To feel this way, as a woman?

[Malorcamum]

Meditating on what it is to be a woman. I don’t hate anyone, and I respect trans women. I feel they will simply never be women though. They’re a different group entirely, and that is ok.

I believe they should have equal rights and feel safe in the world. Everyone should have that right.

I don’t understand the insistence on being recognised as women, though.

The fact that women often feel uncomfortable around men, that physically they can often overpower us, that experience is valid too. Why should women’s spaces and rights be imposed upon? It should be ok for us to assert this without us being accused of being hateful or transphobic. We also have a right to feel safe.

Why can’t trans women have their own spaces and be celebrated as a group in their own right? I fully support that.

Trans women will never know what it’s like to be a woman, to menstruate and bear children. To go through female puberty. I can understand why that may be hard to accept if you don’t feel you’ve been born in the right body, but it’s impossible for anyone to change that.

I should not have to clarify my pronouns or refer to myself as cisgender. I am a woman. I am proud to be a woman. I have been discriminated against as a woman. I have been unsafe as a woman. I have experienced violence and harassment as a woman. I have been privileged as a woman. I have intimate female relationships which are different to my relationships with men. It’s my lived experience and mine alone. Trans women experience these things, but not from the same perspective.

In asking me to recognise you as a woman, I feel you’re asking me to deny my own experience.

Equally, if by saying that you’re a woman is to deny women their own experience. To say that you’re a trans woman is to accept, celebrate and embody your own experience.

If you don’t want to be referred to as ‘he/him’, that’s fine, but ‘they/them’ already has a different meaning - referring to a collective group of people. It’s confusing and impractical to use ‘they/them’. I’d have no issues using ‘zey/zem’, or another set of pronouns which specifically means trans woman. I want to live in a world where both are accepted and free.

I’m really interested in what other people think and understanding other people’s perspectives. What do you think?

No-one is intersex there are a small number of people who have DSDs but they are all 1 sex or the other

Zey/Zem. lol 😂

I believe anyone should be able to wear what they want as long they’re not exposing themselves, but wearing trousers doesn’t make you male and wearing a dress doesn’t make you female.

in answer to the “trans women are women” surely the reply is well no they’re not if they were they wouldn’t be trans ?

my dd has a friend from school who transitioned to “female” from 13/14 and was very feminine right from infant school. Thing is with all the men in toilets stuff, if dds friend was in the ladies/changing rooms/swimming pool with you, you would have absolutely no idea that they weren’t female, which is fine, and I have no problem with referring to her as a she as that’s what she appears to be. My problem is when a bloke with a penis still attached says he’s female and wants to use the ladies Eddie izzard

I don’t particularly agree with what dds friend has been able to do, but don’t know enough to judge, she seems less a person in wrong body and more a penis was attached to wrong body.

Hard agree. Women are not an idea in a man's head. As hard as it is to hear, there is a difference, and it's a big one. It's just so insulting to me that women as a group have been oppressed for thousands of years by men, assaulted, raped, killed over and over and over, walked over, controlled, belittled, threatened etc etc etc and men put on a dress and suddenly they are the most oppressed. Womanhood isn't something that can just be 'put on' or achieved by wearing a sparkly headband or a pink dress. And that in itself is insulting to me; that my femaleness can be reduced to a sexist stereotype of wearing a dress or a headband. Particularly as I live in trousers most of the time, shirts and baggy jeans!

I've nearly died in childbirth, I have endometriosis, my sister died of a female only type of cancer, I have been sexually assaulted numerous times, belittled at work, paid less than male counterparts, mocked, threatened, cat called, groped constantly (the first time when I was only 12). I don't walk alone in the dark, when I ever did I held my keys in my hand, I calculated routes, I always text my parents or friends when getting into taxis alone. And on and on. All these experiences have built into me my lived life as a woman. A man will never have this. I can't share spaces with them, the thought of my heavy flooding in a toilet with a man in the next cubicle, or in a changing room at a gym or pool getting undressed in front of them, or in sport. If I ever needed a single sex rape crisis (hopefully not!) or a counselling service, a man there, however he identified, would make me feel awful, I'd need to self exclude. This has all been happening to other women. It's now finally on the ordinary public's radar hence all the threads, but it is something that does need to be pushed back on.

I agree with you op, it's mad it's ended up like this, but women need their stuff back.

The definition of intersex: Intersex people are those born with any of several sex characteristics, including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals.

Yawn

YANBU. Transwomen are not women. They are a different demographic with different needs from women. Conflating the two groups has resulted in harms to women and our rights.

Intersex is considered a derogatory outdated term that DSD charities and the community have repeatedly asked not to be used.
I repeat no-one is intersex we are all male or female but a very small number of people will be born with a DSD this does not make them some 3rd sex or in-between the sexs. It's offensive nonsense pushed by stonewall et al

Not a third sex no, but somewhere in between the two.

No they are either male or female with a Disorder of Sexual Development that always follows a set path depending on the DSD that they have.
There is not 3rd sex or in-between sex (which would be a 3rd sex).

You're being rather pedantic. Intersex people are not TYPICALLY male or female. That's what makes them intersex.

No it means that they have a DSD and they have as a community repeatedly asked for people to stop using the misnomer of intersex and people did for decades (it went out of use at the same time as mongoloid and spastic in medical and common parlance) it is only since the rise of gender ideology that it has been resurrected against the wishes of the DSD community even after they specifically asked stonewall to stop using it or claiming to represent them.

And having DSD means they are not typically male or female, that's just a fact.

Yes but they are still male or female not something in-between and don't want to be referred to as intersex

It is quite amusing seeing the odd man out and about dressing in women’s clothes, wearing a wig and too much make up. Quite comedic. Obviously I feel sorry for them and their families.

Are you denying people with DSDs the right to name themselves, GreenGully? Intersex implies that they are between sexes. Some sort of third group. They are not. People with Differences in Sexual Development know exactly which sex they are, either female or male, even if their appearance is at all ambiguous, even if they appear not to be typically female or male.