Cisgender Lesbians & Trans Women

[kellyandthecat]

www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/02/16/cisgender_lesbians_and_trans_women_how_to_mend_the_rift.html

I am a straight 'cisgender' woman but a friend of mine in America posted this article and I thought it was really interesting to think about 'other' kinds of women. I cant say I know very much about it or feminism with a capital F since I left university but this article definitely makes what it calls TERFS - 'trans-exclusionary radical feminists' look quite bad so I was wondering if anyone on MN had read it and had any thoughts. No one in my house ever wants to have a chat about this stuff

I'm not "cis", nor was I assigned female at birth. I am female and I do not believe that surgery, hormones or putting on a dress can make a man into a woman. For this i have been labeled a TERF. Thankfully I didn't do it on twitter so I've not been threatened.

As Parker Molloy still has a penis then he is not going to be welcomed into women only spaces. Even if he puts on a dress, has breast implants and says he feels like a lady. Lesbians don't dig penis, if they did they wouldn't be lesbians. But of course in TransWorld lesbians are just women so their wishes and desires are secondary to trans

I'm a woman whatever I am wearing, however my hair is done, whether I have painted nails or not, whether I am using power tools or cooking, all the time. I'm always a woman and no man can become like me by acting like me or dressing like me. I'm deeply offended that anyone thinks womanhood simply can be put on like a dress. You either are a woman or you aren't (with the exception of certain conditions like intersection people, which in afraid I don't know a great deal about)

I'm always a woman and no man can become like me by acting like me or dressing like me.

Lots of women are never going to become like me, even though we share the same traits of having a vagina and so on. There's an awful lot more to me being me that isn't to do with my sex or gender - that's only a little bit of me. A lot more of me is down to things I find interesting, how I relate to other people, what things I've experienced in the past, and so on, and that's likely to be just as different from another woman as it is from a man.

One of the things which makes me me is getting annoyed with people who tell me how I should think. Giving me evidence and a summary of the differing viewpoints and leaving me to think about it is much more likely to get me onside that just telling me.

oh my lord what a non problem
cis
terf

what percent of the population do you think
a) understand
b) give a toss about these terms.

really , get out more

Jasper You must have a lot of time on your hands to post such a non-point. Maybe you should get out more.

It is completely beyond me how anyone can fail to see that this is a rapist agenda, plain and simple. If someone doesn't want to have sex with you, they don't want to have sex with you, and that's the end of it. Trying to force someone who doesn't want to have sex with you to have sex with you is... oh yeah. Rape. Why can't these people just leave lesbians alone?

Ebearhug, it's too early for me probably but I can't work out if you're agree sing with me or not?

I just feel a bit upset at being rebranded as "cis" albeit hopefully only by a minority of fanatics on the Internet. As if women don't already have enough problems due to being women, now we're being told that, actually, being a woman is something anyone can do, even if they have a penis, and that if we don't accept that then we're bigots. I suppose I just worry that these ideas will spread further and I don't think that would be a good thing.

I enjoyed this thoughtful blog post on "cis":
londonfeminist.com/site/what-is-cis-and-does-it-matter/

How are lesbians cisgender anyway?
Even if you buy into a term that seems to define femininity as a desirable and natural state, femininity is about marking women as different and deferent to men, to compliment and complement them - lesbians do not do this.
Monique Wittig was pretty interesting about lesbians and gender.
But yeah this article is horrifying.
If women feel disgust about the idea of sleeping with someone with a penis, who produces sperm, that seems pretty much in line with being a lesbian.

bygonebureau.com/2013/10/21/the-best-of-both-worlds/
'Look, it’s not like I require the women I date to be cool with having my dick inside them. In fact, I’m fine if that never happens. But being shut off from the very idea of it, not even considering that having my penis inside you is different from having a man’s penis inside you? That hurts. '

Please please have empathy for lesbian women and see how a form of activism that blithely espouses this sort of idea is harmful for us.

It's just bollocks isn't it? As a straight woman am I allowed to choose whose penis i have or don't have inside me, or is it just lesbians who have to entertain the possibility of sex with a person with a penis??
It's insane

Yes, it's really frightening. I absolutely support the right of any human to decline sexual activity with any other human for whatever reason. Any alternative is coercive and rapey in the extreme!

Billions of women in the world who like penises but they want to put theirs in the minority that don't. I've never heard of any transwomen trying to bully men into having sex with them by claiming that they are bigoted for not being attracted to them. Strange that.

I think the fact that jasper thinks it is a non problem reinforces the fact that it is and issue women should be worried about .

There isn't a single mention of male violence in that article kelly. Not even in reference to the murders of transwomen. Who do you think is killing transwomen and men? Because it isn't women. It certainly isn't lesbian women nor is it radical feminists.

It is certainly a trick of the patriarchy to focus on women's behaviour and gloss over men's frightening, violent, murderous behaviour. And that is what transactivists do, almost exclusively.

Well yeah but then there'd have to be campaigns against the main cause of murder of transwomen - the sex industry - when online transactivists generally seem to be into sexual and moral libertarianism, so I don't know quite how that would work.

www.spectator.co.uk/features/9141292/dont-you-dare-tell-me-to-check-my-privilege

As so often, La Burchill gets it right and gives both barrels to this nonsense.

And what kind of person has sex with someone who doesn't want them to? Rapists, obviously

It really is rape culture. Sad to see Owen Jones defending it today.

Burchill nails it bang on. Luckily, the issues she's rightly peeved about have not yet entered real life conversation.

When my friends start using the terms privilege and problematic, I'll wade in. Until then I'm watching the lunacy from a jaundiced distance.

It's real-life conversation for young lesbians. They'll likely have to nod along with it in LGBT youth groups and it's all over tumblr. They often feel as though they ought to transition because they don't express themselves in a feminine way.
It also affects girls who feel uncomfortable sharing school bathrooms with males who identify as girls. Not to mention the sexist ideas behind 'identifying' as a girls which presumably gets absorbed by those girls.