Trans sibling in law

Again, genuinely don’t understand this.

How do you think Afghan men are controlling Afghan women? Do you think they are just naturally placid for cultural reasons?

@SleeplessInWherever

" I also feel the same way about “adult human” anything, yes - it removes any complexity of who we actually are."

Men - the adult humans males - really don't care one bit about complexity, or indeed about "who we actually are", when seeking to remove rights from women and girls. All they care about is that women and girls are "human females". It literally doesn't go any further than that. That's the definition of women and girls for them, and that's why it's the definition we too must use to fight for our rights. Otherwise, we'll just be talking at cross-purposes.

I’ve answered, very clearly; what makes us all female.

This Aunty Mabel I apparently have doesn’t have a shared experience of womanhood with me, does she, because we have very different lives and experiences.

You are very lucky @SleeplessInWherever if you have never been discriminated against because you are female but in fact I'll warrant you have but you can't bear to think about it.
If for example you were ever given baby dolls and told "you'll be a lovely mother" then that's just the start.

However, I'm not asking "is culture important". I'm asking "what is a woman?" You don't think you have much in common. What DO you have in common with all other females that makes you all women?

I'll wait.

I mean, why can't Afghani women just 'identify' as men to escape their position, do you think?

‘If society uses the biological fact of female to oppress women, through socially constructed gender stereotypes, it’s being classified by sex we should be rejecting, refuse to be limited because you happen to have certain chromosomes.’

Take away all the stereotypes, and oppression tomorrow, and women would still need different rights and could be oppressed on that basis.

I genuinely don’t understand why that isn’t obvious. That is why we have the concept of ‘indirect discrimination’.

Sorry what?

You don't think woman's safeguarding, safety, opportunities. dignity are important?

Thats what you're saying.

Because that's what you compromise when you decide the biological differences between men and women aren't important.

I'm honestly gobsmacked that women would actually admit that.

Quite true. The desire to believe that we, as humans, are more than organic flesh and bone is an entirely natural one: humans have been believing that since the year dot. This is the whole reason religion and ideological belief systems exist. As a species, we've also seen throughout history the degree to which we persecute others who don't happen to worship our particular 'gods'.

We want to feel that we have some form of 'soul'; some essence of humanity which makes us more than just animals. I've seen it argued somewhere that this is why there's a 'pornography' of death as well as sex: perhaps the essence of the obscene is that we are nothing but bodies. Yet our bodies are what we are: mammals, a dimorphic species, animals descended from apes: the theory of evolution being one the religious adherents were determined to deny despite evidence to the contrary. Compare today's GI arguing similarly unscientifically that men can be women and vice versa. The rest is metaphysics.

Humans are constrained, oppressed and in some ways enabled by the experience of living within our sexed bodies. Beyond that, narrow gender stereotyping and common (but unsubstantiated) assumptions about what it means to feel, look, dress and behave as a man or a woman, are adding far more constraints to the ones already imposed upon us by our sex.

For this reason I find any concept of 'gender identity' extremely narrow and reductive, and I reject this emphatically as an additional implement of my oppression. Being a woman means being born in a female body. This is the only relevant criterion.

They’re not as important as our many other differences and experiences.

Having biology in common with an Afghan woman, for example, is nowhere near as important as our cultural differences.

Privilege has been mentioned a few times, and to be clear - far from it.

What else do we ALL have in common then?
Including baby girls, butch truckers, fashion models, teenage girls who hate their breasts, and your Aunty Mabel who was in the Girl Guides in WW2 and ran messages for the ARP?
Or are you proposing a superior category of women who've thought deeply about their gender identity and the baby girl and your Aunty Mabel aren't female?

I’m female because I was born one, I’m a woman for a variety of other reasons - many of them external. I do “woman” in the way that I do it, based on the life I’ve had, and really resent being told I’m doing it “wrong” by those who’d have me in a group because of a set of chromosomes.

But you can't do woman wrong if you were born female. You are a woman just by existing. And I know any GC person who would tell you you are womaning wrong. TRAs OTOH like to tell people they are trans based on stereotypes.

Ooh, there’s another “are you stupid, dear?”

I might start counting.

I think that referring to women as exclusively adult human females is constraining. But each to their own.

Deciding that we can all pretend that biological differences between men and women don't exist/aren't important ...

Is EXACTLY the type of thing that could sounds good to relatively privileged women in a university setting, thinking about it theoretically.

But ia total disaster when applied to vulnerable women who live in the real world, dealing with its practicalities.

No. You've misunderstood. Every Mumsnet thread is about putting other posters right. I'm talking about the posters on this thread who think it's OP's role to put her sibling in law right. It isn't. It's not her business.

I think it’s reductive because, IMO, women have spent decades fighting against objectification and essentially being seen as “just a pair of tits.”

Why then would we take the approach that actually, we’re just adult human females. Just a uterus, that’s me. That’s not all we have in common, and it’s not the end of the definition of woman. I don’t actually want to be defined by having a womb.

It's not reducing you to just a pair of tits and a uterus though is it. It's merely a statement of biological fact, wick incidentally doesn't require tits or a uterus. My mum had a full hysterectomy and oophrectomy (sp?). She's still a woman. I held my very lovely friend this week whilst she cried following a medically necessary mastectomy. She's still a woman.

'Adult, human female' isn't the only thing most women have in common. But it's the only thing all women have in common.

I think it implies that’s all woman is - a set of parts, and that’s got to be a bad thing.

The grammar failure in this sentence is interesting, because it falls down the gap in the logic failure you seem to be suffering from.

Should it read "I think it implies that's all a woman is"?

Or "I think it implies that's all 'woman' is"?

Those are two very different meanings that you don't seem to be able to disentangle.

We're trying to define words, while you seem to think we're trying to define people.

"Woman" needs a very specific meaning to be useful. And that meaning of the word being constrained - to refer only to sex and nothing else - is a way to not constrain actual women.

I would answer sensibly, but your last section implies stupidity. Again. Fairly common theme here isn’t it.

let’s ignore the material reality of women and girls

Is this the result of privilege? People take rights for granted? Lack of historical perspective? Exceptionalism?

Do people not realise that what men can do in Afghanistan, they have done and can do elsewhere?

Do they not understand how rights are lost?

You're not just a uterus or a pair of tits. 100% agree with this. That's where your personality, experiences, relationships, etc, etc all come into play.

But you are biologically different to a male. And women are not going be better off if we to ignore such a basic, self evident fact.

If we do this, we become unable to safeguard women in changing rooms, toilets and situations where they need intimate care.

We become unable to protect women from men when they need safe spaces to heal in domestic violence shelters and rape crisis counselling.

We expose women to male violence (sexual and otherwise) in prisons.

We severely limit women's participation, success, reward and safety in sport.

We fail to respect lesbian women's rights to their own dating scenes / platforms.

Absolutely none of these consequences are positive developments for women.

Yes indeed so. Further, if gender is a societal set of stereotypes, it follows individuals can't be a particular gender. (No individual human is, or could be, a set of any sort.)

Of course you can be a particular sex. (You are a particular sex.) So if "gender" means "sex", then you can be a particular gender. (But in that case, of course you can't change gender, because you can't change sex.)

These two different meanings of "gender" - "set of stereotypes"/synonym for "sex" - have a propensity to confuse the unwary. (Even, perhaps, some 'gender studies' graduates.)

I wonder, @SleeplessInWherever: did you at all, in your studies, ever come across or hear mention of the notion of a fallacy of equivocation?

[It has been fascinating, reading this thread, to see so many clear and explicit examples of someone's lack of awareness of her own failure to understand.]

This is all just more luxury beliefs isn't it.

It absolutely blows my mind that this poster is prepared to let the very collective of people that have fucked us over for centuries into our clearly, biologically defined class. What could possibly go wrong??🤞🏼
Honestly, completely bonkers.
What is going on in your head? And what on earth were they teaching you in your gender studies lectures??

You seem to be missing the word ‘human’ in ‘adult human female’ and I’m not sure why.

I am the same as every woman ever, because our ability to participate equally in society is completely dependent on our ability to control our fertility and therefore be economically independent.

Take away rights to contraception and you take away rights to education and rights to work for women, but not for men.

What do you think happens to women in societies where men are allowed to dominate them physically with no recourse to the law? Do you think the impact on men and women is the same?

More than anything, I don’t understand how it’s possible to post on this site and believe that sex is just a matter of chromosomes. The people posting about mastitis, birth trauma, abortions etc - not men.

‘If society uses the biological fact of female to oppress women, through socially constructed gender stereotypes, it’s being classified by sex we should be rejecting, refuse to be limited because you happen to have certain chromosomes.’

And here we have it, let’s ignore the material reality of women and girls, because if we remove that then women and girls can’t complain and fight against the terrible things that happen to us, precisely because of our sex class. This is the dismantling of our rights as women in order to erode safeguarding, therefore opening the door to any amount of oppression from men. If you truly believe this then you have drunk deep of the Kool Aid. This isn’t a woman problem, it’s a man problem, and removing our rights to distinguish ourselves as a sex class wholly separate from men, whose material reality is wholly different from men, would be the biggest act of self harm women could enact on themselves.

I’ve explained that, I’m not just a uterus. I also feel the same way about “adult human” anything, yes - it removes any complexity of who we actually are.

I’m female because I was born one, I’m a woman for a variety of other reasons - many of them external. I do “woman” in the way that I do it, based on the life I’ve had, and really resent being told I’m doing it “wrong” by those who’d have me in a group because of a set of chromosomes.

I also don’t think any trans woman, ever, has ever told me they’re a “better” woman than I am. I don’t believe that all trans identifying people, of any type, are part of a huge agenda to victimise women. By and large, I’m not sure it’s that deep.

How on earth can ‘adult human female’ be reductive, in what sense? Do you feel the same way about ‘adult human male’?

I think like a lot of people who buy into GI you are over intellectualising it. Instead of viewing the way women actually survive in the world you are seeking to see something that just isn’t there, you want to come up with some magical meaning that will stop feminists in their tracks, it totally fits with the TIM view that they are ‘better women’ than actual women because they see something that we don’t. Of course they bloody do because they’re men larping as women and playing make believe. They can’t ever have experienced womanhood because they’re not women.

We’ve heard all the arguments as to how women could make this all better if they would just do this or that, be kind, step aside, trust TIM when they say they just want to be their authentic selves. Men have tried to get women to believe things that aren’t true since the beginning of time, and GI is simply another manifestation of that. They couldn’t get us to believe that they are superior to us because they’re men, so they try to tell us that they’re better women than us when they’re pretending to be women. And that’s the problem with ‘beliefs’, they’re not facts. When you ignore facts you put women and girls at risk, and I say again, No Thank You. This whole ideology is laughable and derisory, and I genuinely find it astonishing that anyone believes it even for a second.