School sports

[AlphaTransWoman]

Do you think it is ever acceptable to force a child assigned male at birth to participate in contact sports at school such as football or rugby. If so do you appreciate the distress this may cause to children born with a male body who have a female gender identity?

What happened in the chess club when you tried a female name? It sounds like a really useful experiment to show boys, to teach about sexism.

The chess 'default' is mixed sex tournaments. Woman are somewhat competitive against men - a woman has sometimes been ranked in the top 100 players in the world, something that'd obviously never be possible in sprinting or weightlifting. But participation rates are so low that there aren't, as of October 2023, any women in the top 100.

e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_rankings

In the light of the above it is more than reasonable for women to have their own, occasional, lower stakes and status tournament without men muscling in.

I would really like to know this too.

Exactly.

if ‘Gendered Socialisation’ was a reliable phenomenon then we’d all be sitting quietly with our knees pinched together and our hands folded in our laps. We wouldn’t be repeatedly telling male people to get their male bodies out of our single sex spaces, sports and services.

If ‘be subservient, don’t argue, put the needs of men before your own’ worked on all little girls there would be no such thing as a terf (and lesbians would all be permanently closeted).

Trans Activists hate Terves because Terves are uppity bitches who won’t kowtow to gendered socialisation (and those of us who look ladylike but still say no, fuck off, eg Posie P, seem to drive them just as bonkers as those who are GNC in aesthetic and attitude, eg Kathleen Stock).

I don’t know if anyone on this thread saw the Barbie film but there is a bit that is a parody of the Matrix, only instead of offering a blue pill or a red pill Weird Barbie offers Stereotypical Barbie a high heeled court shoe or a Birkenstock.

if old fashioned female socialisation worked 100% the Birkenstock would never have been invented at all, as it is, the whole cinema laughed out loud in wry recognition that what women like and what women are supposed to like (according to old fashioned sex stereotypes) are often at complete odds with each other.

(I actually hate Birkenstocks and would prefer a Croc, an athletic trainer or a cowboy boot, but none of those would be as cinematically dramatic/amusing!)

I would really recommend "The Gendered Brain" by Gina Rippon which lays out the history of scientific research into male and female brains since the dawn of scientific endeavour. It's really worthwhile and honestly it gave me a better understanding of the concept of gender, which I previously would have said is entirely fictional but I do now think it has some element of "reality" albeit being entirely independent of sex and in no way creating a qualification to opt in or out of one's biological sex where opportunities or resources are sex-based. Gender is the real effect of sexism on the brain. The brain is highly plastic (changing according to what is experienced) but does not respond to the pressures of sexism in a uniform and predictable way.

If society was not endemically sexist then there would be no gender and no trans because everyone would be able to live authentically as themselves without strictures based on expectations of behavior or preference due to biological sex.

Speaking of a "failure" of socialisation can only come from a place of believing that sexist socialisation is a good and desirable thing. It is not. All feminists are a "failure" of such socialisation from that point of view but as that kind of socialisation is oppressive and restrictive a better word would be "liberated" - but if your opting out of male socialisation comes into the form of wanting to opt in to female socialisation then that's not liberation.

I'm not commenting on the rest, but the notion that a group of teenage girls would be lovely and inclusive....

Judging by issues at my son's secondary school, definitely not.

I liked that bit.

And then in that last scene where Margot Robbie is still looking incredibly pretty and feminine but we see she is wearing pink Birkenstocks, it's like, you don't have to choose one thing or the other. You can be pretty and also practical.

You can be kind, but also a TERF. Because women's boundaries are important.

Yes, surely only someone who has never been a teenage girl, or spent much time around teenage girls, could think that.

Not in the chess club gave to face but playing online chess. He found people played "differently" against him - he was 12, "different" was all the description he could give - he has ASD. Slightly more aggressively perhaps? He certainly got a lot of 'stay in the kitchen' type chat messages from the men people he was playing . And his current online chess account is called something like MrMalenameMan because he didn't like it.

Weird Barbie Matrix parody scene, for anyone curious:

https://x.com/solarmilfs/status/1668561908763611136

Stereotypical Barbie initially chooses the high heel because she’s born from from life-limiting sex stereotypes, whereas the Birkenstock leads to a world where women are real, living, complex human beings who don’t always get along with each other.

Weird Barbie’s house is the netherworld between the two, she’s a Barbie who used to be a stereotype until an actual little girl played with her.

Exactly that.

The real, messy, complicated world is full of metaphorical pink Birkenstocks (and brown high heels!)

Imagine how boring life would be if everyone was in the pink box or the blue box 24/7 for the whole of their lives - baby girls in pink and baby boys in blue is surely only useful as a stopgap until the child has an imagination and the beginnings of a expressed personality?

This is getting a bit off topic but I thought so many things about the Barbie movie were really well done.

For me the mic drop moment was when Ken gets let loose in the real world and he sees everything being controlled by and set up for the benefit of men rather than Barbies and he's like, "Wooooaaaahhhh! This is AWESOME!!!!" after having lived his whole life in a world controlled by and set up for the benefit of the Barbies.

Hopefully that part made a few men reflect on what the real world must feel like for women sometimes.

See, the “male brain” and “female brain” bollocks is why for so long girls have been under diagnosed with ADHD or autism, because they were assumed to only affect boys (see ?Baron Cohen? And the autism=extreme male brain).

Now imagine being a girl with ADHD who can’t be quiet and placid. She’s still not a boy.

it does mess with some people's heads when i turn up to work in an Iron Maiden t-shirt, black jeans and my silver glittery docs 😁

@ApocalipstickNow

I never understood that theory about autism. As a ND trans woman, how can I have an "extreme male brain" yet have such a strong desire to live as a woman?

I would really recommend "The Gendered Brain" by Gina Rippon

No point. The OP can’t even acknowledge and listen to posts in this thread, let alone get through an actual book that explains their sexism.

Because sexism.

It’s assuming because people with ASD are assumed to be more rational, logical and rigid thinking these then they must be ultra male, because males are rational and logical.

it’s a whole bundle of stereotypes.

Honestly, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

An actual book WRITTEN BY AN ACTUAL WOMAN, yet.

From your posts here, you seem to have an idea of what it means to be a woman that is very much at odds with the experiences of being a woman described by women responding to you.

It seems your view of womanhood comes from very stereotyped definitions that were imposed upon women for centuries as a tool of oppression. Hearing them can cause great distress to women because they've historically (and still in the present) been used to abuse women, by forcing them, legally, politically, socially, physically and psychologically, into roles that are alien and harmful to them.

On the whole, women feel about these characteristics similarly to how you feel about the characteristics you've claimed are "male," such as competitiveness or aggression or enjoying contact sports.

In fact, all people, male or female, are individuals with their own needs, abilities, tastes and characteristics. It's when society starts imposing gender norms that we can feel our true selves don't fit these made-up definitions and it can be very emotionally and psychologically distressing.

Because what you wish to live as is not what a woman actually is.

It's what you imagine a woman to be.

I never understood that theory about autism. As a ND trans woman, how can I have an "extreme male brain" yet have such a strong desire to live as a woman?

"Extreme male brain" doesn't mean extremely liking khaki and football, it is talking about the way autistic brains operate.

One of the things "extreme male brains" do is have obsessions. It might be chess, it might be bus timetables, it might be the idea that your brain is in the wrong body.

Another thing autistic brains tend to do is misunderstanding social things and taking things over literally. So here people see "how to be a real man" stereotypes, and think if you don't do those things you're not a man at all. Or as you are here, expecting having an autistic brain to mean you should be a manly man rather than understanding that the "extreme male brain" simile only refers to particular aspects of how the brain works.

Most people I have come across with ASD tend to be quite non stereotypical of their own sex whether M or F. They aren't as influenced by what everyone else does, they don't see the point. It's a trait I like very much.

You might also find it useful to look up confirmation bias.

@thirdfiddle
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. Still struggling to get my head around it all though.

I have a question, @AlphaTransWoman. You mention wanting to "live as a woman" a few times.

What does that mean for you, in concrete terms?

I don't mean in terms of what character traits you attribute to women, but in terms of how you personally want to live your life. What do you think living your life as a woman looks like, and what would having to live your life as a man look like in contrast?

This is so extremely contradictory though. I don't think you really can even begin to see it, but you absolutely need to.

You have such a strong desire to live YOUR interpretation of what a woman is.

You are not 'living as a woman'!

You are living a role that you define as 'a woman' from your perspective of being male. That is also defined by your perspective to NOT live as you perceive a man lives.

So, due to queer theory and post modernist theory, some parts of society have now told people that simply saying the words 'I am a woman' means you are what you say you are. I think that deep down you know this and you struggle with it.

What you do need to do is to understand the inherent misogyny, narcissism and contradictions in your beliefs and go and get some actual balanced support. Not from any fucking therapist that will simply tell you what they think you want to hear or who is deeply entrenched in affirming people's identities.

The only way to ‘live as a woman’ is to be conceived as a female zygote, survive your mum’s pregnancy, be born a girl and then live long enough to reach the age of majority.