Will society accept transwomen ARE women in future generations?

[interestingdebatetoday]

Today I debated with a young woman I adore. I'm in my 30's, her in her 20's. She attended uni in a very liberal city and has studied psychology. Definitely armed to hold an opinion.

We disagree currently on several of the current topics re trans. I personally hold what's probably the norm on the feminist boards of mumsnet in my views.

It made me wonder though - she claims not to feel women are really impacted, uses unisex bathrooms as a norm, and obviously has been socialised to not find an issue in accepting transwomen as women. Is it possible that actually society will progress in a way that her generation down simply won't have the issues which I feel exist when trying to include transwomen AS women?

Can women be educated/socialised to a place over time where several generations on - we will be the old women with outdated beliefs and the world simply isn't bothered about the things which we were?

It has to go one way or the other really doesn't it? Either a big u turn and the idea that transwomen ARE women becomes laughable and delusional is mainstream and acceptable (as many of us might feel on the boards) OR transwomen ARE women and we were the ones who were wrong

It made me wonder... I was really suprised tbh. 10 years later made a huge difference to whether we felt our rights were under attack...

You'll never persuade most of us to accept men going into women's prisons. Because they're men and prisons are sex segregated for good reasons.

Third provision would not work.

The only other alternative is mixed sex prisons. If people genuinely think that is the way forward they need to explain why, not pretend there is nothing to see here because TWAW.

You still don't seem to have read what I have written properly.

Sure I did. You said

So trans women either end up in a male prison or in solitary confinement or in a prison hundreds of miles from their family

These are the problems to be solved. They can be solved without allowing men into women’s prisons.

F4 none of those issues can be properly addressed without accepting that there are differences between trans women and women and appreciating the reasons that prisons are segregated by sex.

The trans lobby keeps saying that all women are risk assessed before entering a prison which is ridiculous given that no women end up going to men’s prisons in practice.

A risk assessment of Karen White as a woman would not have led to a sentence in a male prison and a risk assessment as a man would not have led to solitary confinement. It’s really unclear what the magic process was supposed to be that would have somehow safe guarded women from KW but not infringed KW’s right to be treated as any other prisoner.

Not sure if this has been said already, but Rosemary West is currently held in HMP Low Newton, an all female (but formerly mixed) prison that is the only women's prison in the UK which runs the "Primrose Project", designed to help women with dangerous and severe personality disorders.

Most prisons now (or were, until people started confusing sex with gender) are single sex - but even where they are mixed there is not usually any mingling between male and female prisoners. They are held in completely separate wings. The most common mix is provision for women alongside provision for young offenders.

Where women have been held in the male estate previously, they are held in solitary confinement away from the general prison population., and therefore only held there for specific purposes and for a limited time (such as needing to removed from their previous prison at short notice for their own safety and before a longer term appropriate placement can be found).

Also, it's worth bearing in mind that when decisions about how to handle high risk prisoners are made, they consider the likely impact of the removal of both protective factors (such as their family) but also disruptive factors (such as other gang members - or an abusive husband, such as Fred West).

Googling something else brought me to this timely - and worrying - report about the current number of transgender prisoners being held
in the prison estate in England and Wales

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/29/record-numbers-transgender-prisoners-transition-men-women/

The key para is Its figures showed there were 139 transgender prisoners in 44 jails, a third of the total. Of the 42 in women’s jails, 22 were men who identified as female, while in male prisons 92 of the 97 were men identifying as women

Yes, that's right...

In female prisons there are 22 transwomen and 20 transmen.

In male prisons there are 92 transwomen and 5 transmen.

But also note - these figures exclude prisoners who have a GRC, presumably because these prisoners are all held according to their legal gender, thus is seems likely that there are more than 22 transwomen in the female estate but no-one is collecting the information.

I hope FPFW do some more digging around this

Given that there are fewer women's prisons than men's, I'd say that the placing of TW in women's prisons is more likely to result in them being further away from their families.

interestingdebatetoday "I think that's just it - what if actually society moves to a place where there is no male and female?"

How could that ever be. Females and males will still exist, do you mean we won't recognise them as such. Except we will all know that one half of the population has the babies, one half cannot.

So we will have a reality but no language to talk about that reality.

I think that sounds like head in the sand land.

"There is no gender?" We might get to a place where there is no gender but not if trans activists have anything to do with it. If we cannot separate ourselves by gender then the trans people really cannot claim to be trans, surely.

I'd like a world where people dress as they like and leave kids to be kids.

Yes I suppose... obviously there will be male and female but perhaps we stop distinguishing between the two in treatment and language?

I'd like to live in that same world too!

I wish boys/men could just wear dresses, make up, whatever they want- and still BE male (or rather accept that they are) I think living lawfully any way you like but being able to do that embracing the sex you are would be fantastic

I mean perhaps we will...

Not suggesting it's a good idea for the future

interestingdebatetoday

"Yes I suppose... obviously there will be male and female but perhaps we stop distinguishing between the two in treatment and language?"

I don't agree we need to stop making a destoniction. We need to stop making a distinction where it doesn't matter.

Making or not making a destination won't stop men sexually assaulting and raping women. Or men beating up other men when drunk.

Education is key.

Affective law enforcement is key.

Genuine emancipation of womem and girls is key.

(There are other keys soneone will remind me!) But what we name things, if we jumble it all in together won't mean men start treating women the same as men, and to be honest some men treat other men very badly!

Pretending biological males and biological females are the same is a non-starter for me because we are not all treated the same. If we were all treated the same then the fact we were biologically different would still matter because men don't have periods or babies, miscarriages, abortions or the menopause! So we still need to identify those who do!

And womem don't get prostate or testicular cancer. So we still need to identify those who do!

In terms of prisons I have always thought it seemed wrong to me that males identifying as womem be housed alongside other males. But equally inappropriate they be housed in women's prisons.

Since most prisons are for males and most trans identifying prisoners are male then a trans eing/ trans prison seems very much the best option.

For trans men likewise to be housed alongside other trans men seems quite a sensible idea to me.

Why have the trans lobby not lobbied for these changes?

But OP

"I think living lawfully any way you like but being able to do that embracing the sex you are would be fantastic"

I 100% agree.

Is there anything to stop a high risk prisoner from identifying as a low risk prisoner?

Yes I suppose... obviously there will be male and female but perhaps we stop distinguishing between the two in treatment and language?

Fine, but let's eliminate rape, DV, and other crimes which disproportionately affect women first.

This is the essential problem here: the trans agenda assumes discrimination against women is not real, and that sex based discrimination is a function of males sneering at those who prefer the color pink.

Feminism is about the advancement of female rights, not a vague equality that doesn't acknowledge that a biologically distinct category known as woman exists.

I met a lovely older man recently who talked about his successful treatment for cancer which involved being given a form of oestrogen.

It had been really successful and he was living well and cancer free.
He described some of the side effects, including 'little man boobs' as he called them.

This speaks more to the general ineptitude of the NHS in dealing with male hormonal issues than anything else.

In the US, doctors prescribe aromatose inhibitors to prevent gynomastia. Bodybuilders have been using these drugs (Anastrazole/Arimidex, Aromasin, Letro) alongside SERMs like Nolvadex for years. The former suppress estrogen levels and the latter work differently by preventing binding to the receptors in breast tissue.

Anybody on huge amounts of steroids would have several times more estrogen than your friend due to testosterone aromatising if they didn't use the above.

It saddens me to hear of completely avoidable situations like the one you mention.

That Jane Clare Jones YouTube video talked a lot about how the philosophy is about speaking something into being. How the discourse creates the culture and makes something real. So talking about the different sexes and sexism is actually giving it power, speaking it into life.
I'm probably not explaining that correctly.

I disagree with that philosophy. I think that it's ass backwards, humans have always observed and named what they observe - in that order. Will we continue to observe sexism, if we aren't allowed to name the observed different sexes in our species? I think the answer is yes.

Not time to read the entire thread, but this echoes what I experienced in a debate about trans topic with colleagues, including young female ones (mid 20s).

"uses unisex bathrooms as a norm, and obviously has been socialised to not find an issue in accepting transwomen as women"

They felt the exact same. "What do I care who does their business next to me", "so what if a man changes in front of me". One even said in response to me questioning about sport "I'm not into sport so I don't really care".

What surprised me is the "whatever" attitude. These are very smart, highly educated women (mathematicians) and yet they had an indifference to the issue, and I feel didn't truly think about it.

However, I wonder how they will feel in 20, 30 years once they've had more experiences (bad ones) and maybe start to think about it more.

However, I wonder how they will feel in 20, 30 years once they've had more experiences (bad ones) and maybe start to think about it more.*

There's a thread going tonight - women genuinely not understanding why some women feel unsafe or intimidated at night because of groups of men. Calling women who do overdramatic.

So talking about the different sexes and sexism is actually giving it power, speaking it into life.

The problem is that groups suffer both discrimination because of perceived differences - e.g. based on race and gender and exclusion because of actual differences e.g. sex or disability.

To take just one example, if you restrict breast feeding in parliament it only affects women, not men. Even if you say that it is perfectly possible for women to breast feed out of the chamber or pump milk or whatever, the structure and hours of parliament assume that MPs have a wife at home dealing with the children, not a baby in an office waiting to be fed.

I don't think it is possible for women to be fully included in public life if the physical differences between men and women aren't recognised.

There's a thread going tonight - women genuinely not understanding why some women feel unsafe or intimidated at night because of groups of men. Calling women who do overdramatic.

Which thread is it? Trying to decide if I have the patience required to engage with that level of selfish fuckwittery.

I will follow angry to that thread as i have a bet with myself that she DOES NOT have the required patience

Dipped my toe in, decided there was nothing that could be said to the people involved without getting banned. Someday someone will write up a fascinating psych profile of women who hate other women.

merrymouse
Tbh I doubt there are many jobs that could accommodate a woman wanting her child with her so that she could breast feed on demand are there?

Isn't that the idea of maternity leave and then, once back at work, you express if you want to continue breastfeeding?

Would you expect a surgeon to break off operating, or an airline pilot to fly their baby in the cockpit or even a checkout operator to stop scanning the shopping in order to feed their babies?

I don't agree that we should want that level of accommodation because it will ultimately harm life chances of women. Yes, to decent, paid maternity leave. Yes to providing suitable places for working women to express but honestly, you can't realistically expect employers to accommodate babies in the workplace.

And as for MPs, if male MPs need wives at home to care for the children then equality surely is that female MPs have husbands at home to care for the children?