To think men can NEVER be mothers

[Leafstamp]

I am furious that men like this think they can call themselves mums/mothers. This deserves a wide audience, hence posting in AIBU.

(11) Paul Embery on Twitter: "ITV news did a piece about the impact of soaring water bills on an everyday mother. So naturally they got a man to play the part. t.co/b0ipO7loUE" / Twitter

I agree about gender stereotypes but to my mind that's what Gender Critical Feminists/TERFs (and I'm linking but not conflating them) seem to want to preserve.

Huh? How have you come to such as insane conclusion? Just how?

@Oioicaptain your post made me laugh the most on this thread, absolutely spot on!

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” – George Orwell, 1984

A man can never be a woman.

A man can never be a mother.

No. That is a man. A man who got his kicks washing his fetish breast pump on National tv. Not owe the if nah kind of respect. What is wrong with you?

*not worthy of any

Mother = A Female Parent

Not necessarily about carrying and birthing babies, although that does apply.
Just simply a woman who parents a child.

No jangly earring or pinny required.

Some males with fetishes wank to many different stimuli. You seem naive to this.

Some male people have been caught with their penises in the man hole grates in sidewalks and the side of the road. And have you missed the growing online self published porn category of males wanking in female toilets complete with mothers toileting their children very clearly heard in the cublicles beside them. That is why it is called a fetish. Genuinely NAMALT, where M is for males before any person accusing me of misgendering.

It is not beyond the realms of belief once you understand that there is a fetish where a male person will be very aroused at seeing themselves as being fully accepted as a woman, then maybe you would not be so certain.

Perhaps you need to read more about the psyche of what drives some mature male people to want to be considered a woman in the first place.

“If you don't like silly titles like cervix havers, why call a woman a dad?”

This is a sentence that shows just how deeply entrenched in ideological belief the writer is.

The first half of the sentence refers to women not wanting to be dehumanised with language that reduces their bodies to their parts. ‘Cervix havers’, ‘gestators’, vulva owners, one I saw last year or so ‘black birthing bodies’. Who the fuck thinks it is acceptable and progressive to call girls and women ‘bleeders’. And one recently that came to light that women and girls have ‘bonus holes’ and not vaginas.

Do people realise that other animals have cervixes and menstrual cycles?

Yet, this poster seems to be using women’s rejection of being dehumanised to prop up the next part of the sentence.

”why call a woman dad?”

Why indeed? This falls at the very first hurdle when people understand that that male person is not a female person. They never were and never will be. The word is for female people only.

Incidentally, this is one way male people have wedged open the word ‘mother’ to enable them to appropriate it. By using the honorific use of the word where a female person who has not delivered that child can still be called a mother. When you look at it closely, in doing so they have again utilised women’s health conditions to their benefit.

And by that I mean their positioning of ‘but there are women who cannot have children, are they not women too? We are just like them.’ If you don’t believe me, go and read up, it is very easy to find male people using this as logic.

So ”why call a woman dad?” Because that male person is not a female person. The word ‘mother’ is only for female people or animals. It has specific meaning that has never included a male’s need. You, personally, may chose to comply to the demands for using this speech, but you cannot force others. Certainly not through shame. And certainly not with the poorly constructed argument that was used.

All you highlighted was the degree of the removal of women and girls to have words that are unique to them.

You shon a spotlight on that and beautifully lit it up.

By the way, just because someone who believes in queer theory wishes to destabilise the established language to suit their purposes where they can say they are something they can never be, doesn’t mean the rest of society needs to support that person’s need.

We as a society are increasingly beginning to realize that the degree of compelled speech that some people demand is too much for people who were following along being kind. Of course, many never complied. Like those feminists that Bromptotoo believed miraculously started to preserve gender stereotypes.

Now the only people who are complying to that speech demand are those who have been indoctrinated deeply into being ‘kind’ and ‘inclusive’ or who are heavily invested in gender identity. And those people are still feeling morally superior when they write ”why call a woman dad?” While everyone else is feeling the freedom of not publicly having to say they believe in pseudo science and enacting Philosophical theories that are based on falsity. To be clear I am speaking about queer theory as supported by Foucault. And I recommend everyone look up Michel Foucault considered a founding voice of queer theory.

And we are feeling the freedom of not using enforced speech to call a male person either a woman or a mother.

Who ultimately benefits in a world where material reality is ignored and words no longer hold a cohesive and decipherable meaning at all except what each individual wants a word to mean at that specific time and place? Who benefits from the destabilisation of evidence based science ?

@Helleofabore
We really need a Like/Love function on here, cos that was 👌🏼.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. I refuse to mis-sex someone, and I cannot be compelled to, by law. He's a man. He can wear wtf he likes, doesnt change the fact that his sperm contributed the dna that makes up 50% of any kids he has. He produces sperm. No woman in the history of humankind has ever or will ever produce sperm. He's therefore a dad, not a mum. He's also not on the breadline despite the implication of the piece of film.

There was a real opportunity here to represent the mums who do the majority of "womenswork" whether they're employed outside the home or not. There was a real opportunity here to represent a whole group of unnoticed, under the radar, females who go about their days in unpaid labour. Instead, they represented a sexual fetish and how a male with that fetish sees females.

Still, it's sunlight, innit?

Are you mad? Tra want to enforce gender stereotypes to the point they are willing to cut the penis off a boy who acts feminine and the breasts off a girl who acts in a stereotypically masculine way.
This is what gc terfs are against, they do not believe in gender. Act and dress how you like though.
How can you possibly misunderstand the two positions so badly that you think this???

By the way, if you genuinely thought that the feminists who were the first people to raise the alarm about the conflicts to women’s rights in prioritising gender over sex ‘preserve stereotypes’, you might want to think where you got that idea from.

I have spent a whole lot of time recently working out why people have this fucked up idea. Usually it is because someone has watched a video from some influencer who has completely misunderstood what it is that feminists are saying. Because they are also influenced by other influencers (or academics even) that are publishing falsehoods.

Often it is the misunderstanding of the term ‘bioessentialism’. This term has been repetitively used about what these feminists Bromptotoo call ‘TERF’. And I repeat that a court has found that TERF is a derogatory term as it is used now. And that MN delete posts calling people TERF.

A bioessentialist, if I remember correctly, is someone who believes that someone’s sex dictates how they act and their role in society.

Feminists have fought for decades against that very thing.

It is only false interpretations that get anyone to the point of being feminist are bioessentialists. What feminist on earth believes that a woman have a sexed body would mean that she cannot do job type that a male body couldn’t do with reasonable accommodation. And by reasonable accommodation, I mean that women can work in a role lifting lighter weights or using equipment to lift rather than lifting the loads that males lift.

What extremist activists attempt to twist is that feminists understand that female people have unique needs because of their sexed bodies? Such as not being in prison with a male prisoner. Such as needing fair sport due to not having the benefits of a testosterone driven puberty, such as needing single sex spaces for dignity and safety. I think perhaps this is where they attempt to make ‘bioessentialism’ fit their cause.

But it is false.

Those areas are needs that are required for the material reality of our bodies. Yes!!! Some decisions and actions female people will make will overlap other female people’s decision and actions when it has to do with how we react to our bodies.

An example of this overlap is how we address the needs of our bodies during menstruation. Not a stereotype. But an individual choice made logically with the information and resources available. That we don’t want to deal with the realities of flooding periods in hand basins where male people are also in the area is not a ‘stereotype’, it is a human reaction to the need for privacy and if you can’t have privacy then at least having female people who will have been through the same is acceptable.

A ‘stereotype’ is that a woman should stay at home and nurture the children after they no longer need breastmilk and the woman has fully recovered from pregnancy and child birth. Whereas, either parent can be the primary carer of that child.

What the male parent cannot do is take the word used for female parents and use it for themselves.

So. What exactly are the stereotypes that you refer to Bromptotoo? What stereotypes do you believe feminists are preserving?

And maybe this will show you what those feminists you have gotten so wrong actually think. It is long, but hey, you just completely fucked up what they believe so maybe have the decency to listen to their own words. You might want to Ignore the squirrels though, they add nothing to what the women are saying.

Boomboom there really are a few ways.

One way that I have seen on MN as we discussed it with the person who held the concept in their head is :

Firstly, it comes from not understanding second wave feminism to start with. Then it comes from believing the people that are telling the world that a male is a woman if they believe they are (this is philosophical believe and one theory that drives this is queer theory as has been mentioned by numerous pps on this thread) .

Next it is then listening only to those people telling the world that a male can be a woman about what feminists believe. Meaning those feminists who oppose that males can be a woman.

Often they use words that are not well understood both to prop up their credibility but also to make the concepts deliberately inpenetrable for some people to analyse. You have to expend lots of energy to analyse something that you have to decipher first!

By this stage a mature adult with critical thinking ability who knew what women, feminists, believe would be thinking ‘this doesn’t seem right at all! Could this group be lying?’. But those who simply wish to be kind and right thinking simply ingest those falsehoods.

Remember they already believe what many in the world believe is impossible, that male people can be just like any other womaning boundaries around fact have been significantly lowered already.

Another way is that the person is so heavily invested because either they, their child, their loved one or their livelihood depends on that misinterpretation. Either it is an honest misinterpretation or it is deliberate. I saw a deliberate misinterpretation recently.

The misinterpretation is key. It means that they can demonise feminists, which they view as hateful and bigoted. Dehumanised. Just as the terms ‘cervix haver’, ‘bleeders’ and ‘gestators’ have already done. And seriously, as an aside, what organization should ever use the term ‘black birthing bodies’ and think that was acceptable???

If you are so heavily invested, repeating that misinformation gives you some kind of moral authority or a feeling to righteousness.

Feel I should clarify, that was very much tongue in cheek!

Helleofabore your posts are incredible. I wish I was as eloquent as you. Instead I woke up this morning feeling even more incensed about this. I have taken it as a deep and personal insult to what I have gone through, 4 times, in being a mother, which is intrinsically linked to my female biology. How dare this man appropriate it. How dare ITV news belittle it.

Still, it's getting rationed to fuck on twitter, which is cheering.

Thanks smarthome

It has come from dealing with disingenuous posts or just people who believe the misinformation spread by posters on threads or on social media. I have to analyse them to work out why they don’t make logical sense or seem to be totally misrepresenting the truth.

I know some are well intentioned and have others though take great pleasure in either scolding others for having a different opinion or they deliberately ignore the truth and never seek to find solutions that suit both groups. Sometimes because they are the very male people demanding female people budge up.

Why? They are neither a woman or a mother. Should we call them a weasel or a giraffe or a peony because they aren’t those things either. Far easier to call people what they are. Man. Parent. Idiot.

What's even more amazing is if, like most of us, you are imagining Helleofabore CSI hacker style in a darkened room with multiple computers and monitors pulling in information from all over, she does these posts on her phone mainly! On her phone! (I struggle to actually make a phone call on mine!)

She is an absolute superstar ❤

If we accept that this male is a woman then we exclude most women from being women because they have nothing in common with that male which they don't have in common with all other males.

Trans people should have rights of course. I agree with you about the TRA label really. But of course, those called TRAs are not campaigning for rights, they are campaigning for privileges. Privileges which disadvantage and further marginalise women, like men being in women's spaces. So yes, perhaps we should be honest and call them TPA (trans privilege activists).

In terms of the threat of pretending a man is a woman, well there's loads of evidence about what is done in the name of that ideology:
men in women's sports, often winning and hurting women
men in women's prisons
men in women's hospital wards
men in women's toilets and changing rooms
men in women's rape crisis centres
disrespectful and dehumanising language used to describe women or their bodies
men taking over lesbian groups
men harrassing women for not wanting to consider them a potential sexual partner when the women are lesbians
essential women's healthcare being described in ways which mean that lots of women don't know it applies to them
etc

There's also much info about the physical and psychological damage and exclusion this is causing to women. What makes it so hard for you to listen to and hear that?

It's the opposite - the trans activists are the ones who are gender (sex) stereotyping because they think that because they want to wear dresses and lipstick they must be women.

I don't wear dresses and lipstick, so does that make me a man in their eyes? Should I actually call myself a transman? It's utter nonsense.

Gender critical women (not that I like that expression either - they are not critical of gender, they are critical of the erosion of single sex spaces and sport) do not gender stereotype.

For those people thinking it is fine for this man to compel his child(ren) to call him mum should read some of the information on here Children of transitioners:
https://childrenoftransitioners.org/
A point on language. The double standards really annoy me. For inclusivity women and girls have been reduced to body parts, but when men who say they are women are referred to they get to use our words breasts (not chest), woman (not cis woman), mum (not parent) etc. If you haven't figured out what is happening yet then let me spell it out. Women are being made a sub category of our own sex class.

Even the Women's Institute has a man who says he is a woman on their main board/committee. It might sound a bit like a movie but the infiltration is almost complete, charites, local councils, Political Parties, corporations, book clubds, menopause groupd, endometriosis groups, female cancer groups, pregnancy groups, still birth groups, baby death groups, sports, changing rooms female spas, refuges, rape crisis centres etc. have men who say they are women in them. They dominate, change the dynamics and take over. Be kind is over we must all stand up. One of the easiest ways to go this is to defend our language.

5 years ago I was live and let live, I'm not a feminist. I'm a single mum with two teenage daughters. I'm in this fight for them. I'm an active member of my local Women's Rights Network. I know I've been slow to wake up but I'm here now and I'm not going to take my eye off the ball again.

I r especially loved syphoning out true believers by the people who agree with "trans rights" but can't bring themselves to call Mika a woman or use female pronouns. Of which there are many.

Love this. Simple and succinct. And scientifically, and grammatically true.
Both of a lesbian couple are mothers even though only one carried the child.
Both of a gay couple are fathers.
Why the drama?

Brilliant post @FemaleAndLearning Thank you!!