Super dandy wrote:
^New poster appears with a long post in support of GC
- brilliant post - come on in, pull up a chair - don't apologise
New poster appears with a long post not in support of GC
- "That was really just another plop, in a slightly longer form, from freezingsheep wasn’t it?" followed immediately by a a stream of hostile posts^
I think the new poster referred to here was me, and the kind responses were to my somewhat distraught post on this thread yesterday morning.
I know the thread has moved on, but I have been reflecting on this post by Super Dandy today, and the fact that the kindness was only because posters here agreed with me.
It strikes me that I really want is to be wrong, for my understanding and teaching of gender not to have been co-opted and used against the ideals I believe in; for the dignity and integrity of women to be upheld and not threatened by self-ID. I want to be able to accept the claims made to womanhood by non-female-bodied people. I want to read an argument which disagrees with my position and which I can understand and agree with. I have not read it yet.
I want to be wrong because I am socialised to be nice, and telling people 'no' is not nice, when they don't accept the 'no' the first time, and keep pushing.
I have a colleague who has told me that women have, for decades, been expanding the bandwidth of what it means to be a woman and therefore what is there to discuss? But this only makes sense if one takes the view that in the eighteenth/nineteenth century, only elite women were regarded in any way or seen as women; then class consciousness came to the fore; and then recognition of race - in other words, that women who were not white, elite, educated were excluded from discourses of womanhood, and women from other backgrounds were then included. But no-one in the past ever seriously questioned that working class women were female, or that slave women were female - in fact, the hazards of rape and pregnancy outside marriage, of maternal mortality and poverty, fell hardest on these women, hazards born of biological function.
Consciousness raising quite rightly sought to give women of all backgrounds a voice and feminism quite rightly was challenged to be empowering to women of all backgrounds by women of colour. It is not clear to me how expanding quite rightly the boundaries of feminism beyond the white, educated classes really means expanding feminism to include penis bearers though.
So the other argument I have heard is that gender is innate, an identity, and really, what does it harm me if a man identifies as a woman and comes in the female bathrooms? That kind of argument makes me the one who has to defend my views or who is somehow wrong. It remind me of my xH saying 'what is wrong with you?', when I did not want him to touch me.
So, that is the thing I think - that it is women who voice concerns who are portrayed as those in the wrong. Even when the concerns relate to the recognition and protection of the bodies we have, which are the only bodies we have, and which shape how society views us, not some innate, but nebulous sense of gender identity. And I have not yet heard an argument which makes me believe that women voicing concerns are wrong.