"Trans women ARE biological women"

[TangenitalContrivance]

I see this argument and comment more and more the last few weeks and hugely over the last 3 days.

For example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1k1tliv/trans_women_are_biological_women/

This statement, and the comments underneath it absolutely baffle me.

The approach, one that I am sure will only work with a minority of the people who said TWAW, is to undermine the definition of words, yet again, and deliberately cloud the water when it comes to speaking clearly and using terms that everyone agrees with

I have seen it said in more places than Reddit however, and by respected people

nice work

Thank you. This is interesting.

Don’t forget the Hijra in South Asia! But of course you lot would, being white colonising fascists etc

And then there's gender stereotyping and neuroplasticity...
Maybe declare a nil-all draw on the subject of male/female brains?
They kind-of do and kind-of don't differ, depending...

I am asian, I have forgotten more about the hijras of India than you will ever know including the south indian Yellama trans cult, buddy. I live in SE Asia and know helluva lot about the Bugis trans shamans and actual Bugis people. And you know something? These societies were/are repressive sexist homophobic ones which had a role for a tiny number of mostly homosexual men and ensured that they remain in the margins of society. They had no doubts at all about the sex of these people. Sex is clearly binary for them.

Hear hear.

Also: how utterly, utterly white colonialist to claim that non-Western “third” sexes who were almost universally (as noted above) a way of segregating and “othering” gay men is evidence of the presence of “trans identities” worldwide. Pisses me off almost as much as claiming that any pre-Suffrage woman who wore a suit and pretended to be a man to perform a traditionally male role or live without censure with another woman was doing anything other than trying to get around the restrictions on women of the day.

Grrr.

Imagine just arriving here on FWR and failing to even consider that just maybe women here have discussed these concepts and so much more on this board over the last decade - in some considerable depth.

Pathetic.

Mine either.

But it doesn't matter. Because the Supreme Court went through all this with a toothcomb and the result was to judge that for the purposes of the Equality Act there are two binary sexes and that's it. 'It's complicated' is not relevant to it.

The law has to work fairly for as many people as possible and not be an incoherent mess. And the world cannot continually bend around the whatifs and complexities and new issues of a political movement that mostly wants to break and dismantle everything on principle. Never any ideas of how it should look on the other side of the dismantling, nothing practical, no consideration for anyone or consequences, it's rather like a two year old on 'me smash it' mode. All very well and charming in its place, but you can't make a country's law on it.

The yellamma cult in particular was investigated and written about by a german friend of mine about 30 years ago. He had more access to the initiation rituals (as a woman I was not allowed) of the transwomen who inevitably worked as prostitutes (there's a surprise in a sex segregated society!) and often related the gory details to me. That there is a patron goddess for trans women is not meaningful - hinduism offers patron gods for even the criminal classes. Sorry for the OT.

It is a bit sad seeing 2018 conversations (and earlier) being replayed when the time for all that is past. It took seven years to get that case heard with all the evidence, all the intervenors, all the hearings, these conversations have been had. It's all been said and argued before, for years, it's not new information that no one's thought of. The judgement's out, no amount of 'I don't agree' is going to make a difference at this point. And it wouldn't vanish the hard evidence of harms to women and the need for their legal protections anyway; men being sad and complicated isn't a reason to remove equality from women.

Don’t apologise - it’s fascinating!

And aside for rare female bugis shamans who dressed male, there oddly never existed female groups who identified as males. The hijras, bugis shamans were all about dealing with homosexuality. There was much cruelty and stigmatisation involved. Glossing over this is reprehensible.

If you have any links or book suggestions on this subject (your friend's?), I'd be very interested. Thank you.

Well you are wrong I’m afraid. On average mens brains are bigger. But a 7 foot tall female will have a bigger brain than a 4 foot man. Its a spectrum. So physical size means what?

But youve heard it all before so 😀

Oh God, it's the 'but elite women can beat shite men' /Phelps gambit rearing its decrepit head again.

ETA: I linked to this partly because I still think it's one of the best explanations of why the "but elite women/shit men/Michael Phelps has flipper-sized feet" stuff is such a load of old wank, and partly because it dates from 2021, which still isn't the first time.

The one thing we can all agree with is that transwomen are biological… human beings but that’s as far as they can ever get. They are not nor ever will be women.
They’ll need to reframe their trauma. No debate.

He wrote for german magazines at the time and I am not in touch with him now. But there is a lot of literature these days about the Yellamma cult which focusses on the trans element though she is also worshipped in a wider context (pls google). There is a pdf here you may find a useful.Many of the south indian goddesses have origins in heterodox folk worship and then get inducted into orthodox hinduism. The trans folks are (mistakenly imo) very into Hinduism as being trans friendly because the male gods have female aspects in their iconography and have assumed female forms for particular ends in the puranic stories.

And this one too.

https://x.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1856721680007135550

"Being male doesn’t mean you will be tall, it means you will be taller than if you had been female."

Our totally not at all made up 7 foot female (jfc) would certainly be taller than almost all people. But if she'd been born male, she'd be even taller, for reasons Emma explains. She is in a higher height percentile for women than she'd be among men. In other words, yes, most men are shorter than 7 foot tall (I can't believe I'm dignifying this), but there are more men close to 7 feet tall than there are women...and they'd have accompanying male advantage such as denser bones, higher testosterone, more fast-twitch muscle etc. You'd also be surprised at just how strong even short, weedy men are compared to even rather taller or broader women.

That's it, I'm done for tonight. Phelps gambit, 7 foot women, dear God.

Thank you for your post, I'm sure it won't make much difference to a gender addled brain, but I appreciate a bit of first hand knowledge. It sounds like a very dysfunctional culture.

I dont think it is a more dysfunctional culture than any. It let a number of marginal communities to exist in their own way. It wasn't some pre-colonial trans paradise for sure.

Amen.

As my DS(14) says "look in the mirror and deal with it".

Sex is biological - it cannot be changed.

Gender dysphoria is a psychological condition which needs to be treated with therapy not surgery in my opinion.

I have TW friends and I sympathise with their condition but I think they have been indulged.

I see. So a 7ft tall female will have the exact same brain size and shape as a 7ft male person?

And brain fibres? Were Swansea University wrong in their conclusion that female people have more delicate brain fibres?

And I didn't say that physical size meant anything except size. I was saying that there is differences between male and female brains physically. I was very clear that I was not making a distinction between how the brain worked.

No, it was a warning not to assume that your own knowledge and understanding reflects the current level of knowledge and understanding of experts in a particular field. It was a call to humility.

Experts do have a greater depth of detailed knowledge than non-experts. It doesn’t mean they know everything, but they do know a huge anmount, and it is disingenuous to pretend that human development and DSDs are some sort of total magical mystery that no-one understands. The point is that the knowledge is well-established.