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

I still admire you

Thanks, Cornflakes

Why thank you<<<<<< Takes a bow>>>>> I do my tiny bit.

I would really prefer to throw money at the right people. Sadly in current year that's not really helpful.

I look back at when I needed a space well away from men, even a Male custodian or plumber or electrician etc would have unnerved me. Actually having a male body staying in the same place, well I would not have stayed there. Better the shitty devil you know than the unknown man eh?

I wish I could like MN posts!

@Breakfastinbedonhols like noted

I think that is exactly what happened.

And based on what I know of her I’d say the fawning is basically a fear response that she is aware of but finds difficult to overcome.

I should note that neither bloke was outwardly intimidating in any way - just massive energy & attention vacuums which we all reacted to differently.

How dare you???? I do NOT allow you to redefine "woman" to include men. Woman is the name for people with a reproductive system that can bear children. Woman means a person with the experience and socialisation of being raised female. It does not include men, whatever they think of themselves.

@mythro
Neither sex nor gender is a binary.

Until you can show the existence of a third gamete you do not get to redefine human sex classes. Infertile men or women exist. They are still men and women, and pretending they are another class is dehumanising.

Society has never been organised around gender presentation for the simple reason that its only women who risk an unwanted pregnancy after sexual assault.

Yeah, but ... your physical present gamete science nonsense has no weight against mysterious "neuro-chemical reactions in the brain". Wikipedia, that bastion of peer-reviewed research, says so. 🙄

If society had always been divided along lines of gender expression and not sex, then all the women who were shut out of voting, owning property, leaving the house alone, or going to university etc (and those who still are, eg in Afghanistan) would have simply been able to put on some trousers and call themselves William and they could have had it all. A few women did disguise themselves (James Barry) or just said fuck it and did what men do anyway (Joan of Arc) but they knew they were female, and they were doing it BECAUSE they wanted to break out of the prescribed limitations for their sex. A successful disguise relied on not your female sex not being found out - or maybe in some cases on people turning a blind eye even though they suspected.

Likewise a man imitating a woman to get into a woman's space would have needed a convincing disguise, and once he was found out (which he would have been if the aim was to rape a woman, or perhaps not if he just wanted an escape/concealment) - he's have been removed.

Just because some people have successfully deluded others doesn't mean that those deceptions become reality. If a bank robber was disguised as a security guard and people fell for it, that doesn't mean he was one or that society recognises that anyone who looks like a security guard is a security guard. It just means a deception happened.

He goes by he on some days. So maybe we would only be intermittently deleted.

Simply highlighting the ridiculousness of this bollocks!

Personally I go by ἐγώ /οὑ pronouns every second month for three days around the full moon as I then identify as a Gorgon.

It suits you.

Matches your eyes.

Aww thank you that's so sweet!! ❤

Whatever you do give every lwomen a vote and make it anonymous. Because women often feel unable to say what they really think about this issue. Don't let certain personalities throw their weight around so quieter members don't get a say. Also make sure you have discussed what it could mean and how the group could change. You could easily end up losing a lot of the women. If a man was introduced into a women's group I attended I would leave.

BTW my husband is a Neurologist and there is NO evidence whatsoever that transgenderism is caused by anything organic in the brain or the brain being a different sex from the rest of the body. NONE.

Whatever you do give every lwomen a vote and make it anonymous.

This.

And this process should be rolled out across the board. Transgenderism has only made headway through a culture of fear.

Yes, wasnt there a vote for something I forget what, where when it was anonymous it went against tw. They ran it again with identifiers. When it was identified who voted which way, it went tw way.

Truly do detest menopause and what it does to my memory. andbody and sex life and oh God the endless list

@OneMorePlant · Yesterday 18:37

Personally I go by ἐγώ /οὑ pronouns every second month for three days around the full moon as I then identify as a Gorgon.

Any particular one? Or do you identify as Stheno one day, Medusa the next and Euryale at the weekend?

I find it enraging that you and women of your age that you are saying agree with you, don't give a shit about my vulnerable young teenage daughter having a safe space away from men. Thank goodness there are other women who are using their common sense.

I'm in my early thirties and can confirm I (and everyone my age I have spoken to) also support the rights of trans people to "exist and be accepted like everyone else." However I (and most of the friends I have talked about this with) don't think TWAW and do think single sex spaces matter in specific circumstances (prisons, changing rooms, rape crisis services). Make of that what you will.

@WandaWomblesaurus This

Extremely ageist, isn’t it?

Youth and age alike don’t prevent people from being wrong. Nobody has taken a vote on including some men into the category women, and opinion polls get widely varying results depending on how the questions are phrased (it’s clear that a lot of people thought “transwomen” means “women who identify as trans”)

Based entirely on personal contacts: the youngest woman in my local GC group is 22.

My granddaughters (17 & 14) think the gender identity ideology is tiresome rubbish, and are extremely cynical about the kids in their schools claiming to be trans or NB.

One of them (geeky, tall & intellectual) had a certain amount of pressure to call herself a boy not so long ago & resisted it.

In answer to the question (and I am trying to pick my words carefully so as not to offend anyone but I need to be able to describe what happened...)

I attend a women's only martial art class that involves sparring with each other etc. I have done martial arts before in mixed groups and liked it but I found the atmosphere in the women's only lessons completely different, in lots and lots of ways, and really liked it so stuck with it. Also it makes sparring/contact boxing easier because, while I really like men I don't enjoy being hit in the face by men (even very lightly/non-contact). Its just a completely different experience.

The women in the group are a mix of ages from late teens to early 50s but the majority are in their twenties/thirties. A huge range of experience levels an backgrounds. One time two transwomen joined. They seemed perfectly nice, and people smiled at them, no-one said anything horrible but, when it came to pairing up/changing partners no-one wanted to partner with them. And this was in a group which contained the age range most likely to argue TWAW. At the time I would have said TWAW too if asked but I still felt very uncomfortable about boxing with someone who was that much bigger, more muscley, broader than me. Even though I felt fine boxing with women who were stronger, bigger and better at boxing than me. It is just different. The other thing is, and this is going to sound bitchy, but although they were "dressed like women" (Think padded/push up bras, tight T-shirt and small tight shorts) they weren't dressed like any of the women there actually dressed (sports bras with T-shirts, jogging bottoms or long shorts).

In honesty even though no-one was hostile and everyone was super polite/smiley, the atmosphere was awkward and completely different to normal. And the two TW also seemed to find it very awkward as they stood together unsmiling and looked almost scared of the women and left half way through. So I don't think anyone benefitted. All it did was emphasize the differences.

Gender is a neuro-chemical reaction in the brain, normally along the lines of "I identify as a woman therefore I am a women". This is not a choice and also is something all cis people do.

LOL WHAT.