Would you ever consider a transwoman a woman?

[ZeldaFighter]

If a person had transitioned from male to female early in life and had lived quietly and unobtrusively as a woman for say 20 or 30 years, would you consider offering that person the status of "womanhood"?

Would you go on a girls night in a group with them?

Would you think differently if the person had had gender reassignment surgery?

What if they did actually pass?

What if they had a husband and kids?

This isn't a gotcha and I don't know the answers. I am instinctively annoyed by the taking away of women's things but I am also dismayed by the hurt and harm potentially caused to trans people. I'm trying to decide my own position and wondering if there are compromise positions. Apologies if this has been asked before and thank you for your thoughts.

I can easily believe that someone with dysphoria feels like they were born in the wrong body, and that it's a distressing experience for them.

That doesn't mean they were actually born in the wrong body. Believing that means believing in some kind of gendered soul that can be put in a right or wrong body. Understanding how the person feels doesn't mean affirming that the feeling reflects reality.

It's true for other mental health issues too. An anorexic person who truly feels that they're fat. A socially anxious person who truly feels that everyone is staring at and judging them. The feelings can be very intense and painful. That doesn't make them accurate.

The whole 'my lovely friend' bit - some of us also have lovely friends who are female type women unable to share mixed sex spaces and have to walk out when a male person walks in. Your sweet friend who mostly no one would know, who took blockers/hormones young, is the gateway for Isla Bryson, the one with the sword, the one wanking in the cubicle, the one shouting that despite being six foot tall and obvious they are absolutely female and have a cervix in a bottle to prove it -

if it's one, it's all. This is the point. No one is going to stand on the door and discuss with the poor individual in question whether or not objectively they 'pass'. So in fact you are arguing to exclude women, from women's spaces, in order to provide your mate and any other man who wants it with access to non consenting women. For whatever agenda they happen to have. And valuing that more than you value women having equality of access to public life and services and resources.

Third spaces respect people with TQ+ identities and accepts their feelings, needs, preferences not to use a space of their birth sex or identify with it. It would also add to inclusion generally, parents with children etc, meaning it would not be a space in which TQ+ were identified on sight by walking into it, and many women will quite happily use mixed sex spaces with them because they are privileged enough to not realise or apparently be able to imagine what life is like for female people who cannot.

And I believe that some people are born in the wrong body.

How on earth can you be born in the wrong body? You are your body. It's not as if there are person-essences floating around in the ether that get collected and plonked into a baby's body when it's born!
There are people who (in various ways) don't feel ok with the body they have, but that is a psychological issue.

The problem in a nutshell, Farmageddon.

You are describing what I understand as gender dysphoria. These days it's considered transphobic to think that gender dysphoria is a prerequisite for a trans identity. It's OK, posters often come here to tell us we are awful people for saying humans can't change sex but in doing so they reveal how little they understand about things have changed in recent years.

Having known a TW very well I understand how much loathing, a person with gender dysphoria, has for their own body. My friend would 'tuck' even when they slept and kept a razor in their desk drawer to shave at lunch time, this was even before their transition. You'll forgive me if I'm doubtful that the many men I see on line proudly posing in women's underwear, with a 5 o'clock shadow and penis on full view share the same experience as someone with GD. Embracing these men as women is an insult to women and people who experience GD but if you accept self ID then you cannot differentiate which so many of us are holding the line on biological reality.

I think you will find that most women agree with what JKR says. That women's rights and spaces should not be turned into mixed sex spaces for the sake of men who think they are women. Being a woman is not a feeling.

I don't think anyone who expects others to put their thoughts, experiences and feelings aside for their personal comfort and preference can be described as 'lovely' - not matter how soft their voice or pretty their dresses.

I think you will find that most women agree with what JKR says.

And most men. When it comes down to it (and particularly in the context of dating), men absolutely know what a woman is. And judging by recent reports of TW being disappointed to find other TW rather than just actual women in women's toilets or other women-only spaces, so do they!

I suspect OP has a problem because TWAW is pretty well a left-wing mantra these days and the Labour Party cannot decide if only women have a cervix or not. I am also a LP member but do not engage much as meetings have all gone to Zoom and I can't be bothered. It does leave me with nowhere to vote, however.

The born in the wrong body thing is very over.
Mermaids themselves tweeted that of course no one is ever born in the wrong body.
I might possibly agree that their life hasn't been easy. But it's still a choice they took.
My life and other womens lives also have not been easy, but not through our own choices necessarily.

Where is the seething anger from women.?

The only seething anger I see is from the men when we say no. Women on the whole are incredibly funny about this whole issue. Go look at our threads that descend into quips about food mostly. Go back further and it was cakes.

And the no debate was from genderists. We women have wanted debate for 20+ years. Its taken this long to get to any kind of debate.

I know you will hate to hear this but, singling out sports as a no man area makes you transphobic. Just go say that on Twitter and you likely will get your arse handed to you.

The newer mantra is acceptance without exception.
That means any man who says hes a woman in any space for women, no exceptions.

Would I

See / think of them as a woman? No. Transwoman, yes - as in a member of the male sex who regrets that unchangeable fact and lives with it.

Dress, makeup, live and love in safety as they want? Yes - do as you will an it harm none.

Be friends? Yes, I do.

Use their chosen name? Yes, I do that with anyone who has chosen a name for whatever reason.

Say she/her when referring to them? No, I find myself constructing sentences that avoid pronouns - I'm suspicious of attempts to coerce pronouns into email signatures so I'm making a stand through omission.

If they passed? ... Does this actually happen in real life, though?

Women's prisons, changing rooms, dormitories, tents, hospital wards etc - no.

Women's sports - no.

Women's opportunities - no.

Third space is the way for all those areas and transwoman should be welcomed and safe in those places.

You give me hope there are normal people on MN . Well said

I agree. If going down the path of transition is what you need to do to live your life happily and in peace, go ahead, but be honest - you cannot change sex, no-one ever has, and you cannot expect other people to believe it either.

No. I might be great friends with them and think they're one of my favourite people in the world, but that doesn't have any connection to thinking they're a woman.

Normal people who just close their eyes to the issues and don't care about women so long as special male people are nurtured?

No. That's not normal. It is not normal to believe that male people are intrinsically more valuable than female ones, and that females have a biological birth right to take less to give males more. And if you're following that belief you are really making a nonsense out of pretending you think that those male people have become the group you see as lesser and cannot care equally about.

The same JK Rowling who cosplays as a man herself when writing certain books? Quite a conflicted approach.

Since the vast majority of these men retain their penis they clearly are very attached to it. And no I no longer have empathy since these men started attacking our words like women and started saying we were all hateful because we won't go along with the pretense that they are women. They have shown us no respect. And I'll be giving non back. We never get any of this from trans men.

And I do respect some trans, the ones who don't tell lies about biology. Jenner stands up for us women in relation to sports. Buck Angel tells the truth and so does Blair White.

No,

Boom!

JKR is trans!!

🙄

....how is writing under a man's name, something many female authors have done, showing any conflict with believing that women's rights and spaces should not be removed and handed over to men?

This. As long as they didn't try to insist I chant the mantras, and didn't intrude into women's spaces.

Yeah, because a female author assuming a male pen name to avoid preconceptions about her work is exactly the same as men telling female people that lived experience of being female bodied is irrelevant because womanhood is a state of mind and then using that unevidenced assertion to justify a land grab of female spaces and resources.

Not enough roll eyes in the world.

^^Yes to all of this.

I want a word to describe my female body without any of the gender baggage attached. That is taken away when you conflate sex and gender.

The same JK Rowling who was told not to publish Harry Potter as
Joanne K Rowling because parents wouldn't buy the books for boys?

Plenty of female authors have published under male names, not because they thought they were men but because they are still taken less seriously than their male counterparts.

M.C Beaton books have been written by a man since Marion's death in 2019, I don't think he claims to be a woman either.

Because female authors never wrote under male pseudonyms, eh?

I mean, Edith Pargeter writing historical novels under her own name and the Cadfael detective novels under the name Ellis Peters.

All the Bronte sisters.
Mary Ann Evans = George Elliot
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin = George Sand
Alice Bradley Sheldon = James Tiptree, Jr.
Karen Blixen = Isak Dinesen

Female authors using initials, like J K Rowling.
P D James
Louisa May Alcott writing Gothic novels under the same A.M. Barnard.
Nora Roberts = J.D. Robb

Detective fiction is full of female authors using male pseudonyms or initials.
E C R Lorac = Edith Caroline Rivett is one I've read a lot.