Terrified of regressive modern feminism

[TRHR]

By saying "you can't be a woman if you're born without a vagina, and if you're born with a vagina you must be a woman" you're making reproductive organs the defining and most important characteristic of being a woman. This attitude was used to oppress women for centuries. We were baby makers only, and hormonal and chromosomal differences were used to say that we were too "emotional " for public life, education and jobs. Only over the last 100 or so years have our minds and emotions been rightfully recognised as just as important as our vaginas. GC is now going back to seeing our sex organs as our most important identifier and as a feminist and a young woman this really scares me. It is playing right into the traditional patriarchy, is sexist, regressive and oppressive. The fact its being done in the name of 'feminism ' terrifies me. The recent historic implications of insisting women are defined by their bodies scares me. These views are still held by conservative (often religion based) communities and we've all seen how easy it is for these groups to gain power - feminists shouldn't be helping them justify their attitudes or behaviour.

If you've seen/read the Handmaid's Tale you'll know what attitudes I'm afraid of. GCs ironically tell TRAs they are 'handmaids' when actually it is their attitude that has historically led to the oppression that Attwood (who is trans inclusive) bases her books on.

Gender is not a set of stereotypes - it's an identity based on culture, history, society , psychology and often (but not always) sex. It's far more freeing than "vagina = woman" and takes account of each of us as individuals not just bodies, which is what feminism up until now has fought for.
As an example, many trans women don't wear "girly " clothes, they identify as "masculine/butch" lesbians. Many trans men still like wearing make up and dresses e.g. in drag.
Many people would say the world shouldn't be defined as 'male / female' at all. But it always has done, that won't be changed in our lifetime. So seen as that is our social structure, it's oppressive to police how people choose to move through life under this structure based on bodies.
Thanks for reading this far and if I get one extra person to consider the harm that GC is doing, especially to young women of child bearing age, it'll be worth the condescension and vitriol that this post will inevitably receive.

We clearly need a definition of gender so that genuine transwomen are allowed in places they are allowed where males aren't.
How, specifically, would OP draft such a definition that would be usable, say, in a swimming pool changing room, to easily identify TW but exclude men?

but on my NHS letter it directly tells me I need one because I have a cervix - it never mentions being a 'woman'

But if you had a prostate you wouldn’t be invited to a prostate exam as a “prostate haver”.

Funny

'Mocking other women for learning, university education and discussing ideas seems profoundly anti feminist / 'get back in the kitchen dear ' which brings me back to my first post of concerns'

well I’m at university right now, and I suspect many/ most posters on this thread have degrees. I don’t think you’ve read the thread at all actually!

I'm also not sure why she seems to think that most of us are past childbearing years. Many of us are definitely of an age to bear children. Shocking on a site named Mumsnet, I know.

Indeed. I am in fact younger than Jameela Jamil and the nature of linear time being what it is, I will always be younger than Jameela. So if Jameela isn't too old to have an opinion, then neither am I.

I speak very, very basic French.

I know the French for 'woman' and 'female'. Heaven knows what 'cervix haver' or 'menstruator' is. That vocab hasn't been covered in any of my textbooks or language downloads.

I'm very surprised the OP thinks she is being told to get back into the kitchen by a group of feminists. I'm not sure how she has come to that conclusion.

I haven't heard "get back in the kitchen" or "child bearing age" used much this century. Approximately 20% of my generation of women are child free/less at age 45.

Yeah I think @WeeBisom might beat you in a feminist book-reading-off. How about the rest of us clear that floor and let the two of you Duke it out?

It’s fascinating to me OP because perhaps a few years ago I would have made similar arguments, but what I can see so clearly now is that it’s not the GC stance that’s regressive. Re-conflating sex and gender is regressive, which is what some are trying to do now. We had years of trying to separate these things.

As women we are oppressed because of our sex, not our gender. We are not passed over for promotion because we wear dresses (hello, Pip Bunce). We are not exploited by those seeking surrogates because we wear make up. Understanding that our biology is the source of our oppression does not equate to reducing women to body parts. Calling us birthers and menstruators does though.

I think it's far clearer to refer to things like a 'cervical smear for people who have a cervix.

Ah, so you’re happy for those with learning disabilities, illiteracy and who don’t speak fluent English to be thrown under a bus here, as long as adults who understand perfectly well what “woman” means in this context are served? How privileged of you.

@JustcameoutGC

Yeah I think *@WeeBisom* might beat you in a feminist book-reading-off. How about the rest of us clear that floor and let the two of you Duke it out?

Mocking other women for learning, university education and discussing ideas seems profoundly anti feminist / 'get back in the kitchen dear ' which brings me back to my first post of concerns

Yet you consider your own patronising approach acceptable? Without considering for a moment that many women here are academics and professionals themselves. With many years of experience behind them. You've had plenty of well thought out responses here from many different women from all different backgrounds. And you come back with a response like this. I think you need to examine your own bias about the people who use the FWR. Because it seems to me you're reading what you assume is on the page, not what actually is on the page. Because you can't see beyond your own personal bias.

I’m very disappointed with hellofabore

She did not mention reading lists...

I KNOW! How very remiss of me.... And I was a couple of paragraphs off on the length. But I think that is because the OP either hasn't read the many fine posts on here, or has simply reduced answered them with the generic.... you all have to read more!

What wonderful, incredible and powerful biology we have as women - such a shame that 'young child bearing aged women' see that as something to erase

The day that one of you lot can tell me what a woman actually is (without using a circular definition to explain yourself), I might be interested in your opinion. Until then, the whole thing is such patent nonsense that I won't engage.

Quite.

Gender is not a set of stereotypes - it's an identity based on culture, history, society , psychology and often (but not always) sex

This is I think gender identity?

Rebecca Reilly Cooper's long read article is useful to detangle the confusion about what different people mean when they talk of gender.

'Gender is not a spectrum
The idea that ‘gender is a spectrum’ is supposed to set us free. But it is both illogical and politically troubling'
(extract)
"In everyday conversation, the word ‘gender’ is a synonym for what would more accurately be referred to as ‘sex’. Perhaps due to a vague squeamishness about uttering a word that also describes sexual intercourse, the word ‘gender’ is now euphemistically used to refer to the biological fact of whether a person is female or male, saving us all the mild embarrassment of having to invoke, however indirectly, the bodily organs and processes that this bifurcation entails.

The word ‘gender’ originally had a purely grammatical meaning in languages that classify their nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter. But since at least the 1960s, the word has taken on another meaning, allowing us to make a distinction between sex and gender. For feminists, this distinction has been important, because it enables us to acknowledge that some of the differences between women and men are traceable to biology, while others have their roots in environment, culture, upbringing and education – what feminists call ‘gendered socialisation’.

At least, that is the role that the word gender traditionally performed in feminist theory. It used to be a basic, fundamental feminist idea that while sex referred to what is biological, and so perhaps in some sense ‘natural’, gender referred to what is socially constructed. On this view, which for simplicity we can call the radical feminist view, gender refers to the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe and proscribe desirable behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally arbitrary characteristics.

Not only are these norms external to the individual and coercively imposed, but they also represent a binary caste system or hierarchy, a value system with two positions: maleness above femaleness, manhood above womanhood, masculinity above femininity. Individuals are born with the potential to perform one of two reproductive roles, determined at birth, or even before, by the external genitals that the infant possesses. From then on, they will be inculcated into one of two classes in the hierarchy: the superior class if their genitals are convex, the inferior one if their genitals are concave.

From birth, and the identification of sex-class membership that happens at that moment, most female people are raised to be passive, submissive, weak and nurturing, while most male people are raised to be active, dominant, strong and aggressive. This value system, and the process of socialising and inculcating individuals into it, is what a radical feminist means by the word ‘gender’. Understood like this, it’s not difficult to see what is objectionable and oppressive about gender, since it constrains the potential of both male and female people alike, and asserts the superiority of males over females. So, for the radical feminist, the aim is to abolish gender altogether: to stop putting people into pink and blue boxes, and to allow the development of individuals’ personalities and preferences without the coercive influence of this socially enacted value system.

This view of the nature of gender sits uneasily with those who experience gender as in some sense internal and innate, rather than as entirely socially constructed and externally imposed. Such people not only dispute that gender is entirely constructed, but also reject the radical feminist analysis that it is inherently hierarchical with two positions. On this view, which for ease I will call the queer feminist view of gender, what makes the operation of gender oppressive is not that it is socially constructed and coercively imposed: rather, the problem is the prevalence of the belief that there are only two genders." (continues)
aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison

My profuse apologies to the late Andrea Dworkin who my autocorrect inadvertently transed as “Andrew”....

I've seen lots of GC sneering (not confined to this thread) at the texts I listed and read (many at uni) and of concepts discussed at universities generally. Mocking other women for learning, university education and discussing ideas seems profoundly anti feminist

With the greatest of respect, OP, because a lot of your post is an example of the confused thinking of my own students so I assume you are really young - but the women here are all experienced and educated - some of us actually teach at those universities you mention 🤣 If we’re credentialling today, I have four degrees in theoretical fields related to “gender studies” and twenty years of lecturing experience. But the GC women on MN of every amount of education and reading are sharp, knowledgeable and passionate and have spent a very large amount of their lives thinking about the lived realities of women and not just the theories.

Ask yourself: in what university disciplines are men taught to disparage the writings of their “forefathers”? How many times do you hear your male counterparts talk about that old Marxism that must be disparaged because it threatens the safety of men today? That old Newtonian theory that nobody believes in any more so it’s dangerous and creates unsafe spaces?

Male precursors are talked and written about with reverence even when disciplines have moved on. Male academics are respected and listened to even when people disagree with them ... as men are generally in society. It’s only young women, in my long experience, who are encouraged to believe that they must junk all that nasty old women’s thought in favour of shiny new transfeminist thought. In fact, doesn’t that sound ... a little bit sexist? A little bit fairytale, a little bit stereotype, a little bit “we must not believe the old witches and crones! They make us feel unsafe with their unfashionable, baggy-cunted, grey-haired, bio-essentialist unsexy old thoughts! They didn’t go to University!”

Three degrees here, and a senior academic post in a university (oh, and in my childbearing years, too, as that also seems to matter). No one is mocking your education, we're bemused at your patronising posts and obvious belief that we need educating.

As for "sneering, as an academic, I would also point out that an academic writing a text or promoting a particular theory doesn't make them incontrovertible. Their ideas, however educated these individuals may be, should be subject to scrutiny. Many academics are utterly detached from the real world and operate in a system which rewards novelty and impact, pushing many in certain disciplines into a position of intellectual dishonesty in order to chase funding. So, taking a critical approach to academic research and scrutinising it on its merits is a sensible thing to do. Theories, in particular, are often a self-indulgent intellectual game with little grounding in the empirical or material. You know, those pesky concerns that normal people have to deal with in everyday life.

OP: Check your privilege, educate yourself, and do better.

Almost half of women (44.2%)[1] are unaware of what the cervix is, unable to correctly identify it as the neck of the womb (uterus). One in six could also not name a single function of the cervix with less than half (41.40%) aware that it connects the womb to the vagina and only one in three knowing that it provides a seal to hold the baby in when pregnant.

https://www.jostrust.org.uk/node/666780

16.4% of adults in England, or 7.1 million people, can be described as having 'very poor literacy skills.' They can understand short straightforward texts on familiar topics accurately and independently, and obtain information from everyday sources, but reading information from unfamiliar sources, or on unfamiliar topics, could cause problems. This is also known as being functionally illiterate

Is the phrase “people with a cervix” inclusive of this population, OP?

“Not all cis people...have the same organs”. I am not cis (not trans either), what organs might I have, I wonder? And what would one of the functionally illiterate women above make of being told she was “cis”, and provided with your reading list so she could better understand your conception of the world?

I know you think you’re being inclusive, but I think with reflection, you might understand that your inclusivity is not quite what you think it is.

There’s nothing wrong with a uni education. I have one, during which I did read many of the books on this thread, including the irritatingly waffly Butler, so I certainly wouldn’t mock anyone doing the same. But I also wouldn’t dream of supposing that it was in any way necessary to either be a feminist, or for women to understand our own physical reality.

This is for anyone that thinks using a single descriptor of something in one situation is 'reducing' it or 'prioritising' that definition ABOVE ALL OTHERS.

Say I have a red Fiat 500, reg plate 2015, last taxed Dec 2020.
If I have to buy a part for it, the make and model are relevant, so I would describe the car using that. The fact that it's red and when it was taxed is irrelevant here. The make and model don't determine what colour I could spray it, or when I could tax it, but it does remain fixed.

If I am worried about visibility on the road, the colour of the car is relevant, not its age. I might tell my friend to look out for the red car if we were in a car park with several other cars of different colours but including other Fiats.

If I am worried about taxing the car, the most prominent factor affecting my life in a practical way is the date of the last tax, not the colour. This doesn't mean that I prioritise a description of my car as being ' a Dec 2020 taxed car' and think that this defines it totally.

I'm not saying this is a mind-blowing analogy - it seems absolutely to go without saying to me. Yet people do seem to need it explaining that one facet of something can be extremely relevant in one situation and irrelevant in others. The idea that being able to keep 'woman' as a descriptor of a sex class somehow determines what the people being described as women can do, or 'reduces' them to anything, or prioritises vaginas, is just bizarre.

(And wrong. I'm saying it's wrong, to be clear!)

Baggy cunted 😂

What a weird thing to be terrified off?

@Sophoclesthefox

Baggy cunted 😂

It’s just the phrase I feel is hovering somewhere in the cultural background whenever I hear the term “cervix-haver”

I’m sad that my uni education didn’t require a feminist reading list. I feel like I’ve been left out.

16.4% of adults in England, or 7.1 million people, can be described as having 'very poor literacy skills.

I've had job rejection letters from most of these people.