Hello, I'm a TRA - ask me anything

[AlphaTransWoman]

Good evening,

I'm a transgender rights advocate. I say "advocate" rather than "activist" because I believe in constructive debate and consensus building rather than the hostile, shouty kind of activism that gets us nowhere.

I am here because I am genuinely interested in seeing if there is some kind of compromise that can be reached between pro trans and gender critical views. Obviously this is difficult because we may disagree about something pretty fundamental. I feel passionately that trans women are women (at least in the psychological and social sense), so there's an obvious divide if you do not.

The question is, can we find ways to co-exist and find an acceptable way forward on some of the difficult issues that arise around trans acceptance? So I'm happy to have a go answering anything you care to ask in good faith. Who knows, we might even make some progress.

Just for the people at the back:

the number of lesbians who find men sexually attractive is zero

this guy is delusional

Only a man think a lesbian would be attracted to a penis haver.
That's entirely down to the lesbian in question. The idea that lesbians must like A and must not like B is restrictive and potentially homophobic.

I see the assault on lesbians continues. A lesbian is attracted to women. The homophobia comes only from entitled men demanding that lesbians must abandon their feelings and accept men in their dating pool because they demand / expect/want it.

You could answer this too, while you're at it, seeing as you have largely treated me as invisible throughout this thread?

And this.

I despair. I mean literally every response to my post reinforces the fact you are not a woman.
I don't have the energy to bang my head against your wall much more, but please, if you take one thing from this thread, let it be this: lesbians, by their very definition (which is absolute and unchangeable) are not attracted to any male bodies, with or without their penis. If they are, they are bi, not lesbian. Nobody is saying nobody is attracted to transwomen, in fact there is a massive amount who are. But none of them are lesbians. It is YOU who is homophobic in saying this is not the case. Lesbians are allowed to be exclusive to women. And just to really really be clear, transwomen are not women. Transmen are.

What rights are you advocating for, OP?

Specifically?

Self ID?

Hate crime to include 'gender'? (It already includes gender reassignment).

Anything else?

I don't consider you a TRA, OP, and I don't think TRAs would either. My thoughts broadly align with yours on keeping transwomen out of women's spaces and women's sport.

But I entirely disagree with your definition of a women. To me, woman means a person with XX chromosomes, regardless of how she feels or how she dresses. A man is someone with XY chromosomes, regardless of how he feels or how he dresses.

I have a question for you. If all men and women dressed the same, wore their hair the same, and had unisex names, would you still have felt the need to transition?

I have a lot of doubts about innate differences, and I believe majority of observed behavioral differences are not nature, but nurture.
I don't think women have naturally lower self-esteem, I think the societal upbringing leads to that.

I see women-only shortlists as a temporary measure to compensate for that (until the society learns better). If it is a tool for widening women's (=female people who were subjected to societal's gendered growing up) access to some fields, and motivating them, don't you see that including transwomen would actually harm the purpose?

So what do you think about Tra's who have forced a lesbian speed dating group which has been going for 5 years to close after campaigning against them due to their being a hate group for excluding trans women. They offered to hold specific trans inclusive events which was denied by the tra'a as unacceptable and othering. Unfortunately the trans women who did start coming were not respectful to the women - one attempted to grope a woman in the bathroom and another turned up in a pvc outfit with a large erection. This led to the organiser having to try to stop them coming and the later action of the tra's to get them closed down.

Lesbians are same sex attracted. Your sex doesn’t change. It’s in every cell of your body.

By saying some lesbians might be attracted to and happy to have sex with someone who is a male is hugely homophobic.

It smacks of the old ‘she’s only a lesbian because she hasn’t had a good seeing to‘ or ‘she wouldn’t be a lesbian if she had sex with me’

You don’t get to change the definition of lesbian, because it means you can convince yourself you are a woman and also attracted to women. You don’t get to change the definition of what a lesbian is or what gay is.

A woman who is willing to sleep with a male bodied person is not a lesbian.

There’s no wonder the back lash with the gay community is growing. They are being told being exclusively same sex attracted doesn’t exist. And this is leading lesbians being excluded from spaces created for lesbians and the gay community.

Is so damaging. But you Op are just there admitting that it doesn’t matter if it’s damaging. As long as it serves you. Which is most peoples issue with TRAs.

Your story, although common, is difficult to understand.

You say that your personality traits are the same as the typical woman, therefore you are changing your appearance to look like a typical woman.

But that doesn't make sense, for a start, everyone has a different mix of personal traits that can change over time. There's not a set of traits for women and a completely different set for men. Also, theres a difference between how we see ourselves and how others see us. Someone may see themselves as emphatic, but that trait may not be apparent to others. In addition, often these traits are socially imposed. Men are expected to be more assertive than women, therefore are praised for it, but women are punished - 'Karens'.

The idea that a man can wear clothes designed for women, and become a woman is as childish as a toddler thinking hes spiderman because hes got the outfit.

Its the same for surgeries. They dont change sex, just as they dont change race or age. Its superficial, they may make someone happier, but it doesnt change a persons sex.

That would be fine - anyone can wear clothing they want, have surgery they want, but thats not really what is going on. Men are wearing women clothes and changing their appearance and expecting everyone else to treat them as if they are no longer men. They want to be in spaces with women and girls, or for society to make space away from other men for them. They want everyone to buy into their fantasy.

TRA are expecting society to ignore sex, and instead order life around and individually sense of their own personality. As well as being impossible, its dangerous for women and girls.

Like any other word, "woman" is a concept humankind has developed to assist in understanding and communicating about the world. Specifically it is a classification we apply to human beings because we find it useful to distinguish between "woman" and "not woman" for a wide variety of purposes.

Nope. It's about biology - males have XY and females XX chromosomes. @GarlicGrace explained it all beautifully so I won't repeat it. But sex isn't a 'state of mind'. We are created male and female, end of. No matter how many other changes you make to yourself OP, no matter what hormones you take and surgery you have, your cells are still XY. You are male.

I think the best thing was the clothes. This is really worrying OP. The best thing?

OP, you haven’t answered my v reasonable Q so far, but anyway, here’s another.
It seems obvious that we need a word for adult humans who are following (this is not a choice btw) the female development pathway? Of course, not all female bodies follow exactly the same pathway, but they go through at least some processes which never affect male bodies. There are clearly both social, physical and medical implications of these processes which also never affect male bodies. It is important that we can describe this group of people. If not ‘women’, what word should be used?

Its a difficult task to convince women on a feminist board on a parenting website that woman is a social concept and fuck all to do with reproduction.

Can we please stop with the "women are XX, men are XY" statements. As someone who is not XX and meets anyone's definition of a woman (for example, the baby I gave birth to 14 months ago) it is not a reliable definition.

@Shroedy, the use of XX/XY is a short hand to describe a more complex definition. Most people are aware that there are people who have DSDs and that the process of development of a male or female body is a bit more complex than just the XX or XY genes.

None of that applies to the OP, or is relevant to anyone else who claims that mammals can change sex. The OP is male, doesn't have any kind of DSD and simply believes he can become female by wishing it so.

I'm aware of how it's being used and I am not suggesting it has why relevance to the OP.

That doesn't make it not problematic and no, I don't have any form of DSD.

@Shroedy what would be the preferred shorthand for describing biological sex, succinctly, when not discussing unusual edge cases or DSDs? Especially when discussing with someone making claims that sex chromosomes are not relevant to a person's sex.

That's not my concern and I'm not getting involve in the broader debate on this thread. But just as focusing on an ability to bear children (as other have done) is problematic for those who suffer with their fertility, this has the same pitfalls.

As far as I can see, no one is making a claim that being female is about having the ability to bear children. However, people belong to one of either sex class, whether or not any one individual has a fully functioning reproductive system or not.

I didn't realise it was possible to be biologically female, not XX, and with no DSD. I am happy to be educated though if you could explain please?

Sorry to keep going back to 'what a woman is' but it does seem incredibly important to you, @AlphaTransWoman , and obviously as you advocate for basing law and policies around this definition it's important to us.

Feel free to go through and pick up where I have gotten you wrong.

Can I see if I have understood your claim:

You acknowledge (I think) that there are male and female bodies. You believe there is an incredibly strong, almost one-to-one correlation, throughout all of humanity with having a female body and having some sort of checklist of psychological traits (and with a male body and 'male mind' traits). You have also referred to "the way they feel about themselves and wish to live" without giving any more information on what this actually means.

You haven't said on what data you have concluded this, or even given a list of these traits other than "men are more competitive and rational" and "like to be assertive and in charge of things", and women are more "cooperative, empathic and emotional, more likely to to be kind and take a supporting role" - or said how you would measure them, or what it means if someone's ability/personality changes over time, or what even it means to 'be emotional'.

Let's say you think female people are 'above average' on these traits and there is therefore a distinct gap between how male people do on these and how female people do (so you wouldn't really see any overlap, because you claim that the traits are what distinguishes a 'male mind' or 'female mind'.)

You acknowledge there are 'some outliers' - males and females whose mind doesn't 'match' your list of traits. How many, we cannot know, but presumably millions worldwide.

Those with 'woman mind' traits are women, and this includes male people with those traits.

Those with 'man mind traits' are men, and this includes female people.

The fact that millions of female people can have 'man minds' does not suggest to you that in fact psychological traits can present equally in both sexes, but you conclude instead that their bodies are the wrong sex for their mind.

Based on this alone, you believe that 'man mind' people should be treated as male in all situations bar a very few, and same for women minds being treated as female. Bear in mind you say as a woman you are less rational than 50% of the population yet think it is fine to advocate for both sexes on this.

You think that the female body is a visual cue that the person has 'woman traits' and so appearing as a female, or taking on some female physical or social factors like she/her pronouns, female names, gendered clothing etc, tells society that 'this person has a woman mind and must be treated as such', hence your linking of appearance and psychological traits.

Is this more or less accurate?

Sex is reproductive potential.

Women have the potential to produce eggs, men the potential to produce sperm.

No one believes that a man with gender can become pregnant. No one.

Sex is real, and it is immutable, @AlphaTransWoman.

Can you tell me of any medical or surgical procedures that can actually turn a biological woman into a biological man, or vice versa? By which I mean not just giving them breasts and a neovagina, or a mastectomy and a surgically created phallus (and neither the neovagina nor the phallus can do what a biological vagina or phallus can) - but also changing male dna, chromosomes, endocrine system, skeleton etc into a female one, or vice versa.

I would happily have argued for third spaces, in the early years of the rise of trans rights activism - I believe I said that, while I was not happy to give up the one seat at the table that women had fought and campaigned for, we could budge up and make space for a chair for trans people - but the aggressive way that trans rights activism has forced its way into female only spaces - prisons, domestic violence shelters, hospital wards, toilets, changing rooms, women's sports, even rape crisis centres (in Canada, it is now illegal for a rape crisis centre to have even one all female group for rape victims, and in Edinburgh, the trans woman who is director of the rape crisis centre there says women should reframe their trauma - learn to cope with people they clearly see are of the same sex class who raped them - and accept them in every area of the centre as both users and staff) - all that has made me rethink my initial, kind attitude.

If all trans people wanted was gender neutral third spaces, and they weren't trying to rob women of everything we had fought for, I would support them - but that is not the case.

Hello,

Yes, I think that's a fairly accurate summary of my position. I'm really sorry but I'm busy today and won't be able to say any more until this evening.