Looking for a neutral summary on trans issues

[catkind]

I won't pretend I don't hold strong (GC) views myself, but I would find it really useful to have a neutral summary of the positions both sides (and subcamps) are taking. I want to be able to explain to friends who have no idea about trans politics what this is about and what the disagreements are, in terms that friends who are on the transactivist side of the debate won't disagree with. Anyone got any good links for me?

‘Most people’ another ideologically driven unevidenced claim...

It is also factually incorrect that testosterone is the only factor or even the most important factor.

The fact that despite having a masculine gender identity the transman who died remained biologically female but had been treated as though they were male is incredibly important in that death...

Knock it off with the social spaces crap. Places where women are undressed and therefore vulnerable are intimate spaces.

Sorry OP, I haven’t read any responses to your post so apologies if this has already been linked.

This article is pretty neutral. It’s from 4 years ago so things have moved on a bit since it was written but you will be able to copy and paste a few statements that outline the basic premise of the two differing opinions.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2

Yy Sarah I can’t think of any purely social spaces that are segregated by sex... this would be illegal under the EA.

Not everyone has a gender identity...

Of course they do. Read all the posts in FWR about how people associate their identity with menstruation, or giving birth, or breast feeding. Every time someone asserts that things like that matter, they are asserting a gender identity, they are asserting what their womanhood means to them. Because their gender identity is aligned to their sex, that it is a gender identity is easily overlooked. Watch body swap movies. The whole story line is that people only realise that they have a gender identity after the swap.

Places where women are undressed and therefore vulnerable are intimate spaces

Yes, that exactly how I see them, it's strike me as odd that anyone would describe them as social, unless it's just another attempt to blur the lines.

The truth is that someone is comfortable in a space feels comfortable if his/her gender identity matches the sex of all those in the space - and the greater the dissonance between the two, the less comfortable people are - but it is impossible to have that discussion because gender critical feminists refuse to accept that gender identity exists.

I would like to see an explanation that in some way objectively explains and substantiates the concept of 'gender identity', I can't find one anywhere.This means that I have very little recourse when I try to analyse it. It seems that either I can view it as a weak claim with little or no material substance, akin to a 'religious' experience or I can view it from a personal standpoint.

If I view it from a personal standpoint it makes no sense to me whatsoever. I was born female, I was socialised in a culture that has particular expectations of those who are born female. I do not however 'feel' female. I know I am female because that's how I am classified. I know what I have in common with other females which is a particular lived experience that I share both biologically, socially and culturally. How I 'feel' impacts on aspects of my material existence but it doesn't account for it.

It doesn't necessarily matter how I 'feel' in a space, I actually prefer male company on the whole. I've also spent more time with gay men, transwomen than I have with other women. I find a number of the topics that as a 'woman' the culture expects me to engage with rather irrelevant.

HOWEVER I do know that being female makes a difference to my material reality and that of other females. I don't feel more comfortable in certain 'female' spaces because I am sexed 'female' or culturally gendered as such but because in material/factual terms I am safer. Women in parts of India don't walk for miles to find a women's loo because of lack of dissonance between their sexed/gendered selves, but because it is materially safer.

This leads me to another problem I have, the issues that are attributed as 'petty' ideological concerns of UK women have extensive implications. If this idea that safe spaces for women depend on gendered identity becomes the dominant how will that impact on wider policies for women here and elsewhere?

I don't have a gender identity, I have a sex.

Please don't force unwanted labels on people.

Knock it off with the social spaces crap. Places where women are undressed and therefore vulnerable are intimate spaces.

No. They are social spaces. If it was a private cubicle nobody would care. It is because there are other people there that people do care. It is what other people might see, or say, of do that matters. It is the social nature of the space which matters. And that is all about gender and our understanding of how we fit into that social space.

Healthcare needs depend on biological sex (at the time). That's very different to social spaces which are all about gender.

The trouble is there are individuals who want to deny biological sex in ALL situations including when it comes to their health because they are that determined they are the opposite sex.

This is where it is undeniably either a cult or verged firmly into the realms mental illness where a person will harm themselves because they believe in something that strongly and deeply.

And demonstrates quite clearly that gender can not replace sex, because it is inadequate.

Being nice, supportive and accomodating about it, doesn't change this. Indeed it might well add to the chances of harm being done.

Watch body swap movies. The whole story line is that people only realise that they have a gender identity after the swap.

So followers of genderism base their beliefs on Hollywood sci-fi movies then? A bit like Scientology?

Watch body swap movies

I really don't think there is anything else to say, is there?

Knock it off with the social spaces crap. Places where women are undressed and therefore vulnerable are intimate spaces.

But it is your sense of gender - the difference between men and women as you see them - that makes you feel vulnerable. It is how you map sex onto likely behaviour which makes you feel vulnerable and that is gender. There's nothing wrong with feeling that way, but it is gender despite the gender critical ideology.

Of course they do. Read all the posts in FWR about how people associate their identity with menstruation, or giving birth, or breast feeding. Every time someone asserts that things like that matter, they are asserting a gender identity, they are asserting what their womanhood means to them. Because their gender identity is aligned to their sex, that it is a gender identity is easily overlooked. Watch body swap movies. The whole story line is that people only realise that they have a gender identity after the swap.

No they don’t because they are describing ‘womanhood’ in relation to material reality. Identity has nothing to do with this.

Snappity you still have explained what you mean by a 'gendered identity' or what it means to feel 'female' and why/how that might overrides biology or the lived experience of those who are sexed female. And I don't just mean in the first world but on a global basis. Are all those women that the UN/Amnesty/Human Rights Watch and so on report on in terms of the material problems they face somehow not real to you? Will recategorizing them in terms of gender identities stop femicide in Juarez, rape, lack of sanitation, death in childbirth, forced marriage, fgm, lack of abortion rights, lack of contraception access. Linguistic utterances don't change material reality.

A woman in a support group for drugs / alcohol will interact different when a man is present.

Single sex 'social' spaces of this nature have been showed to aid those with addiction problems.

These are vulnerable women, who if they have been abused are finely tuned into the presence of men. Even if they are nice about someone trans, they may well still feel vulnerable on a psychological level because of their experience. It is deeply ingrain as part of their survival. Your logical brain can not over ride feelings like this (have a read about mind management and the concept of the emotional brain and the logical brain and overcoming anxiety).

Anyone asking women to do this, is asking the impossible.

The need for 'social' space along sex lines still exists because of this. There are 'social' spaces which are intimate on a psychological level.

This also does go into spaces where women undress for similar reasons. Especially medical settings.

For your claim to be true breastfeeding etc would need to be functions of identity not functions of biology.

Snappity Just to be clear, do you believe that men are on average and across the world more violent and more likely to be perpetrators of sexual crimes than women because they have been socialised into it rather than because of something in their biology (which people are now trying to socialise away)?

By the way, was there anything else in my answer to the OP you consider biased?

The fact that some people want these things to be recategorised as based on identity not on biology is the whole entire problem.

They will always be based on biology. A transman cannot identify out of menstruation, they need medical intervention for this.

Nope. The basis of gender ideas is sex, not the other way around. The basis of feeling safe in a sex segregated space for me is the lack of penis owner being a) able to access me with his eyes or penis, or b) make me feel uncomfortable because he is the sex that often do that.

The gender markers in our culture that denote penis owners are not the basis for sex segregation.

Not even if you're watching Freaky Friday, Big or any other other screwball comedy and using it to leverage access to women's spaces...

Snappity so clearly you don't want to or are unable to define your terms, which makes me sympathetic to posters who have compared them to a 'cult', it reminds me of arguing with evangelical Christians, a pointless task, since no-one can objectively verify the existence of a deity. And so far no-one on these threads or elsewhere has independently verified the notion of a 'feeling of gender' or a 'gender identity'. The material conditions of women, violence and the threat of violence against women by those who are sexed male, whatever their gender identity may be, is however objectively verifiable.

If you want to impose an identity on other people who don’t identify that way then you cannot ever claim that things like misgendering or sex segregated spaces should be based on how someone personally identifies.

But it is your sense of gender - the difference between men and women as you see them - that makes you feel vulnerable. It is how you map sex onto likely behaviour which makes you feel vulnerable and that is gender. There's nothing wrong with feeling that way, but it is gender despite the gender critical ideology.

I've already told you I don't have a sense of gender so stop 'misgendering' me (That's how this works. Right?)

The rest of that is just word salad. Material reality recognises sex differences not some random feeling in my head which I don't have anyway.

all the posts in FWR about how people associate their identity with menstruation, or giving birth, or breast feeding. Every time someone asserts that things like that matter, they are asserting a gender identity, they are asserting what their womanhood means to them

They are talking about the facts of life not an 'identity'. Weird that you assume it is normal to be so navel gazing and divorced from the reality of one''s life.

These are vulnerable women, who if they have been abused are finely tuned into the presence of men. Even if they are nice about someone trans, they may well still feel vulnerable on a psychological level because of their experience. It is deeply ingrain as part of their survival. Your logical brain can not over ride feelings like this (have a read about mind management and the concept of the emotional brain and the logical brain and overcoming anxiety).

I agree, but the vulnerability is based on their ingrained sense of a) who is male and who is female and b) how males may behave in contrast to how women will react. That's gender.The whole point is that our sense of gender is what informs how we think someone will behave based on our assessment of sex.