To find this unreasonable and offensive to women or is it just me?

[Toorahtoorahaye]

Saw this on twitter and this rhetoric seems to be spreading. So is it just me or are others concerned with this? How does this help women and girls, especially with the turn this has taken in the US recently.

Certain people in China get aborted, killed at birth, dumped in the streets and fields. I’ve no idea why this is happening to some people.

Isn’t the whole point of being a trans woman that you are a woman after you’ve transitioned? It flies in the face of every fact to say that pregnancy related issues affect anyone except natal women. This is getting more like Wonderland every day.

Getting back to the actual topic - women have to be centred in this, if the word 'people' is used instead it allows the misogynists who are steadfastly trying to remove reproductive rights to claim it isn't an attack on women at all. It will be a law that affects people in general so no misogyny involved. Using the word 'women' means we can focus on what is really happening.

That’s basically what I was gonna say but you’ve put it much better than I could have!

Isn’t the whole point of being a trans woman that you are a woman after you’ve transitioned? It flies in the face of every fact to say that pregnancy related issues affect anyone except natal women. This is getting more like Wonderland every day.

The claim is that this is about FTM trans people, but it's actually a concerted push by transactivists to break the link between "woman" and female biology. We have to push back for the reasons mentioned.

Yes, and that post says nothing about reproductive rights for women not being discussed. It asks people to recognise that others get pregnant to and to not exclude them by using language that assumes ONLY women are affected.

Who are these other people? As far as I'm aware only women can get pregnant or am I missing something?

Either way you are so mired in the debate that you are coming over as completely batshit.

Transactivists aka men's rights activists. They actually do nothing to help transpeople, they just make them look ridiculous.

Only women have the physical sex organs to become pregnant so only women need access to abortions. Using the term 'women' or female pronouns in relation to abortion access is perfectly normal and not in the least transphobic.

You can only change socially constructed gender. You cannot change your sex.

If a person who has been born a woman wants to identify as a male then that is fine. However, although that person can become pregnant, they only do so because they have female sex organs,. They are therefore a woman, irrespective of whatever they wish to be called or how they see themselves.

Transgender people need to just accept you cannot change sex. Dictating how they should be referred is purely political correctness and doesn't necessarily mean others regard them as such. It may mean we are all polite in doing so but don't ever regard them as anything other than their birth sex.

The term 'Cis women' is ridiculous. The correct term is just 'women'. The young can be indoctrinated into being cool enough to use such terms but, when it comes down to it, there are still only men and women in the world and it will always be determined by the sex organs you are born with.

Transgender people need to accept that non-transgender people are not the ones who need to change the terms used about themselves. If there is a case for anything other than men and women, then it is for transgender people to have a separate sub-term of men and women to describe their sex. It is not for the majority who are non-transgender to change their descriptive terms or sex-indicating pronouns.

Saskia. You are 100% right.

Intersectionality is the problem here.

It supports the eradication of the concept of womanhood as righteous. It supports the legitimate declaration that you have a grievance with someone based on their sex, sexual orientation, choice of partners, skin colour, you name it. It supports throwing a lot of work for the rights of the oppressed in the bin in favour of just doing the same shit in another direction.

It is a subversion of feminism and progressive ideals that turns everything into the opposite of what it strives to be, and I wish more of us would identify that and publicly reject it. Certainly feminism NEEDs to or face obliteration.

" It does rather seem like you are deliberately missing the point to keep things going in circles. I'll ask my question again to see if we can get somewhere on understanding each other:

do you really think a pregnant transman is male?"

Well I personally use male and female to denote biological sex not gender, so my own answer would be no. But they are men.

You of course will say they are neither male or men.

And that is all well and good, but we and everyone else will agree that they are people. That is why people is more inclusive.,

As for those who are worried that using "people" not "women" risks losing them the rhetorical advantage of being able to ad hominem the people who argue pro-life positions
by calling them misogynist well that doesn't follow.

It would still be the case that the vast, vast majority of people affected will be women and so you can still happily ad hom them on that front.

I mean some people still manage to call those anti-circumsition anti-semitic despite the fact that it is not only Jews that practise it. You can always ad hom positions.

Transgender people need to just accept you cannot change sex. Dictating how they should be referred is purely political correctness and doesn't necessarily mean others regard them as such. It may mean we are all polite in doing so but don't ever regard them as anything other than their birth sex.

This is the heart of the matter. It's all nonsense to pander to people's internal perception of themselves. Everyone knows what a woman is. Really they do.

To be perfectly honest I am tired of having every thread about these topics come back with the idea about how bad transpeople have it, therefore it is perfectly acceptable to force women to abandon even the description of our sex in favour of what transpeople say it is.

Every single time I click on the news there is a new story of a clearly identifiable member of a first group being raped and murdered by a clearly-identifiable member of a second group, or treated to some other kind of violence. Every. single. time. There are increasing numbers of excuses about why the second group just can't help but commit this violence - sex games gone wrong is the latest.

Guess what, the members of the first group are not trans. They are women and girls. The second are men. Let's stop all this shit. We are under attack.

Once again (for the lurkers), this is an issue which affects women. Anyone who seeks to reduce or remove women's reproductive rights is a misogynist.

JAPAB you're still not answering my question. How can a male be pregnant?

Where does the foetus gestate? In a box?

JAPAB is taking the individualist postmodern line that language is whatever the person using it wants it to mean.

Here's an example of why that doesn't work.

A pomo dictionary:

Cat

1. Felis catus
2. A "dog" which uses a flap in the door
3. A "rabbit" which uses a litter tray

"I'm allergic to dog hair. Oh that's ok, I don't have a dog. I have a cat."

Intersectionality is the problem here.

No it's not, justarandomtricycle. Intersectionality is an important feminist concept. But the intersections are axes of oppression - things like race, class, disability - recognizing that, for example, black women are doubly oppressed and disadvantaged. Sex is not included because feminism is for the liberation of women.

Intersectionality is not about including/centring men in feminism. Demands that feminisms have to work for men are nothing more than outrageous male entitlement.

I would argue that perhaps if its going to get this silly, the term 'assigned female at birth' or 'those with female biology' might be better... its inclusive of Women and Transmen.

Yes, intersectionality has been hijacked and distorted so that it now means that women are privileged and should never discuss, campaign or protest any issue which exclusively affects women.

I would argue that perhaps if its going to get this silly, the term 'assigned female at birth' or 'those with female biology' might be better... its inclusive of Women and Transmen.

No, it's okay, women works just fine. It's shorter, and everyone knows what it means.

Woman just means an adult human female.

X post!

Thnk about it 'assigned female at birth rights' just doesn't have the same ring. And imagine trying to fit on a placard.

Really "transgender women" should refer to FTM trans people. And there are many people, unfamiliar with the nuances of this debate, who think it does. And the same for MTF people.

Wouldn't it be confusing if we all started using it that way?

Yes, intersectionality has been hijacked and distorted so that it now means that women are privileged and should never discuss, campaign or protest any issue which exclusively affects women.

It's easy to hijack because it is fundamentally flawed cognitive dissonance in the extreme, and feminism will continue to face issues like this until either there is a schism, or feminism dies as an idea, which it is already doing for some people.

I think unpicking decades of this disease from the ideology may be biting off too much, but not doing so will cause problems. If not this one, the next one, or the next one. This is what happens when you incorporate a dangerous fallacy into an ideology, the same thing has happened with others.

I hold little hope of the schism that is needed actually properly happening, and so post-feminism will probably triumph. Sad, really.