Does anyone else resent the gender/ TERF wars?

Another thought on this direction. If a male with breasts and particular surgeries is no longer male, and are between sexes, are they they same category as female people without breasts and with particular surgeries. Or do those female people fit into another between sex category?

How many sex categories are there?

“And the alterations will have made him slightly less dangerous (if we ignore what they tell us about his attitude to women, and possible paraphilias).”

Indeed. It is a fallacy that a male is less dangerous without a penis and testicles. Not only does it ignore some hard truths about male sexuality but it ignores the now well publicised science that male people with lowered testosterone still retain significant physical advantage. Particularly in power and grip. Meaning that these male people still are much more dangerous than female people when it comes to physical attack.

But also, why?

Being a woman is a biological state entirely in its own right. It's not a catch all for 'defective' men or men who can't deal with their own biology. It's not a reward to be doled out for 'effort'. It's not simply a 'de-penised' state.

I am shocked at how many people seem to regard being a woman as nothing more than being a 'lesser' man'

We can't tell. I also don't care, any more than I do about any other fancy dress presentation. It just makes me think that this person must be excessively self-absorbed and superficial.

I agree with you DeanE.

If a male person taking estrogen stops taking estrogen, do they revert immediately back into being categorised as male?

If a male person’s penis is still attached to their body, just now inverted to produce a cavity in the body, is that considered to no longer be a penis? By that definition, are people with undescended testes or malformed testes no longer male people?

If a male person developed breasts that put him in the non-male category, and then had that breast tissue removed (including due to cancer treatment), do they again become male?

I am keen for anyone to answer these category definition issues. I would love to see how this all would work.

One half-sentence that reminds of how much I despise the works and pomps of John Money. First deciding that a castrated (by accident) little boy should be treated as female (and so dehumanised as to be forced into incestuous sex acts) and second pressing for the use of the term 'paraphilia' instead of perversion.

Considering that Eunuch is now a category of paraphilia, removal of male genitalia can be considered a sex act, declaring that surgical removal of male genitalia somehow makes someone non-male shows another reason that argument is flawed.

I wonder what is going to be the element that makes these male people with transgender identities ‘non-men’ or in between sex categories when we unpick it all? Or is it just another turtles all the way down scenario?

The idea that someone in the 21st century imagines a penis is a magic wand that can convey or remove maleness is most odd. I'd say prehistoric, but suspect that even in darkest prehistory there'd have been some scepticism.

“And yet I didn't say at any point that going through gender reassignment surgery and treatment makes them women did I. I said it makes them something more in the middle because they don't really fit into either category any more.”

These attempts at saying that with surgeries and temporarily changing hormones within the body changes a person enough to decategorise them in the way they wish (ie it fulfills their objective aim for their chosen medical procedure) is flawed in quite a number of ways.

In regard to hormones. Male people produce estrogen already. All that this treatment does is increase a naturally produced level through artificial means. If a male stops taking estrogen, their body continues as usual to produce their normal levels (or the normal levels without some body parts being present if they have removed their testes). The coding in their cells remain unchanged by their treatment and the cells will attempt to perform their roles before the roles of those cells were interfered with.

What happens to a male person with complex health issues that has enlarged breast tissue who has also lost their penis and testicles due to disease or injury? Are they considered non-men too?

To declare that taking these hormones makes someone ‘non-male’ because the levels no longer fit in the typical healthy male range ignores several male health issues. Including the side effects of other drugs, prescribed or not. So does that make any male person with elevated estrogen levels non-male?

If having testes and penises removed for disease or injury decategorises them, that is concerning. The same then has to be said of hysterectomies removing ovaries and uteruses.

And if having extreme body modification that artificially changes a characteristic of a person’s body takes them out of their original category, do we then affirm that those people undergoing modifications to emulate reptiles as being non-human, if not treating them as if they are indeed reptiles.

None of the extreme body modifications chosen to be undertaken by a person to support their identity removes them from
their body’s category. Removing body parts and taking exogenous hormones does not remove a person from their sex category.

A person’s sex is categorised by whether their body configuration was formed to produce large or small gametes, whether that body ever had, is , or will produce those gametes. And regardless of whether those body parts have been removed.

There are no ‘in between’ sex category humans.

it is Wrong for the partially-sentient service bipeds to exhibit unseemly emotions such as anger, speak incorrect words, or display unladylike attitudes

Coincidentally, my cat said pretty much the exact same thing to me just now when I discovered she was munching on my bamboo knitting needle AGAIN and expressed my feelings. Luckily for us both I then put my elbow down on the other needle and snapped it, so as soon as I've finished this mitten I'll burn them. The needles, not the mittens.

Meanwhile, I'm being told that a woman's place is in the kitchen preparing cat breakfast.

And again, the Righteous way is that it is Wrong for the partially-sentient service bipeds to exhibit unseemly emotions such as anger, speak incorrect words, or display unladylike attitudes.

My offended outrage is at the suggestion that cutting something or things off makes males less male. It does not. A man who has had testicles or an eye or his appendix removed, or his leg amputated, is the same man, just as male, as he was before the surgery. His fundamental maleness has been in no way changed. If he takes mood altering drugs, including hormones, he is still the same man he was before he took them. The same male he was from the moment of conception.

And his pretending that if he then wears some kind of fancy dress and performs actions linked to his society's stereotype of women that makes HIM a woman, is offensive. Very offensive.

Women are women from the moment of conception. Even if they maim and drug themselves they don't stop being female.

Sex is real and is binary. There is no middle state.

Sexual attraction is real and is not binary, though many people are on one end or the other of the homo/hetero scale.

'Gender identity' is an imaginary construct, not real.

'Gender' identity is a conceptual framework, one I am not prepared to let limit my own life, if others do, more fool them.

Saying a man is a man or a male is not an insult. There is nothing wrong or offensive or outrageous about being a man or a male.

Saying a woman is a woman or a female is not an insult. There is nothing wrong or offensive or outrageous about being a woman or a female.

Unless your friends are attempting to invade single-sex spaces, there is absolutely nothing that they can do in their costumes that they can't do equally well without them, and without having a 'gender' identity, and it would have saved them lots of pain and harm and money if they'd been told that.

Meanwhile, this is all going on, against women who have the temerity to stand up for their rights to their own spaces.

https://terfisaslur.com

But not even an acknowledgment of this from you. We're still the bad guys, right?

So the difference is electively taken estrogen? Because male people can develop enlarged breasts due to different reasons.

So are you saying that if a male person takes estrogen, they become non-men?

How does this work? Does this then apply to people taking other drugs? That if they take synthesised chemicals found in other species, do they become non-human?

I dare say that it would be possible to find examples where people's posts here have said that, but I have seen very few compared to the hundreds or thousands of posts pointing out the complete lack of evidence that men who claim to be women are any less likely to be predators than any other men.

Edited to add: I don't think anyone is suggesting that women claiming to be men are predators. I haven't come across any evidence that they are any different from other women in terms of likelihood of being a predator.

Well a man who loses his testicles and penis to illness won't have breasts or be taking large amounts of estrogen for starters.

And yet I didn't say at any point that going through gender reassignment surgery and treatment makes them women did I. I said it makes them something more in the middle because they don't really fit into either category any more. I actually specifically stated that they cannot become actual women. Or are you just skimming over that bit to show some offended outrage?

It's not the fighting for women's own spaces I have a problem with, it's the attitudes, derision and offensive language used and the stereotyping of transgender people as predators that I have a problem with.

That was perfectly from what I wrote. You're just choosing to make an issue about women's spaces when I never mentioned them.

“What is the difference between a male person who has lost their penis and testicles due to disease or injury and a male person who elects to have these healthy body parts removed based on their identity?”

This is a question that never gets answered.

One of the things that has shocked me most about all this is how many people out there think women are basically defective men.

The suggestion that a woman is just a man with a few bits cut off and some plastic stitched on is SO offensive.

Women are women from the moment of conception, just as men are men from the moment of conception.No grotesque meat jigsaw game changes that.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone on here say “men LARPing as women” other than @Glitterknickerbockers

I’ve probably seen “men in dresses” now and then, but it is entirely accurate when that is what they are, and the vast majority of posters on Mumsnet are actually fairly factual, rather than insulting. Not so long ago, we would actually get kicked off for using “Trans identifying men.”

Personally, I generally use “men who claim they are women”. Like many other women, I used to call them “transwomen” but some truly ambitious activists started to insist that “transwomen are women” and add in a space into transwomen, where there had never been one, again to add grist to their grift, that these men really were women.

The reason these men insist so vehemently that they are literally women is because they are demanding access to women’s spaces. The moment you concede they are women, and that trans is an adjective, it makes you a bigot. Then you are excluding women from women’s spaces on the ground they are trans, as opposed to excluding men from women’s spaces on the grounds that (whether they like it or not) men is what they are.

So had there never been that insistence that “transwomen are women” was to be taken literally (where before, it had always been understood to be a polite falsehood) we would probably have not become so pissed off with the whole thing.

Nowadays, almost all of us are with the memory of Magdalen Burns. Like her “I’d rather be rude than a fucking liar.”