Review "Six Conversations we're Scared to have"

Question I'm genuinely trying to think through:
Is there anything where simply identifying as the thing makes it true or generally accepted as true?

Don't we have boundaries of definition for all categories?

You can't self identify:
Your age
Race
Being Tall
Beautiful
Funny
Thin
Fat
A nurse
Policeman
Mother
Child
Dog
Donkey
Robot

I guess you can self identify as a religion eg Christian but people are free to say they don't think you are a Christian when you say you don't believe in Jesus.

Is there anything where the sole definition is based on personal identification?

I guess you can say you identify as loads of things but people are free to point out they do not view you as that.

The difference here is they tried to force us play along and tried to take the legal rights of a category to which they didn't belong.

Plus of course, if we let vulnerable male people into female single sex spaces, what do these posters think will happen to the vulnerable women in the female single sex spaces?

This prioritisation of the vulnerable male people then causes harm to the vulnerable female people.

It is like those posters using the vulnerable male argument have simply ignored the needs of the vulnerable female people. Or don’t believe that they have needs for single sex spaces.

I also wonder just what the fuck the transwidows who have been abused are supposed to do. I know there are instances where the couple had been working at the same large organisation and the ex-wife ended up leaving because her abuser was allowed to use the female toilets.

Apparently, no one who repeats the mantra about being kind or respectful thinks anything of the female people who need single sex spaces to remain single sex. Not just the ones some wonderfully kind people think should be single sex based on their own life experiences.

If people think Deborah Frances White is a thought leader on this, then I think they didn’t watch the same interview. Or maybe they just don’t have the knowledge to see the massive cracks in the foundations of her premises.

Also you can't just identity as a mother, you do have to actually either give birth or raise a child.

If at work you announced you were a mother but had no children, you'd just always felt like a mother you'd be viewed very suspiciously.

And if you asked for maternity leave without the arrival of a new child to care for, because you felt like your puppy was your baby you'd be told no.

Words have meaning even socially constructed ones.

You can't just change them and ask everyone to play along with your new personal definitions.

Yes I believe people who identify as transgender exist.
So what?
It doesn't mean they are women. It means they are transgender. They might be male or female.

You seem to have shifted from your
Women is just a social category argument, presumably because you couldn't answer the questions asking you to define that category

To:

Ok they are men but vulnerable men so shouldn't we let them in?

No we shouldn't because they are men and the same potential risk to women as all men. In fact slightly higher if you look at offending rates of trans women in prison.

Why did you presume this group of men were less of a risk? This giving special status and access to a subgroup of men is a safeguarding disaster. Think about priests or celebrities.

Also when you argue they are vulnerable so should be let in to women's spaces do you just mean toilets or also prisons, and sports etc?

Poor boy the other boys are mean to him make the girls look after him and give him their stuff.
No.

I can believe that people aren't happy and blame their body. Lots of people think their life would change significantly if they lose weight, or are taller. So i can see that could be the case for their sex, too.

And i can see that young people are drawn to dressing for their subculture. So the non binary kids adopt a look just as the emo kids did.

And i appreciate that men have fetishes and they use any opportunity to move them out of the bedroom and perform them in public.

Do i think all of these things are the same and are 'gender identities' and should be treated with drugs, surgery and law changes, no.

I don't know if I grasp what you mean by 'gender identity' tbh. @Onetimeonlyftw

It's a theory about psychology. So yes it exists. Like any theory exists. Gender identity is said to be a feeling about our sex, yes? Or do you have another definition?

it’s just, do people really not believe that transgender identity exists?

I don’t believe in gender identity myself, but I do obviously believe there are other people who believe it exists, and that it is very real to them.

Similar to how I don’t believe in Allah personally, but obviously I believe there are plenty of people who do.

There is no logical foundation to this concept that some male people can be 'social' women.

And the weak arsed argument used by Frances-White using 'mother' as an analogy was flawed from the very outset because 'mother' traditionally was both a role and a term for a woman who had given birth. The flaws are so fucking huge she could fly an A380 back to Australia through the gaping flaws.

So much harm has been done and is still being done in the name of 'inclusion' and 'kindness' and 'respect' and the repetition of mantra like thinking.

Let's also not forget that we are expected to allow these male people to be 'social women' for specific purposes and then they are expected to just accept that they are not 'women' when society has agreed that they are no longer women. (ie. that they are not woman for some aspects of life)

If any person who believes that this approach is kind and respectful to anyone, then I think they have very different meanings of kind and respectful.

From a female point of view, this approach limits female people to only being worthy of single sex protections when it is likely that their biological differences are most important (finally important?). Which apparently we are told is what feminists in the past were fighting for, to resist that having a uterus should define a woman’s value or destiny.

The disconnect behind this is like a beacon to me.

So on one hand, feminists were supposedly campaigning so that our female biology didn't define our value, yet .. the only time we can have single sex spaces be truly single sex is when our biology is likely to be the most defining feature. ie. through our trauma experienced due to our biology. I mean, if a poster was to add sports into the times we are allowed to have single sex provision, that is defined by our biological differences too.

It is the disconnect of the concepts behind these positions that defy logic.

And of course, feminists didn't just want society to ignore female people's biology. This is some warped thinking about what feminist's version of equality looked like. Feminists worked for equality of opportunity - equitable solutions that allowed us to have equal opportunity despite our biological differences. When they said, we want equal rights they were not saying 'we are just like men and should be treated just like men'.

Then one the other hand, you have just told a group of male people that they are no longer men, and that they are also not 'women' when they want to be. Only that they can be women when society says so. So part of the time. If people cannot see the inherent issues with that, then I doubt that they do understand kindness and what is best for vulnerable male people.

And remember identity is only based on someone's philosophical belief about themself.

That doesn't then cover all the 130+ other genders that constantly get ignored. And it doesn't then discuss what happens with the people with gender fluid beliefs.

And it doesn't then give clarity on how the growing number of detransitioners are to fit into this 'social' grouping. All of a sudden, those male people who were no longer 'men', were not 'women' except for some things, what are they now? Where do they fit into this social grouping? Or is it that those who are 'no longer men' suddenly become men again? How does that happen?

It feels like we are going back to when the discussion first started on mn. Then, no one talked of changing sex much on here, more about gender, social roles, the idea that men with gender werent like other men. That they knew they weren't women, but just needed a bit of consideration. Men with gender came on here to befriend us and say they are not a threat, and can be trusted not to overstep the mark.

Some women warned that that wasnt how it was going to end.

Then we had men demanding that men with gender are literally women, children were told that they could change sex. We were told men could grow cervixes and its not right to say only women have them. Women have been attack for wanting single sex spaces.

Now its fallen apart, and we are back to threads on mn talking about gender and social roles. And men with gender dont pose a threat...

Of course!

My point is that she doesn’t have those figures because they don’t exist, so she pulled that “statistic” out of nowhere.

@Onetimeonlyftw

i don’t really believe in gender identity.

I do believe that some people wish to identify as the opposite sex. I don’t think that negates biology though and to be honest I don’t think many people actually believe that people can change sex or that sex doesn’t ever matter. It’s a shame that the idea that biological sex is irrelevant and gender is everything has been such a big focus of the trans lobby really. It’s pretty awful that trans people have been told that the end game is that they should be able to and are entitled to pass for all purposes as the opposite sex, that even if they don’t pass, people will always indulge them by pretending that they do pass and that sex is irrelevant (by legal coercion if needed) and that being identified as your birth sex is necessarily awful and humiliating. What a high bar they have set for a trans person to have a valuable life, rather than being valuable as a trans person!

In many cases - sports, healthcare, prisons, schools - there will be a decision maker who should know the sex of the people to whom duties are owed and safeguarding principles will apply. Biology is highly relevant. If you don’t think safeguarding should apply to natal women, why not? A woman was raped by a man identifying as a woman on a NHS ward a couple of years ago (and the NHS denied it because they said there was no man on the ward) - how many women need to be raped by transwomen for there to be an issue? Can you point to a case where a transwoman was raped on a mixed ward or in a private room to prove there is a threat to transwomen from not having access to female wards?

I would be happy with the idea of a “social woman” outside female single sex spaces, if it is also possible to have female only spaces where it is desired. So, if “social women’s walking group” meant women and transwomen, but “female walking group” meant just females, that would be fine by me. People would have a fair description and could make their own choices accordingly. The bit I object to is the pretence that trans women are women for all purposes and the denial of language to female women to describe and delineate their own spaces - if language is expanded and is used appropriately to flag appropriate provision, that is fine by me.

It would help me to understand your point of view if you could describe transgender identities. I think you are saying that a male with an identity of ‘woman’ has a transgender identity? So what characterises an identity of ‘woman’ ?

I use physical characteristics to determine if I think someone is a woman and have described some of the things I look out for upthread. Can you describe what you look for?

And we know that that will ignore the violent and intimidatory protests that they organise.

How come those who keep telling us that these male people are needing women's spaces to protect them from harm never seem to be able to acknowledge that the very people who organise mass protests to stop women meeting, talking or watching debates or documentaries with violence, high levels of aggression and authoritarianism are the ones who also demand that they should access female single sex spaces?

And all the videos, memes and social media posts telling us that it doesn't matter what we want, they are going to do it anyway?

There is this significant disconnect that those censuring us and telling us we need to include these male people like to ignore. The very people who are violent and abusive in real life and on line are the ones demanding access to female single sex spaces.

Truly, organising protests in woman's toilets is showing the world just how aggressive these male people are. I would love to understand how those doing it are vulnerable?

It’s extraordinarily dishonest and I can’t take anyone seriously who does it.

"it’s just, do people really not believe that transgender identity exists?"

I'm trans, so obviously I believe in it.

"And do people really, truly, actually believe that trans women are a threat to them?"

The statistics show that trans women are just as dangerous as men.

"As I understand it, the research shows time and time again that trans women face far more violence than they perpetrate…"

That's something for men to solve, since they are the ones perpetrating that violence. So why ask women to solve it? It's not fair.

Men with trans identities tend to experience violence from other men - often because they are involved in risky sexual behaviour such a prostitution, or because they are in a volatile sexual relationship with another man.

Indeed.

And this is where the sleight of hand language demands of 'they are not men anymore' tries to obscure the continued risk factor. They are male people and retain the male pattern of crime and aggression.

The attempt to detach them from the male category of human through this philosophical language change is dishonest. This group of male people are still men because they are adult male and human. Imbuing the word 'man' with gender identity is purely philosophical theory and based only on sex stereotypes. It denies that there are so many ways to be a man, all that you have to be is a male person over a certain age.

The question, I think, is..."what exactly is a transgender identity?'". It is not a question about whether the concept or 'identity' exists or not. We all know it exists as a concept.

Some take it as a given, without question, to mean that someone is literally the opposite sex to that which they were born - whereas others, myself, for example...see it as a contemporary ( post modernistic) framing device that is utilised to describe someone who doesn't feel comfortable with the stereotypes associated with their sex and wants to express their individuality.

The problem with this, as a I see it, is that it becomes a fixed identity rather than as one way to express one's full range of personality or potential. Identity is not fixed in stone. It evolves as one grows and experiences life.

Transwomen are men. Female only spaces exist to protect the dignity and privacy of one's sex...not everything is about the fear of assault. It doesn't matter how 'lovely' your trans identified friend is...if he is male he does not belong in a female only space.

@Onetimeonlyftw men are the threat and the problem. Not “cis men”. All men.

Please link to your statistics for how much violence they perpetrate. Because I’ve never seen those.

You have also not been able to define your concept of 'social' women. Nor been able to articulate why one group of male people should be considered 'socially' women over any other group.

Does your own lack of ability to articulate this beyond 'these are vulnerable people and we need to be kind' bother you?

I have been abused also by male people with transgender identities,

“As I understand it, the research shows time and time again that trans women face far more violence than they perpetrate…”

Why is this relevant?

Genuinely. Why is this relevant?

Because to be included in female single sex spaces, shouldn’t the comparator be female people, and the rate of offending shows this js not the case.

It can also be said that there are many other vulnerable male groups who are subject to more violence than they perpetuate. As we have pointed out to you. So why don’t those vulnerable male people get the additional privileges that that vulnerable group of male people get?