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.

Transing, not autocorrect’s preferred “trancing”.

Why should I believe a man can by declaration or surgery change sex?

It is a pity that the belief or the operation does nothing to their male entitlement . The belief does not increase their compassion for women.

😂

I am pretty sure that, when the first Cormoran Strike book came out, the fact that JKR had used the pseudonym Robert Galbraith was widely known. I don't recall it being a huge secret.

How could I offer them the status of womanhood? It's not mine to grant. You're either a woman or you're not, nobody gives you it or takes it away from you.

Quite. If the status of womanhood is something to be granted, by whom?, then it is equally something that can be removed, from whom, by whom? It is why we are in this fucking mess.

It is a mistake to see it as a 'joining' of womanhood. It isn't. There is no sisterly feeling apparent in the tide of articles and social media posts and behaviours at rallies.

It's about taking womanhood from women, breaking it down for parts, using and colonising the thrilling and fun bits, and throwing the grotty bits out of womanhood along with female women and leaving that as an unnamed lower caste that are irrelevant and not to draw attention to themselves.

It's taken years to get to that realisation: I started with the female socialised good will and willingness to listen and empathise and try to understand (see Chumplady for details on how women will waste years trying to understand their abuser and what they do what they do, and providing them headspace when their abuser will never spend a moment reciprocally considering them-it isn't like if you just understand enough they'll quit abusing or you will stop minding so much.)

I was considerably helped along though by the first male women's officer for Labour. Ok I thought, innocently, this will be interesting, I'm open to seeing how a male person can fully engage with and represent the needs and issues of women from their position of care and interest in womanhood.

Oh lord the naivety.

Of course that women's officer promptly announced that anything that did not also equally apply to them as a male was not a 'women's issue' because transphobia/excluding males from womanhood, and those subjects (you know, about 99% of them) were not women's issues, nothing to do with them, hell fire and damnation cast upon any woman who mentioned them, and for 'women' read 'male with identity'.

Womanhood is not a reward for suffering (by looking like a woman, with all that humiliation involved for a male, which is just lovely if you're female and to look like you is seen as a humiliation, or a caricature of mocking a la Dylan Mulvaney). It's not a prize women can be mugged for. It either is at birth or it isn't. Head patting male people and telling them that yes, yes, absolutely you see them totally as women is not kind to anyone. Male people can be transwomen, great, good on them.

But women are not transwomen.

@nilsmousehammer 👌

🙄

@nilsmousehammer spot on

women cannot be transwomen is probably now my favourite snappy retort

How are you a woman?

@Brackenfield I am a woman because I am female and a human (and an adult). In much the same way that a doe is a doe because she is a female deer. If she was a male deer she would be a stag. HTH.

Like all other women, HermioneKipper was presumably born female, then grew up.

How are men who claim they are women women?

No wonder you won’t denounce incitement to violence against women on the other thread, you don’t even know what a woman is 🤦‍♀️

I’m a woman because I was born female. Survived childhood and grew to womanhood. Pretty simple really. Adult, human female.

As it happens, in case there was any cause for doubt, which there wasn’t, I know for sure that I have large gametes and xx chromosomes because like 80% of women I have given birth. Helpfully, in case there was any cause for doubt, which there wasn’t, I also know with 100% certainty that the man who fathered my children is definitely a man or else he couldn’t have been their father.

It was just the two of us by the way, there were no other parties involved of other hitherto unknown sex with hitherto unknown gametes.

Two human sex classes male and female, immutable, unchanging and clearly observable on ultrasound or at birth in 99.5 % of cases and discoverable via genetic testing in the rare case of anomalies.

They can call themselves what they like in my opinion.

Yes, they can call themselves what they want, @Dalekjastninerels - sadly they want so much more than that. They want everyone else to agree they are actually female, they want access to spaces where women and girls will be naked and/or vulnerable - loos, changing rooms, hospital wards, prisons, domestic violence and rape crisis centres, and sexual trauma counselling groups - and they want to take over women’s sports, awards - basically anything and everything that was fought for by women and is intended to enable women to gain equity with men.

And any refusal to comply is met with death threats (signs saying “Decapitate a TERF” for example, or saying TERFs should die in grease fires), rape threats and innumerable threats of violence.

So they can call themselves whatever they want, but I will not be forced to comply with their demands.

Maybe they could be a seperate category from women as in transwomen are transwomen but not women. I never use the word cisgender about myself. I am not an anomaly.

They are; I wish them no ill will- but while they yes can call themselves what they like they have not struggled as women have.

I resent their not having gone through the hatd graft of being an actual woman; no periods, no pms etc.

I am completely flummoxed by Nonbinary though.

The pronoun they pisses me off. They is plural.

BIGOT!

(semi joking, but your entirely reasonable take is enough to have you burned at the stake for rampant tervery!)

Maybe they could be a seperate category from women as in transwomen are transwomen but not women. I never use the word cisgender about myself.

But they are in a separate category - they are transwomen (males) rather than women

What is cisgender btw?

This. Great post.

It's all part of the gender religion.
Cisgender = identify as the 'gender' you were born with. That is, you are woman, you 'identify as a woman', therefore, you are a cis woman.

Or, as I prefer to say, you're a woman.

Cisgender is an attempt to erase sex and reduce everything down to a set of meaningless social constructs.

I wonder how it would be received if I started identifying as a transwoman. Get a prosthetic Adam's apple fitted and stuff a sock down my pants etc. 🤔

Yes.
Trans women are women.