I am embracing virtue signalling pronouns in emails

[MsFogi]

I have realised I have made too many assumptions about gender over the years. I had always assumed that Paul (name changed of course) in my company was a man simply on the basis of his appearance (well over 6 foot, well built, big beard, low voice that only someone with an Adam's apple and whose balls have dropped could have). Imagine my relief to find that I have not been misgendering him for over a decade because he has helpfully added his pronouns to his email auto signature - they are he/him/his. There is no company diktat to add pronouns on emails so clearly this is important to Paul or maybe he has been misgendered recently.

So, I thought I would ensure that Paul was not offended on a Teams meeting this afternoon and kicked off the meeting by asking everyone to note that Paul's pronouns are he/him/his and that given that he has stated these that everyone please be sensitive to ensuring that they use them. No one said anything so I think they all took it on board, no one misgendered Paul and I like to think that his move to include his pronouns at work has been embraced in my meeting. Maybe as a result others that attended the meeting will add theirs to their auto signatures too.

Well knock me down with a feather

I’m still waiting so see how a woman behaves so I can decide if I am one?

@aseriesofstillimages

Thanks for coming back.

My question from earlier as I know you've had a number of them:

Can you name some that aren't biological and aren't gender stereotypes that aren't accurate and are often damaging e.g. women should wear dresses, women should wear make up, men shouldn't cry, men should earn more etc?

Genuinely asking as I have done before on here and nobody has answered.

If being a woman can be defined as a gender identity, what are the signifiers of that identity please?

Nobody has ever answered when I've asked. And it's not even a 'gotcha', I just don't understand how people can be so sure that those they disagree with are being nasty, mean, bigoted etc when they can't themselves articulate their own views on the most fundamental issues of this topic.

Me too!

Why is it not possible for a transwoman to have a uterus? I thought you believed that transwomen are women. Most women are born with a uterus, so why would you make the assumption that a transwoman doesn't have a uterus? If transwomen are women, then most transwomen must be born with a uterus.

What do you think would happen if I set up a refuge, or a changing room, or a book club, or a discussion group, or a literary prize, or a political officership, and said it was only for people AFAB

It's not just hypothetical, I'm aware of many situations where women have tried to do this. It's not something that tends to work out for them.

There are examples of individuals who ‘lived as’ the opposite sex throughout history

There have tended to be practical reasons why they have done so. Plus, someone disguising themselves as the opposite sex, isn't actually the opposite sex. It's trickery. You can't really say that sex/gender doesn't have a biological basis simply because some people tricked society into thinking they were the opposite sex. The concept of "gender" is fundamentally about biological sex. If sex didn't exist, neither would gender.

The concept of "gender" is fundamentally about biological sex. If sex didn't exist, neither would gender.

Woah! I do admire your ability to cut right through all the bullshit, and make things crystal clear, Eresh. Thanks.

Ok but now you have to say how they are related. Can you give some more detail?

Ok but now you have to say how they are related. Can you give some more detail?

How what is related? Not clear what you mean.

Right, you seem to know what your talking about, you appear confident on here anyway.
So surely if you believe sex and gender are deeply intertwined, you can explain gender.
What is gender?
How will I find mine?
How intertwined?

All genuine questions, because you can stop all this drama by answering.

Woah! I do admire your ability to cut right through all the bullshit, and make things crystal clear, Eresh. Thanks.

Thank you

This is a repeatedly asked question which TRAs won't or can't answer. Their ignoring of this very simple question speaks absolute volumes.

And people wonder why most people think it's all nonsense.

Most if not all were female trying to get in on life and avoid being married, knocked up and sentenced to a life of hell, weren't they?

Also many were in the creative arts which were notorious for being male dominated.

Even JKR didn't put a female name on her books to avoid being sidelined.

Political lobby: archaeologists shouldn't name biological sex or race of skeletal remains because the person may not agree with the labels.

Also political lobby: retrospectively transes everyone in sight in history without the faintest conscience.

The lack of coherence is not a bug, it's a feature.

Suppose OPAB and OVAB could be used - observed penis and observed vulva at birth?

Or is that a bit too scientific accurate?

Thanks also from me for coming back @aseriesofstillimages I did read a bit about Willmer Broadnax and Billy Tipton. They seemed to have been contemporaries, although I don't know if they ever met, and both in band music. As it was their deaths that led to their secrets being disclosed, it's obviously impossible to ask them what they thought of themselves and why they did what they did.

They, apparently successfully, managed to fool everyone. I wonder if the stress of keeping the secret led to the ulcer that caused Tipton's death? Both directly and indirectly as Tipton seemed to have avoided seeking medical help.

i can't remember what your point was but thanks, again, for the name; sad and fascinating.

I also wouldn’t agree that the majority of people who advocate for trans inclusion insist there must be no words available to refer to a person’s ‘biological sex’ - whether you like the terms or not, ‘AFAB’ and ‘AMAB’ are commonly used for that purpose. I recognise that these terms do not directly capture what you mean by ‘biological sex’ (and are founded on beliefs about the nature of sex and gender that you reject), but they will capture almost all of the same people in reality, given that the sex recorded at birth for the vast majority of people (on the basis of their genitalia) will reflect their chromosomes and align with their other primary and secondary sex characteristics.

No, sex is NOT assigned at birth it is determined at conception and observed and recorded at birth, with the exception of the very rare cases of ambiguity when further tests will be done. That aside, TRAs say sex and gender/gender identity are not the same thing, Female and Male are not genders they are sex categories so the 'assigning at birth' is just a pile of crap that, unsurprisingly, completely contradicts the rest of the gender/gender identity mantra.

@Whatiswrongwithmyknee

This is a repeatedly asked question which TRAs won't or can't answer. Their ignoring of this very simple question speaks absolute volumes.

It's a shame isn't it? It makes me feel that they either can't articulate an answer (in which case I don't know why they feel in a position to call people bigoted etc) or they don't want to because they are being disingenuous and not engaging with the discussion in good faith.

I have read the last few pages of this thread with a lot of interest though haven’t commented this far. This statement you pose above, and the same for ‘what is gender? How do I find mine?’ - what do you say to the notion that the signifiers of gender can only be identified by the individual? What if the sense of womanhood is felt differently, not only between a trans woman and a biological woman, but between two biological women?

I feel like the argument of ‘it’s personality, not gender’ cannot be applied in a world that still applies gender differentiation to almost every human experience. By that I mean that a trans identifying person will not practically fit in anywhere, and feel as if they can’t fit in anywhere, and we all crave to fit in. To be segregated from society is akin to torture.

By asking ‘how do I find my gender?’ leads me to believe that the asker has no conflicts in finding their gender, or, more pertinently, has no conflict in finding where they belong. But what if someone does have that conflict? And what if someone finds an individual sense of belonging in a societal group that they are barred from, simply because of a physical attribute?

@Didimum

Your points are entirely valid.

However, even if you are 100% right, it still does not explain why this aspect of "gender", which is so mysterious it cannot be described, only experienced, and which no one can know about another through observation but only by explicit disclosure by the person themself, is at the same time so significant to how a person exists in society that it is not only interchangeable with sex in determining what social and legal support, protection and opportunities a person needs, but actually supercedes sex for all practical considerations outside procreation and medical care.

So, for me at least, it's not that I don't believe some inner quality called gender could exist - on the contrary, i can see many possible ways gender could be real and indeed I reckon could give a better answer and justification for it than most of the people we see on FWR who claim to believe in it - it's that there is no way gender could exist that backs up the demands that trans ideologists make off the back of it.

What if the sense of womanhood is felt differently, not only between a trans woman and a biological woman, but between two biological women?

Surely the point is that two biological women don't share a "sense of womanhood". What they share is a female body and that they have to deal with the social consequences of that body.

the notion that the signifiers of gender can only be identified by the individual? What if the sense of womanhood is felt differently, not only between a trans woman and a biological woman, but between two biological women?

Of course it is, because it's what we've been saying - it's personality. We are all different.

a world that still applies gender differentiation to almost every human experience

Does it? How does it? Is drinking a cup of tea different for me as a woman than it is for a man? Is this the 'men are from mars' school of thought? Because most feminists take issue with that.

Sexist stereotyping exists, of course. This doesn't actually mean that women are born liking the colour pink, or knitting, or kittens, or pillow fights.

what if someone finds an individual sense of belonging in a societal group that they are barred from, simply because of a physical attribute?

Like, say, older people who would really really like to discover their inner child and enroll in kindergarten?

(I refer you to StephonKnee Walsht, but do take care googling). Or an able bodied person who strongly identifies with amputees?

dailycaller.com/2015/06/02/meet-the-transabled-able-bodied-people-who-identity-as-disabled/

Are we to abandon all boundaries, or criteria, on the basis that some people will be very sad if they aren't allowed to join a particular group?

I think many people want to 'find their tribe'. In the past the seeker may just be left with a dodgy haircut and a dodgier wardrobe. Or we'd have organisations to protect people and society, to a greater or lesser degree, from falling into drugs, bad relationships, etc. Now major institutions are cheerleading children into poorly thought through medical and surgical decisions and insisting on males intruding into female lives and spaces.

I could live with the rest of it, I think; pronouns, cis-this, tran-the other, were it not for tras insistence on gobbling everything. No civil disagreements, as we've seen on this thread. Which posters have called 'the nastiest thread on MN'.

So I'm not prepared to pronoun, to 'be kind', to be 'cis'.

Just verbed pronoun