Obsession with transwomen fetishises sex difference

[spannablue]

Just read on Twitter:

'The problem with patriarchy is not due to men having penises, it's due to the lie that this random feature of birth confers & signifies rank, power & domination. We must not collude in that by fetishising sex difference & aggrandizing genitals that happen to be on the outside.'

What do you think?

spanna, I can't work out what it is that you think this thread is about. Help me out?

Is it that you think that getting to grips with post modernism will help women here come to an understanding of how we should be thinking about trans issues?

Because if that's it, then talk about a strategic categorisation error. You've assumed that our position comes from a lack of understanding about what it means to be trans. But you've got it arse about face (or however Foucault or Butler would put that into fifty sentences of polysyballic words). Our position comes from an understanding of what it means to be a woman. And that is enough.

you can clever-clever on all you like about how to deconstruct all of this, but people won't be hoodwinked into thinking that a penis is a female sex organ. None of this is needed to be a feminist, and people find it off-putting.

...another way to think abput this os to say that Foucault solves some of de Beauvoir's problems.

For what would women do without a mansplainer who tells them how to solve their problems with 'womaning right'.

Excluding a whole category of people is discriminatory.

This is bullshit.

We exclude men from prisons - or at least we are supposed to exclude men from women's prisons. This is not "discriminatory" in the slightest.

I also note the "exclusion is bad" subset of people tend to coincide with the subset of people who don't give a shit whether women are excluded. I don't think this is a coincidence.

Which just means that voices that say stuff that isn't rooted in reality are not treated as if they were rooted in reality

That's not really a good argument when applied to the situation where female posters, including female posters with posting history supporting that, are told they aren't women.

See, the beauty of reality is that we are born female, and words cannot take it away, just as feelz can't make anyone female

Nor is that if an actual natal women is being told she isn't a woman.

ArcheryAnnie, but I have finally understood spanna's problem. spanna does not want to exclude men, like a true MRA, and still wants to call it feminism.

Excluding a whole category of people is discriminatory.

If you genuinely believe this, why do we have single sex facilities at all? After all, women's toilets are designed to exclude a whole category of people, men. Why do we do this? (Ah, good old Chesterton's fence again...)

That's not really a good argument when applied to the situation where female posters, including female posters with posting history supporting that, are told they aren't women.

The argument was not about that, but about the validity of trans.

Nor is that if an actual natal women is being told she isn't a woman.

That was actually what the first part of my sentence said.

what Sophocles said at 20:22

see, I'm not completely sure who foucault is

i do know what a woman is though

so if the point of this thread is to change minds, it's really not going to work with the current FWR audience

it would be good to understand what the intended purpose of this thread was?

Purpose of thread: to talk things through.

'The problem with patriarchy is not due to men having penises, it's due to the lie that this random feature of birth confers & signifies rank, power & domination. We must not collude in that by fetishising sex difference & aggrandizing genitals that happen to be on the outside.'

The problem with that statement is it is untrue. I would re-write it as.

"'The problem with patriarchy is not due to men being born as boys and growing to manhood , it's due to the fact this random feature of birth confers & signifies rank, power & domination on men. We must not collude in accepting the natural consequence of this random feature of birth is conferring power and status"

Purpose of thread: to talk things through.

knock yourself out kid

I've read all your posts twice and I still don't understand why you think keeping men out of women's prisons is discrimination as opposed to safeguarding

like your re-write lass

makes sense to me

What "things", though?

lass

Agree !

Whoever decided that person should be in that place made a bad judgment call.

They were able to make that call. That’s the root cause. Not that they made a bad decision- that the system was set up to allow that decision.

In my work I sometimes have to do root cause analysis and process improvement. The system itself needs to be robust people people are human and they fuck up. The problem here was that the system allowed a man to be placed in a women’s jail at all. the problem is NOT one person’s bad call. We have to assume that people will not always be able to tell if someone is safe or not - the most basic level solution is to not allow anyone to make that error and just not let men be in women’s prisons on the first place.

The same applies to toilets/refuges/wards. You cannot with certainty say that man x is safe/unsafe. So any set up where anyone is making that call is flawed. the robust system is to exclude all men.

Not everything has to be inclusive of everyone. Men have equivalent spaces that are not inferior - they are not being excluded by say, being put on a male ward. Exclusion would be no ward at all, or an inferior ward. Being barred from the women’s ward is not ‘bad’ exclusion.

There is a mistake in it

"'The problem with patriarchy is not due to men being born as boys and growing to manhood , it's due to the fact this random feature of birth confers & signifies rank, power and the ability to dominate on men. We must not collude in accepting the natural consequence of this random feature of birth is conferring power and status"

To some extent I agree that the emphasis on excluding penises is distracting from querying why this random feature of birth should be challenged as a natural bestower of power. I don't think that however is the same point Dr Finn McKay is making.

Just a little side note on the blinkered limitations of viewing the world through post-modernist 'critical theory': university departments of psychology have recognised for 30 years or more that Freud's ideas were mostly nonsense, and moved on to reality-based views of psychology based on actual research. Yet students of literature are still being expected to base their analysis of novels etc on Freud's ideas about oedipal complexes, etc. The fact that, in the reality-based world, his ideas have been discredited by evidence, means nothing to these advocates of 'critical theory'.

No wonder so many people leave university thinking they can believe what they want, rather than recognising the importance of basing their views on evidence.

I'd also like to second Bowlofbabelfish's point about the importance of robust systems to prevent errors, rather than relying on individual judgment. This principle has been recognised as best practice in many fields, most notably initially with airline flight safety, and is being extended to hospitals and medicine.

We know that probation boards, advised by psychiatrists, not infrequently make serious mistakes about who is sufficiently "reformed" to be released from prison without danger to the public. This is, in part, because many individuals with strong psychopathic traits are manipulative and extremely good liars, and very plausible, even charming. (Psychologists believe this is because, unlike the rest of us, they feel no discomfort about lying, so get in lots of practice.) There is a strong link in males between psychopathy and sexual predation. One in every 100 males is a psychopath, and in prisons the rate is more like 30%.

This is a strong reason why it's not good enough to say "Well, it was just a mistake was about Karen White, and it won't happen again." If we accept the principle that self-declared transwomen should be housed in women's prisons, there will undoubtedly be a significant number of "Karen Whites" with a less blatantly identifiable predatory history transferring to the female estate.

Hi spannablue, first of all, thanks for starting the discussion, despite the predictable pushback. It is better to talk than to shout at each other.

I think I understand where you are coming from and believe that you have thought deeply about this issue. I've tried to do the same but in the end, and because of the policy implications, I think the priority should be to protect women and to do so, regrettably, you have to exclude trans women from the category of woman in some circumstances. It may seem unfair but the alternative is worse. Sorry. I understand that 'exclusion' sets off all sorts of alarm bells in those of use who have studied dehumanising regimes and read postmodern theory. But under the logic of self-ID there is no objective way to define who is trans and who is not. You cannot base public policy on that.

Also, thinking about 'exclusion', women are not the oppressor class - isn't that important, also?

Fully agree that the Karen White case is not about a 'mistake' but about a problem with the system.

I'd also like to second Bowlofbabelfish's point about the importance of robust systems to prevent errors, rather than relying on individual judgment. This principle has been recognised as best practice in many fields, most notably initially with airline flight safety, and is being extended to hospitals and medicine.
This is perfect. Take the example of cabin crew "arm doors and cross-check". It's read off a list, every flight. It's obvious. The doors are taken out of normal door mode and put into escape slide mode, it needs to happen every time, and two people double check it to make sure it's happened. Every time. So there aren't accidents where the slides won't work because nobody armed the doors. So flying remains very safe.
Incidentally, cabin crew are an interesting bunch, very badly paid, generally ignored or mocked by passengers, and have performed amazing acts of bravery in carrying out their jobs - acts that nobody ever seems to remember. Sullenberger everyone remembers. Barbara Jane Harrison not so much. Wonder why? www.forbes.com/sites/matthewstibbe/2014/09/08/amazing-flight-attendants/
So safety critical actions carried out religiously are vaguely amusing but big decisions that can go badly wrong are made by egos who have misplaced belief in their own competence and infallibility. What's wrong with having simple checks, done routinely? Erring on the side of caution? My guess is that in the long run it's cheaper to just hope for the best and employing experts to make the hope for the best decisions means there's always someone to blame when the wrong decision is made.
No men in women's prisons = expensive (constant litigation from trans activists). Some prison service managers guess who's lying and who's going to sexually assault women = cheap as chips. (I bet the victims didn't even have the money to sue the prison service for failing to safeguard them from rapey men dickowners.)

In my experience, every time I have been invited to “talk things through” it has been with the aim of showing me that I am wrong and should change my point of view, never with the intention of the other person changing theirs.

I think the idea of Foucault "fixing" De Beauvoir is my favorite part of this increasingly odd thread. Indeed, isn't it obvious that a woman's ideas must be fixed by a man who's just trying to help?

Pomo has a lot to answer for.

Adding to Turph's examples of bravery from poorly paid cabin crews, this young woman saved many passengers, particularly children, during a hijacking.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neerja_Bhanot