The "Transwomen are women" thing

[Battleax]

Bear with me for a moment.

( @Ekphrasis said something interesting on another thread about what closes ears to what we're saying and I've been thinking about closed ears more generally.)

Would it work better to sidestep the whole "Transwomen are women" mantra instead of taking it on?

Just talk about "natal women" having different needs to "transwomen". Every single time.

Because I think "no they're not" stops the brainwashed from listening.

but hearing SM-sceptical DS get maudlin about it finished me off. But he is in a very politicised RL environment, as I say. Maybe they'll all graduate and snap out of the madness

I may be wrong on this (and bare with me because I may not explain myself very well) but I get the impression that university politics is a bit of a micro-climate in itself and many students are deeply involved in debate of some sort. The Trans issue is a bit of a frenzy at the moment and all the students who consider themselves progressive and 'right on' are perhaps debating nothing else.

Of course, it wouldn't do them any harm (and definitely lots and lots of good) if they did they're own bit of non-biased factual research to try and form their own view on things, but they don't. Instead they consider what they do as attacking the perceived 'establishment' and standing up for the under dog. It's almost like they cannot see the bigger picture and the implications involved here.

I don't know if that makes sense. I'm still learning. I'm looking into Social justice warrior actions (Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Julie Bindell and how all these people have been shouted down) and some of the actions against these speakers are crazy.

The way to combat this is to turn it around.

Trans women are trans women. Why are they ashamed of this to the point of lying about it? They should embrace it. Being a trans woman is a unique status. It should be celebrated and supported.

Are trans women so ashamed of their trans identity that they need to lie to themselves and others about it? It’s very sad that they can’t embrace their own unique identities and experiences and feel the need to lump themselves in with women.

I think this is the way to approach changing the narrative.

I agree with your original post Battleax.
I whilst I don’t underestimate the significance of claiming the word women, I think it opens up a hall or smoke and mirrors that can be used to sabotage what could be useful debate and discussion. We know that nobody can come up with a workable definition of woman that ignores biology and stereotypes (or the use of the term woman).
I think it is far more effective to say natal women have some needs that differ to transwomen and vice versa.

Nanny. I think the problem with putting forward arguments about whet would be best/supportive/healthy for transwomen is that you get shouted down with claims that only transpeople can comment on what is best for transpeople.
I have found it more powerful to stick with what are well known, documented needs associated with being a natal woman

Hmm. I don't think being snide, and calling them female impersonators is very helpful.
Yeah, SOME are clearly taking the piss, but there are transwomen out there who have had their own struggles and heartbreak, and it's not for me to decide who is "deserving" of sympathy and who isn't.
I don't care what a man wears or how he presents himself. I will call him "she" if that's preferred. For me it's purely about legislation and the stealth removal of protections for women.
And yes, the vast majority of people are not remotely concerned with this issue. I asked DP about it (old school left, zero interest in gender politics). He was very "shrug, yeah poor old trannies, live and let live" and thats how most people are.
The mainstream media representation is Love Lies and Records, or that Denise Welsh one about the son who starts dating a transwoman. (And didn't realise she used to be a man-how?!) Saying anything negative about trans people seems mean and heartless.
It's a war of perception.

You don't get to id your way out of prostate cancer by putting a dress on. Trans women are men. Different bodies, different issues.

@IfNot I will call him "she" if that's preferred. For me it's purely about legislation and the stealth removal of protections for women

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, aren't these two comments contradictory?

We're all falling over ourselves to say that using "she" is perfectly acceptable if an individual wants it, but given that the problem is defining what "she" means, how can that be?

If we are reclaiming woman as our sex identifer, how do we identify that woman standing over there from that TIM next to her? They can't both be "she" can they?

I don't like the term trans women it has a women in it and they are not women
Also it seems to lead to us calling women 'natal women'
So women are now only a category within the larger group of women

msbeaujangles I can see your point but it is too easy for TIMs to counter arguments about female biology with ‘what about infertile women’ (FFS)

They would have a much more difficult time arguing away the focus on their differences to us and their very difficult medical and social needs.

This is also they way to support transsexuals and trans people who don’t support the TAs. Because these are the areas that they are concerned about too.

I also refuse to refer to Tims as 'she'
If a Tim doesn't want to be a he then fair enough but the Tim will have to think of another word which isn't she

Maybe a heshe?

Yeah you're probably right shots. It's just that there is a gap between the everyday experiences of most people (which may involve knowing a trans person) and the aggressive rhetoric of the trans lobby. If I worked with a TIM for example, I wouldn't be referring to him as "he" to make a point. Seems cruel. But yes, it's contradictory!

So, for example:

Surely trans women need their own rights and protections to differentiate themselves from women upon hospital admission so that medical professionals can accurately assess their condition. Imagine if a trans woman died of or was permanently harmed by a treatable conditional just because medical professionals weren’t aware of her biological needs and misdiagnosed (through no fault of their own) the issue.

In real life, by the by, I know two transvestites (that's what they always called themselves).
Both are mainly dressed as males in everyday life, and "dress up" to go out.
One is married with grown up kids, one is not sure if he is gay or straight, lots of mental health problems. The latter has now decided he is transgender. Not sure if he "is a woman" though.
From an outsiders perspective, both these men just like dressing in women's clothing, and having a female "alter ego". Day to day, they are blokes (and treated like blokes).
If either of these men declared they "literally are women" I would spit my tea, because at the end of the day they have a choice.
I feel quite sorry for the second guy-he's a mess- but the difference between him and me is that I can't choose to not be my sex.
I couldn't choose to not be a 14 year old girl
getting harrassed by men, or a 40 year old woman losing promotions to 25 year old men.
I'm trapped in the RIGHT body, and there's nothing I can do about that. (and no, much as I'd like to be a lad I would never pass as one!)

I agree with you. It’s completely galling, but some kind of subtlety is needed if we want people who are convinced they’re fighting a good fight to listen. I just posted some similar thoughts in the ‘terf’ thread.

Last comment was to Battleax, don’t think that was clear. I’m back on MN after a decade and have totally forgotten how to do the things.

Why does everything need to be about gender? Why can't it be about which SEX a person is?

I think the approach often depends on the interaction. I have taken an approach similar to OP's original position when talking to my young-adult nieces. They are all about (what they understand to be) intersectionality. They believe that TIMs are among the most oppressed of women and those of us lucky enough to be born in the right bodies have cis privilege.

It would absolutely have been counter productive to scoff (aloud) at the idea or insist that TIMs are men with male privilege. Instead I asked them why, if they could see that TIMs suffer oppression both for being perceived as women socially, and for being 'born in the wrong body', so many transactivists (like those who object to the term fgm or criticise womens marchers for using reference to the female reproductive system in their slogans and imagery) refuse to think intersectionally when it comes to women who experience oppression both because of being perceived as women socially, and because they have female biology and physiology?

If we are all just different types of women, why isn't the fact that some of us grow up treated as sex objects from when we start to develop as girls, experience shame and embarrassment over our periods, have to fight for control of our own reproductive systems, live at risk of male violence and sexual assault, are treated as an afterthought by the medical establishment, have traumatic experiences exacerbated by disrespectful services and public perception when it comes to infertility, childbirth, breastfeeding, etc. etc.... Why isn't this viewed through the lens of intersectionality, and those of us who suffer oppression on those two fronts, actively supported and 'centred' by our fellow 'women'? Why instead are those of us with female biology expected to shut up about the oppression we face on that front and only concern ourselves with the struggles we share with TIMs (btw what struggles are they anyway?) and with being good allies and checking our 'cis privilege'?

Is any other group of women who are oppressed on more than one basis, expected to shut up about the experiences that are specific to their group? Or is it that they disagree against all the objective, clear evidence and their own lived experience, that having female biology is a basis for oppression?

I feel certain that our conversation made them think in a way that insisting that transwomen are not women would not have. I didn't get much by way of response, but I hope that when they next come across someone pissed off that a woman marched while holding a sign mentioning ovaries, or whatever, they will have a think about which side of that particular argument they are on.

It's a war of perception.

YY. Perception is everything. It becomes reality.

MmmmmmBop

Excellent post. If you're going to promote intersectionality, it has to include female biology.

Unfortunately, I think this will only work with people like your nieces, as an abstract way of getting them to think.

Because in real life TRA intersectionality means centering men.

But a brilliant left field approach by you.

There seems to be a general trend of not wanting to say no to the kids, from letting small children dictate to parents, to letting teens and twenty-something ideologues heavily influence policy-making.

This is, imho, a huge mistake. The job of adults is to let kids try stuff, think idiotic things and have tantrums, while maintaining sensible boundaries; in fact, the tension seems a necessary condition for progress (increasing maturity in individuals or social progress in society).

It’s putting too much responsibility on immature people to listen to them too much. How will today’s trans allies feel in twenty years’ time faced with the knowledge that they advocated for children to be allowed to damage their their healthy bodies, if those former children are asking how the fuck this was allowed to happen?

Imagine if a trans woman died of or was permanently harmed by a treatable conditional just because medical professionals weren’t aware of her biological needs and misdiagnosed

The problem is that TRAs are vehemently against medical professionals being allowed to know their sex. I'm not sure how that squares with their specific medical needs though.

I happened to be on Pink News yesterday (was looking for a particular article and got to browsing). Wish I hadn't

They are stating, baldly and as fact, that the puberty blockers are just dandy, completely reversible, no side effects etc (very clever sleight of hand actually - there is no evidence of side effects because there is no evidence!)

This is how we come to be demonised for speaking otherwise - "look how irrational they [women] are, look how they want to prevent something completely harmless, nay beneficial, for these poor suffering trans kids, all to keep their own privilege intact..."

It's like bloody Gollum/Sméagol.

Pink News is an incredibly biased, incredibly misogynistic website. Don't be too disheartened by the stuff you read there - it's the gay and trans version of Stormfront.

Pink News isn't called Penis News for nothing.

However I have been extremely heartened by some very 'off-script' below the line comments recently.

Maybe the wholesale erasure of homosexuality, is having an impact on the readers, if not the wildly-drunk-on-kool-aid writers.

Unless women can plainly name what is going on here with the trans movement - which is a male supremacist religion designed to legally and ontologically obliterate women and girls - we are going to lose, and referring to trans-identified men as ‘transwomen’ (or 'trans women' or 'transgender women') prevents us from doing that.

Playing along with the polite 'transwomen are transwomen' lie has allowed feminist critique of gender identity ideology to essentially devolve into arguments about whether ‘transwomen’ have the necessary experience of sexism to be considered 'women'. And it’s all such bullshit. It’s ALL bullshit. Men can never be women, no matter what they feel, no matter how much surgery they have. And men who present in a feminine manner are never treated as women, ever. The way that so-called progressives coddle them and prioritise their every demand over the needs of actual women demonstrates that.

Unfortunately, the 'keep trans women off AWS' petition played right into this, by framing it as being about 'transwomen and women', instead of what it was really about, which is women and men. This has allowed progressives to frame the petition as ‘targeting a very marginalized and vulnerable group of women for discrimination'. It’s not, it’s about keeping MEN off AWS, but even the petition couldn’t or wouldn't say that. It struck me how crazy that is: that the terms of the debate are so controlled by TRAs that even women who recognise the trans movement as a male takeover of feminism are afraid and/or unwilling to name ‘trans women’ AS MEN. To say that this is about male dominance, male control of women. Feminists are bound to lose unless we can expose the dynamic at play here, and name TIMs as men.

Men are never a subset of women, and there is no such thing as 'transwomen'. They are just male colonists, attempting to dominate and control women in the way that sexist men have always done, and women need to acquire the courage to name them as such.