Gender is a belief system. Nothing more, nothing less. Like religion. And like religion you can’t discriminate against believers, and
you can’t discriminate against non-believers. But you certainly can’t FORCE everyone to believe!

And teens questioning their gender identity? Working with kids surely you can’t be that naive? Just think about why everyone wasn’t questioning their gender identity in my school in the late 90s!

I am really shocked by the conversations on here.

The way people view gender is changing. There is a cultural shift. As someone who works in education, it is very common to have students who are gender questioning. Many young people feel differently abour gender and sex. Denying this is true and throwing the argument that men are men and women are women in their face will have no impact.

Change happens. The way humans view gender is changing and will continue to change. There is also research that shows brain scans of people who identify as another gender have brains more similar to the gender they align with than the one they were born as. Who is to say your sex organs are more important than your brain in defining gender?

I am no expert but I believe listening to people and supporting them is more important than rigid thinking and refusing to acknowledge or listen to their views.

Anyone who has attended any women's rights event in recent years will be familiar with cis being used as a slur, and with TW who wish harm on women.

Some TW seem to positively hate us.

The idea that any man who puts on a dress instantly also gains perfect empathy with the female experience is as laughable as it is insulting (not to mention hopelessly naive).

ETA I suppose it does make sense though that if someone thinks TWAW and anyone who says otherwise is a nasty transphobe, they do believe that that is exactly what happens during the transistion process - whether that be hormones, surgery or simply clothing choices.

Plus - 'normal' means 'what most people are/do.' Being 'not normal' isn't necessarily an insult, its saying that thing/ person/ behaviour/ belief is unusual. Its not normal to be trans, because most people aren't.

Transphobia, far-right, blah blah.. would you like to add in some more cliches?

And you might think these are insults or negative terms, but TRAs have rendered them meaningless.

No man who claims he has inner womanly feelings and is therefore a woman, as I (born female) am a woman, and therefore entitled to share women's single-sex spaces, services or sports, can be described as normal. Mistaken, deluded or entitled, yes, but not normal.

Sure, in much the same way a Goth may feel fear. Even if he’s a ‘cis man’.

ETA: this does reinforce the idea that it’s about how they look.

It does happen to men. This morning on Sky they were giving the figures for people with prostate cancer. Only men have a prostate.

She's right that they do fear (other) men. But not because they are suddenly women and are experiencing women's fears. They're afraid because the biggest issue to mens safety is other men, and they know they are attracting attention men that may want to harm them for what they're wearing/how they are presenting.

It's not the same. They can change clothes and stop hormones and just fit right in with the other men again.

@TransParentlyAnnoyed

When they transition, trans women experience that sudden fear of all men which cis women feel as girls. They feel vulnerable when they walk down a street in the same way we do.

This is such a weird take. So much to unpack. Transwomen start to feel that ‘sudden fear’ when they transition. At which point? When they start? When they have fully transitioned? It implies that the fear comes from l’ooking like a woman’. It can’t be because of innately being a woman as, we are led to believe, TW have felt like women their entire lives. So we are back to men are a danger to women because of the way they (women) look.

Then we have someone who describes themselves as NB including themselves in the class ‘cis women’ - the sudden fear felt by cis women/ they feel vulnerable…in the same way we do.

It’s possible TPA means the fear they felt in the past as a girl. After all the TW isn’t, if we look experiencing the fear women fear, it’s specifically the fear girls feel. Are we now supposed to believe that TW go from boyhood to manhood (for most) to girlhood and then to womanhood? And does TPA now feel less fear as they are no longer either a girl or a ‘cis woman’.

I used to work in a maternity setting. There has been a bit of low-level changing to language (women and birthing people eg on the website or the odd leaflet) as a result of some very vulnerable, usually young women using the service who are trying out non-binary or trans.

There was always a trauma history that meant adding distance from their female abused body helped in some small way. They were never demanding anything of anyone and didn’t correct pronouns etc, they were low, sad, depressed usually. Staff would go along with pronouns to help them and be kind as their immediate need was them & their baby not their trauma history.
(We would refer on for that)

Within the service as a whole, 99.99% of the time we just said she/her/women/ladies etc as it rolls off the tongue and we were very very busy and not interested in tying ourselves in knots. No one corrected anyone in either direction. Our job was to support that woman and her baby in the kindest way possible.

it was a service for pregnant women so there were never any blokes involved whether they were pretending to be pregnant or not! No reputable medical clinician was ever going to refer a bio man into our service.

Just posting this as it can feel like the language is getting out of control but I wanted to offer my view that from within a pregnancy service, no-one bought in to it in any major way.

💯

Genderism certainty does exist. It's the belief that people have a gender identity that is at least as meaningful as physical sex and in most cases overrides physical sex.

"Cis" is part of that belief. It's a word that only has meaning within that belief.

Just as you feel you can describe others as "transphobic" based on their beliefs, I can describe you as a Genderist based on yours. (Noting the important difference that "Genderist" is not an agressive judgement deployed to silence views I do not want to engage with by psinting them as irrational and "phobic".)

So you say you don't use slurs, but you happily label others transphobic. Yes the word transphobia describes an actual phenomenon, but it is absolutely a slur the way you use it to demonise people who simply disagree with your belief that we should restructure society around mental genders. An equivalent slur would be Nazi - a genuinely bad thing to be, but also an accusation used to silence and slur people who are nowhere near that in reality.

The rest of your post is pointless. "Cis woman" may be meaningful to you but it means nothing to anyone outside Genderism, and as I noted you aren't even using it in a way that makes sense inside Genderism.

The most interesting part of your earlier post to me is that it betrays that even you actually think naturally about sex in the "old ways" , then have to consciously translate that into the Genderist constructs you say you believe.

Cis is not necessary, man or woman will do.

'Cis' isn't just a clarifying adjective; in this context it's a politically loaded term that many women, me included, find offensive.

I agree with the whole post but could I just add to this: most ordinary people won't have a clue when they hear the word 'cis'. It's just not something used in everyday speech.

Blokes aren’t a ‘minority’. There are fewer of them than women but not so few that they can reasonably be deemed a minority. And they sure as heck aren’t vulnerable!

Some male trans activists are VERY vocal for their hatred of women!

"..for those people in particular who are young, elderly, pregnant or vulnerable...", which is an obvious cop-out.

I don't think that's a cop out at all. At one time, say up to twenty years ago, it was obvious that only one sex could get pregnant so the qualifier woman wasn't necessary.

I don't buy the argument that we need to clarify things for trans men. A woman who wants to identify as trans but then gets pregnant must know deep down that she is still a woman.

trans woman don't hate women

Are you sure about that, @TransParentlyAnnoyed?

The people who are 'offended' by the use of the word 'woman', particularly in relation to pregnancy, are not the sort of people I want to appease.

@TransParentlyAnnoyed “Trans women are normal people”

Define normal.

People who think they can change sex is not normal behaviour. Men who want to access women’s spaces is not normal behaviour.

Did you clarify how you know whether the person examining you is a ‘cis man’ or a ‘trans woman’?

It’s a term I’ve only heard men use. You have clarified that you’re a woman, so I apologise for thinking you were a man.

Men are not an oppressed minority in any sense of the word. Women are not a powerful majority. Women calling adult human males men is not punching down.
No one on this board uses slurs about trans identified individuals that I have ever seen. Correctly sexing someone is not a slur.

A clarifying adjective is not needed to describe what someone or something is not. I am not trans I am just a woman. I do not need to be described as cis to clarify this. Everyone knows what a woman is - even when they pretend not to.