Do pronouns feel alien to anyone else?

[janeseymour78]

By this, I mean I have friends who are 100% pro pronouns as a show of support and we've had our debates, and then there are others who say it is unhealthy to reinforce stereotypes, eg. By using them on work signatures

For me though, adding she/her pronouns to everything and even having being asked what they are verbally, she/her feels alien to me in a visceral way. I'm curious about this because I have several friends who don't share that feeling at all.

Im GC and I don't believe people are binary. I have elements of feminity and masculinity that whatever else that form who I am. I know I'm a woman, I have endometriosis so I'm painfully aware, as well as all the other reasons women are made aware of their sex.

It comes down to adding 'she/her' to everything would not feel right to me, as though it didn't reflect me. It would like I was falsely reinforcing my womanhood when I don't live my life that way or feel that way. Am I making sense? Do others feel this way?

By the way do we have the full bingo card yet?

@Whatiswrongwithmyknee
> TW are protected like other men.
This is nonsense.

> a person recruiting for a job is not going to choose a man over a TW
Do you seriously think trans women do not face employment discrimination.

Only if you're very selective with your dictionaries. Here is the definition from one of the Oxford dictionaries: adult human female

www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/woman?q=Woman

But that's precisely part of a problem. Do you think insisting on completely excluding and alienating trans women is any way to work towards addressing shared issues?
So many GC people are even willing to burn down women's rights just to maintain the separation, like the ones actively working with the conservative right.

If you don't separate men from women you don't have women's rights though do you? TW have nothing more in common with me than any other male so it makes no sense to group me with the and then think we can somehow use that utterly random grouping to address the oppression which biological females face. The TW who feel alienated by that (and lets not pretend it's all TW) need to look at their male privilege tbh. If someone feels alienated by an oppressed group to which they do not belong, working to promote their rights, I think that is something they need to work on.

Hear hear. So very many women have been turned by the massive overreach of trans activism from #bekind allies to staunch defenders of their own boundaries and rights, to active feminists.

Do you think insisting on completely excluding and alienating trans women is any way to work towards addressing shared issues?
Do you think it is possible to work with people who are actively trying to change the definition of woman in law and attack any women who protest? In any case these shared issues (if they exist and I doubt it) are a very small part of what feminism is about. We have bigger fish to fry. Sort out your own problems and stop expecting women to do the work for you.

@Whatiswrongwithmyknee
> If you don't separate men from women you don't have women's rights though do you?

This mindset is precisely the issue here. Why, exactly, do you need to separate trans women from women for women to have rights?

That's really very underhand to selectively quote what I said in order to misrepresent it. You said that TW and W face the same discriminations. I said that employees don't always want to employ women as they worry they might get pregnant and leave - this will never be used as a reason not to employ a TW.

TW face discrimination for entirely separate reasons.

Well unless you're arguing for collapsing all categories and having no BLM, no attention specifically to anti-semitism etc then I think you already know the answer to this.

Because trans women are men

This mindset is precisely the issue here. Why, exactly, do you need to separate trans women from women for women to have rights?
Oh fgs, because we have nothing in common with trans women. Nothing. Why do you expect feminists to look after everyone? We are not your mum.

That's not true at all, but I guess it's no surprise you can't see shared struggles when you're fundamentally incapable of empathizing with anyone else.

I will save my empathy for women. Ones who have suffered horrific FGM, not men who have actively decided to mutilate themselves by cosmetically having their own penis’ removed. That’s really, really not a shared struggle is it?

Your reading comprehension needs a massive overhaul. That isn't what I said at all. In fact, it is so far from what I said that I am wondering if you are stupid or disingenuous.

There is, as you should know, far more to genetics than the sex chromosomes. There has been a lot of academic work on the inheritance of personality traits. You can even see it in non-human animals.

You need to get off the internet and out into reality.

Do pronouns feel alien to anyone else?

Going back to the original question - I am now 65. I have never needed pronouns in my life so far so fail to see why I need them now.

> Ones who have suffered horrific FGM

Middle-class British white women, whom your movement overwhelmingly consists of, suffer no such thing.

Oh right - so anti-FGM campaigner Hibo Wardere doesn't count?

And considering that this country is about 85% white (and that white is not an insult even though you use it as if it were a slur to discredit us), it's actually quite striking that so many of the most prominent gender critical women are not. Allison Bailey, Keira Bell, Sonia Appleby, Raquel Rosario Sanchez just to get you started. How they have suffered at the hands of your coreligionists. Don't patronise ethnic minorities, and don't assume you know the colour or class of any of us.

I can't speak for the wider UK but I live in Scotland and I think the GRA issue turned into a kind of moral panic. It wasn't properly explained or talked about with the public - same thing happened with the Named Person rule SNP brought in.

I personally don't agree with some of the views expressed on this thread, which goes to show how complicated the issue is. I'm just tired of women arguing with each other.

That's not true at all, but I guess it's no surprise you can't see shared struggles when you're fundamentally incapable of empathizing with anyone else.

No, your refusal to listen to women stating their boundaries suggests it's not us who is fundamentally incapable of emphathizing with anyone else.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie if you want a non-British one.

Anyway, as someone said upthread, good night and good luck with your exam revision. Honestly actually, I do wish you happiness via greater engagement with reality and the world outside.

Well that’s the first time I’ve ever been called middle class that’s for sure 😂😂

So protecting women is now a movement? Right okay. I’ll happily belong to this “movement”.

I live in Scotland and don't believe it's a moral panic. The Scottish Government refused to consult or meet with women's rights groups, have so far done two consultations on the GRA (because they didn't get the answers they were looking for from the first one), are holding unminuted, private sessions with select lobby groups during their evidence sessions regarding the GRA, claimed (against all evidence) that the electorate voted them in on a promise to reform the GRA, the Scottish Government were pulled up in court for claiming that TWAW is policy despite no consultation, meetings or evidence to show this being discussed and implemented and any concerns raised have simply been dismissed as 'not valid' by the First Minister. It's institutional capture at an astonishing level.

I will try to hold out on pronouns for as long as I can do so. I'll use those others have requested, sure. But I absolutely don't believe in the religion of gender and I don't really fancy emphasising my sex every time I send an email. And I reject being labelled "cis" - I don't see myself as particularly feminine and, whilst I am quite happy being female (particularly now I am a mother to kids, a happy consequence of being female), I don't believe I could opt out of any of the inconveniences of being female with a new name and pronoun. Unlike many (not all, but many) trans women, I find most of the superficial trappings of being socially female quite annoying - If I could take a pill that selected a boring but acceptable safe outfit that suited me every time I got dressed for the rest of my life I absolutely would.

I'd be quite happy to relinquish "woman" to whatever the new meaning was, if we could have "biologically female" in substitution wherever it matters (safe spaces/safeguarding, sports, discussion of discrimination relevant to those with female bodies etc). But the truth is that this wouldn't be acceptable either. Because biological females are not allowed anything for just us.

The argument that women and trans women suffer discrimination is true. But it isn't really the same - there is in truth not that much overlap on the Venn diagram. Th most obvious overlap would be very brief situations where a TW who passes (unusual) really well is assumed to be a woman and hassled or catcalled or treated disrespectfully, overcharged for MOT etc. But many women suffer long term discrimination due to pregnancy or the assumption of pregnancy etc, many women are the default carers, many women are judged for the ways in which they express themselves due to years of conditioning that late transitioners do not experience etc etc. TW are more likely to be discriminated against for not being male enough. Most on here would fight that cause with TW, but that logically requires TW to accept that they are a male who does not conform to stereotypes of men, rather than a female.