Trans people are only interested in trans rights. Sod the women. Why else would they constantly fight against women? Constantly blame feminists for everything?
Constantly invade the spaces of women who state over and over that they are uncomfortable and do not want it? – HER ENTIRE PLATFORM IS PRO WOMEN???
If Lee wants to 'stand with women', why has their campaign material so far been so unashamedly anti-feminist? - DID YOU READ MY FIRST MESSAGE IN WHICH I OUTLINED HER ENTIRE MANIFESTO WHICH SPEAKS TO MANY WOMEN’S NEEDS.
Speaking as a child-free woman, I would not seek to take on a role that was about representing mothers. I can represent women perfectly well, because I am one. – so because there are student mothers, should we mandate that any woman standing for NUS Woman’s Office must be a Mother ??
The thing about job interview – yeah but they might not give her the job because trans women are characterised as violent, as mentally ill as unstable and as other by transphobes and by society in general. Also some trans women pass v well and don’t disclose their trans status so would probably be assumed fertile too??
Well, what do you think a woman is? I don't have my answer 100% down for his. I'm not a gender theorist, just a state school educated student feminist. My thinking isn’t perfect and I’m a cis woman (going to continue calling myself that, as it’s my own identification which you can’t deny) so my understanding of trans and other identities is limited. I would look to others – to Butler, to Serano, to brilliant bloggers and lists of people I don’t have time to find right now to explain this definition of womanhood. I regret answering this because my answer will be incomplete and not great because I'm no theorist and because I'm busy and tired and unwell and I know you will use to judge everything I have said by - though it hasn't been my main point and I know it'll never change most of your minds about who is and isn't a woman but ok I'll try...
What defines us? Menstruation - what about women who don't menstruate? Ability to bear children - what about those of us who can't? I'm guessing you aren't going to say femininity because we all have our own relationship to that? Our vaginas - what does a vagina look like, what if it's "deformed", what if it doesn't do what vaginas are meant to do? What if our hormones are off because off illnesses and genetic disorders? When we locate womanhood in biology, how many women do we leave behind? And doesn't it all get a bit wandering womb up in here?
To me, womanhood is about how you’re responded to by society, how we’re shaped – and yes, an affinity – however complicated that might be. It has two parts, if society calls you woman and treats you like a woman – you’re a woman. That relationship might be fraught – mine relationship is, but if you’re subjectivised as such and you don’t fully reject that label – you’re a woman. It doesn’t mean you’re happy about it or that that gendering isn’t traumatic or painful in someways. If you reject that label and seek another one, you might be genderqueer or if the category woman doesn’t apply to you but when you hear the word “man”, you feel that affinity yourself in that position – then you’re a man.
I feel like a woman because society rejects my voice. I feel like a woman because when I read Atwood bell hooks, or Woolf or Alice Walker or Sappho or whoever, they speak to me on a level I can’t articulate. I feel like a woman because Shakespeare makes me angry with all those dead and useless women. I feel like a woman because I am sick to death of Hamlet. I feel like a woman because this conversation hurts me, to see my own gender turn against its own. And yes,I do feel like a woman in part because of my vagina, because of my hormonal acne and because of those times crouching in loos pissing on sticks - but that isn't the sum of my feeling or my experience. I feel like a woman in my head, in my heart, in parts of myself I can’t name. I feel like a woman in my every interaction with men – good or bad. I feel in my every interaction with women. If someone clicked their fingers and I was me but I suddenly had a penis and no breasts – I would still feel like a woman, I would still be a woman.
I don’t know – I’m not great at explaining it. That isn’t what I came here to do – to pretend to be an authority on explaining womanhood. I came to defend Anna’s (and Hareem’s) feminist credentials and to express my sincere and heartfelt disappointment at the unkindness and intolerance I read here. I’m not trans, I have a few trans friends and I believe in trans rights but I’m no expert on defining these ideas of terms.
My manifesto for womanhood good comes from many places and many people. It comes from the strong beautiful solidarity I have experiences as part of a feminist society which embraces all women. It comes because I look at Anna and I see someone fighting my fight for me with all her strength and I am thankful.
Here’s a thing Brooke Mangnati (who I guess probably isn’t a favourite around here said) which I feel deeply:
“Here's an idea, not mine, and not a new one. If you want to be a woman, you're in. If you feel or know you are a woman even if the majority of the world claims you're not, you're in. Born with the reproductive organs of a woman? You're a woman. Trans women, who struggle for the right to be recognised and fight against some of the highest instances of violence, depression and suicide in the world? Are women no less "real" than me. As John le Carré so astutely put it in Smiley's People: "Society is an association of minorities."
The concept of woman is not narrow and fragile, it is robust and will take all comers. Its borders do not need policing. It does not threaten me, lessen me, or lessen anyone's womanhood, to acknowledge other women and to hear their lived experience.”
No man is ever going to pretend to be trans to speak over women. It’s too terrible, being trans. It’s terrible because of medical care, because of abusive me who kill trans women for threatening their masculinity and it is terrible because of women like you who speak in ways like this, who mock, humiliate, talk violently of and piss on the womanhood and the solidarity of women like Anna. You make their lives harder and you do a disservice to all women and to feminism in doing so.