Still Genuinely Willing To Discuss In Good Faith

[Catiette]

I've taken the plunge and started a new thread. In the interests of good manners, an addendum that I may be disappearing to work for a while myself, as this has all been far too interesting to allow me to achieve any of my urgent weekend work to-dos today - I hope that, in the light of that, creating this follow-up thread isn't bad form. I just thought other people may want to continue discussing these issues (mainly, now, the redefinition of woman, and statistical trends re. women globally), and I'd definitely dip back in when the urge to procrastinate overcomes me next. No worries, of course, if people think we did it all to death on the old thread - we were fairly thorough, methinks(!), so can also just let Good Faith Discussion #2 rapidly fade into Mumsnet obscurity. 😀

The main thing to note, though, is the difference between "the meaning of 'woman'" and "what it means to you to be a woman." You try to tell us something about the latter, when what you were asked for is the former. But they are not the same.

To continue on this, mother is the word used for a woman who has given birth. Nothing more, nothing less. Usually the baby is raised by the mother, who is indeed then also the guardian. Sometimes the baby is adopted and another women is the adoptive mother. Never the biological mother of the baby though. Sometimes the baby doesn't live, but the mother is still a mother.

Mother has a specific biological meaning. The role of being someone's mother is the legal setup.

Same with women and transwomen. Woman has a specific biological meaning. Transwoman is the role the male person has which can be legally recognized.

Yes, Sanluca, from what little info I could ascertain about the WEF data it's based on economic performance/potential. Perhaps that's to be expected for the World Economic Forum, but it doesn't really seem to tell us much about any of the many things that I would think women would consider important to their quality of life.

I don't personally believe in any kind of 'gendered soul' but it occurred to me that even if I did, it wouldn't make a difference to most single sex spaces because these are based on the difference between the sexes. E.g. sport; a male body can run faster than a female body regardless of gender identity. A male body and female body can create a pregnancy together which is why prisons must be single sex. If the difference between sex and gender is acknowledged, it's perfectly possible to live harmoniously with different views.

I know I'm not saying anything new but it is the muddling of the words sex and gender which causes the issue.

GC feminists

I missed out of the end of the last thread.

I want to pick up on this term. Feminism is critical of gender stereotypes. Feminism Centres women's rights not men. GC feminism isn't really 'a thing.'

Liberal feminism seems to have included men.

Try to give them some space to be wrong, especially girls.

You go through a phase where you compare yourself to the stereotypes and realise you're nothing like that. Society and schools are seriously more full of sexist toxic bs than when I was growing up - it's a lot to process. In one survey the AVERAGE age girls reported that they were first asked for nudes was 11. Jesus who the hell would be comfortable

All a girl has to do to become a woman is grow up. Everything else is optional.

A mother is a female that has experienced a process (of birth)

A widow is a female that have experienced a process (of loosing her husband)

A step mother is a female who has gone through a process (of partnering someone with a child.)

A woman is a female. Adult human.

(...As you can get females in almost all other species)

A trans woman is male. There's a plethora of experiences that lead to this title. An adult human male is known as a man.

Identity is personality. Identity can be the result of a mix of physical actuality and experiences that happen environmentally to the individual over time. All the signifiers used to signal 'an identity' beyond physical actuality are culturally stereotypical aesthetics.

culturally stereotyped aesthetics and medical aesthetical interventions are used by these men to adopt a visual aesthetic of a woman. You can call that a process but it doesn't change the fact they're male / men.

Hope this isn't a tangent, but here is a woman trying to engage a couple of people protesting the Let Women Speak event in discussion, a couple of weeks ago.

"something immeasurable that is who we are, and that something interacts with our bodies and interprets the sensations from our bodies, but is still separate to our bodies. And this thing - essence, mind, identity - can have a gender and that gender can be different to the sex of the body"

Yes, this is indeed an example of "metaphysical fantasy" I mentioned in the earlier thread.

There are lots of problems with it, some of whose expressions in writing go back over two-and-a-half thousand years. (How does this something interact with bodies? (Plato's Parmenides asked this of young Socrates; René Descartes said the pineal gland did the trick but omitted to say how it did so: he knew nothing about melatonin, of course ... oh and so on and so on.)

What is new is the idea of gender attached somehow to this something. What is this gender? not sex, but something that can be different to - and hence possibly the same as - sex (and sex "of the body" (!)) though a part of this detached non-bodily something. Huh?

No, Spooky, none of this makes any sense. (Interesting though it be that you think it does.)

But, well, neither does much religious metaphysics. 'Substance' vs 'Accidents', anyone? Ghosts? Angels? Auras? ... Let's not go there.

The difference, as others have said, is that we have learned to deal with old-fashioned religious metaphysics. "Some people believe ... " the teachers tell the children; the children (well, mine and others) learn it's polite only to giggle behind one's hand and not aloud. You can be friends with people in spite of their strange beliefs. We rub along.

-- But this gender metaphysics is far too often taught as fact. And we are supposed to kowtow to it: as well as allowing teachers to tell our children about 'gender identity' as though it made sense, we are supposed to alter our society in myriad ways in accord with such nonsense, much as past ages did to account for changing ideas about real presence and suchlike cobblers.

Enough is enough. Sorry, Spooky. For all your good faith, your metaphysics is just wholly incoherent; the societal changes you encourage, the damage already done to children on the basis of something similar, wholly unjustified. Please stop. Think.

[Denying your "something immeasurable ... separate to our bodies", btw, does not entail accepting "we are our bodies". That's just another mistake. Oh well.]

Hmmm

If feminism is critical of gender stereotypes could a liberal feminist explain how gender ideology isn't perpetuating the exact gender stereotypes they claim to be critical of?

Surely feminists are as diverse as women are? If not more so as more men are feminists than TWAW?? There are people claiming to be gender critical feminists so yes we very much are 'a thing'

If there is such a thing as 'gendered soul' who come only some people get them? I have absolutely no sense of gender.
I don't mean that my 'gender' matches my sex I mean I don't feel any different in jeans, trainers and a hoodie watching football than if I am wearing a dress, make up and heels and having a 'girls' night out. I do lots of 'female' things - crafting, baking, I like wearing dresses & skirts and have a fairly extensive (heeled) shoe collection. But I'm also a total sports nut, I hate pink, I do plenty of DIY and Theresa May would be horrified to discover that I'm the one who puts the bins out chez Otters. I just feel like me regardless of whether I am drinking a pint or a cocktail. So why do some people get an unmatched gender, some get a matched gender and some people get nothing at all?
Would the men who feel they are women in the 21st century have felt that in 18th century when men wore make-up, wigs, heels and flamboyant clothes? Or is their gender actually just a love of 'pretty' things and because the current stereotypes regards these things as feminine they are extrapolating that they must have a female 'gender'. If we removed all notions that certain thing are not for men or not for women would some men still feel like women? Even if all women and all men wore moon boots and boiler suits and make-up and had long hair?

"Try to give them some space to be wrong, especially girls.

You go through a phase where you compare yourself to the stereotypes and realise you're nothing like that. Society and schools are seriously more full of sexist toxic bs than when I was growing up - it's a lot to process. In one survey the AVERAGE age girls reported that they were first asked for nudes was 11. Jesus who the hell would be comfortable

All a girl has to do to become a woman is grow up. Everything else is optional."

Women will be there for the girls who currently hate them. But I'm not going to wait until they "grow out of it" before I start calling this out.

It's perfectly possible to be a gender nonconforming child and to reject this bullshit as long as we keep making noise. They hear us. They see they don't have to fall for this

@bellinisurge "Women will be there for the girls who currently hate them. But I'm not going to wait until they "grow out of it" before I start calling this out."

totally fair

"It's perfectly possible to be a gender nonconforming child and to reject this bullshit as long as we keep making noise."

That's kind of the best plan I've got.

Yes, I think that you have covered everything there. Can you see any problems or inconsistencies with this?

@ArabeIIaScott great share 👍

Kudos to both the interviewer and the interviewee for having the conversation.

In fact I'd go so far as to say I wanted to stop the interviewer (even though I share the same views) towards the end and listen to more of what the interviewee's views were.
Although she initially started off pretty angrily and defensive, this changed and it was interesting to see a calm conversation unfolding, even when both people had different viewpoints.

I loved the fact that she respected the interview and was happy to tell her friends and a policeman (I think it was a policeman?) to please let her continue in peace.

There are two indices that enjoy a degree of valency: the GGGI used by the WEF and the GII used by the UNDP. Suggy chose to refer to the GGGI because a majority of self-id countries are in the top 20 of that index. This is not true for the top 20 in the GII. The truth is that neither index gives any real indication of women's lived experience in those countries as they only measure actual or potential attainment against economic, educational, health and political targets. If I were at cynical person, I would say that they are designed by men to show how good men are.

@liwoxac, I found the formal/material mode distinction really interesting. It feels so relevant. And @OttersMayHaveShiftedInTransit, I've wondered about that deliciously garish style of 18th century dress before! It's a great example of how arbitrary these perceived signifiers of gender often are.

Looking at this information, I
thought it was what men considered indicators of a ‘good quality of life for women’. Admittedly knowing how much maternity leave, body autonomy and maternal mortality is a good indicator of how much a country prioritises mothers. However, these multiple variable indicators are not useful, I feel, to put into an overall ranking when they are so disparate.

37:50 minutes in at Let Women Speak today.
Conclusive proof that governments know that gender identity either does not exist or is irrelevant.
The speaker says that Germany they are bringing in self ID with a clause that sex is recognised if there is a war.

So, male prisoners identify as women and rape women prisoners - no problem. Men identify as women to take sports women's victories, prize money and cause them injury, no problem. Men identify as women to watch women and girls getting changed, no problem.

But: Men try to identify as women to get out of defending their country and all of a sudden the importance of recognising gender identity vanishes in a puff of smoke!

The thought of sending young men off to fight absolutely fills me with horror and the fact that it is men who are called on to sign up is one of the disadvantages of being male. However it is so telling that the people who have to make these difficult decisions are able to do so when it suits them but are otherwise happy to allow real harm to women and girls.

Much like with the GRA @Wellies54 whereby men are women unless they stand to inherit a title or estate and then lo and behold they are still male and therefore inherit, but this isn't an ideology driven by men for men which gives men all they want which means removing rights from women whilst protecting all their own rights and privileges.

Were you aware that under primogeniture the woman in a different body rule doesn't apply @SpookyFBI ? What do you make of that? Because if TW were just differently bodied women then it absolutely would wouldn't it?

Just aghaaaaawhattgefuck!

Woman and children are so poorly valued in this world it's astounding.

In so many ways it is covert and subtle but stuff like this is not uncommon. Shame on our news sources for failing the people. Shame on our governments.

Just fucking shame

So Germany have no respect for women but have rightly realised that if the men who claim to be women are women in ALL situations in the event of a war all the men would claim to be women. And they need their men to fight and their women to look after the children if it comes to being at war.

It just shows it for the mockery it is.

I do completely agree, to answer your other post as well, in the separation of church and state. I guess where I’m coming from is that I wouldn’t see this as a spiritual believe, but more as a crude attempt at an explanation for a phenomenon that has been observed and that experts in the field agree exists - gender dysphoria. Now, if you don’t agree that gender dysphoria exists then I don’t really know where to go from there. In the same way that I am not a sport scientist and so I am willing to accept what experts in the field say on the matter, I am not a psychologist, but multiple expert psychologists do verify that gender dysphoria exists, so this isn’t a spiritual belief but a verified fact. So if gender dysphoria exists, then there must be something experiencing that dysphoria. This is not really a belief, but a logical conclusion of the evidence.

now, what exactly that thing is, how it operates, what causes the disconnect in some but not in others… this (as far as I’m aware) is where evidence ends and belief takes over. I have absolutely no expectation that there will be any kind of consensus on this which is why I’m happy to use multiple different words to describe it. I started off calling it ‘identity’, then someone else used ‘essence’, I also brought up ‘soul’ because I thought that might help some people understand what I’m talking about, and if you want to call it ‘mind’ that works just as well. Exactly what my beliefs are about this thing, whatever you call it, are a work in progress, which is why I’m so interested to hear other perspectives about it. This is actually the thing I wanted to discuss when I first joined the original good faith discussion thread. This is in my opinion one of the big, ‘meaning of life’ type questions that fascinates me, and I feel like I’m always refining my understanding of it the more perspectives on it I hear.

so to answer your final question in this post, yes - mind, soul, thoughts/feelings, I’m not sure what the best terminology is - given the fact that gender dysphoria exists, there must be something that experiences gender separately from the sex of the body.

I would draw a distinction between things like self harm and anorexia, and things like hormone therapy or transition. People who engage in self harm, and people who suffer from anorexia, would be the first to tell you that these conditions are not enhancing their lives, and are in fact greatly reducing their quality of life. By contrast, the vast majority of people who undergo transition report that it has greatly enhanced their quality of life compared to before they transitioned. On this basis I would place hormone therapy and surgical transition in the same category as someone dying their hair, or getting a tattoo or a piercing, or getting a tubal ligation or a vasectomy to prevent pregnancy. Yes, it’s a more extreme form of modification, but I don’t think that necessarily means that it’s harmful.

When you say 'the vast majority' which data set are you using as no gender clinics are tracking their patients?

Can you please answer my two questions?

Both are pretty easy if you believe in this 'identify as' stuff surely?

Occam’s razor principle is that the simplest explanation is the best. For gender dysphoria, you have come to the conclusion of a mind body mismatch, requiring the assumption off these two things both being equally real and more importantly, completely separate. The other solution is that this is a brain function gone awry somehow, as others have said, in the manner of anorexia.
For me, the abnormal brain function explanation is the much simpler one, that where there is a mismatch between “mind” and body, between conceptual and concrete, it is always the mind which is demonstrably not aligned with reality.
This is not to say that the feelings are not genuine or that eradicating these feeling is always possible. Sometimes it may be more feasible to treat the discomfort the feelings cause, rather than try to lessen the feelings themselves, and I leave this judgement to the people involved and their medical professionals - so long as children and very young adults are not involved.