'What is a transwoman'

[ArabellaScott]

It seems huge chunks of the electorate have no idea what the word 'transwoman' or phrase 'transgender woman' actually mean.

https://murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2023/08/07/clarity-matters-how-placating-lobbyists-obscures-public-understanding-of-sex-and-gender/

'The results of our polling show that to avoid confusion and misunderstanding, journalists and others need to spell out clearly what sex of person is being referred to, in any context where sex matters.'

I've thought for years that this was probably the case. It's infuriating. The change of language, as others have said, has not just been a careless or inept choice of words. It's quite obvious that the words transwoman and transman were coined precisely to try to change the way people think about this issue.

Most English words that end in -woman are old-fashioned or obsolete now, but if you think back a few decades, we had policewoman, washerwoman, Frenchwoman and so on. All words designed to make it plain that the person referred to was not just a police officer or launderer or French or whatever the first part of the word was but also female. We've stopped using a lot of these words because in many cases there was no good reason to point out the sex of the individual and it was reinforcing sexual discrimination and stereotyping.

So transwoman was from the start intended to plant the idea that transwomen are women or female. There was a brief period when the people using the word and pushing for everyone else to use it too would say that there were men and women and then additionally there were transmen and transwomen - so straight away they were introducing the idea that trans people are not to be included in their natal sex class.

And once they had that toehold, very quickly the line changed and activists were saying 'transwomen are women, transmen are men. There are two types of women, cis and trans. Trans is an adjective - trans women are women, just like Black women are women.' And so on. So now we're supposed to accept that trans people belong in a sex class by virtue not of their biology but of their gender identity (which nobody can define or verify).

There’s an interview somewhere, I think with Christine Burns where the change of terminology to “transgender” is discussed. I will try and find it later.

This was done originally so the label could be applied to children. E.g taking the 'sexual' aspect away because the notion of 'transsexual' children would not have gained traction in the way the desexed 'transgender' has.

It was very important to activists to have a cohort of 'trans' children because it provides legitimacy to middle aged (formerly known as transsexuals) people as they can now point to those children and say 'that was once me'. In the majority of cases that isn't true.

Well, at the end of the day all of these terms are just made up bollocks. So who knows what it means. I see transfemme as ‘I am a man who likes woman-y things and feel more comfortable doing woman-y things’. Which is fair enough, crack on as long as you are not actually claiming to be a woman.

Jeez, that hasn't occurred to me.

I knew the faux 'trans child' was necessary and activists wanted to remove the 'sexual' part, but I hadn't connected them to each other.

There was one older TRA who actually admitted this. I don't think it was Burns, I think it was someone who was former military. Someone else may remember the details.

There is a lot of confusion caused by this - my male partner caused quite a stir in our local pub (of about 30 people) when he explained that 'transwomen' were actually men - they had ALL thought it referred to women.

'media outlets, policy makers, and polling companies all need to anticipate relatively high levels of misunderstanding and confusion when they use these terms. Using these terms, without spelling out what they mean for a person’s sex as matter of course, will leave a large minority of people at best uncertain. At worst, they will have a back-to-front understanding of what they are being told or asked'

I would say that 'queer theory' has done a terrific job of doing what it set out to do.

Surely this includes literally everyone who doesn't self-identify as "cis".

I wasn't assigned anything at birth and I have no idea what a gender which is the same as or sits comfortably with being female actually is.

Well that was quite the lightbulb moment.

Thanks.

You're behind the times. The usual suspects started spouting the "trans is an adjective" nonsense years ago. Never mind not only that word formation through the use of prefixes cones naturally in German, but also that if it's an adjective by rights it ougt to be subject to declension. Which would result in the rather unfortunate phrase "transe Frau" (for non-German speakers, the German equivalent of "tranny".)

I have started using the phrase "male people who identify as women".

If that is against the Talk Guidelines we have a real problem.

Well yes but actual, modern spoken & written German uses Transfrau. Which I find useful tbh

Hang on, isn't transfemme an effeminate male? Or can a female be transfemme? My brain can't keep up.

I found the breakdown by age absolutely astonishing: "of those aged 25-34, barely half gave the correct response, for both terms". So how many of the young people being kind and shouting TWAW are actually getting the completely wrong end of the stick?

I’m in that age bracket and I feel confident most of my peers don’t care what a transwoman is let alone able to use the terminology appropriately.

Depends how you define "actual, modern". All major newspapers like the good little lemmings they are have changed their style guides to include the space. As has the government.

If we could rewind back to a previous level of idiocy, when trans activists were claiming that no one was conflating sex with gender, and that "man" and "woman" are nouns for people of each gender, whereas "male" and "female" are adjectives describing sex, we could go with "male woman" instead of trans woman, and "female man" instead of trans man.

I think that would be clearer, but it would also highlight the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

I guess the point is they don't want it to be clearer.

I have no difficult in believing that most people who eventually identify as trans or nonbinary do so for reasons that have their roots in early childhood. What I don't believe is that most of the middle-aged males who transition were dysphoric as little boys, hating their male bodies. They may well have wanted to dress in stereotypically female clothes, and many of them cheerfully admit they took clothes from their sisters and mothers to this end, and later from their wives, but this seems to be for complex reasons which the Talk guidelines probably still don't allow us to talk about openly.

If this were to be spelled out in simple language, it would not be PR friendly, so gender activists stick to the message that gender affirmation is just about helping unhappy children, and who doesn't want to do that?

I find myself pondering what the police write in their notebooks these days when they used to write "female arrested in the hallway" or "two males approached carrying knives". Man and woman were not really used in my experience. How would they describe a "transwoman"?

I have no idea why so many people struggle with this one. Trans woman vs bio woman is what my brain thinks. Although I do know I'll get crucified for thinking bio instead of cis in many circles.

I honestly have no idea at this point. The language rules say yes but I suspect there would be some resistance to typical women falling under the trans umbrella - making the whole thing look silly 🤷

Because the scale of gaslighting is very well planned and orchestrated. That is before you consider the average reading age of the population, the poor level of education, the number of people with little grasp of English, for example. The whole ideology is designed to mislead and confuse. "Cis" is just another made up term to bamboozle the public. As is "transwoman" "transman" and all the other made up words under the Stonewall umbrella.

@partypant the reason people struggle is because they think that someone saying "woman" means an adult human female. Sticking another word in front of it (like tall, or angry, or trans) does not in their mind change what it is any more than it changes a tall cupboard into not a cupboard or an angry lion into not a lion. If they have not got the memo that this logical thinking no longer applies, then they will struggle.

People on Twitter and other SM haven't as far as I can see

Polling results interesting but not surprising, including the low comprehension scores in London; it all tallies with other work into the census questions. And of course, Scots being more correct than the UK in general obviously can be explained by the high public profile of these issues in Scotland. What is clear is that there has been a hell of a lot of muddying of the waters; the confusion has been deliberately induced in many cases IMO.

Is it asking too much to say that media organisations like the BBC could, and should, do more to clarify? Instead of just following some Stonewall rulebook?

Is it perhaps linked to the fact that there are a lot of people in London whose first language is not English?