Sexed identities

[TyroTerf]

Been mulling this over for a while; thought I'd throw it out there and see if it makes sense.

I'm not keen on the idea of 'woman' being a gender identity, because it's antifeminist to tie the understanding of womanhood (female-bodied personhood) to an adherence to or preference for the culturally-specific shackles of our oppression; it creates dysphoria in women.

Yet I can truthfully say I identify as a woman - because I understand myself to meet the biological terms of that descriptor. (Shoutout to the feminist foremothers who pushed this prophylactic against female dysphoria!)

Woman (adult human female) is my sexed identity.

By definition, this identity can only be shared by others of the female sex.

But what of gendered identities? Who we understand ourselves to be in reference to the gendered world of pink and blue, fucker and fuckee, boss class and service human, skirts and shaved heads, all the sexist gendered crap we're immersed in - all our experiences in that world affect who we are.

I was groomed for the whore caste (csa), but my first conscious gendered identity was: resister. Through my teens I added broken; later I overwrote this with feminist.

I've since learned that the word for female resisters who assert a sexed identity is terf. There's sure as hell a gendered aspect to the label; it's used to silence females who resist patriarchal control of our language, and it's often accompanied by threats of sexual violence. It's a gender identity.

It's my gender identity.

But that's beside the point. The main thing I wanted to raise is the idea of sexed identities. Because we're always on the back foot having to defend ourselves, we're always being dragged into arguments over whether Woman is an identity or not an identity, when the question really is: is it a biological fact or a psychological identity?

Clearly it's both. One word with two related meanings: the having of the female body and the understanding of that having; and the former is both a necessary and sufficient condition within which to develop the latter.

The sexed identity of Woman is only found in females. Other sexed identities may be available, but this one is open to all and only female humans. And it matters. It's just as important, just as valid, just as equally fully human, as all the others. Yet it's consistently viewed as the worst abomination of the twenty first century.

Does this make sense?

I would agree that, if you consider Woman to be a sexed identity, it can only be found in females. Womanhood is inextricably bound up with being female.

If a male has a sexed identity at odds with what is expected of males, it could not be called Woman. A man can have a feminine identity, but he remains a man; just as a woman can have a masculine identity, and she remains a woman.

There can be no duality or confusion in the meaning of 'Woman': woman = adult female human.

Agreed; being female is a prerequisite. But clearly there can be a great deal of confusion over the meaning of Woman! What there isn't real confusion over is the existence of two sexes in humans. There's plenty of dickering about with language, but everyone knows bodies come in two distinct types for babymaking, and which of the two they have.

One thing that particularly annoys me is when people say "it doesn't affect your identity as a woman, to let males identify as women too," because my identity as a woman is solely and entirely sex-based.

If Woman is something males can be, my definitional understanding upon which my own identity is founded is invalidated. If Woman is divorced from biology, I cease to be one.

We're being told "No, you may not have a sexed identity. Sexed identities are transphobic and exclusionary. Only gender identities matter." (And then our gendered identities are slurred and denigrated.)

Particularly galling when woman: adult human female is both an objective truth and a means of helping females reconcile with being female in a male-supremacist society.

Besides, the genderist lobby are all about respecting and validating identities. It needs putting to them: why do they respect all identities except the sexed identity Woman: adult human female?

Besides, the genderist lobby are all about respecting and validating identities. It needs putting to them: why do they respect all identities except the sexed identity Woman: adult human female?

Misogyny.

@TyroTerf the confusing over the meaning of the word "Woman" is very recently introduced I feel. It is the reason that Gen X are always described as TERFY because the confusion seeds have been sown at grass roots under our very noses and very recently. I still think the majority of the global population understand what the word woman means, if not by direct experience of the sexed body, then by its alternative. Being a woman has never been a choice before in history. It still isn't.

[quote JoodyBlue]@TyroTerf the confusing over the meaning of the word "Woman" is very recently introduced I feel. It is the reason that Gen X are always described as TERFY because the confusion seeds have been sown at grass roots under our very noses and very recently. I still think the majority of the global population understand what the word woman means, if not by direct experience of the sexed body, then by its alternative. Being a woman has never been a choice before in history. It still isn't.[/quote]
It's hardly a new thing, what 'woman' means, and how womanhood is in part socially constructed was very widely discussed in second wave Feminism. Firestone said that the aim of Feminism should be not just to end male privilege but to eliminate the sex distinction itself.

In the mainstream the confusion is recent. And I don't agree with Firestone.

@JoodyBlue

In the mainstream the confusion is recent. And I don't agree with Firestone.

Oh I agree, I think the modern GC movement is really more a mainstream liberal Feminist movement than a radical one, but these discussions have certainly been taking place in radical circles for a long time.

To me, saying "I identify as a woman" makes as much sense as saying "I identify as being 5ft 6". It's true that my sex has had more influence on my life than my height, but both are tied to my physical self rather than a matter of identity.

Yes "woman" also has cultural meaning. Being a woman in Norway is v different than being a woman in Afghanistan for example. Being 5ft 6 makes me rather average in the UK, but I would be considered very tall in India and very short in the Netherlands. So the contextual meaning of being female or being 167cm might change, but the physical truth doesn't. As Tina Turner might say, "what's identity got to do with it?"

@jj1968 I have read De Beauvoir :) But I didn't think I fell into the rad category until it became obvious that it is now the term for the only feminism that exists. I take your point that "womanhood" has been long discussed. But I was really talking about a mainstream understanding, up until, say 2012.

[quote JoodyBlue]@jj1968 I have read De Beauvoir :) But I didn't think I fell into the rad category until it became obvious that it is now the term for the only feminism that exists. I take your point that "womanhood" has been long discussed. But I was really talking about a mainstream understanding, up until, say 2012.[/quote]
Well I'm not sure much of GC feminism is radical. It doesn't really attack patriarchy or the institutions that support it like capitalism, compulsory heterosexuality and the nuclear family, and it doesn't really attack gender, in fact it often posits that gender no longer really exists except for trans people.

It attacks a very small subset of the population, with the idea that if trans women stopped calling themselves women then this would be a huge advance for feminism when in reality very little would change except trans people would be miserable again. I think a radical movement would attack the root, which is male domination and the institutions that support it, not the 0.1-.3% of people born physically male who come to identify as women. I suspect that's why the titans of feminism like Attwood, Mackinnon, Davies, and others from the second wave are less than impressed - even if you believe that trans women are not women its still pissing about on the margins without confronting the real horror of women's global historic oppression. Radical feminism is bold and revolutionary. Gender critical feminism is quite at home in the Tory Party and enthusiastically applauded by many men and pretty much all patriarchal institutions.

I'm not interested in what male-born people think about feminism.

The thing with a sexed identity is that this isn't about local cultural expectations. The woman in Norway and the woman in Afghanistan have very different lives, but they share the understanding that they are of the female class, whatever that happens to mean locally.

As a statement "I identify as a woman" does sound ridiculous, and I'd be in favour of abandoning the word identity entirely on this context because it's proved less than useful.

Perhaps clearer to say: I identify my body as a woman's (because of my biology) and I identify myself as being a woman to others (by the stuff I talk about, mainly; men don't use the pronoun 'my' when the topic's abortion, for example).

It's a tricksy wee bugger of a verb though. Different people are using it in different ways. Some use it to mean 'this is what my body is' and some use it to mean 'this is what I'd like to be.' The two need separating out, we need language that works for both.

If all types of womanhood are equally valid (hideous, perpetually misapplied word), then being woman-sexed is just as valid as being woman-gendered.

Yet a cursory glance at the sociocultural context reveals that woman-gendered people are privileged over woman-sexed people, who can't even get a little corner of the internet carved out away from the woman-gendered people to chat about experiences of being woman-sexed.

I think the thing that's got me thinking about this is the recent post about stripping the word 'mother' from breastfeeding support. Mother is not a gender identity. It's a sexed identity, experienced by females who've birthed or raised children. The formation of the identity of mother is rooted in and contingent upon the material reality; and now we're told that identity is wrong somehow. the

And then all these parallels started jumping up and down waving for attention.

@jj1968 actually second wave feminism created enough of a playing field that I have felt able to participate in society and the workplace as a person, and have my needs specific to femaleness met when they mattered. By which I mean mat leave, access to space to breastfeed when necessary, female specific facilities in public places that have offered refuge at key points. Female leadership role models. Female successes in all fields. The overthrow of systems at root level is not something I have appetite for, or necessarily think would benefit the communities in which I had lived my life. I am up for supporting the right of that field to exist and then maintaining it. Currently it is under threat of demolition in favour of a parking lot. And to be honest I have not seen one reason ever to regard Atwood as a Titan.

I agree with you op. We do develoe all kinds of identities, and because we are a social species, thy can be an important part of our psychological make-up.

They can relate to certain things that are fairly objective, like our sex or where we are born geographically, our family group or tribe. It can be a political unit or religion or race or social class, which have stronger social elements, even something like a hobby or type of music we like.

I think sometimes were GC go wrong is in not being able to talk about these and that they are actually really important to our mental stability. Not all of them for everybody, but they seem to be very significant in how we understand ourselves and others and root ourselves socially.

This is really how the idea of gender dysphoria came to be understood and somewhat accepted by the public, as a psychological phenomena that was not only a problem of feeling alienated from the body, but also as a kind of identity disorder.

And it's also partly why intersex conditions came into the conversation - it was observed among people who had been raised mistakenly as the other sex that sometimes they did find a real sense of identity as that sex and continued to do so. So the conclusion was, well, gender identity must somehow be separable from the body. So maybe that accounted somehow for these people who are suffering from a sense that they hate their sexed body and see their identity as rooted in that of the other sex. And I think also sexuality clearly played some role in this though that seems to be be seldom clearly examined.

Anyway - to me, which it's clearly the case that people can have real disorders around the mind-body connection and also identity, far too much was assumed and I think we all know that many of the experiments that were carried out were not terribly successful and ought to have shown that more refinement and information was needed. For a few people it seemed to provide some stability, but as a medical solution that seems very much like pure luck when nothing else seemed to help.

Now, I would say that that people who suffer this way are in a worse situation than ever as none of this can happen, and we've pathologised perfectly natural growth around identity that happens to us all around the teen years and can be rather uncomfortable. It also seems to me that it is not chance that there has been a huge growth in the "identities" teenagers try on generally and much of it seems increasingly empty and maybe a response to loss of more fundamental forms of identity through the natural community. All ramped up by corporately manufactured identities, of course.

also @jj1968 it really isn't "pissing about in the margins" to insist that women exist and that this term is meaningful and owned by 51% of the population.

[quote JoodyBlue]@jj1968 actually second wave feminism created enough of a playing field that I have felt able to participate in society and the workplace as a person, and have my needs specific to femaleness met when they mattered. By which I mean mat leave, access to space to breastfeed when necessary, female specific facilities in public places that have offered refuge at key points. Female leadership role models. Female successes in all fields. The overthrow of systems at root level is not something I have appetite for, or necessarily think would benefit the communities in which I had lived my life. I am up for supporting the right of that field to exist and then maintaining it. Currently it is under threat of demolition in favour of a parking lot. And to be honest I have not seen one reason ever to regard Atwood as a Titan.[/quote]
I think the achievements of second wave feminism were world changing but the goals went somewhat beyond those achievements. And sexual violence is still endemic, women are objectified as much as ever, the pressure for physical perfection and the harm that causes is as powerful as ever and the economic marginalisation of working class women is as acute as ever - and that's in the West, elsewhere things are much worse. Most of the gains really benefitted middle class people which is why I think intersectional feminism (and marxist and anarcho feminism which are both somewhat resurgent within the third wave) emerged as the next step.

I'm not sure many people are persuaded that the gains of the second wave will be lost because of this. I mean even if the term birthing partner or something annoys the shit out of you, is it really likely that this will threaten maternity pay or services? Young women are facing growing economic precarity, the threat of climate change, endemic sexual violence and sexualisation, and GC activism has little to offer except telling them they shouldn't be kind to their mates and panicking about non existent trans bogeyman prowling round toilets. It doesnt seem to reflect many young people's lived experience, or their most pressing concerns. And it certainly doesn't represent a threat to patriarchy which is why it has been so enthusiastically embraced by otherwise misogynist men.

I'm not interested in what male-born people think about feminism.

Me neither.

@jj1968 disagree - all I have to say is "if you can't name women, you can't claim women's rights". Class has never come into it for me. Solidarity with my sex was all my interest. Still is. Also happy and fulfilling relationships with all of the men in my life is important to me. I suspect that those concerns are still quite common among many females globally.

Might be easier if disorder hadn't taken on pejorative connotations, I think.

Normal development of sexed identity - as the medical experts of earlier generations were clear on - involves recognising that there are two sexes and placing yourself mentally in the right category based on sex. If this process of identity-development results in someone who can't identify with their sex, then the normal developmental path has clearly gone astray at some point.

Three meanings in one word there: they understood 'sex' to cover sex and sexuality and gender.

Which suggests there are sexed identities, gendered identities, and orientational identities, all rooted in the individual experience of material reality.

I don't know what to say about intersex experiences of sexed identity, except that, for the one woman I knew who discovered her dsd at puberty, it wasn't the gendered element of womanhood she felt had been ripped from under her feet, but the sexed element.

Do the kiddlywinks still define themselves by musical tastes, or has that been superseded? Back in my day blue hair didn't mean you were woke with plural prounouns. It meant you were some flavour of mosher, which was the colloquial term covering punks and goths and all the other alternative musical subcultures. It also usually meant you were due a bollocking over the state of the bath.

@JoodyBlue
all I have to say is "if you can't name women, you can't claim women's rights".

I get why people might have concerns about this, but I don't think those concerns have been borne out. Women still exist, as dowomen's rights and the struggle for them, in California, or Copenhagen, or Buenes Aires where trans acceptance and inclusion has been normal for years. I'm not sure expanding a category necessarily erases it.

The struggle for reproductive rights in Ireland was supported and aided by trans women, women and trans women are on the streets of Poland together right now and trans inclusive feminist groups in the UK led the charge against austerity and cuts to women's services. I don't see any evidence of feminism being weakened by trans inclusion. Surely there is space to fight together against things that affect all women, such as male sexual violence, domestic abuse and objectification, whilst offering solidarity and support to each other for the things that don't such as reproductive rights and trans healthcare.

@jj1968 yes of course there is space to fight together. But that was always historically the case. Women and trans people have long been allied. It is only recently that activism has driven a divisive wedge via the twaw no debate mantra.

I get why people might have concerns about this, but I don't think those concerns have been borne out. Women still exist, as dowomen's rights and the struggle for them, in California, or Copenhagen, or Buenes Aires where trans acceptance and inclusion has been normal for years. I'm not sure expanding a category necessarily erases it.

We have both been on numerous threads where plenty of evidence was provided that changing the definition of woman to include men claiming womanhood has had a profoundly harmful impact on women and girls wherever this has been done worldwide. I have explained the direct harm it did to me, as did many others.

I do not expect you to understand what it feels like to be born female in a male-dominated world just as I don't know what it feels like to be born black in a white supremacist country.

However, as you know what it feels like to be a non-gender-conforming boy in a patriarchal society, to be subjected to homophobic abuse, so do I know what it feels like to be an immigrant and to be subjected to xenophobic abuse. Framing the damaging experiences we had because of this as harmful and discriminatory is no less valid than women or black people describing their experiences with misogyny and racism as oppression and/or discrimination. But it isn't the same. You do not live the harms done to women and girls because of transgender ideology and legislation. I do not live the harms done to black people because of racism.

So I wouldn't ever - not ever - tell black people that their analysis that policies are harming them - policies which have been adopted in pursuit of an agenda that is not in their interest but some other group's - is wrong, unfounded, mistaken or exaggerated.

And yet, here you are, telling us once again we have it all wrong.

P.S. Even though you continue to conflate the two, the gender critical movement is not in and of itself a feminist movement. Even if it contains various feminist groups, some of which are radical feminist ones.

So once again, why do you insist on judging the GC movement as failing to pursue radical feminist aims?

Furthermore, radical feminism is not Marxist feminism - indeed one of the criticisms most frequently levelled at radical feminists is that they ignore another important class issue, that of economic class, chosing instead to focus on sex classes.

May I suggest some more detailed reading on the various branches of the feminist movement? Just to make sure your next put down of the gender critical movement for not pursuing radical feminist aims at least omits aims that aren't actually radical feminist ones?

I don't see any evidence of feminism being weakened by trans inclusion.

Of course you don't. You don't want to.

Surely there is space to fight together against things that affect all women, such as male sexual violence, domestic abuse and objectification, whilst offering solidarity and support to each other for the things that don't such as reproductive rights and trans healthcare.

The complete opposite of solidarity has been offered. I've been on the receiving end of unbelievably extreme hostility from trans inclusive groups. I believe my own experience, not your dismissals.

You can try to recast our experience as wrong or unimportant or any other bullshit about us harming women but it is not going to work as that is just plain old gaslighting.

I do not expect you to understand what it feels like to be born female in a male-dominated world just as I don't know what it feels like to be born black in a white supremacist country

To be fair to jj there's masses of stuff on FWR which doesn't resonate with me either and I am female.

"I think the achievements of second wave feminism were world changing but the goals went somewhat beyond those achievements. And sexual violence is still endemic, women are objectified as much as ever, the pressure for physical perfection and the harm that causes is as powerful as ever and the economic marginalisation of working class women is as acute as ever - and that's in the West, elsewhere things are much worse. Most of the gains really benefitted middle class people which is why I think intersectional feminism (and marxist and anarcho feminism which are both somewhat resurgent within the third wave) emerged as the next step.

I'm not sure many people are persuaded that the gains of the second wave will be lost because of this. I mean even if the term birthing partner or something annoys the shit out of you, is it really likely that this will threaten maternity pay or services? Young women are facing growing economic precarity, the threat of climate change, endemic sexual violence and sexualisation, and GC activism has little to offer except telling them they shouldn't be kind to their mates and panicking about non existent trans bogeyman prowling round toilets. It doesnt seem to reflect many young people's lived experience, or their most pressing concerns. And it certainly doesn't represent a threat to patriarchy which is why it has been so enthusiastically embraced by otherwise misogynist men."

What a load of rubbish!

According to jj feminists made great changes but they really didn't and even if they did it only helped the Karens of the world. Young people get it ,they know G C activists are just trans hating paranoid old women who care nothing about how hard life is for everyone . Transwomen were in the thick of the fight for female equality, just like a transwoman( who wasn't even there and wasn't even trans) started the Stonewall riot. Anyway hardly anyone is GC and even if the vast majority of people don't believe transwomen are women and transmen are men, we'll just call them bigots until they shut up. No transwomen are predators and if they are they are not really transwomen and they didn't harm any women in a female only space , so it doesn't count.

Have I missed anything?

I think it's fair enough to say plenty of people aren't persuaded that the inclusion of transpersons would affect feminisms goals negatively. I don't really even see that its arguable, clearly many don't see that, whether or not they are correct. It just doesn't resonate and it's reasonable, and probably helpful, to ask why.

Do the kiddlywinks still define themselves by musical tastes, or has that been superseded? Back in my day blue hair didn't mean you were woke with plural prounouns. It meant you were some flavour of mosher, which was the colloquial term covering punks and goths and all the other alternative musical subcultures. It also usually meant you were due a bollocking over the state of the bath.

No, I don't see many using music style for identification. A few use the fact that they are into music at all, but they seem to be more serious and listen across genres. Other kids seem to have very mainstream predicable tastes - maybe based on Spotify? - and I don't think as many are learning to actually play music either.

High school groups here seem very basic - jocks, nerds, popular kids, high-achievers, stoners - some of them overlap significantly.