Are you a big fat cissexist?

[Cerseirys]

Because Everyday 'Feminism' thinks you are...
http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/11/common-examples-cissexism/

If this is the future of feminism then I despair, I really do!

[DeoGratias]

There are very ver very few trans people. They are pretty much an irrelevance if we are trying to concentate on discrimination against women of all kinds. I don't think we need to bother too much about them.

[Intheprocess]

Binary thinking (two genders), cissexist:
female (including trans male)
male (including trans female)

Binary thinking (two genders), as defined by many trans-people activists:
female (including trans female)
male (including trans male)

Non binary thinking (more than two genders):
female
male
trans male
trans female
intersex
etc

Making trans women go to male-only prisons is binary thinking. Allowing trans women into women-only toilets is binary thinking. The only sensible solution is to adopt non-binary approach to gender.

[GreenTomatoJam]

I don't believe there are 2 genders though, I know there are 2 sexes (plus intersex).

Intersex is not a gender, it is related to sex, the clue is in the name.

I don't think gender is a thing (just try to define it!). Conflating sex and gender is a dishonest way to argue.

[Totalshambles]

This all seems like some sort of bizarre parody of political correctness, to me. I am sorry but it's true that there are men, and women. Ok within that there are people who don't identify etc etc but these are subsets. Men who identify as women are subsets of men (albeit with their unique issues which should be recognised) and women who identify as male are still subsets of women (ditto requiring recognition etc). Men who choose to identify and even change their bodies to resemble women are not women. Launching campaigns to force their issues to be discussed under the banner of feminism is just another means of male oppression against women, their history, experiences and their need for their own spaces. Interestingly I haven't seen those women who wish to become men arguing for space in male prisons etc..!

Why on earth are the terms penis and vagina in quotation marks? We all have to refer to our genitalia as purported penises or vaginas? I pushed two babies out of mine, there is nothing purported about it that would warrant quotation marks. It's not a "vagina" it's a vagina. Full stop. The world is crazy if, in order to avoid accusations of transphobia we have to completely distort our references to our own genitalia!

And the reference to selling tampons in male loos? Er...what? So they can put them in their "vaginas"?! Baffled!

Nearly as baffled as when I heard the term "ladystick" to describe a penis....seriously?!

[RomComPhooey]

Men often have bigger noses (or is that cissexist too?) - perhaps they should put Lilets in men's toilets to help them staunch serious nosebleeds,

[jorahmormont]

Damn right I'm cissexist. I got accused of being a TERF the other day and almost said "thank you"

It can only be a matter of time before a huge number of people reach trans peak and we'll see a massive number of toys being thrown out of the pram once people stop putting them on a pedestal.

I think I became a proud TERF the day I saw that apparently it's cissexist if a lesbian doesn't "allow" any trans male to female to penetrate them with their penis. How is pressuring people into non consensual sex through emotional manipulation and blackmail acceptable? Oh yeah, because you've slapped a rainbow flag on your twitter header and said "DIE TERF SCUM" in your bio.

For a group of people who claim to be so against violence - yesterday was trans day of remembrance - I've never seen such a group of violenxe-advocating keyboard warriors in my life. I've never seen a "TERF" wish death on a trans person - of course, when we explain our views of gender being an imaginary social construct, we're told that we're "erasing" or "silencing" them, which is probably the same in their eyes - and yet the "terfisaslur" website is loaded with examples of the horrific threats transactivists have made towards anyone they deem to be a TERF. Fucking hypocrites.

You don't have a "girl dick", you don't have a "mangina", and you either want to be accepted as a woman/man or you don't. Someone who wants to be treated like any other woman doesn't reference their girl dick. Someone who wants to be treated like a man doesn't talk about man-struating and manginas. And someone who is so anti violence and pacifist doesn't spend half their waking hours posting "I want to kill all TERF and cissexist scum, find me a TERF to kill" on Twitter.

[OhNoWhatAmIGoingToDoNow]

I couldn't read past the comment that sex related biology is pseudo-science. WTAF?

[Totalshambles]

Oh Jesus I had no idea what a TERF was. i am not a TERF but I am a TEF. I don't think there is a place for trans issues within feminism, full stop. No radical needed. As previous posters' have said, I am very happy to support the end of discrimination and the need for groups to have their needs met. Just not under the badge of
Feminism.

[SmashingTurnips]

Good point about being a 'TEF'.

Whoever came up with 'TERF' in the first place probably thought that they were being really smart because they were riding on the wave of the 'radfems is all manhaterz who eat baby boys for fun' thinking that neoliberals, right-wingers and MRAs have spewing for a couple of generations.

They no doubt thought that, instinctively, lots of women would distance themselves from gender critical thinkers due to us being painted us narsty radicals.

It's not working though. And it is not working because most women read articles like that one and think 'what a load of crap'.

[HoneyDragon]

I don't have to wonder about the tampons in the men's quotation room.

I worked in a supermarket where there were tamoons in the men's quotation room and the women's quotation room.

I knew this because many males came and complained about the tampon machine being in the men's quotation room.

However, my mind was occupied by the bigger question of why anyone would pay £3.00 for a vending machine packet consisting of one tampon and one sanitary towel in either the men's quotation room or the woman's quotation room when they were in a fucking supermarket full of packets full of the tampons and sanitary towels for less that £2.00

Of course as a cisexist I was just more annoyed at it being considered reasonable to charge £3 for a period.

[SoftDriftedSnow]

Did the staff have to speak with air quote accompaniment in the quotation rooms?

[HoneyDragon]

Only when explaining why we had sold out of girls quotation kinder eggs and only had boys quotation kinder eggs left, yet again. (Because girls and boys preferred the pink ones over the blue ones)

[HoneyDragon]

I'm going to air quote everything from now on,

[SoftDriftedSnow]

[CoteDAzur]

"I don't believe there are 2 genders though"

I don't believe there are any genders at all and have a sneaking suspicion that the 'gender' thing in English language is due to your reluctance to say, write, or read the word SEX.

The two other languages I am fluent in don't have a word for 'gender'. On hospital papers, applications, etc you see "SEX: M / F".

[PlaysWellWithOthers]

Just seen this on Twitter, which I thought was apt:

Why do men hurt transwomen?
They can't accept femininity in males.
Why do you insist TW are female?
You can't accept femininity in males.

[GreenTomatoJam]

Cote - that was what I meant - and I also agree that this confusion is partially allowed to happen because people wanted to avoid the word 'sex'

The trouble is, that whilst I don't want to believe in gender norms, other people do, so I have to live with them no matter what my gender is - there's no hiding that I'm a woman, and people make assumptions about me based on that, and that's why I'm a feminist (plus, if I took the other route and decided that trans was the way forward, the surgery needed to persuade people that I was a man would be horrendous and unconvincing)

[CoteDAzur]

There are norms and expectations based on people's sex, yes. As a woman, you are expected to be maternal, nurturing, not intellectually rigorous or challenging.

But there is no such thing as people actually having gender from birth, like trans dogma assumes. Nobody gets born with an overwhelming desire to wear skirts and do housework.

[LauraMipsum]

I think a lot of anti-trans rhetoric stems from this belief that trans dogma assumes that we have an actual gender at birth. I know that some fools people on twitter think that, but my understanding is that it is internal sex identity at birth and goes along these lines:

• We all have a sense of self. Religious people call it a soul, philosophers might call it an id or an ego, centuries of thought have gone into establishing what this sense of self is that separates man from beast. Nobody really knows. It's probably in the brain somewhere. We still don't really understand the brain (I did some neurolinguistics at university and it was a very very new area based on a lot of "probably.")
  
  Some people have a sense of self which includes a sense of their own sex, i.e. that they are a man or a woman. Like freshwater,* I don't, but I am willing to accept that my experience is not universal and that many people do.
  
  
• This is NOT a 'gender identity' that means we are born with an overwhelming desire to play football in blue versus bake cupcakes in pink. That is social construct.
  
  
• This sense of self and sense of sexed identity is immutable. (Here we pass into probably). This is largely based on the case of David Reimer, whose botched circumcision as a baby led him to be renamed and raised as a girl. If there was NO sense of sexed identity he would have been socialised as a girl and been at ease with this as he had never known anything else. However, he wasn't, he always had a profound sense that he was a male, 'transitioned' back to male when he discovered the truth, and eventually committed suicide.
  
  
• For the extremely obvious reasons there is no ethical way to replicate this with a larger sample size. Some people say yes BUT Reimer was abused by the doctor who did the research (John Money) and his issues were not to do with sex identity but with a traumatic childhood. That can't have helped but I am willing to accept that the case points towards a sex identity.
  
  
• It is plausible that when a baby develops, something triggers a female sense of self but a male body (and vice versa). We just don't know enough. What we do know is that there are a large number of human beings who all report that this is their experience. Again, I am willing to accept that this points towards a sex identity.
  
  That's the 'dogma' you refer to.
  
  Unfortunately as tends to happen with science, particularly science on the cusp of 'known' and 'probably,' it has been corrupted into shrieking lunatics posting on twitter about how shewees are cissexist and calling each other TERFs.

[RufusTheReindeer]

I asked this on another thread and nobody answered so I'm going to yell

WHY ARE TRANSWOMEN CONSIDERED A SUBSET OF WOMEN WHEN MUCH MORE LOGICALLY THEY ARE A SUBSET OF MEN???

[Alisvolatpropiis]

Yes Plays! Nail on head there!

[CoteDAzur]

"David Reimer, whose botched circumcision as a baby led him to be renamed and raised as a girl. If there was NO sense of sexed identity he would have been socialised as a girl and been at ease with this as he had never known anything else. However, he wasn't, he always had a profound sense that he was a male"

It is conceivable that the brain functions expects certain functions from the body and is in conflict when these hormones & functions don't appear. In fact, there is now some evidence in support of this: 1/3 of male babies born to women exposed to an estrogenic drug during pregnancy turned out to be transgender women vs 0.3% occurrence in general population, as shown in this study.

But that is sex, and when brain's expectations don't match realities of the body, that sounds very much like a disorder e.g Body Integrity Identity Disorder.

[almondpudding]

Why would David Reimer ever have accepted that he was female simply because he was socialised as a girl?

(I actually don't think he was really socialised as a girl, but for the sake of argument let's pretend he was).

If I was told my entire life that I was a girl, and then I got to puberty and very obviously wasn't, because I had no uterus, no vagina, no normal breast development, no female hip structure and so on, why would I continue to believe a lie?

It is rather like if someone told you over and over again during childhood that you couldn't walk, and then one day you found out you actually could, why would you keep maintaining the lie, simply because you had been socialised to believe it?

[almondpudding]

In fact, if you grew up all your life having to urinate out of a hole in your abdomen, and having to see some weird guy who made you rehearse sex acts and discuss how he wanted you to have surgery to make you a vagina, wouldn't you be thinking there is something wrong here. You would come to realise (which he did around nine) that you were not a girl.

Because that isn't what girls are.

[dontcallmecis]

I'd hate to be the dude charged with restocking the tampons in the mens' loos.

most. boring. job. eva.