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 find no logic to the attempt to paint feminist analysis of transgenderism as akin to homophobes who think homosexuals and lesbians need "fixed".

If anything I find pro trans people as being in the camp of thinking (perhaps inadvertently in their desire for validation) that the non heterosexual non gender compliant amongst us need "fixed" with synthetic sex hormones and mutilating cosmetic genital surgery.

Kim, you were the person who made this thread about surgery etc and asked others to talk about it.

The thread was about the impact trans people would have on gender, not about trans people themselves.

Trans or not no one person knows what it is like to be another person. I am a woman and I don't know how all women think and what choices they want to make for their own bodies, I have a disability and I don't know what all people with this disability feel and what choices they want to make for their own bodies. We each have or should strive to have fully autonomy over our own bodies.

This thread has drifted onto surgery but that wasn't what it started as. A person's decision to have medical treatments generally speaking only impacts themselves and is not really anyone else's business. The acceptance of a male bodied person as female and entitled to access all female only spaces impacts a large number of people which is why it is something that should be available for discussion among those impacted.

Kim are you serious in saying that you find feminist concern and interest in gender politics (which is the umbrella under which transgenderism falls) surprising?!

Really? I mean really?

I can see how it is inconvenient that feminists pay attention to this hugely gendered and sexist issue. But the claim that it is surprising or somehow perverted or weird for us to pay attention is disingenuous to the extreme.

A little anecdote; the reason I, as a feminist, became interested in transgenderism is twofold. Firstly I have contact with transwomen prostitutes, and I have had to learn about GRS with regards to help I am required to find for them (stuff to do with GRS aftercare and a clash with French medical insurance). My focus in the work I do with prostitutes is prostituted women but there is no way I will neglect prostituted transpeople who are on my watch.

Secondly I have a feminist friend who has been stalked and received death threats because she writes in a trans critical manner.

Transgenderism came knocking on my door, not the other way round.

kim I bothered to read this: Do you think HRT / surgery is acceptable or should trans people not be allowed that and should have talking therapy to accept the body they are in?

But feminists do seem to have an unusual interest in trans people and treatment

As Beachcomber said, trans issues came knocking on my door, not the other way around.

Heh heh heh @ the surprise about feminists having a lot to say about transpolitics. You haven't really understoof all these threads, have you, Kim?

You remind me of another poster who pops up in these parts sometimes to not see anything beyond her own life.

My gut reaction is that if men don't like being men, they should change what being a man means, instead of changing their bodies.

"But feminists do seem to have an unusual interest in trans people and treatment. "

Honestly, until the interweb I didn't think transsexualism/ transgenderism had anything to do whatsoever with feminism. I was outright puzzled that some people seemed so involved with it, for me it had about as much to do with feminism as arguments about transubstantiation. Then I found that there were people out there who call themselves women and feminists, who act and talk just like misogynist men in the presence of actual women who disagree with them and feminists. I've really, really tried to avoid trans issues because I think it ought to be totally marginal to feminism.

And also I've just been so outraged that the vocal trans activists spend all their time stalking feminists, not powerful men. Why aren't they targeting the bastions of power, the army, the police, the media? Why are they targeting feminist events and lesbian spaces? They have made trans a feminist issue, feminists didn't

Kim, lots of issues on here get lots of interest, quite a number of threads go to a thousand posts.

Gender identity and what it means is key to both feminists and trans people. So of course threads which cover gender identity get responses.

And you did ask us how we all defined various things to do with trans issues.

As transubstantiation has been mentioned, here is another analogy:

When the C of E started ordaining women, some members of the C of E defected in a very high profile way, and were accepted with open arms by the RC church. (including some married priests - RC priests can't marry)

I was furious. I was teetering on the edge of the RC church, having great difficulty with it and my own principles, anyway, so was not too deeply hurt when I just thought: this is no place for me. This organisation is behaving like a dustbin for misogynists who find themselves out of place where they were before. And all these much vaunted principles about celibate clergy don't matter a jot - they are so dispensable when they are being cast aside to accommodate men's disgust with women priests.

Obviously, I left the church (not formally - I wish there were a ceremony for that). but it was ok - I knew deep down that the misogyny of the RC church conflicted with my spiritual well being and it was just being clarified when it thrust everything aside to accommodate a misogyny that was no longer tolerated elsewhere.

Being a woman should not conflict with my spiritual health as being RC did, but is womanhood now just a grey category for "not men" and must it accommodate everyone?

You know, when an outright misogynist who has told lesbians to suck his balls because they disagree with him, is a star speaker at Dyke March, then I think feminists need to address the trans issue, however reluctantly.

I'm pretty sure anti racists wouldn't be rushing to invite people who have used racist insults to their anti racist rallies. And telling people who didn't want them there, that they were bigoted haterz and Klanphobic or some other such nonsense.

You know, when an outright misogynist who has told lesbians to suck his balls because they disagree with him, is a star speaker at Dyke March, then I think feminists need to address the trans issue, however reluctantly.

...wait, what? AskBasil, really? Who?

I think Basil is talking about Sarah Brown.

Ah - even if she wasn't a raging misogynist, she's a hypocritical asshole and all-round loose cannon on all sorts of non-trans issues, too. I wonder that the LibDems allowed her to represent them for so long. (But then, they are having trouble ditching Mike Hancock, so perhaps I shouldn't expect too much.)

I went and googled, and the DykeMarch twitter account says they "won't tolerate" heckling. So, what does that mean in practice? They can't stop people voicing their disapproval in a public place, however much they huff and puff.

I am surprised at how much responses the trans threads get compared to the actual amount of trans people out there and the small number - about 1 -2000 per year who have surgery. I wish other issues on here got people so excited.

Why do you and others know so much about trans people, surgery, blogs, outcomes? Why does such a small minority take up so much posts on here?

This is disingenuous in the extreme. You cannot be unaware, Kim, of the prominence of trans issues within contemporary feminism and the aggressive way trans activists have attempted to impose a new discourse on top of feminism which makes the reality of biological sex unspeakable, reifies gender as natural and renders 'female' a metaphysical identity which anyone can claim, both legally and socially.

To say you are 'surprised' that feminists might have a problem with this, and to imply it is all down to women having a prurient interest in people who get SRS, suggests that you are not engaging in good faith on these issues, quite frankly.

You have been participating in these threads, in spite of how upset you say they make you, and you cannot have missed women articulating their concerns with the current trans political agenda. What I don't see is any evidence that you have for a moment taken any of those concerns seriously. You want - indeed demand - empathy for the way gender has impacted on you, but you do not return that empathy in kind to female posters here. Instead, you pretend you don't even understand what we are talking about.

Sorry in advance for an epic post. This is a fascinating thread with some brilliant links. I'm definitely getting a copy of Right Wing Women to read!

I find that although some very vocal transactivists behave like entitled arseholes have said terrible things about women who disagree with them, I am seeing a rising number of self-identified feminists online who are also bending over backwards to accommodate them and parrot their dubious lines about the female penis, lesbian transphobia and cis-privilege. They seem to be in a competition over who can be the most right-on, and in their desperation not to offend the very delicate sensitivities of the trans community (the vocal ones, at any rate) they are themselves silencing and dismissing anyone who even questions these views.

Just yesterday two feminist facebook groups that I follow posted things that made me go 'wtaf'?

1. An interesting link was posted up about pop culture and the depiction of female presidents in film, which contained the line "pop culture has not been kind to commanders-in-chief with two X chromosomes."

THE VERY FIRST COMMENT on the post (from a female poster) was "What's all this about chromosomes?"

To which the page admin instantly replied "You're right, not all females have two X chromosomes." God forbid they should inadvertently post a link that doesn't explicitly include transpeople as women...

2. Another page posted a link with the trigger warning "Transphobia" and then linked to this: feminspire.com/a-letter-to-activist-dan-savage-who-continues-to-bully-my-trans-sibling/ which sounded awful going by the title (I have no idea who Dan Savage is, btw), but on reading, it appeared that the sibling of the author had objected to Dan Savage using the T-word in a discussion about how language evolves and some words are no longer acceptable/are reclaimed by those they once insulted. He wasn't calling anyone a tranny, he wasn't directly insulting transexuals/transgendered people, he was talking about how words that were once used as description are no longer acceptable and how some words that were once insults - queer, for example - could be reclaimed. But apparently just saying the word itself is so hateful and bigoted that it caused the person in question to feel 'unsafe'.

And everyone piled in on the comments saying what a hateful biphobic piece of shit/a troll/privileged white guy he is, in what felt like a more "righter-on than thou" pile-on.

It's reading this stuff on my FB feed day in day out that makes me feel that any discussion is being silenced, shouted down, that people are having to censor their speech and phrase themselves very carefully to avoid being tarred with the transphobe brush or pulled up for the tiniest slip in their language, anything to dismiss the serious points that people are trying to discuss. It's not that I go looking for this stuff (to go back to Kim's assertion that feminists are obsessed with trans), it's constantly being shoved in my face.

Somebody upthread (sorry, silly device won't allow me to scroll back so excuse me if I paraphrase) said that it feels like transpeople are on a mission to put themselves in the front of the 'most oppressed' queue and consequently I think many women are feeling that they have to be nice and tolerant and defend transpeople to the hilt, ahead of their own needs, so as not to be seen as intolerant bigots.

Christ, it's just another version of women being socialised to be people-pleasers and care-givers, isn't it?

WhentheRed wrote - "comments from those on twitter and other places who mock women for being "obsessed" trans*women's genitals."

Let's not forget the women who are mocked on Twitter for not being obsessed with trans women's genitals.

Lovecat, Right-Wing Women is available as a PDF.

radfem.org/dworkin/

Lovecat, that is exactly my problem. This wave of Feminism and feminist discourse is being shaped by trans issues. It's "What about the tranz?". No wonder coherence has been lost and people won't identify as feminists, or feel they have no "home".

It's why I'm all about women's liberation.

Oh, thank you Beach :o

Yes, Crotch, it seems all-pervasive. I feel we are halfway down a very slippery slope here.

Anything women demand, or even ask for is too bloody much for some men

Honestly.

Lovecat, Dan Savage is the creator of the It Gets Better Project, which he set up in response to the suicide of a gay teenage boy. He is also known for writing poignantly and sensitively about his adopted son and his and his partner's attempts to maintain a relationship and help the mother, a drug user with various problems. He also writes a sex advice column.

Pretty much anyone with any perspective on sex will sometimes disagree with his advice. When various women complained about one particular piece of advice about a teenage girl, he then wrote a follow on piece essentially retracting the advice and that was the end of the matter.

He once gave a piece of advice considered transphobic, which he apologised for. As a consequence has been glitter bombed twice, has had trans activists protest his public speaking about other topics and has been labelled a transphobe ever since. The whole thing got stirred up again recently when he defended a woman and an abortion provision campaign which used the word vagina in relation to abortion provision (apparently transphobic as mentioning body parts may trigger dysphoria in trans people).

Unlike the abortion campaign, he doesn't seem to get criticised for writing about sex and mentioning clitoris, vulva etc when talking about women having sex. As far as I know anyway...