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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

If you don’t see the issue with TW being classed as women please read this.

423 replies

bambambini · 13/02/2018 00:09

Especially if you have daughters who play sports. Do we really want to have “woman” “girl” “female” totally redifined so that sny msle can say they are a woman? If yes- are you really ok with your daughters facing this now and in the future?

amp.theage.com.au/sport/afl/hannah-mouncey-visits-afl-house-after-failing-to-get-information-from-officials-20180202-h0swtp.html?__twitter_impression=true

OP posts:
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12
charlestonchaplin · 13/02/2018 08:58

JacquesHammer
It is a danger to women to allow me to play rugby

I don't understand this statement in the context of the rest of your post.

ItsAllGoingToBeFine · 13/02/2018 09:02

our world is split by biological sex. That separatism has historically damaged women far more than men, and i refuse to be complicit in continuing it

So do the (at least two posters who believe this) really believe that there should be no sex segregation under any circumstances?

Andrewofgg · 13/02/2018 09:02

Of course it is very sad for some individuals that there may be no team where they can play their chosen sport but if there are not enough trans women in the area who want to play rugby or whatever, it is JTB, isn't it?

JacquesHammer · 13/02/2018 09:03

@CharlestonChaplin.

Typo. Should say “men” not “me”

JellySlice · 13/02/2018 09:05

Allowing TIMs to play rugby on a female team is comparable to allowing me to eat peanuts while sitting between my nut-allergic colleagues.

AngryAttackKittens · 13/02/2018 09:06

Our species is split by biological sex because we are fucking mammals. We can and should change the societal bullshit built on top of the sex difference, but the fact that we are a sexually dimorphic mammalian species is not going away, not even if you let your daughter get her neck broken playing rugby with boys far stronger than she is.

RadioGaGoo · 13/02/2018 09:10

Malificant 7, interested to know what you think is 'trans fear?'

sallyarmy1 · 13/02/2018 09:11

What is a 'cis' woman?

Off to google.....

Agerbilatemycardigan · 13/02/2018 09:12

It's not trans fear, it's man fear.

charlestonchaplin · 13/02/2018 09:13

I should have thought of that!

JacquesHammer · 13/02/2018 09:16

@Andrewofgg absolutely. And women have been dealing with the “not enough players, too bad” for years. But that’s ok as it’s women.

Anniegetyourgun · 13/02/2018 09:17

I find it oddly paradoxical that radical feminist anti-trans threads always end up insisting on the weakness of women, and their inability to hold their own against men.

I was going to take issue with this as well. Someone even said upthread that women are "the second sex", the implication (if I rightly understood) being that we are lesser, rather than that we are unfairly regarded as lesser. Women are not weaker overall; we have different strengths. However, in terms of height and musculature, which is what is under discussion on this thread, yes, women don't have so much of either. We're talking about sportspeople, ie the fittest and ablest of, for the most part, young adults so the stereotype holds pretty firmly in this context. In sports that rely on skill rather than strength, equestrianism the only example that springs to my mind, women can indeed compete on an equal basis and on rare occasions are allowed to do so. The idea of segregating sports - and setting weight categories in martial arts - is to take pure size and muscle out of the equation and let skill shine through.

As for the subject of the article in the OP, there are two separate issues which I believe are wrongly conflated. That anyone is being called a freak, told they should be put down or die of cancer (why is it always cancer?!) etc, is unacceptable and downright disgusting. No-one should be subjected to that kind of abuse.

The refusal by the governing body to allow the athlete to compete in women's sports is being presented as another example of such intolerance, but IMO it is another matter entirely. You can't simply ignore the fact that this is a very large, muscular individual who competed on an equal basis with men and is now expecting to compete on an equal basis with women. Being less strong than before the transition does not = being weak (and if it did, do we currently let men compete against women as long as they're seen to be "weak enough"? No, we don't). You can't in all fairness compensate someone for being (verbally) abused by allowing them to (physically, in this case) abuse someone else, and let's make no mistake, if this individual gets into a real rough-and-tumble match with your average woman player, someone IS going to get hurt. And it's not going to be Hannah.

IMO this is the whole problem with the trans debate (or should I say #nodebate?). On the one hand there's unthinking bigotry with which no-one decent wants to be associated. On the other there are real issues which need to be thrashed out so that no-one suffers more than necessary. (Would that all human conflict could be straightened out with love and understanding...) Don't let us allow the former to blind us to the latter.

lou1221 · 13/02/2018 09:18

There is no way that I would want myself or my daughters on the sports field with males. I'm not talking about training, but competitively. Being 5'2" it would be like a tank hitting me.

Anniegetyourgun · 13/02/2018 09:27

X-posted with loads of shorter posts saying very similar. I blame the site for failing to load the whole thread though - I didn't spend over an hour typing it!

Rufustherenegadereindeer1 · 13/02/2018 09:29

us athlete can have so little understanding of the factors that influence performance. It’s not all about height .And I feel sorry for any girl whose parents are so desperate to look cool that they are ready to throw her and her team mates under the bus.

So far this has summed it up for me

HandbagKrabby · 13/02/2018 09:34

I have a massive issue with men deciding what women feel like, telling women this is how they feel #nodebate and then getting mainly other men to enshrine this in law. At no point does a biological woman get her say and if she does says something and she disagrees with a man she’s a bigot.

Either it’s misogyny in the extreme in that nothing a woman says is worth listening or even true, or it’s the cognitive dissonance from when a woman disagrees with you but you think you think and feel like a woman so you can’t cope with the concept you might be wrong.

Whatever this person’s personal struggle to be the person they wish to be is, and best of luck to them, this struggle has no right to be played out in a women’s sport.

Rufustherenegadereindeer1 · 13/02/2018 09:36

Personally i domt believe that loads of men woukd self id for this

What i do believe is that a few would and that a few honestly gender dysphoric transwomen would also continue with their sports and that children struggling with their identity in school would also continue

And even a small amount of 'advantaged' sports transwomen would be enough to tip the balance

My boy loves football and enjoyed playing it...but he was (not very good) and much smaller and weaker than his team mates

He gave up cos whats the point if you dont even get to go on the field sometimes and everyone yells at you and no one picks you for the team. Now he is bigger and stronger and coukd hold his own but its too late

Thisusernamethingistricky · 13/02/2018 09:40

I have a massive issue with men deciding what women feel like, telling women this is how they feel #nodebate and then getting mainly other men to enshrine this in law. At no point does a biological woman get her say and if she does says something and she disagrees with a man she’s a bigot.

This. Men are whatever they say they are, and women are whatever men say they are.

Watching that video in the link in the OP, I genuinely was expected a slightly higher pitched voice or something.

Hannah Mouncey is a man, a bloke, a lad, a fella, a dude. There is literally nothing ambiguous about it. I will called her 'she' (because that has no effect on me) and obviously believe that she absolutely has the right to go about her life without being bullied, harassed or discriminated against.

But I will never believe that she is actually a 'woman' and I will never believe that she should be playing with and competing against women.

And you can't make believe it either.

Thisusernamethingistricky · 13/02/2018 09:41

That should be 'make me believe it'!

Rebeccaslicker · 13/02/2018 09:46

If you were told that Hannah mouncy was actually a parody created for tv, you'd dismiss it as being too implausible.

What the hell is going on in the world?

BiologyMatters · 13/02/2018 09:49

I stopped doing karate when i was 16 because there were a couple of grown men in the adult class in their 40s and 50s (several belts above me) who took "light contact sparring" to mean hit as hard as you like. I frequently came away absolutely covered in bruises. My manager at my part time job took me aside and asked me if i had an abusive boyfriend and did i need help. No just some great big bloke thought hitting 16 year old girls because he was "allowed" was a great laugh. They said if i couldn't take it i shouldn't go, so i stopped going, as not sparring was not an option.

They weren't trans but it makes no difference in real terms. I used to enjoy it but couldn't go anymore as i got fed up of being beaten up every week. Ironically i started going to learn self defence and build confidence.

whiskyowl · 13/02/2018 09:52

Susan - not radical enough.

Women's brains weigh less than men's brains and are smaller.

If I insist on measuring intelligence by measuring weight/size of brain, then most women will be found to be second class.

But intelligence isn't about just the weight/size of brain - it's about all kinds of other things, including density of neural networks.

If you have a measure that persistently finds women to be 'lesser' than men, maybe change the measure. Sport is largely stupid a patriarchal creation, so maybe it's time for new and more egalitarian types of sprot.

ConfusedWomanInHerForties · 13/02/2018 09:58

I am completely AGHAST, that anybody could think that it's fair for a trans-woman to compete in sports against women. It's so unfair.

A pp mentioned about men being larger etc, but even if they aren't big men, they are still stronger. When I was in the process of leaving my first husband, I also happened to be training for a new job, which involved learning how to fight and how to self defend....one day he attacked me, and despite me fighting back as hard as I could, I was no match for him....he is 5ft 7 and skinny....but I had no chance whatsoever.

I dread to think what my now DH would be like to fight....he's 6ft 3 and built like a brick shit house...I dare say he could kill me with one punch.

This makes me so scared for women going forward....they may as well just give up....

Fucking madness.

ShotsFired · 13/02/2018 10:01

As a sideways observation, I see in the news that Tesco has been blasted for having sexist portrayals of women as the "parent figure" on their trolley icons (a stickwoman with the skirt)

Tesco are changing it to a gender neutral design.

What're the odds that "gender neutral" = the typical male stickman figure?

ConfusedWomanInHerForties · 13/02/2018 10:04

I stopped doing karate when i was 16 because there were a couple of grown men in the adult class in their 40s and 50s (several belts above me) who took "light contact sparring" to mean hit as hard as you like

Exact same thing happened to me. I had to quit, because I knew it was only a matter of time before I lost a tooth or worse.

whiskyowl I just can't understand what point you are trying to make. Men are stronger physically than women. It doesn't mean that women are less valuable or less clever however, it does mean that we are physically weaker, and it would be monumentally disadvantageous for women to have to compete in sport against men, even if that man has had his penis turned inside out and shoved inside him.