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!

'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.

Cis is not necessary, man or woman will do.

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.

💯

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.

@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’.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Sigh.

Bodies exist. Our physical sex has physical and social consequences, especially for those of us who are female.

Women and girls, in the original female sense of the word, historically and in many places still today have been literally lesser citizens simply because of our sex. We have been property. We have been banned from education, from owning property, from voting or holding positions of power, from rights over ou own children. Our bodies have been sexualised and exploited for sex and for domestic labour.

And even though these things may not be legally enshrined in most (not all) countries any more, nevertheless their deep roots in our culture still affect how we are seen and how we are treated, and how we see ourselves and interact with others.

These things are facts.

Deciding that the words "man" or "woman" actually mean something mental not physical doesn't change any of the above.

All it does is take away the language and connections to our cultural history that we as women (in thd original female sense of the word) need to share and make sense of our common experiences of sexism, and destroys the rights, resources and protections that were intemded to mitigiate the challenges of be8ng female in a default-male world not be homestly arguing for their removal but by debasing the language in which they are written.

So it's great that you are starting to think about this. But please don't assume the women here just haven't thought about things deeply or are less aware than you.

If you had done a search you'd know that the supposed "gender difference" brain scans shown by some research are well known and do not show what some claim they do. Brains are plastic - their structures are changed by how they are used. So these differences seen in scans (which by the way don't show gender differences at all, they show sexuality differences, and once those are acclunted for the brains of trans people aren't any different to the rest if their actual sex) can just as easily be the results of thinking a certain way not the causes of it.

But again, even if the scans had shown what you thought they did, all that would means is that there are some mental commonalities between the sexes. It wouldn't undo physical sex or the consequences of it. It doesn't mean a person with a male body is "really" female, really "a woman", unless you also change what those words mean.

If you think there's a good argument to group humans by personality or character as well as or instead of sex then great! Make that case.

But make it from first principles.

Don't just appropriate the existing words for sex as if sex and its consequences are something we can just shrug off. As if how a man thinks makes his male body in the real world, somehow magically interchangeable with a female one so much so that women who do not know him will experience his eyes in a shared space as female eyes, his body as a female body, his hands touching her for intimate personal or medical care as female hands because he somehow has a "female" personality.

Women are more than a personality trait or a feeling in a man's mind. We are the female half of the human race is all our diversity and we have the moral right to be recognised as such.

@peetieswie

You say "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."

Are you brave enough to take your own advice and really listen to the women here, to learn what we actually think and why we think it, what we believe about sex and about gender and why we think it matters for women that the reality of our sex is being overwritten by the personal choice of gender before you jump in to tell us why are wrong?

Change happens but nobody can change sex.

I sincerely hope that you are not telling the teenage girls you work with, some of whom will be navigating puberty and starting their periods, that they need to 'listen to and support' teenage boys who wish to use their toilets and changing rooms. I especially hope this in the case of girls who are living with abuse or who have been sexually assaulted.

'Humans [can] view gender' however they wish, but the unassailable fact remains that sex can't change, and neither do the cultural, historical, medical and day-to-day practicalities and realities associated with your sex. To tell teenagers that this isn't so is doing them a terrible disservice, particularly in a world where misogyny is rife. And make no mistake that misogyny is at the heart of All This. A teenage girl who is coming to terms with being gay does not need to be told that teenage boys can also be lesbians, and therefore she must be open to dating them or else she's a bigot/Nazi/genital fetishist. That's the message you're sending when you're telling girls to 'listen to and support people'.

How about we 'listen to and support' teenagers to be themselves? To reject harmful gender stereotypes completely - if you're a boy who likes to wear makeup and dresses or a girl who wears suits, go for it and celebrate it and know that what you wear or what you like isn't defined by your sex? That if you're a 14 year old girl who prefers trousers and girls, or a teenage boy who likes boys and nail polish, you don't need healthy body parts to be amputated and to be pumped full of hormones in order to comply with gender stereotypes? Why is encouraging major invasive surgery and a lifetime of medication the 'kind' option?

I don't understand why you're 'shocked by the conversations here'. Women on a parenting forum talking about an ideology which has its roots firmly embedded in misogyny, one that is harmful to children, can hardly be 'shocking'. Also many of us have first hand experience of living with partners and children who have been captured by this ideology and have had their lives shattered as a result. Many of us are SA, rape and DV survivors who have lived in refuges or used rape crisis facilities and are horrified at the idea of sharing those spaces with men.

Perhaps read through some of these conversations again, and take your own advice - listen to people. Really, really listen.

Gender = classifying people according to sexist stereotypes.

Many of us assumed that everyone had agreed this was bad in the 1990s, but apparently not.

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

There isn't, but if there were, wouldn't you just conclude that classifying brains according to gender is bollocks and that people have a wide range of brains?

Who is to say your sex organs are more important than your brain in defining gender?

You are the one suggesting that people's sex organs are relevant to their brain.

Do you really work in education?

Of course I am open to hearing the views of others and understanding different perspectives. Although the condensending tone and attempt to make me feel stupid is pretty off putting honestly so bye.

We know nothing about you and can only respond to what you post.

You posted "I am really shocked by the conversations on here" and other posters responded in kind.

Seriously?

You jumped in with a drive by scolding of the type we see all the time here, which you would have known if you'd spent any time reading before posting.

Your post brought nothing new but in your arrogance you didn't even bother to check if your points had maybe come up before.

Now you realise they have, instead of reflecting on how you got it wrong and considering whether you were maybe a little condescending and prejudiced about the women here, you switch to flouncing because we didn't pander to your ego by pretending it's all greatly insightful fresh new perspectives.

And you think we are the rude ones?

Can you point to where anyone has attempted to make you feel stupid?

All the responses to your post have been respectful and given in good faith. Your response to them is not to engage, which of course is your choice. But please don't pretend you have chosen not to do so because posters have been unpleasant to you - they very obviously have not.