3 questions for GC women

[ChirpyFinch]

As the title says, three questions for the women in this chat.

1. Do you think the majority of people are gender critical, and why/why not?

2. Globally, the right wing is more vocally gender critical than the left. They are also far more likely to be regressive on a range of women’s issues like abortion and anti-gay. Why do you think they agree with GCs on this one issue but disagree on so much else (if you think they do?)

3. How many trans people do you estimate there are globally?

Try erythritol with monkfruit. Less aftertaste.

How does a female brain end up in a male body then?

And what would be the evolutionary purpose of it?

'water is wet' is given as a truism. No-one disputes it - you get wet if you touch water - most of us are not university-level chemists. Ditto fire is hot - in reality fire is oxygenation of materials and is related to e.g. rust. Ditto no-one disputes that there are only two sexes in mammals (and we are only interested in mammals here) one that produces large gametes and one that produces small gametes. The large gamete producer in mammals conceives, gestates (builds) and bears young. Shorthand for these two groups is male/man, female/woman in the human species. In others it is e.g. male/dog, female/vixen; male/stag, female/doe; male/cob, female/pen etc. TRAs get really cross when this is pointed out - I have no idea why.

That one who suggested putting potatoes in a cheesecake needs banning.

(Not really. But no way, potato)

Yes, I think as I understand it ‘3rd gender’ in most cultures has generally always referred to gay men, largely because many cultures find the idea of female homosexuality impossible to countenance. I think (so may be wrong) that it was only male homosexuality that was illegal in the UK, until it wasn’t, for this reason?

I’m rather intrigued by this - was going to ask for the recipe but then we all got told off by Miss.

@ElleWoods15

And finally, I don’t know but my guess is that there are more young women and girls who openly have gender dysphoria because Gen Z is a vastly more accepting and inclusive generation than those that have come before.

Take a step back from that.

You can say "your body is male or female. A man is any personality in a male body and a woman is any personality in a female body".

Or you can say "Men and women have different personalities. If you have the wrong personality to be a woman you are not a woman you are a man (or non binary or some other label".

I don't see why the second idea is considered more inclusive and more accepting than the first. It seems to me to be the opposite - the idea that people need to worry about whether their actual characters are male enough or female enough, whatever that even means.

It feels like the lack of acceptance and exclusion that trans identifying people feel they are escaping was only ever a restriction in their own minds. It is genderism that says man and woman is based on your inner self not simply your body and that means your inner self can be wrong and you need to transition to be who you really are.

It's not gender critical people who say that. Gender critical people are not the ones saying your body has to somehow "match" your mind at all. Gender critical people have accepted the person you are in the body you have all along.

This piece is over a decade old and still very relevant:

https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/toward-an-end-to-appropriation-of-indigenous-two-spirit-people-in-trans-politics-the-relationship-between-third-gender-roles-and-patriarchy/

There are few dishes that can’t be improved with potato, but I’m with you that cheesecake is one of them.

Good on you for actually having come up with a considered viewpoint on this.

Go on, then. Explain to me what exactly it is I have in common with Munro Bergdorf that I don't have in common with, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Ummmm. Sweet potato?

Yes, I think you are right, though apocryphally Queen Victoria would not accept that women could be homosexual. But sodomy has been illegal in England far earlier than the reign of Queen Victoria. Female homosexuality has scarcely been mentioned - though it was known to exist people tended to avoid the point.

Get out.

😁

(that was about yon taty not Queen Victoria)

@BeckyAMumsnet I loved the cake posts. I thought they were an appropriate and witty response to a disingenuous TRA attempt to goad (also very good recipes).

I didn't know that they also derail Aston's large language machines - worth knowing thank you.

Mumsnet chat, on FWR and elsewhere, isn't tightly focused on the question set. It's what makes most of us come back for more. Who wouldn't want to ask Gordon Brown about biscuits?

Long live the humans say I. Bring back the recipes.

#Istandwithjamandglutenfree

I would say that's to do with Christianity. Male homosexuality is outlawed in Christianity. Female homosexuality was either seen as unbelievable or less of a threat.

My experience of posting on other threads leads me to believe there’s little point of my answering that, because GC posters don’t seem to accept the concept of identifying as a gender.

@ElleWoods15

"A truly progressive society would recognise that the only thing that makes someone female (woman / girl) or male (man / boy) is their biology. "

Please, Elle, could you explain what it is about this quote that you so profoundly disagree with? Why is this wrong? What does make someone male or female if not their biology?

If you are my age, surely you remember the things being said about Gen Z now were once said about the millenials and Gen X? Surely you remember that teenage girls' media when we were young was also saying "now we have feminism everything will be much better than it was 20 years ago"?

But if you have lived through the same years and come to a different conclusion, I'd love to know more about how you got there. Not just "hey I think differently" but why you thikn what you think - what you have seen to suggest to you that it's more progressive and effcteive to think of Man and Woman as dufferent types of personailty than names for the two human sexes?

Obviously - that’s because gender critical feminists reject the entire concept of gender!

Gender in feminist theory = oppressive sex stereotypes.

Please do answer re: gender identity’s evolutionary purpose tho because I haven’t ever had an answer on that at all - just post a link if you can’t be arsed to type something out yourself.

Perhaps if you could explain what identifying as a gender means, and what gives it primacy over one's sex?

But the fact that Gen X or millennials are more inclusive (as a generalisation) than baby boomers (again generalising!), doesn’t mean that Gen Z can’t be more inclusive still.

I don’t think my generation (X fwiw) is the worst, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think there’s room for improvement. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

My experience of posting on other threads leads me to believe there’s little point of my answering that, because GC posters don’t seem to accept the concept of identifying as a gender.

If you have taken a position on this issue for the good of society, you presumably believe that your opinion makes sense, don't you? Im inclined to doubt that it does due to my own experience of people promoting trans activist positions, but I'm keeping an open mind here. Why not see what people think? Civilly and in good faith on both sides, of course.

Some people are too intelligent for their own good, it seems to me. Biology is the mistress here, dividing humans into 2 sexes (with some mistakes along the way, but those mistakes are always linked to sex e.g. CAIS is only found in males). Believing that your 'soul' can have a different gender to your sexed body is based on stereotypes of what it means to be a man or a woman.
I know that sex in mammals is binary (that is, I can prove it with the mammalian body). I know that gender is a social concept (that is, I can prove it is society linked by comparing gender norms in different cultures - they will not all have the same norms). Something which I believe, e.g. that there is a supernatural being one could call 'god', cannot be either proved or disproved - it cannot in any way be described as knowledge - nor can the idea that an inner feeling of 'gender' determines whether you are male or female be proved or disproved, meaning it is a belief. That this particular belief relies on a certain set of gender stereotypes suggests that it has no base in reality - because gender stereotypes differ over place and time.
That's why someone who is GC can say that they do not believe your sex determines your personality or how you behave. Believing the opposite, that sex is determined by inner feelings is demonstrably untrue.0

@ElleWoods15

Please, Elle, could you explain what it is about this quote that you so profoundly disagree with? Why is this wrong? What does make someone male or female if not their biology?

Yes, I am also very interested in your thoughts as to why you seem to disagree with the biological fact that what makes a person/animal male or female is their biology and chromosomes???!

Fa'fafine are men. Not women.

If increased acceptance is the reason for so many young girls declaring themselves to be men, or not to be girls, at least, we could expect a proportionately similar number of older women to do the same.