Awards dedicated to women, along with all-women shortlists and quotas for women on corporate boards, exist because women tend to have low self-esteem and doubt their own abilities. They therefore lack the confidence to compete with men on a level playing field.
I have a lot of respect for you based on a lot of the things that you have said in this thread, and then you go and throw something like this in that absolutely 100% proves that you don't get what a woman's experience of life is at all. I'm using the biological definition of the word, because to me that's all a woman is.
All women awards and shortlists do not exist because we have low self-esteem and lack confidence - That is hideously offensive! They exist because of everyday and endemic sexism which disadvantages women. They exist because if they didn't men would get all the awards. They exist because women hit the glass income and promotion ceiling, because we are the ones who have to take time off to give birth, and recover, and tend to do the child raising. They exist because a huge number of men take us less seriously. They exist because even women have absorbed patriarchy BS and tend to see men as more worth of the awards than us.
How can we get along with each other and meet everybody's needs, given that we have such different perspectives on the nature of sex and gender?
I respect you, and want you to have the right and ability to get on with your life safely as much as I want it for myself. I do think that we need to move forwards together not in opposition, and I'm grateful that you are reaching out. To me, in order to do that, I need you to acknowledge that there is a difference between sex and gender identity, and that the sex based definition of woman is vitally important when it comes to matters of women's safety and equity. Campaign for another word for feeling feminine - I'll happy call you femme, feminine, or any new made up word you like - because women's rights don't exist if we don't have a word to call adult human females.
I do, however, believe there are fundamental differences between the sexes, arising from the evolutionary roles of males as hunters and warriors and women as caregivers.
This gendered division of labour has existed for thousands of years in the vast majority of societies in the world, and I believe this is partly due to innate differences in the ways in which mean and women think.
It’s a sex based division of labour/stereotypes/societal structures/plain old misogyny. I strongly suspect that these have disadvantaged women for as long as they have existed. Stereotypical differences in the way women and men act have some basis in biology and some in sociology. None of which is evidence for a gendered brain; just because a biological female doesn't feel motherly, or wants to go shooting and fishing at weekends, doesn't make her brain any less female. It just means that she is at the tail of the bell curve of typical behaviours observed in women.
I can't tell whether you are a man, a woman or non binary.
I’m sorry but I think this is plainly nonsense. You can tell the difference between the sexes of the vast majority of people who you meet. You can’t see gender identity, but do you understand that being a woman is a matter of biological sex and nothing to do with how we feel in the head, for the vast majority of us here on mumsnet? Follow up question, do you acknowledge and respect that the majority of women here don't have a gender identity, we go purely based on our sex?
I think sex is largely a state of mind, yes.
I'm a woman and that's just how it is. I'm sorry you can't see that.
You think that sex is a mostly a state of mind, yet you are attracted exclusively to the female sexed body, have I got that right?