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 believe you and I feel very similar which is nice x

I've got a friend Nicky whose name is sometimes shortened to Nick. Is she a man then?

I did once. He sexually assaulted me. Realised very quickly that they are men till the end. Even after the operation.

Yes I would consider them a woman, I have trans friends, and I view them as they see themselves.

@wontbesilencedbyyou

In the nicest possible way, you probably know someone who is more of an exception. Over 90% of transwomen keep male genitalia, so statistically most of us are more likely to know one of those than someone who has surgically transitioned and has a husband and kids. In fact, if self ID becomes law, then the average transwoman will be even less like your friend, because anyone can say they are a woman with no commitment to any form of transition whatsover.

I would see your friend as a transwoman. Socially, very much to be treated as a woman, biologically male when that matters.

That’s an interesting phrasing. Is it even possible to view anybody as they view themselves? And is their ‘view’ of womanhood is anything at all like a woman’s view of womanhood?

I got into a bit of an argument with a self-declared ‘cis’ man a few days ago. It was about a portrayal of transwoman in a comic asking a young woman if she needed menstrual products because she was cranky. The man argued that he had trans friends and they noted women will offer tampons out (so it was validating for the TW to do it too). He said, very assertively, that women do this. But he was viewing his version of womanhood through the eyes of another male. It wasn’t in anyway reflective of how women actually think or behave (not least because it’s incredibly misogynistic to think bad mood = period).

My point being that he was so sure that view was reliable because he trusted his TW friend’s assessment on womanhood, when actually it couldn’t have been further from the actual truth.

Did this friend of your friend have the initials DM by any chance?

But many transwomen see themselves as transwomen at least in the old generation

I have never been offered sanitary protection by another woman during the whole course of my life.

The kind of person who does this has no idea what being a woman means. Period fetishes are among the more common ones, and are not the domain of natal females. I will not be made party to this.

@CountZacular its amazing how these men manage to miss the point of how it would ever come about that one woman was offering another a tampon. It certainly wouldn’t be triggered by ‘crankiness’.

Do they even realise what tampons do?

It's never just sanitary protection, it's always tampons.

Never pads, either menstrual or bladder weakness types.

The way tampons are used is the turn on.

Even if that hypothetical woman was cranky because of PMS/having a period, she would have clearly sorted her own period protection out already if needed. Having a tampon wafted helpfully in front of her is not going to help in any way other than in the mind of a man.

It is not possible to accept them as a woman. Because they aren't.

This goes the other way too. My DS is at uni and a transman has entered into the fold and tried to join a 'boy group'. It has changed the entire dynamic of the group and their 'lad chat' is now no longer possible and none of them like it. They do not see her as a man.

It's just the way things are. And I don't think we should be lying to trans people in telling them it is possible to be part of the opposite sex norms and groups - transition should really only be an absolute final resort when dysmorphia cannot be resolved in any other way, and with the understanding that you will never be the exact same as the sex to which you are transitioning, which is also known as the truth.

No. Sorry but no.

This.

No. Twatw, which is absolutely fine.
but TW are not W, for obvious reasons.

Can I refer to bull in a field with big balls a cow and actually force myself to believe it ?

No.

No. Only chromosomes can ever determine a person's sex. It doesn't matter how many operations someone has/what they call themselves/what clothes and hairstyles they have/what they want other people to call them, they cannot change their biological sex.

My initial complaint that started the whole discussion wasn’t even about the TW character but about the writer (male) assuming it was something women might do. It was a male defender, using a male’s lived experience as defence, defending a male writer, writing a male character - and I (a woman) was supposed to accept that as evidence of how a woman behaves.

Transitioning never seems to put an end to everyday misogyny.

Of course it is.

Whereas actual women are struggling to imagine circumstances in which you’d know someone needed one. And they’re mostly quite uncommon circumstances.

I suspect the fantasy of some sort of girly hijinks in women’s toilets is also part of this. They’re imagining all sorts of communal sanitary product sharing m, helping one another 🤮 or wherever. And the reality is a long way from that. Thankfully.

The reality might be someone seeing another woman being irritated that the tampon machine is empty and saying she’s got some in her bag. But I can’t think of a time this has ever happened in my presence. I wouldn’t be able to help anyway because I don’t menstruate because of the coil.

It is basically anything to do with vaginas is a bit of a pervy kick. So gross

I wrote a long post on MN a while ago about the Jungian view of this - basically that it is a lack of of successful integration of the feminine which develops into a neurosis (or complex) and then an unhealthy obsession with it, but it was deleted and I can't be arsed typing it up again if the Mumsnet overlords will just delete it.

It's pretty interesting though and is a genuine attempt at understanding how these behaviours manifest but I guess there could be a vague reading that it insinuates mental health issues so that Must Not Be Talked About

Well - why wouldn't you trust the opinion of a man on what constitutes womanhood, over the experience of a woman who has lived their whole life female, @CountZacular? It's like they can't hear how ridiculous they sound, making their weighty pronouncements on womanhood, based on zero experience. It's the ultimate mansplaining.

I think what many many trans women, and their advocates, are trying to convince us of, though, is that it is not a common lived experience of periods, childbirth, breastfeeding, menopause etc that makes us women, but something else absolutely entirely which may or may not be cosmetic, social, or etherial but which they certainly cannot define.

That offends me and is detrimental to me as a woman.

I’ve namechanged for this post as it feels like it could be outing.

Someone mentioned the dynamic change when anyone male is part of a women’s group, and I have two examples of this.

I worked with a transsexual (MtF) for a few years, and more recently I spent a weekend learning a craft at a women’s only retreat type event, with two transwomen amongst other women.

I tend to feel obliged to accept them as women, because that’s what they want. The work colleague was married to a man, no children, but the dynamic of the relationship was very different to a typical M-F relationship, although lack of children could explain that. Her behaviour was very male though, so whilst we tried to include her in ladies nights and friendship groups, it didn’t work out as I think she wanted. It always felt a little stifled, we didn’t relax as tends to happen with female only groups, so most of us felt sorry for her as we knew she felt that we weren’t 100% comfortable. She is lovely though, and we still keep in touch, but it’s not the same as a female friendship.

The TW at the craft workshop both identified as lesbians, and kept hitting on other women, and explaining how transphobic lesbians are for rejecting them. It was very uncomfortable. Both dominated conversations and tried to bring it round to smear tests and lesbian sex, which tended to be ignored and the subject changed. Mainly though they were pandered to the whole weekend. Luckily the organiser had made sure the TW were sharing a room, but they made comments about that.
I’ve been to similar weekends that were mixed sex, and never had these issues - by identifying as women the two TW had a huge level of entitlement, and ruined the weekend. I even think that TW being part of a mixed sex group wouldn’t have behaved like that. It was the women only aspect that appeared to give them a sense of power and entitlement.
I know the organiser well (through years of these events), she says it’s always the same, but she can’t specify female only as colleagues of hers have lost their small businesses due to TRA pile ons, and she can’t afford to lose hers. She also says that TW only ever book into women only weekends, not mixed sex.

I don't care about body parts etc, you cant change sex but I'm quite happy to socialise etc. I don't get the concept of segregated nights out anyway