'Not biologically male'

[weekfour]

everydayfeminism.com/2017/02/trans-women-not-biologically-male/

Just going to post this here and then go and do some deep breathing to try and control my frustration.

If someone is struggling with themselves and the world to the extent that they can't cope with the word "woman", how is it that we are assuming that the words "cervical smear" will be any easier to handle for them? I mean, are we actually helping anyone out with this mad rush away from horrid words?

Oops, posted too soon.

Do all of these verbal contortions and rigging the world to suit do anything at all to lessen dysphoria?

Or do they just give a nice warm glowing veneer of virtue?

loop

How is that ever going to work? You would be asking people the same question over and over. Do you require cervical screening? Do you require maternity provision? Do you require breast screening?

And all these people would have a collective name. Woman.

Instead of just counting the number of women, adjusting for age, and providing the service based on statistics.

People have to plan. For research, funding, provision of services, diversity quotas.

And what about the inherent power dynamic that affects women?

Some people rape other people? We haven’t had time yet to ask them each individually how they identify.

Your method completely ignores all the things that are determined by biology.

A company who wants to have the 50 percent women and 50 percent men. Could have 100 percent men based on gender identity.

A chemist who provides the morning after pill, could be woefully undersupplied or overstocked, based on gender identity.

Unless they constantly asked each individual person do you need the morning after pill? Instead of using statistics.

Manufacturers of the contraceptive pill wouldn’t know where to start unless they knew the number of women who might use it.

And, of course, this is not about words. This is about the concept of male and female.

You can change the words as much as you like. It doesn’t alter the reality.

You can call women uterus havers. And a man with gender dysphoria, will want to call himself a uterus haver. Because ‘woman’ will be meaningless. It’s not the word he’s after, it’s the concept.

It’s already happening. Women were given the name ciswoman to describe them in relation to transwomen.

You’re already seeing transwomen describing themselves as cis. And AFAB.

Sometimes I think I’m on another planet. Dividing the human race into categories depending on what they feel like on any given day?

Strewth.

Why have they edited out all the natural pauses between sentences in that video? Is it so that there’s no time to think ‘this is clearly bullshit’? Regardless of the insane content it’s so hard to listen to.

YES! That's exactly what he does. You're brain is going 'What? But?' and the next point is already coming so doesn't get a chance to complete - Riley just carry's on, assuming you agree, and your brain shakes itself, and because you didn't have time to examine that idea, you just go along with it.

Until you get to the end, and do have time to think...

Almost feels like a brainwashing technique - like if you weren't already sure of yourself, that it might have a swaying effect, purely because of the delivery, and nothing to do with the content.

loopsdefruit
I do think that what makes you a woman/man/both/neither is just your gender identity.

I agree that we have different organs that require different care and can have different health needs/medical issues, but I don't think that those differences need to have 'man' or 'woman' attached, because man and woman have expectations and stereotypes associated with them.

Make man and woman social, and treat everyone on an individual basis depending on their organs. So forms would be like "Gender: options" "Do you require breast/cervical screening?: Y/N" "Do you require prostate checks?" etc...

That would be a breech of the Equality Act on at least 3 counts (sex, race and religion), so hopefully will never happen in the UK. The majority of us dont have a problem with our identity, and women need the protection we get from having sex as a protected characteristic.

How do you g

I feel sorry for this person. This person wants to be female so badly that they are willing to suspend all reality to achieve it.

Sorry,

How would the nhs plan screening etc if it didn’t know how many biological women would potentially require it? I mean screening for various cancers, cervical screening etc. And for men - prostate cancer. How can you target women to provide them with information that could potentially save their lives if that biological category is erased?

So many conditions are experienced differently according to sex. Your biological sex is important because biological men and women are different.

They is why there are women specific health services developed. Because there are differences which cannot be changed.

loopsdefruit
I do think that what makes you a woman/man/both/neither is just your gender identity.

I agree that we have different organs that require different care and can have different health needs/medical issues, but I don't think that those differences need to have 'man' or 'woman' attached, because man and woman have expectations and stereotypes associated with them.

Make man and woman social, and treat everyone on an individual basis depending on their organs. So forms would be like "Gender: options" "Do you require breast/cervical screening?: Y/N" "Do you require prostate checks?" etc...

Not everyone has a gender identity. I certainly don't want to have to choose between social categories of 'man' and 'woman'. I find the idea offensive.

I do think that what makes you a woman/man/both/neither is just your gender identity.

I agree that we have different organs that require different care and can have different health needs/medical issues, but I don't think that those differences need to have 'man' or 'woman' attached, because man and woman have expectations and stereotypes associated with them.

Make man and woman social, and treat everyone on an individual basis depending on their organs. So forms would be like "Gender: options" "Do you require breast/cervical screening?: Y/N" "Do you require prostate checks?" etc...

Well first, thank you for actually putting an argument across rather than just plopping in with 'you are all so transphobic'.

But, do you really think that the thing that makes us man/woman is our gender identity?

What is millenia of women's oppression based on? Is it based on their identity? Did they identify their way into that oppression? Can they identify their way out of it? That oppression has always been, and continues to be, based on sex.

I saw a meme that said 'we all know what a woman is, we all came out of one'.

What is the point of arsing around with '"do you require cervical screening/prostate checks' when you could say 'are you female or male'.

Of course the differences need man and woman attached - men can't have babies, men don't need abortions, men won't get ovarian cancer or cervical cancer, men don't need an HPV vaccine, wonder won't get prostate cancer. What is wrong with attaching factual statements to these things.

If you are male you are not female.

PricklyBall, sorry if my post wasn't clear. Riley seems to be conflating the factors that people use to determine (in the sense of infer) someone's biological sex, with the factors that determine (in the sense of define) biological sex.

She then lists the five criteria that "determine" biological sex - of course conflating these different senses of determine.

And since most of the criteria that "determines" biological sex are changeable, it follows that biological sex is not some immutable unchangeable fact.

She also says that if you argue that biological sex is determined by chromosomes alone then you are going your own way because biological sex has never been just about that one factor, but about all the listed factors.

But again this conflates the notions of the factors people use to identify/infer sex with the notions of what defines it.

As I said, I do not think it is anatomical knowledge that is at fault, just a misunderstanding of the differences between these notions.

Blah blah, yadayayadayada, blah mansplain blah, yadayada blah di blah.

#womencansee

We know Riley's not a woman. We know transwomen are male. Long complicated mansplanations about biology, don't change that.

The adam's apple and the mansplaining gives it away every time. Even when the make up is good.

I have TRIED to listen to a Riley video but until they stop talking at 120 words per minute and change that irritating jumpy editing, I'm never going to last until the end.
If someone posted a really interesting coherent argument, presented in that manner, I STILL couldn't watch it.

I always think that those who go on about biological sex being 'a grey area' that can be debated on are just immensely privileged because it just shows that they have zero concept of sex based oppression.

It's kind of like when men like Richard Dawkins use rape as a basis for willy waggling arguments about 'logic' and the like.

There are millions of women the world over who wish that being male or female was something you could 'identify' your way in or out of.

"most of the criteria that "determines" biological sex are changeable" Bollocks. In reality the five criteria she refers to aren't changeable, not without outside interference.

(a) genetics - fixed
(b) outward appearance - fixed, unless changed by surgery (humans as a species are bipedal, although some may be born without a leg, or later had a leg removed via surgery, we wouldn't be telling ourselves that humans are naturally one-legged)
(c) secondary sex characteristics; beards on men, wider hips on women etc etc. Again, these are fixed in that an autopsy done on a body will always be able to tell the sex (bone structure, skeletal shape etc). Obviously they can be changed - but only via outside interference, surgery and hormone treatment.
(d) hormones - again fixed. Females produce female hormones, males produce male hormones. Hormone production can be affected by un-natural factors - disease for example. Or again by outside interference and hormone treatment. Hormone production doesn't change naturally because you feel you are the other sex.
(e) gonads - again fixed, unless missing or medically abnormal at birth, or later removed. But not naturally "changeable".

So excluding intersex people (as they have asked not to be included in this), the point she is making is "all five criteria for determining sex are fixed, unless medically or surgically altered".

Good point. Pity she effectively adds "but I don't care, even though I have shown that they can't be naturally changed, I'm telling you that they can be surgically and medically changed and therefore I'm demanding they are. And that you all suspend disbelief and accept this is natural".

Exactly, maryz

If biology is so flexible and so irrelevant, how are people managing to do sex selective abortions because they don’t want girls? Are they guessing?

How did Boko Haram know who to kidnap? Did they guess? If some of those girls felt like they were boys, would they have been released?

How do the cultures that perform FGM know which bits to cut off which people? Do they just start whipping off undies and hoping for the best?

There’s a lot of amazing lucky guesswork going on in the world where biological sex is such a woolly, nebulous concept. It’s amazing.

You can only be so sunny about gender when you’ve failed to understand its materiality in the world.

dammit! so sunny about SEX not gender.

The argument that biological sex doesn't exist because you can cut bits off is insane.

Apart from anything else, you can't add any other bits on. Men don't have a vagina made by surgery, they have a cavity that needs constant dilating otherwise it will heal up.

Women, the very small percentage who have bottom surgery, don't have a working penis. It doesn't produce sperm and it doesn't get erect without artificial means.

Cutting bits off and fashioning the remaining skin into a certain shape isn't changing sex. Neither is sewing on a phallic shaped piece of skin.

It's poor cosmetic surgery really isn't it?

Just like that poor woman who is trying to look like a cat , or the man who had surgery to look more "Asian" (while googling that I discovered a lot of Asian people are getting surgery to look more American, wtf are doctors up to these days?) or those who want their limbs cut off because they are body dysmorphic, or anorexic people wanting liposuction.

In all those cases we feel sympathy, we are concerned and supportive, but we don't go ahead with the surgery just because the person feels like a cat/Asian/disabled/fat.

I don't understand it, I feel surgeons agreeing to it should have a good hard look at why they became doctors. But then I feel that about surgeons who are willing to give people humongous boobs, or butt implants, or some of the more extreme facial stuff

Psychopathy is higher amongst surgeons than any other profession.

I agree that we have different organs that require different care and can have different health needs/medical issues, but I don't think that those differences need to have 'man' or 'woman' attached, because man and woman have expectations and stereotypes associated with them.

Make man and woman social, and treat everyone on an individual basis depending on their organs. So forms would be like "Gender: options" "Do you require breast/cervical screening?: Y/N" "Do you require prostate checks?" etc...

No assumptions based on the gender question (or sex question come to that) and people still get the medical care they need, also removing the 'man/woman' thing might help lessen dysphoria for people who experience it while meeting their medical needs.

Men and women existed as separate, biological, categories before any word for "man" or "woman" existed. The development of language did not suddenly construct the categories "men" and "women" - language was merely used to describe what already existed, and was deemed important enough to name.

Yes, there are stereotypes based on "man" and "woman". But, again, because language evolves, any word substituted for "man" or "woman" will end up carrying the same stereotypical connotations as the original words. Because all that's happened is the words have been changed, the underlying attitudes and beliefs haven't.

So we can change the signifier "woman" to "uterus haver" or "child bearer" and uterus havers and child bearers will still be viewed as illogical, emotional, hysterical, [add in other pejorative terms for women] because the underlying beliefs have not changed. It is simply that women are now reduced to individual body parts/functions. If that's not insulting, I don't know what is.

What is the point of arsing around with '"do you require cervical screening/prostate checks' when you could say 'are you female or male'
I know two natal women who have enquiried with their gp about needing a prostate exam. I think perhaps not everyone has the intimate knowledge of male and female biology that many here do.