So ... Does this indicate that you CAN be 'born the wrong gender'?

[Garrick]

www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/im-girl-meet-twin-boy-6348318?

Summary: Twins Alfie and Logan, 4yo, are both boys. Logan has insisted on wearing girly clothes, doing girly things, and that he is a girl since the age of two. His mother, who sounds brilliant, reports him wishing his willy would fall off.

I'm somewhat flummoxed. When I were a lass, little boys like this were described as camp (behind their fathers' backs) and, as far as I know, mostly grew up to be camp and fulfilled their rightful destinies. Rather like Ugly Betty's brother.

But this is what some transwomen say they felt like as children, isn't it? And I have rubbished it because I find it hard to believe in gender as an innate feeling. I'm not sure whether I think little Logan proves me wrong

So transmen are actively removing (or campaigning for it removal and achieving it) the word women and replacing it with pregnant individuals.

They feel they are being excluded because they are pregnant men.

If I'm honest I wouldn't be at all surprised if in thirty years time pregnant women are called pregnant individuals.
I can see why someone would find it annoying though.

I thought it was mainly transwomen doing the campaigning? Or have I got that wrong?

If ciswomen are women whose gender identity aligns with their born sex, and transwomen are women and always have been, does that mean transwomen are cis? And seeing as a lot of born-women say they don't have a gender identity or are unhappy with gender, does that make them transgender?

It's not "annoying".

If you can't see the problem with removing all reference to women and girls in anything that is specific to women and girls, around the world, because of their biology, then I'm not sure there's anything else to say.

There have been complaints about charities sending sanitary protection to girls who don't have any. That sort of thing. I get that you don't get why this is a problem, but please do us a favour and give this perspective some thought, rather than saying oh yeah that's a bit annoying and anyway what's the problem.

You think that in 30 years time every country in the world will refer to "pregnant individuals" because it really won't matter to anyone who has what reproductive system? Come off it. This is a world where women are still to all intents and purposes chattels. You have a very optimistic view of what is going to happen in the next 30 years.

"This is a world where women are still to all intents and purposes chattels."

This should say in some parts of the world.

Women are being bought and sold as we speak. Or should that be "people", yes that's better, that'll make it way easier to address the problem.

Where have you seen transmen up in arms for these terms to be changed? [puzzled]

There is a massive shitstorm going on right now because a women's festival wanted to do a vagina cupcakes workshop, in order to reduce the stigma around vulvas/vaginas. Making cupcakes where the icing is representative of a human vulva is supposedly transphobic. Because.... not all women have vulvas.

One of the posts slagging off the women's festival organisers says that transwomen are apparently biologically female. People have agreed with that statement.

But there's nothing to see here.

The divorce from reality is very sad.

"I wouldn't be at all surprised if in thirty years time pregnant women are called pregnant individuals."

Where are you from, WhenShe? I'm just wondering the name of the planet you are broadcasting from because it really doesn't sound like ours.

Dementor, yes, agender is under the trans umbrella, so women who say they don't have a gender identity are trans. Not all agender women choose to identify as trans.

demented it makes people like many on this thread agender or genderqueer I think.

It incidentally means that many posting on this thread are not women. And they weren't girls growing up. So any of the things that happened to us that we thought were down to us being female, actually weren't, or something.

So as I have no internal gender, I have no sex. I am neither male nor female. Thus, when a man shouted "show us your tits" at me out of a van when I was 14, this was not a result of sexism / misogyny / or an example of how women and girls in the UK are treated to street harassment by men. As I am not female, and I have no way of telling what his sex was as I didn't stop to ask him.

Not that it matters though, probably. I guess "some people harrass other people on the street" covers it all off nicely and there is no need to even try to understand whether there are any underlying patterns of who is doing what to who and why.

Oh. So I'm trans then?

I expected to feel angrier, somehow.

I guess I need to join the ranks of trans people who also think a lot of this is a load of old shit, and misogynist shit at that, and get called a terf on twitter and all the rest of it.

Although I don't have twitter either. I'm not doing very well at this so far.

Sorry. I'm getting a bit pissy and sarcy.

I think I'll go to bed now

It is hugely frustrating that females as well as dealing with all the other patriarchal shit have also got to stop and waste time trying to defend the right to make a bloody cup cake in the shape of a vagina! And try and stop the total erasure of our name and identity for the sake of a tiny part of the population, who, even if our name is erased will still not be able to be female!

This young woman had to look on the internet to see if trans women could actually have a period!

Meanwhile many, many girls and women the world over have their education harmed because they cannot go to school while their period is happening, or maybe even the arrival of their period signals the end of schooling for some.

We should be supporting such women and not being forced into arguing about and defending the terms used for our bodies and identities. It is total crap.

lunapads.com/pads4girls?geoip_country=US

Of course trans women deserve the protection and care in law we all expect and they deserve to be safe, and not to be discriminated about in the work process.

But they do not get to define female or tell us how to speak. I hope they must realise that telling females what they can can't say is something men have been doing for millennia. I would have thought they would want to distance themselves from anything that smacked of trying to control women!

I've seen a bit of the vagina cupcake shitstorm on twitter. It's fucking nuts.

The taking issue with vagina cupcakes is downright stupid.

If somehow trans activists are stopping sanitary protection being sent to girls who need it - or preventing sanitary protection being discussed as an issue then that is really damaging.

I'm sure some of the things trans activists do / or try to do are damaging.

I think many agender people would not consider themselves trans because they have grown up in families where nobody expected them to have a gender identity, so they have never transitioned from anything in the first place.

Other agender women feel they have transitioned and are trans.

Agender is total bullshit.

dementedDementor twitter has a lot to answer for, it's given a voice to a lot of people who maybe should not have one!! It's easy to say offensive and damaging things anonymously and it's easy for things to be assumed, like we should take any of this crap seriously! At the moment the traffic is going in one way, if Twitter has been invented a few decades before it would probably have been used to out gay people or damage trans people. I wish there was more of a moral responsibility to things to speak kindly, wisely and in a measured way. Social media is like a sledge hammer to crack a nut! (not a tweeter fan!)

Regarding people calling pregnant women, pregnant individuals - I'll hold my hand up and admit I was talking from a Western perspective not every country in the world (my bad).

But I genuinely would not be surprised, I'll be almost 70 then. Now admittedly my nan is a bit older than that but so many things that we take for granted sound alien to her.

Just things like how much mat leave you can take and redundancy packages, employers duty of care. She looks at me like I'm crackers.

I'm a big embarrassed to say the language she uses is not remotely polically correct. And she can't see why she should change,

The world changes fast and thirty years is a pretty long time.

It isn't very long ago that it was progressive to believe that women had penis envy and little boys had Oedipal complexes.

Now that isn't seems as progressive. It is seen as ridiculous. Not every new cultural idea stands the test of time.

It isn't very long ago that it was progressive to believe that women had penis envy and little boys had Oedipal complexes. Now that isn't seems as progressive. It is seen as ridiculous. Not every new cultural idea stands the test of time

And even more recently homosexual acts were illegal. Like I said things change quickly.

WhenSheWasBadSheWasHorrid you are talking as if it is to be assumed we will be written out of our own story! I bloody hope not. I hope things are changing for the better. I hope that increased maternity leave and redundancy packages are for the benefit of individuals.

Because a small number of biological females who identify as trans men can and do get pregnant, doesn't mean we need to stop talking about pregnant women. There is only so far we need to fall down this rabbit hole before some sensible person in authority, (I don't care if they are male or female, trans or not) will say, ah no, the emperor has no clothes on!

In this story Trevor is a trans man who has had a baby, who obviously has the necessary female anatomy to do so. I have no problems with Trevor doing whatever Trevor wants with Trevor's body. I am not sure how I would feel about Trevor being my La leche League breast feeding counsellor, but since I am 50 now my breast feeding days are well behind me. I think the key thing for me is that Trevor probably needed some specialist help and as a member of a very small group of people who are in that boat Trevor probably needed that specialist help to identity as a member of the group. So we do need to identify who is whom and what is what in these medical situations. I think it is just being honest about what is real. And the idea that males, biological males, can get pregnant is just confusing, unhelpful and untrue, referring to pregnant women is not confusing, because we are talking about biology, not some kind of identity we may have for ourselves.

rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/09/07/trans-father-rejected-as-leader-breastfeeding-support-and-advocacy-group/

WhenSheWasBadSheWasHorrid - I don't understand what you want to happen in the future? What do you think is the best way to proceed? As in, when a baby is born, how do you identify whether it belongs to the group more at risk of prostate cancer or the group that may need smear tests?

You know how we are told that misgendering is so hurtful, than transwomen want to curl up and die when someone calls them "he" because their dysphoria just kills them? Well, I would like to understand how come Travis went through pregnancy with swelling belly and all that without going ka-boom. Where was that unbearable gender dysphoria then?

"Like I said things change quickly."

You don't get it, do you? The point was that not every social change stands the test of time.

italian don't interpret my "I wouldn't be surprised" to mean I'm 100% on board with this, it is inevitable and for the best.

I don't know if this is a good thing / bad thing. Step too far etc. I honestly don't know, the only thing I'm sure of is that there will be big changes and I could imagine this happening.

To me it does seem a bit odd to delete pregnant women.
But for all I know one day I'll be chatting to my grandkids about how "in my day there were no pregnant individuals just pregnant women"

You are right the futures not written yet, who knows how it will turn out.