What rights do transpeople believe they do not have?

[sunshinesupermum]

Serious question, so I can go back and discuss with my DDs (aged 38 and 42) without a row. I support JKR and they call me a TERF!

Feminism is for women, by women.

So right Arabella Scott

This. DH asked me if he should get involved and I explained that while I enjoy his passive support, if he did get involved it would take 5 minutes before he started to tell me where we were going wrong. He got the message.

On feminism:

If you believe that feminism is supposed to include trans women, I draw the following conclusions from that:

• You are OK with redefining the word "woman" to mean people of either sex who dress/think/feel in a stereotypically feminine way, so that male people who dress/think/feel in a stereotypically feminine way can be included within this definition.
• You are OK with there not being a word which means "all adult humans of the female biological sex, however they identify", and there consequently not being clear vocabulary to identify the group of people who may, for example, suffer obstetric violence, become pregnant as a result of rape, or be subjected to female genital mutilation.
• You are OK with biologically female people feeling uncomfortable and unsafe, often to the point of self-excluding, in women only spaces because their feelings and safety are less important than those of biologically male people who claim to dress/think/feel in a stereotypically feminine way.
• You do not care enough to object to vulnerable biologically female people being less safe in women's prisons, or biologically female athletes no longer having the right to fair competition in order to accommodate biologically male people who claim to dress/think/feel in a stereotypically feminine way. Or if you do care enough to object to that, you have not yet realised that you are considered a TERF by those whose ally you claim to be.

Now maybe I'm stuck in the second wave with that mad old bat Germaine Greer, despite being a millennial, but I struggle to see how the above values are compatible with being any kind of feminist.

Prioritising male people over female people is the literal opposite of feminism, is it not?

And on gender identity:

I do not actually believe that people should be allowed to identify however they want. There, I've said it. Now, we cannot actually stop biologically male people from believing or claiming that they identify as women, but I do think the law should say, "your identity is your business, but for the purposes of the law, including sex based rights and access to single sex spaces, if you are biologically male you are to be treated as a man in all circumstances where society distinguishes between men and women".

That may sound harsh, so let me explain my line of thinking.

If you want to identify as a cauliflower or a cheese sandwich, to quote someone on another thread today, fine. I mean, you're not one, but cauliflowers and cheese sandwiches are not sentient beings and are therefore not bothered by you claiming to be one.

The problem with you identifying as a woman is that your identity includes all women, barring the ones who choose to identify as trans men or non binary. Your identity is personal to you. It has nothing to do with me. I do not wish to be included within it. I also do not wish to describe myself as a man or non binary simply to escape being included within your identity. I also do not want to have to start a campaign for spaces and sporting categories for people of my own biological sex who do not share your identity, because frankly, we already did that once. If you really can't use spaces and compete in sports for people of your own biological sex, you need to start a campaign for your own spaces and sports for people who share the same identity as you. But your belief that you have the right to identify as being the same was me, despite the fact that there is not one thing we have in common, deprives me of my right to identify myself as being different from you. As far as I am concerned, I have an absolute right of veto on whether we share any kind of identity or not, and I am saying we don't.

This colonisation of womanhood has got to stop.

Margot please write a book. Or at the very least an essay.

I've been struggling for ages to express the exact things you've put so eloquently and dispassionately.

@MargotBamborough thank you for all your recent posts, could not have said it better.

@@eellww - as others have said, you seem to think your initial post will be some kind of profoundly informative lightbulb moment for us GC people.

It isn’t. We’ve heard - and refuted - every one of those points many, many times before.

Perhaps it might help if you could define ‘gender’ for us.

What is gender? What is a gender identity? What is a female gender? What is a male gender? What are some of the other genders?

I hope you won’t say something that (further) diminishes your credibility, like ‘it’s up to people to define those words for themselves’.

Because sex is definable, it does matter and it cannot be changed - and you can’t expect people to relinquish the idea of sex for something people can neither agree on, nor define.

You also mention hate crimes against trans people.

More hate crimes occur against biological women in one day than have occurred against trans people in the last 10 years.

We are so acclimatised to hate crimes against women that they somehow don’t even count in the minds of transactivists and their allies.

We know they don’t count, because we’re told we’re bigots for being alarmed by the prospect of hate crimes against us increasing, as a result of (among other things) self-identification.

Another one appreciating MargotBamborough posts. Brilliant responses but particularly loved "We "fail to see" this because it's utter bollocks"!

Reasons why misogyny was left out of the hate crime list (a) it's only a crime against women and women don't count (b) the sheer scale and number of incidents would be overwhelming.

Perhaps it might help if you could define ‘gender’ for us.

Oooh do you think we might be, finally, treated to a workable, agreed definition?

I’m living in hope…..

They want the right to take all women and girls sex based rights (which they already have in Scotland). Beyond this they want women to be happy about it and disbelieve their own eyes or at least pretend they are ok with it. Boils my blood.

I actually do live in hope.

If someone could just define ‘gender’, ‘female gender’ and ‘male gender’ for me - in a way that doesn’t involve harmful, regressive, sexist stereotypes - maybe I might finally see the other side of the argument.

I feel like I've been waiting 84 years for the answer to this question.

Thanks @MargotBamborough very well said

Apparently it's dressing like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

It's always freaked me out because every woman-hating man I've ever met has held that up as a pinnacle of femininity.* *

The instances of violence towards women by trans women are such a minority of trans women and do not fairly represent the trans community.

In that case, it would be good if your majority of transwomen would publicly denounce those instances of violence. I've seen absolutely no evidence of them doing this.

Trans women are more likely to be on the receiving end of misogynistic violence than to be perpetrating it.

Transwomen in the UK are more likely to be murderers than murdered.

Almost 2% of the human population are also intersex, which is the same amount of people with red hair or green eyes, so this is not rare.

What do people with DSDs (note: not "intersex") have to do with transgender? In any case, the 1.7% figure, and as common as red hair analogy, have been thoroughly debunked and even Anne Fausto-Sterling who came up with the 1.7% estimate has revised it downwards - although she's still wrong by a couple of orders of magnitude. (It's actually 0.018% of the population.)

Trans people also have to go through years of counselling before treatment is agreed.

This is untrue, as Hannah Barnes' book Time to Think has demonstrated in the UK. Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage suggests, although her evidence is more anecdotal, that it is also untrue in the US.

Access to medical treatment is literally saving people's lives so access to healthcare for trans people is essential and time critical

Is this about the thoroughly discredited suicide statistics? And the evidence for transitioning reducing depression etc. is very weak.

Why should we, as cis-gender women, not want the same rights for others that we have so hard fought for ourselves?

Why should you impose the "cis" label on people without their consent?

I would really urge anyone here who is opposing trans people, particularly trans women, and their rights to spend some time researching and reading opposing views

Why do you presume that we haven't? Also, how much time have transgender identity ideologues spent considering the views of women? None - that's why they use the "No debate" mantra. Have you personally read Helen Joyce's Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Kathleen Stock's Material Girls, Hannah Barnes' Time to Think, Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage, or any of the many other works critical of gender identity ideology? Or even JK Rowling's own short essay about her views on the gender identity debate?

WTAF are you talking about?
Not content with trying to redefine woman, you are also trying to redefine feminism.

Feminism is literally not about everyone, it's about women.

Also, you might want to look up the meaning of discriminate. I don't think it means what you think it means (it's not a synonym for 'being mean').

+1

@MargotBamborough 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏🌺💐💐💐💐

Thank you for the education but most importantly thank you for standing up for women so eloquently and informatively. I wish I could make half as a good argument as you do!

@eellww are you coming back to answer the questions put to you?

Or like some many other gender ideologue, will you disappear into the ether when you find yourself unable to answer the many questions?

The arrogance of telling us that we need to better inform ourselves of the other side.

Many of us on here have been following this debate for years. We’ve heard all the arguments many times.

Gender ideologues, on the other hand, haven’t. Because you insist on ‘no debate’ and on shutting us down. Believe me, we are far better informed on both sides of the debate than you can possibly imagine.

Listen to the Witch Trials of JK Rowling, and you will see that she has spent hours and hours and hours researching both sides to inform herself.

Know that academics like Stock and Joyce have also thoroughly researched this.

We want to talk with you - create a dialogue, and a path forward towards some sort of cohesion, but your side refuses to.

You have to ask yourself why?

@MargotBamborough well done for putting all that information together. Hopefully @eellww will read it and imagine being a female sexual violence survivor sharing a toilet with a man who identifies as trans.

@eellww - who are you to consent to males coming into my daughters changing rooms? Why would you put a man’s safety and feelings before women and girls? We are not here to act as human shields for men who identify as women.

@MargotBamborough
👏👏 💐
Two brilliant posts, thank you. Bookmarking them!

@eellww

Trans people suffer at the hands of patriarchal ideals and violence daily just as we do. It is unfair and uninformed to claim that trans women are just men demoting themselves and then trying to claim the struggles and rights of cis-women and that they have the same rights as men, this is narrow thinking and untrue.

You really said the quiet part out loud there didn't you? Was it intentional?

Saying that trans women are demoting themselves to womanhood at the same time as claiming to be a feminist is quite something.

I suspect that your view is shared by trans women though, the 'trans' part means that they are superior to women and why women's right's come second to the rights of trans women to do as they wish and to invade spaces.

It's also explains why trans women have been able to invade women's spaces and sports with such ease, after all, being male women they must be superior.

We have seen your arguments before eellww, No means no.

@MargotBamborough

Thanks for your posts, they are excellent.