What do you expect transwomen to do then?

[Blibbyblobby]

@JohnHuffam1812 asked me a question on the woke thread that I think deserves an answer. The thread closed before I could post it but I’m answering here and hope that JohnHuff will see it and maybe give his/her/their thoughts.

What do you expect transwomen to do then? Should they not just be extended as much as they possible can within reason?

I expect trans women to acknowledge they are not female and that female experiences are also valid. I expect them to take as a starting point that the existing female-only spaces - ie everything defined as “women-only” when woman was synonymous with female - remain single sex for now. And then we work together, case by case, to see what can be reasonably opened up as mixed sex/single gender, and what might justify some third provisions, and what is just plain female and doesn’t really intersect with trans women’s needs and lives full stop.

I don’t know where that conversation will end up, and I don’t need to know. Maybe we will come to an agreement that “woman” becomes an entirely gender term that coexists with an entirely separate name for the female-bodied. Maybe, as trans women learn more about female people’s lives, they will decide the thing they recognise in themselves is not womanhood and the journey goes somewhere else. Maybe we will see a way forward that reduces the importance of both sex and gender for everyone and as we gain a more truly equal culture, the need to be seen as the “gender” one “truly is” just seems less and less important.

The point is, the first step is to communicate fairly, respectfully and openly. Without that we won’t be able to find reasonable solutions. But once we do communicate fairly, respectfully and openly, reasonable solutions will be surprisingly easy to find.

Basically, I expect trans women to respect our differences, and I expect us all to respect each other, speak honestly, listen with acceptance, and take it from there.

Quite. Mutual respect and equality of expectations - not just demanded and enforced from females - would fix most of this.

As soon as we start into the 'within reason' there is the admittance that TW and female people are not one and the same, and that the impact has to be considered when they are forced teamed. There is also increasing evidence that female needs and issues and TQ+ needs and issues cannot be met in the same resource or brief, because the needs conflict and the existence of females as a separate group with specific need is in itself perceived as hostile. In most cases once a female only resource tries to include TQ+ it becomes by necessity wholly TQ+ focused, and female service users become a secondary priority handled only on TQ+ terms, and some are straight out excluded and bounced out. This is not inclusion. It's been tried. It has not worked. It's largely been the intolerance of female need and concerns and inclusion and diversity on the part of the TQ+ political position that has broken it. With generosity and tolerance towards females and a range of provisions including female only amongst women's provisions, it might have worked. That ship has now sailed.

TQ+ needs should be met. In additional services, resources, facilities, and how that happens is down to TQ+ people to negotiate. Females continue to be half the human race and require sex based provisions and equality, regardless of male wishes for them not to have it.

Why is question even being asked of women? Ask the men.

Yep.

I expect transwomen to do what the transwomen I know do. To know they are male. To know that they cannot known what being a woman actually us. To know how to discuss the discrete needs of women and transwomen and to honour them. To recognise the incredible damage being done by Stonewall and many trans allies, TRAs, to the rights of women and trans people alike.

I do know where that conversation can go as I have had it many times over the last 5 - 10 years. In one instance that conversation leads to a 60 year old transwomen re-evaluating 40years of her life and acknowledging that she has been blessed never to have been challenged and that her life has had to change as she is now no longer able to fool herself that she ever convinced any woman into thinking her make body was actually female (scuse the he ing and she ing, he is male but I've known her since we were about 17).

Respect us a two way street. Any transwoman who cannot stop and hear, acknowledge, the perspective of women is never going to be part of any solution. They will only ever perpetuate the problem.

I’d like it to be accepted that “feeling like a woman” is just that, a feeling, not a reality. It’s a desire, or projection, or psychic construction. “Identification” is a form of adopting a psychological or social narrative, not a magical transubstantiation or essence. It isn’t something actual that confers a set of rights.

Then we might be able to talk about extending courtesies and legal fictions (eg. in the GRA), and how far these should go, in a meaningful way.

I expect them to do what they used to do before their identity became hijacked by a violent men's rights movement.

@EishetChayil

I expect them to do what they used to do before their identity became hijacked by a violent men's rights movement.

This ⬆️

With all due respect blibbyblobby I only read the final page of that thread but I am not so sure that the poster you were discussing this with will venture here on this board.

I mean, you have posed a reasonable first post that can be built on.

I certainly don’t feel as optimistic as you that it would now actually result in women getting their needs 100% considered. And I may be more hard line in some areas such as language than others.

But I also expect some transitioned males to stop with the dogmatic pronouncements that they are ‘just like other women’. There are many transitioned males who do understand and admit that they are male and living a male version of what they believe a female is.

Like you, I think a healthy start would be to except they are not ‘women’ for every purpose. And to stop forcing this.

Should they not just be extended as much as they possible can within reason?

I will guess from the user name this is a male person, who believes that all resources belong to males, who gets what is in the gift of males, that male people say other male people should get whatever they need from female resources (after all, no skin off the nose of anyone male, is it?) and there might be at some point some question of reasonability..... say if it was absolutely proven beyond all question in an objective, male approved, peer reviewed, statistically nicely chatted about and rubber stamped way that enough female physical harm had been done for male people to say 'hmm, maybe we have a responsibility here?'

The male entitlement is off the scale.

It's the same as saying to females, we require you to enact a belief that this male person is female, despite that the requirement comes from a mutual understanding of male entitlement and authority to so direct you, to expect you to accommodate to your own disadvantage, and the remembering of the male person's higher status and rights will be a full part of it at all times. You will serve and support this inequality while at the same time enacting that you don't see it or believe it is there.

Funny isn't it? What we expect is a proper conversation.

Not that someone ceases to exist, stops presenting as they do, goes away, shuts up, stops.

We want an honest, mutually respectful conversation.

Probably nothing like the answer John etc would want to read as it leaves them nowhere to hang their 'transphobes! bigots!'

Mutual respect.
I believe everyone should ave the right to present themselves and live their life as they chose (clothes, names, jobs, hobbies etc)
In return there should be respect that single sex exemptions exist for a reason and it is not always appropriate for everything to mixed sex/single gender.
I'll happily support any campaign for a third, mixed sex space in addition to a single sex space if it is appropriate, for anyone who needs them (take toilets for example... families and disabled people plus carers are other groups who would benefit from a mixed sex toilet in addition to single sex)

I redirect them to recognise that they have a belief. That they have not changed reality, but are responding to their own belief. That they have exactly the same rights as everybody else with respect to their beliefs: the right to practice and express their belief insofar as it does not affect or disenfranchise anybody else. I expect them to recognise that they are males, and have the same rights as other males, regardless of gender expression.

Why are we only talking about transwomen? even when they try and transition into transmen biological females are not deemed newsworthy

Just a thought

And I still can't qualify what a transwomen actually is do we mean post op? Or pre op? Or no intention of ever getting the op (or shave or even wear a skirt unless I'm in court)

Absolutely. With every other protected characteristic there is an acceptance that rights may clash and that courtesy/negotiation/the courts will deal with these clashes. With TW we have a game of Equality Top Trumps in which they are somehow entitled to everything while women come away with nothing. This must stop and TW need to acknowledge women have rights too (though to be fair, outside the lunatic fringe, many do)

@foxgoosefinch

I’d like it to be accepted that “feeling like a woman” is just that, a feeling, not a reality. It’s a desire, or projection, or psychic construction. “Identification” is a form of adopting a psychological or social narrative, not a magical transubstantiation or essence. It isn’t something actual that confers a set of rights.

Then we might be able to talk about extending courtesies and legal fictions (eg. in the GRA), and how far these should go, in a meaningful way.

Hear hear.

Thank God, some sensible well written posts on here. Many years ago,I was working in psychology (nursing) even before being given plastic surgery,you were evaluated by my section, plus 2 DRs, for suitability. Now days this doesn't happen. One of my best friends worked in a gender reassignment surgical unit. The number of people who regret that they went down this route,(sometimes not even as far as surgery) one of the experts hounded out of Tavistock, said we will have a generation unable to have the children they want in the future.

Sorry meant to say,"the number of people who regret the hormone treatment or surgery are hushed up

To be fair my answer is becoming more like, ‘what do I expect a transitioned male to do? How about not expect women to sort shit out for this group of males? How about expect them to have always been respectful human beings who didn’t just assume women’s spaces/opportunities/ services/sports/prizes/words/ representative opportunities and so on and so on, were ever theirs for in the first place?

How about that instead of using females as service humans and security humans, those males broadened the ‘bandwidth’ of what male meant?

But yes. All too late now. Now all we can expect is that they wake up to the negative impacts they have already enacted on women, own that harm and start respecting women by actually admitting the reality for both groups.

And back off pushing for medicalised (hormonal / surgical) treatments for children and teens.

Issues facing males are not mine to sort out. We all have limited time, energy and resources, and I choose to focus mine on helping women and children/young people.

I should make it clear that the process I envision is not at all “what can female people reasonably give up to support trans women and what do they need to keep?” It’s more like “if we look at why this provision exists with different eyes, is there a better way to achieve the same thing? Would including some, or all, male people with perhaps new ground rules for all participants actually make it better?” And underlying that is a belief that sex-segregation is a necessary evil that can also become self-perpetuating, and if society can find ways to achieve the same safety and support for female people without sequestering us away (eg by improving male standards and expectations) that is positive for everyone.

Hellebore excellent post. Yes. All of that.

Thank you for this thread. I had a reply for @johnhuffam1812 also.

JohnHuffam1812

So yes, both sides of this debate are being unreasonable ( although what a transwomen is doing at a smear test ( although they can be administered by men ofc) I don't know.

I believe BlibbyBlobby refers to this incident.

extract

The NHS has apologised to a woman who was left “embarrassed and distressed” after a nurse with stubble and a deep voice was going to carry out her cervical smear test at hospital.

The woman requested a female NHS nurse to perform the intimate procedure but was dismayed when a staff member with “an obviously male appearance” greeted her.

When the patient pointed out the mistake, the nurse replied: “My gender is not male. I’m a transsexual.”

The woman declined to go ahead with the examination – given to women aged 25 to 49 every three years and every five years for women aged 50 to 64 – and complained about her treatment. She stressed her complaint was not about the nurse’s appearance or gender status.

It is understood the nurse self-identified as a woman but had not been employed on that basis. He saw the patient only because of a clerical error.

“[It was] weird where somebody says to you: ‘My gender is not male’ and you think: ‘Well, what does that even mean? You are clearly a man’, the woman toldthe Sunday Times. “[The nurse] had an obviously male appearance . . . close-cropped hair, a male facial appearance and voice, large number of tattoos and facial stubble.”

The patient said it was “bad enough for a fortysomething mother”, but the effect of such an incident on her 17-year-old daughter would have been much worse.

The patient has requested anonymity for herself and the clinic because of fears it or the nurse could be criticised. The appointment for was on September 16 last year in an NHS clinic run by the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust.

It said: “We apologised to this patient for the recording error and because the staff member accepted they didn’t manage the situation appropriately; the patient needed to feel listened to. Trust policy is to consider seriously all requests for clinicians of a particular gender.”

Meanwhile, the famous Ladies’ Pond on London’s Hampstead Heath will no longer be a haven preserved for women after a controversial ruling allowed men transitioning to be women to bathe there.

Regulars have complained in recent months that men who identify as women and wore female bathing clothes were using the pond. A spokesman for the City of London Corporation, which manages the lake, confirmed tothe Mail on Sundaythat men transitioning to women will be allowed to use the pond and the female changing rooms.

Julie Bindel, a feminist writer who has also been swimming at the pond for more than three decades, said: ‘It is totally unacceptable to allow men who identify as women, but who are otherwise male bodied and socialised as men, to be in a women-only space.”

inews.co.uk/news/health/nhs-woman-transgender-nurse-smear-test-114009

If this nurse was truly mistakenly asked to perform smears, this nurse should have raised the issue with a manager before they ever entered the room, pointed out that it was inappropriate and swapped with a female member of staff. They did not.

I wonder how many smear appointments this nurse took before encountering a patient who was confident enough to make a complaint.

And back off pushing for medicalised (hormonal / surgical) treatments for children and teens.

Yes - it amazes me how much middle aged MTF transitioners - including some who regularly post on these boards - can have the audacity to think they should be able to dictate or control what medical treatments are available or pushed for distressed children, and especially teenage girls - a group with which they have nothing and no life experiences in common, apart from a spurious projected fantasy of what “femininity” might be.

With regards to women's rape crisis services I would expect trans women to use the specialist groups that are set up especially for them and not insist on using the female services.

we will have a generation unable to have the children they want in the future

Yes.

I believe that there has been a growing number of female detransitioners attending fertility doctors in Sweden (iirc). And if I also remember correctly some of those had no idea why they would have troubles conceiving.