I'm giving up.

[GarlicShake]

This is more of a despairing rant than an invitation to reply. Sorry! I feel like I've nowhere else to put it.

I am 61 years old. I'm facing ageism & ableism as well as sexism. I have a corner to fight.

I went on strike for maternity rights, for equal pay, even for the factory to have a women's toilet. I forged a career in a world that was predominantly male, argued for my pay rises and trained younger people up to be non-sexist. I've been blamed and misconstrued, beaten up, raped, and carefully answered the gamut of sexist assumptions. I battled for my pension rights and I threatened the bank with legal action when they refused to take my salary into account on my first mortgage. I am still fighting.

But I just can't hack fighting for younger women any more. They're throwing away all that we, and the two generations before and the one after mine, won for them. I can't even tell whether they don't give a shit or they think all their rights are safe so they needn't bother.

I'm not going to argue the transgender thing any more. I'll stick to supporting the handful of FB friends who get it, but I'm not arguing in my own voice from now. I'm giving up on explaining why "Ms" matters - it's been around for 50 years, for crying out loud! People can figure out why the Nordic model's a better idea for themselves - or, most likely, not. Women can congratulate themselves on being financially dependent on husbands, and figure that out for themselves too.

And I think this country's going to vote itself out of Europe. That'll wake a few people up in short order, I fear, but I shall be needed to stick up for older & disabled people like me as our rights will get shredded. I am tired.

I am very tired and disappointed. Thank you for all the brilliant discussions, MN feminists! Good luck.

It was only a tiny proportion of middle class women who didn't have to work in paid employment.
Lurcio, I understand the point you made that many women actually always worked, but I disagree with the idea that only a tiny proportion of middle class women did not have to work - if you are talking about the UK in the last century up until the 1970s.

Many people who did not work in paid employment, and who were not middle class, may have been very poor, and they may have worked very hard indeed in all sorts of ways but most women were not in paid employment after they had children.

It was common practice for many women to work, but then to give it up when they had a family.
A Century of Labour Market Change 1900-2000 says this:
At the beginning of the twentieth century, around five million women worked, making up 29 per cent of the total workforce. By 2000, the figure had risen to 13 million, 46 per cent of the total workforce.
Then have also attached a graph about women with children working.

In defence of Queen's 20s work colleague, who said now women just have 2 jobs, I do think that with greater freedom there have also come greater and greater expectations for women. You must be beautiful, groomed, a high earner, good at sex and always ready for sex, have children, look after them. It is so difficult to meet these expectations that young girls are becoming depressed. Many young women do not dare to stop to have a family when that's what they might really want because then they will not be able to have a good enough career and be self sufficient enough.

Sometimes it seems as if men do not want a family any way as they would rather
go on just having a succession of girlfriends from the plentiful supply of women who are always available.

Of course I am not suggesting that it would be a good idea to go back to how things were, or to give up work and control of ones own life, but it is all very difficult.

Meanwhile, Garlic thank you. I was not a fighter like you but have had the benefits.

I am confused by the transgender issue if anyone would explain it to me. When I said something a bit disparaging about a man who 'self identified' as a woman, my daughter said it was wrong of me to take that view.

Excellent point about women often being the only/one of a few of their sex in the room at professional events. That's been my career but I hadn't made the link with men at a toddler group wanting sympathy (#NAM)

My mother wasn't "allowed" to work by my father, back in the fifties as it would have reflected badly on him. Then when she did get work after he left, she was paid a third of what the single man beside her doing the same job was earning.

What I can't understand on mumsnet is the general acceptance of women doing most or all of the housework and childcare.

Do you know, recently I've felt like giving up too. It feels like there are only a small minority of feminists left who are interested in fighting for women's rights. The rest appear hell bent on fucking it all up for us in their desperation to be progressive and pander to a small group of men who claim to be women, demanding access to everything we have fought for. We're not just fighting the patriarchy but the useful idiots in the women who are mindlessly helping in regressing the cause.by decades, bleating 'transphobia!' at anyone who tries to speak up.It's so depressing.

That is what I was asking about Darrow. My daughter told me I was wrong to sound cynical about someone being a 'self-identufying' female.

I know Germaine Greer was sleighted for complaining about transgender (?) women. So was Ian McKewan.

Please would you explain all the arguments.

In short, Kind, women have been and still are oppressed, not because of their gender but for their biological sex. In a world designed by & for men, a female body is a weakness. Men don't have periods, pregnancies, miscarriages, births and menopauses. Men don't breastfeed their children. In a world where the default is 'man', women have serious disadvantages which are exploited.

What binds women isn't shoes or hair extensions. It's the impositions of "gender" telling us what we can't & mustn't do, our shared biological experiences and the disadvantages they cause in a men's world.

If women can be male - having been "gendered" male at birth, with the relative privileges it brings, and never being inconvenienced by periods or babies, then what is a woman? What's a woman, if not a female human?

I'd better interrupt this now (I could go on for years!)
Ask your daughter how she'd feel if her best female friend was put in prison, say, with a male woman who has a fully working penis. Would her risk of sexual violence be the same as if women prisoners were all female?

Also ask her what "feeling like a woman" feels like. We'd all like to know.

Thank you very much Garlic for explaining.
I do understand what you mean that being a woman can only be the result of the full experience of being a woman from birth on,

My daughter is so thoughtful, so not wanting to pass judgement, so wanting to see everyone's point of view & be open minded - that she would believe it wrong to judge someone for feeling they were not the sex they had been born to. She would want to allow them the freedom to change themselves. So I thought that I, being too behind the times, should listen to her.

In truth she would be horrified by the scenario you described. I did say I thought it would be very unpleasant to have a man identifying as a woman in in a public lavatory and she agreed.

What about people who have had a full sex change physically? They will not have had the real experience of being a woman, but they would be less of a horrific threat in a small space.

What about people who have had a full sex change physically?

Interestingly, not all transsexual women insist on "being women" if that means trampling over female women's experiences and/or safety.

Regarding the loo thing, I have no answers and consider a detail in a much bigger & scarier picture.

I would, though, say it's not the having of an extra 'hole' that makes a woman. Medically speaking it's having internal gonads. And that is also what defines our gendered experience.

In the middle of the University of Cardiff no-platform controversy, Germaine Greer said a very simple thing: Women are not just men with their penises cut off.

It's the same challenge to masculine-centric language, thinking and our society's whole conception that the default for 'human' is male.

For example, the Green Party's 'Women and non-men' - they could not imagine in the conference just telling men to be quiet & not speak, or telling men that they could not put themselves forward as candidates. Instead, they twist themselves inside & out to be 'inclusive.' But it's only the category of 'woman' that has to shift.

I think we should all just claim we are men. Go in to our employers and on that basis demand a 15% pay rise. Say to our families that we will only do 10% of the housework and childcare.

And then say to anyone who challenges us that "I present as a woman, but I identify as a man."

As I saw on Twitter one of the Green Party members saying, as a reason for speaking at the party conference when they'd asked for "women and non-men" to speak.

Thanks Garlic

Rolling
*I think we should all just claim we are men. Go in to our employers and on that basis demand a 15% pay rise. Say to our families that we will only do 10% of the housework and childcare.

And then say to anyone who challenges us that "I present as a woman, but I identify as a man*

I find this very amusing![grin}

Well, if we can't joke about the stupidity of oppression, it all gets very dark ...

The idea of man as the default is so widely accepted that even the most progressive women buy into it sometimes, For example, in explaining to their children the difference between boys and girls you will read/hear it explained as boys have a penis, girls don't.

Has anyone ever heard the explanation given as girls have a uterus, boys don't i.e. girls always lack something, when in fact boys also lack something. You just never hear it said that way round.

Penis envy is a well known term. How often do we hear of uterus envy?

All plays into the male as default belief.

Yes, that is true Grimble A man once even told me that female genitalia is just an unformed version of a man's!

Back to the transgender etc question:
One thing I was wondering though, is if a person can be born truly feeling they are not in the right body, is this not a genuine plight related to a different physiology that needs sympathy and support of some kind?

If so what?

Has anyone ever heard the explanation given as girls have a uterus, boys don't i.e. girls always lack something, when in fact boys also lack something. You just never hear it said that way round

Wow, Grimble in all my 57 years, and 44 years as an explicit feminist, I'd never thought of that. Brilliant!

Or you could point out that men are lacking half a chromosome as the Y chromosome is roughly half the size of the X chromosome.

It's the reason men are far more susceptible to genetic diseases and it's also a LOT of fun to point out.

A penis is just a grossly swollen clitoris by the way.