“Transwomen are women”

[BertrandRussell]

I’ve tried this before-but please can someone explain the thinking behind this to me. I am naive enough to think that there must be some- is it the “male brain/female brain” thing? And where did it come from? Where did it start?

Please-no abuse from either “side”. Just statements of fact. With links to evidence if possible.

I seriously don't get it either

Why are people just spouting transwomen are women and that's it shut up.

A transwoman is a transwoman. That is it.

A woman is a woman.
That is it.

They both have rights. They both have the right to safe living. But at the moment, one is being prioritised OVER the safety of the other and it needs to stop.

Women have fought for decades to get the rights we now have. It's sickening that we have to start again

On the GoFundMe page there are hundreds of posts saying 'Transwomen are women'. Presumably they all know why they think that? or at least one of them does?

Some of it seems to be 'They have a hard time and are therefore women'. I'm not sure where that leaves transmen (a subject somewhat closer to my heart).

The relentless repetition of the mantra transwomen are women just makes them look crazy.

Something they never seem to grasp.

So why aren’t transwomen, well ‘transwomen’. That’s how it is in the real world.

No matter how long I keep my fingers crossed or hold my breath I won’t ever be chinese. Not going to happen. Ever.

And it's the fetishists who are driving this.

The desperation to breach women's boundaries and impose themselves as the most womanly woman ever is a massive sexual compulsion.

But but but - show me the sorcerers alchemy that can turn a man into a woman. And not a woman with a penis because that is not a woman.

It's a fetish dressed up as a civil rights issue

Tempted to get this printed on a T shirt.

Oh I’m getting ‘you ain’t no sister, bruv’ printed on mine. I might add a photo of Dick Emery too.

Oh I’m getting ‘you ain’t no sister, bruv’ printed on mine. I might add a photo of Dick Emery too.

Fekko
perfect

Actually I think it’s worth remembering the difference noted earlier in between transsexual and transgender people.

I wouod love some more studies in the difference of behaviours between the transgender and the transsexual.
I suspect transsexual are much less of a ‘danger’ to women than transgender are. The length that they will have gone through (with the surgery for example) will make them fit in within ‘women’ much more likely and logical in some ways.

Transgender people in the other hand are more likely to be those who will still have a penis and will want to use it (sexually). I suspect they are also the ones who are the most vocal about it all (happy to be corrected though). These are the people I would have an issue to say they are ‘women’ because they will not share the biology, will still share the functioning sexual organs of men AND still behaved in the masculine gendered way (I am in a position of privilege and I will be listened to).

TBH, I dont understand WHY transwomen would want to be considered women. They would be putting their life at risk (eg health screenings) and will face very different challenges than women amongst other things.
It’s as if the recognition that a tranwoman is a woman is the ultimate recognition that they have acheived what they set out to achieve.
Except they dont agree on what the final aim is (See the transgender/transsexual Issue) and I’m not sure they can actually define themselves what it is they want to achieve.

I'm not sure I agree about drawing that distinction between transexual and transgender, Hermione.

For one, I can think of a particular transexual celebrity who recently was threatening and shouty and silencing to a group of women for misgendering him as any misogynistic man might be. And who holds some horrible sexist views about women. I'm cognisant that he falls into the 'look how committed I am to transition' category. And I definitely wouldn't want to be alone in a changing room with him especially if he knew my views on sex and gender.

And for two, even if transexual women were harmless as kittens, I'm still as uncomfortable being informed I'm the same as they are and must accept them in intimate female spaces.
I mean, I wouldn't strip naked in front of my harmless elderly dad, or brothers, or male friends I trust. For me the ultimate deciding factor isn't 'will you hurt me?'

It's 'are you my sex?'

There's so much more to male aggression and dominance than just penis. 95% of all men have a hand grip strength greater than any woman. That thought occurs to me often. Even the weakest men can out grip the strongest women.

We'll never bridge the physical chasm between the sexes. Yet too many women are running like lemmings off that cliff rather than admit there's a chasm right there.

The main drivers behind the "male brains are different to female brains" are two men. Simon Baron-Cohen (e.g. www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/17/featuresreviews.guardianreview6) and Steven Pinker (e.g. newrepublic.com/article/68044/sex-ed).

For the studies, with small samples sizes, who say they have found differences between male and female brains (post mortem), the following main problems exist:

• we're talking about samples at quite a gross scale of analysis, rather than a fine scale of analysis.
• small sample sizes tend to find differences between groups because small sample sizes mean outliers have a strong influence on results.
• p

"small sample sizes tend to find differences between groups because small sample sizes mean outliers have a strong influence on results."

YY to this - the last paper I looked at on the subect had about 30 samples, spread between men, women, transmen, transwomen. Massively affected by one outlier.

I'd add another to your list - poor quality control on the data. The same paper (supposedly drawing attention to a greater density of a certain type of cell in men than in women and transwomen) had two other outliers in the opposite direction, a woman and a transwoman with none of the relevant type of cell in that region of their brain (post-mortem samples). Now I'm not a biologist (work in a different part of science), but none at all in a supposedly important part of the brain for function? I'm thinking "error mounting your samples/ damage during the dissection process". (QC of data is a massive issue in the area of science I work in - huge numbers of papers on how to compare results from different measurement techniques, how to calibrate for the age of the instruments).

the last paper I looked at on the subect had about 30 samples, spread between men, women, transmen, transwomen. Massively affected by one outlier.

I'd like to know how they pick their transwomen sample.

Surely they would get a huge difference between a raging heterosexual with a cross dressing fetish and a homosexual with gender dysphoria?

Even the weakest men can out grip the strongest women

I think that might be an overstatement, to be honest.

A really really big one. There are plenty of women that are stronger than plenty of men.

Have Baron-Cohen or Pinker said any more since those papers?

www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4vcxd0/almost_all_men_are_stronger_than_almost_all_women/

Beautiful graph and a discussion on grip strength

I can well believe that, Pocket. I'm a (largely in abeyance) female rock climber, so much time spent crimping on tiny holds. My nearly 80-year-old father can still open jars I can't. (Where's the frustration emoticon when you need one).

It's something you learn when you're into sport seriously and play a lot of mixed sport (in my case rock climbing and 5-a-side football when I was younger before my knees got knackered). Muscular strength is even more obviously dimorphic than height. I always find this set of graphs of weight-lifting records by weight category for men and women very illuminating - there is pretty much no overlap - the men in the lightest weight category can lift more than the women in the heaviest category for bench and deadlift (there's a bit of overlap for squat).

Those are the sorts of plots you don't get for mental abilities, such as maths, incidentally:
www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm

Yes, Dodo. Time for my favourite plot (I hear a collective sigh from the FWR regulars who have seen this time and time again): the d-value.

For physical characteristics like height and strength and running speed, d-values between the male and female distributions are typically between 1 and 2. For cognitive characteristics, in the few studies that actually find them, the d-values are typically below 0.5. (And given early brain plasticity and the social differences in the upbringing of girls and boys from newborn onwards, it's impossible to design and experiment which would tell you whether any tiny differences between the sexes are due to nature or nurture).

TL:DR - if all you know about person A is that they are 6'2" tall, it's worth punting a fiver on them being male. If all you know about them is that they have an IQ of 140 it isn't.

Surely they would get a huge difference between a raging heterosexual with a cross dressing fetish and a homosexual with gender dysphoria?

YY. And when they have taken sexuality into account, they found differences between homosexual and heterosexual MTFs in line with Blanchard's theory. www.sexologytoday.org/2016/01/on-russos-is-there-something-unique.html?m=1

Ahhh Ereshkigal

The reason this matters is that, in the MRI study Russo describes (Zubiaurre-Elorza et al., 2013), all of the male-to-female transsexuals were attracted to men, but all of the control males were attracted to women, and all of the female-to-male transsexuals were attracted to women, but all the control females were attracted to men. That is, although the subject groups differed from the control groups in their gender identity (as they must), they also differed in their sexual orientation.

Something of a rookie error, there.

Strewth.