A new definition of female, brought to you by twitter.

[PotholeParadies]

A female academic has posed this question

Please explain to me how a fully transitioned trans woman, who has breasts and a vagina, has orgasms and experiences the sex act in the same way my body does, should be forced to put male, not female, on the census, just because that is on her birth certificate.

Jane Clare Jones has already been on the case, but I thought we might also enjoy taking that apart.

That academic criticises GC feminists, or "te*fs" as she is fond of calling fellow women, for reducing women to their reproductive capacity. She has given zero thought to classification and as to why saying women belong to the female sex class is merely a biological description and the least regressive way of considering women. A simple cold fact. Apparently though, reducing being a women to penetrative fuckability is not remotely sexist or anachronistic. Holes'R'us

My mind a genuinely blown by all this posturing about it being more important to self-validate by lying on the census (thereby making it seem like there are fewer trans people than there are) than to have accurate stats on the UK trans population so trans people can make the arguments they'd like to for NHS funding, changing the legal protections for 51% of the population, etc.

Absolutely!

Dr EM on Twitter (she's really worth a follow) did a long thread about this a couple of weeks ago. CBA to find it, but someone less lazy might be able to do so. Dr EM is a GC feminist & excellent twitterer, and she did a really good job of showing how much of an own goal lying on the census form about sex is for TWs.

That academic criticises GC feminists, or "tefs" as she is fond of calling fellow women, for reducing women to their reproductive capacity.*

Unlike her definition of being fuckable in a womanly way?

'As a historian, the census is one of the best and most important documents we have about people’s lives. They have always been a positive battleground for self-Id, especially for women.'

What on gods green earth is she on about? She seems to be living in somekind of Barbra Cartland fantasy novel.
Remember girls JUST BE NICE (and the boys will llike you)
btw; bad news Fern, however 'nice'you are men like the ones you are trying to arselick will still hate you.

I can't imagine what happens with these figures. What if the number of trans people is shown to be really small? And then when services are inadequate do we get "oh but there are loads of us, we just weren't truthful on the census?"

Yes, how does disappearing the numbers help when we are told, and can see, that resources are already short in supply?

Not sure it will work they way they wish it to.

If you've got one you know it's muscular, warm and wet, orgasms happen all around the vagina, not just on the visible bit of clitoris - and the clitoris is much bigger than most people know - and the uterus flexes during the month and we bleed and bloat and flatten with blood and babies or blood and no babies. All being well it's a whole pulsing, sometimes painful, sometimes amazing self-maintaining city - not a cul de sac.

KettlePolly Seems like MNHQ thought that the last part of your post was not in spirit, but what a pity it was deleted because this is such a great description of the female reproductive organs.

That whole debate is about women.

By stating that TW are categorically female, she's wiped out the sex based rights of transmen.

That whole debate is about trans women, no mention of trans men, that should say.

That whole debate is about trans women, no mention of trans men

Colour me surprised.

If you've got one you know it's muscular, warm and wet, orgasms happen all around the vagina, not just on the visible bit of clitoris - and the clitoris is much bigger than most people know - and the uterus flexes during the month and we bleed and bloat and flatten with blood and babies or blood and no babies. All being well it's a whole pulsing, sometimes painful, sometimes amazing self-maintaining city - not a cul de sac

Love this.

@Eteri your dd sounds like a sensible person. My big fear is the trans person in my life (I'm not the parent) will make that irreversible surgical decision. If you have any persuasion tips, I'd love to understand them. I know young people think we old people know nothing, so I've just made vague comments like, "be careful," and "big decisions are best made over long timeframes."

@TheChampagneGalop

If you've got one you know it's muscular, warm and wet, orgasms happen all around the vagina, not just on the visible bit of clitoris - and the clitoris is much bigger than most people know - and the uterus flexes during the month and we bleed and bloat and flatten with blood and babies or blood and no babies. All being well it's a whole pulsing, sometimes painful, sometimes amazing self-maintaining city - not a cul de sac.

KettlePolly Seems like MNHQ thought that the last part of your post was not in spirit, but what a pity it was deleted because this is such a great description of the female reproductive organs.

Disgraceful that MNHQ deleted this post

There is no way that a person with a neovagina experiences sex in the same way as a natal woman does. The neo and natal vagina and clitoris are just not wired the same.

Delphinium20... I think the best thing to do is present people with 100% facts, not twee euphemisms like 'bottom surgery'.

('m sorry if you already know all this, but...)... Here's the 'facts' (as far as I can gather)...

This 'M2F sex reassignment surgery' (SRS) is expensive (around 30K if you go private), takes around 4-5hrs to perform, and between 3-21% of surgeries have some degree of post-operative complications such as meatus stenosis (pee hole becomes so narrow you can't pee properly), clitoris necrosis (neo-clitoris goes black and falls off) to name but a few. (the abstract of the french study (labelled scence2) at the end of my rant (!) outlines some issues and their percentages).

There's a few different surgical techniques to create a neovagina and some of them are better than others, both in terms of visual effect, cost, and possible post-operative complications.

All of them start out with...
an orchidectomy (removal of testicles).

All of the surgical techniques keep the pee opening (called meatus) intact to maintain the urinary tract. Some people opt for a clitoroplasty which can be artificial and purely cosmetic (if the surgery is performed after the initial surgery or if the initial surgery goes wrong and it falls off) yet most people seem to be offered a functional clitoroplasty during the initial surgery. They use a flap of skin from the head of the penis (called a sensate flap graft) to create this neoclitoris. Some surgeons trim this neo-clitoris to be as small as possible, some surgeons leave it larger. There is a big risk for necrosis here, and as this is where people pee, a risk for infection, too. If the procedure goes wrong, then people risk becoming incontinent/having no 'clitoral' sensation.

Some surgeons use only penile inversion to create the neovagina, and internally create a 'walled space' using the same split in two penile tissue. This results in a 'short' vagina, of around 3-5 inches long. These were probably the 'earlier' neovaginas. There is less infection risk with this procedure, but penetrative sex is less satisfying for the partner if the partner has a penis and there may be some discomfort for the person with this type of neovagina. Some people report hairs growing on the inside of their vaginas, mainly due to incomplete laser treatment for the odd stray hairs some penis' have, and this can increase risk of infections down the line. Some people also experience an inversion collapse which visually appears like prolapse (the inverted penile tissue is visible outside of the vaginal opening) and which needs corrective surgery.

Surgeons usually use laser-treated scrotal sac tissue to create labia majora and these labia are sometimes filled with medical grade silicone/or patients fat/or implants are used to create plump artificial labia majora. Most of that is not needed, and some surgeons simply use a folding technique. Some surgeons will also create labia minora, but these are always 'porn-star pussy' style; neat, tucked in, barely visible minora. Some surgeons use 'skin expander' type techniques to better mimic the smooth, plump labia majora of natural vaginas, and some surgeons offer a technique called 'peno-scrotal flap technique', which means a flap of penis skin is used to create the labia, which cosmetically looks more natural as there's colour variation due to penile skin being slightly darker than the surrounding flesh.

Some surgical techniques create the 'walled space' with part of the sigmoid colon, which is an older technique now, and which can result in some people's neovaginas smelling like faeces (the smell is caused by indole type secretions from the colon) . Some people also report expelling 'balls' of brown 'mucus' and experiencing strange 'pulsating' type sensations in their neovaginas. (Colons naturally contract, but in people who have conditions like IBS, this happens in a painful, irregular way). This 'sigmoid colon' technique is often used in corrective surgeries when penile inversions 'prolapse'. The benefit to using the colon to create the 'tunnel' is that the vagina is then stronger, longer, (around 8 inches) and has better stretch. Infection risk is higher in this procedure, for obvious reasons.

The more modern technique in initial surgery is to use laparoscopically harvested peritoneum (which is basically stomach-lining) to create the 'walled space', which has the benefit of secretions which do not smell of indoles, so a more 'natural' lubrication.

All of the neovaginas need to be dilated post-surgery, and this is not a pleasurable task, especially in the beginning when everything is tender. Eventually you taper off the dilation, from (sometimes) twice a day to 2 or 3 times a week for the rest of your life.

There may well be infections issues for life, too. Although neovaginas created with peritoneum do have some natural lubrication, they do not truthfully 'get wet', nor do they have the same ph level (vaginas have a ph of 3.5 to 4.5) or bacterial flora found in natural vaginas which means that organisms which would usually happily live in an ordinary vagina can become overgrown/problematic in neovaginas. Neovaginas are more likely to have BV, (bacterial vaginosis) and they do not have the lactobacillus natal vaginas have. They do not seem like vaginas, but more like 'guts' (see science1).

If you want to see how bad it can get, then visit www.neovaginadisasters.com

this site is NSFW, nor is it for the faint hearted, and nor is it a site designed to 'laugh' at people who have had poor outcomes. There are some pictures on the site that evidence poor outcomes, and which do not look like the 'before and after pictures' you can look at on ordinary 'SRS Clinic' websites.

(science1: The neovaginal microbiome of transgender women post-gender reassignment surgery, at:
microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-020-00804-1

(science2: Postoperative complications of male to female sex reassignment surgery: A 10-year French retrospective study, at:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30269882/

I think people need all the information before they make a decision. And that includes the bad, the risks, the awful photos because depending on where you live, depending on where you get your surgery, depending what surgeon you get, if it goes wrong it can go drastically wrong.

I’ve learned so much on this board but this thread, and in particular @yaboo’s post above is astonishing. Thank you (I think) for sharing stuff that I didn’t know I didn’t know

That's a really informative and interesting post yaboo.

Ironic that Shon Faye wrote "Women, enjoy your erasure."

Hasn't Shon just erased Shon's self?

Shon has certainly ensured that the Census records one less trans woman for related services in Shon's area.

Shon has certainly ensured that the Census records one less trans woman for related services in Shon's area.

Yep, seems to be quite a few of them doing it. Seems a bit silly really, maybe they don't want relevent services for themselves after all 🤷

@yaboo

I had no idea about any of this. I'm appalled. Someone needs to copy and paste your response under that twitter feed.

The men who don't hold a GRC but who are putting their sex down as female are attempting to erase the idea that female means female. They want everyone to have to stop and consider "is this person actually male?" at all times.

I have no idea why, but they seem to really hate women.

As for the question posed at the start of the thread, it exposes a very bizarre thought process, that to be a woman you must experience sex, that a man with sufficient surgery is a woman, presumably all those men who haven't had their penises chopped off yet are actually still male. Bizarrely sexist and transphobic.

Those men who say they are women with penises are just as female as those men who say they are women without penises. Which is obviously not female at all.

yaboo

Eye opening (and watering) explanation. And when coupled with the fact of an increase of 4000% in kids showing up at gender clinics, very sobering.

And, certainly to me, would indicate a vast difference between adults in the market for that surgery, and those kids. (Which is hopefully very useful for the parent of a trans identifying child on here).

It also clears up a question I had about peeing. Post surgery peeing is from the neo clitoris? Is that right? What happens if it falls off?

Dear goddess. Yaboo's post had me crossing my legs and wincing. That surgery is a level of risk and discomfort that you would not expect people to accept, normally. I can see why some transwomen do get emotional after going through all of this (plus hormones), only to be told "yes, you are still biologically male". They can't change their chromosomes or past, but they have literally done everything in their power not to be a man.

Then, you have the attention-seekers who claim womenhood on certain days or when they dress in drag. I don't know why the first group who have been through all this pain and trouble are not more angry about the second group appropriating their identity.

I am now morbidly wondering if a transman's surgical transition is any easier.

@PotholeParadies

A female academic has posed this question

Please explain to me how a fully transitioned trans woman, who has breasts and a vagina, has orgasms and experiences the sex act in the same way my body does, should be forced to put male, not female, on the census, just because that is on her birth certificate.

Jane Clare Jones has already been on the case, but I thought we might also enjoy taking that apart.

a female academic 😳

@TheABC

Dear goddess. Yaboo's post had me crossing my legs and wincing. That surgery is a level of risk and discomfort that you would not expect people to accept, normally. I can see why some transwomen do get emotional after going through all of this (plus hormones), only to be told "yes, you are still biologically male". They can't change their chromosomes or past, but they have literally done everything in their power not to be a man.

Then, you have the attention-seekers who claim womenhood on certain days or when they dress in drag. I don't know why the first group who have been through all this pain and trouble are not more angry about the second group appropriating their identity.

I am now morbidly wondering if a transman's surgical transition is any easier.

Transmen's surgeries seem worse (see Scott newgent a transman who nearly died as a complication from his surgery)

Transmen also have much higher rates of heart disease than natal men, as the testosterone worsens their risk to a higher degree

Do people really study Medicine for 5 years in order to then spend their days making fake vaginas out of whatever bits and bobs are at hand? I assume it's well paid with regular hours.