Really good article in the NY Times on the trans and gender issue 'What Makes a Woman?'

[BiscuitMillionaire]

Apologies if you guys have already discussed this, but I hadn't seen it before, and an american friend just linked to it on fb. It's from 2015.

www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/what-makes-a-woman.html?_r=0

That is a brilliant article.

Wow! Just the article I have been looking for. Thank you. This is great!

Thankyou for the link - articulated my feelings perfectly

That is fabulous, thank you

Thanks you for linking. A great article but it already sounds from a different era in the way it innocently misgenders Bruce Jenner and so forth. It's hard to imagine the author getting away with such "transphobia" in piece these days. It feels as if several of the battles she lists have already been all but lost in the current madness.

It is brilliant and much needed for this era.

Their truth is not my truth.

"People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr. Summers, shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman.

Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female identity. They haven’t traveled through the world as women and been shaped by all that this entails. They haven’t suffered through business meetings with men talking to their breasts or woken up after sex terrified they’d forgotten to take their birth control pills the day before. They haven’t had to cope with the onset of their periods in the middle of a crowded subway, the humiliation of discovering that their male work partners’ checks were far larger than theirs, or the fear of being too weak to ward off rapists."

I don't think it's got quite that bad here. I didn't know about things like Fund Texas Women changing their name to Fund Texas Choice because "“With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans people who needed to get an abortion but were not women,” the group explains on its website."

Brilliant article!

Very good! I was interested to read to race analogy - I used this myself in a debate about the philosophy of transgender issues at Christmas, and no one could come up with a difference between changing sex and changing race. Ther are both permanent and essentially irrelevant to who you are as a person (excluding prejudices suffered of course )

Yes. Though this article doesn't go as far as to say it's not possible to change your sex, and gender is a social construct.

I admit to finding the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner a bit much. However, I would be interested to know if there is any research that suggests that trans people actually do opt into old fashioned gender stereotypes more often than not.

Jenner has become totemic for trans rights without, I suspect, providing a typical example of one.

Very interesting article. I found this bit:

"Yet Ms. Jenner and Ms. Manning, to mention just two, expect to be called women even as the abortion providers are being told that using that term is discriminatory. So are those who have transitioned from men the only “legitimate” women left?"

particularly pertinent. It's not just abortion providers who are being challenged on their use of "woman/women" to refer to adult females who are pregnant. As I recall, the Canadian Midwives Association have changed their literature to refer to "pregnant persons" to avoid using "women/mothers".

The mangling of definitions is becoming increasingly bizarre.