Trans sibling in law

But sometimes biological sex is the important factor. When talking about menstruation, pregnancy, menopause. I want single sex toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards. I don't want to discuss the sexual abuse I've suffered at the hands of men in front of men.

My Muslim friends need single sex swimming session.

Is it important at book club? No. Are men welcome at the craft club I run? Of course!

I'd love to see @SleeplessInWherever and the rest of her gender studies class explain their position to a woman locked up with a man in prison.

Would she agree, do you think, that this man's 'womanly feeling' is more important than his biologically male body and physiology?

I'd love to see how that conversation would go.

Gender isn’t an actual thing. It’s a social construct based on stereotypes of sex.

You cannot possibly know that all trans women are sexist men, because you cannot know the motives of all people. What a broad assumption.

Just ask them what they want and how they'd like to be referred to. You might make a few errors with pronouns for a while but this makes no difference to your life..

Are those who state that gender doesn’t matter sexist then, because they believe that only sex matters?

It shouldn’t be as important as many other factors, because IMO that makes it self limiting.

Just because some men minimise women to being a sum of their biological parts, doesn’t mean we have to do the same, and in essence agree with them that that’s what we are.

Unfortunately identifying as not carrying out and enabling sexist views is not the same thing as actually not doing it. In rather the same way as identifying as binary biology not existing does not do much to disappear reality.

Quite.

Yet you still don’t seem able to explain why you think sex should be ignored.

Again, really can’t recommend Call tbe Midwife enough as a study of how women are structurally impacted by their sex.

As a related example, Parliament might be debating whether to decriminalise abortion, largely because of changes to abortion laws that were made necessary by Covid.

Regardless of your views on the rights and wrongs of decriminalisation, this was a change that happened because of external events, not a deliberate desire to discriminate against women, but no man will be sent to prison for having an abortion. Sex affects men and women in fundamentally different ways.

Thinking about this further: I think we're back to the old confusion between sex realism and sexism. There are not just two positions (sex matters, sex doesn't matter) but three:

Sexism (sex does and should govern everything): " Don't be silly, of course no woman could fly solo to the moon. They're not strong enough and too emotional, especially at the wrong time of the month."

Sex denialism (only gender matters): "Of course a woman - the right sort of woman - can fly to the moon. Being female is irrelevant." First day of voyage: "This rocket is a pig to fly." Five days into voyage: "Oh shit, I forgot to pack any tampons."

Sex realism (sex needs to be reckoned with in certain situations): "Yes a woman can fly solo to the moon if she plans properly." Packs tampons. And (since rocket was probably built by men for men) checks that all the controls and fittings can be operated by somebody of her size, weight and grip-strength and gets them adjusted if they can't.

A definition doesn't have to cover your "complexity" it needs to cover the minimum requirements for something to belong to a group that sets it apart from other groups, for example, mammals:
1 produce milk to feed their young
2 have hair
3 give live birth
4 are warm blooded
5 breath air
If you have all of these characteristics you're a mammal and you can be a mammal in the shape of a bottle nosed dolphin or a Bactrian camel or a human, it doesn't matter which shape you take to belong to this group as long as you fit all of the above criteria.
If you're a mammal in the the species Homo sapiens who happens to produce eggs during the fertile period of your life, you're a woman and you can be that woman in any way you like (here's your complexity) or society allows you to be (which feminists tried hard to fight against), you do you. What can't be a woman is an adult human that produces sperm no matter how much he'd like to and how many of his society’s gender stereotypes he tries to emulate, or how much surgery he gets.

I have absolutely no need for a gender studies reading list thanks, and you can’t back up your views with anything coherent, that’s the point. It’s just postmodern babble. You also don’t grasp what the difference is between a stereotype imposed on female people and a sexist man seeing that stereotype, liking it and thinking he should adopt it.

There’s plenty of reading on the subject available, if that would help?

Yes, how terribly boring it is to actually be able to back up one’s views.

My opinion on the quality of Gender Studies degrees is not improving at all with this thread.

Indeed it's a walking advert for making all reputable universities drop the subject.

I don’t expect you to answer every post, but I remain baffled by your inability to acknowledge the impact of sex.

A trans man in America, me in the U.K., a woman in Afghanistan - we are all, for instance dependent on sex specific medical care. We can’t do that by force of will - it’s something that needs to be enabled by society.

I would recommend watching an episode of Call the Midwife - it’s very good on the structural, medical and legal changes that have impacted women’s lives over the last 60-70 years.

There are far too many responses to reply to them all individually. What a frankly boring day that would shape up to be. They’re all along a similar theme anyway, so answering one does seem to answer quite a few.

I am not reaping sexist rewards, or giving anyone to anyone, thank you.

And just imagine the degree of privilege you would need to have to not even consider what this would mean for womem prisoners or rape victims, etc, etc, etc

So the argument is that female biology as a grouping should be disregarded because there is "no shared experience of womanhood" , but that "identifying as a woman" is a valid category which groups women ( the ones who don't identify as not-women) with men who identify as women?
But if even the females in that grouping have nothing in common beyond their biology, what on earth do they have in common with the males in the group and what do those males have in common with each other?

Well considering you're selecting carefully which posts you reply to for any you can pull this performative stuff with, why not? Count away and have fun.

I can change my hair, my nails, my clothes, my walk, my hobbies, my colour preferences, my choice to nurture or not, I can make my mouth say anything at all, and I can have extensive plastic surgery and take a lot of drugs, but what I cannot change or escape is being inside a biologically female body. I'm reminded, again, horribly, of the incident of the poor woman with a trans identity sobbing to her taxi driver rapist 'I'm a man'. It made no odds. She was existing within biology that men feel entitlement to use.

Waffling interminably about angels dancing on the head of a pin in the way that I can do in a very privileged life in a very privileged country will make no material difference to that of any kind. And the key reasons women have for doing it is so that they can feel lovely about and reap the binary sexist rewards of giving the rights and bodies of other women to men.

I don’t think Aunty Mabel can use a urinal either.

https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g186338-d1627791-r942938675-Lyric_Hammersmith_Theatre-London_England.html

Regardless of feelings about mixed sex toilets, is it not obvious that urinals, while arguably gender neutral, are not sex neutral?

But apparently we can solve this problem if we just don’t refer to sex?

Well, yes you do. You have the shared experience of being female.

What shared experience do we all have with trans women?

Well done! Women aren't all the same.
We are all female.
If you don't think women are all female you're going to need a different definition.

We have one that works very nicely thanks.