Feminism and the idea of a man or woman trapped in the wrong body are contradictory ideas

[EatsBrainsAndLeaves]

This post is in response to another thread where posters wanted to discuss this, but didn't want to derail the thread. So I said I would start the thread here.

A basic element of feminism is that women and men are born as that sex - biologically men/women, but society socialises us to behave as our alloted gender. Gender is the idea that women and men behave in certain ways. And we are all socialised in this even if we reject it or try to as adults.

For example, research shows that people treat the same babies differently depending on whether they are told they are boys or girls. The media pumps images to our DCs about what a girl or a boy should be interested in, play with and wear. Teachers are more likely to allow boys to speak out to the whole class than girls - well researched.

Feminism challenges these gender constructs and says that girls and boys can enjoy doing the same things, etc. Transexuals talk about being born in the wrong body e.g. born in a male body, but feeling like they are really a girl/woman.

But this is obviously at odds with feminism. Sex is a biological fact. You are born in a male or female body. Behaving or feeling like a man/woman is supposed to feel, is an artificial construct. Because what does a man or woman feel like? We only feel like ourselves as individuals. So any idea of feeling a man or a woman or a boy or a girl is based on an artifacial idea of how a boy/girl is supposed to feel.

So the basic idea of being born in the wrong body, is contradictory to the basic ideas of feminism.

"Biology is real. Gender is a patriarchally created social consruct."

That is the kind of unscientific statement which an intellectual feminist seems to be able to get away with while claiming that it represents some kind of "analysis" I.E feminist analysis. You would need to define "real" for that statement to have any meaning, and "gender", unless you are choosing that to be the definition.

In any event, there is a large body of theory suggesting that, due to exposure to male or female hormones in utero, men's and women's brains develop differently. The below link is a fairly neutral article about it, citing both the evidence for this and critiques of it, some from a feminist angle. The point is, unless you are transgender, there is no way of knowing how the feeling of "being in the wrong body" manifests itself. The Op's thesis boils down to the idea that it is based on statements like "I like pink so I should have been born a girl". It may not be. It may be based on the idea that you look and feel wrong in your body, in the same way as someone born with the correct nerves for an arm but no arm might feel. I have no idea as I am not transgender but I can respect the strength of feeling that transgender people seem to show. The fact that the expression of male and female behaviour is a spectrum (and it clearly is) does not prove that it is a social construct any more than the fact that male and female foetuses are exposed to different hormones in utero categorically proves that males and females will automatically exhibit typical male and female behaviours. The reality is that nature vs nurture debates are very hard (almost impossible) to resolve without fairly extreme and immoral experiments.

www.gender.org.uk/about/04embryo/47_hmerr.htm

I don't think I am disregarding women's feelings,but I do wonder how trans people are expected to live in our society with its strict gender binary.You can believe that gender is entirely a product of society,but that doesn't make it go away.As society changes and people are more free to express gender as they want to,then maybe there will be less people who identify as transexual.Maybe there won't - we don't know.
In the meantime,what do transexual people do? It is easy to say that someone should live as they want and ignore society's conventions,but that isn't easy to do and it hasn't worked for many people in the past.
Men aren't up in arms about FtoM people,are they? Because they do not perceive them as a threat,presumably.I think women as a group can act in the same way.
But that is easy for me to say because I haven't yet been in a situation where I felt I needed to be in a women only space.

I am not saying it is easy to be transexual. I just don't think women should give up women only space or accept MtoF are really women, to make transexuals feel better. I guess this is what we mean when we say women's feelings count too.

I don't know how men would feel if FtoM accessed men only space. Have read on internet, so don't know if true, about one FtoM who had not had genital surgery who started to use male communal showers in a gym and the men were very unhappy about it. But tbh without knowing how men would react to say FtoM accessing support groups exclusively for men who had been raped, it is difficult to know if this would be an issue. And I do remember men being pretty locking of Chastity Bono when she had operation for FtoM - so there certainly was not acceptance from men.

I guess 1 difference though is that a MtoF is accessing space where they are in a more priveleged position of being male and with the FtoM it is the opposite. But I am not explaining that well - sorry.

Sorry larry, not ignoring you. I will respond, but need to go and do things in rl now. Will be back

Do people here believe that a man with a penis is a woman?

If he goes through the legal process to be recognised as a woman, do you still believe that he's a woman, even if he keeps his penis? How does that fit in with the "wrong body" theory, if males can be women penis intactica, which is what they increasingly do.

Also, the idea of an body map that was mentioned upthread is incorrect. People who are born with missing limbs don't have a prior body map that tells them they should have no missing limbs. The brain responds to what is there, not what is not there.

Body dysphoria - believing that you should have a missing limb or that your body is the wrong shape or size is a mental illness, not a sign of an underlying issue with the body.

It's a simple statement Larry, but it's not incorrect.

Convoluted irrational arguments don't equal intellectual arguments. It's a common mistake to believe they do.

I'm not getting into a discussion of reality with you given that I'm not a postmodernist. Most people including yourself I assume accept the idea of real and not real. It's why we all get up in the morning to take part in the real world rather than staying in bed and fantasising about what might have happened to us. A man believing he is a woman is not engaging with his own physical reality. That's the problem here.

Pride of Chanur, I'm not sure why you're saying this about me:

"then you also believe a FtoM is a man"

Where do you get that from what I've said?

EBAL, if transgender people are only talking about their own internal gender experiences and not applying it to wider society I don't think it matters if they are right or not. It is then, as far as I concerned, like believing in God. People can believe in God, as long as they understand that is personal to them and don't tell me I must share their feelings.

And that seems to be a major issue with transgender. It is going beyond them having an internal gender identity to insisting that everyone must have those feelings, and claiming that everybody who denies they have these feelings just hasn't noticed these feelings because of their own privilege.

That is a ridiculous argument. Of course there are privileges that people can't see, white privilege, heterosexual privilege and so on. But these privileges can in a rational way be described and pointed out to people. The problem with the transgender argument is that nobody will rationally explain what this internal gender identity involves. So are we meant to take it on faith that we benefit from something that hasn't in any way described or defined?

I don't think we can segregate everyone based on a feeling that is not explained.

I don't think it is tolerant, or promoting equality, or compassionate, or broad minded, or inclusive of trans people to support their feelings when you have no idea what those feelings are. It is just playing lip service to an idea. But a lot of posters on here are claiming that they are fighting against the fascist, unfeeling, intolerant feminists in support of trans people, but yet they themselves don't seem to know what the characteristics of this internal gender identity are. Ignorance is not tolerance.

It reminds me of a tv programme where they had a black man (who I assume must have been some kind of specialist in equality) going around and sitting in on corporate equality workshops. The trainers were basically saying you must say XYZ, not say ABC, not do EFG, call such and such group MNO. He got angry about it and said that all that achieves is to mask people's real beliefs. There is no discussion of having a real understanding of what it means to be black, how it feels, and where racism comes from and what ethnicity means to each of us. When I did diversity training, the first thing the trainer said was that she wasn't doing the XYZ approach because it just builds better racists; they are still racist underneath but they hide their discrimination in the workplace by not saying XYX.

And that is what goes on on these threads. They end up full of people falling over themselves to say they are so compassionate to trans people and feminists are not. But I don't think that not agreeing that trans people shouldn't be beaten up on the street etc is a mark of particular compassion; it is simply a mark of basic humanity. I think that trying to understand that people have very different feelings about gender identity, gender roles and biological sex, and that we actually have to think about these things if we really want to build relationships with others, which is what you are doing by asking the questions in the first place.

I think there are conflicts of interest, definitely. I think female-born-women need some exclusive spaces and it's wrong for trans people to be muscling in on those.

I don't think that's quite the same as trans being a contradictory idea though. I think hormones have a helluva lot to do with how at home we feel in our bodies. I currently feel like a young woman trapped inside the body of an old woman and am considering HRT. I should probably just face reality though, even if it gives me osteoporosis.

The gender stuff is obviously patriarchal BS. I'm sure I'd fail any 'living as a woman' test. Perhaps if we weren't living in a patriarchy, M to F trans wouldn't feel obliged to insist they are women.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I think the whole thing is a giant mess but that trans is a real condition which appears to be made better by hormonal therapy in lots of cases. I think we need to find social solutions to ensure that nobody's rights are impinged on, rather than telling trans they are deluded.

Didn't mean you personally,Nyac - what I meant was "If one believes,which obviously you don't,that a MtoF is a woman,then one must also believe a FtoM is a man". my point wasn't to get at what you believe,but just to say I don't see this as misogyny,because it cuts both ways.

Not stopping, just thought that some of you who might be interested in knowing more about some feminist arguments around transgender/transexualism, might be interested in this link. It answers the 10 most common comments made on the internet when people are criticising radical feminists position on transgender.

transgendertropes.wordpress.com/

NYAC, do you know why they have done that? Is it because of changes in the law or is it something they have decided for other reasons?

Will that apply to refuges that are solely for asian women? Or are those refuges run by an organisation other than women's aid?

I don't know if someone has pointed this out yet, so apologies, but to say "Woman and man is a biological fact" is not the case. It might well be for 99% of the population, but for a small set of people, such as intersex, it's not true. Therefore that premise is wrong

Bennifer, male and female are biological facts. The fact that intersex people also exist doesn't mean that male and female people don't.

Intersex is also a biological fact.

It's not logical to say that because of intersex, that male and female suddenly become nonexistent. What reasoning are you using there Bennifer?

Nobody has argued that people are only male or only female. A tiny number of people are biologically intersex.

It's a new internal policy SeaHouses, so not available publicly. Not sure about why they've done it, probably because they are legally required to.

Male and female are only biological facts where every single one of three boxes are ticked consistently in one direction. Are they XX or XY, do they have male or female sex organs and, more controversially, do they have male or female brain development. If any individual can tick every box in the above three categories, they are factually a man or a woman. If any of those boxes contradict one another, it is far more complex. Transgender people, I feel, would tend to believe that there was at least one contradictory element within them within the three categories.

I'm clearly not arguing that men and women don't exist, but what I'm saying is that the fact that intersex exists, makes it simply not correct to say to say that male and female are 100% mutually exclusive categories, i.e. you're either male or female, which is what I thought was implied in the statement that "woman and man is a biological fact"

That's a version of biology I've never heard of. Is it one you just invented today Larry?

Sex refers to reproduction and is based in our sex organs and chromosomes. Female brain "development" as you put it, would be a brain that has XX chromosomes in its cells.

Males (men) don't have XX chromosomes they have XY chromosomes. Feelings don't change that.

Out of curiosity, Nyac, how would you feel about a FTM transsexual being in a women only space?

Given that MTF transsexuals are, in your view, still men, then presumably FTM transsexuals are still women? And in that case they are welcome in women only space, even if they look and sound like men?

Male and female are mutually exclusive categories. Intersex is another category, or more accurately intersex is an umbrella term for a range of discrete categories.

Biologically there is men, women - and a tiny number of intersex people. Most intersex people can be fairly easily alloted male or female gender, but with a few it isn't so easy. Some intersex people actually want a third category of intersex, although many don't.

Larry - When babies are born we know what sex they are. We don't have to wait while the midwife for example checks the chromosomes to declare the sex of the baby. With an adult male/female we know their sex, we don't have to have a checklist before we can assess this.

Obviously the terms have been used loosely, "man" and "male" used interchangeably here. It seems like there's a bit of sophistry going on though with the intersex.

e.g. Hot and cold are mutually exclusive - luke warm is a third category!

The point is that even if it's a small number of people, male and female (and man and woman) is clearly not mutually exclusive.

Point taken Bennifer. But does it make any difference to the overall point?