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.

This whole debate rest on where the line is drawn between maleness and masculinity (or femaleness and femininity) is drawn. If the former is purely a biological designation (like having blue eyes or being 5'8) and in no way influences how people think of themselves as gendered identities - then that's no problem.

No, I don't think maleness and masculinity are the same thing. I just struggle with the concept that a "non masculine" man (for want of a better term) should consider himself a woman.
I have no idea how it feels to "be a woman", really. I just know how I personally feel, and don't imagine for a moment that my experience matches up to that of every other female on the planet...
I can't grasp how feeling uncomfortable in your own skin indicates that you'd be happy claiming to be something else entirely?
And to imagine that you can actually visualise how the other sex "feels", as if we were just one huge homogeneous mass?

Floggingmolly

I don't think the female sex is a 'homogenous mass'. In fact, women and men have always struck me as having much more in common than not. There are systems of oppression, sure - but Imo this is largely the result of men (or some of them) behaving oppressively and violently simply because they can. Just like some politicians will always carpet bomb cities if they have the power to do so. Presumably, if tomorrow women were endowed with greater upper body strength and penetrative appendages then a significant minority of them would be going around committing acts of sexual violence. Because they're human beings. And some human beings (both men and women) are sociopathic shit fuckers who will abuse any power they're given. It just so happens that hitherto most of the power has been possessed by men.

So in that sense - anatomy is, in part, destiny. Or all sorts of physical conditions and material advantages allow one group of people to subjugate another. That doesn't mean we can't change things or do everything we can to minimise such abuses of power; but it does mean recognising that a world in which gender no longer matters probably is not possible.

So in a sense I'm agreeing with you - I think. :)

That article is Orwellian. It is actually written in Newspeak.

I'll get excited when a man actually squeezes a baby through his dick.

"It just so happens that hitherto most of the power has been possessed by men.

It just so happens?!

Are you being serious??

It just so happens that men oppress girls and women does it?

Things like the global oppression of one sex by the other don't "just happen". Or are you suggesting that patriarchy is the natural order?

So the biggest problem with this as far as I am concerned is that a lot of protections are written as being sex based. If it is the case that both men and women can become pregnant then it can be argued that discriminating against a pregnant woman is not illegal sex discrimination as men can become pregnant too. There are large impacts of this around the world where laws refer to protecting women rather than eg pregnancy itself.

Example if the US a few years back where a BF mother brought a sex discrimination case. The case was not found in her favour and one of the comments (note not going towards the judgement but still noted) was that as men can BF too, it is impossible for this to be sex discrimination.

Yes. It needs to be kept a purely biological protection rather than bearing any relation to identity, labels, etc etc.

Well either that or all the relevant laws in countries where they are based on sex rather than the actual thing need to be rewritten NOW.

Unfortunately that won't happen and this will come out slowly as lawyers start to see this "loophole".

In the UK pregnancy itself is a protected characteristic for example so that is fine.

I wouldn't want a person like the one in the article denied pregnancy related time off / care etc because they say they are a man, so it cuts both ways.

There are potentially far-reaching consequences of tampering with language and no longer having a word for "person who when they're born everyone says "it's a girl"" is a massive problem and will get worse.

I said this on MN about 4 years ago I think it was and someone stoutly asserted that having no word for people with vaginas would in no way impact or affect things like charities that help women or girls when that means people with vaginas. They were wrong though wren't they.

No Beachcomber - I'm just saying that men oppress women principally because they have had (so far) the power to do so. I'm NOT saying that's the natural order. Or it will always be so. It isn't inevitable - but a man's physical strength is a large factor in the development of patriarchy. And it probably always going to be a very unfortunate factor TO SOME EXTENT. There will always be rape - just as there will be always be murder and genocide. Unless you think a society without ANY sexual violence is possible - which is Panglossian in the extreme.

If one group of people has a material or physical advantage over another group of people then some of them will abuse that power. This is just an unfortunate fact of human nature.

It doesn't have to be men. It can be rich, powerful, white women subjugating poor, black women. Or female prison warders. Or men subjugating poorer men. Or any permutation you like.

Human beings are capable of extraordinary nobility and empathy, but human nature is also partly really not very nice at all. All we can do is raise boys not to rape or abuse, just as we raise children not to commit arson or mug old ladies. And we punish those who do these things. And we do everything we can to minimise those things. Everything. But there will always be a certain number of arsonists, rapists and muggers in the world. And if what we understand as patriarchy does end (which it probably will over the centuries) then we will be faced of new forms of oppression. If women do gain equal power to men in politics and business then presumably they will then be doing half all the bad shit that the men do as well as half all the good shit. And there could be entirely new classes of victims.

Do you see my point?

That's a very pessimistic view, qwerty.

As an example, the difference in rates and severity of street harassment towards women in different countries shows that culture, standards of behaviour in society, what is deemed acceptable or not, have a huge impact. As societies we can improve, and while criminals, sociopaths etc will continue to behave badly we can at least reduce the amount of poor behaviour by "normal" people.

I also think saying well let's not bother supporting women who are oppressed because if they get a voice they might be just as bad as the men so why bother...

Maybe they won't be just as bad as the men? Maybe they will... It's worth finding out, surely?

In some matters it is highly unlikely that women will be just as bad as the men ie sex crimes. Someone said one way of stopping the sexual abuse carried out by NGOs and which goes largely unpunished / covered up would be to make them all women. It's an interesting point. Both men and women in the west have the money and wherewithall to go overseas to sexually exploit impoverished children, for example. But strangely it's almost all men who do this.

This needs to be addressed honestly rather than playing with thought experiments that in a totally equal world women would perpetrate these crimes at the same rates as men so why bother.

Someone posted on MN about this within the last six months. I can't imagine it's particularly common...

Attention seeking to try to get some money by selling the story to the paper; totally legit.

I cannot reconcile this... there is no point at which the spheres overlap- pregnancy and being a man.

It's this sort of bollocks - pregnant man, ffs - that makes it clear that the T doesn't belong to the LGB. The first three just want to be left alone to be true to themselves. They require no third party intervention, medical or otherwise, and do not require validation. If I told a gay man he wasn't gay he'd think I was an idiot. He wouldn't tell me I'd committed an act of violence by failing to reinforce his sexual preference.

The T is based on factual untruths. Rather than be true to themselves, they want to adopt someone else's identity and demand that the rest of us collude in this nonsense. If you're pregnant you cannot possibly be a man. Trying to force people to utter what they know is a lie: that a man can be pregnant, corrupts communication. It's a serious matter, and as PPs have remarked, it will have far-reaching effects.

Frustrating though it is, this issue seems to me to be the most pressing facing feminists today.

penetrative appendages

Women do have penetrative appendages. We rarely use them to sexually assault people though.

And actually qwerty, I agree, there is, and will always be a set of humanity that are jerks. The point of society is trying to minimise the effect of those people.

I've said on another thread recently, I think one of the major fears men have about feminism is that women might get in charge, and start doing to men what men have been doing to women and girls for thousands of years. The Handmaid's tale isn't a dystopian future - every element is happening to women right now, somewhere in the world.

Yes. A lot of the fear of feminists / women by certain men and groups of men is a fear of reversal - it's projection. They assume that women feel about men the same way men feel about women. It's interesting.

I don't agree with you, Qwerty. What's acceptable male behaviour varies massively across cultures and at my advanced age I can compare the attitudes of my DPs generation to those of my young adult DC, their cousins and their friends. How DC are raised makes all the difference and each generation is less sexist than the one before. Of course there are still yobs and Neanderthals, just as there are people who are happy to commit other crimes, but the atmosphere in the UK is far more female friendly than in many other countries or when compared to the UK in the 1960s when I was a child.

We are moving towards women's liberation and, as feminist views become more mainstream, more is being done to improve the life chances of women and girls across the globe. Progress is not fast, but it is happening.

However it is only through class analysis that sexism can be measured. If woman ceases to be a measure of material reality and instead becomes no more than an adopted identity then we lose the tools to analyse our oppression.

Queen: Of course societies can improve, and the degree to which particular expressions of oppression manifest themselves vary from culture to culture, for all sorts of complex reasons. But oppression exists in all culture.

Furthermore, we need to be vigilant against reversals in social progress - which can happen at any time. (The recent resurgence of fascism throughout the West and the election of Trump is a case in point). It is mistake to complacently fall for the enlightenment myth that social progress is an inevitable upward trajectory towards a utopian end. Civilized order is always fragile and progress can always go into reverse. Unfortunately.

As for me trying to suggest that attempts to foster equality are pointless because women will be just as bad...I think equality can only have any kind of value within a broader moral paradigm. Winning power for its own sake will not bring about any kind of improvement in human societies. Numerous revolutions in which the revolutionaries have ended behaving as badly or worse than the oppressors bear this out. But of course more equal and harmonious relations between the sexes would be a good thing - as, it goes without saying, would be as less rape, sex slavery, child abuse etc etc as possible - an achievable goal that should occupy the full efforts of those who have the power to make a difference. The same goes for any project concerned with making human life happier and less subject to agony and abuse. A utopia in which reversions never take place or none of these things exist to any extent at all is not possible however.

As for perhaps women not being as bad as men...Well, if women are indeed not a nurturing, caring, passive homogenous mass but human beings just like men, then there is no reason to suppose this. To suggest otherwise is to buy into the patriarchal myth that women are innately different to men on an emotional and psychological level.

then there is no reason to suppose this

Except there is. It wouldn't be a direct switch replacement, it would be an evolution, and what is self-evident in the world, right now, is that women commit far, far less violent crime. That if you educate and empower women, then societies become better for boys, girls, woman and men.

Since this is where we're starting from, not some blank slate, flip of a coin, who's in charge - yes, we can say that with great confidence, feminism, female empowerment, will make the world a better place for everyone

Prawn I'm not sure.

I don't know how old you are, but how much better are things really? I recently read (and I don't know if this is true) that the number of women and female children being sex trafficked exceeds the number of slaves at the height of the slave trade. That is a staggering statistic. And this is just one woman's perspective, but my baby boomer mother insists women are now far more objectified than they were when she was young. In certain respects things are better. A particular social class of women in the West have far more opportunities than they're grandmothers could have even dreamed of. It is no longer legal to rape your wife and you are no longer locked up in any infirmary if you don't sign your life away to a man. All unquestionably good things. But whether aggregate female oppression is overall worse throughout the world than it was in, say, 1950?...I actually don't know. The sex industry is now one of the biggest business in the world and as more women and flee conflict zones and countries destabilised by climate change induced catastrophes, more and more will fall into exploitation. Sexual abuse will become of the biggest global industries.

Of course women commit less violent crime. Because of their disempowerment and anatomical differences they don't have the same opportunity to. Presumably though if you put a woman at the head of a company like Goldman-Sachs she would be no less likely to mistreat her employees or commit fraud than a man? Violence isn't just physical. It can be political, social and economic.

Violence isn't just physical. It can be political, social and economic

It can indeed. The vast majority of people aren't going to be the head of Goldman-Sachs of course. The evidence we have to work on right now, is that female CEOs increase performance of those companies, that micro loans to women in poverty to start businesses greatly improves the life of both those women, and the people around them. That if you reduce economic imbalance, then social violence is reduced.

The trick will be to stop once women are equal, rather than go all the way to female domination - of course since we're no-where near that yet, I think that we can keep pushing forward.

What evidence is there that female CEO's increase the performance of their companies? And how do you define 'performance'? An increase in the wages of the companies' lowest paid employees and it's contribution towards a more prosperous society? Or an increase in the private wealth of the CEO and the companies' shareholders?

Not aware of many multinational CEO's, male or female, giving a shit about the former.

It's almost like short hair and a preference for trousers, or even "gender identity" aren't a reliable barrier to conception. It's almost like biology is the thing that's real, and gender is made up bullshit

Who'd have thunk?

Qwerty - I'd be really interested in the source for that trafficked women/children vs slavery. DH and I were just discussing it & wondered how you'd estimate or measure the scale of current trafficking. We're assuming there are good historical records for slaves, as there would be for any other traded commodity at that time.