Graham Linehan on the chapter about him in Jon Ronson's new book

A transwoman isn't a man. What a transwoman is a matter of opinion. According to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 "her acquired gender is legally recognised as female, subject to statutory exceptions". According to the Equality Act 2010 "she is not a woman for the Act's provisions concerning the protected characteristic of sex".

The law is very good at making sweeping statements then making exceptions. A teenage boy or a man who has sex with a 17 year old girl is not a paedophile, for example, even though a 17 year old is supposedly still a child.

People don't biologically change on their 18th birthday. They do biologically change at puberty. The point is that we no longer in our society consider that biology is the most important consideration. To insist that it is - but only in the case of transwomen - doesn't make sense.

A transwoman isn't a man.

False. An adult transwoman is an adult male, that is, is a man.

What a transwoman is a matter of opinion.

True. People can hold any opinion they want. No one else has to agree with them, though.

They do biologically change at puberty.

Biological changes happen throughout life; some are quite profound. However, none of these change one’s sex at birth into the opposite. It’s impossible.

Please can we maybe not do the justifications for adults having sex with children?

The law doesn't class anyone as a paedophile. The law makes judgements on whether acts were/are criminal.

By the same metric, the law isnt interested in a mans identity. The EA applies to sex.

A transwoman with a GRC is legally "a woman" like a company is legally "a person".

It's a lgeal fiction to allow an entity to act in certain circumstances in a capacity that they would not otherwise have. It's not a redfinition of the reality of women and men in the lived world.

The only way a transwoman is a woman in reality and in his relatonships with other people rather than just in certain aspects of his relationship with the law and the state is if we change what the word "woman" means, from a fact of the body to a set of personality traits.

And even if you do that, (1) the word "woman" is not longer applicable to a very large number of the female people to whom it currently applies, and (2) said man STILL is in no way interchangable with or any more like the female half of humanity than he was before.

So all you've really done is moved a word around. Reality hasn't altered because of it. The existence of two sexes and the physical, historic and social outcomes that result from this doesn't change just because you changed what a word means.

Ultimately the only way you can make transwomen women, or even just not-men, in our lived reality as well as a legal sense is to force people to pretend reality is different to what it in fact is.

A man witha piece of paper saying he is a woman is still just a man with a piece of paper.

And why is it all genderists slip the old 'age is just a number' thing in? Very odd.

have you got bumping this thread on a weekly basis when it's fallen off the page yet again because everyone else has lost interest diarised???

smh

Every single “trans woman” is a man. Biologically and under the Equality Act 2010.

People don't biologically change on their 18th birthday. They do biologically change at puberty. The point is that we no longer in our society consider that biology is the most important consideration. To insist that it is - but only in the case of transwomen - doesn't make sense.

To make the glaringly obvious point: age is a continuum, but sex is binary. A man can't become a woman, and vice versa.

But people do change age. (I can't believe I have to explain this.) A 15-year old will one day be a 16-year old, who will one day be a 17-year old, and so on and so forth. Children reach puberty at different times. They reach emotional and intellectual maturity at different times. (Some of them never reach it, mentioning no names.) Therefore the law has to make somewhat arbitrary decisions about the age when a person can consent to sex, vote, drive a car, get married etc.

The law doesn't have to make decisions about what constitutes a male or a female, however, because these are fixed states that don't change.

This really isn't difficult to understand, unless you are the sort of person who is determined not to understand it.

This is nonsense.

Under all scientific, objective, verifiable criteria a ‘transwoman’ is a man.

It is not possible to define or describe a transwoman without starting from the basic fact that he is a man.