Am I alone in wondering where the WOMEN wanting to trans are?

[loveyouradvice]

They feel so invisible....

Everywhere I look there are men who have or are transitioning to be transwomen - on magazine covers, on all women shortlists, in the media....

But where are the natal born women who are/have transitioned?

The only two I've come across are:

• one who detransitioned and wrote movingly about it, after ten years as a transman
• the american high school wrestler who is fighting to be allowed to fight in men's categories

The article really made me think. I've always viewed the women in my family (going back the 3 generations I know of) as being unappreciated and unpaid or low paid Mothers/carers/supermarket workers/factory workers. Victims of the lack of opportunity for women and the expectations that society placed on them.

I'm the first person in my family to go to University, get (more than one) degrees and have a professional job that as far as society is concerned, pushed me into being middle class. I have a brother and several male cousins that haven't done that.

And of course the men in my family had the advantage of being men and all that entails under patriarchy.

But I'm now looking at them in a different way. Yes they were advantaged by being men but they were all miners and unskilled labourers. Dangerous, dirty jobs for little pay and considered inferior by a lot of society.

Shitty jobs in awful conditions in all weathers and at all hours. My Dad's only 62 but went down the pit same as his Dad (who died young) and his Step-Dad. Even though he was really bright, there was no opportunity for college for the likes of my Dad in 1970s Yorkshire. Not an option. Wouldn't even be suggested.

We moved down south just before the miners strikes but my Dads home community was completely destroyed. My Dad and all the males on that side of my family are ill or dead through industrial related illnesses. The women lived much longer. My Grandmother is 85 (and she had a bloody hard life) but has outlived 3 husbands.

And yes, going further back the men in my family were cannon fodder in 2 world wars they didn't start or really understand.

I have genuinely always thought it was just the women that suffered under patriarchy as men were always advantaged and not subjected to the abuse women suffer and that is true - but I'd never thought of how the patriarchy really just benefits such a very small number of privileged men.

Sorry that was @Stillscreaming - Do you mean you think there is some relationship between some female teenagers with eating disorders and some trans boys?

And those men who were going out conquering, where were the women?

It's on that link you posted Italian; originally we were hunter gatherer societies we people doing different jobs but none less or more valued. The women breastfed children for far longer than today so the ones who went searching for food or trade were the men. That wasn't initially a patriarchal domination I believe.

But I think being oppressed because you are not male is exactly the same as being oppressed because you are female.

Whilst it seems like the same thing I think it results in practical differences as to how we approach correcting it, although my thoughts are pretty nascent on that. But what I'm firmly starting to believe is that we are oppressed not because of what we ARE but because of what we ARE NOT. I do think that's important, yes.

I don't think we are oppressed because of what we are not. I agree with NannyOgg in that ALL major religions contain, or even are based around, the oppression of female sexuality, because men could not until very recently be sure if a child was theirs, whereas women obviously can.
I think it's that basic. Every religion since Abraham has sought to shame, punish and destroy women for autonomous sexual behaviour. So I think we are oppressed because of what we have, and it's something men always seek to control.
As for innate differences beween the sexes in the animal Kingdom and humans; of course men and women are different. While there are actually more similarities between us than there are differences (although it seems to be in someone's interests to always focus on the differences in such studies) there are differences in behaviour, I think, that are not just to do with socialisation. The trouble is that different hasn't usually meant equal, and certain groups have a vested interest in portraying women as inherently defective.

Rat "But what I'm firmly starting to believe is that we are oppressed not because of what we ARE but because of what we ARE NOT. I do think that's important, yes."

How?

The benefit for men in controlling women is controlling access to women for sex, controlling whose baby pops out of the woman's vagina, the partners/husband's etc, and making sure that the man has good standing in his community.

He may have one wife or twenty, but she had better not be sleeping with anyone else. If she does he might be emotionally hurt, he might be undermined, he may end up raising and paying for a child who is not his, his whole inheritance may be given away to someone who is not his kin.

This is all about what we have (female reproductive organs) it's not about what we don't have.

Before people settled down and started farming, I think (and I have heard this elsewhere so it is not just me), that people hunted animals and people picked berries, and people dug up roots.

What would be the point of the men chasing an animal for 50 miles only to kill it and say "Kids, wife, dinner is ready, oh hang on they are back at the rock fifty miles away."

I am not so sure that early humans had such well defined roles as one person (with a vagina) picks berries and one person (with a penis) kills an animal. I am sure that came in, with time, but early people I think not.

So our oppression, for another's benefit is absolutely about what we have got. What we have got which is worth controlling. The people that colonized other lands did not go there because of what the other people did not have.

However, men do appear to have taken it all a step further, innovative lot , and seek to oppress, or police, how other men act, and then yes, they do appear to oppress other men who do not fit their own high standard macho-ness of what being a man is about.

Poor people, people of colour, people of different religions etc all do get oppressed by others. Yet even in these oppressed groups it does seem women and girls are also singled out for additional oppression from within their own group by their own people's.

Sometimes this oppression is done by women, FGM, foot-binding etc but yet it still serves a purpose for men. FGM survivors will be unlikely to seek sex outside the home, women with bound feet cannot run away.

I really cannot see how any of this is about what we do not have, it is what we have which is valuable and because we do not have a sticker on our head saying 'fertile'/'infertile' then I think women are all lumped in together.

Nowadays some men would run a mile rather than have kids but the pattern of oppression for some is so established it does seem far removed from our fertility. Yet 'domestic' violence and abuse and control often begins when a women gets pregnant.

If these do not seem quite good reasons for young women to want to identify out of being female, especially if they are lesbian or are not keen to get married or have kids or whatever, I am not sure what is.

However, we need the young to fight this and change things for the better for all people.

Phew sorry that is long, I must go and do some stuff. Fortunately not the washing up - hubby is doing that. Remember it's not all men who are mean and nasty!

From that article: [men] are also overwhelmingly responsible for the dangerous, exhausting, and unpleasant physical work that confers little money and less status

The source she uses to support this statement is only concerned with work that happens in 'the workplace'. This seems incredibly short sighted for an evolutionary biologist. In human evolutionary terms, 'the workplace' as a distinct space is a tiny blip.

More than two women a week are killed in the UK by current or ex-partners but they don't count because their work in the home is not done in 'the workplace'. They don't have an occupational health department and they and their partners are not subject to H&S law.

Similarly, prostitutes (or 'sex-workers' if you absolutely must) are not included in this analysis. In fact the author of the article categorises women's work in this area quite differently: Males are slightly more promiscuously inclined on average, which results in a demand/supply imbalance that is commonly corrected through material exchange.

Being treated as property is bad for women, but at least they are generally a valued resource in patriarchal societies

Yeah us and the rest of the livestock. What is our fucking problem?

low-status men have it worse.

Do they fuck. They have it worse than women with a PhD, like this author. They don't have it worse than their own wives and partners. They don't have it worse than the countless women chewed up and spat out or killed by men of all status in the sex industry while correcting the sexual demand/supply imbalance through material exchange.

Disingenuous BS. Suzanne Sadedin 'likes to think' she's a feminist but she isn't. Who gives a shit though really? We can all self-ID as anything we want these days and it's not as if women need a political movement to fight for our rights.

Good post italian

I put this on another thread but in terms of evolutionary anthropology the theory is that the change to being bipedal, rather than on all fours, is what necessitated pair bonding and more permanent mating. Simply because it is possible to defend against predators and carry an infant in all fours, infants cling on. But not when upright and in two legs, carrying the infant means you can’t carry a weapon. Therefore you need a permanent mate to help defend you.

And he’s only going to do that if it’s his kid. All those primitive biological urges to pass on your DNA and stuff.

Sorry Italian, I think you've got it arse about face. But that's okay. And Nanny that theory about bipedal females not having a spare hand for a weapon, well that would be all well and good if humans went around in pairs, except we don't and never have. We've long, long been a social animal living in communities. There is no evidence anywhere that we ever ever lived as individual family units outside of a community. So unlikely that the children within that group were only protected by their individual parents. But anyway, we're so off into theory now it's untrue.

Nah, I blame the neolithic. 10,000 odd years ago we discovered farming which is basically breeding animals and plants so we don't have to hunt or gather them any more. It's inconcievable that this discovery wasn't in some way tied up with the discovery of human fatherhood.

'Patriarchy' - it's right there in the name, it literally means rule by fathers.

It is absolutely a system that has grown out of men's desire to control women's fertility and sexuality. We literally carry their genes into the next generation. And we're smaller and weaker. What's not to oppress?

We were always tribal ‘society’ though? I’m not so sure we would have been bothered by who fathered who as long as you reproduced until much much later when we developed other value systems. I chose to believe that it wasn’t inevitable that we developed into a patriarchy, although because women essentially had to spend more time sitting down I can now see that it was more likely. It’s sort of like natural selection, there will be outcomes that are more likely because of environmental factors but a lot of random possibilities too.

Nah, I blame the neolithic. 10,000 odd years ago we discovered farming which is basically breeding animals and plants so we don't have to hunt or gather them any more. It's inconcievable that this discovery wasn't in some way tied up with the discovery of human fatherhood.

That's a massive extrapolation, we don't know what Neoliths thought about parenthood but we do know about the Australian Aboriginal 'spirit child' conception beliefs, which didn't link sex and reproduction. The concept of fatherhood could be much more recent.

Despite the 'spirit child' beliefs, Aboriginal society wasn't any less patriarchal.

Do Wicca and Paganism oppress women? Genuinely interested, I don't know. I think the fact that modern day religions are all patriarchal is no surprise; a matriarchal or egalitarian religion wouldn't have half as many takers as a patriarchal one in a burgeoning patriarchy. And remember, history remembers the victors.

I don't think this was inevitable however. I think there were probably millions of different opportunities for things to go a different way... or perhaps just to delay the inevitable, who knows. I'm no historian - not at all - but I have harboured a lifelong interest in the story of Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni, the Romano-British tribe:

The Iceni were independent allies of Rome, but when the King died leaving the land to his two daughters and the Roman King in thirds, the Romans saw no reason not to take the lot - now no man was on the scene. Boudicca objected, and was flogged and her two daughters raped. This was not how things were done in Britain! Women were of high status, the Iceni and her allies were outraged for their Queen, the Romans had massively misjudged the importance and status of British women in disrespecting them so. Boudicca led a huge revolt, destroying three cities and killing 80,000 Romans. She nearly won. She poisoned herself after her final defeat.

One can only assume her having daughters indicates a working reproductive system. Clearly the patriarchy Romans thought she was "owned" by her husband, perhaps because of it; no idea why the Britons didn't though.

FYI I'm not saying there was no patriarchy in Britain at that time, just that it's one of those times when patriarchal super-alpha-male dominance won out. Perhaps the "top of the tree" in today's terms might have been a little different had a great many little things gone the other way.

Clearly the patriarchy Romans thought she was "owned" by her husband, perhaps because of it; no idea why the Britons didn't though.

The Acient Romans would have perceived her as being owned by her father, they didn't do that passing on of ownership of women at marriage but her children would have belonged to her husband.

Oh interesting! I really should stick to my specialist subjects but I just can't help the occasional stream of consciousness.

I know several. MN is a transphobic sewage farm, don't ask here.

We've just had a more or less civilised thread, @entropynow , there is probably only a willy in a bathroom on every third page. I'm taking it as a massive improvement, if not a total win.

Sewage farm?? Lovely.
Anyway.
Interesting theories to ponder as I go to bed.

I think it was the excess that farming produced, suddenly there was something to control and that led to other controls.

@RatRolyPoly "Sorry Italian, I think you've got it arse about face."

Because...? Honestly, look at it logically, all the people who are oppressed in a certain way have certain features, why would you feel those features were not relevant? How could those natural features be as a result of that oppression? How can this be arse about face? It doesn't matter if we disagree but I can't see what you think is the reason. Women are oppressed because they are not the same as men but not for the thing that makes them different? How so?

Love it when people bomb in, don't look at what we are saying, shout a bit and bomb off byeee...

" I'm taking it as a massive improvement, if not a total win." Good news. It is important to realise that when we engage we do actually learn things, we can change some views, expand our horizons. I would love to have my horizons expanded. I really don't just want to bang on about my own thing! I think learning about things is one of the real strengths of mumsnet.

There MUST be a few human matriarchal societies remaining though? Does anyone know?

I don’t think anyone’s under any delusions that womens bodies aren’t repressed. But if your laying the blame purely with biology it’s problematic because biology is responsible for our bsse drives. It rules what we do to survive. Find food, reproduce, nurture young. So since most societies have evolved to be patriarchal (although I’m sure the argument falls down because we know that humans probably haven’t always been) So it would follow that there’s actually a very valid reason that the female has ended up being in this position, as humans have survived pretty damn well. That would be a rather depressing way to look at the world.

*should read base drives

I am aware of some where women are seen as powerful and important, not sure how much political power this results in, but I have a vague memory of this power being linked to motherhood.

So, I say, again, tell me something that women suffer from and campaign about that is NOT linked to their biology and biological oppression by the patriarchy.

Nannyoggs I feel you’re being obtuse now. Patriarchy eveloved to repress women bodies bacuse of their biology. And for some other reasons too. NO ONE has disagreed with this. Answer me this. Was it a biological inevitability that the human race would develop into a patriarchal society? Does it help our survival, as we’ve survived pretty well? If the answers to these is yes, the why the hell would we even try to rally against the idea of a patriarchy? Because humans have evolved to be more empathetic over the years? Yea right.