Following on from the TERF thread...

[CailinDana]

Trying to get my head straight on this. Surely the whole malarkey around transwomen wanting to be recognised as women even though they have penises will eventually actually help to break down the idea of gender?

What I mean is, if a person with a penis can be labelled a woman simply because they want to be labelled in that way, surely gender becomes meaningless as it tells you nothing meaningful about a person except perhaps the clothes they like to wear?

This is a half-formed thought, feel free to develop/challenge.

And I am constrained by recognising that gender dysphoria must feel awful and wanting to be sympathetic - but thinking that "just stating" you are the opposite sex is too low a bar.

"You are a post-postmodernist crotch"

"I don't get postmodernism and I'm not ashamed to say that :-)"

Votes TeamCrotch.

Err...

Ok, thanks Kim.

I am a woman. I don't have to anything about it.

"You are a post-postmodernist crotch". Very Withnail.

Add a "do".

I assume Kim meant people who had penises, chest hair and deep voices?

Well, quite. Actually, I know a woman with chest hair (pcos), a woman with a deep voice (smoking). Not a woman with a penis, though.

Kim, though I know this makes me transphobic in some quarters, that still doesn't make a man a woman. Unless the definition of woman has been changed without most women knowing.

Oh, it has? Well, blow me down.

It is considerably more complex and thus more useful than 'there is no truth'. More useful is to say there is no neutral truth. But I can well imagine how this complexity has been converted into a source of power in discourse by some.

I agree Buffy that is is important to interrogate the neutrality of truth, especially as it is presented in the social sciences. But postmodernism IMO has indeed converted this critique into a discourse of power that functions to defend the status quo.

As I recall, [Butler] separates bio and social but points out that what people see and react to is the performance. You do not necessarily know the sexuality or physicality of the person based on that performance. So the performance becomes the reality in social terms, this is what people use to judge you.

This is an interesting deconstruction of Butler's performative theory of gender from a radfem blogger. Basically, she points out that Butler individualises what is actually a coercive social process.

The second, related consequence of this application is that Butler has framed Gender not in terms of a cultural system into which we are conditioned, but as a thing that we do. Moreover, as a thing that we can electively do in the same way as making a bet. By treating Gender in the same way as performative verbs, the stifling norms of Gender simultaneously (and confusingly) become “a domain of freedom and agency”. This treatment elides the reality that Gender is in fact a set of cultural products we internalise through our social learning from birth. Gender socialisation shapes and constrains who we are in a very real way, whether we like it or not. Even oppositional displays of “playing with Gender” have been necessitated by the constraint of imposed Gender in the first place. There is no opt out.

rootveg.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/i-say-it-therefore-it-is-so/

Kim, what they are is a male with a brain that says otherwise, regardless of whether or not the cause is biological.

What they get called by other people depends on the society and the personal wishes of the person in question.

What makes a woman a woman?

What makes a woman a woman is:

a. adulthood.
b. having physiological traits that are mostly female.

This is an article published this week in the Wall Street Journal by the former head of psychiatry at John Hopkins university. He closed the gender clinic there where the awful experiments were carried out on children by John Money.

genderidentitywatch.com/2014/06/17/paul-mchugha-usa/

Your link says they are women. I have no reason to doubt it.

A person born with no legs is a human being even though human beings are a bipedal species.

MRKH is considered a congenital abnormality affecting women.