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.

For instance, the view that women value life more because they give birth to children. Or that men seek power because they have penises and higher levels of testosterone.

You keep talking about nurturing and care when it comes to pregnancy. I'm talking about risk and danger. If something is produced, and high risk and cost, then it is valued higher - except, when it comes to humans, when suddenly, babies are produced at great danger and effort, but considered relatively worthless in the grand scheme. NOTE caring and nurturing are not needed here! Purely talking cost of acquisition vs. societal value.

You keep saying that we're saying that men seek power because of testosterone. I'm saying that as the larger, stronger sex, they already have that power, they are already defending the higher ground.

And there is nothing innate about men being compelled to oppress women

Sorry, missed this.

Are you sure? Because it seems to me that there is an innate tendency to defend advantage. The silverback leads the pack and has to win challenges, my boss at work is required to give direction rather than have me tell him what to do, hierarchies at play, and those at the top want to maintain their position above the people below.

This can take many forms, but to suggest that physical violence isn't one of those forms would be untrue.

It's socially unacceptable now, but how many of us were smacked as a kid? Our parents enforcing the hierarchy with physical violence was perfectly normal. How many times do you hear about it happening, until the son got big enough to whack his dad back?

You keep saying that we're saying that men seek power because of testosterone. I'm saying that as the larger, stronger sex, they already have that power, they are already defending the higher ground.

Yes, but whether they are compelled to defend that power is another matter. And they can only exercise it in certain contexts. Power is not just a case of physical strength. Margaret Thatcher had enormous power even though she did not have physical strength. She sank the Belgrano with a mere word.

In lots of contexts men do have power over women by virtue of being physically stronger. But whether they have any desire to exercise or defend that power is completely down to socialisation.

As an adult I have more physical power than children. But I have no desire to exercise it over them, or defend it.

If men will always defend the power they already have patriarchy can never be overcome, surely?

In pre-history through to now male power was asserted through physical strength. But as I have said before, as more human interaction and institutional power is mediated by machines, that will change. Much power is now exercised in cyberspace.

My theory is that mass automation and digitisation will be the undoing of patriarchy. Because male strength will count for nothing. Men will no longer be necessary - economically or socially. Robots will be the friends of women.

And God knows what technologically facilitated forms conception and pregnancy will take in the future. It won't always be the same.

It's been a textbook example of sexed socialization, the women taking care of a newcomer while the man expects to be made a fuss of and have his opinions deferred to

You could all have hidden the thread/ ignored Qwerty/ started a new thread. Nothing obligated any of you to give him any attention whatsoever.

Nothing obligated any of you to give him any attention whatsoever

Just socialization getting us to take care of a newcomer

And yes i am being flippant

I haven't participated in this thread for the reasons given above. I do, however, take my hat off to those who persisted in trying to get qwerty to grasp basic feminist beliefs. Complete waste of time, but you never know, he might have started listening

I just don't have the patience. If I don't believe someone is debating in good faith I won't engage or, if I do, I feel annoyed with myself later.

I can't help wondering whether qwerty is a very slow release GF.

Male violence is a major factor in how patriarchy is maintained.

Girls and women are subjugated through male violence (much of it sexualised) and the threat of male violence.

All this talk about size, strength, power etc is very economical with the truth.

(Sorry slithylove )

Slithytove even!

Male violence is a major factor in how patriarchy is maintained.

Girls and women are subjugated through male violence (much of it sexualised) and the threat of male violence.

Yes. I agree Beach. Because they are socialised to be the more dominant, violent sex. In a post-patriarchal society they wouldn't be would they? By definition.

So therefore violence and domination does not necessarily follow anatomical advantage. If it did then there would be no point in feminism would there?

Look, all I am saying is that there is no such thing as a violent, dominative male psychology independent of socialisation.

If power follows physical advantage, and men will always defend that power, then feminism is completely negated.

I haven't engaged with it either. It's impossible to ignore this level of derailment and persistence and it is very clear he isn't here to educate himself. I think he's trolling.

Me too, Charlie and Prawn.

Beachcomber you're completely right about the importance of male violence in maintaining patriarchy. Rape, DV, murder, assault - none of these apart, I'd guess, from murder are pursued and punished at the rate they would be were male violence seen as the anathema it should be m

Women can only be liberated when their status is such that the use of physical violence against them is considered a massive wrong, something that makes outcasts of its perpetrators. Nowadays it still often seems to be minimized as something men do, the boys will be boys argument.

Men who are feminist allies know that violence against women is never justified. My DH said that as soon as a man raised his hand the relationship was over, because if a woman didn't know that however fierce an argument violence was impossible, then how could a woman speak her mind? There are already plenty of men who believe this. We need more.

With this issue, it helps that the personal is political. We, as women, are in a position to teach all the men and boys in our immediate circle to analyze male violence and to speak up whenever they hear their peers minimizing male violence.

Returning to the poor, much abused thread, there are a number of issues. The first is the complete batshit bollocks of a woman becoming deliberately pregnant while expecting anyone to believe that she's a man. "His uterus" is no more credible than "her penis," and I couldn't utter either phrase without a staggering amount of eye rolling.

So I don't believe this pregnant person is a man, and I would take a lot of persuading to accept that she believes it either. OK, there's always going to be a disconnect between body and aspiration if you're hoping to be seen as the opposite sex, but actually getting pregnant is surely the ultimate reverse?

I don't see that pregnant men will affect healthcare directly because regardless of how she identifies she'll be treated as a woman though the poor HCPs will be reminding themselves at ever contact to use the right pronouns and not cause offence by acknowledging that she's performing the ultimate female work.

There's all the rest, though, that sex based protections will simply vanish if men, legally speaking, can become pregnant.

Generally speaking, though, it's the transwomen who pose problems. Transmen were raised with female socialization and tend not to be demanding. It's the transwomen who want into female spaces, whereas it seems plenty of transmen feel safer in the ladies and are not agitating to get into men's facilities.

I have to I say of the two options, I prefer the in-your-face piffle of "Pregnant Man" to the coverage of the fell runner found guilty of attempted murder in which the Guardian completely failed to mention that Lauren Jeska was a man, who tried to cover up his cheating to win trophies in women's categories.

I'm really not a troll. And I'm not trying to minimise anything, which people seem to be suggesting I'm doing for some reason. Of course violence (rape, murder, assault, FGM, honour killings and all sorts of other awful things) maintains patriarchy. White supremacy used to be maintained by lynching, whipping and raping black people and chaining them up in galleys.

All power is imposed through violence. It can be directly physical, or it can be imposed politically or economically, or in other more diffuse ways. Human power works by effectively crushing a subordinate group into compliance and divesting them of full personhood. Whenever people get power, they have a tendency to abuse it in this way. Violence will always partly characterise human social structures.

Of course individual people won't always abuse it - but the people who do abuse it do so in ways partly determined by processes of socialisation (among other things of course). This could be because they live in a society where women are considered inferior beings, or one where Jews are considered inferior.

But no one is born with a predisposition to misogyny or antisemitism. That is really all I am saying. Which of this do people disagree with?

Did you read this Qwerty?

Aside from the issue of the thread itself, or the derail, have you actually got any sense of appropriate online behaviour, Qwerty? Because if you scroll back through this thread, there are huge stretches where every other post is by you, and some patches where there's strings of 3 or 4 consecutive posts by you. On a thread which wasn't started by you, in a section (feminism) where as a man you should be thinking "hang on a minute, is my voice the one which should be dominating the conversation?" You seem to lack any basic awareness of the give-and-take, and more importantly, of listening to the other person's point of view which characterises normal healthy discourse, whether online or in real life

Or this?

Qwerty, it is nobody's job to give you an education. If you're sincerely interested you could do some reading. Your performance here demonstrates that you don't know anything as much about feminism as you think you do, and that you aren't prepared to actually listen to anyone

You didn't take any notice if you did.

What are SGM buttons Helen? I looked them up and they seemed to be army souvenirs. Think I'm missing something.

They impart the secret power to hide posters and avoid derails!

Sounds exciting, and useful too, Helen. Tell me more, as a search has got me nowhere.

YY Prawnofthepatriarchy to both your posts.

As you say the whole "pregnant man" thing is a headfuck and I find the reporting misogynistic and stupid but the ones that cause real trouble are transwomen.

I saw something today in the French press about this pregnant transman which made me smile wryly. Being written in French there were additional linguistic problems to those posed by pronouns - they had to use a word that exists but doesn't mean what they had to use it to mean.

In French, nouns are masculine or feminine and adjectives agree with the noun. So if you describe someone as "big" if they are a woman they are "grande" and if a man they are "grand".

The headline of the article was the equivalent of and they had put the word pregnant in inverted commas because for the sake of grammar they had to use the masculine word but the problem is that the French masculine version of pregnant a) isn't an adjective but a noun b) doesn't mean pregnant. They weren't sarky inverted commas and the article was similar in content and tone to the one in the OP. It really was a grammar / language issue.

Although I live in France and speak French I hadn't thought about this aspect before. There are going to be real language problems as certain words just don't work or even exist which would be grammatically correct and trans correct. Also, the French are very strict and protective of their language and there is an institution called l'Acadamie Francaise which decides what is officially French and what's not.

I know language is fluid and all that but things are going to be very complicated for any language that has gender.

Link to the article www.francesoir.fr/societe-sante/royaume-uni-hayden-cross-un-transgenre-de-20-ans-est-enceint-de-quatre-mois

Prawn, since MNHQ has decided not to give us a "hide poster" facility, a previous denizen of FWR, StewieGriffinsMom (who was fab, and I miss her) invented the "virtual hide poster button". The idea was you pretended you'd pressed it then proceeded through the thread on that basis.

I was thinking that exact thing, but it would only work if everyone did it, otherwise the subject of the thread changes and if you tried to stick to the original you could end up feeling like the hidden one.

Yes all, please do ignore the troll saying 'look at meeeeeee, look at meeeee' and get this thread back on topic.

Aside from the linguistic conundrums Beach, (and one of the headfucks to me learning basic French was the idea that inanimate objects had gender), did the article signal any particular perspective on the issue?