For those who believe in Gender Identity over sex: why do you still need to believe in Men and Women at all?

[FlirtsWithRhinos]

One thing I do not get about Genderism is that they reject the belief that it's the physical body that makes a human a man or a woman, yet still believe some humans are men and some humans are women.

But if we hadn't had the example of two physical sexes, why would we have come up with the idea of Man-people and Woman-people in the first place?

I find it very weird that they can't or won't tell us what definition they use for Man, Woman etc ("it's a gotcha" , "blah blah blah" etc) yet demand such very specific provisions for Men and Women. How can they be so certain "trans women must use women's spaces/compete in women's sports" when without a definition of woman it's impossible to even explain why women need women only spaces or women only sports?

Yeah you look at what this poster said:

"The problem here is that you simply aren't aware that it is possible to change sex. Once you realise that all of your objections are resolved. Of course bodies matter, that's why we want to change ours. You're not wrong about which physical characteristics are male and which are female, you simply didn't realise that they could be changed. And we don't need to identify sex separately from gender because we change our sex to match our gender. See? Once you understand biology it is actually quite simple. :)"

And it's lunatic stuff. I doubt you could even find trans organisations that would make such a silly claim. Maybe in Canada...

It's so insane that you have to question if they really believe it, but if they do really believe it, then perhaps there is some hope for them. Like maybe their whole position will come crashing down when they realise it's been built on a false idea.

The crux of the dissonance must lie in the fixed mental and emotional image/imprint that compels the person towards transition - in an attempt to somehow embody those feelings and images, and render them permanent.

The fact that mental distress so often continues after transition, including ( especially) physical surgeries and removal of body parts is indicative of the psychic roots of the distress or delusion. But having thrown one's lot in one must persist and attempt to grab hold of the fantasy and really perform it ( which is why the lives of many transitioners revolve almost entirely around their trans'ness). It requires constant vigilance and studied performance.
As soon as the pose slips, the truth seeps out in the body language, in the demeanour, the vocal tone, the instinctive preferences.

Was reading a post by a TRA ally on a forum I contribute to in which he shares stories from FTM transitioners explaining ghow their imaginings of what it was to be male were ignorant of many of the realities ( presumably the less desirable ones). The thing is, though, that if you really are male, and maleness is an object you already posess - then there should be no surprises or sudden realisations - because you already know it and own it.

But as we know being male or female is not a fixed experience or set of learned behaviours - it is a total physical/cultural/social/emotional state - and one that is predicated on the body and biology.

People think if they acquire certain superficial physical attributes it somehow renders them the sex those characteristics represent. I suppose some types experineces will be achievable. for example, a small man with a slight build and breast implants may on occasion be mistaken for a woman and receive some male attention - which must be very validating; and when a woman has her breasts removes and grows facila hair - being called " mate" might be very gratifying - but beyond such experineces there must so much dissonace, along with continual, self conscious study and pose.

Very good point.

Which makes me think that compliance training, with animals and with children and those with disabilities, is now something regarded as old fashioned, ethically very dodgy and can often be harmful.

In BDSM, there is (should be, or it's not a club or person to go anywhere near for play) careful consent and negotiation on both sides. It's a game with tight rules. Not an excuse to bully and dominate someone else while expecting them to be a NPC in your personal world.

As someone else has laready said - the whole scenario does feel like a game - with pre-ordained roles, and expectations, which are acted out.

'Safe, sane, and consensual' seems to be regarded as a quaint anachronism these days.

I wonder whether part of the issue here is ignorance about what sex actually is. Watch any David Attenborough documentary and it will become clear. Sex refers to your role in the mating process. That's why the same word can mean either what role you play (i.e. whether you contribute the sperm or the egg) or be used as shorthand for sexual intercourse (i.e. the intercourse of a set of male and female sex organs). Admittedly humans also have recreational sex and same sex couples also use the word to describe what they do, but the origin of the word is in reproduction.

Show me a trans man who has fathered a child using sperm produced in his own body, or a trans woman who has become pregnant using one of her own eggs, and then maybe I'll be convinced that it is possible to change sex.

You've touched on an interesting point about sex and gender there.

There is no reason, in theory, why someone whose biological sex is female should not behave in this way, insulting and belittling other women and demonstrating a certain sense of entitlement, then becoming aggressive and threatening when they refuse to comply.

The fact that such behaviour makes you assume - probably correctly - that the person you are talking to is male, is surely a consequence of gender, not sex. In a society where females had been raised to be the dominant sex, the same behaviour could be seen as an inherently female trait. Perhaps, as you say, testosterone plays a role in this behaviour, or perhaps it is purely a product of male socialisation. It's difficult to tell.

But what it tells me is that whilst we know it is not scientifically possible to change one's sex, many of the people who claim to have a female gender which conflicts with their male biological sex are still demonstrating non physical, behavioural traits associated with the male gender, not the female gender.

If the person concerned actually was a woman who was accidentally born in a male body, we would not be able to tell that we were talking to someone of the male sex online. They might be 6 foot 6 with a deep baritone voice and a prominent Adam's apple, with no chance of "passing" in real life, but on an anonymous internet forum we should not be able to tell that they were not born female.

Absolutely. It's fascinating that this person did not pass online. It makes one wonder what the purpose of self identity is if to everyone else you seem as male as all other mansplaining entitled arseholes.

Such an interesting discussion, I suppose we have our belligerent scolder to thank for that.

I think this sums it up.

@MargotBamborough

That's broadly how I think about it.

There's three reasons we need sex-specific opportunities, protections and support.

• The first is where there's a direct physical difference, like sport or healthcare
• The scond is where society is arranged in such a way that makes a physical difference significant, for example women need maternity leave because of the way we have structured society around paid work and private resources.
• The third is where society has normalised biases and behaviours around our sex which are not based in our actual abilities and preferences but nevertheless cause us harm. Into this very broad church go MVAWG and sexual aggression on various levels, cultural biases about leadership and rationality and the resulting political and economic marginalisism, imbalances in childcare and life admin, male entitlement and encrouchment on our physical space and mental time...often small in their own right, but cumulatively a drag on women's capacity to focus on their own interests. Critically, it's not just about how others in society see and react to us, but also what that does to our own self image and how we become complicit in our own marginalisation.

This last point is why mitigation for gender-based issues is still sex specific. A trans woman who feels she embodies qualities typically seen as qualities of women and has fought to have this recognised has a different relationship to herself and society than a female person who has had those qualities expected of her and judged by them since birth. For the first they are a liberation. For the second, a constraint. How can they both be fairly supported as "Women" when their fundamental experiences of being a "Woman" are so different?

This is why TRAs always miss the point. Their simplictic thinking goes "[X] is for women so trans women must have access to [X]". They don't see that the things that exist "for women" today are responses to specific challenges faced by the group called "women" because of what that group has in common which each other and no other humans - their physical sex.

So changing the definition of "Woman" to something other than sex doesn't create a logical case for opening up Women's resources to male-bodied women, it creates a logical case that these "Women-only" resources are not, in fact what Women need, but what female people (in the sex-based sense) need.

To accept TWAW, just wrongly named as men, TRAs need also accept "Women's" stuff was really for Female stuff, wrongly named as Women's. To mix a few maetaphors, they can't have their cake and eat it - it's two sides of the same coin.

Good summary, @FlirtsWithRhinos.

I think it's clear that in the first two of your three situations, only biologically female people have those specific needs. In terms of the hot spots in the trans debate, however, the only issue that would fall squarely within those categories is women's sports. The purpose of the category is to account for physical differences, not identities, so no male born people in women's sports.

However, when talking about single sex spaces, the counter argument is going to be that because trans women (believe they) are socialised as women, they need to be in those women's spaces which are segregated from men for the same reasons as women need them. And maybe they do. But the difficulty is that their perception of themselves as being women, in need of the same privacy and protection that society affords to women to shelter them from men, is not shared by most of the women themselves, for whom the trans woman's presence means the women's spaces are no longer single sex.

How do we reconcile the needs of the kindest, gentlest, most harmless trans woman who feels completely unable to use a men's changing space with the needs of a rape survivor whose trauma response to seeing a male bodied person a women's changing room will make her feel completely unable to use it?

The only solution, as far as I can see, is third spaces, and an absolute ban on people using single sex spaces for the opposite sex, regardless of where they are in their transition, whether they have had any surgery, or what their "legal sex" now is.

But all the discussion I have seen online around this topic seems to suggest that many trans people do not want third spaces because they perceive them as "othering", with some openly saying that they would not use such spaces even if they existed.

And it goes without saying that the kind of people who would refuse to use third spaces if they existed and insist on using women's spaces are precisely the kind of people we least want in our spaces, with very good reason.

Yes. The conversation goes something like

"That is for women, so to prove I am really become woman I must have that!"

"But you in that space/resource/facility is incompatible with meeting the needs of the biological women it is for, and removes those resources/equality/access from women."

<Launch of never ending word salad on why those needs don't exist and don't matter anyway and are mean to talk about and yada yada yada.>

Boiling down to "I don't care, it doesn't matter to me, I want what I want and they're only women, how dare they say no to me."

Proving conclusively that when they said "I am a woman" they didn't mean that sort of woman.

@FroodwithaKaren One of many trans paradoxes, isn't it?

Someone who actually was a woman in a man's body would understand exactly why women don't feel comfortable sharing their single sex spaces with someone who has a man's body, and would put others' needs before their own by respectfully staying out of those spaces.

Not to mention would not be acting out a powerful and fundamental belief of being something other and better than other women, and in a position of superiority to dictate to them all.

It's kind of 'tell me you're male without telling me you're male'.

#NoDebate has really done a number on women. And #BeKind.

But once you’ve seen it, there’s no going back. There’s no backwards and forwardsing between pro-trans and pro-women positions, the shift goes only one way. Little by little, person by person, the truth will prevail.

@MargotBamborough

I'm not just talking about physical spaces, but any "women-only" supports - that includes STEM opportunities targetted at girls, returning to work schemes, social nights, over 60s excercise groups, drop in advice sessions, women's writing prizes - basically anything that exists today because in the past women have said - "hang on, this isn't fair" or "look, men are almost always much better at thing [X] because they get a lot more opportunities and encouragement as kids, so we'll have a women's version where we can progress at our level and find out what we can do" or "you men are stopping us talking about community needs that impact us because they don't interest you, so we'll have a woman's group where our stuff comes first".

The only solution, as far as I can see, is third spaces, and an absolute ban on people using single sex spaces for the opposite sex, regardless of where they are in their transition, whether they have had any surgery, or what their "legal sex" now is.

So far me, this is jumping to a solution without fully defining the problem. I don't mean I expect you to define the problem in your post - I mean society has been pushed into arguing about solutions and skipped a solid definition of the problem. It's all hand-wavy "TWAW so it's just the same problems as women have, except more so because we are extra oppressed, why are you asking you bigot?"

But all the women-only stuff exists as a result of first identifying a problem. For example, before opening up a Women in STEM event to trans women, I'd want evidence that trans women have the same challenges, and indeed that other men don't. I don't want resources that exist to mitigate specific problems having a secondary utilisation to relieve trans women's gender dysphoria, because that's stopping/ reducing their effectiveness in doign what they were set up to do.

So what I want to see is data and clarity about the problems trans women face not just the assumption that provisions shaped by and for female needs are the right ones for them as well.

How do we reconcile the needs of the kindest, gentlest, most harmless trans woman who feels completely unable to use a men's changing space with the needs of a rape survivor whose trauma response to seeing a male bodied person a women's changing room will make her feel completely unable to use it?

Agree likely additional spaces (and let's also ask the question about other men, maybe victims of rape, who may be equally unable) but I think it's for trans people and their allies to define what they need and make the case for it based on first principles for both the need and the shape the solution takes, not simply "the women have it so I should too". And if their solution is "best place for us is in with the women" it's not enough to just base that on getting away from men, they need data to show how their need is the same as that of the women, including the effect of socialisation and childhood decisions, and that the impact of their presence on other women who need that space is the same as that of a female person.

I find it hard to put my finger on. There are female posters on Mumsnet who can certainly be rude/patronising/ judgemental/ bossy, but I don’t hear their posts in a male voice. Whereas some male posters (not all IMO) are quickly recognisable as male.

Maybe it’s a tone of “Right! Now I’ve arrived, I’m going to chair this discussion. Listen respectfully, as my time and knowledge are valuable.”

I agree that toilets, changing rooms should be designed to be safe for everyone but it doesn't logically follow that this means males using female spaces or unisex spaces (which boils down to the same thing). We know these are more dangerous and less pleasant for women.

"Listen respectfully, as my time and knowledge are valuable"

I did read everything this poster wrote, initially with respect. I was condescended to immediately. By someone with (obviously) no comparable education in the subject under discussion. Respect was lost. You can see how it started and how it went.

It was embarrassing. So much fail. So much.

All that online porn doesn’t translate into real interactions - even if they are on an internet board.

I should have written “born male” rather than “male” in my last post. I try not to misgender people, but then again, sex isn’t the same as gender, is it?

Yes, it is all fantasy role play.

Why do you think they use the same words for sex and gender despite sex and gender not being the same thing?

If male is now a gender then you can't call a trans woman male without misgendering them, which means even mentioning their biological sex becomes an act of bigotry.