If 'Woman' is redefined to mean 'feminine' or 'a feeling' what should we do?

[HamsterToast]

Please don't think I'm being defeatist or a downer regarding all the great work being done to protect sex-based needs for women.

However, I find myself wanting to plan for what to do if we lose this. If 'woman' becomes legally defined as how you look or feel, and sex is taken out of it totally.

Some ideas I have had are:

• Use 'female' instead of woman? Campaign for the inclusion of 'female' in legislation?
• Openly and publicly demonstrate against females having to be feminine?
• Provide advice about what to do if you are targeted by a predatory male in a female space?
• Set up new spaces somehow?
• Set up support for victims of assault in this context?
• Grassroots organisations similar to the 60s?

We can always hope for the best but it might be good to plan for the worst and how we will move forward?

Good grief, that’s giving up and rolling over for the patriarchy, OP!
I’m autistic, so I’m afraid I for one will never accept that I have to speak lies about what constitutes a woman, in order to please a group of men with an agenda.
You can actually refuse to go along with the whole Orwellian nightmare, you know?
If every woman in Britain insisted that women don’t have penises, supported the sticker campaign, and refused to accept women’s changing rooms being thrown open to all and sundry, what can they do? Put 35 million of us in prison for “hate speak”?
It’s about time women stopped being compliant in their own abuse and erasure and started drawing some lines. I bet men are not going to allow “transmen” in their spaces.

I agree with Babdoc.
Be a Refusenik. Don't support or fund organisations that go along with gaslighting women, and start our own. We did it once, we can do it again.

1. Activitists are not only wanting "woman" redefined but also "girl" and "female"
2. Most women are not feminine and so most women will not be women nor will they be female
3. New hierarchy (as mentioned on here years ago)

>Men >Women (who used to be men) >Cunty people > who will need a new descriptive >> "non people" seems like a frontrunner

Be advised that whatever is "won" or "given" will nto be enough. This is about the utter destruciton of the language of women's rights and feminism, all the protections for women and girls in law around the world, resulting in an inability to advocate for or raise awareness around issues that affect girls and women (see how the words "sex based oppression" are apaprently "TERFY", ditto women who focus on "gynocentric" issues) etc etc So the only women that feminists can and should work for are transwomen. The non poeple have their focus put back where it belongs, on men.

It's quite sraightforward. If we lose we are fucked. We lose all employment protections, any kind of efforts to increase our participation in eg politics, certain jobs, school subjects, our prizes and awards will all go, prisons will lock women in with rapists and so on and so forth. Women's sport will be over.

Note - this is not hyperbole, these things are all already happening.

Note that leading activists for trans people are being variously revealed as

Sex offenders
Violent
What in the old days we would have described as "pervy weirdos"
People who advocate for "intergenerational" sexual relationships
There are big links to porn across this >> and it all seems very sex obsessed (surprise surprise there's a clue as to what sex people are)...
"Get tits early and suck cock" to schoolgirls
Encouraging girls to have anal sex and not mentioning prostate
Advocating for extreme porn to be legalised in the UK
And so on

These are not benign people TBH.

clitoris!

Prostate was mentioned >> girls were referred to as "non prostate havers"

The problem I foresee is that redefining woman as something other than "a female of any age", which would require an Equality Act amendment to change and the Govt have said they won't do but Stonewall et al want, means that discrimination on the basis of female biology would no longer be a criminal offence. So a company mysteriously never hiring biological females would no longer be challengable at tribunal. Sexual harassment would no longer be a crime and would be replaced by gendered harassment, which would be harder to define and prove, especially when a "woman" is perving on other women in changing rooms or showers. How can a "woman" harass other women on gendered grounds? ATM if said "woman" lacks a GRC, they can still be treated as a male under the law for such offences.

The flip side would be that, if sex discrimination is no longer a crime, we might (and IANAL so would appreciate a lawyer's eyes here) not be banned legally from making vulva-only spaces, provided that we promoted them as such and not as women's spaces. Of course, TRAs will complain that we cannot possibly know whether someone has a vulva without performing an intimate examination, ignoring the reality that I was in a room last night with 30-odd women and I could tell by looking at their faces that they all have vulvas, even the short-haired "butch" lesbians.

Pattern recognition is women's friend, for good reason.

We know that the GRA is the starter and the EA is the main course for TRAs (thanks Be North East for letting that slip) so we need to keep fighting even if we lose the GRA battle.

Riot.

"means that discrimination on the basis of female biology would no longer be a criminal offence. So a company mysteriously never hiring biological females would no longer be challengable at tribunal."

realistically this hardly ever happens anyway
Especially since the rules around paying for tribunals were changes
thousands of pregnant women still get sacked for beign pregnant wevery year

agree it will be worse, just pointing out it's not exactly great at the moment!

The obvious path would be to gather all the statistics that demonstrate, how people with vaginas are discriminated against, disadvantaged and marginalized and start a movement that fights for special protections for this class of people, the PoV (People of vagina).

If the genderists have their way. Would that mean we would no longer be able to classify rapists as sex offenders
Gender offenders doesn't quite sound as serious.

Deepwater solo - is that inclusive of artificial vaginas / inverted penises

Especially since the rules around paying for tribunals were changed

There's a lot of funding changes that really hurt women: legal aid for divorce cases was pulled, hurting women more than men; tribunal legal aid was pulled, hurting women more than men; joint claims Universal Credit being paid to whichever partner puts their name down (in an abusive relationship, the perp, who is usually the man) instead of being split automatically.

I think that what's happening is that women are being subtly forced back into the home and into dependency on husbands, and that this is deliberate Government policy to make unemployment rates look better. If the Govt did this openly by removing divorce rights (oh wait, they plan to remove the automatic anullment of marriages if a non-transitioning spouse doesn't want to stay married, so they already are attacking the right to end a marriage) and

iamawoman, I am sorry to inform you, that it is, sadly, not inclusive of them, because much of the damage to PoVs happens in childhood via socialization, and can, therefore, by definition not include people who did not have vaginas or vagina-analogues at such a young age.

(I hate this phone.)

If the Govt did this openly by removing divorce rights (oh wait, they plan to remove the automatic anullment of marriages if a non-transitioning spouse doesn't want to stay married, so they already are attacking the right to quickly end a marriage under one circumstance), removing legal right of access to household income, and removing the right to challenge a discriminatory employer, there would be public outcry. So they do it subtly, by taking those rights away from the poor and the trans widows first.

And the way they take away these rights de facto instead of de jure is by making them impossible to enforce if you have even an average income, let alone if you are poor.

bd67th, I don’t think the government has any agenda of trying to drive women back into the home to help the unemployment figures!
Britain currently has the lowest unemployment figures for decades, and is facing a labour shortage as Brexit bites. The government actually needs a lot more women into the workforce, especially to replace the EU care workers, hospital staff and fruit pickers.
I think we need to focus on lobbying against self ID, and we need to be vocal in defending women’s rights to safety, privacy and dignity in refuges, prisons, changing rooms and toilets. It’s no good being submissive, kind and “ inclusive” of trans if that means being “ exclusive” of women.
Let the TRA’s fight their own battles. Their rights do NOT override ours.
They should be offered a third space and allowed to live their lives in peace, but not to abuse us.

It's definitely not giving up----a sisterly f*ck you to anyone who said that! :-)

I am fully versed in what is currently happening- immersed & emotionally invested.

I believe in contingency plans. We can't rely on the good guys winning. We can't rely on the world seeing sense. We can't rely on the Government doing anything other than what will bring them the most votes. Sure I'm cynical but the world sucks.

I need to know that if we do lose this legally then we are not going to go quietly into the night, helpless against rape and attack and erasure. I need to look for hope if we don't win the war.

Otherwise I might go a bit mad.

Thank you to those who offered suggestions about HOW to go on fighting, that is what I needed.

Deepwater solo, sorry I was being silly with my throwaway comment, I think the point I was badly trying to make, whilst breastfeeding poorly baby, is that whatever we rename ourselves as a group, they will still try to infiltrate, usurp, accuse us of transphobia. Let's not diminish ourselves to our genitals. We are women, we are female, and we will not allow them to take that from us. They may not feel they identify as men but they are still non-women

Are we now going to have babies out of our fucking feelings, rather than our vaginas.

iamawoman multitasking, I see.

No worries, I was tongue in cheek. I frankly do not believe that the dismanteling of the term 'woman' to mean nothing but a feeling will not be sustainable.

But, if it should succeed and the crazy brigade should win that (which I personally consider impossible), we'd have to beat them at their own game, and that would be, to define an oppressed subsection. Which would be very easy to do, because the data and analyses are obviously there, courtesy pre-queer-feminism. By their own logic, they must not coopt and appropriate the subset of PoV, or, say ACoV (Adults born as Children of Vagina).

To be clear, this is stuff for a Monty Python flick, imo. But if their postmodernist (PoMo) logic ever prevailed, this would be the logical next step for us. In PoMo world.

correction: I frankly do not believe that the dismanteling of the term 'woman' to mean nothing but a feeling will be sustainable.

bd67th, I don’t think the government has any agenda of trying to drive women back into the home to help the unemployment figures!

Maybe not, maybe it's a concerted effort to drive down women's wages by stopping us from complaining, with the effect of making it impossible to afford to be a single mum. But the effect is one of removing female liberty and de facto rights, and there's too much of it happening recently for me to consider it to be coincidence.

Are we now going to have babies out of our fucking feelings, rather than our vaginas.

If you put it like that, I'm all for it.

I agree that we can't assume that things will go the right way (look where that attitude got David Cameron with Brexit...)

I think it's worth not overstating things, even if in jest. So no, there won't be "gender crimes" instead of "sex crimes", because rape is a crime involving sexual activity, hence the shorthand. Though the phrase "gender based violence" seems to be creeping into common parlance, and that can fuck off.

I think it more likely that we will end up with things going so badly (Karen White won't be an outlying, unusual case) that there will be a sharp, corrective swing back to how things were but perhaps with stricter rules. So actual toilet laws, not the custom and practice that we have right now. How many women and girls end up as collateral damage before there is significant social and political pressure for change, I don't know (and I find it scary that the current number of victims is clearly not enough )

bd67th, I don’t think the government has any agenda of trying to drive women back into the home to help the unemployment figures!

I think bd67th has a point, here. They want to roll back social programs aiming for some Dickensian 'ideal'. And they must know that this will hit more vulnerable groups, including women, first and hardest.
I just don't think it will stop there or that women will be the only targets. They are just among the first targets. Nothing personal, so to speak...