Transinclusive feminists, please help me understand.

[thinkingaboutLangCleg]

Genuine question. I recognise that some men suffer from gender dysphoria or truly believe they were meant to be women, and some want to live out their fantasies. So I understand why they want access to women’s single-sex spaces and facilities, to validate themselves.

I understand why they want language and culture changed to include them in the category of women.

Some men will take advantage for personal gain (eg taking ‘women’s officer’ roles or sports prizes), or to harass women and girls in intimate spaces eg toilets, or to be transferred from a male to a female prison. Women and girls lose out, obviously, with no corresponding gains to compensate.

I can understand that women who aren’t feminists may not be concerned about the effects on women and girls.

But how does a feminist reconcile her feminism — centring women’s rights and needs, including the right to privacy and safety —with supporting transwomen’s actions that necessarily impinge on these?

This is a genuine question, as I wonder if I’m missing or misunderstanding something.

tinofshortbread I kind of understand what you are getting at but not sure I agree with
"Males seek to control females precisely because female people have the power to create babies that they can only have vicariously through marriage or surrogacy."

In my opinion males seek to control females for only one reason and that is to ensure that the children their women gestate are indeed the males' children.

Crikey tin you're up upping your game to the max now!

Not sure quite what to say tbh.

'So maybe we need to get back on track and start eliminating the male sex.'

Yowzers.

'Denying male people the knowledge that they do not have this capability (men have babies too, you know!) leads everyone to become psychologically female - in that they do not know whether they are capable of gestation.

Male people would no longer exist psychologically.'

Erm... '

???

'When you tell a story in which a woman dropped her purse and you handed it back to her, you actually have no knowledge of her reproductive functionality, she could easily be a trans woman or a person with DSD who is primarily male but who has selected to live as a woman.'

I'm a bit caught up in the purse thing. Do women drop their purses a lot? Not really. It's buried deep in a pocket or handbag. IME it's men who strew keys cash all sorts of shit from their pockets.

My handbag weighs about a million tons. I need to go through it. Consequence of lack of pockets in our clothes plus always expected to have xyz. Or something.

I fucking hate handbags.

Anyway.

So a woman drops her purse. Or a man drops his wallet.

Obviously you give it back unless you're a theiving wanker.

Sorry what was the point of this little story?

When you say "a woman dropped her purse" I read "a human female person dropped her purse." I don't gender her, I sex her, based on her body.

I don't need to know whether she's fertile to correctly identify her as female, because the fact of her being female is not contingent on her fertility. Your chain of causality looks backwards to me.

And your suggested plan to cripple male-variant psychology would only work if they were all blind and stupid. Reduce the world to women who are male and women who are female, and all women will see and recognise that only inny-vulva women ever gestate, and that outy-vulva women never gestate.

You're advocating stripping males of the language to describe their biology, a straight up flipping of roles.

Not only do we lack the physical power to enforce this, it's also not dismantling the system of sex hierarchy. It's just flipping the poles. That's not a viable solution to sex-based oppression.

Worriedaboutrecording: I've asked this question many times, and always have had a response that asks us all to deny reality, which isn't a goer as far as I can see
I agree. It seems more and more inescapable that if an ideology or movement is founded on something that's demonstrably untrue, it's always going to be shaky. Therefore it has to be enforced by aggression (as we see when feminists try to hold meetings or speak in public) and dissent must be banned.

Oddly enough since we went into lockdown and we all started walking everywhere I seem to have given up on handbags. I now go out with my phone and a bank card tucked into its cover, a mask and hand gel in my jacket pocket. Wonder why I used to carry around huge handbags?

Don't get me wrong, I can see the logic in the idea of making male people not exist psychologically, as it were.

But it would only actually have a chance at working if doctors routinely performed cosmetic genital surgery on male foetuses, without parental consent, and then found and implemented a decent cover for giving everyone a mandatory regular injection from puberty onwards to disguise the fact that 50% are on hormones to stimulate breast growth, again without any sort of informed consent.

In old money, males and females are socialised according to their sex class membership. You'd have to eliminate all observable physical differences and also successfully obscure your work from everybody.

It's an interesting idea but it is utterly impractical, because the division isn't rooted in words, psychology, or identity. It's rooted in the sexually dimorphic body.

‘But still you gender her, based on appearance, gait, demenour etc. And thats where gender lies, not in the body, like sex, but in social interactions. Because the gender of woman is imposed on female people, you assume she is female, but you have no actual knowledge of that....but still you gender her‘

I discern sex (in clothed humans) by things like skull size and yes, I suppose gait*, but not in a stationary person who has dropped something.
To be completely honest in the split second it takes to pick up a dropped item in a public place and hand it back, I probably wouldn’t have any sex or gender thoughts at all. It would be an automatic reaction to the fall of the item.

But then I am of the school of thought that you hold the door open for the person behind you, and that sex/age etc doesn’t come into it.

Ultimately we pay attention to the sex of other humans for two evolutionary biological reasons, risk assessment and mating potential. Neither of those are high on my agenda in the scenario you describe.

*and gait is a biological sex difference, not a gender difference...

scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2636&context=facpub

Conniethesensible, I have read your comments with interest. I agree with many of your principles, eg being kind, campaigning for everyone to have educational opportunities. Only not as part of feminism.

As a socialist I care about ownership of utilities, for example, and deteriorating pay and conditions for working people. As an environmentalist I care about pollution and loss of habitat, etc.

But as a feminist I oppose anything men do that threatens women's rights, including the current trend against free speech and single-sex spaces. I can't care more about men feeling validated by using women's services than I care about the women whose privacy has been removed, no matter how harmless that man may be.

Thanks for engaging, Connie, and everyone else who has posted here.

@334bu

tinofshortbread I kind of understand what you are getting at but not sure I agree with "Males seek to control females precisely because female people have the power to create babies that they can only have vicariously through marriage or surrogacy."

In my opinion males seek to control females for only one reason and that is to ensure that the children their women gestate are indeed the males' children.

Well - yeah, thats true at an individual level - they know that they themselves cannot produce babies and seek to control the female people who gestate their children.

But on a societal level, there is a collective control of female people, which works to benefit all men, expectations for example that women will provide childcare, domestic labour and sexual entertainment. Some men kick back against it of course, but they still benefit surruptiiously.

I think many people will argue that "centring women's rights and needs" is not their interpretation of feminism. They will probably argue that their interpretation is that "men and women should be equal".

The dictionary definition is ‘The advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.’ However, there is a separate mumsnet definition which is something about ‘liberation of women’, which I’m always a bit suspicious of as it conveniently allows for people to take ‘feminist’ actions/arguments that don’t advocate equality and instead benefit only women (because ‘men aren’t our problem’).

I think words should retain their meaning otherwise we end up with situations like the current trans one where ‘a woman’ can have a penis and magically change sex depending on how they feel that day.

However, there is a separate mumsnet definition which is something about ‘liberation of women’, which I’m always a bit suspicious of as it conveniently allows for people to take ‘feminist’ actions/arguments that don’t advocate equality and instead benefit only women (because ‘men aren’t our problem’).

Bloody hell!

Women's liberation is not a Mumsnet definition! It's a movement that began in the 1960s.

Here's the story. Enjoy.

www.bl.uk/sisterhood/timeline

@TyroTerf

When you say "a woman dropped her purse" I read "a human female person dropped her purse." I don't gender her, I sex her, based on her body.

I don't need to know whether she's fertile to correctly identify her as female, because the fact of her being female is not contingent on her fertility. Your chain of causality looks backwards to me.

And your suggested plan to cripple male-variant psychology would only work if they were all blind and stupid. Reduce the world to women who are male and women who are female, and all women will see and recognise that only inny-vulva women ever gestate, and that outy-vulva women never gestate.

You're advocating stripping males of the language to describe their biology, a straight up flipping of roles.

Not only do we lack the physical power to enforce this, it's also not dismantling the system of sex hierarchy. It's just flipping the poles. That's not a viable solution to sex-based oppression.

But most of the time you cant really sex someone, you can make a guess at their sex, but its usually based on gender signifiers.

I know you think that my plan for male eradication is flawed, but honestly, you have no idea how stupid men actually are. Men with PhDs who cannot identify what it is that makes someone female. The good Doctor Harrop has managed to get through an entire medical degree and still cant work out the basic differences between the sexes. I think my plan would work far better than you think. The intelligence of males has always been over-estimated IMHO.

But most of the time you cant really sex someone, you can make a guess at their sex, but its usually based on gender signifiers.

I can only laugh at this.

To clarify, though, I think it can still be feminist if something benefits only women in the situation that they are already disadvantaged and need an individual boost to reach equality with men.

But when you have instances like the Australian (I think it was) minister who removed funding for prostrate cancer, and then you have people saying “well, why should she focus on men’s problems as a feminist”, that’s when I think it becomes a bit lopsided.

To clarify, though, I think it can still be feminist if something benefits only women in the situation that they are already disadvantaged and need an individual boost to reach equality with men.

Well that's very generous of you to think it can still be feminist. We appreciate your permission. You see, this why it was called liberation. We were liberating ourselves from needing male permission.
Still are.

Bloody hell!

Women's liberation is not a Mumsnet definition! It's a movement that began in the 1960s.

Here's the story. Enjoy.

Yes, I’m well aware of the women’s liberation movement.

If you read my post properly I’m saying that there is a separate mumsnet definition of ‘feminism’ which says it’s about the ‘liberation of the sexes’ rather than ‘equality’.

Going by the original definition, it is implied that feminism would also advocate for men were this necessary and they became less equal than women (which is unlikely to ever happen in reality because equality is subjective). When you change it to ‘liberation of women’, equality for men becomes irrelevant.

I couldn’t find that story. All the recent news stories relating to prostate cancer in Australia look pretty positive. Specialist nurses seem like a great idea: www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.abc.net.au/article/12818954

Well that's very generous of you to think it can still be feminist. We appreciate your permission. You see, this why it was called liberation. We were liberating ourselves from needing male permission.
Still are.

Ok, so theoretically speaking....if something benefited women to the point that men became disadvantaged, would you still say that this aligns with the stated goal of ‘equality of the sexes’?

And what is it exactly you think you need permission from blokes to do?

Nope you did not, you said liberation of women.

The concept of feminism came later in the liberation of women, the word wasn't used in the 60s. And by equality we meant women catching up.
Feminism has never been about distributing what little women have to men.

I couldn’t find that story. All the recent news stories relating to prostate cancer in Australia look pretty positive.

I don’t think it was recent. Maybe as far back as a decade or two. It was just an example of how ‘liberation of women’ isn’t the same as ‘equality of the sexes’, and how if feminism becomes the former definition examples like the above wouldn’t become something of relevance (but they would if it was about ‘equality of the sexes’.

And what is it exactly you think you need permission from blokes to do?

Well retain the single sex exemptions for staters.

if feminism becomes the former definition

You have this back to front completely.

Nope you did not, you said liberation of women.

Did not what?

I’m well aware that I said ‘liberation of the sexes’. Read my exact quote below, it’s pretty clear that I’m saying there is a separate mumsnet definition of feminism.

The dictionary definition is ‘The advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.’ However, there is a separate mumsnet definition which is something about ‘liberation of women’.

If everyone knew basic biology, none of these problems would even exist

People can be gender fluid, people can change gender, you can have male gender one day and female then next if you want. No problem and we really need to be accepting of this. Respect name changes, respect choice of clothes and just generally be respectful.

People can't change biological sex.

Sports, toilets, refuges, changing rooms etc should be separated according to biological sex.

END OF PROBLEM.