British 'man' becomes pregnant

[slithytove]

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/first-british-man-reveal-hes-9582789

Sorry, it's a mirror link

I don't usually post about this stuff, but it's really annoyed me this time.

Now 'men' can get pregnant? So 'men' will need maternity leave, 'men' will need maternity services, probably somehow different to women's.

Is it just me or does the fact they are calling this person a man instead of a transman, allow men (people born as men) to take even more from women under the trans rights umbrella?

Who would it hurt to call this pregnant person a transman?

I guess we should be grateful this person was born as a woman and is therefore socialised to not put themselves first.

No qwerty. You want it to be essentialism so that you can dismiss it without actually considering it or properly thinking about it.

Have you read the link I posted above?

Feminist phenomenology holds the position that being-in-the-world is not an abstract condition--without sex or gender. At the most obvious level, this leads to a focus on gendered embodiment and its impact on subjectivity. From these beginnings, feminist phenomenology clarifies how sex and gender impacts one’s experiences and understandings of the world, broadening to explore the social political consequences.

Well, yes of course gender impacts on how we understand ourselves and the world. That is just a statement of the obvious.

The question is, are those understandings we have of ourselves as gendered subjects immutable? Or can they change?

You seem to be implying that they can't. That women will always be more natural carers (or have more of a propensity to value life more) because they become pregnant. I don't agree with that. And it does seem essentialist to me. I'm not saying that to catch you out or anything, only because that is what you seem to be implying.

Welcome to MN, by the way, qwerty.

Thanks Cote.

Stick around and you will learn to differentiate between arguments.

You will also see, hopefully, that we are not stupid and actually would not say stuff like "Men can't help being rapists and killers, poor dears. We have to accept them that way".

No I'm not saying you said that, and I don't mean to suggest you're stupid. We just disagree. But you did say (and correct me if I'm wrong) that biological differences in male neurochemistry predisposes men to be rapists and killers. That's pretty iffy I think.

I can't see where anyone has said, or is implying, that women and men are stuck in gender roles forever and this can never change due to their biology. I don't understand where you're getting that from querty?

*predispose not predisposes

A quick search will show that you are only person who has used the word "predispose" on this thread (in multiple posts).

I said that testosterone increases aggression, activates the amygdala ("lizard brain") and inhibits impulse control. This is fact. And on average men have far more testosterone than women. That is also fact.

I don't know what else you want me to say. If some feminists have agreed somewhere that hormonal differences don't affect behaviour, I cannot agree with that because that is politics turning a blind eye to biological reality. It is similar to what TAs are doing, and I am not in the business of following dogma, whichever side it belongs to.

I can't see where anyone has said, or is implying, that women and men are stuck in gender roles forever and this can never change due to their biology. I don't understand where you're getting that from querty?

1. The experience of pregnancy means women value life more implies that:

2. Women are naturally more given to caring and nurturing than men. This implies that:

3. Male and female psychology is forever divided by the experience of pregnancy.

All this overall implies that women (who will always be the ones who become pregnant: that cannot be changed) will always, overall, be more caring and nurturing than men. And men, who cannot become pregnant, will always be more likely to value life less - and therefore be violators and killers.

Another post full of strawmen and misrepresentation (or perhaps misunderstanding, willfull or otherwise) of what I said.

A piece of feminist advice for you - try to listen to and understand what women say rather than bluster on about what you think or arrogantly decide they have implied. Feminists are not generally coy about what they mean, they tend to directly say what they mean. Your posts are jam packed with disagreements with what you want us to be saying rather than what we have actually said, a phenomenon that might be described as prejudice.

You state that phenomenology when applied to feminism is "a statement of the obvious" and yet you have yet to show in your posts that you have grasped what the statement being made is. So perhaps it isn't quite so obvious after all?

"women will always, overall, be more caring and nurturing than men. And men, who cannot become pregnant, will always be more likely to value life less - and therefore be violators and killers."

You are taking it too far. There is no doubt that pregnancy, having & nurturing a baby etc change women and make them more aware of the love and care that goes into a human being. IMO and IME, whether that makes each woman more caring than each man is a different story and depends to a great deal on our starting points.

There are also many women who have not yet or will not ever get pregnant & have a baby. It would be interesting to see a study where their levels of aggression/violence are compared to a group of men and a group of mothers, but I doubt if they would be terribly different than mothers.

And you say that you are not suggesting that we are stupid but this repetitive telling us what we think suggests otherwise.

We do actually know our own minds and, I for one, am heartily sick of men explaining to me what I think. It's almost as though such men think we are inferior.

I said that testosterone increases aggression, activates the amygdala ("lizard brain") and inhibits impulse control. This is fact. And on average men have far more testosterone than women. That is also fact.

It is far from a proven fact that testosterone increases aggression. Or that the higher levels of testosterone men are born with predisposes them to violent behaviour.

The interaction between the limbic brain and its higher, more rational components is highly complicated. We all have a tendency to atavism. For instance, if you put any one under enough threat then they will regress. But the brain is plastic, and responds to the physical and social environment.

This article puts it best:

For one thing, hormones do not directly change behaviour; they influence the expression of a behaviour within appropriate environmental/ social contexts. When studying human behaviours, identifying which environmental/social contexts might be important remains a significant challenge to researchers trying to identify hormone–behaviour relationships.

The only evidence that testosterone does lead to more aggressive behaviours is correlational, and administrations of exogenous testosterone in clinical trials have resulted in no elevation of aggressive behaviour.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091208132241.htm

No doubt if you measured the testosterone levels of Wall Street traders or a load of jocks at a frat party then you would find they have higher testosterone levels than me when I'm sat listening to the new Beyonce album.

But does that mean men are born with a greater predisposition than women to commit physically violent acts? No. It means that. in particular social contexts men have abnormally high levels of one hormone. Which proves absolutely nothing.

and yet you have yet to show in your posts that you have grasped what the statement being made is

What is the statement being made?

Coming back to the thread topic, I would like to answer this first post by qwerty:

"isn't the general consensus that gender is a social construct and therefore there is no such thing as innate manhood or womanhood? If that is the case then surely it is legitimate to term this man a 'man', a 'transman', a 'woman' or anything else he prefers?"

You are confusing sex with gender.

Man = Adult human male
..... where Male = Of the sex that can make sperm.

Woman = Adult human female
..... where Female = Of the sex that can bear young or make eggs.

Gender = Girls like pink / boys like blue, girls like dresses and glittery stuff, boys like machinery and trains, etc.

In other words, gender is a social construct. Biology is not a social construct. It's the DNA in every cell and your organs, including your genitals.

The pregnant "man" in the OP is still female and will continue to be female even after a hysterectomy, double mastectomy, years of Testosterone injections etc because that "man" will never be "Of the sex that can make sperm" and will always be "Of the sex that can bear young or make eggs".

Sex is biology and it is not possible to change it by wishing yourself something else. Gender is a social construct and it is possible to put on a dress, grow your hair long, paint your nails, act more feminine etc. These two things are completely different and you really need to start differentiating between them if you are going to hang out on FWR.

Sex is biology and it is not possible to change it by wishing yourself something else. Gender is a social construct and it is possible to put on a dress, grow your hair long, paint your nails, act more feminine etc. These two things are completely different and you really need to start differentiating between them if you are going to hang out on FWR.

I actually agree with you here Cote, and on reflection I was wrong not to make a clear distinction between biological manhood or womanhood and gender as an identity. Fair point and I stand corrected.

I haven't followed all the previous posts (because I find them too confusing), but my limited understanding, gained from my women's studies education a looooooong time ago now (so I'm not terribly up to date) is that the effects of testosterone on violence are complex and involve understanding interactions between individuals and their environments as well as their body chemistry. In other words, testosterone levels, as well as violent behaviours, can be affected by various environmental triggers and stresses. It isn't just biology pure and simple at all and we are more than our bodies and body chemistry in a vacuum.

Here is one recent public access article that discusses some aspects of this.

traumamon.com/?page=article&article_id=18040

qwerty I'm quite shocked at your posts in this thread. Have you considered for a moment that your knowledge of feminist thought might be too simplistic for you to understand the points Beachcomber has made. Her viewpoint is as far from essentialism as it's possible to be but you don't seem to be able to get any further than just yelling "essentialism!"

Your clarification that you don't think she is stupid is mind-bogglingly lacking in self-awareness.

You put it much more succinctly and eloquently than me YetAnotherSpartacus. Thank you.

You put it much more succinctly and eloquently than me YetAnotherSpartacus. Thank you.

Possibly I did, but TBH this thread has got so complex that I'm having trouble following the different positions in it.

My post was not intended to back up or be evidence for any particular position or poster.

YetAnother is not saying the same thing as you, though. Nobody is saying behaviour, environment etc does not affect testosterone levels. They do.

What you have said, qwerty, is "there is little evidence that testosterone makes people more aggressive" which is provably false. The effects of testosterone on aggression are very well documented, and their pathway is also now being discovered, as in the study I linked to below.

It's hard to understand stuff if you have a fixed idea of what the other person is saying, which is different from what they're actually saying, and you're not willing to try and understand their pov.

Sorry that wasn't directed at Cote, in case there's any doubt

Is there proven evidence that normal male levels testosterone cause violence? That there is not a correlational but a causative or predispositional link between those levels and violent behaviour?

Not sure that there is.

To clarify, what I have been trying to say throughout this thread is that overall, in most human societies, men are more manifestly aggressive than women because of social factors. Because of nurture rather than nature.

Men are not necessarily born more likely to develop aggressive personalities than women; and women are not necessarily born more likely to develop caring, passive, nurturing ones than men. There are no biological determinants of male domination independent of social, cultural and economic context. None.

The fact that more women, overall, exhibit a more benign psychology and men a more aggressive one is the result of socialisation.