Women's rights general conversations - Thread 2

[Kucingsparkles]

Continuation of Thread 1

There is so much excellent information and so many active discussions on FWR that I wondered if it would be useful to have a thread to sort of "cross-fertilise" between them - airing little thoughts or vignettes that wouldn't themselves merit their own thread, to highlight other posts/threads of particular interest or to point to notable developments on fast-moving threads so that casual observers know where to look.

(For example, "the X thread has meandered onto a fascinating discussion of Y" or "Poster P's amazing analysis on thread Z might have relevance to the scenario in thread W" or even "Random bloke asked me to smile while I was choosing onions, grr"- that sort of thing).

Personally I dislike recorded or observed female at birth, but find either less offensive than assigned (which is wrong in fact as well as intent)

Except "recorded" and "observed at birth" are also wrong, because it means mistakes aren't correctable.

I always imagine a bureaucratic error nightmare where someone is female, but can never manage to get that properly recorded it because it's neither her "gender" nor her "sex/gender recorded at birth"...

Yes, it's all a nonsense. Just 'male' or 'female' should suffice - we are all one or another and can't change between them.

The phrase 'assigned female at birth' paradoxically only exists because in a very, very few cases (I should think vanishingly small nowadays in developed societies) some people with DSDs were unfortunately misassigned. Obviously, once that error has been detected and their correct sex category determined, the 'sex assigned at birth' is not correct.

Misassigned happens in very rare circumstances of DSD. There is a society where children recorded female at birth grow a penis when they reach puberty. It's a genetic mutation but unlikely to be found outside this small group in the Dominican Republic. www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34290981.amp

@Tricyrtis2022 thank you! And now you say it, of course!

I just heard R4 discussing the problem with Andrew Tate and how teachers are doing PSHE lessons where they discuss misogyny.

The interviewee said that Tate starts with reasonable statements such as "men have different bodies to women" and goes through them having different strengths but ends with "women should stay at home cooking and cleaning".

They said the problem is that Tate warns boys that women will try to argue against this, so female teachers just reinforce his points.

Is it not also a massive problem that schools are teaching that you can change sex. Teachers are calling girls "he" if they request it, and saying such girls are boys and anyone who says it's not true is transphobic.

When teachers are bare faced lying to children they prepare teenagers for finding people who start with the truth elsewhere.

I guess one thing I have found is the pervasive notion that if you acknowledge any physical or biological differences between men and women, it automatically means that you must think women are inferior. That difference leads to an automatic hierarchy somehow.

That's an extremely interesting point. I never thought about that. It might be related to what men can't do - gestate a baby and give birth - which is (to my mind) obviously the most important physical thing a human being can do. If we are clear about that, the physical things that men can do suddenly are a bit crap, and as a society, we simply can't think that.

The main biological difference- afaik the only one which doesn't conform to some sort of overlapping bimodal distribution - is that men are 100% crap at having babies.
It's this absolute superiority of ours which gives rise to men's need to control us, and ongoing structural sexism even in developed societies where mere size and strength are increasingly irrelevant.

Xpost!

Great minds, etc!

I think it also points to the fear that lies at the heart of the need/wish to control women.

Cynical me says that the worst thing for women's history was when men realised they had anything to do with the making of babies.

Cynical me says that the worst thing for women's history was when men realised they had anything to do with the making of babies.

I think that in antiquity men assumed that they jizzed the baby inside the woman who was a mere vessel for carrying it.

That's an extremely interesting point. I never thought about that. It might be related to what men can't do - gestate a baby and give birth - which is (to my mind) obviously the most important physical thing a human being can do. If we are clear about that, the physical things that men can do suddenly are a bit crap, and as a society, we simply can't think that.

I suspect that "women and children first" when disaster strikes is not about gallantry but a tacit acceptance of this point. Survivors consisting only of men would be a bit useless in the survival of the species stakes.

But what if gallantry itself is an acceptance of this physical reality? I am just musing here.

I remember when DD1 was a new born and I was breastfeeding her, DH took over everything else. He said that he thought that as I had done the amazing work of gestating and birthing a small human and was now keeping said small human alive, his job was to take care of me. I would qualify that as gallantry. Gallantry doesn't have to be a patronising bad thing, does it?

I'm not sure that's 'gallantry' exactly ... risking life and limb in the supermarket and kitchen.

OK, maybe not gallantry, true. Although I don't know, he changed every nappy however explosive for the first month or so of her life. I thought that might qualify 😜

But the sort of behaviour that, well, honours the female ability to create life should be more widespread, I guess.

I'm on the thread about the TRA storming of McGill University and went meandering off on a stream of consciousness.

Namely, about the idea that when the Righteous do this kind of batshittery, it makes ordinary people take notice and raises awareness of the extremes of genderism. I think this does happen, of course - just look at the polls every time this topic escapes out into wider MN.

However, I think we (who are so very aware of the events and developments and all the nuances) can overestimate this too. Much of the media is utterly captured and if they even report these things will dutifully put the most Righteous spin they can; often these things aren't reported at all. This keeps the general public mostly in the dark.

On a more disturbing level, are all the people who deliberately refuse to acknowledge the news, even if it gets reported, because Bad Media or Tainted Source. They just stick their Righteous fingers in their Righteous ears and their Righteous heads in the sand.

My DH is a partial example:

He's 100% in agreement with me that sex is binary and immutable, that gendered souls don't exist, that males don't belong in female spaces, that rendering distressed children into sterilised permanent medical patients on the basis of social contagion is horrific, he's alarmed by sex-work-is-work and by ubiquitous increasingly violent porn, he's worried about what these things mean for our DDs.

And yet he deliberately doesn't want to know about most of these events and developments. He's always been a Good People, you see - he's genuinely conflicted that the Bundle of Good Beliefs has been Trojan-horsed by this utter rotten bullshit... He says it upsets him, or there are so many more important news events, or that any particular example is minor or any other way of batting off this topic. This is one of the very few topics that he and I can't speak about with complete freedom and honesty - always approached (by both of us) like a pair of mating porcupines.

Anyway, to bring the rambling back to where I was going - my DH will never know about the TRAs storming McGill university, as he doesn't know about TRAs storming Edinburgh university or Cambridge university or about duck-headed ballgown-piss protester or WiSpa or Hindenburg-boobed Canadian teacher ... his head is firmly in the sand.

I think the only reason he knows almost anything at all about this is because I insist on making him aware, by a programme of carefully-selected carefully-timed carefully-aimed information-arrows.

So I hold out little hope for other Righteous Good People.

I suspect that the sector of the people who deliberately refuse to acknowledge the news, even if it gets reported, 'because Bad Media or Source', although not negligible, is dwarfed by those that aren't aware of what's going on at all.

I have a good friend who almost fell out with me over this issue, because she knows a couple of transwomen and likes them and thinks they pose no risk to anybody, so she's not willing to consider any other side of it. We agreed not to discuss the issue, but I feel as if I've slightly drawn away from her since then - no idea if she feels the same but as we're not talking about the issue I guess I won't find out.

Here's something else for people to avoid knowing about. Why do tampon companies think this is a good idea?

twitter.com/ripx4nutmeg/status/1612717064023588864?

Tampon guy

I'm non binary. i don't menstruate.

Said as if the being non binary explains the lack of periods

No mate the reason you don't menstruate is because you are a man!!!!!

God that guy is so creepy.

He says he did it because he wants women to stop hating themselves so much

Say what?

I'm playing on the 'occupations A-Z' thread, and nearly objected to someone putting 'wanker' as it's not actually an occupation but seems like I'd have been wrong.