Conciliatory Conversation On gender

[FairAdvocate]

Hello!

In the last few months I have been reflecting on the transgender and feminism debate and I feel I've got a few things to share with you on it from a perspective perhaps you wont maybe often hear.

To preface and explain, I am a transgender woman/female and I'm writing here today not to create any kind of argument or discord but because I am here to say that I think there are things that my side of the floor has gotten wrong.

I want to start from a position of saying that I can understand why some of you feel erased or afraid. I dont say that in a patronising way; I say that from a position of being fully periceved as female in society and I often to feel quite vunerable because of that in certain situations just like I imagine many of you do aswell.

I started down this road from hearing about how a 'A woman is person who says they are a woman'. I must admit I never quite got it. It makes no sense but yet, there are many transgender people and allies who say this like it has any kind of meaning. Just like when they also say that 'woman' is defined by a certain set of catagories etc. Its always bothered me and I didnt know why. For me, the more I have medically tranisitioned to female, the more Ive began to understand the word and defintion of female cannot be just removed from the term woman.

Now, I suspect this is where most of you reading this will be in decent agreement of. However I suspect what I say next will cause more issues. I believe myself to be female not just because of my physical aspect having been changed through medical transition (albeit its not a perfect process) but also because I believe my brain structure to have formed female in the sex differences between male and female likely at birth. There are quite numerous studies that do back this up to an okay but emerging degree and I am also aware that there also a few that dont say that exactly but say my brain formed in a kind of third way. Either way, I think it is clear from these studies that my brain developed differently to that of a male and it has manifested itself so I am quite closely alligned with being female.

To me, I feel like this makes a me kind of intersex person but perhaps in a different kind of way than we usually think of the term intersex. Though, through my medical transition obviously estrogen has, at least for me, solidified my mind to that much more towards female.

With this in mind, I find myself looking at the world as a woman but a woman who came with unique challenges and hurdles that are difficult to explain. For example, often I have been accused of saying its wrong that GRS gives me a vagina and have often been shouted at and saying im just sexualising it. However for me, the vagina isnt and wasnt the main source of my distress. The main source of my distress is that I will never have ovaries and will never have children and be a biological mother. I have never been interested in having a child as a male in anyway.

For me, it reminds me that I am not just a straight forward female and many will not accept me. After some deep reflection I think that I have also accepted that I will have to go through hurdles and I will have to remove my male form in such a succfient manner that I can be accepted by other women in certain areas. With that in mind I have also come to accept that self indentifcation shouldnlt be accepted. That tears at me because I wish I lived in that ideal world. But, as a woman who is only attracted to men, I understand frankly just how dangerous some of them can be. But ive come to the conclusion that if we keep pushing for this we are only making it harder for everyone and it will only lead to further division, more toxicity and we will just tear oursevles apart.

I do look at my rights from five years ago and I look at them now and see how they have reduced from prisons putting people such as as me in mens prisions, to the recent SC ruling, sports associations banning us. I do truly think that most women do and have historically accepted women like me but I also understand that came with agreements and understandings. Understandings which I think have been overstepped in the last ten years.

While I dont and will never accept calling me a man; I can understand why some of you that are reading this may have gotten fed up and stopped caring. I suppose what I am really trying to say is, can we all start again? If I can accept that women (including myself) need protections in some areas and I can accept the need for medicalising, the dropping of self identification, the need for due process in changing your sex legally can you accept that Im not a man? Can you accept that calling me certain things and the misgendering, using terms such as Trans identified Male is actually causing more harm than it is good?

Can we not as women actually just get our heads together and work out a decent solution? I do believe we might remain with some differences. For example I do believe a woman is a person who was born with a female gender identity by which I mean the overall average structure of the brain and therefore mind. And I do understand you will use a defintion to be defined by your anatomy. But I do believe that actually both of these can be true. While I cant be 100 percent true to your defintion I have tried to be because of where my defintion has led me and I understand how difficult that may be for someone who has all the correct anatomy to understand. But I have tried to understand how you feel so I am trying to ask for the same.

Finally, thank you for reading my long message. I am very nervous to be leaving it. Please can I ask you from refraining to calling me names and refering to me as a man, this is a request and not a demand. I have very much put myself out there with this and I hope that what is reflected back to me is the same spirit in which I wrote this.

Thank you

P.s I hovered over the 'Post' button for about five minutes before clicking it.

'You haven't been polite in the slightest! - I mean I have.
How is polite to walk into a room full of women' I posted a thread on the internet for anyone to see or reply to.

I dont agree with what happened there. Not much else I can add.

This is so true. Thank you.

OP it is possible that most people will NEVER agree with you. Like as in 98% of people in the world will likely never see you as you wish to be seen.

How do you intend to manage the discomfort of this? Because the onus is on you to make peace with this. It is not up to the world to validate your self-perception. The world will see you as it sees you.

You are just one in a long line of attempted educators. It's always about the rest of the world having to support the self-image of the trans person rather than the trans person having to accept that they will never be seen as what they wish to be. You might find the Psychiatrist Az Hakeem interesting on this. He sees this insistence in terms of autistic meltdown.

I hope you find peace in this world as you are not as you wish the world to see you. I urge you to understand that many people will never accept your self definition (even if they pretend to out of politeness) and that's okay. Learn to find peace in this and have some respect for the women around you. Women have long been allies and friends with gay men, even when in recent years some of those men have treated us poorly.

I havent cited it. As I stated earlier I dont want this to get bogged down into technical points in studies. Thats not what im trying to do here.

Everyone is free to go and find them, honestly, they are availible online to all for people to make thier own judgements about.

You most certainly have not been polite! You are a very unpleasant man - the kind of man who has no respect for women as human beings and think we exist simply to support him. You refuse to listen or to answer reasonable questions. You feel tremendously sorry for yourself but have no empathy for anyone else. Yet you consider yourself to be wonderful for not calling us "bitches". Yet.

The problem is that I can't agree to disagree on whether you're a woman, because you're not. And I am sorry to put that so bluntly, but you're the one forcing this discussion point by insisting that you are.

It's like asking me to agree to disagree that a dog is a cat.

You might be living as a woman. But you're not a woman. Taking oestrogen doesn't make you a woman.

And you've also referenced "changing sex".

This is what I mean about engaging with women's debate. The starting point needs to be reality. And that's the fact that you can't change sex and you're not a woman.

Tell me what you think it is that makes you a woman? I'm trying to understand how you can possibly think this is true, so please help me understand. It's an honest question - I'm not trying to catch you out. I just don't get it - but I am autistic so maybe I'm missing something obvious?

The vast majority of women here on MN despise Trump. The man is deeply odious and I could never have voted for him, even though I was entirely opposed to the Democrats position on gender.

What you're seeing here - from lots of us - is strength of emotion. We've spent the last god knows how many years being told we can't ask for rights, and that we can't be recognised as a sex class. We have been raped, attacked, spoken over. Our girls have lost sports places. Women have missed out on opportunities and promotions. TW have been given positions, voices, and opportunities that had been reserved for women. Disproportionately so. We've been told repeatedly that trans women are "better women" than us. And so on.

You're not seeing hate. You're seeing women at the end of their tether. We would like to co-exist peacefully. But the hate we continue to get in the opposite direction is neverending. Just look at the Supreme Court ruling - the vitriol spouted at women has really ramped up. The reality is that you are still protected against discrimination - the only issue you now have a problem about the spaces you use when there's no neutral/third space. It's not hate, nor is it transphobic.

Off the subject, but I have a DS with extremely high care needs. He is disabled, 15 years old and still in nappies. There are very few disabled toilets that have facilities to accommodate him. It's really difficult for us.

So I understand the practical difficulties - albeit the circumstances are different. The disabled community have been campaigning for better changing facilites. The trans community needs to campaign for whatever space you think you need. And actually, you'd find that a lot of women would offer their support if you stopped trying to talk over them and claim their spaces as yours.

Obviously, when I say "you", I mean the collective trans community, not you specifically.

Whats to stop a man doing that anyway?
honestly can we just have a better think about that premise

But you still haven't provided any evidence of feminists behaving in an equivalent way towards trans people.

Do you understand that it is defamatory to claim that both sides have behaved in the same way? That you are accusing women of violent, criminal acts that they have not committed?

Now we're getting to the point.

If single sex spaces for women are once again single sex spaces for women, and we see a man in our single sex space, we know that he is not allowed to be in there and we can take steps to have him removed.

We are no longer required to consider his possible gender identity.

But this means you are also required to stay out.

Yes it's a bit like all those 'female sex offenders' who turn out to have a cock for all that raping.

There are a lot of people who come from prejudice on both sides. And yes, we need a discussion, and youbare brave posting here.

I think the answer to the sports thing is complicated. However, the advantages of having a Y chromosome are pretty clear in almost all sports. Look at the athletics results for 9 year old kids. The males outperform the females by a significant margin in almost all results.

It may not apply to chess, but it certainly applies to darts and pool - having a Y chromosome gives you broader shoulders and straighter elbows, which is a huge mechanical advantage.

Sport is important to me. At a community level, I would be happy to compete against a transwoman. At an elite level, however, there is a huge gulf between what a top level cis woman can achieve and what someone withna Y chromosome can achieve. Full inclusion of transwomen in women's sports would completely remove cis women from the podium at elite levels.

Yes, transwomen are a marginalised group, but that does not mean that cisxeomen do not have the right to object to significant potential harms.

'Why do you want to destroy women's single sex provisions rather than do the work to come to terms with your own body?' I did, I changed it to female. Ive already spoken about this in this thread several times.

No you didn't dude - humans can't change sex. If I carve my liver into the shape of a lung, it's still a liver. If I take pills that turn me blue, I'm just a blue human, not a smurf.

Just logically, no studies required, you can't have a 'female' brain in a male body - because if it's in a male body, it is by definition a male brain, and everything that person is feeling, are male feelings. There is no archetypal female brain to compare the male brain to, unless you can define female without including any males.

Sorry but this will just not work. To talk about single sex spaces and rights based on sex we need to be able to say you are the opposite sex to being female. If we can't call you male, then we have been backfooted from the start.

No. We discussing the privileges transwomen demand to be allowed to use womens single sex spaces when women are saying no, we need to be able to categorize you as a man and us as a woman.

I have a question for you.

Have you ever thought that instead of trying to make it so that society sees you as a woman, one idea would be to try and make it so society broadened it's views of what is acceptable and "normal" within both genders?
For example instead of taking up the battle of "becoming a woman", what about the battle of getting men to appreciate that some men think and feel more in alignment with archetypal feminine qualities and states? Is there only one way to be a man?

But I also need time to process that someone would want to prosecute me for being myself.

’Yourself’ is not female though. You know you are actually male, I understand you don’t accept that, but you know you are not like us so to impose yourself on us in sensitive spaces is not ok.

The funny thing is that, as a woman, if I was asked not to use certain spaces and was provided with quite a number of reasons - I wouldn’t use that space. I might not like it if it caused me inconvenience but I would not be able to invade spaces I have been asked not to.

This is why we say No.

do you all kind of see how I came in and offered serious and thought through conciliations and how most of you jumped down my throat?

I want to pick up on this: quite frankly, no.

I don’t think you offered serious or well considered conciliations. I’m sure you think they are, but this isn’t our first rodeo. We aren’t distracted by these things being couched in the language of collaboration and friendship.

What you ‘offered’ was our capitulation.

Rejecting that isn’t ‘jumping down your throat.’ We are not the aggressors in this conversation.

You have come to Feminism board of Mumsnet to discuss single sex spaces while asking us to hobble our language. We cannot discuss women and men in law and in society if you want us to be unable to correctly identify who we are talking about.

There is no definition of women that includes you, because you are male. You frame it as an attack when we explain that yes, you are a man (as confirmed by the Supreme Court last week). You are feminine-presenting and have gone the feminising surgery and hormone treatments, which I hope have given you what you wanted from them. But it cannot make you a woman, meaning female, meaning of the sex that produces large gametes.

Women on this board have been enthusiastic proponents of third spaces for years. If you feel unable to use the facilities for your sex, gender-neutral, unisex, accessible (insert descriptor of your preference) are the facilities you can use. Not those for women, because they are not yours and never were. Stonewall and others lied to you about that, which must be a blow.

We get it; Stonewall had been lying to us for years.

That you seem to think you get an exemption that should allow you to use the female spaces and services is a remarkably entitled opinion. It’s actually very rude.

I am going to make an entitled statement myself now:

I speak for almost every woman on this board when I say Give Us Our Stuff Back. Our words, our spaces, our hospital wards and shelters, our competitions, our prisons, our freedom to associate without you, our lesbian events, our changing rooms.

Make your own spaces. We did - it was hard but we did it and so can you. We wish you success with it and we wish you happiness. We just don’t offer it at our expense.

Nothing stops a man doing it anyway - so why do you want in to the female facilities if there's no protection provided by them anyway?

If the certificate/mods/fashion isn't needed to go in the ladies, why does getting them matter?

In any case, your premise is wrong. Social norms are strong (hence the women's only chess tournaments).

Just look at something as superficial as how many tubes you put your legs in when you get dressed. In Ireland, Wales and England it's socially extremely unusual for a man to only put his legs in one. And in history in those countries, women were sanctioned for putting their legs into two.

Something as silly as that, and it's so strongly enforced.

Of course it works for toilets - if it works for tubes of fabric, it absolutely works for toilets - only extreme boundary violating males, with obviously nefarious intention (unless employed to be there, I'll head that one off now - and then there's generally a warning put out so women know he's there) go in female facilities

The problem with stopping the segration is that the segregation is a partial solution to the barriers that prevent females from playing in the first place. Removing the barriers is work that will take generations.

I think you’re very brave for posting here, and for taking the time to outline your position to a group of people who don’t typically respond well to the trans community. Thanks for sharing your story and I hope society becomes more tolerant and kind

I genuinely don't understand what "conciliations" you think you have offered in this thread.

All your posts are just "me, me, me".

There has been zero acknowledgement from you at any point that we have the right to exist in a way that is not centred around you.

And I think you need to accept that in the light of the Supreme Court ruling, it's no longer about conciliation or compromise. We have our rights under the Equality Act, and you have yours (which do not include access to our single sex spaces).

If you disagree with the Supreme Court judgment, go and campaign for women to be erased in law and for your rights to supersede ours. Do it properly, openly, through democratic means. But don't expect us not to fight you every step of the way.

You can think what you like - there's plenty of open tournaments - if women and girls still want female tournaments, then that's up to them. You don't get to decide when women and girls have social equality in chess, it doesn't affect you, and it's none of your business.

Women have been extremely fucking tolerant and kind, thank you very much.

We are where we are today because our tolerance and kindness has been taken advantage of.

Now we would like to be shown some tolerance and kindness in return.

Okay. I'm sorry about my tone. Just one correction, I meant your G.I. issues, not guy issues. Darn autocomplete.

I am sorry if this is upsetting for you to hear but it's true -- you can't experience menstrual symptoms as you don't have a menstrual cycle or the biology that's needed to have one.

You might experience physical symptoms that seem to overlap with PMS irritability, bloatedness, tenderness of breasts etc but the underlying reasons behind those have nothing to do with menstruation.

Women's symptoms stem from natural hormonal changes in their body as it prepares to shed the uterine lining. There are "marked fluctuations of blood levels of TNFalpha during the menstrual cycle." These make us feel feverish. Imagine a whole layer of necrotic tissue peeling off and being expelled via the vagina. You can only ever imagine. You can't experience that.

Our bodies undergo hundreds of tiny changes through that process and the symptoms arise from their cumulative effect. Yours aren't coming from the same place so please stop claiming you have a menstrual cycle, weak or otherwise. You don't have the requisite parts and you take one straight dose of female hormones. Ours vary naturally depending on the date (day 1 being the first day of the period).

Here's a personal anecdote, I had amenorrhea for three months and visited the gynaecologist. She gave me a week's worth of oestrogen tablets. After having them for a week, the signal to shed the lining came through (thanks to my female HPG axis) and my period was induced. No such thing happens with men because their HPG axis is male -- oestrogen can't set off the chemical cascade needed for menstruation to occur .

I've seen men discuss oestrogen induced changes excitedly, it takes months for even modest ones to appear. It's crickets after just a week. Because they aren't augmenting their hormonal system, they are disrupting it.
Your HPG axis is immutable male. It can't be converted to a female one because that requires female gonads for the axis to regulate.

One thing i do think is sad is that actually as a general group women ARE traditionally very kind and tolerant of differencd and I think they HAVE been very gentle and understanding of trans issues. Let's not forget that women have been staunch allies to gay men for centuries.

You need to be asking what happened, do you think, over the past decade to change that?