Transwomen were 'coercively and violently' assigned male at birth.

[Macareaux]

And apparently, later in the thread, the reason we don't talk about transmen as much as transwomen is that feminism is not about the men.

JFC my head hurts.

I'm just astonished that people who are so aggressively entitled and often so aggressive can also be such fucking snowflakes.

Quite, Dance. They're only too keen to dish it out but get incredibly angry if anyone even slightly dissents from their claims.

the trouble is that if you agree that gender is a construct then what even is a woman?

Easy.

A woman is an adult human female.

You've fallen for the lie that "woman" and "man" are genders, and that this is something separate from their sex.

Women are humans of the female sex. The gender usually assigned to them is the feminine gender.

Woman is not a gender.

Equating woman with feminine is sexism 101.

Mainstream understanding of basic feminist principles is totally arse about face these days. It makes me want to weep.

Well that was patronising. I'm well aware of the difference between female and feminine, thanks.

The terms 'woman' and 'man' are loaded with gender assumptions and do not equate to 'Female' and 'male'.

We need to talk about the features of what it is to be a woman or a man before we talk about reassigning gender because we will find that the problem lies in those features and definitions, not in biology (for the most part).

I wasn't meaning to be patronising, just pointing out that agreeing that gender is constructed doesn't cause any difficulty in knowing what a woman is if you accept the standard dictionary definition of the word.

Yes, the words for adult human females and adult human males are loaded with gender assumptions. Hence the ongoing attempt by feminists to decouple the word woman from the feminine gender.

Apologies for implying you yourself were ignorant of the difference between sex and gender. But there is a widespread lack of understanding of what that difference is, from which a great deal of the madness stems.

No problem. I think we agree.

It is a shame that there's such conflict between transpeople and feminists who ultimately - I think - want the same thing: i.e. to be allowed to behave as they wish, not be controlled by what social norms say about gender etc.

I think we're concentrating on individual behaviour without questioning the norms that cause it, when those are the very things we should be disputing.

They think the midwives should have known they were going to become trans?! What about the 99% of the rest of the population who want their sex correctly recorded

To continue your point, JungDisciple, if midwives 'know' who is trans (or maybe it's easier to say know the baby's gender) then how do they know it? Is it based on some scientific test or is it a feeling/intuition? With trans ideology being what it is, I'd plump for the latter. So if midwives know this, how do they know it? Maybe it can be learned, in which case we could surely all learn it. Or are midwives really the dangerous creatures described all those years ago in 'Malleus Maleficarum'?

Whatever. This ex-midwife knows that external genitalia are a very good guide to sex in the vast majority of cases and that the gender bollox starts with the pink & blue cards, presents, nurseries etc that we seem so in love with now.

Not RTFT but look how many likes it's had. God - how utterly depressing that people actually believe this rubbish.

I just watched a Travis Alabanza Ted talk where they talk about it being "assigned without consent", so really comparing being sexed to being raped, or at least using similar terms.

Sex isn't recorded without consent or violently or coercively.

It's just recorded. Observed as the fact it is.

Surely the only violence, coercive or without consent things around that are due to then being forced into a box by your immediate surroundings. If your family and world view isn't restricted or manipulated due to your observed sex, where is the violence?