Friend shocks me by suddenly saying he's female. How to handle this?

Welcome to the trap - no pun intended. If you refer to people by their biological sex, you are never wrong.

Please don't assume my thoughts on women's feelings vs men, thanks. The maternity services example doesn't make sense. Some women will have fertility issues. Some women will be child free. Are we going to go around and question everyone woman/girl of childbearing (whatever that means) age on whether she plans on being pregnant and how often? No, we just allow for a certain amount of variation which could easily include the tiny fraction of trans women.
Our views on gender clearly differ, but I've never said men are women, so we can leave that aside.

Simple. Calling them by their preferred pronouns. Any other way that doesn't relate to physical sex differences. Minding my own business about what they do with their clothes or hair or whatever. The same as I would treat a fellow woman anyway.

No, the right is to have access to a public facility.

What public facility?

Trans people have the same rights as everyone else in this respect.

No, the right is to have access to a public facility. Which by that argument, no trans person would have. Perhaps you support gender neutral options?

"then how are you going to protect trans women from men?"

How is it women's responsibility to protect men who claim to be women from men?

I accept that many women feel that way. To me (as a woman) it feels like a sad symptom of a greater problem on inequality, but I respect views may differ.

Chromosone checks - tick
Genital inspections - tick
Men are going to assault anyway so let them in - tick

It's like being on reddit.

I'm expecting 'intersex' to make an appearance next.

Why is it women's responsibility to protect men from men?

If you accept there is a risk (which I would argue is irrelevant because predators are going to predate and no amount of signage makes a difference), then how are you going to protect trans women from men? Unless you are in favour of providing gender neutral options?

Lol

Because unless you're checking people's chromosomes you're going to run into a heck of a lot of variation. And who decides where to draw that line? Policing women only benefits the patriarchy.

I've addressed upthread that I think trans people need individual provision there, because prisons are such unsafe environments we need to be pragmatic about it. But in theory I don't see how mixed sex imprisonment is inherently cruel or unusual punishment.

Maybe this poster is doing a subtle campaign for specsavers…. Or, you know what they say, some activities do make you go blind 😂😂😂😂

Ummm… calm down dude. You seem quite excited by that idea. So how have people known who is a woman for centuries before all this stupidity? You claimed TIM were being murdered in bathrooms at an alarming rate.. how did the men know they were TIM and not women?

Are you telling me that people can't tell a person's sex by looking at them 😂

let me guess, you’re gonna bring up “genital inspections”? Yawn. Done redone and debunked.
i mean, we could expect TIM to abide by the law and not use women’s spaces, in which case women could be confident everyone in there was female, or we could use our fucking eyes, hearing and common sense. Is this seriously the best argument you’ve got? You can’t come up with one material benefit to women for letting males in their spaces? So it’s a one way transaction?

How? How closely do you have to look? Not all women's bodies are the same.

LittleMyLabyrinth · Today 12:06
I answered that up thread. Feminism is about equal rights. I've yet to be given an example of a right taken away from us by trans women, but I'm open to further information.

Response:
The right not to be subject to mixed-sex imprisonment, which is enshrined in the Geneva Convention. (Cruel and unusual punishment.)

@LittleMyLabyrinth
Perhaps you missed this.
Could you explain if this "further information" changes your view?

Then how would you check? Who looks enough like a woman? Do we need to submit our bodies for inspection? Do we give away our freedoms to the patriarchy for the "safety" of a self-imposed segregation because we've given up on actually stopping violence? afaik assault in bathrooms and changing rooms is extremely rare compared to other spaces. Should we all be put away in a harem to "protect" us? Do we need to perform extreme femininity to ensure it's never questioned? I just find the whole thing depressing.

Forget the pronoun issue, it’s a red herring.

Op, your friend/potential project partner is expressing a belief that being ‘female’ is entirely a state of mind independent of the physical body.

(We’ll overlook for the moment the fact that anything his ‘mind’ comes up with entirely a product of the male brain cells in his male body and has no independent existence, so any ideas about itself it comes up with are by definition male. We’ll also overlook the fact that there is absolutely nothing he can now do as a female person that he couldn’t also have done as a male one.)

For this belief to be consistent and for ‘female” to mean anything at all, he must also believe that you, unless you also have a female-gendered mind, are not female.

Because ‘female’ is in the mind, not the body, remember.

if you believe, as I do, that you are female solely due to the fact that you have a biologically female body, and this fact is independent of any feelings or beliefs you may have about yourself, then by his belief system (that being male or female is something your mind tells you that you are, independent of what body you have) you are not a female person, whereas he is.

So don’t ask your friend why he believes he is female, ask him why he now believes you are not. And when he says, as he undoubtedly will, that of course this isn’t the case and he does you believe you to be female, ask him how, in the absence of a ‘gendered mind’, this can be true.

And watch him try to come up with answer that doesn’t reference your physical form.

Oh don't be ridiculous. You know full well by looking at people what sex they are.

Because it's only enforceable if we police women's bodies. How else could you check? How would you decide who "looks" like a woman? The only ways I can think of are degrading and invasive.

This is such a ridiculous thing to say that being too rigid in our definition could harm women.

No one cares what the trans woman looks like, they only care that he is male.
They care that he is male because men pose a risk towards women and in enclosed spaces where women undress, it is safer to separate by sex.

Just to be super clear this is not about looks it is about sex.

What’s gender?

genuinely, what is gender because I have no idea?