All women/women and transwomen. How do the dynamics change?

[waterwitch]

I’m in a local women’s charity group. There has been a suggestion that we should consider allowing transwomen (realistically a transwoman) to join. Just wondering if anyone would like to relate their experiences of this situation. I do have an idea of how the dynamics might play out, but would prefer to base this on actuality than my personal stereotyping iyswim

If they were actual women they would self exclude from women's spaces to not make other women uncomfortable. They would not demand access and throw a rage fit when hearing no like a man.

Some of you see me as advocating for men, but to me transwomen are women

And to most people they aren't. How are you defining "transwoman"? You seem to reserve the right to leave out "predatory men". Given that 1 in 585 MTF trans people are convicted sex offenders, do you deny their gender identity?

at worst it would make you group look more inclusive

'Look', yes, because the look of a thing is more important than the reality and the effect it has on others.

How completely in keeping with trans ideology.

I left that group for exactly the same reason. There were a couple of people like that in there by the time I removed myself from it, very clearly a fetish situation with everyone fawning all over them. It was grim and embarrassing.

In everyone's day to day life you always use gender to refer to anything rather than sex, this is why there are stereotypical renditions of "Man" and "Woman" on toilet doors as opposed to the biological markers of male and female

Bollocks

The pictograms for Man and Woman represent sex not gender, because how you urinate is explicitly tied to your body, not how you identify.

Penis havers, otherwise known as men, can use urinals. Women can't. As well as requiring the facility to sit down, we also need more toilets than men per head of population, because we have to deal with menstruation, we need to urinate more often due to smaller bladders, and are more likely to have continence issues than men due to physiological damage from pregnancy and childbirth.

All of these relate to our sex, not our personalities.

Oh, and in answer to the OP's question, it did very much change the dynamic of the group and this was only online. It is not a scenario I would ever take part in replicating either online or in person. It was deeply unpleasant.

Pippa I'd like you to reread this part of your post very carefully.

You have no right to get personal and question my parenting ability when you do not know me, especially in an environment that is supposed to be supportive to new and expectant mothers.

You think that you have a right to an environment that is free of critical comments, i.e. hurtful words on the internet from someone you will never meet and who poses no physical threat to you. Here, you have set clear boundaries. (Good luck with that on AIBU, btw. )

With that in mind, how come my mother, my sister and my daughter don't have the right to use a communal changing room without encountering a naked male there? What about hospital wards? My mother would have discharged herself in a panic, if she had to share a room with a strange male patient, regardless of gender identity?

Why are their needs less worthy than your need for people to be nice to you?

You mention intersectionality. Have you an idea of what number of women and girls are sexual abuse survivors? Is it intersectional to destroy female-only spaces, even if they're the only spaces some sexual abuse survivors may be able to use, so that a small subset of male people can have the choice of which space to use?

The reason we know this agenda isn't "intersectionality" is because intersectionality would recognise being born female as an axis of oppression, as well as gender identity. People use it to promote gender identity ideology over sex, which isn't right.

By the way. That 1 in 585 stat is just those in Uk prison according to latest stats. There were more in prison a few short months ago.

And therefore that doesn’t then include all those on the sex offenders list. I believe some women’s groups are now finding out how to match those people up too.

Stonewall assured us all that the census data would be accurate.

So, we should not question this data.

If you are teaching, you must know about risk for safeguarding.

Please explain to us here, parents of children and those with caring duties for vulnerable people, how do you propose to sort the people you assure us are like your friend, from the ones in prison to ensure safeguarding?

And why should we continue to trust any organisation who says they have the highest safeguards in place when you end up with Mermaids trustees as Jacob Breslow, and their employee with the erect penis collage on line, or Girlguiding District leader Monica Sulley who poses sexual content and then posing with weapons on line.

This is just three instances recently off the top of my head.

So, while you are calling for parents to ‘be kind’, can you explain how ‘kind’ it is to our children to have had such safeguarding lapses because organisations were ‘being kind!!’

The thing is. It seems you will read all our posts and dismiss them. But maybe, maybe just one thing we say will start the niggle.

Will it be the sports issue? Will it be the discussion about crime statistics? Will it be knowing that women are self excluding from rape care?

Will it be knowing that sense of vulnerability of looking at your child and realizing that telling a child to be ‘kind’ has led your child to be bullied?

Will it be watching as five out of six of your teens friends declare trans identities within 6 months of each other as I have and realising that there is something happening with our children and 5 out of a group of 7 are very unlikely to be ‘trans’, yet the school affirms them and even changed the records on 2 without the parent’s knowledge.

Will that be the stage you realise there are issues and those you have discounted for being ‘not liberal’, ‘not your age’, or whatever you tell yourself to discount people telling you what is happening were raising the alarm and your own prejudice ignored them.

“You have no right to get personal and question my parenting ability when you do not know me, especially in an environment that is supposed to be supportive to new and expectant mothers.”

Check out the new and expectant mothers board. This is the board to discuss the pro-women and pro-girls, the female half of the population however they identify - but female only, rights where there is conflict with a group of males who you have told us to be kind to.

Nice bigly letters neighbourhood.

A few years ago I belonged to a women's group that was invaded by a man who insisted he was a woman and demanded we respect his rights as a woman to join us. He refused to leave the venue where we met and wouldn't answer any questions about himself — did he have a GRC, was he living as a woman — and got aggressive when asked. I'm not trying to upset anyone by referring to him as a man: he was very clearly a man, his voice was male and he spoke to us in the way that angry men speak to women.

We took a vote then and there on whether we wanted to accept a TW in the group. I and several other feminists and lesbians were aware of gender ideology and words that can't be expressed here and voted against including him. Several women declined to vote and around half thought we ought to be kind and include him and so won the day. Number of us, including me, left the meeting and group at that point. I was one of the organisers and over the following weeks some women messaged me saying they wouldn't attend the group if he wasn't included and others said they wouldn't attend if he did. At the following month's meeting a handful of the be kind women turned up. I started a new GC women's group. The Be Kind group lasted a couple of months. Rumour has it that the new recruit came on to a couple of the other members and things fell apart, but it's rumour. Most of the women who'd been in the Be Kind group ended up joining my group, although some of them avoid any discussions of gender.

Please note that the word cis is not acceptable here. See the specific T+C's for this space.

Cease using it. I doubt anyone will bother to report you, your blather is very informative, you seem quite certain that everyone identifies as something. Well no. I am a woman. I don't identify as anything other than me. My sex is female, that means I am a woman. No identification required.

No man can ever be a woman. He will be male. No name badge will change that. Wikipedia is not an authority on anything. You can attempt to mangle the language as often as you like. But all you do is highlight that you are one of those posters who wants women to shut the fuck up and now down to the almighty penis.

Never going to happen. Save your breath.

Is it no big deal? Women have had women-only spaces for all of history. Only recently has it somehow suddenly become something questionable or bigoted to suggest that women benefit greatly from time together, without men.

Of course this doesn't need to be every group, but I think most women have always had, in addition to mixed sex groups, groups that were tacitly understood to be just for the women. I don't know that we should so casually dismiss something that is often a source of succour, support, and joy to so many.

I'm thinking of hammams in North African countries, or the sacred pools of Papua New Guinea, or even just small craft groups.

women only should be understood to be women only. Even discussing allowing men changes the group because it's so hard for women to stand up and be counted that they won't do so.

Yes.

It is so sad to read the groups who have been broken by this. As our visitor(s) this morning on the now deleted thread proved, male pattern behaviour rarely changes fully.

I think that women who are ‘kind’ never see it because it remains hidden. I think it would be eye opening for them to see some of these males in a situation where things are not going their way.

Imagine ignoring the current uni aged protestors who are trans or just trans allies and the way they behave at protests? Compared to the women’s behaviour at the protests.

What about the well publicised actions protestors took against Dr Stock?

I understand some academics would want to ignore inconvenient truths somehow, but they should at least admit to themselves they are ignoring it is happening and that they are minimising it. And stop admonishing others for seeing it and the significance .

At least admit the very chilling effect.

Gender is a neuro-chemical reaction in the brain, normally along the lines of "I identify as a woman therefore I am a women".

A neuro-chemical reaction in the brain - like a brain fart?

Clitoral Violence

The trouble with these pseudoscience "explanations" is that you can see people bending over backwards to try to force some distantly related, minor scientific theory into something resembling a "proof" of genderism. If you have to twist the evidence and the scientific claims and then make fake extrapolations from them, you're probably not barking up the right tree.

If "I feel like a woman so I am one" is somehow a scientifically valid and evidenced truth, and constitutes "gender identity" as a real thing, then are you saying that every thought we have about what we are means we are that thing? Including Rachel Dolezal who identifies as black, someone who thinks they're Jesus, someone with anorexia who is convinced they're fat, an adult who identifies as a child? Because they are all brain processes too. If you genuinely think gender identity is different, then you would need to be able to show this brain process is different and special - with clear, replicable, measurable, empirical evidence. If that exists, then why have self-ID and affirm predators and kids who are suffering from social contagion? We could just test for people being "really" trans couldn't we? And save a whole lot of harm to women and girls, pain and regret?

Either being trans is a real thing with actual scientific evidence other than just announcing you're trans. Or there's no scientific evidence whatsoever for it being a real thing, which is why trans people see the need to demand self-ID. Which is it?

@Ereshkigalangcleg
I like your term 'male transperson'
Think I might use it more often.

SockGoddess I don’t know if you’ve read Simon Edge’s The End of The World Is Flat, but that it such a good satire about this very thing. Bending over backwards to make nonsense appear scientifically sound.

All this has really exposed all the weaknesses in the safeguards for insuring veracity we took for granted. ‘Peer review’, academic qualifications, references, studies, standards, accreditation, badges, etc, etc.

So much we just took on trust turned out to be a flimsy load of bollocks. Our trust has being royally abused. I wonder how we can get it back again.

*been

I suppose that in 2004 we enshrined a massive, fat, dirty lie into law.

How can you argue for the truth after that?

Gender is a neuro-chemical reaction in the brain,

Have I missed some ground-breaking piece of scientific research? A new discovery? Evidence please, @mythro

The transmaxxers don't believe that brain chemistry stuff. They believe that being trans is a conscious choice and a way to keep their hair from thinning and obtain cheaper car insurance and have lots of sex with sympathetic young women.

I once visited a friend who'd had a psychotic meltdown and while there encountered a man who was certain he was Napoleon. He and my friend both had neuro-chemical reactions in their brains, too. Odd, isn't it.

"Either being trans is a real thing with actual scientific evidence other than just announcing you're trans. Or there's no scientific evidence whatsoever for it being a real thing, which is why trans people see the need to demand self-ID. Which is it?"

I find it concerning that some people cannot see the logic fail with this whole ideological situation.