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.

It was in a magazine which I don't have to hand. And I agree it's questionable. However there are globally 20-30 million human slaves and around 80% of slavery is estimated to involve sexual exploitation. I would imagine that would exceed the number of American and European colonial slaves in the 1700's. Could be wrong though.

It is absolutely shocking and it is incredible - indeed almost weird - how little you hear about it.

It is absolutely shocking and it is incredible - indeed almost weird - how little you hear about it.

I guess for most of us in western countries you only come into contact with or are exposed to the reality of modern trafficking if you are engaging in illegal or elicit activities - prostitution, cannabis farming, gang masters, for example - and you're hardly going to broadcast it to your wider social circle. It's 'easy' for the average British person not to see, unless they work in law enforcement or another related job like child protection. I have a friend who works in one of these roles and they come across a lot of vulnerable and trafficked adult workers by happenstance. It's really unsettling when she talks about her work, because it is happening right under our noses within half a mile of where we live. It really does go on in plain sight.

fortune.com/2015/03/03/women-led-companies-perform-three-times-better-than-the-sp-500/

Fortune is an OK source I think.

Not sure why it matters? Are you suggesting that we hold female CEOs to some higher standard - that they have to both be profitable, and somehow better for all their employees too? I'm saying there's certainly no evidence they are worse, but on the contrary, that they are better, by the measurements used to assess the performance of CEOs.

It's not that I don't see your point qwerty - it's that I don't agree with it.

Men oppress girls and women because we are female - that is that we are the sex that carries and births babies.

Men's size and strength helps them to be able to oppress girls and women but it isn't the reason for that oppression. Patriarchy is a sex based social order not a strength or size based social order.

Another thing that helps men oppress girls and women is their willingness to be violent. Girls and women are subjugated through violence and the threat of violence.

It is important to be honest and clear about the above if we are sincere in a desire for girls and women to be liberated from sex based oppression. We must name it for what it is and resist obfuscation or shying away from uncomfortable truths.

Which is why so many of us have an issue with "man has a baby!". Men never have and never will have babies. Men oppress women because women and only women have babies.

It is very difficult to quantify or measure trafficking and modern slavery in a meaningful way. But I do believe it's a huge problem, and in the case of sexual exploitation hugely gendered. I don't think we can indulge any thought experiments about what would happen if women were in charge. Because they aren't and never have been, so we have no idea.

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.

YY to this ChocChocPorridge. To which I always want to say "don't judge others by yourselves".

Also it's very difficult to unpick the entitlement men experience and see what is innate given that it's based on thousands of years of women being second class citizens.

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.

IMO women, as a class, have a better understanding than men as a class of the value of human life, all human life. And that is because we do the actual work of creating that life.

The patriarchal myth is not that women and men are different but that we have different value.

So true, Beachcomber.

Attention seeking idiot.

Female who dresses/presents in a masculine way gets pregnant. This is not news.

IMO women, as a class, have a better understanding than men as a class of the value of human life, all human life. And that is because we do the actual work of creating that life.

In other words, women are more nurturing and caring. More maternal. Compassionate. Non-agressive. Passive.

And I don't understand what the distinction between 'different' and 'different value' is. Surely 'different value' means 'different'?

You should hear my DF, a retired GP, on the subject. It was he who brought me up a feminist. He strongly believes that women are better people than men for a number of reasons, primarily because women have the babies and this makes them far stronger and more empathetic. Women keep society together. When a baby is born with major health problems a lot of men find it "too difficult" and leave. Women almost never do. Given that men and women are equal in terms of intellect and that men commit nearly all crime, he felt it was obvious that women should be in charge. Then along came Maggie and knocked that theory for six.

I think we have made progress in some areas, most areas, but gone backwards in others. Back 20 years ago, when I was a new mum my community midwife told me I had no idea how lucky I was that my DM was all for my return to my career. She said literally all the other women were being told that whatever course they had chosen was wrong. But I still see new mothers here feeling guilty because they don't work, work too much and every variant between. Never occurred to me to feel guilty but then I've been lucky.

I think contraception and abortion have very much changed relationships between the sexes, more than we sometimes acknowledge. The big ugly issue that affects people here in safe UK is porn, which bears no resemblance to the material available when I was 20. I cannot think that repeated exposure to the relentless misogyny of this can fail to damage the young of both sexes, particularly the inexperienced, who are likely to imagine that what they're watching is normal.

Another thing that helps men oppress girls and women is their willingness to be violent. Girls and women are subjugated through violence and the threat of violence.

Of course they are. I have never denied this. But if you are saying this is purely because women have babies then you are subscribing to a very essentialist, and some would say, patriarchal perspective. You are saying in a sense that oppression is established by biological facts.

Men (or some of them) are willing to be violent over women because they are born into a world in which they have power over them. If they did not have this power then presumably they would have the same level of willingness to inflict violence on them. Unless you think that men exit the womb with an inbuilt desire to subject women to violence - which would not be very feminist, to put it mildly.

You could set up an (unethical and illegal) experiment where warders have the power to inflict agonising electric shocks on the inmates of an institution. A number of the warders would enjoy the power of inflicting pain on the inmates. Many wouldn't - and would walk out of the experiment. But there would be some who would like it. Including women. They would do it because they can, and they would probably justify it to themselves by viewing the inmates as somehow less than fully human. By dehumanising them.

And it just so happens (and I don't that lightly) that for millennia the inmates have, preponderantly, among other oppressed groups, been women. There are lots of theories about why that happened (feudalism, ancient warrior cultures, whatever) but it did not arise as a natural order.

Prawn I think porn is actually going to transform human nature. For the worse. It will completely remove sex from a context of intimacy and love.

Disagree qwerty men oppress women because of our biology - we are smaller, weaker, our reproductive capability and penetrative ability.

It's not some wild coincidence.

If we want to know how the world would look with women in charge it might be worth examining the typical behaviour of women when they are in charge. Women make up the great majority of single parents. Do they lord it over their helpless DC? Well, no, not really. Unsurprisingly they are more likely to neglect their children than single fathers because neglect is linked to a parent being unable to parent through poverty, DV and other partner abuse, addiction and MH difficulties. Often the problems - and their lone parent status - stem from a bad marriage.

However men are far more likely to be responsible for physical violence, injury, death and sexual abuse. The evidence suggests that mothers are safer bets for children, that they do not abuse their power, but are sometimes disabled from providing optimum parenting by abuse or neglect on the part of the father.

Biology and the cultural expectations founded in it is the critical reason why women all over the world are discriminated against. Not gender identity.

This really strikes a chord with me Venus. I saw an article on Everyday Feminism recently in which the writer, who did not identify as female, had gone to Planned Parenthood (in the US) for an abortion. This writer was asking that such services stop assuming that the gender of a person seeking an abortion is female and that they should be asked initially how they wish to be gendered.

I struggled with that, I really did. I want to be as open minded as possible and fully understand that many, many trans people arrive at that conclusion about themselves with great anxiety and difficulty. But I felt angry - a place where women go to seek abortions should be a safe place to do so. The dialogue should be around how to give women in the US better, safer access to such facilities, that's the crucial point at stake. And I think turning such a women's issue into a gender issue takes valuable attention away from the issue at hand.

I'm not sure that women are less violent than men. I am fairly sure that we are less sexually violent than men though. And that is quite a big deal.

Additionally, we are socialised not to be violent, while men are socialised to be violent (broad brush). This should not be underestimated. In a direct reversal - suddenly women are mostly bigger and stronger than men, hold all the power, aren;t used to being challenged, men seen as second class etc would we be less violent? Don't know, don't know at all. I do suspect we'd engage in less sexual violence though, although obviously I can't be sure.

Thing is we wouldn't get an exact reversal - or want it. The aim would be to level the socialisation and societal attitudes so as to improve the lot for everyone.

I do not believe that women are "naturally" more nurturing or empathetic etc than men, personally. I think that many many men have those traits and that plenty of women do not.

The slavery thing - remember you want to look at % of populations as the world's population has grown so enormously in recent decades / centuries.

Also that attitudes have changed - a child that was enslaved by its parents would not have been remarkable 100 years ago, now it is a matter for the social services. Child sexual abuse and trafficking is more known about, less covered up, more talked about. Ditto prostitution. People are able to travel more - this has had a large impact as well. There is a whole lot of difference and some is quite complex, you'd need to be very very careful before trying to make credible comparisons about prevalence.

I agree Hermione, but they are issues of capability. All those things ALLOW men to oppress women. If women were stronger or had penetrative ability then they would be committing rape too. There is nothing INSIDE men (from the moment they are born) that makes them any more violent than women.

They just have the power to do bad stuff to women, and some of them do bad stuff. And a culture of men doing bad stuff forms over centuries. Men are not innately any different to women, psychologically or emotionally. They are not born more violent. And there is no reason to think women would not be equally violent in a culture which allowed and legitimated female violence. That's just hard to imagine because patriarchy is all we've ever known.

AgentCooper

The main problem as I see it with that type of thing is that a strong argument around abortion is why the fuck should men be deciding on things which they will never exerpience, they are never at risk of experiencing, it's not their area, they should have no right to tell women what they can and can't do with their bodies.

But, as soon as you say men can be pregnant too, and talk about pregnant people, then this argument vanishes. Why shouldn't men have an equal say in abortion laws, why shouldn't their views be taken seriously - after all men can get pregnant too.

It makes it much harder to make arguments around "what the fuck do you know about it?".

"If women were stronger or had penetrative ability then they would be committing rape to"

Women are more than capable of rape / well it'd be sexual assault in the UK.

We can drug men and penetrate them with objects
We can assault them while they're drunk
Or asleep
We can coerce them when they're teens, groom them
We can set up websites sharing images of young boys being assaulted
We can most certainly sexually assault children in schools
In the 70s female entertainers had the same access as male ones
We can sexually exploit our own children

All of this is doable
And yet
We rarely do it

I would say that sexual offences are a peculiarly male domain and understanding why that is, would be great in reducing it. Unfortunately pointing this out is not popular, men get all upset and NAMALT and simply won't think about what can be done to reduce it.

Men are more likely to be raped by another man than raped by a woman, by far.

These are simple facts and I wish more men would engage and think what can be done. This is on them, women and children have really limited power to address it.

Hermione is, as is often the case, completely right. Men oppress women because of our biology. Acknowledging this is not essentialist, Qwerty. Essentialism is claiming that there are innate, essential differences between the sexes. This leads to a belief that there can be a mystical womanhood unrelated to material reality, which is used to explain why some men are "really women" in some innate way, regardless of their anatomy. That's where the "born in the wrong body" narrative comes from.

That women are oppressed because of our biology is basic feminism.

Queen, the brain is plastic so, socialisation obviously has a big effect on gendered propensity to violence. Men are at least in part socialised to be assertive, aggressive, competitive (all cognates of violence) and women to be passive, demure, compliant, nurturing etc. That socialisation process obviously does in part determine the undeniable fact that the vast majority of violence is committed by men. But at least theoretically, that process is reversible (if it weren't then there wouldn't be much point in feminism). Indeed, when women have been socialised into very brutal sub-cultures they have displayed the same aggressive traits as men. Lindsay England is a prime example.

As for sexual violence, you're probably right insofar as women lack a penetrative capacity and the sheer muscle to overpower a victim. Female sexual misbehaviour tends to be very different in character. Female pedophilia (which probably exceeds anything we would be comfortable admitting to as a society) is probably more covert and subtle (though no less damaging).

I don't know. As we've ever never had an equal or female dominated society there is no knowing what it would be like. Have you read 'The Power' by Naomi Alderman? It's very interesting. Really good book.