Is this parody? I hope it is. (Reproductive rights for people with testicles. What?)

[VestalVirgin]

"I can’t have babies. And no one in the reproductive justice movement is talking about this."

This complaint is uttered by a transwoman. I.e. biological male.

everydayfeminism.com/2015/11/trans-women-reproductive-justice/

Has any actual woman ever demanded that treatment for her very real infertility of her real female body be placed above issues like contraception and abortion in the feminist movement? I cannot remember even one such instance.

But here this transwoman is, and demands that feminism prioritize sperm banking.

So does it boil down to: feminists FOR sex, AGAINST gender. Transactivists FOR gender, AGAINST sex? Where sex means biological difference and gender is the socially constructed difference?

Sorry, I know this is a very simplistic breakdown and probably a dumb question. I find it difficult to keep straight in my head, especially with the language used in the articles on EF which seems to muddy the distinction by obfustication.

Mrsfrumble that sounds about right.

EF is just weird.

"which seems to muddy the distinction by obfustication"
I don't think this is an ACCIDENT :-)

Surely there are many more couples infertile for medical or unexplained reasons or same sex couples unable to source a donor or surrogate than there are trans people?

So is showing baby pics also homophobic or medico-phobic?

minds me of my little bit of classical culture -- Orestes, after killing his mother (who killed his father, cheery lot these classical greeks!), is on trial, and Athene (I think) as his advocate argues that the FATHER is the one true parent, the mother is just a receptacle for his sperm, just an incubator..............

Amazing, is it not, how people nowadays hold the exact same opinion!

How far we have come ... or not.

Here's another! This person also fails to mention where exactly these adopted children are going to come from, but at least they don't pretend they're going to be gestating anyone:

www.buzzfeed.com/zoewilkinsons/on-trans-motherhood#.le4zLNEyR

slightly off track, and I'm new to this issue, so apologies if it's been done before.

But this;

*“Don’t you miss being a girl and feeling free like that?” L said, sighing.

I felt a familiar pang of loss – for the girlhood with the dresses and the giggling and the running.

people who don’t know any better assume that I had a girl-presenting childhood during which I ran around feeling femme and free. Maybe I had a girlhood and a boyhood all rolled into one,*

I can't identify with that at all. I don't know if it makes me odd, or I had a particularly non gendered childhood, but when I think back to being a child, I don't think of being a girl at all. I certainly don't remember waiting around in dresses feeling "femme and free"

I do remember loving being active, revelling in the things my body could do, enjoying playing and being carefree. I really don't remember anything being girl-specific.

Dresses were something to be endured when my mother wanted to show me off.

It seems to me trans women, or this one at least, has some romanticised, stereotyped version of childhood where girls are an entirely different species to boys- tying in with the increasing gender divide in children generally.

Thing is, that often the women being used as surrogates are very poor. There's a roaring trade in surrogacy in rural SE Asia. Comparatively rich, white westerners from Europe, the US and Aus/NZ are paying women to merely incubate a baby for them.

Homosexual men and TW literally rent space within a woman's body. These arrangements aren't comparable to most surrogacy in the west, where relationships are built with the birth mother, who, if she wishes, will be part of the child's life. In these arrangements, once the rented space has been evacuated, that's it. She hands the baby over and is never heard of again. The situation has got so bad that some SE Asian countries have enacted laws to try and prevent the practice.

Yet another example of women's bodies not being their own in times of economic hardship.

It also seems to me that L meant "don't you miss being a kid and feeling like that?" - twirling around randomly not being an adult thing, really!

Oh, I got mixed up, the quote was:

". She told me about her niece, who ran around the whole time in her dress, playing jokes and being sweet and ridiculous"

Apart from the dress, there's nothing gendered in this behaviour! I'm sure the writer ran around playing jokes and being sweet as a child too!

I am very uneasy about cross border surrogacy, whether the womb renters are male, female, trans or whatever.

Yes Micah, I don't think back to a 'girlhood' either, I think of a childhood. If I have to name a part of my life as a 'girlhood' it would mostly be negative events around puberty involving being ashamed of my changing body, being objectified etc. My childhood before puberty was a childhood had by a girl but not a girlhood in any sense more than that.

I too am uneasy about surragacy when it involves much poorer womens' wombs being rented out by Westerners.

In fact, more than uneasy. I think it's wrong.

Surrogacy like that is very wrong. It leads to things like the situation where the woman had twins (I think) and one had Downs, and the parents who were to adopt (perhaps, this is the wrong word, because it doesn't seem like an adoption. Perhaps 'Commission' is more the feeling I get from the prospective parents), didn't want him.

I was horrified that this could happen, after all the risk she took for them. Of course the mother kept him, but also of course she needed help - she was poor, and not planning to have a baby to raise!

I didn't have a girlhood. I had a childhood. Fraught with body shaming and being excluded from things I wanted to do because I was a girl (I like computers and practical things. I've lost count of the amount of time I was the only girl in the room, and how poorly I was treated by the males present).

Not to say that there weren't some very happy bits, but none of them were girl related - being a girl never brought me anything good until I was an adult (yes, I mean my kids and my DP - soppy I know) - I'm still often the only woman in the room, and I still get treated poorly because of it (not as much now I'm older and senior)

As PPs have said this article is very weird for its denial that, for all the mental identification and surgery in the world, biologically male bodies and biologically female bodies are simply factually different. It reminds me a bit of this post, which I came across after someone on the AIBU "cis" thread running ATM referenced the idea of 'the cotton ceiling':

factcheckme.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/the-cotton-ceiling-really/

Essentially 'the cotton ceiling' seems to be saying that trans people are discriminated against by people deciding that they don't want to have sex with them due to them being trans. However, various lesbian activists have pointed out that they, as lesbians, would object to having sex with a transwoman not because she is trans, but rather in cases where she still has a penis. The trans activist in the discussion linked above said:

"There is nothing inherently male about a woman’s body, unless she identified things about it as male herself. So, no, I do not consider trans women with penises to be male-bodied, unless that is how they identify." and that, therefore, lesbians who choose not to engage in PIV intercourse with a transwoman with a penis have "internalized the message that trans women are somehow male".

I remember when I first encountered sex and gender, actually in the context of university history, it was drilled into me and my coursemates that sex = biology and gender = the various societal meanings lumped on top of that. To me it doesn't seem remotely helpful to try to conflate the two and, indeed, the fact that transactivists are trying to do so (and in so doing are tramelling over lesbian concerns and the lived experiences of people with biologically female bodies that have periods and babies etc etc) makes me lose a lot of patience with them.