[quote wellbehavedwomen]@SarahG6383
I’m confused about all the hate. Surely they are trying to include transgender men. Transgender men still bleed every month and I’m guessing here, don’t like being labelled as a woman? so I get it. So it’s including them too?
So say, "women, transmen & NB people" then, which includes everyone - and erases nobody. But here's the thing: that erasure is the point. It's not about inclusion at all.
When it comes to anything connected with women's biology, there is a huge drive towards erasing us. Making it a generic 'people'. Yet that drive is completely absent around men's biology. The funds and awareness raising activities around prostate cancer, for example, talk about men, males and boys all the time. No challenge, no awkwardness, no second-guessing. It's only women's biology has to be disconnected from the very language used to describe us, and that's because it's part of the drive to abolish all women's single sex provision. You can't defend what you are not allowed to define. Orwell was very clear that those who control language control the conversation - and we are not accepting this. As the slogan goes: we will not debate our right to exist.
If this were about inclusion, it would affect men, too. Scotland wouldn't have new legislation that says men are male sexed people, but a woman is anyone who identifies as such. Yet it doesn't. The Green Party wouldn't have tried to define humanity by the terms, "men and non-men". This has nothing to do with inclusion for transmen and NB people - which could be far better achieved by naming them with women, and thus truly including all - and everything to do with erasing the descriptor of woman, and even female, as belonging to us as a sex class.
Think about it. Women are disadvantaged across all walks of life and all classes and in myriad ways because of our biology. Because we have kids, we are smaller and weaker physically, and we have a long, long history of being treated as property - as literally chattel. We have combated that with huge success in the past century in the same way all groups do - collective action, and because there is a clear descriptor for us as that collective.
Uncouple the words from who we are, and make the term 'woman' and 'female' as well unisex - so there are males and females in one group, and no way to collectively organise as a group of female people, because we're not allowed to do so as it is deemed hateful... and how can we defend our rights? In a world where it's declared that men can give birth and women are as likely to rape and commit serious crimes of violence (because the stats are very, very clear that transwomen do offend at standard male rates) and you are not allowed to have language to point out the old sex classes at all - how can you counter that? How can you defend reproductive rights, under assault all over the world, when transwomen protest that it's exclusionary for the women's march to address that because they don't have a female reproductive system - only you can't call it female now, because according to Eve's Trust that's hateful, too?
Being kind is great. Can people start to be kind to women? Please? Right now, what we get are death and rape threats whenever we try to point out that this linguistic land-grab harms our interests, and erases our capacity to retain anything as a single-sex provision. Ask Rosie Duffield, JK Rowling, and all the less famous women who have tried.[/quote]
This is the best comment I have ever read on this site.