example) & the Trocs have been doing it for years (importantly, deliberately set up as a farce - no invitation of direct comparison with female dancers). There is no doubt but that male & female “ballet bodies” look different: some slight variety around the world, eg NYCB’s dancers are famously tall & have been ever since the Company was founded, but the basics are all there. Schools in the UK don’t emulate the Russian practise of having a 50kg maximum weight for girls in pas de deux classes & in the last few years White Lodge (Royal Ballet Y7-11 boarding school has finally come up with pastoral care guidance for students with eating disorders) but the fact remains that to have a chance at being accepted into vocational training you need to be slim & long-limbed. A small head & long neck; slim hips & narrow shoulders; knees that hyperextend; feet with a high arch & instep plus the first 3 toes of equal length; & no “bulky” muscles. Male dancers are bigger, stronger, broad of shoulder - with legs that make those of superheroes look positively weedy. Male & female dancers build up different muscles because their bodies need to do different things. I’m sure you could find, in the general population, a woman, or even some women, capable of lifting some men over their heads one handed. Of catching them in fish dives & throwing them about the place. It is silly to try to pretend that is standard though. It is my female body that determined I was the one trusting my partner while they held me -basically doing a backbend - up over their head & strolled around the studio. My partner’s inhabiting a male ballet body let him control how many turns I did when we pirouetted; the sweep & angle of my body in a fish dive; and the speed and smoothness of each & every promenade. Boys/men have so much control over things in PDD that, while it’s not great partnering to only blame them for mistakes, if something goes wrong it’s pretty much certain to have been their fault. I miss dancing terribly - I dream of it still, I can even physically feel it when watching performances. I can’t somehow remake my body into one that can dance again, though; & any suggestion that bodies are malleable in any such way is rank ableism.

As a general observation, it really is hugely frustrating that men have created & sustained a myth that trans women are The Most Marginalised & Vulnerable (etc); & even more men have essentially chosen to self-ID as “member of an oppressed minority”. Featuring much trampling all over women who are obviously not REALLY vulnerable - it’s just disability/domestic violence/FGM/“honour killings”/gynae issues/other insignificant nonsense after all, right?

You don’t get to pull “it’s a woman’s body because it’s my body & I’m a woman BECAUSE I SAY SO”. We are brought back again to the small children who by this logic are now a whole array of creatures & vehicles etc. Acceptance without exception at any age means that Alfie has exactly as much right to identify as a dachshund as he does to identify as a girl. There is no logical coherence to accepting the latter but rejecting the former. Could we have a crack at usurping Johnson - without resorting to sending in tanks (James Blunt optional) - simply by announcing our bodies are Prime Ministerial bodies? Doesn’t seem to be a goer for me: could a Tory perhaps give it a go & report back?

We absolutely all of us inhabit our own completely unique bodies. But we get issued with either the male version, or the cool upgrade known as female; and then we stay that sex forever. Somehow we have large numbers of people genuinely believing that “sex is a spectrum” & humans are able to change their sex using cross-sex hormones. Not simply nonsense being peddled - risible as it is - but a lie that is dangerous.

I’ve fallen asleep at least a dozen times while trying to write this - alas even outrage cannot force my brain into obedience - so while I’ve tried checking it am sorry if you spend time trying to untangle neuroblip-wrought nonsense & can make no sense of any of it.

• If anyone out there is tempted by some boy/transgirl chorister whataboutery, I very much have to hope you are somehow unaware that although female [singing] voices obviously do not break dramatically in the way male voices do, they still mature. My voice matured late (apparently it got confused about the instructions for use - or perhaps it WAS right about power tools being for people 18+?) & the appearance of the sudden power & firm extension of lower range was, for me, sudden & secure: a girl’s voice to a woman’s voice.

This is what I wrote to the Guardian:

I am writing to express not just disappointment but outrage at the article in this series which you published today. Juno Dawson is NOT "living in a woman's body", and never can be, because he is a man. You do something as good and interesting as having a series with this name and then publish this as part of it? Unbelievable. Can women not have any space that is not invaded by men? I hope you get a lot of complaints from women (you are not likely to get any from men, including those who are so full of entitlement that they believe they can openly lay claim to the nonsense that they know what it is like to live in a woman's body).

You have really let yourself down with this, Guardian. By all means let trans people be heard, write about them and accept copy from them every day if you want. Let Juno Dawson have a voice and tell us about his experiences. I have no problem with that. But DON'T mansplain to women what it is like to live in our own bodies.

Shocked, I am shocked that this happened. No one could have predicted this.

The pont about about how there should have been a piece by a transman, not a transwoman, if the series is about "living in a woman's bod", is spot on. If the remit of the series had actually been what it said it was, that is what would have appeared. This now makes it obvious that there was another agenda.

I have written to the Guardian about this now. How DARE they publish, as part of a series explicitly about "living in a woman's body", an item in which a man mansplains to us what it is like to live in our bodies? By all means let hear from Dawson, I have no problem in hearing about and from transpeople about their lives and the struggles they encounter. But "LIVING IN A WOMAN'S BODY"? No you are not and never will be. What a slap in the face.

This is shocking of the Guardian, a newspaper I read every day and in general respect. I am very disheartened by this.

Spot on there @QueenPeony. Trans men omitted from the discussion - again.

Also this makes no sense, I thought the whole point of being trans is that you aren't "in" (if we go along with such a concept) the body you want to be in, so a trans man talking about being in a woman's body would have been a far more appropriate way to be inclusive.

But if course it's not about including trans people, it's about making sure people with male bodies can invade anything that's meant to be about female bodies.

I hope, however, that my point still stands which is that any expression of Gay male sexuality, even at it's most atypical as in The Guardian article, doesn't speak to the experience of women who are born from, live and die in a female body.

Personally I am only interested hearing from the latter, so thanks OP for making me aware that the series is going on.

A beyond insulting but completely predictable invitation by the Guardian to participate in a male's pseudo reality.

#NoThankYou

Because she wants to be addressed as she. I have no issue with addressing people how they wish to be addressed. That's just respecting personal preferences.

I’ve been avoiding reading this series because I was dreading them doing a trans one.

I’m gutted that I was right.

It’s so sad that when I see a guardian article that hints that it might be feminist, I’m now looking at it with deep suspicion. They either shove trans in it or I can’t help but feel that it’s for show, so they can go ‘but look, we really care about women’.

I know that Mumsnet rules state that we have to used pronouns not based on sex, but it's bizarre to see women complaining that "she is not a woman". It makes the argument very muddled.

It is not Dawson talking in that 2017 article, it is the author, a gay man called Douglas Robertson, reporting his offence at Dawson’s views and expressing his own early experience of being same-sex attracted in the swimming pool changing rooms.

This is the views of Juno 'A lot of gay men are gay men as a consolation prize, because they couldn't be women' Dawson, eh?

www.independent.co.uk/voices/juno-dawson-attitude-magazine-interview-transgender-gay-man-lgbt-trans-woman-a7752701.html

It's interesting that, in the 2017 article, Dawson talks about being a 8 or 9 year old boy and some sexual excitement at seeing an adult teacher's penis as he stripped off for swimming, confirming JD's burgeoning sexual orientation.

This, I am going to go out on a limb, would not be parallel in any shape or form to the experience of an 8 or 9 year girl faced with the same circumstance, regardless of potential sexual orientation because it encapsulates male rather than female sexuality.

Feels like The Guardian is trolling women at this point so, as I have absolutely nothing in common with Dawson or any kind of shared experience, I'll pass on this particular article, thanks but like you, serendipitea may now explore the rest of the series knowing this one is out of the way...

Gosh. That was unexpected.

It was obviously a grooming effort from the first mention of "woman's body" in the Guardian, so I stayed well away from reading any of the series. Now that the expected gaslighting article has been launched and neutralized, I will go back and read the baiting articles, which I hear were good.

[ A Treatise of Human Nature [1739-40], I, iv, 6]

I wonder where you think he goes wrong, if he does.

Genuinely insulting.

None of us are beholden to our bodies.
This made me so angry. Such wilful trolling of women, and blatant privilege flaunting.

Tell that to people with disabilities, or chronic conditions, many of which affect women only, not those with biologically male bodies. Tell that to people who are raped and fall pregnant. Or who actually want to be pregnant but can't conceive. Or who are pregnant by choice and suffering multiple debilitating side effects...

“Although the physical transformations I have made have increased my sense of self-ownership and self-worth, I have remained the same person, on a fundamental human level. With each act of bodily rebellion – some superficial, some life-changing – I have preferred my exterior, but it is not the greatest source of joy in my life. The interior – call it consciousness, soul, self or personality – has remained consistently me

Do we not all have an interior me?