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.

The article WhosLookingAfterCourtney was talking about

I must be having a seriously stupid day, because none of it makes sense.

The author suggest that we shouldn't be calling children with penises boys, and children with vaginas, girls, because cissexism. Even asking a woman if she knows whether she's having a girl or a boy is supposedly problematic.

"it challenges the idea of separation, which is fundamental to patriarchy" - no, the idea that male access to females must never be impeded is fundamental to patriarchy. And that is what transwomen wanting to go in female spaces is about, and why they are largely supported in this.

Like, I don't think you'd say that lesbian separatists are the foundation of patriarchy would you?

It's true that men want to be alone together, however they don't want women alone together. Men would be just as happy if not happier with a world where men went to the pub/whatever and women were locked into individual cupboards. The fact that women do have a secret world apart from men bothers them intensely.

All very interesting. I think both the points above are fair in that in its crudest form, for me, patriarchy would be 1) Men and women are different, and 2) men are more important than women.

I just read that article, and what I got from it that I am getting very, very tired of the notion that knowing that the configuration of your genitals makes a difference to how you are treated in the world is "creepy".

What's really giving me the rage about that article is the idea that gender is a "thing", immutable, fixed in stone - where for me (having struggled all my life against gender as this set of oppressive and arbitrary little boxes other people want to force me into) it's so clearly a fluid, culturally variable social construct.

And I shall continue to allow DS to talk about his willy, while simultaneously having conversations with him about how it's alright for boys to like pink, play with whatever the fuck they want, and that toys are to be classified as either interesting or not interesting (to you - and it's fine if other people make the classification differently) not as boys' or girls' toys. And that boys can wear pink dresses if it takes their fancy and aspire to be ballet dancers, and girls can wear khaki trousers and aspire to be all-in wrestlers.

Oh and (getting the rage even more) how the hell do you teach your children how to avoid unwanted pregnancies when they're old enough unless you're allowed to talk about the type of contraception appropriate to their biology?

Someone made the brilliant observation upthread which I think is worth repeating: "trying to be so open minded they fail to notice their brains have fallen out."

The issue isn't actually with trans* or with feminists, the issue, as ever, comes back to men's behaviour.

So true. The paradox for feminism is that in order to abolish gender as a meaningful ideology, we have to reinforce it by segregating ourselves. Our long-term objective is incompatible with the short-term necessity of protecting ourselves from men's harassment and violence. I don't think there's any way out of this trap. It needs men to renounce the privileges and entitlements of their gender, and that's out of our remit.

unless it becomes unacceptable to refer to someone's sex at all, there will be words for 'person with willy' and 'person with vagina'. Won't there? I cannot see how we can get by without such words, even if we don't need to know someone's sex as much as we think we do at the moment

I'm struggling to think of more than a handful of contexts where these words are useful, aside from enforcement of / resistance to heterosexist patriarchy. The cancer I'm statistically most likely to get is one that affects men and women equally. Do we need a separate pronoun for "child of smokers"? He-him/She-her/Re-gal.

I used to look quite androgynous and people often got my gender wrong. These days, not so much. This is not because I have started taking my knickers off in public.

"What I mean is, if the debate around female space is pushed far enough then I think it'll come down to "if you have a vulva you can enter here, if you don't get lost -" which, over a long period, could actually do a lot to strip away ideas of gender as what you'll be saying is, ok, we have two basic types of genitals (with some variations in between) and those genitals relate to nothing else to do with a person - they can wear dresses or suits, want to be called man or woman, it's all a matter of choice, we just restrict based on anatomy not on any notion of gender" - does that make sense?"

I agree with this - when we are splitting say toilets into "womens'" and "mens'" its about anatomy rather than "gender" isn't it?

"It's true that men want to be alone together, however they don't want women alone together. Men would be just as happy if not happier with a world where men went to the pub/whatever and women were locked into individual cupboards. The fact that women do have a secret world apart from men bothers them intensely."

Do you GENUINELY believe this!?

I agree with what you're saying Buffy about they're being no notion of the "wrong" gender if gender doesn't exist. And that's why I think, ultimately, transgender people will (unwittingly) break down the idea of gender, as if they continue in the current vein, it will become necessary to refer entirely to biology when defining what services are available to people, to the extent that, for example, maternity services will have to be directed at "people capable of bearing children" rather than at "women" as "women" is a meaningless term in that context if a person with a penis, who could never bear children, can be called "women." It would also, perhaps, break down the idea that "women" should bear children and if you have two x chromosomes but can't bear children you're somehow "less of a woman." If it's actually the case that "woman" can refer to anyone, even people who biologically could never have children, then the linking of "woman" and "child" becomes meaningless, doesn't it? It just becomes people who can bear children (all of whom have uteruses) and people who can't (some of whom have uteruses, some of whom have penises).

In addition, it could have the effect of, in cases of rape, taking the focus entirely away from the victim and entirely on the perpetrator. Because, when you're talking about why you don't want people with penises in a certain changing room, it comes down, not to the fact that the other people have vaginas, but entirely to the fact that that person has a penis (regardless of gender identity) and so could rape someone. It throws light on the fundamental idea of feminism that men, simply by virtue of being taller, stronger and in possession of a penis, are a threat to women, regardless entirely of the clothes anybody wears (much and all rape myths would have us believe otherwise). It breaks down the gender argument and takes us to the nitty-gritty, which I think is a good thing.

I wish it did, CallinDana, but anytime I see this raised, you get a bunch of people coming in and totally derailing with the "people can be raped by fingers, too! Do you want to exclude all finger-having people, do you? DO YOU?"

...which also gets pretty tiresome having to go through the whole "yes indeedy but most rapes are by penises and you are deliberately taking the piss" conversation yet again.

True SmallPress. The aim is always to dismiss women's concerns. Which makes me wonder why some men are so keen to be identified as women? Although it's telling that once they are identified as women, they then want to redefine what "women" means - partly male entitlement but partly also a result of recognising just how disempowering being a woman is?

It is very interesting to look at the WHO definitions:

www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/

"What do we mean by "sex" and "gender"?

Sometimes it is hard to understand exactly what is meant by the term "gender", and how it differs from the closely related term "sex".

"Sex" refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women.

"Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.

To put it another way:

"Male" and "female" are sex categories, while "masculine" and "feminine" are gender categories.

Aspects of sex will not vary substantially between different human societies, while aspects of gender may vary greatly."

By this the notion of gender could be regarded as sexist and boy is just short hand for 'male child' and girl short hand for 'female child', both of which are biological realities and will bring different physical challenges while growing up.

What if trans women were accepted as women in the gender sense, but not as female in the biological sense?

But what counts for a woman? I don't wear dresses or wear makeup, wear men's trainers. Currently hairy as fuck. Am I a man? If I accept someone else's definition of gender do I have to accept that I don't "pass" as a woman myself?

Yesterday I saw someone complaining about an article about fuckinng Mila Kunis. "Mila Kunis wants men to stop saying 'we are pregnant'"

Apparently the authors of the article were cis sexist for perpetuating the myth that men can't pregnant and that only women get pregnant.

Has the definition of woman always been about gender? or is this a recent thing and i'ts always been a synonym for female human?

CailinDana wrote - "transgender people will (unwittingly) break down the idea of gender, as if they continue in the current vein, it will become necessary to refer entirely to biology"

It seems to me that trans people are excluded as much by their biology as by their gender.

If trans people unwittingly lost the gender-is-innate pillar of the transgenderism ideology that many transactivists advocate, would those transactivists want continue with another of their main goals, which is to abolish the biological basis of the sex categories of female and male (which they believe are social constructs)?

But surely there has to be some way to differentiate the side of the species who bears children from the side that does not? Simply for practical reasons?

If TERF accusers object to the discussion of "women's issues" then discussion of things like menstruation, pregnancy etc have to be couched purely in biological terms, not in terms of women. It is beyond ludicrous to pretend these things simply don't exist, they absolutely do, and stopping the people who experience these things from discussing them is ludicrous and can't ever be justified I think. A person who simply can't experience menstruation/pregnancy has no place in an area designated for people who do experience those things. If it's TERF or whatever to refer to the people who experience these things as "women" then, ok, we're not women we are biological breeders or some such nonsense. But one thing transwomen can't ever say is that menstruation/pregnancy don't exist, or that we can't talk about them. There is absolutely no justification for that.

If we accept that gender is a social construct, something that is performed, then I suppose you choose RFFU ....

Personally, I'm willing to go along with pronouns etc, it's when trans women claim to be women in every sense of the word, and if course the women-only spaces issue, that it gets really, really offensive.

I think it might come to saying "Ok transwomen, be women, we'll have to be something else." There is no possible way a person who can't get pregnant can stroll into a space for pregnant people and pretend to participate as though they are actually pregnant, it's just too mad to contemplate, surely?

No Kim, they don't. But some transactivists do object to women discussing "women's issues" like menstruation and pregnancy, on the basis that it is exclusionary of trans women. The logical conclusion to that is that such things are not discussed as "women's issues" but under some other term. The danger then is that transwomen try to participate in those spaces, claiming that as they are women they can do so. But would that actually happen?

It might seem petty, but when women's accomplishments are so frequently dismissed and not counted having transwomen be counted as biological women does take away from biological women's accomplishments. I don't want to rehash the other thread but there were several stories where a transwoman who would have trained as a man been treated as a man all her life has now been awarded as a woman..and beaten biological women in sport etc. It seems unfair.

And this might not be an issue in the UK but in the states where Uni costs are prohibitively expensive some athletes can only make it on a sports scholarship. If people who are biologically male are allowed to play on women's teams biologically female will suffer

I thought that most sports insist on MTFs waiting for medication to kick in and for any advantage to disappear.

And as Kim said, some trans activists are selfish idiots. None that I know though.