what does it mean "live as a woman"?

[vivariumvivariumsvivaria]

I gather that in order for a male person who believes themselves to be feminine they have to "live as their acquired gender" for 2 years in order to get a GRC.

Is there a definition of how women live? Because I don't think I qualify.

We've moved on a long way since then, and it's always been clear that robust policies need to be in place to cover this kind of situation
Did BitMuch get an answer to their question as to what these policies should be and whether girls should have to share their changing rooms with people of the opposite sex?

Apparently they do not believe that @OurMamInHavianas! Given the recent Twitter outrage about self identifying as black 🤔

I'm not sure dragging people with various DSDs into it is helpful, Butterfly. I appreciate you are trying to say that you have a DSD, but you don't know and a quick scan of a previous posts suggests that you were clearly identified as male when born. If that is the case any DSD you may have is, in my view, not significant enough to push you across the line between the sexes. Well, the gulf, rather than the line.

Individuals with CAIS where their male karyotype becomes completely cryptic, such that they would only know with genetic testing that they have a male karyotype, are a different consideration. But that isn't you. You had observable male phenotype before you started artificially messing with it.

You are male, Butterfly. Everything you do is a male behaviour. Right down to the long, lecturing, self-absorbed forum posts that are a massive chore to read... that is a female behaviour too because some women do it but it is much more typical in males.

Anything a male does is a male behaviour.
Anything a female does is a female behaviour.

When people say they are "living as a woman" they are saying "I act out what I believe to be female typical behaviour" which is frankly just LARPing. That acting out itself remains male behaviour. And the behaviour at an unconscious level that is much more closely tied into actual, rather than imagined, sex generally seems to remain consistent with male typical behaviour anyway. Entitlement, taking up space, status seeking, aggression. Males who think they are females seem to be unable to stop actually behaving male, they just paste a veneer of "acting like a woman" over the top of it. A human cannot change sex no matter how much they pretend or wish.

Society tried to train me to perform a particular mode of behaviour, which I very much didn't get on with.

Can you elaborate a bit? Girls are taught early that their needs are secondary to those of males and that it's their role to put themselves last and support males, training which many of us object to. Many women view a man who is gentle and cares about women in a positive light. Toxic masculinity is not the only option for men.

I can assure you that having to use the boys' changing rooms at school, in the midst of this profoundly palpable awareness of the wrongness of your own body, was an experience that I can only really refer to in Lovecraftian euphemisms.

I don't know what "Lovecraftian euphemisms" means, but aren't most teenagers self conscious about their bodies?

Girls are taught early that their needs are secondary to those of males and that it's their role to put themselves last and support males, training which many of us object to.

And men are often taught the same thing.

I feel that that training from society would have been the better thing to have rejected.

To a large extent much of this problem does come from claims to "womanhood" being wrapped up in the worldview that women should play support roles to the performance. We see both males and females performing their prescribed roles.

There are some interesting answers to Sinead Watson's question on Witter last night.

twitter.com/ImWatson91/status/1444746311056642052?s=20

She asked:

"I was asked “what does being a woman feel like?” this morning, and after thinking about it all day I still don't have an answer. I've never “felt” like a woman, I just am one."

"So, I put it to Twitter: "

"What does being a woman feel like? "

"What does being a man feel like?"

I do have a GRC. It took me ages because the process is utterly ludicrous and I'm allergic to forms

I would just like to once again point out that although an individual applicant may well find the process ludicrous, this is the most successful such process we have ever designed in the UK.

More than 95% of all applications are successful. Applicants provide paper evidence from two healthcare professionals (one from their GP, one additional). These can be obtained privately at minimum fuss and for less than £500 if the NHS is too slow or the applicant's GP too reluctant to diagnose gender dysphoria.

After that, there is no actual evidence required showing any proof of living in one's "acquired gender" other than letters addressed to the applicant in a name that would be generally perceived as being for the sex the applicant wishes to be.

There is a quirk, however, in the application process. It was introduced deliberately to hide from the public the fact that no surgery is required to obtain a GRC - because of which even many of the smaller, and newer, trans rights organisations at first thought a medical transition was a condition for qualifying for a GRC.

And that quirk is that if an applicant says they have medically transitioned, they are then asked to provide evidence for that. This made the process onerous for the early applicants in 2004 and 2005, because many of them were post-op transsexuals who had transitioned many years before that and so struggled to provide the medical evidence. And to get a diagnosis back then was more difficult than it is today. So when the GRA was first enacted, you had lots of those post-op transsexuals share how difficult it was for them to secure a GRC.

This explains the difference in experience between those who found the whole process demeaning back then and those who secure a diagnosis of gender dysphoria today (which is not difficult if you know what to say and/or can go private), do not transition other than a name change and then apply two years after that. (The two year period is by far the most onerous condition, because there is no way around it.)

Neither of these applicants is lying - they are sharing real experiences of applying for a GRC, but the law does not need to be reformed to make the process easier or friendlier. It already is. And unlike any other applications to the state, applicants for a GRC can get help with their application from a civil servant.

As a mother of several children I can confirm that they all got very body conscious about 10-11 years old. None of them are even the slightest dysphoric but all of them are uncertain and uncomfortable with the changes puberty is making to their bodies.

I just don’t understand this “acting” or “living” like a woman. I think a lot of it comes down to stereotypes. After having the “gender talk” in school, my son stopped doing some very loved activities as they were “for girls” and “sometimes boys become girls”. Being very good at all sports he can easily “perform masculinity” which this has made him do (I am working on undoing this damage).

I think pushing children into stereotypes is beyond wrong. And I don’t think it helps the more sensitive, creative boys that the popular, sporty boys drop out of creative classes because some adult has told them it is “traditionally girly”.

I think saying a lot of this is just stereotypes is a little dismissive of how stereotypes can affect individuals

I suspect a lot of children are aware of boy and girl as society classification way before they know about , and certainly before they understand the biological differences , so those stereotypes may be all that they know

Yes it's stereotypes, but expecting a individual to recognise and fight that is wrong , you need the right support structures and the right type of personality to be able to do that

I might think that butterfly has been hoodwinked, misled, but she only gets one life to live . I also think women are misled when they choose to spend hours on make up believing it's their nature ,and nothing to do with patriarchal society but At the end if the day it is their choice and thier life

( which is not to say that I think butterfly is living as a woman because I think that's biology )

Yes it's stereotypes, but expecting a individual to recognise and fight that is wrong , you need the right support structures and the right type of personality to be able to do that

Yes, children can't all be expected to realise that when they're told 'you can't do that it's for boys/girls', that it's the stereotype that's wrong, not them. Especially when this message is coming from adults they trust - parents or teachers, as well as from their peers. If no one tells them that they have more freedom than the stereotypes permit, how are they to know? And even if they understand that, they need support from adults to fight it.

Stonewall know this, which is why they are targeting primary schools. TRAs also know that feminists fight against this stereotyping which is why we are being cast as witches who hate 'trans children'.

Teaching children that they have a 'gender identity' from an early age embeds the stereotypes as something within themselves which is supposed to 'match' their sex. Re-inventing stereotypes (external) as 'gender identity' (internal) makes it something that is a personal quality rather than a societal imposition. Campaigning for children to change their bodies to match their 'gender identity' is much more acceptable to many people than campaigning for them to change their bodies to fit personality traits which are more acceptable in the opposite sex due to stereotyping. Even though it's actually the same thing.

Yes I can't get over the idea that getting children to change how they look to fit in better isn't considered conversion therapy

Thanks for your posts, Butterfly - but, I still don't get it. Nothing you have written about your style of dress or speech or poetry is familiar to me.

So, this is the problem. You have, kindly, offered up examples of how you fulfilled the GRC's requirements of "living as a woman" - but, NONE of the examples are things that I do, and I AM a woman.

It's a bit mad, isn't it? I'm really very offended by the suggestion that you are the same as me because you are more feminine than I am. My female body does stuff that yours will never do, it is those biological functions which make me a woman, not the way I clothe or move my body.

Can I ask you about SRS? My understanding is that few trans women have genital surgery, but also refer to breast implants or facial surgery as SRS. Is that correct? The term "SRS" means any sort of affirmation surgery rather than creation of a neo vagina? Again, no pressure to answer from me, I appreciate these are intrusive questions.

Thanks for that twitter link, Helleo. That is indeed very interesting, but, largely fruitless.

largely fruitless

As it generally always is. Isn't it.

That is the whole point. 'Living like a woman' means being a female and living everyday. Living like a transwoman or a transman, means something rather different. Living entails dealing with your individual body's reactions and needs and having a personality.

It is a common discussion point I have seen watching and reading detransitioner accounts. They realised that they are never going to be that opposite sex in reality. They may 'pass' but it is still not enough. So they choose another path and continue to deal with their dysphoria in other ways.

Just a thought... we're the GRC requirements written by a predominantly male team?

It boils down to why on earth are we pretending that the answer to gender dysphoria is saying "yes you are correct, you are the opposite sex, now let is perform some irreversible harm to your perfectly healthy body". The concept of "living as a woman" to get a GRC is part and parcel of this ludicrous charade.

Women don't live as women. They just are women. Living "as" a woman is something that only males can do and it absolutely must be based on adopting a different set of stereotypes. The ingrained male behaviour that is resultant from their male sex (whether at a more innate level or a very hard ingrained social conditioned level) is never changed. They still behave in many ways... male. The only thing that can actively be changed is lightly social conditioned stuff and adding a performance of stereotypes layer on top. Plus various medical interventions to create an facsimile of a female body of course.

It's just a bloody insult to women at the end of the day.

@WomaninBoots

I'm not sure dragging people with various DSDs into it is helpful, Butterfly. I appreciate you are trying to say that you have a DSD, but you don't know and a quick scan of a previous posts suggests that you were clearly identified as male when born. If that is the case any DSD you may have is, in my view, not significant enough to push you across the line between the sexes. Well, the gulf, rather than the line.

Individuals with CAIS where their male karyotype becomes completely cryptic, such that they would only know with genetic testing that they have a male karyotype, are a different consideration. But that isn't you. You had observable male phenotype before you started artificially messing with it.

You are male, Butterfly. Everything you do is a male behaviour. Right down to the long, lecturing, self-absorbed forum posts that are a massive chore to read... that is a female behaviour too because some women do it but it is much more typical in males.

Anything a male does is a male behaviour.
Anything a female does is a female behaviour.

When people say they are "living as a woman" they are saying "I act out what I believe to be female typical behaviour" which is frankly just LARPing. That acting out itself remains male behaviour. And the behaviour at an unconscious level that is much more closely tied into actual, rather than imagined, sex generally seems to remain consistent with male typical behaviour anyway. Entitlement, taking up space, status seeking, aggression. Males who think they are females seem to be unable to stop actually behaving male, they just paste a veneer of "acting like a woman" over the top of it. A human cannot change sex no matter how much they pretend or wish.

Male typical behaviour?

You've just listed a bunch of socialisation stereotypes and claimed them to be essential qualities of maleness in a thread where a bunch of posters have repeatedly asserted that inherent stereotypes of maleness and femaleness are bullshit and we've discussed a DSD -which clinical staff have suggested I probably have based on both family history and observed physical evidence- which expresses itself as a continuum of ambiguous phenotypical variations with the same underlying karyotype. Ambiguous genitalia at birth is frequently surgically 'assigned' to one presentation or another in the case of some expressions of this DSD. Does the surgeon who performs this surgery have a magical gender sorting hat?

Butterfly people with the various AIS's don't have ambiguous genitalia, do they?

don't be cross - it's a fair point. You are male, possibly with a DSD, but, male. You present as female.

I am in trouble at work because I see this obligation to "Live as a woman" as insufficient to allow a trans woman access to my single sex spaces.

I want my single sex spaces because I am a woman and entitled to them in law. No males, regardless of their feelings, because even male people like you are not the same as me.

Now, why is that not ok? Why can I not have my space or my noun? It's galling when you, by contrast, can have all the things that you need to feel comfortable in your skin?

I sincerely hope you do, by the way. I am glad you sound so positive about the interventions you have had.

The ingrained male behaviour that is resultant from their male sex (whether at a more innate level or a very hard ingrained social conditioned level) is never changed.

It started a birth and continues until death. Even if someone 'lives as a women', it is the male perception of being a 'woman', it is the male perception of people's reactions to them as an individual. Because even if you have supposedly lived as a 'woman' since 10, that first ten years has formed your perceptions. You have not been a female since birth and been shaped by the events in your life from being a female. Even to the point of watching someone else's reaction to females but from the perspective of being a male child. How a person who is living 'as a woman' perceives their life, is through the eyes of a person who has a body modified to look feminine.

That is the reality.

Ambiguous genitalia at birth is frequently surgically 'assigned' to one presentation or another in the case of some expressions of this DSD. Does the surgeon who performs this surgery have a magical gender sorting hat?

If you knew anything at all about people with DSDs you'd know this isn't current practice in the UK.

No they don't do that to DSD babies anymore unless there is an absolute medical need. And no they don't need a "sorting hat"... we can test genes and work out what is going on now. There's no "continuum", you are one or the other with whatever mistakes occurred in development along the way.

You have said in previous posts that you were unambiguously male at birth. You are male. If you have a DSD is it one only male people can have.

We are not blank slates. You are conflating genuine sexed behaviour (which exists to an arguably greater or lesser degree) with stereotypes. Being tall is a typical male trait but tall women are not men and short men are not women. Chopping a tall man off at the knees does not make him a woman, a male adopting behavioural traits that are more typically female does not make him a woman.

There are several layers of behaviour in my view. Deep seated innate stuff, very hard programmed social conditioned stuff (it is hard to pin down which is which from pure observation without doing unethical experiments), more surface level social conditioning and acting out stereotypes. You are conflating them.

If a behaviour is observed in a male person it is a male behaviour. If it is observed in lots of male people it is a male typical behaviour. Thinking you are really a woman inside and acting it out accordingly is inherently male. It can't be female can it? My observation was that quite often male typical behaviour persists through "transition".

It is quite possible for a male to have zero male typical behaviour, I doubt it but theoretically possible. This would not make him a woman just an extremely untypical male. Still male, as defined by his body.

@vivariumvivariumsvivaria

Thanks for your posts, Butterfly - but, I still don't get it. Nothing you have written about your style of dress or speech or poetry is familiar to me.

So, this is the problem. You have, kindly, offered up examples of how you fulfilled the GRC's requirements of "living as a woman" - but, NONE of the examples are things that I do, and I AM a woman.

It's a bit mad, isn't it? I'm really very offended by the suggestion that you are the same as me because you are more feminine than I am. My female body does stuff that yours will never do, it is those biological functions which make me a woman, not the way I clothe or move my body.

Can I ask you about SRS? My understanding is that few trans women have genital surgery, but also refer to breast implants or facial surgery as SRS. Is that correct? The term "SRS" means any sort of affirmation surgery rather than creation of a neo vagina? Again, no pressure to answer from me, I appreciate these are intrusive questions.

I think we're actually largely in agreement!

Stereotypes don't 'make' a person male or female. There are experiences of womanhood that you live daily as a person inhabiting a particular body format which I don't. I'm not trying to claim -your- womanhood. We have different experiences! We both also have different experiences to other women. There are patriarchal oppressions we share experiences of alongside ways that we differ.

When we engage with society we enter into an implicit agreement that dressing and behaving in certain ways will prompt certain behaviours in response. Many of these behaviours - both performed and recieved in turn - are bullshit stereotypes inflicted on us which nobody should be beholden to! I agree that it's a complex, confusing, miserable snarl. I don't have an axiomatic answer that neatly resolves it into clean categories, I'm afraid - but it's pretty clear in today's world that dividing on genetic lines isn't the way!

What I do know is that I experienced severe gender dysphoria until my phenotypical expression was altered through endocrine and surgical intervention. In my case, the only surgery I needed was to reconfigure the form of my primary sex characteristics. If this surgery had been performed at birth or in my twenties, my genes would have been the same, and the overall physical outcome would likewise have been similar. I'd perhaps have been brought up differently, and that would have changed the opportunities I'd have been given and the way I was treated in childhood. So would having been born into a different class or economic bracket, or indeed a different country!

@OldCrone

Ambiguous genitalia at birth is frequently surgically 'assigned' to one presentation or another in the case of some expressions of this DSD. Does the surgeon who performs this surgery have a magical gender sorting hat?

If you knew anything at all about people with DSDs you'd know this isn't current practice in the UK.

So you know why it isn't current practice in the uk, yes?

I don't have an axiomatic answer that neatly resolves it into clean categories, I'm afraid

Hang on, what is the "it" referring to there? I see no obvious prior referent. Dividing what?

I think perhaps part of my issue butterfly is that by following your route you are accepting the stereotypes that many of us fight against in different ways , and for me at least people like you actually increase my feelings of dysmorphia , body hatred etc

And I know it's healthier to accept my body as it is

But when people imply through their actions that woman is about more than biology , I feel pretty physically sick