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.

Thanks for confirming - good to have it clear in my mind.

unbelievable!

Interesting thread.

So to you OP, womanhood is, in turns, lovely dresses (or power suits) and being admired, a deep undefined and undefinable feeling that you “know” yourself to be (something you can’t know yourself to be as you’ve never experienced it) or simply something that makes you happy when you look in a mirror.

And womanhood, for you, is all or one of those things, depending upon which is convenient at the time.

Why do you want this discussion about how we can fit you into womanhood? You appear to have made up your mind that you are a woman and don’t really care what we think about it, so that whole “discussion” is really only lip service.

For you to get what you claim you want - separate spaces for yourself and others like you - you do not need us as that has literally nothing to do with us. To achieve that, you need only to engage those like yourself in campaigning for that. There’s no need to involve women at all.

I am interested to know what, if anything, you hope to achieve from this thread.

Batshit

people are quite at liberty to be batshit of course. I firmly support the right of individuals to believe that climate change isn’t a thing or that sex is just a state of mind

what I don’t support is the right of those individuals to shape green policies or prison provision

because if you are demonstrably wrong you forfeit your right to a say in that area

I was hoping for more from the OP, but it’s actually boringly disappointing in its predictability. Women are facing death threats, violence, loss of their jobs and standing, they’re being silenced, being forced to share their spaces with men, they’re losing their place on sports teams, being told that they must accept TIM and TIW or be accused of homophobia, they’re being ‘re-educated’ and being accused of transphobia if they express any GC views or refuse to pander to pronouns, and so on and on and on - all because men like the OP can’t get it into their arrogant male skulls (which, should the OP be dug up years from now, will show him to be the male he is) that wearing women’s clothes, taking hormones or declaring one set of meaningless gender normative traits to be preferable over another doesn’t make you a woman.

"men are more competitive and rational"

"women are more emotional"

This is so regressive and offensively sexist, I don't even know where to start.

Did you never consider the idea that instead of trying to change your presentation to fit these stereotypes, we should all practice radical acceptance of our bodies and put the stereotypes in the dustbin of history where they belong??

Your body is perfect as it is. You are enough, enough as you are. Get rid of the shackles of this sexist bullshit and you will be free.

So, OP, from what you’ve said, you think that it is quite acceptable to notice that I am female, and conclude that I am likely to be less rational, less competitive and less inclined to lead than my male counterparts?

And you wonder why this is considered sexist and repressive?

(Hag, MA Cantab, PhD, CEO of a business I started & built myself)

You might be one of the outliers. Too many and there fails to be a one-to-one correlation between sex and behaviour clusters and gender identity completely falls apart as a concept.

Or you might really be a man.

Or you might actually be deluded about your own personality, and need someone else to measure it for you - again, putting the end to self-id.

That's why this needs hammering out, empirically - no-one can really identify as anything until we know specifically what the thing we are identifying as actually is.
Anyone can say they are "honest" or "rational" but we can draw up concrete examples of what that would actually look like in lived behaviour.

Pope, using only this thread, I’m drawing a strong conclusion the GC has quite a strong relationship with rational thought processes and critical thinking…… Maybe we’re all men really?!
😁

Thanks for the thread, @AlphaTransWoman .

My question is about your definition of woman. It seems to me incomplete.

I have a close friend, a man, who is probably the most empathetic, gentle, uncompetitive, cooperative person you could ever meet. All the "female" personality traits you list, and more. As it happens, he's also gay, although I'm not sure whether that's relevant or not. But in any case, he is absolutely, 100% a man, and has never considered himself anything other than that. In your definition, is he a woman (even though he and the rest of the world consider him a man, and he has a male body)? If not, why not? Do you have to add "and considers themself to be of the sex in question" to your definition to make it work? And if so, what's the point of the first bit, about personality traits, at all?

Also, the traits you list are like height - they tend to be higher in people of female sex (and the "male" ones tend to be higher in those of male sex), but it's all on a spectrum, and there's an enormous amount of overlap. Where's the cut-off? What you suggest seems to me like the equivalent of saying "if you're over 5'8", you're a man". If you're over 5'8", you're more likely to be a man than if you're under 5'2". However, the fact of being 5'9" is not causal of manhood. Isn't it the same with the personality traits which you consider make you a woman?

As I said, to have clusters of traits being used to differentiate between two discrete things (man and woman) they would have to have no overlap.

I haven't quite got the energy to ask OP whether they would change their mind when presented with unequivocal evidence that personality traits both overlap and appear in both sexes. And that's even without going into the socialised brain (if you are rewarded more, for example, for sharing rather than being selfish, you would display sharing behaviours more, etc etc)

I note that they are literally pre judging people by appearance to have certain traits. Literally pre-judice.

Afaik the only trait that is clearly documented as heavily gendered - correlates strongly to one sex over recent history at least - is violence/ criminality.

@popebishop yes because there is a biological reason for that one!

⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️

👏👏👏👏👏

Only a man would repeatedly ask women for their opinion and then completely ignore it and refuse to take on board their intelligent and well thought out arguments then think his stupid one liners explain perfectly why he is right.

I wonder if he even notices he's doing it. It's the one big thing in this thread that really screams out that it's a man writing. So much for not having a male brain, when everything he's said and how he comes across comes from standard male socialisation brain.

I haven't quite got the energy to ask OP whether they would change their mind when presented with unequivocal evidence that personality traits both overlap and appear in both sexes.

If you had a venn diagram with male on one side and female the other, all of the personality traits would be in the intersection. But OP would be trying in vain to separate them.

The only difference between men and women is their physical sex. Everything else is environment, socialising and culture.

Dress a baby in a white babygro and no one would be able to tell it's sex until it's time for a nappy change. That's biology.

Dress a baby in a pink babygro and everyone will call the baby she. That's culture.

OP is confusing the two and thinking that the pink babygro literally turns the baby female.

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?

@zozueme this is a great question

Thank you! He actually responded to this by assuming I meant my own posts were intelligent- I think it was obvious I was referring to all the other brilliant women's rights advocates on here. AND accused me of being male in my accusation of his one liners being stupid!!!! I mean, smiling in the mirror is his answer to what he can do as a woman that he can't as a man! One of the stupidest things I've ever heard and that's why he wants to trample over our rights??? But pointing that out is male aggression. Wtf? The male entitlement is overwhelming OP.

Would you be willing to expand upon your biology, please? If I have understood you correctly, you don't have XX chromosomes but you do have ovaries, a womb etc, have I got that right? Would you be willing to share what chromosomes you do have, please?

Having clear language to be and to use around this subject is really important for clarity of the whole discussion. If you have a condition or syndrome and are willing to share the medical term for it, please do.

Obviously if you're not willing to do so, I completely respect that. It's very personal information. It will however make it harder for the rest of us to find clear language for the purposes of our discussion.

I'm unaware of any reasons why a woman would not have XX chromosomes that wouldn't be covered under the umbrella term DSD, but I'm very happy to learn.

All this “I am a woman because I feel like one” relies totally on outdated, even toxic stereotypes of womanhood, imo. I thought we had evolved past the point where pink, skirts, make up, high heels, long care, and caring nature = woman, and short hair, likes sports, wears trousers, no make up etc = man - but the TRAs and their handmaidens seem hell bent on dragging us back to the 1950s, whilst, at the same time, claiming that they are the modern, forward thinking ones. It beggars belief.

Lesbians aren't attracted to people with penises.

If a woman is attracted to such, she is not a lesbian.

Lesbians do not have penises.

Transwomen cannot be lesbians.

Etienne did not say that all lesbians find all other lesbians attractive, as well you know, so no need for the whole faux shocked schtick. (Btw, did you grasp your womanly pearls when typing that?)

Over all history - since the dawn of time, surely.

I think its more helpful to talk in terms of mental and physical sex, the mental side of it being more important to me. In the vast majority of cases female minds are found in female bodies and vice versa, but sometimes (eg in my case) there's a mismatch.

A basic sense of self-preservation.

Firstly, I don't like having an ugly body. Like most women, I would much rather be attractive.

Secondly, I don't like being regarded, and treated, like a "man" when I feel like a woman inside.

But for actual, real women, the physical side dominates our lives, in a way it simply does not for men.

I’ve outlined that several times already and you keep ignoring it. Menstruation, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, childbirth, breastfeeding, peri-menopause, menopause, being physically weaker and therefore at risk, etc, etc, etc.

Biology - what you dismiss as the ‘physical side’ dominates our daily lives.

You have no idea what it means to be a woman, and to live as a woman. You don’t have the first clue.

You think it’s dresses, hair, make-up and removing your body hair.

Do you not see how clueless you actually are? How offensive you are when you dismiss our real, lived experience with your airy-fairy, nonsense feelz?

But surely mental sex is based on toxic and outdated stereotypes of what it is to be a man or a woman, @AlphaTransWoman?

It says that women are emotional, like make up, sparkly things, long hair, pink, caring professions, are weaker, with lower self esteem and belief in their own abilities, whereas men are confident, strong, love sports, wear trousers, don’t like pink or make up or have long hair, and don’t naturally undertake caring roles.

Women have been fighting for decades to be free from the strictly gendered roles society has prescribed for women - they are restrictive and, as I said earlier, toxic - but trans rights activism wants to base the very essence of what it is to be a woman on these outdated stereotypes, dragging women and feminism back to the 1950s - whilst claiming to be the modern, progressive ones.

I believe it would me MUCH more progressive to have a society where people can like, wear and do whatever makes them happy whilst accepting their sexed body, not one that seeks to reduce women to make up, boobs, skirts and long hair.

A woman has female chromosomes, dna, biology, reproductive system, endocrine system - that is the basis of womanhood - and there is no medicine or surgery that can change a man’s biology into a woman’s biology.