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.

I expect that to accept that we live in a misogynistic society and their sense of entitlement to be the ones deciding what is 'within reason' is a clear expression of their male privilege.

This! Males can never understand what it is to be female. Even when they think they do, they have no idea.

This is an exchange from twitter today.

I expect transwomen not to shower with their cocks out in the women's area.

Either use the men's, ask for a third space/go to a gym that has one, or shower at home.

@PurgatoryOfPotholes

This is an exchange from twitter today.

I expect transwomen not to shower with their cocks out in the women's area.

Either use the men's, ask for a third space/go to a gym that has one, or shower at home.

It is beyond bonkers that to some this now seems like an inappropriate ask.

Very difficult too to not see the thrill in breaking boundaries.

Female people's boundaries.

I don't exist as a prop in someone else's experiences. Go shower with your cock out somewhere I don't have to be involved.

I’ve never seen a women’s gym either here or in the US where the actual showers didn’t have enclosed cubicles, so the piteous “showering with my cock exposed” doesn’t really wash (as it were…)

Oh dear! Absolutely no care that it caused the woman distress. Just determined entitlement that they had every right to be there.

Hang on… where are all those who tell us that these males never do this. That they would never shower without being private … ever… at all?

I could be very cynical and say that it's almost like the reaction from females in the shower and changing room is important to the poster.

I expect TW to not treat females like this. It would not be acceptable from any other male.

The other amazing thing is that on twitter, trans activists are constantly telling Helen Staniland that communal showers don't exist any more in leisure facilities, and that the Staniland question concerns an entirely hypothetical scenario.

Oh look, turns out communal showers do exist, don't they. Well, of course they do. They're a space-saving measure.

I would like everyone who believes that female only anything should be mixed sex without exception to consider their arguments and the desired outcomes while reflecting on colonialism.

Osterhammel asks, "How can 'colonialism' be defined independently from 'colony?'"[9] He settles on a three-sentence definition:

Colonialism is a relationship between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonised people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonised population, the colonisers are convinced of their own superiority and their ordained mandate to rule.

www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/colonialism

What @Artichokeleaves said.

@Theunamedcat

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)

Because the question has been asked about transwomen. Because transmen, being female, are included in feminism. Because transmen do not pose a threat to other women.

Transwomen's transition status, physical appearance and performance of stereotypes is irrelevant. They do not change sex. Transwomen remain male. This thought policing and colonisation of womanhood is being done by males.

Tw need to sort themselves out and leave women the hell alone. That's what I expect them to do. Do the damn work yourselves.

It almost gleeful isn't it? The absolute entitlement of it, causing a stir where none need have happened.

It's the same with many TWs on YouTube who crow about their use of female bathrooms. I think the one I am thinking of even said "try and stop me".
Male entitlement at its finest.
And this is the world we now find ourselves in, faced by a clearly male bodied individual with male anatomy, in an intimate, private, vulnerable place, AND WE CAN'T SAY A FUCKING THING.

But.............be kind wimpens.

I expect men who identify as trans:

• To acknowledge that only adult human females are women.
• To accept that they are a subset of men not a subset of women.
• To desist from expecting admission to spaces that women expect to be single-sex.
• To desist from claiming knowledge or experience of womanhood.
• To stop reducing women to stereotypes by claiming to be a "woman" based on liking to wear clothes typically associated with women, growing their hair long, wearing make-up.
• To accept that I, a woman, do not feel any sense of fellowship with them and I see them as men.
• To acknowledge that threats to their safety come from their fellow men and not from women who speak up for women's rights.
• To acknowledge that women and girls all over the world are persecuted, abused, killed because of their sex and that men who identify as trans need to stop claiming they are the most vulnerable demographic in society.
• To acknowledge that women have justifiable reasons to feel uncomfortable around men and that just because a man presents as his idea of a woman, we still instinctively perceive them as men.
• To accept the proposal of gender-neutral/third spaces for toilets, changing rooms, etc, and not dismiss that proposal on the grounds that they are women and therefore must have access to women's facilities.
• To acknowledge that they have an unfair advantage in sports and therefore stay out of women's categories in sporting competitions.
• To not put themselves forward as candidates for all-woman shortlists in elections, for competitions or prizes (for example, the Women's Prize for Fiction) that are for women, or for jobs which are expected to be filled by a woman candidate (for example, CEO of a rape crisis centre).
• To accept that they cannot compel how other people speak.
• To accept they still have male privilege and their insistence that women accept them as women is a manifestation of this privilege.
• To seek solutions that enable them to live their best lives that do not infringe on women's existing rights or force women to accept a definition of women that includes men.
• To expand what it means to be a man rather than demand that we render the word "woman" meaningless.

I want people to understand or acknowledge that there are (according to studies) two types of transwomen.

Hence the disconnect between transwomen who are often understanding, sympathetic friends who totally get it, and transwomen who feel like enemies.

Everything I have read, (and 90% of it is from transwomen themselves), leads me to believe that there are far more of the latter than there are of the former. And I've been reading about this for at least six years have never wavered in that opinion. If anything, it's just more obvious.

Effeminate men with gender dysphoria is one thing. Cross dressers, transvestites or AGP men is a quite another.

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe that any men should be in women spaces.

Women are not a resource.

We are not here to validate men, whether it's a mental health issue, or a sexual fetish.

We are actually human. People in our own right. With our own set of circumstances and characteristics that place us all in the same category.

But when you are talking about a cohort, who not only commit 98% of all sexual offences, but where the actual sub category also includes sexual fetishists for whom a woman's space is a turn on, I will never understand any woman thinking that access should be granted on a case-by-case basis.

Sorry, OP.

I believe the reason you run into such difficulty with getting some transwomen to accept this discourse, is precisely because of the distinction between the two types.

If you take a look at the trans widows threads on here, you will realise how utter blindness and a determination on a certain path, to the the exclusion of every possible other consideration, is a characteristic of certain transwomen.

To be proud to be a transwoman and accept that is not the same as being a women. Not worse, not better, but different. Own it and demand third spaces to suit your needs.

I expect a trans woman to stay out of female sport. We’ve already seen female records being broken by trans women who have lived for 40 years as a man, trained as a man, been taken seriously and had better access to funding and training as a man, with at least 19 key physiological differences (that hormones won’t change) that benefit them in sport.
It just takes the absolute piss out of us.

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

No. Absolutely not. Like most posters here I 100% disagree with this. That's absolutely not going to be happening.

Case by case can fuck off with its boundary blurring nonsense and mixed sex can fuck off and anyone who thinks the word woman is up for gender grabs can fuck right off too.

I expect them to do, as others have done, things like this:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/petitions_noticeboard/3752551-Petition-for-third-spaces-Fionne-Miranda

Women for decades had to fight for their rights so I would expect Transwomen to do the same, their own spaces for their own needs and not just take rights away from women, rights that have been hard fought for decades! Sometimes I want to say piss off and do the hard work yourselves because we had to and still have to. If you really believe you akin to a woman than graft like we had to - dont be the typical male where everything comes easy.

The fact the question is being asked shows they are still thinking like a man, everything is about them, and what others should do for them, they are the centre of the universe and no one else matters etc.

you want shelters? build some for yourselves like we did and fight for funding like we had too.

you want to use a toilet thats not the mens, get your own and the same applies to changing rooms.

dont want to be in mens prisons campaign for your own spaces then.

dont want to compete in mens sport? campaign for your own in that too.

wasn't that long ago that everything was unisex, mental asylums, prisons, hospitals, we fought for single sex for those things and the toilets hell to start with women didnt have public toilets at all it was men only women were meant to be chained to the kitchen, it took much campaigning from The Ladies Sanitary Association to get toilets women were allowed to use. and we still dont have all the sports men are allowed to compete in at Olympic level.

I will never understand any woman thinking that access should be granted on a case-by-case basis.

Case by case as in "do we keep X single sex or restructure it as mixed sex?" Not case by case for individual people. And as I said, the default is single sex and for many things that is how it should stay for the foreseeable future, especially physical spaces. But I think it's entirely reasonable that, say, a ladies night at a nightclub where women get free drinks should be based on gender. And I think the career opportunities/fast track cases are somewhere there could be other ways to achieve the same result of bypassing/neutralising the sexism that limits women unfairly vs men.

But as I said, I would not want to come into this (sadly at the minute hypothetical) process of mutual respect, communication and understanding with preconceived ideas of the result. So I'm not saying these are the solutions we should finding, more that I'm open to the possibility that solutions I'd currently think "no" to might actually make sense.

And widening my reply to some of the other discussion points raised, I'm not saying it's female people's job to solve the problem for trans women (despite it being dropped in our laps, sigh). It's more that I think we and they are both, in different ways, trying to fight the dominant male culture to make spaces for ourselves. So I think joining our perspectives is of mutual benefit. My gut feel is that many of the things that trans women want from womanhood are things female people wish hadn't been tied up into womanhood in the first place, and if we could create a safe, quiet place to talk about it we'd realise we aren't even fighting about the same thing anyway.

And I guess I'd better deal with my comment about sequestration. It's a whole thresd in its own right but the nub is that single sex spaces exist to mitigate issues with male treatment of women, including non-physical things like the male gaze. But they don't solve them. Outside the safe space the issues still exist, and in fact are actually implicitly being accepted as normal male behaviour by the existence of the safe spaces.

These female only provisions are, in our current society, needed, don't get me wrong about that. The problem is that once they exist, they become a reason not to solve the problem (hence the push for trans women to be "safe" in female spaces rather than turning analysis on the male behaviour that makes them unsafe). They also contribute to the construction of women as other and the fetishisation of female private spaces that drives some males to want to be in them. I understand the point about dignity as well as safety but I also know (first hand) this is also to some extent cultural as well.

So while I certainly don't suggest we just get rid of them and magically the need they meet will vanish (that is Genderist mystical thinking!) I do think we should at least aspire to a future where they are not needed and see them not as an end state solution in their own right but as a mitigation that we need now but that should not absolve us, and men, from addressing the actual problem of society implicitly sanctioning poor male behaviour and attitudes.

I just want to add that we wouldnt even have a lot of the sex segregated things we have today if it wasnt for WW1 and WW2, they didnt give a shit that we had no womens toilets or changing rooms in the workplace etc until they desperately needed us to work replacing the men in the factories, fields and shops.

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.

Most people don't have a gender if it defined as something to do with identity and nothing to do with biology. So actually the question is, and can only ever be, mixed sex or single sex.

These female only provisions are, in our current society, needed, don't get me wrong about that. The problem is that once they exist, they become a reason not to solve the problem (hence the push for trans women to be "safe" in female spaces rather than turning analysis on the male behaviour that makes them unsafe). They also contribute to the construction of women as other and the fetishisation of female private spaces that drives some males to want to be in them. I understand the point about dignity as well as safety but I also know (first hand) this is also to some extent cultural as well.

I don't agree. The fact that we have women's spaces is not inherently a reason to not bother to make everywhere else safe. The continued need for such spaces is a reflection of the fact that society continues to oppress women and treat them as objects to serve men's desires. This cultural oppression is what causes men to want to intrude on women's spaces and not the existence of the spaces themselves - i.e. without the protective spaces, they would just find another way to assert their dominance and control of women. We should not be arguing, in any way, against sex-segregated spaces. The spaces don't directly solve the issues but by removing barriers to women talking and thinking together, they do create a context which is less disabling of women's attempts to say no to the continued oppression. They also allow women to more easily see themselves as actually valuable human beings.

What I would like them to do is to figure it out for themselves. To sort their own protected spaces and stop relying on women to sort it all out for them.

What I expect that they will do is continue pushing into women’s spaces and complaining that women aren’t being accommodating of their needs.