How can feminism in the UK be more inclusive? Striving for equality for all women

[isequalityamyth]

I have spent 40 plus years pushing, fighting, scrapping at times for equality, fair pay, calling out sexism, even the every day minor crap...if you call me girl I’ll call you kid all day long (apparently that is really annoying). & no I’m not sitting on your lap or taking a ride in your "fuck mobile".

The reality is though that I’ve been fighting from a very white privileged middle class standpoint. I had the privilege of having a feminist father who encouraged my education, encouraged my promotion.

When I went for entry jobs post graduating I was met with a phew by the male interviewers. My name and hobbies are not necessarily reflective of how I look. I got told once in an interview they were relieved I wasn’t a heffer, I looked and sounded english (seriously yes this was stated). This was the normal.

Yes I’ve fought my way up through the glass ceiling, but I was given a ladder.

I'm not demeaning my own battle nor those of others, I am just conscious that I had help, I had a tool set, I had support, I had the right skin colour, I had privilege.

How does one take a different perspective, not all women are the same, we all have different experiences. We are not starting from the same position, as a white Middle class woman I definitely had a head start in the equality stakes.

So my long winded question - how do we make feminism more inclusive? Not so white MC centric. As surely feminism needs to be more inclusive and it doesn't feel that way right now.

Do gender identity clinics use brain scanning as part of the diagnostic process?

If they don't, why not?

'I don't believe that trans women deserve this more than women in minority ethnic or religious groups, this isn't an oppression olympics and i believe we should be practicing intersectional feminism where all women get the support they need.'

You've neglected to include an awful lot of women there. And yet you say you're not interested in oppression Olympics.

I note you talk about religion and ethnic minorities. What happens to the women who because of religion or cultural norms are not allowed to mix with men under certain circs?

Begay how does the brain stuff manifest in those who switch between girl and boy mode?

And why does what goes on in the brain supercede sexed bodies? The latter being the reason for single stuff stuff.

And in the absence of a test for gender id, why does what a person says they feel take precedent over sexed bodies?

If a scan were possible, then people would have to use the stuff for their gender id on the scan. Yes?

@NiceGerbil

'I don't believe that trans women deserve this more than women in minority ethnic or religious groups, this isn't an oppression olympics and i believe we should be practicing intersectional feminism where all women get the support they need.'

You've neglected to include an awful lot of women there. And yet you say you're not interested in oppression Olympics.

I note you talk about religion and ethnic minorities. What happens to the women who because of religion or cultural norms are not allowed to mix with men under certain circs?

apologies for not being clearer on my "oppression olympics point", as you appear to have misunderstood my intent. i simply meant to say that no one group of women "deserves" feminist support more or less than others, my wording could've been clearer on that point.

Males are not a group of women.

I suspect that is too blunt for you.

This all seems like a decades long No True Scotsman Fallacy.

For the uninitiated, the fallacy goes like this:

Person 1: no Scotsman puts salt on his porridge.
Person 2: Yerwot? My cousin Dan has salted his porridge every day for thirty years.
Person 1: Your cousin is it? Well, no true Scotsman puts salt on his porridge!

Possibly followed by: he should bugger back off to England with you!

Instead of questioning the original assumption in response to new information, fault is just found with later information to justify why it doesn't actually count.

At some point after some study or other, we developed some observations on how to distinguish a male brain and a female brain.

Male brains had this feature. Female brains had that feature. This was used to justify (in learned tones) why women were under-represented in well paid professions in various popsci magazines. Our brains, see?

Then, someone points out that some male humans may have a neurological feature after all and it's:

"No true male brain has that feature. Bugger off, you're a woman!"

if it's been scientifically recognised that trans people's brains align more with their current gender than their sex (assigned gender at birth),

But it hasn't been. The idea is just completely and ludicrously wrong.

All seems rather daft. We all trace our origins back to the fusion of one egg cell and one sperm cell. 99.982% of human babies born were conceived with an XX or XY karyotype, by the way. And there has been no significant correlation between people with intersex conditions and people who identify as transgender, so let's not discuss that. People with variations of sexual development have said to keep them out of it!

So there you are, with a single cell that resulted from the fusion of the X egg and a Y sperm, rapidly undergoing cell division. Every cell is an undifferentiated, i.e. unspecialised cell, but each is XY in the DNA in the cell nucleus. Then as the weeks progress, cell differentiation starts happening, which means specialised cells, like bone, skin, muscle, pancreas and neural cells start forming. Every single one carrying the same DNA instructions as that first cell, but following different sections of it.

Of course the male fetus has a male brain! Where would a female brain have come from? No-one would talk of a male baby having female kidneys if his kidneys were smaller than usual for a boy, would they?

why doesn't it? if it's been scientifically recognised that trans people's brains align more with their current gender than their sex (assigned gender at birth), it is pseudoscientific to try and state that trans women are men

No, it has not.

I don't think you understand how science works.

A woman is murdered every three days in the UK, meaning ~120 women were murdered in the UK last year.

No. That's femicide, the the number of women known to have been murdered by specific men. The murder rate for women in the U.K. is about 240. The same mistake gets made by gender activists with the US figures.

The appropriate comparator for MTF trans people is other males. So we can say they cut their statistical risk of murder by transitioning, and that they are statistically safer than the sex they identify as.

I'm BAME and I have never felt excluded by feminism. And I reject the sneering of 'white feminism' I see in public discourse.

GC feminists aren't obsessed with trans issues. It's more simply that TRAs wish to alter the very definition of what it means to be female. This is the foundation of feminism. These issues occupy the main space because without resolution there is no feminism which doesn't centre males. I realise my personal experience doesn't negate the many BAME women saying they do feel excluded, but unless we are clear what a woman is, we risk losing the movement entirely which is dangerous for all women, of any colour, ability and class.

Plus I would argue it's BAME women who have more to lose if TRAs get their way. BAME women are over represented in prison populations (this needs addressing) but they're the ones most likely to be locked up with the Karen Whites and Barbie Kardashians. It is an issue for all of us.

@Sillydoggy

Feminism at its core must be for the benefit of woman . I don’t subscribe to its position as a left wing political movement as I think the last few years have shown that Women’s rights are a cross party issue. I appreciate that there are some leftist women for who their second passion is the political left but that does not mean that feminism is stuck there. I absolutely agree that there must be room for conservative and other female voices in feminism.

I can’t see how views such as pro life or modesty clothing fit into feminism at all though because they are trying to restrict the rights of other women. I respect the right of a woman to say she would never have an abortion herself but I do not think it is a feminist statement for her to say that I can’t have one. I do however listen to women with a pro life position on other topics.

It's a matter of exclusion, rather than being directly only about feminism.

Someone can make a feminist argument to restrict freedom of speech, or ban Islam, or link it to some kind of anti-semitic argument, whatever - I and most people are not going to give that some sort of free pass because it benefits women. Even if there is a legitimate relation to women's issues, there are also other questions of justice and truth and such that come are real and important and which women, being human beings, care about and are allowed to think about.

So if you ban a group of women, from the women's march, because they have a different view of the balance of justice in some area, or from the discussion of women's rights and women's issues, you no longer have a women's march, ora discussion by women for women. You have kind of political party.

Isn't this the kind of problem that has followed feminism around for ages? Not just in criticism from enemies, but it's coloured the feminist discourse in ways that have often been unhelpful. Julie Bindle vs Posie Parker shit among most unpleasant manifestations "you aren't a real feminist because...".

I think the ideas around modesty are a good example where the voices of more conservative women have really made the discussion less than it could be. In religious thought modesty is fundamentally about respect for the body, respect for human beings as sexual, and a recognition that this can be exploited in all kinds of ways, and it gets into questions of privacy and treating bodies as sexual objects in public spaces and mixed sex spaces.

A lot of the ideas, though they use a very different language, mirror the kinds of feminist arguments you hear in other areas, around things like choice feminism vs systemic exploitation and the correct response to that, bringing fetishes into public, privacy from the other sex, and porn and how it affects young men. Essentially the position is, it's not real freedom to have highly sexualised versions of women, dictated by fashion, to be normative in public spaces. It affects how people, especially young ones, perceive women, in a negative way.

Obviously not all will agree with that but it's very difficult to see how that would not be a valid contribution to the feminist discourse. In general it seems to be posited that it is because it "restricts women's freedom" but isn't that the same argument used to justify prostitution and porn? It smacks of an a priori decision that people outside the gate must have non-feminist positions or aren't thinking about what is good for women.

I think there's a real split in feminism, between those who see it as a political position on the left, and those who see it as something more. But the former tend to want to gatekeep while also making claims of a kind of universality.

@NiceGerbil

Males are not a group of women.

I suspect that is too blunt for you.

Doesn't seem to matter how blunt it is for some, like a bad salesman they just keep plugging on, saying the same thing in slightly different ways, hoping to wear people down.

'
So if you ban a group of women, from the women's march, because they have a different view of the balance of justice in some area, or from the discussion of women's rights and women's issues, you no longer have a women's march, ora discussion by women for women. You have kind of political party.'

In shorthand, male people who feel they belong at and should have their voices heard in discussions about abortion, girls getting an education, age of consent etc should be able to.

We have seen some of the results of this

Women being told not to wear 'pussy hats' at marches on the USA
Statements that 'gynocentric' feminism is exclusionary and issues that come under that should not be a focus of feminism
There may be more.

Yes great idea.

Out of interest are there less eating disorders in countries or communities where women are forced to cover? Genuine question if anyone knows the answer.

This is actually really interesting - eating disorders don't manifest in many other cultures in the way thy manifest in the west at all. As in, it's not that they have fewer (though that may also be true) but that have a completely different appearance, affect different groups, are seen as having different causes.

In fact lots of psychological disorders that we think of as illnesses in the same way as a specify disease process or virus etc, are largely cultural constructed in some way.

There is a book on this, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, that you might be interested to look at. Or this article on the same topic:www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html

@NiceGerbil

' So if you ban a group of women, from the women's march, because they have a different view of the balance of justice in some area, or from the discussion of women's rights and women's issues, you no longer have a women's march, ora discussion by women for women. You have kind of political party.'

In shorthand, male people who feel they belong at and should have their voices heard in discussions about abortion, girls getting an education, age of consent etc should be able to.

We have seen some of the results of this

Women being told not to wear 'pussy hats' at marches on the USA
Statements that 'gynocentric' feminism is exclusionary and issues that come under that should not be a focus of feminism
There may be more.

Yes great idea.

Um, what do males have to do with what I said? I think you are mixing up the posts. I am taking about groups of women being left out.

I'm with Andrea Dworkin on the left/right thing

archive.org/details/woman-hating-right-left-andrea-dworkin-1987

@NiceGerbil

Males are not a group of women.

I suspect that is too blunt for you.

with this being your perspective, i have nowhere to go with this conversation.

Ah ok smoked duck I misunderstood you.

Begay it's a pretty mainstream view in society that women are female. Not male.

You say that view is so ? extreme that you won't engage. But it's not extreme. It's how the vast majority of people in the world see it.

Why is it extreme to say that women are female and not male?

What are your reasons for saying that men and boys can be male or female and so can girls and women?

I mean male female in the older sense, in case you believe that men can be female and women can be male.

And why not transwomen? And women.

Don't you want stats to collect and show anything about trans people's experiences, situations etc? I don't get that at all.