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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To post on trans issues in the Feminist Chat forum?

654 replies

DadJoke · 11/07/2018 11:50

I've been posting a lot on trans issues over in feminist chat. I am keenly aware that it's primarily a women's forum, for women to discuss issues pertaining to their needs. I also know that the presence of men in women's spaces can undermine useful discussions and become "all about the men"

When I say women, I include transwomen. I know many of you don't, but that's not at all what this AIBU is about.

So, am I making a useful contribution to the debate, or undermining it?

OP posts:
Thread gallery
10
NoNotheresnolyrics · 11/07/2018 18:13

DadJoke what if they have a neo virgina?

NoNotheresnolyrics · 11/07/2018 18:14

He doesn’t want to sleep with transwoman because he doesn’t think they’re woman 😂😂😂

TellsEveryoneRealFacts · 11/07/2018 18:15

To clarify (this is getting a bit personal) I do find some transwomen attractive, but I enjoy PIV sex too much to consider them as sexual partners

To clarify, I do find some transwomen perfectly nice, but I enjoy the safety of female spaces too much to consider letting blokes with penises and mental health issues about female bodies to consider them acceptable in enclosed female spaces.

AynRandTheObjectivist · 11/07/2018 18:15

To clarify (this is getting a bit personal) I do find some transwomen attractive, but I enjoy PIV sex too much to consider them as sexual partners.

And to add: I bet anything you would have sexual contact with a woman who, for medical reasons, could not have PIV sex (say, vaginismus). You might find it frustrating but on no level would you think it was the same as sex with a transwoman.

Because you don't consider trans women to be women when it doesn't suit you. Do you really think we don't get it?

JacquesHammer · 11/07/2018 18:16

but I enjoy PIV sex too much to consider them as sexual partners

So you think women should consider trans-women to be women, but you don’t between the sheets? Gotcha.

GardenGeek · 11/07/2018 18:17

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

AynRandTheObjectivist · 11/07/2018 18:19

Would you KISS a transwoman, OP, and feel her breasts? Would you allow her to go down on you? Would you allow her to give you a hand job?

If not, why not?

GardenGeek · 11/07/2018 18:21

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

ReluctantCamper · 11/07/2018 18:23

assigned male at birth

fuck me that gives me the rage

science and reality denying bullshit

it's like these people have never heard of the 20 week scan.....

blackdoggotmytongueagain · 11/07/2018 18:23

And frankly, sweets, lots of transwomen enjoy PIV sex too much to bother with your penis - they are too busy claiming to be lesbians and getting women to service them. They don’t fancy yours much either. It’s an odd thing when a het man claims to be a lesbian, and it’s even odder when someone claiming to be a het woke bro won’t sleep with a transwomen because penis.
Hypocrite.

TellsEveryoneRealFacts · 11/07/2018 18:27

Dadjoke: 'Dear mummy, what was it exactly that made you and the midwife assign me male at birth? Was it the knowledge that I would in future mansplain feminism to feminists and hold totally hypocritcal views whilst also putting women and girls into harms way? Or was it my penis? Do tell, I really would love to know. Thank you mummy'

Mummy: Don't be a twat all your life love.

Rebooting · 11/07/2018 18:28

I suspect Dad is enjoying this thoroughly.

He isn’t listening and he thinks he’s got the wimmz whipped with his amazeballs thinks.

TransplantsArePlants · 11/07/2018 18:28

Thank you for starting this thread DadJoke. It's been really enlightening

Prestonsflowers · 11/07/2018 18:30

dadjoke

In amongst all your waffle and contradictory posts you mentioned that you had seen a post where someone suggested that gender dysphoria is a mental illness.

It was the op who posted a very articulate and measured opening post on their own thread.

I read your comments and I thought then that you were incredibly rude, dismissive, and insulting.

After reading your posts here, I think I was right

I also think that you are very disingenuous and mendacious

IMO you are a typical example of a MAN who knows best and all of us dumb and stupid women were just waiting for you to mansplain to us.
So go and mansplain to women who are interested because I’m not

Bowlofbabelfish · 11/07/2018 18:31

It's not a belief, it's an innate sense

An innate sense is a belief.

An innate sense cannot be measured, or quantified. It cannot be seen, smelt, heard, touched or interacted with by any measuring instrument other than whatever the nebulous thing we call our consciousness is.

Your position is faith based, and roughly akin to a belief in souls. Lots of people believe in souls and if you do thats fine - religious belief is one of the protected categories under the EA after all.

Along with sex. which is objective and quantifiable.

ReluctantCamper · 11/07/2018 18:31

sonographer

ooh, I think we're going to assign this one male

if you look at this part of the gender identity here you can just make out an enlarged sense of entitlement

RabbitsAreTasty · 11/07/2018 18:33

I was pleased to read upthread that you came to the feminist board seeking some education. Wonderful. Many of us did the same. There are thousands of women whose thinking has changed as a result of discussions here. There was a thread about that the other day.

What do you feel the feminist boards have taught you? Which of your opinions have been overturned or modified as a result of observing discussions between women?

DN4GeekinDerby · 11/07/2018 18:33

Bit long but so many thing. DadJoke The technical word for your 'like' is probably gynephillic though a female on synthetic testosterone, even without surgery (of any identity - not every dysphoric female on T identifies as trans man or even as trans), does often have changes to the vulva that not every gynephillic person likes - smell, texture, size, and so on. I personally don't mind but I know others who find the changes offputting. Neovaginas/vulvas are an entirely different thing particularly on a male (some females with certain DSDs have them as well).

Even saying you 'like vulva' can be turned complicated but for 95%+ people just saying you're a straight man will be far more understandable without your defining people you're attracted to by their genitals when there are dozens of other sex characteristics that play quite a big role in human attraction before getting seeing genitals. That's why most of us can tell who we're attracted to with their clothes on and using hormones.

Also, as a dysphoric person, let me say how much I hate when people think calling me a person with a vulva is somehow better for us. I mean, seriously, it's dehumanizing in any case but using it for people who are distressed by our sexed characteristics seems a particular asshole move. Like, great, thanks for seeing and defining me by one of things about myself I often hate and try to ignore. I'd far rather just be called female if my sex is relevant. Female and male have a meaning for millions of species of animals and plants, they can keep working for humans. There are times I don't like and even despise people can see it, but that doesn't change that anymore than my hating that people being able to hear I have an American accent changes my nationality or how I talk.

Trans issues are not intrinsically a feminist issue. Even under intersectionality, not everything can be shoehorned in. Feminism, in the dozens of branches which disagree on many of the details and solutions, is about focusing and resolving the issues of those who are female regardless of their gender identity. Trans women and other dysphoric males have many important issues to deal with, but they aren't feminist issues. They're trans/dysphoria issues which deserve attention in their own right. Some people focus on one or the other or on other things. Few people can focus on everything. This idea that we can make every issue a feminist issue and push feminists to deal and talk on it is unhelpful, I think.

Now, some trans issues are also feminist issues. The issue with the sharp rise of female kids being referred to gender clinics, the damage encouraging binders is having on female bodies, the lack of research of testosterone on the female body, the issue with trans men who register at their doctor's as male not getting appropriate invited to appropriate cancer screenings because the computers don't yet have space for both sex and gender identity, questioning how do we work with violence stats if we register them by gender identity and not sex... Some people think that's silly but I was discussing female-perpetrated rape recently, something I am a survivor of, and I was asked if my stats included trans women. I can't answer that because I don't collect data but governments and organizations don't usually collect both gender identity and sex information so it's possible. It's hard enough to get people to take female rapists seriously (see what happened with the recent machete rapist case, so many people still saying "you can't rape the willing" when she had a machete) without now having this as another barrier (and I'm using this both because it's personally important to me and because it's one of the few I can think of where trans people are visibly falsely blamed by the public in a way I can give evidence of).

If you post unrelated stuff there to 'debate'/rile up people, YABU. That's what AIBU and chat and other places are for. Find something relevant, there are plenty of them that are reasonable for that section.

And really, most of us can treat people as individuals and treat trans and other dysphoric people respectfully and want at the class/public/medical/legal level want female/male/lesbian/gay to have specific meanings so we can use the words to communicate - that's their purpose. If we use 'includes everyone who wants to' definitions, it mucks things up. That's why I tend to use dysphoric rather than trans most of the time since Stonewall UK decided crossdressers and similar were under the trans umbrella, I want to be clear I'm referring to people with gender dysphoria regardless of how we identify as to cope with it (also, not all types of gender dysphoria are innate. There are decades of research on the connection between PTSD and gender dysphoria, many of us diagnosed pre '00 (when dysphoria because it's own diagnosis rather than a symptom of several things) ended up with a PTSD diagnosis. I'm one of them. I may have a genetic predisposition, but I was not born dysphoric and as, by the US largest survey, there is strong evidence that most trans-identified people are survivors of child abuse with a horrifying 50% surviving child sex abuse, so ignoring the role trauma plays in this is to ignore an essential medical need to consider for our communities. Acknowledging that some/many/all of us aren't born this way doesn't make any part of it less valid. We can accept some people are trans even knowing all that).

TransplantsArePlants · 11/07/2018 18:33

innate sense/ belief

potato/potAHto

ReluctantCamper · 11/07/2018 18:34

sonographer I'm going to assign your baby female - congratulations! this sparkly area of the gender identity indicates a vocation for cleaning toilets and a propensity to accept being told what to think

Nappa · 11/07/2018 18:37

As someone who had a man stare at me through the gap whilst I was on the toilet in a hotel bathroom, in the womans toilets! I feel compelled to tell you that you don’t know anything. You are outting woman in harms way, women whos biology makes us generally smaller and weaker.

Yeah sure, I wasn’t hurt but my privacy was violated and I was too scared to come out until someone else thankfully came in to the toilets and he went away. I don’t know if he was a trans or whatever, all I knew was that a man was standing outside the door making eye contact with me when I was having a piss.

That frightened me, I didn’t care about all lf the trans stuff before but I will oppose it at every opportunity now!

DickTERFin · 11/07/2018 18:39

Well, what new things have we learned from this thread then?

Transwomen are women except when straight men don’t want to bang them.

Some Men like to tell women what to think, talk and act.

The kind of men who like to do that tend to be attention seeking dingbats and make pointless threads in a bid to get some women, any woman, to fawn over their “dazzling intellect”.

Dadjoke is a transphobe.

So... a big fat nothing then.

TransplantsArePlants · 11/07/2018 18:40

Dick

Au contraire: many have done their best work on this thread, and it's reached a wider audience than on FWR.

ReluctantCamper · 11/07/2018 18:41

It's been fun though dick

a lot of smart funny women got to be smart and funny on the internet

I enjoyed reading it

just shows you can make a silk purse from a hogs nutsack

NoNotheresnolyrics · 11/07/2018 18:42

Nappa my friend was using a ‘gender neutral’ toilet a couple of months ago and a person started kicking the door in whilst she was trying to take a piss (thought my mate was someone else). The person was big and strong and my friend was terrified.