Do pronouns feel alien to anyone else?

It would be a short lived career.

Fuck me. I really hope certain posters don’t ever attempt livestock farming.

This

fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/

No-one passes. That they do is a lie told by trans people to each other, but in real life, no-one passes.

A trans woman’s skeleton is still male. The pelvis differs, So gait does too. Hands differ, facial shape, voice, shoulders, articulation.

This is why on Twitter there’s such a propensity to cartoon avatars or extremely heavy editing amd filters. Out in the real world, despite what they claim, trans women are far more like Eddie Izzard than like Kylie Minogue (ask your mother who that is.)

No, sex refers to which type of gametes you developed towards support for in-utero.

You are pretending that secondary sexual characteristics define sex, and they don’t. This is exactly analogous to claiming that wearing a striped pullover and beret, giving an insouciant shrug and smoking Gauloises would make you French.

Of course you are. What’s going on in the head of someone with psychological issues doesn’t force anyone else to change how they view reality.

A trans woman is no more a woman than a person claiming to be Napoleon III is really emperor of France.

And yet, according to normal people’s definitions, we know that your mother was a woman and your father was a man, and that your mother was the one who gave birth.

You are deliberately mixing the labels with the underlying reality.

You don’t get to choose your reality. A white man does not get to choose to be black. A rich person does not get to choose to identify as poor to get benefits, or an Englishman identify as French to get the right to work in Europe.

Asking people to play along with the conceit that you are the opposite sex, or that there exists an innate gender is no more reasonable than any of the above examples, and as we know, if anyone does play along then that will be used to invade women’s single-sex spaces and facilities.

I've moved on from pronouns to adjectives now - mine are "angry" and "dispirited".

Sorry, tired, and this is actually a hard one to articulate in writing!

What I was trying to say was:

No, they don't feel alien to me because I use them the same way everyone always used them up until about 5 minutes ago.

@Whatiswrongwithmyknee I should have included the bit I was referencing (below) but maybe I misunderstood the op. To me it's not about pronouns "reflecting me" because all pronouns do (well, should do, at any rate) is tell give the sex of the person being referred to. I concede that there are people who think the words she and her relate to femininity, or gender identity or whatever, I just think they are wrong.

I think gender identity and its associated ideology is bollocks. I haven't got pronouns in my email signature, I don't tell people which pronouns to use when talking about me, and I don't expect other people to tell me how to refer to them.

"It comes down to adding 'she/her' to everything would not feel right to me, as though it didn't reflect me. It would like I was falsely reinforcing my womanhood when I don't live my life that way or feel that way"

But the only reason people state them is because they are being used to refer to people who are not female? i.e. transwomen?

If any TW uses she then clearly they do mean much more than you are allowing here.

Yes, they do feel alien, because I don't buy into this gender ideology, and I don't see the need to announce my sex all the time. If you know me as a woman, then you'll use the relevant pronouns anyway.

Re the original question, I can only think she/her might "feel alien" if you ascribe a value or meaning to the words beyond simply being a way to refer to a female person (or animal).

But that is all the words she and her do: they tell us the person being talked about is female. They don't tell us anything else about her. The words she and her don't tell us how clever she is, how witty, or kind or funny. They don't tell us how successful she is in her career, or if she has one at all. They don't tell us whether she is well read, has a deep knowledge of 19th C philosophy or gardening or particle physics, or if she knows all the lyrics to the entite Beatles back catalogue.

These words don't tell us much about her at all, except that she is female.* So no, they don't feel alien to me, but I can see how they might to you, if you believe that they are loaded with additional meaning.

*Notwithstanding the people who also use the words to refer to men and boys, aka male humans.

"Why, exactly, do you need to separate trans women from women for women to have rights?"

Firstly, women are an oppressed group of people. And they are oppressed by men. Women's lack of rights is caused by male oppression. Recognising these hierarchical structures and working to combat them is important for any civil rights movement (see black liberation, gay liberation, etc.)

There has never been a rights movement, however, where the oppressing class has declared itself to BE the class it is oppressing, and to even say that it is more oppressed. Except for now, with women's rights. Despite being oppressed by men for millennia (and often on the basis of our biology), women are now being told by males that they are women, because woman now has nothing to do with bodies or being female but is now entirely a mental construct which can instantiate inside a male's brain. Woman is a thought. And men can be women by thinking. By virtue of a mental state, men can jump from the oppressor class to the oppressed class.

If the distinction between men and women is broken down, if the oppressor can become the oppressed just by thinking it and declaring it to be so, then it is hard to see how there can even be 'women's rights' because there simply isn't such a thing as 'woman' that is a meaningful category other than "a person who is apt to declare themselves as such."

Secondly, women have special rights and needs by virtue of our female body. Only females can give birth, can get abortions, have periods, have female reproductive cancers, etc. Our female bodies are not catered to by science or medicine or technology (see the book 'invisible women'. ) Our bodies are highly sexualised and objectified by male society. The female sex has the right to gather away from males, in sports, domestic abuse shelters, hospitals, prisons, etc.

Transwomen, however, insist that they are female too and that they get access to these spaces as well. If transwomen gain access to these spaces, then women lose the right to female only spaces because by definition they are not female-only any more. So, in order for women to have certain rights it is essential that transwomen are kept separate in certain domains. This is exactly what the Equality Act recognises.

I will try to hold out on pronouns for as long as I can do so. I'll use those others have requested, sure. But I absolutely don't believe in the religion of gender and I don't really fancy emphasising my sex every time I send an email. And I reject being labelled "cis" - I don't see myself as particularly feminine and, whilst I am quite happy being female (particularly now I am a mother to kids, a happy consequence of being female), I don't believe I could opt out of any of the inconveniences of being female with a new name and pronoun. Unlike many (not all, but many) trans women, I find most of the superficial trappings of being socially female quite annoying - If I could take a pill that selected a boring but acceptable safe outfit that suited me every time I got dressed for the rest of my life I absolutely would.

I'd be quite happy to relinquish "woman" to whatever the new meaning was, if we could have "biologically female" in substitution wherever it matters (safe spaces/safeguarding, sports, discussion of discrimination relevant to those with female bodies etc). But the truth is that this wouldn't be acceptable either. Because biological females are not allowed anything for just us.

The argument that women and trans women suffer discrimination is true. But it isn't really the same - there is in truth not that much overlap on the Venn diagram. Th most obvious overlap would be very brief situations where a TW who passes (unusual) really well is assumed to be a woman and hassled or catcalled or treated disrespectfully, overcharged for MOT etc. But many women suffer long term discrimination due to pregnancy or the assumption of pregnancy etc, many women are the default carers, many women are judged for the ways in which they express themselves due to years of conditioning that late transitioners do not experience etc etc. TW are more likely to be discriminated against for not being male enough. Most on here would fight that cause with TW, but that logically requires TW to accept that they are a male who does not conform to stereotypes of men, rather than a female.

I live in Scotland and don't believe it's a moral panic. The Scottish Government refused to consult or meet with women's rights groups, have so far done two consultations on the GRA (because they didn't get the answers they were looking for from the first one), are holding unminuted, private sessions with select lobby groups during their evidence sessions regarding the GRA, claimed (against all evidence) that the electorate voted them in on a promise to reform the GRA, the Scottish Government were pulled up in court for claiming that TWAW is policy despite no consultation, meetings or evidence to show this being discussed and implemented and any concerns raised have simply been dismissed as 'not valid' by the First Minister. It's institutional capture at an astonishing level.

So protecting women is now a movement? Right okay. I’ll happily belong to this “movement”.

Well that’s the first time I’ve ever been called middle class that’s for sure 😂😂

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie if you want a non-British one.

Anyway, as someone said upthread, good night and good luck with your exam revision. Honestly actually, I do wish you happiness via greater engagement with reality and the world outside.

That's not true at all, but I guess it's no surprise you can't see shared struggles when you're fundamentally incapable of empathizing with anyone else.

No, your refusal to listen to women stating their boundaries suggests it's not us who is fundamentally incapable of emphathizing with anyone else.

And considering that this country is about 85% white (and that white is not an insult even though you use it as if it were a slur to discredit us), it's actually quite striking that so many of the most prominent gender critical women are not. Allison Bailey, Keira Bell, Sonia Appleby, Raquel Rosario Sanchez just to get you started. How they have suffered at the hands of your coreligionists. Don't patronise ethnic minorities, and don't assume you know the colour or class of any of us.

Oh right - so anti-FGM campaigner Hibo Wardere doesn't count?