Friends suggesting transphobia and misogyny both rooted in policing gender roles

Your comment is straight out of Mar-a-Lago.

Feminism seeks an end to 'gender roles' which it believes are constructed and imposed on women by patriarchal society to oppress them.

Transactivism seeks the acknowledgement that gender roles are innate, embedded, 'natural'. That is the opposite of the goals of feminism.

The fact that transactivists believe some people get the wrong gender doesn't change those fundamentals - they believe that gender roles are a fact, rather than a social construct.

They can't have it both ways.

How could these men gain fulfillment from playing the woman if there was no costume for them to put on, no gender role for them to perform?

Precisely.

Wow, you seem to have landed here with some pretty rigidly fixed ideas about what posters on this board think, feel and believe.

It feels like you’re pretty closed off to having your preconceptions challenged, ironically. It’s a pity you don’t seem willing to engage, rather than simply judging and declaiming; as if you were to engage in good faith with reasonable propositions made without aggression, you’d find people willing to engage and debate reasonably.

Putting to one side the point that fear of violence is not the only reason for sex segregation of toilet facilities your argument appears to boil down to this.

• Women don’t commit sexual violence against other women
• Many women wear dresses
• Therefore nobody who wears a dress will commit sexual violence against a woman

I will leave it to you to point out the bus sized holes in this logic.

So on one hand you affirm the sexes share behavioural expressions but on the other any shared expressions by trans people are 'fake'/copied & purely motivated by a desire to claim they are the opposite sex rather than an organic inclination that's commonly aligned with the opposite sex? That's incoherent.

You are saying that if lipstick and heels didn’t exist, women and transwomen would “organically” invent them.

Why then are trans-identifying men only attracted to and engage with the symbols of femininity peculiar to their own societies? For that matter, if fishnets and a pearl necklace were so “organic” why do they exist as only in modern western society?

Incoherent, indeed.

Quite. We're all waiting for the slam dunk argument that explains why 'feeling womanly' should be used instead of 'sex' for access to women's stuff.

The reality of biological sex and its consequences is not a matter of "indoctrination".

Such posts are best ignored. the writers are beyond logic

She's right in the sense that defined gender roles are essential to the whole concept of trans-ness. If there are no gender roles associated with the two sexes, if either sex can be and present in any manner, then there's nothing to "trans" into. Gender roles limit the popular perception of what a man or a woman can be. A woman who fails to stay inside the gender role box prescribed for her sex is seen as transgressive, and therefore disruptive, potentially dangerous; she needs to be herded back inside the box by whatever means necessary.

The apparent transgressiveness of transgenderism thus reinforces gender norms.

Very, very few people think it should be illegal for men to re-name themselves Tiffany and go out in public dressed like women, false breasts, make-up, high heels and all. Because most people are tolerant and kind, they might even call that man "she" to his face because they want to be nice. 99.9% of gender critical people respect the existence of trans-identified individuals and have no issue living their lives in whatever way seems best to them. Nevertheless, we know that trans-identified men are not women. Their sex is still male. They are still, and will always be, men. They are men who seek to adopt the gender role commonly assigned to women.

How could these men gain fulfillment from playing the woman if there was no costume for them to put on, no gender role for them to perform?

It isn't even that. Because even if you do believe that "being female ... is an identity that can be adopted" all that means is you want to change the people a word refers to. It doesn't actually remove the fact of two human sexes, nor require that the female half of the species not be named or recognised at all.

The thing that proves, unequivocally, that fir all their guff about "self determination", what sexist people like Howse and Bailey really want is not a new understanding of what a woman is at all, but appropriation and subjection of the female sex in support of men, is that even as they tell us our name properly means something else, they do not allow us to define ourselves outside that name.

For Gender Absolutists like Howie and Bailey it's not enough to change what "woman" means, we must also submit to that new meaning regardless of how we may know ourselves and have our own life experiences.

Only one side in this is saying that the reality of sex and groups based on identity and presentation can't both exist under different names for these different things.

Only one side is trying to prevent any cultural, political or social recognition that sex has consequences especially for female people.

Only one side is trying to rewrite Feminism to support the subjugation of female needs in favour of men's feelings.

This is one of the reasons GI supporters love "no debate".

It isn't just to shut sex realists up - it's because they are unable to make solid arguments and "no debate" gets them out of having to do so.

There will never be a true Scotsman so there is no point.

Well she certainly isn't "lovely" because she's doing performative virtue signalling on Facebook without apparently ever having stopped to think about what she is posting. It doesnt make any sense and she doesnt understand feminism at all.

Up to you whether you feel you have to post something in response and I'm sure there will have been some good suggestions already. Feminism does not prioritise the desires of men over the needs of women. But is it worth your time? Modern version of an old proverb "Never attempt to teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pig. "

It's funny how so many of your statements are just you telling on yourself.
Hope you have a nice day, but I'm out!

Nope! Many of us are up for hearing some convincing arguments. With evidence.

Bring them on! Now's your chance! The floor is yours!

Really not. A lot of people here are too far indoctorined in their own beliefs to accept new information anyway.

Trans rights really do enforce stereotypes
I thought that being gender critical means opposing stereotypes and stereotypical behaviour. It seems people think it's being against the whole trans subject. Although I'm fully aware one cannot change sex, dress how you like, I do not care.

I will never understand women (or men)who advocate so strongly for men to access any space for women. It's not all about toilets.
And if it looks like transmen are ' ignored' maybe because they're less of a 'threat'. They are welcome in womens' spaces. But if a TM wants to use mens' spaces, fine; their choice.

As for 'educate yourself' oh the irony.
Heard it all before

Oh and if you see transphobia, hate or bullying, please please report it.
MN are rightly hot on this.

I agree about Facebook ^

Do you really need to say anything in response, OP? Normally I would advocate a robust response to this nonsense, but FB isn't the place to do it. It's just for people who want to broadcast (among all the shitty adverts). Let her have her say. See who agrees. Make your own mind up.

Sometimes there's a lot to be said for what our grannies used to tell us: "silence speaks louder than words"!

I don't know why anyone still uses fb for socialising. None of the younger people in my family do. I have Whatsapp groups with my friends and family. I keep a fb account purely to find out what events are happening locally. People say X is a cesspit, but I learn far more from X then I ever did from fb, and fb seems to bring out the absolute worst in human virtue-signalling, humble-bragging and trolling.

Yes, I think this is at the core of the debate.

We live in a relatively liberal society where people can generally identify how they like. If you want to cosplay as a pirate or a cat, I honestly don't care. If you though insist that you take the legal identity of a cat and insist that some poor vet has to treat you as such them this becomes a problem. You start to impact other people and their rights to live how they want which in most cases involves acknowledging biological reality.

So it's all about a conflict of rights. The right to self determine versus the right to acknowledge biological reality. The vast majority of people support the latter and we live in a democracy so it follows that these rights should be given priority.

Menopausal women do not look like men. Women with mastectomies don’t look like men. Women with short hair don’t look like men. Women with small boobs don’t look like men. Women who are tall don’t look like men.

Not to mention there's this thing called 'biological diversity' & 'menopause' & 'cancer treatment' where women look like men, men look like women & so on.

What the actual fuck?
Vile leveraging of medical conditions to prove a non-existent "point"

A post menopausal woman is still female; as is a woman who has had a mastectomy.

Additionally, resembling is not the same thing as being.