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.

friends and relatives and even, on a few notable occasions, teachers and clinicians who outright told me not to use male facilities anymore because it was going to get me hurt or killed.

Why would it get you hurt or killed?

I don't think we should let men into same-sex spaces. I wouldn't want that - I'd hate that. Find it hugely uncomfortable, dangerous and counter-intuitive.

But you've just said that you think some males should be allowed in women's spaces. Which ones? Where do you draw the line?

7. Don't forget to wear sunscreen
8. Stretch

9. hydrate, don't for to hydrate

7. Drink a bit of water.
8. Take a piss.

Remember just stay female while doing all this. You're doing great! You've got this living as a woman thing down gurrrl.

It seems to mean 'living how you think a glamorous childless sexy woman lives' eg loads of slap, fancy dresses, heels, wigs, but without all the actual reality of being a woman.

These threads are always very enlightening.

Personally, I don't think there's any way in hell that butterfly is spending day after day on here out of a sense of altruism for transwomen who are, er, less fortunate than butterfly, in terms of passing and being accepted.

One can't see huge self obsession and determination to ride roughshod over people on one hand, and then embrace the claim that the person is really completely selfless, on the other.

And, as I never tire of saying, the gender critical viewpoint and/or advocacy for women's rights is usually furthered far more by people who don't want it, than those who do.

And I'd bet my mortgage that this thread is doing exactly that for all and any lurkers.

5) Ingest nutrition
6) Don't forget to poo

• got an actual cackle from me.

@ArabellaScott

*5) Ingest nutrition 6) Don't forget to poo*

• got an actual cackle from me.

Me too. Because I was wondering if I ever did actually forget.

I was reading about the 'stolen concept' fallacy today. Interesting:

'When modern philosophers declare that axioms are a matter of arbitrary choice, and proceed to choose complex, derivative concepts as the alleged axioms of their alleged reasoning, one can observe that their statements imply and depend on “existence,” “consciousness,” “identity,” which they profess to negate, but which are smuggled into their arguments in the form of unacknowledged, “stolen” concepts.' - Ayn Rand, (of whom I know virtually nothing, but the idea seems to be apposite).

Hai there, I heard you like Mudkips being a feminist.

So what do you do in your feminism, apart from argue for mixed-sex toilets?

There is an MN thread of feminist goals here. www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4184062-Feminist-goals-and-organisations-which-are-working-towards-them

@MonsignorMirth

I've dipped in and out of this thread, and I do appreciate Butterfly's posts - whatever they reveal they are more welcome (to me!) than the 'your all biggots' that we often get. But I admit I've not read every post.

What comes across, and is something I've noticed far more than I thought recently, is how much 'being a woman' / being accepted etc comes down to REALLY believing it and REALLY looking like x/y/z.

Butterfly, there are lots of people in the past few years who have been arguing that having gender dysphoria should not be a requirement to be classed as trans, and that appearance is irrelevant.

Do you agree with either of these? I must admit I'm not sure how the first one works, as most people - I would have thought - see 'being trans' as almost synonymous with having some degree of gender dysphoria. (As to how that is diagnosed/assessed, that's obviously fairly reliant on stereotypes and is clearly problematic- but that's not really what I was focusing on here).

As for 'appearance' / passing - the current line is that gender is a feeling inside and one may or may not choose to alter their dress/appearance etc but that shouldn't be expected/required. (Again, most people seem to perceive TW as trying their hardest to look stereotypically overtly feminine, whereas I'm not sure this is in line with the Twitterati).

I don't understand why a person would transition without experiencing gender dysphoria.

As in, I literally don't understand. And that's ok. I don't think I can understand. Dysphoria is so inherent to my understanding of my transness that the idea of going through all the misery I've gone through just to get to a point where living feels bearable - it doesn't compute.

However, equally, dysphoria is something at least as much in my past as it is my present.

If I'm able to understand on some level that my awareness of my own body and the configuration it's in is capable of causing me clinically significant distress, but doesn't do so every day anymore, and that having addressed it with transition doesn't make me any less 'trans' - then I'm also able to at least acknowledge that it's possible for a person to experience this awareness without dysphoria.

Without clinically significant distress, is there a good case for endocrine interventions in adolescents who desperately ask for them? I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not a psychiatric clinician; I wouldn't feel confident nor comfortable in answering that one.

I know that being forced to endure a puberty that's clearly causing me harm would be cause for a serious sense of humour failure; I've been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt!

Appearance is very tough; I've always adhered to the idea that how you present to the world should never be used as a means of assessing 'worthiness' or any of that nonsense. Nobody should have to conform to patriarchal standards of beauty, femininity or masculinity in order to be taken seriously or treated with respect.

I believe that there are simple and obvious cues you can make use of to communicate how you would like to be addressed, but I appreciate that many of those are also gloriously flouted and subverted by non-trans GNC people, and I heartily applaud doing so. Hell, I often do so myself (and I'm aware of the immense privilege I have in even being able to do so).

We do rather make everything awfully complicated, don't we?

Ultimately, I don't think you need to be sad in order for your transness to be valid, and I don't think you have to look a particular way to be able to claim ownership of transness.

I think it's important to be realistic about how you are likely to be treated by others; I get frustrated by what appear to be telepathic demands by others to magically know pronouns, for example. If I'm asked to use a particular set, I'll do my damnedest to observe it and be respectful; I might not get it, but it would be weird and hypocritical to claim someone else's experiences of gender aren't real.

How that interacts with selfID and the provision of same-sex spaces? I've said before that I am made rather uneasy by the presence of people who trigger my fight-or-flight reflexes in spaces that I consider to be refuges and have spent my entire adult life making use of. A deep, unregulated voice, a peripheral sense of size and the occupation of space - these deeply encoded pathways worn by years of experience are really hard to overcome, both for the observer and the presenter, and it requires an active process of familiarisation and control to manage them.

It's clear to me that it's important to try; I don't think it's unreasonable to kindly ask people to do so. Many posters on this thread have stated their experiences of doing just that - their good humour, patience and acceptance has probably made a huge difference to the lives of the trans people they've encountered before.

I'm trying to work out when and where we went wrong. What changed? Is it just that trans people are more common, more visible now, and this is a reaction to that - familiarity breeding contempt? Is it that with greater visibility came a greater awareness of trans people often being deeply sad, broken individuals with frequent piles of comorbidities and years of trauma? Is it a reaction to the tactics used by activists - taking a more combatitive, no-tolerance stance to perceived hostility? Did we simply fuck it up by existing - was it an inevitable point in our future?

I'm not sure. I want to find a way to unfuck it, as the current situation certainly benefits nobody.

There is a recent Guardian article by Finn Mackay which may be of some interest:

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/05/finn-mackay-the-writer-hoping-to-help-end-the-gender-wars

@DialSquare

Well, living as a menopausal woman involves brain fog, aches and pains, insomnia, weight gain (like I needed more of that), shit hair and invisibility to name but a few. Strangely, no one is volunteering to live like that for a day let alone two years.

And as a menopausal women I have male pattern baldness and suddenly carry my weight like a beer belly. I also have male pattern anger some of the time 🤷🏼‍♀️

We do rather make everything awfully complicated, don't we?

You might.

It's not complicated, Butterfly. Nobody hates you, nobody is denying your existence. We just want female only spaces, and refuse to concede. That's all.

@Datun

"And I'd bet my mortgage that this thread is doing exactly that for all and any lurkers."

Hi! Lurker here. You couldn't be more wrong in my case, I'm afraid. Don't make the mistake of thinking you speak for all biological women, or even all survivors of sexual assault, because you very much don't.

I'm still working out what I think about a lot of trans issues and if anything I tend more towards the GC perspective in some respects. But I have found a lot that resonates with me in Butterfly's posts on this thread and a lot that repels me the responses to them. She has described her experiences with sincerity and openness and in return she has been hectored, mocked, misgendered, and otherwise ill treated.

The only mistake she's made here, so far as I can tell, is in trying to appeal to some sense of shared humanity - but you're so entrenched in your beliefs that you don't even seem to see her as a person. It's actually rather chilling.

So, where are we - almost everyone posting so far is perfectly happy with: 'living as a woman' means quite simply: being a woman and living.

One or two others don't actually have a definition, and are pretty sure that it's complicated and involves a weird miasmic shifting cloud of different, interacting factions. According to this gender stuff, there is definitely a difference between men and women, because men shouldn't be allowed in women's spaces. But nobody can tell us what that difference is nor how we can tell.

About right?

I seem to have lost my violin. Has anyone seen it?

No. Butterfly. No. Women do not want men in their spaces. End of fucking discussion.

Butterfly, the fact that you don’t know where “it went wrong” and wonder if messed it up “by existing” shows that you haven’t read or understood the majority of the posts here. You keep reiterating your personal experience and you tell us to “be kind” to people with penises.

We have told you that women have accepted transsexuals over the years, sometimes not readily if dealing with trauma. But accepted them.

Then came stonewall and self-ID. Prisons, hospital wards, sports, shelters. Everywhere penis people declaring that they are women. Some (in prisons) are rapists. Some have beards. Women are being threatened with rape by “lady dicks”.

And then stonewall came for our children. Children are given a “menu of gender identities” and medicalised if they don’t confirm.

Women have had enough. We say no. A general blanket no, a non-negotiable no and that is still taken as a starting point for discussions, even on this thread. Our worries are ignored, are fears aren’t even registered and everything is about how oppressed penis people are. NO.

@ArabellaScott

We do rather make everything awfully complicated, don't we?

You might.

It's not complicated, Butterfly. Nobody hates you, nobody is denying your existence. We just want female only spaces, and refuse to concede. That's all.

Yes, it's always meant to be so complicated. When it really isn't.

Women get to decide who comes in their spaces.

Sort out male violence first, then you might get an opinion.

Until then, the answer is no. Very, very uncomplicated.

@ButterflyHatched
Pre covid I took my 75 year old to the theatre for a birthday treat. The rest of her week long break staying with us was slightly over shadowed by her having a UTI and being unwilling to leave our house as she didn't want to be 'caught short'. It transpired that she hadn't had a wee at the theatre when I thought she had because when she arrived at the "ladies" it was labelled as a gender neutral space and she didn't want to go because there might be a man in there. Her holding it in for several hours was probably a factor in the UTI.
Now she won't win the oppression Olympics, but she is a frail elderly lady who had the misfortune to grow up with a physically abusive father who once kicked down the door of the family bathroom and dragged her out of the bath by her hair because she didn't vacate the room quickly enough for him.
Why doesn't her trauma count? Why does she still need to put her needs, her comfort, her dignity aside for a man?

The only mistake she's made here, so far as I can tell, is in trying to appeal to some sense of shared humanity - but you're so entrenched in your beliefs that you don't even seem to see her as a person. It's actually rather chilling.

I don't think anyone's suggested that Butterfly isn't a person, only that Butterfly is a male person, and therefore not a woman. Men are human too. I don't think anyone has denied this fact. We share our humanity with males, but men are not women.

What's your answer to the OP's question @HarlanPepper? How does someone 'live as a woman'?

Hi! Lurker here. You couldn't be more wrong in my case, I'm afraid. Don't make the mistake of thinking you speak for all biological women, or even all survivors of sexual assault, because you very much don't.

Now this is something that keeps coming up. I don't want you to feel personally attacked, but we need to go into this, and what it says about wider attitudes about women.

It is always "well, you don't speak for all women!" And? When did anyone think they spoke for 3.9 billion human beings? They speak for some women, and that is sufficient. Women's consent matters. My father doesn't have the right to consent for me, my brother doesn't, my husband doesn't, and nor do other women.

It doesn't matter if you want to share a hospital ward with Butterfly. My mother doesn't, and I will go to the mats for her and women like her and I do not care how many lurkers tell me I don't speak for all women. I never claimed to. But I know whom I do speak for and they matter too.

The only mistake she's made here, so far as I can tell, is in trying to appeal to some sense of shared humanity - but you're so entrenched in your beliefs that you don't even seem to see her as a person. It's actually rather chilling.

Chilling? Women are saying 'no'. That's all that's happening. Refusing to agree with a male doesn't mean one is 'dehumanising' them. It just means according a female perspective equal weight.

@HarlanPepper , I respect your views. I was you about a year ago. I had and still have a huge amount of respect and empathy for Butterfly and everyone who goes through what I understand to be an immense suffering.

What it comes down do for me is that it is always transwomen’s need who trumps women’s and girls’. It is alway transwomen who are the most oppressed. We always hear about transwomen’s struggles and we do try to be kind. And we do emphasise.However, I rarely see any sympathy for women and girls. I rarely see any acknowledgment of the struggles of women and girls.

About a year or two ago, I had long discussions with a transwoman here. I was beyond sympathetic. And then some trans activists throw smoke bombs at a women’s demonstration - in the shadow of Grenfell tower. I know of people who died there. I have spoken to friends who were unable to speak in their grief over what had happened. But this transwoman would not condemn this…because…most oppressed. And then I started to read all the threads looking for any sympathy with biological women. It is almost never there.

[quote HarlanPepper]@Datun

"And I'd bet my mortgage that this thread is doing exactly that for all and any lurkers."

Hi! Lurker here. You couldn't be more wrong in my case, I'm afraid. Don't make the mistake of thinking you speak for all biological women, or even all survivors of sexual assault, because you very much don't.

I'm still working out what I think about a lot of trans issues and if anything I tend more towards the GC perspective in some respects. But I have found a lot that resonates with me in Butterfly's posts on this thread and a lot that repels me the responses to them. She has described her experiences with sincerity and openness and in return she has been hectored, mocked, misgendered, and otherwise ill treated.

The only mistake she's made here, so far as I can tell, is in trying to appeal to some sense of shared humanity - but you're so entrenched in your beliefs that you don't even seem to see her as a person. It's actually rather chilling.[/quote]
That's fine Harlan. I did make a little bet with myself that there might be a post like yours, to be honest. It's fairly unusual, however.

Maybe you're genuine, maybe not. But I have seen a zillion posts like those of butterfly. And they always end up with trying to get women to comply.

So I'm afraid I'm over it.

This isn't about individuals. This is about laws that allow a male rapist to access incarcerated women as part of his sentence.

You may not be thinking of these women, but I am.

You can't say yes to some men and no to others. Why would you? What's in it for women?

Batman has written a good summary of where things went wrong. It used to be just a small number of trans women quietly using women's spaces, and most women accepted this, understood they were rare and generally vulnerable, and out of courtesy treated them as if they were women.

Now we are told any male person who says he is a woman is literally a woman. They are demanding access to our spaces and abusing us if we express discomfort. It feels very different. It doesn't feel safe.