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.

On top of that, being a man, you have never experienced the same level of threat that biological women have experienced. In fact, you are a threat. And women will treat you that way, for our own safety.

I picked that out of a brilliant post by CaillinDana not because I disagree, but because it's true. I've stopped asking women out since I started reading MN because I don't want to be the cause of a woman's discomfort.

Obviously I meant to post twice. :o

You didn't mean to post twice, that was the patriarchy at work, DT.

But - have you really stopped asking women out? Women you know?

Flora"tiggy are you serious or do you perhaps not realise how condescending that post is?

I'm not interested in collecting a group of token trans friends so I can brag about how cool I am. I'm interested in real friends and feminism. The type that puts women first. I couldn't give a fuck what trans people think about skateboards."

I'm suggesting that if you only read the stuff written by extremists about their extreme views on the subject you're hardly going to get an idea about who/what trans people are. And if I know your views are based the rantings of idiots who don't represent they people who they purport to speak for, why should I care less what you think on the subject?

The computer term GIGO applies. Garbage In - Garbage Out.

I think you have got to the crux of it allhailqueenmab.

Women are defined by men and that definition exists to validate manhood.

What defines women is decided by men. And what men want us to be is determined by what they want themselves to be.

And that is why feminists are angry with trans politics. Because we are yet again being defined by and for men in order for men to construct a definition of themselves which suits them.

It is deeply patriarchal and profoundly misogynistic. Plus we are being told that the small amount of space that is grudgingly allotted to us is up for grabs to any man who wants to be in it. And we are privileged bigots when we object to no longer having any space or sanctuary free from those who oppress, abuse, exploit, dominate and define us. And we must also participate in the male fantasy that we don't actually really materially exist in any meaningful way or in a way founded on a female perspective, on self-determination. We must embrace our own disappearance because a small group of men want to have our very selves. We must engage in delusion, we must use double think, we have to submit to gaslighting and a positively Orwellian worldview that we can see to be patently false because we know who we are and it is not how we are defined in male dominated gender culture.

Reminds me of this dworkin quote;

“The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.”

Some things I don't care about:

• what transwomen are thinking inside their own heads but not expressing in public dialogue or activism

• whether random men on t'internet care about what I think.

Some things I do care about:

• women being attacked and abused for defining their own sexual boundaries

• women's rights and safe spaces being eroded to benefit

• focussing feminism on women.

Every other minority or oppressed group has extremists and they also have moderate voices. Even when the extremist voices are picked up in the mainstream press (e.g. the Daily Mail), the moderate voices will be picked up in other press and usually it is the moderate voices who are given the serious airtime / platform (e.g. Guardian, Times, Question Time etc). With transactivism, these people you say are extremists with extreme views are the only voices being heard, they are the ones popping up in the Guardian, the New Statesman and liberal feminist blogs. They are also the same as the views heard IRL activism (with actual talking out loud to other people) around issues such as communal space policies. I don't care if these are not representative of what other transwomen think. These are the voices which are affecting women and they can't simply be brushed off as extremists.

allhail and Beach well put.

We must engage in delusion, we must use double think, we have to submit to gaslighting and a positively Orwellian worldview that we can see to be patently false because we know who we are and it is not how we are defined in male dominated gender culture.

Exactly this. A huge lie is being constructed around us, that there is no material reality of being a woman, and it is being demanded that we not only say nothing about this lie but that we positively affirm our belief in it. I would like to have confidence in society that as this issue becomes publicly discussed, people will see the lie and reject it. However history makes me pessimistic about this. I can imagine when foot-binding first started in China, women must have thought that this could not take hold. I'm sure they would have been beyond despair at the thought it would last 800 years. It is very worrying that children are being raised with this gender dystopic nonsense.

TiggyD it must be great to be in the group who get to do the defining and who get to be entirely dismissive of a group of women's extremely thoughtful, profound and painful analysis of themselves and their existence as; "Garbage In - Garbage Out".

I'm sick of this idea that the vast majority of transwomen are shrinking violets who just want a peaceful life and who are 100% respectful of bio females, totally, always (even when they are imitating us and fetishizing our oppression and enjoying putting on the shackles of femininity) and that it is only a tiny fringe of extremists who are the problem.

I have been reading stuff written by transwomen for years on various threads, blogs, articles, etc for years, plus talking to transwomen in real life through volunteer work I do with prostitutes. With only a few notable exceptions they have all shown; male entitlement, the ubiquitous obliviousness to that male entitlement, exertion of male privilege and an expectation of female cooperation with anti-female gender identity bullshit and get a tendency to become angry/upset/distressed/gaslighty/rapey/emotionally manipulative/aggressive/threatening/sulky/guilt trippy/suicidal/narcissistic ragey/abusive/domineering etc if that cooperation is not forthcoming or not doormatty enough.

In other words, they act just like men as a class. Which isn't terribly surprising is it really.

To be fair I have had some very interesting and mutually respectful discussions/disagreements too but not many compared to the discussions I have had that follow the above schema.

Now TiggyD it is great that you have lovely trans friends and have nice days out with them. But you are a man and you don't actually need to care very much about any of this because it doesn't affect your (already limited) human rights and your status as not quite human (this is reserved for women you see). You have the buffer of being in the dominant class - which to my mind makes it pretty goddamn cheeky of you to tell us what to think or what is or is not "garbage".

Your "garbage" is my rights, status, existence and humanity.

beach

Everyone is so busy dancing around trans feelings that they don't want to talk about the reality of their experience with transwomen. The transwomen I know or have encountered (especially the "lesbians") have exhibited male entitlement and various aspects of personality disorders, particularly narcissistic rage. The transmen, on the other hand, have not.

I'm sick of men telling women what to think about gender politics when it has no negative impact on them. Look at the entitlement on display here where a man feels able to state that Sheila Jeffrey's book is "not a meaningful contribution to feminist theory".

www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/06/it-s-time-end-divisive-rhetoric-sex-and-gender-and-create-trans-inclusive-feminism

Your "garbage" is my rights, status, existence and humanity.
Yes.
Great comments Beachcomber & others

Yes BillNTeds, even women I know. My XW told me a schoolfriend of mine would 'love' to see me and I won't contact her, just in case, because she was in an abusive relationship with another mutual schoolfriend, and that could be triggering for her.

Her abusive fuckwit actually kicked one of my teeth out in class. I'd dropped my pen and bent down to retrieve it. He kicked me in the face, I grunted, the teacher asked me what was wrong and I answered "nothing" and bled silently onto my desk after spitting my lost tooth out.

She and I were good friends at school and again in our 30s after she escaped him. We lost touch after my divorce unfortunately. I will not contact her, just in case.

That sounds quite self pitying, doesn't it? :o

Why not contact her if she would love to see you?

Great analysis above. I have a cruder (as in simplistic) way of looking at it.

I was as a kid what is irritatingly called a tomboy because I was interested in doing the stuff normally associated with the opposite gender. As an adult I've maintained the feeling that I am more at home with stuff normally associated with the opposite gender and often feel out of it with female friends who are discussing fashion, shopping, baking, babies etc. (even though I am married with DCs) and feel more at home with a pint and talking about sport with male friends.

So, if I put on a lounge suit and took myself and my vagina into a male space could I call myself a man and expect all the blokes there to accept me as one? Could I hell. So why do these penis owners who do the same in a woman's space expect us to accept them? Bugger off.

And no, I refuse to call myself a ciswoman either. I am a woman and 'cis' can fuck off to the far side of fuck.

I could call myself a purple spotted green alien for a change perhaps. Would it make me one? No.

If that makes me a bigot, you know what? I don't care.

Sometimes I think we are in such danger of being 'open minded' that our brains fall out and so careful to avoid the sensitivities of an extremist minority with identity issues that we don't look after ourselves enough. It's another case of apologising for our very existence.

That's DT.

Agree very much with queenmab, Flora and Beach.

“The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.”

Beach this Dworkin quote reminded me of another passage of hers from Right-Wing Women, which seems hideously apt in light of the fact that so many people, including women themselves, are so willing to embrace the notion that 'woman' is an ontologically meaningless concept ('a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman').

“The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt. Because women’s testimony is not and cannot be validated by the witness of men who have experienced the same events and given them the same value, the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.

“The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.

Doctor - at the risk of sounding critical and making you feel like you just can't win (!) I think you're probably taking it too far. All you really need to do is to be aware of your threat status and take that into account. You don't have to sequester yourself away from women - what does that achieve? We all have to live in the world together, the important thing is that we do so with consideration and compassion.

Thanks for the and link to the book review Flora.

Book review would be funny if it wasn't a man mansplaining what the women should be thinking and doing (in a mainstream publication).

How comforting that a man feels "comfortable in ignoring" a women's analysis. Not.

How fabulous for a man to tell us it's time for "trans inclusive feminism". If said man actually understood the issues he would be able to grasp that trans AKA gender inclusive feminism is an oxymoron and that "cisgender" is absolutely not used to "describe people who identify with the sex they were assigned at birth". Hence why it is gaslightingly called cisgender not cissex.

Knob. People who don't understand the difference between sex and gender and how the two operate in society should be reading more Sheila Jeffreys, not feeling comfortable in dismissing her.

Although of course he doesn't have to care because as pointed out by flora, transmen aren't trying to take over male space, rights, politics, etc. And even if they were, men would just laugh at them or rape them, just as they do with gender compliant gals.

'I am a woman and 'cis' can fuck off to the far side of fuck.'

MTE, grimbletart

Donkey that is so correct. Thank you for posting that.

Look at this from Adam Boulton from Sky News saying this week that challenging rape as a weapon of war is "a little bit trivial":

twitter.com/Claire_Phipps/status/478137213986033664/photo/1

Boulton makes no mention of the number of women raped nor how many of them were also murdered or died as a result (including as a result of rejection by their families). That is all trivial compared with the lives of the soldiers, mostly men. The numbers don't matter, it doesn't even need to be mentioned.

Were these women asked their gender identity before being raped? Were men who think they are women also raped, impregnated and rejected by their families?

Were these women asked their gender identity before being raped? Were men who think they are women also raped, impregnated and rejected by their families?

Exactly Flora. That's why it's so frustrating when people say that woman is an identity. Can women and girls around the world identify their way out of the things that are done to them because they are female? Why are they choosing to identify this way in the first place? It's a stance that is cruelly oblivious to the reality of what sex-based oppression actually is, and what's unnerving is that so many women who call themselves feminists seem completely fine with it.

Buffy in a word, no.

As the actual or potential providers of sexual and reproductive labour, men as a class would disregard our identity and have regard to the material reality of our bodies. We would, in the meantime, have lost the ability to describe and understand our oppression.

Buffy, don't apologise for your analysis or sharing of lived experience. Don't put it down. It's a bad habit that is socialized into women and we must shake it off.

I have very fond and respectful memories of a certain feminist who told me not to apologize for my testimony or female perspective. It was good and wise advice and I just wanted to mention it to you because women deserve to be heard and there is no trivial analysis in feminism. The personal is political and all that and