Does anyone else resent the gender/ TERF wars?

[TERFCat]

I met up with an old friend last night. The first two hours were magical! Everything was going great until the "what is a woman?" question popped up... Then, it all turned sour, and I don't think she and I will be catching up again for a long time.

Basically, whilst I think women's rights are paramount and should be defended whenever necessary, I'm really starting to resent the impact this had on my real life.

I have lost friends over this, and I've likely been stopped from making more too!

Does anyone else feel this way?

Sorry, then. But your friends use womanface and women object to that.

@Glitterknickerbockers , in your very first post, you mentioned some trans friends and indicated they were of the male sex.

You have been asked more than six times whether they use women’s spaces. Can you answer that question please?

It is entirely relevant, given you used them as a tool for arguing the women here are unreasonable and you are now arguing yourself that they should not be using women’s spaces, so… are they or are they not?

And are they fighting for third spaces? If not, why not?

The question I have politely put to you, Glitterknickerbockers, is even more basic than the question which as PriOn1 pointed out you've been asked six times or more 'do your trans friends use women's spaces?'

My question is: do you accept that your lovely trans friends are still men, as male as the day they were born?

I don't know. I don't ask them which bathrooms they use because that's invasive and weird. The few times we've gone at the same time the facilities have been unisex single occupancy toilets and it's not been an issue. It's literally never been an issue the entire time we've been friends.

What is an issue, is the verbal and physical abuse I have witnessed towards them out in plain day light in public and online and the distress it has caused them.

The women here are not unreasonable for wanting single sex spaces. They are unreasonable for the derogatory language they use when talking about trans women. There are a string of very nasty terms used to describe them regularly here which have no purpose other than to be cruel because they go far beyond factual terms such as male or trans identifying male. Men in dresses, men LARPing as women, male bad actors, all these terms are not used as neutral factual terms, they are used to be offensive.

I don't know if they are fighting for third spaces, we literally don't talk about this stuff or talk about the fact they are transgender all the time. They are simply a person I talk to like any other person and about things I talk to any other person about. I have never asked anyone what toilets they use, I don't intent to ask them either. It's rude.

No, I don't accept they are as male as the day they were born.

They are not biological women, but their bodies are also very different to that of a biological man due to surgery and hormone treatment. I would personally describe them as in between physically so whilst they have not achieved biological femaleness which impossible, they are also not as male as the day they were born. Because they don't have the hormonal profile or standard physical characteristics of a male anymore.

Yes I know they still have male genetics and chromosomes and whatever else you all like to talk about here, but a male with no penis, breasts and a fuck tonne of estrogen in their body is categorically not as male as the day they were born.

...they are used to be offensive.

The women are offended because their spaces are being invaded by males, so they will speak out and loudly.

The females of other species get offended by invading males too, it's not just humans. Ever see a group of lionesses chase off a male?

a male with no penis, breasts and a fuck tonne of estrogen in their body is categorically not as male as the day they were born

yes he is.

Man is not an offensive word, male is not an offensive word, and whether you describe your friends as men LARPing as women or as men re-enacting a female stereotype they are still men. They are not any sort of woman, and what they have chosen to do is an expression of contempt for and hostility to women, so there's no point being surprised if women go on the defensive.

I do feel quite sorry for them, and regret that they live in a society that hates women so much that it encourages men to do this, and encourages young women to self-harm.

So you came on here, all guns blazing at us women who have the temerity to fight for our own spaces - which you later concede is perfectly reasonable.

And yet you don't even know if your 'lovely' trans friends are infiltrating those spaces or not?

Do you not detect a whiff of double standards here @Glitterknickerbockers? Why are these men 'lovely' if they potentially demand spaces that don't belong to them? Why are women being castigated for fighting for their rights?

Yes I know they still have male genetics and chromosomes and whatever else you all like to talk about here, but a male with no penis, breasts and a fuck tonne of estrogen in their body is categorically not as male as the day they were born.

Yes they are. Surgically altering yourself affects your sex not one jot. Even single cell in these men's bodies is categorically male.

If I ever get testicular cancer, and have to have my testicles removed (with significant hormonal consequences), I will be extremely offended if anyone suggests that I am any less of a man as a result. This really is a demeaning view of what a man is. I will be as male as the day I was born, and indeed as male as the second I was conceived.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone on here say “men LARPing as women” other than @Glitterknickerbockers

I’ve probably seen “men in dresses” now and then, but it is entirely accurate when that is what they are, and the vast majority of posters on Mumsnet are actually fairly factual, rather than insulting. Not so long ago, we would actually get kicked off for using “Trans identifying men.”

Personally, I generally use “men who claim they are women”. Like many other women, I used to call them “transwomen” but some truly ambitious activists started to insist that “transwomen are women” and add in a space into transwomen, where there had never been one, again to add grist to their grift, that these men really were women.

The reason these men insist so vehemently that they are literally women is because they are demanding access to women’s spaces. The moment you concede they are women, and that trans is an adjective, it makes you a bigot. Then you are excluding women from women’s spaces on the ground they are trans, as opposed to excluding men from women’s spaces on the grounds that (whether they like it or not) men is what they are.

So had there never been that insistence that “transwomen are women” was to be taken literally (where before, it had always been understood to be a polite falsehood) we would probably have not become so pissed off with the whole thing.

Nowadays, almost all of us are with the memory of Magdalen Burns. Like her “I’d rather be rude than a fucking liar.”

The suggestion that a woman is just a man with a few bits cut off and some plastic stitched on is SO offensive.

Women are women from the moment of conception, just as men are men from the moment of conception.No grotesque meat jigsaw game changes that.

One of the things that has shocked me most about all this is how many people out there think women are basically defective men.

“What is the difference between a male person who has lost their penis and testicles due to disease or injury and a male person who elects to have these healthy body parts removed based on their identity?”

This is a question that never gets answered.

It's not the fighting for women's own spaces I have a problem with, it's the attitudes, derision and offensive language used and the stereotyping of transgender people as predators that I have a problem with.

That was perfectly from what I wrote. You're just choosing to make an issue about women's spaces when I never mentioned them.

And yet I didn't say at any point that going through gender reassignment surgery and treatment makes them women did I. I said it makes them something more in the middle because they don't really fit into either category any more. I actually specifically stated that they cannot become actual women. Or are you just skimming over that bit to show some offended outrage?

Well a man who loses his testicles and penis to illness won't have breasts or be taking large amounts of estrogen for starters.

I dare say that it would be possible to find examples where people's posts here have said that, but I have seen very few compared to the hundreds or thousands of posts pointing out the complete lack of evidence that men who claim to be women are any less likely to be predators than any other men.

Edited to add: I don't think anyone is suggesting that women claiming to be men are predators. I haven't come across any evidence that they are any different from other women in terms of likelihood of being a predator.

So the difference is electively taken estrogen? Because male people can develop enlarged breasts due to different reasons.

So are you saying that if a male person takes estrogen, they become non-men?

How does this work? Does this then apply to people taking other drugs? That if they take synthesised chemicals found in other species, do they become non-human?

Meanwhile, this is all going on, against women who have the temerity to stand up for their rights to their own spaces.

https://terfisaslur.com

But not even an acknowledgment of this from you. We're still the bad guys, right?

My offended outrage is at the suggestion that cutting something or things off makes males less male. It does not. A man who has had testicles or an eye or his appendix removed, or his leg amputated, is the same man, just as male, as he was before the surgery. His fundamental maleness has been in no way changed. If he takes mood altering drugs, including hormones, he is still the same man he was before he took them. The same male he was from the moment of conception.

And his pretending that if he then wears some kind of fancy dress and performs actions linked to his society's stereotype of women that makes HIM a woman, is offensive. Very offensive.

Women are women from the moment of conception. Even if they maim and drug themselves they don't stop being female.

Sex is real and is binary. There is no middle state.

Sexual attraction is real and is not binary, though many people are on one end or the other of the homo/hetero scale.

'Gender identity' is an imaginary construct, not real.

'Gender' identity is a conceptual framework, one I am not prepared to let limit my own life, if others do, more fool them.

Saying a man is a man or a male is not an insult. There is nothing wrong or offensive or outrageous about being a man or a male.

Saying a woman is a woman or a female is not an insult. There is nothing wrong or offensive or outrageous about being a woman or a female.

Unless your friends are attempting to invade single-sex spaces, there is absolutely nothing that they can do in their costumes that they can't do equally well without them, and without having a 'gender' identity, and it would have saved them lots of pain and harm and money if they'd been told that.

And again, the Righteous way is that it is Wrong for the partially-sentient service bipeds to exhibit unseemly emotions such as anger, speak incorrect words, or display unladylike attitudes.

it is Wrong for the partially-sentient service bipeds to exhibit unseemly emotions such as anger, speak incorrect words, or display unladylike attitudes

Coincidentally, my cat said pretty much the exact same thing to me just now when I discovered she was munching on my bamboo knitting needle AGAIN and expressed my feelings. Luckily for us both I then put my elbow down on the other needle and snapped it, so as soon as I've finished this mitten I'll burn them. The needles, not the mittens.

Meanwhile, I'm being told that a woman's place is in the kitchen preparing cat breakfast.

“And yet I didn't say at any point that going through gender reassignment surgery and treatment makes them women did I. I said it makes them something more in the middle because they don't really fit into either category any more.”

These attempts at saying that with surgeries and temporarily changing hormones within the body changes a person enough to decategorise them in the way they wish (ie it fulfills their objective aim for their chosen medical procedure) is flawed in quite a number of ways.

In regard to hormones. Male people produce estrogen already. All that this treatment does is increase a naturally produced level through artificial means. If a male stops taking estrogen, their body continues as usual to produce their normal levels (or the normal levels without some body parts being present if they have removed their testes). The coding in their cells remain unchanged by their treatment and the cells will attempt to perform their roles before the roles of those cells were interfered with.

What happens to a male person with complex health issues that has enlarged breast tissue who has also lost their penis and testicles due to disease or injury? Are they considered non-men too?

To declare that taking these hormones makes someone ‘non-male’ because the levels no longer fit in the typical healthy male range ignores several male health issues. Including the side effects of other drugs, prescribed or not. So does that make any male person with elevated estrogen levels non-male?

If having testes and penises removed for disease or injury decategorises them, that is concerning. The same then has to be said of hysterectomies removing ovaries and uteruses.

And if having extreme body modification that artificially changes a characteristic of a person’s body takes them out of their original category, do we then affirm that those people undergoing modifications to emulate reptiles as being non-human, if not treating them as if they are indeed reptiles.

None of the extreme body modifications chosen to be undertaken by a person to support their identity removes them from
their body’s category. Removing body parts and taking exogenous hormones does not remove a person from their sex category.

A person’s sex is categorised by whether their body configuration was formed to produce large or small gametes, whether that body ever had, is , or will produce those gametes. And regardless of whether those body parts have been removed.

There are no ‘in between’ sex category humans.