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.

It’s certainly where your understanding ends. Unfortunately.

Ummm…errr….. so gender is basically personality? So there’s a woman personality and a man personality? What’s the difference? Are you seriously saying we make laws based on personality? Why not star signs instead? That makes about as much sense

I said all other men POTENTIALLY pose a threat to women, that’s why they’re excluded for single sex female spaces. No one thinks ALL men pose a threat to women, but it would be naïve in the extreme to think that none do.

I didn’t say anything about the law, did I.

The way that I view other human beings isn’t within the legal framework, evidently - SC has just told us that.

People who accept gender self ID wouldn’t have done anything with the law to begin with. But like I said earlier, GC women have and I’m not going to be dragging biological males into your path.

Hard disagree. “Gender based violence” is called that partly because the rotten word gender has been co-opted by the rotten trans rights movement for its rotten ends - to help create the sort of well-meaning jumble of words you’ve put together there. Could you try calling it “sex based violence”? See how simple that makes things?

I don’t think none do either.

I just personally don’t engage with all of any group on the basis that some of them might potentially cause me harm.

I said personally, because I’ve been informed (repeatedly) that others do.

Some men pose a risk to women. We know that.

How do you tell which men pose a risk to you? They don’t wear a handy badge you know?

Well no. Because that would mean that men are born just predisposed to murdering women on the basis that they had a Y chromosome, and I don’t believe that to be true.

Although I get where you are coming from, with the live-and-let live stance, but I think the tide has turned too much. Everyone seems to be focussing on toilets, but for me there’s bigger issues.

What if a rape victim has gynae problems so only wants to see a female consultant. Pre SC -ruling, she could conceivably be booked to see a fully intact trans woman, but now that won’t be allowed to happen,

or she could share a room with a fully-intact trans woman in a woman refuge,

or find herself in a ladies gym communal changing room with a fully intact trans woman.

etc

Ok, so not laws. But you’re saying we allow males to enter female spaces based on their personality? If they claim they have a “female personality” they’re safe to be in female spaces. Even though no one can prove they have this female personality and no one knows exactly what it is but they’re totes got ur honest guv? But you’re excluding males who don’t have this “female personality” because… well, why are you excluding those males? Do you see how batshit that sounds?

Dogs don’t tell me they’re going to bite me either, but some of them would - I don’t avoid them all?

They’re my risks, you don’t need to argue with me about them. I’m not putting you at risk by not buying into it, because as previous - I don’t drag men into your space.

This thread was doomed from the outset because there can be no compromise, women don’t want to compromise and have no reason or incentive to.

You wouldn’t compromise with a stranger off the street if they decided they didn’t want to take the bus anymore and wanted to use your car instead, although I imagine there are some on this thread who’d see it as their duty to ‘be kind’ and hand their keys over!

I don’t think any woman believes ALL men pose a risk to us. Many of us have fathers, partners, brothers, sons, uncles, friends who are lovely people and would never hurt, rape or even harass a woman. That doesn’t mean that men do not, as a sex class, pose a risk to women, as a sex class. Surely you must acknowledge that, and it’s rather concerning as a level of either ignorance or being deliberately obtuse not to. Are you ignoring that 2 women a week in the UK alone are killed by male
partners? That 98% of violent crime is committed by men? That rape of women is used as a weapon in war to the extent it is recognised as a war crime? That women globally are raped, assaulted and killed by men in huge numbers?

I am a teacher by trade. I know that I would never hurt a child and pose zero safeguarding risk to children. And yet every school I’ve worked in has required me to have a full, enhanced DBS check before I’ve been allowed in the building unaccompanied, let alone been given a contract. They do that because that is how safeguarding works. They don’t look at me when I come in the door and think “female, been teaching for years, statistically low risk - we’ll not bother with the paperwork”. You assume the highest level of risk is present, then you work to reduce it as best you can. In schools, that is by not allowing unsupervised adults without a DBS, even if they “look” safe. In spaces where the more vulnerable sex class - women - are particularly at risk, you do it by not allowing the sex class which poses the risk of harm. It doesn’t matter if they say they’re female
or that they’re no risk any more than nobody should take my word for it when I say I’m no risk. Safeguarding works by being proactively risk averse as much as possible.

@Tygertiger

The safeguarding is a good analogy.

I’m not saying being born a male makes you a murderer; I’m saying violence against women is sex-based, not based on what’s going on in women’s heads.

And men are the violent sex; the stats back me up on this.

The word “gender” may seem quite anodyne, and seems to explain much for you. But I absolutely hate it - it represents the colonisation and obfuscation of language to me.

This post is where I saw OP laughing about holocaust victims.

I do think that to maximise my safety, I have to believe that all men have the potential to harm me physically or sexually. All of them.

A friend's 15 year old brother sexually assaulted me when I was 8.

My first husband physically assaulted me for ten years.

He then subjected me to a serious sexual assault, several months after I got away from him - he broke into my house to do so.

Many years later when I lived alone for a short while, the man who rented the flat next to mine subjected me to a campaign of terrifying text messages for many weeks.

A man in the same hospital ward as me attempted to rape me in the bathroom.

I know NAMALT but I have to believe that they all have the potential to harm me.

Because so many of them have.

No women whatsoever have, though.

Are you suggesting that it’s just a wild coincidence that men make up the vast majority of murderers (and all the rapists)??

What even IS a man in your mind?

I agree with many of your points, but I disagree with this one.

Not All Males Are Like That, however, ONLY males are like that. Sexual assault by females is vanishingly rare.

“I’d rather be called rude than a fucking liar” as the great woman said.

To be fair, only the brain is a self aware organ so how would we know?

Maybe my spleen spends its days in private anguish tormented by hormones it knows are wrong but is unable to escape.

Maybe the reason I'm overweight isn't over-caking but because my stomach is actually supposed to be inside a 6'4 man.

Don't be naive. Scotgov and co's deeper pockets would have made their best strategy to keep pushing delays and complexities until the costs of getting to court used up all the available money. What JKR underwriting the legal bill did was make that impossible, ensuring that the appeal got to the Supreme Court so the incoherency of the Scotgov case was exposed.

This is why women are digging again and again to crowdfund cases that are seeing costs mount up while they are delayed and messed around due to the other side's (malicious?) incompetence - because we know that are arguments are coherent and fair, and when we get to court, we win. So we fund the cases so the other side can't play dirty and force the funding to run out.

She supported the confirmation of rights that apply to all women.

Supporting women isn't cheerleading individual women's favourite causes you know. It's ensuring there are structures, systems and protections in place that empower women. What women choose to do or support on an indivdual basis is up to them, the supports are there for them either way.

Is that not just...accepting your female sex though?

I don't really see what women who accept that they are women have in common with men who don't accept themselves as men?

"Women" isn't a catch all category for anyone who doesn't feel comfortable performing stereotypical masculinity.

I feel I have more in common with both trans men (who are female) and men who are not trans than I do with trans women.

And that's without even touching on the fact that for some of them, wanting to "be" a woman is a fetish. I would actually feel more comfortable sharing a changing room with the average gender conforming man than with someone who is sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a woman. And we know these men exist. Yes, not all trans women. But some.

None of this to me is indicative that gender identity is a real thing that we all have. For me, the absence of a particular mental health condition or paraphilia is not an identity.

To the extent that being a woman forms part of my identity, it is related to my biological sex. I've been pregnant seven times and given birth to and breastfed two babies. That absolutely has formed part of my identity, but it is something no trans woman can ever share, although a trans man might.

I honestly think that gender identity is just something that has been invented by trans people to justify why they belong to categories which they objectively do not belong to.

You've written some breath-taking nonsense amongst your "Why can't everyone just be nice like me" protestations, but this one's a doozy!

You think people who don't recognise a gender identity don't know who they are? 😂 That we're unaware, unthinking, unfeeling bundles of physical biology?

On the very, very slim chance that you did mean what you wrote here - allow me to introduce the concepts of character, personality, intellect, curiosity, ability and experience. You'll find them much more interesting than gender, and equally present in both sexes.