WIBU to ask MNers who think Trans Women are 'Chicks With Dicks' to ...

[KKCupCakes]

Take a look at this article about supporting families of Transgender people by the Gires.org.uk Website to see why that view is so utterly incorrect and harmful?
www.gires.org.uk/assets/supporting-families.pdf

OP - Does your wife (who you said is a transwoman today on another thread) still have a penis?

Noodle - everything you have said is brilliant and right. I have had some half-formed thoughts along those lines but you've expressed it so clearly. Thank you.

I hate the way trans women are discussed here. It's cruel and spiteful. You're generalising about a whole group of people. It's so much more complex than you understand.

I wanted to add a dissenting voice and say that, in my life, I'm happy to recognise trans women as women.

They weren't raised as girls which makes a difference to the messages they've received and I agree that rigid, binary genders expectations are destructive and that ideally people should be able to express their gender as they wish. But that's not (yet?) how things are and trans people are trying to be true to what they feel. Non-binary identities seem to be increasing which some see as an attempt to reject the social construct of gender.

So, if any trans women are reading this, I hope you know that the spite and disgust isn't felt by everyone.

I don't feel spite and disgust at all Moosey. But I'm not going to just drink the Kool-Aid and blindly accept something just because it seems like I should.

I'm a liberal and have always spoken up for and believed in GLB rights and for a long time I felt the same way about transpeople.

I don't anymore.

I don't believe trans people should be subjected to violence or abuse or harassment, nor should anyone. I support their right to live how they want to live.

But. I believe people are born male or female or in rare cases intersex, and that's that. But I don't think it means anything really, other than one has a penis and one has a vagina.

You can have a penis and want to wear dresses and makeup and marry another person with a penis. That doesn't make you a woman. It makes you a man who likes dresses and make up, and so fucking what? That's fine.

I can't begin to tell you how bored I am with threads about transgender issues. Anyone would think we are all meeting them on every street corner daily, the way we all carry on at the moment.

Could some of this be put down to:

When someone transitions FTM, they are used to not being automatically listened to, they are used to having to work/adapt to be socially accepted/feel secure. And as a man, they sometimes find a new and higher automatic social status in being a man. Simply because some of all that privilege that goes with being a man is transferred to them.

But when someone transitions MTF, they are shocked/surprised by how much as women they are sidelined, not listened too, how they have to adapt and work to be heard/accepted/accorded any respect or how they just are never accorded that respect. and this is a total shock to them. Because, before transition, they thought that women were treated well/more favourably/better than women actually are treated. And when they transition, they find a whole load of crap to deal with that they didn't think was there.

And the MTF think the crap is about being trans, but actually a lot of it is about being a woman. And because they aren't used to being treated like that, aren't conditioned to it, brought up with it, inured to it, they react very strongly. But they don't react in the way women are conditioned into reacting to bad treatment. Women are brought up to smile sweetly, not fight back, be nice, don't make a fuss- if you really have to do something, find a male champion or form a large coalition of similar minded women, preferably some older/with high social or financial status.

They just react to bad treatment in a way that men are brought up to react to bad treatment- be vocal, don't accept it, don't back down, do something about it, express outrage, express indignation, keep going until there is change. and, unfortunately, that ire, at the moment, is being direct at women, because due to how women are conditioned to react to conflict/criticism, they are getting further with that than by turning that ire on men. And unfortunately, that is just rubbing women's faces in the shit that they already know. And it also comes across as jockeying for position in the social hierarchy.

So I think a lot of this highlights just how poorly women are treated and just how little men notice that, and how men react when treated like women (i.e. they don't like it).

I think there is a way out of this, but it's not by one oppressed section of society turning on another oppressed section of society.

Leave, you could try not reading them. The clue is usually in the title.

Sayno, that's an interesting take. But I take issue with being accused of turning on transpeople.

Not accepting that an operation to remove your sex organs, hormone replacement etc can change your sex isn't feminists turning on anyone.

We can have that opinion and still feel exactly like Cheerfylyank explained in her 4th para a few posts back.

I am a liberal but my limit is reached when I find myself described as a cis woman.

I agree 100% with BubsandMoo and many others here.

Once again it's all about the menz. I want to hear what transwomen feel about earning 67% of what men earn. That is the only female experience that really matters. If they can change that then I'll happily call them sista.

Until then what I am seeing and hearing is physical caricatures based on surface level attributes, a combination of generic 'feminine attributes' -- generalisation taking physical form and appearing allover the news and all over magazines ad nauseum. Because being a woman is all about appearance apparently.

Meanwhile women are getting acid thrown on their faces and girls are suffering FGM, or being kept out of school because they don't have sanpro or toilets or because the thought of a woman with a book and the ability to read it is too much for the men in many societies to handle.

I would love to see pressing problems for women receive the attention this non-problem gets.

Yessssss math.

mooseymouse I'm 100% with you. I'm happy to recognise trans women as women - several of my really good friends are trans, and the trans women are just as female as the ones born with vaginas.

They are also all individuals, not stereotypical caricatures or extreme types. Some are open and out there and wacky and talk about their penises because being open and making light is how they cope with really traumatic stuff - I know that feeling, I made some pretty offensive jokes when coping with my miscarriage. Some were born somewhere in between the two genders, with genitals that don't match their chromosomes, or unusual chromosomes. Some fit the stereotype of the "good tranny" and just want to have the surgery, pass as cis women, and have a quiet middle class life. Some of the women born with vaginas I know also have confusing chromosomes, or make offensive jokes about sex, or can never bear children, or are sexually attracted to other women.

I honestly don't see what anyone gains by trying to shut people out of their club of "real women" other than a false sense of power. The lines between the genders and physical sexes are blurry as all hell and if someone says that they belong on the female side I reckon that they probably know better than me, and the only decent and kind thing to do is to believe them.

Being a woman is about your chromosomes, not about your secondary sexual characteristics or your anatomy, or what your body can do with that anatomy, or what your body wants to do with that anatomy or with whom.

You go a long way towards saying exactly that when you state that many women can never bear children, can be sexually attracted to other women, etc. but you veer away from the issue of chromosomes and turn it all into a matter of subjective feelings.

Making jokes or however else you cope with stress or other emotions is irrelevant.

It's not about whether you feel you are a woman. You couldn't possibly feel you are a woman any more than I could feel I was black. I have no idea how it feels to even be my own sister, and we share the same parents and the same genes.

What is gained from asserting that there is such a thing as real women with female chromosomes and other people who do not have female chromosomes is a grip on the truth and on reality.

Bullshit. For starters, chromosomes don't just come in two arrangements. Some people are xxy, or xyy, or have only a single x chromosome. And then there are people with hormonal differences, a person with androgen insensitivity may have male chromosomes but be born with a vagina and develop as a woman. It's not a simple binary, and it's not simple. You are not an expert on biological sex and gender.

But more importantly, it's none of your damn business to police, and it costs you nothing to just accept people. Why be unkind to people when it costs you nothing at all to be kind? It's just the classic case of a group that's been shat on by society (women) being delighted to find someone who they can exclude like they've been excluded. It's a shitty way to behave.

I've seen the phrase 'chicks with dicks' a few times on MN and every time it's been in the same context as this. IE a false accusation thrown at people who disagree.

Sex is usually binary. Thats not to say there arent unusual exceptions, and actually intersex was already mentioned. But it is a rare anomaly.

Someone missing a leg doesnt make humans as a species any less bipedal.

"trans women are just as female as the ones born with vaginas."

Look up the word 'female' in any dictionary to understand why that is not true.

"For starters, chromosomes don't just come in two arrangements. Some people are xxy, or xyy, or have only a single x chromosome."

Those are chromosomal disorders. Some people are born without feet or with just one leg. Does that mean to you that the human race is not bipedal?

Pfft, transphobic bloody dictionaries...

Haha cote

I know. Why can't dictionaries be kind, I ask you

I think it's sad that some trans activists are really alienating feminists (women who could help further the trans cause but won't if they feel their needs are threatened)

But I agree with everything other posters have said and that some trans are going too far and encroaching on womens rights in some warped attempt to make things equal or fair.

sian this has NOTHING to do with being kind. I am completely kind and accepting of anybody's choice of self-expression.
What I'm not prepared to do is let that self-expression override my rights as woman.
I'm not being shitty at all. I have a friend who now lives as a woman. The reality is that they may feel like a woman, or whatever their idea of feeling like a woman is, but I wouldn't be comfortable for instance sharing a changing cubicle with them in the way that I would with woman friends.

RollerGirl why do you think that it should be women furthering the trans cause? We've still got quite a lot of our own fight left to fight. Why don't trans people fight for the trans cause?

The problem to me is the self identification part. I have every sympathy with a person who undergoes counselling, hormone treatment and surgery in an attempt to be as close to their identified gender as possible and then gets on with their lives. I do have a problem with a man who claims he is a woman, and has the right to wander into womens locker rooms, gyms and refuges with his intact functioning penis just on his say so. That is the way things are going in America and I can see it happening here.

"trans women are just as female as the ones born with vaginas"

That's simply not true. Trans women are male. They may be as feminine as women you know, but they are not female.

I'm gender critical but not trans phobic at all. I support people's rights to self define if it makes them happy but I also support people's rights to question trans theory and orthodoxy and challenge false statements like the above. I'd never use a phrase like the one in the OP so fuck off with that, but I also won't accept the article you linked to as having much basis in fact.

Agree with Worra too. I'm actually surprised by the attitudes of some posters on this forum but then I forget that people have different opinions. I haven't read much transgender FtoM being discussed in the same way. It's a shame, I thought people were becoming were more open minded and accepting.