New to the debate

[Frederica852]

Started hearing more about issues around women's rights and transphobia lately and am slightly mystified by all the labelling of people's view and aggressively calling people phobic etc etc

Trying to make sense of it. Clearly a nuanced issue but there are some key points that are beginning to take shape in my mind E.g.

• biological sex is male or female. You're born one or the other and can transition if you wish during your life.
• gender is becoming a separate concept from sex so you can be biologically male but identify as female and vice versa.
• gender is a tricky concept because it's hard to work out what it means without getting into old fashioned stereotypes.
• some don't believe gender is a thing and there is only biological sex
• some people think the people in the point above are transphobic.

For my own part, I was born female and therefore I am now a woman. I don't know what gender identity really is. I am a woman but I like football and boxing and I hate wearing dresses. I don't think that makes me a trans man. That said I'm fine with others feeling a strong sense of gender identity and identifying as a different gender to their biological sex. Live and let live and all that

Am I getting the basics at least?

Gender is a social construct. Much like nationality. What makes you, let me guess, "British", other than the fact that this is the national identity that the people living on these islands came up with?

Well if have British citizenship you can identify how you like, but the reality is that your ability to freely travel, work abroad or whatever else you may wish to do is constrained to the confines of what is permissable for British citizens regardless of whether you identify with being American or whatever. Similar to gender and sex I suppose, you can identify as whatever, but there should be constraints onto how far identifying rather than actually being allows you access to certain spaces.

@Kittii

I'm British because I was born in England and have British citizenship, as evidenced by my NI number and passport. I can't decide to identify as Italian just because I love Italy and wish I could speak Italian.

All of this is just bureaucracy set up by humans around arbitrary national boundaries set up by humans. What if you moved to Italy and acquired Italian citizenship? That would make you Italian, wouldn't it?

@RainbowSpunk

It's whether you use feminine, masculine, or gender neutral labels to describe yourself.

Do you call yourself a man, a woman, or neither? Depending on the answer, that's your gender identity.

How does a child come to know what label to use? Do they look at the people around them who use each label and identify with the group that matches them? How can you be certain they are not just identifying with the existing social stereotypes?

Why should the label you use to describe yourself have a bearing on which groups of people can and can't compete fairly in sport?

If it's just about labels, why are surgery and hormones necessary?

Yes the predictable transphobic/bigot comment came out early. But at least @RainbowSpunk is engaging with the discussion and not just shouting bigot and then leaving the thread without engaging, like most TRAs do.

No it wouldn't make me Italian 🤣

Oh, I think you'll need to provide some proof of that!

Whilst you are at it you could try finding proof that GC women sent the existence of transpeople.

We both know that all you will find is women putting forward logical arguments and being patient with tautological idiocy.

And yet any poster here can show you any number of death threats, doxxing, court cases, job losses and political lobbying all aimed at making the word woman mean something other than its common usage.

Hence your repeated use of 'non trans women' etc.

The rules of gender change for each culture and over time! There are no hard and fast rules or themes.
The only constant rule is that each sex should perform the gender roles assigned to their sex (unless an exception applies).

Currently, Western gender rules for men include;
dominant, assertive, outgoing
dont show emotion (anger doesnt count as an emotion)
interested in sports, machinery
like muted colours, blue, green.
short hair, practical clothing, short nails.

Western gender rules for women include;
be passive, unassertive,
show emotions (except anger)
interested in animals, children, home making, crafts
like pretty things, sparkly things, bright colours.
impractical clothing, long nails, spend hours on your hair and make up before you are fit to be seen.

[quote Blibbyblobby]@RainbowSpunk

It's whether you use feminine, masculine, or gender neutral labels to describe yourself.

Do you call yourself a man, a woman, or neither? Depending on the answer, that's your gender identity.

How does a child come to know what label to use? Do they look at the people around them who use each label and identify with the group that matches them? How can you be certain they are not just identifying with the existing social stereotypes?

Why should the label you use to describe yourself have a bearing on which groups of people can and can't compete fairly in sport?

If it's just about labels, why are surgery and hormones necessary?[/quote]
Children are assigned a gender identity by those around them, mostly adults, based on their physical characteristics.

Well no, it wouldn't.

Nor does popping on some lipstick and a dress and walking into the women's loos make you a woman!

See how easy that was 🤣

All of this is just bureaucracy set up by humans around arbitrary national boundaries set up by humans. What if you moved to Italy and acquired Italian citizenship? That would make you Italian, wouldn't it?

Can you self-identify as Italian and get to vote in Italian elections and claim Italian benefits?

Would you still be Italian if you'd never lived in Italy but felt very strongly that you were?

Would it be ok to demand that the existing Italians redefine Italians and Italy to include you without you having to do anything to move to Italy or understand the culture you are appropriating?

@Kittii

No it wouldn't make me Italian 🤣

Why not? Learning the language, successfully applying for citizenship... What more is needed?

"Then correct them. That's what trans people do."

Do you not see the arrogance and outright craziness of that statement? "Because I believe x about myself, based on something that can neither be measured nor adequately explained to others, I must insist that the entire world shares my belief". It's not 'correcting' people, it's browbeating them.

I've explained it to you. It's more that you refuse to accept the explanation

Interesting choice of words.

I don't believe I do have a gender identity - I am a woman because that it the word used to describe a human adult female (like mare for female adult horse, ewe for female adult sheep etc)

You appear to be saying that I do have a gender identity but refuse to accept it - how does that work, then?

You do know you are making a bloody good, logical case against transwomen being women, don't you?

@CuriousaboutSamphire

Oh dear! That reads very badly, OP. It reads exactly like some of the persistent monitors and agitators we get here a lot. So you might get some strident responses.

But stick with it.

First and foremost you are going to have to explore that.

How do human beings change sex? Can you explain what you understand by that?

Having a sex change is what I'd always assumed by this. A PP has made a good point about even then you cant change your sex genetically which I'd never given thought to before

Plenty GC people openly stated that they want to put an end to the very idea of being transgender. What is that, if not extinction?

Can you provide some receipts for that? Pushing a misleading narrative is
irresponsible and harmful.

A desire to protect children from undergoing irreversible medical treatment before they are old enough to fully understand the consequences is about safeguarding not trans extinction.

So many strawmen here that MNHQ are checking their fire insurance coverage.

@RainbowSpunk

Children are assigned a gender identity by those around them, mostly adults, based on their physical characteristics.

That doesn't answer my question. That's how gender is (according one ideology anyway) "assigned".

But how does a person come to know what label to use? It's not just the assigning thing is it, because then trans people would not exist.

So there must be something more than that. Something that causes trans people to know their assigned label is wrong. What is it? Do they look at the people around them who use each label and identify with the group that matches them? How can you be certain they are not just identifying with the existing social stereotypes?

Plus the other questions:

Why should the label you use to describe yourself have a bearing on which groups of people can and can't compete fairly in sport?

If it's just about labels, why are surgery and hormones necessary?

No change is needed these days, no hormones or surgery. Surgery renders a person infertile, and thats considered to be a human rights abuse.

That gender identity is a matter of your sense of self, defined solely by how you self-identity. Not by "gender stereotypes"

And you self-identify as a woman. Making that your gender identity.

The problem is that this makes the term 'woman' meaningless.

Women need specific sex based rights, regardless of how they identify.

Sometime this comes down to bodily functions. Women need specific rights and services to deal with periods, to avoid pregnancy, to cope with pregnancy, to receive fertility treatment, to cope with menopause, to breast feed, to urinate (note recently publicised female urinal for festivals that nobody can work out how to use) etc, etc. Referring to lactators, gestators, menstruators, doesn't acknowledge the fact that these things are only relevant to one sex, and the impact they have on women and their rights.

A recent example of why this is important is the pandemic. Women were under represented in government (note that a law has only just been passed to allow female ministers to go on maternity leave), and the government did not consider services that are only required by women - the morning after pill, services for pregnant women.

I don't know what 'woman' means when related to gender, and it's telling that you haven't received a straight answer OP.

I just know that women - the group of adult humans whose sex is female - need language to describe the rights they need to enable equal participation in society.

Spunker- so if the concept of trans doesn’t exist for most people this would mean trans people what? Stopped existing? Stopped seeing themselves as trans? How would this work?

Many feminists loathe the stereotyping around descriptions of gender identity - getting rid of stereotypes would not actually get rid of trans people- of course not! Even if trans people said “I accept my biology but my personality means I am x type of person” that would not stop them existing- or even stop anyone defining them self as trans.

Extinction is not the same thing. We don’t say pandas will go extinct because we might be calling them something else now, do we?

I think you are starting the journey many here have recently been on. Me included.

I would have said the same as you a few years ago, wouldn't have refuted the sex change idea. I found some of the posters here very hard going. But I never posted anything like the post upthread that was posted at me!

Keep reading, asking, thinking. Make your own sense of it.

It's like saying a horse is whatever I say a horse is.

Exactly. Welcome to gender identity ideology, any lurkers! That is really how it works.

Some males have decided that because they didn't feel comfortable in their male bodies or feel like they thought males should feel, based on their second hand, stereotyped perception of what they think women must feel like (female people), that they are actually female, and should be treated exactly the same in every way, regardless if what that means for actual people who are female.

Mind, the Italian thing is quite a good analogy in many ways.

You could move to Italy, follow a bureaucratic process ( not, I note, self id, but a genuine gatekeeping process and one where the applicant can be rejected as well as accepted) and become "Italian".

But you would not have the same experience and meaning of being Italian as someone who grew up there, steeped in Italian culture, treated as Italian by the rest of the world, knowing all your life that when people say "Italians are X, Italians as Y" they mean you, that the history of what happened in Rome and the Vatican is part of what built the streets on which you walk and the laws and culture that formed your identity from the day you were born.

And if you and your Italian-born friend travel to another country - the USA, for example - every interaction they have will be informed by the USA-ian's cultural understanding of "Italians" in a way that yours will not. You, despite your bit of paper, most likely genuine love of Italy and a lot of shared experience of Italian life, will never have their experience of being Italian.

And being an Italophile because you love the food/clothes/lifestyle is entirely separate from actually being a native-born or naturalised Italian, no matter how much you wave your arms about.

@Blibbyblobby

For me, the two crucial difference between That said I'm fine with others feeling a strong sense of gender identity and identifying as a different gender to their biological sex. Live and let live and all that and what is happening on the ground right now are

1. the dominant narrative about trans identities has moved from people living "as if" they were the opposite sex, (which yes, typically did boil down to adopting the social stereotypes plus for some, surgery) to "Trans women are women, trans men are men".

The implications of that are:

Women experience sexism not because they are female and society reacts to their bodies in a certain way regardless of how they may feel themselves as a person, but because they are a certain type of person, a "woman".

A male person's experience of "womanhood" in his imagination while living a life where people react to him as a man is as authoritative as a life lived in a female body and treated from birth as a woman.

There's no material reason for single sex anything unless it's entirely a body-based difference (ie medical or reproductive). So women's sports, education, changing spaces, political representation, employment initiatives, anything being done to address historic social, political, cultural and economic inequalities between women and men must become mixed sex to include males who identity as women as equal and interchangeable with female people.

Surgery or any type of physical transition is not a pre-requisite for a trans identity, because the identity is innate and separate to the body. The penis is only male when attached to a person self-defining as a man. Penises attached to male women are welcome in women's spaces. This means separating women and men no longer protects women from rape because some women can rape others.

Statistics that are intended to show sex-base trends and patterns will now include male statistics. This risks hiding female-specific trends and patterns where female representation is very low (for example sex crimes, political leadership) and male representation is very high.

Any discussion of the systemic impact of biology on women's lives - for example expectations and structures around child rearing and domestic responsibility on our economic power over our lifetimes, our physical ability to defend ourselves against male violence, the narratives structured around our bodies in media and in porn - gets taken out of any discussion about feminism and what women need in our society because "not all women have wombs, not all women have vaginas". Which would be ok if alongside recognising that Women is now a mixed-sex group, we had created a new social group for female people and transferred all the single sex protections and analysis over to it. But we haven't. So TWAW has effectively unnamed and undefined female people as a group despite the undeniable oppression and inequality we have experienced and continue to experience.

2. "Trans people are who they say they are" AKA self id

All the above would be ok (ish) if there was some sort of objective test or gateway that had to be passed to be accepted as a trans woman (or man). But there isn't. It's being framed as transphobic to even ask. The narrative on the one hand appropriates DSDs and "science" in the sense of research into non-human sex groups, subtleties within human (mostly secondary) sex indicators and development to claim that innate trans identities are "proved" by science and anyone questioning that is a science-denier, but on the other hand resists any suggestion that there could be an objective way to prove trans identities.

Which in effect means the right to participate in women's opportunities, speak as a representative voice of women, enter women's spaces and define women's experiences belongs to any male who wishes to appropriate it.

And even all of that wouldn't matter if this was just (as it is for men) an academic topic. But through lobbying and the tag-teaming of this very specific narrative about trans people onto LBG rights as trans being some sort of "LGB 2.0", (1) and (2) have become the dominant narrative of trans identity and through that, the definition that is being pushed when equality schemes, laws and charters are being defined. Since women are an oppressed/disadvantaged group, how we are defined in these things matters in a why it does not matter to men.

And that's why it matters.

Thank you so much. But oh my gosh this makes my head spin a bit