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.

That's a fair point, almondcakes.

I have noticed on twitter that anyone who has used a race analogy has been called a racist. Unless it is a trans activist, and "ally", or a man using the analogy, of course.

Buffy, I don't think I am arguing that the power issue, as expressed by post modernism, isn't very important, I'm just trying to extend it out by bringing in its relationship to material reality. Also, I'm not holding you to account as any kind of strawman!

SmallPress, I am sure I could be called a racist for using the hunter gatherer analogy, and I did consider using coal miners or agriculturalists. But ultimately, white people do fetishise hunter gatherers just as men fetishise women, so it seemed the most analagous.

I am also aware that some hunter gatherer groups have numerous genders. But that is generally done by splitting biological females into more than one gender group, and/or splitting biological males into more than one gender group, or more rarely by having an extra group not defined in relation to biology alongside the biological groups. I've not seen an example similar to what is happening with trans activists, where no group that defines itself as biologically females only is allowed to exist.

Well we've already got the phenomenon of Chloe Jennings White haven't we.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/19/chloe-jennings-white_n_3625033.html

When the media reports on him, they fail to tell us that he was born and brought up male.

Dear me. Hasn't liberal feminism got itself into a muddle. As an old second-waver I don't know whether to laugh, cry or scream. I have a lot of sympathy for those of either sex who genuinely feel that the sex they were born into is wrong for them, and who put themselves through all the therapy, medication and whatnot to try to make themselves feel right. But surely the kind of so-called trans women discussed above are just men who have found a new way to make women's lives difficult and who are running with it as hard as they can. They are just using the old misogynistic, patriarchal tactics of divide and rule, and silencing with menaces. And some feminists are colluding with this? The women who went through hell to improve our lot succeeded so well that there is no more important work to do? Real, born women are not disadvantaged in any way any more? Talk about cognitive dissonance...

This is a really interesting thread.

I also came at this originally from the opinion that the personal is personal, so I will use which ever pronoun you prefer for yourself etc., but the attempt to trump women's issues and rights takes it to the political.

You see Beachcomber's example about abortion rights makes me feel like we're in some Orwellian nightmare. How can abortion rights not be a women's issue?

It's our fight. We've been fighting it for a long time. Countless women have died in backstreet abortions because they were denied access to safe abortions. And yet we're being told it's about other "people with wombs" too. It makes me angry.

You see Beachcomber's example about abortion rights makes me feel like we're in some Orwellian nightmare

That and children diagnosed as trans, and no safe spaces without men allowed...

Am finding this thread very interesting, am sort of following the post-modernist bit too, but for the second time on this thread - a standing ovation goes to grimble

I know the abortion article is . This is exactly what radical feminists have been predicting for decades. Transgenderism has acted like a stealth movement - laws and the dominating philosophy in academia have been changed on the sly before the public debate and exploration of the issues.

Now it is too late for the public debate to happen because the debate itself is transphobic. Neat huh?

The author of the abortion article also wrote this www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16462-transphobia-has-no-place-in-feminism

Despite being a graduate of Women's and Gender Studies, she doesn't seem to understand what either a woman or gender is. And notice how she totally misrepresents de Beauvoir and uses her to paint radical feminists as essentialist.

And this stuff is being given mainstream airtime and it is transphobic to say WTF?

When I first became aware of these issues I really thought that common sense would prevail but it seems the rad fems I was hanging out with at the time are being proven right. The Gender Recognition Act was passed very very quietly, with no consultation from feminists and indeed with vaste numbers of women either not being aware of it or not appreciating its significance. And now it is too late.

The graduates of gender studies are often the most rigid and simplistic in their thinking, rather than being the people who grasp the political meaning of what they're saying. It makes me wonder if these courses are sometimes more about indoctrination than real education these days.

I am so, so fed up with this idea that gender identity must trump any other possible meaning of womanhood or you are a bigot. If someone wants to define himself as a woman because he thinks his supposed brain sex outweighs social conditioning or whatever, that's his choice. But I don't see why I am supposed to accept that as applying to me and my understanding of womanhood as well.

And as for the attempt to define other people's sexuality by telling lesbians that if they want to call themselves lesbians they must accept people with male bodies as possible sexual partners or else be bigots, honestly, I have no words.

"But I don't see why I am supposed to accept that as applying to me and my understanding of womanhood as well. "

This is a good point.

There seems to be an issue that women are making up that trans activists are taking over feminism, such thing as the cotton ceiling, reproductive issues ignored etc. So I have gone through numerous weekly round ups from the F word, covering 150 feminist links.

Articles primarily about:

Reproductive issues (abortion, breast feeding, miscarriage, sterilisation, infertility, childbirth, menopause- most not mentioned at all) : 3%
Disadvantaged groups excluding trans (lesbians, gay men, race, regionalism): 10%
Transgender rights: 18%

There was one article exclusively about lesbians. The topic was how lesbians should be shown having penetrative sex more on tv.

Articles criticising cis women were 7%, many complaining about lesbians.

There was one article exclusively about motherhood. This was about how mothers inconvenience childless women by needing help with childcare.

I just read that abortion article with a horrid sinking feeling in my heart. All it said to me was that men have found another way to silence women and tie them up in knots and make them feel like they are the ones oppressing other people and women are falling for it. Again.

How fucked up is it to make an oppressed group identify with a certain identity, crush them because of that, and then tell them later that their very identification is wrong? It's such a massive headfuck I can't even begin to get my brain around it. All it says to me is that no matter what women do to gain basic respect men will always find a way, no matter how fucked up and ridiculous, to silence us, and their voice will be the ones that are heard.

So the women who have been killed and mutilated down the years mean nothing in the face of a few men who want to take centre stage and redefine gender in such a way that, as usual, their needs come first.

almondcakes WTAF. Was that supposed to be a site about women's rights?

What can be done about all this harmful bullshit?!

I picked the F word because it seems to be the best known mainstream feminism site in the UK.

I used to love the F Word. It used to have a much more varied bunch of contributors and it felt really pioneering and interesting.
The trouble is that now they've taken such a trans/queer-focused approach, it means that only a certain type of feminist wants to write for them, so they're much narrower in all areas than they used to be.

Gosh almondcakes at those stats. I knew the F-word had been eaten by right on trans liberalism and whataboutery but those stats are bad.

Totally agree with Tunip about indoctrination in academia. And all you say callindana.

This is outrageous too gendertrender.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/breaking-news-lesbians-stage-protest-of-heterosexual-male-keynote-speaker-at-london-dyke-march-2014-threatened-with-arrest/#comments

This stood out for me from that article Beach linked to:

"Cisgender feminists must include and advocate for trans women."

Really? Feminists being told how to do feminism again? That's never happened before has it? Oh wait.

Apart from which I reject the label cis.

Yes, that leapt out at me, Basil

It's always the women who are expected to do the accommodating, isn't it?

And this absolutely horrified me:

"Cisgender feminists must not only make space for trans women within feminism, but enable their voices, perspectives, and stories to be disseminated and promoted."

WTAF? Sorry, but if trans women want their voices heard, let them do their own bloody activism alongside feminism, don't demand it at the expense of female voices, perspectives and stories - and certainly don't "promote" it over that of actual women. If that's somehow transphobic then I think I must be too, which is weird, because I get on very well with the one trans woman that I do know in RL. (sorry, I'm aware that this sounds like 'some of my best friends are black' but then in RL my friend doesn't insist on her experiences trumping everyone elses and has actually fully transitioned...)

This might be a bad analogy, but thinking back to apartheid South Africa, did activists of Indian origin demand that the ANC promote and disseminate their stories?

If feminists and allies make things better for women so that women are more likely to be considered equal, surely the knock on effect is good for trans people (if both sexes are equal, less jarring for the worldview than it is right to transition from one to the other, I think)